> XZWπ` Nbjbj .\F%BBBBBBBV~ ~ ~ 8  V1  "* * *    $hO4B  BB* * <<<DB* B* <<<BB<* 1*h%~ >0<01<nj<B<t rw <S   d   1VVVD VVV VVVBBBBBB Enter the Code: Cybernetic Aspirationism in Don DeLillos White Noise Randy Laist University of Connecticut  HYPERLINK "mailto:rlaist2000@yahoo.com" rlaist2000@yahoo.com Don DeLillos novels are replete with characters who engage in cryptography as a kind of existential fetish. The football coach of Logos College in DeLillos second novel, End Zone, is named Coach Creed; he conceptualizes football as a sealed-off, self-referring sign-system in which he names the plays. In Ratners Star, from 1976, Robert Softly heads the Logicon Project, a cabal of subterranean researchers committed to articulating a definitive mathematical meta-language. Lyle Wynant in Players thinks of the symbols on the stock ticker as an artful reduction of the external world to printed output (77). The cultists in The Names, whose cult is secretly named The Names, choose their murder victims according to a correspondence between the victims initials and the initials of the town the victim is in. The cultists crimes represent a ritualistic bid to forge a bond between language and reality that is as emphatic and as definitive as death. Creed, Wynant, Softly, and the cultists all share, along with many other DeLillo characters, the frantic desire to reduce the chaotic polysemy and infinite jestingness of language down to a brutal equation of sign and signified. For these characters, the mathematical code is a master-metaphor for the relation of the soul to the cosmos. Ordinary examples of encoded communication football plays, geometric proofs, or financial data acquire religious significance as worldly manifestations of the divine Logos. For these characters, to become encoded to be a cipher in the code or to be someone who knows the code would be to escape the contingency and existential imperilment of language as it is spoken among the ruins of the Tower of Babel, the kind of language that can not be perfectly translated from one sign-system to another, the language that is forever at the mercy of contingency and error. In these novels, DeLillo frames language not only or even primarily as a way of communicating, but as a way of being and a mode of self-understanding. If reality can be thought of as existing in the form of a code, these characters intuit, then reality can be solved. The solvable world presumably dissolves away into a perfect, painless aura of sheer meaning. Recurrently however, the code-dreamers are foiled by a cosmos that is poetic and figurative rather than codical and resolvable. White Noise, DeLillos next book after The Names, resurrects this character of the aspirational code-theorist most conspicuously through the verbose Mephistophelean semiotician Murray Siskind. Murray is a professor in the department of American Environments at the College-on-the-Hill. He monkishly devotes his life to reading the sacred meanings latent in the most commonplace features of 80s suburbia, particularly the television and the supermarket. Murray watches television the way a seer reads entrails, with devotion and steadfast faith, in order to Find the codes and messages (50) encrypted within the surface signs. When the television viewer assumes the appropriately submissive receptivity, television becomes a source of Coded messages and endless repetitions, like chants, like mantras. Coke is it, Coke is it. The medium practically overflows with sacred formulas if we can remember how to respond innocently and get past our irritation, weariness, and disgust (51). For Murray, the supermarket is a three-dimensional extrusion of the sacred code-world of television. In the supermarket, Everything is concealed in symbolism, hidden by veils of mystery and layers of cultural material. But it is psychic data, absolutely All the letters and numbers are here, all the colors of the spectrum, all the voices and sounds, all the code words and ceremonial phrases. It is just a question of deciphering, rearranging, peeling off the layers of unspeakability (37-8). Murray, in the American tradition of the Puritan colonists and the Romantic Transcendentalists, sees his world as a text wherein is writ the cosmic truths of mans relationship to the universe. What you see is not what you get, but is rather a code for what you get. The perceptual world of concrete existence is simply a layer, a veil, or raw data; a riddle to be solved, an equation to be balanced between the illusion of history and the ultimate transhistorical revelation. In accordance with his obsession, Murray has pared his own life down to a set of elements which signify his identity rather than express it. He describes his relocation to Jacks generic college town of Blacksmith as an attempt to avoid situations (11). He lives in a story-book boarding house populated by the usual round-up of Sherwood Anderson-ian grotesques among whom he happily fills the role of the Jew (10). He has reduced his personality to that third-person perspective which is the audience for both television broadcasting and academic publication; an anonymous theorist addressing other anonymous theorists; terminally dis-engag. Murray seems to fit himself together in the role of academic out of costume-pieces; his corduroy outfit, his kitschy pipe, and his beard which Jack describes as an optional component. Murray doesnt only live among codes, he models himself in the code-language of clich and stereotypicality. But Jack Gladney, the angst-ridden protagonist of White Noise, is considerably more ambivalent about what he wants out of an existential language than his colleague Murray. Jacks ruminations on the codes which seem to constitute his family life have more in common with the characteristic perspective of David Bell, the protagonist of DeLillos first novel, Americana, who recognizes in himself a tendency to get blinded by the neon of an idea, never reaching truly inside it (123). Jack takes a deep satisfaction in his kitchen, where the levels of data are numerous and deep (48), considering Denises body-posture, he ponders, How many codes, countercodes, social histories were contained in this simple posture? (61), but the data never disclose the kinds of patterns which Murray celebrates, and his questions (the many questions which constitute such a major part of Jacks narrational voice) are never asked with the expectation that any answer is forthcoming. Whether they are sitting around the kitchen, going out for fried chicken and brownies, or fleeing an industrial disaster, the Gladneys constantly address each other through a ludic dialect of mistaken connections among pieces of trivia. Nonsense is their lingua franca. The jumbled code of the Gladney family constitutes a collective self-hypnotism which conjures up an illusion of knowing that is actually an artifactual substitute for knowing. Jacks carefully maintained environment of hermeneutic ambiguity promotes the kind of knowing which Heinrich describes when he asks, What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything (148-9). Jack wants his family to represent a certain kind of mystery, a particularly noncommittal one that invests existence with a general haze of significance rather than signifying anything in particular. He likes his mysteries timeless rather than solvable. He has distanced himself from his ex-wives who all circulate in extra-domestic circuits of knowledge. One ex-wife, Tweedy Browner, has remarried to a CIA operative who is sponsoring a Communist revival in Indonesia as part of an elegant scheme to topple Castro (86); an involuted cloak and dagger plot that loses itself in the chaotic sprawl of Late Cold War intrigue. Another ex-wife, Dana Breedlove, review[s] fiction for the CIA, mainly long serious novels with coded structures (213). This surreal detail suggests an epistemic parallelism between the esoteric priesthood of 80s literary theory and the complexities of international espionage and indicates that Jacks suspicion of his wifes cryptological systems are bound up with a suspicion of literary textuality. Jack wants a language that is like his son Wilders inchoate wailing in which Jack hears the boy saying nameless things in a way that touched me with its depth and richness (78). He wants a language that is like the German that he can only speak in concrete nouns and ordinal numbers. A language in which signification is immanent in the symbol itself; a code that contains its own translation, rather than spill[ing] out, three dimensionally, all over the landscape (139), into the messy strata of history and modernist intertextuality. As far as Jack is concerned, the whole point of [his current wife] Babette (192, 193) is that she is what she is, a devoted wife and mother, committed to promoting an atmosphere of mundane domesticity. Her yesyesyes (34, 209, 210) is not the all-inclusive affirmation of the heroine of Ulysses, the archetypal long, serious novel with a coded structure, but is a kind of denial of anything beyond the immediate present; a mantra she murmurs to block out thoughts of the future, the past, or the world outside the visible environment. But of course, Babette also turns out to be another secret agent; another representation of the 80s marriage as a secret agency in which both partners are cloaked moles. Nevertheless, Jack and Babette mirror each other in ways that reinforce their mutual hypnotism, most blatantly through their shared obsession with death that they have both been keeping from each other. Despite her perfidy, or perhaps even because of the manner in which her concealment about her fear of death echoes Jacks own concealment, Babette and Jack are able to communicate with each other in a kind of perfect cybernetic dyad of code and message. As they lie together after confessing their death fears to one another, Jack says, We held each other tightly for a long time, our bodies clenched in an embrace that included elements of love, grief, tenderness, sex and struggle. How subtly we shifted emotions, found shadings, using the scantest movements of our arms, our loins, the slightest intake of breath, to reach agreement on our fear, to advance our competition, to assert our root desires against the chaos in our souls (199). They constitute for each other a self-enclosed circuit of sign and signification; they enter bodily into a complex and nuanced but perfectly understandable code-language of two. Jack engages in this same kind of epistemological coitus with the ATM machine upon entering his secret code. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval. The system hardware, the mainframe sitting in a locked room in some distant city. What a pleasing interaction. I sensed that something of deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed. A deranged person was escorted from the bank by two armed guards. The system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now (46). Jack imagines that he is able to communicate with this global cybernetic world-soul with the intimacy with which he responds to the body-language of his wife. The code is a kind of existential passport into the network of data; a deliverance from time and space. The intimate existential identity of Jack and his code makes this transaction possible. A letter from the bank warns Jack to Know your code. Reveal your code to no one. Only your code allows you to enter the system (295). By becoming his code, entering it, to use a word that the Babette associates with a certain mechanical kind of sex, Jacks being takes on a metaphorical character; as if hes being transposed into the electric circuits of Pure Meaning. The brand names which crowd into the interstices of Jacks consciousness throughout his narration have a similar function. A brand name is the epitome of the word that exhibits zero-polysemy; a signifier that is coextensive with what it signifies. Brand names have a magical, incantatatory aura for Jack because they are pure code, a way of speaking in things rather than in words. Following his exposure to an ambiguously toxic industrial chemical, however, Jacks interview with a medical technician introduces him to the flip-side of his transcendental ATM transaction. The capacity of the modern subject to enter into a techno-existential code-world reveals its deadly underbelly. When a display of bracketed numbers with pulsing stars (140/260) portends some dire yet elusive signification for Jack, he finds himself on the outside of the same kind of codical network which had previously authenticated his existence. I wondered what he meant when he said hed tapped into my history. Where was it located exactly? Some state or federal agency, some insurance company or credit firm or medical clearinghouse? What history was he referring to? Id told him some basic things. Height, weight, childhood diseases. What else did he know? Did he know about my wives my dreams and fears? (140). The same system of order that allowed Jack to shoot out into the circuits of cyberspace now reverses its existential valence and shoots into Jack, infecting his most intimate recesses with the same alienness and suspicion that characterize computer technology. By merging his ontological aspirations with the metaphoricity of telecommunications, Jack has been interphorically compromised. The secret code that affirmed his invulnerability easily morphs into the computerized dots that register [his] life and death (140). Deathlessness in the channels of codical ciphers has revolved into a helpless and exiling death-boundness; a condition of conclusiveness in which You are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that (141). Jack himself becomes a superfluous remnant of his cybernetic avatar. The Simuvac medical technician is not even looking at Jacks body, he only enters and accesses data on a computer. As the subject of medicine, Jack isnt the body-for-medicine as Sartre describes it, not the surgeons corpsey mass; Jacks body is a body-for-technoscience, a computer programmers virtual body, a body composed of immaterial codes existing nowhere in particular. At the clinic quaintly named Autumn Harvest Farms, Jack is encoded, graphed, imaged, charted, quantified, fragmented, and transposed into data. He is conducted down a gamut of diminution, abstraction, and rarification, each cubicle appearing slightly smaller than the one before it, more harshly lighted, emptier of human furnishings Someone sat at a console, transmitting a message to the machine that would make my body transparent. I heard magnetic winds, saw flashes of northern light. People crossed the hall like wandering souls (276). Autumn Harvest Farms is another iteration of Murrays Supermarket, a mixture of purgatory, inquisition, purification, transmigration. Our suburban equivalent of sacred space. The technician with whom Jack consults reminded me of the boys at the supermarket who stand at the end of the checkout counter bagging merchandise (277). If elsewhere, the supermarket bagboy has become the suburban equivalent of the Grim Reaper (281/284), his appearance at August Harvest Farms literalizes the metaphorical analogies of the Supermarket; Jack becomes the merchandise the bagboy will bag. Whatever of him that remains behind subjectively is the unreal remainder, the false character that follows his data around. Ultimately, even his relatively flesh-based circuits of codical information, his wife and his family, drift away from him into their own meanings. Babette becomes increasingly aloof and unapproachable as she falls into despair. His search for a solution to the predicament of human existence drives him to empty the family trash compactor and comb it for an answer that he knows in advance isnt there anyway. In the immediate sense, he is trying to find the pills which claim to relieve the fear of death, even though he knows that they were taken away in the last garbage collection. In a broader sense, he is searching through the garbage for answers, for some sign of meaning and coherence, a bit of epiphany that will allay the panic of mortality. What he finds is, crayon drawings of a figure with full breasts and male genitals. There was a long piece of twine that contained a series of knots and loops. It seemed at first like a random construction. Looking more closely, I thought I detected a complex relationship between the size of the loops, the degree of the knots (single or double) and the intervals between knots with loops and freestanding knots. Some kind of occult geometry or symbolic festoon of obsessions. I found a banana skin with a tampon inside. Was this the dark underside of consumer consciousness? (259). The uncanny semiotics of the garbage offer only clues, only insinuations and suggestions, poetic images rather than diagnostic ones, always poised between significance and coincidence. The postmodern unconscious the dark underside of consumer consciousness is not a royal road to anything. These garbological artifacts defy any grammar of understanding except to grimly emblematize in scatological terms the chaos and secrecy that constitute the epistemological condition of the Gladney family. The polysemous unreadability of the garbage reproduces the cybernetic condition of white noise, the condition of maximum entropy wherein all messages are equally probable and all meanings confounded by an infinite precession of alternate meanings. Jacks attempts to enter the code-world repeatedly collapse either into lethality or ineffectuality. The world of death and randomness continually reasserts itself against Jacks fantasies of redemptive self-encryption.     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