1. Don DeLillo, White Noise (1984) Lecture I
Ramon Saldivar
Stanford University

2. DeLillo, White Noise Lecture I
Novels by Don DeLillo
Americana. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Rev. Ed. New York: Penguin, 1989.
End Zone. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Paper: New York: Penguin, 1986.
Great Jones Street. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Paper: New York: Vintage, 1989.
Ratner's Star. New York: Knopf, 1976.
Players. New York: Knopf, 1977.
Running Dog. New York: Knopf, 1978.
The Names. New York: Knopf, 1982.
White Noise. New York: Viking, 1985.
Libra. New York: Viking, 1988.
Mao II. New York: Viking, 1991.
Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997.
The Body Artist. New York: Scribner, 2001.
Pseudonymous Novel [written under the name Cleo Birdwell]:
Amazons. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980.
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DeLillo, White Noise Lecture I

3. Don DeLillo Interview with Rolling Stone 1988
Themes that recur:
Secret patterns in our lives
A sense of ambiguity
The violence of contemporary life
Violence and Consumer Society
Desperation and loneliness
The backdrop of brightly colored packages
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DeLillo, White Noise Lecture I

4. The Transcendence of Supermarkets
“There’s something [in supermarkets] that we tend to miss a sense of something extraordinary hovering just beyond our touch and just beyond our vision,” DeLillo in Rolling Stone
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DeLillo, White Noise Lecture I

5. Alan Ginsburg, “A Supermarket in California”
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked
down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking
at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon
fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at
night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!
--and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?
What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you,
and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy
tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour.
Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade
to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automo-
biles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America
did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a
smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
From Collected Poems by Allen Ginsburg, published by Harper & Row. Copyright © 1984 by
Allen Ginsburg. Used with permission.
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DeLillo, White Noise Lecture I

6. Consumerism as Identity in the Era of Late Capitalism
Illusion of community
Illusion of kinship
Aura of connectedness
“The Most Photographed Barn in American” WN 12-13
The Fullness of Being
WN 19-20
Murray Jay Suskind & the Function of Family
WN survival in a hostile world
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DeLillo, White Noise Lecture I

7. The Aura of the Marketplace
WN 82, 83, 84
Shopping as medicine, drug, balm
Shopping creates Family
Sense of fulfillment
Renewal of patriarchy
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DeLillo, White Noise Lecture I

8. DeLillo, White Noise Lecture I
The Price of Kinship
WN, 84 bottom:
“We drove home in silence. We went to our respective rooms wishing to be alone.”
Steffie mouthing the words of TV
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DeLillo, White Noise Lecture I

9. “Everything is concealed in symbolism,” Murray Jay Suskind
WN 37
Supermarket as revelation
WN 38
Supermarket as renewal
WN 34
“Pockets of rapport”
“magic act of adults and children, sharing unaccountable things.”
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DeLillo, White Noise Lecture I

10. Epiphanies Classical and Modern
Epiphany
In Hellenistic times an epiphany (from the Greek epiphania, "manifestation"), was an appearance of divine power in a person or event
The New Testament uses the word to denote the final appearing of Christ at the end of time; but in 2 Timothy 1:10 it refers to his coming as Saviour on earth.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 171
Transformation of the material world by the imagination
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DeLillo, White Noise Lecture I