A tank train has derailed and smoke is billowing from it. The deadly chemical creates a thick black cloud. While firefighters in coveralls with gas masks run around below, above, the cones of searchlights from army helicopters follow where the huge dark mass is blown by the wind. A voice from a megaphone calls for evacuation. The Gladney family joins the convoy of cars leaving town.
In the American writer Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, which was recently published by the Argo publishing house in a new translation by Alena Dvořáková, this experience takes an ordinary American family out of their routine. Jack Gladney, Babette and their children from previous marriages lived in a small college town. Until now, they only knew disasters from the comfort of the couch, when they ordered Chinese every Friday and watched floods, earthquakes or plane crashes on TV.
White Noise was published in English in 1985 and won the prestigious National Book Award. Next to the later Underworld, it remains the pivotal prose of the eighty-seven-year-old DeLillo, ranked among the world’s most important living novelists. For example, literary critic Harold Bloom on White Noise assembled an entire book of essays in which academics compare DeLillo to the classics Honoré de Balzac or Émile Zola.
Even at the turn of the millennium, the book was one of the most frequently taught postmodern works at American universities, the translator writes in the afterword to the new edition. On the contrary, the adaptation filmed by Noah Baumbach and Adam Driver in the lead role for the Netflix video library was only received lukewarmly last year.
It is easy to imagine that the audience had different expectations from her, because White Noise is deceiving. It is not a disaster. Just as DeLillo’s peer Cormac McCarthy recently wrote a book about a plane crash in which the plane crash does not play a significant role, White Noise is not an apocalyptic novel. In scenes like the one with the chemical accident, it rather shows various social phenomena. For example, how Hollywood or television distorts sensory perceptions and real experiences, until a person affected by a disaster cannot do more than compare it to a movie. And when he comes into contact with a dangerous substance, he shows the symptoms they talked about on the radio, not the ones he actually feels.
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University professor Jack’s house is overflowing with shops. Toys, plastic tricycles, magazines, curtain rods are lying around. Children’s socks, open boxes, piles of newspapers and papers. There is food covered in mustard or mayonnaise in the refrigerator and on the kitchen counter. Crumpled foil, shiny bags of chips, rings from plastic lids. Individually wrapped slices of cheese and packs of chewing gum.
Don DeLillo at the 2015 National Book Awards. | Photo: Profimedia.cz
But that’s not enough. For other things, the family constantly goes to the supermarket, where the children sit in a shopping cart and grab goods from the shelves. As the protagonists wander the endless grocery aisles, they see their reflections on the mirrored columns, they see themselves on the security guards’ monitors. They take food in maxi packages as well as favorable discounts with bright stickers. The fruit is seasonal, sprayed, polished and people put it in many plastic bags. All this to the sound of automatic doors, the rustling of cash registers or the whispers of elderly women with powdered faces. Why all this? Because the “shopping symphony” fills the heroes, floods them with a sense of well-being, security and satisfaction.
In this respect, White Noise is admittedly a novel from the 1980s, the era of department store expansion. He rather transparently warns against obsession with consumption, gluttony with “products” of all kinds. Before the deadening effect of television and the supermarket, which seemed to symbolize America here. When every item purchased, every disaster on the screen creates a desire for the next, bigger one. Until finally, everyone just mindlessly “consumes” some “content”, stupid and disoriented by marketing slogans, media slogans, staring at screens.
Binge fever
Characteristically for an American consumerist novel of this era, most of the characters are corporeal. Suffering from “overeating fever”, they struggle to get out of oversized cars in tracksuits, into which they pile their enormous purchases. They eat while walking, in shops and in parking lots. They often don’t even waste time creating the illusion of a family dinner, sitting across from each other at the meal.
At the same time, it is a satire on the academic environment throughout. The university staff here wear gowns and dark glasses to appear more important, but they conduct seminars on blockbuster movies and read at most cereal boxes or television programs.
The hero Jack does not know German, yet he is a professor of so-called Hitler studies, for which he invented an entire department full of subjects such as “Nazism for advanced students”. In his thoughts, Adolf Hitler loses all horror. It becomes just another “product” built as a “brand”, the object of interest of people willing to specialize in the greatest servility, to attribute meaning to anything until, in the end, nothing has it.
DeLillo cuts to the point, literally asking if people were this stupid even before television came along. But at the same time, the subliminal hum of screens, washers, dryers and other appliances, as well as the highway behind the house, are strangely woven into the scenes from Jack’s household. Sometimes the phone rings and a voice from the call center comes from the receiver. Every now and then someone mumbles the name of a product in their sleep. And at other times, a kind of absurdity from the continuously running broadcast, a fragment of a sentence like “And other trends that could significantly affect your portfolio” penetrates into the conversation of the characters. The forum, like from Václav Havel’s plays, clearly situates the book in the 20th century.
Today, when many devices have stopped humming loudly and narrow laptop displays no longer give you the headache of old monitors, home reality already looks different. DeLillo captured the era before LCD screens, before the Internet, before social networks, before smartphones and TikTok.
This, however, was the white noise of the title: the chirping of civilization, the excess of stimuli from all kinds of devices, which, together with the endless shelves of abundance in stores, distance a person from his essence, distract him from his nature.
In the most ambitious parts of the book, Don DeLillo describes a strange, quiet type of anxiety that this cluster of sensations evokes. In the case of Jack, it has a surprising reason: all that consumption, even Hitler’s obsession, displaces the hero’s fear of death, delaying the realization of what anchors him in the world, why he is here, and what, on the contrary, transcends him. The theme in the book slowly begins to prevail. While at the beginning Jack was hoarding objects, towards the end he throws them away. He becomes more and more fixated on some kind of experimental drug that could delay the fear of death. Maybe his suddenly strangely forgetful wife Babette took him, maybe she didn’t.
The supermarket as a symbol of the USA. The illustration photo from 1981 shows a department store in the US state of Maryland. | Photo: ČTK / AP
I need to be
Almost forty years after its first release, the existential passages prove to be the most timeless, while other parts of White Noise have aged after all. They wouldn’t even mind the monologues dedicated to television and Elvis Presley, the reader can easily replace them with TikTok or the singer Taylor Swift. Although the general fascination with Hitler has perhaps faded a little.
Sentences like “We don’t die here, we shop, but there’s less of a difference than you’d think” nevertheless seem unnecessarily effective. Like the literal scene where Jack goes on a shopping spree and “I shopped to shop, I poked and prodded, I looked at stuff I didn’t want at all, and then I bought it anyway”. Or when he compares a disaster on TV with a real disaster, his wife on TV with the one sitting next to him on the couch. When a disaster evacuation simulation organization uses a real disaster to practice the simulation.
All these typically postmodern forums about how things lose meaning have gotten a little tired over time. On the contrary, the reader wonders if White Noise would have benefited from a little more fleshed-out characters with inner lives. Or some other scenes from the university campus. So that everything on the more than 500 pages is not just a kind of representation, a personification of an idea or an illustration of a thesis.
But it’s still a novel that has something to say. And by releasing it, Argo is paying off a significant debt. Bíly šum was first published in 1997 by the now defunct Votobia publishing house in an unsuccessful translation by Libuša Bryndová, who instead of supermarkets and pop culture wrote about self-service or folk culture, and at the same time unfortunately translated “system” as fate or “gramma” as grandfather.
The original translation didn’t differentiate between Fahrenheit and Celsius, so it was 15 degrees warmer in the city than in the countryside, the supermarket was loaded with “occult information” instead of “psychic data”, the characters ate “pills shaped like flying saucers” and adopted English idioms verbatim, so instead of ” not by chance” they might have said “not in a million years”. All of this, combined with slavishly adopted sentence structure, lots of blurbs, and punctuation errors, stripped DeLillo’s writing of all its charm.
Even a small detail will show how many orders of magnitude more perfect the new translation by Alena Dvořáková is. For example, the economical poetic description “Silence in the halls, shadows on the sloping lawn”. A translator from the 1990s destroyed it with the sentence “In the halls, in the shadows, and on the lawn stretching up the hill, there was silence.” Whereas Dvořáková? “Silence in the corridors, shadows on the sloping lawn.” Good job.
Don DeLillo: White Noise
(Translated by Alena Dvořáková)
Argo Publishing House 2023, 528 pages, 498 crowns.
2024-01-31 16:31:39
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