White noise Writers who cut through the soulless ness of our time
Garvey, John
JOHN GARVEY WHITE NOISE Deafening roar of the trivial Home years ago I spent five daysinamonastery.Nonews-paper or radio or television, just rhythms of work and prayer, and the attention to both...
...On TV and in particular on the particular evils of phenomena like Geraldo Rivera: "As you know, in addition to being the worst person on the face of the earth, Geraldo is just about the nicest...
...One of Trow's main points is that the mediating contexts that once made life livable on a human scale have been re-moved, and we now have "two remain-ing grids in American life-the intimate grid, and the grid of 200 million...
...What I like about novelists and crit-ics as varied as De Lillo, Leslie Savan, Jonathan Franzen, and George W.S...
...It's abso-lutely wiser to laugh at the person who tells you that without your subjective ex-perience of cinnamon you would have hanged yourself at the age of thirteen, and that without your subjective expe-rience of the smell of melting snow your attitude toward your mother or your wife would be no more than, How can I make her give me what I want...
...Trow can be very funny...
...Our work is not to chime in and compete, becoming part of it...
...And the intimate grid is manufactured, hand-ed to us: "Every cover of People says the same thing: 'This is what you love...
...In Strong Motion (Far-rar, Straus, and Giroux, 1992), a novel too strange to describe in a few lines, Jon-athan Franzen has a wonderful passage about "the system" which gains its power cumulatively...
...or really begin to know any-thing at all...
...It is too easy, even tempting, to become part of the gener-al noise, the static that blocks the still-ness within which we can begin to know the Lord...
...Just because it's not worth doing doesn't mean it won't go wrong...
...Don De Lillo's novel White Noise, years ago, suggested that death is the white noise we all know and live against and for and avoid, all at once...
...It's not easy to get a woman to withdraw money from the bank and give it to a stranger...
...For example, for peo-ple not to like the World's Fair of 1964-65 "was the same thing as to break the agreement that was all that stood be-tween them and being alone...
...This is not an easy book, and its style will put some people off-short cap-tioned sections, moving around topics that don't immediately seem germane- but it works brilliantly...
...it's not easy to get 50 million people to think of Suzanne Somers as a beautiful young woman...
...When I came away and, hours later, heard the first "news," it was as if nothing had happened dur-ing those days...
...This is not easy...
...The mes-sage of many things in America is 'Like this or die.' It is a strain...
...In life, every powerful accomplishment is hard...
...We have to join the more difficult effort, and cut through...
...To vote for the man with the harsh-est views on drug kingpins...
...It's a con, and it prevails...
...Leslie Savan's The Sponsored Life (Tem-ple, 1995) is the best guide to seeing how advertising and television form us (I have written about it here before, Febru-ary 10,1995...
...No one likes to be called a moralist these days (though nobody objects to being called moral), but that's what they really are...
...That novel and other books I have read since have con-vinced me that the best novelists, poets, and critics are more sensitive to our real climate than most theologians and philo-sophers, and our real climate is the one that matters most to whatever it is we mean when we talk about "spirituality," a really irritating word, much too com-forting and exalted...
...They aren't happy with this, and they try to warn us...
...Who can you be?'" As Trow sees it, an ado-lescent sensibility rules, a cold and mean-ingless irony: "Much advertising now lets children in on the joke, and many American babies are coming to loathe the joke...
...There was the same ur-gency in the voice of the news reader, but what he was saying was quite ob-viously not urgent...
...On celebrities and magazines: "It may be that the suc-cess of certain magazines depends upon the ability of the editors successfully to stimulate doubt, to create an atmosphere of unsureness...
...In 1981, George W.S...
...JOHN GARVEY WHITE NOISE Deafening roar of the trivial Home years ago I spent five daysinamonastery.Nonews-paper or radio or television, just rhythms of work and prayer, and the attention to both that is part of the prayer...
...And it illustrates, finally, something that is true not only of our age and peculiar situation, but of all life, anywhere: "Consider it: all transactions involving authority involve an attempt to al-leviate the sense of loneliness that is a condition of life...
...I think this is the level of most public discourse these days...
...Trow's new introduction is as helpful in its way as the original essay was...
...Is escaping a burn-ing house a matter of spirituality...
...One of them inquires, with soulful sin-cerity-remembering a shampoo com-mercial-"Valerie, are we limp and hard to manage...
...Suddenly the modes of death begin to be attractive...
...No pow-erful accomplishment is easy...
...Real spirituality means, among other things, seeing through a lie...
...It seems responsible to do so, in some vague, civic-minded way-high school teachers always recommended it-but more likely it is the need for distraction...
...I don't want to ruin it for you, but Franzen gets at the soullessness of our time: "It's much wiser to live rationally, as a machine does...
...Trow's essay Within the Context of No Context was first published in book form...
...Why is it that, every day, I spend so much time reading the paper, listening to news, etc...
...There are whole churches whose mission seems to be to replicate the general noise, with a Christian twist...
...It has just been republished in paperback with a new in-troduction (Atlantic Monthly Press) and it is a strange, good thing to have at hand, another help to clarity, though clarity may not be the first word that comes to mind in an essay so allusive, so much like a collage of observations, epigrams, anecdotes...
...To maintain that what is real about the flavor of cin-namon is its informational content: it tells your brain-and this by sheer chemical accident, since cinnamon is non-nutri-tive-eat me, I am good for you...
...There is an exceedingly silly science fiction comedy called "Earth Girls Are Easy," in which aliens learn everything they need to know about how to sur-vive in our society from a couple of hours spent in front of a television set...
...One of her gifts is to point out, with convincing illustrations, the fact that the connection all of us have to ad-vertising is one which forms and in-forms our entire world, not just the one we inhabit self-consciously as we watch television...
...Trow is that they understand the land-scape within which we try to make sense of things, and they know how that land-scape has been formed to make sure that our attempts to make sense fit into the plans of other people, or conform to what some critics have called a "con-sensus reality...
...As I was writing this I came across an ap-peal to Christians to use the media and all its ways of informing us to get the Christian message across...
Vol. 124 • July 1997 • No. 13
