"Killers and diers": white noise, violence, genre.

Abstract

Towards the end of Don DeLillo's White Noise, Murray lectures Jack Gladney on the theoretical relationship between "killers and diers" (290). His point that "violence is a form of rebirth" for the killer places DeLillo's novel inside a long line of traditionally violent works in American literature. My essay will examine the topic of violence in White Noise by unraveling the various literary genres on which DeLillo relies. Teachers of the novel will find my approach useful, because it allows the general and theoretical subject of violence to be discussed through concrete and specific narrative conventions. My essay will also act as a blueprint for teachers who wish to teach the novel through its genres, as a captivity, slave, gothic, or crime novel. Finally, my essay will provide an alternate way to teach the novel's post-modern methods by illustrating its reliance on low or popular art forms.

Essay

Towards the end of White Noise, Murray lectures Jack Gladney on the theoretical relationship between "killers and diers" (290). His point that "violence is a form of rebirth" for the killer rephrases Richard Slotkin's classic Regeneration through Violence and places DeLillo's novel inside a long line of traditionally violent works in American literature (290). Murray's words reveal the novel's heavy reliance on two particularly violent literary genres: the gothic romance and crime fiction. First, the television, "where outer torment lurks, causing fears and secret desires," threatens the Gladney clan and therefore becomes a contemporary manifestation of the threatening outsider whose appearance unleashes the violence of a gothic novel (85). Second, the narrative ends in a murder scene, because "All plots tend to move deathward" in crime fiction (26). The novel, on one level, borrows its plot from post-war pulps such as those penned by Jim Thompson and Patricia Highsmith. The characters attempt to define criminality and to assign blame and responsibility where it belongs. However, as in any good crime story, the characters themselves become the criminals. My essay will examine the topic of violence in White Noise by unraveling the two violent and often contradictory literary genres on which DeLillo relies. It will simultaneously provide an alternative way to teach the novel's postmodernism by illustrating its reliance on low or popular art forms.

When I taught the two courses, American Gothic and Crime Literature, the novel became my automatic choice to represent the postmodern period. Linda Hutcheon has called Margaret Atwood the "epitome of postmodern contradiction" because by "using and abusing" genre conventions in Lady Oracle Atwood creates a "repetition with difference" (151). My classes suggest that DeLillo in White Noise does something similar. One aspect of the postmodern is its ability to simultaneously incorporate and dismantle cliche and convention. I saw that the novel would test the student's grasp of the genre conventions we examine throughout the semester.

The novel contains several hints that Jack lives in a gothic nightmare. Over a week's worth of classes, I point out the five main ways in which the novel is traditionally Gothic. It is cobbled together from disparate forms and genres. It stands in opposition to the more formal histories and makes no pretensions about constructing a larger, more universal history. Gladney reads in the gothic way and suggests that the reader does so. He shifts among traditional gothic roles, from heroine to hero. He operates in the gothic universe when what he refuses to see in either himself or the outside world appears as the uncanny machine of haunting. I make each claim and then give the students five to ten minutes to find examples of each convention. As a final assignment, they write a short paper that examines one cliche or convention not covered in class.

First, the novel is cobbled together from disparate forms and genres. Early on, Jack lectures his advanced senior class following an "impressionistic, eighty-minute documentary" edited together from films created in and documentaries created about Nazi Germany. He follows a similar method while constructing his unique field by drawing on the materials of film studies, history, sociology, and political science. His actions replicate those of a gothic novelist. When writers such as Charles BrockdenBrown, Horace Walpole, and Ann Radcliffe created the form at the end of the eighteenth century, they had nothing to draw upon directly and so put Shakespeare next to Sophocles and German tragic drama next to obscure contemporary allusions. Like Jack, the writers had little interest in chronological history or facts and sutured disparate elements into a fractured whole.

The novel also chronicles America's own obsession with gothic narratives. Students are likely to have noticed these allusions but generally will not have a sense of what it all means together. In bed, Babette reads historical pornography to Jack (29). In the supermarket, Denise and some friends look at the paperback books with "vivid illustrations of cult violence and windswept romance" (37). Babette volunteers to read to the blind "about dead men who leave messages on answering machines," (57). Each example of pulp fiction is carefully chosen, because each plays off a cliched gothic convention.

My second point recalls gothic patterns from previous texts. The original gothic novels stood in opposition to the more formal, masculine, and cultured histories of the long eighteenth century. Gothic narrators such as the governess in James' The Turn of the Screw bury their personal pasts and offer confused, non-linear accounts of political history. We are still unsure in White Noise of the narrator's confused past, despite Jack's repeated attempts to explain from where all the children, wives and spouses originated. Jack Gladney's class, like the novel itself, has no pretensions about constructing a larger, more universal history. Its subject is a specific kind of history, which is meaningful to the haunted narrator, and through the process of identification, his or her reader. His scholarship has made Hitler into a department and suggests that all of history should be viewed as a preparation for or a result of this now Christ-like figure. The resulting historical fragmentation causes the "noise" and chaos that haunts the novel.

At the beginning of the semester, I explain to the students how to read in the gothic way. They learn to pay attention to what is not said, shown or revealed. Indeed, The Turn of the Screw, Beloved and Poe's stories rely so heavily on this practice, that it would be impossible to perform a literal reading of these texts. Gladney's own use of these reading practices is my third main point. He provides the metaphorical instructions for reading the novel as a gothic when he tells the reader: "Every semester I arranged for a screening of background footage" (25). Jack only concentrates on background footage and noise, implying that this is where the real story lies. In the novel's background, we hear two things: the television and warning sirens. Jack fails to hear the sirens and threats from the television and, in doing so, acts the part of the typical gothic heroine who searches for understanding and explanation, but refuses to acknowledge the danger at her doorstep.

Fourth, Gladney possesses the ability to shift roles and change the plot of the novel. He begins as a typical gothic heroine: victimized, masochistic, and confused. Murray underscores these personality traits in Jack when he tells him, "Helpless and fearful people are drawn to magical figures, mythic figures, epic men who intimidate and darkly loom" (287). In the last third of the novel, Jack transforms from heroine to hero: violent, looming, and brooding. He leaves the role of heroine to his daughter Steffi, who signs up to play a victim in a SIMUVAC exercise.

My final point is that Jack operates in a gothic universe when what he refuses to see in either herself, or the outside world, appears as the uncanny machinery of haunting. As a result, the town they live in is filled with haunted houses. For example, Murray lives across the street from an insane asylum. Jack asks if he "gets any noise" from the house, such as "beatings or shrieks" (49). The Treadwell House, "an old frame structure with rotting trellises along the porch" (57), sounds like a scary house named by children. Something also haunts the Gladney house. He believes that "something lived in the basement" (27) and reveals that "We had two closet doors that opened by themselves"(64).

The imagery of haunting inevitable perplexes students and they want to know what, exactly, haunts Jack. Several weeks earlier, during the Modernism portion of the course, I have the students read Freud's seminal essay "The Uncanny." In it, Freud analyzes the process of doubling that occurs through haunting. Doubling acts initially as preservation against extinction. One projects and replicates oneself in the other to preserve the self. Creating a double insures one's own immortality. But, because one is able to see oneself replicated in another, one must recognize one's own mortality. The repetition is itself uncanny because it suggests that what is animate is really mechanical and what is mortal could break. The self, once unique, has now become as fleeting and insubstantial as a copy. The aspect of the double changes, and it becomes the opposite of itself. What was once an "assurance of immortality" becomes "the ghostly harbinger of death" (235). To see one's double is to be exposed to one's own mortality and death.

The television set performs the role of uncanny double for Jack. Theoretically, its programming represents and doubles our reality and us. Technology, which created the television, promises immortality. But the double that haunts and promises immortality, must, according to Freud, reverse in significance and start to mark one's own death. When Jack exposes himself to the invisible effects of a technologically produced chemical cloud, he discovers he is not immune to death. His physical exposure to radiation mirrors his ongoing exposure to the television's waves and images. What haunts Jack specifically is the possibility he may be contaminated by the violent images on television. Ironically, his antidote is to become a "killer" instead of a "dier" and a producer of violence instead of a consumer.

In my crime course, I also teach White Noise because of its reliance on the genre's conventions. I present the novel last because it allows the students to draw together all of the tropes and patterns we have identified and examined throughout the semester. The crime novel tends to contain fewer unresolved narrative complexities than the gothic, and its conventions seem less slippery. Students, I think, have an easier time recognizing the repetition of its patterns in one semester's worth of reading. This fact causes me to rely more heavily on the students to think across the texts we have already covered and to identify similarities to White Noise. I accomplish this goal by dividing the students into several groups to which I assign one text we have already covered. They must then sketch out the connections and similarities between their assigned text and White Noise. On the second day of this activity, I ask each group to determine how DeLillo also breaks the patterns the students established in the previous class. The third and possibly fourth days are spent "reporting" the findings back to the class.

I begin the course with Poe's detective stories and thus ask the first group to compare Jack's role with Dupin's. Immediately, they see Jack hunting down answers even before he hunts down Mr. Grey. Jack, like a good detective, looks for concrete solutions and refuses to admit that any event is preternatural. He leads the fight for the ideas of progress, rationality and scientific objectivity that his family no longer find acceptable. For example, Heinrich, Jack's son, "proves" that truth is relative in a rather drawn out conversation about whether it is raining outside. Jack cements his role by making snide allusions to the patter of detective films and novels.

The student groups who read the novel alongside pre-WWII and post-WWII crime fiction often have the most fun finding similarities between them, because DeLillo relies on this kind of narrative the most. Even Old Man Treadwell demands his weekly dose of cult mystery (5). Crime fiction is less interested in incarcerating criminals and having a reconciled, happy ending than detective fiction. It prefers to represent and promulgate alienation and disorder. White Noise, too, opens up more pathways than it closes and ends in a satisfyingly unsatisfying way.

The students often compare the world of White Noise with that of tough-guy fiction, such as those created by James M. Cain or Raymond Chandler. They notice that the central tough guy narrator has been traded in for the mild-mannered and comparatively feminized Jack. It is amusing to note that the novel replaces Chandler's lawmen with a professor who becomes a new kind of enforcer, doling out grades and passing the children of the upper middle class. Babette's definition of modern masculinity suggests that Jack, by virtue of being a man, still harbors tough, violent instincts. She says, "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 would look for a chance to do this thing" (225). When I ask the students to list the personality traits of the tough guy narrator, they see how much Jack has in common with him.

I like to teach Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita before White Noise because comparing the murders in these novels allows the students to find different ways of viewing Jack's final transformation. I have found that the students who are asked to draw connections between these novels and DeLillo's often have the most spirited discussions and speak enthusiastically back to each other as each groups shares their list of connections and differences with the rest of the class. Lou Ford, the protagonist of The Killer Inside Me, is a small-town legitimate sheriff who turns out to be smarter and more devious than the reader and the inhabitants of the town first thought he was. Eventually, Lou reveals that hears voices and provides one reason why he kills. White Noise, too, follows the same pattern. Jack peppers his narration with references to criminals who hear voices telling them to kill. He, too, hears these voices emanating randomly from behind the walls of his house. He seems to be the only one who hears them because he does not know how to repress random thoughts and urges (288). Inevitably, he confronts Mr. Grey who speaks in the same voices as the television set does. Like Lou's, Jack's violent tendencies seem to appear out of nowhere, but the careful reader can trace their appearance from the novel's first pages. Heinrich, too, may have these same violent tendencies. Babette worries that "Heinrich is going to spray bullets" (27). He takes pictures of policemen dredging up bodies out of the lake (59). His own tendencies mirror Jack's, suggesting a hereditary link or cause for the violence in both father and son.

The Talented Mr. Ripley provides an alternate view of Jack's behavior. In this novel, the reader becomes so strongly identified with its criminal protagonist, Ripley, they cheer when he gets away with murder. Sally R. Munt's reading of Ripley casts him in White Noise-like terms. She writes, "One strong, radical aspect of Highsmith's writing is her firm integration of good with evil, no longer cast out as 'other', but slipping undifferentiated into the totality of human behavior. The rejection of a Manichean morality disturbs the expectations and pleasures of the reader, who is made more and more uncomfortable" (18). The absence of black and white, right from wrong, resembles Jack's world. He may, like Ripley, be seen as alternately fighting to restore order or finally succumbing to the disordered animal violence that the television suggests lurks in every human heart.

Another possible reading of Highsmith's novel suggests that Ripley hates himself so much that, by killing Dickie and becoming him, Ripley actually kills himself. The murder has less to do with Ripley wanting to be Dickie than his not wanting to be himself. A similar pattern exists in Lolita, another postmodern novel that alludes to multiple narrative genres. In Nabokov's novel, Humbert Humbert is followed by, plagued by, and haunted by the pornographer Quilty. Quilty, as a negative projection of the protagonist, must be hunted down and shot in a scene that White Noise echoes perfectly. Just as Mr. Grey talks in television cliches, Quilty speaks in dramatic cliches. As a final task, I assign a short, overnight, paper that asks the students to think about what the multiple allusions to Lolita may imply about Jack.

White Noise serves as an excellent capstone for a gothic or crime fiction course because it provides a practice field for identifying different kinds of plots and protagonists, cliches and conventions. The students, in reading and discussing the novel, develop a more thorough understanding of a specific genre and begin to notice postmodern literature's reliance on low and popular art forms.

Works Cited

DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin, 1985.

Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and Trans. by James Strachey and others, 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74. XVII, 219-52.

Highsmith, Patricia. The Talented Mr. Ripley. 1955. New York: Vintage Crime, 1992.

Hutcheon, Linda. The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of English Canadian Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

Munt, Sally R. Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. 1955. New York: Vintage International, 1989.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600-1860. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973.

Thompson, Jim. The Killer Inside Me. 1952. New York: Vintage Crime, 1991.

Michelle E. Moore, The College of DuPage, IL

Moore, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English at the College of DuPage