In Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, the narrative trope of repetition is purposefully overused to detract from its effect. This technique mirrors the endless repetitions of disaster which the Gladney family watches on their television Friday nights (DeLillo 64). Repetitions in a novel demand the reader discover the significance of a recurring detail or passage. White Noise problematizes this literary convention. The entire novel becomes a series of repetitions or déjà vu, every moment being an adaptation of one already shown on film or television. According to John Frow, what unifies the fragmented episodes in DeLillo’s narrative, “is their source in a chain of prior representations” (Frow 421). White Noise brings together a conscious repetition of television news scenarios, narrative conventions from popular genres of fiction and everyday tropes of the suburban life experience, all of which are common to most Americans. Re-presentation of recognizable scenes, however, does not indicate a passage of particular significance in White Noise. The frequency of uncannily familiar scenes is the significant point; every narrative event is a déjà vu.
The two-story world of an ordinary main street. Modest, sensible, commercial in an unhurried way, a prewar way, with prewar traces of architectural detail surviving in the upper stories, in copper cornices and leaded windows, in the amphora frieze above the dime-store window. (DeLillo 257)
This scene draws on suburban conventions, DeLillo’s Blacksmith becoming a re-presentation of any number of preceding and subsequent fictional Anytowns. Watching Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life suddenly provokes a sense of déjà vu as James Stewart’s George Bailey runs down the main street of
Other moments of contemporary suburban déjà vu mark the landscape of White Noise. The road out of Blacksmith that the family takes to get to the first evacuation center draws on a universally familiar cliché. The Gladney station wagon takes “the main route out of town, a sordid gantlet of used cars, fast food, discount drugs and quad cinemas” (119). The ‘airborne toxic event’ and its abnormality make the contrasting unremarkable familiarity of this suburban construction ‘sordid.’ Later Jack describes the hypothetical Gray Research headquarters as another instance of déjà vu in the repetitive suburban landscape. The company’s name, real or not, contributes to the universal nature of the building Jack imagines. Its greyness mirrors the indeterminacy of all suburban constructions. It is, not surprisingly, a building that anyone who has driven through a suburban office park can imagine: “One of those long low brick buildings with electrified fencing and low-profile shrubbery” (193). Jack’s use of the phrase ‘one of those’ in the description immediately signifies his reference to a frequently recurring structure in the landscape.
Déjà vu of this sort become invested with sudden meaning at the time of the chemical spill. Authorities cite and then disregard déjà vu as one of the symptoms of exposure to the ‘airborne toxic event,’ itself a familiar trope from disaster films and special television bulletins. The phenomenon of déjà vu, after its association with exposure to Nyodene D., is explicitly and self-consciously addressed in the novel. Seeing a roadside accident as the family proceeds to the evacuation center, Steffie proclaims “I saw this all before” (125). The car crash scene ‘this’ refers to is a familiar image from television traffic reports, Steffie’s déjà vu resembles any other in the novel, including our own. Similarly, the toxic spill which punctuates the center of the narrative is deflated by its own familiarity in the collective conscience. The minor media attention devoted to the ‘airborne toxic event’ testifies to its frequent representation both in television newscasts and narrative fiction. As the ‘man carrying a tiny TV set’ demands: “Does this kind of thing happen so often that nobody cares anymore” (161-2)? He implicitly answers his own question moments later when he turns to Jack after his speech: “I saw this before” (162). That his complaint is a déjà vu dooms the subject of his complaint to being one as well.
The lingo and recurring terms of surveillance and television news infiltrate the vocabulary of White Noise’s characters. Knowledge and clichés associated with the world portrayed by reporters become déjà vu when incorporated into Jack’s narrative. He re-presents the terminology of political scandal, made common parlance by television news associated with Watergate and more recently ‘Monicagate.’ Asking Babette for the Dylar Jack pleads, “I only want them for the sake of historical accuracy. Like White House tapes. They go into the archives” (209). His interpellation of disinterested and archival intentions holds no sway with his wife. Jack can’t hide his selfish motives from Babette or us, the objectivity once implied by journalistic phrases being long forgotten due to their endless repetition.
Television news terminology reappears frequently in White Noise, and always fails to have the desired impact. When easily integrated into familiar newspeak, the name of the drug whose mystery motivates the novel’s second half tellingly proves to be a pliable signifier. Interrogated about the drug, Jack’s doctor “said he thought Dylar was an island in the Persian Gulf, one of those oil terminals crucial to the survival of the West” (180). A double-edged familiarity and ignorance of the world political situation, a widespread result of American news reporting, makes this exchange unremarkable and familiar. A similarly familiar mood of everyday paranoia, reinforced by reports of abductions and murders, is casually referred to as Jack waits for Denise outside her school. As he puts it, “I sat in the driver’s seat scanning the mass of faces, feeling like a dope dealer or pervert” (210). These paranoid conventions of the surveillance genre are emptied of their shocking implications because they are so relentlessly repeated to American consumers of news.
Many of the other déjà vu that appear in White Noise stem from the characters’ awareness of genre conventions. The concept of conventions emerges from one of the foundational texts of genre theory, Thomas Schatz’ book Hollywood Genres. Conventions are tropes which reappear and come to characterize a specific genre, like the femme fatale character of so many film noir. White Noise employs many conventions of the family, melodrama, suburban and disaster genres. Jack and Babette , after a fast-food meal taken in the car, anticipate a convention of the family narrative. The parents are aware that “[a] sulky menace brewed back there. They would attack us, using the classic strategy of fighting among themselves” (235). The term ‘classic’ in this sentence does not imply actions previously taken by Jack and Babette’s children. It refers instead to a frequent scene of tired children in back seats on long drives, the repeated demand “Are we there yet?”
To avoid repeating this narrative déjà vu from so many family movies and sitcoms, Babette begins a debate about the conventions of another genre, alien films and UFO sightings.
Why is it these UFOs are mostly seen upstate? The best sightings are upstate. People get abducted and taken aboard. Farmers see burn marks where saucers landed. A woman gives birth to a UFO baby, so she says. Always upstate. (235)
This observation sparks a comically distracting debate which eventually leads Jack to ponder the existence of conventions in geography: “There had to be large cities in the northern part of some states. Or were they just north of the border in the southern part of states just to the north” (235)? Babette mobilizes genre conventions again when telling Jack about her encounters with Mr. Gray. She invokes tropes of the melodrama and suburban fiction genre, wherein affairs must always be conducted in motels. She describes the one where she meets Mr. Gray as “a grubby little motel room. Never mind where or when. It had the TV up near the ceiling” (194). Jack and readers immediately recognize this image, a re-presentation of a motel room represented in countless other narratives. Babette’s suggestion to ‘never mind where or when’ underlines that this image of a motel room is completely divorced from space and time. The motel, like the toxic spill or quaint main street, becomes a set removed from its original narrative location and integrated into DeLillo’s collage of re-presented familiarities.
The medium of White Noise is, therefore, not a novel of fiction but a quilting of scenes and moments from previous fictions. Thus, when authorities first set up the déjà vu hotline, Jack explains that “[t]here were counsellors on duty around the clock to talk to people who were troubled by recurring episodes” (176). That Jack uses the phrase ‘recurring episodes’ not only evokes the recurring conventions mentioned earlier. This also points to the episodic nature of the novel, the way in which scenes change like television channels with the press of a button. As John N. Duvall points out, the Gladneys occupy “an imagistic space of consumption that one accesses by playing dial-a-rama, turning the dial/dyl to the channel of one’s choice” (Duvall 449). DeLillo’s characters and readers are made aware, if they weren’t already, that the postmodern text is a self-conscious pillaging and re-presentation of previous representations. With a turn of phrase pillaged from Marshall McLuhan, the novel’s re-presentation of countless widely-diffused narrative conventions becomes its message.
Note: Written for the course English 492: Divergent representations of the suburbs in postwar American fiction and film taught at McGill University by Dr. Jason Polley in the Fall of 2006.
Works Cited
DeLillo, Don. White Noise. 1985. White Noise: Text and Criticism. Ed. Mark Osteen.
Duvall, John N.. “The (Super)Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in DeLillo’s White Noise.” 1994. White Noise: Text and Criticism. Ed. Mark Osteen.
Frow, John. “The Last Things Before the Last: Notes on White Noise.” 1990. White Noise: Text and Criticism. Ed. Mark Osteen.
It’s A Wonderful Life. Dir. Frank Capra. Perf. James Stewart, Dona Reed, Lionel Barrymore, Thomas Mitchell, Henry Travers.
Schatz, Thomas.
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