One of White Noise’s reoccurring themes is data. We talked a little bit about this last class, with that You Are Where You Live Web site. According to Amazon’s Search Inside feature, “data” appears 18 times throughout the novel. One of the instances that stuck out most in my mind was the SIMUVAC guy’s comment to Jack, “You are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that” (136). It seems to comment on the way in which people are represented in the postmodern age. We’re not people; we’re our credit histories, our Amazon.com purchases, our library recorders, etc. This touches on the disconnectedness of postmodernism, the amassing of disparate information and voices to form a necessarily untrustworthy narrative. It reminds me off Fight Club (the movie), which I haven’t re-watched for the class; but I remember hearing the line, “You are not the balance of your bank account,” or something along those lines. In Fight Club, they are obviously fighting against being represented in this dehumanized way as mere data (this happens most conspicuously at the end of the film, when they destroy the credit card company headquarters); White Noise, on the other hand, seems to passively accept it.
A little later in the encounter with the SIMUVAC guy, Jack says, “It is when death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak, that you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself. A network of symbols has been introduced, an entire awesome technology wrested from the gods. It makes you feel like a stranger in your own dying” (137). Thus he recognizes the dehumanizing role data plays, particularly in his own death. This also touches on the postmodern issue of the depth/surface dichotomy. In this quote, Jack observes that, to the SIMUVAC guy and many others, he’s not a person, in the sense of being a multi-faceted, unique human being; he’s a series of symbols on a screen, a superficial rendering of his data. For me, this relates back to Fight Club again, where Ed Norton’s job is to calculate the profitability of recalling faulty automobile equipment: people’s lives are saved or sacrificed based on a mathematical equation. It’s all a cold equation.
And now I’m a little paranoid and depressed so I’m going to look back at one of the humorous but consequential questions DeLillo poses: do sheep have eye lashes? (152).