The Disintegration and Re-integration of the Family. Don DeLillos novel White Noise - Term Paper Example

?The Disintegration and Re-integration of the Family Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise centers on an extreme portrayal of an American family. This portrait takes on typical features of the American family, such as lack of communication and obsession with materialism, and distorts this original notion into a portrait of a bewildered family in a bewildered society. It is a family lost in a world of confusion and "white noise," and, especially, in the material things of modern consumerism. God and all spiritual hope have disappeared for all intents and purposes, replaced by a faith in the products of the consumerist culture. While it would be impossible to define the traditional family model, the degree to which DeLillo presents the Gladney clan as fractured and compiled suggests some degree of representation. The first thing the reader notices is the fact that they are a collection of various genetic linkages and non-linkages, that is the children belong to either one or the other parent and none of them are a direct biological link between the two parents, Jack and Babette. It is as if their own accumulation of material goods is equivalent to their accumulation of children and spouses, and Babette gleefully remarks “Isn’t it great having all these kids around?... Who else can we get?” (DeLillo 80). It is a family which has little in common except watching television. Each Friday night, Babette insists that the family watch television together, an attempt to create a family ritual that is usually a failure, due to the fact that everyone would prefer to do something else. Family solidarity is threatened in the contemporary world because it rests on a form of a myth (Cantor 61). This opinion is evident in the following passage: I tell Murray that ignorance and confusion can’t possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity… He asks me why the strongest family units exist in the least developed societies… Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. (DeLillo 81) The modern society with its fast pace living offers no, or very little, opportunity of true bonding with the people around us, even immediate family. The pervasive presence of technology proves menacing. Throughout the novel, in counterpoint to the human babble of Jack’s friends, family, and neighbors, modern technology asserts itself through the humming of machines and the constant stream of media sounds and images. Technology has become as much a part of the texture of daily of life as humans are themselves, making them almost anonymous and it is exactly this mechanical state of life that is pulling the characters away from each other. The objectification of the contemporary man continues to spread through the culture via everyday consumer activities of the American family; the relentless shopping of the Gladney family provides the chief means by which they constitute their existence (Lentricchia 78). When Jack and Babette suffer an anxiety attack, they rush their family off to the supermarket. The vast availability of goods makes them feel welcome and gives them the illusion of omnipotence, and the consumers’ illusory dreams are fed to the maximum, providing them with the utter fullness of being. Jack is a romantic who questions society, but at the same time, highly values his relations and family, or at least is trying hard to believe that he does. The two key scenes proving this are the novel’s opening, in which Jack bears witness to a mass of parents seeing their children off to college, and Jack’s conversation in the car with his son, Heinrich, about whether or not it is raining. The procession of station wagons represents a depiction of the time-honored and traditional passage from childhood to adulthood in which parents see their children off to college. He describes the parents as “a collection of the like-minded and the spiritually akin, a people, a nation” (DeLillo 4). He witnesses, year after year, how these parents are made real and alive by their children and how by the mere fact of having a child, parents become part of a unity that transcends the lonely realm of the individual. Being an outsider, Jack resists being considered a part of this community. Jack aligns these parents with the consumer society, seeing how “they’ve grown comfortable with their money” (DeLillo 4), and that the children are merely physical assets that their parents have obtained. When Babette points out that they, too own a station wagon, he dismisses her comment by diminishing the worth and quality of their station wagon, and portraying it as a cliche and emotionless symbol of the consumer era family, all in order to be able to align himself with a higher degree of family love. The second key scene to deciphering Jack’s relation to his family is him and Heinrich discussing the rain. This is the most sustained and overt representation of the subversion of the parent child dynamic. Heinrich is the most articulate skeptic in the novel, but despite his genial philosophical playfulness, Jack becomes outraged and frustrated at his inability to connect with him. The father-son relationship he desires to have with Heinrich, whom he so aptly named hoping that such a sound name would give him the authority Jack so desperately wants to possess, follows into the realm of the traditional father-son relationship: the aging father passes on his life’s wisdom onto his son who is on the verge of becoming a young man, and thus, by instilling his words in him, the father lives on through his son. But, instead of this lifelong connection, Jack is only a participant in a battle of wits where he eventually and indisputably loses. Jack and Babette’s sexuality in the novel’s first section further reveals a dissolution of traditional family values. The two decide to read pornography to one another and this seems to be a common activity for them. Many critics point to this scene as yet another instance of the simulacra making authentic human interaction impossible. Not only do they have to read other people’s fantasies to evoke their own physical and emotional contact, but Jack has to go into his son’s room and procure the reading material from there. The fear of death lies at the centre of White Noise, “death is of course the major white noise of DeLillo’s scheme, the ubiquitous, lurking, palpable dread that is anatomized in this novel” (Weinstein 143). Everything in the novel, from Jack being the chairman of the Hitler studies program to the supermarket, from the airborne toxic event to the white noise of the novel’s title, circles back to human beings’ primal, deep-seated fear of dying. Babette says that “she wants to die first because she would feel unbearably lonely and sad without [Jack], especially if the children were grown and living elsewhere. . . . She also thinks nothing can happen to [them] as long as there are dependent children in the house. The kids are a guarantee of [their] relative longevity” (DeLillo 99). Traditionally, a family can be perceived as means through which an individual can transcend his own mortality through procreation. Babette acknowledges the role her children play in informing her sense of immortality. This sense is transient, though, because it is contingent upon the children remaining dependent, which they obviously will not. By subverting the traditional family roles and dynamic, DeLillo allows no possibility of children being their parents’ refuge from death, and they are forced to face their mortality head on and without the possibility of relief or escape. In addition, Jack’s role as the chairman of Hitler studies is clearly an attempt to ward off death. Society’s greatest weapon for warding off death is technology, but here it has gone awry, with medications such a Dylar which are supposed to eradicate the fear of death, while in fact they create death plots of their own. If technology represents the West’s failure to conquer death, fascism represents its supreme effort to serve it, and Hitler is finally understood to be a magical talisman against death itself or the protagonist, the kind of epic figure to whom helpless and fearful are drawn, not so much larger than life as larger than death (Weinstein 143). Jack’s acute, lifelong interest in Hitler lies in the sheer size and stature of Hitler’s persona. As perhaps the most hated and feared figure of the twentieth century, Hitler has spawned a myth larger than life and, as Murray notes, larger than death. Despite the fact that his name is a symbol of death and devastation, what matters most to Jack is that the name of Hitler will never die. Not even the postmodern world which questions and reevaluates every possible truth man has known since the ancient times, cannot stripe Hitler off of his frightening aura. This is exactly why Jack is utterly obsessed with him. Hitler has the power to restore significance and meaning to his life and offer fullness to his emptiness (Cantor 59). Jack believes that Hitler unified Nazi Germany in this same way, by grouping them and making them feel invincible, and we frequently see frightened people clinging together in groups in the novel (after the airplane scare, throughout the airborne toxic event). However, consumerism creates its own death, it amasses waste, a kind of cultural death, and ultimately it leaves people feeling empty, as Jack feels after his shopping spree. Death lurks everywhere, especially in the "white noise" of the modern world, especially in the waves and radiation with which we surround ourselves. The airborne toxic event makes visible this submerged death, and also heightens Jack's already dominating fear of death when it infects his bloodstream. Different characters in the novel approach death in different, often contradictory ways, trying to soothe their own fear as best as they can. In a society obsessed with consumption, one can appropriately find a utopia and a temporary reprieve from death in a supermarket. But in the end, the bewilderment remains as Jack refuses to comprehend the fact that withdrawal is futile, because it involves the rejection of his own imperfect family for the simulated one. References: Cantor, Paul A. “Adolf, We Hardly Knew You.” Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Ed. Harold Bloom. Chelsea: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003. Print. DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin Group, 2009. Print. Lentricchia, Frank. New Essays on White Noise. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Print. Weinstein, Arnold. “Don DeLillo: Rendering the Words of the Tribe.” Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Ed. Harold Bloom. Chelsea: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003. Print. Read More