3. White Noise as image-fiction

In Nobody's Home, his investigation of American naturalist fiction, the literary critic Arnold Weinstein writes that with White Noise Don DeLillo delivers "an anatomy of America the Beautiful in such a way that we discover a world we live in but have never seen, shimmering in its defamiliarized rendition of how the natives work and play."(41) For Weinstein, DeLillo in White Noise fulfills exactly what David Foster Wallace demands of image-fiction: he concentrates on the over-familiar, the ordinary, and teaches the readers "to look as children again" (to use Murray Siskind's phrase 42), he makes the world strange again, as if experienced for the first time. The target of DeLillo's defamiliarizing strategies is as seemingly banal as that of "Little Expressionless Animals": while Wallace's story takes place behind the scenes of a TV-show, the narrative of the novel unfolds in the middle of an American household.

White Noise explores the domestic life of the Gladney family with all its ordinary chores and problems: shopping, school, eating, the media, campus-life, sex. It achieves this by peeling off "layers of unspeakability", by employing "a kind of conceptual generosity that restores our doings to light and language, bring[ing] awe back to the world."(43) As an illustration of his point, Weinstein quotes a passage in which the supermarket is depicted as a jungle.(44) He therefore places DeLillo in the tradition of realists like E.M. Forster and Joseph Conrad whose main areas of exploration were unknown and uncharted territories, which at that time were not visible in the media. This is the same kind of inverted realism which Wallace demands of image-fiction: instead of making the unfamiliar familiar, Delillo "depict[s] the known world with the eye-opening vision of a Martian visitor."(45) Like the classic realist writers, he presents the reader with a strange world, only that this world is the environment in which the reader himself lives.

The project of defamiliarization is at the heart of all of DeLillo's fictions. Like Wallace, DeLillo perceives that the main problem of the contemporary writer is that he is faced with a culture in which "everybody seems to know everything." Similar to Wallace, he sees this as the effect of the mass media which exhausts every new topic "in a matter of days or weeks." As opposed to this pervasive feeling of familiarity, "The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery."(46)

Beside the similarities between the respective literary agendas of the authors, there are more concrete correspondences between "Little Expressionless Animals" and White Noise. Both the story and the novel are deeply concerned with TV. Televisual chatter does not only pervade the Gladney household but the entire narrative. As in "Little Expressionless Animals", the TV-set in the novel is personalized, it "talks", "says", and "asks".(47) Throughout White Noise the tube chatters along and makes cryptic announcements. Indeed, it is so much part of the household that it can be considered a member of the family. Like other broadcasting-devices it seems to have a life of its own: when Babette appears on the screen the rest of the family is unable to raise the volume (p. 105); and during an important discussion between Jack and Babette, the radio constantly switches itself on and off (p. 195).

Babette's appearance on TV is one of those paradigmatic instances which Dee Goddard and Muffy De Mott discuss in "Little Expressionless Animals". The boundary between the televisual world and reality is violated, and Jack and his children are deeply affected: "A strangeness gripped me, a sense of psychic disorientation." (p. 104) This sounds like the first indications of that madness which Muffy describes. Similar to Wallace's story, we are made aware that a profound change has taken place concerning the relationship between image and real person in the perception of the viewer. They are no longer closely linked but have drifted apart. Thus, when Babette appears on the screen two distinct entities seem to exist, and Jack is left in a schizophrenic doubt as to the real identity of the person he seemed to know so well: "It was but wasn't her."

Other similarities to Wallace's story include some references to the financial logic of TV(48) and some scenes in which the reductive formulas of TV are satirized. Jack's whole lecturing methods seem to be deeply influenced by TV's reductive narrative techniques. During his lesson on Hitler's mother (p. 70) he just jumps from anecdote to anecdote. The entire horror of the Third Reich suddenly seems to be explainable by a man's relationship to his mother. Indeed, Gladney's special field itself, Hitler-studies, represents such a fragmentation and reduction of an immensely complex topic, as it often is found on TV. In describing the scene, DeLillo makes the reader aware of something else which corroborates the televisual parallels: the importance of outward appearance. Not only does Jack wear his usual apparel of authority, the dark glasses, but he repeatedly reflects on his gestures and movements. For his words to appear weighty and truth-laden, he must cut the right figure.(49)