The White Noise Between Life and Death

It doesn’t take a literary degree to know that Don DeLillo’s White Noise is an extended meditation on death in the modern world and the way that modern suburban life works to distance us from our own mortality.  Even before the long second section that deals with the Airborne Toxic Event, Jack Gladney and his wife, Babette,  are concerned with death: who will die first, they ask each other casually.  Murray Siskind, fellow professor with Jack at College-on-the-Hill and newcomer to the town of Blacksmith, is obsessed with the town’s grocery store and its connection to death.  In our first encounter with him there, he says to Babette that the grocery store reminds him of Tibet: 

Look how well-lighted everything is.  The place is sealed off, self-contained.  It is timeless.  Another reason I think of Tibet.  Dying is an art in Tibet. . . .  Here we don’t die, we shop.  But the difference is less marked than you think.

The other professors in the American Environments Department (where they study pop culture), measure out events in their lives by death, such as recalling where they were when they learned James Dean had died.  Death is everywhere in the novel, but only as a casual thought, part of a theory about life and the world, always kept at arm’s length from any visceral fear.

Instead of dealing with fear directly, the novel  is a comedic romp through the intellectual landscape of the university and the Gladney household.  Everyone speaks in pithy profundities, and everyone has a theory about the world.  Normally those moments of sharp insight are the passages that get highlighted by the reader and pulled out for reviews and quotes to be shared with friends, but this novel is teeming with them and it quickly becomes clear that that intellectualism is something of a joke in the novel.  (As a side note, just because they are a joke doesn’t mean that they can’t also swell with the feeling of truth and seem exceedingly clever—so don’t think I wasn’t highlighting and loving all the brilliant exchanges like a fiend!)  Intellect and theory and world-weariness are all used like shields and fortresses in White Noise to protect everyone from the massive void that is death waiting at the end of the ride.

The sheer breadth of DeLillo’s discussion of modern culture in this novel amazes me.  He touches on consumerism and the effort to buy our fear away at the grocery store.  He touches on environmentalism through the asbestos matter that shuts down the girls’ school at the Airborne Toxic Event that fuels the last half of the novel.  He touch on conspiracies through the government cover-up of the Airborne Toxic Event, the shadow company that created Dylar, through the stories in the National Examiner that Babette reads to Mr. Treadwell.  He touches on issues of authority and how we rely on people in position of power to make us feel safe even when we are not, and our willingness to blindly follow government officials, doctors, professors, parents, radio personalities and more in order to not deal with the ugly possibility of chaos and death.  He touches on the American family and how it creates its own cloud of confusion and misinformation to protect itself.  He touches on academia and the silliness of intellectual thought to carve out reason in what is an unreasonable world.  DeLillo explores nearly every facet of modern life to show all the barriers and defenses that we construct to protect ourselves, and most impressively, he does it all while managing to create a compelling and at times laugh-out-loud funny tale.

Making fun of modern intellectualism always runs the risk of creating an overly-intellectual piece that becomes the thing it sets out to mock.  Because the characters are so successful in compartmentalizing their fears, it is easy for their narrative to lack any visceral punch.  For example, when the town is threatened by the black cloud of Nyocene D, there is never any fear that the novel will collapse into a tale of survival.  It is treated with humor and distance because that is how the characters react to it.  Even as panic and fear are lurking beneath their cool exteriors, we never feel them in our gut.  It is easy to be a detached reader and an unmoved observer.  Put another way, I found myself interested in the characters, but not invested in them in any way.  That is, of course, part of DeLillo’s point and plan, but it is a dangerous plan for anyone who wants gripped readers.

The way that DeLillo counters this distancing effect, I think, is with a gentleness and love toward his characters.  What I mean is that he creates a palpable sense of affection for the Gladney family and all its quirky members.  Even as he mocks the professors and Jack, there is something gentle and appreciative, not harsh and condemnatory.  DeLillo is pointing out flaws and peculiar behavior, but his criticism doesn’t mean he and his reader can’t admire the self-protecting silliness even as we recognize it in ourselves shake our head at it.  And then there is Babette, who is, I believe, the most moving character in the novel.  She doesn’t seem to be equipped with all the intellectual tools that everyone else has to fight off the darkness, so when her attempt to calm her fears with Dylar fails, she is left with a deep and black depression that is painful to read.  The deadness of her responses to Jack just make me ache for her, which is incredibly grounding.  Babette is the character whose armor is thinnest, and through her, we see the pit of emptiness that all the other characters are trying to keep at bay.

White Noise is a smart, well-written, funny, and clever novel that has earned all the acclaim it has received.  If you have not dived into its pages for yourself, perhaps it is time to do so.