The language of White Noise

I just finished White Noise.

For me, the book accumulated as I read, just like the plot's internal accumulation of things, noise, concepts, dread. The weight of the book kept growing in my mind, and the farther I read the more I found myself entwined in the story, in the lives of the characters, in their existential and conceptual dilemmas. I appreciated the humor more and more as the book went on, as well, and perhaps that's what I am most impressed by, in the end: DeLillo's ability to craft a novel that is at once psychologically crushing and tongue-in-cheek. Perhaps that's really the only way to do "psychologically crushing" successfully.

There were obviously a number of fascinating ideas in the book, a multitude of scenes laden with meaning that I want to go back and pick apart. But there was especially one scene near the very end that really struck me. Jack has just found Willie Mink, and he is following his own dictated plan to "enter unannounced, gain his confidence, advance gradually, reduce him to trembling," etc. This particular moment falls under the "reduce him to trembling" category:


I advanced into the area of flickering light, out of the shadows, seeking to loom. I put my hand in my pocket, gripped the firearm. Mink watched the screen. I said to him gently, "Hail of bullets." Keeping my hand in my pocket.

He hit the floor, began crawling toward the bathroom, looking back over his shoulder, childlike, miming, using principles of heightened design but showing real terror, brilliant cringing fear. I followed him into the toilet, passing the full-length mirror where he'd undoubtedly posed with Babette, his shaggy member dangling like a ruminant's.

"Fusillade," I whispered.

He tried to wriggle behind the bowl, both arms over his head, his legs tight together.


One of the side effects of Mink's precious medication, Dylar, is the inability to distinguish between the spoken word and the actual event. When Jack says "Hail of bullets," Mink experiences those words as someone would experience the event itself. This idea fascinates me. It is encouraging in the sense that, despite our "white noise" culture, true language can still break through the barriers and really MEAN something. It is frightening in the sense that we are moving toward a culture where language manipulates. When our president and the newspapers tell us that a country is harboring weapons of mass destruction, what choice to we have but to react to those words as Mink would, crawling into our bathrooms with our arms over our heads, bracing ourselves for the inevitable, granting unheard of amounts of trust to people in positions of power to deal with these words in any way possible, use whatever force they have to in order to keep us from hearing those words again.

I think the fact that this is a side effect of a medication that is designed to take away the fear of death is significant. So often, it seems like medications have side effects that cancel out the original reason for taking the medication - and this is a perfect example of that. For when do we feel the power of words more than when those words imply death?

At the end of the novel, it seems that the people who don't fear death, who are able to go about their daily lives with a measure of assured ignorance and blind trust in some unidentifiable system, are the people who pay the least attention to language. Shopping in the newly reorganized supermarket,


They turn into the wrong aisle, peer along the shelves, sometimes stop abruptly, causing other carts to run into them. Only the generic food is where it was, white packages plainly labeled. The men consult lists, the women do not. There is a sense of wandering now, an aimless and haunted mood, sweet-tempered people taken to the edge. They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn't matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation ...


The language of waves and radiation can never have the visceral power of the spoken or the printed word. It seems in this context to have only a destructive or deceptive power. I think DeLillo must have felt that way too, as a writer who still uses a typewriter to compose his novels because he likes the physical sculpting of language better than the electronic composing that seems so convenient to many others. So on some level, I can't help but feel that White Noise is an assertion of language in the face of a culture that is trying, slowly but surely, to reduce it to "smeared print, ghost images."