White Noise, pre-critical reading

I'm trying something a bit different here, and it might be interesting and it might not. I'm going to write two reviews of Don Delillo's White Noise, one before I read the background material and whatnot included in the Viking critical edition (gotta love those critical editions) and then another after. Essentially, I'm seeing how much, and what, changes in my views on a work of art when I know it in a (relative) vacuum, and when I know the thoughts of others on it.

The more I dwell on White Noise, the more I like it. The style of it strikes me as a cross between Pynchon and Vonnegut – darkly satiric and openly arty, but approachable.

Was anything written in the '80s not darkly satiric, by the way? It seems an apocalyptic decade. The next generation seemed odd and dangerous, but it wouldn't matter because they wouldn't be given a chance to grow up, at least not in anything but some post-apocalyptic hell. This seems to be the end-pointed gestured toward by so many works in the '80s.

Ultimately, the work is about how we deal with death, and the verdict seems to be that we deal with it by lying to everyone until we know until we reach ourselves. The book's tensions are all predicated on falsehoods, though it's only when the truth is revealed that the real trouble begins.

Ignorance is bliss could be the motto of the book. The protagonist, Jack Glad ney, is a formidable figure of great intelligence, at least when seen from the outside. Our perspective shows him as a man constantly fretting about the opinions of others, of becoming obsolete to his wife, to his family, to his work. His counterpart is Murray, who is painfully, prophetically honest. Murray seems incapable of deceit, gleefully showing the patchwork of lies that make up society. In a way, Murray seems a modern take on the Trickster character, setting up people for their great falls, but unlike the Tricksters of old it is not simply an element of truth, a grain of fact, in his words – they are pure fact. And they destroy.

Jack Gladney has convinced himself in four previous marriages that he wanted women so intelligent they were involved in Intelligence, but they all left him unsatiated. He has found love in a simple woman, Babette (whom he calls Baba in bed). And the core of her simplicity, as it is revealed, is her uncaring of death. They rarely discuss it, but when they do she says she hopes she dies first. It is a comforting thought to Jack, who doesn't want to die first simply because he doesn't want to die ever. The revelation that death haunts her, constantly, to the point of complete moral collapse, is the Fall of their relationship.

From here he has but one remaining comfort: the young boy, Wilder. I'm not sure Wilder's age is ever given, but he borders on ageless. He is within talking age, but he chooses not to. There is no gross hints of autism or any learning disabilities – he simply doesn't talk much. It is revealed near the end of the book, after roughly a year has passed, he is talking less. Far from concerning his parents, he becomes a simple comfort, a person of pure ego (as described by Murray), with no concern of the death of himself or those around him.

The last chapter of the book opens with an extended scene of Wilder, worth describing in some detail (after this scene there is a brief epilogue, which seems like it should be a separate entity and not the end of the same chapter). He rides his tricycle across a multilane highway as two old ladies watch, screaming but not interceding, as cars nearly hit him but don't, Wilder himself wildly unconcerned. After safely crossing, borderline miraculously, he rides down an embankment into some mud. Finding himself half-floating in the filth, he begins to cry, to weep, to wail, at which point a passing driver stops and goes down to help him, the ladies serving only as witnesses, not participants.

It's a rather odd scene, something that, in isolation, could be used as a standard mockery of art, a post-modern mess. But of course it isn't that, not when taken with what else is said about Wilder, and what the book is.

The key phrase to this is, once again, from a discussion between Murray and Jack. Wilder is either described as or described as having (the sentence is, purposefully probably, ambiguous) a “cloud of unknowing.” This is a reference to the 14^th century work of English Christian mysticism, The Cloud of Unknowing. In that work, God is described as either having or being a cloud of unknowing, only pierceable with the arrows of love. In other words, Wilder serves as a symbol for God.

In what way? It seems to me that Wilder serves as God for Jack and Babette, for all those around him who need the comfort of the deathless, of embracing the unknowing. If lies are unsustainable, and the truth destroys, the option is the embracing, the worship, of the unknown, of ignorance. In other words, the novel goes about describing a sort of atheistic mysticism, an embracing of the unknown because the Truth is too grand for comprehension, the difference between it and ancient mysticism being that the Truth has gone from God to Nothing.

But the last scene calls even this succor into question. Can this Edenic idiocy avoid a Fall perpetually, or is that what we're seeing in the final chapter? Just as the book shows an atheistic mysticism, maybe this an atheistic apocalypse, an event no longer of an end in redemption, but an end in collapse.

Cheery! Thanks, the '80s!