Modern Life and Death in Don Dellilo's White Noise - Research Paper Example

of Death in a Narrative An Analysis of Don DeLillo’s White Noise Introduction Death is undoubtedly the theme of Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Murray Siskind, a College-on-the-Hill professor who is obsessed with the exploration and reinterpretation of American popular culture, talks about the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the German mentor of Jack Gladney has been using the Egyptian Book of the Dead, translated into German.1 The core episode of the story is the Airborne Toxic Event, the associate of Heinrich (Jack’s teenage son), Orestes Mercator, dreams of becoming one of the greats in the Guinness Book by challenging and confronting death by enclosing himself in a glass pen jam-packed with poisonous snakes, and Heinrich challenges an imprisoned mass murderer in a chess game. The scholarly expertise of Jack centers on the leading organizer of mass slaughter—Hitler—whereas Murray Siskind and his associates in the American Environments movement are fascinated with the melancholy related to the passing away of superstars and the killing of political figures, and the image of death in mainstream culture.2 In this paper, Don DeLillo’s White Noise is analyzed in relation to the fear of death with the guidance of story’s characters. Similar to others, Jack, who is the head of the Hitler course at the College-on-the-Hill and the storyteller of the narrative, and Babette, the wife of Jack who takes care of an old blind man and gives lecture on adult education, have been preoccupied with the concept of death due to their inexplicable fear of it. They are unable to admit or recognize death as a normal part of human existence. They are too absorbed by their fear of death that their emotions, thoughts, and everyday interactions are frequently disrupted by the uncertainty of death.3 Both of them assert their desire to die before the other, because neither of them can endure the difficulty of surviving without the other. Yet, it is absurd that neither of them wish to pass on first since the two of them dread death extremely. The Characters’ Perception of Death in White Noise After several failed marriages Babette and Jack think they are destined for each other because they feel secure and peaceful in the company of each other. Jack believes that Babette is very different from his ex-wives because she reveals everything to him, she does not hide anything from him. They believe that they are totally honest with each other, even with their fears, yet they hide their anxiety over death from each other. For that reason, Babette and Jack, as they frequently say, use several methods of coping with their own fear of death.4 Hence, rather than confronting the truth, they build a false existence and remain afflicted with despair. Outside the impression of longing, DeLillo depicts death’s universal presence: Supermarkets this large and clean and modern are a revelation to me. I spent my life in small steamy delicatessens with slanted display cabinets full of trays that hold soft wet lumpy matter in pale colors. High enough cabinets so you had to stand on tiptoes to give your order. Shouts, accents. In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It’s everywhere and nowhere.5 Jack is fascinated with the reality of death. He delves into family photos and asks the question “who will die first?”6 This question is the story’s catchphrase. On another instance he relates the self to death and inquires, “how [can the self] be stronger than death?”7 Death is the element of the white noise that leaks in with the noises from the neighboring road: “traffic washes past, a remote and steady murmur around our sleep, as of dead souls babbling at the edge of a dream.”8 Sounds of technology and movement evoke the idea of death. Surprisingly, the single site of stillness and silence in the whole story, a place that carries Jack to mystified and introspective melancholy, is the burial ground. It is a site devoid of modernity, on the border of Blacksmith, the writings on the gravestones wiped out, the loved ones of the dead themselves nonexistent. It is strange that Jack, with his terror of death, would go to this place; much less experience some unclear feeling of serenity there. The book The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, one of the literatures DeLillo says inspired his work, claims that the fear of death and its consequent suppression, the inability of society to understand death, is the leading factor in the dynamics and evolution of culture. As remarked by Tom LeClair: “DeLillo seems to accept Becker’s Existential and Rankian positions that the fear of death is the mainspring of human motivation and that man needs to belong to a system of ideas in which mystery exists. But DeLillo differs with Becker’s conclusions that repression of the death fear is necessary to live and that ‘the problem of heroics is the central one of human life,’ for repression and heroic attempts to overcome death place Gladney in life-threatening situations.”9 This basically sums up the notion of death in White Noise. The question that lingers unresolved between Jack and Babette is “who will die first?” Such is not the random terror of death that anybody could feel, that prevents individuals from careless activities or risk taking, or that may take place when knowing about the disease or death of another person. Rather, for Jack and Babette, it is a continuous, day-to-day, primary part of their lives. Jack is frequently frightened at night by what he recognizes as “the more or less normal muscular contraction known as the myoclonic jerk. Is this what it’s like, abrupt, peremptory? Shouldn’t death, I though, be a swan dive, graceful, white-winged and smooth, leaving the surface undisturbed?”10 Jack searches outside biological explanations for indications of death, and replies irrationally: “I awoke in the grip of a death sweat. Defenseless against my own racking fears… The digital reading on the clock-radio was 3:51… What does it mean? Is death odd-numbered? Are there life-enhancing numbers, other numbers charged with menace?”11 Jack thinks that the ghostly shape hovering outside their home is the Angel of Death. The gravity of Babette’s anxieties is not made known until the secrets of Dylar are exposed in the latter part of the story. When Jack tells about the coming of the unworried parents sending their children to College-on-the Hill, alongside their loads of consumer products and the students carrying snacks and electronic gadgets to the dormitories, Babette cries, “I have trouble imagining death at that income level,”12 by which Jack replies, “Maybe there is no death as we know it. Just documents changing hands.”13 After a while Jack goes back to the continual discussion with Babette about who will pass on first. Jack says, “I tell her I want to die first… She claims my death would leave a bigger hole in her life than her death would leave in mine…”14 However, behind closed doors, Jack knows that he has no desire of dying first; that he harbors a greater fear of death. A marked opposite is presented by Winnie Richards, the neurologist who examines Dylar. Her advice to Jack was this: “it’s a mistake to lose one’s sense of death, even one’s fear of death. Isn’t death the boundary we need? Doesn’t it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.”15 Acceptance of one’s fixed and delicate life over time is definitely not an issue exclusive to a particular historical period or civilization. Instead of discussing the inevitable death that ties all human beings into wide, universal dynamics, DeLillo is interested in the specific late 20th-century psychological and cultural devices that try to mask, re-create, or describe the connection between identity (self) and death.16 DeLillo claims that technology has cultivated a material culture of consumption, limitless wants which at the same time supports and enables human beings to momentarily evade awareness of their imminent death: “We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception… To become a crowd is to keep out of death. To break of from the crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face dying alone”.17 Regardless if the prevailing structure is favorable or unfavorable, there appears to be a natural desire for a system of some kind. The real human tendency towards structure, “to break things down… to separate and classify”18 as explained by Babette, is a vital component of building one’s self or identity. Hence Jack is confusingly an opponent and a victim of such predicament. When Jack has been contaminated by a vapor of Nyodene D, he cannot run away from death anymore. He gets in touch with the SIMUVAC operator after finding out about the possible contamination: “Am I going to die?”19 “Not as such… Death has entered. It is inside you. You are said to be dying and yet are separate from the dying… It is when death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak, that you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself… A network of symbols has been introduced, an entire awesome technology wrested from the gods. It makes you feel like a stranger in your own dying. I wanted my academic gown and dark glasses.”20 Technology detaches Jack from both life and death. The scientific knowledge and process whereupon technology is rooted start with a basic presumption of objectivity; distant observation is needed to create reasonable assumptions, to create an understanding of an “invisible… impressive… disquieting”21 reality. The thoughts of Jack is accustomed, prepared, to identify “codes, countercodes, social histories… hidden by veils of mystery and layers of cultural material”22 on an intellectual, speculative extent. Yet as explained by Jack, “when your death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak… you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself”.23 Once it becomes an imminent fragment of Jack’s thoughts, death stops being a “professional matter”.24 Physicians turn into modern ministers, the sole societal member able to interpret the “network of symbols, an entire awesome technology wrested from the gods.”25 In numerous instances, death assumes an existence of its own, separate from the person; it becomes an evident, measurable occurrence. This could explain the stubborn interest in television calamities, death occurring somewhere else in the world. “Every disaster made us wish for more…”26 Murray Siskind, Jack’s associate, distinguishes the all-presence of death in the society, yet also the motivation to disagree with it. Murray says, “Tibetans try to see death for what it is. It is the end of attachment to things… But once we stop denying death, we can proceed calmly to die and then go on to experience uterine rebirth or Judeo-Christian afterlife or out-of-body experience or a trip on a UFP or whatever we wish to call it… Dying is an art in Tibet… Here we don’t die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think… In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air.”27 Even though Jack consults Murray after the contamination with Nyodene, the latter is playful or glib, first regarding the honest explanation of Jack of his fear of death as a pop-culture statement. Murray’s response to Jack’s “I want to live”28 statement is, “From the Robert Wise film of the same name, with Susan Hayward as Barbara Graham, a convicted murderess. Aggressive jazz score by Johnny Mandel.”29 Still, not like human beings, death is under no circumstances the totality of its information. Dylar was not able to live up to its pledge for death is bigger, more accepting, than any technology humanity can build. If death is conquered on a certain aspect, it merely grows and basically reorganizes itself. It resembles the “nebulous mass”30 enlarging within Jack’s mind and body; “it has no definite shape or form”31, yet death has a manifestation in the story as a white noise. That sound floods the motel room where Jack is supposed to murder Mink: “The intensity of the noise was the same at all frequencies. Sound all around.”32 The usual hustle and bustle of daily life overcomes this noise, yet it is present nevertheless. Only at specific times of struggle or problems do people become accustomed to it particularly. Similar to the airborne toxic event, one can produce inner, similarly devastating tragedy for her/himself. Jack turns down technology, shuns the belief on ‘life after death’; attempts to become a murderer rather than a victim, yet in the end this was unsuccessful too. He even tries to free himself from material goods and earlier belongings which hold memories of his past or other personalities. These remains of the past stop him from escaping it. He does appear either unable or hesitant to distance himself from consumer culture, introducing the supermarket sales counter queue as a fascinating symbol for optimism, faith, and life: “Here we don’t die, we shop… This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of age, our carts stacked brightly with goods”.33 It appears Jack has discovered his ideal place in the celestial marketing system. Jack is hence able to analyze, yet is no less vulnerable to the suitable illusions which envelop people. Murray provides Jack numerous techniques of responding to the notion of death seeded in his body, yet the wealth of options which are all similarly suitable, useful, or not-useful, proposed with similar honesty or dishonesty but all seemingly false. Jack could conquer his worry over death by placing his confidence on technology, or by focusing on a life after death34: “Read up on reincarnation, transmigration, hyperspace, the resurrection of the dead and so on. Some gorgeous systems have evolved from those beliefs. Study them.” “Do you believe in any of these things?” “Millions of people have believed for thousands of years. Throw in with them. Belief in a second birth, a second life, is practically universal. This must mean something.” “But those gorgeous systems are all so different.” “Pick one you like.”35 Death as a nightmare of the Gladneys forces them to look for successful techniques to avoid it. Jack and Babette experiment with various escape routes. Primarily, Jack decides to study Hitler to deal with his anxiety: “Hitler would seem to symbolize all the irrational and dangerous forces that have destabilized modern life, but for Gladney he provides the solid foundation of a successful career.”36 Because Hitler is a figure of death, Jack assumes that if he covers himself in the portrait of Hitler, he can tackle death. By relating himself to Hitler, Jack expects that he can also become superior over death. Hence, he makes use of Hitler simply as a defense mechanism. In the beginning of the story, death is associated with narrative design and to all method of narrative designing. Jack, wearing his academic robe and shady glasses, has engaged in a discussion in the class of Murray Siskind. Jack ends his remarks suggesting similarities between Elvis and Hitler with a declaration he himself fails to comprehend: “All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot. Is this true? Why did I say it? What does it mean?”37 For a person who tries to escape thoughts of death, this is an undesirable awareness. Murray offers Jack, with his hopeless fear of death and his thoughts that death has invaded his body, with a ‘hypothetical’ escape: “I believe, Jack, there are two kinds of people in the world. Killers and diers. Most of us are diers… It’s a way of controlling death… Be the killer for a change. Let someone else be the dier. Let him replace you, theoretically, in that role. You can’t die of he does. He dies, you live.”38 Although this does not appear rational, it is suggested as an idea, a suggestion to test despite an unkind reality, and because Jack is intelligent, a new idea seems appealing. It openly opposes his initial belief that “all plots tend to move deathward,”39 yet an idea that encourages life, a means to deal with death appears certain. It was noted by one scholar that, “Murray’s theory of killing for life-credit substitutes for Jack’s now untenable sense of shopping for existential credit.”40 Such idea somewhat eases Jack’s fear of death. White Noise not merely centers on the characters that are fixated with the uncertainties and mysteries of death but also centers on various characters such as Murray Siskind, one of the story’s characters who does not fear death. Death should not be terrifying; for Murray Siskind, death is normal and not a bad luck. He always studies the realities surrounding him. He feels death everywhere and stays involved by it. Murray attempts to persuade Jack on the reality of death: “It has a life independent of us. It is growing in prestige and dimension.”41 While in the supermarket, Murray explains his beliefs about death to Jack and Babette: Tibetans try to see death for what it is. It is the end of attachment to things. This simple truth is hard to fathom. But once we stop denying death, we can proceed calmly to die… We don’t have to cling to life artificially, or to death… We simply walk toward the sliding doors… Look how well-lighted everything is… It’s timeless. Another reason why I think of Tibet. Dying is an art in Tibet. A priest walks in, sits down, tells the weeping relatives to get out and has the room sealed… Chants, numerology, horoscopes, recitations. Here we don’t die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think.42 Murray believes death is a normal part of human existence. By accepting and facing it, just like the Tibetans, humans can exist happily. Although the Gladneys watch television or shop in order to fight their fear of death, Murray refuses to carry out these activities to remove his fears. Hence, he makes the most out of life and gives meaning to it. The friend of Heinrich, Orest, is another contradictory character in the novel as he does not fear death too. Orest is confident with himself and he is eager to face death in order to unravel its secrets. He attempts to outdo the Guinness record by enclosing himself in a pen filled with deadly snakes. Jack has a hard time understanding Orest’s reasoning for doing such risky act. Still, it is without a doubt that Orest is in no way terrified of death. At a young age, Orest is not terrified of dying. When he is unable to accomplish his task, he simply vanishes. He would choose death than a life of failure. Contrary to the main characters, Orest is not terrified of dying but he confronts death deliberately. Relationship between Life and Death and Modern Man in a Media-Dominated World The mass media, particularly television, is always mentioned in the story, which is characterized by arbitrary pieces from the media which repeatedly interfere with Jack’s storytelling throughout the story. The media show sights of death continuously, which implies that the story’s characters are practically engulfed by reports, accounts, and images of death: Gladney’s family has a weekly tradition, every Friday they watch television together: That night, a Friday, we gathered in front of the set, as was the custom and the rule, with take-out Chinese. There were floods, earthquakes, mud slides, erupting volcanoes. We’d never been so attentive to our duty, our Friday assembly. Heinrich was not sullen, I was not bored. Steffie, brought close to tears by a sitcom husband arguing with his wife, appeared totally absorbed in these documentary clips of calamity and death. Babette tried to switch to a comedy series about a group of racially mixed kids who build their own communication satellite. She was startled by the force of our objection. We were otherwise silent, watching houses slide into the ocean, whole villages crackle and ignite in a mass of advancing lava. Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, and more sweeping.43 The Gladney family’s amusement every Friday night is filled with a series of images and movies of natural disasters which they consume with immense delight. By the conclusion of the story the audience is already made aware that aside from Jack the other Gladneys are also very terrified of dying. Hence, the question is why are the Gladneys, whose greatest concern is how to block all ideas of death, almost overjoyed when they see documentary clips on natural calamities? As explained by Heidegger, daily exposure to death distorts death “into an event of public occurrence which the ‘they’ [das Man] encounters”.44 Lazy, nonsensical conversation makes the modern man, the failed Dasein, view dying merely as an isolated incidence which can certainly not trouble it. Tragedies signify for the Gladney family precisely that form of event.45 “These things happen to poor people who live in the exposed areas… 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”46 remarks Jack once he is informed of a potential toxic release close to his neighborhood. Jack thinks that they are immune to these tragedies. His statements are true to lazy, nonsensical discourse. Thus, it seems that the interest of the Gladneys in the calamities displayed on television can be viewed as an illustration of daily exposure to death, to which the members of the Gladney family have an intense longing, for it comforts their fear of dying. The sense of comfort the Gladneys have is rooted in two aspects. First of all, they are comforted because their consumption of media images is quite profound that it relieves them of their personal anxiety. An explanation for the power of their experience may rest in the overall position of the movie audience: throughout the process of watching the audience does not have a moment to think about what s/he has watched, for not like reading the activity of watching is constantly instantaneous with the pace of the movie.47 The more disastrous the actual idea of the movie is, the more excitement is expected, for a person’s own death is distant from the magnitude of the global disasters shown in the television and the audience links the actual idea with the films, not with his/her own death. In White Noise the actual disasters, when onscreen, are converted into entertainment goods that can be devoured as a distracting, entertaining diversion. Being in the media’s omnipresence, the forgetfulness of one’s own death pushes the Gladneys away from their true mortality. In addition, watching natural disasters and the death of other people gives them the sense that they can all of a sudden deal with their own death. Hence, the Gladneys, ironically, become oblivious of their mortality and believe that they can deal with it. The irony is brought about by their delusion that they are all right with their personal fear of dying, although, in truth, they are merely all right with the dissociated and filmic death of media displays which distance them from their own thoughts of death. The Gladney family misunderstands the death of the modern man, the media images of death, with being mortal, or the boundary of human life. Their comfort does not last long, because after the display of death in the media they have to confront their fear of dying once more. What’s more unfortunate is that Jack’s search for technology, his need to be certain that it can conquer and calm down his fear of dying, makes him anxious about the consequent disengagement from death. He pronounces: “A network of symbols has been introduced, an entire awesome technology wrested from the gods. It makes you feel like a stranger in your own dying.”48 Technology does not give him the freedom or escape from the affliction of his imminent death. His life seems beyond his own control, at the hands of technical devices, specialists, and professionals that he does not fathom yet to which he has to surrender to. By means of technology, he can just partially escape the trouble of his own mortality, like a half-done escape giving him a sense of detachment and fear. It is merely through his effort to kill in the last part of the story, and his consequent effort to rescue his target, that he is successfully freed from being withdrawn, troubled, and vulnerable. Conclusions Death is without a doubt the central theme of White Noise. Don DeLillo endowed the concept of death a new meaning. He uses dark humor to describe how some people feel about death, how fear of dying cripples their life, just like how it adversely affected the life of Jack, Babette, and the other members of the Gladney family. They tried to relieve this fear of death by resorting to technology and media images of natural disasters and death, but these solutions were temporary and eventually backfired. It is fortunate for Jack to have acquaintances like Murray Siskind and Orest who hold a positive view of death. Fortunately, at the end, one way or another Gladneys understood that death is a normal part of life and is everyone because it is unavoidable for humanity. They finally understood that rather than contemplating constantly on their mortality, which is out of their control, they must make their lives meaningful and fulfilling. Bibliography Buell, Frederick. From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century. London: Routledge, 2004. Cowart, David. 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Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillo’s Novels. UK: Peter Lang, 2010. Lentricchia, Frank. New Essays on White Noise. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Lentricchia, Frank. Introducing Don DeLillo. New York: Duke University Press, 2010. Martucci, Elise. The Environmental Unconscious in the Fiction of DeLillo. London: Routledge, 2012. Miccoli, Anthony. Posthuman Suffering and the Technological Embrace. UK: Lexington Books, 2010. Orr, Leonard. Don DeLillo’s White Noise: A Reader’s Guide. New York: A&C Black, 2003. Osteen, Mark. White Noise: Text and Criticism. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. Parini, Jay. American Writers: Classics. New York: Gale, 2003. Shapiro, Michael. Reading the Postmodernity Polity: Political Theory as Textual. Minnesota: Minnesota Press, 1992. Yavuz, Sevilay. “The Fearful Dream of the Gladneys: Death.” International Journal of English and Literature 4.4 (2013): 89-93. Read More