Last week I wrote about Don DeLillo’s prescience in forecasting the return of Redd Foxx and Andy Kaufman. (They’re back! As holograms.) This week I thought I’d shift from holograms to hurricanes. The link goes beyond the merely alliterative. Holograms are created by interference patterns—and an “interference pattern” is both a DeLillo-esque term and a pretty good descriptor for an incoming weather shakeup. (Colloquially, of course—not scientifically.) The word hurricane comes from the Spanish huracán, which in turn derives (probably) from the Taíno hurakán, “god of the storm.” Last weekend, in Mexico, a massive hurricane was promised: the largest in recorded history, we were told. But the storm gods had other ideas, and the damage proved to be relatively modest. It’s of course problematic—and probably even morally repugnant—to feel let down by this turn of events. But it’s also likely part of who we are, or sometimes are: spectators, enchanted by disaster.
In White Noise, DeLillo’s narrator, Jack Gladney, gathers with his family in front of the TV set on a Friday evening, watching “houses slide into the ocean, whole villages crackle and ignite in a mass of advancing lava.” Every disaster, he reports, “made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.” A bit later, he speaks with his colleague Alfonse Stompanato (and what a name: Stompanato):
I said to him, “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,” he said, with a reassuring nod. “It happens to everybody.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re suffering from brain fade. We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information.”
. . .
“You’re saying it’s more or less universal, to be fascinated by TV disasters?”
“For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.”
“I don’t know whether to feel good or bad about learning that my experience is widely shared.”
“Feel bad,” he said.
At another point in the novel, Jack sees a TV report about the discovery of dead bodies in someone’s backyard. “The reporter said two bodies had been found, more were believed buried in the same yard. Perhaps many more. Perhaps twenty bodies, thirty bodies—no one knew for sure. He swept an arm across the area. It was a big backyard.”
Again, we’re good people, all of us, and we want everyone to live. And yet, and yet: the grand narrative exerts its pull. So, along with Jack and Jack’s son, we gaze and listen:
Digging would continue through the night, [the reporter] said, and the station would cut back to the scene as soon as developments warranted. He made it sound like a lover’s promise.
The work goes on for seventy-two more hours. No more bodies are found.
The sense of failed expectations was total. A sadness and emptiness hung over the scene. A dejection, a sorry gloom. We felt it ourselves, my son and I, quietly watching. It was in the room, seeping into the air from pulsing streams of electrons. The reporter seemed at first merely apologetic. But as he continued to discuss the absence of mass graves, he grew increasingly forlorn, gesturing at the diggers, shaking his head, almost ready to plead with us for sympathy and understanding.
I tried not to feel disappointed.
