3.2.2 The return of the repressed: 
death in a culture of simulation

White Noise is a novel haunted by death. Death is the subtext of the plot and of Jack Gladney's perceptions. It is the one thing he fears so much that through its constant repression it becomes more and more visible at the margins. It is present in the Friday night televisual disasters and the burning insane asylum, it finds its way into Jack's body through the exposure to the chemical cloud, it is supposed to be the climax of the showdown, and it is the main topic of the last chapter "Dylarama". All of Jack's conscious and unconscious attempts to contain reality, to reconceptualize it in familiar and unthreatening terms are attempts to ward off death.

In Gladney's world, no event or "situation" (one of Murray Siskind's favorite terms) should ever occur: "Insbesondere steht der Tod bei Gladney als notwendige Folge jedweder 'Situation', jedweden plots. Solange die Wiederholung herrscht, ist kein Ende (= Tod) in Aussicht."(84) Gladney's idiosyncratic fear of plots is a poorly veiled fear of death: "We edge nearer death every time we plot," he explains to his students. (p. 26) Plots always lead to an end, which for Jack is always associated with death. Television plays an important role in this disavowal of change and death. Not only does it supply Gladney with a stereotypical language which renders the world as a static, unchanging sphere, but it also restructures consciousness in such a way that hardly anything strikes the subject as new, and therefore uncontrolled and threatening. TV is the medium of repetition in which the same stereotypes and generic formulas are repeated over and over again so that nothing ever comes to an end.

Reality cannot be contained in ready-made stereotypes, and death can never be completely repressed and denied. The chemical stench interrupts the relaxed little chat between father and son. Similarly, a trace of toxic waste penetrates Jack's body. The feared "situation" has indeed occurred: "'Am I going to die?' 'Not as such,' he [the SIMUVAC official again] said. [...] It's a question of years. We'll know more in fifteen years. In the meantime we definitely have a situation.'" (p. 140) This ungraspable, almost unrepresentable contamination turns the airborne toxic event into a real "toxic event".

Jack's reaction to this threatening situation is his wish for a return to his self-created artificial existence: "I wanted my academic gown and dark glasses." (p. 142) He wishes that the situation could be reducable to simulated events reported in tabloids: "The tabloid future, with its mechanism of a hopeful twist to apocalyptic events [...]." (p. 146) As the novel shows in many scenes, death as such can never be reduced and dissimulated. The more urgent Jack's attempts at repression become, the more death haunts him. Murray provides an incisive remark on the adaptive power of death: "Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a vial agent. Is it a law of nature?" (p. 150)

The death that Jack faces appears itself less as a real event than as a simulated and almost conventional occurrence. Perhaps this new kind of death, if it occurs, appears as a kind of deja vu: "Maybe when we die, the first thing we'll say is, 'I know this feeling. I was here before.'" (p. 151) Perhaps death does not mean an ultimate finale, or some kind of brutal cut in the fabric of life. Perhaps it appears as a repetition itself, a highly familiar event which does not pose any threat to the subject. Death would become just another stereotype in the realm of simulation in which nothing new could henceforth occur: "In einer Welt ohne Tod (als stabiles Zeichen) mutiert dann konsequenterweise auch das Gedächtnis, die Erinnerung (als Wieder-Holen des Nicht-mehr-Präsenten) zum deja vu (zum Wiederholen des Immer-schon-Präsenten)."(85)

This is clearly the state of affairs which Jack Gladney would wish for himself, a world of repetitions in which nothing comes as a surprise. This is also the logic behind SIMUVAC's attempts to use the real event as a model. This endeavor turns the real deaths occurring during the evacuation into statistics on which further improvements can be based. For SIMUVAC, death is not an ending, but an investment into the future. Death not only remains an issue for Jack throughout the novel but comes to determine his every step. His confrontation with Willie Mink is as much about revenge as it is about Dylar, the drug that is supposed to suppress the fear of death. Evident in White Noise is the dialectic of the fear of death and its constant repression.

This same dialectic of fear and repression is one of the main dynamics behind television. Its whole consumerist logic is dependent upon fear, as Babette recognizes: "It is all a corporate tie-in. The sunscreen, the marketing, the fear, the disease. You can't have one without the other." (p. 264) In order to sell, TV has to instigate fear in the viewer: of being too fat, too ugly, too passive, or too exposed to the sun. At the same time hoewever, TV appears as the medium which can alleviate these fears because it offers the respective products as remedies. Murray is aware of the same double-edged logic behind technology in general: "It creates appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other." (p. 285)

This dialectic of immortality and extinction also makes for the fascination of televisual coverage of disasters: on the one hand it creates a pervading anxiety by showing that the viewer is surrounded by catastrophes near and far; on the other hand it alleviates the viewer's fear by proving that he is not involved; i.e. as long as he is on the other side of the screen. The significance of the TV screen as a perceptual boundary already became apparent in discussing the Gladney's Friday night televisual disasters. The volcanoes and mud-slides bound them together because they were in a secure place; i.e. not in California, so to speak.

The notion of the TV screen as a boundary with almost ontological status is familiar from the conversation between Dee Goddard and Muffy De Mott in "Little Expressionless Animals" (cf. chapter 2.2). Muffy calls the tube an apparatus through which people define "themselves as existents," because they are in front of it. If they happen to somehow see themselves on TV, their whole being, their ontological status is put into question: "sometimes you hear about how it drives them mad sometimes." When Babette is interviewed on television, the rest of the Gladneys are in the grip of a strange panic. Especially Jack feels a "sense of psychic disorientation":

The face on the screen was Babette's. [...] What did it mean? What was she doing there, in black and white, framed in formal borders? Was she dead, missing, disembodied? Was this her secret, her secret self [...]? [...] I'd seen her just an hour ago, eating eggs, but her appearance on the screen made me think of her as some distant figure from the past, some ex-wife and absentee mother, a walker in the mists of the dead. If she was not dead, was I? (p. 104)

Jack does indeed appear on television, or at least he himself uses a TV metaphor with a computer screen to represent his contamination:

Death has entered. It is inside you. You are said to be dying and yet are separate from the dying, can ponder it at your leisure, literally see on the X-ray photograph or computer screen the horrible alien logic of it all. It is when death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak, that you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself. [...] It makes you feel like a stranger in your own dying. (p. 141/142, my emphasis)

The way that modern medicine and all its apparatuses treats sickness is very similar to TV. Computer scans turn the body into a set of abstract data which can be submitted to all kinds of interpretation and manipulation. The subject is distanced from its own body which is rendered insubstantial through scanning. Health, sickness and even death become mere variations in a set of shiftable data. Later Jack registers this insubstantiality as a kind of loss: "there's something artificial about my death. It's shallow, unfulfilling." (p. 283) Although his death has been turned into a shallow spectacle of signs, it nevertheless haunts Gladney. Neither TV nor digital renderings of his condition can mitigate his fear of death. That is why he turns to Dylar.

Dylar seems to be the ultimate drug for a technological culture. It is said to ward off the fear of death without treating any of its causes. In this way it resembles TV which makes it possible for the viewer to face all kinds of violence, massacres and disasters without changing anything about them. The close association of Dylar and TV becomes obvious in the approach of Grey Research, the firm that developed Dylar. They follow "the instrumental reasoning of a purely representational conception of the world; manipulate the signs, deconstruct the symptoms, and the cause or referent in effect disappears."(86) One of the side-effects of Dylar is the loss of memory. Towards the end of the book Babette becomes more and more forgetful. As we will see in chapter 4.2.2, the destruction of memory and historical consciousness is also one of television's more sinister side-effects, at least in Thomas Pynchon's fictional representation of it. The reduction of topics to their most common features and the need for constant updates leaves no room for complex renderings of the past. The reduction of the world to impersonal data, a side-effect of Dylar as well as TV, dissociates the viewer from his personal past and thereby relieves him of his frightening particularity, which again is closely connected to mortality and death.

If there is one character in White Noise who should live free of anxiety, it is Willie Mink, the man behind Dylar. At the end of the novel, at the "showdown" with Jack, he lives in a motel room where he is found tossing handfuls of Dylar tablets into his mouth. There is something composite about him, he appears less as a human being than as some kind of repository for various kinds of fragmented data. He has the overall "attitude of a stranded air traveler" (p. 307), mingles phrases from nutrition ("Or you can eat natural grains, vegetables, eggs, no fish, no fruit", p. 311), dentistry ("Did you ever wonder why, out of thirty-two teeth, these four cause so much trouble?", p. 312) and weather reports ("And this could represent the leading edge of some warmer air", p. 313). This jumble of discourses is similar to that of TV in which a cop-show is followed by a soap-commercial, and a documentary on starvation is interrupted by advertisements for low-fat milk. Mink even physically resembles a TV set: "his face was odd, concave, forehead and chin jutting" (p. 305/306); "His face appeared at the end of the white room, a white buzz, the inner surface of a sphere." (p. 312)

In the figure Mink the close connection between Dylar and TV is further emphasized. He is as full of the drug as he is of television. Together they seem to actually seal him off in a kind of anyxiety-free realm. Mink is strangely unimpressed by Jack's threats and his gun. Gladney desperately tries to make him aware of his precarious situation, but only provokes cryptic televisual announcements from Mink which are completely inadequate. Mink thus seems to have reached the fearless condition Jack himself seeks. Through his use of Dylar and incessant TV-watching signs and signifieds have become completely dissociated for him. The real threat of Jack approaching with his gun is perceived by Mink as distanced from him, belonging to a different realm.

But again the reader is to witness a return of the repressed. As Jack utters the words "hail of bullets" and "fusillade" (p. 311), Mink cringes with terror and seeks to take cover. He does so at the mere sound of the word, a reaction which an actual fired bullit would not have achieved. It seems that for Mink the words "hail of bullits" do not refer to something any longer, they have become what they signify. So what television and Dylar have achieved for Mink is a separation of signs and their denotations. It is as if he has slipped into the tube and now occupies a world of mere signs. At the same time that the threatening world has vanished from the scene as referent it returns in the signs themselves, including pain, fear and death.(87)

Mink's reaction to Jack's words resembles Wilder's reaction to the image of his mother on the TV screen. Both react as if the sign (word/image) were the real thing: Mink takes cover, Wilder "watched his mother, spoke to her in half-words, sensible-sounding fragments that were mainly fabricated. [...] Wilder approached the set and touched her body, leaving a dusty handprint on the dusty surface of the screen." (p. 105) Wilder has clearly not learned yet to tell image and real referent apart. For him his televised and his real mother are the same. His perception can thus be called innocent. He does not feel the "psychic disorientation" that the rest of the family does. For them the relation between images and reality is troubling; to a certain extent Babette's image "is" her real self, but it also is not her: "It was but wasn't her." (p. 104) Mink is at the end of the process of dissociation of sign and signified. Mink would probably only react to Babette's televised image but not to her real person.

The two seemingly alike but completely contrasting perceptual modes of Wilder and Mink, the "innocent" and the "sophisticated" one, can be paralleled to Susan Sontag's "primitive" and "modern" use of images: "The primitive notion of the efficacy of images presumes that images possess the qualities of real things, but our inclination is to attribute to real things the qualities of an image."(88) For Wilder's "primitive" perception the image of his mother possesses the same qualities as his real mother. Both have the same power over him: if they appear he smiles, if they vanish he cries. Mink on the other hand perceives real persons as images with no capacity to hurt him. He has become one of the "little expressionless animals" who, like the boy who watches his girlfriend through a window, perceive the whole world around them as some kind of spectacle of which they are not part of. But as DeLillo carefully shows, death cannot be outwitted: it returns as part of the signs and images themselves.