American Postmodernism

Just kidding. While the film makes mention of Dukakis as "a miserable failure," and perhaps Donnie Darko could be interpretted as such, this simplistic, yes, Wikipedia analysis might be the most insignificant feature of Richard Kelly’s cult classic. At its most basic layer, the movie is structurally based on Philosophy of Time Travel, a novel that is simultaneously the central text around which the film’s plot and characters orbit, creating a vision of hypertextuality at its most postmodern. However brilliant the film, I find that there are several inconsistencies, which may reflect my inability to comprehend the profuse and scientifically complex themes of Donnie Darko. 

Donnie Darko is an outsider, a character on the fringes of his community and even his family due to his psychosis (sleep walking, hallucinations, insomnia, etc.), so it makes sense that he is the outlet to the alternative universe that comes to pass on October 2, 1988. Since each event seems to happen as a result of a previous event, the themes of cosmic fate and causation also fall in step with the premises of Philosophy of Time Travel. Since, Donnie Darko is "the living reciever of the tangent universe that spins off the primary universe," the tangent universe being the alternative reality that occurs after Donnie Darko lives when he is supposed to die on October 2nd and the primary universe being ‘the true reality’ that existed before Darko’s death and immediately after he is killed by the plane engine that warped through a worm hole to the past, the tangential or alternative reality begins and ends with ‘the dark hero.’ But why does Frank, his sister’s friend in the bunny Holloween costume, come back from a future that hasn’t happened yet to pull Donnie Darko from his cosmic fate, death by his mother’s and sister’s plane engine? Why didn’t Frank just let Darko die and allow the primary universe or God’s path to take its course naturally?

If Donnie had not been pulled out of bed by Frank at precisely midnight, Donnie would have been taken out by the engine and everything would have been as it should have been. Frank, in that case, would not have lost an eye, and then die. Gretchin would have never met Darko, but yet, she wouldn’t have been run over, and, of course, killed, and Darko’s mother and sister never would have been on the plane home from his sister’s Star Search performance. However, if Darko’s mother and sister had not been on that plane home, the engine that was supposed to kill Donnie Darko and ‘make everything right’ and therefore, terminate the tanget reality, which ultimately claims so many lives at its end, might not have hit the worm hole and the alternative reality, the one in which Darko lives beyond October 2nd, would have destroyed the true reality and its alternatives, hence Frank’s repeated utterence and daily count down to ‘the end of the world.’ So perhaps Donnie was meant to live out the tangential reality and survive for an extended 28 days, triggered by Frank’s "Get Up" at midnight on October 2nd just minutes before the engine crashed into his room, in order to realize he would inevitably have to die in order to save Frank, Gretchin, his mother, and little sister.

Darko lives at the center of the alternative reality for 28 days, and all the characters in the film gravitate toward him. He is ‘the gifted’ or hallucinatory one that can physically see the immediate future actions of every person he encounters, including himself, at given times. But it seems that this ability or curse only leads him to play out the tragedy, once again, that had resulted in Frank’s and Gretchin’s deaths, and sent the future’s dead Frank back to Darko’s "primary reality" on October 2nd before the engine crash. After all of this rambling, I still don’t understand why Frank time travelled back from the alternative reality’s future to the real universe minutes before Donnie’s fated death, if all Donnie had to do was die to maintain reality for everyone as it should be and prevent the end of the world? Someone help me out.

My favorite quote from this book: “For most peole there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set” (66).

The one thing I noticed first in White Noise is the obsession with death, although I don’t think I need to prove that this book is about death and fear. All of this fear seems to be instilled by the media and culture around Gladney and his family. It reminds me of that documentary by Michael Moore…the first one, Bowling for Columbine. I haven’t seen the whole thing, but there’s a part in it that talks about how we become violent and fearful as a society because of the tactics of the media. Just look at what we see on the news…rarely is a happy story broadcast as the headliner. Everything causes cancer or heart disease or sudden infant death or clogs your arteries. This is evident in White Noise when the train crashes right outside Blacksmith. The whole family is listening on the news to reports of what has happened and what they should expect. At first it’s just a “plume” of smoke, and then it becomes “a black billowing cloud” and then a “cloud of deadly chemicals,” each instilling more fear into the Gladney family. And with each report the newscasters come up with new and more terrible symptoms of breathing in the deadly cloud. When they say sweaty palms, Denise and Jessie have sweaty palms. When people are supposed to be vomiting, so do the girls. I see a parallel to this in my own life. My roommate is a constant worrier and health nut. We had to replace perfectly new pots and pans because they were Teflon and “could potentially cause cancer.” There was a report that eating too much tuna or seafood can cause reproductive problems in women of childbearing age, so my roommate will only eat tuna or salmon once a month. She scoffs when I put Splenda or Nutrasweet in my coffee because, well, you know the story about laboratory rats. I feel like I had the same conversation with my mother that Denise and Babette had about sugar-free gum (except I was the one being chastised). There is fear here and it is all coming directly from the media in one way or another. And these facts could be completely true…but I think DeLillo brings up the point that our whole world is based on facts, or misinterpreted facts. What do we really know about what we’re being told? All we know is that the media is constantly barraging us with fear and death and distaster. People can’t believe it when the news isn’t there for the plane crash or the chemical leak. The man at the Boy Scout camp wants validation for his fear. He asks, “Isn’t fear news?”

I was also struck by how relevant this books still is. DeLillo mentions events that relate to our current events. His son, Heinrich, is excited by death and the sensationalism. He reminded me a bit of the Columbine shooters…and Jack even mentions long trench coats when speaking to Heinrich about death. Before they evacuate their house, Jack refuses to leave because fleeing is only for poor people. Sounded like Hurricane Katrina to me. Some other people also mentioned the plane crash that sounds a lot like our recent crash. I can’t remember the other allusions, but there were more that I picked up on. I would say it’s prophetic, but really I think we’ve been heading this way for quite some time.

on the back of our edition of white noise, the editor states that the book is about jack and babette "navigat[ing] the usual passages of family life to the background babble of brand name consumerism." however, there is nothing "usual" about this family – i found all the characters drawn fantastically (with the exception of Wilder?) and unbelievable. they supposedly live in middle america – Indiana, Ohio, Michigan – yet do not in any way resemble a stereotypical middle american family. they are far too intellectual, introverted, excitable, in other words, they are too ‘new york’ to fit the middle america mold. moreover, the authenticity of jack’s character immediately is called into question when we learn that he is one of the country’s foremost Hitler scholars and doesn’t speak a lick of German! his role as professor/intellectual becomes even more complicated throughout the story as he makes one poor decision after another (couldn’t jack afford to simply leave the state during the ‘airborne toxic event’ instead of putting his family at risk by stopping in the next town) why does jack continually feel compelled to listen to the authorities (SIMUVAC, doctors, colleagues, babette, heinrich) for direction and the truth?

the question really is: after the fourth or fifth marriage, when is it time to call it quits? what im trying to get it, i guess, is the very well written ending and how this becomes such a profound moment. it seems to me that the profound ending (the shoot out) draws its strength from the fantastically manufactured beginning. none of the characters, especially jack and babette, i found remotely believable, of course, keeping in mind that ive never read this novel before and these are only my preliminary reactions… my larger difficulty with the novel compels me to ask, is this how americans actually react to their commodity saturated environment? do they have such an acute fear of death that they betray their husbands, sell their bodies for sex in exchange for drugs, let the drugs fall into the hands of a nine year old, steal a car and shoot a guy twice in the stomach? maybe. nobody can deny that commodity consumer culture is violent (remember last week’s computer commercials from 1995 featuring whats his name…) If americans don’t react in this way to the violence of capitalism, then what is this book saying? is it just a big joke?

if this novel were written today, would it not write itself? today, with all the natural disasters and our government’s inability to do anything about them, this book is eerily still pertinent. on the other hand, i would argue that in many ways the novel is outdated…perhaps we could touch on this during class discussion. later.

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).

 

I started off reading White Noise by marking an asterisk on the top corner of each page that held a passage that might be a good starting point for my weekly blog post, but then it turned out that by page 80 or so, every page of my book had an asterisk scribbled on it, so I just stopped marking them. It’s hard to narrow down what to discuss first, or what might be a helpful contribution to what I’m sure is going to be a fairly fun class discussion. Here goes.

At some point while pre-discussing this book, I remembered Prof. Sample suggesting that we keep our eye out for how DeLillo makes use of common objects (his example was the various meditations and connotations placed on the helicopter). Maybe the most reflexive image re-introduced in different contexts throughout is the television (55 mentions in 40 chapters). It seems that with each chapter, its purpose is re-allocated and re-characterized in some way that I hope we can discuss in class. Early Gladney confesses its role in his daily "formal custom" (16). Later, in that tremendously desperate conversation in which a number of characters boldly define the contents of their lives in relation to scatological things they did during pop-culture deaths, it plays as more of a lifeline anchor (Stompanado: "For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. . ." [66]). Later still, it acts as a mirror to Gladney and his relationship to Babette and his semi-kids (103-105), and scenes throughout are punctuated by TV commentary ("The TV says:") as if it is an actual character amongst the revealing and absurd dialogue spars throughout the book.  

The most interesting TV-related scene for me was Babette’s reading of the tabloid for the huddled masses at the camp (pgs. 142-147). It goes without saying that this whole section of the book is a mass commentary on technology and people’s flimsy relationship to what they perceive as authoritative information, with groups huddled around anyone (or anything) with a story to tell (machines, children). This particular grouping was a technology-barren re-enactment of the act of watching episodic or documentarian TV. Both the audience and Babette (who seemingly plays the role of the actor, projecting voices to the subjects profiled in the tabloid articles) seem to acknowledge that they aren’t gaining situationally-related news or instructional information, but are simply engaged with the hopeful theatricality of the dynamic. Gladney’s narrative characterization of the what is maybe the most primitive situation of civility and simulation at the camp highlights both our reliance on techo-media and our blind optimism for what it tells us: "They were content to exchange in brief and unrelated remarks, as during a break for a commercial on TV. . . Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope." (146-147)

I kept returning, throughout so many passages of this book, to that bizarre incident of the JetBlue crash landing of Flight 292 that happened recently, and the role television had in people’s perceived expectations of airplane disasters (seeing as every passenger had now a schema for not one, but two massive national disasters). I’ve been researching this event for a project I’m writing that is unrelated to this course, and I’m continually struck by how the in-flight broadcast of the situation (which, like any cable news event, flip-flopped between reportage and "expert" punditry) either magnified or diminished the passenger’s relationship to the immediacy of the situation. In many ways, the nature of the cable broadcast encapsulated the camp scene in White Noise, with expert pundits dispensing hopefully useful information, newscasters reporting often-speculative news as fact, and actual commercials broadcast in between (I know, this can also apply to many aspects of the crash landing in the first third of the book, but it applies differently there). In the days that followed the incident, armies of media were uncovered or made available, and its all really quite exhaustive, but unstoppably interesting at the same time. Here are some links to some media regarding the incident, if you’re not aware of the situation or are as morbidly interested in it as I am: 

• The actual story of the crash landing [MSNBC]
• Video of it, sadly, from Fox News, which is not my first choice (.wvm) [The Poltical Teen]
• A link to a Podcast of the pilot’s recordings during the landing (.mp3) [Fly With Me]
• A strange follow-up peice about C-List celebrity Taryn Manning’s experience as a passenger [MSNBC, imdb]
• Anderson Cooper’s interview with a pregnant passenger (.wvm) [mccanta]
• A This American Life episode with insightful interviews with passengers (Note: this is a HUGE .ram file, so be careful downloading it) [This American Life]

With so much to discuss in this book, I can’t help but lean towards DeLilo’s impression of children throughout the novel. At times, they are the sublime image of the way things ought to be, as on pg 154 where J.A.K. was drawn to watch his sleeping children. Just the image of his children brought him peace despite his impending death by computer.

 

Other times there is a more sinister aspect to the children and their actions. Heinrich makes pronunciations that are chilling in their accuracy and in their gruesome descriptions. His depth of knowledge is unsettling at times, especially compared with the ignorance that is displayed by the adults; especially the academics. The children all seem possessed not only of a greater knowledge than the adults, but also of strength of character that gives them a greater presence than their parents. For example, J.A.K.’s daughter, Bee, is able to make cross-continental plane trips and make deeply insightful remarks into her parent’s marriage, while her mother and father are incapable of communication.

 

As it is written on page 103, "Make no mistake. I take these children seriously. It is not possible to see too much in them, to overindulge your casual gift for the study of character. It is all there, in full force, charged waves of identity and being. There are no amateurs in the world of children."

 

With this back and forth, I am sometimes at a loss for exactly how DeLilo wishes children to be seen. Maybe they are something to be feared. With J.A.K.’s fear of death, cannot the children, with their seemingly depthless knowledge, be only one more constant reminder of his looming death? There is a distance between him and the children is not something that grows, it is a constant. From the beginning, despite the numerous "family activities", it is always as if J.A.K. is watching his children. Their connection to the television and the radio make them almost a spectacle to be viewed. The fact that much of what they say is an exact repetition of what is on the television may be more of a commentary on the media than on the kids. But the children are always being viewed by the parents, almost spied upon.

 

In true postmodern spirit, the children are part of the paranoia that is so present in the novel. With their superiority, they are just one more part of the hierarchy that is represented, but not necessarily understood. The hardest part about this is making an argument one way or the other; partly because of some of the contradictions that exist in the book. J.A.K. thinks that staring at his daughters is a sublime while the thought of staring at Heinrich is slightly unsettling. Yet J.A.K. is so happy to spend time with Wilder that even when the child is screaming (because of…insert here-pain, despair, discomfort, fear, misunderstanding, perhaps just plain pissed off) he can be at peace. Ah, the contradictions that signify postmodernism. Children may be the future, but beware the future. This idea could be good or evil depending on how you want to look at it. In my mind, I side with the kids. As long as most of the adults act like Babette and J.A.K., I would rather put my faith in children. They are the most human characters. They display their fear, like Denise does. They are intelligent and remember the things they are taught, like Heinrich. Even in their despair, they seem to learn form it, as is implied after Wilder’s 7 hour fit. While DeLilo is ambiguous in his presentation of children, I think this is partly because he does sense the future in them. They are human, they are flawed, and that is safe! If anybody has seen "The Hudsucker Proxy", I see that as a good comparison. Norville Barnes is childlike on so many levels, and his invention is perceived as insane by the other adults. The only one who gets it is the boy who discovers the hula-hoop rolling on the street. And thus the craze started (at least according to the Coen Brothers).

 

"There are no amateurs in the world of children." No matter what, the kids seem to understand, or at least have the ability to learn. So like the Bible, maybe DeLilo feels that children are what the world will be built on.

 

One thing that struck me about the novel (besides recognizing the parts with the airplane and simulation that we had discussed before in class) was Jack’s interaction with the doctors in the novel.  He advises taking Wilder to the doctor when he and Babette cannot stop the child from crying, justifying the need for a doctor because crying is a basic human condition.  The suggestion of just going to the doctor escalates the crying problem into a crisis.  Doctors seem to have a power element for both Jack and Babette, make them more aware of their behavior and more nervous about it.  Doctors have the power to proclaim what causes death, and to delay death.  A doctor determines that Gladys Treadwell “died of lingering dread” after wandering the mall for four days with her brother.  This does not seem to be a true medical cause, but because it is a doctor’s diagnosis, it is not questioned.  Jack wants doctors to solve the problem of explaining his wife’s mystery drug and also helping him cure his own fear of death.  The doctors also have the ability to see Jack as “the sum total of [his] data,” because his information is stored in a computer and can be analyzed impersonally to give him the rating of “pulsing stars,” meaning he is going to die, but no one will give him more information than that.  Computers, not humans, take responsibility for determining Jack’s outcome; it is left to humans to deliver the news to him.  Jack’s regular visits to the doctor make him a “professional patient” but the visits do not seem scientific as much as a dialogue in which little information is revealed.  The doctor says that Jack has high potassium levels, but he won’t specify whether this is good or bad but also won’t explain some of the options for the good (the blood sample could have been hemolyzed) or bad (indication of kidney failure).  By not giving Jack information about his condition, he enables his fear of death to continue, for Jack has no control over it.  When Jack goes to the clinic for further evaluation, he wants to know that the typical response of the other patients is, then gives the same answer.  He makes himself fit the mold so that he can identify with other people, even if (or especially because) that puts him at risk for death.  By giving answers based on what the printout says about him, he validates the conglomeration of data the doctors are judging him by.  It seems to me that Jack likes the drama of knowing that death is going to come sooner than he had thought, even though the doctors don’t know what the effects of the toxic exposure are.  It gives him meaning as a regular person, not a Hitler scholar who creates a persona to be himself, but an unfortunate victim who has had contact with the unknown.

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!

White Noise is a novel that hovers around ‘the system’ of capitalism and consumption. When I read it I constantly felt ‘logged into’ what Jameson termed the new technological or hysterical sublime. Jack, a reflexive intellectual with a high position in the College on the Hill, intermittently recognizes the presence of this ‘system’. However, in the nature of a true sublime, the ‘system’ is omnipresent and can never be pinned down or thoroughly comprehended. It is just there, as an overpowering ungraspable fact tapping into every aspect of postmodern life, to inspire fear and awe in those who catch a glimpse of it.

Jack’s fear of death, like his accelerated progression towards it, is a result of the power of this immense and indefinite capitalist system. Death, of course, is the closest we can come towards imagining a sublime: the fear of the great unknown, the ultimate void of non-existence. The text itself points out the great power of consumerism and, I would argue, connects it to death. Even in the quiet small town society of Blacksmith, the supermarket is the heart of existence. It represents “some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension.” (36). As long as the supermarket is shining and bright, other signs of deterioration in the community can be overlooked. Shopping is a source of happiness. Money transactions equal life. As Jack goes on an unusual shopping spree, he reports how he “began to grow in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I’d forgotten existed. Brightness settled around me” (84). Like making and having money, his ability to spend confirms his place within and blessing from the system (46). Likewise, Winnie Richards asserts that she is proud to be an American because America is the most sensory stimulating country in the world. It is the capitalism’s promised land: the ‘city on the hill’.

This positive image of consumption/ accumulation is countered later in the text (in “The Airborne Toxic Event”), when the byproducts of industrialization become acutely life-threatening. The effects of consumerism as a life-style does make the sky at sunset more beautiful, but the viewers’ awe of this beauty is accompanied by the fear that it is somehow caused by the accumulation of toxins and other pollutants in the air. The text creates a general feeling that the new technological developments – despite the beauty Jack finds in their incomprehensible levels of intricacy – represent an invisible force of death seeping into the human genome to thwart future generations. But perhaps just as disturbing is the discovery that immediate and familiar things constitute health hazards. To careful people like Denise, daily life becomes a constant negotiation between forever new and contradicting waves of information about the hazards of foodstuffs and medicines; the do’s and don’ts for a longer life. For every product, there seems to be a threat. And the products of capitalism are omnipresent. Several places in the text family scenes are interrupted by breaks in the text in the form of advertisements for new products like optical megabyte hard discs (112), or credit cards with rainbow holograms (122). As the text nears its conclusion, these breaks present darker ‘products’ of consumer society, such as “Random Access Memory, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, Mutual Assured Destruction” (303). At this point accumulation has come to signify death. This is evident in the room of Jack’s German teacher, Howard Dunlop. The objects that pile up in his room in stacks tall enough to keep all sunlight out reminded me of the piles of belongings that accumulated in German concentration camps during WWII. There is also the suggestion (made by Murray) that Howard finds death erotic. Jack on the other hand, who desperately tries to avoid death, empties his house of excessive possessions. Yet he cannot escape the fact that the career he has built up is based on death. The unprecedented magnitude of death Hitler instigated is what occasioned his founding of the department of Hitler studies at the College on the Hill. In this connection it seems possible to read the ‘city on the hill’ as a counterpart to the College on the Hill, and American society as comprising both the supreme bliss and the ultimate threat of consumption.     

One of the things that struck me about White Noise is how there were many things very un-artistic that were viewed in very beautiful and artistic ways. The manner in which Hitler is idolized, Murray’s seminar on car crashes, the toxic, pollutant-caused sunsets that everyone stands around in awe over, the idealization of sitting in a snake pit, Jack and Heinrich finding beauty in a house burning down… I don’t really have any enlightened ideas of what it all means, but I just kept thinking how unsettling it was that the characters in general, found things that would usually be taken as negative aspects of our society, or of life, and could transform them into beautifully artistic, or as Jack said at one point, “literary.” Jack’s romanticizing of carrying around a loaded pistol was another example of something that would usually be seen as dark, creepy, or as a breakdown of safety, is somehow turned into an empowering, fantastic experience. And I guess the real question is why is it easy for some things to be transformed into positives, and yet the greatest of all negatives, death, can’t be? Jack can find a burning house poetic but he can’t find the strength to accept the inevitability of dying. And so I was thinking of how accustomed we are to seeing violent things on television, how ‘entertaining’ it is to play Grand Theft Auto on your brother’s Playstation where you can use anything from a bat to an automatic machine gun to kill you opponents, and even how things such as the most recent hurricane season can almost feel like primetime television, just as entertaining and fascinating as any other network drama. None of it seems real so it can be glorified and artistic. I don’t know if it really has anything to do with why DeLillo chose to portray certain things in certain lights, perhaps he was just being artistically “literary” by providing such uplifting descriptions of such negative things. I just thought there was a definite contrast between how so many horrific things were described in a lighthearted manner throughout the novel, up until the final confrontation between “Mr. Gray” and Jack. The actual shooting of Mr. Gray is a very dark and eerie scene, even though I fully expected Jack to find something beautiful in the way the gunfire sounded, or the way Gray bled on the tile floor. But he didn’t because it was real, and I guess those are my thoughts on all that.

To get started, let me say that I’m only just at Dylarama in my reading.  Thus far, the Gladneys (or Jack Gladney and his step-family with Babette) have visited the Red Cross Boy Scouts camp and have been shuttled to the abandoned karate studio to escape the black chemical cloud.   There’s a lot to be said about this story and the complicated themes moving through it, but what I am focusing on most is the parent-child relationships within the Gladney family and how the fast-paced information culture is a variable of argument, interest, and amusement in these relationships.  In Jack’s relationship with his son Heinrich, it seems that the two suffer each other, a father-son relationship difficult from all angles.  Jack trumps whatever bundle of knowledge Heinrich places at his feet, in what reads as a battle of wit.  I wondered though, why Jack cared so much about possessing a greater intellect than his offspring, but the more I learned about Jack with his professor’s robe and thick glasses, the more I understood how he created a story of himself for himself, the image of J.A.K. Gladney as opposed to what lies beneath his disguise.  At other moments between Jack and his children, I was caught off guard. 

Towards the end of their stay at the Boy Scout camp, he observes Steffie sleeping, a spiritual moment that he believes is important. “In my current state, bearing the death impression of Nyodene cloud, I was ready to search anywhere for signs and hints, intimations of odd comfort” (154).  After Steffie utters “Toyota Celica,” Jack comments that the brand name spoken by his sleeping daughter is a truth that “amazed (him) more.”  His mind wanders as the reality of how far reaching marketers, television, and commercial forces are warping his children and his world.  It is a moment where Jack, by observing his children and their relationship to media, recognizes his own disparity. 

Since I am reading on, I will not comment on whether or not Jack’s disparity can be traced to the overwhelming media presence in his life, or whether this scene shows a picture of how parents may view themselves and the nature of their world by watching as their children experience their world, anew.  There are other moments in the book where the narrative seems to point to this kind of reading; for example, when Denise warns Babette not to chew sugarless gum and Babette responds by reminding her daughter how just weeks before it was sugary gum that was a product to avoid.  It’s funny how commerce and information or misinformation plays into our lives, and then again, it’s a bit troubling to think about how this kind of culture is affecting the next generation.  So, this is what I am thinking about so far . . .

I’m planning something totally different for my presentation on White Noise, but I did come across one interesting motif in my research. I wanted to share it here because I didn’t know if I could work it in.

There seems to be a water motif in White Noise. I think this is most obvious at the end, when Jack sets out to kill Mr. Gray, or Willie Minks. There are several lines about what the rain is doing outside: "Water fell to [the] earth in drops" (304) and "Water fell in drops, surfaces gleamed" (305). Additionally: "Water struck the roof in spherical masses, globules, splashing drams" (307) and "Water struck the roof in elongated orbs, splashing drams" (310). These passages struck me, as I found some coincidental information in my research.

On a lark, I typed in "white noise" on Google. Among the references to the novel, I also found a good number of links that discussed actual white noise, or white sound. One website in particular,www.purewhitenoise.com, interested me the most. This website describes white noise as: "White noise is actually a sound frequency or a signal that one hears as a gentle hiss, similar to the sound of wind rustling through trees, a waterfall, radio static or the ocean surf". Their examples of a waterfall and ocean surf definitely tie in with the type of merchandise they sell – white noise CDs, and a fair number of them leaning towards water sounds. A few examples are: Wonderful Rain, Restful Waves, Distant Thunderstorm, Soothing Shower, and Sea of Serenity. 

The water-related passages didn’t surprise me then, considering what else the website had to say about white noise: "To use a simple analogy, the color white contains the whole spectrum of colors of light. Similarly, white noise is created by using the entire spectrum of frequencies the human ear can hear". This goes along with what Babette postulates in the novel, when she is relating to Jack the story of the Dylar and Mr. Gray: "What if death is nothing but sound?" (198), to which Jack responds: "Electrical noise" (198).

The Google search on "white noise" also provided some links on a movie that came out this year, called White Noise (www.imdb.com/title/tt0375210/). In this movie, Michael Keaton’s wife goes missing. While she is missing, he experiences peculiar phenomenons, like radios coming on (much like in the novel White Noise, on page 195) and issuing blasts of static. Eventually, a creepy man helps him understand that his wife, through various technology, is trying to contact him from "the other side" using EVP, or electronic voice phenomena. One individual, in commenting on this movie, pointed out that there was a water motif in this film (a waterfall near Michael Keaton’s house, etc.). 

There are many, many other themes/motifs to explore in the novel, but I hope that this one has provided some food for thought. I’ll look forward to an interesting discussion on Tuesday.

I’m interested in the snippets of dialogue spoken by the television and radio in White Noise.  I think these snippets are examples of the proliferation of meanings rather than the breakdown of meanings for which postmodernism is known; or maybe the breakdown is the result of this profusion.  This connection can be seen in two separate quotes from the novel.  The narrator says that “The world is full of abandoned meanings” (184); Winnie Richards, the neurochemist, says that America “still lead[s] the world in stimuli” (189).  It seems like stimuli lead to abandoned meanings.  This can be seen in various conversations throughout the novel in which scientific knowledge is contested by pop cultural knowledge.  For example, the conversation that begins with a question about outer space gets diverted by the objects pushed on them by the television.  When the sun’s corolla is mentioned, Steffie says “I thought Corolla was a car,” and Heinrich responds that “Everything’s a car” (233).  In this sense, the advertisements on radio and television perform a doubling procedure, twinning everything into a mess of overlapping meanings (one for each thing and one for the car-version of that thing).  It’s interesting, too, that Dylar entered Babette’s life through an advertisement she found in a trashy tabloid.  Dylar is a proposed cure for the fear of death, but it seems more like a metaphor for television.  It is “delivered at specified rates for extended periods” (188).  It is “technology with a human face” (211).  “In a very real sense it doesn’t matter what is in those tablets.  It could be sugar, it could be spice.  I am eager to be humored, to be fooled” (251).  But rather than the protection from death, the modern mass media provide the ‘stimuli’ that bring about the death, as well as the death of meaning through its very profusion.  And Wilder is the only character who seems to recognize the falsity of its promise: “The small boy remained at the TV set, within inches of the dark screen, crying softly, uncertainly, in low heaves and swells, as Murray took notes” (105).

Julie, your Post-Colonial reading of White Noise is an interesting one. I too noticed that Jack seemed to be keenly aware of the ethnicities of those around them. However, I didn’t take it quite as far as you. Isn’t there a difference between recognizing your doctor’s ethnicity (even if Jack uses ethnicity as the principle identifier), and refusing to see a doctor who is not white? By this I mean, Jack doesn’t necessarily demonstrate, as you write, “inabilities to understand and accept the ‘foreign’ goods, services, and people that he encounters,” for he does accept their aid. Rather, he seems to identify these people and products by their nationalities. Furthermore, this novel’s treatment of race can’t be boiled down to a white/other binary. Of all the characters, Germans are perhaps the most exoticised people with their dry spit and harsh sounding tones. I guess what I’m saying is that I think this piece is more complicated than Said’s Orient/ Occident split.

Instead, I would argue that White Noise is a novel of invasion, whether it is by media or people. I think you are right to point out that Jack notices that his world is changing, becoming more and more “foreign,” but at what point does DeLillo suggest that Jack sees the “infiltration of ‘the other’ to be an affront to his security and dominance as a white American man”? I agree that Jack is becoming Xenophobic, but this fear of the foreign is not limited to non-whites. When does Jack’s ethnicity become an issue? Isn’t the greatest invasion the non-descript “foreign” matter that enters his body?

I hope that we have time to discuss this in class, for I would be very interested in hearing you speak more about Mr. Grey. You argue that he embodies an “Ethnic Other,” yet the reader (not to mention Jack) only learns this at the very end of the novel. And even then, we are unsure as to his ethnic identity. Doesn’t the name “Mr. Grey” simply suggest an unknown?

Perhaps I am wrong. After all, he insists that his “bland diet” should be the key to his longevity. Not to mention the fact that he has built a career around the study of Hitler…

Is Jack Gladney really possessed by his fear of death, or is it a symptom of some greater anxiety? As a white American male, it seems that Jack feels disempowered by the unceasing infiltration of "the Other" into his white-washed suburbian, middle-American utopia via immigration, technology, and globalization. Throughout the narrative, the reader is confronted by Jack’s inabilities to understand and accept the ‘foreign’ goods, services, and people that he encounters. According to literary critic Basu Biman, "signs of otherness, then, attach indiscriminately to people and personnel, products and services" in Gladney’s mind. For instance, the supermarket is a symbol of presumably white American capitalism, consumerism, excess, and even, gluttony (to some extent), but it has also become an suburban metropolis of the global market. Upon his first trip to the supermarket with his family in the novel, Jack sees a number of "exotic melons of several pastels" (36) to choose from and Murray, in a later supermarket venture, compares the modern American supermarket to "a Persian bazaar or boom town on the Tigris" (85). Jack is consumed by Orientalist notions of exoticism; foreign nationalities and cultures are feminized and ‘third-world,’ like the fruit they contribute to the world market that ends up on an American shelf. He is overwhelmed by the "small dusty third-world place" the American supermarket has become, and in concert with his children’s naive, but incessant talk of ‘other’ places and people, his wife’s illicit liason with Mr. Gray, an ethnic ‘other’ whom he feels he must confront and wrest control from, he ultimately understands infiltration of ‘the other’ to be an affront to his security and dominance as a white American man. Another example of Gladney’s discontent and xenophobia is at the moment he demands the "third-world technicians" emboddied in the modern ATM machine to "Speak English, for God’s sake."   

As Jack plummets down the tunnel of percieved loss of self-efficacy and control, he becomes more and more obsessed with the fear of death, another instance of total loss of control, and the acquisition Dylar, a drug he believes will mitigate his anxieties. Shrouded in a black robe and sunglasses as he lectures with certainty on the intimacies of Hitler’s biography, even Gladney’s pseudo-identity as imperious professor and founder of Hitler Studies provides him inadequate agency, since his powerful presentation of Hitler is just that, a presentation and something that is not fundamental within Jack in real life. 

Jack’s anxieties ultimately culminate in a violent act, the shooting of Willie Mink (Mr. Gray), who Jack insists is the embodiment of the agressive ‘other,’ in an attempt to regain his percieved loss of self-efficacy and reaffirm his ‘nationalist’ identity. This incident parallels Fight Club, insofar as Durden responds to the globalized consumer culture rampant in what he believes is a feminized, contemporary America with violent acts of terrorism in order to reestablish the white male’s masculinity and agency in a culture that has come to reject all that is white, Nordic, and male. Gladney is also comparable to Fight Club’s narrator, also named Jack in the movie, when Fight Club’s protagonist shoots himself in the head to be free of Durden’s psyche and to regain psychological solidarity and peace of mind. In the same way, when Gladney shoots Mink, but refuses to kill him, Jack feels that he has perhaps regained his masculinity and validity as a white American who is still able to maintain his identity in the shifting postmodern plain of invading ‘others.’ It appears, however, that DeLillo offers little in the way of an actual solution to the anxieties of men such as Jack Gladney, and it also seems that though Jack didn’t kill Mink, nothing has truly changed in Jack’s or his family’s lives. Is this DeLillo’s way of commentating on the condition of postmodernity, that there is no real solution to xenophobic anxieties, and moreover, does DeLillo suggest that there is, perhaps, no real problem either? Perhaps globalization and ‘the other’ are inevitable components of the American way of life, and despite the disbelief and resentment of middle Americans like Jack, it may be the dynamic, vibrant shine that makes the Unites States what it is.