A Thesis for the Master of Arts Department of Foreign Languages and Literature

National Cheng Kung University

The End of Time, Natural History and Post-apocalypse: American Innocence in Don DeLillos White Noise

Graduate StudentYen-hung Chen

AdvisorProf. Shu-li Chang

101 2 Feb 2012

Abstract

After its publication in 1985, White Noise has been regarded as one of the most

representative works expressive of postmodern zeitgeist. While depictions of such cultural

phenomena as advertisement and consumerism make up of the major part of this novel, Don

DeLillo presents a story diluted by miscellaneous incidents through the eyes of the

protagonist Jack Gladney to portray the different aspects of postmodern everyday life. As a

professor, husband and father, Jack, who lives in the midst of and is within the information

network interwoven by the mass media, supermarket and technologies, faces various tedious

duties and plays different banal rolesflirting provocatively with Hitler studies to secure his

career, finding out his wifes secret medication, sitting with his family in front of television

on each Friday night and so on. Yet, though his life is stuffed with trivial happenings, to Jack,

he cant help thinking about death. No matter how hard he tries to carry his life purposelessly,

Jack is unable to get rid of the sudden intrusion of fear and anxiety provoked by his thought

on death. In this thesis, in order to explain why DeLillo makes White Noise a seemingly

uncritical work that focuses on the banality of Jacks everyday life, I will attempt to flesh out

the discourse of American innocence hidden under the narrative surface of this novel, which I

would borrow James Bergers idea of Reaganist post-apocalyptic rhetoric to outline its

characteristics in the introduction. Chapter One, by emphasizing on the paradoxical temporal

relatedness and thematic unrelatedness of consecutive events in White Noise, aims at making

sense of the structural aporia in DeLillos work. From a review of three critics essays and by

drawing on Gerhard Hoffmanns notion of situationalism, I would like to indicate the

dichotomized interpretations made both by critics and by Hoffmann, all of whom are too

eager to extract a positive meaning out of the novel to touch and confront the nucleus of the

structural innovation of White Noise. Though those critics try to put their emphases on

finding out images that can, in a way, explain the paradox they find in this work, they all

avoid explaining what that paradox means and instead they simply attempt to substitute it

with either an image of thought or a possibility of multiplicity. To avoid falling prey to this

easy dichotomization, I will turn to the core of the paradox in DeLillos workthe

paradoxical sense of time. Rather than grounding my reading on the binary logic of

either-orunity/parts, one/many or duration/moments, I argue instead that there is an implicit

desire hidden behind the paradoxical sense of time in White Noisea wish to be innocent or

free from the burdens of time, one that, on the one hand, makes the novel insensitive to the

demand for thematic significance, and, on the other hand, drives the story to move

headlong to the end of time. Then, in Chapter Two, to continue my explorations on the sense

of innocence emanated from and if not rhetorically performed in White Noise, I will place my

focus on Jacks obsession with death by elaborating on and linking it with the notion of the

end of time I discuss in Chapter One. Firstly, by drawing on Walter Benjamin and Eric

Santners explanations on natural history, I attempt to discuss what the relations between

death and the end of time in this work. Whereas, in a thematic level, the novel seems

preoccupied with deatha will-be state of being that prompts either Jack or reader to grasp

what Jack/his full being is; in a formal level, the novel seems to move in a circuitous manner

that both moves towards and away from the end of time. As such, the novel repeatedly

interrupts its own narrative course and leaves behind embodiments of death, those remains

that constitute for Santner a natural history, in its course at the same time. Such natural

history making not only induces us readers to dig out what those consecutive but unrelated

narrated remainings signify. A sense of incomprehensible marks on Jacks habitual response

in life, given that he doesnt respond to any kind of change brought by occurrences at all

because the only apocalypse is his own death. Then, I will analyze how Jack faces death in

this work to further describe his insistence on his innocence, an innocence that is masked as

and covered under his perverse confidence in his ability to keep death awayhe thinks he is

the exception. Finally, before getting back to Bergers elucidation on post-apocalypse rhetoric,

in the conclusion, I will summarize what Id discussed in my thesis first. By rewinding how

Jacks innocence is presented by the form and the content in White Noisethe paradoxical

sense of time and death as a structural element and a narrative force, I would like to connect

these features expressive of innocence in the novel to ones of Reaganist post-apocalyptic

rhetoric. While both share the sense of time that eliminates distinctions among past, presence

and future, and a disavowal attitude that endeavors to protect their own beliefs, I will

allegorize DeLillos work to other historical contexts and references of American culture.

Then, to conclude, I will discuss the relation between Jacks innocence and his postmodern

environment as wellhe doesnt know how to respond it other than remaining his innocent

optimism in his own belief.

Keywords: the end of time; natural history; post-apocalyptic rhetoric; American innocence

1985

To my advisor, Prof. Shu-li Chang, who kindly tolerates my unwise behaviors, sets up an

exemplary model I greatly esteem and provides me with numerous help; my committee members who gave me lots of useful advices; my families who always supports me with their silent worries; Wan-chi Weng who quietly waits for my slow thesis writing and my dear friends who accompanies me no matter what I did and what happened

Table of Contents

Introduction: Why Noise?---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1

Chapter One: The End of Time---------------------------------------------------------------------------------9

Reading for Unity or Reading for Multiplicity--------------------------------------------------------15

Situationalism for Multiplicity--------------------------------------------------------------------------22

Toward the End of Time---------------------------------------------------------------------------------30

Chapter Two: Natural History---------------------------------------------------------------------------------34

Remnants or Living on-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------36

Natural History: Benjamin and Santner----------------------------------------------------------------46

Innocence Revealing--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------55

Conclusion: Toward Post-apocalypse------------------------------------------------------------------------67

Works Cited------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------73

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Introduction

Why Noise?

All you have to do is to tell the truth

What truth does he want?...

...He wants your truth.

What good is my truth? My truth means nothing

White Noise (23)

After its publication in 1985, White Noise has long been considered as one of the most

representative works expressive of postmodern zeitgeist. While descriptions about cultural

phenomena like technology, advertisement and consumerism make up the major part of this novel,

Don DeLillo, through the eyes of the protagonist Jack Gladney, presents a story diluted by

miscellaneous incidents for portraying different aspects of postmodern everyday life. As a professor,

husband and father who lives in the midst of the information network interwoven by the mass media,

supermarket and technologies, Jack not only needs to fulfill tedious duties in his daily life, but also

plays various banal roles entangled in the so-called postmodern circumstancesimulating the

appearance of Hitler for securing his career, finding out what his wifes secret medication that aims

at eliminating her fear of death, sitting with his family in front of television on each Friday night

and so on. Yet, even though his life is stuffed with trivial happenings, to Jack, he cant help thinking

about death incessantly. No matter how hard he tries to carry his life purposelessly, Jack is unable to

get rid of the sudden intrusion of fear and anxiety provoked by his thought on death. So, in this

novel, through so diverse textual exportationspostmodernity, quotidian life, fear of death et cetera,

DeLillo presents a rather noisy work. Given that presentation of each cultural image presents

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discrepant figurations of significance, this novel, for readers and critics, is like a reservoir

overloaded with information. While it cues us to read it from several perspectives it relates toa

highly capitalized society, a world filled with simulations or even a metaphysical inquiry about

ones existence, such heteroglossic significations in White Noise not only blur our foci on digging

an interpretation about it out, but also make it too unspecific to be critical.

In this thesis, in order to explain such an interpretative deadlock DeLillos White Noise

poseswhy an uncritical work that focuses on the banality of Jacks postmodern daily life is

regarded as a representative of postmodern novel, I will attempt to flesh out the discourse of

American innocence hidden under the narrative surface of this work, which construes why it is

uncritical via Jacks narration and how it corresponds to its postmodern context. Yet, before delving

into my analysis that targets at depicting innocence in the novel, in this introduction, firstly I would

like to take a detour to James Bergers idea of post-apocalypse which concerns about the Reaganist

rhetoric popular in 1980s. By indicating two features of such rhetoricit manifests a distinctive

sense of time that breaks distinctions among past, presence and future, and issues a denial that

negates the existence of trauma for preserving perfection of America, I will take Bergers idea as a

template for understanding the deadlock in DeLillos work. That is, inasmuch as Jacks narrative in

this novel also characterizes with these two features, which I will discuss in my two chapters about

its form and its contents respectively, I argue that this rhetoric not only helps us to see the innocence

DeLillo designs to present via Jacks narrative. It assists us to recognize an epistemological attitude

toward postmodern condition as well. As post-apocalyptic rhetoric displays the confidence in what

it intends to upholdflawlessness of America the nation, Jacks narrative also carries such

all-knowing optimism. To Jack, it is his belief in his good life that exhibits this innocent confidence.

Then, after explanations of Bergers idea, in the following, I will briefly introduce the scheme of my

thesis. Through two terms I coin to describe the conceptual figuration of the form and the content of

White Noisethe end of time and natural history, I would like to present how I try to prove

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DeLillos work is post-apocalyptic, which bespeaks DeLillos irresponsive response to postmodern

condition through its presentation of the paradoxical sense of time and its disavowal attitude toward

admitting its imperfection.

What is the Reaganist Post-apocalypse Rhetoric?

To Berger, Reaganist post-apocalypse rhetoric bears two distinct characteristics. Firstly, as it

clings to a belief that America was perfect in its inception, has always been perfect, and is perfect

today (134), such rhetoric carries out a peculiar sense of timeits like a prophecy that the result

was ever achieved and is fulfilled in advance while it is made. Taking Reagans campaign speech in

1984 as an instance, Berger quotes: It was a second American revolution [he says of his first term],

and its only just begun. But America is back, a giant, powerful in its renewed spirit, its growing

economy, powerful in its ability to build a new future. And you know something? Thats not

debatable (qtd. in 136). For Reagan, though his so-called revolution just begins, America whose

statusa powerful and giant-like presence that is undebatable and a will-behas already been

achieved. That is, the revolution had finished revolting. America, with its renewed spirit and

growing economy, has already acquired the ability to build up a new future now. The revolution that

just begins had already succeeded because its effect has arrived. Yet, via Reagans

sayingAmerica is back, it seems like that such new America isnt a real new one. Rather, it

was something ever existed before but disappeared for a while. Through the revolution that just

begins and has achieved its wonderful results, such once existed America is back and sets up a

possibility for bridging Americans to a new future. So to speak, in Reaganist post-apocalypse

rhetoric, a singular sense of time dominates its narrative logic. If the revolutionwhat brings the

end of the world as we know it (Hall 3), namely, the apocalypseis prophesized, such an

undebatable ending revealed in this prophecyAmerica is back and is powerful in being able to

bring up a new futureis what will and must occur. However, in Reagans speech, this ending has

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already happened. Whereas the status that America is ready for a new future is post-apocalyptic

for America had experienced the revolution he refers to, such readiness had been there when

Reagan says his speech/prophecy outAmerica is back and is powerful enough. Besides, while this

prophecy delivers a teleological view that both the end and the destiny of America are

includedbeing powerful for a better future, this future that will befall has already been

contained by its origin paradoxically. It is about the once powerful America that was lost, is going

to be retained and has even been acquired again. Therefore, for Berger, in this kind of rhetoric, an

achieved utopia is displayed (138). For Reaganist, only perfection will be, must be and is

achieved in America.

Nevertheless, why does Reaganist post-apocalyptic rhetoric operate in this way? Berger

explains that Reaganism, the dominant political direction of the 1980s (138), is a composite

ideological phenomenon that covers plural political and historical sources. While it appertains to

positions such as economics, military strategy, religion, sexuality and law that attempt[s] in

some way to undo the incomplete changes of [the 1960s] (139), Reaganism, regarding the 1960s as

a site of trauma or apocalypse owing to what Americans are reminded of in the civil right

movement in that decadethe history of the racial oppression, like the slave trade and the

destruction of Native American cultures (140), reacts to purge such imperfection through its

distinctive narrative pattern. That is to say, for Berger, Reaganist post-apocalyptic rhetoric is not

only an exemplification of a belief in Americas perfection. Its also a distinctive expression that

denies or disavows the historical trauma as well. Like how Reagan illustrates Martin Luther Kings

achievement in a speech given on Kings birthday in 1987, he, via his post-apocalyptic rhetoric,

rejects the fact that the racial injustice ever exists in America. Berger quotes: What he

accomplishednot just for black Americans, but for all Americanshe lifted a heavy burden from

this country. As surely as black Americans were scarred by the yoke of slavery, America was

scarred by injustice. Many Americans didnt fully realize how heavy Americas burden was until it

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was lifted (qtd. in 143). Even though Reagans words seemingly focus on depicting what King

does for Americato lift the burden of the racial injustice, there is an implication in his speech that

this burden, for him, does not really exist. Whereas it was not realized by most Americans until it

was solved by Kings accomplishment, this injustice is not what people know before it disappears.

Put it differently, as the racial injustice is not acknowledged by most Americans, except for black

Americans, at all, it doesnt exist in, at least, white Americans world. Besides, for they know

nothing about it, the racism can never be a problem for them, either. However, to Reagan, the most

important thing is not whether the racial injustice ever existed in America or not. Instead, since

America was scarred by the racial injustice which is now lifted, racism does not linger in America

anymore. That is, the racism, as something unknown in the past, is not a problem now. Though it

might be a problem that most Americans did not sense in the past, its out of responsibilities of

Reagan or white Americans in 1980s. So, in his speech, Reagan, via his post-apocalypse rhetoric

that denies existence of the racism for America is always believed to be perfect, manifests

characteristics of his narrativesthe traditional American apocalyptic prophecywhat America

will be, or is meant to be, or ought to beslides instantaneously into post-apocalyptic fulfillment

(145). Namely, for Reagan, America is and has always been New Jerusalem or City on a Hill or

promised land (143). To preserve its perfection, in his rhetoric acts, to deny what reminds of its

imperfectionhistorical trauma such as racism in the past or presentis needed repeatedly.

Therefore, for Berger, Reaganism in 1980s exemplifies a peculiar way of rhetoric form that

attempt to reconcile its vision of America as an achieved utopiawith destabilizing events and

ideasthat called this vision into question (xviii). In Reaganists view, whereas America is

perfect and has always been perfect (135), the post-apocalyptic rhetoric that negates flaws or

trauma twicenothing bad or unjust existed in the past and exist in the presence, or nothing was

imperfect in the past and is imperfect nownot only bespeaks its optimism within its negative

attitude but also cues us a way to understand why its sense of time is folded into one. That is to say,

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in order to protect this achieved utopia from any forms of damages, Reaganist post-apocalyptic

rhetoric exercises its epistemological sovereignty supported by its belief through simultaneously

predicting and fulfilling the apocalypse, or a change, it expects. With such an epistemological

stance, in this thesis, I would like to further explicate it is what Jack maintains in White Noise. On

the one hand, while Bergers idea of post-apocalypse relates to 1980s, I would like to unlock the

allegorical potential of White Noise which is not limited to one expression but is open to other

historical contexts and references of American culture. On the other hand, since Reaganists

post-apocalypse is a post-apocalypse that has repressed its apocalyptic moment (emphasis added

135), via this narrative feature, I would like to add that Jacks innocence is more than a caricature of

American culture. As such innocence is also his responses toward postmodern circumstance he

inhabits in, it exposes Jack or DeLillos irresponsive responsehe cant criticize it directly nor

accept it totally; therefore, he can only un-resolve his narrative and remains optimistically confident

in what he can control.

Whats Next?

Chapter One, by emphasizing on the paradoxical temporal relatedness and thematic

unrelatedness of consecutive events in White Noise, aims at making sense of the structural aporia in

DeLillos work. From a review of three critics essays and by drawing on Gerhard Hoffmanns

notion of situationalism, I would like to indicate the dichotomized interpretations made both by

critics and Hoffmann, all of whom are too eager to extract a positive meaning out of this novel to

touch and confront the nucleus of the structural contradiction in White Noise. Although those critics

try to put their emphases on finding out images that can, in a way, explain the paradox they find in

this work, they all avoid explaining what this paradox means and instead simply attempt to

substitute it with either an image of thought or the possibility of multiplicity. In this chapter, to

avoid falling prey to this easy dichotomization, I will turn my analysis to the core of the paradox in

Chen 7

White Noisethe paradoxical sense of time. Rather than grounding my reading on the binary logic

of either-orunity/parts, one/many or duration/moments, I argue that there is instead an implicit

desire hidden behind such sense of time in DeLillos novela wish to be innocent, one that, on the

one hand, makes the novel insensitive to the demand for thematic significance, and, on the other

hand, drives the story to move headlong to the end of time. That is, time in White Noise seems never

ends and it can thus continue ad infinitum.

Then, in Chapter Two, to continue my explorations on the sense of innocence emanated from

and if not rhetorically performed in White Noise, I will place my focus on Jacks obsession with

death by elaborating on and linking it with the notion of the end of time I discuss in Chapter One.

Firstly, by drawing on Walter Benjamin and Eric Santners explanations on natural history, I attempt

to discuss what the relations between death and the end of time in this work. Whereas, in a thematic

level, the novel seems to be preoccupied with deatha will-be state of being that prompts either

Jack or reader to grasp what Jacks/his full being is, the novel seems to move in a circuitous manner

that both moves towards and away from the end of time in a formal level. As such, the novel

repeatedly interrupts its own narrative course and leaves behind embodiments of death, those

remains that constitute for Benjamin and Santner a natural history, in its course at the same time.

Such natural history making not only manifests how Jack is continuously haunted by his fear of

death and how he responds to it in the novelhe shuns death as if it is what he can totally

understand. A sense of incomprehensibility marks on Jacks habitual response in life as well, given

that he doesnt respond to any kind of change brought by occurrences at all because he only

believes in what he recognizes. That is, like how he negates death as a knowable thing in his life, he

is in fact confident in what he thinks to be the truth. Then, by adopting Henry F. Mays idea of

American innocence, I would like to further explicate the epistemological position Jack takes in

White Noise. Forasmuch as Jack keeps himself from death within a knowable distance, I contend,

such ability he thinks he owns, except for his innocence in his exceptional state, discloses Jacks

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confidence in his invincibility. From two textual instanceshow Jack reacts to two major and

deathly events in the novel, the airborne toxic event and his revenge on Mink due to Babettes affair,

I would like to indicate how such innocence influences Jacks actshe so trusts in his own ideal

that he becomes careless about how he achieves it and what he undergoes.

Lastly, in the conclusion, before returning to Bergers post-apocalypse, I will summarize what

Id discussed in my thesis first. By rewinding how Jacks innocence is presented by the form and

the content in White Noisethe paradoxical sense of time and death as a structural element and a

narrative force, I would like to connect these features expressive of innocence in the novel to ones

of Reaganist post-apocalyptic rhetoric. While both share the sense of time that eliminates

distinctions among past, presence and future, and a disavowal attitude that endeavors to protect their

own beliefs, I will allegorize DeLillos work to other historical contexts and references of American

culture. Then, to conclude, I will also discuss the relation between Jacks innocence and his

postmodern environmenthe doesnt know how to respond it other than remaining his innocent

optimism in his own belief.

Chen 9

Chapter One

The End of Time

Is a symptom a sign or a thing? What is a thing and

how do we know its not another thing?

White Noise (126)

White Noise, one of the most representative novels of postmodern literature, poses difficulty of

comprehension to the readers, mainly because what the novel is regarded to illustratea

postmodern cultural condition which is suspicious of absolute truth and which embraces

multiplicityresists easy comprehension. Although the story in White Noise is not too difficult to

understand, its narrative which chronologically describes what happens to Jack in one year presents

manifold postmodern phenomena but does not offer its reader a singular focus that can enable us to

decipher what this novel means. Take the first and the last chapter of this novel as examples. The

novel begins with a scene in which the first-person narrator/character Jack, while looking at a

parade of station wagons driving in and out of the campus with proud parents dropping their college

kids on the first day of class, thinks to himself how this assembly of station wagons suggests to

them that they are a collection of the like-minded and the spiritually akin, a people, a nation (4).

Yet, the novel ends with three unrelated scenesfirst of Wilder riding bravely on his bicycle across

a busy highway, then of Babette, Wilder and Jack watching the sunset together, and finally of their

shopping at an identified supermarket. Taking together, the beginning and the end of the novel

exemplify how, on the one hand, the narration lacks coherence, and, on the other, Jacks life also

lacks purpose and significance.

Through the use of this piling up of unrelated episodes in which nothing significant actually

happens, the narrator Jack introduces, rather randomly, his work, family life and his thoughts. A

Chen 10

narrative model is set up in chapter onein a chronological order his reflections and accounts of

disassociated events are interlaced into a narrative. In chapter one of this novel, for instance, Jack

begins by describing how parents and students arrive in station wagons, forming an assembly as if

they were a people, a nation. A page later, he moves on to describe his banal and eventless family

life, as he lives at the end of a quiet street with Babette and their children by previous

marriages, while working as the chairman of the department of Hitler studies at the College

on-the-Hill (4). There is no logical connection between Jacks thoughts about the station-wagon

assembly and his life, regardless his domestic or professional one. Yet, the narration which conjoins

both seems to homogenize them into one sequence where a focal point dominates. In other words, it

is the narration that provides the structural principle of chapter one. In terms of the contents of

these events described, there is no discernible logical connection among them. Such dissociation

between the expression of narrative form and that of content is not only pervasive in the first

chapter of this novel. Its even obvious in the last chapter as well. As Jack jumps from one pointless

scene to anotherfrom Wilders death-defying bicycle ride, the sunset watch and shopping at the

supermarket, this concluding chapter that is supposed to wrap up the loose ends of this novel neither

concludes anything, nor does it relate back to two major events occurred in previous chaptersthe

toxic event and Jacks revenge on Mink.

Of course, it is possible for us to argue that the three seemingly unrelated scenes described in

the last chapter do resonate with the main themes of the novel such as death, community and

consumerism. It is also possible for us to insist that the placing of these three unrelated scenes

together in one chapter represents an authorial strategy to underscore the singularity of each

otherwise insignificant event of the everyday. Without any precession or succession that induces

their happenings or closes the effect they bring up in the story, these three events presented in the

last chapter seemingly depart from the stream of time theyre situated in. As if they can be placed in

any part of this story because of their untimeliness, these three events which close White Noise

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without truly ending it manifest the paradox caused by the opposition between their positions in the

temporal sequence of the novel and their assumed thematic significancethey are expected to end

the novel but they do not at all. Thus, White Noise, while seemingly pointing towards some themes

without placing focus upon any particular theme, exhibits one interpretive aporia: what does the

novel mean as it presents so many details, scenes, and events, without eventually expressing much,

at least not much that is of any significance?

Generally speaking, the so-called narrative contains both actions or events, which prompt the

progress of the story, and characters whose characteristics or motivations are revealed through their

actions. The novel, as an extended narrative (novel 226), doubtlessly carries greater

complications of plot, character, et cetera. So to speak, whilst we aim to understand a narrative or a

novel, we, except for plot and character, often overlook one of its fundamental componentsa sort

of consistency that sustains the evolution of plots and development of characters. Namely, since a

narrative/novel/story is one spatial temporal entity created by the presentation of its plot, character

and so on, we, through our spending the time of reading it page by page, will gradually unfold what

it conveys within its flow of time. Such process of understandingwe engage in excavating the

messages hidden within typed lines to enter a fictional world (or a virtual time/space) to experience

what it enclosesdemands our paying attention to the spatio-temporal movement of a narrative.

For us, not until the end can we ascertain what a story really means. Whats more, as long as such

spatio-temporal consistency is maintained throughout the narrative, it indicates that the sequential

order a story bears is also sustained. A narrative, in other words, is thematically significant and

sense-making as long as it maintains, sustains, and retains its temporal sequentiality. That is to say,

a narrative can be said to be word-making and world-making when it follows a linear and causal

sequentiality that temporally moves from a beginning to an end and casually moves from the cause

to an effect. Or, at least, a narrative can be understood as a serial of events even though its narrated

in non-chronological order.

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Given our premise that a narrative/novel/story grounds its thematic significance on the

consistency of its narrative movement, especially on the temporal movement of its narrative, we can

better understand why DeLillos White Noise, though it is replete with actions and events, ends up

telling us little about what the novel really means. Like what the first and the last chapters of White

Noise demonstratethe excess of unrelated events and the lacking of a consistent thematic focus

underscore an interpretative aporia. On the one hand, whereas a series of events are related within

the spatio-temporal movement of a narrative, the form of a story will also mold its contents in

accordance with the scope and sequence of these events and actions. However, as my discussion of

the opening and the closing chapters of DeLillos White Noise makes clear, there is a clearly

discernible gap between the excess of consecutive events and the formal un-relatedness of these

events: Jacks looking at the parade of station wagons doesnt seem to be a significant event that

bears any relevancy to other events in Jacks life; likewise, Wilders bike ride, the sunset watch and

the reshuffling of shelves in the supermarket dont relate to each other, either. Such disconnection

between the contents of the novel and its form not only blurs presentations of White Noise through

an out-of-focused lens, but it also gives each singular event a sense of incompletion, thereby

depriving each of any constitutive thematic signification as well.

On the other hand, the discrepancy between the expression of form and contents in DeLillos

novel, rather than simply exhibits an interpretative aporia of this work for us readers, demonstrates

the ambiguity of time that furthers this difficulty of interpretation. Although White Noise, by

relating accounts of a series of events taking place chronologically in a year, does tie each narrated

event into one sequence, the nonsequentiality brought by noncausal relations among the narrated

events instead smashes any readerly expectation for consistency excited by the linear narrative form

in DeLillos work. Time, as a measuring medium which is used to order events and quantify rate of

change, is made paradoxical thanks to the discordance between the form and contents in this novel.

Whilst all happenings are joined in one sequence of time and divided by their irrelevant relations,

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every event seems to be both a narrated duration and a part of the linear time simultaneously. Like

those events in the first and last chapters of White Noisethey, regardless of their noncausal

relations, are put into a sequential course of narrative so that every event in this work becomes

perplexing in terms of the overall meaning the novel conveys. That is, in the sense of time, each

event in the novel becomes a moment and a part of the durationa singularity and an element that

constitutes a part of the theme.

A paradox thus arises. Given that there is an excess of unrelated events in White Noise, each

event may be thematic significant for it seems to suggest a thematic lesson. Yet, not only each event

is singular, but also it is non-resonant with one another so that, taken together, these events do not

point towards a singular idea that can be taken as the ultimate meaning or theme of the novel. This

is not to say that these events are not, in a curious way, related; after all, they are placed into a

temporal sequence and are therefore temporally related. Such paradoxical doublenessas events

are temporally related but thematically unrelatednot only influences our ways of understanding

each of themevents in this work may be important/irregular details or trivial/quotidian

descriptions. It also forces us to take different paths while we try to analyze what White Noise

signifies; that is, neither to read this novel whose formal unity signifies the singularity of its

thematic significance nor to read it as a novel whose temporality, or lack of it, connotes multiple but

different themes. Thus, it is the contradictory sense of time produced by the discrepancy between

the form and content in Jacks narrative that makes White Noise aporetic in its own significance.

The chronological yet noncausal narrative provides us clues for interpretations though; it takes us to

one impasse where a paradox between the expression of its form and contents ends up

compounding its ambiguous sense of time. How to make sense of this interpretative aporia posed by

the discordance between form and content that we find in DeLillos White Noise, I argue,

constitutes a large bulk of scholarship on this postmodern classic. While some critics may spend

much time considering which perspective the reader should take, most try invariably to either

Chen 14

impose a singularity of meaning on this form/content discordance or see this discrepancy as the

authors celebration of the multiplicity of unrelated events of the everyday.

In this chapter, taking cues from the aporia White Noise unveils to us readers, I would like to

further my observation to examine why we shall adopt a very different position to explain DeLillos

novel. As what Id discussed in the introductory partthis novel isnt easy for us to understand

because of the paradoxical temporal relatedness and thematic unrelatedness of consecutive events, it

may be difficult for us to interpret it to fit it into our conventional demands or expectations for the

unity or coherence between form and content. The literature review that I provide in the following

yields evidence of the strenuous efforts made by three critics to make sense of the structural aporia

outlined above. Whilst those critics put their emphases on finding out images that can, in a way,

explain away, the paradox they find in the novel. Both ways of interpreting the novel are too

positive to touch the nucleus of such a structural paradox in White Noise. They avoid explaining

what that paradox means and attempt to substitute that with either an image or a possibility of

multiplicity. To avoid the conceptual bind that traps the scholarly studies of DeLillos White Noise

in the binarism of either searching for a structural unity or to celebrate structural fragmentation, I

opt to draw upon Gerhard Hoffmanns notion of situationalism as the episteme of the postmodern

era so as to activate the multiple interpretative possibilities opened up by this stylistic paradox that

we find in DeLillos White Noise. Finally, in the final part of this chapter, I will turn to the core of

the paradox in DeLillos workthe paradoxical sense of time. In this part, instead of grounding my

standpoint on the binary logic of either-orunity/parts, one/many or duration/momentsand

avoiding falling prey to this easy dichotomization, I would like to point out an implicit desire

hidden behind the end of time is produced by the paradoxical sense of time in White Noisea wish

to be innocent that makes the novel uncritical yet drives the story to move headlong to the end of

time.

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Reading for Unity or Reading for Multiplicity

In Closing the Loop: White Noise, Tom LeClair interprets White Noise as a closing of a

large loop in DeLillos career (207).1 For LeClair, while DeLillo is one alleged system novelist

who creates his works as a dynamic whole that model[s] the qualities of living systems (234),

his worksregardless of the individual work separately or all as a wholeare congruent in their

subjects and loop strateg[ies] (233). White Noise, a work stressing on a motifdeathand

synthesizing subjects and writing techniques adopted in Americana and End zone (208, 207), builds

up an intertextual loop that references both to itself and to DeLillos other works owing to its

structural and stylistic reductiveness (211). For instance, by inverting and combining materials of

his former works, and by referencing to the domestic settings in Americana and collegiate settings

in End Zone, DeLillo makes White Noise like a novel that retell stories already told in both.

Moreover, as three subgenresaround-the-house realist novel, disaster novel and college

novelare sequentially featured in the three parts of this work and strangely fades off into

overlapping genres in the plot, White Noise displays a reductive circularity in its narrative form.

Thus, while subgenre in this work is repeatedly recycled, played, exhausted of their generic

possibilities only for being resurrected to a new one, LeClair contends that the structural principle

of White Noise is a series of loops given that the characters in the novel are all victims of a

self-inflicted double bind: fearing death and desiring transcendence (11). It is the entrapment in

this self-inflicted double bind that dooms the narrator to move in a series of circuitous loops that

constantly refers both to previous actions and to futuristic events. LeClair thus claims that it is to

demonstrate the self-destructive loops of Gladneys sad foolishness that DeLillo should decide to

employ a continuous ironic reversal, trapping and retrapping his characters in their contradictions

(11-12, 12). With such a conscientious use of loops, LeClair proclaims, White Noise explains 1 When LeClair published his critical work in 1987, DeLillo published eight novels (there would be nine if Amazon, published under pseudonymCleo Birdwellin 1980 is counted in). And, among those novels, the last and the latest one is White Noise in 1985 (not until 1988 did DeLillo publish a new book). Therefore, to LeClair, since White Noise was temporarily the last novel DeLillo published, its why he called White Noise a closing of a large loop in DeLillos career (207).

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away the contradictory disparity between the absurd situations in which the Gladneys find

themselves and the impossibility of attributing a definitive signification to these seemingly

meaningless events. What remains is thus this ironic awareness of being trapped in this absurd but

real double bind. Oddly enough, LeClair proceeds to argue, this ironic awareness can also be

translated into and taken as a hope that some possibility of newness among these absurd remains

can still emerge out of this double bindthere is a chance for both writer and readers to discover

something that is uncertain but not-yet categorized in the debris of those clashed opposites.

However, to Peter Boxall, White Noise is less a system novel than a novel which vibrates

with a kind of latent critical potential (130). For Boxall, as the title of this novel is prophesied in

DeLillos previous workThe Namesand is provocatively hinted by narrator of The Names,

James Axton, who opens his narration by describing a strange sense of time, dead time,

experienced in the international flight travel, thereby serving as a sonic accompaniment to a kind

of absence from history (109), White Noise is just like a fulfillment of its own prophecylike

death itself (110)since it tells a story about Jacks life in one year through its plotless narrative,

while detailing, in a jumpy yet chronological style, Jacks fear of and confrontation with the

prospect of death. That is, because of its contradictory motifsits about a period of time in Jacks

life and about Jacks wish to take his narrative as an antidote to his fear of death (111), this novel

carries no temporal tension or historical detail in the narrative time (110). So to speak, whilst

White Noise presents a part of Jacks personal history and actualizes its own prophesied death-like

quality without utilizing any distinct temporal markers, the novel, being set in a motionless and

thusly dead time, is about and of dead time. Nevertheless, in Boxalls view, even though White

Noise is like the occurrence whose traces of its occurring are intended to be wiped out on the axis of

history by cancelling its own existences, this novel opens a kind of historical gap, a pocket of

empty time from its suspension of time (115). As one avant-garde work whose critical power

appears in the throes of its disappearance (125), White Noise makes itself a picture of emptying

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now, which is crowded with historical ghosts who wait to be animated, to be given a voice (130).

Boxall urges, through this simultaneous presentation of time and its cancellation, White Noise

therefore activates a kind of critical potential by driving readers to discover what the novel means

and how it deals with the threat that the end of time poses.

However, in Foreign Objects, or, DeLillo Minimalist, Andrew Hoberek points out that White

Noise proffers a critique against the systematic abstractions that governed U.S. foreign policy by

pointing out three formal strategies used in its narrativeminimalist, postmodern novel and trauma

narrative (102). For Hoberek, White Noise, grounded in a historical moment when people in

America realize the declining international authority of U.S. and their false belief in a

universalizing model of development due to the failed implementations of two foreign

affairsVietnam War and Iran Revolution (110, 102), resists any model of thought based on

systematic abstractions of modernization theories through the provocative use of the aesthetic of

particulars and what Robert Chodat calls the aesthetic of the heap (103, qtd. in 107).2 Hoberek

proclaims, in terms of the minimalist formal style which focuses on what Mark McGurl describes as

the smallness, privacy, and racial homogeneity of domestic life in the late 1970s and 80s (qtd. in

101), DeLillo presents this work in a privatizing turn that disregards the context White Noise is

engulfed in. With an engagement with aspects of contemporary reality (104), Hoberek quotes

McGurl to say that DeLillo concentrates his storytelling on merely personal experience (qtd. in

104). Yet, even though such an investment in concrete objects does pave the way to an aesthetic

of particulars in White Noise (114), to Hoberek, DeLillo paradoxically manifests his concerns with 2 According to Hoberek, modernization theory was proposed by social science scholars in the late 1950s and was installed at the center of U.S. foreign policy by Kennedy administration (102). Hoberek quotes Michael E. Latham to point out that the objective of this theory is to help the so-called Third World to [accelerate] the natural process through which traditional societies would move toward the enlightened modernity most clearly presented by America itself (qtd. in 102). Hoberek quotes Nils Gilman to propose, as Americans believe in one ideal terminus (qtd. in 102), for, as Gilman has so characterized it, Americans believe that America as an ideal terminus should be a well-developed country with social leveling to minimize class distinctions; state-guided industrialism; an exaltation of rationalism, science, and expertise as the guide for democratic institutions; and convergence on a consensual model of social organization based on progressive taxation and state provision of social benefits (qtd. in 102), a universalizing model of development is conceived and is adopted to help other countries to progress (102). Therefore, to Hoberek, the systematic abstraction is produced in such a system of presumptionsit presupposes the development would be natural and that development should be like what America underwent.

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contemporary history while there are several foreign objects appearing on the narrative edge of

White Noise. For instance, objects like Chun Ducs name and a tall old Moorish movie theater

tell the presences of Middle East and Vietnam in this novel (112). Though theyre implicit in

DeLillos writing, Hoberek reasons, those still evidence DeLillos concern about the failure of U.S.

foreign policy or the ethos of his age. And, such indexical reference to historical context even

relates White Noise to postmodernism as wellboth carry the explicit political and historical

interests (121). Nevertheless, except for its thematic and formal congruity with postmodern and

minimalist fictions, Hoberek further argues, this novel corresponds to another genre, trauma

narrative, too. As DeLillos work is presented without an explicit narrative framework that

prioritizes fragmentation (107), its fragmented narrative that relates to a tacit concern with a

historical context in which only with the help of an aesthetic of the heap can a succession of

traumatic eventsVietnam War especiallybe articulated. Hoberek thus quotes Chodat to argue

that the breakdown of the linear narrative in DeLillos novel can be related to the kind of trauma

narratives practiced by the Vietnam novelists (107).

That is, White Noise can be seen as either a postmodern fiction or a trauma fiction not only

because it deploys a conscious aesthetic strategy that links the fictional events to historical events,

but also because, as Chodat perceptively points out, it features both a breakdown in the economy

of representation as an aesthetic response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event

(qtd. in 107, qtd. in 101). Moreover, while such a breakdown of linear narrative indicates a fall

(107, 116)an impossibility of ascertaining what is the truth or of returning to the origin site of

traumatic events, DeLillos minimalist engagement complements this disbelief by placing the

narrative attention on objects only. Therefore, by using narrative strategies which bear affinities to

these three formal strategies but showing subtle differences from them as well, White Noise not only

displays its resistances to a predetermined model of generic expectations that may limit our

understandings toward a work, but also manifests a political possibility hidden beneath its

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compound and paradoxical narrative presentations: there is an implicit concern about failures of the

U.S. foreign policy, which is shown in its minimalist form that ostensibly bespeaks its apolitical

domesticity (121).

From the arguments made by the three critics outlined above, we could discover a rather

interesting phenomenon: no matter what kind of interpretation those critics give in their essays, all

of them begin their reasoning with a paradox in the novelthe novel does say something that is

significant but it expresses that in a style that cancels out the key point that it wants to make. For

LeClair, as the subgenre in each successive part of White Noise is repeatedly overlapped and

covered over by other subgenres, the form of the novela loop framed by consistent destructions

and reconstructions of genres in White Noisenot only blurs our understanding of what this novel

means, but also uncovers a possibility of newness resulted from the circular fluidity of its structural

loop. But, Boxall, by associating the title of the novel, White Noise, with its heraldwhite

noise, which refers to the dead time experienced in the air travelprophesied in The Names,

contends that White Noise, given that its thematic preoccupation with the end of time is cast in a

narrative temporality that is frozen for its non-circular porperties, makes itself the very embodiment

of dead time and thus, rather ironically, carries a critical potential for the probing of a

counter-narrative of history. Yet, for Hoberek, White Noise, because of its deployment of a

hybridized formal strategya minimalist narrative that is at the same time both a trauma narrative

and a postmodern fictionreveals its implicit concerns with the trauma of history, while

challenging any given mode of strict categorization that pits its form against its content, grand

history against the banality of the everyday life. Accordingly, regardless of how that paradox is

posed in the novelby repetitive replacements of genre, a narrative about and of dead time and

correspondences to three literary styles, for all three critics, White Noise delivers more than a

structural paradox which empties the significance of the novel by turning its presentation into what

it doesnt present. Namely, while presentation in White Noiselike subgenre, the narrative time or

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hybridized formal strategyseems to tell what the novel signifies by its apparent linguistic

organization and references but cancels out its signification through the use of incongruous

expression that highlights the disparity between its form and contents, this paradox doesnt exhaust

those critics interpretations. Though none of them can clearly explain what that paradox means in

DeLillos work, all notice the vacuum of reference in its perplexing narrative. As what they describe

in their essayssuch paradox makes this novel a loop, dead time and a hybridization of

genresreveal their determination to abstract a meaning out of the aggregate of incongruous

meanings that each separate actions or events seem to suggest to them, those descriptions of theirs

manifest those critics incapacity to fully grasp what the structural paradox that they find in

DeLillos White Noise may mean. To put it differently, whereas a loop, dead time and a

hybridization of genres include that paradox in the circularity, motionlessness and chiastic

combination of the novels temporal or genre structure, they provide no explanations about why

DeLillo chooses to focus on and play with genre, time and other formal strategies to formulate this

paradox. Thus, the interpretations those critics proffer stand for their apprehensions about how that

the novel registers, through the divorce of form and content, a structural paradox that is the

trademark of the postmodern era; at the same moment, these interpretations also delineate the

limitations of these critics own ideological stancesnone of them is able to explain why this kind

of structural paradox has become a norm, rather than an exception, of our time, the so-called

postmodern era.

However, a possibility for an interpretative breakthrough can be glimpsed in those critics

arguments. Like what they point out in their essaysthat paradox manifests a possibility of

newness, a critical potential and a political resistance, such conclusions they arrive at not only

expose their failure to find a critical language to present that paradox in its own term, but also

demonstrate their attitudes toward domesticating or homogenizing the white noise disrupting the

narrative movement of the novel at every turn of the chapter, with every shift towards a new

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situation, which newness ends up being the repetition of the same, with a subtle, though significant,

difference. That is, on the one hand, although each critic has his own perspective to comprehend

and articulate that paradox, none does try to name it with a new and exclusive term directly. Even

they do perceive the singularity of that paradox; they, rather than focusing on its paradoxical

uniqueness, they take up existing interpretative framework or language to analogize and substitute

that singularity. Such evasion uncovers both those critics limits of language and inabilities not only

to define but also to imagine DeLillos white noise. On the other hand, regardless of their efforts

to translate that paradox into some kind of possibilityontological or epistemological this novel

carries out such as being a loop or manifesting its critical potentiality through its form, we could

discover that such positive affirmation is only another evasion. While they see both contradiction

and singularity unmasked by that paradox, all critics straightaway categorize this uniqueness into so

abstract a term, possibility, in an attempt to cover up their failure to either to name it or to fathom

what that paradox means.

It should now be clear that all three critics offer perceptive readings of DeLillos White Noise.

However, due to their inability to phrase that structural paradox they find in the novel in their own

language, those critics turn their focus onto depicting and analogizing that paradox instead of

concentrating on figuring out what that means. Even through interpretations that make that paradox

a loop bearing a possibility of newness, dead time with a critical potential and a hybridization of

genres carrying a political possibility, critics impose a conceptual grid on the nameless and

unrepresentable white noise that DeLillo tries to articulate in his novel by drawing up a series of

figurative analogies. Thus, as these critics try to interpret the paradox they find in this novel, they

try to reintegrate this structural incongruity back into the narrative unity of DeLillos White Noise.

Inasmuch as they depict that as contradictions between form and contents in this work, critics

cannot help but attempt to find another general image or universal trope either to symbolize or to

signify this incongruity. In the following, however, I will draw upon Hoffmanns notion of

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situationalism to argue that the way to do some sort of justice to a postmodern novel like White

Noise is to engage a situated reading of its structural incongruity and, rather than always trying to

fit each event to a universal or general interpretative framework, to read it as a contingent

expression of the fleeting time caught in a localized space.

Situationalism for Multiplicity

Though White Noise is doubtlessly a postmodern work, its not regarded as an examplar of

postmodernism but as a meditation on postmodernity (Duvall 117). While its not a fiction that

illustrates Linda Hutcheons so-called the poetics of postmodernismboth a way of speakinga

discourseand a cultural process involving the expressions of thought that penetrate a novel with

the metalinguistic contradiction of being inside and outside, complicitous and distanced, inscribing

and contesting its own provisional formulations (14, 21), White Noise, though it showcases neither

the reflexivity of metafiction nor the problem of representing the past (Duvall 117), is not

poetically postmodern in Hutcheons sense. That is, since a poetics of postmodernism is a poetics of

a historiographic metafiction (5), DeLillos fiction fails to fit this definition. Nevertheless, Duvall

still opts to see it as a postmodern fiction for it pertains to postmodernity in its treatment of issues

such as media culture or advertising as it embraces those products of postmodern as its subject

matter (117).

Yet, in spite of the fact that it does not seem to fit the general features of the poetics of

postmodernism described by Hutcheon, White Noise isnt merely a novel which reflects the

cultural situation of the postmodern world in its narratives (Duvall 290). While the indeterminate

signification of this fiction, conjured up by the discrepant effects of the inconsistency between form

and contents, exposes an artistic freedom so that the modes of traditional expression in its

narration are challenged (Childs and Fowler, Postmodernism 185, 186), White Noise

demonstrates a characteristic of the poetics of postmodernism; that is, it evinces a deep skepticism

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of the adequacy of any essential or general laws that can fully explain how writing can possibly

function or operate in this era of postmodernism (Poetics 179; Sim, Postmodernism 289).

Namely, while this novel seems to present a nebulous signification through its transient narrative

foci and suggest some apparent themes through its deliberate narrative designs, White Noise reveals

itself in a double movement that encodes and decodes the events and actions in the narrative at the

same time; better still, White Noise moves along two parallel trajectories: on the one hand, each

given chapter describes events suggestive of thematic imports; on the other hand, each successive

event or action promises a thematic interpretation that moves towards a direction that does not

cohere or resonate with the thematic possibilities activated by events described in previous chapters.

In a way, in White Noise, the narrative does move, but it does not move towards any given direction;

rather, it moves towards several possible thematic possibilities. With such a mutually cancelling

nature in its narration, DeLillos work not just uncovers its sceptical or even curious states of being

an extended narrative that encloses characters, plot, milieu and so on (Novel 226). It unmasks

its postmodern features. Therefore, regardless of its irrelevance to the kind of poetics of

postmodernism described by Hutcheon, White Noise, with a poetics expressive of its skepticism

about the temporal movement of poetic representation, is nevertheless poetically postmodern. Yet,

even as we may read White Noise as a postmodern fiction with a correspondent poetics, how could

such understanding help us interpret White Noise productively?

For Hoffmann, situationalism offers an answer for us to better understand White Noise. While,

to Hoffmanns view, this is a term that accounts for discontinuity, incoherence, and immanence

and for a fact that language is localized (105), situationalism represents an episteme of

postmodernism, which exemplifies the drastic and radical changes happened to the common

structure of knowledge[t]he dominance of the field of experience over the subject of

experience, the separation of this field [of experience] into isolated situations, and then the

abandonment of a good sequence of these [isolated] situations, of bonds of causality and logic

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(105). That is, as the measure of reality in postmodern time is substituted by a field of experience,

rather than by an experiencing subject, in which men are defined by the different situations they

are in and the way they perceive them (105; 108), Hoffmann quotes Frederic Jameson to say that

situationalism reveals the fact that our entire contemporary social system has begun to live in a

perpetual present and in a perpetual change (qtd. in 106). Whats more, this oxymoronic

knowledge of time as both frozen and fluid, with its emphasis on temporal seriality characterized

by its immanence (of the situation) and indeterminacy (of connections) (106), influences other

disciplines to re-define human subjectpsychoanalysis finds true subjectivity in the

undeterminable and unnamable fluid structure of the unconscious (108); sociology looks into the

self that is produced from a scene that comes off (109); and, to N. Katherine Hayles, a chaos

theorist, she considers the components of human experience as social constructions

(110)denatured natural facts of life (110).

To Hoffmann, situationalism, exemplified by the rejections of wholeness and unity whose

conceptual formulations are influenced by specific historical developments, constructs the ground

for new ways of expression. Given that the contemporary paradigm of knowledge is governed less

by certainty than by uncertainty (111), this paradigm shift also clears space for the emergence of a

kind of writing that experiments with an ambivalently situational structure in an undifferentiated

flow of time (111). As such, narration itself, rather than characters or events, becomes the driving

force of the narrative, prompting and activating a situational transformation of meaning in the

postmodern novel, a transformation that is both caused by and responsive to the transformation of

contingent situations (116).

Having already described how, in the postmodern era, the logic of situationalism infiltrates into

every disciplines of the social sciences as well as the humanities, Hoffmann then proceeds to posit

that given that narrative is, by definition, a situational transformation of meaning (116), it

necessarily has to reconstruct what [its narrative] deconstructs in a sequence of situations (116).

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Two significant implications ensue from this observation: on the one hand, what matters in a

postmodern narrative is thus the situated experience itself, rather than the experiencing subject;

on the other, an in-between area is then opened up by the simultaneous movement both towards

deconstruction and reconstruction. This in-between area, Hoffmann insists, marks not only a

vacuum but offers new possibilities, too, for, in a curious twist of logic, in the emptiness of this

in-between, in the absence of absolute significance, a new fullness with new significations can

gather (116). This in-between space, however, it is important to bear in mind, is not actually a

spatial concept, for it connotes, to borrow a phrase from Gilles Deleuze, a line of flight, a force of

becoming. As situationalism aims at creating spaces of in-between though conflicts between our

reading experiences of the texts and our understanding of, or transformation by, its logic (117), it

rips the text open to expose a newness of meaning, which is more than an absence of meaning and

less than the presence of an absolute significance. That is to say, situationalism deconstructs any

predetermined principle of presentations and invites us to participate in the process of meaning

constructions, given that the text itself, with its irreducibility to any given doctrine, calls for this

inventive and creative participation on the readers part.

Though so far we might have a rough idea about situationalism and its cultural roots, how does

it work in narratives and what kind of narration does it give rise to? Hoffmann claims that situation

is the basic unit of fiction by positing two definitions. First, a fictioncomposed by isolated and

localized situations which are reconnected into a continuity of timeis a situational

transformation of (anti-)meaning or a narrated constant (118). Second, situationalism, which is

concerned about both the formation and deformation of situations (118), is one narrative strategy

that deconstructs coherence or continuity of a narration. So, as situation synthesizes a part of

narrative with elements such as character, plot or theme in the prescribed form (119), it, more

than images that offer sensory contents only, provides actual materialsspace, time, character,

action/event (119)about a part of narrative in a fiction and a portion of the story. Yet, Hoffmann

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claims, the situation in fiction is double-poled (120). It is constituted by both form as order and

force as disorder (120). As form, the situation forms a context whose componentsspace, time

and so oncomprise a totalized structure such that (dis)connections to former or later situations

could be made. To Hoffmann, the situation as form acts like a frame (121). Since it proffers both

natural and social frameworksspace, time, a background for understanding characters wills and

aimsto readers, the situation as form is a constituting principleor centerment (121)in any

narration. As for force, Hoffmann explains, it dispossesses form, frame, and fixities while it turns

the situation into transience and energy (123). That is, compared to form that encloses its

components in a given structure, force is the created thing that is simultaneously contained in

form and also (qtd. in 124), Hoffmann quotes Deleuze to say, overspills form by the materiality

of movement (qtd. in 125). As such, force is a paradox that defines the narrated situation as well

as the interaction of situations and the organization of the whole text (124). Therefore, given that

narrative situation encompasses both form and forcestasis and mobilityin its open structure

(118), Hoffmann takes situation as the structural paradigm of postmodern fiction. While the

postmodern fiction infuses doubt into its narrative by presenting a sequence of situations with no

meaning and order, it calls question to the expressed import of its expression but still keeps on

giving expression to that which is inevitably to be deconstructed.

To put it differently, even though postmodern novel attempts to question the hierarchies,

fixities and definites that function merely to safeguard the certainty of universal truththe

logical, the real (129), the dissolution of absolute truth which its narrative aims to produce is set

into motion by the play of this paradoxa conceptual control that includes the lack of control

(133). It thus follows that postmodern writers self-consciously play with the paradoxical interplay

between form and force (132), which exposes both their awareness and deployment of form that

aims at enclosing a story in its situational narration but with their self-reflexive and creative play

with tension and fusion, with simultaneity and sequentiality without final synthesis (133). So, for

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Hoffmann, as variable perspectives in a continuous stream of situations reign postmodern fiction,

the theme in those texts becomes representation not of world and self but of this paradoxical

constellation of disorder and order (144). The situation, expressive of its fluidity and multiplicity

in the enclosure of form and force that structures force and de/reconstructs it, manifests its

paradoxical property as a possibility. In postmodern fiction, since the paradox of the situation

presents an uncertainty that nothing can be grasped in its situational state, possibility of creation

rather than a simple emptiness is exposed. As the singularity of this statebeing a narrative form

that is irreducible to a theme but expressive of its transient formexcites the reader to interpret it

by freely connecting to some other reference in a story, situationalism that drives us to disconnect

and reconnect with other situations at our will not just displays the process of creation that reader

takes a part in, but also exposes what this singularity means to us.

Now that situationalism, as discussed above, is the representative narrative style adopted in

postmodern fiction, Hoffmann asserts, activating a situated symbolic mode to interpret those

works will be a must. That is, as the gap between understanding and the lack of understanding is

opened up by the incongruity between intelligible form and indeterminable force in postmodern

work, to read those fictions as symbols is to fill gaps of knowledge that cannot be filled by rational

explanation (144), or to suture such gaps by incorporating them to a secondary signifier (145).

With such reconstruction that turns postmodern works into symbols and relates those signified gaps

to other referents, readers can implant a judgmental, generalizing significance in those texts while

theyre able to attach their valuations and perspectives to their own readings (145). In other words,

since the literary symbol, so Hoffmann explains, carries three componentsthe vehicle, a

narrated and representational entity; the tenor, meanings; [t]he specific relation between vehicle

and tenor (146), it, like the situation in narrative, encompasses one structure that is conditioned by

its components whose interrelations among each other provide meanings.

To Hoffmann, though it is a formal model of signification (146), the symbol is structured in

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an open form that readers can read from its configuration or through their associations due to the

versatility provided by its complex composition. While its structure may lead readers to find a

meaning extrinsic or intrinsic to the vehicles, this discovery, regardless its being an

oversimplification, implies that the three components of a symbol will offer readers different

perspectives to read the symbol. Therefore, for Hoffmann, the symbol, with the openness in its

composition, proffers readers a way to cross over the gap presented in postmodern fiction on the

one hand. On the other hand, while it makes readers to approach the void opened up by the gap

through the reconstruction of the symbol (144-45), the symbol, as the situation that frees force

from form and rebuilds a new one, discloses the lack of substitutes for the gap (145). That is,

whereas a symbolization is a means for making up for a deficit of meaning (147), its an

assimilative activity that a capacity to explain and to represent the gap will be fulfilled by

suggestions of symbolic thinking (147). Put it differently, as to symbolize is to grasp the absent,

the ungraspable in the fiction (147), Hoffmann asserts, it presents a paradox readers facetheyre

unable to get to the place the gap occupies due to its emptiness; but, theyre still able to approach

the gap if they follow the structure of it and symbolize that movement to approximate the gap.

Thus, to sum up, while situationalism in the postmodern novel exposes a series of

transformations of situations that let form and force interplay and decenter its narrative with its

obvious reflexivity, symbolization, proffering readers the chance to access texts, discloses readers

(in)ability to grasp the gap, or in-betwenness, between the play of form and form in any given

situation. As situationalism opens up a possibility of newness by disclosing apparent conflict

between form and force in the narrative, the absence of meaning and order exposed by the

paradoxical narration seems to express what this text means. Yet, this evident paradox instead

prompts readers to find what this text signifies. That is to say, readers try to cross that gap of

understanding in a metaphorical way (159)they interpret it through their perspectives

according to a similarity in structure between the two (160), which hence stimulates them to

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adopt their imaginations and creative acts to connect form with force. Such a process of

signification which involves situational presentations and readers participations, in a word,

manifests a characteristic postmodern featureboth comprehension of ones failure of control and

attempt to regain control; so, situationalism is simultaneously deconstructive (in its narration) and

reconstructive (in its interpretation) (162).

Therefore, unlike the interpretative methods deployed by LeClair, Boxall and Hoberek in their

analyses of White Noise, situationalism is not really an interpretative method. It is a perspective that

attempts to connect postmodern culture with one specific kind of narrative form. As those critics

aim at explaining White Noise through images that both depict and represent the paradox brought by

the presentation of that which cannot be represented in its narrative, situationalism shows us a

position to freely engage with a text. By emphasizing on a literary form whose stylistic features

corresponds to those of postmodernitydiscontinuity, immanence and uncertainty, situationalism

not only performatively enacts our understandings about this kind of narrative: there is a gap left by

a paradox between its static form and transient contents, but it also incites us to participate in a

process of creating its meaning through the symbolization of this gap. Even though we understand

that it is impossible for us to fully grasp what a fiction means thanks to the gap in its narrative,

through this ongoing process of symbolization we instead discover new possibilities that open up

for us to activate multiple possible interpretations. Situationalism gives any of us a way to approach

a work and to use our imaginations to create meanings.

Yet, although LeClair, Hoberek, Boxall, and Hoffmann are all concerned about activating the

process of ongoing symbolization in their own acts of interpretation; Hoffmanns situationalism

isnt as limited as the interpretative methods adopted by the first three critics. Since situationalism

grounds itself on a premiseits foci on a narrative form that corresponds to postmodernity and that

rejects any unified wholeness, it is not an evasion intended to replace ones inability to phrase and

explain the paradox in a fiction by a seeming positive saying about the false possibility of the

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paradox. Contrariwise, situationalism is an affirmation that relates the paradoxical narrative to

postmodern culture where its bred. Instead of upholding a vague possibility based on the

uncoverings of vague references in a novel, it, unlike what the first three critics do, examines,

confronts, and responds to the influences brought by postmodern culture first and then embraces the

possibilities exposed by the evolving episteme of postmodernism. So to speak, Hoffmann sets up a

different and much more positive way of interpreting White Noise. Whereas his way lays its foci on

postmodernity and a possibility of multiple meanings we readers bring through our symbolization,

situationalism demonstrates naivet that is even more positive than the kind of possibility those

critics raisewe readers can still grasp what a paradoxical work means regardless of the possibility

that we cant truly cross the gap that work presents.

Toward The End of Time

In this chapter, starting from a brief introduction about why White Noise is aporetic in its

narrative presentations, I have discussed the reason why its perplexing in its meaningthere are

two dimensions of expression contradicting to each other. While chronological narrative form in

this novel doesnt guarantee the thematic unity of its contents, those described events dont

completely go out-of-the-joint of time in White Noise, either. Contrariwise, various and unrelated

events in this novel prompt us to read it through the multiplicity they carry; their sequence on the

same time axis restrains us from explaining it without noticing its unity though. Such paradox

caused by the discrepancy between form and contents in White Noise entraps our attentions to the

grid of either-oreither unity or multiplicity. Besides, it also makes us wonder whether this work

denotes something or not. I also further my discussions on such paradox of meaning with

explorations of two dissimilar interpretative ways. Firstly, from essays wrote by LeClair, Boxall and

Hoberek, I discover an ideological inclination in their readings. While they all begin their essays

from the paradox brought by the presentation of that which is unpresentable in White Noise, they

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aim at depicting how that paradox is molded and then replacing it with the possibility of newness or

critical/political potentials. Rather than name and explain that paradox straightaway, these critics

attempt to cover their incapacity to catch and explicate that paradox in a disguise of affirming what

they dont know. Then, I turn to another waysituationalismwhich Hoffmann deliberates in his

study of postmodernism. Unlike those critics interpretations that set out to explain away the

paradox in White Noise, situationalism directly binds that kind of narrative to the alleged ethos of

the postmodern culture. Proceeding from the self-conscious and self-reflexive premise characteristic

of postmodernitythe approaching to and filling in the gap between form and content is both

necessary and impossible, situationalism shows us another possible way of interpreting White

Noiseby the activation of an ongoing and creative process of symbolization, various readers can

participate in and multiple meanings can thus be gathered. From this possibility of multiplicity,

situationalism proffers another kind of positive affirmation: readers can still embrace possibilities of

creation that the process of symbolization brings regardless of their incapacity to fully grasp the

meaning of this novel.

So, to sum up, by critically reviewing the four critics approaches towards a postmodern work

like White Noise, I would like to point out one shared tendency hidden in their diverse arguments.

No matter which focus they rest on in their discussionsto interpret the work as a signification of a

unity or multiplicity, all four critics attempt to enclose the multiplicity of symbolization to specific

images. Yet, I argue, in some way, such affirmations do not explain the paradox White Noise

includes in its narrative. By either replacing that paradox with what they cant even describe or

connecting that to the postmodern culture, both try to cover the fact that they cannot ascertain what

such paradox is. Even situationalism which seemingly exposes a different attitude from what those

critics have practiced still clings to the belief that readers do know their distances from real

understanding of that paradox. All of them nevertheless show their obsessions with upholding and

valorizing one singular interpretation about that paradox. I assert, instead of substituting that

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paradox with either a unified image or an aggregate of possible multiplicity, we shall directly

confront that paradox. That is, since that paradox is brought by the contradictions between form and

contents in White Noise, we shall return to this starting point and figure out what causes this

self-opposition. This will return us to articulate the paradoxical postmodern sense of time.

In White Noise, whereas both form and contents pertain to presentations about timethe

narrative form that arranges events in a chronological order and the contents that present a series of

stories in a logically inconsistent plot, the paradox is caused by DeLillos juxtaposition of two

senses of time. Namely, as White Noise describes what occurred to Jack in one year, noncausality

among events seems to cancel the assimilative effect brought up by its chronological narrative; yet,

the novel is still read by most critics as a sensible story that refers to some postmodern cultural

phenomena Jack meets in his life, though the nonsequnetiality among each occurrence seems to

make the story unintelligible. Such contradiction that twists opposite expressions of form and

contents in White Noise into an intelligible story contains two incompatible senses of timeone

absorbed by the linearity of time and another released by the exigency of the linearity of time. The

former signifies the causal unity that time as duration embodies; the latter relates to spots of time

that time as each sporadic moment manifests. Therefore, White Noise, through its presentation of

two paradoxical senses of time, is infused with various interpretative possibilities composed by

several conceptual pairs: parts and unity, multiplicity and oneness, and moment and duration. While

the story is narrated in a chronological sequence with a start and an end, and is expected to present

one theme within its causation, the irrelevance among each event makes all happenings on that

timeline become contingent and even everyday-like. Contrariwise, each of them may be a

significant part of the plot as well due to its inclusion in the unity of this story. So to speak, by such

combinations of two senses of time, I contend, White Noise not merely displays a paradoxical sense

of time, but it also demonstrates the end of time in its narrative movement. On the one hand, it

cannot be denied that each event has actually happened in the narrative, but, given its random,

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contingent, and incomplete nature, each event is marked with an aura of yet-to-be-resolved-ness. In

this sense, each happening in this story is both an event occurred in the past and a not-yet-resolved

event whose potential import is yet to be actualized in the time to come. In other words, each event

is simultaneously a happening that can be assimilated into a story with a beginning and ending, and

one that is not yet finished and thus out-of-joint within the temporal framework of the story. Like a

dj vu and a prophecy that both relates to its precedence and its sequel simultaneously, this sense

of end of time seems to give the narrated event a universal propertyit had already occurred for

it is like an everyday event and it will occur in the future as well. Whats more, since it disallows

any closure in the novel, such end of time not only makes White Noise lose its critical momentum,

but also imbues this work with an intense atmosphere of playing innocent. That is to say, the

paradox brought by the conflict between its form and contents in DeLillos novel is unlike what

critics interpret it to be: for displaying some kind of possibility. Rather, it presents an innocence

aimed at rejecting the critique directed at what Jack observes in his narration. To sum up, given that

narratives play with the end of time, as it perfomatively enacts two contradictory sense of time,

the narrative gains an ongoing life by innocently refusing to end time. In other words, the innocence

of White Noise is that its narrative can stop at any time but it can also live on ad infinitum. Such is

the end of the time that DeLillo plays with; such is the strength and also the weakness of his

groundbreaking novel, White Noise.

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Chapter Two

Natural History

There must be something, somewhere, large and

grand and redoubtable enough to justify this shining

reliance and implicit belief.

White Noise (154)