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White Noise
AMERICAN POSTMODERNISTS
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1. WHITE NOISE by Don de Lillo. Chapters 1-10.
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At the beginning of chap 9, men in Mylex suits try to figure out what is causing health problems at the grade school. Wikipedia suggests that Mylex is a made-up word to have us think of mylar. Really?
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(Oi, the little reply window I now get when using Vivaldi....)
Anyway, yeah, interesting. I get: Mylar is a registered trademark owned by Dupont Tejjin Films for a specific family of products made from the resin Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET). The true generic term for this material is polyester film.
I wonder if he didn't want to use the exact word mylex because of all the trouble you can get into these days if you use somebody's registered trademark. Maybe he was just playing it safe.
The actual product Mylar is actually quite interesting, I find.
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thank you! the notebook is filling up :)But about Mylar/Mylex, Mylar isn't something to protect one against hazardous materials, is it? And trademarks ... back then?
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Speaking of which, where Jack says : “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. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.” , and then afterwards muses: Is this true? Why did I say it? What does it mean? , have you any commentary on whether you feel there is any truth to it? (Let's take our gray matter for a proverbial walk :) )
Re the hazardous materials, I do know that Mylar is used for thermal insulation, and I imagine that would be something that firefighters would use for example. Not too sure about insulating you from other hazardous materials, but in any case, it's what space suits are/were made of.
Re copyright and patenting, sure, I think it's been alive and kicking for longer than in 1985-ish? According to this article, it was alive and kicking 5000 years ago already...... http://www.informit.com/articles/arti...
...and here's a history of copyright in the US : http://www.arl.org/focus-areas/copyri...
Okay, but specifically trademarks - yes, trademarks were quite proliferous by the mid 1980's.
Traveller wrote: "Apologies for holding us back, but I had still wanted to comment about the conversation that Jack and his son has in the car. Referring to the son Heinrich's comments (anybody else also find that a..."That is one of my favorite conversations in the book. It may be this po-mo thing, but in the real world I have had similar conversations with my own teenage son, in the car. Our most recent one was about the stars. That is what I loved about this book, so much was based in the "ludicrous boring real world", and it's a joy to read about, because, it is really just the opposite . We should remember the "real world" is an amazing place, full of ridiculous wonderful things and people.
The name "Heinrich" is one of the primary things that jumped out at me every time it was brought up. And the conversations with his son are hilarious. If I was that parent I would spend most of my time laughing.
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Sure, its a look at our contemporary world through intelligent eyes, wouldn't you say? ...and that is to a large extent what the postmodern art/intellectual scene is about. :) Glad we agree!
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I'd have to read a bit more of the novel to comment on the strangely German slant... but yes...
Just wondering where everyone is at with the book.
I'm up through Chap 19 :)
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I haven't commented yet, but will soon.
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Well, note how Jack and Babette always meet Murray in the supermarket. In this novel, the supermarket seems to be a symbol of consumerism. I think we should be aware that DeLillo does tend to use symbols quite a lot.
..and then the toxic event at the school. A foreshadowing of what is to come later in the novel? ...but note how he mentions everything in our technologically modern consumerist society that can be toxic - quite a list.
Remember that a large part of postmodernist criticism centers around the effects of various aspects of modern technology on society. :)
After reading how Jack and Babette came home with their spoils, unloading the station wagon, I went to the grocery store. I had a sense of deja vu... I became completely conscious of what I was doing, buying, the people around me.
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Hi everyone, after re-reading both this thread and the first bunch of chapters in the book, I noticed that I felt a bit differently about some of the things, and that I had also not said things then that I wanted to say now, so I'll start with the very first few chapters, and make more posts over the next day or two.
Anybody reading for the first time, or re-reading, please join in!
The station wagons in the first line caught my attention since all the middle class moms and dads are driving high carbon-emitting 4x4’s these days…
I think White Noise was first published in Jan 1985. I find it saddening to look at the America of those days, and what America has become now; where he says: ”This assembly of station wagons, as much as anything they might do in the course of the year, more than formal liturgies or laws, tells the parents they are a collection of the like-minded and the spiritually akin, a people, a nation.”
Hitler studies - symbol of how everything lurid and sensational is turned into fodder for exploitation; making money, or gaining acclaim, reputation or celebrity from it... well, despite this novel starting to show its age, that part certainly hasn't changed!
LOL, I had to smirk at the cynical observation: “ (Babette is) …unlike my former wives, who had a tendency to feel estranged from the objective world—a self-absorbed and high-strung bunch, with ties to the intelligence community...” He sounds like a veritable sheik complete with harem.
We commented previously on the “heat in cities” observations in Chapter 3, and I must say now that climate change has become a much more pressing thing than when we initially read it and far, far more than when he’d written it, there’s a kind of prescience in what he says, but also a kind of innocent ignorance of the correct terminologies. He’s simply lumping carbon-emissions in with “heat”, and of course, it does contribute to warming.
Along the same lines, I was also wondering a bit about the huge size of their families – I mean, each person (and I mean person, not couple- each couple seems to have about 5 or 6 between them) seems to have about 3 or 4 children, and DeLillo seems oblivious to the harm that increased population growth does, and that it is population density that adds to the cities’s “heat”.
There’s so much humor in the novel, sometimes I even have to laugh out loud… like when I read this: “There is no Hitler building as such.” So silly. There’s a lot of silliness, DFW-type postmodern silly. (DFW = David Foster Wallace).
Here’s more: “I understand the music, I understand the movies, I even see how comic books can tell us things. But there are full professors in this place who read nothing but cereal boxes.” “It’s the only avant-garde we’ve got.”
This is obviously satire, but it's done with a type of silly playfulness that was quite characteristic of postmodern novels written around this time.
This reminds me of what one of the most famous postmodern critics of modern "consumer culture", Jean Baudrillard, had said about modern mass culture: "It should comment on and criticize itself and so upset the ceremony of mass culture." Baudrillard was a bit of a firebrand who liked to make waves.
Why I was also thinking about Jean Baudrillard, was because of his comments on signs, simulations and simulacra with reference to the "Most Photographed Barn" mentioned in White Noise at the end of chapter 3. I can’t believe that we never commented on the "most photographed" barn in our previous discussion – there’s a wealth on semiotics (theory of “the sign”), as well as “simulation” in there!
I'll check around to see if I can find more material on the much-photographed barn, and come back to it in my next post. In the meantime, you might find my review of Simulacra and Simulation useful, here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
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Now, I found that pretty interesting in what it also says about the characters of Jack Gladney and that of Murray J. Siskind.
Jack and Murray are both "fakes" but in different ways. You might have noticed how Murray waxes lyrical about, well, basically what are the emptiest aspects of consumer culture. He is always saying things that sound profound, but that's actually nonsensical fluff if you look at it more closely. So, Murray is 'fake' in the sense of that he focuses on shallow, empty things, and this also shows in his choice of academic focus : "Elvis Presley". (Apologies to my mom and all other Elvis fans out there! )
Jack chose Hitler and Murray chose Elvis. Jack chose death and Murray chose a purveyor of relatively shallow popular consumer culture.
I don't want to go too far with this train of thought in case I go past chapter 10, but I want you to also notice, at this early stage of the novel already, how De Lillo often uses beautiful language to describe the mundane, profound language to describe the inane, and so on.
Ugh, now I got distracted from the photographed barn again. More on the barn soon.
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Ok, back to the barn:
Here is the text from White Noise:
Firstly re the signs: "Soon the signs started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site.
DeLillo is talking about literal signs here, but in cognitive linguistics and semiotics, a "sign" can mean many things. "Signs" are everywhere - they are what conveys meaning.
The study of signs, is called 'semiotcs' and I'm going to take bits out of my review on a book about semiotics here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... where you can read more on the subject if you're interested.
Basically, we can apply semiotics to almost anything, from linguistics, to psychology to the arts-- even to music. We can even look at signs in nature-- the signs and body-language animals make; although this is not the usual field of study of semiotics--it is most often applied in studying human culture and cognition; in studying the various ways in which humans make sense of the world.
Signs, according to semiotic theory, represent all our thoughts. Our thoughts are signs (or in semiotic language, a subdivision of a sign, called the signified), because in our minds, we represent reality with thoughts--what we see and think and hear, are not the real things, but a representation of real things. So thoughts or words or images (in our minds) of a dog are the signified, the word made up of the letters D-O-G is the signifier, and that which is being represented (the dog itself) is the referent. And signifier and signified together (the thought and the word) make up a sign - in this case, the sign for a 'dog'. Of course, a picture of a dog also constitutes a signifier for a dog, and will also conjure the idea of a dog in our minds.
Okay, so as you can see, this can be applied to a lot of areas: texts, photographs, visual art, film, language, and so on, and each area of application has its own set of signs and codes and terminology applying to those signs and codes, for instance when analyzing a photograph, we'd be looking at color, tone, lighting, 'vectors' (lines in the photograph) depth of field, and so forth.
In the specific context of this scenario in White Noise, the "signs" are of course, literal signs, but the photographs are also signs, - they're signifiers but on top of that, they also become referents in the sense that they're photographs of the most photographed barn. The photographs are also simulations.
Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book. “No one sees the barn,” he said finally. A long silence followed. “Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.” He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced at once by others. “We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.” There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides. “Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.” Another silence ensued. “They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said. He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film. “What was the barn like before it was photographed?” he said. “What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can’t answer these questions because we’ve read the. signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can’t get outside the aura. We’re part of the aura. We’re here, we’re now.” He seemed immensely pleased by this.
It's almost as if Murray is saying that the barn has become part of hyperreality as both a sign and a simulacrum (remember what Baudrillard said about a simulation eventually becoming a simulacrum in modern culture?).
There's a discourse going on about the barn that is more than just the barn. If the barn wasn't the "MOST-PHOTOGRAPHED" barn in America, people wouldn't be this interested in it. ... but it's become a tourist attraction purely based on the fact that it is a celebrity barn, and it's a celebrity barn based purely on the fact that it is most photographed, and in that sense, the barn itself has become a sign - it's become the posterbarn for all barns in America - it's become THE barn in America- a barn that you simply HAVE to photograph darling, because it's - you know, the most "in" barn on the planet.
See what happened there? DeLillo is quite cleverly commenting on yet another aspect of consumer culture in a very postmodern fashion. :)
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From chapters 4 -10, some observations and comments:
When times are bad, people feel compelled to overeat. OMG, they had things so good in the 80’s! If only Delillo could see into the future…
We’ve already commented on, how, thirty years into the future, we find their pre-smartphone attitudes towards TV rather strange.
But how strange is this: “It was my own formal custom on Fridays, after an evening in front of the TV set, to read deeply in Hitler well into the night.” (Ch. 4.) What the…? I wonder what DeLillo was trying to achieve with the Hitler thing? I looked it up and DeLillo seems to have some kind of fascination with Hitler – the monster was also included in one of his earlier stories, Running Dog.
How cynical is this? “The chancellor warned against what he called my tendency to make a feeble presentation of self. He strongly suggested I gain weight. He wanted me to “grow out” into Hitler.” Ironic humor, since Hitler was by all accounts a small man.
The narrator says: “I am the false character that follows the name around.”, which reminds me yet again of Simulation and Simulacra.
The brief comments that the narrator makes on death, actually screams at you with how out of place it is next to the triviality and surface fluffiness of everything else he offers.
Even in his epistological/phenemonolical/relativistic conversation that he has with Heinrich in the car, the narrator is shown up to be a bit of an ass, and how he presents his “course on Nazism shows him to be a proper jackass. Firstly, who makes such a big fuss out of Nazism, and then presents it only in the form that its propaganda took, with zero intellectual insight or anything to offer regarding the reasons for its rise and the consequences it wrought?
This sounds very British to me: XD ““I want to make you happy, Jack.” “I’m happy when I’m pleasing you.” “I just want to do what you want to do.” “I want to do whatever’s best for you.” “But you please me by letting me please you,” she said. “As the male partner I think it’s my responsibility to please.”
How old is Wilder? Some sources say 2, some say 3 and some say 6. But he does seem to be younger than 6, and yet nobody ever seems to look after him. I never left my children unattended until at least around 7 or so, and never at home alone, only partly unattended, so I feel a bit uncomfortable at how Wilder seems like a little ghost floating around in much of the novel.
Wow, and : ” “People who can fix things are usually bigots.” isn’t a bigoted statement? DeLillo’s wry irony pops up all the time.
I must say that I’m enjoying the prose and writing style. It has a nice descriptive flow to it.
Btw, Heinrich is wrong when he says we can’t control what’s going on in our brains – to a large extent, we can.
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Hello again Traveller (and others) Thank you for your valuable contributions. I almost want to start off in adolescent parlance by saying "cool, you all see what I see" - but that would be far from the truth. A lot of it went over my head as being simply strange and different. I am presently on Ch. 29 so a lot is still fresh and relatively accessible in my mind. There are so many threads to pick up on but not to raise too many new subjects - I wished to touch on some of the ones you expounded on above. The Barn. Somewhere in time, while reading that part of the story, I was struck by what I can only refer to as "the known, unknown". How often haven't we all stood outside a famous icon, a place, a work of art and thought "Is that all there is?" I know it happened to me on seeing the Eiffel tower years back and that very same "tourist reaction" is what is so perfectly captured here:
“We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.” There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides. “Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colours our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.”
Then the question of WHY HITLER? / WHY ELVIS?
Just to throw in my sixpence, although I'm in total agreement as to some of your thoughts. I stumbled on a quotation by Ivan Ilyin the other day that I've had difficulty shaking off, so perhaps I'm over shooting the mark but think of this.
"In a consumer society, we are all prisoners of either addiction or envy"
Both of these men were larger than life, had enormous following and absurd levels of power. Did they not warrant the kind of homage that this quote refers to? i.e in a post modern world, a world where we are forced to consume - what better examples than these two?-Individual, gargantuan, caracatures - symbols of excess in every way.
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Bonitaj wrote: How often haven't we all stood outside a famous icon, a place, a work of art and thought "Is that all there is?" I know it happened to me on seeing the Eiffel tower years back and that very same "tourist reaction" is what is so perfectly captured here: "We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colours our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism..."
...exactly. That is exactly what I wanted to convey in my many words, and is exactly what I suspect theorists like Baudrillard and Eco mean by "hyperreality". I see it perhaps a bit more prosaically than "a religious experience", and would be inclined to cynically call it "hype", but Murray hit a nail there, actually - it IS a form of religious experience when it becomes something "must-see" simply because so many others made the pilgrimage to go and see it and photograph it - just like the Eiffel tower, the leaning tower of Pisa, the Sistine Chapel etc, just like the pilgrimage to Mecca. It doesn't really matter that it's just a barn, because now it has become something more, an icon of rural America and has gathered weight by the fact that so many others before have made their little pilgrimage there.
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Just to throw in my sixpence, although I'm in total agreement as to some of your thoughts. I stumbled on a quotation by Ivan Ilyin the other day that I've had difficulty shaking off, so perhaps I'm over shooting the mark but think of this.
"In a consumer society, we are all prisoners of either addiction or envy"
Both of these men were larger than life, had enormous following and absurd levels of power. Did they not warrant the kind of homage that this quote refers to? i.e in a post modern world, a world where we are forced to consume - what better examples than these two?-Individual, gargantuan, caricatures - symbols of excess in every way.."
Agreed, though I wouldn't say that Elvis had power in the same way that Hitler had, but indeed, they both had immense charisma and had maidens weeping at their feet - as we also mentioned in the initial part of this thread. ...and people turned up in droves to experience that charisma first-hand.
I did want to mention at some point, though it's later on in the novel, that the novel shows it's age by the fact that all of the lecturers at the college on the hill were at least in their teens or older when James Dean died, (I mean, James Dean died in 1955 already - far ahead of my time) so I'm sure people reading his novel at the time it was published, must have been around when Elvis was still around, who died in 1977. (Which would make sense, since the novel was published in 1985.)
To my generation and beyond, Elvis doesn't mean much - just a name from the past, but at the time that the novel was published, he must have still been fresh in people's minds, and hence the "Elvis" choice must have made much more sense then.
The 80's were great. Gen. X all the way! Also, I am trying to remember the details of this book...I can say that I laughed out loud and adored the family. I have always considered a re read and maybe I will!
gosh - not to date myself but I was in California the day Elvis died! Significant in that I am not an American resident but brought me into that "bubble of media attention" I hadn't yet experienced 'out in the world'. I was just surfacing into my 20's then and very much aware of his fading grandeur, as it were. If one conceptualises both of them as "book ends" there certainly is a lot to pack in - in between them in history.Interestingly enough that Murray should've chosen the "less academic" figure to study i.e. a lot less material to consult and offer discourse on, whereas the protagonist seemed to have set out to study and know more about the nature of Hitler - the man he was. and yet...
There's a lovely quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld that always comes back to me when I question my motives for doing something...
"We would be afraid of our finest actions
If the world knew all the reasons behind what motivated them"
As the protagonist says to Babette's daughter Denise in confessional mode - reflecting on things German:
"But it's not a question of greatness. It's not a question of good and evil. I don't know what it is...some people put on on a uniform and feel bigger, stronger, safer. It's in this area that my obsessions dwell"
That as a minor detail, but more importantly, his obsession with death and the feeling that only something as HUGE as HITLER can divert his attention from it.
Thanks again for coming back to the discussion - will be back with more later.
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Also, I am trying to remember the details of this book...I can say that I laughed out loud and adored the family. I have always considered a re read and m..."
Yeah, another Gen.Xer here. :) Nice to see you popping up here again, Jennifer! It would be nice if you can make time to do a short story with us in December!
Yup, I also laughed a lot reading this - the humor is often subtle, sometimes less so - but much of it seems to be written tongue-in-cheek. However, parts of it drag a bit, but I'm getting ahead of myself with that...
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Hmm, interesting. Wasn't he old-ish and fat by then and is it true that he got a heart attack while he was err.. in the bathroom struggling with constipation?
Re the Hitler motif, I have something about that in the notes of my copy with notes about the book:
INTERVIEWER: Hitler and the Holocaust have repeatedly been addressed in your books. In Running Dog, a pornographic movie allegedly filmed in Hitler’s bunker determines a good deal of the novel’s plot. In White Noise, university professor Jack Gladney attempts to calm his obsessive fear of death through his work in the Department of Hitler Studies.
DELILLO: In his case, Gladney finds a perverse form of protection. The damage caused by Hitler was so enormous that Gladney feels he can disappear inside it and that his own puny dread will be overwhelmed by the vastness, the monstrosity of Hitler himself. He feels that Hitler is not only bigger than life, as we say of many famous figures, but bigger that death. Our sense of fear—we avoid it because we feel it so deeply, so there is an intense conflict at work. I brought this conflict to the surface in the shape of Jack Gladney. 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.
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I must admit that he manages to inject a sense of wonder into the mundane every so often in the novel.
compared to many readers here it has probably been forever since i read this (contemporary American lit at u) so no quotes come to mind, no copy, just general memory of how enjoyed, how comic, how bathetic are jack and Murray too. by now, having read semiotics etc i am aware of theory of 'excess' and 'jouissance' and even the leading edge of 80s theory seems dated, makes me feel old... but maybe should try reread...
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Hi Michael, lovely to see you here, and thanks for bringing in "theory of 'excess' and 'jouissance'
Yes, there's a lot of humor and satire in the novel, but also bathos, you're right. And the sense of excess and 'jouissance', to the point of addiction, is all shown in how the characters consume, consume and the pleasure it brings them.
Sometimes I can't help thinking: if people can enjoy their lives, why should they not, as long as it doesn't hurt anything or anyone. Sadly we know that in many cases, some are rich at the expense of others, but besides that, we are all busy happily destroying life on this planet and mucking the planet up - so sadly there is a price to our enjoyment that didn't seem to be obvious to DeLillo at all.
Michael wrote: " and even the leading edge of 80s theory seems dated, makes me feel old... but maybe should try reread. ..."
Spoiler meant for Michael: (view spoiler)
Traveller! thanks again for your assiduous input. To anyone else I might have said you're a 'name dropper', but in your case it's hugely successful, succinct and appropriate... so thanks for leading us in the "right direction".
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Oh, sorry, that was meant for my GR friend Michael, whom I sometimes have author conversations with. It doesn't really have a bearing on this book or this discussion, so I should have put it in spoilers. I'm so sorry about that! Let me put it in spoiler brackets right away!
no... don't you dare! I'm always looking for new leads, so don't let my envy intrude... ;)
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Hi Bonitaj, (view spoiler)
thank you Traveller! I've been so steeped in psychopathology lately, that I've side stepped my narcissistic investment in literature! I like your idea very much and I think we could start off (spoiler) lambasting Jordan Petersen... at least from my perspective. But there you go... take the ball and run with it. I'll be on the field somewhere.... ;)
my last comment went on the other thread. just, this makes me nostalgic for when it was all 'new'...
So, I just thought that I would share that the movie is coming out with Adam Driver. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqJD7...
I had no idea this was happening.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqJD7...
I had no idea this was happening."
Wow, thanks for that, Jennifer! That should be interesting to see.
Great news. I'll share it with my son who's most impressed with Don di Lillilo! Thanks
On Paths Unknown
Books mentioned in this topic
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Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Jean Baudrillard (other topics)Edward L. Bernays (other topics)
Fredric Jameson (other topics)
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And I love white noise for falling asleep, although the first thing I think about when I hear the phrase is the "noise" part, the lack of coherence.
In fact, A/C units make GREAT white noise. I have one in my bedroom and I love that about it.