Even before the Internet and social media made media saturation in American life a cause for constant discussion and concern, the mass media had provided fertile ground for literary exploration. In 1938, John Dos Passos's U. S. A. called attention to the popular media through the use, as the editors of the Norton Anthology of American Literature write, of "newspaper excerpts and headlines, snippets from popular songs, and quotations from speeches and documents...in an imitation of the weekly feature one saw at the movie house" (1854). Nearly fifty years later, Don DeLillo presents the mass media as a ubiquitous presence in everyday life, and explores the consequences of that ubiquity. The mass media, DeLillo suggests in his novel White Noise, replaces human intellect and experience with unthinking consumerism, and addresses the human need for meaning by creating new mythologies based on the outlandish fictions of trashy supermarket tabloids.
Throughout White Noise, the children of the main character, Jack Gladney, and his wife Babette, particularly their daughters, act as receptors and transmitters of media messages, revealing how much the media can penetrate the consciousness. Watching his children sleep, Jack muses:
In those soft warm faces was a quality of trust so absolute and pure that I did not want to think it might be misplaced. There must be something, somewhere, large and grand and redoubtable enough to justify this shining reliance and implicit belief...Steffie turned slightly, then muttered something in her sleep. It seemed important that I know what it was...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. (155)
The joke is that to the characters who inhabit White Noise, the make and model of a popular automobile do impart ritual meaning. The Gladneys are not religious. Neither do they adhere to the "traditional" model of family that may have once imparted a sense of continuity and meaning to the average human being. They are a nontraditional family, the children products of a variety of Jack's and Babette’s previous marriages. They get their sense of community from visits to their local supermarket, from the ritual of purchasing, and the sound of the television pervades their home life.
This pervasiveness has an extraordinary power, as demonstrated by the girls' reactions when the airborne toxic event occurs. Years of passively absorbing media messages have left them extremely suggestible; they do not manifest symptoms of exposure until those symptoms have been listed on the radio, and those symptoms change as their knowledge of what the radio says the symptoms are changes. The fact that the girls' symptoms are always out of sync with the latest news shows their illusory nature. The first reports warned listeners of sweaty palms, but by the time the girls began "complaining of sweaty palms,” there had "been a correction" that changed the symptoms to "nausea, vomiting, [and] shortness of breath" (111-2). Later on, the symptoms are again amended, this time to include the sense of deja vu, which Steffie then manifests. This seeming suggestibility strikes Jack: "It could mean she was in a position to be tricked by her own apparatus of suggestibility...Was she so open to suggestion that she would develop every symptom as it was announced?" (126). Steffie is, of course, the same child who murmurs the makes and models of family automobiles in her sleep, so that seems likely.
Children aren't the only ones susceptible to media influence, of course, and as the evacuees settle into their situation, even the adults begin to show a desperate need for media-created meaning. A scene in which Babette reads tabloids to a group of listeners takes on absurd significance:
There were four blind people, a nurse and three sighted people arranged in a semicircle facing the reader...Babette employed her storytelling voice, the same sincere and lilting tone she used when she read fairy tales to [the youngest child] Wilder...No one seemed amazed by [the fantastic tabloid story]...There was no interest shown in discussion. The story occupied some recess of passive belief. There it was, familiar and comforting in its own strange way...I wanted to believe at least this part of the tale. (142-5)
The reference to fairy tales, the absence of questioning or discussion, and the "passive belief" DeLillo mentions all resemble religious ritual. But for the specific text Babette reads, she could be reading to her audience from the Bible. The stories themselves, in fact, serve the same purpose as religious gospel. Babette reads about proof of life after death, which is, of course, a main tenet and comfort of religious thought. Clearly, in the absence of religion, supermarket tabloids provide hope and meaning to humanity.
Throughout White Noise, DeLillo avoids overt condemnation of modern media culture, but the absurdity of the world he depicts makes clear his anxiety over the pervasiveness of the mass media. It cannot be a positive development for advertisements to penetrate so deeply into a child's consciousness that that child says the names of cars in her sleep. Nor can it be positive for children to be so susceptible to the media that the mere mention of symptoms can cause the children to believe they manifest those symptoms. Children, of course, are not the only ones affected by media culture: it has become so ubiquitous that it provides not only suggestions about what to watch and what to buy, but also provides spiritual meaning and hope in eternal life. And as insightful as White Noise was in the decade of its publication, it is even more relevant today, in the age of cell phones that stream television shows and Google advertisements targeted to individual Web surfers, twenty years later.
Works Cited
DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin Books,1988. Print.
"John Dos Passos." The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. D. Ed. Julia Reidhead. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2007. 1853-4. Print.
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