White noise

III

Reviews

Sol Yurick

Yurick's review of White Noise appeared in the Philadelphia inquirer on January 20, 1985.

FLEEING DEATH IN A WORLD OF HYPER-BABBLE

We in America are assailed by a million messages. Television, newspapers, signs, sounded words and those messages whose import we cannot understand—electromagnetic impulses—that pass through our body, radiated from thousands of channels. Words assail us, icons confront us. They sink into our bodies, become part of us, and, perhaps, reemerge in dreams.

Jack Gladney learns this directly. A professor of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill, a small liberal arts school in Middle America, this narrator of Don DeLillo's beguiling new novel is sitting at the far end of a barracks in a Boy Scout camp—one of the many shelters to which local people have fled in the wake of an "airborne toxic event." He listens to his daughter Steffie mutter some words in her sleep, then utter a few distinct syllables, then speak two "clearly audible" words:

"Toyota Celíca. . . . She was only repeating some TV voice. Toyota Corolla, Toyota Celica, Toyota Cressida. Supranational names, computer-generated, more or less universally pronounceable. Part of every child's brain noise, the substatic regions too deep to probe. Whatever its source, the utterance struck me with the impact of a moment of splendid transcendence. . . ."

On the last page of the book, contemplating an eerie scene, Gladney muses, "This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living." And in time, all these waves seem to become as one.

White noise.

White Noise.

White noise is a susurration, a fusion of signals and messages, a leveling of sounds into one all-sound—its individual components become indistinguishable. White noise is essentially anti-dramatic. No highs, no lows, no emphases, no diminuendos, all utterances made equal. People who have trouble sleeping—perhaps they want to shut out the screams of the world and their minds—put on earphones that emit a monotonous, soothing sound. Auditory entropy. The death of distinction and distinguishability.

The plot of White Noise takes place in one academic season—one of the grand cycles of life and death in modern society. Gladney, who invented Hitler Studies in North America in March of 1968, has made the field his own, much in the way that others have possessed Holocaust studies. He runs Hitler conferences and teaches Advanced Nazism. But Jack Gladney doesn't speak German—he's gotten away with this for years. It's not that he hasn't tried to learn. German resists him—he finds the sound of the language ominous and mysterious. Unlike his creator, he doesn't have a good ear.

Gladney's fellow academics have succeeded in making major disciplines out of the fascinations of their youth—trivia. "There are full professors in this place who read nothing but cereal boxes," observes a newcomer. They have elevated the common media (television, the gossip and wonder sheets, jazz, rock music, soap operas, commercials, cartoons, movies) into the focus of intense study.

And, after all, these were made the primal images of their youthful unconscious, not the kind of thing Freud talked about. They discuss their interests with the same fervor as experts in Dante, Kant or Marx. This is very American. (And what is common wisdom other than high-class philosophy in other jargons? The flip side of Hegel is Sancho Panza.)

Murray Jay Siskind, an ex-sportswnter turned teacher, wants to create a power base in the college—Elvis Presley studies. "Where were you when James Dean died?" one of the academics asks. The question and answer are a test of personal memory wedded to public events, a mimicking of the greater ritual: "Do you remember where you were on the day President Kennedy was shot?" Hitler becomes as important as Elvis Presley. White noise.

Jack and his wife, Babette, have been married previously a few times. Children from earlier marriages live with them. DeLillo's children don't speak like ordinary children but rather like adults. One is reminded of Ivy Compton-Burnett. In fact, everyone in White Noise speaks the same way. The wonder of DeLillo's art is that it is not boring or monotonous but very funny in a mordant way. White noise, black humor.

DeLillo has a superb but peculiar ear, a first-rate sense of rhythm. Some authors have the ability to listen and record the way people talk. This is not merely an auctorial way of being a tape recorder—it's not as easy as it sounds. The writer must choose what's important and eliminate what's not. The mere act of recognition requires art of the highest order. But DeLillo's technique takes us beyond. After hearing, he transforms what he hears into a kind of new, invented dialogue. On close examination you realize that no one talks like this . . . and yet everyone does.

The Gladneys seem to live a timeless life. Babette teaches yoga and reads to the blind. The blind, rather than wishing to listen to uplifting literature, prefer lurid accounts (miracles, monsters, incredible conspiracies and plots) to be found in the National Enquirer and National Star—they have a wish to believe in the incredible in the midst of white noise. Or perhaps, being overwhelmed by too many signals, they need excitement, anything that signals the presence of the anti-rational and mysterious. The remnants of the ancient gods are to be found in the cheap tabloid pages.

The life of the Gladneys seems serene, but there are deeper currents of disturbance. Babette has a fear of death. She's been taking mysterious pills—something called Dylar—that are supposed to suppress this fear by working on the appropriate part of the brain. Babette has learned of Dylar while reading to the blind from the Enquirer. Her family is worried. Is she becoming a junkie? Before they can find out what drug she takes, the accidental spill of something called Nyodene D intervenes. The spill boils up into a black cloud—the "airborne toxic event."

The cloud seems to have a life of its own . . . black, billowing, cohesive, it is wafting around the countryside. Everyone is uprooted and flees. A nightmare scene, perhaps out of Dante ... an exodus of panic, an emergency no one is ready for ... a crawling caravan of American refugees in cars bottlenecked on ribbon-threads of highway (how else can we escape?), chaotic, incoherent, dangerous.

Helicopters surround the cloud at night and play spotlights on it. Beneath, in the winter scene, a procession of the fleeing, listening constantly to their radios to see which way the cloud is going. There is a scheme to drop Nyodene D-eating bacteria into the cloud. The bacteria eat the cloud. Science has created the problem, science can solve it. Absurd.

Jack is exposed to the toxicity.

Language conventions that level and conceal the horror spring up and become common usage, ritual. After his exposure, not so much to a noxious, disgusting, dangerous, poisonous cloud, but to this "airborne toxic event," Jack is examined. His life particulars are fed into a computer to evaluate his life chances. The projection is ominous. He asks: "Am I going to die?"

"Not as such."

"What do you mean?"

"Not in so many words."

That's white noise. In a theme reechoed from The Names, his previous novel, DeLillo shows us that the death of language can also mean the death of people. "Not in so many words."

(Considering the recent events at Bhopal, India, one might ask, was DeLillo prescient? Or rather, did he fix on the kind of event that is always taking place in one part of the world or another? White noise prevents us from seeing certain horrifying commonplaces of this modern age.)

Later, the emergency is, so to speak, pre-simulated by a company called Advanced Disaster Management: "Air-sampling people will deploy along the cloud-exposure swath . . . We are not simulating a particular spillage today. This is an all-purpose leak or spill." In our time, disaster simulation is transformed into a rite of avoidance.

Now, with the possibility of death in him, a concrete death, one that can take up to 15 years, Jack turns to the question of Babette and her constant drug taking. He finds out that she made the connection through the Enquirer, but was forced to have sex with the dispenser of the drug. There is a hint of government funding behind it ... perhaps chemical warfare ... a program run wild, a chemical escaped, just as LSD was a drug that escaped from a government testing program.

Unable to deal with this infidelity, he decides to kill the man responsible. He traces the man and shoots him, but in a comic way. Jack cannot succeed in killing him. In the end, he and Babette are reconciled.

In a sense, White Noise doesn't really have a plot: It is about the intrusion of plot into life, a stringing-together of random events into some kind of meaningful schema:

"Someone asked about the plot to kill Hitler. The discussion moved to plots in general . . . 'All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers' plots, narrative plots . . . We edge nearer death every time we plot ... It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.' "

Plot is both commentary on time and time-related. Plot and time are dangerous. All sequenced events, things and people lead to death. And thus, the peculiar sense of timelessness in White Noise becomes threaded together by time by being rethreaded, plotted, by the author. Narrative plots and life have an ending.

According to the common wisdom of our time, all things decline into entropy, reaching, as is said about the universe itself, the heat-death, ultimate blackness that is the opposite of, and yet the same as, whiteness. And, perhaps, it is the art of the writer to string events and to overcome this whiteness by plotting, by structuring people, sounds, conversation, events into a sequence ... an invocation of structures and signs to avoid the unavoidable. DeLillo's book strives to overcome the death in all of us, at the same time leaving us with a sense of horror . . . the meaninglessness of it all, while being very funny.

White Noise is philosophy as dialogue, events, people, a brilliant commentary on American life. But a short review can't begin to show DeLillo's skill, for the philosophizing doesn't get in the way of our enjoyment and the humor doesn't get in the way of the profundity.