White Noise
Pietro, Thomas De
Laughing through the malls WHITE NOISE DonDelillo Viking, $116.95, 326 pp. Thomas DePielro DON DeLlLLO'S centerless novels everywhere threaten to deconstruct. No character or idea — and his...
...Concocted images of more man just death saturate the world of White Noise — a world coterminous with our own — until the point of mass skepticism...
...The "dark black breathing thing of smoke" wafting from the train yard seems to be merely another occasion to ponder death in the abstract — a subject of endless fear and fascination for Gladney and Babette, whose daily quibbles result from simple questions: which toothpaste should they buy...
...In White Noise, his eighth and funniest novel, darkness comes literally after a "postmodern sunset," a found artwork created not by nature but by an' 'airborne toxic event'' — an event around which this painfully hilarious novel revolves...
...Everyday life for Gladney, his wife Babette, and their children from previous marriages has always proceeded randomly, defined by media-created images, full of "vague forebodings" and "nameless dread...
...No character or idea — and his clever novels abound in both — appears more privileged than the next...
...Even the billowing, poison-bearing cloud can be understood in purely commercial terms: "the cloud resembled a national promotion for death, a multimillion-dollar campaign backed by radiospots, heavy print and billboard, TV saturation...
...For DeLillo, a novelist of questions, there is no clear winner in the struggle between randomness and order...
...Don't you know about all those theorems that say nothing is what it seems...
...Heinrich gives voice to the collapse of object into subject which everyone else in White Noise experiences silently...
...In DeLillo's truly Swiftian social satire, we're never sure what he himself believes or what he thinks of his characters...
...This has been proved in the laboratory...
...it comes to us in White Noise bathed in the blue glow of TV...
...The most immediate consequence is a world in which no one is sure how to function...
...the holocaust becomes a metaphor for quotidian helplessness and victimization — a metaphor deflated by DeLillo's piercing wit...
...The objective world, such as it exists, comes to us distilled by the media...
...The mantra-like chants of product names which punctuate DeLillo's manic narrative promise his characters "a fullness of being that is not known to people who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around lonely walks in the evening...
...He parts company, though, with other technicians of uncertainty — Pynchon or Barth, say — in that his work poses an urgent and admirable challenge: to locate ourselves within the heightened reality he so accurately records...
...Gladney's colleagues, and everyone else in White Noise for that matter, worry little about history or traditional culture, and with good reason...
...As in Swift, we're instead forced to rely on ourselves, to measure literary experience against our own sense of reality...
...What further distinguishes DeLillo from other postmodern explorers of subjectivity is his determination to discover the social consequences of this abstract idea...
...In all his novels, DeLillo chronicles the sensory overload and existential breakdown endemic to our time...
...The peace and security found in malls and supermarkets, where many of the lives in White Noise unfold, calm palpitating hearts and cool sweaty palms...
...Everywhere in the novel popular culture assaults with its overripe imagery and everywhere a colleague of Gladney's is there to interpret it for us: Alfonse (Fast Food) Stompanato on prewar soda pop bottles, Murray Jay Siskind on car crashes in the cinema, Dimitrios Cotsakis on Elvis...
...There's no past, present, or future outside our own minds...
...Its residents, including Jack (a.k.a...
...What we laugh at is ourselves in constant fear of oblivion...
...Midway in this domestic nightmare, when actual crisis strikes in the form of a railcac leaking noxious fumes, the mid-western college town of Blacksmith barely flinches...
...These iconologists and mythographers of "the American mystery" caricature the kind 5 April 1985: 219 of high-minded defenses of mass culture common among pundits and professors...
...But DeLillo's penchant for waxing theoretical about consumption is itself consumed in parody...
...No celebrant of these "cancerous times," DeLillo writes at the sunset of postmodernism, when endless self-referentiality suggests a failure of vision, mere acquiescence to an "age of darkness...
...Uniform, White...
...Gladney's fascination with fascism derives from a similar impulse...
...Babette's classes in sitting, standing, and walking — she's to begin teaching one in eating and drinking — together make up a technology of everyday survival...
...This juxtaposition of consumption with death may be funny, but it's no joke...
...The most articulate skeptic here is Gladney's precocious son Heinrich, a fourteen-year-old deconstructionist, whose philosophical playfulness rivals that of Jacques Derrida...
...From the accumulation of consumer rot, DeLillo manufactures a wonderfully comic apocalypse — a genuine revelation...
...In this case, Gladney's crazed pursuit of the drug Dylar (an antidote to the fear of death) gives shape to the chaos everywhere imminent in the novel...
...J.A.K...
...Death com-modified and thereby assimilated...
...Neither makes much sense when reality itself is in perpetual doubt...
...The reverential awe and academic solemnity Gladney's buddies bring to their wacky subjects throw into doubt their genuine insight into the "only avant-garde we've got" — the culture of consumption...
...We don't die," a character says strolling the aisles, "we shop...
...Numbing flourescent light seems to stave off death...
...In one particularly Kantian aside, Heinrich calls into question his father's idle speculation on the weather: "Our senses are wrong more often than they're right...
...Gladney, chair of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill, have inured themselves to real disaster...
...Death too pervades White Noise, on the air (televised catastrophe), in the air (the toxic cloud) and in the title itself ("What if death is nothing but sound...
...who will die first...
...The only relief is laughter, pure and unabated — the kind DeLillo induces with apparent effortlessness...
Vol. 112 • April 1985 • No. 7
