Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
dustry, presented to us without explanation or justification. At one point,
DeLillo simply lists them, à propos of nothing in particular: “Dacron, Or-
lon, Lycra Spandex”, one of his recurring little mantras to the modern
world. He calls such labels “supranational names, computer-generated,
more or less universally pronounceable. Part of every child's brain noise,
the substatic regions too deep to probe.”
It might be tempting to read all of this as standard knee-jerk paranoia
in response to our 'chemical world', a reiteration of the popular notion
that all 'chemicals' are bad and the chemical industry is inevitably pol-
luting. Some critics have indeed interpreted
White Noise
as, in part, a
cautionary fable about such ecological and toxicological human-made
hazards. Perhaps that was not surprising in view of the context in which
it was first published in January 1985 - just a month after the leakage of
methyl isocyanate gas from Union Carbide's chemicals plant at Bhopal
in central India, which claimed thousands of lives. Tom LeClair argues
that the toxic substances in the airborne toxic event “were engineered to
kill and thus give man control over the Earth; instead, they threaten their
inventors and nature”.
White Noise
, he says, is an expression of DeLillo's
“rage at and pity for what humankind does to itself” (LeClair 2003).
But I think DeLillo's fable is more subtle than that. Jack does not re-
gard the toxic cloud as the inevitable product of humankind's hubris in
making these awful substances; rather, he is perplexed at how the prosaic
process of synthesis and artifice can generate something that resembles a
natural
hazard:
This was death made in the laboratory, defined and measurable, but we
thought of it at the time in a simple and primitive way, as some seasonal
perversity of the earth like a flood or tornado, something not subject to
control. Our helplessness did not seem compatible with the idea of a
man-made event. [DeLillo 1984, p. 127f.]
The synthetic chemicals that pervade Jack's life are regarded by him as
benign, or at least as necessary. He is bewildered when they seem to turn
on him. Yet he experiences no conversion to any sort of back-to-basics
environmentalism in the topic, despite acquiring a potentially fatal con-
dition from the toxic airborne event and despite discovering unwhole-
