The Supermarket: Consumerism, Simulation, and the Fear of Death in Don DeLillo’s White Noise
Houda Hamdi
Publication: Volume 3 Issue 3
Abstract
Through a study of Don Delillo’s metafictional novel, White Noise, this paper portrays the ways in which the novel reflects upon the postmodern American world of consumerism and simulation. The space of the supermarket reveals not only the post-modern subject’s obsession with the erratic shopping mode of life, but also the detachment of the subject from the reality of the product he or she buys. Polyphony or the diversity of discourses, similar to the Bakhtin’s theory of the marketplace in his definition of the novelistic genre, translates the invasion of media communications, advertising, TV commercials, and conversations in the daily life of the contemporary fictional characters. These discourses, in their polyphonic aspect, function as mediated representations which obstructs the subject’s relationship with reality. This paper demonstrates that, behind the surface, the supermarket, as both a space and a metaphor for the world of Simulacra and consumerism, hides another existentialist issue—man’s fear of death. The supermarket is, therefore, not only interpreted as a metaphor for the American Simulacra and consumerism, but also as a self-reflexive element which, in Bakhtinian terms, reflects the polyphonic nature of the fictional world of the novel. The paper discusses Gladney couple’s defence mechanism strategies to defy or repress death, and the metafictional nature of ‘white Noise’ which fears its own hermeneutic closure, another name for death.
Keywords: Postmodernism, Consumerism, Simulacra, Death, Metafiction, Polyphony, Hyperreality, De-Doxify/De-Doxification, Baudrillard.
Houda Hamdi (houdajay@hotmail.fr) is a professor of Drama at Christ-Roi in Longueuil, Canada. She is also a professor of French language at La Commission Scolaire de Montréal. She holds a PhD in American literature from the University of Montreal (2016) and completed her Master’s degree in African American literature in 2009. She is currently working on research addressing the issues related to dis-cursive perceptions of language and identity.