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34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Comedic Campus Chronicle Clicks, November 23, 2002
Technology is changing the inner experience of human beings. In White Noise, Don DeLillo shows us how this is done. Waves and radiation. Television serves as kind of new collective unconscious, creating a new inner frame of reference. Jack Gladney says at one point, "His skin was a color that I want to call flesh-toned." Stephie murmurs, "Toyota Celica," in her sleep. The TV is now a member of the family. We are moving toward a post-modern mentality.Jack Gladney is, at best, an unlikely hero, I think. He is professor of "Hitler Studies" at a great American college; an academic who is comically humanized off of the pedestal of academia to the reader. He teaches the incarnation of death and national propaganda, and then comes home to a mundane and motley family crew of ditzy third wife, step-children, and biological children deeply rooted in the national propaganda of America. The extreme superficiality of his life is astounding. Everything is meant to *seem* significant...Hitler studies, the robes and sunglasses, the most photographed barn in America. Like so much of what we see and hear nowadays...what it's about is *sounding* like it's about something important. Everything is sense impression. Never mind what a word really means...if it *sounds* solid and strong, then that's reason enough to use it. In this way we escape from nature. We create lives that "protect" us from the things that are "out there" somewhere. "I'm not just a college professor," says Jack. "I'm the head of a department. I don't see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That's for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the country, where the fish hatcheries are." As a metafictional Heidegerrian test, White Noise is a cross between life and narrative, death and narrative closure. Delillos narrative closure is that death may go a little way toward explaining why some are dissatisfied with his endings.
As DeLillo puts it, "All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers' plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children's games. We edge nearer death every time we plot." If one accepts this, or accepts that DeLillo believes this, then it's hard to imagine how his endings (death) could be "satisfying" or why they (it) should be. In light of this, can the narrative interruptions that pepper the text ("Krylon, Rust-Oleum, Red Devil") be seen as attempts to stave off the death that the narrative compels us toward, that the end of the book will bring? And what to make of the fact that most of these narrative interruptions are drawn from TV and advertising? I wonder about the role of children, particularly Wilder, in White Noise. Murray suggests a couple of times that the way to deal with the onslaught of TV is to view TV as a child views it. Children's consciousness, he seems to believe, has evolved to a state where they can absorb this onslaught without being troubled by it. If this is true, though, why does Wilder (remember his crying jag) seem to be the most sensitive individual in the book? And why do the other children seem less like children than like small adults? Even our language is adulterated and attenuated to protect us from confronting horror directly. In the Gladney household each family member corrects another with a further error. An exaggerated chronicle of the ludicrousness of modern America.
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