January 8th, 2023

The Joys of Getting It Wrong

The nice thing about a world post-death of the author–if that death is presumed, in a Barthian way to mean that once text passes from author to reader, the author “dies” and all that is known is how the reader interprets the work and not any ideas or intentions the author may have had about how the reader should read–is, wherever you go with a book, there you are. (I’m madly over-simplifying, but if you wanted very serious complicated literary criticism, well, I have terrible news for you about this post!) You can be pretty sure, VERY sure, that was not the plan of the author or publisher or school of thought it was produced by or for but–oh well! There’s all kinds of joys to be found in strange places.

Of course, we do know certain things about authorial intentionality a lot of the time, and/or at least context. It’s not that I don’t acknowledge those those things–it’s just that I do not always care. I wanted to read <i>White Noise</i> because the film was coming out at the end of last month and Mark was excited, having always loved the book since he first read it in first-year university and he thought I would like it too, so I agreed to read it first and then watch the film with him. Right away, I saw what Mark saw: the laser-eyed lists, the hilarious details, the po-mo absurdity but also warmth of the family and friendship–I love it. For a book that is so hailed as serious and respectable, WN is funny af and a lot of fun to read.

However–published in 1985 and set, one imagines, a year or two before that, as novels tend to be, WN is also seemingly (who knows what the author’s intent might be? ;)) a critique of materialist culture where the centre of worship is the supermarket or the TV and everyone huddles around the news just to feel alive. The family shops and memorizes jingles and struggles to remember trivia; they rehearse constantly what they will do in case of disaster but cannot discuss they memory or the impact of real ones. Hitler is reduced to the site of academic achievements; car crashes too. It’s a weird and desensitized world DeLillo has created.

The protagonist, Jack Gladney is a prof at a small university and lives with his wife and kids in a big house near the school. It wasn’t until I started watching the movie that I realized how strongly I identified with that family–when I saw the house in the film, I was weirded out that it was MY house. I too grew up with a professor dad in a big house with my mom and sibling in the 1980s–I’m about the age of the younger Gladney kids. DeLillo’s literary project–among others–in this project was to show how over saturated and trivialized American family life had become, but to me it seems positively dreamy and quaint. The family has one TV they all gather to watch, and they move it from room to room, clustering together in an animal heap wherever it goes. They eat meals together and drive everywhere together in the only family car, a station wagon–everyone goes everywhere together. They are always sitting on each other’s beds, chatting, watching each other do tasks or chores, bickering. There was no way to get in touch with anyone outside the house without walking to a plugged in phone handset and dialling their number and seeing if perhaps they were home–or else, you could physically go looking for them. They supermarket is the apex environment but the family goes as a unit to shop, and often meets friends and neighbours there and CHATS. It was sweet and lovely, and completely at odds with what I think was DeLillo’s project of making the 1980s seem over-commercialized and harsh–it seemed loving and quaint to me.

I would move into this book immediately if I could, or at least visit for a while. But of course, I already lived there once. Of course, this reading is wildly coloured by my life experience, as is anyone. Perhaps there will be a future school of criticism about the death of the reader, but I don’t know how that would be possible and also it would be too sad.