Baudrillard, DeLillo's "White Noise," and the End of Heroic Narrative

Abstract

From Americana, through Great Jones Street, White Noise, and Libra, Don DeLillo's novels have been concerned with the relationship between American identity and the mediascapes. If the two earlier works were preoccupied with the way in which the American dream is manipulated by the media, the later two chart a world that is mediated by and constituted in the technologico-semiotic regime. In White Noise DeLillo's protagonist Jack Gladney confronts a new order in which life is increasingly lived in a world of simulacra, where images and electronic representations replace direct experience. In Libra, Lee Oswald is a product of that order; a figure devoted to media selffashioning, he constructs his lifeand indeed his deathfrom the proliferation of charismatic images and spectacles of a postmodern society.1 White Noise and Libra particularly, with their interest in electronic mediation and representation, present a view of life in contemporary America that is uncannily similar to that depicted by Jean Baudrillard. They indicate that the transformations of contemporary society that Baudrillard describes in his theoretical writings on information and media have also gripped the mind and shaped the novels of Don DeLillo. For White Noise especially because it most specifically explores the realm of information and mediascape Baudrillard's works provide an interesting, valuable, and even crucial perspective. The informational world Baudrillard delineates bears a striking resemblance to the world of White Noise: one characterized by the collapse of the and the flow of signifiers emanating from an information society, by a loss of the real in a black hole of simulation and the play and exchange of signs. In this world common to both Baudrillard and DeLillo, images, signs, and codes engulf objective