Understanding Literature: The Importance of the Supermarket in White Noise

Postmodernism in literature is characterized by dark humor and fragmentation, based wholly in paradoxes. Don DeLillo captures postmodernism in everyday life in the novel White Noise, published in the mid-1980s. The reader follows Jack Gladney on his journey through his days at work on The-College-on-the-Hill teaching Hitler Studies and at home, with his current wife, Babette, and their many children, the majority of them not even fully related. They are the definition of American fragmentation. The only dinner eaten together as a family is a takeout Chinese meal on Friday nights in front of the television watching programs. Postmodernism everyday life is a culture filled with consumerism and hyperreality. 

The supermarket in White Noise is more than aisles and aisles filled with food and other less food-like products. In White Noise, the supermarket in represents how people constantly engage in and continue the culture of capitalism by immersing themselves in the world of consumerism. The people of White Noise have completely lost their individual sense of being and are seeking to fill the dark void in their lives with products. They have lost their individuality but yet, all they know is being individual. The society is a broken, fragmented population filled with individual humans that do not know their purpose or the purpose of anything. The characters perform tasks and go about their everyday activities and occurrences for themselves and themselves only. In the sense of meals supposed to be eaten together, they will use the microwave to heat up ‘dinners for one’ at different times from the rest of the family. Activities that are meant to be shared are being ignored by the Gladney’s and the rest of society. 

The supermarket becomes an outlet for Jack and Babette to fill the desires and the apparent ‘needs’ of the character. It provides them safety, security, and calming sense of seeming organization. The supermarket is a place where they can go to consume and shop for the sake of shopping. It helps with the attempt to fill an ever expanding void within themselves – to achieve a sense of worth and well-being. I will be examining the importance of the supermarket in White Noise by calling attention to these facts. 

Organized Chaos 

The supermarket is the definition of complete organized chaos. The way the supermarket is set up is just the beginning. “Apples and lemons tumbled in twos and threes to the floor when someone took a fruit from certain places in the stacked array. There were six kinds of apples, there were exotic melons in several pastels. Everything seemed to be in season, sprayed, burnished, bright” (DeLillo 36). The supermarket is an orderly time warp of a place for the consumer. They enter and are transported to a place where the season of the food does not matter because everything always seems to be in season. Lines and lines of eye-catching colors and products the customers do not need are lined up in neat rows to catch their attention. Bright tags and advertisements that scream ‘12 cans of Chicken Noodle Soup for $3!’ and the customer buys twenty-four even though they do not like chicken noodle soup, nonetheless need twenty-four cans of it. 

White noise is a combination of all the different frequencies of sound. The supermarket is the very essence, at the very heart of the white noise in White Noise. When Jack Gladney wanders through the aisles of the supermarket with Babette and children in tow, he passes aisles and aisles of food in brightly colored labels or all in unmarked packages in the ‘generic food area,” which they skip over because simple, white packages with no labels are not good enough. It is a world of bright labels and brands. 

As they step into the world of the supermarket, the different frequencies in the supermarket all blend together – cashiers ringing customers out, customers talking loudly, cellophane rusting as people examine the content of them – and suddenly it is all white noise to the consumer. Jack During “realized the place was awash in noise. The toneless systems, the jangle and skid of carts, the loudspeaker and coffee-making machines, the cries of children. And over it all, or under it all, a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension” (DeLillo 36). It is impossible to realize how loud it is in the supermarket until the customer steps outside into the vast parking lot with their many plastic bags and all they hear is nothing. Maybe all the customer can hear now is a young child crying because their mother did not buy the sugary cereal they begged for or the sound of the shopping cart wheels rolling against the concrete. They can hear all of the individual sounds now because it is no longer a mess of organized chaos melted into white noise. The white noise in the supermarket drowns out the problems in the consumer’s life. It gives them an escape from the outside hyperreality and gives them a simulated reality in a controlled environment. The supermarket is a place where the consumer can lose themselves. When Jack decides what brand of food to buy, he is focused at the task at hand. His impending death is no longer the focus – for once in his life – of his mind. It is in the background; it is the white noise, just like the sounds of the supermarket. It is still there but now slightly dulled, making their wandering lives more bearable. 

 The supermarket provides a change for the customer because it is the one part out of their week that stays the same. They can count on it. It is organized chaos. People expect the supermarket to provide an experience of safety, security, and predictability. The aisles are set up neatly, labeled perfectly, and never change. Or at least they should be. They do not go into the supermarket each week to be surprised; that is what the thought of death is for. This is why everyone was so thrown off when the supermarket changed without warning or notice. People were absolutely frantic. “The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers. They walk in a fragmented trance, stop and go, clusters of well-dressed figures frozen in the aisles, trying to figure out the pattern, discern the underlying logic, trying to remember where they’d seen the Cream of Wheat. They see no reason for it, find no sense in it” (DeLillo 325). Why was nothing the same? In ways, it did not matter. In others, it mattered more than anything. The supermarket was supposed to be reliable, the one secure thing in their weeks – maybe year. The sense of safety that the supermarket was now broken and fragmented just like the consumers’. They wandered, lost and confused around the store. “They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal” (DeLillo 325). 

What is worse: betrayal without warning or time to prepare yourself for disaster? This is questioned when the SIMUVAC team lays out the process of the rescue simulation for Jack. People worry about the impossible daily but never prepare for it. The SIMUVAC team is in place for that reason, to get people ready for terrible disasters by simulating hyperreality. One of the team questions, “Life seems to work that way doesn’t it? You take your umbrella to the office seventeen straight days, not a drop of rain. The first day you leave it at home, record-breaking down pour” (DeLillo 205). People can prepare for disaster or the aisles of the supermarket being rearranged all they want but they will still be fully blind sighted when disaster strikes.

Consumerism

In “Living in a Simulacrum: How TV and The Supermarket Redefines Reality in Don DeLillo’s White Noise”, Ghashmari states “one of the major issues that DeLillo depicts in White Noise is the emergence of the consumer culture in the postwar, postindustrial society” (172). The supermarket is a never ending parade of consumerism clad in brightly colors. The characters in White Noise use the supermarket to fill their consumerism needs. They are prolonging the culture of capitalism in contemporary American life by conforming to what is expected of them. It is a constant, never-ending cycle of consumption; buying at the store, going home and eating it, going back to the store, etc. The supermarket controls the daily lives of ordinary people because it provides a sense of purpose and gives meaning, even in the current culture. It gives people a new meaning in their lives in an extended hyperreality. They look for the meaning in the products that the buy, thinking they will provide the answers to their questions. In consumer culture and in White Noise, it stops being shopping out of necessity and out of hunger. Now, they buy products and other food out of desire and they shop for the sake of shopping. The attraction of the colors, sizes, and packaging in the supermarket draws the consumers in and sparks their desires. The surface of the products plays to the inner workings and thoughts of the consumer and grips their attention. In White Noise, people do not buy goods for their value, they “feel an ecstasy caused by the spectacle of the goods. The supermarket, the mall, and the hypermarket have become a Mecca for consumers in postmodernity” (172). When the Gladney family was at the mall, Jack got an urge to spend recklessly without abandon and without reason. He bought anything and everything. The more he spent, the less he cared, the less he felt money mattered, and the more fulfilled he felt. He found his sense of purpose after spending all that money and buying things he did not need. He said “I shopped for its sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise I had no intention of buying, then buying it” (DeLillo 84). The Gladneys do the same thing at the supermarket. Babette buys things she does not need and food she will never eat. She hopes that buying the healthy food will force her to eat it but it ends up just being a colossal waste of money. Ah, consumerism. 

Filling the Void

The consumers, the supermarket go-ers, and the whole population of White Noise are seemingly given purpose by the supermarket. The supermarket fills the void in their lives. They cannot control death, when they will die, or the answer to the “Who will die first?” question. They can only control the products they buy, what they consme. If they buy healthy products, they will be safe and it will hold off death until they are ready for it. The supermarket provides an opportunity for peace of mind for the consumer. Consumers use products they do not need to fill the ever growing black hole within them – the fear of death, lack of purpose, a rapidly fading real reality, etc. When Jack goes to the supermarket, he ponders “That’s what I think of whenever I come in here. This place recharges us spiritually, it prepares us, it’s a gateway or pathway. Look how bright. It’s full of psychic data…. The large doors slide open, they close unbidden. Energy waves, incident radiation” (DeLillo 37). People are filled with a vast emptiness that they do not know or understand how to fill. Going to the grocery store gives consumers the will to carry on. The good feelings and the ecstasy that consumers feel while shopping make them feel like they have a sense of well-being, rather than emptiness. Consumers try to buy their way to feelings of security and happiness. “In the supermarket, the main arena for consumer culture, goods tell the shoppers who they are, and shoppers try to search for answers to their daily lives’ questions in the things they buy” (Ghashmari 173). They are searching relentlessly and tirelessly for something they cannot even grasp themselves. 

Jack and Babette’s actual reality is that they are terrified of death and even more, dying second. They are obsessed with the question “who will die first?” Both of them feel that they physically cannot be first to die because neither of them wants to be alone and secretly hopes that the other will die after them. The experience of ‘real’ has disappeared and what is replaced is the reality of struggling with death. When Jack and Babette are at the supermarket together, he thinks to himself “Here we don’t die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think” (DeLillo 38). The idea of shopping and dying are tied hopelessly together. The thought of both of their impending deaths is so terrifying to them that it wraps and intertwines itself into everything they do, even seemingly mundane activities like going to the supermarket. In Jack and Babette’s reality, they are living to die because it is all they can think about. It is all they see because they are wholly too aware that it could happen at seemingly any moment. They see it in the children, on the streets, and in each other. Instead of focusing on life with their family and each other, they focus on their own individual unstoppable and eventual deaths, confirming the selfish nature of the culture of consumerism. People are only concerned with the idea of their individual selves. They cannot be alone and they do not want to die for themselves, not so the other will not be alone. 

The fragmentation in American postmodern society in White Noise provides an accurate depiction of actual society. White Noise captures a realistic, dark, and twisty road through life, fast approaching death or even the mere idea of death. The society of consumers and the Gladney family swipe their credit cards and fork out cash for items they do not need or even want in hopes of filling the vast, ever growing emptiness within them. They seek fulfillment not from people, but from things. Instead of eating dinner together, they microwave a meal for the individual while the future looms in the near distance. The only activity that the majority of the family participate in together is going to the supermarket. They contribute to the white noise of the organized chaos, consume unnecessary purchases, and fill the dark space in them one product at a time. 

Works Cited

Alworth, David J. "Supermarket Sociology." New Literary History 41.2 (2010): 301-27. Web.

DeLillo, Don. White noise. New York: Penguin , 1986. Print.

Ghashmari, Ahmad. "Living in a Simulacrum: How TV and The Supermarket Redefines Reality in Don DeLillo’s White Noise." Electronic journal of theory of literature and comparative literature 3 (2010): 171-85. Web.

"IN RETROSPECT: JOSHUA FERRIS on WHITE NOISE." The Elegant Variation. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Jan. 2017.