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Is Technology shown to be a Threat or a Benefit in Postmodern Human Existence in Delillo's White Noise?

Technology is providing ease of life through modern gadgets while its blindfolded

pervasiveness is also leading to varied threats to human existence. This is why it creates

insecurities and death-thinking in White Noise throughout the novel. Impact of an

expanding mosaic of modern technological development is the main theme in Don

Delillo’s White Noise. It goes into several related aspects of environmental pollution,

popular culture, gaseous pollution and paradigmatic human relations. Chapter 21 of

White Noise is of special significance here. Just see how death enters deeply into the

minds of Jack and Babette when they both run with their family to evacuate from their

village in their own wagon. This clearly is an instance of both the beneficial and

threatening aspects of technology.

Major undercurrent and explicit essence of this novel is to be found in the

expanding horizons of modern technology producing, as it were, garbage upon garbage,

junk food and cluster upon clusters of pulsating humans turning into mere consumers in

big shopping malls and grocery shops. This consumerist culture is further subject to

media propaganda and announcements on daily basis. Remote devices, stereophonic

systems, cell phones, satellite television, super-conductors, supersonic sound systems

etcetera become handy tools for influencing popular culture and people. A popular

culture or pop-and-rock society is depicted in this novel. Any avid reader of the White

Noise is likely to draw such a view and explanation about the nature of this book.

It is a satirical novel and not a political fiction for its focus is more on exposing

cultural-technology dichotomy in a singularly unique style of Delillo’s. Writing style is

inherently satirical. This satire is implicit in the following passage also:

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The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that

coursed through the west campus. In single file they eased around the

orange I-beam sculpture and moved toward the dormitories. The roofs of

the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full

of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes,

stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and

sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western

saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students

sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects

inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and

table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the

hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and

lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth

control pills and devices; the jurik food still in shopping bags – onion and

garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms,

fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints

(Delillo 1).

We see in this very first paragraph of White Noise clear traces of overshadowing

of technological goods in the present-day American society and its wholesome

dependence on computers, automobiles, junk food, easily available pornography and an

emerging captive mind which may go astray without these tools of automation,

information and entertainment. This novel of Delillo’s shows more of enslavement of

human mind at the hands of modern technology than benefits of technology to America.

The following paragraph from White Noise, however, again depicts technology in

its twin aspects of providing both security and insecurities to parents of growing children

especially when this particular moment becomes a cause of rejoicing in the past as well

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as thinking for the future in terms of “insurance coverage” and apparently seeking

security in “collection of the like-minded” people.

I’ve witnessed this spectacle every September for twenty-one

years. It is a brilliant event, invariably. The students greet each other with

comic cries and gestures of sodden collapse. Their 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 conscientious suntans. The well-made faces and wry looks. They feel

a sense of renewal, of communal recognition. The women crisp and alert,

in diet trim, knowing people’s names. Their husbands content to measure

out the time, distant but ungrudging, accomplished in parenthood,

something about them suggesting massive insurance coverage. This

assembly of station wagons, as much as anything they might do in the

course of the year, more than formal liturgies or laws, tells the parents

they are a collection of the like-minded and the spiritually akin, a people, a

nation (Delillo 1-2).

This novel has a very contemporary perspective as well. It is relevant even to the

twenty-first century America. It is so close to present-day technologically oriented

societal norms and living that reading it becomes very engrossing affair throughout from

airborne toxic event striking a small college town to its concluding part when Jack shoots

himself in his effort to kill the seducer of his wife.

After the toxic event (as a result of a technological failure), chaotic evacuation

follows. Gladney family, living in this town, eventually come out of it. Jack Gladney gets

exposed to ‘Nyodene D’ which is potentially and deadly toxic. Babette, Jack’s wife, also

develops her own ‘death awareness’ quite like her husband. She starts taking an

experimental drug, Dylar. For obtaining this drug Babette starts having secret coital sex

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with the drugs inventor, Minks. Jack eventually finds out and confronts Babette and

Minks both. In the end, Jack, while confronting Minks, is shot in the process.

It is a technological failure that leads to deepening of imagining and thinking

about death on the part of Babette. This ultimately led to promiscuous perversions for

overpowering the fear of death.

Entire novel revolves around diverse forms and provisions of modern technology

and its damaging impact on human beings and their consciousness resulting into death-

thinking. It is this linkage of technology, human behavior and perversions that even the

following passage from a critic, B. R. Myers, becomes quite relevant in order to show

what technology can lead to in times of crisis:

Throughout DeLillo's career critics have called his work funny:

"absurdly comic ... laugh-out-loud funny" (Michiko Kakutani), "grimly

funny" (Phillips). And most seem to agree with Christopher Lehmann-

Haupt that White Noise is "one of Don DeLillo's funniest." At the same

time, they refuse to furnish examples of what they find so amusing. I have

a notion its things like "Are the men in hacking jackets? What's a hacking

jacket?" but it would be unfair to assert this without evidence. Luckily for

our purposes, Mark Osteen, in an introduction to a recent edition of the

novel, singles out the following conversation as one of the best bits of

"sparkling dialogue" in this "very funny" book. It is telling that the same

cultural elite that never quite "got" the British comic novel should split its

sides at this. "I will read," she said. "But I don't want you to choose

anything that has men inside women, quote-quote, or men entering

women.’ “I entered her.” “He entered me.” We're not lobbies or elevators.

'I wanted him inside me,' as if he could crawl completely in, sign the

register, sleep, eat, so forth. Can we agree on that? I don't care what these

people do as long as they don't enter or get entered. "Agreed." “I entered

her and began to thrust.” “I'm in total agreement," I said, “Enter me; enter

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me, yes, yes.” “Silly usage, absolutely." "Insert yourself, Rex. I want you

inside me, entering hard ..."And so on. Osteen would probably have

groaned at that exchange if it had turned up on Sex and the City. The fuss

he makes over it in this context is a good example of how pathetically

grateful readers can be when they discover -- lo and behold! -- that a

"literary" author is actually trying to entertain them for a change (Myers

104).

Above mentioned quotation indicates the level of social perversion that a

technological failure can bring about in peoples’ life.

Technology also terrorises people rather ‘inadvertently’, as it were, through toxic

leaks and what not. Yet it is all pervasive and it is becoming ever ubiquitous as well

despite all its concomitant injurious effects leading to near constant “imagining of death”

in the minds of persons like Babette and Jack. White Noise is full of such recurring

postmodern perspectives of technological realities:

"It's not the station wagons I wanted to see. What are the people

like? Do the women wear plaid skirts, cable-knit sweaters? Are the men in

hacking jackets? What's a hacking jacket?" [Babette]

"They've grown comfortable with their money," I said. "They

genuinely believe they're entitled to it. This conviction gives them a kind

of rude health. They glow a little." [Jack]

"I have trouble imagining death at that income level," she said.

[Babette]

"Maybe there is no death as we know it. Just documents changing

hands." [Jack] (Osteen 15-16)

Babette is talking like a person affected by technology in different ways. She is

interested in Wagons etc because she wants to see those fashionable persons who maybe

sitting in the wagon car belonging to rich people. Information technology creates desires

and widens area of network for rising expectations. She thinks that at the higher income

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levels, there may not be the constant threat of death. She thinks that richer people with

better technological possessions maybe away from fear of death.

At another place in the White Noise, in chapter 06, Heinrich and Jack are busy in

an interesting conversation about prediction relating to expected rains and showers. Jack

is driving Heinrich home. Heinrich says that the radio is announcing about rain that night.

Jack says that "It’s raining now." The debate moves to the more metaphysical levels and

Jack argues that what one sees or feels should be privileged while Heinrich points out

that the senses are suspect and one should believe the media (De Delillo Ch.06).

Then Siskind explains death in terms of technological development in the

following passage:

Discussing modern death in language that applies as well to

modern science, Siskind sums up the Gladneys' dual fear: "The more we

learn, the more it grows. Is this some law of physics? Every advance in

knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain.

Death adapts, like a viral agent. Is it a law of nature?" (Osteen 307)

This passage from White Noise refers back to an earlier one about

the effects of an industrial (or postindustrial) disaster: Ever since the

airborne toxic event, the sunsets had become almost unbearably beautiful.

Not that there was a measurable connection. If the special character of

Nyodene Derivative (added to the everyday drift of effluents, pollutants,

contaminants and deliriants) had caused this aesthetic leap from already

brilliant sunsets to broad towering ruddled visionary skyscapes, tinged

with dread, no one had been able to prove it. (Osteen 317)

Postmodernism has a tendency to point out various existing perversions and also

better points relating to technology and human existence. It is largely drawn from

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existential limits to human patience. As such White Noise is a successful attempt to

communicate its message of link between technology and various areas of social and

professional functioning.

Delillo, indeed, is a postmodern writer. In his White Noise he goes much beyond

the parameters of postmodernism because he is also entering into realms of mystery and

romanticism in above mentioned paragraphs. In his views, as such, modern technology is

extremely harmful to the basic creativity and normal life style of human cultural ethos. Is

there any answer to this postmodern critique of modern technology? If there is any

answer in this regard, it is then difficult to see it in any postmodern writing.

Postmodernism focuses human attention to several pejorative trends but it is not its

tendency to answer various pointers raised by it.

This is what Delillo is also doing. He is just pointing out things and matters

occurring in the present-day America. His attempt appears mainly to point out what is

what. He does not prescribe any answer to diverse linkages of technology, individual and

society.

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Works Cited

De Delillo, Don. White Noise. Hardcover Edition, Viking Penguin: New York,

1985.

Myers, B. R. “A Reader's Manifesto - an Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness

of American Literary Prose”, The Atlantic Monthly. Volume: 288, 1. July-August, 2001.

Osteen, Mark, Don Delillo, White Noise, Text and Criticism. Penguin: London,

1998.