White Noise: The Hero Defended

Abstract

Don DeLillo’s White Noise was published in the spring of 1985 and reviewers were quick to note that it neatly anticipated the Union Carbide disaster that killed two thousand in Bhopal, India.¹ A review in The New York Review of Books also mentioned the “horrors of 1984” (Johnson 6), noting that Orwell had failed to predict the future, but, perhaps, DeLillo would have better luck. The tone of most reviews, however, did not so blatantly mimic DeLillo’s observations of magic and dread, and focused more on the publication supermarket, welcoming DeLillo to its shelves. Paul Stuewe’s short review in the Quill & Quire reads somewhat like a review of a bottle of wine as he notes that a good, experimental author of the 1970s had finally “mellowed” enough to please “book lovers,” and concludes that White Noise is “a superb novel of modern manners and mores that should earn its author much-merited fame and fortune” (77). It is likely that it was this combination of timing, topical concerns, and accessible style that moved DeLillo into the circle of “fame and fortune,” but this book also marks his introduction into the circle of academia, for underneath its pleasurable reading surface White Noise is an ideal undergraduate introduction to some of the theories of postmodernism.²

“Is it possible that constant fear is the natural state of man and that by living close to my fear I am actually doing something heroic, Murray?”

“Do you feel heroic?”

“No.”

“Then you probably aren’t.”

Don DeLillo, White Noise 275–6