Panasonic White Noise

The entire first volume of White Noise is devoted to apparently anything but the “disaster” element. It opens as a first-person narrative, and relates to us – through the eyes of our narrator – the inner workings of (and delicate relationships strung between) himself and the other members of his family. On first reading, none of this storytelling made sense to me. That is to say, as a story, it all made sense and flowed with fair coherency, but what I did fail to grasp was what, exactly, this rambling was attempting to achieve. DeLillo devotes the entire first volume of his novel to telling us nothing. We are introduced to the main characters – and then reintroduced, and reintroduced, and reintroduced yet again. We are handed every miniscule detail regarding their daily lives. We learn that some of them like to buy brand-less items at the grocery store, while others of them are loathe to enter the frozen foods aisle. Some go to church. Some teach Hitler. Some watch TV all together, one night a week. Some cry. Some are brooding. The only thing DeLillo refrains from telling us, it seems, is what brand of toothpaste they use.

It is not until the second volume that the “disaster” begins to come into play. Why does DeLillo choose to delay the core of his story by so much? In Lucifer’s Hammer, the comet occurs on the second page (of the first chapter). Yet DeLillo proceeds a full 20 chapters before he sees fit to bring his object of calamity into the picture. Why?

I think the answer here lies in the novel’s title. Admittedly, I haven’t even come close to reading it all, but so far I can see no other clear explanation. DeLillo titled his novel “White Noise,” and this certainly doesn’t seem to refer to the source of the novel’s disaster (particularly not the way the title of Lucifer’s Hammer refers directly to the Hammer-comet). (Granted, he originally had other plans, but the end result remains, regardless, that he chose “White Noise” – which, for that matter, varies not too enormously from the original.) I feel that it instead relates to the method of his storytelling. In choosing a first-person narrator, DeLillo has made the decision to relate his story through the eyes of a human being, who can and will suffer all the limitations that fall on any human being. We have no reason to believe every word of the novel, for we have no reason to believe every word the narrator says, because the narrator is only human. We have no reason to trust in him, nor do we have any reason to believe that the entire account is a fiction, either. We simply don’t know. This narrator chooses to spend 105 pages (in my edition) to do what could have been accomplished in 5 pages: introduce himself and the other characters of the story. What are the hundred other pages but white noise?

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Categorized as Reflections

By nympheline

I think Andy Warhol is possibly the most insightful life-commentator that I know of.

3 comments

  1. While we may agree that Delillo is telling us an incredibly long list of unimportant and minute details about each character, I think there may be more to it than just that. I believe that Delillo is trying to bring us closer to the characters. The interactions we see between Jack Gladney and his (4th) wife, Babette show a great kinship between two parents, their honesty and commitment shows great detail as to how their relationship works (which makes me think that she might have a better run than Loretta from Lucifer’s Hammer). Also if you look at the way Jack interacts with his new friend from The Hill, Murray Jay Siskind; Jack has known him for such a short amount of time, and yet there meetings seem as thought they might have been friends for year past.

    I also think there may be more than meets the eye when it comes to the conversations that Jack has with both his son, and Murray. Almost all of their conversations lead you to believe that there is something underneath all of their words—may be the extreme amounts of existentialism going on, or maybe that’s just me, but there is definitely something the Delillo is trying to tell us with these thought-provoking dialogues!

    I may not know exactly how this novel will end, because I have never read it yet, but I am pretty sure that there is some extreme importance to this first segment that need so deeper looking into!

  2. We’ll talk much more about this on Tuesday, but I do want to suggest that the seemingly mundane details DeLillo bombards us with are there for a reason (or, many reasons). DeLillo has said that with White Noise he wanted to capture “the radiance of dailiness” — whether he achieves this can be debated, but it does help to know his goal.

    I’d also argue that we don’t have to wait until later in the novel for disaster. Every chapter is tinged with disaster, catastrophe, and death — often quite explicitly. In some cases Gladney seems to be a sophisticated observer and commentator upon all this disaster, while in other cases, he seems to be naive and unaware of his own complicity.

  3. Hm, I certainly don’t think that DeLillo conveys nothing in the first volume. The key words of my entry would have to be “on first reading”; I definitely think/agree that there is a lot going on within the family and the first volume does, well, volumes in terms of revealing the relationships between – and to a certain extent the personalities of – the characters. I’ve been trained in the school of thought wherein it takes more than one reading to get anything /really/ substantial out of a given text, and I believe it is part of the author’s art (generally speaking, not specific to DeLillo) in writing to be able to function on many levels, so that even a first, superficial reading can reveal something interesting about the text – even if as simple as one particular way the text can be tied back to its own title. And I would argue that, regardless of the deeper importance of the first volume, the kind of conversation that goes on reads like white noise – for example, we have characters in conversation with each other while other characters speak on the phone in the background. It’s all kind of a steady murmur of layers of voices.

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