White Noise 329sense of it at first. This level of subconscious prod-
uct placement pervades the novel and the cultural
“white noise” of the novel’s title: Even Gladney, the
novel’s narrator, will at times interject lists of prod-
uct names, often with no apparent connection to the
narration’s other material.
Gladney himself is a commodity, having invented
the academic field of Hitler studies and having sold
the field and his value in it to College-on-the-Hill,
where he is chair of the Hitler studies department.
His colleague Murray Jay Siskind admires his cre-
ation in terms of ownership (“He is now your Hitler,
Gladney’s Hitler”) that imply Gladney has com-
modified Hitler and made himself the sole retailer.
Gladney sells Hitler, and he sells himself by wearing
dark glasses and academic robes in order to create an
image that is easy to compare to product packaging.
Commodification in White Noise extends beyond
the traditional concept of branding, though, to
include not just the products we think about but the
way our fears are created and then sold back to us.
A real estate office, for example, displays pictures of
Victorian homes that are not available because they
are no longer for sale or because they are not even
in that town: A way of life is commodified, sold to
prospective home buyers and even local citizens,
who simply see the images by first generating a
desire for that way of life—or, put another way, by
generating fear of not having that way of life. Fear
of bodily danger is commodified as well: After a
family discussion of all of the ways electrical and
magnetic fields emanating from television and radio
and power lines can harm us, Gladney observes,
“Terrifying data is now an industry in itself. Differ-
ent firms compete to see how badly they can scare
us.” And throughout the novel, he makes references
to all of the ways commodified products fail to calm
our commodified fears: “This is a town of tag sales
and yard sales, the failed possessions arrayed in
driveways... .”
A powerful example of the way commodifica-
tion pacifies us occurs in one of the more famous
scenes, the story of “the most photographed barn
in America.” Gladney and Murray Jay Siskind drive
to view the barn and the tourists who have come
to take pictures of it (or buy postcards). Siskind
makes several observations about the barn, arguing
that people cannot see the barn once they have seen
the signs announcing it as the most photographed
in America, that they are all there to reinforce the
barn’s status and to participate in something com-
munal and larger than themselves. The barn is no
longer a barn but a commodity that sells comfort
in group participation. People are reassured because
their actions are sanctioned by all of the people
who have come before, who are there now, and who
will follow. Later, Siskind will point out that we
are reassured by knowing that we are the targets of
marketing, and that there is special fear in realizing
that we are no longer of interest to marketers when
we become “consumers who have lost their group
identity.”
Michael LittledeatH in White Noise
One of the minor characters in White Noise is
19-year-old Orest Mercator, who wants to set a
world record for consecutive hours sitting enclosed
with 27 poisonous snakes. Jack Gladney, the novel’s
narrator, argues at length with Orest about the
danger involved (and the pointlessness of courting
that danger): Jack repeatedly tells him that he will
die if the snakes bite him, and Orest repeatedly
counters that the snakes will not bite him. When
Orest finally begins his experiment, nothing goes as
planned: He is in a hotel room rather than a glass
box, there are only three snakes instead of 27, the
snakes are not venomous, and he is bitten within
four minutes.
The Orest/snake story line is a small part of the
novel, but it helps to bracket the various responses to
the idea of death with which the novel is so deeply
concerned. For example, the contrast in tone from
the seriousness and intractableness of the original
conversation to the absurdity of the final event help
to construct the novel’s ambivalence about how seri-
ous death is but how misguided we may be to take it
too seriously. These extremes are manifested as well
in the conversation that Orest and Jack have: At one
extreme, Orest is unable to acknowledge the pos-
sibility, much less the certainty, of death in general
(although he does have antivenom with him during
his snake experiment), while Jack is obsessed by
death in concrete terms. Jack and his wife, Babette,