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'So I have heard and do in part believe it.'
Niklas Luhmann (quoting Shakespeare), The Reality of the Mass Media.
Master Card, Visa, American Express Don DeLillo, White Noise
Jack Gladney, protagonist and first-person narrator of Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985), is driving his fourteen-year old son Heinrich to school. When his son reminds him that according to the radio report it will rain later this evening, the father points at the raindrops on the windshield and answers that it is raining already, adding: "Just because it's on the radio doesn't mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses." Subsequently, the father tries to get his son to confirm what is evident to the senses ("Is it raining ... or isn't it"). His son, however, "wouldn't want to have to say" and does everything to deny his father the confirmation of his sensory perception, pointing out that scientifically, the senses are not reliable, that subjective truth is meaningless ("My truth means nothing"), that "here" and "now" are fleeting categories ("Now comes and goes as soon as you say it"), and that linguistic reference is rather uncertain ("How do I know that what you call rain is really rain?"). Finally, the son himself points toward sensory perception to refute his father. His father's definition of rain as something that makes you wet stands in contrast to the fact that both, sitting in the car, are dry. The father resorts to sarcasm, ending the conversation by proclaiming "a victory for uncertainty, randomness and chaos. Science's finest hour." (DeLillo 22-24)
Through the eyes of Jack Gladney, the middle-aged college professor teaching Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill somewhere in the middle of America, Don DeLillo's novel presents a disquieting portrayal of American culture. "[A]wash with noise," both literally and in terms of the "incessant bombardment of information," the electronic media have become a "primal force in the American home. Sealed-off, timeless, self-contained, self-referring." (DeLillo 36; 66; 51) They create the appearance of estrangement from reality, a disconnect that becomes only more apparent when catastrophe in the form of an "airborne toxic event" hits the idyllic college town. The dialogue between father and son about rain addresses the novel's concern with unreality from an epistemological point...