A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (11 page)

Well, average Joe Briefcase has an OK brain, and deep down inside he knows, as we do, that there’s some kind of psychic shell-game
going on in this system of conflicting whispers. But if it’s so bald a delusion, why do he and we keep watching in such high
doses? Part of the answer—a part which requires discretion lest it slip into anti-TV paranoia—is that the phenomenon of television
somehow trains or conditions our viewership. Television has become able not only to ensure that we watch but somehow to inform
our deepest responses to what’s watched. Take jaded TV-critics, or our acquaintances who sneer at the numbing sameness of
all the television they sit still for. I always want to grab these unhappy guys by the lapels and shake them until their teeth
rattle and point to the absence of guns to their heads and ask why the hell they keep watching, then. But the truth is that
there’s some complex high-dose psychic transaction between TV and Audience whereby Audience gets trained to respond to and
then like and then
expect
trite, hackneyed, numbing television shows, and to expect them to such an extent that when networks do occasionally abandon
time-tested formulas Audience usually punishes them for it by not watching novel shows in sufficient numbers to let them get
off the ground. Hence the networks’ bland response to its critics that in the majority of cases—and until the rise of hip
metatelevision you could count the exceptions on one hand—“different” or “high-concept” programming simply doesn’t get ratings.
High-quality television cannot stand up to the gaze of millions, somehow.

Now, it is true that certain PR techniques—e.g. shock, grotesquerie, or irreverence—can ease novel sorts of shows’ rise to
national demographic viability. Examples here might be the “shocking”
A Current Affair
, the “grotesque”
Real People
, the “irreverent”
Married
…
with Children
. But these programs, like most of those touted by the industry as “fresh” or “outrageous,” turn out to be just tiny transparent
variations on old formulas.

It’s not fair to blame television’s shortage of originality on any lack of creativity among network talent. The truth is that
we seldom get a chance to know whether anybody behind any TV show is creative, or more accurately that they seldom get a chance
to show us. Despite the unquestioned assumption on the part of pop-culture critics that television’s poor old Audience, deep
down, “craves novelty,” all available evidence suggests, rather, that the Audience
really
craves sameness but thinks, deep down, that it
ought
to crave novelty. Hence the mixture of devotion and sneer on so many viewerly faces. Hence also the weird viewer complicity
behind TV’s sham “breakthrough programs”: Joe Briefcase needs that PR-patina of “freshness” and “outrageousness” to quiet
his conscience while he goes about getting from television what we’ve all been trained to want from it: some strangely American,
profoundly shallow, and eternally temporary
reassurance
.

Particularly in the last decade, this tension in the Audience between what we do want and what we think we ought to want has
been television’s breath and bread. TV’s self-mocking invitation to itself as indulgence, transgression, a glorious “giving
in” (again, not exactly foreign to addictive cycles) is one of two ingenious ways it’s consolidated its six-hour hold on my
generation’s cojones. The other is postmodern irony. The commercials for
Alf
’s Boston debut in a syndicated package feature the fat, cynical, gloriously decadent puppet (so much like Snoopy, like Garfield,
like Bart, like Butt-Head) advising me to “Eat a whole lot of food and stare at the TV.” His pitch is an ironic permission-slip
to do what I do best whenever I feel confused and guilty: assume, inside, a sort of fetal position, a pose of passive reception
to comfort, escape, reassurance. The cycle is self-nourishing.

guilty fictions

Not, again, that the cycle’s root conflict is new. You can trace the opposition between what persons do and ought to desire
at least as far back as Plato’s chariot or the Prodigal’s return. But the way entertainments appeal to and work within this
conflict has been transformed in televisual culture. This culture-of-watching’s relation to the cycle of indulgence, guilt,
and reassurance has important consequences for U.S. art, and though the parallels are easiest to see w/r/t Warhol’s Pop or
Elvis’s Rock, the most interesting intercourse is between television and American literature.

One of the most recognizable things about this century’s postmodern fiction has always been the movement’s strategic deployment
of pop-cultural references—brand names, celebrities, television programs—in even its loftiest High Art projects. Think of
just about any example of avant-garde U.S. fiction in the last twenty-five years, from Slothrop’s passion for Slippery Elm
throat lozenges and his weird encounter with Micky Rooney in
Gravity’s Rainbow
, to “You” ’s fetish for the
New York Post
’s COMA BABY feature in
Bright Lights, Big City
, to Don DeLillo’s pop-hip characters saying stuff to each other like “Elvis fulfilled the terms of the contract. Excess,
deterioration, self-destructiveness, grotesque behavior, a physical bloating and a series of insults to the brain, self-delivered.”
¹¹
The apotheosis of the pop in postwar art marked a whole new marriage between High and Low culture. For the artistic viability
of postmodernism was a direct consequence, again, not of any new facts about art, but of facts about the new importance of
mass commercial culture. Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as by common images: what binds us became
what we stand witness to. Nobody sees this as a good change. In fact, pop-cultural references have become such potent metaphors
in U.S. fiction not only because of how united Americans are in our exposure to mass images but also because of our guilty
indulgent psychology with respect to that exposure. Put simply, the pop reference works so well in contemporary fiction because
(1) we all recognize such a reference, and (2) we’re all a little uneasy about how we all recognize such a reference.

The status of Low-cultural images in postmodern and contemporary fiction is very different from those images’ place in postmodernism’s
artistic ancestors, e.g. the “dirty realism” of a Joyce or the ur-Dadaism of something like Duchamp’s toilet sculpture. Duchamp’s
aesthetic display of that vulgarest of appliances served an exclusively theoretical end: it was making statements like “The
Museum is the Mausoleum is the Men’s Room,” etc. It was an example of what Octavio Paz calls “Meta-irony,”
¹²
an attempt to reveal that categories we divide into superior/arty and inferior/vulgar are in fact so interdependent as to
be coextensive. The use of Low references in a lot of today’s High literary fiction, on the other hand, serves a less abstract
agenda. It is meant (1) to help create a mood of irony and irreverence, (2) to make us uneasy and so “comment” on the vapidity
of U.S. culture, and (3) most important, these days, to be just plain realistic.

Pynchon and DeLillo were ahead of their time. Today, the belief that pop images are basically just mimetic devices is one
of the attitudes that separates most U.S. fiction writers under c. 40 from the writerly generation that precedes us, reviews
us, and designs our grad-school curricula. This generation gap in conceptions of realism is, again, TV-dependent. The U.S.
generation born after 1950 is the first for whom television was something to be lived with instead of just looked at. Our
elders tend to regard the set rather as the flapper did the automobile: a curiosity turned treat turned seduction. For younger
writers, TV’s as much a part of reality as Toyotas and gridlock. We literally cannot imagine life without it. We’re not different
from our fathers in that television presents and defines our contemporary world. Where we are different is that we have no
memory of a world without such electric definition. This is why the derision so many older fictionists heap on a “Brat Pack”
generation they see as insufficiently critical of mass culture is at once understandable and misguided. It’s true that there’s
something sad about the fact that David Leavitt’s short stories’ sole description of some characters is that their T-shirts
have certain brand names on them. But the fact is that, for most of Leavitt’s educated young readership, members of a generation
raised and nourished on messages equating what one consumes with who one is, Leavitt’s descriptions really do do the job.
In our post-1950s, inseparable-from-TV association pool, brand loyalty really is synecdochic of character; this is simply
a fact.

For those U.S. writers whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, those who are big on neither Duchamp nor Paz and who lack the oracular
foresight of a DeLillo, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous
vapidity that compromises fiction’s seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always where it ought to reside. In one of
the graduate workshops I went through, a certain gray eminence kept trying to convince us that a literary story or novel should
always eschew “any feature which serves to date it”
¹³
because “serious fiction must be Timeless.” When we protested that, in his own well-known work, characters moved about electrically
lit rooms, drove cars, spoke not Anglo-Saxon but postwar English, and inhabited a North America already separated from Africa
by continental drift, he impatiently amended his proscription to those explicit references that would date a story in the
“frivolous Now.” When pressed for just what stuff evoked this F.N., he said of course he meant the “trendy mass-popular-media”
reference. And here, at just this point, transgenerational discourse broke down. We looked at him blankly. We scratched our
little heads. We didn’t get it. This guy and his students simply did not conceive the “serious” world the same way. His automobiled
Timeless and our MTV’d own were different.

If you read the big literary supplements, you’ve doubtless seen the intergenerational squabble this sort of scene typifies.
¹⁴
The plain fact is that certain things having to do with fiction production are different for young U.S. writers now. And
television is at the vortex of most of the flux. Because younger writers are not only Artists probing for the nobler interstices
in what Stanley Cavell calls the reader’s “willingness to be pleased”; we are also, now, self-defined parts of the great U.S.
Audience, and have our own aesthetic pleasure-centers; and television has formed and trained us. It won’t do, then, for the
literary establishment simply to complain that, for instance, young-written characters don’t have very interesting dialogues
with each other, that young writers’ ears seem “tinny.” Tinny they may be, but the truth is that, in younger Americans’ experience,
people in the same room don’t do all that much direct conversing with each other. What most of the people I know do is they
all sit and face the same direction and stare at the same thing and then structure commercial-length conversations around
the sorts of questions that myopic car-crash witnesses might ask each other—“Did you just see what I just saw?” Plus, if we’re
going to talk about the virtues of “realism,” the paucity of profound conversation in younger fiction seems accurately to
reflect more than just our own generation—I mean six hours a day, in average households young and old, just how much conversation
can really be going on? So now whose literary aesthetic seems “dated”?

In terms of literary history, it’s important to recognize the distinction between pop and televisual references, on the one
hand, and the mere use of TV-like techniques, on the other. The latter have been around in fiction forever. The Voltaire of
Candide
, for instance, uses a bisensuous irony that would do Ed Rabel proud, having Candide and Pangloss run around smiling and saying
“All for the best, the best of all worlds” amid war-dead, pogroms, rampant nastiness, etc. Even the stream-of-consciousness
guys who fathered Modernism were, on a very high level, constructing the same sorts of illusions about privacy-puncturing
and espial on the forbidden that television has found so effective. And let’s not even talk about Balzac.

It was in post-atomic America that pop influences on literature became something more than technical. About the time television
first gasped and sucked air, mass popular U.S. culture seemed to become High-Art-viable as a collection of symbols and myth.
The episcopate of this pop-reference movement were the post-Nabokovian Black Humorists, the Metafictionists and assorted franc-and
latinophiles only later comprised by “postmodern.” The erudite, sardonic fictions of the Black Humorists introduced a generation
of new fiction writers who saw themselves as sort of avant-avant-garde, not only cosmopolitan and polyglot but also technologically
literate, products of more than just one region, heritage, and theory, and citizens of a culture that said its most important
stuff about itself via mass media. In this regard one thinks particularly of the Gaddis of
The Recognitions
and
JR
, the Barth of
The End of the Road
and
The Sot-Weed Factor
, and the Pynchon of
The Crying of Lot 49
. But the movement toward treating of the pop as its own reservoir of mythopeia gathered momentum and quickly transcended
both school and genre. Plucking from my shelves almost at random, I find poet James Cummins’s 1986
The Whole Truth
, a cycle of sestinas deconstructing Perry Mason. Here’s Robert Coover’s 1977
A Public Burning
, in which Eisenhower buggers Nixon on-air, and his 1968
A Political Fable
, in which the Cat in the Hat runs for president. I find Max Apple’s 1986
The Propheteers
, a novel-length imagining of Walt Disney’s travails. Or here’s part of poet Bill Knott’s 1974 “And Other Travels”: