“Hyperethnicity”: Mystery and Italian American Catholic Imagery in "White Noise" by Don DeLillo

The present article analyzes the reinvention of Italian American Catholic Imagery in “White Noise” by Don DeLillo using the heuristic tool of “hyperethnicity.” The notion of “hyperethnicity” addresses ethnicity as a protean category subject to what Michael Fischer calls the process of “(re-)invention” (1986 195-6), as a fluid “network of signs which — as they interact with their socio-historical contexts — constantly recreates itself and re-establishes the relation between the signified, the signifier, and the referent” (Moskalenko 2021, 35). Given the writer’s artful re-elaboration of the signifiers and the signified of the emblems of Catholic imagery — that is, the topos of the Holy Family, the representation of Madonna with Child, and the ritual of baptism — and the revision of elements typical of the cultural phenomenon identified as Southern Italian Catholic mysticism which emerge in “White Noise,” “hyperethnicity” proves to be an essential tool in the analysis of DeLillo’s imagined landscapes with their underlying cultural touchstones. As Sandra M. Gilbert once put it: “to be an Italian-American is to live in a world of perpetual mystery” (Gilbert 1991, 116), and indeed the examination of the relationship between that sense of mystery and Italian American ethnic identities allows one to investigate the roots of the former and the trajectory of the latter. “Hyperethnicity” — by taking into account the reshaping of the vivid and rich Italian American heritage by the complex socio-cultural context of the United States in the postmodern age — represents a theoretical framework that allows for the comprehension of the mechanisms at the core of the “mystery” which informs DeLillo’s work, and, paraphrasing the writer, provides a basis to analyze it as “natural product of Catholic upbringing” (DeCurtis 1991, 55) translated onto the composite landscape of twentieth-century America.