Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Worshiping the Self at the Supermarket Temple

In White Noise, DeLillo situates the supermarket as the epicenter of “American magic,” which is defined in the novel as the particular quality of the escape from death in American culture. The novel provides us with multiple variations of kinds of death, as well as different preventative measures that can be taken to avoid its inevitability. For example, one could take Dylar to extinguish the fear of a physical death, the loss of the body, or one could even take the lives of others in order to reestablish the sense of control over one’s own fate. These measures prove to be ineffectual for Jack, whose life comes to be dominated by death, providing temporary solutions for permanent, ineluctable problems. By the end of the novel, all possibilities being exhausted, we find Jack drawn back to the supermarket, a place framing the narrative and exposing Jack, in all its white-washed-label glory, to certain comforting banalities that shield him from death. The supermarket here becomes a temple in which one worships the self, a place that creates a self-contained narrative of anesthesia: “Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks ( 310). Thus anesthetized, the people of the church of the supermarket can become ignorant to the facts of their own deaths, alienated from it, numbed to it. Everything from the monotonously branded products to the outrageous stories in the tabloids, to the technology that appears to have answers humans cannot and should not have, is designed—at least in this novel—to maintain the illusion that one is not, in fact, cannonfired from birth in the direction of one’s inevitable death. Instead, life is focused around visits to the supermarket as both a way to sustain life (through food) and a way to forget that life ends in its opposite. It is an exercise in active defiance; there is nothing in the narrative of the supermarket that supports the idea that life has an end. And it is to this comforting womb of fluorescent lights that Jack flees to by the end of the novel—for if he is unable to prevent his own death, then he might as well be comfortable on his way there. Turning up the white noise concentrated in the supermarket is an effective way to drown out the reality of death:

“It seemed to me that Babette and I, in the mass and variety of our purchases, in the sheer plentitude those crowded bags suggested,…in the sense of replenishment we felt, the sense of well-being, the security and contentment these products brought to some snug home in our souls—it seemed we had achieved a fullness of being that is not known to people who need less” (20).

This is precisely the illusion pulled by what Murray calls the American magic: the comfortable deception created by the narrative of the supermarket that allows Jack, and everyone, to deny their own deaths. Life is the very last “product” one can own, after everything else decays, and it can be neither bought nor sold, only lost. Supermarkets create white noise by selling nearly everything else, readily available to be bought. In the act of purchasing and amassing goods it’s easy to forget that life is perishable and may even have an expiration date as soon as that bundle of bananas.

2 comments:

  1. Stray observations, more white noise:

    - White noise is a combination of all frequencies the human ear can detect, and thus it is commonly used to mask other sounds. So the metaphorical white noise in the novel is used to drown out the "noise" of death.

    - This motif of conglomeration shows up several times in the novel, especially in the character Mr. Gray. What is so frightening or disruptive about combinations of this kind?

    - Wilder is such an interesting character to me and I almost wrote the blog post about him. The only reason I didn't is because I couldn't seem to pin him down or get at any central purpose he serves in the novel. He is a figure of innocence, perhaps the only character who isn't touched to some degree by their own death. Yet at the end of the novel he rides out into traffic, seeming to confront death head-on. Was he influenced by his parents' preoccupations? Did he need to perform some feat of heroism to gain back their attention? At some point in the novel did he mature and come to the realization of his mortality and then want to test it?

    - The language in the novel seems to me like it is intentionally banal, mirroring the banalities encountered in the supermarket and elsewhere. Stylistically bland yet ideologically dense. There's so much conceptual candy to chew on, but it only tastes like a sugar pill. Frustrating and fascinating.

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  2. Any of these would work, Kyle, as paper topics. Your analysis of the supermarket as temple is intriguing, and I'd love to see this linked to the banal language of the novel (a link between form and content). You might be a bit more argumentative with your phrasing - although perhaps what you're interested in is DeLillo's ambivalent mixture of fascination with/critique of the supermarket as temple phenomenon. Thanks for the stray thoughts on the novel, too...

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