Reality or hyperreality? The Erasure of Meaning and Authenticity in Postmodern Society through the Lenses of Don DeLillo's White Noise

Abstract

White Noise by Don DeLillo presents an uncannily recognizable world, yet also pervasively dystopic. Behind a façade of banality and conventionality lies a complex exploration of postmodern society, and particularly of the impact that technology, consumerism and mediatic supremacy are having on our perception of reality, as well as our own sense of self. Throughout this essay, White Noise will be woven into postmodern theories such as Baudrillard’s hyperreal simulacra, McLuhan’s views on the consequences of mediatic saturation, Lyotard’s dismissal of metanarratives and Jameson’s thoughts on the ever-growing postmodern sublime. Through these lenses, White Noise presents a world in which meaning disseminates among a myriad of signifiers without signified, and where authenticity becomes a vacuous concept. In turn, technology takes on the responsibility of human determination, discourse precedes reality, identity becomes performance, spirituality is transmuted into consumerism and, ultimately, postmodern life turns into a type of death. The narrative ultimately implodes upon itself due to its self-awareness of its own status as hyperreal, yet it is in this exposure of the ‘leak through the mesh’ (123) between reality and hyperreality that a glimpse of truth can be ascertained.