Airborne Toxicity in Don DeLillo’s White Noise

1 Introduction

One of Don DeLillo’s most famous works, the 1985 novel White Noise, focuses on the story of a family who get caught up in an airborne toxic event. Depicting the life of a couple that is afraid of and obsessed with death, the novel captures the feelings of chaos, uncertainty, and fear experienced upon the sudden appearance of a “black billowing cloud” which is formed by a fictional chemical called Nyodene Derivative (DeLillo, 1998, pp. 113, 111). The novel consists of three separate chapters. While the first and the third chapters focus on some of the family issues of Jack Gladney, who is a professor of the fictional discipline “Hitler Studies,” the second chapter focuses on the appearance of the billowing cloud of Nyodene D.

The appearance of this toxic cloud is a central plot point within the novel, as it creates great unease among the characters of White Noise. The cloud becomes a manifestation of human mortality, thereby revealing the fragility of human existence. The occurrence of a single event triggers widespread panic, prompting individuals to start fleeing frantically. This occurrence effectively shatters the illusion that technologically advanced and prosperous societies are impervious to such calamities. The profound fear of death and the accompanying loss of command over one’s own life serve as poignant illustrations of human apprehension and unease in relinquishing control over their existence.

After hearing the orders to evacuate all places of residence, residents start fleeing from the town of Blacksmith. Jack Gladney joins the people fleeing their homes with his wife Babette and their four children from previous marriages: Heinrich, Denise, Steffie, and Wilder. On the road, they start running out of gas, thus Jack drives into a gas station and gets out of the car for only a few minutes during which he enters into contact with Nyodene D. Following Jack Gladney’s accidental exposure to this toxic chemical, the readers are given an insight into Gladney’s psychological situation. The novel emphasizes the detrimental impact of the fear of death on both individuals and societies, as symbolized by the black cloud. At the end of the novel, the characters confront their fear of death after facing the decision to either surrender to their anxieties or embrace their own mortality. Thus, the novel suggests that accepting the inevitability of mortality can result in a deeper comprehension of one’s own existence. However, the abrupt and unknown nature of the exposure creates a reaction which is one of chaos, uncertainty, and fear at first. Just like the sudden emergence of COVID-19, the abrupt appearance of a “black billowing cloud” in White Noise creates great fear among the characters. The uncertainty which is experienced due to the unknown nature of these two incidents led to a period of chaos.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, people across the world came to realize the significant relationship between air and human health. This pandemic, which changed the course of many lives, demonstrated how air serves as a transmitter of viruses. However, this quality of air is not new, with air acting as a significant tool in transmitting diseases, pollution, and even death. It is crucial to understand that airborne diseases include but are not limited to epidemics or pandemics such as the black death, influenza, or COVID-19.

Since the Chernobyl disaster, it is perceived that “the divine and demonic shadow kingdom ‘of antiquity’ has been superseded by the modern shadow kingdom of toxic and radiological hazards” (Nixon, 2011, pp. 62–63). Environmental disasters such as the Bhopal disaster, Donora Smog, and the Chernobyl disaster emphasize the impact of toxic chemicals on human and more-than-human lives. These disasters show that toxic substances that threaten the lives of all living things imperceptibly seep into the soil, water, and air, causing harm and toxifying ecosystems, and entering into human and more-than-human bodies. Exposure to toxicity and radioactivity can happen in the blink of an eye, transmitted through the air we breathe.

Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise presents a significant example of ecocriticism because of its striking portrayal of an airborne toxic event, highlighting that environmental risks can occur instantaneously and that our bodies can easily be affected by environmental risks and hazards. The novel was published in 1985, only a few months after the Bhopal disaster, which resulted in the death of thousands of people who became exposed to the highly toxic methyl isocyanate gas in Bhopal, India. Just like this toxic gas leak in Bhopal, the appearance of a “black billowing cloud” of the fictional chemical Nyodene D. in White Noise, presents an environmental crisis through which air’s entanglements can be explored. Similar to the issues and reflections experienced after the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the characters in White Noise experience chaos, uncertainty, and fear following the abrupt occurrence of an airborne toxic event.

2 Air and Environments

While focusing on toxicity in White Noise, it is crucial to understand the relationship between air and environments. Exploring the meaning of the word “air,” we find a description from the Cambridge Dictionary, which suggests “[a]ir is the mixture of gases that surrounds the earth and that we breathe” (Cambridge University Press & Assessment, n.d.). All living beings need air for respiration. The process of respiration enables animals and plants to live. Thus, air is one of the most essential things that exists both for the human and for the more-than-human world. In contrast, something that is so vital to our survival can also become extremely dangerous to our well-being. The COVID-19 era has made this very obvious to us, and yet there are other incidents dating back to many years before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Chernobyl disaster is a great example of the transmitting power of air. We have been well aware that radioactivity did not just affect Chernobyl; the winds carried radioactive particles over long distances, and as a result, a vast area of land became contaminated to various degrees. And how did this radioactivity expand to such distant places? Well, air was mainly responsible for this expansion. This incident changed our perception of air and radioactivity. Other incidents that occurred before the Chernobyl disaster also enhance this perspective. The Bhopal Disaster and the Donora Smog have been significant disasters that emphasized the power of air in transmitting death and disease.

Today COVID-19 serves as another example that highlights the role of air in everyday lives. When an unknown virus diminishes the world’s population, the whole of humanity passes through times of chaos, uncertainty, and fear. Recent research on the psychiatric manifestations of COVID-19 claims:

COVID-19 can directly or indirectly influence the central nervous system, potentially causing neurological pathologies such as Alzheimer disease and Parkinson disease. Thus, chronic COVID-19-related disease processes have the potential to cause serious mental illnesses, including depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders. (Ptacek et al., 2020, para. 1)

The feelings that are experienced by the occurrence of COVID-19 are also vivid in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise. When one of the protagonists, Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler studies, who has a strange obsession with death and its causes, is exposed to this fictional chemical called Nyodene Derivative, he immediately finds himself in a state of despair about his health and well-being. With this background, Ulrich Beck’s term “risk society” can be applied to explain some of those underlying feelings of fear and uncertainty that lead people to act irrationally. In his work Risikogesellschaft, translated into English as Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Beck argues that risks are created by the same society that tries to eliminate them, and this situation is the main paradox behind Beck’s concept. He highlights that there is no clear distinction between nature and culture, thus nobody is free from risk. However, in White Noise, Jack Gladney mentions a different type of societal dilemma, where certain communities are more vulnerable to risk than others:

These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it’s the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters. People in low-lying areas get the floods, people in shanties get the hurricanes and tornados. I’m a college professor. Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods? We live in a neat and pleasant town near a college with a quaint name. These things don’t happen in places like Blacksmith. (DeLillo, 1998, p. 119)

The enduring consequences of environmental disasters on both ecosystems and human bodies can materialize in unforeseeable manners, rendering it quite hard to detect as the damage can occur “gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon, 2011, p. 2). Furthermore, just like Gladney pointed out, the weight of environmental deterioration is experienced disparately among various populations, with certain groups enduring the burdens of environmental injustices disproportionately. Unlike Gladney’s perception, Beck suggests that the whole society is under the threat of human-made disasters, which can be encountered anywhere and anytime during the course of our daily lives, thus highlighting that nobody is free from risk. Taking a look at the world we live in, we realize that even natural disasters that seem to be beyond the causal capacity of human beings may well be the result of human actions, human negligence, or even technological failures. Reflecting on this paradox suggested by Beck’s risk society makes us understand the chaos and fear that cause people to act irrationally. Pointing out the proximity of risk, Buell (2001) focuses on Beck’s theory as

[t]hreats from civilization are bringing about a kind of new “shadow kingdom,” comparable to the realm of the gods and demons in antiquity, which is hidden behind the visible world and threatens human life on this Earth. People … find themselves exposed to “radiation,” ingest “toxic levels,” and are pursued into their very dreams by the anxiety of a “nuclear holocaust”… Dangerous, hostile substances lie concealed behind the harmless facades. (p. 30)

Taking the theory of risk society into account, the quote shows that the perception of risk has shifted in time, and now hazardous substances have become risks that threaten all life forms on Earth. The fact that exposure to these substances can occur anywhere at any time is what makes them so terrifying. The proximity and the precariousness of risk, and the fear that it engenders, are vividly portrayed in Don DeLillo’s White Noise.

In the second part of the novel, after receiving the instructions to evacuate all domiciles, Jack Gladney and his family flee their house. Upon hearing on the radio that people on the west end of town should head for the abandoned Boy Scout camp, they also start heading in that direction. On the way, they realize that they are running out of gas, so they stop at the nearest gas station. When they reach the pump, Jack leaves the car only for a few minutes, and this is when he becomes exposed to the black billowing cloud of Nyodene D. Buell’s description above, which mentions that our world must be investigated through a second reality, corresponds with another scene following Jack Gladney’s exposure to the toxic cloud. Right after reaching the evacuation camp, a health technician types his data into a computer that predicts how many years he will live after his exposure:

“Am I going to die?”…

“We’ll know more in fifteen years. In the meantime we definitely have a situation.”

“What will we know in fifteen years?”

“If you’re still alive at the time, we’ll know that much more than we do now. Nyodene D. has a life span of thirty years. You’ll have made it halfway through.”…

“I wouldn’t worry about what I can’t see or feel,” he said. “I’d go ahead and live my life. Get married, settle down, have kids. There’s no reason you can’t do these things, knowing what we know.”

“But you said we have a situation.”

“I didn’t say it. The computer did. The whole system says it. It’s what we call a massive data-base tally. Gladney, J. A. K. I punch in the name, the substance, the exposure time and then I tap into your computer history. Your genetics, your personals, your medicals, your psychologicals, your police-and-hospitals. It comes back pulsing stars. This doesn’t mean anything is going to happen to you as such, at least not today or tomorrow. It just means you are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that.” (DeLillo, 1998, pp. 140–141)

The above scene from White Noise is similar to many people’s experiences during COVID-19. Both during COVID-19 and in White Noise, people are surrounded by dangerous things. During COVID-19, those people who were closest to us could actually infect us with the deadly virus, which illustrates that understanding such dangers requires considering other realities. People needed medical tests to make sure if they were infected with coronavirus or not. Governments reported daily to the public how many people had died or were suffering from COVID-19. Through these realities, individuals struggled to understand the dangers of everyday life. Considering the whole situation, one may wonder if it is really necessary to focus on these realities to continue living. Are we “the sum total” of our data? Perhaps we should consider Dr. Bernard Rieux’s approach in Camus’s (1991) famous novel The Plague, when he says “I have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing” (p. 113). Similar to the idea suggested by Dr. Bernard Rieux in the previous quotation, we should sometimes focus on what we have now and find a way to continue our lives, because focusing on the uncertain only creates more fear and anxiety.

All in all, the agentic power of elements such as chemicals and radioactivity that can be transmitted through the air becomes evident through tragedies such as Chernobyl, the Donora smog, and the Bhopal disaster. While toxic exposure to chemicals or radioactivity was the visible aftermath of these disasters, it would be wrong to overlook the human error and the technological mishaps that took place and consider these disasters as mere consequences of modernity. Looking at these elements, Beck’s theory of a risk society becomes even more apparent, because chemicals and radioactivity are products of modern society, used by humans to rule over nature. Furthermore, the notion of unlimited economic expansion, as well as waste and pollution, which are also seen as the byproducts of human progress, make ecological degradation a global issue. The hazardous chemicals that modern society uses in its exploitation of the natural resources of the universe become a threat to the same society because, after all, we are biological bodies as well. Considering these facts, we realize that the agentic force of chemicals and radioactivity is highly significant because, most of the time, the elements that are mentioned are not even visible to the human eye. However, their power cannot be ignored as they cause severe casualties and even cause people to relocate with the aim of escaping the effects of these disasters. In order to understand this idea better, the agentic force of toxic elements will be discussed in the next part of this article.

3 The Agentic Force of Toxicity

Toxicity permeates different perspectives of modern life. Cambridge Dictionary defines the word toxic as (1) “poisonous” and (2) “very unpleasant or unacceptable” (Cambridge University Press & Assessment, n.d.). Today the word “toxic” is used to describe many things ranging from hazardous chemical substances to harmful relationships and people. However, in this article, the term toxic will be analyzed as an aspect of disaster studies, which places a toxic incident within the borders of an environmental disaster. In his article “Disaster Studies,” Lindell (2013) describes a disaster as follows:

An event concentrated in time and space, in which a society or one of its subdivisions undergoes physical harm and social disruption, such that all or some essential functions of the society or subdivision are impaired. Physical harm and social disruption occur because an event exceeds normal protections. (p. 797)

This definition matches well with the scene that is depicted in White Noise after the sudden appearance of a “black billowing cloud of Nyodene D.” (DeLillo, 1998, p. 113), which impairs some functions of society and causes “physical harm and social disruption” (Lindell, 2013, p. 797).

Toxicity is a recurring theme in DeLillo’s White Noise. The chemical cloud that travels from one space to another through the movement of air categorizes itself as a “corporate poison” (Heise, 2008, p. 162), which is a technological development and byproduct of modern society. Another significant element of Lindell’s (2013) definition of disaster focuses on three conditions, which are “hazard exposure, physical vulnerability, and social vulnerability” (p. 799). Exposure and vulnerability are intermingled terms. Our physical and social vulnerability can enhance the risk of our exposure; thus, we live in a constant state of fear and shock due to the unpredictability and vulnerability of our existence.

In White Noise, while the appearance of a “black billowing cloud” represents uncertainty, how people react signifies the phase of chaos and fear that is experienced by the people upon the appearance of this cloud. Another factor that enhanced fear in White Noise and during COVID-19 was the abruptness of both events. The black billowing cloud appeared suddenly and, through the power of wind, it managed to spread its toxicity to a wider area. In the case of the coronavirus, no external forces were needed to spread the virus. As people traveled, the virus traveled along, spreading the illness to almost all the countries in the world within a very short period of time. El’s (2019) analysis is significant in understanding this relationship:

One of the results of the airborne toxic event is the evacuation which forces people to leave their homes … one single event affects people’s lives dramatically and devastates their lives. People have to change their locations, sometimes live in barracks under quarantine … The fact that the toxic cloud moves regardless of human will befits the material agency principal, which considers toxicity as a mobile and agentic force. (p. 36)

All materialities have their own agency. Even though materials can be human-made, this does not mean that they are subject to the control of human beings. Even materials that seem futile and insignificant to human beings, such as garbage, have an agentic force as the gases that accumulate at garbage dump sites can cause chemical reactions. Thus, nothing can be considered futile, insignificant, or absolutely subject to human control. Contemplating this agentic force, we perceive that the toxic cloud of the fictional chemical Nyodene D. in White Noise and the airborne virus in COVID-19 also do not submit to human control. In White Noise, people evacuate their houses to prevent coming in contact with the toxic cloud that travels with the wind. In contrast, during the coronavirus pandemic, people had to stay in their homes under quarantine to prevent the spread of the virus. Thus, we comprehend that the ties we have with our homes can easily become affected by the agency of airborne viruses or toxic events.

How people are deprived of their homes can be better understood with the idea Ursula Heise, a German literary scholar, suggests through risk perception. In her book Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, Heise describes the relationship between risk and an individual’s bond to his or her community. According to Heise (2008), risk perceptions are resources for “the cultural study of contemporary societies’ relation to the natural environment” (p. 122). In order to understand how our actions are determined by our relation to the natural environment, we can focus on Heise’s approach towards risk perception. Through risk perception, Heise (2008) seeks to explain how people are deprived of their homes:

Most obviously, risk perceptions can either intensify or break individuals’ and communities’ bonds to a local place. In the first case, the desire to protect an area from danger may deepen residents’ affective attachments to it … Conversely, the perception of danger can break inhabitants’ bonds with a place and prompt them to move away, or stigmatize a site to such a degree that its material as well as aesthetic and cultural value decreases. (p. 152)

In her book, Heise (2008) argues that “the novel abounds … to the multiple technologically generated risks that the average American family encounters in daily life” (p. 164). Thus, we can see that Heise’s focus on DeLillo’s novel points to a perception of risk based on Ulrich Beck’s idea of the proximity and precariousness of risk. In the case of the coronavirus pandemic, it can be said that the whole world was shocked when it realized the magnitude of this catastrophe. Moreover, the underlying causes of the fear and chaos experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic were the confrontation with the agentic power of the coronavirus and the realization of its proximity and power. The agentic power of toxic chemicals or airborne viruses is highly significant, as mentioned in the previous two quotes. They can either increase or decrease the attachment that people have to a particular place. This is what makes this force so powerful. It is helpful to focus on Alaimo’s (2010) theory of trans-corporeality to understand the agentic power of a material. According to Alaimo:

Trans-corporeality reveals the interchanges and interconnections between various bodily natures. But by underscoring that trans indicates movement across different sites, trans-corporeality also opens up a mobile space that acknowledges the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors. Emphasizing the material interconnections of human corporeality with the more-than-human world – and, at the same time, acknowledging that material agency necessitates more capacious epistemologies – allows us to forge ethical and political positions that can contend with numerous late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century realities in which “human” and “environment” can by no means be considered as separate. (p. 2)

When comparing the COVID-19 pandemic to DeLillo’s White Noise, many similarities can be identified. With regards to El’s (2019) quotation about evacuation and quarantine, we can suggest that the evacuation that takes place in White Noise can also be encountered during the COVID-19 era. While some governments managed to evacuate their citizens from countries that were already infected with the coronavirus, some were not as successful, which aligns with the chaotic evacuation journey of Jack Gladney and his family.

In contrast, during the period of COVID quarantine, people were faced with another problem, which was being “locked down” in their houses. Quarantine is the opposite of evacuation. While the first one locks you up in your house, the second one locks you out of it; however, in reality, their practice can be different. While an emergency evacuation serves as a top-down imperative, quarantine relies on individuals to take responsibility for themselves. Yet, during the COVID-19 pandemic, such differences were blurred. As mentioned in “Governmentality Versus Community: The Impact of the COVID Lockdowns”:

The COVID lockdowns were characterised by new forms of governmentality as lives were disrupted and controlled through the vertical transmission of biopolitics. … The Coronavirus lockdowns forced people to adapt their community life as travel was restricted and public and leisure services were withdrawn. In Foucault’s (2003) framework, this meant new forms of territorial governmentality and the reshaping of the relationship between individuals and the state as the biopolitics of emergency were imposed. (Wallace et al., 2023, para. 1–3)

While some countries imposed a full closure policy during COVID-19, some did not impose such strict measures. The biopolitics blurred the lines of freedom that is cherished among democratic countries around the world. Thus, the similarity between the evacuation scene in White Noise and the quarantine during COVID-19 can be seen, as they both lacked individual free will. Just like the evacuation in White Noise, the quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic was imposed upon individuals from above, making the whole process harder to internalize. Why such strict measures were taken is explained as follows:

COVID-19 was treated like the plague or even leprosy, even this [sic] meant keeping in the same territory people who were sick (unhealthy) and those who were not sick (healthy) but were suspected nevertheless of having been in contact with the “virus carrier” and have [sic] not yet developed symptoms. Modern medicine from at least the cholera epidemics has been against this view of “contamination”. But fear, uncertainty, and division about the nature of the virus created this regression to the habitus of 19th century medicine, giving at least a sort of certainty that imprisoning people in a certain space and limiting social interactions was the less bad solution. (Bigo et al., 2021, p. 6)

Measures like isolation and quarantine showed that COVID-19 was treated like one of the diseases of the nineteenth century. Even though medicine is much more advanced than it was in the nineteenth century, the fear and uncertainty of the virus created a unique form of governmentality for the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2020, a study that focused on the psychological impact of quarantine showed that “separation from loved ones, the loss of freedom, uncertainty over disease status, and boredom can, on occasion, create dramatic effects” (Brooks et al., 2020, p. 912). In White Noise, what created the feelings of chaos and fear was not the quarantine, but these feelings emerged due to the occurrence of the airborne toxic event itself. In contrast, Jack Gladney’s exposure to Nyodene D. and the uncertainty regarding how Nyodene D. would affect his body in the future made Jack more and more obsessed with death. As a college professor, he did not believe that these things could happen to people like him, yet he eventually found himself dealing with an increasing fear of death following his exposure to the highly toxic chemical Nyodene D.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the airborne virus created quite similar feelings. However, according to Brooks and his colleagues’ (2020) study on the psychological impact of quarantine, the quarantine has exacerbated the symptoms caused by the pandemic. After conducting research on three electronic databases, the review focused on 24 papers that concentrated on different quarantine examples such as the ones imposed after SARS and Ebola outbreaks. This review highlights the following:

Most reviewed studies reported negative psychological effects including post-traumatic stress symptoms, confusion, and anger. Stressors included longer quarantine duration, infection fears, frustration, boredom, inadequate supplies, inadequate information, financial loss, and stigma. (p. 912)

It is likely that stressors such as confusion and fear emerged due to the abruptness and the unknown nature of the coronavirus; however, as suggested by Brooks et al. (2020), these stressors intensified with the amount of time passed under quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Furthermore, when comparing the COVID-19 pandemic to the times portrayed following the emergence of the black billowing cloud, parallels to what El (2019) argues in his article “Non-Human Agencies in Don DeLillo’s White Noise” as the zeitgeist of COVID-19 can be observed. He notes a tendency toward self-soothing behavior as well as a reflection of damaging effects, which include fear and manifestations of mental ill-health depicted by DeLillo in White Noise. In order to understand what will happen to him after being exposed to the black billowing cloud, Jack Gladney contacts some officials to get some information about his situation and learns how many years he would live, and this situation corresponds to how people tried to understand the scale of COVID-19 through the news. While the statistical data that appeared on the news were important for all of us, it also reflected the fear that was experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. In his article, El (2019) points out:

The quarantine makes the characters in the novel lead a more isolated life dependent on television and other media devices. Therefore, the airborne toxic event not only affects people in physical ways but also affects them psychologically … As the evacuees have been informed about the toxic event primarily via television, they feel the necessity to be informed about the cure of the event via television, too. This example puts forth its helplessness in the posttraumatic world. (p. 43)

As highlighted by El, being informed about the toxic event, primarily via television, and feeling the necessity to be informed about the resolution of the event via television can be applied to COVID-19 as well. In White Noise, and also during the COVID-19 pandemic, people sought solace by searching for information online or through radio and television. Results of an online assessment in India on the role of mass media during the coronavirus pandemic show that “the use of internet/social media was highest during and before lockdown, followed by TV news. The use of TV and internet/social media increased during the lockdown while the use of newspapers, radio, and magazines declined significantly” (Dhanashree et al., 2021, para. 4).

Due to the quarantine, television and the internet were the most common places where people could find information. Furthermore, these technological tools became the only means of entertainment, which provided a way for us to temporarily escape from the reality of the coronavirus and the quarantine. Thus, considering COVID-19 and Don DeLillo’s famous novel White Noise, we discover that both events mark the agentic force of airborne events. These airborne toxic events are so powerful that they change the course of people’s lives. While some people face evacuation, others face quarantine, and due to the intensity of these events, people acquire new and different habits, such as the need to be constantly informed via television and the internet. Moreover, these incidents also have a great influence on behavior patterns as people use social media and television “as a method of coping and escapism” (Fernandes et al., 2020, p. 60).

In a recent study by Fernandes et al. (2020) that focuses on the impact of COVID-19 on internet use among adolescents, the term escapism is explained as follows: “Escapism refers to a form of avoidant coping aimed at dealing with stress by escaping unsatisfying life circumstances” (p. 60). Although the study indicates that high use of social media and the internet was reported among teenagers even before the quarantines were imposed by governments, it can also be noted that lockdowns played a significant role in the increase of such behaviors. Thus, through these research papers, we comprehend that social ties can easily become affected by the agency of things such as airborne viruses or toxic chemicals.

Considering material agency, one realizes that even things that are unimportant to us can play a role in our lives. This role can be as influential as a change in our behavior or the loss of our home. Thus, when considering the coronavirus and the appearance of the toxic chemical of Nyodene D. in DeLillo’s White Noise, it can be suggested that these events change the course of people’s lives, affect their psychology, and even shape the zeitgeist of the times in which they live.

4 Fear, Uncertainty, and Chaos

Comparing COVID-19 and the novel White Noise, it becomes apparent that the troubles experienced during COVID-19 have many resemblances and similarities to the tumultuous plot depicted in the novel. The sudden emergence of COVID-19 and the abrupt appearance of a “black billowing cloud” in White Noise, both generated great fear. The uncertainty experienced due to the unknown nature of these two incidents led to a period of chaos. While COVID-19 and the black cloud of Nyodene D. were the main reasons behind the feelings of chaos, uncertainty, and fear, the media also played a major role in generating these feelings.

In White Noise and amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, people felt the necessity to be informed about the toxic event primarily via the internet and television, and also eagerly waited to be informed about the cure through all sorts of media channels. White Noise was first published in 1985; thus, the characters in the novel sought information through radio and television. However, accessing information during the COVID-19 pandemic differed from the means used by the characters in White Noise. During the pandemic, as information was sought through TV and the internet, news was encountered that sometimes gave hope, while other times shocked and scared even more. As the airborne toxic event created an era of fear and chaos in White Noise, the news about people dying due to the coronavirus also formed similar reactions all around the world. In the novel, the story of a man dying is described as follows:

It was out in the parking lot that we heard the first of the rumors about a man dying during the inspection of the grade school, one of the masked and Mylex-suited men, heavy-booted and bulky. Collapsed and died, went the story that was going around, in a classroom on the second floor. (DeLillo, 1998, p. 40)

A similar case, which mentions a dead man on the streets of Wuhan, was also made public through the newspapers and the news on January 31, 2020. The image published by The Guardian shows a gray-haired man with a face mask lying dead on the street, and there are two people next to him wearing masks and dressed in hazmat suits. As the newspaper suggests “the reaction of the police and medical staff in hazmat suits, as well as some of the bystanders, highlighted the fear pervading the city” (France-Presse, 2020, para. 4). In both cases of death, whether factual or fictional, reactions similar to fear and chaos that occur due to unusual airborne incidents can be experienced.

In White Noise, nobody can tell what the outcomes will be after becoming exposed to the “black billowing cloud” of Nyodene D. Furthermore, amid the first appearance of the news of this toxic event, the symptoms reported on the radio differ after a certain amount of time. Jack Gladney’s son Heinrich describes the symptoms as follows: “At first they said skin irritation and sweaty palms. But now they say nausea, vomiting, shortness of breath” (DeLillo, 1998, p. 111). COVID-19 also had a similar aspect as the coronavirus had mutations that made it especially hard to follow and detect without a verified test. The symptoms differed for each variant, thus, creating an era dominated by uncertainty.

The methods people use to protect themselves from the effects of these airborne events is another similarity between Don DeLillo’s novel and COVID-19. DeLillo describes this method as follows: “There was a family wrapped completely in plastic, a single large sheet of transparent polyethylene” (1998, p. 121). Both in the case of COVID-19 and the cloud of Nyodene D., people tried to protect themselves in a similar manner. The internet presents pictures of people using melon peel, orange peel, or even bras to cover their mouths as methods of protection from the coronavirus. TRT World, which is a Turkish public broadcast service, launched a video on YouTube showing these unusual, DIY protective solutions. In the video, we can see a person shopping in the supermarket dressed up in scuba gear. While some pictures mention the location they were taken, such as the picture of a man in Manila, Philippines, wearing a water bottle on his head, other pictures do not mention the location they were shot. Similar to the previously discussed scene from White Noise, during the COVID-19 pandemic, people were seen wrapped in plastic to protect themselves from the coronavirus. The means of protection people sought during the COVID-19 pandemic illustrate the chaos and fear that became an everyday reality. People tried every means possible to prevent coming in contact with the virus because of the unknown nature of its severity and contagion. This uncertainty, fear, and chaos can also be understood through Alaimo’s (2010) concept of trans-corporeality:

[T]rans-corporeality denies the human subject the sovereign, central position. Instead, ethical considerations and practices must emerge from a more uncomfortable and perplexing place where the “human” is always already part of an active, often unpredictable, material world. (pp. 16–17)

Becoming part of an active and unpredictable world that affects our lives and also takes away our sovereign position was highly obvious during COVID-19, and DeLillo managed to vividly portray the position of this human in White Noise. Considering the anthropocentric point of view, this philosophical viewpoint asserts that human beings are the center of the universe. Until recently, this has been humanity’s pervasive approach towards the environment. Either nature was ignored, abused, or sacrificed for the sake of humans. However, incidents like COVID-19 became influential in demonstrating the real position of human beings within the universe. Although realizing that human beings do not secure a sovereign position and seeing humanity as a part of the whole ecological system through its entanglements in the ecologies is the right perspective, it continues to shock people to be reminded of their helplessness against nature after incidents such as the worldwide spread of an airborne virus.

While Nyodene D. and coronavirus are both airborne and share many similarities, they are in fact quite diverse in their origins. Nyodene D. is a fictional chemical, whereas COVID-19 is a virus. Due to its toxic nature, the chemical Nyodene D. is hazardous to all bodies, whether human or non-human. The person who becomes directly exposed to the chemical can suffer the outcomes of this exposure, yet these people do not further spread the toxic chemical. As the people do not have any role in the spread of Nyodene D., all the characters in the novel go on with their lives after a short period of evacuation. In contrast, COVID-19 is a virus that functions differently than human-made chemicals. As suggested by Pfizer “[v]iruses are unable to reproduce by themselves. In fact, they barely qualify as living things when outside of a host. But these parasites are well designed to infiltrate host cells and replicate copiously” (How Do Viruses Make Us Sick?, n.d., para. 2). This depiction from Pfizer clearly shows the difference between Jack Gladney’s Nyodene D. and our recent threat: COVID-19. Coronavirus is a living entity, just like the human being it chooses as its host. It requires another body to live and replicate. In order to spread, it seeks another host, which explains why the course of life changed during the coronavirus pandemic, as people had to minimize contact with each other, hence passing many days under quarantine. Thus, even though the coronavirus and the fictional chemical Nyodene D. differ in their origins, they create similar feelings such as fear and chaos, which emerge from the uncertain and undetectable nature of both incidents. Furthermore, a parallel between Nyodene D. and COVID-19 can be drawn, as both events share a common airborne nature. After becoming exposed to Nyodene D. Jack Gladney contemplates his exposure as follows:

That little breath of Nyodene has planted a death in my body. It is now official, according to the computer. I’ve got death inside me. It’s just a question of whether or not I can outlive it. It has a life span of its own … “This is the nature of modern death,” Murray said. “It has a life independent of us. … The more we learn, the more it grows. Is this some law of physics? Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent. Is it a law of nature? Or some private superstition of mine? I sense that the dead are closer to us than ever. I sense that we inhabit the same air as the dead.” (DeLillo, 1998, p. 150)

This quotation also reminds us of the coronavirus, which adapts, grows rapidly, transmits through the air, has a life span of its own, and is a type of death that is closer to us than ever, making us fear it more than ever as it can penetrate our bodies so easily.

While fear was one of the most pervasive feelings experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, an article by Willrich et al. (2022) relates the feelings experienced due to the coronavirus to “the fear of contamination by the coronavirus, fear related to the difficulty of accessing health services and fear regarding the work and income situation” (p. 4). Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic started a new period in our lives where governments used many regulations to control the spread of the virus. These regulations “led political power to take on the task of managing people’s lives through discipline and biopolitics, i.e., biopower is constituted from two poles, which are the body discipline (disciplinary power) and the population regulations (biopolitics)” (Willrich et al., 2022, p. 4). The enforcement of such powers and regulations to control and manage people’s lives also created great unease, stress, and fear among many people.

The concept of “governmentality,” which Michel Foucault coined in his lectures on security, territory, and population at the College de France, focuses on his extensive work on power and society. Governmentality pertains to the approaches and rationalities that direct and oversee individuals and populations in contemporary societies. It encompasses the interplay of establishments, customs, and discourses that mold the manner in which people are governed. The COVID-19 pandemic has become a time of crisis that revealed how biopolitics and biopower operate over the public. The policies about quarantine and vaccination became signs of such governance, and this situation also added to the fear and stress experienced by people who, on the one hand, tried to focus on their health and well-being, and on the other hand, attempted to control the social and economic burden of the pandemic.

5 Conclusion

At the backdrop of DeLillo’s fictional narrative of a cloud sickening and killing humanity, and underlying the panic, distress, and anxiety of the coronavirus epidemic, is the question of why humans fear the unknown. Is it the feeling of helplessness that scared us the most? The course of our lives changed during the COVID-19 pandemic when we were faced with an unknown virus. After all the advances in technology and medicine, it was an utter shock to have a single virus bring life to a halt all around the world. How could all of this happen so swiftly? Why was it so difficult to fight this virus? After all, it was the twenty-first century, was not humanity evolved enough to stop the spread of this airborne disease? Perhaps we can relate to this final quotation from DeLillo’s White Noise, which provides some explanation for the fear that surrounded us during the COVID-19 pandemic:

“It’s like we’ve been flung back in time,” he said. “Here we are in the Stone Age, knowing all these great things after centuries of progress but what can we do to make life easier for the Stone Agers? … If you came awake tomorrow in the Middle Ages and there was an epidemic raging, what could you do to stop it, knowing what you know about the progress of medicines and diseases? Here it is practically the twenty-first century and you’ve read hundreds of books and magazines and seen a hundred TV shows about science and medicine. Could you tell those people one little crucial thing that might save a million and a half lives?” (DeLillo, 1998, pp. 147–148)

The physical repercussions of COVID-19 on the overall well-being of the general population, in conjunction with the socio-economic inequities and worldwide politics further intensified the effects of this crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic showed the disparities on a global scale pertaining to medical services, residential accommodations, and surveillance mechanisms experienced more severely by certain societies. COVID-19 was a deadly threat that, unfortunately, resulted in the deaths of many people. We tried to adapt ourselves to keep up with the new variant and help prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Recognizing our vulnerability was a true shock.

Humanity cannot be prepared for all sorts of disasters awaiting it. Just like the appearance of a black billowing cloud of Nyodene D., the spread of coronavirus created an exceptional panic all around the world. The COVID-19 pandemic affected the whole of humanity and caused great fear among people young and old. Of course, experiencing such fears and stress was reasonable, as the realities of COVID-19 were solid and factual. We feared for our lives and our loved ones because coronavirus threatened all of us, and we were not sure about what was going to happen next, which was truly alarming. Even though Don DeLillo wrote White Noise many years before COVID-19, and the novel delves into the perilous ramifications of corporate greed and technological advancements, the appearance of the toxic cloud of Nyodene D. and how late the people were warned to evacuate serves as a physical manifestation that encapsulates the notion of entropy by elucidating the disintegration of societal organization. The risks posed by the accumulation of industrial waste and the occurrence of environmental catastrophes urge society to be vigilant to airborne dangers. The depiction of these everyday risks in the novel bears many resemblances to the incidents that took place during the coronavirus pandemic. These similarities highlight why a movie adaptation of the novel debuted on Netflix shortly after the coronavirus pandemic. Furthermore, the feelings that were experienced both in White Noise and the COVID-19 pandemic show great similarities, making us think that, although times change and technology improves, the fear that we face remains in its most primitive and crude form. Yet, can we conclude that the experience of fear, in its most primitive form, is a bad thing?

When Charles Darwin presented the idea of natural selection in his famous book On the Origin of Species, he drew attention to living organisms’ ability to adapt and change (Natural Selection, n.d., para. 1–2). This idea corresponds with humanity’s endeavors to adapt. Fear is one of those vital things that kept us alive for centuries. Amidst the fear and chaos, we also bring out the best of ourselves. We constantly adapt and progress in times of havoc (Mobbs et al., 2015, p. 6). In White Noise, we can see examples of this adaptation. The airborne toxic event takes place in the second part of the novel; however, in the third and final part of the novel, entitled Dylarama, the plot shifts to another story. Moreover, the novel surprisingly ends in a supermarket, which manifests the necessity we all feel to continue with our daily lives, even though we have just faced one of the biggest threats of our lives. If we can find so many similarities with COVID-19 in a fictional novel written in 1985, we can assume that similar feelings occur under different times and situations. Maybe we should not just focus on the fear but look past it to recognize our true potential in facing the unknown.