Of Waves and Radiation

The myth of the eternal death in Don DeLillo’s White Noise

A spectre haunts the modern world — the spectre of death. In a zeitgeist saturated with — if not in many ways defined by — a constant stream of images of mediated violence, much of the struggle of the modern individual deals with learning to negotiate, and eventually (hopefully) live in a world that’s drowning in a seemingly bottomless sea of calamities. Don DeLillo’s White Noise is an exploration of the lives of several characters struggling with a similarly disjointed and haunted world, united despite philosophical differences by their primitive ambivalence to that overwhelming question — what will happen when I die? Much has been written about White Noise’s treatment of death as a physical, social and existential force. This essay will instead focus on the role of death within White Noise as a literary and ontological phenomenon, analysing the ways in which DeLillo’s treatment of death is reflected in the structure of the narrative itself, and observing how this frustrates and rejects traditional approaches to storytelling.

The central character of White Noise, an astoundingly mediocre professor of “Hitler Studies” (a field which notably, he personally pioneered) by the name of Jack Gladney, is pathologically obsessed with death. Virtually every aspect of his life is saturated with this obsession: from his job, having made a career from arguably the single most vilified individual in modern history, who many have deemed to be a singular monolithic embodiment of death itself; to his relationship with his family, of which he ominously asks himself repeatedly, “Who will die first?” (45); to the “broad towering ruddled visionary skyscapes, tinged with dread” (76) which he watches with no small amount of awe; to the numbers on his alarm clock when he wakes at night, asking himself in a confused panic, “Always odd numbers at times like this. What does it mean? Is death odd-numbered?” (21). He wakes “in the grip of death sweat”, “defenseless against [his] own racking fears” (20). Death appears frequently in his conversations with others — both at work, where it is “strictly a professional matter” that he is “comfortable with” and “on top of” (33), and in personal life, in the form of the “usual rumors […] of sexual freedom, sexual slavery, drugs, nudity, mind control, poor hygiene, tax evasion, monkeyworship, torture, prolonged and hideous death” (10) — where at one point or another, he casually, and with remarkable detachment, discusses with nearly every other significant character in the book a startling host of serial killers, spree-shooters and mass murderers. He passively mentions his wife’s growing fear that their son will become one of these killers, ending up “in a barricaded room, spraying hundreds of rounds of automatic fire across an empty mall before the SWAT teams come for him with their heavy-barreled weapons, their bullhorns and body armor.” (9)

And yet, for all the talk about death, it ultimately ends up being utterly meaningless.

Towards the beginning of the novel, during a discussion with his students about “the plot to kill Hitler”, Jack alludes to an underlying theme throughout the novel, and what is arguably the crux of the novel’s “action”, if it can be called that — the dialectic of life with death, and the negotiation of narrative in between:

The discussion moved to plots in general. I found myself saying to the assembled heads, “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.” (11)

Death is conceived as a sort of noble construct here; or at the very least, a distinct singularity towards which all plots — including that of life itself — proceed. Jack asserts this with some degree of authorial dignity, in the careful and measured tone of a professor attempting to impress some air of didactic authority over his students — but immediately undercuts himself privately by asking to himself (or perhaps the reader — the distinction is unclear): “Is this true? Why did I say it? What does it mean?” (11)

The irony of this moment resonates throughout the rest of the novel too, which itself not only does not “move deathward”, but in fact, for the vast majority of the plot, arguably does not move at all, at least in any meaningful traditional sense. Structurally, White Noise is constructed in a manner that is antithetical to nearly all conventional standards of narrative sensibility: its chapters are presented as discombobulated episodes of seemingly unrelated and discrete qualia, with little connective tissue in between; and each chapter begins and ends abruptly, with little indication of even an attempt at continuity. This is not to say however that each chapter or section is without structure entirely; throughout the novel, on both a micro- and macro-narrative scale, there is a consistent cadence which emerges out of what otherwise appears to be general purposelessness. This cadence is the underlying structure of what DeLillo interprets to be modern life, and death itself: the sine wave.

White Noise is divided into three sections, which roughly correspond to three properties of the oscillation: the first section, titled “Waves and Radiation” serves roughly as an introduction to the idea of signal failure, embodied by boredom, and constant frustrated attempts at communication which end up being distorted or outright ignored; the second segment, “The Airborne Toxic Event”, describes the effects of the titular calamitous event which itself is a mediated account of an amorphous and potentially inexplicable phenomenon, representing the abstraction of death; and the third segment, titled “Dylarama” (a pun on the Greek horama, meaning “sight”, created by mashing together Dylar — a fictional drug that can supposedly “cure” one’s fear of death — and horama; which can also function as a pun on the word “diorama”, which alludes to the novel’s preoccupation with mediated artifice and representation through the televised image), follows Jack’s attempts to renegotiate the value of his own life through the spectacle of violence, which he attempts to reproduce in his own life.

One can trace roughly across these three segments a kind of inverted wave: the first segment serves as the baseline between wavelengths (with the narrative itself being one particular wavelength); the second segment serves as a trough, in which Jack is forced to confront the uneasy presence of an mediated unknown, and through this process, discovers the impetus to change his life (or so he thinks); and the third segment serves as a crest, in which he finally gains the courage to actualise what previously existed solely as a representational image (violence on television), only to realise that he cannot and consequently he returns to his life of mediocrity, or the beginning of the wavelength.

Each one of these phases is also subjected to a kind of self-referential irony, in which expectations of narrative and amplitudinal distinction become deliberately conflated and interchangeable. The Airborne Toxic Event is described variously as an amorphous nebula of questionable origin, identity and even effect, which cannot be consistently detected in any form; its presence is insidious and creeping, and it does not strike so much as it suffocates slowly and silently. There is an implicit implication of a previous passage in which Jack discusses his own ideas of death after visiting the hospital with his wife and son for a routine visit:

Doctors’ offices depress me even more than hospitals do because of their air of negative expectancy and because of the occasional patient who leaves with good news, shaking the doctor’s antiseptic hand and laughing loudly, laughing at everything the doctor says, booming with laughter, with crude power, making a point of ignoring the other patients as he walks past the waiting room still laughing provocatively — he is already clear of them, no longer associated with their weekly gloom, their anxious inferior dying. I would rather visit an emergency ward, some urban well of trembling, where people come in gut-shot, slashed, sleepy-eyed with opium compounds, broken needles in their arms. These things have nothing to do with my own eventual death, nonviolent, small-town, thoughtful. (34)

The Airborne Toxic Event is Jack’s eventual death on a mass scale — his “weekly gloom”, his “anxious inferior dying”, “nonviolent, small-town, thoughtful” — except unlike his death, the Airborne Toxic Event is a media event, broadly televised and broadcast on the radio. It however is also different from the “floods, earthquakes, mud slides, erupting volcanoes”, the “houses slid[ing] into the ocean, whole villages crackl[ing] and ignit[ing] in a mass of advancing lava” which hold his family so rapt with attention and left “wish[ing] for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping” (29) in that there is no spectacle involved save for the simulacrum of the spectacle created by the media: it is quite literally an indistinct cloud hanging over the town, utterly lacking in spectacle, defying even the most basic of descriptions. In short, it is the slow death, the anxious, inferior death, presented as spectacle; and consequently, it fails to sedate or elate, and results in a signal failure.

Following it is the Dylarama, in which Jack attempts to reassert himself and his own sense of life through the false myth of redemptive violence which he has been attuned to through consumption of mediated spectacle. After receiving a gun from his stepfather, who, in so many words, encourages him to pursue a more primal drive towards vengeance and bloodshed, Jack embarks upon a quest to find a man who not only has had an affair with his wife, but who is the producer of the titular drug Dylar, which is rumoured to be able to completely inhibit one’s fear of death (which, in this context, takes on the role of a kind of existential pharmakon). Upon finally locating the man, though, Jack finds himself unable to parse the gap between the “calamity of death” — “something bigger, grander, more sweeping” than his feeble existence, glorified through television as spectacular and cathartic violence — and his reality, defined by his fears of his own slow death. What occurs is a fundamental epistemological failure, in which the violence of the spectacle (and vice versa) has been attempted in reality, only to fail comedically. This too constitutes a signal failure, in which the medium and the message have become confused and have been revealed to be fundamentally incompatible.

In both cases, death is presented as an impossible and possibly even irrelevant state in relation to life. The death that Jack observes on television is not the same as the death that he actively fears; yet with these two major incidents, it seems clear that there is little distinction between the two in practice. Multiple times throughout all three sections, Jack directly questions whether he himself is dead:

The face on the screen was Babette’s. Out of our mouths came a silence as wary and deep as an animal growl. Confusion, fear, astonishment spilled from our faces. What did it mean? What was she doing there, in black and white, framed in formal borders? Was she dead, missing, disembodied? Was this her spirit, her secret self, some two-dimensional facsimile released by the power of technology, set free to glide through wavebands, through energy levels, pausing to say good-bye to us from the fluorescent screen?

A strangeness gripped me, a sense of psychic disorientation. It was her all right, the face, the hair, the way she blinks in rapid twos and threes. I’d seen her just an hour ago, eating eggs, but her appearance on the screen made me think of her as some distant figure from the past, some ex-wife and absentee mother, a walker in the mists of the dead. If she was not dead, was I? (47)

Confronted directly with the presence of the dead, he wonders:

The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.

May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan. (44)

And finally, and most hauntingly, he confesses to Murray later on;

I only know I’m just going through the motions of living. I’m technically dead. My body is growing a nebulous mass. They track these things like satellites. All this as a result of a byproduct of insecticide. There’s something artificial about my death. It’s shallow, unfulfilling. I don’t belong to the earth or sky. They ought to carve an aerosol can on my tombstone. (128)

For Jack, for all his fears of death, there seems to exist little practical difference between the white noise of life — with all its empty marketing slogans and academic jargon and inscrutable bureaucratic euphemisms and endless banners of products spooling out forever and ever — and the white noise of death, an eerie static, insistent but near subliminal, just beyond the threshold of perception. Both are equally discombobulated and disjointed, and, in the words of his colleague Murray, Jack, and everyone around him, “inhabit the same air as the dead” — a vast, unending stream of errant signals rushing through “one channel of vitality”, undifferentiated and equally indistinct (68).

In traditional narratives, life and death are typically seen as reasonable start and end points: it’s only natural, one would suspect, that a story would take on the structural format of its teller’s life. But in DeLillo’s White Noise, no such distinction exists. Life and death are effectively interchangeable; one is neither alive, nor dead, but either either, or neither — or more likely than not, both at once. The novel ends, and begins, and ends, and begins cyclically, images of order giving way to images of disorder and so on and on and on, ad perpetuum; the events of the novel having brought few revelations, and only revolutions. The life of Jack Gladney rises and falls in measured, sputtering cadence; but each and every time it is observed, he gets no further than he did before, trapped as a ghost within the spaces between the word and reality.

There’s a popular saying that literature lives, that stories are alive; but in truth, it’s a bit more complicated. The moment a story is told — especially the moment it is recorded — it becomes frozen, its characters trapped in a perpetual looping stasis. The myth of the eternal death is that when our stories end — whether they be the ones we have written, or the ones we have read — there will be a sense of closure; we will be afforded the spectacle of an ending, so that we can say with some sense of finality, this is it. But that’s not how it actually is; and death shall have no dominion. The signal does not disappear just because we stop observing it; it goes on, and on, and on, and on, cascading forever, going nowhere, haunting the air, looming just beyond the threshold of our perception. At every moment, they’re there all around us, thousands of signals, blending together, a seamless fold of ghosts unraveling in time. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living.