Pensamiento - Literatura

I. Introduction

Don DeLillo's White Noise (WN) is a novel laden with meanings being explored since the end of the 19th century. Although a piece of art in itself resulting from the creativity of a writer with a dazzling capacity to communicate complex meaning artistically, it shows the traces of modern and contemporary investigations and announces both the developments that would take place around a visual culture and most importantly, where the human potential is to build a less alienating world.

Several currents are brought together in WN, of which, perhaps, the crucial is a study of the human fear of death and the presentation of how a kind of denaturalized industrial/consumerist society escapes this fear collectively.

The idea that a death fear is one of the reasons why we live in a falsified world is not explicit in WN but resonates throughout the novel. A fear of death which cannot be uprooted from our minds, but which might be held under control by the development of the human capacity to communicate in a positive way, keeping each other the best company possible. The individual and collective denial of death explains at least in part why we can find ourselves lost in the embrace of consumerism or hypnotized in front of a TV set, as we will see. DeLillo just mentions one direct influence in WN, that of Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death. Clearly, the essay is a relevant clue for interpreting the role of children in the novel for instance, how-especially the toddler-they operate as symbols of the fear of annihilation. "I think we feel, perhaps superstitiously, that children have a direct route to, have direct contact to the kind of natural truth that eludes us as adults. There is something they know but cannot tell us. Or there is something they remember which we've forgotten" (DeLillo 1991). But in DeLillo's literary investigation of the death fear, we will find existentialism. Heidegger is in the air: his da-sein , existence is being there , in time.* Because living means approaching death, and this awareness, when faced, causes unbearable anguish, we resort to the falsified existence of fleeing that fear by means of collective deception. However, living should involve facing that fear, as Heidegger explains, and this can be done by grounding our search in the common, what there is at hand, our daily direct experience, the source concealing the deepest meanings, which could be revealed.

El factum de que el "ser ahí" peculiar en cada caso [the existing subject] muere siempre ya, es decir, es en un "ser relativamente a su fin", se oculta trasmutando la muerte en el caso de defunción de otros [it is others who die] que tiene lugar cotidianamente y que en rigor nos asegura con mayor evidencia aún que "uno mismo" [the abstract subject] por lo pronto todavía "vive" (Heidegger 278).

This abstract, collective subject, if we may call it so, contemplates catastrophes on television in WN, for instance, as a means to transmute death in other people's death. Death as an event appearing on television is something you escape of because it is happening to others. But fleeing the death fear, as stated, is leading a falsified existence. Humans should make use of what they have at hand-language, and following also Habermas's theory of communicative action, communicating. Human communication, language shared, in interaction, is a possible way out, in spite of gigantic obstacles. It is language and not TV (see part III) the tool which might possibly help us in dealing with our death fear, because language-words rooted in actual needs and desires-"bridge[s] the lonely distances" (DeLillo qtd. in Cornel 26). In spite of the ending of the story (incidentally, secondary to its core and resonant meanings), we find this echo of Habermas's, where the emphasis of rationality would be in the world of language resulting from the social structure, this is, rationality would be constructed by individuals in verbal interaction and not by ideology, far less by consumerism. There are traces in the novel that language, human communication contains the potential of guarding us effectively off despair, isolation and the fear of death, and these traces run too deep or too high for us to grasp clearly, but they are there, we hear their bright rumor in spite of whatever is going on. A fundamental implication of all this, as we will see, is that mass culture, consumer culture, this is, we humans as objects of manipulation, do not explain it all. Our culture is also a result of our fear. And WN poses communication might keep us from falling into isolation and death.

WN moves further into the investigation of what was a key question for the Frankfurt School of thought—the integration of technology and scientific thought into the systems of domination—expanding on research on the role of the visual in a mass culture which does not meet but confuses further human needs and desires. The different authors of the Frankfurt School shared a concern for a question that Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer posed in their 1947 Preface to Dialectic of Enlightenment: "why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism." Their common fundamental assumption was that everything had causes and a meaning. In WN the assumption seems to be the same, but it analysis introduces an empowering element, not explicitly, though. Again, contemporary problems resulting from societies alienated from civilization are rooted in a fundamental human concern, the death fear. This involves an empowering perspective, for people cease to be mere victims of a system far beyond their reach and are reminded that the key to understanding and action is within reach, in their own existential experience.

It is true WN poses no certainties. However, this is no obstacle from our contemporary approach. Cecilia Tichi, analyzing the fictional form of the television aesthetic in TV-era writers, comments something which is of use for the interpretation of this novel:

"maybe," "I'm not sure," "probably," "possibly." The tentative, the provisional are the key terms . To say, as some critics have, that this kind of style shows a lack of political, social or personal care or commitment misses the point because it really characterizes that commitment. In the era of commercial broadcast television, the voice of the tentative, the provisional is that of integrity (Tichi 127).

The issues dealt by authors like Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm, and later and differently by Habermas, such as culture industries, the one-dimensional society of mass culture, authoritarism, fascism, the family, subjectivity and collective perception, the role of science and technology, the warfare/welfare society, freedom and the fear of freedom, the role of language. are a valuable attempt to criticize advanced industrial societies out of a concern about the fulfillment of human needs. This is also found in this novel.

In WN we discover hints of how advanced industrial societies integrate individuals into the capitalist system of market via mass media and marketing, creating a one-dimensional universe where personal criteria and critical action have no place and where a falsified reality is perceived in spite of, in detriment of actuality. It states by artistic means that in our panicked escape of death we resort to what our denaturalized society offers in the shape of a bombardment of images actually intended for something else (push us to being docile consumers) and which lead us to apathy, as postmodernists posed. This current of meaning in WN is set in the context of modern industrial societies which have not evolved to true democracies but to variations of dominations systems in apparent disguise: the distortion of modern society, which instead of using knowledge and resources to create true democratic systems of social organization, uses all sciences and technology to develop homogenizing and alienating modes of domination, "conformity enforcers" (Bloom n. pag.) embodied in conforming populations, a situation which leads us back to barbarism and away from critical conscience and civilization.**

WN comes from modernity, it is connected to the period of the second industrial revolution, that of electricity, announcing what the third electronic revolution would bring about. In literature, the stream-of-consciousness viewpoint, theoretically established by the psychologist William James, helped to investigate subjective introspection. The subject's mind displaced space and time as the main structural devices to organize the narration of experience. From Gertrude Stein to Faulkner, via all the artistic isms, the investigation of human perception in the individual mind would break all molds and liberate the individual to search for alternative modes for existence and experience. "Although I don't necessarily want to write like them [Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and others], to someone who's 20 years old that kind of work suggests freedom and possibility. It can make you see not only writing but the world in a completely different way" (DeLillo 1982). DeLillo will actually use freedom to explore the world in his works, both in form and in content, profiting from what has come before, breaking boundaries in critical revision, expanding, contextualizing while becoming what is termed as "universal". His concern with language, with doing what Gertrude Stein did-restore their meanings, rescue them from degradation-is connected to modernist exploration, which adds to something that is at the core of its difference with modernist experimentation: the existentialist concern mentioned above.

From postmodernism, WN recalls McLuhan's anthropomorphization of the media, where the TV and the radio appear as extensions of the human voice and eye. In its formal resources, as well as in some of its meanings, the novel presents these media following the postmodernist idea that they are the message in themselves, shapers of perception, fragmentators of reality. Marcuse's one-dimentional world moves onto McLuhan's global village and this is found in the crowds in WN, while they shop, take part in simulations or watch a disturbing industrial sunset. What was posed in The Gutenberg Galaxy about TV having the ability to lead people back, to tribal society, by means of the effect it causes in homogenizing perception, is shared and transcended in WN: shared because television viewers appear as a crowd, a tribe, as if watching a fire; transcended because TV is not wholly a brainwasher, an emptier of human contents, a user and an abuser of the species. Television is also used by humans to combat their deepest fear. Whether this is convenient or inconvenient is not the crucial issue, seems to state his novel, our private enlightening TV set.

This questions in some way Baudrillard's idea that people internalize media transmissions. It is so, but there is more to it, DeLillo seems to state. And in this there being more, we find a possible way-out.

[I]n "The Implosion of Meaning in the Media," Baudrillard claims that the proliferation of signs and information in the media obliterates meaning through neutralizing and dissolving all content-a process which leads both to a collapse of meaning and the destruction of distinctions between media and reality. In a society supposedly saturated with media messages, information and meaning "implode," collapsing into meaningless "noise," pure effect without content or meaning (qtd in Kellner's "Baudrillard: A New McLuhan?" n. date, n. pag.).

However, DeLillo's white noise is not exactly that. It is humanized to the core, and therefore empowering. Baudrillard's bombardment of images (simulations) and signs (simulacra) which actually lead us to apathy is enriched by the notion that this process is connected to an existential human fear. Human concerns are not obliterated for good, and this implies existence. Therefore, although WN is full of examples which validate some of the postmodernist points of analysis, postmodernism cannot account for an complete interpretation of the novel.

Summing up, DeLillo poses the power of the media and of consumer society, but he does not demonize them nor lead us to cynical nihilism. There is criticism by artistic means, but there is no despise and, most importantly, although people are actual victims of the system they are set in, DeLillo links that state of affairs to a deep human concern, the death fear, which actually has the effect to empower people, because then people are not lost in the threatening tornado of a world they will never work out or be able to manage. The key to understanding is in each human being, so people could try to work it out perhaps just by means of communicating and developing their own criteria. There is a potential for dissent, in spite of overwhelming obstacles.

This hopeful perspective is something that announces what artists and researchers would do from the 80s onwards—transcend the blind alley postmodernism had directed us to. The fact that semiotics became a science, independent of linguistics, contributed to the promotion of visual signs. Visual texts, images, gained the relevance of written texts for the understanding of the world (Brosch 32). Image fiction—what this novel is an example of—relates to how mass culture is affected by visual dominance in cultural discourses. WN develops formally in issues like the impact of TV in technical literary resources. DeLillo will use the presentational sensory-mode of the media stylistically, reproducing their daily haphazard intrusion in people's lives, the fact that their contents are namely perceived in the sensory involuntary mode and not through conscious voluntary processes. Visual dominance will also develop intellectually, in how image conditions collective modes of perception and conceptualization; also in its role to help us deal with existential anguish. The earlier postmodernist implications are questioned. In spite of the fact that there will be numerous moments in the novel when the world of simulacra seems to have a life of its own that threatens human existence, and in spite of the ultimate yielding to this irreal world by the protagonists' existences, DeLillo will hint at clues for critical thinking. WN finds other approaches, additional points to make in the same setting.

The 20th century left us stunned and shattered, alienated in the face of all the injustice, all the horror we had been capable of out of the worst possible use of human advancements. We became masses of people dying of hunger and disease in a world of richness and knowledge, masses being tortured and killed in conventional wars in a world that had named the key concept of human rights, masses of consumers watching TV and dying nicely at home, out of a lack of personal criteria. Because the era of subjectivity and human rights opened the way to more civilized processes and aims, personal criteria and intelligent communication became public enemies and were targeted in the mass media.

In this familiar nightmare landscape of lurking dangers difficult to identify, we will find a family which complies superficially with collective demands and which seems to be a network of dissenters, seeking individual criteria to assess events and showing loving interaction and communication. These are the tracks which may lead somewhere provided we do not panic. Through the protagonist couple, we will learn that individual human fears-the vital problem of being in love and fearing having to bear the death of your loved one-can be sucked up by collective fear in the air. This yielding to collective perception is dangerous because it can set us in a landscape where a lost and confused crowd, unable to take any action, spend the time awaiting something which cannot be understood, like a prehistoric band watching the unstoppable spread of the last glaciation, or as if they were a species in front of a huge screen of white noise.

* Cf. with decontextualization in a world of simulacra.
** See entries of Adorno, Fromm, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Habermas at the end of this essay.

Next: II. Different Worlds

Please, quote the author and the site: michelle renyé, at mujerpalabra.net.
Another quotation style: michelle renyé. "Dissenters Are Never Superheroes. An Essay on DeLillo's White Noise". Mujer Palabra. 2005. Path: Pensamiento. Date of Access <https://www.mujerpalabra.net>.