Don DeLillo: White Noise (1985)
White Noise is Don DeLillo’s “postmodern” story of how “networks” and systems, such as the sensorium, academia, everyday life, popular culture, consumerism, and environmental hazards impact the psyches of the citizens of the contemporary US. The novel takes place in a middle-American town that is home to a liberal arts college. Its protagonist is Jack Gladney and his fourth wife Babette; he a professor of Hitler studies (in fact, its founder) and she a teacher of the gestures of modernity like walking. They live with their four children (they both have others living variously overseas and in the US) who are responsive, like them, to the vibrating networks that surround them. The world of the family is changed by the appearance of a cloud of a substance known as Nyoprene D, a byproduct of an insecticide to which Jack is exposed. He is told that he has the contaminant in his bloodstream and that he will die at some point in the future – no one knows when. Simultaneously, Babette answers an ad for a study that promises to cure people of their fears of death and volunteers to be an experimental subject for the drug, known as Dylar. The companies abruptly stops the study, but Babette continues to get the drug through her contact, Willie Mink, known at this point in the text as Mr. Gray. It becomes clear that the drug doesn’t work, Jack confronts his wife about her using it, and she confesses the circumstances of her affair with Mr. Gray and his giving her the drug. Jack reveals to Babette that he is scheduled to die. In the last chapters of the book Jack finally finds Mink and shoots (but doesn’t kill) him. Babette and Jack’s youngest son taunts the systems of modernity by driving his tricycle into traffic and surviving.
Points to revisit: themes, problems raised, etc.
-popular cultural flotsam and how it serves the novel
-the book’s time: does it hold up, etc.
-the million possible literary references that appear briefly and then slide out from under you: Brave New World, Cat’s Cradle, Crying of Lot 49, etc.
-the idea of the “real simulation” of the real (SIMUVAC)
-Hitler studies?
-surplus data, a bombardment of information
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