voices.
The glut of images and glamour of celebrity displayed in White Noise's tabloids take center stage in Great Jones Street (1973) and Mao II. Like Gladney, both Bucky Wunderlick, the earlier novel's rock-star protagonist, and Mao II's novelist Bill Gray seek what Wunderlick calls a 'moral form to master commerce'-a means of discovering authenticity in a world crowded with images and commodities (Great Jones Street, 70). Like Bell, these characters withdraw into cocoons where they script private narratives or pursue semisacred quests, only to find their efforts transformed into just another spectacle or consumer item.
Another theme that White Noise shares with DeLillo's earlier novels is the social impact of technology, particularly its most devastating products-atomic weapons and poisonous waste. Gary Harkness, the narrator of End Zone (1972), discovers a disturbing fascination with the language and 'theology' of nuclear war. End Zone foreshadows White Noise both in its parody of disaster novels and in its protagonist's ambivalence about technology and its consequences. Similarly, Ratner's Star (1976) blends mathematics and Menippean satire to mount a scathing critique of scientific authority, exposing it as an elaborate form of magic that neither consoles nor contains the fear of mortality it conceals. In these earlier novels, as in White Noise, science engenders a deep and dangerous alienation from nature. DeLillo has returned to these themes in his most recent novel, Underworld (1997), which meditates on the intertwined relationship between waste and weapons.
DeLillo's next three novels, Players (1977), Running Dog (1978), and The Names (1982), offer variations on the terrorist thriller, in which bewildered protagonists seek solace in cathartic violence. Players adumbrates White Noise not only in its superbly rendered dialogue and its depiction of the sedative effects of television (see the excerpt reprinted on pages 342-43), but also in its sharp portrayal of contemporary marriage. Like Jack Gladney, Lyle and Pammy Wynant, the bored protagonists of Players, are at once tranquilized and terrorized by the institutions with which they are inextricably involved. The swift, cinematic Running Dog marks DeLillo's first analysis of what Gladney calls the 'continuing mass appeal of fascist tyranny' (25). Much of that appeal, according to Running Dog, issues from the insinuation of filmed images into every crevice of our lives. If in White Noise television is a ubiquitous voice droning at the edges of consciousness, in Running Dog the omnipresence of cameras transforms all behavior into acting, disabling characters from discriminating between real things and images. The Names, the novel about American expatriates that immediately precedes White Noise, explicitly investigated for the first time what had always been DeLillo's implicit subject: the nature and value of language itself. Although the plot outline resembles those of DeLillo's earlier novels, The Names leaves us with DeLillo's first hopeful denouement, as narrator James Axton recognizes in his son's exhilaratingly mangled prose a source of redemption that, prefigures Jack Gladney's discovery of 'splendid transcendence' in the utterances of his children (155).
The works that followed White Noise have shown DeLillo continuing to experiment with form and subject. In 1986, The Day Room, a play, was first produced. It meditates on the relationship between madness and inspiration and features a straitjacketed actor playing a television set (which, as in White Noise, provides absurdly apposite comments). DeLillo's subsequent novels have equalled the critical and commercial triumph of White Noise. Libra (1988), brilliantly synthesizing a fictional biography of Lee Harvey Oswald with a plausible account of a conspiracy to kill President John Kennedy, earned nearly as many critical plaudits and even more commercial success than White Noise. Although distinct in both theme and structure, it shares with White Noise a self-reflexive consideration of our need for plots. Mao II, like Libra, won a major national award and for the first time directly addressed DeLillo's understanding of the writer's place in society.
Underworld, a monumental chronicle of America since 1951, unfolding mostly in reverse, is DeLillo's most universally acclaimed and best-selling work so far. While most of DeLillo's works have been compact, even terse, Underworld covers a vast canvas with dozens of characters. One of its protagonists, the haunted 'waste analyst' Nick Shay, recalls Gladney in his obsession with the detritus of consumer culture and his attraction to violence and the demonic. Although Underworld is at once broader and more personal than DeLillo's earlier novels-drawing for the first time upon his background as an Italian American reared in the Bronx-it expands again on the relationship between 'American magic and dread,' analyzing the myriad theologies through which Americans seek to reclaim transcendence in a world of fearsome technologies and fulsome messages.
White Noise thus brings together many of DeLillo's obsessions: the deleterious effects of capitalism, the power of electronic images, the tyrannical authority and dangerous byproducts of science, the unholy alliance of consumerism and violence, and the quest for sacredness in a secularized world. Like all of his fiction, it displays his virtuoso command of language and, particularly, his ventriloquistic capacity to mimic the argots of various cultural forms. In it he amplifies the noises around us and permits us to hear again how these sounds shape our own voices and beliefs.
The first critical analysis of White Noise appeared only two years after its publication, in Tom LeClair's influential book, In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. LeClair places DeLillo in the canon of other American 'systems novelists' (such as Thomas Pynchon), who analyze the effects of institutions on the individual. LeClair's chapter on White Noise (reprinted here on pages 387-411) presents the Gladneys' trash compactor as a self-reflexive image of both the novel itself and of postmodern America; he goes on to argue that DeLillo finds in that rubbish a source of transcendence that enables Jack to glean a more satisfactory relationship with nature, his body, and death.
Frank Lentricchia's 1989 essay in Raritan (see page 412), together with the two essay collections he subsequently edited, helped attract academic attention to DeLillo's work. Lentricchia discusses the 'most photographed barn in America ' as one of DeLillo's-and our own- 'primal scenes,' finding in it a perfect instance of how images have supplanted events in contemporary America.
Both LeClair and Lentricchia discuss DeLillo's language, but they emphasize most his authority as a cultural critic. Their emphasis has been shared by many critics, as White Noise has gone on to become one of the most frequently taught and analyzed contemporary novels. With the rise of cultural studies in the academy, many literary critics diverted their attention to the very arenas-TV, advertising, pop culture-depicted in White Noise, applying theories such as those propounded by French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard. In his highly influential book Simulations, Baudrillard argues that original ideas and events have now been replaced by simulacra-an infinite regress of reproductions without origins; in turn, the 'real' has given way to what he calls the 'hyperreal' (Baudrillard 1988, 166). John Frow was the first to elucidate the connection between White Noise and Baudrillardian simulacra, arguing that the replacement of originals by simulations has worked both to pervert and preserve American myths of origins and authenticity. One of the main forces behind this shift, Frow argues, is television, which, along with the consumer capitalism it serves, reduces all phenomena to mere information.
Although other critics, most notably Leonard Wilcox, have also interpreted the novel through Baudrillardian paradigms, perhaps the most extreme statement of this viewpoint is that of John Duvall, who argues in the essay reprinted on pages 432-455 that White Noise is 'an extended gloss… on Baudrillard's notion of consumer society.' Duvall makes the radical claim that consumer society, which pretends to foster free choice, actually inhibits it and thereby promotes a 'protofascist' system that recapitulates the abuses of Nazi Germany. Like Frow, Duvall concentrates on television, which inverts the relationship between mediated and immediate experiences, so that only what is broadcast by the media seems real. Other critics, such as Ferraro, have offered more moderate versions of Duvall's arguments. Still, Duvall's piece is exemplary in its treatment of Murray Siskind as the novel's Mephistophelean spokesman for what, Duvall argues, DeLillo finds most dangerous.
Cornel Bonca opposes critics like Duvall and their inferences about DeLillo's Baudrillardian views (see page 456
