I had read Falling Man by Don DeLillo and was not impressed. It's a story about a marriage breaking apart in the aftermath of 9/11, but has just too many scattered segues into trying to form a plot. However, I decided to give his fiction another try, as I had admired his writing style, as well as the authors he'd influenced, for many years. Enter White Noise, which has an infinite setup for each of its sardonic passages, such as the end of chapter 1: "I am chairman of the department of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill." Set in the late 80s, as far as I can tell from the book publication date and the prevalence of station wagons, it follows a college professor, his exercise-obsessed wife, and their brood of children from failed marriages through a Midwestern winter full of radiation waves, the airborne toxic event, and dealing with the side effects of our media-saturated world. Jack, our narrator and Hitler expert (who doesn't speak German), leads us through lengthy descriptions of his world, his disguises, and his personas, while finally reaching my favorite chapter, on page 293 out of 332, a Socratic discussion about the individual's fear of death with his colleague Murray.
Murray is a New Yorker who has traveled to this quaint little college town to study the American essence of culture. He's fascinated by the mundane, by all this white noise that surrounds us, that creates in us this fawning consumerism as a repressed, unconscious sort of mannerism: expressway traffic, fast food environments, ATMs, and of course, supermarkets and televisions. Television is ''the primal force in the American home, sealed-off, self-contained, self-referring, a wealth of data concealed in the grid, in the bright packaging, the jingles, the slice-of-life commercials, the products hurtling out of darkness, the coded messages, like chants...Coke is it, Coke is it, Coke is it.'' This concept is reflected in Jack's life as there are phrases that pop into almost every conversation he has with his precocious children. The TV is always on in the background, swirling in their dreams, with its incantations of "Toyota Celica" for his daughter, or listing side effects of mind-dumbing medications for him as he strolls through the living room.
The events in this town seem to happen in waves, rolling back onto previous lives and looking into future apocalyptic ones. Every discussion is laced with ominous undertones, unvalidated emotions, and a sort of hurtling toward fate. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Socratic method-esque discussion that Jack and Murray have while strolling along the college campus:
Murray: "Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?"
Jack: "What good is preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious, quivering thing.
Murray: "True. The most deeply precious things are those we feel secure about. A wife, a child."
Jack: "So how do I get around fear of death?"
Murray: "You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out. This is the whole point of technology. Technology creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. It's what we invented to conceal the terrible secret of our decaying bodies."
Murray, continuing with other ways to get around the fear of death: "There are two kinds of people int he world. Killers and diers. Most of us are diers. We don't have the disposition, the rage, or whatever it takes to be a killer. We lie down and die. But think what it's like to be a killer, to kill a person in direct confrontation. If he dies, you cannot. To kill him is to gain life-credit. The more people you kill, the more credit you store up. It explains any number of massacres, wars, executions."
Jack: "Are you saying that men have tried throughout history to cure themselves of death by killing others?"
Murray: "It's obvious...The killer, in theory, attempts to defeat his own death by killing others. He buys time, he buys life."
Though the technology of the 80s was not even half as impressive as today's gadgets and advances, Murray was expounding upon the timeless debate of the good and evil in any invention. Technology has brought us life-saving antibiotics and revolutionary surgeries, and it has also brought us bullets and drones. It can aid us both in the creation of our self-focused lives, and in the destruction of ourselves and our world.
