What follows is Part II of Joshua Ferris's superb appreciation of Don Delillo's White Noise. You can find Part I over at the NBCC's Critical Mass, where it appears as part of its very fine "In Retrospect" series.
2.
There might not be a better definition of “white noise” within the pages of the novel itself than the one inspired by the supermarket. “And over it all,” Jack narrates as he stands in the produce aisle listening to the supermarket’s ambient noise, “or under it all, a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension.” This is an almost mystical observation by a highly attuned consciousness, the kind reserved in the past for those on the brink of spiritual discovery. Jack’s friend Murray—“guru” might be more apt than “friend”—makes the comparison explicit. “This place recharges us spiritually,” he says before an extended monologue on the similarities between the supermarket and Tibet. “It’s full of psychic data.”
The supermarket is the book’s cathedral or place of wonder where Jack finds himself surrounded by incantations (“Kleenex Softique, Kleenex Softique”), customs (“People wrote checks, tall boys bagged the merchandise … the slowly moving line edged toward the last purchase point”), and its own form of asceticism (the “new austerity” of generic foods). It is where he and his family make routine pilgrimages and share the community of fellow congregants like Murray. It is not church, exactly, but as Murray says, “the difference is less marked than you think.” The same is true to a lesser extent for the Mid-Village Mall, where Jack shops with reckless abandon and feels “an endless well-being,” an echo of his feeling, when leaving the supermarket with two shopping carts, that he had achieved “a fullness of being.”
The supermarket is also where Jack finds the tabloids, those topically absurd rags which, Jack says late in the novel, provide “everything we need that is not food or love.” These are the sacred texts of White Noise, the hopeful narratives that reverse or negate death, the secular answer to divine miracles. Babette narrates a tabloid story at the family’s Boy Scout refuge during the Airborne Toxic Event called “Life After Death Guaranteed with Bonus Coupons.” This tale—of death defiance through reincarnation and coupon redemption—acquires an urgency at that moment and offers an unironic hope. Her tone of voice, Jack tells us, “betrayed no sign of skepticism or condescension,” and the audience that grows around her, of frightened evacuees in need of reassurance, listens with a deadpan seriousness. She might have begun her narration by saying, “This is a reading from the Book.”
She reads these stories not as nuggets of craven curiosity, as we normally read celebrity magazines, but as possible dispatches from the beyond of promises made to a desperate and secular audience of things the Bible once promised a religious one: eternal life, harmonized life, digestible life, a tidy narrative that renders death meaningless. Both Jack and Babette express a willingness to believe in this seductive alternative:
Babette picked up a tabloid someone had left on the table.
“Mouse cries have been measured at forty thousand cycles per second. Surgeons use high-frequency tapes of mouse cries to destroy tumors in the human body. Do you believe that?”
“Yes.”
“So do I.”
Much more than a joke, the tabloids have replaced religion to answer their primal need for immortality, higher forms of intelligence, and defenses against death. “The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity.”
In addition to the supermarket and the tabloids, a lot of the book’s white noise comes from the television. Delillo seems content most of the time to allow the TV to simply speak for itself, as when Jack tells us “The TV said…” followed by some decontextualized bit of random broadcast. But it is also the cause of a ritual coming together in the Gladney household. Every Friday night, regular as the Sabbath, they order Chinese take-out and gather in front of the set “as was the custom and the rule.” Family sullenness and boredom are held in abeyance while the clan is transported as one by Old-Testament-like footage of calamity and death, in the tradition of old religious ways.
The only overt criticism of television—Murray’s account of his students’ bad opinion of it (“Television [to them] is just another name for junk mail”)—is overturned by Murray himself. Like the supermarket, the TV offers “incredible amounts of psychic data” to him. To Jack, too. Full of mantras, chants, incantations, and sacred formulas (“Coke is it, Coke is it”), the TV acts in the book not so much as the medium of a postmodern or Baudrillardian crisis of representation as it does a source of genuine wonderment. Decoding its data may be as rigorous a task as decoding the mysteries of the divine (the stars, the moon, the sky), but the process would essentially be the same, as would the result: the possible revelation of something transcendent. After all, the TV is the almost prophetic source of one of the most unforgettable scenes of the book, Jack’s daughter’s dreaming recitation of the phrase Toyota Celica. During the Airborne Toxic Event, soon after Jack discovers that his exposure to Nyodene D. means certain death, he pulls a chair over to the cots where his children are sleeping. “Watching children sleep makes me feel devout, part of a spiritual system. It is the closest I can come to God,” he says, professing his spiritual yearning while admitting a distance from any traditional higher power or belief system. He hears Steffie utter the initially inscrutable phrase, which he soon recognizes:
A long moment passed before I realized this was the name of an automobile. The truth only amazed me more. The utterance was beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder. It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky, tablet-carved in cuneiform. It made me feel that something hovered. But how could this be? A simple brand name, an ordinary car. How could these near-nonsense words, murmured in a child’s restless sleep, make me sense a meaning, a presence? She was only repeating some TV voice … the utterance struck me with the impact of a moment of splendid transcendence.
Like Babette’s tone of voice while reading “Life After Death Guaranteed with Bonus Coupons,” Jack’s tone above reveals no condescension. “Beautiful,” “mysterious,” “looming wonder,” “something hovered,” “a meaning, a presence,” “a moment of splendid transcendence”—these are not the words of an unreliable narrator conveying an authorial intention to expose the high irony of postmodernism’s cheap conflation of brand names with something mystical. They are rather the words of someone expressing genuine wonder at an incantation, at the forming of words in a sleeper’s mouth, regardless of the content of those words. No matter they are the result of consumer conditioning, given to Steffie by some “TV voice.” For the purposes of the above passage, the car and the brand name are wholly beside the point. The significant matter is the mystical content of the utterance.
The greatest amount of white noise rendered dramatically in the book comes not from the TV or the supermarket but from the Gladney family itself. Their conversations range over many topics, hopping from one non sequitiur to the next, and more often than not conveying large quantities of misinformation about the wider world. Murray tells Jack, “The family process works toward sealing off the world” and also that “magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan.” Jack objects, but in practice, the family dialogue demonstrates exactly that: uncertainty, skepticism and ignorance of the outside world. The babble and misinformation are as rampant within the family as they are broadcast on the TV or headlined in the tabloids.
If Jack is at his most pious while watching his children sleep, he recognizes their mystical possibility when Wilder, his toddler step-son, inexplicably and relentlessly wails on and on for hours. Jack tolerates this human white noise with aplomb, going so far as to wish he could join Wilder (note the name) “in his lost and suspended place [where] we might together perform some reckless wonder of intelligibility.” Once the crying stops, Jack says about the boy it was “as though he’d just returned from a period of wandering in some remote and holy place … a place where … we in our ordinary toil can only regard with the mingled reverence and wonder we hold in reserve for feats of the most sublime and difficult dimensions.” Jack regards the family not only with the pious reverence reserved for sleeping children but with the occult mystery inhering in wailing infants.
Finally there is a call-and-response quality to much of the interfamily dialogue, and these exchanges can be as nurturing as formal litanies, with a strong impulse toward love and protection. It is another one of Jack’s secular defenses against death. Here’s a rather arch exchange between Jack and Babette:
“What do you want to do?” she said.
“Whatever you want to do.”
“I want to do whatever’s best for you.”
“What’s best for me is to please you,” I said.
“I want to make you happy, Jack.”
“I’m happy when I’m pleasing you.”
“I just want to do whatever’s best for you.”
“But you please me by letting me please you,” she said.
“As the male partner I think it’s my responsibility to please.”
Critics of Delillo have pointed to such exchanges in their accusation that his characters all sound the same, but this misses the larger point, especially in White Noise. Delillo has said in interviews that he has no unified theory of dialogue, that he thinks about dialogue differently from book to book. The very sameness in the above passage of the supplications with their like-minded responses serve an important role in a book in which traditional prayer and liturgy provide no alternative to the deep well of need its characters achingly express.
The “ambient roar” of the supermarket, the tabloids, the television, the brand names of a pervasive consumerism, the family babble—these are all examples of “white noise,” but they are not without ambiguity. Perhaps they underscore the onslaught of dreck from the surrounding culture, but they also provide a lonely and frightened man with wonder, reverence, pleasure, and “a moment of splendid transcendence.” In a world where nuns no longer believe in God and the Day of the Dead has become Super Bowl Week, one crucial element of the white noise of the title points to the spiritual, the unknown, and the transcendent. If white noise is misleading, it is also nurturing; if it is meaningless, it is yet stirring; if it is chaotic, it abides. One half of white noise is not to be bemoaned or critiqued, but marveled at.
3.
White Noise begins and ends with a ritual. The first is the cavalcade of station wagons arriving for the new school year, which Jack describes as a spectacle—“a brilliant event, invariably”—and which he has not missed in 21 years. It ends with the communal nightly pilgrimage to the highway overpass where he, his family and his neighbors witness the exalted sunsets that might be a temporary result of fallout from the toxic spill or something permanently deserving of awe. “[W]e don’t know whether we are watching in wonder or dread,” he says, as if commenting upon the entire phenomenon of white noise itself. In the end, neither he nor Delillo provides an answer.
Between these two rituals, the attentive reader encounters the high priest of Hitler Studies who tries to both evade and master death through his submersion in a “larger-than-death” figure; the ascetic-visionary-guru Murray Jay Siskind; the fundamentalist Alfonse Stompanato who discusses pop culture with the “closed logic of a religious zealot, one who kills for his beliefs”; amulets and vestments, like Jack’s copy of Mein Kampf, which he clutches to his chest at moments of discomfort, and his dark black glasses and heavy academic robe which bestow upon him “the dignity, significance and prestige” appropriate to priests; the rhetoric of exhortations as issued from some holy order found in Jack’s command “May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan”; amulets like the visor Denise wears day and night and later the protective mask Steffie refuses to take off; glossolalia; invocations (“Dacron, Orlon, Lycra Spandex,” “MasterCard, Visa, American Express”); the use of drugs, in this case not for ecstatic religious purposes but for death assuagement; numerology (“Is death odd-numbered?”); congregations, whether at the supermarket, on the overpass or in the classroom; superstitions (“It is the nature and pleasure of townspeople to distrust the city”); the miracle of Wilder’s unharmed tricycle ride across the freeway; and many other customs, rites and rituals, not only that of Friday-night TV, but Jack’s more “formal custom” afterwards of reading deeply into Hitler; the heavy visitation to the most photographed barn in America (“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender… we’ve agreed to be part of a collective experience,” Murray tells Jack, elevating a scene typically presented as a lament about the simulation’s preeminence over the real—the photograph of the barn over the barn itself—to one of overt religious import that better explicates Josiah Royce than Jean Baudrillard), and finally Babette’s very secular custom, conspicuously occurring in the otherwise inactive Congregational church, of teaching the elderly how to stand, sit and walk, later upgraded to eating and drinking.
This overwhelming litany of how Delillo fleshes out traditional religious elements in the post-Christian world of White Noise is not exhaustive. He has done nothing short of scuttling the entirety of established religious systems only to remake one, full of the same structures and accoutrements, out of the stuff of American cultural life, very often out of the same white noise that doubles in the book as the agent of death against which those structures and accoutrements are intended to protect. The protective devices of this new pseudo-religion meet with mixed success in giving comfort to Jack Gladney as he struggles with his death fears, but no matter. Their domain is not so one-dimensional as to provide only protective devices. They also reveal to him glimpses of greater meaning, of awe and of transcendence. Above all, they reveal that Delillo goes beyond cultural assessment in White Noise to show—if we didn’t know it already from The Names—that he is a writer deeply, almost preternaturally attuned to the eternal human encounter with what constitutes the religious and the spiritual.
Joshua Ferris’s first novel, Then We Came to the End, was recently nominated for a National Book Award. His essay on White Noise is excerpted from a longer work in progress.
I love reading White Noise, love teaching it. But there's one thing about it I've never quite been able to get around, and I wonder if anybody else has the same reaction. Basically it's this: all the evacuation procedures related to the Airborne Toxic Event work--the characters are safe, and I don't see in reading that we should give any special credence to the idea that Jack has in fact been fatally exposed--you trust the guy who tells him?--though I'll admit that he himself believes it. But the fact that the procedures work suggests that DeLillo's world isn't nearly as precarious as his characters believe, or as the book itself seems to suggest. White Noise appeared, however, in more or less the same week as the Bhopal disaster--a real life Airborne Toxic Event in a region with basically no evacuation procedures in place. Many dead, more sick--so that reading the book when it appeared made me think that it had, in essence, been mugged by reality; almost as though the novel itself were no more than the white noise it seemed to describe. Which at that point, faced with such an actual, on-the-ground disaster, seemed unacceptable in a way that might be said to mark the limits of DeLilloish postmodernism; the style itself not an analytic tool but a part of the problem. I tried to write about this in a review at the time, but I was young and botched it and the editor changed and the piece got spiked. I don't think I've yet read any criticism that drew on the conjunction in time between the novel and Bhopal, though doubtless somebody has. Over the years this has dimmed a bit, and I like the novel more than I used to, especially for things like Murray or the supermarket. But clearly the issue has stayed with me, I still argue with the book, and I'm curious about other people's reactions, about whether anyone else has been struck or perturbed by it.
Posted by: michael gorra | November 20, 2007 at 07:23 PM
Michael, the Viking Critical Library edition of WN talks about Bhopal in the introduction and includes three stories from Newsweek about the disaster. It does a good job of putting Bhopal in the context of the novel—certainly as much as is necessary.
Prescience has always been one of Delillo’s gifts, prescience for disaster and violence in particular. Gerald Howard’s recent Bookforum article points out that even in his pseudonymous novel “Amazons”—which can only be described as a comic romp calling for very little gravitas—fundamentalist Saudis buy the New York Rangers and impose a strict moral code on the novel’s hockey players. This at a time when, say, Hollywood was still presenting anyone Islamic as nothing more than coke-snorting oil sheiks. This eerie prescience (about Bhopal, about religious terror)—for me, anyway—doesn’t rob his fiction of its power, if only because the world of WN, for instance, is an obvious heightened creation kept down by the ballast of Jack’s earnest (and wonderfully drawn) death fears.
If there is a nagging sense that the stakes aren’t high enough in WN to feel a real endangerment for Jack and his family, I’d argue Delillo does a good job from the beginning to give the Gladney family distance from the actual disaster. They aren’t at ground zero. From the Gladney home Heinrich, and later Jack, can only see the billowing cloud by looking through binoculars. And though Jack is exposed, we know that Nyodene D. is “a whole new generation of toxic waste.” Who’s to say how it works, even at ground zero? There’s not much talk about victims. There’s no death toll offered, no description of the suffering. Which is conspicuous, given Jack’s preoccupation with such details. Perhaps the wholly invented Nyodene D. only works as the SIMULAC man intimates—uncertainly, and over time. The very ambiguity of its death-delivery system mirrors the uncertainty of death itself, and mirrors Dylar as well, with its time-released specificity. There would be, then, no Bhopal-like horror in Blacksmith. There’s enough textual evidence to offer the Airborne Toxic Event as an alternative to the grueling and wide-spread violence of Bhopal.
And as you say, Jack believes in his death—Delillo is very clear on that score—and like another dubious narrator—Humbert Humbert in Lolita—there’s the seductive tendency to get swept up by their keen observations and feints for pathos, perhaps at the expense of a clear-eyed look at the worlds they inhabit.
Posted by: Joshua Ferris | November 21, 2007 at 11:38 AM
This piece is very well expressed, but I couldn't agree less. And I'm relieved, because a good friend and I -- not notable novelists like Mr. Ferris, but nonetheless engaged with the literary culture (and occasional worker bees within it) -- are posting a back-and-forth about our mutual dislike of White Noise beginning next week on my blog. Underworld is one of my favorite novels, but I've never made it very far into White Noise, despite repeated tries. (My friend has finished it three times in a perverse attempt to warm up to it, so I'm hoping his rigor makes up for my lack of same in our conversation.) Anyway, I find DeLillo's use of the supermarket as a commentary on the average person's spiritual life to be intellectually lazy, massively condescending, and ultimately unconvincing. Yet I say in all honesty that I'm grateful for Mr. Ferris' post, which I enjoyed. Difference of opinion is what makes horse races, after all.
Posted by: JMW | November 22, 2007 at 09:43 PM
Thanks, Joshua, for the tip about the Viking edition, and I think too that your words about the distance Jack's famly has from the ATE makes sense. But I still can't shake my own sense that the novel isn't fully grappling with the issues it poses, or appears to pose. I say "appears" because it's true that over time the Nyodene D has started to seem less central to the book as a whole than it did on first release, with Bhopal in the news. Less central, as other things start to seem more--the Hitler rap, and the supermarket, the nuns, etc. Or is it that distance itself is his subject here? For a comparison I'd look to The Names, which seems to me underrated--a novel about temptation, seduction, about being pulled in by system--there that grappling does take place, and the book has always seemed to me briliant and creepy, dangerous in the strongest and best sense.
What White Noise does have, on a scale that none of DeLillo's other books do (unless possibly some of the early ones, which I confess I haven't read, North Dallas 40 aside) is comedy--he has always a sense of the absurd, but here it becomes laughter, and sustained dark laughter at that; again, the nuns. Underworld will have such passages, but they are only moments in its Victorian scale. But this one is comic as Vile Bodies or yes, Lolita, is comic. It's holding up--to me at least it looks stronger than it did in 1984. Right around this time of year, as I remember.
So I suppose my lesson--obvious, always in need of being relearned--is that the book is never just its moment; for me, in this case, that has been hard to remember. I'd still like to read something substantial that works White Noise against Bhopal, and in some richer way than simply treating it as context or background. But I suppose that's what the MLA bibliography is for, unless I want to write it myself.
Posted by: michael gorra | November 23, 2007 at 04:06 AM