The Most Read Passage in White Noise

You know the one. So this is about that:

Several days later Murray asked me about a story known as the most read passage in White Noise. We turned 12 pages into the book, around where Delillo’s developing Murray’s character. There were cereal boxes and corduroy.  Something had happened with a woman in Detroit. Soon the allusions started coming to mind. THE MOST READ PASSAGE IN WHITE NOISE. I remembered having read five separate analyses of this passage before we reached the passage. Even then, there were 40 grad students and a full professor of English peering over our shoulders. We shrugged and went along. All the people had hornrims; some had lattes, multicolor highlighters, and an air of smug hyperliteracy. A man near the front murmured symbols and referents — impressions of the passage taken from his elevated spot. We turned around and watched the readers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in the little book.

“No one reads the passage,” he said finally.

A long silence followed.

“Once you’ve read all the interpretations of the passage, it becomes impossible to read the passage.”

He fell silent once more. People with literature degrees left the elevated site, replaced by others.

“We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every reading reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.”

There was an extended silence. The man near the front murmured symbols and referents.

“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We read only what the others read. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all great books.”

Another silence ensued.

“They are reading about reading,” he said.

He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film.

“What was the passage like before it was analyzed?” he said. “What did it look like, how was it different from other passages, how was it similar to other passages?”

I thought of the idea for this blog post a few summers ago, when I had graduated college and finally got around to reading White Noise. I’d heard a lot of praise for the book, so I picked it up from my school’s library while I still had borrowing privileges. As soon as I got to the break on the twelfth page, though, I got a sense of déjà vu — wheels might have turned subconsciously  when I’d been introduced to Jack and Murray in the opening pages of the book, but as soon as I read about their trip into the country, I knew I had read it before. Ah, yes, “the most photographed barn in America!” I had indeed already read this excerpt (from, I think, the same webpage I just linked), because after encountering several number of references to it in other contexts, I had had to see what all the fuss was about. Various invocations of The Barn Scene haunted my undergraduate career, and I don’t think I ever even took a proper English or Lit class. It’s a terrific scene in a book I enjoyed a lot; it’s just a little bit overanalyzed, you know?

I was reminded of this scene last night on my flight home for the holidays, as I read David Foster Wallace’s essay on television and irony, which quotes the passage at some length. I would have to excuse Wallace’s reference passage even if he had treated it superficially (you can be sure he didn’t!), since “E Unibus Pluram” itself was published only a few years after White Noise. Anyway, both the book and the essay are great reads, and for today’s reader they might elicit a feeling of intellectual and pop culture nostalgia. Which, I’m sure an abler critic than I could argue, is the idea.