The language of White Noise

I just finished White Noise.

For me, the book accumulated as I read, just like the plot's internal accumulation of things, noise, concepts, dread. The weight of the book kept growing in my mind, and the farther I read the more I found myself entwined in the story, in the lives of the characters, in their existential and conceptual dilemmas. I appreciated the humor more and more as the book went on, as well, and perhaps that's what I am most impressed by, in the end: DeLillo's ability to craft a novel that is at once psychologically crushing and tongue-in-cheek. Perhaps that's really the only way to do "psychologically crushing" successfully.

There were obviously a number of fascinating ideas in the book, a multitude of scenes laden with meaning that I want to go back and pick apart. But there was especially one scene near the very end that really struck me. Jack has just found Willie Mink, and he is following his own dictated plan to "enter unannounced, gain his confidence, advance gradually, reduce him to trembling," etc. This particular moment falls under the "reduce him to trembling" category:


I advanced into the area of flickering light, out of the shadows, seeking to loom. I put my hand in my pocket, gripped the firearm. Mink watched the screen. I said to him gently, "Hail of bullets." Keeping my hand in my pocket.

He hit the floor, began crawling toward the bathroom, looking back over his shoulder, childlike, miming, using principles of heightened design but showing real terror, brilliant cringing fear. I followed him into the toilet, passing the full-length mirror where he'd undoubtedly posed with Babette, his shaggy member dangling like a ruminant's.

"Fusillade," I whispered.

He tried to wriggle behind the bowl, both arms over his head, his legs tight together.


One of the side effects of Mink's precious medication, Dylar, is the inability to distinguish between the spoken word and the actual event. When Jack says "Hail of bullets," Mink experiences those words as someone would experience the event itself. This idea fascinates me. It is encouraging in the sense that, despite our "white noise" culture, true language can still break through the barriers and really MEAN something. It is frightening in the sense that we are moving toward a culture where language manipulates. When our president and the newspapers tell us that a country is harboring weapons of mass destruction, what choice to we have but to react to those words as Mink would, crawling into our bathrooms with our arms over our heads, bracing ourselves for the inevitable, granting unheard of amounts of trust to people in positions of power to deal with these words in any way possible, use whatever force they have to in order to keep us from hearing those words again.

I think the fact that this is a side effect of a medication that is designed to take away the fear of death is significant. So often, it seems like medications have side effects that cancel out the original reason for taking the medication - and this is a perfect example of that. For when do we feel the power of words more than when those words imply death?

At the end of the novel, it seems that the people who don't fear death, who are able to go about their daily lives with a measure of assured ignorance and blind trust in some unidentifiable system, are the people who pay the least attention to language. Shopping in the newly reorganized supermarket,


They turn into the wrong aisle, peer along the shelves, sometimes stop abruptly, causing other carts to run into them. Only the generic food is where it was, white packages plainly labeled. The men consult lists, the women do not. There is a sense of wandering now, an aimless and haunted mood, sweet-tempered people taken to the edge. They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn't matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation ...


The language of waves and radiation can never have the visceral power of the spoken or the printed word. It seems in this context to have only a destructive or deceptive power. I think DeLillo must have felt that way too, as a writer who still uses a typewriter to compose his novels because he likes the physical sculpting of language better than the electronic composing that seems so convenient to many others. So on some level, I can't help but feel that White Noise is an assertion of language in the face of a culture that is trying, slowly but surely, to reduce it to "smeared print, ghost images."

Did Salinger read Yeats?

I was just attempting to read more of Yeats' poetry, sifting through my volume of "The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats" of which I have read approximately one 25%, when I ran across his poem "The Wild Swans at Coole." Perhaps it's the fact that I just got through a unit on The Catcher in the Rye with my students, but it struck a very Salinger-esque pose in my mind, especially the ending, where he's contemplating his relationship to the swans:

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

The mention of the swans as "unwearied," the jealously inherent in the phrase "their hearts have not grown old," and, of course, the fear of their inevitable departure, all speak strongly to me of Holden Caulfield's obsession with the ducks in the lagoon in Central Park. The fear of aging and of dying (in both instances, made even more clear by the onset of winter) is made more mystical in Yeats' poem through his focus on swans rather than on ducks; such mysticism would naturally feel out of place in Holden Caulfield's all-too-earthbound world. But the underlying concept is undoubtedly the same. Perhaps it's just a coincidental parallel. But it's an interesting one, anyway.

If a tree falls in the forest and there are no reporters around ...

I suppose I should acknowledge that it's Valentine's Day, even though I'm not a fan of the holiday. The fact that my SO is in San Francisco (and that we've actually never had a Valentine's Day together in all our five years as a couple) doesn't help matters much, but I suppose I could do worse for a dinner date than Don DeLillo. One of my favorite parts of White Noise so far is actually the relationship between Jack and Babette - they interact with each other so carelessly, so unthinkingly, simply because their places in each other's lives are confirmed. It's a comforting portrayal of stability in a book that seems to be about the exact opposite.

I just finished the first section ("Waves and Radiation"), and it's gotten a lot easier to read with concentration, now that I understand the particular type of concentration this book requires. I'm slightly bothered by the way his characters engage in dialogue - particularly the children, I suppose. I accept the ridiculousness of the dialogue between Jack and Murray because they are, after all, both fairly ridiculous professors in concentrations that lend themselves to overstatement and overanalysis. But what accounts for the odd preternatural tone in the discourse between his children? I know it's just part of the atmosphere of the novel, and I do realize this is intentional - a result of all the waves and radiation invading their mentalities. DeLillo obviously knew that his dialogue wasn't, perhaps, 100% realistic, but it still rubs me the wrong way.

One thing that struck me particularly towards the end of the section was a little snippet of dialogue that follows Jack's airport run-in with the stricken passengers of a flight that plummeted four miles, only to have its engines restart and carry on as though nothing had occurred. He has just listened to this long, terrifying saga, and Bee, his 13-year-old daughter, who came on a different flight, appears next to him.

"Where's the media?" she said.
"There is no media in Iron City."
"They went through all that for nothing?"

I find it unsettlingly true that, in today's culture, nothing seems to mean anything - or perhaps even exist - unless it is confirmed by some kind of media outlet. Which may, perhaps, be the force driving this huge blogging trend right now. Everyone wants their existence to be confirmed. To mean something. To be undeniably tangible - "Look, there's my name!" If you don't have a website link to stick up in your MySpace or Facebook profile, than who are you? The acceptance of mass media as a driving force in the world has created a sort of ontological hole in the universe. It's fascinating to me. And scary.

Anyway, Don DeLillo certainly knows how to pick apart America's bizarre struggle with existence and death, despite his sometimes fantastic dialogue.

Clutter

Well, after one false start, I'm finally actually reading White Noise. I read the first page about a week and a half ago, put it down, and decided I didn't absolutely have to pick it back up again. So I didn't. But today I went back to it and read a little further, and by page 26 I was sold.

It's a very difficult book to concentrate on, which surprised me until I thought about the nature of the book. The title alone implies a constant, insidious envelope of sound, a distraction that one can never be free of. The blurb on the back speaks about Jack and Babette navigating "the usual rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism." A chemical cloud represents "the 'white noise' engulfing the Gladney family - radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings - pulsing with life, yet suggesting something ominous." Hence the difficulty I'm having concentrating on the actual book. I think once I get more into the swing of things and feel more connected to the characters, the initial distraction will go away. But I can't help wondering if this is somehow purposeful. Did DeLillo want to make the reader aware of the postmodern chaos of the world he had created by constructing a narrative designed to make the reader feel a bit ADHD himself? The short chapters add to the scattered, unfocused feel of the narrative, as the novel jumps from one thought to another, one character to another, one place to another, with no transition or conciliatory nods to the reader's need to be handled gently when entering this world.

There also seems to be almost too MUCH meaning packed into everything. The novel is very dense. Everything seems equally significant and insignificant - the clutter is meaningless, but in its very meaninglessness, it takes on a meaning, providing a metaphorical way to examine the culture that so carelessly produces it.

I like thinking about clutter, because it's something that's concerned me for some time now. Sometimes I find myself voluntarily being distracted by something - TV, instant messaging, food, online shopping, blogs, etc - and realize that it would be all too easy to lose yourself in a world of such distractions and never return to the thing that you were originally distracted from.

Mr. Nobody at All

Well, I finally finished The Best American Short Stories. The stories after Aleksandar Hemon's all sort of seemed to blur together for me (although I do admit that I liked Mary Gaitskill's story, "Today I'm Yours," more than I thought I was going to) until I reached Ann Beattie's hefty 46-page story, "Mr. Nobody at All." Utterly fascinating. The whole thing felt a bit "Six Feet Under" to me - which is a good thing - in its exploration of how people react when a loved one dies. The multiple narrators (memorial service attendees jostling each other for a chance to say something about the dead Geoffrey Chestnut, and in turn to reveal more than they probably intend to about themselves) made up for the length of the story by creating a constantly shifting perspective and tone. (Actually, I think that's the same reason that "24" always seems shorter to me than an hour-long show ... the more viewpoints you're trying to harness, the faster time will seem to pass.)

After reading a bit more about Ann Beattie, I must admit I'm intrigued. Anyone who can write an entire short story in a matter of hours definitely has my respect. Also, I wonder how much of Ann Beattie there is in the enigmatic Geoffrey Chestnut - one of the things many of his "mourners" comment on is his penchant for practical jokes, and several profiles of Beattie reference her status as a practical joker. The fact that she, like Geoffrey, has become more distanced from the public in recent years (at least, according to Ploughshares) adds another layer of intrigue. I think the story has a lot to say about the meaning of art and the plight of the artist, and I'd like to read through it again and think about what Beattie might be saying there, especially if she is sort of positioning herself as the dead artist about whom everyone believes they know the truth.

Next on my list is White Noise. Perhaps I'll get started on that later today. Or maybe I'll actually try to do some writing, myself ...