Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
way of understanding or describing these substances: a meaningless, su-
perficial, invented label. If you use the label, it sounds as though you
have taken command of the substance, it makes it something familiar and
casually appropriated - even though you have absolutely no idea what it
is. Jack starts to see or hear about teams of men in protective clothing
who appear around Blacksmith, and in every case he specifies that the
garments are made from Mylex, although it is clear that this means noth-
ing to him. 'Mylex' sounds technical, it sounds as though he knows what
he is talking about, although there is (so far as I know) no such sub-
stance. There is a knowing, post-modern irony at work here. It is widely
recognized that the sloppy fictional mode particularly prevalent in movie
scripts tends to employ scientific words without any notion of what they
mean, simply to add a patina of apparent scientific credibility (if not
merely to signpost supposedly scientific content). DeLillo has Jack
Gladney do the same thing, and now the author is not inadvertently
showing his ignorance but pointing out how this tendency has become a
stock aspect of modern life.
But there is no doubt that Jack's identification of the protective mate-
rial as Mylex has another implication. If he had simply said 'plastic', the
effect would not be the same. Mylex has a corporate aura - it suggests
that the men in protective clothing are part of an operation as inscrutable
as the fabrics they wear, an organization shrouded in the mysterious
trappings of power. And as the tale proceeds, this operation becomes
more ominous. The Mylex men are clearly involved in some kind of
clean-up procedure, and eventually this literally spills out into the open
when a train carrying some chemical agent is derailed, creating a fire or
explosion that sends a cloud of toxic material to threaten Blacksmith.
When Jack tries to establish the nature of the spill, he is faced with a
similar blank, forbidding label: his son Heinrich tells him that “It's called
Nyodene Derivative or Nyodene D.” When Jack finally sees this so-
called 'airborne toxic event', again he seeks refuge in names that he has
heard but not understood: “It was a terrible thing to see, so close, so low,
packed with chlorides, benzines [
sic
], phenols, hydrocarbons, or what-
ever the precise toxic content.”
Nyodene, Mylex, Dylar: clearly names from the same stable as Ny-
lon, Kevlar, Mylar, the ubiquitous synthetic products of the chemical in-
