I've been perplexed for some time about the Don DeLillo phenomenon : how can such a good writer be such a bad novelist? One finishes one of his books with deep admiration for his style and certain scenes, but wondering what happened to the story he was telling and what was the point of writing the book. There's an irritating sameness to the novels, with their paranoid plots of modern life run amok and a world devoid of any meaning. The latter in particular is the basis for the claim, which seems justified, that Mr. DeLillo is the best American post-modernist. To the extent that post-modernism stands for anything it stands for the idea that nothing means anything. (Of course, that begs the question of why write about anything, but we'll ignore that for the nonce.)
White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies at a small college. He's on his fourth wife, Babbette and has four kids and what I think most of us would say is an excessive fear of modern life and of his own death. Of the book Mr. DeLillo has said :
[A]ll I can say about White Noise...is that
the book is driven by a connection I sensed between advanced technology
and contemporary fear.
By the former I don't mean bombs and missiles alone
but more or less everything -- microwaves, electrical insulation etc. One
would have to
write a long dense essay to explain this connection
adequately -- that's why I wrote a loose-limbed and shadow-sliding work
of fiction.
As it happens, Jack's fear of technology turns out to be justified when a toxic chemical cloud is unleashed in the area and he is terminally poisoned. But it is in his fear of death that I think Mr. DeLillo loses his way.
Jack fears death precisely because he believes in nothing. For such a person the self is all that matters, so the prospect of one's own death must be terrifying. For with your own death the world, for all intents and purposes, comes to an end. Your own death is the Apocalypse. Now, Jack has a friend, Murray Jay Siskind, who serves as kind of the Greek chorus of the book. When Jack is dying, Murray tells him :
"I believe, Jack, there are two kinds of people in
the 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 let death happen.
We lie down and die. But think what it's like to be a killer. Think how
exciting it is,
in theory, 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."
This theory also explains much of the 20th century--from genocide to abortion--if we accept that murder has become a way for a people who no longer believe in anything beyond themselves to try to pretend that they have some kind of power over death. But it is of course a delusion. All the murders in the world--as Jack's subject, Hitler, demonstrates--won't extend your life by one minute. And even if they could, what would be the point, since we've already decided that our lives are meaningless?
So what Mr. DeLillo has done here is to set up an elaborate joke. We can see how foolish these beliefs are and how destructive. It's clear that such theories, though intended to empower us, have left us empty; our lives dissatisfying; our mortality devastating, even though inevitable; and the morality which once gave our lives a sense of purpose discarded so that we may pursue personal pleasures which fail to fulfill. surely the point of the novel, after all this, must be that this is all a huge mistake. Right? We have to have been building to the moment when Toto rips away the curtain and the post-modern Wizard is exposed as a fraud, haven't we? The answer, inexplicably, is : no. And so we feel the air rush out of the balloon just as we thought Mr. DeLillo was ready to let it fly.
Jack does indeed try to claim a life credit by hunting down the quack who's been giving the drug Dylar--sort of an anticipation of Prozac that quiets fears--to Babbette. But there's nothing empowering about the scene; it's merely embarrassing. When Jack takes himself and his victim, both wounded, to the hospital, he meets a nun, Sister Hermann Marie. He questions her about her faith, but she reveals that the religious have none either, their seeming piety is all an act :
"It is for others. Not for us."
"But that's ridiculous. what others?"
"All the others. The others who spend their
lives believing that we still believe. It is our task in the
world to believe things no one else takes
seriously. To abandon such beliefs completely,
the human race would die. This is why we are here. A tiny minority.
To embody old things,
old beliefs. The devil, the angels, heaven,
hell. If we did not pretend to believe these things, the world would
collapse."
It is here that Mr. DeLillo goes too far because he shows us that the joke is apparently on him. He seems to be a Jack Gladney, believing nothing, obsessed with death, one of T.S. Eliot's hollow men. That suffices to make him ridiculous, but he goes beyond that to claim that those who are not withered up must be pretending to believe in something, and to claim that even the pretend believers are a tiny minority, dwarfed by the more honest unbelievers. This is simply untrue, at least here in America, where the great majority have utterly traditional and conventional religious beliefs and a certainty that every life has a purpose..
The extreme skeptics though have always been a part of Western Civilization
and they always will be. For the perverse truth is that we can not
even prove that we exist, that we are not merely a dream. Actually,
no one has yet bettered Samuel Johnson's amusing but unsatisfactory response
when asked how he would refute Hume or Berkeley's theory that we can not
know with certainty that anything exists. Dr. Johnson turned and
kicked a boulder, saying : "I refute it thus!" But not even the skeptics
(and Johnson was one) can accept the implications of their own ideas, else
they'd give up. They'd certainly not try to communicate ideas if
those ideas mean nothing. If the post-modernists had the courage
of their convictions they not write, and even the best of them, an Albert
Camus or a Don DeLillo, would not be much missed.
(Reviewed:28-Jul-02)
Grade: (C)
