reading the scene during the airborne toxic event where gladney is talking to the realbutsimulation officer i was surprised in how ahead of his time delillo was. maybe he wasn’t far ahead of his time. since orwell writers have explored the idea of government knowledge and personal privacy.
gladney is, to an extent, an everyday citizen who lives in an interpretation of what the world was in 1985, not some hero of a distopia novel, but he worries what extent of his personal information has been examined by the officer in order to determine how threatened by nyodene d he might be. “where was it located exactly?…what else did he know? did he know about my wives, my involvement with hitler, my dreams and fears?” (p.140)
postmodern is based on reference within reference where culture becomes art, not vise-versa. we must then ask whether orwellian paranoia is a reaction to the world and a distrust that developed out of the actions of the government, or if it was the ideas written about in such books as 1984 that became the worries of the common american. did the paranoia about government control of the culture end up in books or did books create the paranoia of the culture?
it may seem like a circular argument but it could be applied to almost any concept of our culture. in sex, drugs, and cocoa puffs, klosterman writes that during the first few seasons of the real world, he saw people on the show that reminded him of people he knew. after a few seasons the opposite became true: he now met people who reminded him of characters on the show. while something was attempting to reflect real life, all it did was create an image of real life and real people for our society to emulate.
the same could be said about novels from orwell to delillo, the reasons behind the postmodern distrust of government could be postmodern in themselves-people becoming the fabricated image of reality they are presented with.
Also, with books like Orwell’s 1984 published in 1949, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 published in 1953, and Huxley’s Brave New World published all the way back in 1932, books with themes similar to the ones in Delillo’s White Noise which was not published until 1985, did Delillo’s ideas about technology and government control come from these earlier novels or are these reactions common to Americans with “distrust that developed out of the actions of the government.”
To me, it seems that these earlier novels may have been the ones before their times, in respect to their ideas on American society, and novels that came later, like Delillo’s, probably fed off of the ideas of these earlier works to shape and drive their own opinions and comment on American society, technology, and government control.
It’s interesting that the question of government control is coming up. I say it’s interesting because unlike 1984, Fahrenheit 451, or Brave New World, the government is remarkably absent in White Noise. There is no “Big Brother” or “World Controller.” There is no mention of national or state politics in the novel, no appearance of any authority figure at all, really (Hitler being the exception that proves the rule).
In fact, one of the general themes of the novel seems to be the powerlessness of traditional patriarchal and government figures. The governor is rumored to have died in a plane crash (153), a story that is neither confirmed nor denied. The chancellor of Jack’s college died skiing (4). And there’s Jack himself, whose insecurities and sense of helplessness drives the plot of the novel.
There is of course the SIMUVAC technician, but I’d argue that he doesn’t represent government control so much as the simulation of control. He has access to “data,” true, but no real control.
This is one of the things that makes White Noise postmodern: there is no central government authority; it has been replaced by a diffuse and elusive net of technology, power without a face. Orwell and to a lesser extent Bradbury and Huxley are modernists, imagining big, blocky discrete entities that run our lives. This idea of a central governing authority with nearly limitless power just doesn’t jibe with postmodernists, whose work suggests that nobody is really in control. The closest traditional authorities can come now is to simulate their power, something Baudrillard discusses at length.
I’m reminded of the conversation between Jack and Heinrich:
Jack cannot answer Heinrich’s question because it’s simply too scary for Jack to imagine that nobody is in control.
Perhaps this explains why Jack is so taken with Hitler: he yearns for a time when you knew exactly who was in control. Hitler left no doubt about who ran things. I don’t think this is too unusual: many people would rather submit to an absolute authority than face a world in which doubt and uncertainty reign.