Postmodern Fiction ADMBurns 18 February 1994Guns and the People Who Use Them 3452 wordsin DeLillo’s White Noise

In his novel White Noise, Don DeLillo explores the subtleties of guns. He imagines

them in the hands of SWAT teams, children, charlatan scientists, killers who play

chess, retirees, and a professor of Hitler studies. For each, the gun plays a role in

the intensity of life, especially in the case of the last, the novel’s protagonist Jack

Gladney. Jack is caught up in a flat life of commodities and fears, in which the

supermarket is the chief cultural institution and the government is a cabal of

conspirators. Ill at ease, drenched in data, and scared, Jack struggles to give

significance to his life, to make a mark, all while trying to see through the fog of

information hanging over him. These are efforts to stave off mortality. Connecting

with the data and constructing a scheme give Jack a form to face down a shapeless

death. Secrets, plots, angling for control are steps toward subverting existing

power networks, whether scientific, civic, or celestial. Jack is aware from the start

that these goals are beyond his ability; his large body and meaty hands are not

sufficient. He appropriates tools: dark glasses, a tunic, an extra initial. But these,

too, are insufficient. He needs true force to complete his plot, to escalate his

intensity. To be a killer, Jack needs a gun.

A knife is too gritty, a bomb too complicated, an ax too brutal. A gun is cold

and sterile, but empowering. It has gravity and command. A gun distances the

shooter from the shot, but gives a jolt of power, a sense of accomplishment,

strangely coupled with less guilt. People don’t kill people; guns kill people. With a

gun, there is a loss of agency, a confusion of means and intent — neither party can

see the bullet, yet the target falls. Multiple stab wounds aren’t hazy. Few knifed

victims ask, Who stabbed me?, and believe they stabbed themselves. For these

reasons, DeLillo puts a gun in Jack’s hand. Even before he receives the gun,

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however, Jack thinks about firearms. Initially, they perplex him, awaken his

curiosity. Later, as Jack slips deeper into his plot, guns are either at the forefront

or in the background of his thoughts all the time. His involvement with guns

becomes so intense, Jack’s progression in White Noise can be read as a gun system

— empty, load, aim, fire, empty — that matches his own experience with his

revolver. When taken together, the powers of the gun give Jack a feeling, however

false, of control, of secrecy and information, and of plot. The gun, he thinks, will let

him control others as well as himself. He will be spectacular as a fire, loom like a

sunset. He will be commensurate with death. Also, the gun will give him access to

a second and secret life of intrigue. He will have knowledge of others and

knowledge that others do not have. With the Zumwalt, Jack joins in the rich and

potent tradition of firearm. This cult of violence has its own annals, its own magic,

for which Jack has learned the code. He can use this information to plan deadly

plans that involve inestimable powers and intricate levels of suspense, plots of

magnitude and death. From the novel’s beginning, Jack vests his hope in the

weight of a weapon pushed into his hands by a grubby father-in-law.

Jack’s first reference to guns appears when he reflects on the quirks of his

fourteen-year-old son, Heinrich. His wife, Babette, has some unorthodox views on

the child, perhaps because she projects step-motherly fears onto Heinrich. That is,

because Babette is not the natural mother of the boy, there is little reason for her to

be anything but frank, even pessimistic, in her views of Heinrich’s future. Her

alienation releases her from the guilt that would ordinarily accompany such

thoughts. Babette seems to equate dysfunctional relationships with agitated

children who become violent adults. To Babette, violence means guns and crowds.

But she also envisions her sons crimes being matched with equally violent justice.

“Babette is afraid Heinrich will end up in a barricaded room, spraying hundreds of

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rounds of automatic fire across an empty mall before SWAT teams come for him

with their heavy-barreled weapons, their bull horns and body armor” (22).

This fantasy puts guns in the mind of both Jack and Babette, and those

thoughts reappear when Jack tells of debating with his son the presence of rain.

Regardless of the illogical nature of Heinrich’s argument, Jack introduces an

equally illogical and improbable rhetorical device, but one which to him would

inspire a certain amount of truthtelling: the man with a gun to one’s head. For

Jack, all insolence and pretense disappears when the man with the gun shows up.

It does not matter what kind of man, how bellicose or amicable, small or large. He

is important, rhetorically and in principle, because of his gun. Jack does not resort

to more conventional pedantic figures, such as “Would you tell your teacher /

mother / doctor that?” Instead, he turns to the gunman, a real threat, as if the

“man in the trenchcoat and smoky glasses” were himself, dressed in a flowing robe

and tinted glasses. He asks tells Heinrich, “He holds a gun to your head and says,

‘Is it raining or isn’t it? All you have to do is tell the truth and I’ll put away my gun

and take the next flight out of here’” (23). The gun is a means of procuring what

the holder wants. Once he obtains that desire, the threat vanishes, politely.

Jack connects guns with giving a person historical significance when he talks

with Heinrich about the boy’s chess partner, a convicted killer living in the

penitentiary. To Heinrich, the crimes of Tommy Roy Foster of matter-of-fact, a

reaction to having “time…running out on him,” and being “under pressure” (44).

Heinrich’s seeming disinterest suggests not only that Heinrich is desensitized to

violence, but that it almost seems rational. Without irony, he draws a causal

connection between the stress of contemporary life and shooting into crowd of

people. Foster’s motives are vague, however, just like his victims. At first glance,

there seems to be no pattern or definite goal behind Foster’s killing, except in his

final shooting — that of a police officer. In doing so, Foster was either reacting

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directly to a threat in the form of a single officer, or he wished to strike out against

what he thought was a system of oppression, i.e., the government body of justice.

The killing of the police officer also ties Foster to real-life cop-killer and historically

significant Lee Harvey Oswald, whose shot was an afterthought to his real mission,

the assassination of the President, the master of the system.

The historical significance of these actions is double-edged, however. Often

paranoid, schizophrenic, or both, the killers long to be an important figure, yet they

realize they cannot do so without eliminating another famous person, and they

cannot do that without a gun. This is the extreme form of Murray’s theory of life-

credit in which the killer steals the energy of the dier. “The more people you kill,

the more credit you store up” (290). The real question is not “Who is the killer?”

but “Who did he kill?” The victims already are significant and famous. Killers, until

the instant of their crimes, are anonymous. Oswald, Sirhan, Chapman, Hinckley.

The gun is the great leveler. A tabloid prophesy Babette reads at the shelter

introduces the idea of the killer stealing the life-force and supplanting the killer:

“Beatle assassin Mark David Chapman will legally change his name to John Lennon

and begin a new career as a rock lyricist from his prison cell on murder’s row”

(145). Killers become part of the cult of the famous and the dead, insinuating

themselves forever into the story of their victim, and even after their own deaths,

the assassin lives in stories, changing and growing. DeLillo himself wrote a

fictional biography of Oswald twenty years after the killer’s death. This opportunity

for immortality and historicity enthuses Jack. His interrogation of Heinrich

regarding Foster indicates a deep interest in the dynamics of the killing; he wants

to find the key to control and life. Jack wonders, “‘Did he care for his weapons

obsessively? Did he have an arsenal stashed in his shabby little room off a six-story

concrete park?…Did he fire from a highway overpass, a rented room, his former

place of employment and start firing indiscriminately?’” (44). The answers to these

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questions, the sum of this data, is greater than the person. If Foster did it all right,

he would be important on a media level, rising above the average unemployed,

twenty-seven year old divorcee.

Jack commiserates with Foster’s need for fame. He realizes Foster’s

mistakes: committing the crime in a city with no media, killing six average people

rather than one famous person. Done over again, it wouldn’t be “an ordinary

murder,” but rather an assassination designed to “kill one famous person, get

noticed, make it stick.” Heinrich notes glumly that Foster will not go down in

history. Gladney feels the same way. “Neither will I,” he says, but he has not yet

met his opportunity to use a gun. When it is his turn, he will build a plot around one

person, gain life credit, access the club of jealous men who reached for a gun in

their rage.

To Jack, this kind of behavior is empowering. Because he admires people

who wield guns, he imagines others will admire him if he has a similar power.

Before he get the gun, Jack reappropriates Hitler’s victims as his own, without the

guilt. Jack never mentions the deaths of Jews and troops, only that Hitler was

larger than death, presumably because he was responsible for so many deaths.

Hitler’s gaining life credit on a larger scale reflects questions of agency that

accompany the gun. Is Hitler accountable for those millions of deaths? or are his

soldier? or both? With a gun, did the triggerman kill? the gun? the bullet? Hitler

was almost as distanced from the killing he caused as a shooter is from his victims.

Pull the trigger, a person drops. The causal relationship seems intuitively

confusing. But the feeling of minimal exertion of a finger effecting maximal pain in

another is exhilarating for Jack, even before he fires at Mink. The potential for that

force gives Jack a confidence and security to overcome contrary feelings of

conspiratorial systems. By his own admission, he is obsessed with this idea. It is a

question of control. “It’s not a question of greatness. It’s not a question of good

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and evil. I don’t know what it is. Look at it this way. Some people always wear a

favorite color. Some people carry a gun…and feel bigger, stronger, safer. It’s in

this area that my obsessions dwell” (63).

He hopes to become spectacular, to have witnesses in awe of his power and

fearful for their lives. Recognition of the imminence of death is recognition of the

potency and whatever is threatening. Describing the vision of the airborne toxic

event, Jack introduces the idea of “fear [that] was accompanied by a sense of awe

that bordered on religious. It is surely possible to be awed by the thing that

threatens your life, to see it as a cosmic force, so much larger than yourself, more

powerful, created by elemental and willful rhythms” (127). Jack believes that if he

can be seen in such a light, his life will not be threatened, he will be almost a

cosmic force, just as Hinckley tried to match Reagan. When he finally confronts

Mink, he uses his gun to bring about the same kind of fear, even while Mink

desperately pops pills, hoping to negate the fear. Confronted with Jack and the

weapon, Mink was “showing real terror, brilliant cringing fear.…I loomed in the

doorway, conscious of looming, seeing myself from Mink’s viewpoint, magnified,

threatening” (311). It is a realization of Murray’s belief that “helpless and fearful

people are drawn to magical figures, mythic figures, epic men who intimidate and

darkly loom” (287) While it is difficult to say whether Mink really saw Jack as

magnified and magic, we may assume that Mink was as taken by the threat as was

Jack by the ATE. Gun control is mind control.

Babette is sensitive enough to see this need in her husband, but she is

fearful of it. She knows where Jack falls in the network of history, simply by default

of his being a man, and she can predict the deathward movement of his plots.

Babette knows Jack is given to egomania, to rage and jealousy, and violent means.

Jack is himself consciously unaware of this. Even when he goes off to kill Mink, he

confuses his intentions and his motivations. He sublimates the possibility of

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wanting to kill Mink because of his wife’s adultery. Jack wants to keep death a pro-

fessional matter, denying his instinctual drive to death. “Am I a killer?” he asks

Babette. She answers attributes his anger to gender-instinct and answers

affirmatively, “You’re a man, Jack. We all know about men and their insane rage.

This is something men are very good at. Insane and violent jealousy. Homicidal

rage. When people are good at something, it’s only natural that they look for a

chance to do this thing” (225). Babette fears that her husband will pursue an

opportunity to practice his inborn expertise at killing.

Ironically, it is the man next closest to Babette that provides Jack with the

means to remove his lust from nature (285). When Babette’s father, Vernon Dickey,

arrives, Jack wakes in the night, believing that “Death or Death’s errand runner”

has arrived. Not yet possessing a gun, Jack clutches Mein Kampf as he confronts

the intruder. He soon discovers it is only his father-in-law, who has brought with

him an important message, as if a disposable character in Death’s imperial plot.

Until the arrival of Vernon, the Jack’s plot is stalled. He knows his mission, he

knows his target, his plan, etc., but he cannot move forward, even with his gender-

instinct pushing him. His plot is thwarted until the arrival of another, more

masculine male, who brings with him a small dark object of masculinity. When he

gives the gift to Jack, it is a passing on, a watershed, from one generation to the

next, another plot in the matrix. The gun is the perfect plot device. Taking the gun,

Jack confronts the sum of his thoughts on firearms. Loaded. The intensity of the

experience is almost beyond Jack. It alters and cements his belief in force, in the

avoidance of death. “There was something unreal about the experience of holding a

gun.…Was [Vernon] to be Death’s dark messenger after all? A loaded weapon.

How quickly it worked a change in me, numbing my hand even as I sat staring at

the thing, not wishing to give it a name. Did Vernon mean to provoke thought,

provide my life with a fresh design, a scheme, a shapeliness?” (253). The gun opens

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to Jack the world of plots and secrets. Echoing Babette’s thoughts on the

inevitability of a man’s urge to homicide, Vernon adds “It’s only a question of time

as to when you’ll want to use it” (253).

Jack, too, begins to understand the significance of the weapon to his plots.

The gun adds a dimension to his life, a new level of power to defeat and spread

death. Controlling this new power was a test for Jack, a thermometer of intensity, a

measure of manhood. Given the chance, would Jack be a killer or a dier? The

inability to handle the gun is the inability to handle the larger issues of life. He

reflects on the power of the gun, as it “occurred to [him] that this was ultimate

device for determining one’s competence in the world.” His next question

highlights DeLillo’s use of the gun throughout the novel. It entrenches the gun

deep in questions of identity and agency. “What does it mean to a person, beyond

his sense of competence and well-being-and personal worth, to carry a lethal

weapon, to handle it well, be ready and willing to use it?” Jack quickly answers his

own question, discovering it supplies to him all the grandeur he had been aiming

for, at least since discussing Tommy Roy Foster. The gun “was a secret, it was a

second life, a second self, a dream, a spell, a plot, a delirium” (254). It is the

material counterpart to Hitler studies, the steel cousin of Mein Kampf, an

extension of his heavy hands.

The gun gives Jack the secret information that draws boundaries between

himself and others. Most of the information in the narrative is open to the public.

Noise filtered through television, supermarket announcements, tabloids. But Jack’s

life with the gun is his own. No one knows of his new strength, his new knowledge.

He begins with Vernon’s expert knowledge of the Zumwalt, and progresses into his

own secrets of scheme. He “thought of the Zumwalt automatic hidden in the

bedroom,” (272) a secret hidden in a room of secrets. Thoughts of the gun return

him to his few schemes in his time of innocence. Whenever he remembers the gun,

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he feels “a small intense sensation…whether pleasurable or fearful [he] wasn’t sure.

[He] knew it mainly as a childhood moment, the profound stir of secret keeping”

(274). Jack engages himself in the enterprise of creating a strong self to replace his

weak one. The gun is, as he says, “a second life” and a “secret history of the man

who ones it.” He wonders how far into the plot of the gun he has fallen, asking

himself, “Was I immersing myself, little by little, in a secret life?” (274). These

secrets distinguish him as an individual, separate him from the crowd, so he is able

to live a life exclusively his, not an average, thoughtless existence of the crowd.

This is not to say that Jack is necessarily fighting against the crowd, but rather that

he is trying to rise above it. In this sense, Murray is right in saying, “To plot is to

live,” (291) but this does not negate Jack’s earlier premise that “all plots move

deathward” (26). These secrets give Jack authority over his second reality, a

privilege he does not have in his first. “It was a reality I could control, secretly

dominate” (297).

The second reality is a second chance at Willie Mink. Jack could not control

Mink when Babette went to see him. But with the gun, Jack can dominate Mink,

loom above him. When Willie cowers before Jack, Jack wins a kind of hollow victory.

The gun is more responsible for the intimidation than is Jack, and the simple words

“Hail of bullets” are enough to provoke a frenzy in Mink. Jack’s great moment of

intensity, the culmination of his secret life, of his drive to power, of his avoidance of

death, comes immediately prior to his shooting the first bullet into Mink’s stomach.

In that instant, Jack finds his place in the information matrix which had blanketed

since the story’s beginning. The total fear of Mink is an uncompromising admission

of Jack’s power, of his significance. Jack knew who he was in the network of

meanings” (312). The intensity is matched only by the actual firing at Mink, the

sight of colored spot bursting from Mink’s belly. Jack “fired a second shot just to

fire it, relive the experience” (312). These moments of intensity, contingent on use

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of the gun, give Jack his conception of self. That experience is privately his. Until

Mink gets hold of the gun and reciprocates, derailing Jack’s intricate plot and

ruining his feeling of exclusivity. When he is shot, “the world collapsed inward.”

He is “hurt, stunned, and disappointed” (313). The plot quickly degenerates into

Jack forgoing credit for his moment of strongest intensity. Instead of a looming,

awesome figure, he is a forgotten one. “Who shot me?” Mink asks. Jack answers

meekly, “You did” (314). This is an admission of defeat, of lost agency, on Jack’s

part. Though the gun represented so much to him — control, plot, and information

— Jack loses the intensity of his life and is empty, met only with empty beliefs of old

nuns in an empty hospital.

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