200 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
Early in White Noise DeLillo introduces the idea of the simulacrum when
Jack and his colleague Murray Siskind visit a barn billed as “The Most Pho-
tographed Barn in America.” As they stand near the “slightly elevated spot set
aside for viewing and photographing,” Murray says to Jack, “No one sees the
barn.” Instead, they “are taking pictures of taking pictures.” We live in an age of
the mechanical reproduction of art and images; thus, we find the image further
removed from its referent. The referent (the barn in this case) has completely
disappeared beneath the images of it and the images of those images. DeLillo
highlights the role of commodification in this disappearance of reality: Near the
viewing site for the barn, “A man in a booth sold postcards and slides—pictures
of the barn taken from the elevated spot.” Reality is buried under layers of sig-
nification and the endless commodification of all experience.
On 23 October 1995 Don DeLillo sent a reply to a reading group’s questions
about White Noise, giving his permission for it to be posted online. Addressed to
Jon Jackson, it explains his preference for language over plot: “For me, well-behaved
books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face
of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I
write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the
final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting
textures, that drives my work” (“Don DeLillo on Writing”).
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND RESEARCH
- Students interested in structure and genre might enjoy investigating these
topics in DeLillo’s White Noise. He mingles several genres in this novel:
the beginning a combination of academic novel and domestic comedy; the
“Airborne Toxic Event” reads somewhat like a disaster novel; and in the final
sections there are overtones of a thriller with absurdist sensibilities. All these
genres are delivered metafictionally and ironically. Students could investigate
where DeLillo uses conventions of any one of these genres and to what pur-
pose, and could also trace where he diverges from them and what he reveals
about them by doing so. A related topic would look at the idea of “plot” as
Jack Gladney repeatedly, obsessively plans his attack on Willie Mink, and
what DeLillo questions about the very idea of plot in a Postmodern world.
DeLillo’s Paris Review interview, the articles by Cornel Bonca and Tom
LeClair, and Leonard Orr’s guide will be useful resources. - In his treatment of contemporary themes and issues in his novels DeLillo rou-
tinely employs defamiliarization, painting a picture of contemporary life that
looks like the real world but is slightly exaggerated or altered so that the absur-
dities are more readily apparent. Nowhere is that process of making the reader
stop and recognize anew something seen every day more apparent than in White
Noise. DeLillo commented after returning from three years in Greece that he was
surprised by “something on television which I hadn’t noticed before. This was the
daily toxic spill—there was the news, the weather and the toxic spill. This was a
phenomenon no one mentioned. It was simply a television reality. It’s only the
people who were themselves involved in these terrible events who seemed to be