Don DeLillo's White Noise

Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise deals with postmodern ideas through a fairly straightforward narrative. Despite the traditional plot development, DeLillo’s characters are thoroughly postmodern in the lives they lead and the ideas they entertain. Through these characters White Noise comments very directly on our constructions of reality. DeLillo abandons the pursuit of absolute truth and delivers the postmodern thesis that there are multiple equally legitimate constructions of reality. He focuses on the social relativity of truth, examining the cacophony of voices that contribute to each individual’s worldview.

Early on, White Noise challenges our most basic means of knowing, sense data. Heinrich, Jack’s fourteen-year-old son, is the ultimate skeptic, “Our senses? Our senses are wrong a lot more often than they’re right. This has been proved in the laboratory. Don’t you know about all those theorems that say nothing is what it seems?” (23). Sense data is one’s primary, and perhaps only, way of knowing any reality outside oneself. By faulting this, Heinrich faults all knowledge, except perhaps Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum.” Any means of organizing reality has to deal with massively incomplete or even inaccurate data. This fundamental philosophical limit of our knowledge of the world is one of two underlying problems that lead to the existence of multiple realities.

The second underlying problem is the relativity of truth, with regard to both the physical, and the social. Heinrich speaks first of the physical relativity of truth. He asks Jack, “What truth does he want? Does he want the truth of someone traveling at almost the speed o flight in another galaxy? Does he want the truth of someone in orbit around a neutron star?” (23). This physical relativity implies that even in a scientific sense there exist more than one legitimate construction of reality. Faced with multiple truths, Heinrich abandons them all.

The social relativity of truth leads other inhabitants of this postmodern world in a direction exactly opposite Heinrich. They accept multiple truths and draw upon many sources in a fragmented manner, as do many postmodern works. Babette teaches a posture class that exemplifies this trend, “She makes references to yoga, kendo, trance-walking. She talks of Sufi dervishes, Sherpa mountaineers. The old folks nod and listen. Nothing is foreign, nothing too remote to apply,” (27). Her students are willing to accept these disparate sources and mold their own conglomerate truths from them. Jack calls it “the end of skepticism,” (27). Each individual’s amalgam of truths is the product of all of human history, of countless philosophies. How we construct these amalgams is a central them for the rest of the novel.

The text addresses the role of language in constructing reality. It questions language’s ability to address reality at all. Again Heinrich asks the philosophical questions, “What if this guy with the gun comes from a planet in a whole different solar system? What we call rain he calls soap. What we call apples he calls rain. So what am I supposed to tell him?” (23). Language is a human social construct. Any statement, true or false, must be a statement in some language. Therefore, the truth or falsity of any statement is a human social construction, not a function of some absolute reality. p>The power of officialdom is a theme DeLillo addresses repeatedly. Even skeptical Heinrich seems willing to accept the official. In conversation with Jack, “‘It’s going to rain tonight.’ / ‘It’s raining, now,’ I said. / ‘The radio said tonight,’” (22). This is all the skeptic can hope to accept. Jack tells us, “In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are. No one’s knowledge is less secure than your own,” (120). For the skeptic every day is an epistemological crisis.

The Airborne Toxic Event, the central plot piece of the novel, is largely a discussion of the official. Each news update changes the official status of some statements. Babette tells Heinrich that the girls complain of sweaty palms. “‘There’s been a correction,’ Heinrich told her, ‘Tell them they ought to be throwing up,’” (112). New symptoms have officially been announced, replacing the old. The girls’ actual symptoms are not as legitimate as the symptoms announced on the radio.

We embrace official voices for the comfort they provide. Jack informs us, “It seems that danger assigns to public voices the responsibility of a rhythm, as if in metrical units there is a coherence we can use to balance whatever senseless and furious event is about to come rushing around our heads,” (120). We need to believe that some order exists, even if we cannot say what it is. Jack and Babette reveal this in a telling conversation, “‘They seem to have things under control,’ I said. / ‘Who?’ / ‘Whoever’s in charge out there.’ / ‘Who’s in charge?’ / ‘Never mind,’” (147).

Ultimately, data is what is official in the postmodern world. Jack’s encounter with the SIMUVAC man after his exposure to Nyodene D is telling. “. . .the man seated there typed out data on his keyboard. My name, age, medical history, so on,” (138). For the moment, this data is all that Jack is. The SIMUVAC man tells him this explicitly, “It just means you are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that,” (141). Data is stored symbolic value. Reality, including the individual, is composed of the symbolic.

DeLillo also examines how individuals in our immediate environment influence our views. When Wilder concludes a seven-hour crying session, Jack tells us, “I waited for Babette to glance at me behind his back, over his head, to show relief, happiness, hopeful suspense. I didn’t know how I felt and wanted a clue,” (79). Jack bases his reality at least partially on Babette, who surely bases her reality at least partially on Jack, who . . . There is no end to this postmodern loop. The recursive nature of our construction of reality is a common theme in postmodernism. This is why much postmodern work focuses meta-fiction, giving us a story about a story about a story . . . DeLillo illustrates this point through a linear narrative filled with recursive ideas.

This crying session leads Jack to contemplate another means of approaching truth: mysticism. Jack narrates:

Nearly seven straight hours of serious crying. It was as though he’d just returned from a period of wandering in some remote and holy place, in sand barrens or snowy ranges—a place where things are said, sights are seen, distances reached which we in our ordinary toil can only regard with the mingled reverence and wonder we hold in reserve for feats of the most sublime and difficult dimensions. (79)

This calls up images shaman and medicine men fasting, meditating, ingesting hallucinogenic drugs, and enduring extreme pain, all to look at the face of God. This is the stuff of Carlos Castaneda and Timothy Leary. This is a form of knowledge that is still respected, but only at a distance.

Jack needs to believe that this sort of blind faith still exists. When a nun at the hospital reveals that she does not really believe, Jack is crushed. She understands his need to believe that she believes:

“Our pretense is a dedication. Someone must appear to believe. Our lives are no less serious than if we professed real faith, real belief. As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe. Wilde-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak. We are left to believe. Fools, children. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us.” (319)

This information cannot fit into Jack’s reality. He refuses to accept it. Stubbornly, he argues, “‘There must be some of you who aren’t pretending, who truly believe. I know there are,’” (320). DeLillo shows us how are construction of reality influences how we evaluate new information.

This is not the first time Jack has let his image of the world obscure reality. Early on in the airborne toxic event, Jack denies that it will come there way, “‘I’m not just a college professor. I’m the head of a department. I don’t see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That’s for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the county, where the fish hatcheries are,” (117). In this case it is not just Jack’s worldview that is important, but also his self-image. He accepts the reality of an airborne toxic event, but not the reality of himself in an airborne toxic event.

DeLillo has identified several influences on our constructions of reality, from the most individual and particular to the most overarching and structural. There is no single coherent truth to be constructed from these disparate sources. Each character pieces together an individual truth in a catch as catch can manner. This is postmodernism.