Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
tons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling
irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows
and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices;
the junk food still in shopping bags - onion-and-garlic chips, nacho
thins, peanut crème patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and tof-
fee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints. [DeLillo 1984, p. 3]
This, DeLillo implies, is the complete kit you need for modern life in
America, all of it essential, including - perhaps especially - those brand-
named items that remain an utter mystery to non-Americans: the
Waffelos and Kabooms. The topic is a fantastical grotesque, Rabelais
transferred to the late twentieth century - for it was Rabelais who
introduced such absurd, comical lists into the novel (Rabelais 1532,
1534). And he too wrote satire with serious intent.
DeLillo's narrator, Jack Gladney, teaches at the College-on-the-Hill
in a town called Blacksmith, where he is chairman of the department of
Hitler studies, a discipline he invented in 1968. Jack has subsequently
been concealing the fact that he actually does not know the German lan-
guage, while making ineffectual and clandestine attempts to learn it.
Thus Jack's professional life is every bit as superficial and synthetic as
his material life, a world of strange and unfamiliar substances which he
and his family wear and use and ingest without question. “We began qui-
etly plastering mustard and mayonnaise on our brightly colored food”, he
says. They sense something is not right about this, but the culture in
which they are embedded renders them powerless. “This isn't the lunch
I'd planned for myself”, Jack's wife says. “I was seriously thinking yo-
ghurt and wheat germ.”
This is a life that is pharmaceutically sustained. Everyone is on
medication. When Jack's daughter asks him “What do you take?”, he
tells her, “Blood pressure pills, stress pills, allergy pills, eye drops,
aspirin. Run of the mill.” But some medication is not described by
function; it simply has a medical-sounding name. Jack's wife is on a
drug called Dylar, and he can discover nothing about what it is supposed
to do. All he knows (at first) is that it makes her absent-minded.
Jack Gladney's world is full of these trade names for synthetic
chemicals and materials, and they serve the dual purpose of comforting
and alienating. People recite the names because that is all they have by
