Underworld and White Noise
It is commonly argued, and not exclusively by sports fans, that competitive sports provide arefuge of clarity and simplicity in a bewilderingly complex and ambiguous world. If it is hard to keeptrack of who did what to whom and why in Srebrenica in 1995 or Shrewsbury in 1402, it is a relief torecall more straightforward matters like the Jets' 16-7 victory over the Colts in Super Bowl III, TigerWoods' 15-stroke victory in the 2000 U.S. Open, or Billie Jean King's straight-sets routing of BobbyRiggs in 1973. In sports, the outcomes are indelible and indisputable, whereas in life we journey, in ourmiddling way, through a dark wood, never learning how the big story begins or ends. When BobbyThomson hits that one-strike pitch off Ralph Branca for a three-run home run on October 3, 1951, forexample, the Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant-and theoutcome is not challenged in court, the Dodgers do not ask for a statewide recount, the Supreme Courtdoes not step in and award the game to Brooklyn by means of a creative reading of the equal protectionclause of the fourteenth amendment. Sure, occasionally you get your figure-skating controversies and
(291-92)Yet as Kermode points out, the plot that affirms life may well spring from our fear of death: Men, like poets, rush "into the middest," in medias res, when they are born; they also die in mediis rebus, and to make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems. Unfortunately for fans of clarity, though happily for fans of competitive sports, this argument- likeUnderworld itself- is full of garbage. In White Noise, the airborne toxic event ispresented as just another one of "the networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies" (46) that fill theair, like the hum of consumers in the mall or the ubiquitous and intangible webs of information thatdefine Jack's life at Autumn Harvest Farms and at the Automated Teller Machine. e gymnastics scores, but the "objective" sports, the one involving goals, runs,touchdowns, baskets, meters, and seconds, are thoroughly decisive: someone wins, someone loses,end of story. " Is this a real ending,an invocation to all the living and the dead (as in Joyce) or to the tabloid cults of the famous and thedead? Perhaps, perhaps not. But since the drug does not actually succeed in counteracting its users' fear of death, both Babette's andJack's plots to obtain Dylar seem pointless and futile. If we compare White Noise's airborne toxic event withthe1984 toxic leak at the Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, India (which occurred about a monthbefore the book's publication, and which DeLillo is often credited with having eerily anticipated), themotivelessness and the agentlessness of the event should seem all the more remarkable- not becauseUnion Carbide intended to poison thousands of residents of Bhopal, surely, but because White Noisecontains so little treatment of the causes of the event, not a word about the train that derailed, about thechemical company that was transporting Nyodene D, or about the large-scale socioeconomic forcesbehind chemical spills and other industrial disasters. Just winners and losers, as in the playoffs; one side goes on, to spin its narrative anotherday, and one side goes home. And, of course, "the men in Mylex suitsare still in the area, yellow-snouted, gathering their terrible data" (325). As is so often the case in White Noise (think of the joy Jack experiences atthe mall or at the ATM), it is extremely hard to determine whether we are to take this "seriously" or"ironically" or by means of meta-ironic sentences containing lots of "scare quotes. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. No one asks Michael Jordan, "why were you trying to hit that buzzer-beater?" No one grills Tom Bradyabout why he was trying to unload the ball, no one wonders why the Giants were trying to beat theDodgers, regardless of whether they were stealing signs. We might then be inclined to remember that Jack apparently does not understand hisown motives for studying Hitler or for founding Hitler Studies, and tends to speak about his career in themost shallowly professionalist terms available: he has carved out an academic niche, he has establisheda new field and a scholarly reputation of some sort, yes, but tellingly, we never get any sense of theintellectual substance of this field, or of Jack's work in it, on which Jack's reputation presumably rests. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction.
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Acceptance Essays
