In the penultimate scene in the greatest novel ever written, Don DeLillo’s WHITE NOISE, a nun in an emergency room tells the protagonist that he’s a dumbhead if he believes in God and heaven. The prompt for this was a calendar on the wall of the treatment room with a Norman Rockwell-esque painting of JFK and the late Pope John (of Vatican II fame) enjoying a pleasant moment together in a partly cloudy heaven landscape.
You’d have to be a dumb fool to believe in such a heaven, the nun tells our protagonist, Hitler Studies professor Jack Gladney. Jack protests that surely nuns believe and the church believes.
No, the nun says, we don’t believe, but we pretend to believe, because if those of you who don’t believe didn’t have nuns and priests and ministers pretending to believe, civilization would collapse.
And soon it will anyway, because most who pretend have, like our nun, teeth nearly transparent from age.
And this is from one of the most hilarious novels I’ve ever read.
I’ve read WHITE NOISE every three or four years for the last 40 years. I was in my late 20’s when it changed my life. It made me realize that there is a new, better, supercharged way to approach fiction. No more would writing be the effete village affair of Updike, Bellow, or Cheever, even when they were most offensive.
No more would stories be about bucolic burning of autumn leaves in an Updikian novel where the insufferable and inevitably depressed husband’s loins lust after his neighbor’s whatzits. Fiction could be a neutron bomb that leaves a lifeless landscape with nothing but orgasmic sunsets fueled by toxic wastes and death clouds.
No one knows if WHITE NOISE is the first postmodern novel or whether it satirizes postmodernity. I think it’s the latter.
I think DeLillo hates the things that have made us no longer believe in God and the afterlife: toxic waste, garbage, divorce, violence, rampant and cancerous consumerism, the medical-industrial society, cable TV, fragmented attention spans, vacuous universities and colleges, ephemera, too much to do, easy intercontinental travel, obsession with physical health and fitness, obesity, foodie obsession, the equal ratio of teachers to students.
Babette, the protagonist’s fourth wife – I think fourth – teaches posture and sitting and standing classes in the basement of one of those ubiquitous-yet-empty mainstream Protestant churches.
When, Jack wonders, did everyone become a fucking teacher? And of such totally inane things?
WHITE NOISE is the only place to get hilarity out of guns, pills that erase the fear of death, nebulous masses inside the body, airborne toxic events, emergency evacuations, the insipid and lifeless mentality of medical prevention, the total and abject joke that postmodern universities and colleges have become, the stupidity of professors and experts and medical personnel, the uselessness of government.
Lubricating the whole world of the novel is television. If DeLillo had written WHITE NOISE today, we could add the internet.
Television fragments the world. It makes comprehension impossible.
The forest is lost for the trees.
TV and the net give us factoids, factoids that we get wrong anyway. Then we share our fake news and non-facts with the rest of the world. Then we’re so muddled and addle-brained that we begin to feel self-sufficient. A new raincoat, new fake news, the next vacuum cleaner is all we need.
We clutch those new things – and new spouses, and new trips, and new places to live – as shields against the ugly fact that we are dying. That new travel destination or shelter dog becomes a happy distraction from death. For a few days.
Today, we have distractions, not belief. And never has such a harrowing tale been better coated in honey than in WHITE NOISE.
