Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
familiar foods and drinks that we never even knew were there. One day
red wine is good for you; the next, it is a hazard. Beware sugar; beware
salt. These oils are good; those are bad. New pollutants are being detec-
ted as fast as new methods are devised to detect them (and, of course,
because of those very innovations). Old drugs prove to have unforeseen
side effects; can we trust the new alternatives any better?
Jack Gladney's family is surrounded by such vague and incompre-
hensible dangers, of which the airborne toxic event is just the most con-
crete example. His son Heinrich's hairline is receding, although he is just
fourteen. “Did his mother consume some kind of gene-piercing substance
when she was pregnant?” Jack wonders. His stepdaughter Denise tells
her gum-chewing mother “That stuff causes cancer in laboratory animals
in case you didn't know.” At one point, the children's school is evacu-
ated because of toxic fumes, which could be coming from
the ventilating system, the paint or varnish, the foam insulation, the elec-
trical insulation, the cafeteria food, the rays emitted by microcomputers,
the asbestos fireproofing, the adhesive on shipping containers, the fumes
from the chlorinated pool, or perhaps something deeper, finer-grained,
more closely woven into the basic state of things. [DeLillo 1984, p. 35]
In other words, everything is a potential hazard. And Heise argues that,
just as DeLillo's characters cannot be sure what to believe, so in
White
Noise
he creates a narrative structure in which the
reader
does not know
what to believe either. (We will later see precisely the same device used
by Thomas Pynchon.) Not just the half-familiar names of products -
Mylex, Dylar, and so forth - but also the seemingly wilder comic
inventions have an air of plausibility: Siskind's academic quest for a
mythology of Elvis, college courses on the study of car-crash scenes in
movies, drugs for suppressing irrational fears. Even the story in a super-
market tabloid that “From beyond the grave, dead living legend John
Wayne will communicate telepathically with President Reagan to help
frame U.S. foreign policy” starts to sound horribly possible. Thus, says
Heise (2002), “the novel's narrative mode, which exacts decision making
[about what is real and what is not] from the readers, mirrors in its form
the fundamental uncertainties that beset risk assessments in the 'real
world'.”
