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.

Neuromancer and What It Means to Be Human

My brother has long been a fan of science fiction, so I have been aware of Neuromancer since shortly after it was printed in 1984, but until this last week, I had never read it.  Excited to finally read the novel that established cyberpunk as a genre, I was not in the least disappointed.  I was not surprised to find rainy and crowded urban streets filled with questionable characters and the neon lights of commerce.  I was not surprised to find assassins and street-wise leather-clad women.  I was not surprised to find a computer-savvy protagonist who was supposed to be one of the best in the business.  But a number of things did surprise me.

First, Neuromancer does not just create a new genre, it cobbles that genre together from several others.  Neuromancer is part science fiction, part western (complete with “cowboys” and wild west mentality), part heist narrative, part hard-boiled detective, and part classical horror (I am thinking in particular here of the Frankenstein narrative).  Gibson does a fantastic job of stitching all these elements together to create something entirely his own.  I particularly love his method of world building and the way he imagines the massive changes to human civilization down the line, from the Sprawl of urban life that stretches from Boston to Atlanta and beyond to the technological changes in warfare that introduced Mole IX, “the first true virus in the history of cybernetics.”  The slang and jargon feel organic and handily serve to further flesh out the world through which Case and his cohorts slide.

The second surprise for me was the strength of Gibson’s writing.  That really shouldn’t have surprised me, since this book is in a list of top 100 fiction novels written since 1923, but you never know.   I knew the book was famous, but I hadn’t heard anyone talk about Gibson’s language.  While he is no Marilynne Robinson, Gibson has strong, evocative imagery and some great poetic bursts.  It is clear that his first order of business is to create a fast-moving story through a three-dimensional world, so a great deal of his language is given over to completing that task, but he never loses his voice, always moving beyond the merely functional to find a consistent and, surprisingly to me, beautiful style.

The third and final surprise has to do with the arc and subject of the story, so here is where I need to break into the spoilers.  If you don’t want the novel spoiled (and really, you should plan on reading it yourself, so don’t spoil it!), then call this a positive review and return to whatever other business you have at hand.

All clear?

So first, let’s talk about the A.I. here!  From the moment Wintermute enters the story, there is the delightful tension caused by the characters trying to use their employer while the employer tries to exploit the characters.  And once the Straylight run had begun, I was trying to figure out how they would both pull off the heist and prevent Wintermute from becoming an unshackled A.I.  But no!  Wintermute got what he wanted, and all Case cared about was making sure the sacks of toxin didn’t undo his ability to jack in!  And what would this all powerful A.I. do once he was let loose upon the world?!  Turns out that it will reward those who helped it, that it will become the matrix, that it will otherwise not interfere in human life, and that it will look for similar intelligences across the universe.  Yeah, that was a shocker to me, and I find Gibson’s decision to play out the coda as he does reveals the central focus of his novel.

At its heart, Neuromancer is about what it means to be human.  The question of what makes us us is everywhere in the novel.  McCoy Pauley the person became Dixie Flatline the construct, a collection of ROM data that can imitate a person’s speech and thought but that has no existence outside of those moments it is computing.  Dixie says to Case that there is no sense of time for Dixie between moments when Case is jacked in.  All the particulars of Pauley are recreated, but there is no essence that is Pauley.  This limitation is not universal in the world of Neuromancer, however, because Linda Lee is captured at a whole different level through RAM by Neuromancer.  Case accuses Neuromancer of creating a construct of Linda, but the A.I. corrects him, “You were wrong, Case.  To live here is to live.  There is no difference.”  But even Dixie has the desire to be eradicated, a suicidal impulse not to be found in mere programs.  In addition to Linda Lee and Dixie, there are all kinds of lines between living and not-living, being oneself and not being oneself in Gibson’s novel.  There are clones (like Hideo and 3Jane), there are cryogenic stases (during which periods, the frozen person is considered legally dead), there is the distinction that Case draws between cowboys and meat (between being spread out in the matrix and bound by the flesh), there are the A.I.s, there is the dual layering of Corto and Armitage, and of course there are all the homegrown organs that can be programmed (like Case’s pancreas) and software that can be inserted directly into a human being.  All these things blur the lines between people and machines, between life and death, between objectivity and subjectivity.  So what is it that makes a human being a human being?

The traditional answer to that question is the soul, that certain something that raises us above the flesh and beyond the world.  That is why A.I.s traditionally play the role of something to be feared in science fiction.  Humans inhabit a middle ground between animals on the one hand and the spiritual power of god on the other, and when we take on the role of god, we can create a being that looks like a person but that lacks the thing only a spiritual entity can grant: a soul.  The A.I., then, again speaking traditionally, has all the faults of a human without any of the redeeming spirit necessary for compassion and understanding; therefore, A.I.s again and again are abominations that seek to enslave or destroy humankind.  But not in Gibson’s world.  The thing created, the thing that was once Wintermute and Neuromancer individually but is now some nameless entity is not very different from us.  At the end of the novel, Case asks the entity if it is now a god, and its only response is “Things are different.  Things are things.”  The entity is much smarter, much vaster, but not substantially different from us, looking for his own kind and ignoring the machinations of humans.  In short, humans are a type of machine, and the mysteries of personality and soul are unknowable to us and are more likely than not created by an individual’s body chemistry, chemistry that can be played with and reprogrammed.  We are, in Gibson’s world, nothing more than we are.  There is a grand equality to Gibson’s universe as presented in Neuromancer.  Things are things, and people are things. 

But of course things and people are also more than things, as Gibson hints at the thin line that importantly divides these matters.  The first is in Neuromancer’s observation about Linda Lee.  The reason he knows that “to live here is to live” is because Case, as he becomes aware of his vast knowledge of all knowable things in the matrix, does “not know her thoughts,” meaning Linda Lee’s thoughts.  There is some part of Linda Lee that is unknowable by data, and the extent to which that is the case is the extent to which Linda Lee is “alive.”  Similarly, Wintermute cannot know the password that allows him to merge with Neuromancer (presumably because Marie France built him that way), and Wintermute says, “You might say that I am basically defined by the fact that I don’t know because I can’t know.”  Our identities and our lives are hidden in those unknowable things, the secrets that we keep, even from ourselves.  It is no accident that Gibson calls the melodic password that is required to access the head at the center of Straylight a “true name.”  The thing must be named to be accessed, and it must be a “true” name, a name that gets at the essence that is in all other ways unknowable.  When Case first encounters Neuromancer in the form of a Brazilian boy, Case asks him his name, to which the boy responds, 

To call up a demon you must learn its name.  Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in another way.  You know that, Case.  Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to control.  True names . . .

In the end, people are merely biological machines in Gibson’s world, replaceable, upgradeable, predictable, breakable, and repairable.  Our intelligence is no less artificial than a computer, and the machines that we make are granted equal status as the creators.  It’s a bold and striking stance, and it’s not something I’ve ever seen posited as it is in Neuromancer.