In the first few pages of White Noise, Jack and Murray head to the country. The men don’t linger in the romantic landscape of meadows, apple orchards, white fences and rolling fields. Conventional intentions of a pilgrimage – the wish for understanding and peace – is upset right away by the crowd of photographers and their heavy-duty equipment. Advertised as four walls of awe and inspiration, the barn itself is obscured, corrupted by a new sensibility of what it is “to see.” This is not to say that Jack and Murray are offended and overcome with earnest feeling; the trip is taken without pretense of romance or leisure. They arrive as skeptics and take the scene in as scholars. Murray records notes and interrupts silences. The idea of a long, literary silence is subverted. As a reaction to the ineffable, silences don’t trail off into mystic, infinite, universal reverie. Satiric silences “fall” and then “extend” and then there’s “another silence” and then Murray “doesn’t speak for a while.” The first thing to come out of Murray’s mouth is “No one sees the barn,” a clear play on the common rhetorical saying “No one sees God” – something I’ve only heard in discussions of spiritual frustration. Jack and Murray head for the hills and don’t experience ascension but rather, depression. In this opening scene, I read a subversion of literary convention and the beginnings of a critique on the sublime brought to full fruition with the later appearance of the “postmodern sunset.”
Whoops, midnight. Thoughts following deadline:
Doomster Heinrich keeps his distance from the new sunset; Jack explains that his son detects something “ominous” about the brilliant change in a natural phenomenon. I get it; there’s not much for Heinrich to protest. The “unbearably beautiful” sunset isn’t an anomaly like the “black, billowing clouds” later given the name Airborne Toxic Event. No outright conspiracy, no dark hand of man here. If anything, in its wake, the passing disaster has left a path of visible beauty. Science provides no answers to the question of whether Nyodene Derivative is responsible for the shift. How many degrees of brilliance has been added to an everyday sunset is unclear. It fluctuates, according to Jack. Traveling to the overpass is an unlikely yet popular pilgrimage. Ambiguity, mystery, veneration: the Airborne Toxic Event has increased a sunset’s inherent sublime qualities. I think it’s safe to say that the overpass was never The Place to Be. When human ambition interferes with something as natural as the come-and-go of a sunset (or the growth of produce or the way we talk to each other), is it so terrible to take advantage of the discovery, to stretch limits, to head towards the unknown, risks and all? Visions of bright, genetically modified apples as Jack walks into his corner supermarket and sounds of friendly, conversational television on an otherwise quiet evening at home come to mind. Offering a spin on the sunset’s origin story, Winnie Richards says, “[It’s not] residue from the cloud that causes the sunsets. It’s residue from the microorganisms that ate the cloud.” Because the essential sublime quality of a sunset is kept intact and even enhanced despite disaster in White Noise, I’m beginning to shed my bleak outlook on white noise as negative interference. How about white noise as positive intervention?
With Jack’s “don’t know” refrains and the appearance of meaningful silences, the highway overpass is holy in a way the biblically-charged barn was not:
This waiting is introverted, uneven, almost backward and shy, tending toward silence. What else do we feel? Certainly there is awe, it is all awe, it transcends previous categories of awe, but we don’t know whether we are watching in wonder or dread, we don’t know what we are watching or what it means, we don’t know whether it is permanent, a level of experience to which we will gradually adjust, into which our uncertainty will eventually be absorbed, or just some atmospheric weirdness, soon to pass…What is there to say? The sunsets linger and so do we.
If the novel ended right there, with The sunsets linger and so do we, I think we might read this as a transcendental moment (finally!) in the novel. An epiphanal moment of what you call “meaningful silence.” But — the novel keeps going on, ending with the disorienting rearrangement of the supermarket, a move that undoes (I’d argue) any of the pretensions to transcendence that Jack tries to summon up on the overpass. The novel continually, I think, undoes whatever glimpses of transcendence it offers…