White Noise and Postmodernism

My general perception of Don DeLillo's White Noise before reading it was something along the lines of, "It's weird and David Foster Wallace liked it, and a lot of people always seem to talk about Don DeLillo." I wasn't familiar with the author outside of seeing "Cosmopolis" -- yes, Robert Pattinson, that one -- which I thought was actually quite good if extremely strange. (I also saw it right after "Holy Motors"; another, better, movie involving limos and cryptic dialogue.) Looking through critiques of White Noise after I finished, people tend to fall into 'love it' or 'hate it' camps. I'm not sure I had particular feelings either way, but mostly because I spent the majority of the book trying to puzzle out what the heck the subtext was and getting distracted by the style.

White Noise is narrated by Jack, a renowned college professor in Hilter studies who lives in the suburbs with his family. The general plot revolves around his discovery that his wife, Babette, has been having an affair and taking experimental medication to eliminate the fear of death. And boy is White Noise about death.

This all takes place in a nihilistic, dystopian world where apparently everyone speaks with the same stilted, unnatural dialogue. Seriously, no character has a definitive "voice" except for the narrator. It's weird, but also the same as "Cosmopolis," so I can only assume this is how DeLillo usually writes. The book places heavy emphasis on the prevalence of TV, radio, ads and consumerism (cue the Franzen / DFW comparisons), which is particularly striking given that it was written in 1984 before Facebook and the smartphone, etc.  Don DeLillo saw the future, kids. Slate has an excellent White Noise podcast discussion related to this: listen here.

After Jack is exposed to an ominous "airborne toxic event" (no, not the band), he obsesses over his vague medical tests and the certainty of death ... in a couple decades. His fear drives him to further investigate Babette's medication, and the final act of the book descends into a very weird place indeed. If only someone had told him that we're all dying on the inside. At the same time I was compiling points for this post, I was reading The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee and was struck by this observation: "Society, like the ultimate psychosomatic patient, matches its medical afflictions to its psychological crises ... the rot, the horror -- the biological decay and its concomitant spiritual decay -- was now relocated within the corpus of society and, by extension, within the body of man."

So what is white noise? The background noise that you usually tune out but is always present; the triads of ads and snippets from TV/radio that DeLillo randomly disperses throughout the book, the mindless consumerism at the grocery store scenes. At one point death is described as white noise, which, yes, it's always in the background of this book and life in general, and tuning in to (social) media is a way to ignore it. I think it could also relate to the strange dialogue in the book and Jack's effort to learn German. Rather than true communication it's just noise.

White Noise is considered "postmodern" and I had to do some digging to try and get a grip on what that meant. I came away thinking I need to read an entire separate book on postmodernism and then come back to critique it in White Noise. Confusing things are confusing. A helpful resource is the Jean Baudrillard page in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (referenced below), if you really want to have a head-scratching journey. Relevant to this post, one of the key components of postmodernism is the idea of a simulacrum, which Wikipedia helpfully defines as a "representation or imitation of a person or thing" ... Think of those crazy mirrors where you own image repeats itself again and again and again into infinity.

Gratuitous yet apt screencap from "Supernatural".

For Baudrillard:

 "Postmodern societies [are] organized around 'simulation' by which he means the cultural modes of representation that 'simulate' reality as in television, computer cyberspace, and virtual reality ... In the society of simulation, identities are constructed by the appropriation of images, and codes and models determine how individuals perceive themselves and relate to other people ... In this postmodern world, individuals flee from the 'desert of the real' for the ecstasies of hyperreality and the new realm of computer, media, and technological experience."  

So, this blog exists in a postmodern world. I'd like to point out that, once again, this was written BEFORE Facebook/Instagram/Twitter, and that Morpheus welcomes Neo to "the desert of the real" in "The Matrix" (wait, there are even MORE levels to that movie!?). And clearly, yes, this is the vibe of White Noise.  

Bottom line: Lots of interesting philosophical overtones, little to no character development or plot.