Huntsville-Madison County Public Library discussion

Surfing through waves of paradoxical language and the fear of Death

‘White Noise,’ first published in 1985, is the first of Don DeLillo’s novels I have read although I’ve known of him since the late 80’s, when his next novel, ‘Libra,’ about Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination, brought him to my attention.

‘White Noise’ is very on-the-nose as far as 1980’s culture. It takes a satirical approach to consumerism, academia, conspiracy theories, chemical anti-depressants and the pervasive fear of death that spread in the era of environmental disasters. The first person narrator is Jack Gladney, a professor at the College-on-the-Hill in the university town of Blacksmith in the Ohio/Indiana area although the state is never directly mentioned.

Jack has created the department of Hitler Studies at the college in an era of increased specialization. His colleague and friend Murray Siskind wants to do the same with Elvis Studies except that he has a rival professor that also teaches courses in Elvis Presley. Murray also offers a seminar on Car Crashes in Cinema.

Jack lives with his wife Babette and four of their children from previous marriages in a ‘Yours, Mine, and Ours’ situation, including the toddler Wilder, their only child together so far. Babette volunteers as a reader of tabloids to blind people and Jack and Babette claim to have no secrets from each other, getting into bedtime discussions of which one of them would be better off dying first. Each of them has a neurotic fear of Death.
‘Who will die first? She says she wants to die first because she would feel unbearably lonely and sad without me, especially if the children were grown and living elsewhere. She is adamant about this. She sincerely wants to precede me. She discusses the subject with such argumentative force that it’s obvious she thinks we have a choice in the matter. She thinks nothing can happen to us as long as there are dependent children in the house. The kids are a guarantee of our relative longevity…I tell her I want to die first. I’ve gotten so used to her that I would feel miserably incomplete.’

Each of their positions, though couched in altruistic statements of compassion, are expressions of complete selfishness, erected as walls of rationalization to hold Death at bay.

Death is one of the major themes of this novel, so pervasive in its absence as to be as much of a major character as any of the humans. The novel is divided up into three sections.

The first section, ‘Waves and Radiation,’ is primarily an introduction to the major characters, each of whom has a unique relationship with Death, each neurotic in its own way.

The second section, ‘The Airborne Toxic Event,’ concerns a explosion created when an eighteen-wheeler carrying toxic chemicals, crashes into a fast-moving train, creating an environmental disaster that brings the characters’ relationship with Death right to their doorstep. As the family are ordered to evacuate to escape the ‘feathery plume’ as the media call it, they all pile into the station wagon. Running out of gas, Jack pulls into a deserted convenience store to fill the tank. His two-and-a-half-minute exposure to the chemical cloud has left him vulnerable to a mortality that won’t be evident for another 15 years. This news is delivered to him by emergency medical personnel from a company called SIMUVAC, a team designed to study disasters through simulations.
“But this evacuation isn’t simulated. It’s real.”[Jack points out] “We know that. But we thought we could use it as a model.” “A form of practice? Are you saying you saw a chance to use the real event in order to rehearse the simulation?”

The third section, ‘Dylarama,’ deals with the chemical dependence on miracle drugs, specifically in Babette’s case with a special study of the experimental drug Dylar, an extremely addictive anti-depressant that does not rid her fear of Death, yet her dependence on the drug has caused her to trade sex for the drug with a mysterious man she refers to as ‘Mr. Gray’ when she is forced to confess to Jack.

DeLillo’s satire, at least in this novel, has similarities with Kurt Vonnegut’s doomsday black comedies. DeLillo lacks Vonnegut’s temperament as an obvious jokester. He tells his story with a straight face—literally, as I’ve observed in YouTube interviews with the stone-faced author. The linguistic paradoxes are also similar to Joseph Heller’s ‘Catch-22’, which was a giant tapestry where every sentence was a rhetorical Catch-22.

With ‘White Noise,’ DeLillo has bitten off more than he could chew, in my opinion. The novel is cluttered with too many targets. However, I do not consider ‘White Noise’ a complete failure. Its ambition is admirable. While technology has changed, DeLillo’s points about pharmacology, media, academia, and consumerism possess a universality that makes them relevant in the 21st century. It is a tale full of white noise and fury, signifying, if not “everything”, then certainly far from nothing.