The Main Theme of Delillos Novel - Literature review Example

Is technology shown to be a benefit or a threat in postmodern human existence? Answer with specific reference to Delillo’s White Noise. Throughout White Noise Don Delillo displays how technology can provide an abundance of convenience to modern lives. Telephones make it easier to communicate, kitchen appliances let us cook faster, and cars get us where we need to be. But technology also is shown to have a dark side: it gets in the way of an authentic life, a life where you rely on your own senses and identity, and it is portrayed as reducing the intimacy and fellowship between people. The impact of an expanding mosaic of modern technological development is the main theme of Delillo’s novel. The author provides many examples throughout the story, some relating to environmental pollution, for example ‘the black billowing clouds’, gaseous pollution and human relations generally. In some ways technology creates an artificial barrier between life and non-life. This division can lead people to focus on what is on the other side: death. For example, death enters deeply into the minds of Jack and Babette when they both run with their family to evacuate from their village. Technology is threatening them, invading their personal space and yet ironically they escape the threat with yet more technology. Throughout the novel there is an ambivalence about technology, whether it is indeed a benefit or a threat, but the reader leaves the novel mostly with the belief that this is all a satire on technology. What is satire? It is the mockery of contemporary mores. In this paper, I will argue that Delillo’s portrayal of technology is ambivalent with hints of satire. The explicit essence of this novel is to be found in the expanding horizons of modern technology that produce layer upon layer of garbage in America’s landfills, endless amounts of junk food, and huge, ugly shopping malls and grocery shops. Consumerism, DeLillo seems to be saying, is making people lead empty, unauthentic lives. It is sucking the energy and joie de vivre from them. This consumerist culture is further subject to media propaganda and announcements on a daily basis: the news is always on the radio and TV--it is omnipresent. Communication is relentless: remote devices, stereophonic systems, cell phones, satellite television, super-conductors, supersonic sound systems become handy tools for influencing popular culture and people, but all to what end? A popular culture or pop-and-rock society is depicted throughout this novel. To some, this might be a kind of paradise, but there are many who would find it quite horrifying, especially those who are already suspicious of the influence technology has on their lives. Delillo plays with the reader, and as such you can never quite be sure whether he is for or against the technology that is evident in the novel. At times it appears the conveniences are very comfortable, at other times it appears they are deadly. At times White Noise can be a satirical novel, but it also has moments when it is deadly serious--for example, when Jack shoots himself--but there are moments where Delillo focuses on the absurdity of technology, the absurdity of the urge to accumulate more. This satire is implicit in the following passage also: 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 . . . 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 . . . 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 Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints. (Delillo 1) In this very first paragraph of White Noise we see how Delillo intends to trace the way technological goods overshadows postmodern American society and how what sometimes seems to be a wholesome dependence on computers, automobiles, junk food, easily available pornography in fact makes lives more automatic and unreflective and our only source of entertainment and stimulation. Delillo’s novel is showing more the enslavement of the human mind at the hands of modern technology than benefits of technology to America. There is always the hum of some machine in the background—‘blue jeans tumbled in the dryer’ (18)—drowning out key parts of the conversation, thus resulting in a mix up of information. This constant noise and saturation from media (radio, television) serves to inform the characters on every detail in the outside world. Even children know the name of Kleenex, for example. Indeed the characters’ world and eventually overpowering their common sense-if the radio hasn’t said it will rain on a given day-it doesn’t-, only it is, yet they can no longer process the facts that they encounter, even if this is the total antithesis of the information given to them. The following paragraph from White Noise, however, again depicts technology in its twin aspects of providing both security and insecurities to parents of growing children especially when this particular moment becomes a cause of rejoicing in the past as well as thinking for the future in terms of insurance coverage and apparently seeking security in collection of the like-minded people. I’ve witnessed this spectacle every September for twenty-one years. It is a brilliant event, invariably. The students greet each other with comic cries and gestures of sodden collapse. Their summer has been bloated with criminal pleasures, as always. The parents stand sun-dazed near their automobiles, seeing images of themselves in every direction. The conscientious suntans. The well-made faces and wry looks. They feel a sense of renewal, of communal recognition. The women crisp and alert, in diet trim, knowing people’s names. Their husbands content to measure out the time, distant but ungrudging, accomplished in parenthood . . . This assembly of station wagons . . . tells the parents they are a collection of the like-minded and the spiritually akin, a people, a nation. (Delillo 1-2) Technology can hinder, but it can also heal. It can provide the technology for heart surgery, but it can also damage the heart through endless junk food that is pervasive throughout this novel and in American society. Part of Delillo’s critique is that his family only feels connected through the endless cartons and cans that they purchase. A prime example of the ambiguity in this novel is the ‘family movie night’ with the added convenience of a Chinese take out meal. Jack does not enjoy the evening, but because it is the socially accepted norm the Gladney family have been conditioned to believe that this is what constitutes happy American family life. This novel with its contemporary feel is highly relevant even to the twenty-first-century America, where technological lives have sped up far more quickly than they were in the 1980s. It would be fascinating, for example, to know what DeLillo thinks about Facebook, or whether his satire predicted the dummying down of our youth and the boom that is convenience and more convenience. The lives portrayed in White Noise are so close to present-day technologically oriented societal norms and living that reading it has become a very engrossing affair, causing the reader and at times myself to question the reliance and importance we place on technology and these seemingly positive time-saving devices, without considering what the loses are. Given that television served historically to advise its viewers of major political world events, such as the War, we are now overwhelmed by a surge of adverts inadvertently telling us which SUV to purchase. The effect as we see in White Noise is that it enters the person on such a level that they chant these mantras in their sleep ‘Toyota, Toyota, Toyota’ (Delillo 141). Everything from airborne toxic events striking small college towns to the novel’s conclusion when Jack shoots himself in his effort to kill the seducer of his wife highlights how technology is omnipresent. After the toxic event (as a result of a technological failure), chaotic evacuation follows. People clamour into their cars hoping technology will save them from technology, again highlighting the hypocrisy and ambivalence of this witty satire. This can be seen most acutely in the behaviour of the Gladney family Jack unfortunately becomes exposed to ‘Nyodene D’ which is potentially deadly toxic. Babette, Jack’s wife, also develops her own ‘death awareness’ quite like her husband, for which again she places her trust in the modern advancements of medicine and uses the experimental drug Dylar. Babette, failing to consider the unknowns of an ‘experimental’ drug, places her faith in the unknown to ironically escape the unknown. Delillo then plays with the reader as he exposes Babette and Minks (the supplier of the experimental drug) in the end. Jack, while confronting Minks, is shot, ironically with a modern day tool, which is the source of huge conflict in the modern world. Delillo shows how Jack has become so consumed and ultimately driven to the edge of his life by the pervasiveness of the technology and its quick-fix ethos. It is a technological failure that leads to deepening of imagining and thinking about death on the part of Babette. This ultimately led to promiscuous perversions for overpowering the fear of death. Indeed, the novel revolves around diverse forms and provisions of modern technology and its damaging impact on human beings. It tends to drain people of the meaning in their lives. We can see this in the description of Denise wearing the green visor- ‘Something about the visor seemed to speak to her, offer wholness and identity’ (37). We can also see this in part in Babette’s depression. The novel also revolves around the comfort, convenience, and ease it provides to people. A vacation is always only an airplane away; any disease can be cured with a drug. It is this linkage of technology, human behaviour and perversions that is so important to the success of this interesting novel. What we see again and again in DeLillo’s novel is the level of social perversion that a technological failure can bring about in peoples’ life. It is a sad testament to the power we have ceded to our machines that we have so little power over what we do and think anymore, even if we are swaddled in comfort. The radio conversation between Jack and Heinrick is a fine example of this dependency on modern technology, and how it can, if allowed to consume you. White Noise shows how technology is basically an ambivalent force in our lives. Technology terrorises people rather ‘inadvertently’, as it were, through toxic leaks and other unexpected, uncontrollable events. It gives the illusion of control, but nothing more, perfectly highlighted in the SIMUVAC passages. It is therefore becoming ever ubiquitous despite all injurious effects leading to the near constant ‘imagining of death’ in the minds of persons like Babette and Jack. White Noise is full of such recurring postmodern perspectives of technological realities: Its not the station wagons I wanted to see. What are the people like? Do the women wear plaid skirts, cable-knit sweaters? Are the men in hacking jackets? Whats a hacking jacket? Theyve grown comfortable with their money, I said. "They genuinely believe theyre entitled to it. This conviction gives them a kind of rude health. They glow a little. I have trouble imagining death at that income level, she said. Maybe there is no death as we know it. Just documents changing hands. (Delillo 6) Babette is talking like a person affected by technology in different ways. She is interested in Wagons because she wants to see those fashionable persons who may be sitting in the wagon belonging to rich people. Information technology creates desires and widens areas of network for rising expectations. She thinks that at the higher income levels, there may not be the constant threat of death—‘I have trouble imagining death at that income level’ (Delillo 6). She thinks that richer people with better technological possessions may be free of a fear of death. In the first pages of chapter 6, Heinrich and Jack are busy in a highly entertaining discourse about predictions relating to expected rains and showers. Heinrich says that the radio is announcing rain that night. Jack says ‘It’s raining now’. This shows how the media has a threatening control—so much so that he can no longer accept that it is raining, even if he can see or feel it, because technology has not told him so. People it would seem can be in different places, talking simultaneously, and feeling different things. There is the illusion of closeness, but no real closeness. The debate moves to the more metaphysical levels and Jack argues that what one sees or feels should be privileged while Heinrich points out that the senses are suspect and one should believe the media (Delillo 22). This is part of a great philosophical debate which DeLillo captures perfectly. Who can we trust: man or machine? The answer, he implies, is that both have their flaws. We should be suspicious and watchful of everything-including ourselves and our various impulses and feelings. Siskind picks up on this confusion-especially as it related to death and its knowability-in the following passage. Discussing modern death in language that applies as well to modern science, Siskind sums up the Gladney’s dual fear: ‘The more we learn, the more it grows. Is this some law of physics? Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent. Is it a law of nature?’ (Delillo, 141). There is a superficial life imposed on the real one throughout the novel. As the critic Cornel Bonca writes in an essay, Delillo borrows ideas from Baudrillard in order to present “the unpresentable in presentation itself”—an example of this is the toxic cloud. This passage from White Noise refers back to an earlier one about the effects of an industrial (or postindustrial) disaster: Ever since the airborne toxic event, the sunsets had become almost unbearably beautiful. Not that there was a measurable connection. If the special character of Nyodene Derivative (added to the everyday drift of effluents, pollutants, contaminants and deliriants) had caused this aesthetic leap from already brilliant sunsets to broad towering riddled visionary skyscapes, tinged with dread, no one had been able to prove it. There is also a tendency for technology to dictate how to live as when, during the evacuation the radio says, “she was showing outdated symptoms” (117). Postmodernism has a tendency to point out various existing discrepancies in the various narratives around us and points relating to technology and human existence. It is largely drawn from existential limits to human patience. As such White Noise is a successful attempt to communicate the theme of the linkages between technology and various areas of social life. Delillo also paints a postmodern picture of the Gladney family, according to the critic Leonard Orr: although the family appears to be traditional in some ways—middle class, with a male breadwinner—it is also profoundly contemporary—with both husband and wife having been married four times and their children are from different partners (Orr, 21). This makes things interesting. Delillo, indeed, is a postmodern writer. In his White Noise he goes much beyond the parameters of postmodernism because he is also entering into the differences between the world we think we live in and the one we actually live in. In his views, as such, modern technology is extremely harmful to the basic creativity and normal life style of human cultural ethos. Is there any answer to this postmodern critique of modern technology? If there is any answer in this regard, it is then difficult to see it in any postmodern writing. Postmodernism focuses human attention to several pejorative trends but it is not its tendency to answer various pointers raised by it. This is what Delillo is also doing. He does not especially prescribe any answer to the diverse linkages of technology, individual and society. That is not his job as a novelist. His job is to make us feel how these things are affecting our everyday life. However, Delillo does prescribe a course of action, based on the feeling he presents in this fine novel-he does warn us that the only thing we can do is keep our eyes open and never rely on anything too much. Bonca, Cornel. “Don DeLillos White Noise: The natural language of the species.” College Literature. June 1996. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3709/is_199606/ai_n8753398 Orr, Leonard. White Noise: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003. Read More