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Escaping the Aura: Consumption and The System of Objects in Don DeLillo’s White Noise
Man is – Hegel dixit – ‘an animal sick unto death,’ an animal extorted by an insatiable parasite (reason, logos, language). In this perspective, the ‘death drive,’ this dimension of radical negativity, cannot be reduced to an expression of alienated social conditions, it defines la condition humaine as such: there is no solution, no escape from it; the thing to do is not to ‘overcome,’ to ‘abolish’ it, but to come to terms with it, to learn to recognize it in its terrifying dimension and then, on the basis of this fundamental recognition, to try to articulate a modus vivendi with it.
-Slavoj Žižek
Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise was published in 1985, and is widely regarded as a
seminal postmodern text. The novel deals heavily in themes characteristic of twentieth-‐
century literature of the postmodern vein, including media saturation, fragmented identity,
and the multi-‐marriage family unit. Behind these subsidiary themes, however, lie the
book’s two main driving forces: death and shopping. Ever the satirist and social
commentator, DeLillo depicts the rabid consumerism of American society with
unprecedented vision, and he portrays society’s looming fear of death with a commitment
rarely encountered in American literature. The book, which deals with death consistently
throughout its 326 pages, is divided in two by the 21st chapter—a 54-‐page-‐long account of
a family’s efforts to cut and run following an industrial accident in the small town where
the novel takes place. This segment towers in comparison to the two-‐or-‐three page
chapters of the rest of the novel. The novel’s use of “the airborne toxic event” as a dramatic
climax proved particularly fitting at the time of its publication, given that the Union Carbide
disaster, an industrial accident in India that killed over 2,000 people and left thousands
injured, occurred just months prior to the novel’s publication. DeLillo’s vision of consumer
culture, in combination with the eerie timeliness of his choice of an industrial disaster for
an agent of death, gave the novel so much attention as to bring DeLillo into the national
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spotlight. The attention made DeLillo and his work the subject of many discussions on the
significance of death and consumption in contemporary America. Many critics contend
that within the pages of White Noise lies DeLillo’s critique of Western society’s unhealthy
relationship with consumer culture. In this essay, I use this common interpretation to
enter the discussion surrounding death, consumerism, and culture, using this critique to
explore a number of interpretive problems within the text, including: the relationship
between one of the novel’s most prominent ideological institutions—academia—and the
driving themes of death and consumption; the role of consumer culture as an
unsatisfactory means of circumventing the fear of death; the price of participation in
consumer culture; and what the novel can tell us about our relationship with death.
The Birth of an Ideology: Consumption as the Root of Production
DeLillo is no stranger to satire. Consequently, the reader must take the novel’s
idyllic description its quiet college town with a healthy dose of skepticism. The picturesque
image painted by the narrative resembles one that has been inverted and skewed by Karl
Marx’s camera obscura; DeLillo is daring us to reveal this image’s real concrete substratum
through careful analysis. The school in the small college town of Blacksmith, where the
novel takes place, is called the “College-‐on-‐the-‐Hill” (DeLillo 4). This name immediately
calls to mind John Winthrop’s allusion to the biblical “city upon a hill” in his sermon “A
Model of Christian Charity.” In the sermon, Winthrop explains to the Puritan colonists of
New England that they will be a “city upon a hill” that is watched by the world. The
message of Winthrop’s sermon was not only that the Massachusetts Bay Colony would be
under constant scrutiny, but that it would serve as an example to the other developing
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American colonies and the world. Similarly, while the opening pages of White Noise don’t
necessarily paint the “College-‐on-‐the-‐Hill” as a model of Christian ideals, they do call to
mind academic ones, ideals like reason and intellectualism.
The description that Jack Gladney, the novel’s narrator and main character, gives of
himself in the opening pages of White Noise is consonant with the ideal depiction of the
College-‐on-‐the-‐Hill insofar as it suggests that his intellectual pursuits are also guided by
academic ideals. Jack is the “chairman of the department of Hitler studies at the College-‐
on-‐the-‐Hill,” a department he founded (4). Regardless of whether Jack’s study of Hitler is
serious or not, the fact that the department is called “Hitler studies” frames it as a valid
topic of academic inquiry simply because the topic is Hitler; whether or not the department
is worth its salt intellectually is irrelevant if people are disinclined to investigate its
academic merit in the first place. Paul Cantor explains how, even in a world where truth is
now generally regarded as relative, “Hitler often seems to stand as the lone remaining
absolute: the incarnation of absolute evil” (Cantor 39). As a result, Hitler has become
something of an “argument stopper” in the sense that
People who can agree on nothing else will join together in rejecting Hitler and all he stood for. To defend or admire Hitler is to risk removing oneself from the acceptable range of rational discourse and branding oneself as a dangerous extremist or an outright kook. (39)
People are unlikely to label Hitler an invalid or discreditable field of study for the same
reason that Hitler has become an argument stopper. To question the value in studying an
historical figure as gigantic as Hitler would be to risk discounting his horrifying influence
on the twentieth century, and, as stated above, “removing oneself from the acceptable
range of rational discourse.” Jack’s standing as the preeminent scholar on a topic as
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requisitely serious and important as Hitler points to the seriousness and importance
associated with him as an academic.
Jack’s aura of seriousness, however, much like the College-‐on-‐the-‐Hill’s air of
academic idealism, is misleading. We learn the true nature of the College-‐on-‐the-‐Hill by
examining how DeLillo portrays the breed of “academic” that the College employs and the
their pseudo-‐intellectual pursuits. The tendency to grant merit to that which is
academically unimportant is highlighted in the college’s “Department of American
Environments.” The department undermines the academic façade of the College-‐on-‐the-‐
Hill in its willingness to accommodate seemingly any subject without blinking an eye. It is
especially fitting that DeLillo uses the College-‐on-‐the-‐Hill’s American Environments
department to explore this tendency. Jack first refers to the department as the “popular
culture department,” only to add that it is “known officially as American Environments”
(DeLillo 9). The more official-‐sounding name is used to impart an air of validity to the
department and its faculty, and avert the criticism delivered by those who would question
the academic worth of a “popular culture department.” DeLillo obviously has his tongue in
his cheek to some degree, as he himself is a diligent student of popular culture, but the
critique is definitely present.
White Noise’s critique of what constitutes meaningful academic inquiry is perhaps
most pointed when commented upon by the character Murray Jay Siskind. Siskind is a
visiting lecturer in the department of American environments who wants to “do with Elvis”
what Jack has done with Hitler (9). Jack describes Siskind, whose own academic pursuits
could be seen by some as trifling, as “embarrassed by what he’d gleaned so far from his
colleagues in popular culture” (10). As Siskind explains: “I understand the music, I
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understand the movies, I even see how comic books can tell us things. But there are full
professors in this place who read nothing but cereal boxes” (10). The fact that the
department embarrasses even Siskind exposes the absurdity of the ideal academic
depiction of the College-‐on-‐the-‐Hill by revealing that a professor who spends all his time
analyzing cereal boxes has become possible in it.
As the novel progresses, we find the idyllic depictions of not only Jack’s relationship
with Hitler studies, but Hitler studies itself, to be just as misleading as the ideological image
of the College-‐on-‐the-‐Hill. Where the Hitler studies department is located, for example,
brings its authenticity into question via sheer association. As Jack explains, “there is no
Hitler building”; the department shares a building with American Environments (9). Jack’s
relationship with Hitler studies also clashes with the idyllic image of the rational, scholarly
college professor. His actions—like overeating to “grow into Hitler” and donning “glasses
with thick black heavy frames and dark lenses” to supplement his “hulking massiveness”
(17)—are far from those expected from a rational academic, let alone the head of a
department. The strangest thing about the department of Hitler studies, however, is the
novel’s banal and trivial treatment of Hitler himself. On the topic of Hitler, Jack says at one
point that “it’s not a question of good and evil” (63) and even describes Hitler later in the
novel as “fine, solid,” and “dependable” (89). By failing to evoke “the moral indignation and
even metaphysical horror” that have become the expected cultural response to Hitler, and
by transforming him from a “willful tyrant into someone reliable,” the idea of Hitler studies
shifts from practicable to comically inappropriate, especially when he is linked by Siskind
to the study of another twentieth-‐century icon, Elvis Presley (Cantor 40, 44).
Understanding DeLillo’s treatment of Hitler within the novel further reveals the reality
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beneath the first few pages’ idyllic portrayal of the College-‐on-‐the-‐Hill, while
simultaneously discrediting Hitler studies itself; the college is in fact an academic venue so
“open-‐minded” that it can allow almost anything in the name of academia, even the
appropriation of something as disturbing as Hitler into the mainstream of western culture.
At first glance, evidence in the novel suggests that the ideological depictions of the
College-‐on-‐the-‐Hill, Hitler studies, and even Jack Gladney himself are consequences of the
novel’s characters operating within a production-‐driven Marxist framework. Examining
this evidence allows us to uncover just how these ideological depictions might arise out of
said framework. For example, Cantor states that when Hitler is “stripped of his aura” to the
degree that he is in White Noise, he can be turned into a commodity (44). The language that
Jack uses to describe his founding of Hitler studies supports Cantor’s assertion:
I am chairman of the department of Hitler studies at the College-‐on-‐the-‐Hill. I invented Hitler studies in North America in March of 1968. It was a cold bright day with intermittent winds out of the east. When I suggested to the chancellor that we might build a whole department around Hitler’s life and work, he was quick to see the possibilities. It was an immediate and electrifying success. (DeLillo 4)
The language Jack uses to recount this experience does not sound like the kind that an
academic would use to describe the founding of his department, but rather that of an
inventor or entrepreneur recounting an early business venture. For instance, a field like
“Hitler studies” cannot really be “invented.” Consider the following example: a small
agricultural community living centuries ago may have used manure from their livestock to
fertilize their crops. This could have taken place for generations, only for one farmer to one
day realize that the excess manure produced by his bulls could be sold to nearby less-‐fertile
communities for profit. The random details about the day Jack “invented” Hitler studies,
and the choice of the word “invented,” itself, suggest a similar revelatory moment. I
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remember precisely when it hit me. It was a cold bright day with intermittent winds out of
the east, when all of a sudden: Eureka! Hitler studies! Jack didn’t invent anything. Rather, he
took something that we can presume had been studied for decades and decided to consult
someone with the standing and authority to market it; just as the farmer would have gone
to his community leader, Jack took his idea to the college chancellor. In both instances, a
figure of authority is “quick to see the possibilities,” and a businessman is born.
Other characters also acknowledge Jack’s entrepreneurial savvy. Siskind, for
example, describes Jack’s early efforts with Hitler as “masterful, shrewd, and stunningly
preemptive” (12). The foresight Jack exhibited was exactly what the college chancellor
recognized in his idea; Jack had found an open niche in the academic marketplace that
allowed for Hitler studies to be merchandised like a product and exploited to the fullest.
Prima facie, Jack’s relationship with Hitler—and the way this relationship bolsters the
overarching ideology of academia—is is lock-‐step Marxist in that it seems to explain the
ideological façade of the College-‐on-‐the-‐Hill—and Jack’s role in that ideology—as products
of the concrete substratum working itself out.
Jack’s relationship with Hitler, however, proves more complex than that of a
businessman and his product. The fact is that Jack, even more than he markets Hitler,
shops for Hitler; he consumes Hitler. In other words, it is not production, but the closely-‐
related practice of consumption that Jack’s “invention” of Hitler studies is predicated upon,
something that Cantor hints at but neglects to develop. As Cantor puts it, Jack discovers
Hitler as his life’s work while “strolling up and down the aisles of the vast supermarket of
academic possibilities.” This figurative supermarket is one where people are “free to shop
around for their values and identities” (Cantor 41, 43). In the process of producing an
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academic commodity, Jack is actually partaking in a culture of consumption wherein he
selects not only a lifelong profession but a corporate identity as well. According to this
reading, Jack’s ability to market Hitler as a field of study depended first on his decision to
identify in Hitler his own values and identity. We find, therefore, that the root of Hitler
studies lies not in Jack’s production and marketing of Hitler, but rather his consumption of
Hitler. This begs an important question: what does Jack think he’s getting from Hitler?
Moreover, where does Jack’s “consumption” of Hitler fit into the overarching theme of
consumption that is portrayed in the novel? These questions and others are best explored
through an analysis of the relationship between consumer culture and death, the two
overarching themes in White Noise. By beginning with an exploration of Jack’s relationship
with Hitler, we can show how consumer culture provides Jack and the other characters of
White Noise the empty promise of amnesty from their fear of death at the expense of their
relationships with one another and a real lived existence.
The Promise of Consumer Culture: “J.A.K.”, Baudrillard, and The System of Objects
Jack shopping for his identity in Hitler initially seems like a relatively harmless
activity. The concept is similar to one espoused by cultural theorists Rob Shields and
Michel de Certeau, who are of the opinion that the consequences of a consumer culture are
at their worst benign, and at their best empowering. Shields and Certeau both assert that
consumption, the driving force behind consumer culture, allows for “an active, committed
production of self and of society which, rather than assimilating individuals to styles,
appropriates codes and fashions, which are made into one’s own” (Shields 2).
Consumption, therefore, provides a flexible social code within which the subject is free to
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produce a persona or multiple personae that are not mere embodiments of popular trends,
but reflect instead the attitudes and values of the subject.
However, Jack’s founding of Hitler studies does not appear to stem from a
“committed production of self.” Nor does it seem to reflect his attitudes and values. We
have already established that Jack does not adopt Hitler out of any deep-‐rooted personal
interest with him as a topic; the random details about the day Jack “invented” Hitler studies
suggest that much. If anything, DeLillo emphasizes Jack’s choice of Hitler as the basis for
his academic career as—except for its marketability—an arbitrary one. The inauthenticity
of Jack’s commitment to Hitler studies is further reinforced by his lack of proficiency in the
German language. In reality, Jack’s association of himself with Hitler is just the first in a
series of personal overhauls that allow him to construct an inflated shell of himself: the
persona of “J.A.K.” Gladney. Jack assumes this inflated persona whenever he is on campus,
and reinforces it with a number of supporting commodities. Jack accomplishes this
reinforcement by donning dark glasses and wearing an academic robe (DeLillo 9). He
literally over-‐consumes food in the interest of “growing out” into Hitler to convey “an air of
unhealthy excess” (17). Likewise, the name “J.A.K.” Gladney is not entirely his own, but
rather a modification of his given name; just as the popular culture department is officially
known as “American environments,” Jack becomes “J.A.K.” on campus to reinforce his
image with an air of professionalism and intelligence—to intimate, as Babette says,
“dignity, significance and prestige” (17). By arranging the commodities at his disposal, Jack
creates the persona “J.A.K.,” who is more intimidating and demanding of respect in a way
that Jack believes he is not outside of an academic setting.
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Throughout White Noise, the divide between “Jack” the real individual and “J.A.K.”
the fabricated persona becomes most evident when Jack’s authority is threatened, such as
when Jack runs into his colleague, Eric Massingale, during one of his many trips to the
supermarket. Massingale is a computer teacher at the College-‐on-‐the-‐Hill. Massingale tells
Jack that without his dark glasses and impressive gown, he looks like a “big, harmless,
aging, indistinct sort of guy,” a “different person altogether” (83). With what Jack describes
as a “dangerous grin,” Massingale says knowingly that he “gets it.” Massingale has been
provided a glimpse at “Jack,” the real individual that Jack’s constructed persona, “J.A.K.,”
seeks to exceed in importance and prestige. In Massingale’s moment of revelation, Jack is
left flat-‐footed and debased. The encounter puts him “in the mood to shop,” and so he flees
to the Mid-‐Village Mall. There he consumes “with reckless abandon” to meet “immediate
needs and distant contingencies” (84). What Jack consumes, however, has little if anything
to do with his “needs,” but rather centers around re-‐establishing the “J.A.K.” persona, his
“existential credit,” as it were:
I shopped for its own sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise I had no intention of buying, then buying it. I sent clerks into their fabric books and pattern books to search for elusive designs. I began to grow in value and self-‐regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I’d forgotten existed. Brightness settled around me…I traded money for goods. The more money I spent the less important it seemed. I was bigger than these sums. These sums poured off my skin like so much rain. These sums in fact came back to me in the form of existential credit. I felt expansive, inclined to be sweepingly generous, and told the kids to pick out their Christmas gifts here and now. I gestured in what I felt was an expansive manner. I could tell they were impressed. (84)
We find that Jack is once again consuming to protect himself, and reverting to the exact
same language used to describe his inflated role as a professor: “filling himself out,” he
finds new aspects of himself and locates a person he’d forgotten existed. The “existential
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credit” Jack describes is one that he mentions at numerous other points in the novel. In one
such scene Jack checks his bank balance at an ATM. When “the figure on the screen roughly
[corresponds] to [Jack’s] independent estimate,” a wave of “relief and gratitude” flows over
him, “blessing his life” (46). Most of all, Jack senses “that something of deep personal value,
but not money, not that at all, [has] been authenticated and confirmed” (46). This thing of
“deep personal value” most closely resembles the “existential credit” Jack feels filled with
after his trip to the Mid-‐Village mall. Jack’s refills of “existential credit,” however, are
invariably short-‐lived, and despite his heft, glasses, tunic, and title, Jack is left personally
unfulfilled because, contrary to Shields and Certeau, his appropriated “codes and fashions”
are not made into his own. Rather, Jack is, as he himself admits, “the false character that
follows the name [J.A.K. Gladney] around” (17).
Jack’s continued alienation from the persona he wishes to construct of himself
draws attention to the ways in which his persona complicates the largely benign vision of
consumption espoused by Shields and Certeau. We can once again turn to Jack’s
relationship with Hitler to explain why he remains alienated as a result of his participation
in consumer culture throughout the novel, and how this participation is a reaction to his
fear of death. The course description for the only class Gladney teaches, advanced Nazism,
says that the course provides “insight into the continuing mass appeal of fascist tyranny”
(25). The irony is that Jack himself has fallen victim to the fascist tyranny proffered by
consumer culture as an escape from death, a tyranny embodied in the asylum he seeks in
his studies of Hitler, among other things. In his seminal text The Sublime Object of Ideology,
Slavoj Žižek explains the role of culture in relation to the death drive thusly:
“All ‘culture’ is in a way a reaction-‐formation, an attempt to limit, canalize – to cultivate this imbalance, this traumatic kernel, this radical antagonism
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through which man cuts his umbilical cord with nature, with animal homeostasis. It is not only that the aim is no longer to abolish this drive antagonism, but the aspiration to abolish it is precisely the source of totalitarian temptation…” (Žižek 5)
Žižek later argues that fascism, which demands uniformity and forbids the reshaping of
ideology, is based upon a single imperative: to “obey, because you must” (82). This, in turn,
requires that one “ renounce enjoyment, sacrifice [himself], and [not] ask about the
meaning of it” (82). The consumer culture we witness in White Noise is synonymous with
Žižek’s concept of culture carried to the extreme of fascism insofar as “the source of the
totalitarian temptation” is the aspiration to not just limit or cultivate the death drive, but to
abolish it entirely. In White Noise, there is substantial evidence that this temptation is
characterized by Jack’s fascination with Hitler. As Siskind explains to Jack:
“Helpless and fearful people are drawn to magical figures, mythic figures, epic men who intimidate and darkly loom.”
“You’re talking about Hitler, I take it.” “Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death. You
thought he would protect you…‘Submerge me,’ you said. ‘Absorb my fear.’ On one level you wanted to conceal yourself in Hitler and his works. On another level you wanted to use him to grow in significance and strength.” (DeLillo 287)
Similarly, when a mysterious old man appears in his backyard one morning, waiting
patiently in a rocking chair, Jack mistakes him for “Death, or Death’s errand runner” and
tellingly hides behind a copy of Mein Kampf for protection (243-‐244). The old man
eventually proves harmless; he is not Death but Jack’s father-‐in-‐law. Nevertheless, Jack’s
fear of dying persists, and he continues to seek asylum in his studies of Hitler and his
continued outings to the grocery store, shopping mall, and other sites of consumption. It
then becomes clear that what Jack ultimately wants from his culture is protection from
death. As a result, his desire to yield to the temptation Žižek describes is particularly
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strong, and through much of the novel he demonstrates a willingness to forego subjectivity
and the potential to reshape his cultural landscape in exchange for amnesty from death; in
other words, he demonstrates a willingness to, as Žižek argues, “obey” because he thinks he
must.
As my epigraph suggests, Žižek contends that the death drive defines the human
condition. Similarly, the hazard of alienation (from others, from the world at large)
discussed in the preceding paragraph is one that French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard
views as a fait accompli in a world operating under the ideology of consumer culture. In
stark contrast with Shields and Certeau, Baudrillard focuses primarily on the socially-‐
crippling effects of consumer culture. Baudrillard’s first major work was The System of
Objects. Not unlike this analysis of White Noise, Baudrillard works within a Marxist
framework through much of The System of Objects in the sense that his rhetoric centers
primarily on production, only to conclude with an attempt to define consumption:
Consumption is not a passive mode of assimilation (absorption) and appropriation which we can oppose to the supposedly active mode of production in order to bring to bear naive concepts of action (and alienation). From the outset, we must clearly state that consumption is an active mode of relations (not only to objects, but to the collectivity and to the world), a systematic mode of activity and a global response on which our whole cultural system is founded. (The System of Objects 199)
Utilizing this definition of consumption, Baudrillard explores how the relationship between
people and the objects that constitute their world stifles subjectivity. While Shields
describes consumerism as an active and committed production of self and society,
Baudrillard reveals it in the context we encounter in White Noise: a fascist consumer
culture that aims to assimilate everyone into what Baudrillard terms “the system of
objects.” Within this system, according to Baudrillard, the apparent freedom to reshape
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ourselves and society through our purchases is ultimately illusory; the only real “freedom”
we have within the parameters of consumer culture is the freedom to accumulate and
arrange commodities in a way that reflects our continuing advances in social status. Thus
where Shields and Certeau might read Jack’s adoption of the J.A.K. Gladney persona in
White Noise as an instance of empowerment, Baudrillard would argue that Jack’s dark
glasses and robe serve primarily to insulate him not only from death, but the world at large.
Moreover, Baudrillard would likely argue that these accessories are arbitrary signs of
differentiation which signal Jack’s superiority in a particular social arena, and that by
investing these signs with such value, Jack and the rest of society neither strengthen nor
weaken consumer ideology but simply confirm its authority.
According to Baudrillard, no combination of purchases or arrangement of goods can
alter the role of consumer ideology because the exhortation to accumulate and arrange
signs of social status is at the very root of its nature; the system demands that we define
ourselves in relation to the objects we possess. Consequently, the “totalitarian temptation”
that Žižek speaks of is fulfilled by Baudrillard’s totalitarian characterization of consumer
ideology: the so-‐called “subject” has no power to alter consumer ideology and can only fall
into line as an object within the system. Baudrillard argues that by becoming surrounded
by objects, we ourselves have become objects. Consequently, we no longer interact in a
meaningful way with the world at large or the people who occupy that world; we become
insulated from meaningful interaction of any kind. In short, we are too busy accumulating
and arranging commodities, wasting our lives away in malls and supermarkets—the
realms “where the goods of the good life promised in the magazine ads and television
commercials can be found” (Langman, cited in Shields 5)—in an effort to demonstrate that
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we live “the good life” to connect with each other or the world at large. Baudrillard
illustrates the mechanics of this alienation by distinguishing between what he calls the
utensil and the object:
A utensil is never possessed, because a utensil refers one to the world; what is possessed is always an object abstracted from its function and thus brought into relationship with the subject. In this context, all owned objects partake of the same abstractness, and refer to one another only inasmuch as they refer solely to the subject. Such objects together make up the system through which the subject strives to construct a world, a private totality. (The System of Objects 86)
Therefore, unlike the utensil, the object acquires a significance that transcends its
usefulness, and in doing so becomes part of a complex system of objects that refer to and
define one another. In the case of Jack Gladney, the self-‐referential nature of this system of
objects structures the subject’s existence in a way that offers to reinforce his image as an
authority figure and loosen death’s grip at the expense of contact with the real world. It is
clear, therefore, that consumer ideology, contrary to the ideas of Shields and Certeau, does
not empower Jack, but neutralizes him and robs him of agency, ultimately separating him
from those around him and the rest of the real world.
A Link in the Chain: The System of Objects in White Noise’s World and Ours
Jack is clearly not the only one alienated by consumer culture. The question, then,
becomes focused on the ideology of consumer culture: how does such an ideology emerge,
and what are its broader social implications? Furthermore, DeLillo’s history of parody and
satire require that we examine these implications not only in the world of White Noise but
in our own. As I have mentioned several times, the goods that Jack consumes serve
primarily as objects. Baudrillard would argue that this is because they seal the subject off
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from the real world (The System 111). This “sealing off” is aptly illustrated by the divorce
from nature that has clearly permeated the world of White Noise. The sound of traffic on an
expressway is described as though it is a babbling brook (DeLillo 4). Pages later, Jack
describes a scene at the dinner table as one of chaos and noise; the family darts around
grabbing utensils and rifling for “brightly colored food” in the cupboards and refrigerator
before settling down to plaster mustard and mayonnaise onto their respective lunchtime
meals. DeLillo describes the mood as one of “deadly serious anticipation,” as though their
meal was “a reward hard won” (7). “A reward hard won” calls to mind the freshly-‐killed
meal of a hunter-‐gatherer or a pioneer smoking meat by a handmade fire, yet this
description is of a family rummaging through the kitchen to grab what they can from
ready-‐made cartons, “shiny bags of potato chips, flip-‐top rings and twist ties,” and
“individually wrapped slices of orange cheese” (6-‐7).
Due to the overwhelming profusion of technology that isolates us from nature—
including such innovations as the air conditioner, the refrigerator and television, as well as
advances in agriculture, textiles, and manufacturing that provide us with an overabundance
of commodities—humanity’s relationship with need has become mystified; we are
immersed in a largely artificial environment where mere survival or protection from the
elements is no longer a concern. Moreover, what presents itself as technological progress
is not progress at all but stagnation. Minor improvements, refinements, and repackaging,
or in Baudrillard’s words, “anything to enhance the prestige of the object, but nothing by
way of structural innovation,” all pass for technological breakthroughs in present-‐day
society (The System 125). As a result, we live in a world of “pseudo-‐functionality” in which
objects are meant not to be used but simply to be purchased (162). Objects are “structured
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as a function neither of needs nor of a more rational organization of the world, but instead
constitute a system determined entirely by an ideological regime of production and social
integration” (174).
An example of the kind of regime Baudrillard describes appears in the opening
paragraphs of White Noise, in a scene that describes in detail what Jack and Babette refer to
with familiarity as “the day of the station wagons” (DeLillo 5); tts relevance in the context
of this essay warrants a lengthy citation:
The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. In single file they eased around the orange I-‐beam sculpture and moved toward the dormitories. The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-‐up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags – onion-‐and-‐garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dun-‐Dum pops, the Mystic mints. (3)
The way the description is organized makes it one of the most important and lasting
paragraphs throughout the entire novel because it reflects the ontogeny of humanity’s
mystification of/from need. The first third of the paragraph sounds as though it was pulled
from the pages of a 19th century journal describing a caravan of Conestoga wagons on the
Oregon trail; the items listed at the beginning of the paragraph are loaded down with what
seems like the bare essentials: light and heavy clothing for varying weather conditions;
blankets for protection from the elements; boots and shoes for traversing unfriendly
terrain; English and Western saddles for loping on horseback, and rafts for spanning
Gonzalez 18
formidable rivers. Yet the (station)wagons course not through the uncharted West of the
United States, but the west campus of the College-‐on-‐the-‐Hill.
Indeed, in contrast with the beginning of the paragraph, the last third of the
paragraph highlights the distinction Baudrillard draws between utensils and objects. The
possessions in this passage place their possessors in a matrix of abstract values, many of
which have less to do with the “real” world than with what Baudrillard describes as a
“hyperreal” system of false needs. Even those things which used to be useful—the English
and Western saddles and the rafts from the first third of the paragraph—are divorced from
their original purpose; the saddles are not strapped to horses, and the rafts are already
inflated despite being far from any discernable body of water. The controlled substances
foreshadow the appearance of Dylar in the novel: the fictional drug purported to insulate
its users from the fear of death. The tennis rackets and hockey sticks are not weapons, but
objects of recreation. The food is described as “junk,” which reveals how even provisions
have ceased to function in any practical way insofar as they provide no real nourishment,
only empty calories. As Richard Lane notes in Jean Baudrillard, this blurring of the line
between reality and hyperreality is a major theme throughout White Noise. In response to
this lack of distinction between reality and hyperreality, the novel’s characters become
particularly concerned with the distinction between being in the world and being isolated
from it: “There is a constant teasing-‐out of any hint of inauthenticity, a constant bantering
between characters about the disjunction between information overload and the feeling
that nothing about the world, about being in the world, is known” (Lane 126). For
Baudrillard, however, this sense of isolation from the “real” world is not up for debate. It is,
Gonzalez 19
as mentioned earlier, a fait accompli, a direct consequence of the proliferation of consumer
goods—and our dependence on them—throughout society.
The position of the students amidst the list of objects also proves to be particularly
telling. The students, who leap from the station wagons to unload all their goods, are
described in the middle third of the paragraph, buffered on either side by descriptions of
their worldly possessions. This juxtaposition suggests that the students, like their
possessions, are little more than links in a chain, comparable elements in what I referred to
earlier as Baudrillard’s system of objects. The parents of the students, too, “stand sun-‐
dazed near their automobiles, seeing images of themselves in every direction” (DeLillo 3).
Their diet trim bodies, well–made faces, wry looks, and “sense of massive insurance
coverage” are all qualities that make them seem almost identical. These qualities, in
combination with the “assembly of station wagons” unites these parents “as much as
anything they might do in the course of the year,” and “more than formal liturgies or laws,
tells the parents they are a collection of the like-‐minded and the spiritually akin, a people, a
nation” (4).
The stereo sets, radios, and personal computers of the students interact with and define
one another in a complex language of objects that identifies those students as members of
an affluent, college-‐educated youth culture. In contrast, the sense of spiritual kinship the
parents find in their well-‐made faces and their overflowing station wagons sets them apart
from their children and many other groups. What unites all these objects (remembering, of
course, that “these objects” includes the students and the parents), is the language spoken
by consumer culture: Baudrillard’s language of the system of objects.
Gonzalez 20
This language is common between Jack, the students arriving at the College-‐on-‐the-‐
Hill, and the parents of those students. In truth, a careful analysis of all the characters of
White Noise would show that the majority of them are consumed by this very discourse.
The consequence of participating in this discourse is a social structure wherein “traditional
symbolic objects” such as tools and furniture bear “the clear imprint of the conscious or
unconscious dynamic” of human activity (The System 200). Within this structure, objects
and people alike now function as signs, and their organization forms a signifying fabric
constituting the “virtual totality of all objects and messages ready-‐constituted as a more or
less coherent discourse” (200). This discourse encompasses everything and thereby
reduces all human relations to forms of consumption. We can neither live in the real world
nor respond to each other as human beings because the objects we possess divorce us from
both. Apart from Jack’s relationship with Hitler and efforts to maintain the “J.A.K.” persona,
the best example of how an individual can become divorced from the “real” world
(especially in the context of evading death) is that of Babette’s consumption of the
medication Dylar. Dylar is a fictional medication that suspends the patient’s fear of death
at a seemingly unwanted expense: the medication has dramatic effects on memory.
Babette, despite circumventing her fear of death, cannot fully remember the life she is
living. Dylar is, in many respects, a very literal manifestation of consumer culture’s
capacity to insulate Babette, not just from death, but also from the real world.
However, I believe that the alienation Baudrillard describes is best exemplified
when Jack and Siskind pay a visit to “a tourist attraction known as the most photographed
barn in America” (DeLillo 12). As Jack and Siskind approach the site, they encounter a
number of signs advertising the barn’s imminence (and eminence). When they finally
Gonzalez 21
arrive, they find the area teeming with people either photographing or selling pictures of
the attraction. Not once in the description of their trip does Jack mention seeing the barn.
In fact, while admiring the crowd that the barn has gathered, Siskind, ever a source of
explanation within the novel, mentions that no one can actually see the barn itself; rather,
they are all participating in the prepackaged experience of the barn:
Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn…We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura…Being here is kind of a spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like tourism…They are taking pictures of taking pictures…What was the barn like before it was photographed?...What did it look like, how was it different from other barns? We can’t answer these questions because we’ve seen the signs, seen the people snapping pictures. We can’t get outside the aura. We’re part of the aura. We’re here, we’re now. (12-‐13)
Serving no other purpose than to be photographed, the barn has ceased to function in its
capacity as a protective storehouse and now functions only as the image or spectacle of a
barn—a “barn” as it were, in quotation marks. Likewise, the spectators who partake in the
spectacle have ceased to function in their capacity as people. For Baudrillard, this state of
affairs typifies consumer culture: because nothing serves a real purpose, everything within
this culture is nothing more than a spectacle. Just as with “the day of the station wagons,”
we see that this dictum applies not only to objects, but to people as well. DeLillo has
already shown that the children unloading the station wagons can exist amidst a sea of
objects as objects themselves; by inverting the inanimate object (the barn) with living ones
(the spectators), DeLillo reveals how the barn can exist as a link in a chain of spectators –
another object amidst a sea of objects. Self-‐consciously participating in a consumer
phenomenon that might best be termed “the barn experience,” these spectators cannot
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simply take pictures of the barn. Rather, they exist primarily to service the barn, to
maintain, as Siskind insists, its image. Just as the barn serves no other purpose than to be
photographed, the tourists serve no other purpose than to photograph it. The tourists and
the barn, then, are caught up in a tautological relationship in which each defines the other
with no real reference to the outside world.
The relationships that I have explored in this essay, between Jack and his J.A.K.
Gladney persona (and the components that make up the persona, including Jack’s
sunglasses, his weight, Hitler etc.), between the students and parents on “the day of the
station wagons” and their respective possessions, and between the tourists and the barn:
all parallel the relationship Baudrillard sees between consumers and commodities within
his system of objects. No commodity within this system serves a purpose other than to
signify the social status of its possessor while, in turn, the primary role of the commodity’s
possessor is to impute significance to the commodity. In The Consumer Society, Baudrillard
expounds upon this very tendency by arguing that the proliferation of consumer goods in
the developed world has caused us to “live at the pace of objects, live to the rhythm of their
ceaseless succession” (The Consumer Society 25). This “ceaseless succession” stems from
the fact that objects do not fulfill real needs, but rather participate in what Baudrillard calls
a “system of needs” in which objects produce neither enjoyment nor satisfaction but signify
successful participation in society (75). As Douglas Kellner notes, reinforced by the mass
media, the system of needs presents a logic of social differentiation that induces individuals
to “buy into an entire system of objects and needs through which one differentiates oneself
socially, yet integrates oneself into the consumer society” (Kellner 15). Indeed, Baudrillard
notes, the message broadcast by every outlet of the mass media is not necessarily to buy
Gonzalez 23
specific products, but simply to participate in the system of needs (The Consumer Society
122).
The fact of the matter, however, according to Baudrillard, is that our dissatisfaction
with the objects we consume will inevitably surface, egging us on to consume more. The
degree of fulfillment that consumer culture offers is simply impossible to attain. Jack is
perpetually seeking out ways to top-‐off his “existential credit.” When Dylar eventually
proves ineffective, Jack and Babette retreat to the aisles of their local grocery store or
shopping mall. When Jack flees to the mall with his family to “meet immediate needs” and
“distant contingencies,” the kids act fulfilled and Jack feels filled out, but the family’s
enjoyment is fleeting, and they gain no real satisfaction from the trip. Upon leaving the
mall, the Gladneys drive home in silence and, upon arriving home, retreat to their
respective rooms, “wishing to be alone” (DeLillo 84). The Gladney house is, in fact, little
more than a storage space for past purchases that have failed to deliver on their promises:
“things, boxes,” all of them items that “carry such sorrowful weight,” and have “a darkness
attached to them” (6).
The characters of the novel, be they Jack’s colleagues at the College-‐on-‐the-‐Hill, the
students arriving at the College-‐on-‐the-‐Hill, or the spectators at the most photographed
barn in America, seek the protection, the fulfillment, and the wholeness that consumer
culture proffers. Characters such as Jack allow us to conclude that the individual’s
participation in consumer culture is driven by his fear of death. While we do not have the
same level of personal insight into what drives the masses of people we encounter
elsewhere in the book to partake in consumer culture, several things support that this drive
is a fear of death: the novel’s working title of The American Book of the Dead, the manner in
Gonzalez 24
which death literally looms in the novel, and the historical context in which the novel was
published, for example, all imply that the fear of death is one that is continuously present in
the minds of the novel’s characters. As the working title The American Book of the Dead
suggests, the characters of the novel appear trapped in something of a no-‐win situation.
The fear of death is one that Žižek describes as inherent in human nature, one that, as we
see in the novel, can be paralyzing in its power. On the other hand, the novel also makes
clear that consumer culture is equally paralyzing in its capacity to isolate individuals from
what Baudrillard calls the real dimension of lived existence, replacing interpersonal
relationships with relationships among individuals and the objects they possess. It seems,
then, that regardless of one’s participation in consumer culture, one effectively chooses to
be estranged from life in one of two ways.
As both Žižek and DeLillo suggest, however, there is a third option. DeLillo mocks
both the paralyzing fear of death and the sacrifice of submitting to consumer culture by
ensuring throughout the novel that everywhere death is expected to occur, it fails to
deliver. Ernest Mercator, a friend of Jack’s son who is trying to set a new world record for
sitting in a cage full of poisonous snakes, survives. When Jack is exposed to Nyodene D, the
deadly component of the looming toxic cloud, his doctors tell him that he will not suffer any
effects until he is well into his seventies, an age no different from the average life
expectancy. Jack, who confronts Willie Mink (the man responsible for Dylar’s creation)
with every intention of killing him, ultimately saves his life. The novel’s ending, wherein
one of Jack’s sons embarks on a heart-‐stopping, death-‐defying tricycle ride across multiple
lanes of freeway traffic, ends not in tragedy, but in the entire Gladney family enjoying a
beautiful sunset. DeLillo does not mean to imply that death is not a reality; he is merely
Gonzalez 25
exposing that the fear experienced by the characters in the novel is unwarranted. I believe
this to be DeLillo’s endorsement of what Žižek suggests in my epigraph: that to truly live,
one must confront death in all of its sublime depth and darkness. One cannot then fear it
absolutely, for to fear death absolutely would prevent one from truly living. Nor can one
attempt to ignore death by partaking in consumer culture, especially given that ignorance,
as we have seen, is far from bliss. Rather, one must acknowledge the depth and darkness of
death and establish what Žižek characterizes as a modus vivendi with it, the ability to
observe life from the overhead perspective from which Siskind observes “the barn
experience,” and, ideally, still be “immensely pleased” by what we see, even if what we are
seeing are the ironies exposed by White Noise
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Works Cited Baudrillard, Jean. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. Trans. George Ritzer.
London: Sage, 1998. . The System of Objects. Trans. James Benedict. London: Sage, 1998. Cantor, Paul. Adolf, We Hardly Knew You. In New Essays on “White Noise,” ed. Frank
Lentricchia. DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. Kellner, Douglas. Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond.
Cambridge: Polity, 1989. Lane, Richard K. Jean Baudrillard. Routlege Critical Thinkers Series. London and New
York: Routledge, 2000. Lentricchia, Frank, ed. New Essays on “White Noise”. New York: Cambridge UP, 1991. Shields, Rob, ed. Lifestyle Shopping: The Subject of Consumption. New York: Routledge,
1992. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso, 1989.
