David Foster Wallace was a new name when an acquaintance lent me the book A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Inside the 1997 collection of essays and articles, a bookmark had been placed at a selection titled “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” an 80-odd-page exploration of the relationship between TV and fiction writing at the start of the ’90s. The title is a twist on E Pluribus Unum, or “Out of Many, One” in Latin (but I had to look that up, even though it’s a common phrase in American history). The essay still serves an important purpose 19 years on, in that it helps explain a complex subject from a perspective I cannot personally obtain. After all, Wallace wrote this in 1990, when I was a wee little boy.
Wallace actually discusses both fiction and literature from the 1950s on, but focuses on a few main points or theories. He asserts that the one thing tying together TV and fiction circa 1990 was irony (i.e. – “A statement that, when taken in context, may actually mean the opposite of what is written literally; the use of words expressing something other than their literal intention, notably as a form of humor.” – Wiktionary). He develops this argument by discussing why people watch TV in general, how TV got so ironic, and what happened when fiction tried to reclaim the irony throne it had held since long before ironic TV got so pervasive.
Part of the reason I found the essay so interesting is because, as an adolescent, I was an eager consumer of television. My time spent growing up can be mapped as a steady path from Sesame Street to Nickelodeon to Saved by the Bell to…well…to all the sitcoms aimed at people over the age of 12. Then I got to high school and realized that most TV shows are retarded (for lack of a better word). And things only got worse after that: Survivor and American Idol led the way for “reality” TV, while dumbed-down dramas still dictate a large portion of adult viewership.
Now, looking back, I’m sort wondering how it had gotten so bad before I was even born. Enter Wallace, who unforgivably calls TV a “malignant addiction.”
“By 1830, de Tocqueville had already diagnosed American culture as peculiarly devoted to easy sensation and mass-marketed entertainment, ‘spectacles vehement and untutored and rude’ that aimed ‘to stir the passions more than to gratify the taste’” (p. 36).
“Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests. It’s all about syncretic diversity: neither medium nor Audience is faultable for quality” (p. 37).
As you can see, Wallace didn’t let himself resort to calling TV an evil device intended for brainwashing or mind control. I’d rather not be so forgiving, but he argues the point well. Still, he doesn’t let TV off the hook for being capable of such high levels of manipulation, spread across the areas of psychology, emotion, and behavior.
“The modes of presentation that work best for TV…are unsubtle in their whispers that, somewhere, life is quicker, denser, more interesting, more…well, lively than contemporary life as Joe Briefcase knows it” (p. 39).
“The most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others’ ridicule by betraying passé expressions of value, emotion, or vulnerability” (p. 63).
“…Also, inversely, trains us to relate to real live personal up-close stuff the same way we relate to the distant and exotic, as if separated from us by physics and glass…” (p. 64).
After Wallace outlines the core of the problem, he introduces a subgenre called Image-Fiction. He claims that this style was closely tied to television, not only as a reflection of the various content on TV, but also in that it was an attempt to reclaim irony for the world of literature. The peak of this subgenre, according to Wallace, was the then-brand-new novel My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist by Mark Leyner. The work “incorporates elements of science fiction, cyberpunk, tabloid journalism, and advertising slogans; and as the book is also filled with TV and pop-culture references (e.g. to kung-fu films) and literary allusions it may be difficult to read without the wide-ranging knowledge of current affairs” (Wikipedia).
In other words, Leyner created a novel as random, flighty, and all-encompassing as TV itself. Unfortunately, though, Image-Fiction was (arguably) a fruitless effort.
“The reason why today’s Image-Fiction isn’t the rescue from a passive, addictive TV-psychology that it tries so hard to be is that most Image-Fiction writers render their material with the same tone of irony and self-consciousness that their ancestors, the literary insurgents of Beat and postmodernism, used so effectively to rebel against their own world and context. And the reason why this irreverent postmodern approach fails to help the new Imagists transfigure TV is simply that TV has beaten the new Imagists to the punch” (p. 52).
Wallace takes this as a dead-end for contemporary fiction, in that the lone device television (“E Unibus”) had become just as much a consumer and recycler of culture (“Pluram”) as it was an entertainment culture provider. These fiction writers couldn’t escape what Wallace called TV’s aura. But he also claims that rebellion in the face of institutionalized irony is pointless.
“…Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks” (p. 67).
I especially liked a quote from another author: “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage” (Hyde, p. 67). This reminded me of Pitchfork Media, and the essay I wrote about that organization – which brings up interesting questions about modern times, post-Y2K. Even if the Internet and other media have started to wean us as a culture from the grip of TV, do we still remain a society of ironic rebels with no clue how to construct a better future for ourselves? At the time, Wallace thought that having more control over content – the type, sequence, timing, etc. – would make no difference. Furthermore, he seems scared of the idea of anarchy, as if having any one device or organization determine his content input was a source of comfort. I’d like to think that the Web 2.0 explosion, with stars including YouTube, Last.fm, and Facebook, is a sign that people do appreciate having such control. But I’m looking at the subject 20 years later, so I have that advantage.
Wallace admits that his missing escape plan might be due to his lack of foresight or imagination. I have to agree with that notion, since I founded Supraterranean on the hopeful idea that we can further develop our creative ambitions through new forms of expression and interaction. This reminds me of The Matrix: once you stop trying to bend the spoon with your mind, you realize that only your mind can bend, not a metal object (…and after all, there is no spoon). We’re beginning, as a culture, to learn how to bend our minds, when once we had convinced ourselves (or had been convinced by TV) that it was impossible. What I’m trying to say is that, when we’re ready, TV will become obsolete. And that process is already under way.
But then again, I have been in a better-than-normal mood lately, so that could be swaying my conclusion.
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- Tom Burrell On His Book ‘Brainwashed’ (March 24, 2010)
