"How the Dead Speak to the Living": Intertextuality and the Postmodern Sublime in

"White Noise"
Author(s): Laura Barrett
Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Winter, 2001-2002), pp. 97-113
Published by: Indiana University Press
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 "How the dead speak to the living":
Intertextuality and the Postmodem
Sublime in White Noise

Laura Barrett

Florida Atlantic University

Xhe simulacrum, "a copy without an original,"1 is the most salient metaphor of White Noise,
novel in which simulations exploit real catastrophes, and in which tourists visit the "most photo?
graphed barn in America" not to see the barn but to see photographs of the barn. Further empha-
sizing the distance between experience and expression is the novel's emphasis on the ineluctabl
representative nature of language. The disconnection between signifier and signified, pointedl
demonstrated in conversations between the narrator, Jack Gladney, and his son, Heinrich, and the
collapse of etymologically sound meaning (such as the absence of Germans in Germantown) sug
gest that words, too, are copies without originals. Deja vu, one of the many shifting symptoms o
contamination from the airborne toxic event, renders memory itself suspect, suggesting that th
earlier experiences upon which recollections seem to depend may not exist. The lack of originating
moments results in a persistent conversation with the past, an overwhelming nostalgia for a more
stable moment in history. Academics and housewives routinely seek distraction in news of James
Dean and Marilyn Monroe because, as Murray Siskind, a visiting lecturer on Elvis Presley, aptl
notes, '"[h]elpless and fearful people are drawn to magical figures, mythic figures'"; and the nar?
rator, Jack Gladney, fashions his world around a dead fascist in the interest of self-preservation.2
But it is not just individual characters who are in conversation with the past: DeLillo's entire nar?
rative is a dialogue with older literary works, including sacred texts, Puritan sermons, westerns,
and Modernist and Postmodernist fiction.

As Douglas Keesey notes, the novel is a generic hybrid, a nexus of types of fiction ? the
domestic drama, the college satire, the apocalyptic melodrama, the crime novel, the social satire.3

1. Michael Valdez Moses, "Lust Removed from Nature," New Essays on White Noise, ed. Frank Lentricchia (Cam?
bridge University Press, 1991), p. 64.
2. Don DeLillo, White Noise (Penguin, 1984), p. 287. All subsequent references to White Noise will be from this edition.
3. Douglas Keesey, Don DeLillo (Twayne, 1993), p. 133.

Laura Barrett, "How the dead speak to the living": Intertextuality and the Postmodern Sublime in White Noise," Journal of
Modern Literature, XXV, 2 (Winter 2001-2002), pp. 97-113. ?Indiana University Press, 2002.

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98 Journal of Modern Literature

That trespassing of boundaries which is typical of

product of myriad representations, and DeLillo's
conclusion confirms that White Noise is not the las
to maneuvering between reality and art ? as Adol
of invented characters ? the reader is required to n
previous fictional worlds, but this intertextuality4 d
novel's artifice: it places White Noise within a long
older texts that might shed some light on a contempo
themselves betwixt and between, unmoored from a
cal) and ill at ease with death as the final destinat
for "simulated evacuation," he is forced to point ou
real evacuation. Incredulously, he asks, '"Are you sa
order to rehearse the simulation?'" (p. 139). The exp
precedes rehearsal. The result is a life hopelessly
between Jack and his son, in which origin is indisti
is merely representational, that the self is construc
that religion is a pretense (even for the German nu
a past in which the ego seemed less fragile and arb
objective reality. Jack especially turns to the past
intertexts confirm, humans have never had acces
only virgin land is death, and so the characters sh
which has not been mediated.

Many critics, most famously Fredric Jameson, have argued that Postmodern pastiche is a
neutral borrowing from previous sources, an irresponsible romp through literary, historical, and
artistic archives without any particular point or recognition of the previous works' contexts. Linda
Hutcheon, however, argues that intertextuality5 is

not ahistorical or de-historicizing; it does not wrest past art from its original histori?
cal context and reassemble it into some sort of presentist spectacle. Instead, through a
double process of installing and ironizing, parody signals how present representations
come from past ones and what ideological consequences derive from both continuity
and difference.6

Perhaps it is ironic that DeLillo would choose to address an existential crisis, in which characters
cannot experience anything for the first time, through intertextuality, which necessarily chal?
lenges notions of originality and singularity. After all, White Noise is about so much more than
the metafictionality of Postmodern literature, and its allusions to previous texts are not lamenta-
tions about the impossibility of creating fiction after all the good stuff has been taken; they speak

4. The term "intertextuality" has different meanings for Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Gerard Genette, and Michael
Riffaterre. I am using "intertextuality" to designate the meeting of two textual worlds, but I understand this meeting to
function in the way that Linda Hutcheon describes "parody": "repetition with critical distance, which marks difference
rather than similarity" (A Theory of Parody, [Methuen, 1985], p. 6).
5. Hutcheon uses the word "parody," which she acknowledges is often called ironic quotation, pastiche, appropriation,
or intertextuality (The Politics of Postmodernism [Routledge, 1989], p. 94).
6. Hutcheon, p. 93.

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 Barrett: White Noise 99

of humanity's preoccupation with death

so, DeLillo's intertextuality connects r
present, between experience and recollec
between things as we felt them at the t
for irony, sympathy and fond amuseme
(p. 30). This is not the misprison of anx
response to a cultural as well as a litera
terms of another statement uttered by
the voice" (p. 86), but the irony here, as
for narratives of the past is understanda
face of fragmentation, of transcendental
moment of chaos. Initially, Jack's appre
in history: his impulse is to revive the e
Jack replaces sex with reminiscence as
"[c]hildren wincing in the sun, women in
past possessed some quality of light w
attempts to borrow language and behavio
tures do not hold, but, as Tom LeClair n
presses beyond the ironic, extracting fr
mystery."7 White Noise's intertextuality
resentations and a metaphor for the nov

The first chapter of DeLillo's novel i

initiates the novel's intertextuality. A li
"College-on-the-Hill," a setting which ec
which he predicted that the incipient Pu
the object of pitiless European scrutiny
college, have emigrated to form a new
describes a social order contingent upo
providence) ranked into two sorts, ric
metaphor of a body, Winthrop argues th
success hinges upon cooperation. DeLillo
to form an elect in which quasi-spiritual

The parents stand sun-dazed near their

every direction. The conscientious sunt
feel a sense of renewal, of communal r
as much as anything they might do in th
or laws, tells the parents they are a colle
a people, a nation. (pp. 3-4)

7. Tom LeClair, "Closing the Loop: White Noi

Illinois Press, 1987). Rpt. in The Viking Critical
8. John Winthrop, "A Model of Christian Cha
Heimert and Andrew Delbanco (Harvard Universi

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100 Journal of Modern Literature

DeLillo's language is not as far afield of Winthrop's as

the "city on a hill" will thrive because its constituents
loves the creature, so far as it hath any of his image i
himself.... Thus it is between the members of Christ. E
own image and resemblance in another, and therefore
It is no surprise that this is a community from which
son to name two, were exiled. The Puritan diaspora,
world in which we seek community through sameness
observes that the "third-person [consciousness]. . . ,
element in consumerism, "came over on the Mayflow
among American consumerism, cult mysticism, and Pu
of a mass marriage ceremony in Yankee Stadium sou
Puritan millennial impulse: "there is a sense . . . that t
them, that they are every where surrounded by signs o
the Last Days."11 That the same passage could describ
correspondences between past and present. Moreover, t
tion, which allowed the Puritans, like many Christians
history in light of Scripture, provides an early exampl
and world events as corresponding to Old and New T
recalls a time when past and future ostensibly coales
living between origin and end, it, too, was subject to m
As important a force of cultural construction as A
whose influence is seen in the novel's first sentence: "T
shining line that coursed through the west campus"
gic and parodic. The train of station wagons transpo
represents suburban America and recalls the Wild W
highways pockmarked the American landscape, just a
western setting while reminding us of the gap between
of blacksmiths in Blacksmith. The items transported
boots, quilts, sleeping bags, rucksacks, Western saddl
inflated rafts, stereo sets, radios, personal computers,
trical gadgetry, sports paraphernalia, and junk food un
arrival recalls the prototypical hour of conflict betw
enacted in High Noon. Through his use of the words "w
religious and western foundations of American cultu
western heroism and middle-class suburbia ? are literal
through the campus, raising the issue of individual as
peculiarly American genres, the western, like Puritan
and destiny, qualities painfully missing in postmodern

9. Winthrop, pp. 87-88.

10. DeLillo, Americana (Penguin, 1971), pp. 270-71.
11. DeLillo, Mao II (Penguin, 1991), p. 7.
12. While the Puritans fiercely insisted upon an unmediated relation
ing, clearly evident in the Antinomian Crisis, admit to the ineluctabil

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 Barrett: White Noise 101

literature and the films that later embodie

central theme of American literature: th
various geographies in order to arrive a
doing so, they surrender particularities
These individuals are interchangeable: "Th
names. Their husbands content to measur
ents are stereotypes, men and women wi
type, appear, without specified origins, in
town with a Mid-Village Mail and a Mid
beginning and an end.
Far from its roots in Protestantism and
individuality is replaced by media role
and spirituality is sorely felt by Jack, a
mundane and superficial life with some g
is a hollow husk, and millennial transform
Indeed, White Noise is a meditation on
of cosmic revelations, which, like all othe
irony that DeLillo's working title for W
several sacred texts: the Egyptian and Ti
journey to the underworld, and Revelatio
supermarket as an analogue to the Tibeta

"This place recharges us spiritually, it p

how bright. It's full of psychic data.. . . E
by veils of mystery and layers of cultura
here, all the colors of the spectrum, all
ceremonial phrases. It is just a question
layers of unspeakability. Not that we wou
be served." (pp. 37-38)

While Murray is too farcical to be taken

ment, the supermarket's importance ? as
and of mystery ? cannot be entirely di
supermarket "a revelation" (p. 38), thus c
from a crisis in faith caused by persecuti
ument for Puritans, predicts the end of its
prophecy itself is revealed to John, the f

13. Moses, p. 79.

14. DeLillo has said, "Perhaps the supermarket tablo
They ask profoundly important questions about dea
Art atmosphere" (Caryn James, "I Never Set Out To
Rpt. in The Viking Critical Edition of White Noise,
15. Certain details link The Revelation to White No
(1:7)," the visitation of plagues, and the promise of
except him who receives it" (2:17). The New Oxfor

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 102 Journal of Modern Literature

Noise. Particularly useful in terms of my discussion of i

as the work is sometimes called, is a rearrangement of
time and situation of the author.16 Exegetical scholars g
rather than an individual author, highlighting its com
origin of the text may be, origin itself is clear in Rev
prophet, announces, "Behold, I make all things new_Wr
and true. ... I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and t
ticularly important in Revelations, as the author is com
claims that the author of Revelations is also the author
two texts share a devotion to the word: "In the beginnin
God, and the Word was God."18 Indeed, the rider of a w
in Revelations is "called Faithful and True." Although hi
he is called "The Word of God," and "[f]rom his mouth
the nations.19 The rider's name is unspoken, perhaps bec
and his words are linked to violence through the metap
God" itself ? the prophet whose utterances are true an
and sound ? white noise.20

White Noise's allusions to all three of these sacred texts serve to underscore Americans' unpre-
paredness for death: characters in White Noise cannot even think of death, much less philosophi-
cally plan for it. The narrator, Jack, attempts to outwit death by immersing himself in language, a
medium which he believes controls reality, a faith in language perhaps stemming from Genesis, the
story of creation in which God literally speaks the world into existence and bestows upon Adam
the gift of naming creatures. The expulsion from Eden results in a violent separation of word and
meaning, and language, which has not previously had to deal with abstractions such as death,
now becomes symbolic, conceptual. Ironically, in White Noise, to alleviate the dread of death ? a
by-product of the Fall ? humans can resort to a drug that makes the association between word

16. John L. McKenzie, Dictionary ofthe Bible (Collier Books, 1965), p. 39.
17. Revelations 21:5-6.
18. John 1:1-2.
19. Revelations 19:11-15.

20. The metaphor of white noise is most often considered as the interference of communication. LeClair consi
other meaning in music, "the sound produced by all audible sound-wave frequencies sounding together ? a term for
plex, simultaneous ordering that represents the 'both/and' nature of systems (and irony)" (p. 409). Cornel Bonca sug
that white noise is "the death-fear expressed in the only terms that a postmodem media culture knows how to expr
("Don DeLillo's White Noise: The Natural Language of the Species," College English XXIII [1966]. Rpt. in The V
Critical Edition of White Noise, p. 467). The description of the rider in Revelations connects white noise with a
unveiling, which links it to the sublime.
Moreover, the Romantic sublime also connects White Noise with Moby Dick, another classic American text
deals with the search for divine meaning, the failure of language, and the loss of individuality (the result of failing
Ahab's seductive oratory). In DeLillo's novel, the white noise of consumption, manifested in catalogues of Japan
mobiles, credit cards, and environmental disasters, stalks Jack throughout the novel. Technologically produced whi
is designed to conceal silence, "the cover over the existential perception ofthe infinitude" (Moses, p. 81). During a co
with her husband to determine whose fear of death is stronger, Babette asks, '"What if death is nothing but sound?'
response and the subsequent exchange confirm the angst: "'Electrical noise.' 'You hear it forever. Sound all arou
awful.' 'Uniform white'" (p. 198). Similarly Moby Dick, a whale whose whiteness becomes a source of mystery r
the supermarkets filled with white-labeled generic food, exists for Ahab as a distraction from the void, and huntin
creature is tantamount to Jack's hunting of Willie Mink, alias Mr. Gray.

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 Barrett: White Noise 103

and object terrifyingly real, so that the ph

end result is that language is more distance
ing bullet, the plunging aircraft, the raini
pseudo-victim taking cover behind a sofa, t
Unlike Murray Siskind, the quintessential
dent meaning, hence his academic reliance
of Hitler Studies. He assumes that the Germ

Fd made several attempts to learn Germa

roots. I sensed the deathly power of the lan
charm, a protective device. The more I shr
pronunciation, the more important it seeme
to touch often seems the very fabric of our
... (p. 31)

The unspoken but omnipresent reference to language in the novel is Hitler's celebrated oratorical
skills, the talent of effecting reality through words. For the sake of his profession, Jack becomes
J.A.K. Gladney, a bulkier, vaguely threatening manifestation of his former self, and his son is
given a German name because it presumably evokes strength. But the problem with language is
its imprecision, and Jack's insistence on a one-to-one correspondence between word and meaning
is the source of his existential angst.21 A seemingly simple statement by Jack's son Orest which
appears to quantify the dead gives rise to a semiotic nightmare for Jack and his son, Heinrich:

"There are many more people dead today than in the rest of world history put together.

I looked at my son. I said, "Is he trying to tell us there are more people dying in this
twenty-four-hour period than in the rest of human history up to now?"
"He's saying the dead are greater today than ever before, combined."
"What dead? Define the dead."

"He's saying people now dead."

"What do you mean, now dead? Everybody who's dead is now dead."
"He's saying people in graves. The known dead. Those you can count."
I was listening intently, trying to grasp what they meant_

21. His faith in meaning is prefigured in Revelations, which accepts the sanctity of words and warns against the dangers
of representation. Revelations ends with a command to preserve language:
I warn every one who hears the words ofthe prophecy of this book: if any one adds to them, God will add to him
the plagues described in this book, and if any one takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God
will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book (22.18-19).
The novel's evocation of The Revelation no doubt constitutes an unsanctified representation ofthe word." Moreover,
the earlier quotation from The Revelation is translated from Hebrew, and thus is already representative of the original, so
White Noise's allusion is at least twice removed. What then does it mean for a postmodern novel which both recognizes the
power and the unreliability of language to converse with the Bible? While the novel's title and many of its more humorous
episodes suggest that language is intentionally misleading, the underlying point seems to be that words are life-giving, but
only insofar as they are adapted to new messages and new eras. Words must be changed in order for the message to survive.
Jack's failing is not in looking to the past for narratological models; it is in insisting that those models be used to describe
current situations. Similarly, Jack wants to believe in "'[t]he old heaven and hell, the Latin mass. The Pope is infallible,
God created the world in six days.... Hell is burning lakes, winged demons'" (p. 318).

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 104 Journal of Modern Literature

"But people sometimes stay in graves for hundreds of y

dead people in graves than any where else?"
"It depends on what you mean by any where else."
"I don't know what I mean. The drowned. The blown-to-bits."

"There are more dead now than ever before. That's all he's saying." (p. 266)

The rising drama of the dialogue, its augmented sense of urgency, seems to be connected to
increased realization of a breakdown of language on a fundamental level. We can no longer acc
such words as "dead," "now," and "anywhere else" as givens. The very fabric of communica
is fraying as it is being used. And if language's inherent instability is not sufficiently demor
izing, the originator of the contested sentence is silent for the subsequent conversation. In
place, Heinrich mediates. We can never be sure if the volley of inquiry and answer between J
and Heinrich approximates Orest's meaning. Moreover, Jack's comprehension of his own m
ing disintegrates under the pressure. And, for that matter, Heinrich's interpretation is easily r
as an observation of the increasing importance of the dead: "the dead are greater today than e
before." Finally, no one seems to understand the symbolic reading of Orest's original statemen
even the living are dead.
Recognizing that Heinrich's name has not granted him immortality or even a justifiable you
fulness, Jack suspects there is something more powerful than the magic spell of language, and
is death: '"Let me whisper the terrible word, from the Old English, from the Old German, fr
the Old Norse. Death ... Processions, songs, speeches, dialogues with the dead, recitations of
names ofthe dead'" (p. 73). What is powerful, then, about Hitler's speeches is its fatalistic cont
Clearly, Jack chooses Hitler studies because it enables him to trace a cultural nightmare ? a
the individual words that sparked it ? back to a beginning, which also happens to be an e
death. So many ofthe novel's hilarious conversations center on death ? the account of Tommy
Foster's murder of six, Jack's and Babette's verbal duel to determine whose fear of death is gre
and Jack's encounter with the SIMUVAC technician in which he attempts to establish (with
verification of an appropriate expert) how he feels. Even the semantic debate about climate ev
the connection between language and violence when Jack coerces Heinrich to answer a ques
by inventing a theoretical gun-toting man who wants to know if it is raining. Indeed the clos
we come to a classic showdown in the novel is not Jack's parodic shoot-out with Willie Mink,
his classroom debate with Murray, in which each professor tries to eclipse the other with maca
stories of their dead icons.

Beyond suggesting more than our distance from other cultural views of death, DeLillo's work?
ing title evokes the literary history of our legacy. "The American Book of the Dead" is the first of
a series of significations upon the last story in Joyce's Dubliners.22 What DeLillo has created in

22. Douglas Keesey argues that DeLillo felt "some kinship with James Joyce," making connections between Ameri-
cana and A Portrait ofthe Artist as a Young Man and Ratner's Star and Ulysses (p. 2). In an interview with Tom LeClair
(LeClair and Larry McCaffrey, Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary Novelists [University of Illinois
Press, 1983]), DeLillo identifies Ulysses (as well as Nabokov's Pale Fire) as one ofthe classic modern novels which he most
admires (p. 85). In this interview, he also quotes Joyce's famous phrase "silence, exile, and cunning," uttered by Stephen
Dedalus in A Portrait ofthe Artist. Jack's conversation with Sister Hermann Marie at the end of White Noise is reminiscent
of the crisis of faith which sends Stephen out of Ireland at the end of A Portrait ofthe Artist.

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 Barrett: White Noise 105

White Noise is literally an American book

ization of Jack Gladney "as a modernist dis
reverberations of Joyce, the quintessential
tury experience and literature in a human
rather than numerical and technological.
While DeLillo's working title indicated a
reflects the two central metaphors of Joyc
of White Noise, the snow of Joyce's story
both links his characters to the past and pre
playing obscures the deadness and stillness
as DeLillo's: Gabriel Conroy is ever attendin
ing ofthe men's heels," the clatter of knives
provide a steady background noise against
Dublin, synesthesia plagues Blacksmith.26
so that sound becomes visual, but the result
reconciled to their surroundings than are re
and information proves a formidable anesth
Like Gabriel Conroy's mourning of bygone
tion and desperately attempts to link his ow
promise for a future.27 The "epic quality" of
Jack to reconsider the enormity of the disa
connected in doom and ruin to a whole hi
(p. 122). Jack compares the evacuation of th
dedicated rebels. A great surging drama wit
his own twentieth-century adventure to "w
Jack recalls his earlier references to the w
hours of crying is offered, Jack attributes
place, in sand barrens or snowy ranges ? a p
rise to a similar mythic reading when Jack
spaciousness to this moment, an epic pity

23. In fact, the world that Gabriel describes in "The D

"His own identity was fading out into a gray impalpab
and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling" and "A vag
had hoped to triumph, some impalpable and vindictive
vague world" (James Joyce, Dubliners [Penguin, 197
from this edition.) In DeLillo's world, the vague terror i
in fact, takes the shape of existential angst. We are, th
his own living. The sense of dissolution, of "weightless
Technology has made the vagueness more acute; it has
24. "Baudrillard, "DeLillo's White Noise, and the E
(1991), p. 348.
25. Joyce, p. 179.
26. The novel's setting in the town of Blacksmith recalls Stephen Dedalus' promise to forge "the uncreated conscience"
of his race. That the town's name no longer bears any connection to its meaning simply underscores the postmodern experi?
ence lamented by the narrator.
27. Jack and Gabriel also share a poetic sensibility which desires language to transcend worldly issues. Like Jack, who
assumes that Hitler studies is not about good or evil, Gabriel, a teacher and an author, who writes literary reviews for a West
Briton newspaper, thinks that literature is above politics.

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106 Journal of Modern Literature

when Jack, upon seeing a white-haired figure on his la

a visit. The figure becomes preternatural in Jack's ey
bearer of "an ancient and terrible secret" (p. 244), the w
of his allegorical force" (p. 243). Undermining the re
satiric tone heard in a one-sentence paragraph follow
not Death that stood before me but only Vernon Dickey
from the young narrator of "Araby" is the difference b
own folly ? the confusion of infatuation and love ?
mistaking his father-in-law for the grim reaper. Jack a
same ideals but respond differently to their disappointm
Ironically, the very Modernist narrative that Jack hung
tion. Nostalgia permeates the annual Christmas party
"[t]hose were the days," "never-to-be-forgotten," and "[t
cians have diminished over time, and according to Gabr

"this new generation, educated or hypereducated as i

humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humor which belong
night to the names of all those great singers of the past
that we were living in a less spacious age. Those days m
called spacious days."29

Both Gabriel and Jack seek the legendary spaciousness

stricting, shrinking world.
Gabriel's allusions to Greek mythology and Victorian
[that] add romance to a life" (p. 9). The academic robe
for Jack, to contradict the a-romantic "digital watch b
narrative mode, like the academic robe, embellishes a d
ingful the seemingly random. But his efforts are con
postmodem society:

Babette and I and our children by previous marriages

in what was once a wooded area with deep ravines. The
backyard now, well below us, and at night as we settle in
fic washes past, a remote and steady murmur around our
at the edge of a dream. (p. 4)

Jack begins to tell a fairy tale, but the phrase "by prev
ignating the demise of the garden, mar the illusion. Th
the water, whose absence is underscored by the verbs
by in a prelapsarian world.

28. Joyce, pp. 199, 207, 194.

29. Joyce, p. 203.

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 Barrett: White Noise 107

Working with the models of an Amer

attempts to construct a narrative as cos
as geographically sweeping as the wester
ernist novel. Even Jack realizes the futili
post-modern world, and his final allusion
literature ? must come to grips with its d
kov occurs in the penultimate chapter of
is a parody of Humbert Humbert's murd
timate chapter of Lolita.31 Just as Humb
that have preceded his utterly unoriginal
unable to turn his gaze away because he h
that he does "not have to knock [since t]h
years earlier, Humbert does knock on hi
door and remarks on how easily it opens
Lolita, after Humbert has killed Quilty, h
side of the highway to satisfy "a very sp
ride across a highway. Humbert's defian
ment" which propels him off the road,
grassy slope, among surprised cows," fille
emotion not unlike the "wonder and drea
in White Noise. Whereas Humbert drives
furrow." The shift from urban to quasi-b
alludes to the epiphanies of Romantic p
in The Prelude ? and the transcendental
Emerson's clarity of vision in Nature. W
sarily tainted by virtue of their moment in
authentic realizations, reached after reflec
flash of blinding insight. Humbert Humb
blue skies on an old mountain road ironic
vapor from a small mining town."35 Recog
never ceased for a moment" as children ar
he has stolen Lolita's childhood.36 Howeve

30. In broad terms, Lolita appears to be an influence

can society satiated with advertisements and mark
Lolita will come from this edition.) Humbert's vision
prototypes, predicts the loss of original in White
Poe and as a pale shadow of a film idol or a western
literature. More specifically, Humbert refers to his
brainless baba" (p. 27). It is precisely Babette's heft t
intellectual, but it is worth noting that Babette is re
31. The confrontations occur in the penultimate cha
western "showdowns," in which the hunted men are
confesses the that "both of us were panting as the c
32. Nabokov, p. 268.
33. Nabokov, p. 279.
34. Nabokov, p. 279.
35. Nabokov, p. 280. The primary sense in last chapt
36. Nabokov, p. 280.

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108 Journal of Modern Literature

quasi-Wordsworthian experience, as he would like u

the manuscript is not a penitent man; he is, in fact,
muscles. Humbert's revelation comes to him during
inserts it into the seemingly appropriate scene.
The "epiphanies" in White Noise are as troubling
subsequence to Lolita. The first epiphany occurs for
vocabulary who does not distinguish between telev
article. Like Hawthorne's Pearl, Wilder is purely sy
his parents, provocative in his naivete.38 By virtue o
Wilder is inversely associated with Lolita, a child pr
highway excursion also links him with Humbert Hu
the narrative moment when he recognizes Lolita as a
the blind alley which introduces James Joyce's "Araby"
Noise is a rite of passage, the end of Wilder's inhuma
his plastic tricycle, rode it around the block, turned r
to the dead end" (p. 322). His "mystically charged" tr
his plastic tricycle is the only miraculous event in W
frightened; tears come when his tricycle, having ma
embankment, evoking shock and possibly pain. His in
but his pain upon tumbling into a "water furrow" is
awakening after suffering his own wound in the prev
Jack's awakening is no less ambiguous than Wild
early in his encounter with Mink is parodic: "I con
glowed, a secret life rising out of them. ... I knew fo
what wet was...I knew who I was in the network of
to see myself from Mink's viewpoint" (pp. 310, 312).
utter self-consciousness, a completely severed subject
epiphany, in which an object's "soul, its whatness, lea
The soul of the commonest object. . . seems to us rad
with painful self-consciousness, as he has already adm
the name around" (p. 17). Indeed, Jack's self-consc
condition than a literary posture. In "The Dead," G
over his dinner speech, rehearsing his debacle with
of him. Like Jack, he thinks of himself as composin
the fractured ego that is emblematic of Modernism is a

37. I am indebted to Stacey Olster for this insight into the novel.
38. For DeLillo, "[c]hildren have a direct route to, have direct conta
even their] misspellings and misused words reflect a kind of rea
An Interview with Don DeLillo" in Lentriccia, Introducing Don
39. Quoted in M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, Sixt
40. Lines from his own texts reverberate in his head and even in
tormented music" (Joyce, p. 192) and "In one letter that he had wr
these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word
Jack during the Willie Mink fiasco, Gabriel literally observes hi
penny boy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalis
lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the

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 Barrett: White Noise 109

deems missing from postmodem society;

that Jack's retrospection is misguided.
Certainly, shooting Mink cannot reconn
possibility of epiphany in Postmodem l
'showdown' between Gladney and Gray
late modernist, existentialist notions of he
been complicated by technology and medi
time" is insufficient to reveal Jack to him
mortality, not a synthetic loss of life di
death. Jack's own pain upon being shot
returns him to the world of ordinary me
Jack's enlightenment after being shot eff

With the restoration of the normal order o

for the first time as a person. The old hum
Compassion, remorse, mercy, (p. 313)

But it is difficult to recognize the heigh

shooting Mink and who exhibits profound
It is important to note that, like Humbert
experience but in the moment of writing; t
longs for the past and relies on melodram
content to live in the present. Both Humb
through representation, through languag
of ontological confusion in White Noise, i
Wilder has passed from Lacan's imaginary
guities, and terminations, Jack has passed
burden of mock belief, to an acceptance of
By the novel's end, Jack must come to
it ? just as the drivers encountering Wilde

they knew this picture did not belong to t

broad-ribboned modernist stream. In spe
split-second lives. What did it mean, this li
gone awry. (pp. 322-33)

The highway is Modernist narrative gon

technology, or increasingly mediated expe
fact, not sophistication but innocence, no
cars manage to avoid Wilder by mysteriou
the universe. The signs and patterns that
tricycle is weighty enough to upset world

41. Wilcox, p. 349.

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110 Journal of Modern Literature

"[i]t is hard to know how [one] should feel about this. .

transcends previous categories of awe, but we don't kno
dread, we don't know what we are watching or what it
Jack's words evoke the uncertainty and confusion of
Modernism are shattered, but the stance is less skeptica
modernism" can be in part defined as a recycling ofthe p
ironic distance, then Jack moves from Modernism to Po
The old world order of progress has been challenged, re
Inherent in this perspective is a sense ofthe interconnect
the novel is filled with terms linking life and storytelli
exalted narrative life" (p. 324, italics added); "The sky
(p. 325, italics added), unlike a previous sunset which p
dynamic colors, a deeper sense of narrative sweep" (
spectacular skies is puzzling: characters do not know if t
cloud or by the microorganisms that eat it. And so, we are
or, more aptly, wonder and dread.
In a world in which everything is a text to be deciphe
possible carry the burden of meaning. It can, however, a
no solutions to mysteries and terrors, but they allow us
puzzles. DeLillo notes that "fiction rescues history from

Stories can be a consolation ? at least in theory. The nove

barrier of fact, and the reader is willing to take that lea
kind of redemptive truth waiting on the other side, a sen

tion. . . . So the novel which is within history can also

clearing up and, perhaps most important of all, finding rh
simply don't encounter elsewhere.43

Yet the patterns that fiction offers must never overwhelm

to reveal the "mystery in commonplace moments" and
Jack's recognition that "[t]he world is full of abandoned
unexpected themes and intensities" (p. 184).45 The colle
is to create legends, which simultaneously offer solace a

The toxic event had released a spirit of imagination. Pe

spellbound. There was a growing respect for the vivid ru
were no closer to believing or disbelieving a given story
there was a greater appreciation now. We began to marve
facture awe. (p. 153)

42. DeCurtis, p. 56.

43. DeCurtis, p. 56.
44. DeCurtis, pp. 59, 63.
45. Many readers assume that Jack is the spokesman for DeLillo himsel
if it exists at all, is revealed after the former's shift in consciousness.
characters' nostalgia and the author's use of intertextuality in the nov
deny the present, while the latter is an acknowledgment of previous l

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 Barrett: White Noise 111

DeLillo suggests that subscribing to a faith

be a replacement for the religious faith w
unthinkable. Even Jack has surrendered the
stand Wilder's adventure, he simply seg
achieved "negative capability," Jack and B
ies, doubts, without any irritable reaching a
himself and/or the reader earlier in the n
days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do
Indeed, the novel's most powerful myste
his near-death experience allows him to m
discovery of Gretta's dead lover removes t
angel Gabriel, whose horn will announce
both works look to the west, toward death
the young gaze west toward the "narrativ
the west, from out ofthe towering light"
come for him to set out on his journey we
Thematically, White Noise has come fu
page and on the west campus, is over or nea
those in the station wagons; and the livin
the novel's start: "at night as we settle in
and steady murmur around our sleep, as o
the supermarket provides a space for revel
unravel: "The supermarket shelves have b
(p. 325). The holographic scanners, "which
[transmit] the language of waves and radia
readers view the rearrangement of the su
gloomy novel. But the lesson that Jack an
that dread is part of being human. Ultimat
that the fear of death is as essential as lan
the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a p
On the verge of death, the co-pilot in the f
than we'd ever imagined. They didn't prep
is pure, so totally stripped of distractions
tion'" (p. 90). If death is the last frontier,
enced it ? even in simulation ? we are in
In the tradition of Kant, Lyotard defines
present an object which might, if only i
of which no presentation is possible.'**8 W
Lyotard is that the latter "puts forward the
ernism uses form to demonstrate the inef
is located in the generic hybrid itself, but,

46. John Keats, Selected Letters ofJohn Keats, ed.

47. Joyce, p. 223.
48. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condi
49. Lyotard, p. 81.

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112 Journal of Modern Literature

("MasterCard, Visa, American Express," "Toyota Cor

which may or may not hold mystical significance. Thos
ambiguous ? gestures toward irony and mysticism. The
is the sublime, a gap which reason cannot conquer.50 W
White Noise ? the modernist highway, the spectacular
our illusion that we can control everything, including d
Significantly, speech has all but vanished in the nov
witnessing the tricycle's journey progressively lose the
in any event. On the overpass, spectators silently view t
voice above a whisper" (p. 325). And Jack is "taking no
The language that seems to have disappeared by the end
"[T]he language of waves and radiation," with the pro
replaced spoken language, which holds no such prom
DeLillo," Paul Maltby correctly identifies the demise of
nomenclature implied in Genesis where words stand in a
ship to their referents" ? in The Names.51 In an interv
from meaning sometimes carry supernal significance:

There's something nearly mystical about certain words a

our lives. . . . Words that are computer generated to b
be sold any where from Japan to Denmark ? words de
hundred languages. And when you detach one of these
designed to serve, the word acquires a chantlike quality.

By the end of the novel, dialogue, largely displaced by n

DeLillo's narrative dialogues with previous authors, w
Jack transforms life into stories, and DeLillo transfo
intertextuality ultimately broadens the novel's definiti
incessant mantras of consumerism, the hum of applianc
sions and radios; "white noise" also includes the previou
nation's sense of itself, all the sound that comprises pr
White Noise is mediated by television, the novel itself i
in the last lines, particularly the last nine syllables, of
Joyce's "The Dead":

50. While Kant's sublime supposes the ultimate victory of reason ove
emotion over intellect: "Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas
sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a m
that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is c
Origin ofOur Ideas ofthe Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. J.T. Boulton
51. Paul Maltby, "The Romantic Metaphysics of Don DeLillo," Con
52. Adam Begley, "Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction." Paris Review
Edition of White Noise, p. 332. DeLillo has also said, "Babbling can
is interesting because it suggests there's another way to speak, there'
brain" (LeClair, p. 84).
53. "Panasonic" was another working title for the novel, and LeCla
recording the wide range of sound, ordered and uncertain, positive an

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 Barrett: White Noise 113

Everything we need that is not food or lov

supernatural and the extraterrestrial. Th
remedies for obesity. The cults of the fam

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the sn

faintly failing, like the descent of their las

If this exchange between the past and th

then Postmodem sublimity may be expr
texts.

54. Joyce, p. 224.

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