Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)
Studies - Judit Ágnes Kádár: 'Kleenex-View' and Cultural Devaluation: Merchandise as Ontology in Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985)
of the importance of creating stories ('plotting'), but narratology does not become his predominant concern throughout the novel. The selected section of the book can be taken as a thematic proposal to the novel as well as a complication after the descriptive, introductory narratives of the earlier chapters. Here the suspicion, that 'something has gone wrong' is foreshadowed; a comprehensive analysis of contemporary American society is envisaged, including some causal relations leading up to the state of fear and references to death, such as "A series of frightened children appeared at our door for their Halloween treats (WN 53)" at the end of Chapter 11. These three chapters are situated in the first part of the novel entitled "Waves and Radiation," in Lentricchia's description: "Waves and Radiation" is all about the white noise, actual and metaphoric, that constitutes the setting of postmodern life, an environment more or less in focus —less rather than more because not a direct object of perception like traditional novelistic and premodern environments, the city and the country. And the less in focus the environment, the more our paranoia is enhanced, not clinically but as a general (and reasonable) physic condition of privileged first world citizens. (Lentricchia: "Tales..." 100.) The psychic condition of people is expressed in the complex symbolism of the toxic cloud, waves and radiation. The scientific description of the phenomenon called 'radiation fog' helps us understand the wide range of symbolic implications White Noise offers the reader: it is an immobile, cloud-like moisture that in clear nights hovers over wintertime valleys while the earth's warmth 'escapes into the upper atmosphere'. The chapters I have chosen for analysis present a world in which people's minds are covered with this 'fog' in everyday terms. The following chart presents a summary of the negative (entropic, deconstructive and devaluing) tendencies that seem to work behind the text and formulate the fundamental concepts it is built upon. 188
