White noise

44 . LeClair calls Steffie's words simply "a product of consumer conditioning," but since that is all he makes of them, he cannot explain why Jack would sense something transcendent in them. He dismisses Jack's response by calling it "a delusion" and an attempt to escape consciousness [see page 399 of this volume]. Frow suggests that Steffie's words come from the "unconscious of her culture," but realizes that this recognition alone is insufficient to bring on Jack's "moment of splendid transcendence." Frow concludes his discussion of the issue with this: "The question of the source of enunciation of these proper names remains an interesting one" [see page 428 of this volume]. Arnold Weinstein quotes the episode only to say "One hardly knows what to make of such renderings, these epiphaníc moments," except that they demonstrate the Frankfurt School chestnut that the "inner life" has been colonized by the "outer" life (Weinstein, Nobody's Home, 306). Finally, Wilcox, in passing, explains Jack's epiphany as an attempt to "glean meanings from the surrounding noise of culture. Jack is drawn toward occasions of existential self-fashioning, heroic moments of vision in a commodified world." However, Wilcox's entire article is about the end of the heroic narrative, and so his use of the adjective "heroic" to describe Jack is meant ironically (Wilcox, 349).

45 . In his interview with Anthony DeCurtis, DeLillo says that "I think we feel, perhaps superstitiously, that children have a direct route to, have direct contact to the kind of natural truth that eludes us as adults. . . . There is something they know but cannot tell us. Or there is something they remember which we've forgotten (DeCurtis, 302).

46 . In the 1993 Paris Review interview, when asked to comment on the Toyota Celica incident, DeLillo replied: "When you detach one of these words from the product it was designed to serve, the word acquires a chantlike quality. ... If you concentrate on the sound, if you disassociate the words from the object they denote, and if you say the words over and over, they become a sort of higher Esperanto. This is how Toyota Celica began its life. It was pure chant at the beginning. Then they had to find an object to accommodate the words" [see page 332 of this volume]. The interviewer doesn't ask what that "object" is, but that doesn't take much effort. Given the scene's context, it can only be Steffie's fear of death.

47 The novel identifies selfhood explicitly in terms of the fear of death. Winnie Richards tells Jack that the sight of a grizzly bear is "so elec-trifyingly strange that it gives you a renewed sense of yourself—a fresh awareness of the self—the self in terms of a unique and horrific situation." Jack responds, "Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level." "That's right," Winnie answers. "And death?" Jack asks. "Self, self, self," she says. "If death can be seen as less strange and unreferenced, your sense of self in relation to death will diminish, and so will your fear." "What do I do to make death less strange?" Jack implores. "How do I go about it?" Winnie's frustrating answer: "I don't know." (229).
NOTES ON THE FIGURE IN THE STATIC: WHITE NOISE

48 By contrast, the same novel relates through James Axton the risk analyst's lament: "We have our self-importance. We also have our inadequacy. The former is a desperate invention of the latter" (The Names, 5). The liberated artist may be the marooned artist.

49 In the following exchange, the possibility is advanced that this subterranean buzz is not just death's harbinger but the thing itself:

"What if death is nothing but sound?" "Electrical noise.""You hear it forever. Sound all around. How awful." "Uniform, white." (White Noise, 198)

50 "At the edge of every disaster," we learn in Great Jones Street, "people collect in affable groups to whisper away the newsless moment and wait for a messenger from the front" (254). In this novel as well, people come to rely on tranquilizers to short-circuit input and to help "run the lucky hum through our blood" (138).

51 In an example of a simulacrum readily relatable to White Noise and meriting the attention of Jean Baudrillard, these were also the days of "ghost game" broadcasts, in which nimble announcers had to re-create on radio the illusion of games wholly on the basis of inning-by-inning statistics received over the wire. "In this half-hell of desperate invention he did four years of Senators baseball without ever seeing them play" (Pafko, 45).

52 Consider in this regard the paradoxical tourist trap of the most photographed barn in America. The collective perception confers an aura of importance upon its object, but because its uniqueness is based on extraordinary familiarity, uniqueness is actually overwhelmed by the cumulative effect of a "maintained" image. We no longer see the barn so many see the same way (White Noise, 12-13).

53 Mr. Gray serves as a nominal and psychological precursor to Bill Gray, the shadow-dwelling author who is rudely thrust into the spotlight of world events in Mao II.

54 Compare the novel-in-progress being authored by Tap in The Names, whose dynamic, untotalizable progress of "White words . . . Pure as the drivelin' snow" (The Names, 336) offers an optimistic spin to DeLillo's consistent sense that language proliferates engimas it cannot dissolve. Art is not the antidote to the environment it derives from.

55 Arguably, he does not have the ability to mind. In "The Ecstasy of Communication," Baudrillard describes his pathology as "this state of terror proper to the schizophrenic: too great a proximity of everything, the unclean promiscuity of everything which touches, invests and penetrates without resistance, with no halo of private protection ..." (Baudrillard, 132).

56 A related malady afflicts James, the mathematician's assistant in DeLillo's play The Engineer of Moonlight: instead of grunting, he says "grunt," or, panicked, says "Loud and prolonged cries for help" (44).

57 . Similarly, DeLillo's refusal to tie up the numerous loose ends of his narrative (the result of Jack's diagnosis, whether Murray gets approval for his Elvis Studies center, and so on) actually helps to keep White . Noise from the inevitable deathward progress to which, so it is rumored in the novel, all plots tend (Zinman, 77).

58 . John Frow suggests that we might speak of an "airborne aesthetic event" in the wake of the toxic scare. He quickly notes, however, that this does not replace the poisonous cloud but joins with it [see page 418 of this volume]. In other words, the beautiful, protracted sunsets that conclude White Noise are, like good metaphors, mysterious incorporations, open-ended messages.

59 . "I do sort of emit a certain feudal menace," concedes a character in Players (171), and this is the manner of expression Bawer indicts. In fact, this quality goes beyond the conversational arcane. At the end of that novel, for example, the sight of a naked woman asleep in bed prompts the following considerations: how women "seem at such times to embody a mode of wholeness, an immanence and unit truth . . . "; how motels tend "to turn things inward" and serve as repositories of private fears; how bucolic street names constitute "a liturgical prayer, a set of moral consolations"; and how sunlight through the window reveals "the animal glue of physical properties and functions," thereby "absolving us of our secret knowledge" (Players, 209-212). Evidently, nothing is off-hand in DeLillo, every moment is richly textured and tilled, charged with scholarship and suspicion.

60 . The trick, of course, is to distinguish this presumably enabling "hovering sum" from the tactical deceptions of the power elite, as David Ferrie puts it in Libra: "There's something they aren't telling us. Something we don't know about. There's more to it. There's always more to it. This is what history consists of. It's the sum total of all the things they aren't telling us" (321).

61 . Capitulation to the void takes several forms in the novel, including Ste file's eager acceptance of the role of disaster victim during simulation exercises and competitions among Jack's colleagues as to who can drive longest on the highway with his eyes shut. This is the Zen of self-erasure without transcendent end.

62NOTES ON THE ROMANTIC METAPHYSICS OF DON DeLILLO

See, for example, Lentricchia, "Tales" and "Libra"; Frow [page 417 of this volume]; Messmer; and Wilcox.

63 Perhaps the choice of title for the novel is, among other things, calculated to evoke that long tradition of Neo-Platonist and medieval mysticism which meditated on divine names. One might cite the writings of pseudo-Dionysius, author of The Divine Names, or the Merkabah mystics, early Kabbalists who speculated on the secret names of God and the angels. For such mystics, the way to revelation is through the knowledge of secret names.

64 This is precisely the theme of an early essay by Walter Benjamin, who, reflecting on the degeneration of language into "mere signs," observed: "In the Fall, since the eternal purity of names was violated, . . . man abandoned immediacy in the communication of the concrete, name, and fell into the abyss of the mediateness of all communication, of the word as means, of the empty word, into the abyss of prattle" (Benjamin, 120).

65 "I do wonder if there is something we haven't come across. Is there another, clearer language? Will we speak it and hear it when we die? Did we know it before we were born? . . . Maybe this is why there's so much babbling in my books. Babbling can be ... a purer form, an alternate speech. I wrote a short story that ends with two babies babbling at each other in a car. This was something I'd seen and heard, and it was a dazzling and unforgettable scene. I felt these babies knew something. They were talking, they were listening, they were commenting. . . . Glossolalia is interesting because it suggests there's another way to speak, there's a very different language lurking somewhere in the brain" (LeClair, "Interview with Don DeLillo," 83-84). And "Glossolalia or speaking in tongues . . . could be viewed as a higher form of infantile babbling. It's babbling which seems to mean something" (DeCurtis, "Outsider," 302). (Such comments help explain the significance of the crying of Baby Wilder in White Noise [78-79J, an episode I shall discuss later.)

66 A little later we read: "People everywhere are absorbed in conversation. . . . Conversation is life, language is the deepest being" (The Names, 52).

67 Kant formulated the following succinct definition: "We can describe the sublime in this way: it is an object (of nature) the representation of which determines the mind to think the unattainabihty of nature as a presentation of [reason's] ideas" (Weiskel, 22).

68 Recall these lines from Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey": "a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns" (Poetical Works, 164). I am indebted to Lou Caton, of the University of Oregon, for drawing my attention to a possible Romantic context for the sunsets in White Noise.

69 Here, I anticipate two likely objections. First, the "airborne toxic event" may seem like an ironic postmodern version of the sublime object insofar as DeLillo substitutes a man-made source of power for a natural one. Yet Gladney's words emphasize that that power is experienced as a natural phenomenon: "This was a death made in the laboratory, defined and measurable, but we thought of it at the time in a simple and primitive way, as some seasonal perversity of the earth like a flood or tornado" (127). Second, I disagree with Arthur Saltzman (Designs of Darkness, 118-19) and others who see postmodern irony in the account of the sunset insofar as (to be sure) (1) the sunset has been artificially enhanced by pollution and (2) most observers of the spectacle "don't know . . . what it means." After all, the passage in question clearly insists on the sense of awe irrespective of these factors.

70 See, for example, Lentricchia, "Libra"; Carmichael; and Cain.10. In his lecture "The Transcendentialist," Emerson asserted, "Although . . . there is no pure transcendentalist, yet the tendency to respect the intuitions, and to give them, at least in our creed, all authority over our experience, has deeply colored the conversation and poetry of the present day" ("Nature," 207).

71 . In his lecture "The Transcendentialist," Emerson asserted, "Although . . . there is no pure transcendentalist, yet the tendency to respect the intuitions, and to give them, at least in our creed, all authority over our experience, has deeply colored the conversation and poetry of the present day" ("Nature," 207).

72 . Jon Klancher notes that it was M. H. Abrams who tagged Romanticism as a "politiics of vision." However, he argues that insofar as Romanticism is an uncircumscribable, historically variable category, one whose construction alters in response to "institutional crises and consolidations," its "politics of vision" can be, and has been, read as not only radical but also conservative (Klancher, 77-88).

73 It is often argued that social history gets repressed in Wordsworth's "extravagant lyricizing of the recovered self" and in his " 'sense sublime' " (Klancher, 80).