ABSTRACT
When Don DeLillo’s White Noise was published in 1985, ATMs had begun to appear in DeLillo’s hometown, New York City, and other nancial centers, but they were still a novelty in college towns like the one where the novel takes place. The notice reproduced above arrives silently in the mail one day, presented as block text ending a chapter. Within DeLillo’s dystopian satire, it is another faceless wave of data cascading into the life of his protagonist. Information overload hovers over White Noise, in the form of “the airborne toxic event” that triggers the novel’s action. The notice about new bank cards, with its REMINDER that “only your code allows you to enter the system,” is more setting than plot, although the hum of everyday life is a central theme in White Noise and arguably its primary subject. The notice is presented to readers, in part, as evidence of what it means to live in the U.S. as the twentieth century waned. The note serves as one example among many of the ease with which prot-thirsty corporations can take any form of communication, even a potentially romantic one, and appropriate it for commercial purposes. Letters have become notices, and names converted into numbers.
