本文是一篇英语论文，笔者认为小说中人物的焦虑和荒诞行为，并非源于社会规范的缺失，而是因为他们被符号系统的虚假规范所束缚——这正是鲍德里亚失范理论的核心悖论。德里罗用黑色幽默提醒我们：当消费与媒介成为新的“上帝”，失范不再是社会病理，而是后现代生存的默认配置。他以文学特有的预言性发出警示：当失范被系统性地整合为常态，重新定义“真实”将变得至关重要。
Chapter 1 Contagious Depressiveness
1.1 Lost in Affluence
1.1.1 Tension, Disorder, and Insecurity in Affluence
The protagonist and narrator of White Noise, Jack Gladney, claims that Blacksmith lies far away from large cities and people there are “not smack in the path of history and its contaminations” and do not “feel threatened and aggrieved” (DeLillo 85) like other towns. However, it is widely accepted that the characters in the novel, like citizens in American cities, live in a consumer society and a society of affluence featuring relentless consumption of commodities and aesthetic products. This becomes evident in the very first chapter, which opens with a description of an annual autumn ritual: accompanied by their parents, students at College-on-the-Hill arrive at school with station wagons full of objects:
[...] 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 junk food still in shopping bags—onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut crème patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints. (DeLillo 3)
1.2 Fear of Death
1.2.1 Privileged Death Fear Wrapped in White Noise
Although Baudrillard does not explicitly include fear—a word appearing 72 times in White Noise—in the category of contagious depressiveness (one form of anomie) in The Consumer Society, it is arguably an intensified type of depression that demands more energy compared with fatigue and anxiety, which have been articulated by Baudrillard and analyzed earlier in this chapter. In particular, the fear of death serves as one of the central themes of White Noise, a book claimed as “The American Book of the Dead” by Mark Osteen in his work American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture (2000). Death-related words permeate the novel, weaving an inescapable web: “dying” (33 times), “dead” (70 times), “die” (57 times), and “death” (201 times). Moreover, the novel touches upon various cultural perspectives on death, including the Egyptian Book of the Dead (a best-seller in Germany according to Jack’s German teacher), the Tibetan Book of the Dead (a book studied by Elvis Presley according to Murray), and the Mexican Day of the Dead (a book discussed by Jack’s colleague).
In a letter to Tom LeClair, DeLillo confirms that one of the few sources of the novel is The Denial of Death (1973), whose author, Ernest Becker, claims that the dread of death is the motivating force of modern cultures and that “the problem of heroics is the central one of human life” (7). Although the novel “can be read as a dialogue with” Becker’s book, DeLillo portrays the fear of death and heroic attempts to overcome it as destructive, “plac[ing] Gladney in life-threatening situations” (LeClair 11), situations saturated with consistent electrical noise, “uniform [and] white” (DeLillo 198).
Chapter 2 Mania for Destructiveness
2.1 Obsession with Calamity Coverage
2.1.1 Quotidian Obsession
Violence in an affluent society—one form of anomie in Baudrillard’s opinion—is spectacular, ready to be consumed by citizens through mass media. The “spectacular” violence and the seemingly pacified daily life are “homogeneous” in that they are “equally abstract and [...] thing[s] of myths and signs” (Baudrillard 174). Consumed violence abounds, including “news reports of accidents, murders, revolutions, the atomic or bacteriological threat” (174). What is more, it is stimulating for consumers in White Noise to pass by the newly set butcher’s corner in the supermarket providing the myth and sign of “a bloodstained man pounding at strips of living veal” (DeLillo 167). Blood and the action of pounding are the representations of destructiveness, which is so indispensable in “pacified” daily life that its absence tends to easily reveal “the spectre of the real fragility” (Baudrillard 174).
People’s quotidian consumption of violence is largely due to mass media, through which most people share the experience of viewing calamity the moment it happens. As Guy Debord claims, it is technology, by means of mass media, that seems to “cause a world that is no longer directly perceptible to be seen” (17) and seems to reinforce social consolidation through the shared content released. However, it merely seems to be so. Instead of offering genuine and meaningful spectacles for citizens, media narrative takes the place of reality—which adds up to be history—with “a set of consumable images, representations divorced from their referents and subject to the political whims of their manufacturers” (Olster 80).
2.2 Attraction to Disaster Involvement
2.2.1 Excitement-driven Murder
In the postmodern society, everyone is obsessed with “irreversible [and] always imminent” violence in various degrees in that “it is rooted in the very process of growth and increased satisfaction” (Baudrillard 178). With abundant materials accessible, the threshold of satisfaction is increasingly uprated, to the extent that people revel in real-time disaster coverage, which ensures the stimulation is provided at a safe distance. Furthermore, witnessing destructiveness on television merely serves as a way through which people gain excitement and forget about the authentic banality and fragility of their lives and the society they constitute; getting involved in violence is another way to participate in the operation of the affluent society.
Murray Siskind, a representative of postmodern thought, divides people exclusively into two categories—“killers and diers”—and most people are considered diers without “the disposition, and rage or whatever it takes to be a killer” (DeLillo 290). In his theory, life is a game of gathering strength through violence, which is regarded as “a form of rebirth” (290). To be more specific, the dier succumbs while the killer lives on, thus forming an equation; the more people one kills, the more energy he or she will accumulate like “a bank transaction” (291). According to the demon, killing others is an efficient way to get rid of death, an absurd idea secreted by the so-called academic discussion between two professors whose duty is “to examine currents of thought, investigate the meaning of human behavior” (291).
Chapter 3 Futile Struggle .................................. 32
3.1 Consumption for Mythical Self-confirmation ........................ 32
3.1.1 Tangible Consumption .................................... 32
3.1.2 Academic Consumption ................................... 36
Conclusion ..................................... 45
Chapter 3 Futile Struggle
3.1 Consumption for Mythical Self-confirmation
3.1.1 Tangible Consumption
White Noise depicts a world of consumerism in which almost everyone is propelled by the idea that consumption is a fundamental part of their life, without which it will be difficult to confirm their identity. It is an affluent society where advertisements are spread everywhere, to the extent that they have been imprinted in people’s minds. When Jack drives his son to school, he notices a woman in a yellow slicker on the road and immediately imagines her as a figure in a soup commercial “taking off her oilskin hat as she enter[s] the cheerful kitchen” (DeLillo 22). Similarly, when Steffie tries to understand Wilder’s fascination with boiling water in kitchen, it reminds their father of “a jingle for a product called Ray-Ban Wayfarer” (212).
Jack is not alone in being surrounded by material affluence and mentally invaded by commercial advertising. This is evident in his seven-year-old daughter Steffie, who mutters the name of an automobile, “Toyota Celica.” The muttering is deemed “beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder” by Jack who is struck with “the impact of a moment of splendid transcendence” (DeLillo 155) as well. Steffie’s repetition of the words continuously looped on television, on initial inspection, generates comforting effects bordering on religion; upon closer examination, however, it is “no more than what Marx calls commodity fetishism” (Hou 138). It also reflects the striking success of media’s infiltration into people’s mental field which is even sanctified as an effective antidote to overspread anxiety and fear by showing “a ritual meaning, part of a verbal spell or ecstatic chant” (DeLillo 155).
Conclusion
White Noise serves as a powerful critique of postmodern consumer society, demonstrating the endemic anomie that characterizes contemporary life. Through the lens of Jean Baudrillard’s concept of anomie elaborated in The Consumer Society, which is different from that of Jean-Marie Guyau and Émile Durkheim, this thesis investigates what characters in White Noise manifest as their incompatibilities in a society of free-floating signifiers and how they struggle to confront with the unease and anxiety.
The novel is set in Blacksmith, a small town assumably different from the megacity of New York, a name which appears 11 times, featuring complication and pressure; yet the College-on-the-Hill in the town is composed merely of New York emigres, suggesting the town’s inevitable contamination by urban consumerism and postmodernity. Citizens of the town, or “the heroes of consumption” (Baudrillard 182) live a life of affluence, which brings not pure blessing but a different set of constraints, leading to intense and permeating fatigue, anxiety, and mediated fear of death. These forms of contagious depressiveness are intertwined with a mania for destructiveness, as characters are obsessed with both quotidian and even-based calamity coverage including but not limited to the calamity report on television and the desire for media in a crash landing and the airborne toxic event. Furthermore, Jack, Tommy, and Orest even personally get involved in destructiveness creation, which is not directly illustrated by Baudrillard but is equally noteworthy.
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