As I read White Noise, I couldn’t help but become consumed (pardon the pun) by the presence of noise. I found myself circling every time the word “noise” literally was used – surprisingly frequently, considering that (at least to me) the word never seemed overused. Additionally, the noise created by various appliances, machines, people, and events caught my attention and left me searching for meaning in the noise – what is DeLillo trying to say in each noisy scene/situation? In chapter 17, the noise created by the family unit is responsible for “the world’s misinformation” (81), and this is demonstrated in several scenes with Jack’s family, where one person begins a conversation and before the topic can be resolved or even addressed, each person in the family has contributed his or her thought and has gotten the conversation completely away from the original topic. In the scene in chapter 17, Denise has brought up the name of the drug Dylar (which she suspects Babette of taking secretly), and before a page has gone by, the family has discussed Africa, movies, cars, camels, alligators, Bolivia, copper and iron, and of course, Babette has never had to answer to whether or not she uses Dylar.
As Josh did, I, too, found tremendous interest in the background “noise” provided by television, radio, and other appliances/products of technology. It seems to me that these blurbs of noise occur to highlight, often through juxtaposition, the experiences and thoughts of the characters, or perhaps, to point out things the characters are missing. In chapter 8, for example, Denise runs the trash compactor, where “whining metal, exploding bottles, plastic smashed flat” are the sounds for which Denise listens “carefully, making sure the mangling din contained the correct sonic elements, which meant the machine was operating properly,” which is followed directly by Heinrich on the phone saying, “‘Animals commit incest all the time. So how unnatural can it be?’” (34) Perhaps Heinrich’s reference to incest and the acceptability of something unacceptable is designed to be a statement about the previous situation with Denise and the noise produced by the trash compactor – something unnatural, but made acceptable by this consuming/disposing society. During the “Airborne Toxic Event, as symptoms of exposure are being updated and upgraded, Heinrich says about the neighbor’s daughters having sweaty palms, “‘There’s been a correction….Tell them they ought to be throwing up,’” after which a voice on the radio says, “‘Available for a limited time only with optical megabyte hard disk’” (112). For a limited time only, the current symptoms will be recognized as proof of exposure, but after the period of “buying into” theses symptoms, new ones will replace the old, and you will need to upgrade your symptoms.
Truth and reality obviously factor into this novel also. “‘Just because it’s on the radio doesn’t mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses,’” Jack says on page 22, when discussing with Heinrich the occurrence or nonoccurrence of rain on the windshield of his car. This brings into question the whole truth and reality concept we’ve been tossing around all semester. In trying to get his son to answer the “truth” about the rain falling, he puts him in a man-holding-a-gun-to-your-head scenario, to which Heinrich replies, “‘What truth does he want? Does he want the truth of someone traveling at almost the speed of light in another galaxy?…Maybe…it might be raining yesterday instead of today’” (23). Upon arrival and settling in at the Boy Scout Camp, various people have crowds gathering around them as they relate information, some possibly true, some not. But, as the narrator (Jack?) reveals, because of the extreme nature of their situation, being able to establish what is true/real and what is not may not be important – in fact, maybe the seriousness of their situation allows them to accept the false for true. “True, false and other kinds of news radiated through the dormitory from these dense clusters . . . . Remarks existed in a state of permanent flotation. No one thing was either more or less plausible than any other thing. As people jolted out of reality, we were released from the need to distinguish” (129).
Man! There’s so much to discuss in this book!! We’ve barely chipped away the tip of the iceberg!