Abstract
This article analyses Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise through the lens of Baudrillardean postmodern theory, arguing that the novel is not only postmodern but also realist in a paradoxical sense. The study examines how the fictional world of White Noise is pervaded by simulacra and hyperreality, particularly through the dominant role of television in shaping the characters’ perceptions of reality. The article further explores the novel’s critique of the hegemonic ideology of postmodern American culture, drawing on the work of Michael Rogin to situate the novel politically within the Reagan era.
Keywords: postmodernism, simulacrum, hyperreality, Don DeLillo, White Noise, Baudrillard, television, American culture
Introduction
Postmodernism is not only the catch-all term that covers most of the events taking place in Don DeLillo’s novel, White Noise, but also the context through which one can collaborate in creating the text. That is, one’s background about the postmodern world, and one’s attitude towards it, play an essential role in understanding, interpreting and even co-authoring DeLillo’s motifs and messages.
White Noise is the story of Jack Gladney, the chairperson of the Hitler Studies Department, at a college in the America of the eighties, who has a constant fear of death. He and his family live a typical American life. Death controls everything he does, and he therefore tries to get rid of his fear of death by occupying himself with very American habits, i.e. shopping, watching TV, reading tabloid magazines. One day he is exposed to the toxin of the “air-borne toxic event”, which implants a time-released death in the form of a “nebulous mass” in his body. All his attempts to confront this situation fail. Therefore, he is left confronting the fear of death, his alienation and estrangement, alone.
A World of Simulacra
White Noise is a world of spectacles and images, a TV-saturated, information-based world, a world that seems to be controlled by television which is the main source of news, drama, and knowledge about postmodern culture.
The shift from a modern to a postmodern world is therefore accompanied by a radical change in the mode of representation, bringing with it a change in the relationship of signifier and referent — or rather representation and reality — which is now more problematic because the image has taken the place of the word as signifier. In White Noise, the daily life of the characters is pervaded with a reality that consists of representations: contrary to one’s conventional “realistic” understanding of cultural forms as signifiers which are supposed to represent reality, what these characters have is a problematic comprehension of reality which is transformed and made “flimsy” by its penetration by images.
Baudrillard’s arguments about the simulacrum and the reproducible object world that loses its originality help to explain the privileged status of the image in the fictional world of White Noise. In this novel, the notion of the SIMUVAC, in which the real is used to experience the simulacrum parallels Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum: “Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (1994:1).
Hyperreality and Political Spectacle
“Hyperreality” is, then, dominant in the text; the distinction between the real and the unreal — for example, on TV and in the SIMUVAC experience — is blurred. Even the unconscious is colonized by images and simulacra.
The novel does not only ridicule television but also points to its destructive role in order to articulate the existence of an alternative reality in which television can play a progressive role. Television’s one-sided representation is a part of the hegemonic ideology, that is, of postmodernism. Hence by launching a critique of television in a postmodern context, White Noise calls for the creation of a critical and dialectical alternative.
The novel’s play with ontological levels creates the impression that the alternative reality offered by the TV saturates the characters’ consciousness and unconscious in a way that makes one wonder whether such characters can ever have independent, not to say autonomous, consciousnesses. The various sub-ontological fictional worlds of television interact with the macro-ontological world of the novel, which is a micro in relation to the reader’s macro-world. This dialectical process creates intersections of micro-macro ontological levels and shows how they interact and mediate each other.
Conclusion
Since DeLillo is experimenting with reality, it follows, then, that this reality has different ontological fragmented worlds in which the original one is missing. That is why Gladney — the postmodern subject — has a fragmented world, a world that is not his own, but rather multiple ontological worlds with no telos, except death. White Noise, then, does not only produce characters but also reflects on the context that produces them, a context that is politically concealed. The novel calls for the creation of a critical and dialectical alternative to the hegemonic simulacral culture of postmodern America.