Pure Image: The Function of Simulacra in White Noise
Our world has become truly infinite, or rather exponential by means of images. It is caught up in a mad pursuit of images, in an ever greater fascination which is only accentuated by video and digital images. We have thus come to the paradox that these images describe the equal impossibility of the real and the imaginary.
-Jean Baudrillard, “The Evil Demon of Images and the Precession of Simulacra”.
The world of Don DeLillo's White Noise is a world composed completely of images. All things and, ultimately, all concepts exist as image: aesthetized, free-floating, hyper-real. In a world permeated by advertising and mass media, the experience of images and the experience of “reality” become inseparable. Ultimately, they become reliant upon each other for their authenticity: reality and images imbue each other with meaning. As images become increasingly divorced from their original facticity they are free to continuously reproduce, each image reinforcing the others until a complex system of perpetual interdependency is created in order to produce a sense of “authenticity” that is ultimately circular rather than grounded in any original. In this way, the images of White Noise function as simulacra. However, despite the complex system of “authenticity” production that permeates the text, its goal is never fully realized. Rather than being immersed completely under this network of ungrounded signs and accepting its special construction of “truth,” the novel's protagonist, Jack Gladney, is still cognizant of the ultimate emptiness of his world and he still feels a deep nostalgia for a period of unmediated reality.
Conversely, his colleague Murray Siskind adopts a cynical posture towards his reality: he is still aware of the operation of the system of simulacrum but accepts the inevitability of its existence. Rather than fighting this change in reality or allowing himself to be fully swallowed up by it, Siskind makes commentary and a career on the basis of his circumstances. Finally, there is Willie Mink, the manufacturer and avid consumer of Dylar: he is pure product of the new system of simulacrum, utterly unable to grasp any gap between image and reality or to conceive of a time in the past or future in which such a gap could exist. In this essay, I will consider both DeLillo's use of images as a method of exploring the system of simulacrum that dominates his text and his use of characters at various levels of insight as sites of investigation into the experience of this system. Ultimately I will argue that DeLillo's purpose in White Noise is to critique the increased dominance of this system of simulacrum even as he recognizes the impossibility of escape from it, to “communicate...a warning about the loss of reality through representation” (Keesey, 149). Like Siskind, his approach to this condition is dryly cynical; however, his text also creates a sense of nostalgia in the reader much like that experienced by Jack Gladney. Immersed in the madness of the world of White Noise, the reader is aware of the idea of unmediated reality only through its absence: like Gladney, Siskind, and Mink one is able to conceive of such a state only as a departed reality that one can mourn, mock or forget but never recover.
For Jack Gladney, the pain of the loss of reality is experienced most deeply in the experience of his “death”:
You are said to be dying and yet are separate from the dying, can ponder it at your leisure, literally see on the X-ray photograph or computer screen the horrible alien logic of it all. It is when death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak, that you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself. A network of symbols has been introduced, an entire awesome technology wrested from the gods. It makes you feel like a stranger in your own dying. (142)
Despite the intensity of Gladney's fear of death, the separation from any direct experience of it is ultimately more frightening. However, the above comment suggests that this disconnected experience of death is something that has been thrust upon him by a medical establishment that glories in esoteric language and practices. However, there are numerous levels to Gladney's disconnect, many of which are present before the medicalization of his death. Predating this extreme experience of being “a stranger in your own dying,” there is the separation cause by images and the experience of images: Gladney refers to the cloud of the Airborne Toxic Event as a “national promotion for death, a multi-million dollar campaign backed by radio spots, heavy print and billboard, TV saturation” (158). The connection with advertising is an especially interesting one. Having the Airborne Toxic Event exist not only as image but as advertisement highlights the ultimate emptiness of the particular image. It both speaks of death and says nothing about it: as pure image it is incapable of allowing depth or meaning. The synthesis of all image and communication into the pure image of advertising is offered by Baudrillard as a prime example of the triumph of the system of simulacrum:
