White Noise by Don DeLillo: A Scathing Cultural Critique

White Noise by Don DeLillo A Review Don DeLillo's novel White Noise is a scathing critique on contemporary culture that uses the everyday language of buzzwords, special discounts, and limited time offers to create a world of fear, where people's perceptions are completely shaped by blind faith in the media, medicine, consumer products, and technology. Jack Gladney, the main character, completely preoccupies himself with concerns about his wife, job, and family while trying to ignore his greatest fear, the reality of death.

Jack knows that death cannot be escaped, and yet by remaining loyal to a culture of institutions he feels he can somehow sidestep it. The threat of a potential plane crash shows how one word can change Jack's entire system of beliefs. Certain elements in the crew had decided to pretend that is was not a crash but a crash landing that was seconds away. After all, the difference between the two is only one word. Didn't this suggest that the two forms of flight termination were more or less interchangeable? How much could one word matter? An encouraging question under the circumstances, if you didn't think about it too long, and there was no time to think right now.

The basic difference between a crash and a crash landing seemed to be that you could sensibly prepare for a crash landing, which is exactly what they were trying to do. The news spread through the plane, the term was repeated in row after row. "Crash landing, crash landing." They saw how easy it was, by adding one word, to maintain a grip on the future, to extend it in consciousness if not in actual fact. They patted themselves for ballpoint pens, went fetal in their seats. (DeLillo p90-91) Likewise, DeLillo demonstrates how a single word or phrase can possess the power to bring fear and death closer to reality. When a tanker crashes and releases a toxic cloud over Jack's town of Blacksmith he bases his concern on the vocabulary of the local news.

The description of the toxic gas is constantly changing, causing human reaction to escalate from indifference to panic. "The radio calls it a feathery plume," he said. "But it's not a plume." "What is it?" "Like a shapeless growing thing. A dark black breathing thing of smoke. Why do they call it a plume?" "They're not calling it a feathery plume anymore." "What are they calling it?" "A black billowing cloud." "What are they calling it?" "The airborne toxic event." (DeLillo p109-114) The symptoms resulting from exposure to the toxic cloud, or Nyodene D, are inconclusive and have not been tested by scientists. However, the news media and government agencies serve to create the symptoms of a chemical no one understands. Again, people are absorbed by the words and images rushing past them.

Rational individuals suddenly become devoted followers of the exclusive media coverage, live radio broadcasts, and special reports much like rats following the Pied Piper. "What does it cause?" "The movie wasn't sure what it does to humans. Mainly it was rats growing urgent lumps." "That's what the movie said. What does the radio say?" "At first nausea, vomiting, shortness of breath." Babette's head appeared at the top of the stairway. She said a neighbor had told her the spill from the tank car was thirty-five thousand gallons. She also said that the girls were complaining of sweaty palms. "There's been a correction," Heinrich told her. "Tell them they ought to be throwing up." "It doesn't cause nausea, vomiting, shortness of breath, like they said before." "What does it cause?" "Heart palpitations and a sense of déjà vu."

At dinner Denise kept getting up and walking in small stiff rapid strides to the toilet off the hall, a hand clapped to her mouth. We paused in odd moments of chewing or salt-sprinkling to hear her retch incompletely. Heinrich told her she was showing outdated symptoms. She gave him a slit-eyed look. (DeLillo p109-115) Experiencing inaccurate symptoms from an unknown toxin is absurd, but the imagined affects of Nyodene D still contain some perverse sense of reality. Sweaty palms, vomiting, and nausea are all real physiological responses. Unlike Nyodene D, death has no symptoms that Jack or anyone else can emulate or take comfort in. Death is unknown, and therefore the greatest fear. Jack is terrified of death because it is something he cannot control.

It is nonnegotiable and always exists as an eventual part of life. Even so, Jack has tried to escape death by buying into the latest images of safety and contentment. For Jack, the quaint town of Blacksmith is the ideal American small town; a dependable place, free from violence, death, and the unknown. For that reason, even the potential threat of a toxic event in Blacksmith contradicts much of what he knows to be true. "Nothing is going to happen." "I know nothing's going to happen, you know nothing's going to happen. But at some level we ought to think about it anyway, just in case." "These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it's the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters.

People in low-lying areas get the floods, People in shanties get the hurricanes and tornados. I'm a college professor. Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods? We live in a neat and pleasant town near a college with a quaint name. These things don't happen in places like Blacksmith." (DeLillo p112) After the air borne toxic event forces everyone to evacuate, Jack realizes that he can no longer rely on the perceived well-being of his town. Death continues to draw closer when Jack is infected with the Nyodene D toxin. This time, Jack attempts to take refuge through technology. However, technology is a façade, only capable of masking death.

Jack undergoes numerous medical examinations and extensive testing after being infected, but every test leads back to the same outcome: death. Dylar, a memory wonder drug is Jack's second attempt to escape death through medical technology. Unfortunately, Dylar is not a miracle cure. It merely destroys the part of the brain responsible for comprehending death. The drug is another "limited time offer" that controls Jack's fear, while providing no real peace of mind. "It's what we invented to conceal the terrible secret of our decaying bodies. But it's also life, isn't it?

It prolongs life, it provides new organs for those that wear out. New devices, new techniques every day. Lasers, masers, ultrasound. Give yourself up to it, Jack. Believe in it. They'll insert you in a gleaming tube, irradiate your body with the basic stuff of the universe. Light, energy, dreams. God's own goodness." (DeLillo p272) Written in the mid-1980s, White Noise seems almost prophetic today. Even well before the proliferation of prescription mood enhancing drugs like Prozac, the novel offers a cautionary tale about the dangers of unquestioned faith in a culture of miracle cures.