As a resident of New Orleans, Louisiana, I had the pleasure of "experiencing" Hurricane Isaac earlier this month -- that is to say, I watched all of the different things that the media had to say about Isaac on television from the safety of a hotel room in Jackson, Mississippi. Perhaps it's only because I was reading DeLillo at the time, but I was struck by how much the media's presentation of Isaac resembled the "airborne toxic event" of White Noise.
As I constantly flipped through news channels (it seems that everyone, even me, likes a little disaster (imagery) in life), I kept hearing different things: "Isaac's just a tropical storm"; "Isaac is bordering on a Category One"; "Isaac expected to turn into a Category Two when it makes landfall." Not only did every news channel seem to have a competing opinion about what Isaac was, I also kept thinking that all of these arbitrary names -- "tropical storm"; "Category One"; "Category Two" -- were supposed to signify some hopefulness on our part that we could use language to control this event.
As I mentioned above, all of these thoughts that I was having reminded me of the "airborne toxic event" of White Noise. Readers familiar with White Noise are also aware that there is a mysterious toxic spill that occurs about halfway through the novel. This spill takes on new identities as the media decides to issue them. I have reproduced the three-part progression of this incident from "a feathery plume" to "a black billowing cloud" to an" airborne toxic event" (the names and backgrounds of the characters aren't important in order for me to make my point):
An hour later he was back in the attic, this time with a radio and highway map. I climbed the narrow stairs, borrowed the glasses and looked again. It was still there, a slightly large accumulation, a towering mass in fact, maybe a little blacker now.
"The radio calls it a feathery plume," he said. "But it's not a plume."
"What is it?"
"Like a shapeless growing thing. A dark black breathing thing of smoke. Why do they call it a plume?"
"Air time is valuable. They can't go into long tortured descriptions." (111)
...
"That was the Stovers," she said. "They spoke directly with the weather center outside Glassboro. They're not calling it a feathery plume anymore."
"What are they calling it?"
"A black billowing cloud."
"That's a little more accurate, which means they're coming to grips with the thing. Good." (113)
...
"It affects the false part of the human memory or whatever. That's not all. They're not calling it the black billowing cloud anymore."
"What are they calling it?"
He looked at me carefully.
"The airborne toxic event."
He spoke these words in a clipped and foreboding manner, syllable by syllable, as if he sensed the threat in state-created terminology. (117)
The best thing about this section of White Noise is twofold. On the one hand, DeLillo uses the medium of the novel to (re)present the media (re)presenting the news through the medium of television. At the same time, he also manages to critique this very (re)presentation when, for instance, he speaks of "the threat in state-created terminology." (This level of threat is taken to an entirely new level in Cosmopolis. Expect a post on this soon.)
So, what we should make of this relationship between DeLillo and real life? The answer to this, unfortunately, is not so clear. Using his satire, has DeLillo now authorized us to laugh at the media, thus consoling us? Or, is laughter not enough, and should we still worry about how much control the media has over reality? With DeLillo, of course, we often have to balance more than one answer at a time. Yet these answers certainly don't feel like solutions.
Maybe this, then, is DeLillo's flaw as a writer: he cuts to the heart of the problem, yet fails to offer a solution. David Foster Wallace seems to say as much in his brilliant reading of DeLillo (see: "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction").
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DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin, 1986. Print.
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