Pensamiento - Literatura

II. Different Worlds

DeLillo uses an I-narrator to present people and events as if from a TV set, depicting objects and events as if in a sensory mode, with no intelligent processing, and being linear with time although reproducing the intromission of zapping. However, we find clues and comment on our contemporary world and fundamental human emotions. In this way, readers will perceive as they do when watching TV, but they will also feel the closeness of characters with whom they share something truly human.

In this section we will consider how worded sensory perception is used to depict reality empirically while echoing deeper meanings and how events, major o minor, are presented from this fabric of sensory perception and intertwined with other information, comment, analysis and dialogues.

An outstanding characteristic in WN is the presence of different worlds whose interaction is constant. These combining worlds are like an abstract expressionist work of art—a maddening blurred atmosphere of continuous noise. Space is occupied by information of different shapes, densities and sizes, appearing at random, producing a continuous sound-the adding together all the noise we get from electrical appliances: humming engines, roaring engines, light beeps, short electronic melodies, sudden loud signals, the background noise of TV sets and radios: of action films with their loud crashes, thrillers with its shrieks and silences, commercials with its merry tunes and cheerful wording, quizzes with its canned applause or laughter. In contrast with the effect noises in nature have in people, noises from machines are maddening (see idea highlighted in bold below).

Jack, the narrator, often depicts the world in the least processed manner, as if parting from the senses. There is a complex proposal in the novel on perception, which is not only found in the discussion Heinrich and Jack have on whether it is raining or not and should we trust our senses? (22-4, ch. 6). Sensory perception in WN echoes a vast specter of meaning related to the interpretation of the world we live in. A crucial example is the pervading visual and sound buzz which is a cause leading the characters to confusion and losing their way, to yielding to the death of collective perception.

Visual and auditory images prevail, in the form of nonstop blurred noise in the background whose clearest image is the expressway, linked to death from the beginning: "There is an expressway beyond the backyard now, well below us, and at night as we settle into our brass bed the sparse traffic washes past, a remote and steady murmur around our sleep, as of dead souls babbling at the edge of a dream" (4, ch. 1); to the end, when Wilder cycles across it to lead their parents to join the crowd of helpless people watching the strange sunset from the overpass.

Sound images are often linked to danger and death. The TV and the radio are a character in themselves, The Voices, on and off as if they had more willpower than people to decide over that matter (cf. McLuhan's "extensions of man"). They are related to madness, to people becoming mad as a result of a constant buzz. When Heinrich and Jack are talking about the murderer the son plays chess with, Jack asks: "Had he been hearing voices?" "On TV." "Talking just to him? Singling him out?" (44, ch. 10). Jack knows they too spend their time hearing voices , so he needs to establish a difference which draws the border between losing one's head and not losing it (just yet!): I know those voices come from machines that don't have a will to direct their speech to us/me .

In any case, the constant buzzing of danger, of the death threat will be embodied in the increasingly intrusive presence of TV and the radio. In chapter 27, how the radio is on and off feels like a threatening violation of privacy. This is the crucial chapter where Babette tells Jack the Dylar story—her individual attempt to put an end to her fear of death by taking an experimental drug-and Jack tells Babette about his exposure to Nyodene—the secret of death being in his cells. When she has just explained Jack she had to accept abuse by the doctor to get the drug* and Jack, hearing the old voices of male rage, asks about frequency (!) and she has just answered, we find the radio joining in: "I felt heat rising along the back of my neck. I watched her carefully. A sadness showed in her eyes. I lay back and looked at the ceiling. The radio came on. She began to cry softly" (195). The radio keeps intruding in private moments: "We held each other tightly for a long time, our bodies clenched in an embrace that included elements of love, grief, tenderness, sex and struggle. ... We lay naked after love, wet and gleaming. I pulled the covers up over us. We spoke in drowsy whispers for a while. The radio came on" (199). Later, Babette makes a move to close the episode and the day, and Jack comments she "pressed a button on the radio, killing the voices" (202). However, he has something to say, the worst thing he could ever tell her:

"I'm tentatively scheduled to die . [w]e are no longer talking about fear and floating terror," I said. "This is the hard and heavy thing, the fact itself."
Slowly she emerged from beneath the covers. She climbed on top of me, sobbing ...
Later, after she'd fallen off my body and into restless sleep, I kept on staring into the dark. The radio came on (202-3).

In Part II (ch. 21) the neighbourhood is evacuated due to the proximity of a toxic cloud. Just before Heinrich comments "We're running out of gas" (126) and Jack is exposed to the enormous dark mass that "moved like some death ship in a Norse legend" (127), Jack is theorizing in a panicky way about the power of suggestion (126) in order to escape the anguish of thinking that the girls and Babette could be infected. He suddenly says: "I turned off the radio, not to help me think but to keep me from thinking." A mysterious comment because at this point what we would have expected him to do is turn the radio off to help Babette and the girls not be further influenced by the symptoms announced on it. In Part III this former comment by Jack gains significance and helps clarify meanings: we realize silence is healthier for Jack than the constant background comment of the information gadgets.

Silence is also connected at least to mental health in the family. There are several sharp contrasts between noise and silence. In chapter 17 while the group is driving home after a shopping spree in the human buzz (84), they do it in complete silence. Their silence follows this passage: "We ate another meal. A band played live Muzak. Voices rose ten stories from the gardens and promenades, a roar that echoed and swirled through the vast gallery, mixing with noises from the tiers, with shuffling feet and chiming bells, the hum of escalators, the sound of people eating, the human buzz of some vivid and happy transaction" (84). Their silence could be interpreted as a side-effect of alienation but I do not think that is a good explanation. Usually, their silence includes an air of dignity rooted in awareness: it is like an implied agreement in the family to state they know the previous bustling activity was not what it seemed to be-through silence they show their shared dissent and they feel close to each other.

A different sound contrast comes from form and content. The quality of Jack's voice in chapter 27 is unrelated to what he is going through emotionally. This is a metaphor of the permanent containment effort he has to make in the face of continuing noise:

"First I'd offered him my mind. Now I offered my body." [Babette]
I felt a sensation of warmth creeping up my back and radiating outward across my shoulders. Babette looked straight up. I was propped on an elbow, facing her, studying her features. When I spoke finally it was in a reasonable and inquiring voice-the voice of a man who seeks genuinely to understand some timeless human riddle (194).

Jack is here using a professional resource. He is pretending (see part III). He will continue with the effort. After he has learned what Babette's condition is, shocked and desperate, he tries to "talk her out of it" (196), "to persuade her it was not as serious as she thought," and then moves to making a resentful reproach: "If you are able to conceal such a thing from a husband and children, maybe it is not so severe." Babette replies not accepting the approach: "This is not the story of a wife's deception. You can't sidestep the true story." Jack then says: "I kept my voice calm" and explains to her the idea "I am the one in this family who is obsessed by death" (197).

In the same chapter, focusing now on the visual, the presence of a TV set in Babette's narration is totally powerful and threatening, in spite of the fact that we do not even know if it is on or off. If Babette had been kind of swallowed up by the machine at the closure of Part I (104-5), an episode that created the atmosphere of deadly danger building up around her-sensed because of Jack's and Wilder's reaction-now the machine seems to be monitoring her dying . "We went to a grubby little motel room. Never mind where or when. It had the TV up near the ceiling. This is all I remember. Grubby, tacky. I was heartsick. But so, so desperate." Then: "Did you enjoy having sex with him?" "I only remember the TV up near the ceiling, aimed down at us" (194-5).

Image and sound are powerfully present in the depiction of the exodus in chapter 21 (Part II): just before leaving the neighborhood, "operatic chaos" (115)-with helicopters hovering and police colored lights and sirens-contrasts sharply with the family's silence while eating. This is another type of silence in the book, that which endeavors to guard them off any possible harm. Later, sirens and "decorous hysteria" (118), the vehicle exodus, "the parade of fools," passing under the overpass and watching the people gathered there (121-2)-a forewarning of the ending on the overpass (324-5). After a night in the barracks and Jack finding out he is infected (140-2), there comes "noise and commotion":

The major noise issued from sirens in the ambulettes outside. A voice was instructing us through a bullhorn. In the distance I heard a clanging bell and then a series of automobile horns, the first of what would become a universal bleat, a herd-panic of terrible wailing proportions as vehicles of all sizes and types tried to reach the parkway in the quickest possible time (155-6).

Added to this, the "panoramic disorder" of a landscape of vehicles, not people, panicking away in a night of heavy rain. Finally, the image of danger/death in the air:

Then we heard the rotors. Through the stark trees we saw it, the immense toxic cloud, lighted now by eighteen choppers-immense almost beyond comprehension, beyond legend and rumor, a roiling bloated slug-shaped mass. It seemed to be generating its own inner storms. [Read on] The horn-blowing increased in volume (157-8).

Part III, the one devoted to death and dying, opens in the signifying sensory mood: "The supermarket is full of elderly people who look lost among the dazzling hedgerows" (167). We recall Murray's earlier words depicting the supermarket as a kind of heaven (sparkling white): "Look how well-lighted everything is. The place is sealed-off, self-contained. It is timeless. ... Here we don't die, we shop" (38, ch. 9). We recall the Treadwells (see part IV). Now there is a snow alert (cf. last image of the supermarket in 325-6). Jack bumps into Murray, who tells him his university competitor is dead. Jack immediately focuses his attention in something else, in perceiving life (see part III).

I was suddenly aware of the dense environmental texture. The automatic doors opened and closed, breathing abruptly. Colors and odors seemed sharper. The sound of gliding feet emerged from a dozen other noises, from the sublittoral drone of maintenance systems, from the rustle of newsprint as shoppers scanned their horoscopes in the tabloids up front, from the whispers of elderly women with talcumed faces, from the steady rattle of cars going over a loose manhole cover just outside the entrance. Gliding feet. I heard them clearly, a sad numb shuffle in every aisle (168-9).

This mix of sensory perception of various types is common throughout WN. It helps to convey the sense of actuality. It draws readers to imagining direct experience. Recalling McLuhan's ideas posed in The Gutenberg Galaxy , DeLillo is also reproducing the ability of television to invoke multiple senses. Some noteworthy examples including different senses are: "We entered a period of chaos and noise. We milled about, bickered a little, dropped utensils. Finally we were all satisfied with what we'd been able to snatch from the cupboards and refrigerator or swipe from each other and we began quietly plastering mustard or mayonnaise on our brightly colored food" (6-7, ch. 2). "Flavorless packaging" (18, ch. 5); "moist bag of garbage" (33, ch. 8), "I tried to dissociate the taste of the tap water from the sight of the brains and the general odor of preservatives and disinfectants" (187, ch. 25). Steffie is addicted—Jack's wording—to the smell of burnt things, especially toast (47, ch. 11). Murray is always smelling things and Babette, at the supermarket (18-9, ch. 5; 35, ch. 9) which is odorless ultra-cool (35) in opposition to living creatures. We read about Babette being "moist and warm, emitting a creaturely hum" (15), a state that provokes tenderness and sexual desire in Jack, and we read about Jack feeling "a warmth creeping up" (194), rage. There is a loving need—which is later abandoned, both in the couple and in the family—of touch, of being in touch, in the physical sense of bodies drawing together, as we can see with Jack and Babette in the sports field (14-5, ch. 4), in bed (27, ch. 7), in the supermarket checkout line (40, ch. 9); and on page 114 in chapter 21. Incidentally, this need of physical proximity is also in the family, it is part of the company being with loved ones entails. alone but never alone , to describe it using Carlton's album title.

Apart from sensory perception, in WN we will find information and analysis eloquently (symbolically) contextualized. Babette will play the role of presenting information from mass media when she reads tabloids to people as part of her voluntary work or during evacuation (142-6, ch. 21). Her way of presenting it will be marked by the her turning that material into stories (fiction) using her "storytelling voice." It will be irrelevant whether she is reading the horoscope or about a killer. She will manage the information in mass media avoiding thinking about its meaning, a way to defend herself from the fear of the danger that information could be instilling in her, but also as a way of resistance, of not becoming a believer, for there is nothing in mass media which is true.

Heinrich, the eldest teenage son, uses the information found in scientific-technological sources, apparently, and tries to process it like a scientist, although sometimes he is so cold and seems to enjoy the news so much-signs of immaturity-that he sounds more like a priest threatening with the coming of the Final Judgment. He believes knowledge could be used to understand the world and despises adults for what he sees as their ignorance: "What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air?" (148, ch. 21). "You know something. You know about Nyodene D. I saw you with those people," Jack tells him after Heinrich had spoken to the terrified evacuated crowds: "That was a one-time freak" (149). It is Heinrich mostly that offers data on the threats to well-being in technological societies. It is interesting to compare his words to those of the university neurologist Winnie, an adult (for instance in 228-30), and to consider what Jack actually thinks about his son's faith in statistics and findings, e.g. "Terrifying data is now an industry in itself. Different firms compete to see how badly they can scare us" (175).

Murray—Jack's colleague and... friend?—will complement Jack in contributing analysis from the perspective of the social sciences. I believe he is there as a dark companion of Jack's, whose main role is that he is freer than Jack to give his opinion, both for formal reasons and for reasons connected to the story. Murray is Jack's counterpart-a cynic who believes has no responsibility in anything and who does not establish relationships with anybody. He is sure of himself and his abilities and has no moral questions on anything. Jack is uncertain, vulnerable to fear, and he loves the people in his life. Even though Jack's and Murray's voices merge at times, they seem to pose the question: can we get to understand the world if we are involved?

There is explicit analysis on various topics: TV, crowds, supermarkets, leaders, love, death, the family, sensory and collective perception. Let us comment Jack's analysis on the need of the crowds who have been involved in a catastrophe to linger together** afterwards and have a narrator word what they have been through, in order to process the event together, even as if they had not been involved. In chapter 18 there has just been a crash landing with no dead people. One of the passengers starts narrating the event and the others gather around to listen. Jack comments:

They'd come back to listen. They were not yet ready to disperse, to re-inhabit their earthbound bodies, but wanted to linger with their terror, keep it separate and intact for just a while longer . It was as though they were being told of an event they hadn't personally been involved in. They were interested in what he said, even curious, but also clearly detached. They trusted him to tell them what they'd said and felt (91).
The need to listen to the story in order to be aware that you escaped that catastrophe: "No one knew what to say. Being alive was a richness of sensation" (92). In connection to this we can reflect upon the nature of information among crowds in need re-reading pages 129-131: "As people jolted out of reality, we were released from the need to distinguish." An idea that appears again later: "The toxic event had released a spirit of imagination . We began to marvel at our own ability to manufacture awe" (153).

Apart from sensory information and analysis, there is much communication taking place. All of the characters analyze themes in group communicative processes, which does not mean all communication processes are rational and complete. There are different types of conversations. Babette and Jack communicate often, and they often use humor. Many of their conversations are realistically set, and intertwine with daily activities we easily understand. We will not find Babette taking part like this in other conversations and certainly not with the children-she is persecuted by Denise and Steffie's guilt-tripping, terrified by Heinrich's apocalyptic talk and mostly spends time with Wilder, who does not speak. Bee and Denise talk to Jack about what worries them-their mothers. Jack talks to Steffie about what could be bothering her, and he actually functions as a colleague + father concerned about Steffie's and Bee's concerns. Heinrich and Jack have tense conversations although once they agree on something relevant: on how stupid it is to run to meet death. Conversations in the family group are varied. They are aimed at establishing links, passing on information; mostly, at being together.*** The most striking sort is when they sound difficult, broken, disperse, muffled, but they are not always or all the time like that; they are also playful and humorous. DeLillo seems to elicit the bright side of this commonplace in families where adults and children interact while at the same time hinting at the different dramatic issues:

In White Noise in particular, I tried to find a kind of radiance in dailiness. ... Our sense of fear-we avoid it because we feel it so deeply, so there is an intense conflict at work. I think it is something we all feel, something we almost never talk about, something that is almost there. I tried to relate it in White Noise to this other sense of transcendence that lies just beyond our touch. This extraordinary wonder of things is somehow related to the extraordinary dread, to the death fear we try to keep beneath the surface of our perceptions" (DeLillo 1988).

When Murray is in a conversation he never interacts emotionally-he analyzes and seems to haunt his interlocutors if he cares to notice them. His haunting of Babette is recurrent. His interaction with Jack makes you think at times that Jack is talking to his Invisible Friend, or to his Dark Side-their last conversation is terrifying: like if his disguised fallen guardian angel had finally taken off his costume to watch him die! Conversations at university are by competitive men who analyze topics. When a conversation relevant to human interaction takes place—about Dylar—the interlocutor is a woman neurologist, Winnie, who avoids people around because seem to enjoy making fun of her. At that moment Jack, a less genderized sort of man, is alone with her, away from his colleagues.

* "No one was inside anyone. ... I was remote. I was operating outside myself. It was a capitalist transaction" (194).
** We could witness this in Madrid after the Atocha bombings. People got to hospitals to be of use and the staff told them to go home, for there was enough blood and all, and people just couldn't go home: they stayed, crowding the place, unable to move away or to stop being with all those other people.
*** An interesting analysis could result from linking DeLillo's artistic involvement in the social-scientific debate to Habermas's theory of communicative action. The potential and the power of communication seems to have been worded by Audre Lorde in "A Litany for Survival": "So it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive".

Next: III. Strategies

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>.