White Noise is probably one of the best novels I've ever read - equal parts funny and touching, the narrative centres around how one builds and survives a life around establishing robust and ideally impermeable defences against fear of death. For married couple Jack and Babette, even the knowledge or acknowledgement of death complicates happiness and contentedness and a clear road to carry on. Through conversation between family members and academic colleagues, questions are raised about health, death, the meaning of life, like: is it more natural and/or healthy to repress emotions or to reveal your unconscious to yourself and others? what sets humans apart from other animals and can we be reduced to and/or escape 'male, homicidal, rage'? is the denial of death unnatural and are humans unnatural such that the construction and shape of modern life by definition goes against our animal nature? is death unnatural?
DeLillo's protagonist Jack (an academic who invented and is the leading scholar of Hitler studies) finds himself in an existential predicament when his fourth wife Babette, with whom he fell in love because of his perceived sense of her simplicity, practicality and joie de vivre, confesses to him that she has sought out an unapproved medication and has consented to testing it on herself outside the walls and regulations of a clinical trial - the purpose of this medication is to cure the patient of their dread and fear of death. Discovering this shared fear, Babette is no longer a safe and ample bosom for Jack to insert his anxious head into and he has to confront that this news directly challenges the reasons he chose Babette and his ongoing need for her to be the distraction and counterpoint to his anguish.
This need for distraction is mirrored by the commercial inserts throughout the novel that interrupt scenes - voices appear from the radio, television, overhead speaker at the supermarket and eventually from no identifiable diegetic source such that the voices exist on the same playing field as the story itself. There is a clear comment on how consumerism and certain kinds of passive TV viewing behave as distractions against death, but also as a distancing of the real stuff of life so that humans are not rendered crippled and immobile from fear. Jack's compulsion for Babette to adhere to the tight constraints and boundaries he has established for her (that is, the Babette of Jack's mind) is repeated at the end of the novel where Jack discovers that this community of old German nuns are not believers, but indeed are committed to an act of service to the community in the form of an ongoing performance of faith to enable non-believers to continue to depend on the conviction of believers to find comfort in the concept/acceptance of death and the afterlife. What is a desperate Jack to do when these projected images of external figures rebel from the role he has allocated them? Certainly for him, a problem shared is not a problem halved, but one multiplied so infinitely to the point of eruption and violence.
Toward the end of the novel, there is a great scholarly dialogue between Jack and his colleague Murray that theorises that there are two types of people: diers and killers. In order to escape being a dier, one could choose to be a killer and gain 'life credits' by way of asserting power and taking control. And yet, they reach the conclusion that despite all efforts to eradicate fear of death, death adapts and adjusts and cannot be evaded.
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