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E unibus pluram: television and U.S. fiction.

Author: Wallace, David Foster
Date: Jun 22, 1993
Words: 21657
Publication: The Review of Contemporary Fiction
ISSN: 0276-0045

[7/7]

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End of the End of the Line

What responses to television's commercialization of the modes of literary protest seem possible, then, today? One obvious option is for the fiction writer to become reactionary, fundamentalist. Declare contemporary television evil and contemporary culture evil and turn one's back on the whole Spandexed mess and genuflect instead to good old pre-sixties Hugh Beaumontish virtues and literal readings of the Testaments and be pro-Life, anti-Fluoride, antediluvian. The problem with this is that Americans who've opted for this tack seem to have one eyebrow straight across their forebead and knuckles that drag on the ground and just seem like an excellent crowd to want to transcend. Besides, the rise of Reagan/Bush showed that hypocritical nostalgia for a kinder, gentler, more Christian pseudo-past is no less susceptible to manipulation in the interests of corporate commercialism and PR image. Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.

Another option is to adopt a somewhat more enlightened political conservatism that exempts viewer and networks alike from any complicity in the bitter stasis of televisual culture, and instead blames all TV-related problems on certain correctable defects in broadcasting technology. Enter media futurologist George Gilder, a Hudson Institute Senior Fellow and author of 1990's Life after Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and American Life. The single most fascinating thing about Life after Television is that it's a book with commercials. Published in something called "The Larger Agenda Series" by a "Whittle Direct Books" in Federal Express Inc.'s Knoxville headquarters, the book sells for only $11.00 hard, including postage, is big and thin enough to look great on executive coffee tables, and has really pretty full-page ads for Federal Express on every fifth page. The book's also largely a work of fiction, plus is a heart-rending dramatization of why anti-TV conservatives, motivated by simple convictions like "Television is at heart a totalitarian medium" whose "system is an alien and corrosive force in democratic capitalism"[31] are going to be of little help with our ultraradical TV problems, attached as conservative intellectuals still are to their twin tired remedies for all U.S. ills: the beliefs that (1) the discerning consumer instincts of the little guy would correct all imbalances if only big systems would quit stifling his freedom to choose, and that (2) tech-bred problems can be resolved technologically.

Gilder's basic report and forecast run thus: television as we know and suffer it is "a technology with supreme powers but deadly flaws." The really fatal flaw is that the whole structure of television programming, broadcasting, and reception is still informed by the technological limitations of the old vacuum tubes that first enabled TV. The "expense and complexity of these tubes used in television sets meant that most of the processing of signals would have to be done at the" networks, a state of affairs that "dictated that television would be a top-down system - in electronic terms, a |master-slave' architecture. A few broadcasting centers would originate programs for millions of passive receivers, or |dumb terminals.' "By the time the transistor (which does essentially what vacuum tubes do but in less space at lower cost) found commercial applications, the top-down TV system was already entrenched and petrified, dooming viewers to docile reception of programs they were dependent on a very few networks to provide, and creating a "psychology of the masses" in which a trio of programming alternatives aimed to appeal to millions and millions of Joe B.s. The passive plight of the viewer was aggravated by the fact that the EM pulses used to broadcast TV signals are analog waves. Analogs were once the required medium, since "with little storage or processing available at the set, the signals ... would have to be directly displayable waves," and "analog waves directly simulate sound, brightness, and color." But analog waves can't be saved or edited by their recipient. They're too much like life: there in gorgeous toto one instant and then gone. What the poor TV viewer gets is only what he sees. With cultural consequences Gilder describes in apocalyptic detail. Even High Definition Television (HDTV), touted by the industry as the next big advance in entertainment-furniture, will, according to Gilder, be just the same vacuuous emperor in a snazzier suit.

But in 1990, TV, still clinging to the crowd-binding and hierarchical technologies of yesterdecade, is for Gilder now doomed by the advances in microchip and fiber-optic technology of the last couple years. The user-friendly microchip, which consolidates the activities of millions of transistors on one 49 [cents] wafer, and whose capacities will get even more attractive as controlled-electron conduction approaches the geodesic paradigm of efficiency, will allow receivers - TV sets - to do much of the image-processing that has hitherto been done "for" the viewer by the broadcaster. In another happy development, transporting images through glass fibers rather than the EM spectrum will allow people's TV sets to be hooked up with each other in a kind of interactive net instead of all feeding passively at the transmitting teat of a single broadcaster. And fiber-optic transmissions have the further advantage that they conduct characters of information digitally. Since "digital signals have an advantage over analog signals in that they can be stored and manipulated without deterioration," as well as being crisp and interferenceless as quality CDs, they'll allow the microchip'd television receiver (and thus the TV viewer) to enjoy much of the discretion over selection, manipulation, and recombination of video images that is now restricted to the director's booth.

For Gilder, the new piece of furniture that will free Joe Briefcase from passive dependence on his furniture will be "the telecomputer, a personal computer adapted for video processing and connected by fiber-optic threads to other telecomputers around the world." The fibrous TC "will forever break the broadcast bottleneck" of television's one-active-many-passive structure of image-propagation. Now everybody'll get to be his own harried guy with headphones and clipboard. In the new millennium, U.S. television will finally become ideally, GOPishly democratic: egalitarian, interactive, and "profitable without being exploitative."

Boy, does Gilder know his "Larger Agenda" audience. You can just see saliva overflowing lower lips in boardrooms as Gilder forecasts that the consumer's whole complicated fuzzy inconveniently transient world will become broadcastable, manipulable, storable, and viewable in the comfort of his own condo. "With artful programming of telecomputers, you could spend a day interacting on the screen with Henry Kissinger, Kim Basinger, or Billy Graham." Rather ghastly interactions to contemplate, but then in Gilderland to each his own: "Celebrities could produce and sell their own software. You could view the Super Bowl from any point in the stadium you choose, or soar above the basket with Michael Jordan. Visit your family on the other side of the world with moving pictures hardly distinguishable from real-life images. Give a birthday party for Grandma in her nursing home in Florida, bringing her descendents from all over the country to the foot of her bed in living color."

And not just warm 2D images of family: any experience will be transferrable to image and marketable, manipulable, consumable. People will be able to "go comfortably sight-seeing from their living room through high-resolution screens, visiting Third-World countries without having to worry about air fares or exchange rates ... you could fly an airplane over the Alps or climb Mount Everest - all on a powerful high-resolution display."

We will, in short, be able to engineer our own dreams.

In sum, then, a conservative tech writer offers a really attractive way of looking at viewer passivity and TV's institutionalization of irony, narcissism, nihilism, stasis. It's not our fault! It's outmoded technology's fault! If TV-dissemination were up to date, it would be impossible for it to "institutionalize" anything through its demonic "mass psychology"! Let's let Joe B., the little lonely guy, be his own manipulator of video-bits! Once all experience is finally reduced to marketable image, once the receiving user of user-friendly receivers can choose freely, Americanly, from an Americanly infinite variety of moving images hardly distinguishable from real-life images, and can then choose further just how he wishes to store, enhance, edit, recombine, and present those images to himself, in the privacy of his very own home and skull, TV's ironic, totalitarian grip on the American psychic cajones will be broken!

Note that Gilder's semiconducted vision of a free, orderly video future is way more upbeat than postmodernism's old view of image and data. The seminal novels of Pynchon and DeLillo revolve metaphorically off the concept of interference: the more connections, the more chaos, and the harder it is to cull any meaning from the seas of signed. Gilder would call their gloom outmoded, their metaphor infected with the deficiencies of the transistor: "In all networks of wires and switches, except for those on the microchip, complexity tends to grow exponentially as the number of interconnections rises, [but] in the silicon maze of microchip technology . . . efficiency, not complexity, grows as the square of the number of interconnections to be organized." Rather than a vacuous TV-culture smothering in cruddy images, Gilder foresees a TC-culture redeemed by a whole lot more to choose from and a whole lot more control over what you choose to . . . umm . . . see? pseudo-experience? dream?

It'd be unrealistic to think that expanded choices alone could resolve our televisual bind. The advent of cable upped choices from four or five to forty-plus synchronic alternatives, with little apparent loosening of television's grip on mass attitudes and aesthetics. It seems rather that Gilder sees the nineties' impending breakthrough as U.S. viewers' graduation from passive reception of facsimiles of experience to active manipulation of facsimiles of experience.

It's worth questioning Gilder's definition of televisual "passivity," though. His new tech would indeed end "the passivity of mere reception." But the passivity of Audience, the acquiescence inherent in a whole culture of and about watching, looks unaffected by TCs.

The appeal of watching television has always involved fantasy. Contemporary TV, I've claimed, has gotten vastly better at enabling the viewer's fantasy that he can transcend the limitations of individual human experience, that he can be inside the set, imago'd, "anyone, anywhere."[32] Since the limitations of being one human being involve certain restrictions on the number of different experiences possible to us in a given period of time, it's arguable that the biggest TV-tech "advances" of recent years have done little but abet this fantasy of escape from the defining limits of being human. Cable expands our choices of evening realities; hand-held gizmos let us leap instantly from one to another; VCRs let us commit experiences to an eidetic memory that permits re-experience at any time without loss or alteration. These advances sold briskly and upped average viewing-doses, but they sure haven't made U.S. televisual culture any less passive or cynical.

The downside of TV's big fantasy is that it's just a fantasy. As a special treat, my escape from the limits of genuine experience is neato. As my steady diet, though, it can't help but render my own reality less attractive (because in it I'm just one Dave, with limits and restrictions all over the place), render me less fit to make the most of it (because I spend all my time pretending I'm not in it), and render me dependent on the device that affords escape from just what my escapism makes unpleasant.

It's tough to see how Gilder's soteriological vision of having more "control" over the arrangement of high-quality fantasy-bits is going to ease either the dependency that is part of my relation to TV or the impotent irony I must use to pretend I'm not dependent. Whether passive or active as viewer, I must still cynically pretend, because I'm still dependent, because my real dependency here is not on the single show or few networks any more than the hophead's is on the Turkish florist or the Marseilles refiner. My real dependency is on the fantasies and the images that enable them, and thus on any technology that can make images fantastic. Make no mistake. We are dependent on image-technology; and the better the tech, the harder we're hooked.

The paradox in Gilder's rosy forecast is the same as in all forms of artificial enhancement. The more enhancing the mediation - see for instance binoculars, amplifiers, graphic equalizers, or "high-resolution pictures hardly distinguishable from real-life images" - the more direct, vivid, and real the experience seems, which is to say the more direct, vivid, and real the fantasy and dependence are.

An exponential surge in the mass of televisual images, and a commensurate increase in my ability to cut, paste, magnify, and combine them to suit my own fancy, can do nothing but render my interactive TC a more powerful enhancer and enabler of fantasy, my attraction to that fantasy stronger, the real experiences of which my TC offers more engaging and controllable simulacra paler and more frustrating to deal with, and me just a whole lot more dependent on my furniture. Jacking the number of choices and options up with better tech will remedy exactly nothing, so long as no sources of insight on comparative worth, no guides to why and how to choose among experiences, fantasies, beliefs, and predilections, are permitted serious consideration in U.S. culture. Insights and guides to human value used to be among literature's jobs, didn't they? But then who's going to want to take such stuff seriously in ecstatic post-TV life, with Kim Basinger waiting to be interacted with?

My God, I've just reread my heartfelt criticisms of Gilder. That he is naive. That he is an apologist for cynical corporate self-interest. That his book has commercials. That under its futuristic novelty is just the same old American same-old that got us into this televisual mess. That Gilder vastly underestimates the intractability of the mess. Its hopelessness. Our fatigue. My attitude, reading Gilder, is sardonic, aloof, jaded. My reading of Gilder is televisual. I am in the aura.

Well, but at least Gilder is unironic. In this respect he's like a cool summer breeze compared to Mark Leyner, the young New Jersey writer whose 1990 My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist is the biggest thing for campus hipsters since The Dharma Bums. Leyner's ironic cyberpunk novel exemplifies a third kind of literary response to our problem. For of course young U.S. writers can "resolve" the problem of being trapped in the televisual aura the same way French poststructuralists "resolve" their being enmeshed in the logos. We can solve the problem by celebrating it. Transcend feelings of mass-defined angst by genuflecting to them. We can be reverently ironic.

My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist is new not so much in kind as in degree. It is a methedrine compound of pop pastiche, offhand high tech, and dazzling televisual parody, formed with surreal juxtapositions and grammarless monologues and flash-cut editing, and framed with a relentless irony designed to make its frantic tone seem irreverent instead of repulsive. You want sendups of commercial culture?

I had just been fired from McDonald's for refusing to wear a kilt during production launch week for their new McHaggis sandwich. (18)

he picks up a copy of das plumpe denken new england's most disreputable german-language newsmagazine blast in egg cream factory kills philatelist he turns the page radioactive glow-in-the-dark semen found in canada he turns the page modern-day hottentots carry young in resealable sandwich bags he turns the page wayne newton calls mother's womb single-occupancy garden of eden morgan fairchild calls sally struthers loni anderson.(37)

what color is your mozzarella? i asked the waitress it's pink - it's the same color as the top of a mennen lady speed stick dispenser, y'know that color? no, maam I said it's the same color they use for the gillette daisy disposable razors for women . . . y'know that color? nope well, it's the same pink as pepto-bismol, y'know that color oh yeah, i said, well do you have spaghetti? (144)

You want mordant sendups of television?

Muriel got the TV Guide, flipped to Tuesday 8 p.m., and read aloud: . . . There's a show called "A Tumult of Pubic Hair and Bobbing Flaccid Penises as Sweaty Naked Chubby Men Run From the Sauna Screaming Snake! Snake! . . . It also stars Brian Keith, Buddy Ebsen, Nipsey Russell, and Lesley Ann Warren. (98-99)

You like mocking self-reference? The novel's whole last chapter is a parody of its own "About the Author" page. Or maybe you're into hip identitylessness?

Grandma rolled up a magazine and hit Buzz on the side of the head. . . . Buzz's mask was knocked loose. There was no skin beneath that mask. There were two white eyeballs protruding on stems from a mass of oozing blood-red musculature. (98)

I can't tell if she's human or a fifth-generation gynemorphic android and I don't care. (6)

Parodic meditations on the boundaryless flux of televisual monoculture?

I'm stirring a pitcher of Tanqueray martinis with one hand and sliding a tray of frozen clams oreganata into the oven with my foot. God, these methedrine suppositories that Yogi Vithaldas gave me are good! As I iron a pair of tennis shorts I dictate a haiku into the tape recorder and then . . . do three minutes on the speedbag before making an origami praying mantis and then reading an article in High Fidelity magazine as I stir the coq au vin. (49)

The decay of both the limits and the integrity of the single human self?

There was a woman with the shrunken, wrinkled face of an eighty- or ninety-year-old. And this withered hag, this apparent octogenarian, had the body of a male Olympic swimmer. The long lean sinewy arms, the powerful V-shaped upper torso, without a single ounce of fat. . . . (120)

to install your replacement head place the head assembly on neck housing and insert guide pins through mounting holes . . . if, after installing new head, you are unable to discern the contradictions in capitalist modes of production, you have either installed your head improperly or head is defective (142-43)

In fact, one of My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist's unifying obsessions is this latter juxtaposition of parts of selves, people and machines, human subjects and discrete objects. Leyner's fiction is, in this regard, an eloquent reply to Gilder's prediction that our TV-culture problems can be resolved by the dismantling of images into discrete chunks we can recombine as we fancy. Leyner's world is a Gilder-esque dystopia. The passivity and schizoid decay still endure for Leyner in his characters' reception of images and waves of data. The ability to combine them only adds a layer of disorientation: when all experience can be deconstructed and reconfigured, there become simply too many choices. And in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as "liberating" as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of an assembly's quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience.

Leyner's novel, in its amphetaminic eagerness to wow the reader, marks the far dark frontier of the fiction of image - literature's absorption of not just the icons, techniques, and phenomena of television, but of television's whole objective. My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist's sole aim is, finally, to wow, to ensure that the reader is pleased and continues to read. The book does this by (1) flattering the reader with appeals to his erudite postmodern weltschmerz, and (2) relentlessly reminding the reader that the author is smart and funny. The book itself is extremely funny, but it's not funny the way funny stories are funny. It's not that funny things happen here; it's that funny things are self-consciously imagined and pointed out, like the comedian's stock "You ever notice how. . . ?" or "Ever wonder what would happen if. . . ?"

Actually, Leyner's whole high-imagist style most often resembles a kind of lapidary stand-up comedy:

Suddenly Bob couldn't speak properly. He had suffered some form of spontaneous aphasia. But it wasn't total aphasia. He could speak, but only in a staccato telegraphic style. Here's how he described driving through the Midwest on Interstate 80: "Corn corn corn corn Stuckeys. Corn corn corn corn Stuckeys." (20)

there's a bar on the highway which caters almost exclusively to authority figures and the only drink it serves is lite beer and the only food it serves is surf and turf and the place is filled with cops and state troopers and gym teachers and green berets and toll attendants and game wardens and crossing guards and umpires. (89-90)

Leyner's fictional response to television is less a novel than a piece of witty, erudite, extremely high-quality prose television. Velocity and vividness - the wow - replace the literary hmm of actual development. People flicker in and out; events are garishly there and then gone and never referred to. There's a brashly irreverent rejection of "outmoded" concepts like integrated plot or enduring character. Instead there's a series of dazzlingly creative parodic vignettes, designed to appeal to the forty-five seconds of near-Zen concentration we call the TV attention span. Unifying the vignettes in the absence of plot are moods - antic anxiety, the over-stimulated stasis of too many choices and no chooser's manual, irreverent brashness toward televisual reality - and, after the manner of pop films, music videos, dreams, and television programs, recurring "key images" - here exotic drugs, exotic technology, exotic food, exotic bowel dysfunctions. It's no accident that My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist's central preoccupation is with digestion and elimination. Its mocking challenge to the reader is the same as television's flood of realities and choices: ABSORB ME - PROVE YOU'RE CONSUMER ENOUGH.

Leyner's work, the best image-fiction yet, is both amazing and forgettable, wonderful and oddly hollow. I'm finishing up by talking about it at length because, in its masterful reabsorption of the very features TV had absorbed from postmodern lit, it seems as of now the ultimate union of U.S. television and fiction. It seems also to limn the qualities of image-fiction itself in stark relief: the best stuff the subgenre's produced to date is hilarious, upsetting, sophisticated, and extremely shallow - and just plain doomed by its desire to ridicule a TV-culture whose ironic mockery of itself and all "outdated" value absorbs all ridicule. Leyner's attempt to "respond" to television via ironic genuflection is all too easily subsumed into the tired televisual ritual of mock worship.

Entirely possible that my plangent cries about the impossibility of rebelling against an aura that promotes and attenuates all rebellion says more about my residency inside that aura, my own lack of vision, than it does about any exhaustion of U.S. fiction's possibilities. The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of "anti-rebels," born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point, why they'll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk things. Risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the "How banal." Accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Credulity. Willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. Today's most engaged young fiction does seem like some kind of line's end's end. I guess that means we all get to draw our own conclusions. Have to. Are you immensely pleased.

NOTES FOR EDITOR, WHICH EDITOR, FOR REASONS KNOWN ONLY TO HIM, WANTS TO RUN W/ESSAY.

(1) This, and thus the title, is from a toss-off in Michael Sorkin's "Faking It" published in Todd Gitlin, ed., Watching Television, Pantheon, 1987. (2) Quoted by Stanley Cavell in Pursuits of Happiness, Harvard U. Press, 1981, epigraph. (3) Bernard Nossiter, "The FCC's Big Giveaway Show," The Nation, 10/26/85, p. 402. (4) Janet Maslin, "It's Tough for Movies to Get Real," NYT Arts & Leisure, 8/05/ 90, p. 9. (5) Stephen Holden, "Strike the Pose: When Music Is Skin-Deep," ibid., p. 1. (6) Michael Sorkin, p. 163. (7) Daniel Hallin, "We Keep America on Top of the World," in Gitlin anthology. (8) Barbara Tuchman, "The Decline of Quality," NYT Magazine, 11/02/80. (9) Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vintage, 1945, pp. 57 and 73. (10) Don DeLillo, White Noise, Viking, 1985, p. 72 (11) Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire, Harvard U. Press, 1974, pp. 103-18. (12) Bill Knott, "And Other Travels," in Love Poems to Myself Book One, Barn Dream Press, 1974. (13) "Stephen Dobyns, "Arrested Saturday Night," in Heat Death, McClelland and Stewart, 1980. (14) Bill Knott, "Crash Course," in Becos, Vintage, 1983. (15) Michael Martone, Fort Wayne Is Seventh On Hitler's List, Indiana U. Press, 1990, P. ix. (16) Mark Leyner, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, Harmony/Crown, 1990, p. 82. (17) Miller, "Deride and Conquer," in Gitlin anthology. (18) "At Foote, Cone and Belding, quoted by Miller (somewhere I can't find in notes). (19) There's a similar point made about Miami Vice in Todd Gitlin's "We Build Excitement" in his anthology. (20) Miller, p. 194. (21) Miller, p. 187. (22) Miller's "Deride" has a similar analysis of sitcoms (in fact my whole discussion of TV irony leans heavily on Gitlin's, Sorkin's, and Miller's essays in Gitlin's anthology), but anyway w/r/t sitcoms Miller is talking about some weird Freudian patricide in how TV comedy views The Father - strange but very cool. (23) Miller's "Deride" makes pretty much this same point about Cosby. (24) Lewis Hyde, "Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking," American Poetry Review, reprinted in the Pushcart Prize anthology for '87. (25) I liberated this from somewhere in Watching Television; can't find just where. (26) Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146, Summer '84, pp. 60-66. (27) Pat Auferhode, "The Look of the Sound," in Gitlin anthology, p. 113. (28) Miller, p. 199.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Review of Contemporary Fiction
Copyright 1993 Gale, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.

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