Some books I read for enjoyment, others for a challenge. Then there are books like White Noise I read as a kind of secular penance, because every now and then I need something to more or less kick my teeth in.
Punishment literature, I call it. Post-modern literature is the more accepted term. It’s not my scene, but there are post-modern books, even a couple by the same author, that I can find pleasure in reading. White Noise is such a death-obsessed, narrative-splintered drag that I can’t even fake a baseline appreciation for it.
Jack Gladney is a college professor who chairs a department in Hitler Studies at a geographically isolated college. He is married to Babette, with whom he shares responsibility for a number of children (who are either his or hers but not theirs) and an all-consuming fear of dying.
On campus they are surrounded by people obsessed with drawing meaning from the randomness around them. A professor who likes to smell groceries and is preparing to developing a curriculum around Elvis Presley explains the value of television as learning tool:
“You have to learn how to look. You have to open yourself up to the data. TV offers incredible amounts of psychic data. It opens ancient memories of world birth, it welcomes us into the grid, the network of little buzzing dots that make up the picture pattern. There is light. There is sound.”
No question, Don DeLillo can write. His individual sentences are often brilliant, jewel-cut expressions of icy clarity that dance around and across layers of meaning. He offers more wisdom in his asides that most authors attempt in their entire books. But his worldview is bleak and cold, and his narrative here amounts to a big shrug in multiple directions.
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| Gladney's fascination for Hitler extends to quiet pride at how well his own field of Hitler Studies has taken off. His family seems less impressed with the Nazis. "They lost the war," says his 11-year-old daughter Denise. "How great can they be?" Image from https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/adolf-hitler |
If his goal was to demonstrate the utter meaningless of existence, he succeeds by creating a novel that is essentially plotless.
The main event in White Noise is something called an “airborne toxic event,” specifically a dark cloud of poisonous gas released in a train wreck which descends upon Gladney’s community. Gladney is exposed to some of this gas, which sends his fears of mortality into the stratosphere. He also observes the reactions of his family and neighbors to the crisis, finding them so desensitized they seem unable to process or respond to what is going on.
When it is over, people just move on, either forgetting all about it or distracting themselves by participating in elaborate disaster drills.
Says Babette: “Every day on the news there’s another toxic spill. Cancerous solvents from storage tanks, arsenic from smokestacks, radioactive water from power plants. How serious can it be if it happens all the time? Isn’t the definition of a serious event based on the fact that it’s not an everyday occurrence?”
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| Jack and Babette live amid constant noise and pollution: "There is an expressway beyond the backyard now...and at night as we settle into our brass bed the sparse traffic washes past, a remote and steady murmur around our sleep, as of dead souls babbling at the edge of a dream." Image from https://www.ft.com/content/1ed2c466-0d22-11ea-bb52-34c8d9dc6d84 |
The book is structured in three sections. The first, “Waves And Radiation,” prefigures the Airborne Toxic Event with assorted anecdotes of gloom and dread. Men in white suits examine abandoned buildings for signs of contamination, while a plane carrying one of Gladney’s daughters falls out of the sky. “We’re a silver gleaming death machine!” says a voice from the cockpit intercom.
Black absurdist humor is incorporated freely here and elsewhere, often without warning. Two of Gladney’s ex-wives have some kind of association with foreign intelligence; one talks about having taken tea with Colonel Qaddafi, “one of the few terrorists we’ve met who lives up to his public billing.”
Gladney’s precocious 14-year-old son Heinrich soliloquizes like a teenage George Carlin: “Is there such a thing as now? ‘Now’ comes and goes as soon as you say it. How can I say it’s raining now if your so-called ‘now’ becomes ‘then’ as soon as I say it?”
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| Heinrich's high-school friend Orest Mercator has an elaborate plan to lock himself in a glass cage with dozens of deadly mamba snakes (above). "There are more people dead today then in the rest of world history put together," he tells Gladney. "What's one extra? I'd just as soon die trying to put Orest Mercator's name in the record book." Image from https://a-z-animals.com/animals/green-mamba/ |
When Gladney tells Babette as her husband he feels a responsibility to please her in bed, she responds: “I’m not sure whether that’s a sensitive caring statement or a sexist remark.”
These and other funny lines land here like chuckles in a hurricane. Ultimately, at least in this case, humor serves like description and character as another tool for authorial distancing.
Much of the narrative throughout the novel is focused on Gladney’s career in Hitler Studies (though he is embarrassed not to speak German) and his relationship with the Elvis professor, Murray Jay Siskind, who maintains a running commentary on the absurdity around him:
“I understand the music, I understand the movies, I even see how comic books can tell us things. But there are full professors in this place who read nothing but cereal boxes.”
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| Murray Jay Siskind is an avid reader of supermarket tabloids in his small apartment: "I feel like I'm learning important things every day. Death, disease, afterlife, outer space. It's all much clearer here. I can think and see." Image from https://starcrush.com/weirdest-weekly-world-news-covers/ |
The second section introduces the Airborne Toxic Event which serves as its title. Here the short, meandering chapters of the first section give way to a single 60-page chapter that covers the cloud’s emergence and disappearance from beginning to end. Gladney takes in the uncomprehending faces of fellow evacuees and accidentally exposes himself to the gas while fueling his car.
A sense of enveloping suffocation is hard to shake:
The enormous dark mass move like some death ship in a Norse legend, escorted across the night by armored creatures with spiral wings. We weren’t sure how to react. It was a terrible thing to see, so close, so low, packed with chlorides, benzenes, phenols, hydrocarbons, or whatever the precise toxic content… Our fear was accompanied by a sense of awe that bordered on the religious.
The third section is the most opaque and unpleasant, the most focused on death and meaninglessness. It is also the most fragmentary, with no storyline sticking for very long.
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| A real-life "airborne toxic event" occurred in Bhopal, India just months before White Noise was published, following a gas leak at a pesticide factory. Thousands died. In the novel, we never get a casualty count, just a run of rumors and a sense of death on every doorstep. Photo by Alain Nogues from https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/06/17/1181244389/the-worlds-worst-industrial-disaster-harmed-people-even-before-they-were-born |
Its title, “Dylarama,” is a reference to a strange pill Gladney discovers his wife has been taking on the sly, not the worst of her secrets, it turns out. Gladney begins to obsess over what has been going on with her, alternately rummaging through her garbage and pondering the underlying meaning of trash itself:
Is garbage so private? Does it glow at the core with personal heat, with signs of one’s deepest nature, clues to secret yearnings, humiliating flaws? What habits, fetishes, addictions, inclinations? What solitary acts, behavioral ruts?
At some level, DeLillo is definitely having the reader on. The Gladney kids are so full of learned wisdom that they seem a prolonged satire in the direction of J. D. Salinger’s Glass children. But he also has some deep thoughts he wants to expound upon, which he does at the expense of telling a story or advancing a theme.
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| Don DeLillo in 1988, three years after White Noise made him one of the most recognized practitioners of postmodern fiction. It won the National Book Award and is often cited as a brilliant satire on American consumer culture and its shaky relationship with death. Photo by Bernard Gotfryd from https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/2135-mark-osteen-on-the-apocalyptic-satire-and-historical-panorama-of-don-delillo/ |
This is the first DeLillo novel I ever read, and now it’s the third DiLillo novel I have re-read. Why did I hate it so much while sort of enjoying his other two novels, Underworld and Libra? Maybe because those novels connect to actual historic events, the latter a fictional exploration of the JFK Assassination, the former a montage of many events that starts out at the Polo Grounds in 1951 for “The Shot Heard ‘Round The World.” Set in the then-present, White Noise exists in a very disjointed non-reality, its characters so artificial they seem at risk of floating away.
White
Noise
remains for me a stubborn, perplexing book, making its
meaningless points only to afflict readers with its author’s despair.
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