Agents of Their Own Delight: White Noise and Self-imposed Hyper-reality I came at this presentation from an unlikely angle. I was re-reading the book and felt like I was being asked to look through the deliberately placed patterns to find some sort of meaning, much like Jack Gladney’s search for meaning. It reminded me of something not normally associated with postmodern literature: the random dot autostereogram. Most people know these as Magic Eye posters. Viewers are asked to look through the deliberately, yet randomly placed patterns to find the three-dimensional image lying within. Overlooking the fact that this is an obvious hoax—everyone I asked, and I include myself, can never see the “supposed” 3D image —such murkiness is exactly the problem plaguing the narrator, Gladney, in White Noise. They are constantly being asked to look through consciously placed patterns in order to find images beneath the surface. These sentiments can first be found in the title itself. White noise promises that, underneath all the intensities and frequencies, meaning can be discerned. White noise is merely the auditory equivalent of random dot autostereograms, and the assumption of underlying meaning drives Gladney to search through the mayhem. DeLillo’s novel is both a visual and aural wonderland of frequencies, and like the autostereogram, the obscuring patterns are constructed as a means of hiding what can only be described as the ghostly image of a simulated form. Such obfuscations are the perfect entry point for White Noise as the precession of the simulacra plays a pivotal role in the novel’s odd postmodern quest. While other critics of White Noise—most notably Leonard Wilcox, in “Baudrillard, DeLillo’s White Noise, and the End of Heroic Narrative.”—have identified the problems associated with attempting a modernist heroic quest in a postmodern world, my analysis stems from a fundamental, yet overlooked, desire among the characters in DeLillo’s novel. Critics
such as Wilcox identify Gladney as a wonderer in a wasteland of irreconcilable fragments. To them, Gladney is the rube; he is on a quest to discover himself before his own death (a theme that must be mentioned when discussing White Noise), but is unable to sort through the impenetrable field of empty signifiers, a condition plaguing the postmodern subject. However, when I examine DeLillo’s characters, victim hood isn’t an issue. In the face of a postmodern culture, characters such as Gladney merge their forays into the system of signs with a desire to search for, and install, more layers and patterns that only further obscure the hope of finalizing a self. The characters take it upon themselves to engage in and happily travel through a world of uninterrupted exchange without reference or circumference. More specifically, Gladney finds himself wishing for, searching for, and discovering added frequencies to the postmodern white noise and, throughout the novel, actually finds comfort in his self-imposed obfuscation. For Gladney, the extinction of the real does not prove daunting, and the only means by which he can deal with reality is tied to the ability to construct for himself a world of simulacra that stave off his own mortality. As a result, White Noise chronicles a subject’s deliberate and perpetually unending quest to use the exchange of signs as a means of stalling death, as if engaging in the incessant system of exchange and deferment of postmodern culture will forever defer death. We can see, in numerous instances throughout White Noise, that Gladney enjoys filling in his life with more words, more technology, more narratives, and more products. He seeks, in all these cases, to fill in the world with, as Baudrillard states, in The Precession of the Simulacra, “a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.” (170). He participates in whet he hopes will be an inexhaustible world. Since the modernist quest is suspect, it is only natural that Gladney would willingly engage in an un-
ending exchange of goods, technology, narratives, and, most of all, linguistic signs which offer him the feeling of postponing his own death for as long as the system of exchange cannot be circumscribed. Like the many frequencies found in white noise, Gladney is drawn to perpetuating moments as endeavors to forestall his own death. First, I’d like to look at the ways in which technology plays a role in allowing Gladney to put off his own death. When Gladney and fellow professor Murray Siskand go to visit the most photographed barn in America, they are really participating in an endless dispersal of simulacra through technology. The barn itself, as Siskand points out, cannot actually exist any more, and, as Baudrillard points out in “Simulacra and Simulations” when discussing the process of creating the real, “namely, it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real” (179). Or, as Baudrillard later writes, “Thus the hyperrealism of simulation is expressed everywhere by the real’s striking resemblance to itself.”(180). What does this mean for the most photographed barn in America? On the drive, they both counted five signs announcing the barn, and, at the site, a booth sold a multitude of photos of the barn. In addition, because of the crowd, you could only really get a picture of people taking pictures of the barn. As a result, the barn itself has been elevated from any real barn to its own hyperreality in which it actually becomes a photographed barn, or, as Gladney’s friend Siskand points out, “We are not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies” (12). The nameless energies can easily be seen as the “endlessly names energies”, and these energies are what Gladney and Siskand were actively seeking. Since they participate in the eternal aura of the barn, they experience the enduring power of a continuous image, a moment which Gladney embraces as sign of what future interactions can hold.
IF technology can infinitely extend the life of a barn, then it can also help lengthen Gladney’s life after his exposure to Nyodene D when his diagnoses are constantly being updated. His two and a half minute exposure is of great interest to SIMUVAC workers who explain how any exposure of that duration is a real issue. Gladney finds himself compelled to ingratiate himself to the SIMUVAC worker entering his information into a computer. The worker announces “You’re generating big numbers” and “It’s your whole data profile. I tapped into your history. I’m getting bracketed numbers with pulsing stars” (140). The interest generated never subsides, and the numbers are reassurances. Mutual interest by both Gladney and the scientific community can sustain his mortality since the scientific interpretation means that Gladney needs to live 15 more years in order to gain even more information, and 30 years to be worry free. Literally, the diagnosis calls for waiting out the rest of his life for more answers, and, even at the end of the novel, the doctors are looking to track death’s progression. New numbers generate new possibilities, which become a means of stalling his demise since the scientific data must be processed in the future. Life affirming and perpetuating moments are everywhere, and Gladney seeks to recognize the ways in which his life continues beyond himself into unending patterns of exchange. When he checks his bank account, technology extends his importance into the future. He narrates, “The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval….I sensed that something of deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed” (46). Technology can keep his spirit, his financial existence alive through its continuous exchange of data, and now the bank can keep his financial spirit forever alive within its system. Every time he enters his code, a new combination generates a future of possibilities that must be executed before death enters the system.
While technology can offer Gladney one means of entering into the perpetual system of sign exchange, the consumption of goods further imposed another system of patterns that layer Gladney against death. The family makes many trips to the supermarket, trips which bookend the novel. Critics such as Thomas Ferraro, in “Whole Families Shopping at Night!”, point out how supermarkets and stores can be communal for the family and, as a place of renewel, offer to piece back together what consumerism has torn apart. While this hints at how shopping figures in the novel, an examination of Gladney’s shopping spree proves the ability of shopping to strengthen identity against decay, not merely restore an identity, as a means of extending the self beyond the temporal. After Gladney is mildly rebuked by a fellow professor, he strides through the mall with a different sense of self-importance as he buys more then he ever has before. He willingly and benevolently extends his life into the future by buying presents for a distant Christmas season, by emerging himself in “existential credit,” and also by buying products as distant contingencies in need of fulfillment. Gladney narrates, “I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I’d forgotten existed” (84). By engaging in consumerism, Gladney is also allowing his life to extend beyond himself, to be covered by ever-increasing circles of acknowledgement as a way of confirming, however indistinct, his lasting subjectivity. Not only does consumerism expand and perpetuate the self, it can also improve life. During the shopping splurge, Gladney finds himself entranced by his ability to project a life that can later be filled out, and, even in the face of a looming crisis such as the airborne toxic event, consumer goods are the means of enriching the family. During the evacuation of their home, Gladney narrates, “Babette went to the pantry and began gathering tins and jars with familiar life-enhancing labels” (119). This idea, though, came from Siskand, an obvious agent of postmodern culture, in an earlier scene in the supermarket. He says, “This place recharges us
spiritually, it prepares us, it’s a gateway or pathway” (37). By transforming a “rechaege” into “life-enhancement”, consumer goods offer a real sense of extension, an extended life. Gladney’s narrative tone explains the process of life enhancement and extension through consumerism in the face of termination. Consumerism also allows his personal self to be projected into an infinite future and into infinite moments beyond his immediate perception. Gladney even notes “Our images appeared on mirrored columns, in glassware and chrome, on TV monitors in security rooms” (84). Through Gladney’s active participation in consumerism, his perpetually increasing exchange of goods becomes a means by which he replicates his aura in the face of diminishing mortality. Even during the last scene of the novel, consumerism plays a role in expanding identities. Gladney notes, “This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living” (326). Consuming goods is the way to forestall losing yourself to time, and the buying process sends out waves of knowledge about yourself, and Gladney actively hopes that the promise of speaking beyond his life can be a part of his ability to guard against his demise. Even though technology and consumerism offer the promise of broadening your identity with impenetrable layers before death, Gladney finds the most solace in his linguistic relationships to the world. Throughout the novel, Gladney believes he can guard himself against any ending or some inevitability by inserting descriptions on top of descriptions, in a neverending system of sign exchange that he feels allows him to keep on living. As a result, Gladney supposes that the world can be forever created with judgment placed upon judgment. Jesse Kavadlo, in Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief, points towards the possibility that any fear of death might be balanced by a desire for life, but his belief in this type of balance doesn’t fully describe the type of desire Gladney truly expresses. Gladney doesn’t just desire life, his
desires aim for an incessant expansion of life through an endless system of sign exchanges. In this respect, I find DeLillo’s characters seeping into a post-structuralist postmodern world. At first, such life-extending moments are formed in very subtle ways. Heinrich, Gladney’s oldest son, seeks out considered judgments from his dad in the face of the airborne toxic event. Gladney assumes the alarm can be soothed, narrating, “I sense his support for my little mission, even his hopeful conviction that I might be able to add the balanced weight of a mature and considered judgment to his pure observations. This is a parent’s task, after all” (115). The world as it is, according to Gladney, begs for discourse, begs for judgment, begs for an interpretation. This sentiment is in response to a toxic cloud forever changing from a plume to a black billowing cloud. The situation in which the town people and the family find themselves needs an interpretation, and Gladney wants to impose his own discourse on the event in order to keep it safely at a distance, to begin a process by which he can insert language at will instead of finding truth in observations. Heinrich, though, is not merely a vessel for Gladney to fill with parenting. He is also a perfect example of how to insert a never-ending discourse to keep the world at bay. Heinrich understands his father’s desire to keep death away through the imposition of language. When discussing the rain, Heinrich opposes his father’s view of the world by extending knowledge into an infinite number of unsettled notions. In response to Gladney remarking “It’s raining now,” Heinrich launches into a diatribe that parcels out the world into an infinite regression of semantics, expanding the definition of truth, of the senses, what now means, and what wet entails. Or, as Derrida says, in Of Grammatology,” Heinrich attempts to point out that “what we call production is necessarily a text, the system of a writing and of a reading which we know is ordered around its own blind spot” (1830). As an example, Heinrich offers the path by which the
world can be forever strung out using language as the lengthening device, which directly influences Gladney’s feeling that he can endlessly interrupt endings. Heinrich’s joy in suspending reality is later found in the entire family’s interactions. After a comically lengthy conversation during which nothing is accomplished other than free association among words, Gladney narrates, “The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in the family life that generates factual error. Overcloseness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps something even deeper, like the need to survive….The family process works towards sealing off the world” (81-82). The world becomes insular, and the flow of language remains constant. Derrida posits a reason for this in “Structure, Sign, and Play,” writing “This field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions,… there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions” (289). The inability of the family to arrest their meaning is the means by which they continue their existence, and the need to survive, for Gladney and his family, is the need to fabricate, the need to create a microcosm of discourse that can protect the family from the inevitability of mortality. Now, following Gladney and his postmodern family through the maze of the postmodern world becomes a process of building simulacra, playing in an endless field of simulacra in which he is immersed. Baudrillard writes, in “The Ecstasy of Communication”, about the subject’s relation to “the absolute proximity, the total instantaneity of things…the overexposure and transparence of the world which traverses him without obstacle” (133). However, to see Gladney as merely a node over which the postmodern world flows would be, as I have shown, simplistic. As one of Gladney’s fellow colleagues puts it, “The flow is constant…Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes….We want them,
we need them.” When the baby cries for 7 hours, Gladney doesn’t want it to stop because “Behind that dopey countenance, a complex intelligence operated” (78). When the kids are sent home from school early, Gladney proposes an un-ending list of reasons why: “Investigators said it could be the electrical insulation, the cafeteria food, the rays emitted by microcomputers, the asbestos fireproofing, the adhesive on shipping containers, the fumes from the chlorinated pool, or perhaps something deeper, finer-grained” (35). Even in the supermarket, Gladney notes “I’d been seeing colored spots for years but never so many, so gaily animated” (39). Everything in his life points towards a willingness, even eagerness, to participate in the incessant system of pattern exchange. He immerses himself into this own Magic Eye poster, only the ghost image underneath doesn’t matter. All the specks, graphics, and numbers feed Gladney’s sense of being. Every facial expression holds untold layers of meaning waiting to be deciphered, and all effects have a never-ending flow of causes that must be sorted out. Gladney finds delight, certainly not despair, in searching through the never-ending uncertainty the postmodern world holds for him. In contrast to the modernist heroic quest, White Noise posits a world in which the absolute, knowable subject isn’t attainable, which is just fine with Gladney, who, by the end of the novel, is perfectly complacent watching postmodern sunsets and “telltale dust” on the cars heading east. Characters like Gladney become wholly aware of the possibilities of the groundless, un-ending postmodern world, finding delight in a search for a self that cannot end.