White Noise (1985)

[Murray Jay Siskind:] “There’s a theory about déjà vu.”

[Jack Gladney:] “I don’t want to hear it.”

[Murray Jay Siskind:] “Why do we think these things happened before? Simple. They did happen before, in our minds, as visions of the future. Because these are precognitions, we can’t fit the material into our system of consciousness as it is now structured. This is basically supernatural stuff. We’re seeing into the future but haven’t learned how to process the experience. So it stays hidden until the precognition comes true, until we come face to face with the event. Now we are free to remember it, to experience it as familiar material.”

I first read Don DeLillo’s White Noise a quarter century ago. The fact that it still matters to me is as remarkable as the fact that it was only 10 years old when I first encountered the novel as an established postmodern classic. Ten years is nothing anymore, now that the ’90s is as far from us as the ’60s were in the ’90s, and White Noise feels fresh in a way that it didn’t at the end of the 20th century.

I came back to it after a pair of industrial accidents in the Philadelphia area triggered that particular form of déjà vu that occurs when a work of art seems to predict the future after it has become part of your subconscious. (This happened to me once before, when the band Circulatory System put out an album on January 1, 2001, that seems to reflect on the events of September 11, 2001, particularly with the song “Inside Blasts”). In February 2023, a train car derailed and emitted a feathery plume of noxious chemical cargo on the Pennsylvania/Ohio border in East Palestine, poisoning local creeks and rivers and leading to evacuations in the immediate area. In late March, the Trinseo chemical plant dumped over 8,000 gallons of hazardous latex finishing material into Bucks County creek, which feeds the Delaware River, a waterborne toxic event that caused a bottled water panic in Philadelphia. For several days Philadelphians stayed tuned for an increasingly absurd sequence of Public Safety Alerts regarding a shifting timeline for tap water safety: safe to drink until 2pm today… safe to drink until 2pm tomorrow… safe to drink until 11:59pm Wednesday… and finally, City Declares Water is Safe, Will Not Be Impacted by Spill … No further advisory will be needed after models have shown that the potential threat has passed” into the ocean. By that last announcement on March 28, Philadelphians were no longer running to ACME for cases of bottled water (funny how the solution to plastics compromising the water supply is to stock up on plastic bottles of water), instead gamely wooting over their cell phone alert tones and ordering another round. We quickly regain our gallows humor in the city of brotherly love.

But I digress. And we’ve yet to mention the subsequent April Fool’s Day emergency broadcast tornado warning that interrupted local coverage of the men’s NCAA Final Four basketball championship. Fortunately the weather cleared up before the women’s tourney resumed the next day.

Anyway, we might be covered in latex on the outside, but our organs reportedly remain latex free. 

All this tragicomic panic has kept White Noise on my mind. Browsing Lot 49 bookshop (named after a novel by Thomas Pynchon, a satirist of the postmodern condition often conflated with DeLillo) in South Philly on day 3 of waterbottlegeddon, I overheard a conversation about White Noise (returned to the zeitgeist after a recent film adaptation by Noah Baumbach, who would go on to co-write his own postmodern tour de force, Barbie), and realized it really was time to pluck the book from my shelf and revisit a world that has become increasingly familiar.

And I’m here to tell you two things you might or might not know if you haven’t read this book at quarter-century intervals:

1) It still pops.
2) White Noise now reads as mansplainsploitation, a new kind of prescience for an already uncanny novel, and Murray Jay Siskind (visiting lecturer on living icons in popular culture at the novel’s College-on-the-Hill) would feel at home in Philadelphia circa 2023, browsing the stacks of waterbottle cases at ACME, monuments to yesterday’s crash.

Thanks for tuning into this week’s Friday Feature. Please wear a mask, and keep a couple empty growlers on hand for the next time you need to stockpile water. 4.5 out of 5 sacs of blood.

—J †Johnson