Pensamiento - Literatura

III. Strategies

In a world that overwhelms and in the face of existential feelings that overwhelm, we find survival strategies. Escaping what you fear, escaping whatever overwhelms you, recycling what you cannot bear, imitating as a way to become what you are not. These are some strategies used to build life but which eventually fail. Survival strategies in WN are a warning, and something merely described, too.

Zapping, a Survival Model. Television, the tool to mesmerize and stop people from thinking, appears also as a lucky charm that saves us from catastrophe, and as a model to manage in life. Let us consider these points. First, following Baudrillard, we could say that TV turns reality into simulacra, replacing life and living and death and dying (like shopping does in the novel). However, DeLillo's literary research is more complex: catastrophes on TV are the only attention fixers because while we watch death and destruction we feel we are only witnesses, not protagonist of events. We feel safe. TV also makes us innocent, frees us from the responsibility of acting. We are not in the situations (like Murray). We are not responsible. We can only watch.

[Friday dinner in front of the TV set]
That night, a Friday, we gathered in front of the set, as was the custom and the rule, with take-out Chinese. There were floods, earthquakes, mud slides, erupting volcanoes. We'd never before been so attentive to our duty, our Friday assembly. Heinrich was not sullen, I was not bored. Steffie, brought close to tears by a sitcom husband arguing with his wife, appeared totally absorbed in these documentary clips of calamity and death. Babette tried to switch to a comedy series about a group of racially mixed kids who build their own communications satellite. She was startled by the force of our objection. We were otherwise silent, watching houses slide into the ocean, whole villages crackle and ignite in a mass of advancing lava. Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping (64, ch. 14).

[Lunch time. Campus lunchroom. Jack and his colleagues.]
"Why is it, Alfonse, that decent, well-meaning and responsible people find themselves intrigued by catastrophe when they see it on television?"
I told him about the recent evening of lava, mud and raging water that the children and I had found so entertaining.
"We wanted more, more."
"It's natural, it's normal . We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information . . The flow is constant . Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else (65-6, ch. 14).

Incidentally, Babette, the only family member which is not fascinated but, in contrast, repelled by TV catastrophes, is the only family member who appears on TV-not Jack, the university professor. All the family watch her, mesmerized (104). The fact that Jack and Wilder feel bad about it, hints at the possibility of catastrophe haunting her.

A different idea, in this complex literary analysis is that zapping is used recurrently as a strategy to flee fear. Changing channels helps us not to fix our attention, avoid noticing, feeling, realizing. It is useful for escaping fear and obsessions. Zapping is also connected to the fact that in the novel time is linear but jumpy. Its linearity is fuzzed by interfering thoughts and comments, but most surprisingly, by gaps, interruptions, silences, dream-like or unreal scenes, unresolved or unfinished matter. all of which contributes to a feeling of confusion and unease.

Jack and Babette will practice survival zapping before yielding to the power of collective perception and behavior by watching their own death in the form of a frightening beautiful sunset from the overpass of the expressway (While you watch you are safe) or by joining in the confusion and being lost of the crowds in the supermarket heaven (Shopping replaces dying). Let us consider three variations of zapping in the novel: consuming as action zapping, thematic zapping in conversations, and a powerful example of visual zapping.

Action zapping. In the supermarket scene in chapter 9, Murray is speaking about death to Babette. After his passage on Tibetans, "She put some yogurt in her cart" (38). Through an action, Babette endeavors to escape a mood, a situation. Action is used as a lucky charm. In this same scene, a second instance of zapping takes place while Murray keeps on and on: "Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere" (38) and Babette asks "Where is Wilder?" (39), her recurrent survival zapping question. Jack also resorts to action zapping at the supermarket. Something hits his deepest fears and he dives into a shopping spree:

"I've never seen you off campus, Jack. You look different without your glasses and gown. Where did you get that sweater? Is that a Turkish army sweater? Mail order, right?" .
"Promise you won't take offense." .
"You look so harmless, Jack. A big, harmless, aging, indistinct sort of guy."
The encounter put me in the mood to shop (82-3).

Thematic zapping. The conversational style in the family unit is characterized by constant zapping. I believe the reasons are varied and cannot only be explained by Murray's theory on the idea "the family is the cradle of misinformation" (81, ch. 17). Conversational zapping in the family is linked to:

•  Individual processes occurring in the midst of the communication event, like Babette not wanting to talk about death and dangers. Muffled conversations in the family often mask individual panicking.

•  The bright moments in free roaming conversations in communal processes, especially, those shared by adults and children. A playful instance for free association! (DeLillo's "radiance in dailiness" quoted in II.)

•  The idea that "the world is full of abandoned meanings" (see below): gaps and the like might be performing the function of pointing to this.

Another instance of thematic zapping is when the group has to evacuate their neighborhood: a catastrophe had occurred in real life, but catastrophes belong to the world of TV and the family feels estranged from reality. Jack words it: "I'm not just a college professor. I'm the head of a department. I don't see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That's for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the county, where the fish hatcheries are" (117; and yet before this again in 114). Jack changes his approach to the event in the nonsensical zapping way.

Perhaps the hardest case of thematic zapping (well-digested by Denise, apparently) is again by Babette, when Denise poses the Dylar affair bluntly.

The next day Denise decided to confront her mother directly about the medication she was or was not taking, hoping to trick Babette into a confession, and admission or some minimal kind of flustered response. .
"What do you know about Dylar?"
"Is that the black girl who's staying with the Stovers?"
"That's Dakar," Steffie said.
"Dakar isn't her name, it's where she's from," Denise said. "It's a country on the ivory coast of Africa" (80, ch. 17).

Visual zapping. Why does Jack leave Wilder on the counter in chapter 20? It is a crucial narrative moment. Jack and Babette "are two views of the same person" (100; see part IV) and in this scene the union is absolute. Babette is being pushed to confronting the issue of death because Denise is bringing up the question of Dylar indirectly, in the issue of forgetfulness. In this scene, when we would have expected her asking where Wilder is, instead we find Jack picking up the child and putting him on the counter. It is impossible a parent leaves a toddler on a counter. So it is likely that what is not narrated is that Jack picks Wilder for Babette, and that Wilder is put on the counter and held right away by Babette. It seems clear Jack performs this movement so that Babette can hold onto Wilder. This is love in the sense that there is communication, understanding. Even if it is linked to something tragic. With this movement, the scene where Babette is confronted to her fears is immediately replaced by the scene where Jack will have to confront his, more indirectly, while having a conversation with his son Heinrich (the "hearing voices" dialogue quoted here on page 9).

Another vital strategy coming from the overwhelming world built around consumerism is to abandon meanings. Abandoning meanings is incarnated in the listing of objects whose meanings we process consciously because we are overwhelmed by perception, or whose meanings have been exhausted. The listings which are used to try to say something about their owners, like the luggage of students in the opening scene of the station wagons getting to university (3) or the first description of the family having lunch (6-7), are full of meanings we cannot fully process. The heaps things being thrown away by Jack in three different moments (221-2, ch. 29; 261-2, ch. 34; 294-5, ch. 37) and garbage (read listing and comments on garbage when Jack looks for the Dylar bottle (258-9, ch. 34) are meanings which have been exhausted. Abandoned meanings can be used to re-envision our world. They tell us there is more to see if we care to select. A crucial hint to what is not explained in narration, for readers to work out. Sensory perception in the novel contributes to build the feeling than what is there to perceive is never-ending. There is truly more than what our interpretation abilities are capable of processing. We need to chose which meanings we should abandon, for they are actually meaningless, and which are worth noticing, for they are meaningful.

Transformations as a way to deal with what you cannot bear is a strategy used by Babette in the story, a talent which Jack appreciates in her. Initially, Babette can use anything to construct more on her vital strength, her love to good life. It is as if she were saying, It doesn't matter this is not totally true, we can use it this way to live well (27, ch. 7). It seems that this issue transcends the cold and hopeless postmodernist positions, and announces what would develop later in the arena of visual studies: simulacra, TV, consumerism are not inescapable corrupters. We can watch TV or go shopping and still retain humanity, we can do so and not be necessarily reified by the system, as mentioned in I. Introduction.

Babette is a transformer of things, skillful and cheerful: she can take anything and use it constructively. It is her talent in life. It is something Jack loves in her. But this talent depends on self-confidence. You can use it while you are happy, while you feel balanced, while you know where you are. The moment confidence quivers, the whole edifice collapses. She senses the danger in the world around her through information input which she gets from her children and through the media-the press, TV, the radio-which is overwhelming. Babette is interested in data and knowledge as long as she can use it to improve the quality of living. She resists panicking pretending things are not what the seem to be about: when she listens to Heimrich's or Denise's matter-of-fact input on dangers-Heimrich's apocalyptic-kind of scientific presentation and Denise's child concern for her health-she changes subjects in a casual tone, as if she were zapping, as we saw above. When she reads info on newspapers or tabloids she uses her storytelling-like voice. Watching TV is a family exercise unconnected to whatever TV may be dealing with. The information we get from the world are just stories, It is not the real world, That danger can't be the real world, Not even the airborne toxic event, Jack, tell them! That is the distance she establishes between outside reality and her family. In the novel, this conversion strategy fails, as it actually does in life, but what is meaningful in this strategy is that we are more than victims of a system. Life can outpower that which is built, which reads we can build differently.

Posture, the power of suggestion, a fourth strategy to apply to living. Babette teaches posture. She reminds me of an aspect of Unamuno's priest in San Manuel Bueno, mártir: he could transmit a faith in god but could not believe himself. She buys healthy food she cannot eat but she teaches people how to eat and walk to lead a better life. Jack is always noticing posture: Babette's gracefulness while teaching in class, also in young people in the library, on the campus lawn, Denise lying on his bed talking... He seems to believe in what is probably an idea of Babette's: working from the outside towards the inside achieves some result. He is not skillful like her, he does not transform like her, naturally, lightly. He is not a transformer of things. But he could attempt to practice immersion in the power of suggestion by disguising as the head of a university department devoted to an icon of death. He puts on a heavy costume. He forces himself to be in contact with death all the time, as a topic: "Death was strictly a professional matter here" (74, ch. 15).

There is a paragraph where Jack reflects in an significant manner about the power of suggestion (126, ch. 21). The thought comes from a concern for Babette's and Steffie's health, but there could be more meaning involved, related to him. This gave me a clue to interpret Jack's relation to Hitler studies, which I could not find connected to an aestheticization of politics or any sort of magic for protection (Orr 52). The source of a feeling of protection for Jack in the novel comes Babette and his rapport with the children, as I understood, not from university, Hitler or Hitler the icon. Jack and Hitler are opposites. Hitler is an authoritarian and mad leader, like all leaders. Jack is equalitarian, he is uncertain of many things, even often lost. Hitler hated the Jews, leftwing people, homosexual people and women. Jack seeks the well-being of his loved ones-his loved ones trust him and communicate with him. He does not even try to hurt people with witty comments, like his university colleagues. Hitler's ego was inflated. Jack combines healthy uncertainty and self-criticism with-the eventually prevailing-destructive self-criticism and false uncertainties, uncertainties which mask alien justifications. Hitler was a determined speaker and therefore led the masses. Jack doubts and therefore cannot be a leader. When Jack lectures, the only similarity of the situation is weak: someone speaking to many people. Jack is a university teacher, not a death leader. He does not even enjoy a feeling of power over when he is listened to (at least he does not tell). The nature of the event is completely different: students make questions which indicate they are not followers of a leader that can flick his fingers and have them do anything. In the family, Jack is a kind of network coordinator, not even an authoritarian father. Hitler spoke of death. He inflicted death, using this to reinforce the fallacy that killing is a warrant to life. Jack would not kill, unless out of his mind-a temporary state if we compare it to Hitler's! (I do not believe Jack capable of killing. I understand it is a literary resource.) Jack uses the paraphernalia that recalls the aura not of the powerful but of those who have the power not to be afraid of death. "The damage caused by Hitler was so enormous that [Jack] feels he can disappear inside it and that his own puny dread will be overwhelmed by the vastness, the monstrosity of Hitler himself" (DeLillo 1991). This has nothing to do with magic, but with self-suggestion. Jack's concern is not becoming Hitler or looking like Hitler, but forgetting about his fear of death. He tries his best at pretending, but we know from the very beginning he knows it is all false, vitally meaningless, in spite of what he panics when someone from the university sees him without his disguise and tells him he looks harmless, as we read on page 19. I do not think "looking harmless" would be a problem for Jack. The problem is that the comment mirrors nothing has soaked through: he has not developed any bit of aura revealing he is unafraid of death, making him "glow a little" (6).

Next: IV. Dissenters

Please, quote the author and the site: michelle renyé, at mujerpalabra.net.
Another quotation style: michelle renyé. "Dissenters Are Never Superheroes. An Essay on DeLillo's White Noise". Mujer Palabra. 2005. Path: Pensamiento. Date of Access <https://www.mujerpalabra.net>.