Don DeLillo's White Noise: The natural language of the species

College Literature, Jun 1996 by Bonca, Cornel

The remarkable effect of his deadpan speech is that Babette breaks up in helpless laughter; she "walk[s] in little circles of hilarity, weak-kneed, shambling, all her fears and defenses adrift in the sly history of his voice" (256). This is what white noise often does: it sets one's fears and defenses about death adrift within language (which captures and-somehow- neutralizes them), and for a time those fears are assuaged. They can even be turned to laughter, and redeem the moment from the death-fear's grip. Vernon Dickey knows what Murray knows about the responsibility of dying men: "What people look for in a dying friend is a stubborn kind of gravel-voiced nobility, a refusal to give in, with moments of indomitable humor" (284).

What the novel brings together, then, are two kinds of white noise: that which is a product of late capitalism and a simulacral society, and that which has always been "the natural language of the species"-death evasion-and which now gets expressed in the argot of consumer culture. The result is a vision of contemporary America that bypasses cultural critique in favor of recording awe at what our civilization has wrought. Because for DeLillo, while white noise certainly registers the ways in which Americans evade their death fear, it can also be heard-provided we learn to listen properly-as a moving and quite beautiful expression of that death fear. It becomes nothing less than a stirring revelation of the fear of death, a noise of great (and frankly, unpostmodern) pathos.

At the height of their "major dialogue," Jack and Babette explicitly connect their fear of death to white noise. Says Jack to his wife:

"How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn't they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it?

Wear the same disguise?

"What if death is nothing but sound?"

"Electrical noise."

"You hear it forever. Sound all around. How awful."

"Uniform, white." (198)

This is a breathtakingly loaded passage, and among its virtues is DeLillo's hint to the reader about how to listen to white noise-not simply as cultural detritus but as the manifestation of an attempt to communicate one's fear and hence to "bridge the lonely distances." Life, Jack says here, is lived in virtually unbroken terror that it will end. How do we survive? By repression, of course-by personal and culture-wide denial of the death-fear. But perhaps, Jack gropes, "we share the same secret without knowing it" (my italics): perhaps we speak our death terror all the time without realizing it. In the mysterious way some couples have of understanding the drift of one lover's words when even the lover himself doesn't quite understand what he's saying, Babette urges them both on to the notion that death itself might just be filled with white noise. And if that is so, what is all the noise-not just media/consumer noise but the noise they make while they "walk around, talk to people, eat and drink"-that surrounds them in life? It can only be their intimations of death; it is the death-fear expressed in the only terms that a postmodern media culture knows how to express it.