Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
It would be simplistic, then, to interpret
White Noise
as a warning
about the dangers of chemical industry. It is, among other things, a me-
diation on the tragicomedy of our (which is to say, America's) simulta-
neous dependency on and ignorance of the products of that enterprise.
The topic ends with a description of people in a supermarket, thrown into
agitation and panic when the shelves are rearranged without warning.
“They walk in a fragmented trance”, says Jack, “trying to figure out the
pattern, discern the underlying logic, trying to remember where they'd
seen the Cream of Wheat.”
4.
Corporate Gain, Public Loss?
In his 1998 novel
Gain
, Richard Powers presents a rather more somber
analysis of this same dilemma. This is a fiction of almost unprecedented
chemical sophistication. It tells two stories, shifting sequentially between
them every few pages. One is concerned with the genesis of the fictional
chemicals company Clare, which begins as a candle- and soap-making
business run by two Irish immigrants in Boston in the nineteenth century
and grows to share the stage with Lever, Colgate, and Procter and
Gamble in manufacturing domestic products, foods, and agrochemicals.
The other story is the tale of Laura Bodey, a real-estate agent living in
modern-day Lacewood, Illinois - a town that owes its existence to the
presence of Clare's factories and headquarters. Laura discovers she has
ovarian cancer, which her ex-husband Don thinks was induced by prox-
imity to the Clare chemical works.
Powers has a remarkable understanding of industrial history generally
and of how the chemicals companies arose in particular. He quotes
William Cullen, professor of chemistry at Glasgow and Edinburgh, who
made one of the most eloquent defenses of chemistry as an applied
science:
Chemistry is the art of separating mixt bodies into their constituent parts
and of combining different bodies or the parts of bodies into new mixts
[…] for the purposes of philosophy by explaining the composition of
bodies […] and for the purposes of arts by producing several artificial
substances more suitable to the intention of various arts than any natural
productions are. [Powers 2001, p. 35]
