A decade after its publication, the contribution of Don DeLillo’s White Noise to our understanding of postmodern cultural conditions has been thoroughly examined by literary critics (see, for example, the two volumes of essays on DeLillo’s work edited by Frank Lentricchia). The novel has been mined for statements like “Talk is radio,” “Everything’s a car,” “Everything was on TV last night,” and “We are here to simulate”—statements that critics, attuned to our culture’s dependence on artifice and its habit of commodifying “everything,” immediately recognize as postmodern slogans. What has been less often noticed, and less thoroughly commented on, is DeLillo’s portrait of the way in which postmodernity also entails the devastation of the natural world.

Frank Lentricchia, in his introduction to the New Essays on White Noise, has pointed out that “The central event of the novel is an ecological disaster. Thus: an ecological novel at the dawn of ecological consciousness” (7). But Lentricchia does not develop his insight about the “ecological” character of the novel. Neither does another reader, Michael Moses, who in his essay on White Noise, “Lust Removed from Nature,” argues that “postmodernism, particularly when it understands itself as the antithesis rather than the culmination of the modern scientific project, confidently and unequivocally banishes from critical discussion the questions of human nature and of nature in general” (82). Moses does not pursue this point, but I would argue that one of the great virtues of DeLillo’s novel is the thoroughgoing and imaginative way in which White Noise puts the questions not just of human nature but of “nature in general” back on the agenda for “critical discussion.”

The dearth of commentary on DeLillo’s interest in the fate of nature is explained, not just by the fact that contemporary literary critics tend to be more interested in the fate of culture, but also by the fact that one has to adjust one’s sense of nature radically in order to understand how, in White Noise, natural conditions are depicted as coextensive with, rather than opposed to, the malaise of postmodern culture. This adjustment is not just a task for the reader or critic: it is something the characters in the novel have to do every day of their lives.

As a corrective to the prevailing critical views of the novel, White Noise might be seen as an example of what I will call the postmodern pastoral, in order to foreground the novel’s surprising interest in the natural world and in a mostly forgotten and, indeed, largely bygone rural American landscape. At first glance the setting of the novel and its prevailing tone seem wholly unpastoral. But then the pastoral is perhaps the most plastic of modes, as William Empson demonstrated in Some Versions of Pastoral. The formula for “the pastoral process” proposed by Empson—“putting the complex into the simple” (23)—is one which might appeal to the main character and narrator of White Noise, Jack Gladney. Gladney is someone who would like very much to put the complex into the simple, but who can discover nothing simple in the postmodern world he inhabits, a world in which the familiar oppositions on which the pastoral depends appear to have broken down. And thus the postmodern pastoral must be understood as a blocked pastoral—as the expression of a perpetually frustrated pastoral impulse or desire. In qualifying my assertion that White Noise is an example of postmodern pastoral in this way, I am trying to heed Paul Alpers’s warning that “modern studies tend to use ‘pastoral’ with ungoverned inclusiveness” (ix). However, Alpers’s insistence that “we will have a far truer idea of pastoral if we take its representative anecdote to be herdsmen and their lives, rather than landscape or idealized nature” (22) would prevent altogether the heuristic use of the term I wish to make here. With all due respect to herdsmen, the interest of the pastoral for me lies more in the philosophical debate it engenders about the proper relation of nature and culture and less in its report on the workaday details of animal husbandry or the love lives of shepherds.

Jack Gladney is not a shepherd, but a professor of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill, which is situated in the midst of an unremarkable sprawl of development that could be called “suburban,” except that there is no urban center to which the little town of Blacksmith is subjoined. Like almost everything else in White Noise, the town, to judge from Jack Gladney’s description of it, seems displaced, or more precisely, unplaced. Jack tells us that “Blacksmith is nowhere near a large city. We don’t feel threatened and aggrieved in quite the same way other towns do. We’re not smack in the path of history and its contaminations” (85). He proves to be only half-right: the town is, in fact, subject to “contaminations,” historically and otherwise. Jack’s geography is dated: Blacksmith is not so much “nowhere” as it is Everywhere, smack in the middle—if that is the right phrase—of a typically uncentered contemporary American landscape of freeways, airports, office parks, and abandoned industrial sites. According to Jack, “the main route out of town” passes through “a sordid gantlet of used cars, fast food, discount drugs and quad cinemas” (119). We’ve all run such a gantlet; we’ve all been to Blacksmith. It is the sort of town you can feel homesick for “even when you are there” (257).

Thus, despite a welter of detail, the crowded landscape in and around Blacksmith does not quite constitute a place, not in the sense of “place” as something that the characters in a more traditional novel might inhabit, identify with, and be identified by. Consider Jack’s description of how Denise, one of the Gladney children, updates her “address” book: “She was transcribing names and phone numbers from an old book to a new one. There were no addresses. Her friends had phone numbers only, a race of people with a seven-bit analog consciousness” (41). Consciousness of place as something that might be geographically or topographically (that is, locally) determined has been eroded by a variety of more universal cultural forms in addition to the telephone. Chief among them is television—Jack calls the TV set the “focal point” of life in Blacksmith (85). These more universal cultural forms are not just forms of media and media technology, however; the category includes such things as, for example, tract housing developments.

Despite the prefabricated setting of White Noise and the “seven-bit analog consciousness” of its characters, an earlier, more natural and more pastoral landscape figures throughout the novel as an absent presence of which the characters are still dimly aware. Fragments of this landscape are often evoked as negative tokens of a loss the characters feel but cannot quite articulate, or more interestingly—and perhaps more postmodern as well—as negative tokens of a loss the characters articulate, but cannot quite feel. In an early scene, one of many in which Jack Gladney and his colleague Murray Jay Siskind ponder the “abandoned meanings” of the postmodern world (184), the two men visit “the most photographed barn in america,” which lies “twenty-two miles into the country around Farmington” (12). In his role as narrator, Jack Gladney often notes details of topography with what seems to be a specious precision. But the speciousness of such details is exactly the issue. Even though it is surrounded by a countrified landscape of “meadows and apple orchards” where fences trail through “rolling fields” (12), Farmington is not at all what its name still declares it to be: a farming town. The aptness of that placename, and of the bits of rural landscape still surrounding the barn, has faded like an old photograph. As Murray Jay Siskind observes, “Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn” (12). The reality of the pastoral landscape has been sapped, not just by its repeated representation on postcards and in snapshots, but also by its new status as a tourist attraction: by the redesignation of its cow paths as people-movers. The question of authenticity, of originality, of what the barn was like “before it was photographed” and overrun by tourists, however alluring it may seem, remains oddly irrelevant (13). This is the case, as Murray observes, because he and Jack cannot get “outside the aura” of the cultural fuss surrounding the object itself, “the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film” (13)—noises that drown out the incessant clicking of insect wings and the rustling of leaves that once would have been the aural backdrop to the view of the barn.

As the novel’s foremost authority on the postmodern, Murray is “immensely pleased” by the most photographed barn in america (13). He is a visiting professor in the popular culture department, known officially as American environments” (9), an official title that signals the expansion of the department’s academic territory beyond what was formerly considered “cultural.” Jack dismisses Murray’s academic specialty as “an Aristotelianism of bubble gum wrappers and detergent jingles” (9)—that is, as a mistaken attempt to uncover the natural history of the artificial. Jack finds the barn vaguely disturbing.

But White Noise is about Jack’s belated education in the new protocols of the postmodern world in which he has to make his home. Jack learns a lot about those protocols from Murray and his colleagues, one of whom lectures a lunchtime crowd on the quotidian pleasures of the road (arguably a quintessentially postmodern American “place”). Professor Lasher sounds something like Charles Kuralt, only with more attitude:

“These are the things they don’t teach,” Lasher said. “Bowls with no seats. Pissing in sinks. The culture of public toilets. The whole ethos of the road. I’ve pissed in sinks all through the American West. I’ve slipped across the border to piss in sinks in Manitoba and Alberta. This is what it’s all about. The great western skies. The Best Western motels. The diners and drive-ins. The poetry of the road, the plains, the desert. The filthy stinking toilets. I pissed in a sink in Utah when it was twenty-two below. That’s the coldest I’ve ever pissed in a sink in.”

(68)

Lasher’s little diatribe may seem to suggest that DeLillo is satirizing the much-heralded replacement of an older cultural canon by a newer one: Lasher would throw out the Great Books, if he could, in favor of “the poetry of the road.” But in White Noise it is not so much the replacement as it is the displacement of older forms by newer ones, and the potential overlapping or even the merger of all those forms in an increasingly crowded cultural and natural landscape, that DeLillo records. “The great western skies,” the “Best Western motels,” “the road, the plains, the desert”—all are features of a single, seamless landscape.

Because of their ability to recognize so readily the odd continuities and everyday ironies of the postmodern world, the contentious members of the department of American environments seem better-adapted than their more cloistered colleagues. Their weirdness is enabling. By pursuing their interest in and enthusiasm for things like the culture of public toilets, they collapse the distinction between the vernacular and the academic and shorten the distance between the supermarket, where tabloids are sold, and the ivory tower, where the library is housed. It is instructive that whenever one of their more extreme claims is challenged, members of the department tend to reply in one of two ways: either they say, “It’s obvious” (a refrain that runs throughout the novel), when of course it (whatever it may be) isn’t at all obvious. Or they simply shrug and say, “I’m from New York.” In White Noise, all knowledge is local knowledge, but one must understand how shaped by the global the local has become. We’re all from New York.

While it is true that we can “take in”—as the saying goes—a landscape, the literal ingestion of nature (that is, of discrete bits and selected pieces of it) is probably the most intimate and most immediate of our relations with it. In a telling passage from the opening pages of the novel, Jack and his wife Babette encounter Murray Jay Siskind in the generic food products aisle of the local supermarket:

His basket held generic food and drink, nonbrand items in plain white packages with simple labeling. There was a white can labeled canned peaches. There was a white package of bacon without a plastic window for viewing a representative slice. A jar of roasted nuts had a white wrapper bearing the words irregular peanuts.

(18)

What is striking about the contents of Murray’s cart is the way in which, despite the determined efforts of all those labels to say in chorus the generic word food, they seem to be saying something else entirely. These “nonbrand items” actually seem to be all brand, nothing but brand; their categorical labels seem like mere gestures toward the idea of food, evocations of its half-forgotten genres. Remember uncanned peaches? Visible bacon? regular peanuts? The packaging and the labels do not resolve the question of contents. They raise it; that is, they heighten it, so that it seems more important than ever before.

The jar of irregular peanuts in particular has a disturbing, perhaps even slightly malign quality, as Murray explains: “‘I’ve bought these peanuts before. They’re round, cubical, pock-marked, seamed. Broken peanuts. A lot of dust at the bottom of the jar. But they taste good. Most of all I like the packages themselves. […] This is the last avant-garde. Bold new forms. The power to shock’” (19). Siskind’s identification of the jar of peanuts as part of “the last avant-garde” suggests that cultural production has reached the ne plus ultra of innovation, that henceforward it will consist not in making things new, but in the repackaging of old things, of the detritus of nature and the rubble of culture. “Most of all,” Murray says, “I like the packages themselves.” So there will not be any more avant-gardes after this one—it is not the latest, but “the last.” Those irregular peanuts mark the end of history: more than just irregular, they are apocalyptic peanuts. No wonder Murray savors them. Each is a bite-size reminder of the “end of nature” and the “end of history,” two of the postmodernist’s favorite themes.

The canned peaches, the invisible bacon, and the irregular peanuts also demonstrate very clearly how postmodern culture does not oppose itself to nature (as we tend to assume culture must always do). Instead, it tries to subsume it, right along with its own cultural past. But one would like to protest that despite all this repackaging and attempted subsumption, the fact is that peanuts—even irregular ones—do not result from cultural production, but from the reproduction of other peanuts. One wants to say that natural selection (plus a little breeding), and not culture, has played the central and determining role in the evolution of peanuts of whatever kind. But the role of nature as reproductive source, even as an awareness of it is echoed in certain moments of the novel, tends to get lost in the haze of cultural signals or “white noise” that Jack Gladney struggles and largely fails to decipher, probably because all noise is white noise in a postmodern world. Murray Jay Siskind, as a connoisseur of the postmodern, is sublimely indifferent to factual distinctions between, say, the natural and the cultural of the sort that still worry less-attuned characters like Jack Gladney.

That they must eat strange or irregular foods is only part of the corporeal and psychological adjustment Jack and his family find themselves struggling to make. At least they remain relatively aware of what they eat, in that they choose to eat it. But “consumption” is not necessarily always a matter of choice in White Noise: there are things that enter the orifices, or that pass through the porous membranes of the body, and make no impression on the senses. These more sinister invaders of the body include the chemicals generated by industry, many of them merely as by-products, chemicals that may or may not be of grave concern to “consumers”—not entirely the right term, of course, since few people willingly “consume” toxins. After all, we do not have to eat the world in order to have intimate relations with it, since we take it in with every breath and every dilation of our pores. This suggests that the much-bewailed runaway consumerism of postmodern society is not the whole story: there are other kinds of exchange taking place that do not necessarily have to do with economics alone. The cash nexus is certainly economic, but the chemical nexus is both economic and ecological; the economy of by-products, of toxic waste, is also an ecology. Economic or ecological fundamentalism makes it hard to tell the whole story about postmodernism, as DeLillo is trying to do.

During the novel’s central episode, the “airborne toxic event,” Jack Gladney is exposed to a toxin called Nyodene Derivative (“derivative” because it is a useless by-product). Nyodene D and its possible effects are first described for Jack by a technician at the simuvac (“simuvac” is an acronym for “simulated evacuation”) refugee center: “‘It’s the two and a half minutes standing right in it that makes me wince. Actual skin and orifice contact. This is Nyodene D. A whole new generation of toxic waste. What we call state of the art. One part per million can send a rat into a permanent state’” (138–39). The technician’s last phrase is richly ambiguous: does “a permanent state” mean death or never-ending seizure or a sort of chemically induced immortality? This ambiguity terrifies Jack, and he begins to seek some surer knowledge of the danger he is in. At this point in the narrative, DeLillo’s novel speaks most clearly about the effect the postmodern condition has on our knowledge of our bodies (and thus on our knowledge of nature). Having crunched all Jack’s numbers in the simuvac computer, the technician informs him, “I’m getting bracketed numbers with pulsing stars,” and he adds that Jack would “rather not know” what that means (140). Of, course, that is precisely what Jack would most like to know. The attempt at clarification offered by the technician at the end of their conversation does nothing to explain to Jack exactly when, why, and how he might die: “It just means that you are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that.” (141).

The remainder of the novel is taken up with Jack Gladney’s attempt to escape the reductive judgment of his fate given by the simuvac technician and his computer (whose bracketed numbers with pulsing stars “represent” Jack’s death, but do so opaquely, in a completely nonrepresentative way, rather like the white package marked bacon that conceals the supermarket’s generic pork product). As the repository of junk food and as a host for wayward toxins and lurking diseases, Jack’s body has become a medium, in much the same way that television or radio are media. His postmodern body is hard to get at in the same way that the nameless voices on television—the ones that throughout the novel say macabre things like “Now we will put the little feelers on the butterfly” (96)—cannot always be identified, much less questioned or otherwise engaged in dialogue. In White Noise, the body itself is mediated, occult, hard to identify, and unavailable for direct interrogation by any solely human agent or agency. The postmodern body is, then, a curiously disembodied thing. It no longer makes itself known by means of apparent symptoms that can be diagnosed by a doctor, nor by means of feelings that can be decoded by the organism it hosts (it may be a little old-fashioned to think of this organism as a “person”). During his interview with Dr. Chakravarty, Jack utters a tortured circumlocution in response to the simple question, “How do you feel?” His carefully qualified reply, “To the best of my knowledge, I feel very well,” demonstrates how distant from him Jack’s body now seems (261). That this body just happens to be his own gives Jack no real epistemological advantage. In a postmodern world, technology and the body are merely different moments of the same feedback loop, just as the city and the country are merged in a common landscape of death. Because it is the place in which distinctions between bodies and machines, and between the city and country, have collapsed, “Autumn Harvest Farms” is an exemplar of postmodern pastoral space: at Autumn Harvest Farms, the machine not only belongs in the garden, it is the garden.

However confused he may be, and however paralyzed by his half-living, half-dead condition, Jack Gladney does seem to “feel,” at times, a certain lingering nostalgia about and interest in “nature in general.” This longing, if not for the prelapsarian world, then at least for some contact with a nature other than that of his own befuddled self, is apparent even in the lie Jack tells the Autumn Harvest Farms clinician in response to a question about his use of nicotine and caffeine: “Can’t understand what people see in all this artificial stimulation. I get high just walking in the woods” (279). The only time in the novel when Jack actually goes for something like a walk “in the woods” is when he visits a rural cemetary. Like everything else in the novel, this cemetary has an overdetermined quality: it is called “the old burying ground,” and it is both authentic—actually an old burying ground, that is—and a tourist trap. It is both what it is and an image or metaphor of what it is. And so the old burying ground seems uncanny, with the same kind of heightened unreality about it that gives Murray’s jar of irregular peanuts and the most photographed barn in america their peculiar auras.

Nonetheless, it may be at the old burying ground that Jack comes closest to feeling some of the peace that the countryside can bring:

I was beyond the traffic noise, the intermittent stir of factories across the river. So at least in this they’d been correct, placing the graveyard here, a silence that had stood its ground. The air had a bite. I breathed deeply, remained in one spot, waiting to feel the peace that is supposed to descend upon the dead, waiting to see the light that hangs above the fields of the landscapist’s lament.

(97)

But in this remnant of an older, more pastoral landscape set in the midst of a contemporary sprawl—across the Lethean river separating the graveyard from the factories in town, but still sandwiched between the town, the freeway, and the local airport—Jack does not quite have the epiphany he is so clearly seeking. His hope of living within the natural cycle of life and death suggested to him by his visit to the old burying ground has already been foreclosed by events. Direct encounter with nature, “walking in the woods,” is no longer possible, not only because nature seems to have become largely an anecdotal matter of broadcast tidbits of information about animals (bighorn sheep, dolphins, etc.), but also because nature, like the body, has been ineluctably altered by technology. the old burying ground, landscaped as it is, and given its purpose, is a crude example of this alternation, however comforting Jack finds it.

The supermarket is the place that the characters in the novel depend on most for a sense of order, pattern, and meaning, and thus it fulfills something of the cultural function that used to be assigned to the pastoral. The difference is that the supermarket has an obscure relationship to the rest of the world, particularly to the natural world whose products it presumably displays. The supermarket is a pastoral space removed from nature. Unfortunately, even this artificial haven is disturbingly altered by the novel’s end: “The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of the older shoppers” (326). The “agitation and panic in the aisles” of the supermarket links the postmodern condition back to an older set of fears and confusions that predate the repose that the pastoral is supposed to offer. DeLillo makes this very clear earlier in the novel when he has Jack Gladney use the word “panic” to describe his anxiety upon awakening in the middle of the night: “In the dark the mind runs on like a devouring machine, the only thing awake in the universe. I tried to make out the walls, the dresser in the corner. It was the old defenseless feeling. Small, weak, deathbound, alone. Panic, the god of woods and wilderness, half goat” (224). Thus Jack finds himself in the wilderness even while he is supposedly safe at home in Blacksmith. The order and rationality, the civilized space, that modernity (like the pastoral) supposedly created seems to be no longer a feature of the postmodern landscape.

The postmodern pastoral, unlike its predecessors, cannot restore the harmony and balance of culture with nature, because the cultural distinctions that the pastoral used to make—like that between the city and the country—have become too fluid to have any force and are dissolved in the toxic fog of airborne events. Neither culture nor nature are what they used to be. But perhaps DeLillo’s point is that they never were, that the distinction between culture and nature cannot be taken as an absolute. As a novelist, he knows just how thoroughly “all of culture and all of nature get churned up again every day” (2), as Bruno Latour puts it in his appositely-titled book, We Have Never Been Modern (from which it follows that we cannot possibly be “postmodern” in the strict sense of the term). DeLillo is also aware of another point on which Latour insists: he realizes that the everyday churning up of nature and culture is not just a matter of media representations. Latour argues that “the intellectual culture in which we live does not know how to categorize” the “strange situations” produced by the interactions of nature and culture because they are simultaneously material, social, and linguistic, and our theories are poorly adapted to them (3). They are not cognizant of what Latour likes to call “nature-culture.”

It seems to me that Latour—and DeLillo—are right, and that postmodernist theorists (unlike postmodern novelists, whose work is often finer grained than theory) have invested too much in the ultimately false distinction between nature and culture. They have tried to argue what amounts to a revision of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, first promulgated in his 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Turner argued that the closing of the frontier and the disappearance of wilderness was a turning point in American culture; the postmodernists—especially the more radical or pessimistic postmodernists like François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard, or Fredric Jameson—argue that the disappearance of nature is a turning point in global culture. Postmodernism is a frontier thesis for the next millenium, more dependent on what has been called “the idea of wilderness” than its exponents have realized.

Works Cited

Alpers, Paul. What Is Pastoral? Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.

Delillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Viking Penguin, 1985.

Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral. Norfolk: New Directions Books. n.d.

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.

Lentricchia, Frank, ed. Introducing Don DeLillo. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

———. New Essays on White Noise. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.

Moses, Michael. “Lust Removed from Nature.” In Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke UP, 1991: 63–86.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” In The Frontier in American History. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1986. 1–38.