Chemistry Reference
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through brand names, advertising, television. The recurring triads of
names are a part of Siskind's 'American magic': they are like incanta-
tions, with echoes of a recitation of the Holy Trinity that are not simply
ironic. Fetish objects, indeed. Even the airborne toxic event is presented
in this way: the authorities seize on various euphemisms for it before
alighting on this one, seeking the right balance of gravity and distance.
Dealing with the crisis becomes a question of finding the right slogan.
The deadly cloud, Jack notes, is presented to them in consumerist terms,
like an advertising campaign for death. “
White Noise
”, says critic Mi-
chael Valdez Moses,
is DeLillo's exploration of an America in which technology has become
not merely a pervasive and mortal threat to each of its citizens, but also,
and more importantly, a deeply ingrained mode of existing and way of
thinking that is the characteristic feature of the republic. [Moses 1991]
Where, we might reasonably ask, does DeLillo himself stand in all of
this? That it is hard to answer that question contributes to the topic's
richness. As Thomas DiPietro writes,
In DeLillo's truly Swiftean satire, we're never sure what he himself be-
lieves or what he thinks of his characters. As in Swift, we're instead
forced to rely on ourselves, to measure literary experience against our
own sense of reality. [Lentricchia 1991]
This refusal to provide a neat message, this offering of a range of per-
spectives, some of them only half-glimpsed, is a characteristic of much
post-modern fiction, and certainly it can be found in the other two topics
I discuss below. However, Ursula Heise offers one particularly intriguing
interpretation of DeLillo's stance that has a special resonance from the
point of view of the topic's attitudes to technology in general and to
chemical technology in particular. She suggests that DeLillo has found a
way to explore the complex and in some sense irresolvable issues of risk
with which modern life confronts us. “In
White Noise
”, Heise (2002)
says, “DeLillo is concerned with the way in which new kinds of risk
have invaded the lives of even those citizens that might earlier have had
reason to believe themselves safe from their most dire consequences.”
We are bombarded daily with health scares, and not just from synthetic
chemicals with obscure, futuristic names but from the ingredients in
