affected by them.” White Noise results from that observation. Students would find
it fruitful to track instances of defamiliarization and examine how they remind
a numbed audience about the reality that they inhabit. What do you take for
granted that White Noise makes you notice anew? What do those reminders sug-
gest about the preoccupations of late twentieth-century American lives? John N.
Duvall’s “The (Super)Marketplace of Images” (1994) and the essay by Michael
Valdez Moses in Frank Lentricchia, ed., New Essays on White Noise (1991) will
be useful for developing this topic, as will several pieces in Approaches to Teaching
DeLillo’s White Noise (2006), edited by Tim Engles and Duvall.
- The culture DeLillo paints in White Noise is filled with simulacra, a culture where
an actual emergency evacuation serves an evacuation planning team (SIMU-
VAC) as a practice for their next simulated evacuation, a world where a band
plays live Muzac, where passengers who survive an airliner’s near crash are more
moved by the retelling of the event than they were by the actual experience, a
world where if a disaster does not get coverage on TV, it is not real. It is also a
novel populated by countless lists of the stuff that identifies our existence: “open
cartons, crumpled tinfoil, shiny bags of potato chips, bowls of pasty substances
covered with plastic wrap, flip-top rings and twist ties, individually wrapped
slices of orange cheese.” Moreover, in the same way that our lives are interrupted
by commercials, DeLillo randomly inserts in his narrative lists of brand-name
products: “The Airport Marriott, the Downtown Travelodge, the Sheraton Inn
and Conference Center.” Students might consider how the “simulacra” and
the proliferation of commodities shape the personalities of the characters in
the novel. What is the impact on emotional lives? Why does Jack Gladney go
shopping, and why does he throw away piles and piles of things in one scene?
What is the role of the supermarket in this novel? The essays by Lentricchia
and Thomas J. Ferraro in New Essays on White Noise, several essays in Duvall’s
The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo (2008), the article by Haldar Eid, and
the chapter on White Noise in Douglas Keesey’s book are worth consulting. For a
different approach, students might investigate how DeLillo’s use of brand names
and references to popular culture differs from such usages in other contemporary
fictions—perhaps, for instance, in minimalist works such as those by Raymond
Carver and Bobbie Ann Mason.
- In “The Question Concerning Technology” the philosopher Martin Hei-
degger asserts that “Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technol-
ogy, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to
it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this
conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us
utterly blind to the essence of technology.” The mysterious drug Dylar, taken
by Jack’s wife Babette and eventually an object of desire and obsession on
the part of Jack, is described as a high-tech “drug delivery system” designed
to rid its takers of their fear of death. What does DeLillo have to say about
the human relationship to technology in the latter half of the twentieth
century? In the letter to Jon Jackson, DeLillo says, “the book is driven by
a connection I sensed between advanced technology and contemporary
fear. By the former, I don’t mean bombs and missiles alone but more or less
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