This post examines a couple of rhetorical figures which are used repeatedly in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise. The first figure is congeries. (I did a whole post on congeries—“A Heap of Words”—back on 26 October 2020.) A congeries, according to Richard Lanham’s Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, is just a “word heap”. It’s one of the easiest of the figures to construct, since all you have to do is pile up a bunch of words. In a typical congeries there is no syntax, no hierarchy of terms, no relationships of cause and effect, just one thing and then another thing. There is no rule about how many items make a heap; my general sense is that a congeries should be a big enough pile to trip over. When I first started to notice this figure, I didn’t think much about it, but over time I discovered that it’s used quite often. I’ve collected many examples, from many different writers. Sometimes there will be just one congeries in a novel, but sometimes there will be several. In White Noise I have found about a dozen, some larger, some smaller.
The novel begins with a most impressive example. Here the narrator and protagonist, Jack Gladney, is describing the arrival of college students, driven to the campus by their parents, at the beginning of the school year:
“The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. In single file they eased around the orange I-beam sculpture and moved towards the dormitories. The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags—onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut crème patties, Waffelos and Kabooks, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints.” (3)
This is a list of consumer items, a portrait of a society devoted to the ownership of stuff. The book as a whole presents a critique of American consumer culture, and this congeries sets up this theme. The next example, from just a few pages later, continues this theme. Babette is Jack Gladney’s wife:
“Babette and I do most of our talking in the kitchen. The kitchen and the bedroom are the major chambers around here, the power haunts, the sources. She and I are alike in this, that we regard the rest of the house as storage space for furniture, toys, all the unused objects of earlier marriages and different sets of children, the gifts of lost in-laws, the hand-me-downs and rummages. Things, boxes. Why do these possessions carry such sorrowful weight? There is a darkness attached to them, a foreboding. They make me wary not of personal failure and defeat, but of something more general, something large in scope and content.” (6)
There could not be a clearer signal that heaps of possessions are of major thematic significance in the novel. A little later, the narrator reacts rather differently to the profusion of stuff in American life—the stuff provides “a sense of replenishment”, a “sense of well-being”, “serenity and contentment” (20).
In the next example Jack is in a shopping mall (about half-a-dozen scenes in the novel take place in stores and shopping malls):
“We went our separate ways into the store’s deep interior. A great echoing din, as of the extinction of a species of beast, filled the vast space. People bought twenty-two-foot ladders, six kinds of sandpaper, power saws that could fell trees. The aisles were long and bright, filled with oversized brooms, massive sacks of peat and dung, huge Rubbermaid garbage cans. Rope hung like tropical fruit, beautifully braided strands, thick, brown, strong. What a great thing a coil of rope is to look at and feel. I bought fifty feet of Manila hemp just to have it around, show it to my son, talk about where it comes from, how it’s made. People spoke English, Hindi, Vietnamese, related tongues.” (82)
The second figure is pysma, which Lanham defines as asking many questions which require diverse answers. (I suppose pysma is kind of congeries of questions.) Lamham gives an example from Cicero’s speech Pro Roscio, a speech defending Sextus Roscius, who had been accused of murdering his own father: “In what place did he speak with them? With whom did he speak? How did he persuade them? Did he hire them? Whom did he hire? By whom did he hire them? To what end or how much did he give them?” The point here is that Roscius’ accusers can’t answer any of these questions.
By my count, White Noise has about ten examples of pysma. In the following passage, Jack has been sent for medical tests to a facility called Autumn Harvest Farms:
“It turned out to be a functional pale brick building, one story, with slab floors and bright lighting. Why would such a place be called Autumn Harvest Farms? Was this an attempt to balance the heartlessness of their gleaming precision equipment? Would a quaint name fool us into thinking we live in pre-cancerous times? What kind of condition might we expect to have diagnosed in a facility called Autumn Harvest Farms? Whooping cough, croup? A touch of the grippe? Familiar old farmhouse miseries calling for rest, a deep chest massage with soothing Vicks VapoRub. Would someone read to us from David Copperfield?”
In this next passage Jack is talking to Orest, a friend of his son, Heinrich. Orest is training to break the record for the longest time sitting in a cage with poisonous snakes. “You know you can get bitten. We talked about it last time. Do you think about what happens after the fangs close on your wrist? Do you think about dying? This is what I want to know. Does death scare you. Does it haunt your thoughts? Let me put my cards on the table, Orest. Are you afraid to die? Do you experience fear? Does fear make you tremble or sweat? Do you feel a shadow fall across the room when you think of the cage, the snakes, the fangs?” (266)
The next example occurs during the “toxic airborne event”, when an industrial accident causes a great cloud of gas to envelop the town where Jack and his family live:
“There’s nothing on network,” he said to us. “Not a word, not a picture. On the Glassboro channel we rate fifty-two words by actual count. No film footage, no live report. Does this kind of thing happen so often that nobody cares anymore? Don’t those people know what we’ve been through? […] Is it possible nobody gives substantial coverage to such a thing? Half a minute, twenty seconds? Are they telling us it was insignificant, it was piddling? Are they so callous? Are they so bored by spills and contaminations and wastes? Do they think this is just television? There’s too much television already—why show more? Don’t they know it’s real? Shouldn’t the streets be crawling with cameramen and soundmen and reporters? Shouldn’t we be yelling out the window at them, ‘Leave us alone, we’ve been through enough, get out of here with your instruments of intrusion.’ Do they have to have two hundred dead, rare disaster footage before they come flocking to a given site in their helicopters and network limos?” (161–2)
This goes on for another dozen lines, but you get the idea. Pysma often gives a kind of emphasis, as I think occurs in the passage from Cicero that Lanham quotes, but here I think the effect is exhaustion. Enough already!!
Each of these uses of pysma should be examined in its context, but in general I would suggest that they are not like Cicero’s use of pysma quoted above. Cicero wants to emphasize the failure of Roscius’ accusers to answer these questions; but most of the questions in White Noise could be answered, if the questioner were really interested in an answer—the questions tend to exist for themselves, in a world of words without reference. Moreover, the great number of instances of the figure tends to create a world in which there are a lot of questions and no answers.
There are many more figures in White Noise: I find, for instance, anaphora, asyndeton, periodic construction, gradatio, and ploce. In addition, there is a lovely example of epimone, “frequent repetition of a phrase or question, in order to dwell on a point.” The repeated phrase in White Noise is “It’s obvious”, used about a dozen times.
In my next post, I will discuss a couple of specialized rhetorical figures in the book that (so far as I know) have never been named in the handbooks.
The Art of Reading Slowly 