White Noise Supermarket Project
50 POINTS – 750 (minimum) words typed and double spaced
According to W.S. Merwin (American poet), quoted in the The Language of Life, “A
supermarket brings the whole thing into focus. The things that are there don’t belong there, they
didn’t grow there. They have a shelf life, which is being rented, so we can buy them. It’s only
about selling things. It is a very strange kind of situation, but it is so typical of our lives.” Moyers
argues that it is art that connects us to the world of our imagination and our senses, the world we
are distracted from in a consumer culture. “When that connection is no longer there,” he
continues, “there will be no arts and we won’t even know what we missed – we really will be
zombies walking around, if we can walk around at all, in a sort of eternal supermarket.”
In White Noise, Murray views the supermarket as a spiritual, mystical place where he can
“contribute to some kind of spiritual consensus” (18), and were he can “immerse [himself] in
American magic and dread” (19). Murray later tells Jack that the supermarket, “recharges us
spiritually, it prepares us, it’s a gateway or a pathway. Look how bright. It’s full of psychic data”
(37).
Jack believes that “in the mass and variety of our purchases… we had achieved a fullness
of being that is not known to people who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around
lonely walks in the evening” (20).
Your task is to take a trip to a supermarket on a quest for “psychic data” that you
will use to make an argument about in what ways the supermarket is a kind of temple to
the American Religion.
Delillo is using the thoughts and beliefs of his creations, Murray and Jack, to
critique what is valued and disvalued in American life. Now you are to take that critique
and apply it to your world, or supermarket, as it were.
Feel free to be creative, as Delillo is being creative, but your creativity must serve to
make a cultural argument – what does the supermarket say about American worth?
“Place” by W.S. Merwin
On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree
what for
not for the fruit
the tree that bears the fruit
is not the one that was planted
I want the tree that stands
in the earth for the first time
with the sun already
going down
and the water
touching its roots
in the earth full of the dead
and the clouds passing
one by one
over its leaves
This poem is valuable, aside from the sheer beauty of the speaker’s voice, to contrast the
value of consumerism we see with Murray and Jack. The tree is not wanted for what it can
produce – it is not planted so that its fruit can be used or bought or sold. It is planted because it is
a tree, and there is much to muse on regarding the value of a tree other than fruit, literally and
metaphorically. As the world ends, and the “earth is full of the dead” the tree stands, roots firmly
planted, in its natural place.
Consider, by way of contrast, how the supermarket is a “natural” American landscape.
Also consider how the new “organic” or “super-fresh” brands and chains will use trees or leaves
as symbols of how natural they are.