UNIVERSITY OF BELGRADE - FACULTY OF PHILOLOGY

The Fear of Death in DonDeLillo’s White Noise

Seminar Paper in American Literary Postmodernism

Mentor: Radojka Vukčević, PhD Student:Vukašin Damjanović

Belgrade, 2013

The Fear of Death in DonDeLillo’s White Noise

Abstract

In this paper we shall make endeavors to scrutinize the fear ofdeath from different angles and to give as many examples of itfrom DeLillo’s book White Noise. This book captures so wonderfullythe essence of a postmodern America in which people haveseemingly learned to live surrounded by modern calamities, andyet they still carry their inborn primitive fears of dying andperishing. While trying to figure out whether the characters haveany legitimate reasons to fear death to such extent, we shalltake into account technology to which most of them are dependenton, the changed environment they live in; conspiracy theoriesconnected to that very environment, and of course the form ofdestructive consumerism which can be related to over-excessiveness and ‘waste’ - infallible attributes of a postmodernsociety, together with the specific language it creates. Besidesreferences to the book, we will also present two movies dealingwith this topic and furthermore we shall introduce the notion ofsingularity, the notion originally belonging to the sphere ofphysics and mathematics, but used here to explain the postmodernstrivings for trans-humanity in which technological intelligence

gains supremacy over the human intelligence. Also, having somemodernistic qualities to it, the novel has its moments wherepsychology can step up in attempts to explain the loss of self,the faith and God. Finally we shall speak of some possiblesolutions to the problems of disintegrated personality,facilitated perhaps by the very process of individuation.

Key Words: fear of death, consumerism, language, transcendence, truth,technology, conspiracy theories, environment, post-humanity, self

Апстракт

У овом раду ћемо настојати да сагледамо страх од смрти из вишеразличитих углова и притом дати што више примера из Делилове БелеБуке. Ово је роман који на фантастичан начин одсликава суштинупостмодернистичког америчког друштва у коме су људи само наизгледнаучили да живе окружени савременим недаћама, будући да ипак сасобом носе урођене примитивне страхове од смрти и пропадања. Докбудемо сагледавли ликове овог романа и разматрали да ли они имајулегитимних разлога за толику бојазан од смрти, узећемо у обзиртехнологију од које су они зависни, њихову измењену животнусредину, као и теорије завере које су управо повезане са њом.Наравно, све то ћемо посматрати кроз призму деструктивногпотрошачког друштва које је уско повезано са прекомерношћу свакеврсте и тзв. „отпадом“ – неизоставним карактеристикамапостмодерног друштва, заједно са специфичним језиком који настајекао разултат свега тога. Осим позивања на саму књигу, даћемо

приказе двају филмова који се баве овом тематиком, а у наставкућемо се позабавити појмом сингуларности, појмом који првенственоприпада домену физке и математике, а који је овде употребљен какоби се објаснило постмодернистичко стремљење ка транс-хуманизму,реалности у којој технологија и вештачка интелигенција каосупериорније односе превагу над људском интелигенцијом. Измеђуосталог, будући да се у роману Бела бука могу запазити и некимодернистички моменти, позвали смо у помоћ психологију како бисмопокушали да објаснимо губитак сепства, а позабавићемо се ипроблемом вере и поимања Бога. На крају, размотићемо и нека одмогућих решења за проблеме дезнтегрисане личности, можда управопутем индивидуације.

Кључне речи: страх од смрти, конзумеризам, језик, трансцеденција,истина, технологија, теорија завере, животна средина, постхуманизам,јаство

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Death and Car Keys: Profound Fear or Unfounded Obsession? 2

The Fear of Death: Simulacrum, Artificiality and Postmodern Slavery3

Facing the Imminent Threat 5

Postmodern Environment 6

Postmodern Blur: Real vs. Unreal 6

Idiot Box and Mysticism 8

Transcendent Man: Evolution or Degeneration? 9

The Fear of Death As Seen in Postmodern Movies 10

Medication to the Rescue: Eradication of the Fear of Death 11

Don DeLillo’s Use of Language 13

The Naturalness of Death: Fabrication or Actuality? 14

Conclusion 16

Bibliography 19

Introduction

Don DeLillo is considered to be one of the central figures

of literary postmodernism. Although the themes he deals with in

his works can be said to be of postmodernistic character, he also

draws on modernism to which he admits an affinity, for modernism

is at least as important as postmodernism for understanding

DeLillo’s literary achievement. By seeking the epic in the

mundane, DeLillo embraces the modernist avant-garde whilst the

backdrop of the narration is often permeated with issues of

(post)modern times such as rampant consumerism, underground

conspiracies, disintegration of family and violence which can

take many forms. It is interesting therefore that although

postmodernism promotes the idea of cancellation of grand (meta)

narratives, there is in fact a need for some kind of universal

narrative, dealing with either knowledge or truth or with a sense

of right and wrong, and what better constant is there than death

itself. And it is only natural that DeLillo chose exactly this

primordial matter to tackle, since there is nothing more deep-

seated than the fear of dying, even more so in this era of

simulacra and technology where we have false sense of security

and longevity, where we are actually closer to death more than

ever before in history and when our fears have never been more

prominent.

To fully understand (if that is even possible) the fear of

death, we must scrutinize it through the prism of history. From1

the period of Middle Ages up until now there has been decreased

trust in God. With the gradual loss of faith in the creator of

the man and the world, and with the repression of emotions that

hinder the man’s rational decisions, a specific kind of fear has

emerged, the one quite different from the primitive man’s fear of

the unfamiliar forces of nature. The modern man’s feeling of

being abandoned by God created in him a sense of inner void and

helplessness which has compensated in conviction that man is god.

In such ages of despair and pessimism the modern European man has

reverted to new religion – ‘megalomaniacal science’. It is well

known that this so-called overcompensatory hope in science led to

more damaging collapse of human belief that the science would be

that magical power that would overcome death. Martin Heidegger, a

German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological

explorations of the "question of Being", said something like

this: Not to have any anxiety about death is inhuman because it is too human.

(according to ЈЕРОТИЋ, 1994:195)

DeLillo’s novel White Noise depicts the endeavors of modern

life to push the fear of death out of sight, and yet, as in the

case of Jack Gladney, the fear continues to re-emerge and fill

protagonists with sheer horror and apprehension. It is also

interesting to note that different characters respond differently

to the notion of death. For Jack death is absolutely terrifying,

Heinrich faces death analytically and dispassionately, while

Murray sees death everywhere about him and is constantly

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fascinated and absorbed by it. As opposed to Jack and Babette who

would give anything to avoid death, for Winnie Richard, death

“adds texture to life”.

Death and Car Keys: Profound Fear or Unfounded Obsession?

The question “Who will die first?” often immerges in the

conversations between Jack and Babette (for the first time in

Chapter 4), but it also seems to appear for no obvious reason,

simply embedded in the text, wedged between the lines, as if to

emphasize the ubiquitous lingering of that thought which

frequently penetrates the membrane of their subconscious and

arrives in a flesh, right before their mind’s eye. “Who will die first?

This question comes up from time to time, like where are the car keys.” (DELILLO,

1985:15) Readers here may rightfully wonder if such inquires are

joke, for we can come across them in such banal contexts. Is it

possible that they are so idle and have so much free time that

they can pass such questions casually and listlessly? On the

other hand, in the same passage we can find the following Jack’s

thoughts: “The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our

innocence of the future”.

Again, death is represented as an ever-looming power, potent

of robbing people of their innocence, in a sense that we are no

longer innocent when we are aware of our eventual demise. That’s

one of the reasons why little children are said to be innocent,

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because they are too young to grasp the notion of mortality and

hence they are fearless in that respect. “[Murray of Wilder:]He doesn’t

know he’s going to die. He doesn’t know death at all. You cherish this simpleton blessing

of his, this exemption from harm. You want to get close to him, touch him, look at him,

breathe him in. How lucky he is.” (DELILLO, 1985:289–290) That kind of

child’s innocence is transformed into consolation and relief

insofar as Jack and Babette oftentimes reverted to their son

Wilder whenever murky thoughts of death engulfed their minds. He

being a kind of amulet for them, they would, and especially

Babette, desperately cling on to him, and would just abruptly

eject an inquiry wondering where he is. The youngest child in the

family, a 6 year-old Wilder never speaks in the novel which

prompts Jack to sometimes worry about his development. In chapter

16 where Wilder cries incessantly all day, we can hear the crying

as more audible instance of white noise, when parents are

especially worried for their child, for it seems the crying will

never stop: a foreboding of potential death. What Jack did was to

pick Wilder up and sat him against the steering wheel, allowing

him to ‘drive’ for a while. “It might not be so terrible, I thought, to have to

sit here for four more hours, with the motor running and the heater on, listening to this

uniform lament.” (DELILLO, 1985:78)

By engaging in this dangerous activity it may even seem that

Jack is giving in to death, accepting the possibility of it

someday. Jack even started to enjoy Wilder’s weeps (“I let it wash over

me”), felt somewhat connected and closer to him. Later on, when

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they came home Jack’s inner thoughts were ‘divinely-charged’: “It

was as though he’d [of Wilder] just returned from a period of wandering in some

remote and holy place, in sand barrens or snowy ranges – a place where things are

said, sights are seen, distances reached which in our ordinary toil can only regard with

the mingled reverence and wonder we hold in reserve for feats of the most sublime and

difficult dimensions.” (DELILLO, 1985:79) This final paragraph shows how

deeply Jack was affected by everything that had happened, and how

he ascribed high spiritual significance to child’s crying.

The Fear of Death: Simulacrum, Artificiality and Postmodern Slavery

“Jean Baudrillard, the French sociologist most connected with the triumph of the

simulacrum, the copy without an original, to which this loss of the real leads, has

described the consequences of such an erasure: ‘‘When the real is no longer what it was,

nostalgia assumes its full meaning.’’ And Jack Gladney, the narrator of White Noise and

a character whose vocabulary is punctuated by references to God and the human soul,

is a compendium of nostalgic longings.” (DUVALL, 2008:80–81) Such longings

can be observed in his yearnings for “pre-cancerous times”, when

he resists taking further medical test done on him. The doctors

in this novel resemble vulture-like creatures, terrible reminders

of our decaying nature. “People tend to forget they are patients. Once they

leave the doctor’s office or the hospital, they simply put it out of their minds. But you

are all permanent patients, like it or not.” (DELILLO, 1985:260) This last

sentence is so ominous and dark and it represents the paragon of

modern life. Aren’t we all indeed patients in a world where we

cure ourselves with the television and internet, soundbites and

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all sorts of fragmented imagery that our brain absorbs? It is

somewhat paradoxical that we should seek escape and salvation in

the very cause of our dehumanization.

However, it seems that Jack is not so worried with the death

of the body, but this “second kind of death” to which the burning

of the Blacksmith asylum for the insane testifies. It is unusual

how Jack distinguishes two kinds of death. One being “ancient and

spacious” in its terrifying opulence – the fire itself, whilst

the other is “synthetic” and artificial, provoking discontent and

frustration. “Whatever caused the odor, I sensed that it made people feel

betrayed.[…]It was as though we’d been forced to recognize the existence of a second

kind of death, one was real, the other synthetic. […]This is what the odor of that burning

material did. It complicated our sadness, brought us closer to the secret of our eventual

end” (DeLillo, 1985:240–241). It may be that that kind of

synthetic death is also responsible for Heinrich’s receding

hairline, for it is more than unusual for a young boy to lose his

hair at such an early age. It is interesting to note how this

‘deadly’ fire scene brought closer Jack and his son Heinrich.

“Evidently, fathers and sons seek fellowship at such events. Fires help draw them closer,

provide a conversational wedge.”(DELILLO, 1985:239)

Humans have been fascinated with fire since the dawn of time

in that it was a source of life and a means of making meat

edible. That fascination has not subsided in modern times; it has

merely shifted its modus of manifestation. People no longer make

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fires and admire its flickering mystical blazes. They do burning

buildings and they comment on that: “the manliness of

firefighters, the virility of fires, etc.”And of course the talk

of death ensued, yet it was not the kind of talk that makes you

question your mortality, but a casual one: “Most people don’t burn to

death, I said. They die of smoke inhalation”. Since it wasn’t an eminent

threat, the course of conversation took this languid manner, and

a scent of appreciation for such imagery could be felt. They

relished in death for it was not affecting them directly. Once

Jack’s nostrils became aggravated by an acrid fume he became

scared for his own well being.

Facing the Imminent Threat

In the chapter “The Airborne Toxic Event” Jack’s vague fear

of death becomes authentic and confirmed, the toxins in the

environment become more than just metaphorical, and the ominous

sense of looming death and tragedy finally gains shape. At first

Jack refuses the possibility of danger from the ‘billowing cloud’

and assures Heinrich that it won’t come towards them. It was as

though the negation of the threat could somehow make it go away.

His seemingly indifferent attitude shows when he sits at the

table to pay the bills as though nothing important was happening.

It is funny how much people spend time thinking in hypothetic

terms, and yet when something actually happens they turn a blind

eye to it and do not accept the possibility of something like

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that plausible. How can a university professor be at this kind of

danger? “I’m not just a college professor. 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.” (DELILLO,

1985:117).What crosses Jack’s mind is that things like that do

not happen to men of power and reputation, and he even holds this

elitist belief that only the poor can be affected by such risks.

Therefore it is much easier to ponder and fear death from afar,

than to face it openly and directly. Once we look at its face, we

tend to pretend it’s not there and to deny it. And again, we can

observe different reactions to the danger at hand. As opposed to

Jack who refuses to accept the dangerousness of the situation,

Heinrich thrives by watching the spill, talks about it with great

enthusiasm and morbid fascination, and at the Boy Scout camp he

even gained an audience to whom he successfully dispersed his

‘preaches’ about Nyodene Derivative.

“This death would penetrate, seep into the genes, show itself in bodies not yet

born.” (DELILLO, 1985:116) This sentence shows Jack’s fear of death

being transferred to next generations and causing harm not only

at present but future as well. It is unpredictability which makes

our fear of death so pronounced and preeminent. Not knowing what

will happen in future fills us with dread and trepidation. Will

our children be healthy? Will our children be able to have

children? Will they have a planet to live on or will Earth become

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desolated and barren place with no clear water to drink and blue

sky to look at?

Postmodern Environment

“The sound of boots on packed snow, the contrails streaked cleanly in the high

sky. Weather was very much the point, although I didn’t know it at first.” (DELILLO,

1985:109) The sky being the perfect indicator of the Earth’s

health, it is no wonder that the narrator made this shrewd

observation regarding the strange white stripes on the sky, and

by stating that weather is the key. In fact, DeLillo’s words

stand as a foreboding about our near future. It is only now,

after nearly thirty years that we finally find out that the so

called “contrails” are actually “chemtrails” and that they have

nothing to do with condensation of water but with the discharge

of hazardous substances. Namely, there is this whole conspiracy

going on as a backdrop of these phenomena. You must have seen

such trails yourselves, but no one actually gives much

significance to them even thought they can do much damage to our

climate and our health.

The chemtrail conspiracy theory holds that the trails seen

behind some aircraft are not ordinary contrails, but are the

result of high-altitude spraying of some kind of chemicals for

some secret purpose. There are different versions of the theory,

which hypothesize different chemical composition and purposes.

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Lately, chemtrail theorists have suggested that the trails are

composed of barium and aluminum oxide, and are an attempt to

affect climate by reflecting sunlight in the atmosphere. So,

these thick stripes filled with metallic salts, filaments and

engineered biologicals that one can observe, often take on

strange shapes that are in disagreement with nature, and our once

blue sky becomes white and hazy canvas with cross-hatched and

parallel lines and chirped clouds.

Postmodern Blur: Real vs. Unreal

In the light of how much we drift apart from nature, we may

speak of another great theme arising in this novel, and that

being the tension between reality and artifice, i.e.

artificiality. As is often seen in works of postmodernism, ‘blur’

is the vehicle of symbiosis between the real and the unreal. The

confusion between reality and appearance represents an important

part of Jack’s own existence, and much of his fears stem from

inability to distinguish these two, or rather his fear that

artifice is inherently inferior to reality. That’s why Jack

desperately tries to preserve the image of himself as a person of

great sway, and that’s why he wears black shades and

distinguished robes. In his attempt to present himself as someone

who he is not, he even reverted to learning German all in order

to preserve the façade of a man with great reputation and power.

Of course, he willingly gave way to artifice in fear that he

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would be perceived as an ordinary man, not at least intimidating

or enigmatic; that’s one more reason he is driven to learn the

language: academic conference exposing his lie.

Humans’ inability to discern the genuine from the fabricated

is a supreme issue in postmodern times, and DeLillo satirizes

this in White Noise, such as in the case of the SIMUVAC

(simulated evacuation) where men in special suits use the real

toxic event as a preparation for the future simulations which are

to be significantly improved by having to practice with the ‘real

thing’. “Suddenly it just spilled out, three-dimensionally, all over the landscape. You

have to make allowances for the fact that everything you see tonight is real. There’s a

lot of polishing we still have to do. But that’s what this exercise is all about.” (DELILLO,

1985:139) So there you can see the blatant absurdity of such

reasoning where the simulation has precedence over the genuine

catastrophe.

“Another postmodern sunset, rich in romantic imagery. Why try to describe it? It’s

enough to say that everything in our field of vision seemed to exist in order to gather

the light of this event.” (DELILLO, 1985:227) This image stirs in us awe

and admiration and yet the author says ‘another’ implying that

the sunsets are repeating, thus losing some of their charm and

uniqueness. The sunset is spectacular and beautiful, but those

qualities are diminished if all sunsets are spectacular and

beautiful. The image of sunset implies on the one hand the

uniformity of a (post)modern world, i.e. the tendency to make

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everything the same and standardized, and on the other hand our

inclinations to marvel at some phenomena that surround us without

questioning their true causes and potential repercussions they

carry. And Jack even posses a rhetorical question of why we

should try to describe the sunset. In the world we live in words

are inadequate tools for capturing the transcendent beauty. We

may merely be recipients of soundbites and image bites. The

affluency of motleys of different kinds assaults our senses in a

way that we can only take in the information but not process it

critically. We have our culture to thank for this kind of dismal

heritage, a global-village society in which we have become

mindless and passive automatons serving merely as efficient

laborers. The more useless information we are bombarded with by

the television program, the more distracted we get from the

important things in life, and we become numb and ‘cretenized’ to

the point that we cannot think rationally and cogently.

Idiot Box and Mysticism

Throughout the book we can gain certain perspective of how

important a role TV plays in this family’s life. Babette has even

made it mandatory for the whole family to watch television; she

even believes that by making this a domestic activity it will

somehow deglamorize and reduce its negative effects. In chapter

20 we can see that television is always on, whether someone is

watching it or not, as though they are scared to turn it off for

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fear of missing something important. Thus we have a constant hum

in the background: it keeps them safe, it gives them comfort, it

provides a sense of companionship in hours of isolation. It is

interesting however to note Jack’s and children’s emotions when

seeing Babette on TV: “confusion, fear, astonishment spilled from our faces.

[…]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?”(p. 104) Jack’s first impulse is to believe that something

bad has happened to Babette, that she is either dead, or horribly

mutilated. Maybe he is merely afraid for her, but it is also

possible that constant footage of car accidents and deaths has

made such images more pervasive in his mind. And again we get

back to square one - the question of Jack’s fear of death, or

rather his obsession with it, but only we have the technology as

well. Babette’s appearance on TV is made almost into a

transcendent experience from Jack’s viewpoint, and he imagines

Babette sending her (last) regards via encoded and cryptic TV

waves.

When talking about technology we may speak of a somewhat

schizophrenic attitude characters have towards it. In a way they

cannot live without it, but they also dread that very technology

by which they are defined. “As a general trend, according to Boggs and

Pollard (2001:178), postmodern society is highly antagonistic “toward the idea of fixed

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discourses, identities, and meanings” preferring schizophrenic experiences rather than

complete ones.” (according to WINCZEWSKI, 2008:19)

And as DeLillo himself said in one of his interviews: “As

technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more

primitive”. Proof of that can be found when Jack refuses to get

any more tests done on him. Also, Jack is unsettled by the

possibility of a genuine plane of human experience, of an

emotional reality that is inadequately covered up and ultimately

threatened by the technological world through which he

paradoxically seeks escape. He yearns to believe in technology,

but cannot help but identify it, on some level, as unauthentic

and false hope, with what he refers to as “the daily seeping

falsehearted death.” (DELILLO, 1985:22)

As borders between the artificial and the real are becoming

thinner and as new top-notch technologies find their

applicability in basically all spheres of life, we cannot help

but to think of fluidity that has emerged resulting from the

amalgamation of otherwise dichotomous entities.

Today there is more reason than ever to fear technology

since, it seems, it brings more harm than good, gradually

reducing the human aspect out of the new-world-order’s equation,

or rather ‘improving’ human beings by certain alterations such as

installation of the artificial intelligence into them.

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Transcendent Man: Evolution or Degeneration?

We live in a world of metabiology and transbiology where

hybrid forms are no longer science fiction, and where artificial

materials are being introduced into living things. What better

example of postmodernistic blur is there? This is the world of

nanotechnology where transhumanists are trying to create the

post-human, i.e. an improved human that will have no gender, will

not be able to reproduce, will be extremely efficient at a work

place, will not be distracted by love and will be free of

diseases. It seems that Donna Haraway’s manifesto has gained on

significance since the notion of singularity has been introduce

denoting basically the merging of humans and machines. “The cyborg

is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal

symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final

appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity.” (HARAWAY,

1991:118)

The Fear of Death As Seen in Postmodern Movies

There is a documentary film about inventor, futurist and

author Ray Kurzweil1 and his predictions about the future of1 Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil (born February 12, 1948) is an American author,

inventor, futurist, and a director of engineering at Google. Aside fromfuturology, he is involved in fields such as optical characterrecognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition

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technology in his 2005 book, The Singularity is Near where Mr. Kurzweil

explains his thoughts on the technological singularity and its

implications for human kind. Although not implicitly said it is

obvious that Mr. Kurzweil mourns his father’s death and as a

consequence he himself is afraid of dying for which he says is

‘profoundly sad, lonely feeling’. Instead of dying he set a goal

for himself to find a way how not to die. Fear, it seems, is one

of the greatest motivational and driving force in the world if it

can prompt humans to go at such great lengths to find the

solution to the problem of mortality. Kurzweil speaks of

reprogramming biology from diseases and aging in that we can

ultimately stop the aging process altogether and live

indefinitely. Eccentric as he is, he is taking nearly 200 pills

each day in order to reprograme his biochemistry to be younger,

thinking that somehow by using certain supplements he can reverse

the aging process at a cellular level. Singularity will,

according to some scientists, be the point when humans lose

control, much like Dr. Frankenstein lost control over his

creation. As oppose to this dystopian prediction of our future we

also have the other one, where they speak of being able to think

multidirectionally and capable of improving our memory and

communication, and all that by these tiny implants inserted into

technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books onhealth, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technologicalsingularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is a public advocate for thefuturist and transhumanist movements, as has been displayed in his vastcollection of public talks, wherein he has shared his primarilyoptimistic outlooks on life extension technologies and the future ofnanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.

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our bodies. From a viewpoint of a religious person this may very

well appear as highest form of blasphemy, for what is all this if

not creating God-like creatures, powerful in their immortality.

Another movie that deals with the issues of humanity and

mortality is a 1982 American dystopian science fiction thriller

Blade Runner with Harrison Ford as a lead actor. Depicting a

dystopian Los Angeles in November 2019 in which genetically

engineered human-like robots called replicants are used for

dangerous, menial or leisure work on off-world colonies, this

film delves into question of human moral, religion and

technology. Visually indistinguishable from adult humans,

replicants are manufactured by the powerful Tyrell Corporation

and other "mega-corporations" around the world. Their use on

Earth is banned and those who run away are hunted down by the

police force named ‘blade-runners’ and terminated. What we have

in this movie is a dark vision of the totalitarian world of

oppression and inequality. A world in which paranoia and fear

take on their worst shapes, where there is control over the

environment and where replicants go through their existential

crises since they cannot cope with the fact that their memories

are false and previously implanted by humans. Major ideas in the

movie draw on cyberpunk in which blurring the border between

actual and the virtual reality is nothing unordinary, and thus we

constantly wonder whether the main character, detective Rick

Deckard, is in fact a human or a replicant. Although both

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perspectives are plausible, it is somehow in the spirit of

postmodernism to leave things ambiguous and open to opposing

interpretations, not even necessarily binary. Entangled between

the constant raining and the peculiar music and language

pastiche, there lurks the fear of dying and eternal question of

what it means to be human. In all that ‘waste’ there is the

Pynchonesque quest for truth and meaning, and dehumanization as a

by-product of a social decay in a nihilistic, underground

society.

Medication to the Rescue: Eradication of the Fear of Death

An obscure drug and extraordinary piece of biotechnology,

drug Dylar offers a solution to the problem of fear of death in

the novel. When Jack asks Babette on Dylar and why she agreed to

take it her infidelity also emerges, but Babette started

defending herself by saying that her affair was nothing more but

a “capitalist transaction” as though her body was nothing more

but a currency used for trade. As it appears, Babette is even

more afraid of dying than Jack is, even though Jack cannot come

to terms with that information, considering her the cheerful and

vivacious one. When she finally opened up we could see how such

fears both of them have are unfounded and yet strongly present.

“It haunts me, Jack. I can’t get it off my mind. I know I’m not supposed to experience

such a fear so consciously and so steadily. What can I do? It’s just there. That’s why I

was so quick to notice Mr. Gray’s ad in the tabloid I was reading aloud. The headline hit

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home. FEAR OF DEATH, it said. I think about it all the time. You’re disappointed. I can

tell.” (DELILLO,1985:196) She wonders why the fear she feels is there

in the first place, and why it is so intense, and the readers

also must be asking themselves why is that that an attractive

woman with a college professor for a husband and a bunch of

children should feel such strong negative emotions.

Is it rational to hold so deep rooted a fear of dying even

though she is not really sick or compromised by any severe

illness? Jack even speculates about his wife’s fear saying that

maybe it is not so severe because she managed to conceal it for

so long, and he even assures her that he is the one in the family

obsessed by death (“I am the doomed fool”) as if he was trying to

keep all his death for himself, and at one point the talk on

death turns into a competition about who is more miserable and

who feels worse. (B: I do want to die first, she said, but that doesn’t mean I’m not

afraid. I’m terribly afraid. I’m afraid all the time. J: I’ve been afraid more than half my

life. B: What do you want me to say? Your fear is older and wiser than mine? etc.)

(DELILLO,1985:198) It seems that they both have too much free time

on their hands when they can muse on death to such extent, and

could it be that they are in fact afraid of living rather than

dying? Jack also says of himself: “I’m too weak to move. I lack all sense of

resolve, determination.”

Why is it that they are so scared? Is there only one reason

or is it the whole spectrum of reasons working hand in hand

19

producing such an effect? Could it be that they are at some level

trying to to deal with unresolved childhood conflicts that they

cannot bring themselves to come to terms with, or is the mere

vacuity of their lives that prompts their synapses in brain to

send the information of eventual end. Lack of love, and

especially that kind of egocentric and yet positive love which is

needed for a person to be happy and satisfied with one’s life,

may be responsible for the ubiquitous fear that lingers in their

lives. Babette is even afraid to stay alone for a little while

and implores Jack not to leave her. People who don’t love

themselves can’t really love others and tend to jealously keep

them by their side, pathologically afraid of being alone.

Searching to discover the secret of the mysterious drug,

Jack assumes an active, almost detective-like role, and he is

strongly determined to find out what the drug is made of. “DeLillo

draws regularly on the forensic plotlines of detective mysteries and espionage

fiction.”[...]The plots of esoteric fiction, filled with quests for secret knowledge and

cosmic conspiracies, also fascinate him.” (DUVALL, 2008:166) In that respect,

he is much like Pynchon from whom many writers have sprung and

who was the most influential and gifted writer of the post WWII

period. Jack also poses the question of who has the drug that

supposedly represses the fear of death and all his search is

basically the search for meaning and truth, which in fact is the

striving for self-identification in a post-modern world of

disintegrated, fragmented selves. “Dylar promises to erase the awareness of

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death—the last absolute truth in a world of simulation, the last traces of the deep

structures of a modernist consciousness.” (BLOOM, 2002:111) By achieving

this, man would eradicate the last remaining designation of

humanity and would be one step closer to entropy.

Don DeLillo’s Use of Language

As is often seen in the works of postmodernism, the only way

to find the meaning and trace back the true self is through

language. DeLillo chooses the language of commercials and

tabloids and goes beyond mere ridiculing the shallowness of such

‘verbal garbage’, and what he does is assign a higher Meaning, a

meaning which pertains to the essence of humankind. “Steffie…

muttered something in her sleep. It seemed important that I know what it was. In my

current state, bearing the death impression of the Nyodene cloud, I was ready to search

anywhere for signs and hints, intimations of odd comfort…Moments later she spoke

again…but a language not quite of this world. I struggled to understand. I was

convinced she was saying something, fitting together units of stable meaning. I

watched her face, waited… She uttered two clearly audible words, familiar and elusive

at the same time, words that seemed to have a ritual meaning, part of a verbal spell or

ecstatic chant. Toyota Celica” (DELILLO, 1985:155) “Here it looks as if DeLillo is

mocking the traditional faith in visionary moments or, more precisely, ironically

questioning the very possibility of such moments in a postmodern culture.” (MALTBY,

2002:73) In the end it seems that the potency of media expansion,

marketing, etc. is so permeable and powerful to the point where

21

they can become an integral part of us, of our individual

unconscious.

In White Noise we can come across a wide variety of human

language, the expressions being both denotative and connotative,

but language can also be used as the denial of death, as the

evasion of what cannot be evaded. The natural language of the

species (according to Murray) is repression, compromise and

disguise which correspond to death, pain and reality. When Jack

asked Murray whether repression was unnatural, he answered that

fear was unnatural, as well as pain, death and reality. Later on,

Jack entertained an idea which equated killers with people who

wished to cure themselves of death. To take life is to be alive.

Exceedingly morbid, this frightening theory explains how far Jack

has gone in his mind thinking constantly about his end, which

eventually conceived a thought of killing Willie Mink. “In theory,

violence is a form of rebirth. The dier passively succumbs. The killer lives on. […]The

killer, in theory, attempts to defeat his own death by killing others. He buys time, he

buys life.” (DELILLO, 1985:290–291)

The Naturalness of Death: Fabrication or Actuality?

“In White Noise and elsewhere, DeLillo seems to accept Becker’s2 Existential and

Rankian positions that the fear of death is the mainspring of human motivation and

that man needs to belong to a system of ideas in which mystery exists.”(BLOOM,2 White Noise can be read as a dialogue with Ernest Becker’s The Denial of

Death, which is one of the few “influences” DeLillo will confirm.

22

2002:11) In their ‘serious looping Socratic walk’ Murray and Jack

discussed the proposition of death at length. “Do you believe love is

stronger than death?” Not in a million years. Good, he said. Nothing is stronger than

death. Do you believe the only people who fear death are those who are afraid of life?

That’s crazy. Completely stupid. Right. We all fear death to some extent. Those who

claim otherwise are lying to themselves. Shallow people.[…]Do you believe life without

death is somehow incomplete? How could it be incomplete? Death is what makes it

incomplete. Doesn’t our knowledge of death make life more precious? What good is a

precious based on fear and anxiety?”( DELILLO, 1985:284) As we can see,

both Jack and Murray put death on the pedestal, making it a

supreme force and then negate the possibility that it is in fact

the fear to live that makes one dread death as well. Is it really

the case when people say they are not afraid of death that they

are actually lying themselves and rationalizing it? Jack states

that death would be equally horrifying even if we had

accomplished everything in our life that we wanted. Maybe in his

opinion, it is even worse when an accomplished, successful person

has to die because his greatness will die with him. It’s more

than pity when a genius dies, isn’t it? Jack even declares that

such a perspective is elitist, since it would mean that common

people shouldn’t be afraid of dying that much.

Death is for modern man everything but transition from

‘one’s mother’s breast to other’ as it was for Tagore and many

other ordinary people. The fear of death has escalated to such

proportions that the only way to fight it nowadays is to strongly

23

demand certainty in that there is no abyss between the present

and the future. The feeling that the past and the present are

identical carries with itself an unconscious belief that the

identity in question will extend to the future as well.

On the one hand man has the urge to affirm oneself in order

to preserve one’s identity and the identity of the world and he

does that by negating the death, whereas, on the other hand,

there is the urge for renunciation, where, by accepting death, he

strives for mutation of the previous identity, elevating oneself

as the master of the heaven and earth. Torn between these two

principles, the letter man is already now capable of destroying

one world and creating a new one. Instead of people suffering

various death-carrying mutations, the revolutionary man is

carried away by desire to crate one’s own mutations capable of

transcending death.

“Gladney’s modernist impulse toward authentic selfhood and his quest for

transcendental meaning seem oddly out of place in the postmodern world. […]For

Murray the postmodernist, the euphoric forms of electronic data and informational

flow are to be enthusiastically embraced, and Murray takes it upon himself to be

Gladney’s tutor in the new semiotic regime.” (BLOOM, ZUBA, 2002:100) Murray

Siskind is a prototypical man of postmodernism and his ‘preaches’

represent an equal reflection of high-tech consumer society in

which he thrives. When Jack asked him what was to be done about

his thanatophobia he replied to him the following: “You can put your

24

faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out. This is the whole point of

technology. It creates appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal

extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature.” (DELILLO,

1985:285) He believes in and promotes technology so much but is

equally flexible and ready to propose an alternative to Jack in

form of the “life beyond”. Oddly enough, however, he refers to

gleaming tubes, lasers and radiation as “God’s own goodness” and

thus prescribes divine attributes to scientific devices.

Conclusion

Up until recently the fear of death was repressed from

consciousness, but from the mid 20th century people have started

to think about and talk about the fear of death openly. In 21st

century death is less turned towards the man as a collective

being, but is turned towards an individual. Only small number of

people is prepared to face this challenge. Some are evading the

possible implications, others don’t respond to it at all and the

third group seemingly is at peace with it. However, most of them

are neurotic in their attempt to assign certain order to the

question of death.

Can religion once again gain its full potency in its task to

evoke and affirm the religious archetype buried deep in human’s

psyche? For, after all, man has been homo religiosus long before

25

becoming homo evolutis (an engineered and improved human). Can man

overcome the fear of death with the help of faith, hope and love?

Christian doctrine responds to this existential issue by stating

that human is not immortal by nature, and it is only through

God’s grace that one can attain immortality.

The greatest triggers for the fear of death are unfulfilled

human lives, it seems, and there are also cases of resignations,

often bitter and sarcastic, when faced with death. It seems also

that people who have experienced death in their vicinity (i.e.

family member dying) are much calmer when it comes to their own

dying.

As opposed to medieval man who was afraid of death because

he believed in afterlife, the modern man possesses a panick-

stricken fear of death, where defense mechanisms for fighting

against it are inefficient and unsuccessful. What we are to face

is a new challenge of faith and hope in their attempt to fight

against all trials that we may encounter.

The penultimate chapter only further underlines the loss of

faith, but it is not total absence of faith, as such a state

would leave to hell (“Hell is when no one believes.”) (DELILLO,

1985:319). When Jack encounters a nun that is simulating faith he

is more than disappointed because even though he doesn’t believe

in heaven and god and devil, he still needs someone to believe

26

for him in order for his non-belief to remain sustainable. “The

nonbelievers need believers. […]To abandon such beliefs completely, the human race

would die. […]Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure

that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely.”

(DELILLO,1985:318–319). Jack desperately needs to know that there

is someone who truly believes because that would mean, and that

is just maybe, that there is something after death and that life

is not futile, and that there is a possibility for redemption.

When the nun started spraying him with her ‘taunting scornful

prayers’ he regarded it as something oddly beautiful, although he

couldn’t understand it. Sister Marie’s incomprehensible litany

may be the proof of her words that illusions are necessary for

the keeping of the faith (no matter how simulated or artificial),

but it may also be interpreted as one’s necessity to strive for

meaning as the only way to survive the nihility of unbelief.

Wilder’s dangerous cycling on the highway can be seen as

metaphor for life, or better yet the prescription of how it

should be lived. Wilder ignores the cars and his possible death

and so we ask ourselves whether that is the answer. Is this the

best way to deal with death, by ignoring it? I am rather inclined

to think that Wilder’s cycling is positive and motivating. He

darts boldly and is not constrained by other people’s fears.

The last passages of the book are colored in murky shades of

the changing-world vehemence. “The supermarket shelves have been

27

rearranged” (DELILLO, 1985:325) and as a consequence chaos ensues.

Elderly people are particularly stuck by such changes because

their time has long since passed and they feel lost, not able to

grasp the inevitability of such changes. [of others:]“They scrutinize

the small print on packages, wary of second level of betrayal” (DELILLO,

1985:326) suggesting the dawn of new time when even food bought

in stores would not be safe to eat, and the ongoing and

escalating fear of GMO foods.

This “spiritually atrophied culture of late capitalism” (MALTBY, 2002:83) is

only seemingly satisfied and seemingly at peace. Since their

individuality has lost the clarity of its signal by interfering

with white noise, it is prerogative for them to decode the

scrambled signals of their souls and reinvent and free themselves

from miracle vitamins and magical remedies that can only lull

person into a false sense of security and control.

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Bloom, Harold, and Jesse Zuba. White noise. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002.

Bonca, Cornel. College Literature, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Jun., 1996), pp. 25-44. Don DeLillo's White Noise: The Natural Language of the Species, p. 31 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/25112247> July 17 2013

DeLillo, Don. White noise. New York, NY: Viking, 1985.

Duvall, John N.. The Cambridge companion to Don DeLillo. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth

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Century, " Simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. p. 118

Maltby, Paul. The visionary moment: a postmodern critique. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002.

Winczewski, Marianna Jadwiga. Consumption, pastiche and identity in postmodern visual culture. Pretoria: [s.n.], 2008.

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