The Levinasian Face of the Other in DeLillo’s White Noise

ABSTRACT

In light of Levinas’ conceptualization of the face of the Other, I reread the final showdown scene in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Firstly, I delineate how Jack’s egoism renders Mink, who is unmistakably the Other, less human. Through the act of killing, Jack hopes to nullify Mink’s otherness and incorporate it into the same as his life credit. Focusing on Jack’s role change from killer to savior, I then explain how he moves out of his interiority and welcomes the face of the Other. His gaze at Mink’s face helps him see the latter’s vulnerability and his own as well. It is right at this Levinasian moment that he sees and is moved by the face of the Other. Finally, I point out that through his ethical relation with Mink, Jack starts to welcome the faces of many Others and embrace the forming of meaningful human relations. The witnessing of embodied vulnerability demands ethical responses to the Other, which would hopefully offset the troubling tendency of aestheticizing disasters as DeLillo observes happening in his time and dutifully represents in his writing.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Nina Stoyan-Rosenzweig and Glenn Bolas for their generous support and encouragement. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers of Critique for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Wilcox and Duvall are not alone in this line of thinking. Many other critics have analyzed the Jack-Mink confrontation from various perspectives, yet with a shared interest in Mink’s inhumanness (e.g., Saltzman 814–18; Basu 101–06; Wiese 17–19). Highlighting the fraudulent nature of Dylar and its various side effects, Saltzman argues that Mink is trapped in “a kind of Saussurean nightmare” (818). Basu reads Mink as the techno-ethnic other by picturing him “as the figure of polymorphous other” and “a technologically sophisticated ‘extraterrestrial’” (101). Commenting on the showdown scene, Basu writes, “the figuration of otherness deploys all the pathologies of difference that have historically marked the body of the other – madness, sexual transgression, physical deformity and disease, childlikeness, and animal genitality” (105). For Wiese, “Mink is in an impossibly altered state and no longer cognizant of what is happening” as a normal human being (18). Mink’s “preestablished postmodern stylization” upsets Jack’s “predetermined plot” (Wiese 18). Finally, Jack’s plan turns out to be “a hyperbolized parody of the classic farcical revenge narrative of the scorned husband” (Wiese 17). By highlighting Mink’s otherness, such stereotypical reading of the showdown scene has conveniently erased Mink’s humanity, with a view to highlighting Jack’s failure and the social ills of his time.

2. Much has been written about the Jack-Mink encounter. Yet, opinions vary in terms of Mink’s role. These various viewpoints could be roughly divided into two groups. Critics like Wilcox, Duvall, Packer, Saltzman, Basu, and Wiese, focus more on the inhumanness of Mink and his failure to live up to Jack’s expectation, while some others, such as Engles, Kavadlo and Martucci offer a relatively more positive reading on this scene in their reluctant recognition of Mink’s humanity. I hope to carry forward the second group’s positive reading by investigating what Jack has learned from this encounter.

3. Engles insightfully points out, “Jack has long been obsessed with his own death, bolstering his sense of himself by appropriating the aura of whatever strikes him as ‘death-defying,’ including Hitler, the German language, and things Germanic in general” (“Fantasies” 778). Jack bends his efforts to keep his fear of death at bay. His study of Hitler makes the latter a “signifier in a code that does not register the moral significance of his name, but trades him as a commodity on the academic market” (Reeve and Kerridge 307). From such commodification, Jack gains much-needed self-affirmation, which is vital for him to create an imaginary safe zone from death. Moreover, as Bonca points out, “Jack’s immersion in Hitler studies is clearly his attempt to bury himself in a discourse so horrible that his own death-fear is made puny” (38).

4. For more discussions on the forming of community through consumerism, see Engles (“Fantasies” 761–62), Ferraro (20–24) and Weekes (294). For thebinding power of disaster footages, see Green (581–83).

5. By “connection” I mean meaningful and ethical bonds between people. Jack is aware of Mink’s presence, but he opts to view him as the Other. As Engles writes, by pigeonholing Mink as the racialized Other, Jack “resorts to reliable categories in which he inserts a perceived Other in order to construct an appropriate backdrop for his assertion of an individualized self” (“Fantasies” 777). Mink’s otherness is highlighted to establish Jack’s white supremacy and to help him define himself. By doing this, Jack is obviously self-interested and self-centered. But Jack is at most a drifter who has been carried away by his culture and society. Harack makes a point that White Noise “represent[s] DeLillo’s … obsession with illustrating how American inhabit their world … by diagnos[ing] the dangers of forgetfulness, placelessness, and non-consideration of the other in America” (305). Pervasive and entrenched egoism, in many cases veiled by the aura of individualism, obscures the visibility of the Other and disconnects people.

6. As Engles argues, “Jack has been raised as an implicitly white person in a culture bolstered by iconographic celebrations of heroic white men acting out their individualized roles against a backdrop of ‘inferior,’ racialized others” (“Fantasies” 763). Mink, as the racialized other, is expected to set off Jack’s heroism which is expected to be enacted through his meticulous plan.

7. Besides Wilcox and Olster, Saltzman also argues that by saying “I believed everything,” Jack reinforces his “open admission policy to every spectacle and a wholesale renunciation of the capacity for disbelief” (814). Such willingness leads Jack “to be overwhelmed by a wealth of stimulants” and finally contributes to his disabling disorientation (Saltzman 814).

8. However, Engles argues that Jack’s interest in the other people proves to be short-lived when “he turns to his own wound first” before he rescues Mink (“Fantasies” 780). Engles continues, “As a member of a race whose middle-class, male members are particularly discouraged from constructing their identities in raced, classed, and gendered terms, Jack finds himself unable to break out of the resultant habit of focusing single-mindedly on himself, even when ostensibly focusing on others” (“Fantasies” 780). Discussions on Jack’s shifting back to self-centeredness can also be found in Kavadlo (33–34) and Martucci (97).

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Jiena Sun

Jiena Sun, with a Ph.D in literature from State University of New York-Binghamton (2012), is an associate professor in the English Department at Wuhan University (Wuhan, Hubei, P. R. China). She has published books and essays on contemporary American Literature, with a focus on literature and medicine.