3.1.1 The management of reality 
through language

The beginning of White Noise is not a real opening but a repetition, a return to the old familiar College-on-the-Hill for the students after their summer break. As per routine, Jack is there to observe this return: "I've witnessed this spectacle every September for twenty-one years." (p. 3) Right from the start the reader is made aware that he is facing highly-mediated data, that he looks upon the fictional world through the eyes of Jack Gladney. What is observed in this beginning is not so much an event or spectacle, but rather something very ordinary: "'Wie immer' spielt sich ab, was als Ereignis, als Handlungsanstoß nicht so recht gelten kann. [...] Was er [Jack Gladney, V. H.] liefert, ist eher eine Sammlung von Szenen, die sich wiederholen."(53)

What the reader witnesses is suffused with familiarity: a constantly repeated event which the narrator has observed for twenty-one years. Though Gladney claims, "It is a brilliant event, invariably," the language he uses to represent this event does not reveal anything surprising or particularly interesting about it. It rather arrests the observed scene in a kind of timeless present in which nothing new ever occurs:

Their [the students', V. H.] summer has been bloated with criminal pleasures, as always. The parents stand sun-dazed near their automobiles, seeing images of themselves in every direction. The conscientous suntans. The well-made faces and wry looks. (p. 3, my italics)

Jack Gladney's perceptions are suffused with typifications, or rather, he perceives the world by identifying objects and people as being of a classifiable type. Examples can be found on almost every page. When Jack talks with his son Heinrich about the mass murderer with whom he [i.e. Heinrich] plays chess, he asks questions which are clearly based on psychological profiles employed on TV: "Did he care for his weapons obsessively? Did he have an arsenal stashed in his shabby little room off a six-story concrete car park? [...] Did he fire from a highway overpass, a rented room? [...] Did he write in his diary before he went up to the roof?" (p. 44) What Jack reels off here are the typical clich's surrounding the representation of mass murderers in the media, a knowledge which is in no way based upon personal experience but media expertise. Interestingly, Jack is almost always right in his assumptions: the murderer, formerly the embodiment of the completely strange, has long since become a familiar figure in a world suffused with media-generated typifications in which "the opposition between the general and the singular collapses."(55)

Murray Siskind also thinks and expresses himself in generalizations, which becomes clear in his description of the boarders in his rooming house: "A woman who harbors a terrible secret. A man with a haunted look. A man who never comes out of his room. [...] A man with no past. A woman with a past." (p. 10) Murray's list seems to consist of cinematic cliches rather than real persons. Even remarks about intimate matters do not seem to be based upon personal experience but on received models and televisual stereotypes. When asked about his early sex-life, Lasher, one of Murray's colleagues, remarks: "We were kids: It was too early in the cultural matrix for actual screwing." (p. 68) This "cultural matrix" consisting mainly of "Film- und Werbungsklischees"(56) determines the perceptions and self-understanding of all characters in the novel.

When Jack and his son, Heinrich, watch the burning insane asylum, the use of stereotypes in the perception of reality becomes self-reflexive:

"Most of these fires in old buildings start in the electrical wiring," Heinrich said. "Faulty wiring. That's one phrase you can't hang around for long without hearing."
"Most people don't burn to death," I said. "They die of smoke inhalation."
"That's the other phrase," he said. (p. 239)

When a strange chemical odor begins to fill the air, however, the controlled TV-like situation breaks down:

Whatever caused the odor, I sensed that it made people feel betrayed. An ancient, spacious drama was being compromised by something unnatural, some small and nasty intrusion. [...] It was as though we'd been forced to recognize the existence of a second kind of death. One was real, the other synthetic. (p. 240)

In all the mentioned examples the employment of televisual stereotypes serves a containing function. The "real" is reduced to its familiar, and thus, controllable parts. Confronted with potentially threatening events, the subject reproduces only those aspects of it with which he is familiar. The same kind of reduction is at work in the short narratives of Julie and Faye about lesbianism (cf. chapter 2.2). As TV reduces complex matters like fire and mass murder to their most common features because of its economical nature,(58) so too does the subject raised in a TV-culture only perceive the most common features of real events, or at least attempts to.

Language "is used on all sides purely rhetorically, as a weapon in the service of the effort to make the physical world submit to the conceptual."(59) The use of reductive language ranges from very private to the most public matters. When his wife Babette starts to behave in unfamiliar ways, Jack says to her: "You've been depressed lately. I've never seen you like this. This is the whole point of Babette. She's a joyous person. She doesn't succumb to gloom or self-pity." (p. 191) The shift from second to third person in this passage has the same function as the employment of the definite article. Like "the fire-retardant carpet" or "the conscientous suntans", Babette loses all of her individual features and becomes a stock figure in a pre-formed narrative. Thus Jack tries to ward off any threatening change which might have occured in his wife. The unfamiliar depressive feelings can be associated with the "you" which Jack uses to address Babette, only then to be obliterated by employing "she".

"Anything extraordinary or unexpected is warded off by the belief that each type of life unfolds according to its own preordained scenario for which television supplies the necessary sequences [...]."(60) These scenarios and pre-formed narratives become even more essential if the subject is confronted with a life-threatening event. In the case of the airborne toxic event the need for self-preservation, and thus reduction of the event to its common features, is evident. At first Jack tries to disavow the danger of the chemical cloud by associating it with televisual disasters:

Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods? [...] These things don't happen in places like Blacksmith [...]. I don't see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That's for people who live in mobile homes. (p. 114-117)

But the airborne toxic event does not occur in California, and thus cannot be grasped with the usual stereotypes and formulas. Since it penetrates the world of those who otherwise view it as mere spectators on TV, Reeve/Kerridge call it a "toxic event": "Instead of staying safely inside the cultural world, as part of the circulation of signifiers and deferrals, a toxic event can cause irreversible physical changes [...]."(61) The subject confronted with such an event tries to repackage it in euphemisms which reduce it to something familiar, devoid of troubling uncertainties: "The preliminary response to such an occurrence [...] would be to neutralize it with successive euphemisms which, by fitting it to a package that already exists, seek to take away its uniqueness."(62)

The repeated renaming of the disaster, from "feathery plume" to "black billowing cloud" to "airborne toxic event", illustrates this attempt to control the event through the use of language. The simple application of a different name by the media reassures Jack:

[Heinrich:] "They're calling it the black billowing cloud."
[Jack:] "Good."
"Why is that good?"
"It means they're looking the thing more or less squarely in the eye. They're on top of the
situation." (p. 115)

Again and again in the novel language appears to be the main medium of "reality control".(64) Another telling example provides the scene in which Jack picks up his daughter Bee from the airport where they meet the survivors of a "crash landing". As becomes obvious in this scene, neither Jack and Bee nor the reader get to know what really happened (the "real" event) but instead are confronted with different linguistic registers with which the event is represented. The announcements from the crew of the endangered plane change from "crash" to "crash landing"; or from the "Register des Todes zu dem des Unfalls."(65) "How could one word matter?," (p. 91) Jack asks himself. The reactions of the passengers prove that it is all that really matters: "They saw how easy it was, by adding one word, to maintain a grip on the future [...]." (p. 91) The one word tells the passengers that from now on they can face reality in a register which does not include death, although they still do not have the slightest idea of what is really going on.

In White Noise there is thus perceivable a constant struggle with objects and events in their raw, unmediated and threatening form, or to use Sklovskij's phrase, against the "Steinigkeit des Steins". There can be observed a search for colloquial phrases and stereotypes which reduce reality to a familiar domain in which no changes occur. The main repertoire of these phrases stems from television. Not surprisingly, this constant reconceptualization has far-reaching psychological effects.