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some truths about his wife's Dylar, a drug created to suppress over-
whelming fears of mortality.
Indeed, there is a good case to be made that
White Noise
is a dis-
course on the irrational and obsessive fear of death in modern middle-
class America, and that the airborne toxic event is just a symbol of that.
When Jack finally sees the deadly cloud, it is described in mythological
terms: “The enormous dark mass moved like some death ship in a Norse
legend, escorted across the night by armoured creatures with spiral
wings.” Its appearance spawns folk tales among the awed inhabitants of
Blacksmith: it “had released a spirit of imagination. People spun tales,
others listened spellbound”.
This, I think, brings us to the crux of
White Noise
. Its true subject
seems, above all else, to be the mythology that underlies suburban
American life: the way that feelings of disempowerment and helpless-
ness engendered by a dependence on commodities and services provided
by faceless corporations and invisible forces create their own supersti-
tions, belief systems, and legends. “The genius of the primitive mind”,
Jack acknowledges, “is that it can render human helplessness in noble
and beautiful ways.” According to critic Mark Conroy (2003), “If any-
thing, the scientific advance chiefly on display in this world […] reduces
the people further to infantilism, primitive fantasy, and dependence upon
the system as if upon a deity […] the products of modern technology be-
come themselves fetish objects”.
This theme is made explicit through the character of Murray Jay
Siskind, an ex-sportswriter and now a colleague of Jack's at the College-
on-the-Hill who wants to explore the mythology and mystique of Elvis in
the same way that Jack does with Hitler. Siskind studies packaging in the
supermarket and scans the advertisements in trashy magazines like
Ufologist Today
. “I want”, he says, apparently voicing DeLillo's inten-
tions, “to immerse myself in American magic and dread.”
Within this pantheon of contemporary occult forces, technology, like
the old gods, holds both the threat of damnation and the promise of sal-
vation. “Give yourself up to it”, Siskind urges Jack. “Believe in it.” Jack
himself recognizes that these forces are at play, and that our response to
them is primeval. “The greater the scientific advance”, he tells his wife,
“the more primitive the fear.” But these primitive fears are now mediated
