ABSTRACT
At one point in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, the narrator, Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies at a sleepy midwestern college, believes he may have met with disaster. In this chapter, the author aims to read White Noise as a meditation on the importance of entertaining death’s “absent meaning” at a time when, according to Gladney, “The world is full of abandoned meanings”. Like most of DeLillo’s fiction, the novel addresses the fact that modern history is marked by disastrous schemes to colonize and/or purge otherness in the name of a waste-free state. White Noise (mis)spells disaster most imaginatively in those places where it represents modern America’s complex conviction about the disastrous effects of waste. The novel is shot through with allusions to the various emissions, transmissions, additives, substitutes, and spinoffs on which critics of the American scene have seized when claiming that the national landscape has become a virtual wasteland.
