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"Killers and diers": white noise, violence, genre.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Towards the end of Don DeLillo's White Noise, Murray lectures Jack Gladney on the theoretical relationship between "killers and diers" (290). His point that "violence is a form of rebirth" for the killer places DeLillo's novel inside a long line of traditionally violent works in American literature. My essay will examine the topic of violence in White Noise by unraveling the various literary genres on which DeLillo relies. Teachers of the novel will find my approach useful, because it allows the general and theoretical subject of violence to be discussed through concrete and specific narrative conventions. My essay will also act as a blueprint for teachers who wish to teach the novel through its genres, as a captivity, slave, gothic, or crime novel. Finally, my essay will provide an alternate way to teach the novel's post-modern methods by illustrating its reliance on low or popular art forms.

Essay

Towards the end of White Noise, Murray lectures Jack Gladney on the theoretical relationship between "killers and diers" (290). His point that "violence is a form of rebirth" for the killer rephrases Richard Slotkin's classic Regeneration through Violence and places DeLillo's novel inside a long line of traditionally violent works in American literature (290). Murray's words reveal the novel's heavy reliance on two particularly violent literary genres: the gothic romance and crime fiction. First, the television, "where outer torment lurks, causing fears and secret desires," threatens the Gladney clan and therefore becomes a contemporary manifestation of the threatening outsider whose appearance unleashes the violence of a gothic novel (85). Second, the narrative ends in a murder scene, because "All plots tend to move deathward" in crime fiction (26). The novel, on one level, borrows its plot from post-war pulps such as those penned by Jim Thompson and Patricia Highsmith. The characters attempt to define criminality and to assign blame and responsibility where it belongs. However, as in any good crime story, the characters themselves become the criminals. My essay will examine the topic of violence in White Noise by unraveling the two violent and often contradictory literary genres on which DeLillo relies. It will simultaneously provide an alternative way to teach the novel's postmodernism by illustrating its reliance on low or popular art forms.

When I taught the two courses, American Gothic and Crime Literature, the novel became my automatic choice to represent the postmodern period. Linda Hutcheon has called Margaret Atwood the "epitome of postmodern contradiction" because by "using and abusing" genre conventions in Lady Oracle Atwood creates a "repetition with difference" (151). My classes suggest that DeLillo in White Noise does something similar. One aspect of the postmodern is its ability to simultaneously incorporate and dismantle cliche and convention. I saw that...

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