Higher Ground: Marxism in DeLillo's White Noise

According to Raymond Williams, “In a class society, all beliefs are founded on class position, and the systems of belief of all classes …” (Rice and Waugh 122). His work titled, Marxism and Literature expounded on the conflict between social classes to bridge the political ideals of Marxism with the implicit comments rendered through the text of a novel. “For the practical links,” he states “between ‘ideas’ and ‘theories’ and the ‘production of real life’ are all in this material social process of signification itself” (133). Williams asserts that a Marxist approach to literature introduces a cross-cultural universality, ensuingly adding a timeless value to text by connecting creative and artistic processes with the material products that result. Like Williams, Don DeLillo calls attention to the economic and material relations behind universal abstractions such as aesthetics, love, and death. DeLillo’s White Noise brings modern-day capitalist societies’ incessant lifestyle disparity between active consumerists and those without the means to the forefront of the story’s plot. DeLillo’s setting uses a life altering man-made disaster in the suburban small-town of Blacksmith to shed light on the class conflict between the middle class (bourgeoisie) and the working poor (proletariat). After a tank car is punctured, an ominous cloud begins to loom over Jack Gladney and his family. No longer a feathery plume or a black billowing cloud, but the airborne toxic event—an event that even after its conclusion Jack cannot escape the prophecy of his encroaching death. Through a Marxist reading of the characterization of Jack Gladney, a middle-aged suburban college professor, it is clear that the overarching obsession with death operates as an...

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...ducts are made to serve as solutions to the impending troubles of the public, but instead perpetuate the fears of their impending deaths. . What makes this fear exclusively bourgeoisie is that, according to Williams, only this class has the time to consider their “livelihood.”

Work Cited

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DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin Group, 1986. Print

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Rice, Philip. and Patricia Waugh, eds. Modern Literary Theory. 4th ed. New York: Oxford UP,

2001. Print.

Sengupta, Somini. “25 Years Later, Toxic Sludge Torments Bhopal.” nytimes.com. New York

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