White Noise, White Heat, White Books

Dashiel Carrera considers Han Kang, sleep, and the Velvet Underground.

By Dashiel CarreraAugust 29, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

• Fiction

SOUTH KOREAN WRITER Han Kang is perhaps best known for her 2007 novel The Vegetarian, a violent, evocative work that led to her 2024 Nobel Prize win. But hiding in plain sight has been her 2016 masterpiece The White Book, whose English translation by Deborah Smith was recently reissued in paperback by Hogarth. An experimental, autobiographical novel, The White Book contains profound insights about the nature of grief and color that—like so many overlooked novels—are devilishly difficult to describe. But by digging into the novel’s poetic logic with an ear tuned to sound and silence, we can begin to tease it out.

The White Book opens as a meditation on color: “Swaddling bands / Newborn gown / Salt / Snow / Ice,” and so on. This list of white objects quickly becomes a sequence of chapter headings, each paired with a brief, pseudodiaristic reflection. At first glance, such a text appears akin to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (2009)—likewise circuitous and fragmented, intertwining the philosophical with the personal to achieve a literary conception of color. But where Nelson interrogates blue as a presence, Han pursues white as both a presence and erasure. From the outset of the autobiographical novel, the color is entangled with the narrator’s older sister, who died during childbirth. As Han lists and writes, she begins to wonder “what meaning might lie” in these white objects, and her reflections diffuse across memory, conjecture, pastoral description, and elegy.

There are at least two words for “white” in the Korean language, each carrying different connotations. Han described these in an interview with Electric Literature: 하얀 connotes “pure, clean, bright,” while 희다 has “more room for darkness, sadness, and death.” It is this latter definition with which The White Book seems primarily concerned. As Han conjures visions of the sister she never met, the question of “what meaning might lie” in white shifts from an investigation of Korean culture—with its white swaddling gowns and funeral garb—to white’s manifestation in Han’s grief-stricken psyche. Can Han’s white be touched? Tasted? Is her white the color of memory, or what escapes it?

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A few months ago, I began sleeping to white noise. I was in Atlanta, working on a sound installation, living next to a parking garage where drag racers howled unmufflered over concrete ramps through the night. Earplugs didn’t help. So I bought an exercise headband with speakers stitched in the seam, downloaded a white noise app, and started blasting the sound of artificial noise directly into my ears. I couldn’t block out the drag racers, I realized, but I could drown them out.

White noise shares a key quality with the color: it contains all frequencies, mixed together. While white light is the full spectrum of color frequencies, white noise is a layering of sound at every frequency simultaneously. But despite this shared structure, the two phenomena feel vastly different. While the color white suggests stillness, clarity, and sometimes purity, white noise is multitudinous, chaotic, and perpetually shifting. In The White Book, Han leans into this paradox. Her white is not only luminous but also blinding. Empty, but filled to the point of overwhelm. It is a frequency too saturated to parse.

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At the time of its 1968 release, the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat was one of the most raucous records ever made. While their first album won audiences over with calm, vamping bass grooves like that of “Sunday Morning,” White Light/White Heat punched home stereos to their screeching extreme with distorted guitars, violent improvisation, and lyrics describing intravenous meth. The band was so noisy in the studio that one of the recording engineers left halfway through, declaring, “When you’re done, come and get me.”

The album was dense—John Cale stacked track after track of guitar fuzz, leading Douglas Wolk, years later, to call it “the glorious, tainted fountain from which all scuzz flows.” The album became a cornerstone of punk and noise rock, genres known for their irreverence, sneer, and boundless power. But when I recently listened to the record again, I fell asleep.

The paradox is that distortion, though associated with power and volume, eventually neutralizes itself. Run a guitar through enough fuzz boxes and the attack of each note disappears in a staticky blur. Overtones amplify; new tones struggle to emerge. White Light/White Heat becomes, like white noise, a kind of auditory blizzard—thick, saturated, and formless.

Compare this with more recent noise rock bands like Lightning Bolt or Melt-Banana, groups whose chaos is precise, even minimalist: limited instrumentation, clear separation, and brutal clarity. Though these bands are influenced by the Velvet Underground, their lack of overlayering allows their sound to punch through with greater clarity. White Light/White Heat, in contrast, is less a barrage than a smear. Like a Jackson Pollock painting, the record overwhelms with accumulation. Everything, played all at once, becomes indistinct.

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In The White Book, Han writes about her sister’s death in language that feels both detailed and unreal. The narrator imagines the moment her sister dies: a premature birth, her young mother alone in the house, her older sister’s eyes briefly open and slid back closed. She is gone before the narrator gets the chance to meet her.

How does one mourn someone they never knew? So much of grief is structured around valorization of memory: gravestones, photo collages, eulogies. But Han has no memory to return to. Instead, the sister’s existence hovers in the liminal space between life and death, presence and absence. Just as soon as she is wrapped in a swaddling gown, it becomes her burial shroud.

To grieve her sister, Han must acknowledge another form of grief. She must find a shape for something shapeless. One of the first white words in the book is “shroud,” and the word reverberates across the text: “Wreaths of fog […] shroud the city.” Snow blankets the ground. White is not just a color but also a mode of disappearance. Formless and absent in its ubiquity. A blankness that erases as much as it reveals.

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White noise apps offer more than static: “Babbling Brook,” “Blowing Wind,” “Train Ride,” and “Crowded Room” are just a few of the sounds found on my own. These sounds are not “white noise” in the technical sense, but they nonetheless share the same qualities of chaos and calm. A campfire crackles unpredictably; a crowded room buzzes with speech we can’t make out. These sounds are immersive but illegible. They cannot be held. Han herself describes this phenomenon in her interview: living in Poland for a residency, she said, was like being surrounded by a “strange silence.” Even though there were so many people talking, she couldn’t understand: “I was like an island.”

These sounds underscore a lesser-discussed aspect of grief: forgetting. Not holding on, but tuning out. Most writing on grief valorizes the act of memorialization—building mausoleums, telling stories, preserving objects. But there is also a grief that is ambient, residual, and impossible to articulate. It saturates the background of daily life until, like white noise, we no longer notice it.

“My black shoes stamped prints into the early-morning snow […] Turning to look behind me, I saw the snow already sifting down to cover those just-made prints,” the narrator recalls. Grief, like snow, softens and effaces.

But it also contains multitudes. “The wave reaches its greatest possible height and shatters in a spray of white,” Han writes. “The glittering of multitudes is there. The shifting, stirring, tossing of multitudes.”

Grief has no fixed end; it arrives in new magnitudes and dimensions, often under the guise of some other task like spring-cleaning or relocation. It can feel like presence or absence, like noise or silence. It both shrouds and is itself shrouded by day-to-day life. Sometimes it can be held, like ashes or mementos. But it is also something untraceable, like the candle we place atop graves and monuments, dissipated in the atmosphere. These times, grief is something we can never hold again.

Han’s narrator does not define “white.” She questions even its name. “[C]an we really call it white?” she asks. “That vast, soundless undulation between this world and the next.” Her own sister’s life was a flicker, a half presence. A light, far off in the distance. A sound full of frequencies she could never isolate.

In the end, the narrator looks to an “amorphous light, flickering like some gas of unknown composition.” Whether this light is her sister’s spirit or just the shimmer of loss remains unclear. But it remains. Blurred, distant. Never fully in focus, never quite silent, but never quite entirely gone.