DFW.bib

Wallace, David Foster

1988

Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young

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Wallace, David Foster

1989

Everything is green. (fiction; from "Girl With Curious Hair")

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Costello, Mark and Wallace, David Foster

1990

Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present

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Wallace, David Foster

1990

The Horror of Pretentiousness (Review of Clive Barker's The Great and Secret Show)

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Wallace, David Foster

Spring 1990

Michael Martone's Fort Wayne is Seventh on Hitler's List

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Wallace, David Foster

Summer 1990

The Empty Plenum: David Markson's 'Wittgenstein's Mistress'

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Wallace, David Foster

1991

Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes: A Midwestern Boyhood

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Smiley, Jane and Parini, Jay and Wallace, David Foster and West, Paul and Wasserstein, Wendy and Vernon, John

1992

To be Continued.... (sequels to famous literary works)

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Wallace, David Foster

Spring 1992

Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley

incollection

Wallace, David Foster

Spring 1992

Kathy Acker's Portrait of an Eye: Three Novels

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McCaffery:1993oa ~ http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_wallace.html

ABSTRACT_
An Interview With David Foster Wallace by Larry McCaffery LARRY McCAFFERY: Your essay following this interview is going to be seen by some people as being basically an apology for television. What's your response to the familiar criticism that television fosters relationships with illusions or simulations of real people (Reagan being a kind of quintessential example)? DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: It's a try at a comprehensive diagnosis, not an apology. U.S. viewers' relationship with TV is essentially puerile and dependent, as are all relationships based on seduction. This is hardly news. But what's seldom acknowledged is how complex and ingenious TV's seductions are. It's seldom acknowledged that viewers' relationship with TV is, albeit debased, intricate and profound. It's easy for older writers just to bitch about TV's hegemony over the U.S. art market, to say the world's gone to hell in a basket and shrug and have done with it. But I think younger writers owe themselves a richer account of just why TV's become such a dominating force on people's consciousness, if only because we under forty have spent our whole conscious lives being "part" of TV's audience. LM: Television may be more complex than what most people realize, but it seems rarely to attempt to "challenge" or "disturb" its audience, as you've written me you wish to. Is it that sense of challenge and pain that makes your work more "serious" than most television shows? DFW: I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction's job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of "generalization" of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple. But now realize that TV and popular film and most kinds of "low" art--which just means art whose primary aim is to make money--is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas "serious" art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it's hard for an art audience, especially a young one that's been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction. That's not good. The problem isn't that today's readership is "dumb," I don't think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture's trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today's readers both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard. LM: Who do you imagine your readership to be? DFW: I suppose it's people more or less like me, in their twenties and thirties, maybe, with enough experience or good education to have realized that the hard work serious fiction requires of a reader sometimes has a payoff. People who've been raised with U.S. commercial culture and are engaged with it and informed by it and fascinated with it but still hungry for something commercial art can't provide. Yuppies, I guess, and younger intellectuals, whatever. These are the people pretty much all the younger writers I admire--Leyner and Vollman and Daitch, Amy Homes, Jon Franzen, Lorrie Moore, Rick Powers, even McInerney and Leavitt and those guys--are writing for, I think. But, again, the last twenty years have seen big changes in how writers engage their readers, what readers need to expect from any kind of art. LM: The media seems to me to be one thing that has drastically changed this relationship. It's provided people with this television-processed culture for so long that audiences have forgotten what a relationship to serious art is all about. DFW: Well, it's too simple to just wring your hands and claim TV's ruined readers. Because the U.S.'s television culture didn't come out of a vacuum. What TV is extremely good at--and realize that this is "all it does"--is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it. And since there's always been a strong and distinctive American distaste for frustration and suffering, TV's going to avoid these like the plague in favor of something anesthetic and easy. LM: You really think this distaste is distinctly American? DFW: It seems distinctly Western-industrial, anyway. In most other cultures, if you hurt, if you have a symptom that's causing you to suffer, they view this as basically healthy and natural, a sign that your nervous system knows something's wrong. For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire's still going. But if you just look at the number of ways that we try like hell to alleviate mere symptoms in this country- from fast-fast-fast-relief antacids to the popularity of lighthearted musicals during the Depression--you can see an almost compulsive tendency to regard pain itself as the problem. And so pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se. Look at utilitarianism--that most English of contributions to ethics- and you see a whole teleology predicated on the idea that the best human life is one that maximizes the pleasure-to-pain ratio. God, I know this sounds priggish of me. All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression. Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes. LM: Near the end of "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," there's a line about Mark that "It would take an architect who could hate enough to feel enough to love enough to perpetuate the kind of special cruelty only real lovers can inflict." Is that the kind of cruelty you feel is missing in the work of somebody like Mark Leyner? DFW: I guess I'd need to ask you what kind of cruelty you thought the narrator meant there. LM: It seems to involve the idea that if writers care enough about their audience--if they love them enough and love their art enough--they've got to be cruel in their writing practices. "Cruel" the way an army drill sergeant is when he decides to put a bunch of raw recruits through hell, knowing that the trauma you're inflicting on these guys, emotionally, physically, psychically, is just part of a process that's going to strengthen them in the end, prepare them for things they can't even imagine yet. DFW: Well, besides the question of where the fuck do "artists" get off deciding for readers what stuff the readers need to be prepared for, your idea sounds pretty Aristotelian, doesn't it? I mean, what's the purpose of creating fiction, for you? Is it essentially mimetic, to capture and order a protean reality? Or is it really supposed to be therapeutic in an Aristotelian sense? LM: I agree with what you said in "Westward" about serious art having to engage a range of experiences; it can be merely "metafictional," for example it has to deal with the world outside the page and variously so. How would you contrast your efforts in this regard versus those involved in most television or most popular fiction? DFW:This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants. When you read that quotation from "Westward" just now, it sounded to me like a covert digest of my biggest weaknesses as a writer. One is that I have a grossly sentimental affection for gags, for stuff that's nothing but funny, and which I sometimes stick in for no other reason than funniness. Another's that I have a problem sometimes with concision, communicating only what needs to be said in a brisk efficient way that doesn't call attention to itself. It'd be pathetic for me to blame the exterior for my own deficiencies, but it still seems to me that both of these problems are traceable to this schizogenic experience I had growing up, being bookish and reading a lot, on the one hand, watching grotesque amounts of TV, on the other. Because I liked to read, I probably didn't watch quite as much TV as my friends, but I still got my daily megadose, believe me. And I think it's impossible to spend that many slack-jawed, spittle-chinned, formative hours in front of commercial art without internalizing the idea that one of the main goals of art is simply to "entertain," give people sheer pleasure. Except to what end, this pleasure-giving? Because, of course, TV's "real" agenda is to be "liked," because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it's its sole raison. And sometimes when I look at my own stuff I feel like I absorbed too much of this raison. I'll catch myself thinking up gags or trying formal stunt-pilotry and see that none of this stuff is really in the service of the story itself; it's serving the rather darker purpose of communicating to the reader "Hey! Look at me! Have a look at what a good writer I am! Like me!" Now, to an extent there's no way to escape this altogether, because an author needs to demonstrate some sort of skill or merit so that the reader will trust her. There's some weird, delicate, I-trust-you-not-to fuck-up-on-me relationship between the reader and writer, and both have to sustain it. But there's an unignorable line between demonstrating skill and charm to gain trust for the story vs. simple showing off. It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art. I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art. This seems like a poisonous lesson for a would-be artist to grow up with. And one consequence is that if the artist is excessively dependent on simply being "liked," so that her true end isn't in the work but in a certain audience's good opinion, she is going to develop a terrific hostility to that audience, simply because she has given all her power away to them. It's the familiar love-hate syndrome of seduction: "I don't really care what it is I say, I care only that you like it. But since your good opinion is the sole arbitrator of my success and worth, you have tremendous power over me, and I fear you and hate you for it." This dynamic isn't exclusive to art. But I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader. LM: In your own case, how does this hostility manifest itself? DFW: Oh, not always, but sometimes in the form of sentences that are syntactically not incorrect but still a real bitch to read. Or bludgeoning the reader with data. Or devoting a lot of energy to creating expectations and then taking pleasure in disappointing them. You can see this clearly in something like Ellis's "American Psycho": it panders shamelessly to the audience's sadism for a while, but by the end it's clear that the sadism's real object is the reader herself. LM: But at least in the case of "American Psycho" I felt there was something more than just this desire to inflict pain--or that Ellis was being cruel the way you said serious artists need to be willing to be. DFW: You're just displaying the sort of cynicism that lets readers be manipulated by bad writing. I think it's a kind of black cynicism about today's world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what's always distinguished bad writing--flat characters, a narrative world that's cliched and not recognizably human, etc.--is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend "Psycho" as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it's no more than that. LM: Are you saying that writers of your generation have an obligation not only to depict our condition but also to provide the solutions to these things? DFW: I don't think I'm talking about conventionally political or social action-type solutions. That's not what fiction's about. Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction's job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be. This isn't that it's fiction's duty to edify or teach, or to make us good little Christians or Republicans; I'm not trying to line up behind Tolstoy or Gardner. I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art. We've all got this "literary" fiction that simply monotones that we're all becoming less and less human, that presents characters without souls or love, characters who really are exhaustively describable in terms of what brands of stuff they wear, and we all buy the books and go like "Golly, what a mordantly effective commentary on contemporary materialism!" But we already "know" U.S. culture is materialistic. This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody. What's engaging and artistically real is, taking it as axiomatic that the present is grotesquely materialistic, how is it that we as human beings still have the capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections, for stuff that doesn't have a price? And can these capacities be made to thrive? And if so, how, and if not why not? LM: Not everyone in your generation is taking the Ellis route. Both the other writers in this issue of "RCF" seem to be doing exactly what you're talking about. So, for example, even though Vollmann's "Rainbow Stories" is a book that is in its own way as sensationalized as "American Psycho," the effort there is to depict those people not as flattened, dehumanized stereotypes but as human beings. I'd agree though, that a lot of contemporary writers today adopt this sort of flat, neutral transformation of people and events into fiction without bothering to make the effort of refocusing their imaginations on the people who still exist underneath these transformations. But Vollmann seems to be someone fighting that tendency in interesting ways. That brings us back to the issue of whether this isn't a dilemma serious writers have always faced. Other than lowered (or changed) audience expectations, what's changed to make the task of the serious writer today more difficult than it was thirty or sixty or a hundred or a thousand years ago? You might argue that the task of the serious writer is easier today because what took place in the sixties had the effect of finally demolishing the authority that mimesis had assumed. Since you guys don't have to fight that battle anymore, you're liberated to move on to other areas. DFW: This is a double-edged sword, our bequest from the early postmodernists and the post-structuralist critics. One the one hand, there's sort of an embarrassment of riches for young writers now. Most of the old cinctures and constraints that used to exist--censorship of content is a blatant example--have been driven off the field. Writers today can do more or less whatever we want. But on the other hand, since everybody can do pretty much whatever they want, without boundaries to define them or constraints to struggle against, you get this continual avant-garde rush forward without anyone bothering to speculate on the destination, the "goal" of the forward rush. The modernists and early postmodernists--all the way from Mallarmé to Coover, I guess--broke most of the rules for us, but we tend to forget what they were forced to remember: the rule-breaking has got to be for the "sake" of something. When rule-breaking, the mere "form" of renegade avant-gardism, becomes an end in itself, you end up with bad language poetry and "American Psycho" 's nipple-shocks and Alice Cooper eating shit on stage. Shock stops being a by-product of progress and becomes an end in itself. And it's bullshit. Here's an analogy. The invention of calculus was shocking because for a long time it had simply been presumed that you couldn't divide by zero. The integrity of math itself seemed to depend on the presumption. Then some genius titans came along and said, "Yeah, maybe you can't divide by zero, but what would happen if you "could"? We're going to come as close to doing it as we can, to see what happens." LM: So you get the infinitesimal calculus--"the philosophy of as if." DFW: And this purely theoretical construct wound up yielding incredibly practical results. Suddenly you could plot the area under curves and do rate-change calculations. Just about every material convenience we now enjoy is a consequence of this "as if." But what if Leibniz and Newton had wanted to divide by zero only to show jaded audiences how cool and rebellious they were? It'd never have happened, because that kind of motivation doesn't yield results. It's hollow. Dividing-as-if-by-zero was titanic and ingenuous because it was in the service of something. The math world's shock was a price they had to pay, not a payoff in itself. LM: Of course, you also have examples like Lobochevsky and Riemann, who are breaking the rules with no practical application at the time--but then later on somebody like Einstein comes along and decides that this worthless mathematical mind game that Riemann developed actually described the universe more effectively than the Euclidean game. Not that those guys were braking the rules just to break the rules, but part of that was just that: what happens if everybody has to move counter-clockwise in Monopoly. And at first it just seemed like this game, without applications. DFW: Well, the analogy breaks down because math and hard science are pyramidical. They're like building a cathedral: each generation works off the last one, both in its advance and its errors. Ideally, each piece of art's its own unique object, and its evaluation's always present-tense. You could justify the worst piece of experimental horseshit by saying "The fools may hate my stuff , but generations later I will be appreciated for my ground breaking rebellion." All the beret-wearing "artistes" I went to school with who believed that line are now writing ad copy someplace. LM: The European avant-garde believed in the transforming ability of innovative art to directly affect people's consciousness and break them out of their cocoon of habituation, etc. You'd put a urinal in a Paris museum, call it a "fountain," and wait for the riots next day. That's an area I'd say has changed things for writers (or any artist)--you can have very aesthetically radical works today using the same features of formal innovation that you'd find in the Russian Futurists or Duchamp and so forth, only now these things are on MTV or TV ads. Formal innovations as trendy image. So it loses its ability to shock or transform. DFW: These are exploitations. They're not trying to break us free of anything. They're trying to lock us tighter into certain conventions, in this case habits of consumption. So the "form" of artistic rebellion now becomes . . . LM: . . . yeah, another commodity. I agree with Fredric Jameson and others who argue that modernism and postmodernism can be seen as expressing the cultural logic of late capitalism. Lots of features of contemporary art are directly influenced by this massive acceleration of capitalist expansion into all these new realms that were previously just not accessible. You sell people a memory, reify their nostalgia and use this as a hook to sell deodorant. Hasn't this recent huge expansion of the technologies of reproduction, the integration of commodity reproduction and aesthetic reproduction, and the rise of media culture lessened the impact that aesthetic innovation can have on people's sensibilities? What's your response to this as an artist? DFW: You've got a gift for lit-speak, LM. Who wouldn't love this jargon we dress common sense in: "formal innovation is no longer transformative, having been co-opted by the forces of stabilization and post-industrial inertia," blah, blah. But this co-optation might actually be a good thing if it helped keep younger writers from being able to treat mere formal ingenuity as an end in itself. MTV-type co-optation could end up a great prophylactic against cleveritis--you know, the dreaded grad-school syndrome of like "Watch me use seventeen different points of view in this scene of a guy eating a Saltine." The real point of that shit is "Like me because I'm clever"--which of course is itself derived from commercial art's axiom about audience-affection determining art's value. What's precious about somebody like Bill Vollmann is that, even though there's a great deal of formal innovation in his fictions, it rarely seems to exist for just its own sake. It's almost always deployed to make some point (Vollmann's the most editorial young novelist going right now, and he's great at using formal ingenuity to make the editorializing a component of his narrative instead of an interruption) or to create an effect that's internal to the text. His narrator's always weirdly effaced, the writing unself-conscious, despite all the "By-the-way-Dear-reader" intrusions. In a way it's sad that Vollmann's integrity is so remarkable. Its remarkability means it's rare. I guess I don't know what to think about these explosions in the sixties you're so crazy about. It's almost like postmodernism is fiction's fall from biblical grace. Fiction became conscious of itself in a way it never had been. Here's a really pretentious bit of pop analysis for you: I think you can see Cameron's "Terminator" movies as a metaphor for all literary art after Roland Barthes, viz., the movies' premise that the Cyberdyne NORAD computer becomes conscious of itself as "conscious," as having interests and an agenda; the Cyberdyne becomes literally self-referential, and it's no accident that the result of this is nuclear war, Armageddon. LM: Isn't Armageddon the course you set sail for in "Westward"? DFW: Metafiction's real end has always been Armageddon. Art's reflection on itself is terminal, is one big reason why the art world saw Duchamp as an Antichrist. But I still believe the move to involution had value: it helped writers break free of some long-standing flat-earth-type taboos. It was standing in line to happen. And for a while, stuff like "Pale Fire" and "The Universal Baseball Association" was valuable as a meta-aesthetic breakthrough the same way Duchamp's urinal had been valuable. LM: I've always felt that the best of the metafictionalists--Coover, for example, Nabokov, Borges, even Barth--were criticized too much for being only interested in narcissistic, self-reflexive games, whereas these devices had very real political and historical applications. DFW: But when you talk about Nabokov and Coover, you're talking about real geniuses, the writers who weathered real shock and invented this stuff in contemporary fiction. But after the pioneers always come the crank turners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank, and little pellets of metafiction come out the other end. The crank-turners capitalize for a while on sheer fashion, and they get their plaudits and grants and buy their IRAs and retire to the Hamptons well out of range of the eventual blast radius. There are some interesting parallels between postmodern crank-turners and what's happened since post-structural theory took off here in the U.S., why there's such a big backlash against post-structuralism going on now. It's the crank-turners fault. I think the crank-turners replaced the critic as the real angel of death as far as literary movements are concerned, now. You get some bona fide artists who come along and really divide by zero and weather some serious shit-storms of shock and ridicule in order to promulgate some really important ideas. Once they triumph, though, and their ideas become legitimate and accepted, the crank-turners and wannabes come running to the machine, and out pour the gray pellets and now the whole thing's become a hollow form, just another institution of fashion. Take a look at some of the critical-theory Ph.D. dissertations being written now. They're like de Man and Foucault in the mouth of a dull child. Academia and commercial culture have somehow become these gigantic mechanisms of commodification that drain the weight and color out of even the most radical new advances. It's a surreal inversion of the death-by-neglect that used to kill off prescient art. Now prescient art suffers death-by acceptance. We love things to death, now. Then we retire to the Hamptons. LM: This is also tied to that expansion of capitalism blah blah blah into realms previously thought to be uncommodifiable. Hyperconsumption. I mean, whoever thought rebellion could be tamed so easily? You just record it, turn the crank, and out comes another pellet of "dangerous" art. DFW: And this accelerates the metastasis from genuine envelope puncturing to just another fifteen-minute form that gets cranked out and cranked out and cranked out. Which creates a bitch of a problem for any artist who views her task as continual envelope-puncturing, because then she falls into this insatiable hunger for the appearance of novelty: "What can I do that hasn't been done yet?" Once the first-person pronoun creeps into your agenda you're dead, art-wise. That's why fiction-writing's lonely in a way most people misunderstand. It's yourself you have to be estranged from, really, to work. LM: A phrase in one of your recent letters really struck me: "The magic of fiction is that it addresses and antagonizes the loneliness that dominates people." It's that suggestion of antagonizing the reader that seems to link your goals up with the avant-garde program--whose goals were never completely hermetic. And "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" seems to be your own meta-fictional attempt to deal with these large areas in ways that are not merely metafiction. DFW: "Aggravate" might be better than "antagonize," in the sense of aggravation as intensification. But the truth is it's hard for me to know what I really think about any of the stuff I've written. It's always tempting to sit back and make finger-steeples and invent impressive sounding theoretical justifications for what one does, but in my case most of it'd be horseshit. As time passes I get less and less nuts about anything I've published, and it gets harder to know for sure when its antagonistic elements are in there because they serve a useful purpose and when their just covert manifestations of this "look-at-me-please-love-me-I-hate you" syndrome I still sometimes catch myself falling into. Anyway, but what I think I meant by "antagonize" or "aggravate" has to do with the stuff in the TV essay about the younger writer trying to struggle against the cultural hegemony of TV. One thing TV does is help us deny that we're lonely. With televised images, we can have the facsimile of a relationship without the work of a real relationship. It's an anesthesia of "form." The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness. You don't have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness, both of which are like sub-dreads of our dread of being trapped inside a self (a psychic self, not just a physical self), has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I'm going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me. I'm not sure I could give you a steeple-fingered theoretical justification, but I strongly suspect a big part of real art fiction's job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us first to face what's dreadful, what we want to deny. LM: It's this inside-outside motif you developed throughout "The Broom of the System." DFW: I guess maybe, but it's developed in an awful clunky way. The popularity of "Broom" mystifies me. I can't say it's not nice to have people like it, but there's a lot of stuff in that novel I'd like to reel back in and do better. I was like twenty-two when I wrote the first draft of that thing. And I mean a "young" twenty-two. I still thought in terms of distinct problems and univocal solutions. But if you're going to try not just to depict the way a culture's bound and defined by meditated gratification and image, but somehow to redeem it, or at least fight a rearguard against it, then what you're going to be doing is paradoxical. You're at once allowing the reader to sort of escape self by achieving some sort of identification with another human psyche--the writer's, or some character's, etc.--and you're "also" trying to antagonize the reader's intuition that she is a self, that she is alone and going to die alone. You're trying somehow both to deny and affirm that the writer is over here with his agenda while the reader's over there with her agenda, distinct. This paradox is what makes good fiction sort of magical, I think. The paradox can't be resolved, but it can somehow be mediated--"re-mediated," since this is probably where post-structuralism rears its head for me--by the fact that language and linguistic intercourse is, in and of itself, redeeming, remedy-ing. This makes serious fiction a rough and bumpy affair for everyone involved. Commercial entertainment, on the other hand, smooths everything over. Even the "Terminator" movies (which I revere), or something really nasty and sicko like the film version of "A Clockwork Orange," is basically an anesthetic (and think for a second about the etymology of "anesthetic"; break up the word and think about it). Sure "A Clockwork Orange" is a self-consciously sick, nasty film about the sickness and nastiness of the post-industrial condition, but if you look at it structurally, slo-mo and fast-mo and arty cinematography aside, it does what all commercial entertainment does: it proceeds more or less chronologically, and if its transitions are less cause-and-effect-based than most movies', it still kind of eases you from scene to scene in a way that drops you into certain kinds of easy cerebral rhythms. It admits passive spectation. Encourages it. TV-type art's biggest hook is that it's figured out ways to "reward" passive spectation. A certain amount of the form-conscious stuff I write is trying--with whatever success--to do the opposite. It's supposed to be uneasy. For instance, using a lot of flash-cuts between scenes so that some of the narrative arrangement has got to be done by the reader, or interrupting flow with digressions and interpolations that the reader has to do the work of connecting to each other and to the narrative. It's nothing terribly sophisticated, and there has to be an accessible payoff for the reader if I don't want the reader to throw the book at the wall. But if it works right, the reader has to fight "through" the meditated voice presenting the material to you. The complete suppression of a narrative consciousness, with its own agenda, is why TV is such a powerful selling tool. This is McLuhan, right? "The medium is the message" and all that? But notice that TV's meditated message is "never" that the medium's the message. LM: How is this insistence on meditation different from the kind of meta strategies you yourself have attacked as preventing authors from being anything other than narcissistic or overly abstract or intellectual? DFW: I guess I'd judge what I do by the same criterion I apply to the self conscious elements you find in Vollmann's fiction: do they serve a purpose beyond themselves? Whether I can provide a payoff and communicate a function rather than just seem jumbled and prolix is the issue that'll decide whether the thing I'm working on now succeeds or not. But I think right now it's important for art-fiction to antagonize the reader's sense that what she's experiencing as she reads is meditated through a human consciousness, now with an agenda not necessarily coincident with her own. For some reason I probably couldn't even explain, I've been convinced of this for years, that one distinctive thing about truly "low" or commercial art is this apparent suppression of a mediating consciousness and agenda. The example I think of first is the novella "Little Expressionless Animals" in "Girl With Curious Hair." Readers I know sometimes remark on all the flash-cuts and the distortion of linearity in it and usually want to see it as mimicking TV's own pace and phosphenic flutter. But what it's really trying to do is just the "opposite" of TV--it's trying to prohibit the reader from forgetting that she's receiving heavily mediated data, that this process is a relationship between the writer's consciousness and her own, and that in order for it to be anything like a full human relationship, she's going to have to put in her share of the linguistic work. This might be my best response to your claim that my stuff's not "realistic." I'm not much interested in trying for classical, big-R Realism, not because the big R's form has now been absorbed and suborned by commercial entertainment. The classical Realist form is soothing, familiar and anesthetic; it drops right into spectation. It doesn't set up the sort of expectations serious 1990s fiction ought to be setting up in readers. LM: "The Broom of the System" already displays some of the formal tendencies found in the stories in "Girl With Curious Hair" and in your new work--that play with temporal structure and flash-cuts, for instance, for heightened rhetorical effects of various sorts, for defamiliarizing things. Would you say your approach to form/content issues has undergone any radical changes since you were a "young twenty-two"? DFW: Assuming I understand what you mean by "form/content," the only way I can answer you is to talk about my own background. Oh boy, I get to make myself sound all fascinating and artistic and you'll have no way to check up. Return with us now to Deare Olde Amherst. For most of my college career I was a hard-core syntax wienie, a philosophy major with a specialization in math and logic. I was, to put it modestly, quite good at the stuff, mostly because I spent all my free time doing it. Wienieish or not, I was actually chasing a special sort of buzz, a special moment that comes sometimes. One teacher called these moments "mathematical experiences." What I didn't know then was that a mathematical experience was aesthetic in nature, an epiphany in Joyce's original sense. These moments appeared in proof-completions, or maybe algorithms. Or like a gorgeously simple solution to a problem you suddenly see after half a notebook with gnarly attempted solutions. It was really an experience of what I think Yeats called "the click of a well-made box." Something like that. The word I always think of it as is "click." Anyway, I was just awfully good at technical philosophy, and it was the first thing I'd ever really been good at, and so everybody, including me, anticipated I'd make it a career. But it sort of emptied out for me somewhere around age twenty. I just got tired of it, and panicked because I was suddenly not getting any joy from the one thing I was clearly supposed to do because I was good at it and people liked me for being good at it. Not a fun time. I think I had kind of a mid-life crisis at twenty, which probably doesn't augur real well for my longevity. So what I did, I went back home for a term, planning to play solitaire and stare out the window, whatever you do in a crisis. And all of a sudden I found myself writing fiction. My only real experience with fun writing had been on a campus magazine with Mark Costello, the guy I later wrote "Signifying Rappers" with. But I had had experience with chasing the click, from all the time spent with proofs. At some point in my reading and writing that fall I discovered the click in literature, too. It was real lucky that just when I stopped being able to get the click from math logic I started to be able to get it from fiction. The first fictional clicks I encountered were in Donald Barthelme's "The Balloon" and in parts of the first story I ever wrote, which has been in my trunk since I finished it. I don't know whether I have that much natural talent going for me fiction wise, but I know I can hear the click, when there is a click. In Don DeLillo's stuff, for example, almost line by line I can hear the click. It's maybe the only way to describe writers I love. I hear the click in most Nabokov. In Donne, Hopkins, Larkin. In Puig and Cortázar. Puig clicks like a fucking Geiger counter. And none of these people write prose as pretty as Updike, and yet I don't hear the click in Updike. But so here I am at like twenty-one and I don't know what to do. Do I go into math logic, which I'm good at and pretty much guaranteed an approved career in? Or do I try to keep on with this writing thing, this "artiste" thing? The idea of being a "writer" repelled me, mostly because of all the foppish aesthetes I knew at school who went around in berets stroking their chins calling themselves writers. I have a terror of seeming like those guys, still. Even today, when people I don't know ask me what I do for a living, I usually tell them I'm "in English" or I "work free-lance." I don't seem to be able to call myself a writer. And terms like "postmodernist" or "surrealist" send me straight to the bathroom, I've got to tell you. LM: I spend time in the toilet stalls myself. But I noticed you I didn't take off down the hall when I said earlier that your work didn't seem "realistic." Do you agree with that? DFW: Well, it depends whether you're talking little-r realistic or big-R. If you mean is my stuff in the Howells/Wharton/Updike school of U.S. Realism, clearly not. But to me the whole binary of realistic vs. unrealistic fiction is a canonical distinction set up by people with a vested interest in the big-R tradition. A way to marginalize stuff that isn't soothing and conservative. Even the goofiest avant-garde agenda, if it's got integrity, is never, "Let's eschew all realism," but more, "Let's try to countenance and render real aspects of real experiences that have previously been excluded from art." The result often seems "unrealistic" to the big-R devotees because it's not a recognizable part of the "ordinary experience" they're used to countenancing. I guess my point is that "realistic" doesn't have a univocal definition. By the way, what did you mean a minute ago when you were talking about a writer "defamiliarizing" something? LM: Placing something familiar in an unfamiliar context--say, setting it in the past or within some other structure that will re-expose it, allow readers to see the real essence of the thing that's usually taken for granted because it's buried underneath all the usual sludge that accompanies it. DFW: I guess that's supposed to be deconstruction's original program, right? People have been under some sort of metaphysical anesthesia, so you dismantle the metaphysics' axioms and prejudices, show it in cross section and reveal the advantages of its abandonment. It's literally aggravating: you awaken them to the fact that they've been unconsciously imbibing some narcotic pharmakon since they were old enough to say Momma. There's many different ways to think about what I'm doing, but if I follow what you mean by "defamiliarization," I guess it's part of what getting the click right is for me. It might also be a part of why I end up doing anywhere from five to eight total rewrites to finish something, which is why I'm never going to be a Vollmann or an Oates. LM: You've mentioned the recent change about what writers can assume about their readers in terms of expectations and so on. Are there other ways the postmodern world has influenced or changed the role of serious writing today? DFW: If you mean a post-industrial, mediated world, it's inverted one of fiction's big historical functions, that of providing data on distant cultures and persons. The first real generalization of human experience that novels tried to accomplish. If you lived in Bumfuck, Iowa, a hundred years ago and had no idea what life was like in India, good old Kipling goes over and presents it to you. And of course the post-structural critics now have a field day on all the colonialist and phallocratic prejudices inherent in the idea that writers were "presenting" alien creatures instead of "re presenting" them--jabbering natives and randy concubines and white man's burden, etc. Well, but fiction's presenting function for today's reader has been reversed: since the whole global village is now presented as familiar, electronically immediate--satellites, microwaves, intrepid PBS anthropologists, Paul Simon's Zulu back-ups--it's almost like we need fiction writers to restore strange things' ineluctable "strangeness," to defamiliarize stuff, I guess you'd say. LM: David Lynch's take on suburbia. Or Mark Leyner's take on his own daily life-- DFW: And Leyner's real good at it. For our generation, the entire world seems to present itself as "familiar," but since that's of course an illusion in terms of anything really important about people, maybe any "realistic" fiction's job is opposite what it used to be--no longer making the strange familiar but making the familiar strange again. It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most "familiarity" is meditated and delusive. LM: "Postmodernism" usually implies "an integration of pop and 'serious' culture." But a lot of the pop culture in the works of the younger writers I most admire these days--you, Leyner, Gibson, Vollmann, Eurudice, Daitch, et al.--seems to be introduced less to integrate high and low culture, or to valorize pop culture, than to place this stuff in a new context so we can be "liberated" from it. Wasn't that, for example, one of the things you were doing with "Jeopardy" in "Little Expressionless Animals"? DFW: One new context is to take something almost narcotizingly banal- it's hard to think of anything more banal than a U.S. game show; in fact the banality's one of TV's great hooks, as the TV essay discusses--and try to reconfigure it in a way that reveals what a tense, strange, convoluted set of human interactions the final banal product is. The scrambled, flash-cut form I ended up using for the novella was probably unsubtle and clumsy, but the form clicked for me in a way it just hadn't when I'd done it straight. LM: A lot of your works (including "Broom") have to do with this breakdown of the boundaries between the real and "games," or the characters playing the game begin to confuse the game structure with reality's structure. Again, I suppose you can see this in "Little Expressionless Animals," where the real world outside "Jeopardy" is interacting with what's going on inside the game show--the boundaries between inner and outer are blurred. DFW: And, too, in the novella what's going on on the show has repercussions for everybody's lives outside it. The valence is always distributive. It's interesting that most serious art, even avant-garde stuff that's in collusion with literary theory, still refuses to acknowledge this, while serious science butters its bread with the fact that the separation of subject/observer and object/experiment is impossible. Observing a quantum phenomenon's been proven to alter the phenomenon. Fiction likes to ignore this fact's implications. We still think in terms of a story "changing" the reader's emotions, cerebrations, maybe even her life. We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story. You could argue that it affects only "her reaction to the story" or "her take on the story." But these things "are" the story. This is the way Barthian and Derridean post-structuralism's helped me the most as a fiction writer: once I'm done with the thing, I'm basically dead, and probably the text's dead; it becomes simply language, and language lives not just in but "through" the reader. The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush. LM: Let's go back just for a moment to your sense of the limits of metafiction: in both your current "RCF" essay and in the novella "Westward" in "Girl With Curious Hair," you imply that metafiction is a game that only reveals itself, or that can't share its valence with anything outside itself--like the daily world. DFW: Well, but metafiction is more valuable than that. It helps reveal fiction as a meditated experience. Plus it reminds us that there's always a recursive component to utterance. This was important, because language's self-consciousness had always been there, but neither writers nor critics nor readers wanted to be reminded of it. But we ended up seeing why recursion's dangerous, and maybe why everybody wanted to keep linguistic self-consciousness out of the show. It gets empty and solipsistic real fast. It spirals in on itself. By the mid-seventies, I think, everything useful about the mode had been exhausted, and the crank-turners had descended. By the eighties it'd become a god awful trap. In "Westward" I got trapped one time just trying to expose the illusions of metafiction the same way metafiction had tried to expose the illusions of the pseudo unmediated realist fiction that came before it. It was a horror show. The stuff's a permanent migraine. LM:Why is meta-metafiction a trap? Isn't that what you were doing in "Westward"? DFW: That's a Rog. And maybe Westward" 's only real value'll be showing the kind of pretentious loops you fall into now if you fuck around with recursion. My idea in "Westward" was to do with metafiction what Moore's poetry or like DeLillo's "Libra" had done with other mediated myths. I wanted to get the Armageddon-explosion, the goal metafiction's always been about, I wanted to get it over with, and then out of the rubble reaffirm the idea of art being a living transaction between humans, whether the transaction was erotic or altruistic or sadistic. God, even talking about it makes me want to puke. The "pretension." Twenty-five year-olds should be locked away and denied ink and paper. Everything I wanted to do came out in the story, but it came out just as what it was: crude and naive and pretentious. LM: Of course, even "The Broom of the System" can be seen as a metafiction, as a book about language and about the relationship between words and reality. DFW: Think of "The Broom of the System" as the sensitive tale of a sensitive young WASP who's just had this mid-life crisis that's moved him from coldly cerebral analytic math to a coldly cerebral take on fiction and Austin-Wittgenstein-Derridean literary theory, which also shifted his existential dread from a fear that he was just a 98.6 calculating machine to a fear that he was nothing but a linguistic construct. This WASP's written a lot of straight humor, and loves gags, so he decides to write a coded autobio that's also a funny little post-structural gag: so you get Lenore, a character in a story who's terribly afraid that she's really nothing more than a character in a story. And, sufficiently hidden under the sex-change and the gags and theoretical allusions, I got to write my sensitive little self-obsessed bildungsroman. The biggest cackle I got when the book came out was the way all the reviews, whether they stomped up and down on the overall book or not, all praised the fact that at least here was a first novel that wasn't yet another sensitive little bildungsroman. LM: Wittgenstein's work, especially the "Tractatus," permeates "The Broom of the System" in all sorts of ways, both as content and in terms of the metaphors you employ. But in later stages of his career, Wittgenstein concluded that language was unable to refer in the direct, referential way he'd argued it could in the "Tractatus." Doesn't that mean language is a closed loop--there's no permeable membrane to allow the inside from getting through to the outside? And if that's the case, then isn't a book "only" a game? Or does the fact that it's a language game make it somehow different? DFW: There's a kind of tragic fall Wittgenstein's obsessed with all the way from the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" in 1922 to the "Philosophical Investigations" in his last years. I mean a real Book-of-Genesis type tragic fall. The loss of the whole external world. The "Tractatus" 's picture theory of meaning presumes that the only possible relation between language and the world is denotative, referential. In order for language both to be meaningful and to have some connection to reality, words like "tree" and "house" have to be like little pictures, representations of little trees and houses. Mimesis. But nothing more. Which means we can know and speak of nothing more than little mimetic pictures. Which divides us, metaphysically and forever, from the external world. If you buy such a metaphysical schism, you're left with only two options. One is that the individual person with her language is trapped in here, with the world out there, and never the twain shall meet. Which, even if you think language's pictures really are mimetic, is an awful lonely proposition. And there's no iron guarantee the pictures truly "are" mimetic, which means you're looking at solipsism. One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism. And so he trashed everything he'd been lauded for in the "Tractatus" and wrote the" Investigations," which is the single most comprehensive and beautiful argument against solipsism that's ever been made. Wittgenstein argues that for language even to be possible, it must always be a function of relationships between persons (that's why he spends so much time arguing against the possibility of a "private language"). So he makes language dependent on human community, but unfortunately we're still stuck with the idea that there is this world of referents out there that we can never really join or know because we're stuck in here, in language, even if we're at least all in here together. Oh yeah, the other original option. The other option is to expand the linguistic subject. Expand the self. LM: Like Norman Bombardini in "Broom of the System." DFW: Yeah, Norman's gag is that he literalizes the option. He's going to forget the diet and keep eating until he grows to "infinite size" and eliminates loneliness that way. This was Wittgenstein's double bind: you can either treat language as an infinitely small dense dot, or you let it become the world--the exterior and everything in it. The former banishes you from the Garden. The latter seems more promising. If the world is itself a linguistic construct, there's nothing "outside" language for language to have to picture or refer to. This lets you avoid solipsism, but it leads right to the postmodern, post-structural dilemma of having to deny yourself an existence independent of language. Heidegger's the guy most people think got us into this bind, but when I was working on "Broom of the System" I saw Wittgenstein as the real architect of the postmodern trap. He died right on the edge of explicitly treating reality as linguistic instead of ontological. This eliminated solipsism, but not the horror. Because we're still stuck. The "Investigation" 's line is that the fundamental problem of language is, quote, "I don't know my way about." If I were separate from language, if I could somehow detach from it and climb up and look down on it, get the lay of the land so to speak, I could study it "objectively," take it apart, deconstruct it, know its operations and boundaries and deficiencies. But that's not how things are. I'm "in" it. We're "in" language. Wittgenstein's not Heidegger, it's not that language "is" us, but we're still "in" it, inescapably, the same way we're in like Kant's space-time. Wittgenstein's conclusions seem completely sound to me, always have. And if there's one thing that consistently bugs me writing-wise, it's that I don't feel I really "do" know my way around inside language--I never seem to get the kind of clarity and concision I want. LM: Ray Carver comes immediately to mind in terms of compression and clarity, and he's obviously someone who wound up having a huge influence on your generation. DFW: Minimalism's just the other side of metafictional recursion. The basic problem's still the one of the mediating narrative consciousness. Both minimalism and metafiction try to resolve the problem in radical ways. Opposed, but both so extreme they end up empty. Recursive metafiction worships the narrative consciousness, makes "it" the subject of the text. Minimalism's even worse, emptier, because it's a fraud: it eschews not only self-reference but any narrative personality at all, tries to pretend there "is" no narrative consciousness in its text. This is so fucking American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it. LM: But did Carver really do that? I'd say his narrative voice is nearly always insistently "there," like Hemingway's was. You're never allowed to forget. DFW: I was talking about minimalists, not Carver. Carver was an artist, not a minimalist. Even though he's supposedly the inventor of modern U.S. minimalism. "Schools" of fiction are for crank-turners. The founder of a movement is never part of the movement. Carver uses all the techniques and anti-styles that critics call "minimalist," but his case is like Joyce, or Nabokov, or early Barth and Coover--he's using formal innovation in the service of an original vision. Carver invented--or resurrected, if you want to cite Hemingway--the techniques of minimalism in the service of rendering a world he saw that nobody'd seen before. It's a grim world, exhausted and empty and full of mute, beaten people, but the minimalist techniques Carver employed were perfect for it; they created it. And minimalism for Carver wasn't some rigid aesthetic program he adhered to for its own sake. Carver's commitment was to his stories, each of them. And when minimalism didn't serve them, he blew it off. If he realized a story would be best served by expansion, not ablation, he'd expand, like he did to "The Bath," which he later turned into a vastly superior story. He just chased the click. But at some point "minimalist" style caught on. A movement was born, proclaimed, promulgated by the critics. Now here come the crank-turners. What's especially dangerous about Carver's techniques is that they seem so easy to imitate. It doesn't seem like each word and line and draft has been bled over. That's a part of his genius. It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one. LM: For various reasons, the sixties postmodernists were heavily influenced by other art forms--television, for instance, or the cinema or painting--but in particular their notions of form and structure were often influenced by jazz. Do you think that your generation of writers has been similarly influenced by rock music? For instance, you and Mark Costello collaborated on the first book-length study of rap ("Signifying Rappers"); would you say that your interest in rap has anything to do with your writerly concerns? There's a way in which I can relate your writing with rap's "postmodern" features, its approach to structure and social issues. Sampling. Recontextualizing. DFW: About the only way music informs my work is in terms of rhythm; sometimes I associate certain narrators' and characters' voices with certain pieces of music. Rock music itself bores me, usually. The phenomenon of rock interests me, though, because its birth was part of the rise of popular media, which completely changed the ways the U.S. was unified and split. The mass media unified the country geographically for pretty much the first time. Rock helped change the fundamental splits in the U.S. from geographical splits to generational ones. Very few people I talk to understand what "generation gap" 's implications really were. Kids loved rock partly because their parents didn't, and obversely. In a mass mediated nation, it's no longer North vs. South. It's under-thirty vs. over thirty. I don't think you can understand the sixties and Vietnam and love ins and LSD and the whole era of patricidal rebellion that helped inspire early postmodern fiction's whole "We're-going-to-trash-your-Beaver Cleaver-plasticized-G.O.P.-image-of-life-in-America" attitude without understanding rock 'n roll. Because rock was and is all about busting loose, exceeding limits, and limits are usually set by parents, ancestors, older authorities. LM: But so far there aren't many others who have written anything interesting about rock--Richard Meltzer, Peter Guralnik . . . DFW: There's some others. Lester Bangs. Todd Gitlin, who also does great TV essays. The thing that especially interested Mark and me about rap was the nasty spin it puts on the whole historical us-vs.-them aspect of postmodern pop. Anyway, what rock 'n' roll did for the multicolored young back in the fifties and sixties, rap seems to be doing for the young black urban community. It's another attempt to break free of precedent and constraint. But there are contradictions in rap that seem to perversely show how, in an era where rebellion itself is a commodity used to sell other commodities, the whole idea of rebelling against white corporate culture is not only impossible but incoherent. Today you've got black rappers who make their reputation rapping about Kill the White Corporate Tools, and then are promptly signed by white-owned record corporations, and not only feel no shame about "selling out" but then release platinum albums about not only Killing White Tools but also about how wealthy the rappers now are after signing their record deal! You've got music here that both hates the white GOP values of the Reaganiod eighties and extols a gold-and-BMW materialism that makes Reagan look like a fucking Puritan. Violently racist and anti-Semitic black artists being co-opted by white owned, often Jewish-owned record labels, and celebrating that fact in their art. The tensions are delicious. I can feel the spittle starting again just thinking about it. LM: This is another example of the dilemma facing avant-garde wannabes today--the appropriation (and ensuing "taming") of rebellion by the system people like Jameson are talking about. DFW: I don't know much about Jameson. To me rap's the ultimate distillate of the U.S. eighties, but if you really step back and think not just about rap's politics but about white enthusiasm for it, things get grim. Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride. We seem to be in an era when oppression and exploitation no longer bring a people together and solidify loyalties and help everyone rise above his individual concerns. Now the rap response is more like "You've always exploited us to get rich, so now goddamn it we're going to exploit ourselves and get rich." The irony, self pity, self-hatred are now conscious, celebrated. This has to do with what we were talking about regarding "Westward" and postmodern recursion. If I have a real enemy, a patriarch for my patricide, it's probably Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon. Because, even though their self-consciousness and irony and anarchism served valuable purposes, were indispensable for their times, their aesthetic's absorption by the U.S. commercial culture has had appalling consequences for writers and everyone else. The TV essay's really about how poisonous postmodern irony's become. You see it in David Letterman and Gary Shandling and rap. But you also see it in fucking Rush Limbaugh, who may well be the Antichrist. You see it in T. C. Boyle and Bill Vollmann and Lorrie Moore. It's pretty much all there is to see in your pal Mark Leyner. Leyner and Limbaugh are the nineties' twin towers of postmodern irony, hip cynicism, a hatred that winks and nudges you and pretends it's just kidding. Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That's what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? "Sure." Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff's mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do? Irony's useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady's bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage. LM: Humbert Humbert, the rutting gorilla, painting the bars of his own cage with such elegance. In fact, Nabokov's example raises the issue of whether cynicism and irony are really a given. In "Pale Fire" and "Lolita," there's an irony about these structures and inventions and so forth, but this reaction is deeply humanistic rather than being merely ironic. This seems true in Barthelme, for instance, or Stanley Elkin, Barth. Or Robert Coover. The other aspect has to do with the presentation of themselves or their consciousness. The beauty and the magnificence of human artistry isn't merely ironic. DFW: But you're talking about the click, which is something that can't just be bequeathed from our postmodern ancestors to their descendants. No question that some of the early postmodernists and ironists and anarchists and absurdists did magnificent work, but you can't pass the click from one generation to another like a baton. The click's idiosyncratic, personal. The only stuff a writer can get from an artistic ancestor is a certain set of aesthetic values and beliefs, and maybe a set of formal techniques that might--just might--help the writer to chase his own click. The problem is that, however misprised it's been, what's been passed down from the postmodern heyday is sarcasm, cynicism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct, and a terrible penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness instead of an ambition not just to diagnose and ridicule but to redeem. You've got to understand that this stuff has permeated the culture. It's become our language; we're so in it we don't even see that it's one perspective, one among many possible ways of seeing. Postmodern irony's become our environment. LM: Mass culture is another very "real" part of that environment--rock music or television or sports, talk shows, game shows, whatever; that's the milieu you and I live in, I mean that's the world . . . DFW: I'm always stumped when critics regard references to popular culture in serious fiction as some sort of avant-garde stratagem. In terms of the world I live in and try to write about, it's inescapable. Avoiding any reference to the pop would mean either being retrograde about what's "permissible" in serious art or else writing about some other world. LM: You mentioned earlier that writing parts of "Broom of the System" felt like recreation for you--a relief from doing technical philosophy. Are you ever able to shift into that "recreational mode" of writing today? Is it still "play" for you? DFW: It's not play anymore in the sense of laughs and yucks and non-stop thrills. The stuff in "Broom" that's informed by that sense of play ended up pretty forgettable, I think. And it doesn't sustain the enterprise for very long. And I 've found the really tricky discipline to writing is trying to play without getting overcome by insecurity or vanity or ego. Showing the reader that you're smart or funny or talented or whatever, trying to be liked, integrity issues aside, this stuff just doesn't have enough motivational calories in it to carry you over the long haul. You've got to discipline yourself to talk out of the part of you that loves the thing, loves what you're working on. Maybe just plain loves. (I think we might need windwoods for this part, LM.) But sappy or no, it's true. The last couple years have been pretty arid for me good-work-wise, but the one way I've progressed I think is I've gotten convinced that there's something kind of timelessly vital and sacred about good writing. This thing doesn't have that much to do with talent, even glittering talent like Leyner's or serious talent like Daitch's. Talent's just an instrument. It's like having a pen that works instead of one that doesn't. I'm not saying I'm able to work consistently out of the premise, but it seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art's heart's purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It's got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that love can instead of the part that just wants to be loved. I know this doesn't sound hip at all. I don't know. But it seems like one of the things really great fiction-writers do--from Carver to Chekhov to Flannery O'Connor, or like the Tolstoy of "The Death of Ivan Ilych" or the Pynchon of "Gravity's Rainbow"--is "give" the reader something. The reader walks away from the real art heavier than she came into it. Fuller. All the attention and engagement and work you need to get from the reader can't be for your benefit; it's got to be for hers. What's poisonous about the cultural environment today is that it makes this so scary to try to carry out. Really good work probably comes out of a willingness to disclose yourself, open yourself up in spiritual and emotional ways that risk making you really feel something. To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this. And the effort actually to do it, not just talk about it, requires a kind of courage I don't seem to have yet. I don't see that kind of courage in Mark Leyner or Emily Prager or Bret Ellis. I sometimes see flickers of it in Vollmann and Daitch and Nicholson Baker and Amy Homes and Jon Franzen. It's weird--it has to do with quality but not that much with sheer writing talent. It has to do with the click. I used to think the click came from, "Holy shit, have I ever just done something good." Now it seems more like the real click's more like, "Here's something good, and on one side I don't much matter, and on the other side the individual reader maybe doesn't much matter, but the thing's good because there's extractable value here for both me and the reader." Maybe it's as simple as trying to make the writing more generous and less ego-driven. LM: Music genres like the blues or jazz or even rock seem to have their ebb and flow in terms of experimentalism, but in the end they all have to come back to the basic elements that comprise the genre, even if these are very simple (like the blues). The trajectory of Bruce Springsteen's career comes to mind. What interests fans of any genre is that they really know the formulas and the elements, so they also can respond to the constant, built-in meta-games and intertextualities going on in all genre forms. In a way the responses are aesthetically sophisticated in the sense that it's the infinite variations-on-a-theme that interests them. I mean, how else can they read a million of these things (real genre fans are not stupid people necessarily)? My point is that people who really care about the forms--the serious writers and readers in fiction--don't want all the forms "broken," they want variation that follows the essence to emerge in new ways. Blues fans could love Hendrix because he was still playing the blues. I think you're seeing a greater appreciation for fiction's rules and limits among postmodern writers of all generations. It's almost a relief to realize that all babies were "not" tossed out with the bathwater back in the sixties. DFW: You're probably right about appreciating limits. The sixties' movement in poetry to radical free verse, in fiction to radically experimental recursive forms--their legacy to my generation of would-be artists is at least an incentive to ask very seriously where literary art's true relation to limits should be. We've seen that you can break any or all of the rules without getting laughed out of town, but we've also seen the toxicity that anarchy for its own sake can yield. It's often useful to dispense with standard formulas, of course, but it's just as often valuable and brave to see what can be done within a set of rules--which is why formal poetry's so much more interesting to me than free verse. Maybe our touchstone now should be G. M. Hopkins, who made up his "own" set of formal constraints and then blew everyone's footwear off from inside them. There's something about free play within an ordered and disciplined structure that resonates for readers. And there's something about complete caprice and flux that's deadening. LM: I suspect this is why so many of the older generation of postmodernists--Federman, Sukenick, Steve Katz and others (maybe even Pynchon fits in here)--have recently written books that rely on more traditional forms. That's why it seems important right now for your generation to go back to traditional forms and re-examine and rework those structures and formulas. This is already happening with some of the best younger writers in Japan. You recognize that if you just say, "Fuck it, let's throw everything out!" There's nothing in the bathtub to make the effort worthwhile. DFW: For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you're in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it's great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat's-away-let's-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody's got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there's a cigarette burn on the couch, and you're the host and it's your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It's not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it's 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody's thrown up in the umbrella stand and we're wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back--I mean, what's wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren't ever coming back--which means "we're" going to have to be the parents. --From the "Review of Contemporary Fiction," Summer 1993, Volume 13.2
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Keywords:

Wallace, David Foster

1993

The Awakening of My Interest in Annular Systems

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Wallace:1993rv ~

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Source: Harper's Magazine, Sept 1993 v287 n1720 p60(12). Title: The awakening of my interest in annular systems. (short story) Author: David Foster Wallace Subjects: Short stories Magazine Collection: 70C0247 Electronic Collection: A13253163 RN: A13253163 Full Text COPYRIGHT 1993 Harper's Magazine Foundation In the winter of 1963 I remember I was eating lunch and reading something dull on temperature reactivity coefficients when my father came into the kitchen and made himself a tomato-juice beverage and said that as soon as I was finished he and my mother needed my help in their bedroom. My father had spent the morning at the commercial studio and was still all in white, with his wig with its rigid white parted hair, and hadn't yet removed the television makeup that gave his face an orange cast in daylight. I hurried up and rinsed my dishes in the sink and proceeded down the hall to the master bedroom. My mother and father were both in there. The master bedroom's drapes and the heavy lightproof curtain behind them were pulled back and the venetian blinds were up, and the daylight was very bright in the room, the decor of which was white and blue and powder blue. My father was bent over my parents' large bed, which was stripped of bedding all the way down to the mattress protector. He was bent over, pushing down on the bed's mattress with the heels of his hands. The bed's sheets and pillows and powder-blue coverlet were all in a pile on the carpet next to the bed. Then my father handed me his tumbler of tomato juice to hold for him and got all the way on top of the bed and knelt on it, pressing down vigorously on the mattress with his hands, putting all his weight into it. He bore down hard on one area of the mattress and then let up and pivoted slightly on his knees and bore down with equal vigor on a different area of the mattress. He did this all over the bed, sometimes actually walking around on his knees to get at different areas of the mattress, then bearing down on them. I remember thinking the bearing-down action looked very much like the emergency compression of a heart patient's chest. I remember my father's tomato juice had grains of pepperish material floating on the surface. My another was standing at the bedroom window, smoking a long cigarette and looking at the lawn, which I had watered before I ate lunch. The uncovered window faced south. The room blazed with sunlight. "Eureka," my father said, pressing down several times on one particular spot. There was a squeaking sound from the mattress. I asked whether I could ask what was going on. "Goddamn bed squeaks," my father said. He stayed on his knees over the one particular spot, bearing down on it repeatedly. He looked up and over at my mother next to the bedroom window. "Do you or do you not hear that?" he said, bearing down and letting up. My mother tapped her long cigarette into a shallow ashtray she held in her other hand. She watched my father press down on the squeaking spot. Sweat was running in dark orange lines down my father's face from under his rigid white professional wig. My father served from 1963 to 1964 as the Man from Glad, representing what was then the Glad Flaccid Plastic Receptacle Co. of Zanesville, Ohio, via a California-based advertising agency. The tunic, tight trousers, and boots the agency made him wear were also white. My father pivoted on his knees and swung his body around and got off the mattress and put his hand at the small of his back and straightened up, continuing to look at the mattress. "This miserable cock-sucking bed your mother felt she needed to hang on to and bring with us out here for quote sentimental value has started squeaking," my father said. His saying "your mother" indicated that he was addressing himself to me. He held his hand out for his tumbler of tomato juice without having to look at me. He stared darkly down at the bed. "It's driving us fucking nuts." My mother balanced her cigarette in her shallow ashtray and laid the ashtray on the windowsill and bent over the foot of the bed, bearing down on the spot my father had isolated, and it squeaked again. "And at night this one spot here we've isolated and identified seems to spread and metastisate until the whole goddamn bed's replete with squeaks." He drank some of his tomato juice. "Areas that gibber and squeak," my father said, "until we both feel as if we're being eaten by rats." He felt along the line of his jaw. "Boiling hordes of gibbering squeaking ravenous rats," he said, almost trembling with irritation. I looked down at the mattress, at my mother's hands, which tended to flake in dry climates. She carried a small bottle of moisturizing lotion at all times. My father said, "And I have personally had it with the aggravation." He blotted his forehead on his white sleeve. I reminded my father that he'd mentioned needing my help with something. At that age I was already taller than both my parents. My mother was taller than my father, even in his boots, but much of her height was in her legs. My father's body was denser and more substantial. My mother came around to my father's side of the bed and picked bedding up off the floor. She started folding the sheets very precisely, using both her arms and her chin. She stacked the folded bedding neatly on top of her dresser, which I remember was white lacquer. My father looked at me. "What we need to do here, Jim, is take the mattress and box spring off the bed frame, under here," my father said, "and expose the frame." He took time out to explain that the bed's bottom mattress was hard-framed and known uniformly as a box spring. I was looking down at my sneakers and making my feet alternately pigeon-toed and then penguin-toed on the bedroom's blue carpet. My father drank some of his tomato juice and looked down at the edge of the bed's metal frame and felt along the outline of his jaw, where his commercial studio makeup ended abruptly at the turtleneck collar of his professional white tunic. "The frame on this bed is old," he told me. "It's probably older than you are. Right now I'm thinking the thing's bolts have maybe started coming loose, and that's what's gibbering and squeaking at night." He finished his tomato juice and held the glass out for me to take and put somewhere. "So we want to move all this top crap out of the way, entirely"--he gestured with one arm--"entirely out of the way, get it out of the room, and expose the frame, and see if we don't maybe just need to tighten up the bolts." I wasn't sure where to put my father's empty glass, which had juice residue and grains of pepper along the interior sides. I poked at the mattress and box spring a little bit with my foot. "Are you sure it isn't just the mattress?" I said. The bed frame's bolts struck me as a rather exotic first-order explanation for the squeaking. My father gestured broadly. "Synchronicity surrounds me. Concord" he said. "Because that's what your mother thinks it is, also." My mother was using both hands to take the blue pillowcases off all five of their pillows, again using her chin as a clamp. The pillows were all the over-plump polyester fiberfill kind, because of my father's allergies. "Great minds think alike," my father said. Neither of my parents had any interest in hard science, though a great uncle had accidentally electrocuted himself with a field series generator he was seeking to patent. My mother stacked the pillows on top of the neatly folded bedding on her dresser. She had to get up on her tiptoes to put the folded pillowcases on top of the pillows. I had started to move to help her, but I couldn't decide where to put the empty tomato-juice glass. "But you just want to hope it isn't the mattress," my father said. "Or the box spring." My mother sat down on the foot of the bed and got out another long cigarette and lit it. She carried a little leatherette snap-case for both her cigarettes and her lighter. My father said, "Because a new frame, even if we can't get the bolts squared away on this one and I have to go get a new one. A new frame. It wouldn't be too bad, see. Even top-shelf frames aren't that expensive. But new mattresses are outrageously expensive." He looked at my mother. "And I mean fucking outrageous." He was looking down at the back of my mother's head. "And we bought a new box spring for this sad excuse for a bed not five years ago." He was looking at the back of my mother's head as if he wanted to confirm that she was listening. My mother had crossed her legs and was looking with a certain concentration either at or out the master bedroom window. Our home's whole subdivision, Sepulveda Heights, consisted of large prefabricated colonial homes ranged along the crest of a severe hillside, which meant that the view from my parents' bedroom was of just sky and sun and a foreshortened declivity of lawn. The lawn sloped at an average angle of fifty-five degrees and had to be mowed horizontally. None of the subdivision's lawns had trees yet. "Of course that was during a seldom-discussed point in time when your mother had to assume the burden of assuming responsibility for finances in the household," my father said. He was now perspiring very heavily, but still had his white professional toupee on, and still looked at my mother. My father acted, throughout our time in California, as both symbol and spokesman for the Glad F.P.R. Co.'s Individual Sandwich Bag Division. He was the first of two actors to portray the Man from Glad. He was inserted several times a month into a mock-up of a car interior, where he would be filmed in a tight trans-windshield shot receiving an emergency radio summons to some household that was having a portable-food-storage problem. He was then placed opposite an actress in a generic kitchen-interior set, where he would explain how a particular species of Glad Sandwich Bag was precisely what the doctor ordered for the particular portable-food-storage problem at issue. In his vaguely medical uniform of all white, he carried an air of authority and great evident conviction, and earned what I always gathered was an impressive salary, and received, for the first time in his career, fan mail, some of which bordered on the disturbing, and which he sometimes liked to read out loud at night in the living room, loudly and dramatically, sitting up with nightcaps and the letters long after my mother and I had gone to bed. I asked whether I could excuse myself for a moment to take my father's empty tomato-juice glass out to the kitchen sink. I was worried that the residue along the interior sides of the tumbler would harden into the kind of precipitate that would be hard to wash off. "For Christ's sake Jim just put that thing down," my father said. I put the tumbler down over next to the base of my mother's dresser, pressing down hard to create a kind of circular receptacle for it in the carpet. My mother stood up and went back over by the bedroom window with her ashtray. We could tell she was getting out of our way. My father cracked his knuckles and studied the path between the bed and the bedroom door. I said I understood my part here to be to help my father move the mattress and box spring off the suspect bed frame and well out of the way. My father cracked his knuckles and replied that I was becoming almost frighteningly quick and perceptive. He went around between the foot of the bed and my mother at the window. He said, "I want to let's just stack it all out in the hall, to get it the hell out of here and give us some room to maneuver." "Right," I said. My father and I were now on opposite sides of my parents' bed. My father rubbed his hands together and bent and worked them between the mattress and box spring and began to lift the mattress up from his side of the bed. When his side of the mattress had risen to the height of his shoulders, he somehow inverted his hands and began pushing his side up rather than lifting it. The top of his wig disappeared behind the rising mattress, his side of which rose in an arc to almost the height of the white ceiling, exceeded ninety degrees, toppled over, and began to fall over down toward me. The mattress's overall movement was like the crest of a breaking wave, I remember. I spread my arms and took the impact with my chest and face. All I could see was an extreme close-up of the woodland floral pattern of the mattress protector. The mattress, a Simmons Beautyrest whose tag said that it could not by law be removed, now formed the hypotenuse of a right dihedral triangle whose legs were myself and the bed's box spring. I remember visualizing and considering this triangle. My legs were trembling under the mattress's canted weight. My father was exhorting me to hold and support the mattress. The respectively sharp plastic and meaty human smells of the mattress and protector were very distinct because my nose was mashed up against them. My father came around to my side of the bed, and together we pushed the mattress back up until it stood at ninety degrees again. We edged carefully apart and each took one end of the upright mattress and began jockeying it off the bed and out the bedroom door into the uncarpeted hallway. This was a king-size Simmons Beautyrest mattress. It was massive but had very little structural integrity. It kept curving and curling and wobbling. My father exhorted both me and the mattress. It was flaccid and floppy as we tried to maneuver it. My father had an especially hard time with his half of the mattress's upright weight because of an old tennis injury. While we were jockeying it on its side off the bed, part of the mattress on my father's end slipped and flopped over and down onto a pair of steel reading lamps, adjustable cubes of brushed steel attached by toggle bolts to the white wall over the head of the bed. The lamps took a solid hit from the mattress, and one cube was rotated all the way around on its toggle so that its open side and bulb now pointed at the ceiling. The joint and toggle made a painful squeaking sound as the cube was wrenched around upward. This was also when I became aware that even the reading lamps were on in the daylit room, because a faint square of direct lamplight, its four sides made slightly concave by the distortion of projection, appeared on the white ceiling above the skewed cube. The lamps didn't fall off. They remained attached to the wall. "Goddamn it to hell," my father said as he regained control of his end of the mattress. When the mattress's thickness made it difficult for him to squeeze through the doorway while holding his end, my father also said, "Fucking son of a . . ." In time we were able to get my parents' giant mattress out into the narrow hallway that ran between the master bedroom and the kitchen. I could hear another terrific squeak from the bedroom as my mother tried to realign the reading lamp whose cube had been inverted. Drops of sweat were falling from my father's face onto his side of the mattress, darkening part of the protector's fabric. My father and I tried to lean the mattress at a slight supporting angle against one wall of the hallway, but because the floor of the hallway was uncarpeted and didn't provide sufficient resistance the mattress wouldn't stay upright. Its bottom edge slid out from the wall all the way across the width of the hallway until it met the baseboard of the opposite wall, and the upright mattress's top edge slid down the wall until the whole mattress sagged at an extremely concave slumped angle, a dry section of the woodland floral mattress protector stretched drum-tight over the slumped crease and the springs possibly damaged by the deforming concavity. My father looked at the canted concave mattress sagging across the width of the hall and moved one end of it a little with the toe of his boot and looked at me and said, "Fuck it." My bow tie was rumpled and at an angle. My father had to walk unsteadily across the mattress in his white boots to get back to my side of the mattress and the bedroom behind me. On his way across he stopped and felt speculatively at his jaw, his boots sunk deep in woodland floral cotton. He said "Fuck it" again, and I remember not being clear about what he was referring to. Then my father turned and started unsteadily back the way he had come across the mattress, one hand against the wall for support. He instructed me to wait right there in the hallway for one moment while he darted into the kitchen at the other end of the hall on a very brief errand. His steadying hand left four faint smeared prints on the wall's white paint. My parents' bed's box spring, though also king-size and heavy, had just below its synthetic covering a wooden frame that gave the box spring structural integrity, and it didn't flop or alter its shape. After another bit of difficulty for my father--who was too thick through the middle, even with the professional girdle beneath his Glad costume, to squeeze easily with his end of the box spring through the bedroom doorway--we were able to get the thing into the hall and lean it vertically at something just over seventy degrees against the wall, where it stayed upright with no problem. "That's the way she wants doing, Jim," my father said, clapping me on the back in exactly the ebullient way that had prompted me to have my mother buy an elastic athletic cranial strap for my glasses. I had told my mother I needed the strap for competitive sports, and she had not asked any questions. My father's hand was still on my back as we returned to the master bedroom. "Right, then!" my father said. His mood was now elevated. There was a brief second of confusion at the doorway as each of us tried to step back to let the other through first. There was now nothing but the suspect frame left where the bed had been. There was something exoskeletal and frail-looking about the bed frame, a plain low-ratio rectangle of black steel. At each comer of the rectangle was a caster. The casters' wheels had sunk into the pile carpet under the weight of the bed, and my parents and were almost completely submerged in the carpet's fibers. Each of the frame's sides had a flat steel protrusion welded at ninety degrees to its interior's base, so that a single rectangular narrow shelf perpendicular to the frame's rectangle ran all around the frame's interior. This little shelf was obviously there to support the bed's occupants and king-size box spring and mattress. My father seemed frozen in place. I cannot remember what my mother was doing. There seemed to be a long silent interval of my father looking closely at the exposed frame. The interval had the silence and stillness of dusty rooms immersed in sunlight. I briefly imagined every piece of furniture in the master bedroom covered with sheets and the room unoccupied for years as the sun rose and crossed and fell outside the window, the room's daylight becoming staler and staler. I could hear two power lawn mowers of slightly different pitch from somewhere down our subdivision's street. The direct light through the master bedroom's window swam with rotating columns of raised dust. I remember it seemed the ideal moment for a sneeze. Dust lay thick on the frame and even hung from the frame's interior support-shelf in tiny gray beards. It was impossible to see any bolts anywhere on the frame. My father blotted sweat and wet makeup from his forehead with the back of his sleeve, which was now dark orange with makeup. "Jesus will you look at that mess," he said. He looked at my mother. "Jesus." The carpeting in my parents' bedroom was deep-pile and a darker blue than the pale blue of the rest of the bedroom's color scheme. I remember the carpet as more a royal blue, with a saturation level somewhere between moderate and strong. The rectangular expanse of royal-blue carpet that had been hidden under the bed was itself carpeted with a thick layer of clotted dust. The rectangle of dust was gray-white and thick and unevenly layered, and the only evidence of the room's carpet below was a faint sick bluish cast to the dust layer. It looked as if dust had not drifted under the bed and settled on the carpet inside the frame but rather had somehow taken root and grown on it, upon it, the way a mold will take root and gradually cover an expanse of spoiled food. The layer of dust itself looked a little like bad cottage cheese. It was nauseous. Some of the dust layer's uneven topography was caused by certain lost and litterish objects that had found their way under the bed--a flyswatter, a roughly Variety-size magazine, some bottle tops, three wadded Kleenex, and what was probably a sock--and gotten covered and textured in dust. There was also a faint odor, sour and fungal, like the smell of an overused bath mat. "Jesus, there's even a smell," my father said. He made a show of inhaling through his nose and screwing up his face. "There's even a smell." He blotted his forehead and felt his jaw and looked hard at my mother. His mood was no longer elevated. My father's mood surrounded him like a field and affected any room he occupied, like an odor or a certain cast to the light. "When was the last time this got cleaned under here?" my father asked my mother. My mother didn't say anything. She looked at my father as he moved the steel frame around a little with his boot, which raised even more dust into the window's sunlight. The bed frame seemed very lightweight, moving back and forth noiselessly on its casters' submerged wheels. My father often moved lightweight objects around absently with his foot, the way other men doodle or examine their cuticles. Rugs, magazines, telephone and electrical cords, his own removed shoe. It was one of my father's ways of gathering his thoughts or trying to control his mood. "Under what presidential administration was this room last deep-cleaned, I'm standing here prompted to fucking muse out loud," my father said. I looked at my mother to see whether she was going to say anything in reply. I said to my father, "You know, since we're discussing squeaking beds, my bed squeaks, too." My father was trying to squat down to see whether he could locate any bolts on the frame, saying something to himself under his breath. He put his hands on the frame for balance and almost fell forward when the frame rolled slightly under his weight. "But I don't think I even really noticed it until we began to discuss it," I said. I looked at my mother. "I don't think it bothers me," I said. "Actually, I think I kind of like it. I think I've gradually gotten so used to it that it's become almost comforting. At this juncture," I said. My mother looked at me. "I'm not complaining about it," I said. "The discussion just made me think of it." "Oh, we hear your bed, don't you worry," my father said. He was still trying to squat, which drew his corset and the hem of his tunic up and allowed the top of his bottom's crack to appear above the waist of his white pants. He shifted slightly to point up at the master bedroom's ceiling. "You so much as turn over in bed up there? Down here we hear it." He took one steel side of the rectangle and shook the frame vigorously, sending up a shroud of dust. The bed frame seemed to weigh next to nothing under his hands. My mother made a mustache of her finger to hold back a sneeze. "But it doesn't aggravate us the way this rodential son of a whore right here does." He shook the frame again. I remarked that I didn't think I'd ever once heard their bed squeak, from upstairs. My father twisted his head around to try to look up at me as I stood there behind him. But I said I'd definitely heard and could confirm the presence of a squeak when he'd pressed on the mattress, and could verify that the squeak was no one's imagination. My father held a hand up to signal me to please stop talking. He remained in a squat, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet, using the rolling frame to keep his balance. The flesh of the top of his bottom and crack-area protruded over the waist of his pants. There were also deep red folds in the back of his neck, below the blunt cut of the wig, because he was looking up and over at my mother, who was resting her tailbone on the sill of the window, still holding her shallow ashtray. "Maybe you'd like to go get the vacuum," said. My mother put the ashtray down on the sill and exited the master bedroom, passing between me and the dresser piled with bedding. "If you can remember where it is!" my father called after her. I could hear my mother trying to get past the king-size mattress sagging diagonally across the hall. My father was rocking more violently on the balls of his feet, and now the rocking had the sort of rolling, side-to-side quality of a ship in high seas. He came very close to losing his balance as he leaned to his right to get a handkerchief from his hip pocket and began using it to reach out and flick dust off something at one comer of the bed frame. After a moment he pointed down next to a caster. "Bolt," he said, pointing at the side of a caster. "Right there's a bolt." I leaned in over him. Drops of my father's perspiration made dark coins in the dust of the frame. There was nothing but smooth lightweight black steel surface where he was pointing, but just to the left of where he was pointing I could see what might have been a bolt, a little stalactite of clotted dust hanging from some slight protrusion. My father's hands were broad and his finger blunt. Another possible bolt lay several inches to the right of where he pointed. His finger trembled badly, and I believe the trembling might have been from the muscular strain on his bad knees, trying to hold so much new weight in a squat for an extended period. I heard the telephone ring twice. There had been an extended silence, with my father pointing at neither protrusion and me trying to lean in over him. Then, still squatting on the balls of his feet, my father placed both hands on the side of the frame and leaned out over the side into the rectangle of dust and had what at first sounded like a bad coughing fit. His hunched back and rising bottom kept me from watching him cough. I remember deciding that the reason the frame was not rolling under his hands' pressure was that my father now had so much of his weight on it, and that maybe my father's nervous system's response to heavy dust was a cough-signal instead of a sneeze-signal. It was the wet sound of material hitting the dust inside the rectangle, plus the rising odor, that signified to me that, rather than coughing, my father had been taken ill. The spasms involved made his back rise and fall and his bottom tremble under his white commercial slacks. It was not too uncommon for my father to be taken ill shortly after coming home from work to relax, but now he seemed to have been taken really ill. To give him some privacy, I went around the frame to the side closest to the window, where there was direct light and less odor, and examined another of the frame's casters. My father was whispering to himself in brief expletive phrases between the spasms of his illness. I squatted and rubbed dust from a small area of the frame and wiped the dust on the carpet by my feet. There was a small carriage-head bolt on either side of the plating that attached the caster to the bed frame. I knelt and felt one of the bolts. Its round smooth head made it impossible either to tighten or loosen. Putting my cheek to the carpet and examining the bottom of the little horizontal shelf welded to the frame's side, I observed that the bolt seemed threaded tightly and completely through its hole, and I decided it was doubtful that any of the casters' platings' bolts were producing the sounds that reminded my father of rodents. Just at this time, I remember, there was a loud cracking sound and my area of the frame jumped violently as my father's sudden illness caused him to faint and he lost his balance and pitched forward and lay prone and asleep over his side of the bed frame, which, as I rolled away from the frame and rose to my knees, I saw was now either broken or very badly bent. My father lay facedown in a mixture of the rectangle's thick dust and the material he'd brought up from his upset stomach. The dust his collapse raised was awful, and as the new dust rose and spread it attenuated the master bedroom's daylight as decisively as if a cloud had moved over the sun in the window. My father's professional wig had detached and lay scalp-up in the mixture of dust and stomach material. The stomach material appeared to be mostly gastric blood until I re-called the tomato-juice beverages my father had been drinking. He lay face-down, with his bottom high in the air, over the side of the bed frame, which his weight had broken almost in half. This was how I accounted for the loud cracking sound. I stood out of the way of the dust and the window's dusty light, feeling my jaw and examining my prone father from a distance. I remember that his breathing was regular and wet, and that the dust mixture bubbled somewhat. It was then that it occurred to me that when I'd been supporting the bed's raised mattress with my face and chest preparatory to its removal from the room, the dihedral triangle I'd imagined the mattress forming with the box spring and my body had not in fact even been a closed polygon: the box spring and the floor I had stood on did not constitute a continuous surface. Then I could hear my mother trying to get the heavy canister vacuum cleaner past the angled Simmons Beautyrest in the hall, and I went to help her. My father's legs were stretched out across the clean royal-blue carpet between his side of the frame and my mother's white dresser. His feet's boots were at a pigeon-toed angle, and his bottom's crack all the way down to the anus itself was now visible because the force of his fall had pulled his white slacks down even farther. I stepped carefully between his legs. "Excuse me," I said. I was able to help my mother by telling her to detach the vacuum cleaner's attachments and hand them one at a time to me over the width of the slumped mattress, where I held them. The vacuum cleaner was manufactured by Regina, and its canister, which contained the engine, bag, and evacuating fan, was very heavy. I reassembled the vacuum and held it while my mother made her way to me across the mattress, then handed the vacuum cleaner back to her, flattening myself against the wall to let her pass by on her way into the master bedroom. "Thanks," my mother said as she passed. I stood there by the slumped mattress for several moments of a silence so complete that I could hear the street's lawn mowers all the way out there in the hall, then heard the sound of my mother pulling out the vacuum cleaner's retractable cord and plugging it into the same bedside outlet the steel reading lamps were attached to. I made my way over the angled mattress and quickly down the hall, made a sharp right just before the entrance to the kitchen, crossed the foyer to the staircase, and ran up to my room, taking several stairs at a time, hurrying to get some distance between myself and the vacuum cleaner, because the sound of vacuuming has always troubled me in the same irrational way it seemed a bed's squeak troubled my father. I ran upstairs and pivoted left at the upstairs landing and went into my room. In my room was my bed. It was narrow, a twin bed, with a headboard of wood and frame and slats of wood. I didn't know where it had come from, originally. The frame held the narrow box spring and mattress much higher off the floor than my parents' bed. It was an old-fashioned bed, so high off the floor that you had to put one knee up on the mattress and clamber up onto it, or else jump. That is what I did. For the first time since I had become taller than my parents, I took several running strides in from the doorway, past my shelves' collection of prisms and lenses and tennis trophies and the scale-model magneto, past my bookcase and the closet door and my bedside's high-intensity standing lamp, and jumped, doing a full swan dive up onto my bed. I landed with my weight on my chest and my arms and legs out from my body on the indigo comforter on my bed, squashing my tie and bending my glasses' templates slightly. I was trying to make my bed produce a loud squeak, which in the case of my bed I knew was caused by any lateral friction between the wooden slats and the frame's interior's shelflike support. But in the course of the leap and the dive, my overlong arm hit the heavy iron pole of the high-intensity standing lamp that stood next to the bed. The lamp teetered violently and began to fall over sideways, away from the bed. It fell with a kind of majestic slowness, resembling a felled tree. As the lamp fell, its heavy iron pole struck the brass knob on the door to my closet, shearing the knob off completely. The round knob and half its interior hex bolt fell off and hit my room's wood floor with a loud noise and began to roll around in a remarkable way, the sheared end of the hex bolt stationary and the round knob, rolling on its circumference, circling it in a trans-dimensional orbit, describing two perfectly circular motions on two distinct axes, which put the figure in a kind of crude n-space, a non-Euclidean figure on a planar surface: The closest conventional analogue I could derive for this figure was a cycloid, L'Hospital's solution to Bernoulli's famous brachistochrone problem, the curve traced by a fixed point on the circumference of a circle rolling along a straight line. But since here, on my bedroom's floor, a circle was rolling around what was itself the circumference of a circle, the cycloid's standard parametric equations were no longer applicable, those equations' trigonometric expressions here becoming themselves first-order differential equations. Because of the lack of resistance or friction against the bare floor, the shorn knob rolled in its description of this figure for a long time as I watched over the edges of my comforter and mattress, holding my glasses in place, completely distracted from the troubling minor-key scream of the vacuum below. It occurred to me that the hypercycloidic movement of the amputated knob schematized perfectly what it would look like if someone were for some reason trying to turn somersaults with one hand nailed to the floor. This, as I recall, was when I first became interested in the possibilities of annulation. David Foster Wallace's last contribution to Harper's Magazine, "Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes," a memoir, appeared in the December 1991 issue. This story is excerpted from a longer work in progress. -- End --
NOTES_
Excerpt from IJ

Keywords: General; Short stories

Costello, Mark

Summer 1993

Fighting to Write: A Short Reminiscence of D.F. Wallace

article

McCaffery:1993jx ~

ABSTRACT_
Source: The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993 v13 n2 p127(24). Title: An interview with David Foster Wallace. (Interview) Author: Larry McCaffery Abstract: David Foster Wallace believes that irony and cynicism have become so cliched that they are no longer enlightening. Fiction should focus on what it means to be a human being in a time when it is hard to be anything but a cynic. The post-structuralist/postmodern tendency to disassociate writing with understanding any 'other' has led to a collapse of meaningful fiction. Fiction today is not allowed to make the strange seem familiar, so it should focus on making the familiar seem strange. Subjects: Novelists - Interviews People: Wallace, David Foster - Interviews Electronic Collection: A13952263 RN: A13952263 Full Text COPYRIGHT 1993 Review of Contemporary Fiction Larry McCanery: Your essay following this interview is going to be seen by some people as being basically an apology for television. What's your response to the familiar criticism that television fosters relationships with illusions or simulations of real people (Reagan being a kind of quintessential example)? David Foster Wallace: It's a try at a comprehensive diagnosis, not an apology. U.S. viewers' relationship with TV is essentially puerile and dependent, as are all relationships based on seduction. This is hardly news. But what's seldom acknowledged is how complex and ingenious TV's seductions are. It's seldom acknowledged that viewers' relationship with TV is, albeit debased, intricate and profound. It's easy for older writers just to bitch about TV's hegemony over the U.S. art market, to say the world's gone to hell in a basket and shrug and have done with it. But I think younger writers owe themselves a richer account of just why TV's become such a dominating force on people's consciousness, if only because we under like forty have spent our whole conscious lives being part of TV's audience. LM: Television may be more complex than what most people realize, but it seems rarely to attempt to challenge or disturb its audience, as you've written me you wish to. Is it that sense of challenge and pain that makes your work more "serious" than most television shows? DFW: I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction's job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of generalization of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with characters' pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might be just that simple. But now realize that TV and popular film and most kinds of "low" art - which just means art whose primary aim is to make money - is, lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas "serious" art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it's hard for an art audience, especially a young one that's been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction. That's not good. The problem isn't that today's readership is dumb, I don't think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture's trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today's readers both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard. LM: Who do you imagine your readership to be? DFW: I suppose it's people more or less like me, in their twenties and thirties, maybe, with enough experience or good education to have realized that the hard work serious fiction requires of a reader sometimes has a payoff. People who've been raised with U.S. commercial culture and are engaged with it and informed by it and fascinated with it but still hungry for something commercial art can't provide. Yuppies, I guess, and younger intellectuals, whatever. These are the people pretty much all the younger writers I admire - Leyner and Vollmann and Daitch, Amy Homes, Jon Franzen, Lorrie Moore, Rick Powers, even McInerney and Leavitt and those guys - are writing for, I think. But, again, the last twenty years have seen big changes in how writers engage their readers, what readers need to expect from any kind of art. LM: The media seems to me to be one thing that has drastically changed this relationship. It's provided people with this television-processed culture for so long that audiences have forgotten what a relationship to serious art is all about. DFW: Well, it's too simple to just wring your hands and claim TV's ruined readers. Because the U.S.'s television culture didn't come out of a vacuum. What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is all it does - is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it. And since there's always been a strong and distinctive American distaste for frustration and suffering, TV's going to avoid these like the plague in favor of something anesthetic and easy. LM: You really think this distaste is distinctly American? DFW: It seems distinctly Western-industrial, anyway. In most other cultures, if you hurt, if you have a symptom that's causing you to suffer, they view this as basically healthy and natural, a sign that your nervous system knows something's wrong. For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire's still going. But if you just look at the number of ways that we try like hell to alleviate mere symptoms in this country - from fast-fast-fast-relief antacids to the popularity of lighthearted musicals during the Depression - you can. see an almost compulsive tendency to regard pain itself as the problem. And so pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se. Look at utilitarianism - that most English of contributions to ethics - and you see a whole teleology predicated on the idea that the best human life is one that maximizes the pleasure-to-pain ratio. God, I know this sounds priggish of me. All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression. Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes. LM: Near the end of "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," there's a line about Mark that "It would take an architect who could hate enough to feel enough to love enough to perpetrate the kind of special cruelty only real lovers can inflict." Is that the kind of cruelty you feel is missing in the work of somebody like Mark Leyner? DFW: I guess I'd need to ask you what kind of cruelty you thought the narrator meant there. LM: It seems to involve the idea that if writers care enough about their audience - if they love them enough and love their art enough - they've got to be cruel in their writing practices. "Cruel" the way an army drill sergeant is when he decides to put a bunch of raw recruits through hell, knowing that the trauma you're inflicting on these guys, emotionally, physically, physically, is just part of a process that's going to strengthen them in the end, prepare them for things they can't even imagine yet. DFW: Well, besides the question of where the fuck do "artists" get off deciding for readers what stuff the readers need to be prepared for, your idea sounds pretty Aristotelian, doesn't it? I mean, what's the purpose of creating fiction, for you? Is it essentially mimetic, to capture and order a protean reality? Or is it really supposed to be therapeutic in an Aristotelian sense? LM: I agree with what you said in "Westward" about serious art having to engage a range of experiences; it can't be merely "metafictional," for example, it has to deal with the world outside the page and variously so. How would you contrast your efforts in this regard versus those involved in most television or most popular fiction? DFW: This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants. When you read that quotation from "Westward" just now, it sounded to me like a covert digest of my biggest weaknesses as a writer. One is that I have a grossly sentimental affection for gags, for stuff that's nothing but funny, and which I sometimes stick in for no other reason than funniness. Another's that I have a problem sometimes with concision, communicating only what needs to be said in a brisk efficient way that doesn't call attention to itself. It'd be pathetic for me to blame the exterior for my own deficiencies, but it still seems to me that both of these problems are tracable to this schizogenic experience I had growing up, being bookish and reading a lot, on the one hand, watching grotesque amounts of TV, on the other. Because I liked to read, I probably didn't watch quite as much TV as my friends, but I still got my daily megadose, believe me. And I think it's impossible to spend that many slack-jawed, spittle-chinned, formative hours in front of commercial art without internalizing the idea that one of the main goals of art is simply to entertain, give people sheer pleasure. Except to what end, this pleasure-giving? Because, of course, TV's real agenda is to be liked, because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it's its sole raison. And sometimes when I look at my own stuff I feel like I absorbed too much of this raison. I'll catch myself thinking up gags or trying formal stunt-pilotry and see that none of this stuff is really in the service of the story itself; it's serving the rather darker purpose of communicating to the reader "Hey! Look at me! Have a look at what a good writer I am! Like me!" Now, to an extent there's no way to escape this altogether, because an author needs to demonstrate some sort of skill or merit so that the reader will trust her. There's some weird, delicate, I-trust-you-not-to-fuck-upon-me relationship between the reader and writer, and both have to sustain it. But there's an unignorable line between demonstrating skill and charm to gain trust for the story vs. simple showing off. It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art. I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just that art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art. This seems like a poisonous lesson for a would-be artist to grow up with. And one consequence is that if the artist is excessively dependent on simply being liked, so that her true end isn't in the work but in a certain audience's good opinion, she is going to develop a terrific hostility to that audience, simply because she has given all her power away to them. It's the familiar love-hate syndrome of seduction: "I don't really care what it is I say, I care only that you like it. But since your good opinion is the sole arbiter of my success and worth, you have tremendous power over me, and I fear you and hate you for it." This dynamic isn't exclusive to art. But I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader. LM: In your own case, how does this hostility manifest itself.? DFW: Oh, not always, but sometimes in the form of sentences that are syntactically not incorrect but still a real bitch to read. Or bludgeoning the reader with data. Or devoting a lot of energy to creating expectations and then taking pleasure in disappointing them. You can see this clearly in something like Ellis's American Psycho: it panders shamelessly to the audience's sadism for a while, but by the end it's clear that the sadism's real object is the reader herself. LM: But at least in the case of American Psycho I felt there was something more than just this desire to inflict pain - or that Ellis was being cruel the way you said serious artists need to be willing to be. DFW: You're just displaying the sort of cynicism that lets readers be manipulated by bad writing. I think it's a kind of black cynicism about today's world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what's always distinguished bad writing - flat characters, a narrative world that's cliched and not recognizably human, etc. - is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this dark world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend Psycho as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it's no more than that. LM: Are you saying that writers of your generation have an obligation not only to depict our condition but also to provide the solutions to these things? DFW: I don't think I'm talking about conventionally political or social-action-type solutions. That's not what fiction's about. Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction's job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still are human beings, now. Or can be. This isn't that it's fiction's duty to edify or teach, or to make us good little Christians or Republicans; I'm not trying to line up behind Tolstoy or Gardner. I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't good art. We've got all this "literary" fiction that simply monotones that we're all becoming less and less human, that presents characters without souls or love, characters who really are exhaustively describable in terms of what brands of stuff they wear, and we all buy the books and go like "Golly, what a mordantly effective commentary on contemporary materialism!" But we already all know U.S. culture is materialistic. This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody. What's engaging and artistically, real is, taking it as axiomatic that the present is grotesquely materialistic, how is it that we as human beings still have the capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections, for stuff that doesn't have a price? And can these capacities be made to thrive? And if so, how, and if not why not? LM: Not everyone in your generation is taking the Ellis route. Both the other writers in this issue of RCF seem to be doing exactly what you're talking about. So, for example, even though Vollmann's Rainbow Stories is a book that is in its own way as sensationalized as American Psycho, the effort there is to depict those people not as flattened, dehumanized stereotypes but as human beings. I'd agree, though, that a lot of contemporary writers today adopt this sort of flat, neutral transformation of people and events into fiction without bothering to make the effort of refocusing their imaginations on the people who still exist underneath these transformations. But Vollmann seems to be someone fighting that tendency in interesting ways. This brings us back to the issue of whether this isn't a dilemma serious writers have always faced. Other than lowered (or changed) audience expectations, what's changed to make the task of the serious writer today more difficult than it was thirty or sixty or a hundred or a thousand years ago? You might argue that the task of the serious writer is easier today because what took place in the sixties had the effect of finally demolishing the authority that mimesis had assumed. Since you guys don't have to fight that battle anymore, you're liberated to move on to other areas. DFW: This is a double-edged sword, our bequest from the early post-modernists and the post-structuralist critics. On the one hand, there's sort of an embarrassment of riches for young writers now. Most of the old cinctures and constraints that used to exist-censorship of content is a blatant example - have been driven off the field. Writers today can do more or less whatever we want. But on the other hand, since everybody can do pretty much whatever they want, without boundaries to define them or constraints to struggle against, you get this continual avant-garde rush forward without anyone bothering to speculate on the destination, the goal of the forward rush. The modernists and early postmodernists - all the way from Mallarme to Coover, I guess - broke most of the rules for us, but we tend to forget what they were forced to remember: the rule-breaking has got to be for the sake of something. When rule-breaking, the mere form of renegade avant-gardism, becomes an end in itself, you end up with bad language poetry and American Psycho's nipple-shocks and Alice Cooper eating shit on stage. Shock stops being a by-product of progress and becomes an end in itself. And it's bullshit. Here's an analogy. The invention of calculus was shocking because for a long time it had simply been presumed that you couldn't divide by zero. The integrity of math itself seemed to depend on the presumption. Then some genuine titans came along and said, "Yeah, maybe you can't divide by zero, but what would happen if you could? We're going to come as close to doing it as we can, to see what happens." LM: So you get the infinitesimal calculus - the "philosophy of as if." DFW: And this purely theoretical construct wound up yielding incredible practical results. Suddenly you could plot the area under curves and do rate-change calculations. Just about every material convenience we now enjoy is a consequence of this "as if." But what if Leibniz and Newton had wanted to divide by zero only to show jaded audiences how cool and rebellious they were? It'd never have happened, because that kind of motivation doesn't yield results. It's hollow. Dividing-as-if-by-zero was titanic and ingenious because it was in the service of something. The math world's shock was a price they had to pay, not a payoff in itself. LM: Of course, you also have examples like Lobochevsky and Riemann, who are breaking rules with no practical application at the time - but then later on somebody like Einstein comes along and decides that this worthless mathematical mind game that Riemann developed actually described the universe more effectively than the Euclidean game. Not that those guys were breaking the rules just to break the rules, but part of that was just that: what happens if everybody has to move counter-clockwise in Monopoly. And at first it just seemed like this game, without applications. DFW: Well, the analogy breaks down because math and hard science are pyramidical. They're like building a cathedral: each generation works off the last one, both its advances and its effors. Ideally, each piece of art's its own unique object, and its evaluation's always present-tense. You could justify the worst piece of experimental horseshit by saying. "The fools may hate my stuff, but generations later I will be appreciated for my ground-breaking rebellion." All the beret-wearing artistes I went to school with who believed that line are now writing ad copy someplace. LM: The European avant-garde believed in the transforming ability of innovative art to directly affect people's consciousness and break them out of their cocoon of habituation, etc. You'd put a urinal in a Paris museum, call it a "fountain," and wait for the riots next day. That's an area I'd say has changed things for writers (or any artist) - you can have very aesthetically radical works today using the same features of formal innovation that you'd find in the Russian Futurists or Duchamp and so forth, only now these things are on MTV or TV ads. Formal innovation as trendy image. So it loses its ability to shock or transform. DFW: These are exploitations. They're not trying to break us free of anything. They're trying to lock us tighter into certain conventions, in this case habits of consumption. So the form of artistic rebellion now becomes comes ... LM: ... yeah, another commodity. I agree with Fredric Jameson and others who argue that modernism and postmorodenism can be seen as expressing the cultural logic of late capitalism. Lots of features of contemporary art are directly influenced by this massive acceleration of capitalist expansion into all these new realms that were previoisly just not accessible. You sell people a memory, reify their nostalgia and use this as a hook to sell deodorant. Hasn't this recent huge expansion of the technologies of reproduction, the integration of commodity reproduction and aesthetic reproduction, and the rise of media culture lessened the impact that aesthetic innovation can have on people's sensibilities? What's your response to this as an artist? DFW: You've got a gift for the lit-speak, LM. Who wouldn't love this jargon we dress common sense in: "formal innovation is no longer transformative, having been co-opted by the forces of stabilization and post-industrial inertia," blah blah. But this co-optation might actually be a good thing if it helps keep younger writers from being able to treat mere formal ingenuity as an end in itself. MTV-type co-optation could end up a great prophylactic against cleveritis - you know, the dreaded grad-school syndrome of like "Watch me use seventeen different points of view in this scene of a guy eating a Saltine." The only real point of that shit is "Like me because I'm clever" - which of course is itself derived from commercial art's axiom about audience -affection determining art's value. What's precious about somebody like Bill Vollmann is that, even though there's a great deal of formal innovation in his fictions, it rarely seems to exist for just its own sake. It's almost always deployed to make some point (Vollmann's the most editorial young novelist going right now, and he's great at using formal ingenuity to make the editorializing a component of his narrative instead of an interruption) or to create an effect that's internal to the text. His narrator's always weirdly effaced, the writing unself-conscious, despite all the "By-the-way-Dear-Reader" intrusions. In a way it's sad that Vollmann's integrity is so remarkable. Its remarkability means it's rare. I guess I don't know what to think about these explosions in the sixties you're so crazy about. It's almost like postmodernism is fiction's fall from biblical grace. Fiction became conscious of itself in a way it never had been. Here's a really pretentious bit of pop analysis for you: I think you can see Cameron's Terminator movies as a metaphor for all literary art after Roland Barthes, viz., the movies' premise that the Cyberdyne NORAD computer becomes conscious of itself as conscious, as having interests and an agenda; the Cyberdyne becomes literally self-referential, and it's no accident that the result of this is nuclear war, Armageddon. LM: Isn't Armageddon the course you set sail for in "Westward"? DFW: Metafiction's real end has always been Armageddon. Art's reflection on itself is terminal, is one big reason why the art world saw Duchamp as an Antichrist. But I still believe the move to involution had value: it helped writers break free of some long-standing flat-earth-type taboos. It was standing in line to happen. And for a little while, stuff like Pale Fire and The, Universal Baseball Association was valuable as a metaesthetic breakthrough the same way Duchamp's urinal had been valuable. LM: I've always felt that the best of the metafictionists - Cover, for example, Nabokov, Borges, even Barth - were criticized too much for being only interested in narcissistic, self-reflexive games, whereas these devices had very real political and historical applications. DFW: But when you talk about Nabokov and Cover, you're talking about real geniuses, the writers who weathered real shock and invented this stuff in contemporary fiction. But after the pioneers always come the crank-turners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built and just tum the crank, and little pellets of metafiction come out the other end. The crank-turners capitalize for a while on sheer fashion, and they get their plaudits and grants and buy their IRAs and retire to the Hamptons well out of range of the eventual blast radius. There are some interesting parallels between postmordern crank-turners and what's happened since post-structural theory took off here in the U.S., why there's such a big backlash against post-structuralism going on now. It's the cranktuners' fault. I think the crank-tuner's replaced the critic as the real angel of death as far as literary movements are concerned, now. You get some bona fide artists who come along and really divide by zero and weather some serious shit-storms of shock and ridicule in order to promulgate some really important ideas. Once they triumph, though, and their ideas become legitimate and accepted, the crank-turners and wannabes come running to the machine, and out pour the gray pellets, and now the whole thing,'s become a hollow form, just another institution of fashion. Take a look at some of the critical-theory Ph.D. dissertations being written now. They're like de Man and Foucault in the mouth of a dull child. Academia and commercial culture have somehow become these gigantic mechanisms of commodification that drain the weight and color out of even the most radical new advances. It's a surreal inversion of the death-by-neglect that used to kill off prescient art. Now prescient art suffers death-by-acceptance. We love things to death, now. Then we retire to the Hamptons. LM: This is also tied to that expansion of capitalism blah blah blah into realms previously thought to be uncommodifiable. Hyperconsumption. I mean, whoever thought rebellion could be tamed so easily? You j ust record it, turn the crank, and out comes another pellet of "dangerous" art. DFW: And this accelarates the metastasis from genuine envelope-puncturing to just another fifteen-minute form that gets cranked out and cranked out and cranked out. Which creates a bitch of a problem for any artist who views her task as continual envelope-puncturing, because then she falls into this insatiable hunger for the appearance of novelty: "What can I do that hasn't been done yet?" Once the first-person pronoun creeps into your agenda you're dead, art-wise. That's why fiction-writing's lonely in a way most people misunderstand. It's yourself you have to be estranged from, really, to work. LM: A phrase in one of your recent letters really struck me: "The magic of fiction is that it addresses and antagonizes the loneliness that dominates people." It's that suggestion of antagonizing the reader that seems to link your goals up with the avant-garde program - whose goals were never completely hermetic. And "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" seems to be your own meta-metafictional attempt to deal with these large areas in ways that are not merely metafiction. DFW: "Aggravate" might be better than "antagonize," in the sense of aggravation as intensification. But the truth is it's hard for me to know what I really think about any of the stuff I've written. It's always tempting to sit back and make finger-steeples and invent impressive-sounding theoretical justifications for what one does, but in my case most of it'd be horseshit. As time passes I get less and less nuts about anything I've published, and it gets harder to know for sure when its antagonistic elements are in there because they serve a useful purpose and when they're just covert manifestations of this "look-at-me-please-love-me-i-hate-you" syndrome I still sometimes catch myself falling into. Anyway, but what I think I meant by "antagonize" or "aggravate" has to do with the stuff in the TV essay about the younger writer trying to struggle against the cultural hegemony of TV. One thing TV does is help us deny that we're lonely. With televised images, we can have the facsimile of a relationship without the work of a real relationship. It's an anesthesia of form. The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness. You don't have. to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness, both of which are like sub-dreads of our dread of being trapped inside a self (a psychic self, not just a physical self), has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I'm going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me. I'm not sure I could give you a steeple-fingered theoretical justification, but I strongly suspect a big part of real art-fiction's job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us first to face what's dreadful, what we want to deny. LM: It's this inside/outside motif you developed throughout The Broom of the System. DFW: I guess maybe, though there it's developed in an awful clunky way. The popularity of Broom mystifies me. I can't say it's not nice to have people like it, but there's a lot of stuff in that novel I'd like to reel back in and do better. I was like twenty-two when I wrote the first draft of that thing. And I mean a young twenty-two. I still thought in terms of distinct problems and univocal solutions. But if you're going to try not just to depict the way a culture's bound and defined by mediated gratification and image, but somehow to redeem it, or at least fight a rearguard against it, then what you're going to be doing is paradoxical. You're at once allowing the reader to sort of escape self by achieving some sort of identification with another human psyche - the writer's, or some character's, etc. - and you're also trying to antagonize the reader's intuition that she is a self, that she is alone and going to die alone. You're trying somehow both to deny and affirm that the writer is over here with his agenda while the reader's over there with her agenda, distinct. This paradox is what makes good fiction sort of magical, I think. The paradox can't be resolved, but it can somehow be mediated - "re-mediated," since this is probably where post-structuralism rears its head for me - by the fact that language and linguistic intercourse is, in and of itself, redeeming, remedy-ing. This makes serious fiction a rough and bumpy affair for everyone involved. Commercial entertaimnent, on the other hand, smooths everything over. Even the Terminator movies (which I revere), or something really nasty and sicko like the film version of A Clockwork Orange, is basically an anesthetic (and think for a second about the etymology of "anesthetic"; break the word up and think about it). Sure, A Clockwork Orange is a selfconsciously sick, nasty film about the sickness and nastiness of the postindustrial condition, but if you look at it structurally, slo-mo and fast-mo and arty cinematography aside, it does what all commercial entertainment does: it proceeds more or less chronologically, and if its transitions are less cause-and-effect-based than most movies', it still kind of eases you from scene to scene in a way that drops you into certain kinds of easy cerebral rhythms. It admits of passive spectation. Encourages it. TV-type art's biggest hook is that it's figured out ways to reward passive spectation. A certain amount of the form-conscious stuff I write is trying-with whatever success - to do the opposite. It's supposed to be uneasy. For instance, using a lot of flash-cuts between scenes so that some of the narrative arrangement has got to be done by the reader, or interrupting flow with digressions and interpolations that the reader has to do the work of connecting to each other and to the narrative. It's nothing terribly sophisticated, and there has to be an accessible payoff for the reader if I don't want the reader to throw the book at the wall. But if it works right, the reader has to fight through the mediated voice presenting the material to you. The complete suppression of a narrative consciousness, with its own agenda, is why TV is such a powerful selling tool. This is McLuhan, right? "The medium is the message" and all that? But notice that TV's mediated message is never that the medium's the message. LM: How is this insistence on mediation different from the kind of meta-strategies you yourself have attacked as preventing authors from being anything other than narcissistic or overly abstract or intellectual? DFW: I guess I'd judge what I do by the same criterion I apply to the self-conscious elements you find in Vollmann's fiction: do they serve a purpose beyond themselves? Whether I can provide a payoff and communicate a function rather than just seem jumbled and prolix is the issue that'll decide whether the thing I'm working on now succeeds or not. But I think right now it's important for art-fiction to antagonize the reader's sense that what she's experiencing as she reads is mediated through a human consciousness, one with an agenda not necessarily coincident with her own. For some reason I probably couldn't explain, I've been convinced of this for years, that one distinctive thing about truly "low" or commercial art is this apparent suppression of a mediating consciousness and agenda. The example I think of first is the novella "Little Expressionless Animals" in Girl with Curious Hair. Readers I know sometimes remark on all the flashcuts and the distortion of linearity in it and usually want to see it as mimicking TV's own pace and phosphenic flutter. But what it's really trying to do is just the opposite of TV - it's trying to prohibit the reader from forgetting that she's receiving heavily mediated data, that this process is a relationship between the writer's consciousness and her own, and that in order for it to be anything like a real full human relationship, she's going to have to put in her share of the linguistic work. This night be my best response to your claim that my stuff's not "realistic." I'm not much interested in trying for classical, big-R Realism, not because there hasn't been great U.S. Realist fiction that'll be read and enjoyed forever, but because the big R's form has now been absorbed and suborned by commercial entertainment. The classical Realist form is soothing, familiar and anesthetic; it drops us right into spectation. It doesn't set up the sort of expectations serious 1990s fiction ought to be setting up in readers. LM: The Broom of the System already displays some of the formal tendencies found in the stories in Girl with Curious Hair and in your new, work - that play with temporal structure and flash-cuts, for instance, for heightened rhetorical effects of various sorts, for defamiliarizing things. Would you say your approach to form/content issues has, undergone any radical changes since you were a "young twenty-two"? DFW: Assuming I understand what you mean by "form/content," the only way I can answer you is to talk about my own background. Oh boy, I get to make myself sound all fascinating and artistic and you'll have no way to check up. Return with us now to Deare Olde Amherst. For most of my college career I was a hard-core syntax wienie, a philosophy major with a specialization in math and logic. I was, to put it modestly, quite good at the stuff, mostly because I spent all my free time doing it. Wienieish or not, I was actually chasing a special sort of buzz, a special moment that comes sometimes. One teacher called these moments "mathematical experiences." What I didn't know then was that a mathematical experience was aesthetic in nature, an epiphany in Joyce's original sense. These moments appeared in proof-completions, or maybe algorithms. Or like a gorgeously simple solution to a problem you suddenly see after filling half a notebook with gnarly attempted solutions. It was really an experience of what I think Yeats called "the click of a well-made box." Something like that. The word I always think of it as is "click." Anyway, I was just awfully good at technical philosophy, and it was the first thing I'd ever been really good at, and so everybody, including me, anticipated I'd make it a career. But it sort of emptied out for me somewhere around age twenty. I just got tired of it, and panicked because I was suddenly not getting joy from the one thing I was clearly supposed to do because I was good at it and people liked me for being good at it. Not a fun time. I think I had kind of a mid-life crisis at twenty, which probably doesn't augur real well for my longevity. So what I did, I went back home for a term, planning to play solitaire and stare out the window, whatever you do in a crisis. And all of a sudden I found myself writing fiction. My only real experience with fun writing had been on a campus magazine with Mark Costello, the guy I later wrote Signifying Rappers with. But I had had experience withchasing the click, from all the time spent with proofs. At some point in my reading and writing that fall I discovered the click existed in literature, too. It was real lucky that just when I stopped being able to get the click from math logic I started to be able to get it from fiction. The first fictional clicks I encountered were in Donald Barthelme's "The Balloon" and in parts of the first story I ever wrote, which has been in my trunk since I finished it. I don't know whether I have much natural talent going for me fiction-wise, but I know I can hear the click, when there's a click. In Don DeLillo's stuff, for example, almost line by line I can hear the click. It's maybe the only way to describe writers I love. I hear the click in most Nabokov. In Donne, Hopkins, Larkin. In Puig and Cortazar. Puig clicks like a fucking Geiger counter. And none of these people write prose as pretty as Updike, and yet I don't much hear the click in Updike. But so here I am at like twenty-one and I don't know what to do. Do I go into math logic, which I'm good at and pretty much guaranteed an approved career in? Or do I try to keep on with this writing thing, this artiste thing? The idea of trying to be a "writer" repelled me, mostly because of all the foppish aesthetes I knew at school who went around in berets stroking their chins calling themselves writers. I have a terror of seeming like those guys, still. Even today, when people I don't know ask me what I do for a living, I usually tell them I'm "in English" or I "work free-lance." I don't seem to be able to call myself a writer. And terms like "postmodernist" or "surrealist" send me straight to the bathroom, I've got to tell you. LM: I spend time in toilet stalls myself. But I noticed you didn't take off down the hall when I said earlier that your work didn't seem "realistic." Do you really agree with that? DFW: Well, it depends whether you're talking little-r realistic or big-R. If you mean is my stuff in the Howells/Wharton/IUpdike school of U.S. Realism, clearly not. But to me the whole binary of realistic vs. unrealistic fiction is a canonical distinction set up by people with a vested interest in the big-R tradition. A way to marginalize stuff that isn't soothing and conservative. Even the goofiest avant-garde agenda, if it's got integrity, is never, "Let's eschew all realism," but more, "Let's try to countenance and render real aspects of real experiences that have previously been excluded from art." The result often seems "unrealistic" to the big-R devotees because it's not a recognizable part of the "ordinary experience" they're used to countenancing. I guess my point is that "realistic" doesn't have a univocal definition. By the way, what did you mean a minute ago when you were talking about a writer "defamiliarizing" something? LM: Placing something familiar in an unfamiliar context - say, setting it in the past or within some other structure that will re-expose it, allow readers to see the real essence of the thing that's usually taken for granted because it's buried underneath all the usual sludge that accompanies it. DFW: I guess that's supposed to be deconstruction's original program, right? People have been under some sort of metaphysical anesthesia, so you dismantle the metaphysics' axioms and prejudices, show it in cross section and reveal the advantages of its abandonment. It's literally aggravating: you awaken them to the fact that they've been unconsciously imbibing some narcotic pharmakon since they were old enough to say Momma. There's many different ways to think about what I'm doing, but if I follow what you mean by "defamiliarization," I guess it's part of what getting the click right is for me. It might also be part of why I end up doing anywhere from five to eight total rewrites to finish something, which is why I'm never going to be a Vollmann or an Oates. LM: You've mentioned the recent change about what writers can assume about their readers in terms of expectations and so on. Are there other ways the postmodeern world has influenced or changed the role of serious writing today? DFW: If you mean a post-industrial, mediated world, it's inverted one of fiction's big historical functions, that of providing data on distant cultures and persons. The first real generalization of human experience that novels tried to accomplish. If you lived in Bumfock, Iowa, a hundred years ago and had no idea what life was like in India, good old Kipling goes over and presents it to you. And of course the post-structural critics now have a field day on all the colonialist and phallocratic prejudices inherent in the idea that writers were presenting alien cultures instead of "re-presenting" them - jabbering natives and randy concubines and white man's burden, etc. Well, but fiction's presenting function for today's reader has been reversed: since the whole global village is now presented as familiar, electronically immediate - satellites, microwaves, intrepid PBS anthropologists, Paul Simon's Zulu back-ups - it's almost like we need fiction writers to restore strange things' ineluctable strangeness, to defamiliarize stuff, I guess you'd say. LM: David Lynch's take on suburbia. Or Mark Leyner's take on his own daily life -- DFW: And Leyner's real good at it. For our generation, the entire world seems to present itself as "familiar," but since that's of course an illusion in terms of anything really important about people, maybe any "realistic" fiction's job is opposite what it used to be - no longer making the strange familiar but making the familiar strange again. It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most "familiarity" is mediated and delusive. LM: "Postmodernism" usually implies "an integration of pop and 'serious' culture." But a lot of the pop culture in the works of the younger writers I most admire these days - you, Leyner, Gibson, Vollmann, Eurudice, Daitch, et al. - seems to be introduced less to integrate high and low culture, or to valorize pop culture, than to place this stuff in a new context so we can be liberated from it. Wasn't that, for example, one of the things you were doing with Jeopardy in "Little Expressionless Animals"? DFW: One new context is to take something almost narcotizingly banal - it's hard to think of anything more banal than a U.S. game show; in fact the banality's one of TV's great hooks, as the TV essay discusses - and try to reconfigure it in a way that reveals what a tense, strange, convoluted set of human interactions the final banal product is. The scrambled, flash-cut form I ended up using for the novella was probably unsubtle and clumsy, but the form clicked for me in a way it just hadn't when I'd done it straight. LM: A lot of your works (including Broom) have to do with this breakdown of the boundaries between the real and "games," or the characters playing the game begin to confuse the game structure with reality's structure. Again, I suppose you can see this in "Little Expressionless Animals," where'the real world outside Jeopardy is interacting with what's going on inside the game show - the boundaries between inner and outer are blurred. DFW: And, too, in the novella what's going on on the show has repercussions for everybody's lives outside it. The valence is always distributive. It's interesting that most serious art, even avant-garde stuff that's in collusion with literary theory, still refuses to acknowledge this, while serious science butters its bread with the fact that the separation of subject/observer and object/experiment is impossible. Observing a quantum phenomenon's been proven to alter the phenomenon. Fiction likes to ignore this fact's implications. We still think in terms of a story "changing" the reader's emotions, cerebrations, maybe even her life. We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story. You could argue that it affects only "her reaction to the story" or "her take on the story." But these things are the story. This is the way Barthian and Derridean post-structuralism's helped me the most as a fiction writer: once I'm done with the thing, I'm basically dead, and probably the text's dead; it becomes simply language, and language lives not just in but through the reader. The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush. LM: Let's go back for just a moment to your sense of the limits of metafiction: in both your current RCF essay and in the novella "Westward" in Girl with Curious Hair, you imply that metafiction is a game that only reveals itself, or that can't share its valence with anything outside itself - like the daily world. DFW: Well, but metafiction is more valuable than that. It helps reveal fiction as a mediated experience. Plus it reminds us that there's always a recursive component to utterance. This was important, because language's self-consciousness had always been there, but neither writers nor critics nor readers wanted to be reminded of it. But we ended up seeing why recursion's dangerous, and maybe why everybody wanted to keep linguistic self-consciousness out of the show. It gets empty and solipsistic real fast. It spirals in on itself. By the mid-seventies, I think, everything useful about the mode had been exhausted, and the crank-turners had descended. By the eighties it'd become a godawful trap. In "Westward" I got trapped one time just trying to expose the illusions of metafiction the same way metafiction had tried to expose the illusions of the pseudo-unmediated realist fiction that came before it. It was a horror show. The stuff's a permanent migraine. LM: Why is meta-metafiction a trap? Isn't that what you were doing in "Westward"? DFW: That's a Rog. And maybe "Westward"'s only real value'll be showing the kind of pretentious loops you fall into now if you fuck around with recursion. My idea in "Westward" was to do with metafiction what Moore's poetry or like DeLillo's Libra had done with other mediated myths. I wanted to get the Armageddon-explosion, the goal metafiction's always been about, I wanted to get it over with, and then out of the rubble reaffirm the idea of art being a living transaction between humans, whether the transaction was erotic or altruistic or sadistic. God, even talking about it makes me want to puke. The pretension. Twenty-five-year-olds should be locked away and denied ink and paper. Everything I wanted to do came out in the story, but it came out as just what it was: crude and naive and pretentious. LM: Of course, even The Broom of the System can be seen as a metafiction, as a book about language and about the relationship between words and reality. DFW: Think of The Broom of the System as the sensitive tale of a sensitive young WASP who's just had this mid-life crisis that's moved him from coldly cerebral analytic math to a coldly cerebral take on fiction and Austin-Wittgenstein-Derridean literary theory, which also shifted his existential dread from a fear that he was just a 98.6 [degress] calculating machine to a fear that he was nothing but a linguistic construct. This WASP's written a lot of straight humor, and loves gags, so he decides to write a coded autobio that's also a funny little post-structural gag: so you get Lenore, a character in a story who's terribly afraid that she's really nothing more than a character in a story. And, sufficiently hidden under the sex-change and the gags and theoretical allusions, I got to write my sensitive little self-obsessed bildungsroman. The biggest cackle I got when the book came out was the way all the reviews, whether they stomped up and down on the overall book or not, all praised the fact that at least here was a first novel that wasn't yet another sensitive little self-obsessed bildtingsroman. LM: Wittgenstein's work, especially the Tractatus, permeates The Broom of the System in all sorts of ways, both as content and in terms of the metaphors you employ. But in the later stages of his career, Wittgenstein concluded that language was unable to refer in the direct, referential way he'd argued it could in the Tractatus. Doesn't that mean language is a closed loop - there's no permeable membrane to allow the inside from getting through to the outside? And if that's the case, then isn't a book only a game? Or does the fact that it's a language game make it somehow different? DFW: There's a kind of tragic fall Wittgenstein's obsessed with all the way from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1922 to the Philosophical Investigations in his last years. I mean a real Book-of-Genesis-type tragic fall. The loss of the whole external world. The Tractatus's picture theory of meaning presumes that the only possible relation between language and the world is denotative, referential. In order for language both to be meaningful and to have some connection to reality, words like tree and house have to be like little pictures, representations of real trees and houses. Mimesis. But nothing more. Which means we can know and speak of nothing more than little mimetic pictures. Which divides us, metaphysically and forever, from the external world. If you buy such a metaphysical schism, you're left with only two options. One is that the individual person with her language is trapped in here, with the world out there, and never the twain shall meet. Which, even if you think language's pictures really are mimetic, is an awful lonely proposition. And there's no iron guarantee the pictures truly are mimetic, which means you're looking at solipsism. One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism. And so he trashed everything he'd been lauded for in the Tractatus and wrote the Investigations, which is the single most comprehensive and beautiful argument against solipsism that's ever been made. Wittgenstein argues that for language even to be possible, it must always be a.function of relationships between persons (that's why he spends so much time arguing against the possibility of a "private language"). So he makes language dependent on human community, but unfortunately we're still stuck with the idea that there is this world of referents out there that we can never really join or know because we're stuck in here, in language, even if we're at least all in here together. Oh yeah, the other original option. The other option is to expand the linguistic subject. Expand the self. LM: Like Norman Bombardini in Broom of the System. DFW: Yeah, Norman's gag is that he literalizes the option. He's going to forget the diet and keep eating until he grows to "infinite size" and eliminates loneliness that way. This was Wittgenstein's double bind: you can either treat language as an infinitely small dense dot, or you let it become the world - the exterior and everything in it. The former banishes you from the Garden. The latter seems more promising. If the world is itself a linguistic construct, there's nothing "outside" language for language to have to picture or refer to. This lets you avoid solipsism, but it leads right to the postmodern, post-structural dilemma of having to deny yourself an existence independent of language. Heidegger's the guy most people think got us into this bind, but when I was working on Broom of the System I saw Wittgenstein as the real architect of the postmodern trap. He died right on the edge of explicidy treating reality as linguistic instead of ontological. This eliminated solipsism, but not the horror. Because we're still stuck. The Investigation's line is that the fundamental problem of language is, quote, "I don't know my way about." If I were separate from language, if I could somehow detach from it and climb up and look down on it, get the lay of the land so to speak, I could study it "objectively," take it apart, deconstruct it, know its operations and boundaries and deficiencies. But that's not how things are. I'm in it. We're in language. Wittgenstein's not Heidegger, it's not that language is us, but we're still in it, inescapably, the same way we're in like Kant's space-time. Wittgenstein's conclusions seem completely sound to me, always have. And if there's one thing that consistently bugs me writing-wise, it's that I don't feel I really do know my way around inside language - I never seem to get the kind of clarity and concision I want. LM: Ray Carver comes immediately to mind in terms of compression and clarity, and he's obviously someone who wound up having a huge influence on your generation. DFW: Minimalism's just the other side of metafictional recursion. The basic problem's still the one of the mediating narrative consciousness. Both minimalism and metafiction try to resolve the problem in radical ways. Opposed, but both so extreme they end up empty. Recursive metafiction worships the narrative consciousness, makes it the subject of the text. Minimalism's even worse, emptier, because it's a fraud: it eschews not only self-reference but any narrative personality at all, tries to pretend there is no narrative consciousness in its text. This is so fucking American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it. LM: But did Carver really do that? I'd say his narrative voice is nearly always insistently there, like Hemingway's was. You're never allowed to forget. DFW: I was talking about minimalists, not Carver. Carver was an artist, not a minimalist. Even though he's supposedly the inventor of modem U.S. minimalism. "Schools" of fiction are for crank-turners. The founder of a movement is never part of the movement. Carver uses all the techniques and anti-styles that critics call "miniinalist," but his case is like Joyce, or Nabokov, or early Barth and Coover - he's using formal innovation in the service of an original vision. Carver invented - or resurrected, if you want to cite Hemingway - the techniques of,minimalism in the service of rendering a world he saw that nobody'd seen before. it's a grim world, exhausted and empty and full of mute, beaten people, but the minimalist techniques Carver employed were perfect for it; they created it. And minimalism for Carver wasn't some rigid aesthetic program he adhered to for its own sake. Carver's commitment was to his stories, each of them. And when minimalism didn't serve them, he blew it off. If he realized a story would be best served by expansion, not ablation, he'd expand, like he did to. "The Bath," which he later turned into a vastly superior story. He just chased the click. But at some point his "minimalist" style caught on. A movement was born, proclaimed, promulgated by the critics. Now here come the crank-turners. What's especially dangerous about Carver's techniques is that they seem so easy to imitate. It doesn't seem like each word and line and draft has been bled over. That's part of his genius. It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one. LM: For various reasons, the sixties postmodernists were heavily influenced by other art forms - television, for instance, or the cinema or painting - but in particular their notions of form and structure were often influenced by jazz. Do you think that your generation of writers has been similarly influenced by rock music? For instance, you and Mark Costello collaborated on the first book-length study of rap (Signifying Rappers); would you say that your interest in rap has anything to do with your writerly concerns? There's a way in which I can relate your writing with rap's "postmodern" features, its approach to structure and social issues. Sampling. Recontextualizing. DFW: About the only way music informs my work is in terms of rhythm; sometimes I associate certain narrators' and characters' voices with certain pieces of music. Rock music itself bores me, usually. The phenomenon of rock interests me, though, because its birth was part of the rise of mass popular media, which completely changed the ways the U.S. was unified and split. The mass media unified the country geographically for pretty much the first time. Rock helped change the fundamental splits in the U.S. from geographical splits to generational ones. Very few people I talk to understand what "generation gap" 's implications really were. Kids loved rock partly because their parents didn't, and obversely. In a massmediated nation, it's no longer North vs. South. It's under-thirty vs. overthirty. I don't think you can understand the sixties and Vietnam and loveins and LSD and the whole era of patricidal rebellion that helped inspire early postmodern fiction's whole "We're-going-to-trash-your-Beaver-Cleaver-plasticized-G.O.P -Image-of-life-in-America" attitude without understanding rock |n' roll. Because rock was and is all about busting loose, exceeding limits, and limits are usually set by parents, ancestors, older authorities. LM: But so far there aren't many others who have written anything interesting about rock-Richard Meltzer, Peter Guralnik ... DFW: There's some others. Lester Bangs. Todd Gitlin, who also does great TV essays. The thing that especially interested Mark and me about rap was the nasty spin it puts on the whole historical us-vs.-them aspect of postmodern pop. Anyway, what rock |n' roll did for the multicolored young back in the fifties and sixties, rap seems to be doing for the young black urban community. It's another attempt to break free of precedent and constraint. But there are contradictions in rap that seem perversely to show how, in an era where rebellion itself is a commnodity used to sell other commodities, the whole idea of rebelling against white corporate culture is not only impossible but incoherent. Today you've got black rappers who make their reputation rapping about Kill the White Corporate Tools, and are then promptly signed by white-owned record corporations, and not only feel no shame about "selling out" but then release platinum albums about not only Killing White Tools but also about how wealthy the rappers now are after signing their record deal! You've got music here that both hates the white GOP values of the Reaganoid eighties and extols a gold-and-BMW materialism that makes Reagan look like a fucking Puritan. Violently racist and anti-Semitic black artists being co-opted by white-owned, often Jewish-owned record labels, and celebrating that fact in their art. The tensions are delicious. I can feel the spittle starting again just thinking about it. LM: This is another example of the dilemma facing avant-garde wannabes today - the appropriation (and ensuing "taming") of rebellion by the system people like Jameson are talking about. DFW: I don't know much about Jameson. To me rap's the ultimate distillate of the U.S. eighties, but if you really step back and think not just about rap's politics but about white enthusiasm for it, things get grim. Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride. We seem to be in an era when oppression and exploitation no longer bring a people together and solidify loyalties and help everyone rise above his individual concems. Now the rap response is more like "You've always exploited us to get rich, so now goddamn it we're going to exploit ourselyes and get rich." The irony, self-pity, self-hatred are now conscious, celebrated. This has to do with what we were talking about regarding "Westward" and postmodern recursion. If I have a real enemy, a patriarch for my patricide, it's probably Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon. Because, even though their self-consciousness and irony and anarchism served valuable purposes, were indispensable for their times, their aesthetic's absorption by U.S. commercial culture has had appalling consequences for writers and everyone else. The TV essay's really about how poisonous postmodern irony's become. You see it in David Letterman and Gary Shandling and rap. But you also see it in fucking Rush Limbaugh, who may well be the Antichrist. You see it in T. C. Boyle and Bill Vollmann and Lorrie Moore. It's pretty much all there is to see in your pal Mark Leyner. Leyner and Limbaugh are the nineties' twin towers of postmodern irony, hip cynicism, a hatred that winks and nudges you and pretends it's just kidding. Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That's what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets us up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicities. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? Sure. Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff's mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules for art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, then what do we do? Irony's useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady's bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage. LM: Humbert Humbert, the rutting gorilla, painting the bars of his own cage with such elegance. In fact, Nabokov's example raises the issue of whether cynicism and irony are really a given. In Pale Fire and Lolita, there's an irony about these structures and inventions and so forth, but this reaction is deeply humanistic rather than being merely ironic. This seems true in Barthelme, for instance, or Stanley Elkin, Barth. Or Robert Coover. The other aspect has to do with the presentation of themselves or their consciousness. The beauty and the magnificence of human artistry isn't merely ironic. DFW: But you're talking about the click, which is something that can't just be bequeathed from our postmodern ancestors to their descendants. No question that some of the early postmodernists and ironists and anarchists and absurdists did magnificent work, but you can't pass the click from one generation to another like a baton. The click's idiosyncratic, personal. The only stuff a writer can get from an artistic ancestor is a certain set of aesthetic values and beliefs, and maybe a set of formal techniques that might - just might - help the writer to chase his own click. The problem is that, however misprised it's been, what's been passed down from the postmodern heyday is sarcasm, cynicism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct, and a terrible penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness instead of an ambition not just to dagnose and ridicule but to redeem. You've got to understand that this stuff has permeated the culture. It's become our language; we're so in it we don't even see that it's one perspective, one among many possible ways of seeing. Postmodern irony's become our environmgnt. LM: Mass culture is another very "real" part of that environment - rock music or television or sports, talk shows, game shows, whatever; that's the milieu you and I live in, I mean that's the world ... DFW: I'm always stumped when critics regard references to popular culture in serious fiction as some sort of avant-garde stratagem. In terms of the world I live in and try to write about, it's inescapable. Avoiding any reference to the pop would mean either being retrograde about what's "permissible" in serious art or else writing about some other world. LM: You mentioned earlier that writing parts of Broom of the System felt like recreation for you - a relief from doing technical philosophy. Are you ever able to shift into that "recreational mode" of writing today? Is it still "play" for you? DFW: It's not play anymore in the sense of laughs and yucks and non-stop thrills. The stuff in Broom that's informed by that sense of play ended up pretty forgettable, I think. And it doesn't sustain the enterprise for very long. And I've found the really tricky discipline to writing is trying to play without getting overcome by insecurity or vanity or ego. Showing the reader that you're smart or funny or talented or whatever, trying to be liked, integrity issues aside, this stuff just doesn't have enough motivational calories in it to carry you over the long haul. You've got to discipline yourself to talk out of the part of you that loves the thing, loves what you're working on. Maybe that just plain loves. (I think we might need woodwinds for this part, LM.) But sappy or no, it's true. The last couple years have been pretty arid for me good-work-wise, but the one way I've progressed I think is I've gotten convinced that there's something kind of timelessly vital and sacred about good writing. This thing doesn't have that much to do with talent, even glittering talent like Leyner's or serious talent like Daitch's. Talent's just an instrument. It's like having a pen that works instead of one that doesn't. I'm not saying I'm able to work consistently out of the premise, but it seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art's heart's purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It's got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved. I know this doesn't sound hip at all. I don't know. But it seems like one of the things really great fiction-writers do - from Carver to Chekhov to Flannery O'Connor, or like the Tolstoy of "The Death of Ivan Ilych" or the Pynchon of Gravity's Rainbow - is give the reader something. The reader walks away from real art heavier than she came to it. Fuller. All the attention and engagement and work you need to get from the reader can't be for your benefit; it's got to be for hers. What's poisonous about the cultural environment today is that it makes this so scary to try to carry out. Really good work probably comes out of a willingness to disclose yourself, open yourself up in spiritual and emotional ways that risk making you look banal or melodramatic or naive or unhip or sappy, and to ask the reader really to feel something. To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this. And the effort actually to do it, not just talk about it, requires a kind of courage I don't seem to have yet. I don't see that kind of courage in Mark Leyner or Emily Prager or Brett Ellis. I sometimes see flickers of it in Vollmann and Daitch and Nicholson Baker and Amy Homes and Jon Franzen. It's weird - it has to do with quality but not that much with sheer writing talent. It has to do with the click. I used to think the click came from, "Holy shit, have I ever just done something good." Now it seems more like the real click's more like, "Here's something good, and on one side I don't much matter, and on the other side the individual reader maybe doesn't much matter, but the thing's good because there's extractable value here for both me and the reader." Maybe it's as simple as trying to make the writing more generous and less ego-driven. LM: Music genres like the blues or jazz or even rock seem to have their ebb and flow in terms of experimentalism, but in the end they all have to come back to the basic elements that comprise the genre, even if these are very simple (like the blues). The trajectory of Bruce Springsteen's career comes to mind. What interests fans of any genre is that they really know the formulas and the elements, so they also can respond to the constant, built-in meta-games and intertextualities going on in all genre forms. In a way the responses are aesthetically sophisticated in the sense that it's the infinite variations-on-a-theme that interests them. I mean, how else can they read a million of these things (real genre fans are not stupid people necessarily)? My point is that people who really care about the forms - the serious writers and readers in fiction - don't want all the forms broken, they want variation that allows the essence to emerge in new ways, Blues fans could love Hendrix because he was still playing the blues. I think you're seeing a greater appreciation for fiction's rules and limits among postmodern writers of all generations. It's almost a relief to realize that all babies were not tossed out with the bathwater back in the sixties. DFW: You're probably right about appreciating limits. The sixties' movement in poetry to radical free verse, in fiction to radically experimental recursive forms - their legacy to my generation of would-be artists is at least an incentive to ask very seriously where literary art's true relation to limits should be. We've seen that you can break any or all of the rules without getting laughed out of town, but we've also seen the toxicity that anarchy for its own sake can yield. It's often useful to dispense with standard formulas, of course, but it's just as often valuable and brave to see what can be done within a set of rules - which is wby formal poetry's so much more interesting to me than free verse. Maybe our touchstone now should be G. M. Hopkins, who made up his own set of formal constraints and then blew everyone's footwear off from inside them. There's something about free play within an ordered and disciplined structure that resonates for readers. And there's something about complete caprice and flux that's deadening. LM: I suspect this is why so many of the older generation of postmodernists - Federman, Sukenick, Steve Katz and others (maybe even Pynchon fits in here) - have recently written books that rely on more traditional forms. That's why it seems important right now for your generation to go back to traditional forms and re-examine and rework those structures and formulas. This is already happening with some of the best younger writers in Japan. You recognize that if you just say, "Fuck it, let's throw everything out!" there's nothing in the bathtub to make the effort worthwhile. DFW: For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you're in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it's great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat's-away-let's-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes, and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody's got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there's a cigarette burn on the couch, and you're the host and it's your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It's not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it's 3:00 a.m. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody's thrown up in the umbrella stand and we're wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back - I mean, what's wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren't ever coming back - which means we're going to have to be the parents. -- End --
NOTES_
Reprinted at http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_wallace.html

Keywords: Academic; General; Novelists_Interviews; Interview; Wallace, David Foster_Interviews

Olsen:1993yr ~

ABSTRACT_
Source: The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993 v13 n2 p199(17). Title: Termite art, or Wallace's Wittgenstein. (David Foster Wallace) Author: Lance Olsen Abstract: David Foster Wallace differs from most contemporary writers in that he does not use post-structuralist literary devices for the sake of using post-structuralist literary devices. Like Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical pondering, which greatly influenced Wallace, he plays theoretical games in order to address real problems. Neither Wittgenstein nor Wallace takes anything for granted, but their cynicism is not the end, but the means to the end, unlike many contemporary authors and philosophers. Subjects: Philosophy in literature - Analysis People: Wallace, David Foster - Criticism and interpretation Wittgenstein, Ludwig - Influence Electronic Collection: A13952361 RN: A13952361 Full Text COPYRIGHT 1993 Review of Contemporary Fiction If you do know that there is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest It's a myth that truth is stranger than fiction. Actually they're about equally strange. Reality Termites vs. the White Elephants Might I not believe that once, without knowing it, perhaps in a state of unconsciousness, I was taken away from the earth - that other people even know this, but do not mention it to me? The more you live with a pomo text, the less pomo it becomes. Think, for instance, of your first magic-carpet ride through William Gibson's Neuromancer back in 1984. Of the downright glee you experienced in the face of that white-hot language, roller-coaster narrative speed, spaghetti-convolution plot brain-burning dive into that resplendently amazing realm of virtual reality called cyberspace. Of the kick in the head you got realizing here was a writer dealing with subjects you just never saw dealt with in fiction before: computer hackers jacking into consoles with all the intensity of wall-banging sex, multinationals making ideas like national boundaries seem antique as bell-bottoms, affectless cyber-outlaws creeping along the undersides of environmentally and morally comatose cityscapes. Only then you went back and read it again. Maybe you even found yourself writing an essay trying to explain just how jazzed up about it you got. Maybe you even tried to teach it. And the thing was (don't get me wrong here) it remained a great book. It still grabbed you by the the, still spoke to a whole generation of kids that didn't just read science fiction but actually lived it. But you know that language? Somehow it seemed more transparent the second time through, didn't it? You picked up the rhythms easier, intuitively learned Gibson's sleight of hand with those jump-cuts, how he introduced future-words (the Sprawl, a coffin) on one page and then slipped in the definition of them (the Boston-Atlanta metropolitan axis, a small tubular hotel room) a couple of pages down the line. And the narrative pace? It was still there, except now you knew where it was going. You had this sense of logical movement. Plus you'd been watching MTV and reading Kathy Acker and going to Cronenberg films an extra year, and so that pace didn't seem quite as fast as it once had. And what were you thinking of about the plot? It's just this simple love affair between these two artificial intelligences. No big deal. Throw in a heist which you've seen a million times on TV and you've got it. The virtual reality bit? Well, now there's The Lawnmower Man. You might as well go to McDonald's for all the innovation you'll find there. And computer hackers are just those people you read about in Mondo 2000 all the time. And who doesn't know that national boundaries are falling apart, that multinationals are taking over the power vacuum? You watch CNN, right? Not to mention you have this real bad feeling, looking at those techno-sleezoid characters again, that you've seen them all before somewhere. Which you have. Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, and the other Brat Packers have done the same affectless-amoral-urban-underbelly-dweller number more than I can: to think about even if they didn't set it in a near-future world. And was there really a time when environmental destruction seemed a provocatively new topic? All I'm saying is that people like to make sense of things. It's in their nature. How long can any of us, after all, actually five in a state of total Pynchonesque anti-paranoia, Baudrillardian schizophrenia? We'd never get our essays written on time, our magazines published, our classes taught, our exams graded, our children raised. The more we experience a text, pomo or otherwise the more we discover patterns, shapes, connections, resonances, systems. These help us interpret it, make it our own.(3) Granted. Maybe this is yesterday's news. Fine. And yet and yet and yet: the thing that most people seem to forget with respect to a pomo text is that, when all this cosmos-making-out-of-chaos is said and done, there's always a certain remainder staring you back between the eyeballs. Some mystery waiting in the wings. This constellation of important narrative, ideological, and sundry other gaps. Why, for example, returning to Gibson's book for a second, is that intergalactic artificial intelligence mentioned at the end, short-circuiting closure at the moment of closure? What role does it play in the plot that's just transpired? Why, as we learn in Count Zero, the second installment in the matrix trilogy, does Wintermute-Neuromancer fly apart into various subprograms or voodoo gods or viruses (what are they, anyway?) at the very instant it seems to become unified? Who really killed Linda Lee, the protagonist's girlfriend, and why? The point being that, paranoid as we might like to be, essentially these modernist visitors in this essentially pomo neighborhood, frantically trying to mapmake, connect anything with anything, neutralize the radical charge within this pomo text or that, the Tasmanian devil of anti-paranoia is always waiting to join our dance. And when it starts spinning and spitting, epistemological lopsidedness and ontological weirdness can't be far behind. Which is to say a pomo text can always become less pomo, but it can never become modern. The Waste Land you can (at least in the best of all possible worlds) explain when all's done and said. Neuromancer or those crazed fictions in Mark Leyner's My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist or the chronology of Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy or pretty much anything about Burrough's The Ticket That Exploded, you can't. You just can't. Which isn't, it goes without saying, to say you can't explain anything about them. This isn't an either/or situation, but a continuum we're talking about here.) Pomo art, then, or maybe just a specialized kind of pomo art, is "termite art," a term Gibson first introduced me to a couple of years ago and one he borrowed from a 1962 essay by the iconoclastic film critic Manny Farber, long before the word postmodern started getting lots of airplay, and even longer before it started sounding (as it now does) sort of dated and maybe even kind of dumb.(4) In that essay, Farber distinguishes between two kinds of creation. The first, for which he holds nothing but contempt, he calls white elephant art. This is the sort that embraces the idea of a well-regulated, logical area. It's embodied in the films of Francois Truffaut. Proponents of this quasi-neoclassical school produce tedious pieces that are "weight-density-structure-polish amalgam[s] associated with self-aggrandizing masterworks" (136). The second kind of creation, which Farber endorses, he calls termite art. This is the kind that stands opposed to high culture, welcomes freedom and multiplicity, is embodied in the films of Laurel and Hardy. Proponents of this school produce pieces that go "always forward eating [their] own boundaries, and, likely as not, leave nothing in [their] path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity" (135-36). This is a stubbornly self-involved mode of creation concerned with process over progress, question over solution, complex ambiguity over cry explanation.(5) A mode, that is, that leads us to Ludwig Wittgenstein and David Foster Wallace. Avant-Pop and the Scavenger Belly "What?" Wittgenstein and Wallace share a certain quality of mind that may helpfully be thought of as termite consciousness. (Sure: there's a zillion things that separate them; these it seems to me, are basically uninteresting.) What unites them is that they don't jark around with thought-experiments for the sake of jacking around with thought-experiments. They don't play games, aesthetic or philosophical, just to play games, as one might (perhaps tenuously) claim about people like Sollers or Derrida, or (much less tenuously) like untold numbers of fashion-conscious critics, theorists, and other academics in the course of amassing their tenure and promotion files. No: they play games in order to wrestle with very real problems, in order to attempt to work through the world. "What is the use of studying philosophy," Wittgenstein once asked a student, "if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life?"(7) This said by the Viennese philosopher (1889-1951) who, as Wallace (1962-) himself wrote, "by all evidence lived in personal torment over the questions too many of his academic followers have made into elaborate empty exercise" (Plenum 219-20). Who was gay. Who was an indifferent student, an ascetic, a soldier, an aviator. Who, with his friend David Pinset (to whom the musically structured Tractatus is dedicated), had a repertoire of forty Schubert songs which Pinset would perform on the piano while Wittgenstein whistled along. Who in 1913 submitted to hypnosis hoping the resulting trance would allow him to arrive at clear answers to questions of logic. Who lived for more than a year secluded Thoreau-like in a but on a farm in Norway; considered entering monastic life; donated large sums of inherited money to needy Ausatian poets and artists, Rilke and Trakl among them; and published exactly one book and one brief paper in the course of his life. Who was a grade-school teacher until he began to worry his intellectual influence on children was probably harmful. Who disliked universities and academia, and who, like Kafka, was relieved to discover he was dying. Both Wittgenstein and Wallace, along with a motley termite crew of others that includes the likes of Handke and Barthelme, take nothing for granted. Doubt is their cardinal virtue. Wittgenstein may have begun as a modernist searching through his picture theory for what can be said honestly about experience. He ended up, however, drifting in a post-Tractatus twilight zone wondering if he could be even relatively sure he possessed a hand. The movement from the Tractatus to On Certainty is the movement from cubism to assemblage, from Eliot to Acker. And now, via David Foster Wallace, one of his intellectual great-grandchildren, Wittgenstein has been absorbed into the shark belly of the avant-pop. Open that belly, and you'll find everything in it. Not that Wallace has much choice about whether or not to critique what he uncovers there. I mean, he is what he uncovers there. The avant-pop's as much a part of him as the color of his eyes. "Popular culture," says the narrator of "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," "is the symbolic representation of what people already believe" (Girl 27 1). Like many younger writers who shop in the global K-Mart these days, Wallace is made of the stuff. He purchases Andy Warhol's aesthetics of trash and Laurie Anderson's bright ironic media-infiltrated being. Thomas Pynchon's hip convoluted language, cartoonishly named comic characters (Judith Prietht, Rick Vigorous, Wang-Dang Lang, et al.), and maximization of form (even Wallace's short stories are long). Don Delillo's witty thematization of television and early T. C. Boyle's linguistic flash and offkilter realities. Guy Davenport's and William Vollmann's interlacing of real and fictional characters in order to puzzle out the historicity of both, as in "Lyndon," where literature becomes politics and politics literature. Barth's richly reflexive metafiction ("Westward" is, Wallace tells us on the copyright page of Girt, "written in the margins" of "Lost in the Funhouse") and Donald Barthelme's tagless dialogue, culture of urban dreck, and backbroke sentences such as "Was me whispered to Simple Ranger, |Minogue, T. Rex, first public display since '67, crisis wool,' and the Ranger nodded, his eyes more full of knowing than sky, a second" (Girl 137) that grow by accretion and destruction like barnacles on a wreck or a rock. 17.3.52 Does my telephone call to New York strengthen my conviction that the earth exists? In a letter to me dated 17 March 1992, Wallace remarked that his father studied with Norman Malcolm, one of Wittgenstein's students, at Cornell. Wallace himself, a math-philosophy major at Amherst took a seminar on Wittgenstein taught by William Kennick, another student of the philosopher's. He was really interested in it and "deeply taken" with the Tractatus, but felt "the Investigations were silly because they retracted the cold formal beauty of the Tractatus (the Tractatus' first proposition is |The world is everything that is the case,' which along with Crane's |The Open Boat' 's |None of the men knew the color of the sky' is the most beautiful opening line in western lit)." Which led him in the summer of 1990 to publish a twenty-two-page essay in the Review of Contemporary Fiction on David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress that, besides giving Markson's book a sharp, thorough, and sometimes critical reading (Markson, among other things, doesn't get women right, Wallace says), serves as a lucid introduction to many of Wittgenstein's central concepts and clearly establishes Wallace as an understanding and self-proclaimed "fan" (218) of the philosopher. Lenore Sr.'s Measurements "Suppose Gramma tells me really convincingly that all that really exists of my life is what can be said about it?" In that same letter Wallace explained that Lenore Sr., Lenore Beadsman's great-grandmother, "is based loosely, physically, on Alice Ambrose, a very old former Smith professor who lived near me and had been one of the students whose notes were comprised by Witt's Blue and Brown books." Lenore Sr. is a "small, birdish, sharp-featured thing ... a hard woman, a cold woman, a querulous and thoroughly selfish woman, one with vast intellectual pretensions and ... probably commensurate gifts" who lacks a body thermometer and hence has to be kept in excruciatingly hot rooms, thermostats locked at 98.6 - a swell metaphor both for her cold-blooded hermetically sealed life and, quite possibly, for the cold-blooded hermetically sealed lives of logical positivists everywhere. In the 1920s she studied at Campbridge "under a mad crackpot genius named Wittgenstein, who believed that everything was words," as Rick Vigorous not-too-kindly puts it (Broom 73). She consequently serves as a slightly skewed, gently gibing introduction to Wittgenstein's philosophy. For her, whose prize possession is an autographed copy of the Investigations, as for her mentor, language is a system of symbols that filters experience. We only know our lives through what we can say about them. Our understanding of the world arises from our ability to talk about it. Language shapes what we perceive and how we perceive. Moreover (and here Wittgenstein foreshadows Derrida & Co.) both the post-Tractatus philosopher and Lenore Sr. believe language possesses no meaning except in how it's used at specific times in specific places in specific linguistic contexts. The use of a word or a sentence is the language game in which it plays a part. "Meaning," as Lenore Jr. says, "is nothing more or less than its function" (149). Hence the central metaphor of Wallace's first novel: the broom. Lenore Jr. relates how when she was a child Lenore Sr. showed her a broom and asked which was more fundamental to it, the bristles or the handle. Lenore Jr. answered the former. "| Aha,' Lenore Sr. says, "|that's because you want to sweep with the broom, isn't it? It's because of what you want the broom for, isn't it?' ... And that if what we wanted a broom for was to break windows, then the handle was clearly the fundamental essence of the broom.... Meaning as use' (149-50). But what happens if your life has no use? Well, then it has no meaning. And that's just the problem Leonore Sr. finds herself in. She's been tucked away in the Shaker Heights Nursing Home in Ohio. Twenty-four-year-old Lenore Jr. (who, by the way, was also a philosophy major in college) and a few other patients are her sole visitors. She's stuck, in other words, in a stultifyingly static existence. Which explains the main plot of Broom: Lenore Sr. attempts to invigorate her life with use and therefore meaning by proposing to Stonecipher Beadsman III, Lenore Jr.'s dad and chief of the Stonecipheco baby food company, some research into a drug that speeds development of (what else?) language skills and comprehension in kids. See, Gretchen Yingst, one of Lenore Sr.'s cronies at the home, had a husband who used to work for Consolidated Gland Derivatives in Akron. He came up with this cattle-endocrine derivative on his own, writing the results down on Batman tablets before his death. (Does this sound like a Pynchonesque plot, or what?) Stonecipher goes for the idea but Lenore Sr., never exactly a Stonecipher groupie, reconsiders and steals back the tablets and test sample which she next feeds to Lenore Jr.'s pet cockatiel, Vlad the Impaler, with predictably weird results, giving the bird the gift of gab, or at least gabble. Then she absconds to the phone tunnels beneath the Bombardini Building, aided and abetted, apparently, by Dr. Jay, Lenore Jr.'s and Rick Vigorous's psychologist, where there is at least fleeting evidence that she eventually dies Broom 463). There is even more to that broom, though. The word broom is related to the Anglo-Saxon word brom, Low German bram Dutch brem - the last two of which, my Webster's informs me, are closely allied to bramble, a word that derives from the Sanskrit bhram, meaning to be confused. Thus we're talking in a fairly roundabout way of a novel called something like The Confusion of the System - an appropriate, if unlikely intentional, title. Language is the primary system of this text, and confusion of language and other corollary systems (much to Lenore Sr.'s and Wittgenstein's chagrin) is the wrench in the works. Wittgenstein understood his life project as explaining the nature of sentences which, early on in his career, he believed models or pictures of reality. Each element in a sentence, he thought corresponded to the state of affairs it represented, making the universe a pretty unambiguous place, though not everything that could be understood could be said: certain religious moments, for instance, maybe love, and so on. Wittgenstein thereby saw one function of philosophy as demarcating what cannot be said by pristinely presenting what can be said via his picture theory of language, along the way quite possibly uncovering lots of effors that'd given rise to various philosophical doctrines. His basic concern, then, was the relationship of language to world, and his world started out, as Wallace comments in his essay on Markson, "to be logical heaven," but ended up "a metaphysical hell" (223). Tbe more post-Tractatus Wittgenstein examined the relationship between language and world, the more he intuited language didn't really contain the clear-cut structure he'd been hoping for. In fact, he began seeing the philosophical ideal he'd put forward in the Tractatus (1922) as an increasingly dubious one. As his life went on and he began the Investigations (not published until just after his death), he began to get the impression there wasn't so much a universe of meaning out there as a pluriverse of meanings. By granting that the meaning of a word or sentence is in its use, rather than, say, in its reference to a stable and knowable world, the hope of a mythically pure inspection of reality began to gunk up, and the idea of totality began to break down. And it's a short step from thinking context determines meaning to arriving at the doorstep of philosophical relativism. Question: Where then important moral and ethical values Wittgenstein sought in his daily life find a place? Answer: Nowhere. Result: A broom in the system. Now it's true Wallace from time to time echoes the methodical, clean, subject-verb-predicate sentences of the Tractatus, as in these lines from the opening of "Little Expressionless Animals": It's 1976. The sky is low and full of clouds. The gray clouds are bulbous and wrinkled and shiny. The sky looks cerebral. Under the sky is a field, in the wind. A pale highway runs beside the field. Lots of cars go by. One of the cars stops by the side of the highway. Two small children are brought out of the car by the young woman with a loose face. A man at the wheel of the car stares straight ahead. (Girl 3) Thus at least nodding toward a picture theory of the language that takes us back, not only to Wittgenstein, but also to people like Carver, Beattie, Hemingway, all the way to Flaubert's doorstep, and Stendhal's before him, who believed scientistically that language was a mirror held up to experience. This is the impulse that finds voice in a character like Faye in "Little Expressionless Animals," who doesn't like the complexity of lyrical language because "it beats around bushes. Even when i like it, it's nothing more than a really oblique way of saying the obvious, it seems like" (13); and Bruce in "Here and There," who wants to be a "poet of technology" and thinks literature will get progressively more mathematical and technical as time goes by.... Meaning will be clean.... No more ... warm clover breath, heaving bosoms, histories as symbol, colossi; no more man, fist to brow or palm to decolletage [sic], understood in terms of a thumping, thudding, heated Nature, itself conceived as colored, shaped, invested with odor, lending meaning in virtue of qualities. No more qualities. No more metaphors. (155) Ezra Pound's imagism haunts this idea, hard, clear and concentrated as does, of course, the early Ludwig. And Lenore Sr. would just adore it. Only Bruce's story ultimately turns out to be a critique of Tractatus mentality, not an endorsement of it. Bruce is more in love with a picture of his girlfriend than with the girl herself, heartless guy that he is, with the representation of a thing than with the thing. When he moves from ideal picture theory to grubby practice, however, trying to fix a broken stove, he soon realizes the stove is like the world: "a crude piece of equipment" (171). Even if Wallace's mind tells him the first sentence of the Tractatus is the most beautiful opening line in Western lit, his gut tells him otherwise: that the world is an enigma, the universe a perplexity. Consequently his sentences usually sound more like this one from forty-two-year-old Rick Vigorous who's visiting his alma mater: As I joined the serpentine line of students walking up the ungentle hill to the Art and Science Buildings, all of us falling into the vaguely floppy, seal-like gait of the hurried hill-climber, most of us seals apparently late for class, one of us late for an appointment with a tiny ocean of his own past, stretching away and down beside the carved dock of his childhood, an ocean into which this particular seal was going to pour a strong (hopefully unitary) stream of his own presence, to prove that he still is, and so was - that is, provided of course the bathroom and toilet and stall were still there - as I joined the line of seals in short pants and loose short-sleeved shirts and boat shoes and backpacks, and as I felt the fear that accompanied and was in a way caused by the intensity of the wash of feelings and desires and so on that accompanied even the thought of a silly men's room in a silly building at a silly college where a sad silly boy had spent four years twenty years ago, as I felt all these things , there occurred to me a fact which I think now as I sit up in bed in our motel room, writing, the television softly on, the sharp-haired object of my adoration, and absolute center of my entire existence asleep and snoring softly in the bed beside me, a fact which I think now is undeniably true, the truth being that Amherst College in the 1960's was for me a devourer of the emotional middle, a marker of psychic canyons, a whacker of the pendulum of Mood with the paddle of Immoderation. (Broom 206) That's 283 words there, and more labyrinthine clauses, parenthetical phrases with parenthetical phrases, chaotic cataloging, linguistic indirection, and confusing syntactical structures than I care to count. Nor is its information density, as somebody might be inclined to argue, simply a revelation of Rick's mixed-up neurotic mind, though it is, certainly, in part, that. No: it's just how Wallace writes most of the time. Check out, for further instance, the following 122-word knot, an excerpt from a book review Wallace wrote for the Los Angeles Times, and which the New Yorker, predictably bemused, reprinted under the title "Sentences We Hated to Come to the End Of": If pop is the argument between sub-culture (as conceived by the cultural outsider when that outsider happens to be a genius) and the redemptive, relentlessly consuming appetite of the community, then the arc of Elvis's career, from starving white trash to musical insurgent to heartthrob to B-movie mainstay to corpulent Vegas schmaltz-king "performing a kind of enormous victory rather than winning it" ("Mystery Train"), limns also the living and fatal paradox of all popular U.S. art: that this art, which is produced via raw difference, the special fecund anguish of non-inclusion, attacks, seduces and is devoured by a mass-art market that redeems and even deifies the artist while it drains his productions of the denial and pain that is its voice.(8) I had to read that three times to get a bead on it, and even then I was a little queasy. The point being that these sorts of "sentences" are maximalist effusions that correspond not to some mathematically pure realm of being but rather to some multidimensional space of becoming intricate as the involved surface of a brain. Like all good termite art, they continually move forward gnawing away at their own perimeters, revealing themselves as ardent and disheveled processes rather than cool and prim products, reflecting nothing if not their author's (and characters') befuddlement before language and world. Strategic Misrepresentation 101 Suppose some adult had told a child that he had been on the moon. The child tells me the story, and I say it was only a joke, the man hadn't been on the moon; no one has ever been on the moon; the moon is a long way off and it is impossible to climb up there or fly there. - If now the child insists, saying perhaps there is a way of getting there which I don't know, etc., what reply would I make to him? Only they're also funny, those sentences of Wallace's. That's important to remind ourselves every now and then. If Wittgenstein's (at least early Wittgenstein's) consciousness is the harvest of that maudlin Eliotish-Rilkean seriousness and sense of disorientation and cosmic angst the idea of modernism conjures up for a lot of us (pace Joyce and Picasso), then Wallace's consciousness is the harvest of that carnivalesque comic vision and ironic Monty Pythonesque sense of often taking nothing (including itself) very seriously many of us tend to associate with the anti-idea of postmodernism. And yet, despite this apparently important distinction between philosopher and writer, Wallace continually enacts Wittgenstein's interrogation of the efficacy of language in his texts. The mechanisms might be different; the motive is much the same. Remember, by way of illustration, how many people in Broom misunderstand each other and misrepresent themselves. Lenore Jr., raised in a family that made "just a huge deal out of what got said" (399), and Mr. Bloemker, administrator of the Shaker Heights Nursing Home go at it for over two pages trying to define what missing means with respect to Lenore Sr., while Lenore Jr. and Rick go at it a lot longer than that trying to determine whether Lenore Jr. actually loves him or not. That cockatiel, Vlad the Impaler, mouths pronouncements the Reverend Hart Lee Sykes believes profound but which are really just this side of goofy gibberish. LaVache, Lenore Jr.'s one-legged cynic of a brother at Amherst, deliberately misnames his phone lymph node so he can (sort of) honestly tell his father he doesn't own a phone, while he rechristens his friends with aliases like Heat and Breather because, he claims, their real names don't matter much anymore. An important part of the college experience, he adds, "is learning how to lie. |Strategic misrepresentation,' we call it" (237). He wants people to refer to him as the Antichrist instead of Stoney because Stoney, his family handle, makes him part of a system he'd just as soon not be associated with. And that's just for starters. Meaning may be use. But what happens if use becomes unclear, either accidentally or on purpose? What happens if someone hands you a broom yet doesn't tell you what you're supposed to do with it, and you have this sinking feeling that sweeping is only one option among many? What happens if use (and thereby meaning) edges toward some borderline state, toward the nebulous, toward the pure plain puzzling? Well, so much for that immaculate picture theory of language. Confusion of the system. Or, in this case, systems: of language, of meaning, of identity, of narrative, of reality, of, well, you name it. Everything in Wallace keeps coming down to this. Near the end of his life Wittgenstein wrote: "All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life" (On Certainty 16e). We can't escape them. We're all a part of them, from traffic lights to university committees, from paying taxes to psychotherapy sessions. We'd like to think these systems bring the world into clearer focus for us. Except they don't seem to hold up as well as we might hope under any sort of even mildly intense scrutiny. Take identity. We're sometimes under the delusion we know who we really are, if you can imagine such a thing. We assume our Is are the same at 7:00 a.m. as 7:00 p.m., Monday as Friday, March as May, 1963 as 1991 from our perspective and from the perspectives of others. Only Wallace, hearkening back to post-Tractatus Wittgenstein, thematically challenges this notion though a series of nice images he generates in Broom. Lenore Jr. is briefly bewildered, as a case in point, when the new nurse at Shaker Heights thinks Lenore Jr.'s making a bad joke when she announces she's Lenore Beadsman, there to see Lenore Beadsman - save for the fact that she is, in a manner of speaking, Lenore Beadsman, there to see Lenore Beadsman. A more pronounced illustration of identity investigation is the ritual the Spaniard family acts out before the laser disk playing on their TV set: they don masks and tell a tale about how, when they talk of themselves as part of a family, they both feel part of a larger whole (a whimsical nod in the direction of Wittgenstein's "family resemblances," perhaps?) and like they've lost parts of themselves (what's under those masks, anyway, the "real" them? but what's that supposed to mean? and how many layers of masks, figuratively and otherwise, do they each possess?). More pronounced still, don't forget Lenore Jr.'s other brother, John, who's admitted to Lake Lady Medical Center in Chicago because he's convinced he's not himself anymore but a perpetual game-show contestant - a super metaphor for all of us because, in a sense, none of us is us: we're all, in the world accordi ng to Wittgenstein and Wallace, contestants in a multifaceted system (or, better, multifaceted systems) of language games. Except in Wallace's universe it's not always clear who's winning. Or who's playing what. Or what, exactly, the rules to the game an; supposed to be. Gramma Says "Gramma says any telling automatically becomes a kind of system, that controls everybody involved.... Every telling creates and limits and defines." No wonder, then, that Wallace foregrounds the very act of narrative in his work. Telling, after all, is one of the great pattern-making gestures, a method of testing, labeling, controlling. It's the element in which people, situations, ideas, etc., have their existence, the element by which we formulate our daily commotions: and then, and then, and then. "The truth," Dr. Jay claims, "is that there's no difference between a life and a story" (120). LaVache reminds Lenore Jr. that Lenore Sr. believes "that you're only real insofar as you're told about, so that to the extent that you're real you're controlled, and thus not in control, so that you're more like a sort of character than a person, really - and of course Lenore would say the two are the same, now, wouldn't she?" (249). She would. And so it's fitting that many of the players in Broom are obsessed with getting the scripts that are their lives right, but maybe none are so obsessed as Rick, a kind of pomo Scheherazade who works, suitably enough, for a publishing firm and as the fiction editor of a small literary review. He tells Lenore Jr. stories, often not his own, often in bed, often with the point that things can always get worse: babies can die without warning, cars crash through ceilings and kill the innocent, malicious psychologists cheat with wives while mute blind paraplegic husbands lie helplessly by. He also tries creating some tales of his own, as with "Love," which involves the discovery that a neighbor has been taking photos of and collecting artifacts belonging to the little boy next door (unbeknownst both to the little boy and his parents) as part of some dark infatuation - a story, by the way, like several by Rick, that distantly echoes his own infatuation with Lenore Jr. And Lenore Jr. tells not a few stories herself, many having to do with an attempt to figure out the plot she seems to have been unwillingly written into, some (again that word) Pynchonesque conspiracy Lenore Jr. feels herself Oedipa Maasishly to have entered the moment Lenore Sr. vanished, but which may be nothing more than a series of coincidences, or the product of an overactive neurotic imagination. In fact, it's all a little like the game of Telephone, isn't it, where, by the time the message (from Lenore Sr.? Leonore Jr.'s father? whom?) reaches Leonore Jr., it's traversed so much white noise it's become nigh indecipherable. In which case those malfunctioning phones at Frequent and Vigorous, symbols of communications gone awry, are fitting images indeed for the novel itself which is one grand system of communication and which tells story after story, white noise sizzling in its master network as well, as it leaps around achronologically, shifts from third-person POV to first-, comprises whole chapters out of Barthelmesque swatches of untagged dialogue only to introduce the characters speaking them later, months from straight fiction to transcript to monologue to journal entry to magazine article to legal contract to duty log, upsetting traditional narrative boundaries along the way, hybridizing genres, and thereby producing the novelistic equivalent of philosophical relativism. Not to mention that it ends in mid-sentence, some skier caught just as he lifts off the jump, unsure how he'll land, some final broom of the system, though we surely know (we think) the word that finishes the sentence that finishes the novel: it just has to be the only real Wittgensteinian choice: word (467). One of the most significant narrative systems that hums through Wallace's project is television, NBC to MTV, Ronald McDonald to David Letterman, Merv Griffin to Jack Lord. A character in "My Appearance" reminisces about those parodies of commercials that Saturday Night Live used to broadcast after the show's opening: "Such great parodies that it always took you a while to even realize they were parodies and not commercials? And how the anti-commercials were a hit? So then what happened?... the sponsors started putting commercials on |SNL' that were almost like the parodies of the commercials, so that it took you a while to realize that these were even real commercials in the first place. So the sponsors were suddenly guranteed huge audiences that watched their commercials very, very closely - hoping, of course, that they'd be parodies." (Girl 188-89) A system of commerce co-opts a system of art, which was mimicking a system of commerce in the first place, in order to mimic a system of art mimicking a system of commerce in order to make the viewer think he or she's watching a system of art mimicking a system of commerce and not a system of commerce mimicking a system of art mimicking a system of commerce. All in order to sell a product. Baudrillard, be still. In Wallace's work, the simulcra-producing media become as pervasive as planetary background radiation. Televisions seem like they're alwayds on. Which turns out to be not so much a critique of the media on Wallace's part as it is just a video recording the way things really are for a couple of generations raised on airwaves. Leading to the extreme case of a character in "Little Expressionless Animals" who begins wondering, Alice-in-Wonderland-like, which side of the tube she's really on. That is, she begins wondering, like all actors who sense they're part of some bigger, sometimes pretty intricate, script: where is selfhood? where real communication? where the importantly political? where, finally, that ultimate language game: reality? The answer being that reality (whatever the heck that is) goes, subtly, out the window. Broom is a novel published in 1987 but set for the most part in the very near-future world of 1990, now our past. But this future world, no longer our future world, isn't our present world either. And yet it's not exactly not our present world. I mean, it's really pretty recognizable. Except Stonecipher Beadsman II has shaped East Corinth to resemble Jayne Mansfield's profile. And there's that grotesque Norman Bombardini, right out of the Meaning of Life, who wants to eat everything in sight and grow to infinite size. And there're those magical realist frogs growing in the pit of the Thermos Nanaws neck in one of Rick's early stories, not to mention Vlad the Impaler's newfound speech in the real world (which isn't the real world) of the novel. Alternate geography crops up in the form of the Great Ohio Desert, surreality in Rick's goofy sexual dreams of Queen Victoria, absurdity in Dr. Jay's (read: Dr. Hilarius from, yes, Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49) hygiene-anxiety therapy. Meaning those reality termites are back. A Great Lump of Opaque Pig Iron But what about such a proposition as "I know I have a brain"? Can I doubt it? Grounds for doubt are lacking! Everything speaks in its favour, nothing against it. Nevertheless it is imaginable that my skull should turn out empty when it was operated on. Guy Davenport, late-modernist cousin to early Wittgenstein, subscribes to the notion that the philosopher who thought his way through the Tractatus, the Investigations, and On Certainly was the kind of guy who made honesty look dishonest, he was so darn honest: Nothing - nothing at all - was to be allowed to escape analysis. He had nothing up his sleeve; he had nothing to teach. The world was to him an absolute puzzle, a great lump of opaque pig iron. Can we think about the lump? What is thought? What is the meaning of can, of can we, of can we think? What is the meaning of we? What does it mean to ask what is the meaning of we? If we answer these questions on Monday, are the answers valid on Tuesday? If I answer them at all, do I think the answer, believe the answer, know the answer, or imagine the answer?[9] I love that. The world to him was an absolute puzzle. Or, maybe better: the world to him was an absolute game. Or, maybe better yet: the world to him was a maze of absolutely impaired language games. David Foster Wallace, of course, is right behind him. To question the efficacy of language is to question the validity of systems of meaning which is to question the efficacy of systems of narrative which is to question the validity of systems of identity which is to question the veracity of systems of reality. And so on. And so forth. Think of Lenore Sr.'s antimony in Broom as a guiding metaphor for this: "the barber who shaves all and only those who do not shave themselves" (42). Does he shave himself? Well, he can't. And yet he can't can't. Puzzles. Paradoxes. Mysteries. Lenore Jr. is an enigma to Rick. She's someone who "soundlessly invites one to play a game consisting of involved auxxnpts to find out the game's own rules" (72). Rick is an enigma to Lenore Jr. Lenore Sr. is an enigma to everyone. Only that, as we've already seen, is the whole point, really: if we don't fully know the rules, we don't fully know the games. And we don't fully know the rules. Most of the characters inhabiting Wallace's pluriverse are as baffled before life as those poor patients in the Shaker Heights Nursing Home. They live in a perpetual state of philosophical extremis. Metamorphosis is their only norm. "How might one even begin to orient oneself with respect to such a series of changes in the fundamental features of the world?" Mr. Bloemker asks, thinking of those patients and what they've seen of the twentieth century. "How to begin to come to some understanding of one's place in a system, when one is a part of an area that exists in such a troubling relation to the rest of the world, a world that is itself stripped of any static, understandable character by the fact that it changes, radically, all the time?" (143). Lenore Sr., like her mentor, like her creator, adored antinomies. None of these people wants to interpret the world so much as contemplate its complexity. For them philosophy is less the manifestation of a certain stabilizing doctrine than it is an activity of mind concerned with trying (if often failing) to plumb some fairly muddy, muddy depths. Just because you know one state of affairs, Wittgenstein asserts, doesn't mean you can necessarily infer another different state of affairs from them. And yet this is what we all try doing when we speak about the future, isn't it? The result being that we'll never really know if, when we throw that apple into the air this time, it will come down. Not, at least, until we see it drop. If, that is, we are actually seeing it drop when we think we are actually seeing it drop, and not imagining, and not believing, and not hoping. If, that is, it is an apple. If it is air. If we are we. No: we don't "know" much, if anything, about a pluriverse aswarm with language games that must be played out as certainties though the next second may give them each and every one the lie. And it is to this extent that late Wittgenstein and early Wallace are kindred spirits to Kafka, who in many ways is the father of this fin de millennium's Age of Uncertainty. We're all continually waking up in our beds, a funny feeling that that uneasy dream we just had wasn't a dream. So Far It's So far it's a good graduate-workshop story, the rare kind that imposes the very logic it obeys; and plus it has the unnameable but stomach-punching quality of something real, a welcome relief from those dread watch-me-be-clever pieces - or, even more dread, a fashionably modern minimal exercise, going through its weary motions as it slouches toward epiphany. "Familiarity breeds content," Wallace says about the state of contemporary fiction. "Rarely is our uncritical inheritance of early Wittgensteinian & Logical Positivist models so obvious as in our academic & aesthetic prejudice that successful fiction encloses rather than opens up, organizes facts rather than undermines them" (Plenum 234). In these last strange years of this twentieth strange century, Wallace couldn't be more on the money. These may be the days of miracles and wonders, sure Paul Simon, but they're also the days of mean-spirited conservatism. Of economic censorship in commercial publishing houses, where literary lists (if you're lucky enough to make it onto them, which itself is a nearly Herculean task in these recession-heavy times) are cut continually, and in the bookstore business, where novels are removed fturn shelves after just a couple of weeks if they don't sell and sell fast and well. Of writers finding it virtually impossible to survive by writing, if that writing isn't (and sometimes even if it is) everyone else's writing. Of self-censorship by authors thinking maybe, just maybe, the least psychologically dark and stylistically flashy pieces are the ones that'll really sell.(10) But these are the days too, maybe, just maybe, to reassert the importance of Lenore Sr.'s measurements. Rediscover crazy Manny Farber. Maybe even trouble a couple of white elephants. NOTES (1)Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainly, trans. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Harper Touchstone, 1972), 2e; hereafter cited parenthetically. (2)David Foster Wallace, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," in Girl with Curious Hair (New York: Norton, 1989), 277; hereafter cited parenthetically. (3)For more on this idea, check out Brian McHale's "Modernist Reading, Post-Modern Text: The Case of Gravity's Rainbow," in Poetics Today 1 (1979): 85-110; and Kathryn Hume's Pynchon's Mythography: An Approach to "Gravity's Rainbow" (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1987). (4)Farber uses it in "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art," an essay that appears in his collection Negative Space (New York: Praeger, 1971). (5)Termite art, at least by my lights, has less to do with a historical period than with a frame of mind. Rabelais was a termite artist, and Laurence Sterne. Petronius was a termite artist, and Friedrich Nietzsche. At the same time, however, given our present cultural circumstances, it's no surprise that the second half of the twentieth century has seen an exponential rise in this way of looking at things. (6)David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (New York: Penguin, 1987), 7; hereafter cited parenthetically. (7)Quoted by David Foster Wallace in n. 14 of his essay "The Empty Plenum: David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress," Review of Contemporary Fiction 10.2 (Summer 1990), 217-39, and which hereafter will be cited parenthetically. (8)New Yorker, 2 March 1992,91. (9)Guy Davenport, "Wittgenstein," in The Geography of the Imagination (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981), 332. (10)Janice Eidus takes on these issues in her pithily perceptive essay "Censorship from Without; Censorship from Within: Chilling Trends," American Notes & Queries 5.4 (October 1992): 188-90. -- End --
NOTES_

Keywords: Philosophy in literature - Analysis; Wallace, David Foster - Criticism and interpretation; Wittgenstein, Ludwig - Influence

Rother, James

Summer 1993

Reading and Riding the Post-Scientific Wave: the Shorter Fiction of David Foster Wallace

article

Rother:1993xf ~

ABSTRACT_
Source: The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993 v13 n2 p216(19). Title: Reading and riding the post-scientific wave: the shorter fiction of David Foster Wallace. Author: James Rother Abstract: David Foster Wallace is representative of a shift away from postmodernism and its focus on debunking literary and historical myths at the expense of relevance and belief. Wallace's fiction skips the ironical games of postmodernism by inscribing his works with reorganized guidance systems that allow for sincere character development. Wallace achieves this by using layers of stories that 'intercalate each other's strata.' There is a sense of flux, as in the postmodernist works, but also a semblance of order that gives the work meaning, not just craftiness. Subjects: Postmodernism (Literature) - Criticism and interpretation Literature, Modern - Criticism and interpretation People: Wallace, David Foster - Criticism and interpretation Electronic Collection: A13952573 RN: A13952573 Full Text COPYRIGHT 1993 Review of Contemporary Fiction The influential swing toward meaning and away from sense is as discernible on the wilder shores of contemporary American fiction as it is in the shored up wilds of that contemporary fiction that is America. Its consequence has bean a much anticipated but little heralded turning away not only from mytholepsy and the sort of Spenglerian Untergangbang that became the hallmark of postmodernism's first generation, the Pynchon-Coover-Barth axis of the sixties and seventies, but also from the later capitalizing on empty signifiers that became the stock in trade of the movement's second generation, the minimalists, in the eighties. Now, well into the nineties, a third generation has sprung up whose quiet revolution in the realm of fictional technique has scrapped deadpan irony in favor of passive-aggressive role modeling in conceptual plasticene (note Mark Leyner's My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist); loss of affect in favor of affectation, suitably randomized, of loss (viz. Kathy Acker's Empire of the Senseless); and density of texture in favor of density matrices whose historical decompressions of the indigenous reenergize the master-slave dialectic in wholly new and de-Hegelianized ways (for example, William T. Vollmann's cycle of novels-in-progress on the loss-leader role assigned American Indian culture in the discounting of America). Consider, for example, the most recent work of David Foster Wallace, a true third generationist and author - so far - of a novel, The Broom of the System (1987), structured around the prinzip of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) that all fassion of atomic facts begins and ends at ground zero-degree; a collection of fictional pieces both long and short, titled Girl with Curious Hair (1989); a book on African-American street music done in collaboration with Mark Costello, Signifying Rappers (1990); and some as-yet uncollected stories, including the different and really quite remarkable "Order and Flux in Northampton," published in Bradford Morrow's Conjunctions in its tenth anniversary issue in 1991 (no. 17, pp. 91-118). This essay will focus on several samples of Wallace's recent fiction from Girl with Curious Hair and pay particular attention to "Order and Flux in Northampton" because it so thoroughly exemplifies qualities found in the newest writing in what I choose to call the post-scientific mode. I propose to illustrate the differences between Wallace and his postmodernist predecessors by examining the epistemology masquerading as indeterminacy physics that so often undergirds the master topoi of classic first-generation metafictional works, as well as its transfigurations in certain third-generation, on-the-way-to-becoming-classic post-metafictional, or post-scientific, texts. Now, post-scientific fiction, as I see it, counters such specious epistemologizing by altering not only how the game of fiction is played but its nature and rationale as well. If the postmodernists of the sixties and seventies were content to smoke out the mirrors secreted in civilization's high-toned myths, the fact could not be ignored that those myths were from the start intent on blurring the distinction between the innocence of loss and the loss of innocence, whether they were a solution dreamed up by Scheherazade to keep a knife from her throat, or a problem dreamed up for Achilles, Ulysses, or Aeneas to keep him from reflecting too long or too hard on how holding the mirror up to self-reflection can leave any masterpiece open to having its bones jumped someday by a Barthelme or a Barth. These and other writers sought to veil with multiple ironies (or to infinitize ad ironiam) Bedeutung's undignified retreat from Sinn all across the spectrum of twentieth-century culture, believing that, under a barrage of superhip gags and snickers, readers would be at a loss to say whether what they were being treated to was an extravaganza piped into a lounge pretending to be The Big Room or a small satyric revue in a big room pretending to be The Lounge. Wallace, Leyner, or Vollmann, however, divest their fiction of the games multiple ironists play by outering the hidden schematics with which the guidance systems of stories had hitherto been programmed and scrupulously reinscribing them in an idiom not unlike a blueprint's with its filigree of specs but somehow charged with a capability to render character and nuance, as postmodemist coolness seldom was, with a topologist's love of contour and tactility (though the spirit of place is often "being there-ed" at the cost of there's being). Their stories also display a lay(er)ing on of topos-less narrative by a method that musical formalists from Ezra Pound to Pierre Boulez have designted pli selon pli or "fold over fold." Rather than folding in with the basic elements of his story grand narratives (ostensibilized as vast cryptogrammta done up in the style of modernism's - and postmodernism's - great mythophiliacs from Joyce to Gaddis) like ingredients in a batter, Wallace instead contrives something intriguingly different. He folds over layers of text until they intercalate each other's strata, thus simulating a version of hyperspace utterly removed from either the discontinuities of Burroughs's montage linguistics or the Einsteinian cut-ups of Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. These layers act as software for what might be called the Wallace story's programmatic control center or Wittgensteinian database of "atomic facts" by which "everything that is the case" is subtended. Initially, finally: it makes no difference - in that philosopher's Stonehenge of the obvious, the Tractatus, time is as epochal or bracketable in the Husserlian sense as it would be in any spreadsheet universe where only insistencies, duly numbered, ever reach printout. This re-envisioning of fiction as the endlessly reconstitutable core reactor by which reality is broken down into its various unifying fields and not nucleated conscriptively into gross metastases of metaphor and metonymy - engrossing though they might be - as the original groundbreaking works of a Pynchon or a Coover now seem to third-generational eyes to have been. For this and ower reasons (contingent upon Wallace's newer even more engaging "gridworking" and "netlocking in" of facts) it has become necessary to devote to the as yet uncollected "Order and Flux in Northampton" the amount of commentary space usually accorded more easily accessed works, such as, in his case, his 1989 collection Girl with Curious Hair. Though several of the stories from that collection - "Girl" and "John Billy" particularly - screw the potential for weaving in hypertext beyond the first-order permutables that have long been the stock-in-trade of Coover and other older postmodemists to an even further sticking point, "Order and Flux" highlights a recent tropism still very much in progress in both his approach to narration and the crafting of sentences that if not directly attributable to Wittgentein (as were many sentences in Broom), are certainly of the sort he would have relished getting deep inside of. Thus, some of the stories in Girl, and especially the longer ones like "Little Expressionless Animals," "Lyndon," and the novella-length "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," hark back to what now seems a more retrograde stage of Wallace's transition from a writer obsessed with the decline of post-modernism to one heralding the advent of an auspicious shift toward the post-scientific in fiction, as is discernible in "Order and Flux." It is hardly accidental that Wallace closed out Girl with Curious Hair with "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," a story that launched into orbit a satellite of Barth's 1968 medley of metafictional duties, Lost in the Funhouse, and most notably its title piece, in the form of a sendup-cum-homage that is nearly six times as long as its source text. Indeed, Wallace closes a magic circle of first-generation postmodernism by recalcifying - with Lettermaniacal irreverence - the now quaint manner of Barth's 1968 - isme, with its "For whom is the Funhouse fun?" sedimentation of ironies into a petrifactualism that goes the poet Auden one better in praising the limestone he himself has quarried for the occasion. This effect is further enhanced by having D. L., the story's ingenue, present her copy of Lost in the Funhouse for autographing to its parergonic auteur, Professor Ambrose, in whose writing workshop she labors, in an arch reprise of metafiction's "the way we were," to give birth to herself as a postmodernist. Though along the way Girl and "Order and Flux" might re-Cooverize a descanted pricksong or two. Wallaces more mature work no longer under-studies the Rubik's cubism of pieces like "Quenby and Ola, Swede and Carl." On the contrary, in stories like "Say Never," "John Billy," and "Here and There" Wallace transcends the generics of homage by reinscribing the setups that let Coover be Coover within story grids that work to provoke character instead of just being characteristically provocative. Gone, or at least forcefully reined in, are the obligatory algorithmics of the Coover style, that tendency to view fiction as a quickstep of likelihoods high-stepped by fortuity and desire, the slavish imitation of which has left many of today's younger writers awash in paregoric of Cooverismo. In fact, Wallace's sendups of life lived in the shadow of Jeopardy ("Little Expressionless Animals") or The David Letterman Show ("My Appearance") are every bit as distant from Coover's meltdowns of Casablanca and The Gold Rush in works like A Night at the Movies, or, You Must Remember This as Coover's fictions are from the pummelings to low, middle, and high culture administered by R. Crumb twenty-five years ago in the pages of Zap Comics, which they superficially resemble. More often than not, the Coover method is to nominate a she of cubistically pretzelized actantcies out of a field of potential developments whose mutant derivation from an Ur-mythos (such as spanking the maid or leaving a child alone with a baby-sitter) denies any of them precedence within the schema of that particular fiction. For Wallace, however, commandeering myths in order to play ironic games within the interstices of determinisms imposed by their structures is not at all the same thing as demythicizing myths by invading their structures and commandeering their control centers. A timely analogue from virology helps bring into focus the difference between first-generation postmodernism's debunking of myths indispensable to the modernist project and the third generation's of s debunking of their debunking of myth so as to reconstitute the mythical as an esemplast having already internalized advanced tochnology and virtual environments. While books like Barth's Chimera and Barthelme's The Dead Father invaded the cells of myth in order to replicate en abime the multiple ironies of their own self-reproduction, the fictions of Wallace, Vollmann, and the Richard Powers of The Gold Bug Variations effect penetration in order to transmute the very genetic material of the myths themselves. They recognize that myth in our time is not the panoplied derangement of an Achilles's tent or Circe's isle but rather the Jonah-fication of whaling exemplified by the TV shows beamed, spelunker-like, into the Plato's Cave of the global village. In "Order and Flux in Northampton" the basic "plot" downloads much of what is new about Wallace's most recent fictionalizing into a stylistics whose hard copy has moved far beyond the Cooverismics, Barthematics, and Pynchonics of first-generation postmodernisme. Unlike the setups of his more narrowly focused pieces such as the title story of Girl and "Luckily the Account Executive Knew CPR," "Order and Flux" is fielded through a schema that owes less to plot than to a marriage of paradigm and syntagm. Within the plasmic folds of a kind of supercoordinate Hilbert space, Wallace choreographs a dance of distentions (not all of which appear as characters) that are for purposes of the dance indistinguishable from the envelope of fatality with whose topological surface they interface and from whose curvature and parallax they fail to deduce their imprisonment in a paint-by-number Las Meninas that seems drawn to scale by the Logico-Tractator himself. Set on or about June 1983, "Flux" 's Hilbertized world of quantum-massachusetts folds out to include virtually every other vector for which a dimension is assignable as direction or momentum, and so is able to create a chain of Lorenzian attractors in such diverse locales as Rock Springs, Wyoming, Tyoy, New York, Florence, Aldzana, and Fullerton, California - all "places" where life is eerily universalized in parallel to the erroneous comedy unfolding on the Northampton main stage. As a paradigm/syntagm it poignantly triangulurs the exasperations of one Barry Dingle, thirty-five-year-old man-on-the-ground of a "spotlessly managed franchise, The Whole Thing Health Food Emporium ... located directly next to Collective Copy on Northampton's arterial Great Awakening Avenue" (OFN 91). Of course the juxtaposition of these two commercial enterprises so near the jugular of today's post-hippie and unde-Reaganized over-the-counterculture is hardly fortuitous. As with Wallace's literary predecessors Joyce, Barth, Pynchon, and Coover, no detail in his fiction is ever fortuitous. Employed at Collective Copy, next door to where Barry Dingle, "purveyor of bean sprouts," does his thing, is Myrnaloy Trask, "for whom Dingle harbors ... an immoderate love." Trask is variously described as a "trained Reproduction Technician, unmarried woman, vegetarian, flower-child tinged faintly with wither, overseer and editor of Announcement and Response at the ten-foot-by-ten-foot communicative hub of a dizzying wheel of leftist low-sodium aesthetes, a woman politically correct, active in relevant causes, slatternly but not unerotic. ..." Completing the triangle is Barry's rival, Don Megala, the man Myrnaloy Trask "has eyes only for," a "middle-aged liberal" and "professional student" and "presently at work on his seventh and potentially finest unfinished dissertation, an exhaustive study of Stephen Dedalus's sublimaed oedipal necrophelia vis A vis Mrs. D. in Ulysses, an essay tentatively tided |The Ineluctable Modality of the Ineluctably Modal.'" Which serves to explain at least in part why Myrnaloy "has only the sketchiest intuition that Barry Dingle even exists, next door" (OFN 91). On top of this, we are asked to imagine a further triangulation, bordering on parallax, beyond the mere human triangle whose sides have just been outlined, establishing its outlying points esemplastically within a continuum of texts coextensive with, but not contingent upon, the core text of Barry/Myrnaloy/Don (which, if so desired, can be read linearly, though this is not necessarily recommended). And, as suggested earlier, we are encouraged to conceive this triangulation as being disposed within unpredisposable space - a space which no topology dominates or molds dimensions to its particular shape or vectoral agenda - indeed, a space wholly congenial to the one-act play of facts Wallace has mounted on a grammaturgical stage fitted a-scenically, in arena style, with three blind sides. It is these facts, one should hasten to point out, that both figure on and configurationally activate the loom of coincidence on which Wallace's narratological woofs warp and his equivocating back-and-forths shuttle. What facts? Why, those whose incontrovertibility, non-negotiability, and unconvertibility Wittgenstein serves up within the connectable dots of his "picture theory of meaning" and which figure so prominently in his Tractatus as "atomic facts." This atomic factician asserts that a picture, insofar as it is also a fact, is therefore "a model of reality and "like a scale applied to reality." Further, given that "a picture depicts reality by representing a possibility of the existence and non-existence of atomic facts," it must necessarily contain "the possibility of We sum of affairs which it represents." And finally, the all-important proviso that "We could present spatially an atomic fact which contradicted the laws of physics, but not one which contradicted the laws of geometry." Why are these facts so important? Because facts are modal, and that modality is synonymous with the conditions language imposes on that reality constructed according to pictures which meaning assembles out of those same facts that make up the atomic structure of the only world we know. Wallace likes this view of things because hi mirroring the tradeoffs at the heart of Wittgen-stein's own philosophical career it splits the problem of the solipsistic down the middle by salvaging knowledge at the expense of a Cartesian knower and by denying private languages the role of spoiler ceded them by the later, more mistycal Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations. But Wallace's dog-wagging tale is also about love-objects "invested with all the flected umbiguity that makes Romance itself possible" - an ambiguity that thrives on flux and the humunculoidicities of immoderate love (OFN 97), no doubt further Dingle-ized by diffusion, deflection, and distortion of the sort that unpacks the Russian nesting dolls of nightmare that terrorize Mrs. Dingle on the night of 14 June 1983, when she dreams that her husband, the king of Ithaca (played by Nelson Eddy) is dreaming of her demise and that of her son, the "finely sandaled" Barry D. on the night of 14 June 1983 B.C. - a regressus ultimately to be diffused, deflected, and distorted polyphonically into the anoptically "Telemachoid" resplendencies of Ulysses's dream of Joyce in a book (dated 1922) about order and flux in a city called Dublin, the dearness and dirtiness of which, having been "dreamt" in advance almost a millennium ago in a symmetrical inversion involving Northampton, Mass. (in which the "dulcimer-craeftig" Don Megala is cast as the advisor who tells the king of Ithaca that what brought the plague that carried off both Mrs. Dingle and Barry D. was nothing other than the king's dream itself) is grotesquely reprised as if by a Saturday Night Live sketch in which guess who play a Tristan and an Iseult whose dithyring Rambonics, far from bringing death and mortal woe to the pinnacle of taste in this, Denis de Rougemont's and our modern world, merely freeze its eternal antithesis within an instant's burlesque frame. And it concerns parameciae in human saliva that make for the true magnetic north in all their mediated plashings in direct opposition to big toe-seeking inflammations of Eros. Thus, this: a hypertextual space across which parbolas of actantcy can flit but for which no Marvin Minsky-style "default assumptions" can be adduced. Envisioning this is not unlike trying to picture Cartesian tennis being played without so much as a Malebranchian net. Viewed narratologically, the trajectory of "Order and Flux" seems calibrated at about Middle High Pynchon, but such calls are little more than ballpark estimates. Don Webb, in reviewing Mark Jacobson's new novel Gojiro in American Book Review, is so loath to proscribe the dismantling of originality by up-and-coming writers that in approving self-mantling in Ur-styles considered "classical," he all but invents writer-response criticism on poststructuralist principles before the reader's very eyes: For Mr. Jacobson to achieve his paean to life a workable style had to exist. I realize that this speaks against the current call for originality, but books do not need to be original in style. Classical poets always cast their works in the appropriate style, and Pynchon-prose is the appropriate mode for the current epic. It moves between consensus reality and stylized camp reality effortlessly. It leaves the complicated goings-on of the real world whenever a close-up focus is needed-and best of all it can just tell the reader what's going on or spice up the flow with a few jokes. For first-generation postmodernists like Italo Calvino - himself given to wondering before his untimely death, "Why Read the Classics?" - the subtext of such remarks might seem less a surrender to influence in the form of hero worship Man a succumbing to influenza through a contagion of styles. But Wallace is third generation, a fact that clearly emerges in the algorithmic plotting of "Order and Flux," with its reflectively principled encoding of truths elicited from certain axiom systems and rules of procedure able to elicit further truths unrelated to those systems and procedures. As suggested earlier, in at least some of the stories that make up Girl with Curious Hair he is into quite different things than either the permutations of influence or multiple mises en abime played on the mind's eye by a shattered- mirror. Wallace, Volimann, and some of their contemporaries are busily rediscovering the wheeling, if not the dealing, attendant upon plying the psychological dimension in their fiction. This explains why the narrativities of the title story "Girl with Curious Hair," in their determination to find a way out of the seeing-round-corners narcopathology of the story's narrator, shift the fulcrum of self-consciousness away from the sun-stricken heliotrope, Sick Puppy. It also makes plain why the monologics - phase spaced-out to the max - of John Billy, who, in the story bearing his name, implodes a responsibility to "tell Simple Ranger how Chuck Nunn Junior done wronged the man that wronged him and fleen to parts unguessed" (GCH 121) into a shrinking universe-as-tall-tale that miniserially parallels the nebulous expansiveness of a McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. Similarly, with the catechistic dissymmetrics (dedicated to K. Godel) proffered by the connubially stalled respondent in "Here and There" - and others deserving of broader mention than can be made of them there. At any rate, the atomic "facts" comprising Wallace's molecular narratives can be made to seem unatomizably factual in context only if, as with reflection principles, they aid in convincing us that they indeed provide valid ways of arriving at what for the piece in question is a correspondence theory of virtual truth linking the story's "axiom system" with the "rules of procedure" that govern its discursivities narratologically. In fact, it was a sense of deprivation over Wittgenstein's having doublelocked the door to a reconciliation (which only he could have effected) between the dark inner space of solipsism and the deprivatized shadowplay of endless noon in Plato's Cave that gave rise to Wallace's belief that the second and more famous half of the Viennese thinker's career, the post-tractatus revisionist period of logical atom smashing in the Philosophical Investigations (1945-49; pub. 1953), represents a catastrophic loss to philosophy. All that the later works managed to do was to trade the only real bullion ever secured in post-Cartesian philosophy for the inflated paper of language games and psycho-logical atomism. For Wallace's thoughts on Wittgenstein's "tragic fall," see the interview with McCaffery above.) Thus, the narrative game being played in the works under discussion revolves around the problem of creating a private fictional world (theoretically corresponding, more or less, to the truths dictated by God, were He a logical atomist, which, despite quibbles that might arise within the hermeneutics of conjectural atheism, He could well be) without at the same time creating a private language of the sort anathematized by the Wittgenstein of the Investigations and which eventually denied the Joyce of Finnegans Wake a gold medal in the only Olympics that matters. In the RCF interview Wallace contends that membership within hermeneutical circles can result in knowledge only of what it is like to experience being within the bounds of such a community itself, and never of the larger reality whose immanentizing center the knowledge community is. The world "outside" will always remain the "world" outside, no matter how "communicative" relations within that community become. Consider the basic concatenation of events that, far from just populating a Wallace story with data, actually nude up that story. The paronomasia is crucial: nowhere in any of the pieces mentioned so far is the motor of self-determination ever allowed to idle in any particular character's conative driveway. For instance, Barry Dingle's passion for Myrnaloy Trask is in one sense an erotomania fueled by runaway hormones, but in a different sense - one, say, involving an erotomane able to step outside his erotomania and view it non-erotomaniacally - it is anything but such an erotomania. This sort of Turingesque two-step brings to mind Godel's theorem, in which the truth or falsity of arithmetical propositions cannot be wrung out of a self-describability lodged within a system of description itself incapable of assimilating self into any coordinating predicate. But it also sets spinning the peculiarly Boolean mysticism of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, in which atomic facts head up a treatise in which luck is as absent as any trace of a diverting conundrum: "The riddle does not exist," tractates the Logico-Philosophicus. "Order and Flux" begins under an injunction to supply enough atomic facts or "Trask-data" to put Barry Dingle's "immoderate love" for Myrnaloy up on the big screen. These data are further rounded out with dossier fodder documenting Barry's impairment at the hands of his macrophobic mother. This has doomed him to the "position of a man able to want without the disturbing option of ever truly being able to have" (OFN 91, 96). Nor does the same factitiousness that afflicts Barry's search for sexual peace fail to enfold Sick Puppy of "Girl" up to his proverbials, since the brute and stubbom mindlessness by which his existence, a triumph of luck and Reaganomics, has so far been maintained is nothing but a vacuum left by the facts of a sustainable life in departing a causeless loss. Much of that mindlessness reaches critical mass only through sexual jumpstarting, a conscription of orality into the anaesthetized essays of genital intercourse: Unfortunately, even though I am one handsome dude and desirable on the part of many girls throughout my school and life, my penis declines to become erect when they want to commit the sexual act, and will only be erect if they fellate me, and if they fellate me I wish to burn them with matches or my lighter very much and most women dislike this event and are unhappy when burned and thus are chicken to fellate me and only wish to commit the sexual act. (GCH 72). As William H. Gass once wrote in commenting on an especially well-turned Barthelmean period, "it is impossible to overpraise such a sentence." The mix here of Rolling Stone interview jargon and schizoid parataxis (common to serial killers speaking viva voce and mob figures mouthing dialogue in films like Bugsy and Hoffa) constitutes an edgy lead-in to a historically original neo-trash phenomenon. It also alchemizes fact in such a way as to provide a Sick Puppy too stoned to philosophize with a means of turning sex hassles of the "stump Dr. Ruth" variety from heavy metal cliche into base gold. So, too, in the realm of Dinglemania, where factologies lie like glaciers on an emotional tundra landlocked by sea change and roiling with stasis. That such Wittgensteinian reefs remain unnavigable by the port-leaning ship of fools so improbably beached in "Order and Flux" amounts to Wallace's point as well as his counterpoint. Having been invaded by a homunculoid love, Barry Dingle "is, as it were, beside himself, in a state of utter emotional flux whereby up and down, good and bad are as indistinguishable as right and left" (OFN 96). A Dingle-an-sich in hot pursuit of the Dingle-ling-an-sich he pines for completion by another, but this masks a fact at least as crucial to the story's support system as the Godelian umbilical linking the affictive quo est of Barry's toe to the inflictive quod est of his homunculoid love. Within Wallace's Wittgensteinian schematic this dominating because most particularized) atomic fact is that "cross-eyed Barry's" pining is fundamentally "duplicitous" due to his unauthorized version of second sight; this redoubled vision has, from 15 June 1961 (the day in Troy, New York, when his two eyes, which had flirted with disaster like star-crossed lovers from childhood on, finally and forever came together), consistently provided him with a synoptic gospel whose good news parallax routinely deconstructs and whose eight-eyed orthogonals he is determined to transcend via a liebes-toed contusion of cur (his) and bitch (hers) at the feet of his very own beloved Iseult-of-the-"delicate white hands" on the mayday aforementioned, 15 June 1983 (OFN 102). This last date assumes inipanance because (as any attentive reader will instantly grasp) it is the twenty-second anniversary of Barry's blindsiding at the hands of fate and the twentieth of his having first laid eyes (albeit in a doubly triangulated stare: see below) on Myrnaloy Trask. But it is also a mere calendar's tick from June 16th or Bloomsday, that singular diurnal interval in 1904 during which a certain Dingle-like Dubliner by the name of Bloom wanders like Tristan (a major backup myth in "Order and Flux") from one Celticity to another, faithfully (or almost so) temporizing the faithlessness (only skin deep) of his wife, the Myrnaloy Trask-like Molly, whose rendezvous that afternoon with his sexual rival, the Don Megalaesque Blazes Boylan, has brought him to focus his Odyssean wiles on the awful moment of his moment's force: the desire to reclaim his riteful home and wrongful bed, to yang, yet again, his well-worn yin in Ithaca. This town is not, it should be noted, the one in New York state, which, like Barry Dingle's and Myrnaloy Trask's Northampton, is a college town, which, though unlike it, is closer to Troy, a town less given to gown and not all that much further from Homer's Ithaca than is once towering Ilium, where Ulysses made war, from the seat of his kingdom, where he made love. As far, perhaps, as the Troy of Barry's youth, where the cross he now bears was first hoisted onto his shoulders in the form of "thick angled lenses that catch and reorganize the disordered doubleness of things into a unity that fuses at a focused point several yards in front of Barry's own ruined apparatus," is from the Northampton where he now resides and whose objects "appear always twice as far away as they in fact are. Smaller and more distant. . . . So that," the story's mediated voice goes on to descant, "Dingle has chosen ... between doubleness and distance, between there being, for him, exactly twice or exactly half as much as there really is" (OFN 96). (Hence Barry's long, doubly triangulated stare, "as only the cross-eyed can stare," two years earlier when, ma 15 June 198L while at work the Michelson-Morleyed image of Myrnaloy Trask was bounced back at him from off the window of a Northampton Public Transit Authority bus onto the colored glass of the storefront of The Whole Thing Health Food Emporium which he happened to be looking through [OFN 92].) A similar doubling and shrink-wrap redistancing may be noted in Wallace's deliberate use of Ulyssean parallels and his sedulous aping of the sort of pedantic overfastidiousness with which Stuart Gilbert's guide to Joyce's masterbook has long been associated. Don Megala, the Mortimer Adler of dissertations-in-progress, is said to have "at least one" copy of this graduate student classic "under his arm" (OFN 105), and Wallace's point in flashing this reference is to keep his story's Joycean refractions on the beam. Consider, for example, the brief scene in the Collective Copy, which from Dingle's point of view and ours, doubles as the Xeroxing establishment that employs Myrnaloy Trask and as a hotbed of Aeolian circulation, "full of the dry chemical wind of roaring copier and rattling automatic collator" (OFN 104). Here, the eye of the narrative, damping its aperture down to a binocular anopticity nearly enough in sync with Dingle's own to make double or nothing a redundancy, piggybacks on a flatbed of metalepsis to it's own dim view of things, in this case how the "Cave of Winds" segment of Ulysses acquires an eigenvalue relative to the eigenvector of the Collective Copy, one among many such eigenvectors, the sum of which comprises the "observable," or the eigenbasis of the observable (an eigenbasis being a set of vectors, such that any arbitrary vector can be represented as a linear combination of those in the set). This meta-Ulyssean mock-up thus assumes - in keeping with its protagonist's shrunken vision field of folk - the qualities of the very antithesis of "an observable," becoming in fact (and by paronomasial flatlining) an-observable. Indeed, Wallace's tale of erotic whoa tends to downplay sharpness of visual detail to the low anoptic hum of a verbal diagram, almost as if its purpose was to give a sense of how little the ableptical Joyce really saw when writing Ulysses from 1914 to 1922. Wallace's power to make his reader see is evident everywhere in Girl with Curious Hair, so there's no doubt that, for him at least, Pound's metaphrasial homage to the poet of the Odyssey in his Cantos as "blind, blind as a bat" triangulates the ophthal-malogocentricity of Joyce's Homer in much the way Myrnaloy Trask's image is described as hawng caromed off two blindsiding mirrors smack into the corner pocket of Barry's peripheralized vision. Thus, Wallace's tale (in which love is not the issue) reenacts the story by which other lovers and their obsessions avoid being incarcerated in narratives that would otherwise assure their deaths, were not the sole condition of their mortality foreclosed by myths proclaiming their infinite empowerment to die in prophetic retellings of Love prophesies foretold. How else explain the gathering at the end of the story of synchronicities eigenstacked like cord wood and yet knotted in love within the interval 11:50 to 11:57 A.M. EDT, 15 June 1983, which, we are informed, "finds a tiny percentage of the planet's persons involved in a tiny percentage of the planet's various and ineluctably modal situations" (OFN 115)? (Even the sodomistic daisy chain of gang rape perpetrated on Dean Paul Doyle by the Eskew brothers, Ronnie and Boone, on the floor of a crowded dormitory in Cell Block D, Arizona State Correctional Facility, Florence, AZ, constitutes a loveknot of sorts. Which only goes to prove what all the catalog rolling and calculated heartlessness tricked out at the end of the story confirm, namely that when vice is versa-ed, one man's poison can all too often (and unfairly) become another man's meat.) Or, how account for the loveknot of other, antecedent tales only seemingly intercalated at random with the Barry-Myrnaloy original and which may be seen as dependently Dingle-dangle, catenary-style, from this lei of interrupted lays? And even when the dispositional and predispositional paronomastics point the other way - that is, toward the very mythos of the observable with which Wallace's story is every which way preoccupied, it matters little to the human propositions locked inside its phase space of spacey phases. If the world is indeed "everything that is the case," it necessarily looks endlessly down the barrel of its own self-delimiting Dasein; likewise, it disposes of events with astonishing diffidence by disposing of them wherever atomic facts go to die. For between the persistence of Wittgenstein's "picture theory of meaning" ("Picture this" or its equivalent is an injunction which the reader of "Order and Flux" is not infrequently put under by its narrator) and the insistence of its logical framing metabolism that regulates sentences internally according to the laws governing propositions such as those that led the Wittgenstein of the pre-Tractatus Notebooks to declare that "|aRa' must make sense if |aRb' makes sense" - between these two abnegational extremes falls the shadow of the arti-factual, whose field of dominance is the there and then, as opposed to the here and now. In "Flux"'s Northampton, "John Billy"'s Minogue, Oklahoma, and "Girl" 's Irvine, California, no less than in the Dresden, Chicago, or even Tralfamadore of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five (1969), past is never prologue, but in a turnabout that hardly plays fair, prologue ends up as past, thrust, as in a world of metafictional and polymath-physics it must be, into a time warp of dissembling presence whose simulacra mock for all eternity the recurrence of eternal recurrence. Or, to put somewhat less of a spin on it, prologue appears as a past whose energies remain frozen within the very same parenthetical frames as earlier enclosed Slothropian metanarratives hungover with the Spenglerian [delta]t's and all such screamings across the sky. This might be a good moment to stop and ask just what Wallace is proposing as an alternative to Pynchonics and the sort of density matrix the author of Gravity's Rainbow was able to field in that unbelievably dense mother of a book. A density matrix may be defined as a complex system in which many quantum states are taken together to represent reality. When Pynchon employs such a wodd processor in projecting a novel he has not left the realm of mythmaking behind him; he has merely modulated its Joycean and Mannian proclivities to another, more mathematically distant plane of abstraction. Wallace rejects this as the pyramid scheme that it is and always has been. He seems to feel that it's better to internalize the density matrices of the original postmodernists and remetabolize them as both subject matter and object lesson. As suggested earlier, Pynchon-prosaics are everywhere in evidence in "Order and Flux," but subtly absorbed into an ophthalmologos in which the spectacle of Pynchonics moving its slow thighs across the page is more likely to trouble the sight than seriously affect the vision. Filtered as it is through a mere twenty-seven pages of text, "Flux" is accommodated by a matrix of complex systems sufficiently compacted to pass, if not for an infinitely bot and dense dot, then certainly for a planisphere with multiple bearings visible at all times. If its pinions of fact and struts of conjecture avoid the sort of continuum rupture that Pynchon's later work does on, it is because Wallace's propositional calculus deftly escapes being thrown for a loop by feedback from its own theory. Indeed, it seems never to have occurred to Pynchon to wonder in spite of quantum mechanics whether his particular take on the postmodern take on fiction, with its self-discounting silences, might not finally be incommensurate with its dark-sided twin, the world of physics - specially postmodern physics, where contiguous Hilbertized envelopes bump upendlessly against one another and linguistic opacities like "unsolvable," "density," "parallel," and "serial" become impenetrable barriers rather than windows on that ulterior world. Any choice of discourse risks entropicalization whenever language contracts into a space whose flickering topologies wax figurative or wanly wane. Which notation system will be of most use is a matter not of truth but of whose noughtical inscriptions are in force and under what particular whether watch. Also involved are force fields of a different nature: those that determine whether the systems of language and sign or the systems of formula and design will ultimately prevail. Of course, this is not anything novelists or physicists can decide, for themselves or for others. What if all fields, conceptual or representational, merely misrepresent one another's "border writing" without realizing it? Which, finally, in point of a subsequence of recorsi, lands us back at W. H. Gass's original question: What would a literary physics be? What it would not be is a literature of or about physics, either in the direct way of a discourse on the history or ideas of physics, or the interworkings of physicists, whether singly or collaboratively, effecting historic trajectories of explanation, prediction, and control. Neither could it be a physics of literature, which would be an absurdity on its face. As a dangling plethom of misapplied linearities and functions such a hybrid would inevitably con-script a dysfunctionality in dire contradiction to the correspondence (necessary to any science) between reflected truth and the truth of reflection. This leaves, it seems, only one conceivable alternative - the one which, as I have been suggesting, Wallace has selected on occasion: physics in the form of a form of writing radiant with an idealized clarity once thought synonymous with the sort of sciencespeak that Houyhnhmns like the Huxleys, Aldous and Julian, spoke and wrote, but now viewed, this time by Yahoos, as runoff from a stream of consciousness beset by theory and by a praxis capable only fitfully of being its own subject. As Wittgenstein surely recognized when tracking thoughts he would later run to ground in the Tractatus, to write in this form of a form is to court hubris. It entails being aware of the "complete unclarity" of all the sentences that tend to gather (like the crush of oil, oozed) at the mind's tip whenever anyone attempts to talk what is the case down from its ledge of quanta and back into a cage of words. Joseph Liouville, the unacknowledged legislator of narratological physics proposed a theorem according to which phase-space volume does not change with time-evolution. In the formulized formalisms of literary physics this means that no matter how long the time span of a novel might be (whether measured in terms of textual action or of active text), the phasespace within which the work elaborates its own actantial algorithmics - in synaptic contradistinction to Euclidean dottiness on the matter of points, the novel's "counter-point" having magnitude but no location - remains constant. Postmodern fictional space - broadly considered - is phase space; but the space in which Wallace and the younger post-postmodernists choose to have fiction become operational is sentence space -- a space that is, in every sense of the word, Hilbert space. Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind (Oxford University Press, 1989) provides the basis for this when he describes single points in phase and Hilbert space as follows: "A single point of phase space would be used to represent the (classical) state of an entire physical system. In the quantum theory, the appropriate analogous concept is that of Hilbert space. A single point of Hilbert space now represents the aquantum state of an entire system." And because "the most fundamental property of a Hilbert space is that it is what is called a vector space - in fact, a complex vector space," that being one in which "we are allowed to add together any two elements of the space and obtain another such element" (ENM 257; italics the author's), it may not be stretching things too far to imagine the semantico-grammatical elements of a sentence as operating within a kind of complex vector space. To put it more succinctly: first- and second-generation postmodernists build, whether in a novel or a story, a fictional structure in phase space whose parts are only configurable in terms of their inclusion in a whole; space, third-generation writers like Wallace work in sentence or Hilbert space, wherein the entire notion of overarching fictional structure is meaningless except in terms of sentences whose "genetic material" must encode the DNA molecularity of the fiction as a whole. Yet, it must also be kept in mind that the dynamics at work in Wallace's stories are not the only Hilbertian dynamics propinquitous to literary sentencing. When, for example, in the story "Little Expressionless Animals" Wallace has an associate of the TV showtalk magnate Merv Griffin register character by plainly - or not so plainly - speaking out of it, what is projected is not only splendid neo-Heideggerian parody, it is Hilbert spaceyness pure and simple. The remark the Griffin aide-de-Camp makes to the story's co-protagonist Faye Goddard - "The mystery of total data, that mystery made a sort of antic, ontic self-perpetuation. We're talking fact sustaining feeling, right through the change that inevitably attends all feeling, Faye" (GCH 28) - eigenvaluatively Hilbertizes phase space as though it were Wittgensteinian logical space, while at the same time opening the possibility of the entire story being metonymized by this transmutation of sententiousness. The gag here is, at least in part, built around having Merv Griffin phenomenologize droppings like "ontic" which, while vaguely suggestive of "antic," a term to which it is not in any way homologous, still somehow manages to be congruent with it on a free-associational level. Throughout all his writing Wallace enjoys being free with those associations found milling around the hub of the ontological. In "Order and Flux in Northampton" there is mention made of "miraculous manipulations of primal human ontemes too primal and too human even to be contemplated" (OFN 94), an "onteme" being presumably a unit of emitted being. Likewise, Merv Griffin himself, here frontloaded as a "character font' with We freedom to enter and leave the story's narrativity frame (as well as determining the fate of its "typecasts"), proves that in this text at least il n'y a pas de hors-Merv Griffin. But in his own person he also proves something else. As a point of Hilbert space representing ad finitum the "quantum state" of an entire narrative system, his indeterminacy is then indistinguishable from the causeless effect and the effectless cause of that state, which is now a story that has Merv Griffm in it but which determines how it shall be read, from a point outside it, his ever shifting cachet as a performance artist in late capitalist showbiz. (Though it is tempting to adduce the same power to mediate an end run around the means of cultural production to the other "real-life" characters in "Little Expressionless Animals," such as the TV hosts of Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune Alex Trebek and Pat Sajak, their use in the story is in every sense "fair" and merely reprivatizes what is already within the public domain.) Such raids on Nouveau Kitsch by gimcrack "technicals" franchised by E. M. Doctorow and Max Apple over a quarter of a century ago are scarcely new. Indeed, David Letterman appears as a character in another Wallace story, "My Appearance," from Girl with Curious Hair. But differences between the frames broken by these two particular outtakes, though indistinguishable in context from the surface of things fictional, are hardly superficial. "I'm always stumped when critics regard references to popular culture in serious fiction as some sort of avant-garde stratagem," Wallace confesses in his interview with McCaffery. "In terms of the world I live in and try to write about, it's inescapable. Avoiding any reference to the pop would mean either being retrograde about what's |permissible' in serious art or else writing about some other world." Postmodern irony having "become our environment," why not use real names when adverting to the world of commerce and the media instead of stooping to the sort of campy logo-centricity that Updike and other older writers engage in whereby certain fast-food restaurants get called "Burger Bliss" rather than "Burger King." Why not, indeed. The obvious answer is that the canvas of proto-reality, having become indistinguishable from the frame that contains it, is no longer able to prevent fiction from reconfiguring the collage of icons that is itself indistinguishable - postmodern irony having become our environment - from the circumambient culture that sustains it. This iconic speculum also doubles as the medium that permits us to view that no less factitious world whose endlessly recycled representations include made-for-TV images of ourselves being watched as we watch them, thus providing an echo chamber for our least negotiable narcissisms. Escaping from this paralysis of irony and narcissism is one of the main problems Wallace has found himself having to face as a writer: how to spacewalk in the vergeless virtual totally unpunctuated Hilbert space of the new post-scientific sensibility. Post-scientific? Yes - if by the term is meant collaborative rather than unicellular-heroic, transempirical rather than Popperesque, cumulo-enactive rather than linear-descriptive. "No longer devoted exclusively to knowing, knowledge, or know-how" might be one way to encapsulate the post-scientific in opposition to both Feyerabendistic (against method) and anti-feyerabendisfic (against Against Methoa) mindsets. Nor is it in any way to be confused or conflated with postmodernism or poststructuralism. These two no-longerquite-so-trendy dyslexicologies once carved out insubstantial niches for themselves by furnishing ways and means (though not necessarily the ways and means) by which what is - or more often, what is not - might be reconscripted into an army of metaphors and metonymies at least as mobile (and certainly newer) than the one half-excoriated and half-embraced by Nietzsche in "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense" (1873). As fully self-conscious theorias they clearly set out to debug the collective pleroma of sociotronic mass intermediation with literary-philosophical sounding kits somewhere between the reflex tester (again, proposed by Nietzsche, in Twilight of the Idols, or, How One Philosophizes with a Hammer [1888]) and the armamentarium of program protectors with which computer virologists come equipped. Postmodern science begins from the point of recognizing the need, as Stephen Toulmin writes in The Return to Cosmology (1982), "to reinsert humanity into nature." The post-scientific, on the other hand, involves a far different approach to bricolage than the vision of either a Paul Feyerabend or a Gregory Bateson allows for. It requires a hands-on algorithmics for actually doing realily in a sense akin to the old sixties cachet of "doing drugs," but it also combines a counterintuitive reserve with an open field commitment to what the pianist David Sudnow calls "ways of the hand" or "organization of improvised conduct," instead of settling for well worn Taosing rods urging us to play reality by ear. How, then, might "Girl" 's fractalizations of Sick Puppy's discombobulating mind in a prose as sweatlessly unconscionable as it is unconscionably sweatless properly - or even improperly - speaking, be considered "post-scientific"? Or, for that matter, the emergency room narrativistics of "Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR"? Or the Dinglemania so fractally ophthalmologized by Wallace in "Order and Flux in Northampton"? And why should such a cumbersome new concept, laid on the culture like an enormous mustard plaster, be of any interest to literary theory already up to its canines in dogs that won't hunt? Let me attempt to answer that by deproblematizing the issues involved. Post-scientific writing no longer accepts either the single-author theory of literary conspiracy or the conspiratorial model of "non-subjective" impersonal authorship favored by poststructuralists, post-Marxists, postmodernists, and post-post-all of the above. It bathes (rather than frames) the act of writing in the light of a wholly collaborative dissolution of alterities and the culture wars they have historically given rise to. The aim of the scientific has always been to control those parameters that are indispensable to the exercise of domination. Science as we know it has thrived because it has co-opted all responsibly envisionable canons of authority and the perquisites of legitimacy that go with them. Post-scientific writing releases the literary from its longstanding obligation to oppose the scientific, to play "pseudo-" to its overarching power to collapse all articulative distinctions between "state" as a noun and "state" as a verb. It overturns the traditionally imposed hegemony of the temporal over the spatial and returns writing (after long exile) to its dream of fields - open rather than closed (as along the Flaubert-Joyce-Beckett axis); fractal rather than linear-dynamic; integrative rather than discontinuous and catabolic. Though superficially comparable with the plush upholsteries of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and related congeries, post-scientific writing may perhaps best be understood as "discourse art" grated on to a root stock of chaos theory and Nietzschean "somantics," which is a spinoff from semantics and cognitive science, having been filtered through some recent and highly innovative thinking about "the body in the mind." To suggest where this leaves postmodern fiction it is necessary to review what such fiction has been thought to be by the industry that has marketed consensus regarding the value of its products with the untempered enthussiasm of a Honda Corporation touting the merits of a very different type of accord during the last twenty years or so. This accord is nearly always referred back to the same few appraisers of the "postmodern condition" - Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Jameson jump to mind - who view postmodern writers generally as opting to problematize reality in their works rather than settling for an illusionistic consensus of what it is. But of course it could be asked, When has fiction not "problematized" reality? Even "novelists of manners" from Austen to Waugh (keeping to just the Anglo- in Anglo-American writing) have fictionalized their problematizations of it by appending to their testaments to will the empowering codicils of proprietary subjectivity without which any "reality" is but a rationalist's forgery or an irrationalist's fraud. "A mourning process has now been completed," Jean-Francois Lyotard opined sunnily in The Postmodern Condition. "Most people have lost the nostalgia for the lost narrative." That was warmly aired in 1984, an auspicious year for singleminded ascensions into doublethink. Five years before the collapse of the Great Wall of communism in central and eastern Europe; eight years before the resurgence of "post-Marxist" socialism in the same countries that had only recenty rhapsodized about the promise of "post-socialist politics." One grand narrative that turned out less lost than just misplaced by the likes of Lyotard and others eager to hop on the garishly painted wagon of postmodernism was, of all things, modernism. Not the Enlightenment modernism of a Jurgen Habermas, but the aesthetic modernism of an Erich Auerbach, whose final chapters in Mimesis (1953) conceive narrative as a crucible in which even so discontinuous and fragmentary a subjective experience as Proust's can be reconstituted by "analogy" (Proust's term) into a unity. At least some of Wallace's shorter fiction can be seen as exemplary acts of post-scientific writing because they erase the factitious dualism that has plagued the modernism/postmodernism chimera by abolishing the pain in the neck that is vaceabb; to the "pineal connection" underlying its disembodied and mindless interdifferentiality. Wallace's "Flux," for example, is a tale of Love Syntagmaticized that takes a grammar of lore and energizes it to drive a syntax of eigenvectors only dimly contingent upon such signifying chains as socioreality/rhizomatics (Guattari), economimesis/difference (Derrida), or chronotopicality/dialogics (Bakhtin). The linkage system "interseparating" Barry Dingle, Myrnaloy Trask, and Don Megala (not to mention the host of named and unnamed supernumeraries who inhabit the Berkeleyan/Berkeleyan pleroma of Northampton/Amherst, Massachusetts) exceeds reality without transcending it because it offers no megalomaniacal "grand narrative" of the sort that Don Megala hoped to find in Stuart Gilbert's misguided tour of Ulysses. Fiction in the age of science (coincidental with the novel's maximum solvency) has always posted "the world according to . . ." in a ledger of double entry transfers of knowledge from the carnal to the ever expanding database that, in direct succession from Samuel Richardson to his less-talented postmodern epigone John Irving, has rendered "real life" accessible through an essentially Garped economy of means. Like the underheated economy that is present-day America's discontent, such fiction has flourished on a regimen of borrow and spend, ignoring with singleminded determination the mounting deficit of relevance and belief it could no longer bank or bank upon. Northampton's ancestral kvetch, Solomon Stoddard, set the tone for this screming beneath the sky well back in the eighteenth century, when, as the narratormentor to the reader doing "Order and Flux" reports, the dentist/ theologian and deliverer of some stemwinding Great-awakening jeremiads in the years 1711-17 "foretold the world's cold and imminent end, characterizing that end as a kind of grim entropic stasis already harbinged by, among other portents: poor nutrition and its attendant moral and dental decay; the increasing infertility of modern woman; the rise of the novel; the Great Awakening itself" (OFN 94). The example of Thomas Pynchon provides a useful contrast to Wallace's post-scientific approach. Pynchon, of course, is still very much alive, but remains very much a horseman of this chiropractical apocalypse; which is also to say that by now it's impossible to come upon the word entropic without recalling just whose gold lies buried at the foot of gravity's rainbow. Yet, for all its postmodern panache and skill at inventorying the century's paranoid inventions, no shimmer of the post-scientific gleams from the pages of this encyclopedic master. His Vineland is not all that removed from the sort of world that can be pieced together from Rev. Stoddard's X rays of the mouth of Hell. But not so the recent writings of his inheritor and not-so secret sharer of influenza's anxiety, David Foster Wallace. In several of his best stories modernism and postmodernism are underwritten with a currency that projects a semblance of solvency, even while its value continues to drain away behind the scenes of its own commercially staged renascence. If all that Wallace has set a-shimmer doesn't yet gleam, his work nevertheless proves the writing on the wall for any number of his glitzier contemporaries. This wall has been waiting patiently to receive such writings - and those of his post-postmodern contemporaries - if and when what is still wanting in it weighs in with the balanced fullness of its findings, and ours. -- End --
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Keywords: Academic; General; Postmodern literature_Criticism and interpretation; Modern literature_Criticism and interpretation; Wallace, David Foster_Criticism and interpretation; Postmodernism (Literature)_Criticism and interpretation; Literature, Modern_Criticism and interpretation; Criticism and interpretation

Wallace, David Foster

Summer 1993

E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction

article

Wallace:1993hw ~

ABSTRACT_
Source: The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993 v13 n2 p151(44). Title: E unibus pluram: television and U.S. fiction. Author: David Foster Wallace Abstract: Television is more like literature than people care to admit. Literature became self-reflexive in the 1960s as postmodernist authors questioned the abilities and merits of fiction within their texts, doubting authoritative literary voices and eventually eschewing plot altogether. Television also pokes fun at its own limitations, often in sarcastic tones that acknowledge the lack of moral fiber in programming. Contemporary fiction makes fun of the television generation, but no more so than television itself does. Subjects: Television - Criticism and interpretation Fiction - Criticism and interpretation Irony - Analysis Electronic Collection: A13952319 RN: A13952319 Full Text COPYRIGHT 1993 Review of Contemporary Fiction Act Natural Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. The minute fiction writers stop moving, they start lurking, and stare. They are born watchers. They are viewers. They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow. Almost predatory. This is because human situations are writers' food. Fiction writers watch other humans sort of the way gapers slow down for car wrecks: they covet a vision of themselves as witnesses. But fiction writers as a species also tend to be terribly self-conscious. Even by U.S. standards. Devoting lots of productive time to studying closely how people come across to them, fiction writers also spend lots of less productive time wondering nervously how they come across to other people. How they appear, how they seem, whether their shirttail might be hanging out their fly, whether there's maybe lipstick on their teeth, whether the people they're ogling can maybe size them up as somehow creepy, lurkers and starers. The result is that a surprising majority of fiction writers, born watchers, tend to dislike being objects of people's attention. Being watched. The exceptions to this rule - Mailer, McInerney, Janowitz - create the misleading impression that lots of belles-lettres types like people's attention. Most don't. The few who like attention just naturally get more attention. The rest of us get less, and ogle. Most of the fiction writers I know are Americans under forty. I don't know whether fiction writers under forty watch more television than other American species. Statisticians report that television is watched over six hours a day in the average American household. I don't know any fiction writers who live in average American households. I suspect Louise Erdrich might. Actually I have never seen an average American household. Except on TV. So right away you can see a couple of things that look potentially great, for U.S. fiction writers, about U.S. television. First, television does a lot of our predatory human research for us. American human beings are a slippery and protean bunch, in real life, as hard to get any kind of univocal handle on as a literary territory that's gone from Darwinianly naturalistic to cybernetically post-postmodern in eighty years. But television comes equipped with just such a syncretic handle. If we want to know what American normality is - what Americans want to regard as normal - we can trust television. For television's whole raison is reflecting what people want to see. It's a mirror. Not the Stendhalian mirror reflecting the blue sky and mud puddle. More like the overlit bathroom mirror before which the teenager monitors his biceps and determines his better profile. This kind of window on nervous American self-perception is just invaluable, fictionwise. And writers can have faith in television. There is a lot of money at stake, after all; and television retains the best demographers applied social science has to offer, and these researchers can determine precisely what Americans in 1990 are, want, see: what we as Audience want to see ourselves as. Television, from the surface on down, is about desire. Fictionally speaking, desire is the sugar in human food. The second great thing is that television looks to be an absolute godsend for a human subspecies that loves to watch people but hates to be watched itself. For the television screen affords access only one way. A psychic ball-check valve. We can see Them; They can't see Us. We can relax, unobserved, as we ogle. I happen to believe this is why television also appeals so much to lonely people. To voluntary shut-ins. Every lonely human I know watches way more than the average U.S. six hours a day. The lonely, like the fictional, love one-way watching. For lonely people are usually lonely not because of hideous deformity or odor or obnoxiousness - in fact there exist today social and support groups for persons with precisely these features. Lonely people tend rather to be lonely because they decline to bear the emotional costs associated with being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly. Let's call the average U.S. lonely person Joe Briefcase. Joe Briefcase just loathes the strain of the self-consciousness which so oddly seems to appear only when other real human beings are around, staring, their human sense-antennae abristle. Joe B. fears how he might appear to watchers. He sits out the stressful U.S. game of appearance poker. But lonely people, home, alone, still crave sights and scenes. Hence television. Joe can stare at Them, on the screen; They remain blind to Joe. It's almost like voyeurism. I happen to know lonely people who regard television as a veritable deus ex machina for voyeurs. And a lot of the criticism, the really rabid criticism less leveled than sprayed at networks, advertisers, and audiences alike, has to do with the charge that television has turned us into a nation of sweaty, slack-jawed voyeurs. This charge turns out to be untrue, but for weird reasons. What classic voyeurism is is espial: watching people who don't know you're there as they go about the mundane but erotically charged little businesses of private life. It's interesting that so much classic voyeurism involves media of framed glass-windows, telescopes, etc. Maybe the framed glass is why the analogy to television is so tempting. But TV-watching is a different animal from Peeping Tourism. Because the people we're watching through TV's framed-glass screen are not really ignorant of the fact that somebody is watching them. In fact a whole lot of somebodies. In fact the people on television know that it is in virtue of this truly huge crowd of ogling somebodies that they are on the screen, engaging in broad non-mundane gestures, at all. Television does not afford true espial because television is performance, spectacle, which by definition requires watchers. We're not voyeurs here at all. We're just viewers. We are the Audience, megametrically many, though most often we watch alone. E unibus pluram.(1) One reason fiction writers seem creepy in person is that by vocation they really are voyeurs. They need that straightforward visual theft of watching somebody without his getting to prepare a speciable watchable self. The only real illusion in espial is suffered by the voyee, who doesn't know he's giving off images and impressions. A problem with so many of us fiction writers under forty using television as a substitute for true espial, however, is that TV "voyeurism" involves a whole gorgeous orgy of illusions for the pseudo-spy, when we watch. Illusion (1) is that we're voyeurs here at all: the voyees behind the screen's glass are only pretending ignorance. They know perfectly well we're out there. And that we're there is also very much on the minds of those behind the second layer of glass, the lenses and monitors via which technicians and arrangers apply no small ingenuity to hurl the visible images at us. What we see is far from stolen; it's proffered - illusion (2). And, illusion (3), what we're seeing through the framed pane isn't people in real situations that do or even could go on without consciousness of Audience. What young writers are scanning for data on some reality to fictionalize is already composed of fictional characters in highly ritualized narratives. Plus, (4), we're not really even seeing "characters" at all: it's not Major Frank Burns, pathetic self-important putz from Fort Wayne, Indiana; it's Larry Linville of Ojai, California, actor stoic enough to endure thousands of letters (still coming in, even in syndication) from pseudo-voyeurs mistakenly berating him for being a putz. And, if (5) isn't too out-there for you, it's ultimately of course not even actors we're espying, not even people: it's EM-propelled analog waves and ionized streams and rear-screen chemical reactions throwing off phosphenes in grids of dots not much more lifelike than Seurat's own impressionistic "statements" on perceptual illusion. Good lord and (6) the dots are coming out of our furniture, all we're spying on is our own furniture; and our very own chairs and lamps and bookspines sit visible but unseen at our gaze's frame as we contemplate "Korea" or are "taken live to Amman, Jordan," or regard the plusher chairs and classier spines of the Huxtable "home" as illusory cues that this is some domestic interior whose membrane we have, slyly, unnoticed, violated. (7) and (8) and illusions ad inf. Not that realities about actors and phosphenes and furniture are unknown to us. We simply choose to ignore them. For six hours a day. They are part of the belief we suspend. But we're asked to hoist such a heavy load aloft. Illusions of voyeurism and privileged access require real complicity from viewers. How can we be made so willingly to acquiesce for hours daily to the illusion that the people on the TV don't know they're being looked at, to the fantasy that we're transcending privacy and feeding on unself-conscious human activity? There might be lots of reasons why these unrealities are so swallowable, but a big one is that the performers behind the two layers of glass are - varying degrees of Thespian talent aside - absolute geniuses at seeming unwatched. Now, seeming unwatched in front of a TV camera is a genuine art. Take a look at how civilians act when a TV camera is pointed at them: they simply spaz out, or else go all rigor mortis. Even PR people and politicians are, camera-wise, civilians. And we love to laugh at how stiff and false non-professionals appear, on television. How unnatural But if you've ever once been the object of that terrible blank round glass stare, you know all too well how self-conscious it makes you. A harried guy with earphones and a clipboard tells you to "act natural" as your face begins to leap around on your skull, struggling for a seemingly unwatched expression that feels impossible because "seeming unwatched" is, like the "act natural" which fathered it, oxymoronic. Try driving a golf ball as someone asks you whether you in- or exhale on your backswing, or getting promised lavish rewards if you can avoid thinking of a rhinoceros for ten seconds, and you'll get some idea of the truly heroic contortions of body and mind that must be required for Don Johnson to act unwatched as he's watched by a lens that's an overwhelming emblem of what Emerson, years before TV, called "the gaze of millions." Only a certain very rare species of person, for Emerson, is "fit to stand the gaze of millions." It is not your normal, hard-working, quietly desperate species of American. The man who can stand the megagaze is a walking imago, a certain type of transcendent freak who, for Emerson, "carries the holiday in his eye."(2) The Emersonian holiday television actors' eyes carry is the potent illusion of a vacation from self-consciousness. Not worrying about how you come across. A total unallergy to gazes. It is contemporarily heroic. It is frightening and strong. It is also, of course, an act, a counterfeit impression - for you have to be just abnormally self-conscious and self-controlling to appear unwatched before lenses. The self-conscious appearance of unself-consciousness is the grand illusion behind TV's mirror-hall of illusions; and for us, the Audience, it is both medicine and poison. For we gaze at these rare, highly trained, seemingly unwatched people for six hours daily. And we love these people. In terms of attributing to them true supernatural assets and desiring to emulate them, we sort of worship them. In a real Joe Briefcase-type world that shifts ever more starkly from some community of relationships to networks of strangers connected by self-interest and contest and image, the people we espy on TV offer us familiarity, community. Intimate friendship. But we split what we see. The characters are our "close friends"; but the performers are beyond strangers, they're images, demigods, and they move in a different sphere, hang out with and marry only each other, seem even as actors accessible to Audience only via the mediation of tabloids, talk show, EM signal. And yet both actors and characters, so terribly removed and filtered, seem so natural, when we watch. Given how much we watch and what watching means, it's inevitable - but toxic - for those of us fictionists or Joe Briefcases who wish to be voyeurs to get the idea that these persons behind the glass, persons who are often the most colorful, attractive, animated, alive people in our daily experience, are also people who are oblivious to the fact that they are watched. It's toxic for allergic people because it sets up an alienating cycle, and also for writers because it replaces fiction research with a weird kind of fiction consumption. We self-conscious Americans' oversensitivity to real humans fixes us before the television and its ball-check valve in an attitude of rapt, relaxed reception. We watch various actors play various characters, etc. For 360 minutes per diem, we receive unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant feature of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching. And that the single biggest part of real watchableness is seeming to be unaware that there's any watching going on. Acting natural. The persons we young fiction writers and assorted shut-ins most study, feel for, feel through are, by virtue of a genius for feigned unself-consciousness, fit to stand gazes. And we, trying desperately to be nonchalant, perspire creepily, on the subway. The Finger Weighty existential predicaments aside, there's no denying that people in the U.S.A. watch so much television because it's fun. I know I watch for fun, most of the time, and that at least 51 percent of the time I do have fun when I watch. This doesn't mean I do not take television seriously. One claim of this essay is that the most dangerous thing about television for U.S. fiction writers is that we yield to the temptation not to take television seriously as both a disseminator and a definer of the cultural atmosphere we breathe and process, that many of us are so blinded by constant exposure that we regard TV the way Reagan's lame FCC chairman Mark Fowler professed to in 1981, as "just another appliance, a toaster with pictures."(3) Television nevertheless is just plain pleasurable, though it may seem odd that so much of the pleasure my generation gets from television lies in making fun of it. But you have to remember that younger Americans grew up as much with people's disdain for TV as we did with TV itself I knew it was a "vast wasteland" way before I knew who Newton Minow or Mark Fowler were. And it's just fun to laugh cynically at television - at the way the laughter from sitcoms' "live studio audience" is always suspiciously constant in pitch and duration, or at the way travel is depicted on The Flintstones by having the exact same cut-rate cartoon tree, rock, and house go by four times. It's fun, when a withered June Allyson comes on-screen for Depend Adult Undergarments and says "If you have a bladder-control problem, you're not alone," to hoot and shout back "Well, chances are you're alone quite a bit, June!" Most scholars and critics who write about U.S. popular culture, though, seem both to take TV seriously and to suffer real pain over what they see. There's this well-known critical litany about television's vapidity, shallowness, and irrealism. The litany is often far cruder and triter than what the critics complain about, which I think is why most younger viewers find pro criticism of television far less interesting than pro television itself. I found solid examples of what I'm talking about on the first day I even looked. The New York Times Arts & Leisure section for Sunday, 8/05/90, simply bulged with bitter critical derision for TV, and some of the most unhappy articles weren't about just low-quality programming so much as about how TV's become this despicable instrument of cultural decay. In a summary review of all 1990's "crash and burn" summer box-office hits in which "realism ... seems to have gone almost entirely out of fashion," Janet Maslin locates her true anti-reality culprit: "We may be hearing about |real life' on television shows made up of 15-second sound bites (in which |real people' not only speak in brief, neat truisms but actually seem to think that way, perhaps as a result of having watched too much reality-molding television themselves)."(4) And one Stephen Holden, in what starts out as a mean pop music article, knows perfectly well what's behind what he hates: "Pop music is no longer a world unto itself but an adjunct of television, whose stream of commercial images projects a culture in which everything is for sale and the only things that count are fame, power, and the body beautiful."(5) This stuff just goes on and on, in the Times. The only Arts & Leisure piece I could find with anything upbeat to say about TV that morning was a breathless article on how lots of Ivy League graduates are now flying straight from school to New York and Los Angeles to become television writers and are clearing well over $200,000 to start and enjoying rapid advancement to harried clip-boarded production status. In this regard, 8/05's Times is a good example of a strange mix that's been around for a few years now: weary contempt for television as a creative product and cultural force, combined with beady-eyed fascination about the actual behind-the-glass mechanics of making that product and projecting that force. Surely we all have friends we just hate to hear talk about TV because they so clearly loathe it - they sneer relentlessly at the hackneyed plots, the unlikely dialogue, the Cheez-Whiz resolutions, the bland condescension of the news anchors, the shrill wheedling of commercials - and yet are just as clearly obsessed with it, somehow need to hate their six hours a day, day in and out. Junior advertising executives, aspiring filmakers, and graduate- school poets are in my experience especially prone to this condition where they simultaneously hate, fear, and need television, and try to disinfect themselves of whatever so much viewing might do to them by watching TV with weary irony instead of the rapt credulity most of us grew up with. (Note that most fiction writers still tend to go for the rapt credulity.) But, since the wearily disgusted Times has its own demographic thumb on the pulse of news-readerly taste, it's safe to conclude that most educated, Times-buying Americans are wearily disgusted by television, have this weird hate-need-fear-6-hrs.-daily gestalt about it. Published TV scholarship sure reflects this mood. And the numbingly dull quality to most "literary" television analyses is due less to the turgid abstraction scholars employ to make television seem an OK object of "aesthetic" inquiry - cf. an '86 treatise: "The form of my Tuesday evening's prime-time pleasure is structured by a dialectic of elision and rift among various windows through which ... |flow' is more of a circumstance than a product. The real output is the quantum, the smallest maneuverable broadcast bit"(6) - than to the tired, jaded cynicism of television experts who mock and revile the very phenomenon they've chosen as scholarly vocation. It's like people who despise - I mean big-time, long-term despise - their spouses or jobs, but won't split up or quit. Critical complaint degenerates quickly into plain whining. The fecund question about U.S. television is no longer whether there are some truly nasty problems here but rather what on earth's to be done about them. On this question pop critics are mute. In fact it's in the U.S. arts, particularly in certain strands of contemporary American fiction, that the really interesting questions about end-of-the-century TV - What is it about televisual culture that we so hate? Why are we so immersed in it if we hate it so? What implications are there in our sustained voluntary immersion in stuff we hate? - are being addressed. But they are also, weirdly, being asked and answered by television itself. This is another reason why most TV criticism seems so empty. Television's managed to become its own most profitable critic. A.M., 8/05/90, as I was scanning and sneering at the sneering tone of the prenominate Times articles, a syndicated episode of St. Elsewhere was on the TV, cleaning up in a Sunday-morning Boston market otherwise occupied by televangelists, infomercials, and the steroid- and polyurethane-ridden American Gladiators, itself not charmless but definitely a low-dose show. Syndication is another new area of public fascination, not only because huge cable stations like Chicago's WGN and Atlanta's WTBS have upped the stakes from local to national, but because syndication is changing the whole creative philosophy of network television. Since it is in syndication deals (where the disuibutor gets both an up-front fee for a program and a percentage of the ad-slots for his own commercials) that the creators of successful television series realize truly gross profits, many new programs are designed and pitched with both immediate prime-time and down-the-road syndication audiences in mind, and are now informed less by dreams of the ten-year-beloved-TV-institution-type run - Gunsmoke, M*A*S*H - than of a modest three-year run that yields the seventy-eight in-can episodes required for an attractive-syndication package. I, like millions of other Americans, know this stuff only because I saw a special three-part report about syndication on Entertainment Tonight, itself the first nationally syndicated "news" program and the first infomercial so popular that TV stations were willing to pay for it. Sunday syndication is also intriguing because it makes for juxtapositions as eerily apposite as anything French surrealists could contrive. Lovable warlocks on Bewitched and commercially Satanic heavy-metal videos on America's Top 40 run opposite airbrushed preachers decrying demonism in U.S. culture. Or, better, 8/05's St. Elsewhere episode 94, originally broadcast in 1988, aired on Boston's Channel 38 immediately following two back-to-back episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, that icon of seventies pathos. The plots of the two Mary Tyler Moore Shows are unimportant here. But the St. Elsewhere episode that followed them partly concerned a cameo-role mental patient afflicted with the delusional belief that he was Mary Richards from The Mary Tyler Moore Show. He further believed that a fellow cameo-role mental patient was Rhoda, that Dr. Westphal was Mr. Grant, and that Dr. Auschlander was Murray. This psychiatric subplot was a one-shot; it was resolved by episode's end. The pseudo-Mary (a sad lumpy-looking guy who used to play one of Dr. Hartley's neurotic clients on the old Bob Newhart Show) rescues the other cameo-role mental patient, whom he believes to be Rhoda and who has been furious in his denials that he is female, much less fictional (and who is himself played by the guy who used to play Mr. Carlin, Dr. Hartley's most intractable client) from assault by a bit-part hebephrene. In gratitude, Rhoda/Mr. Carlin/mental patient declares that he'll consent to be Rhoda if that's what Mary/neurotic client/mental patient wants. At this too-real generosity, the pseudo-Mary's psychotic break breaks. The sad guy admits to Dr. Auschlander that he's not Mary Richards. He's actually just a plain old amnesiac, minus a self, existentially adrift. He has no idea who he is. He's lonely. He watches a lot of television. He figured it was "better to believe I was a TV character than not to believe I was anybody." Dr. Auschlander takes the penitent patient for a walk in the wintery Boston air and promises that he, the identityless guy, can someday find out who he really is, provided he can dispense with "the distraction of television." At this cheery prognosis, the patient removes his own fuzzy winter beret and throws it into the air. The episode ends with a freeze of the aloft hat, leaving at least one viewer credulously rapt. This would have been just another clever low-concept eighties TV story, where the final cap-tossing and closing credits coyly undercut Dr. Auschlander's put-down of television, were it not for the countless layers of ironic, involuted TV imagery and data that whirl around this high-concept installment. Because another of this episode's cameo stars, drifting through a different subplot, is one Betty White, Sue Ann Nivens of the old Mary Tyler Moore Show, here playing a tortured NASA surgeon (don't ask). It is with almost tragic inevitability, then", that Ms. White, at thirty-two minutes into the episode, meets up with the TV-deluded pseudo-Mary in their respective tortured wanderings through the hospital's corridors, and that she considers the mental patient's inevitable joyful cries of "Sue Ann!" with a too-straight face and says he must have her confused with someone else. Of the convolved levels of fantasy and reality and identity here - e.g., patient simultaneously does, does not, and does have Betty White "confused" with Sue Ann Nivens - we needn't speak in detail: doubtless a Yale Contemporary Culture dissertation is underway on R. D. Laing and just this episode. But the most interesting levels of meaning here lie, and point, behind the lens. For NBC's St. Elsewhere, like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Bob Newhart Show before it, was created, produced, and guided into syndication by MTM Studios, owned by Mary Tyler Moore and overseen by her husband, later NBC Chair Grant Tinker; and St. Elsewhere's scripts and subplots are story-edited by Mark Tinker, Mary's step-, Grant's heir. The deluded mental patient, an exiled, drifting veteran of one MTM program, reaches piteously out to the exiled, drifting (literally - NASA, for God's sake) veteran of another MTM production, and her ironic rebuff is scripted by KM personnel, who accomplish the parodic undercut of MTM's Dr. Auschlander with the copyrighted MTM hat-gesture of one MTM veteran who's "deluded" he's another. Dr. A.'s Fowleresque dismissal of TV as just a "distraction" is less absurd than incoherent. Therd is nothing but television on this episode; every joke and dramatic surge depends on involution, metatelevision. It is in joke within in-joke. So then why do I get it? Because I, the viewer, outside the glass with the rest of the Audience, am nevertheless in on the in-joke. I've seen Mary Tyler Moore's "real" toss of that fuzzy beret so often it's moved past cliche into nostalgia. I know the mental patient from Bob Newhart, Betty White from everywhere, and I know all sorts of intriguing irrelevant stuff about MTM Studios and syndication from Entertainment Tonight. I, the pseudovoyeur, am indeed "behind the scenes," for in-joke purposes. But it is not I the spy who have crept inside television's boundaries. It is vice versa. Television, even the mundane little businesses of its production, have become Our interior. And we seem a jaded, jeering, but willing and knowledgeable Audience. This St. Elsewhere episode was nominated for an Emmy. For best original teleplay. The best TV of the last five years has been about ironic self-reference like no previous species of postmodern art could have dreamed of. The colors of MTV videos, blue-black and lambently flickered, are the colors of television. Moonlighting's Bruce and Bueller's Ferris throw asides to the viewer every bit as bald as the old melodrama villain's monologued gloat. Segments of the new late-night glitz-news After Hours end with a tease that features harried headphoned guys in the production booth ordering the tease. MTV's television-trivia game show, the dry-titled Remote Control, got so popular it busted its own MTV-membrane and is in 1990 now syndicated band-wide. The hippest commercials, with stark computerized settings and blank beauties in mirrored shades and plastic slacks genuflecting before various forms of velocity, force, and adrenaline, seem like little more than TV's vision of how TV offers rescue to those lonely Joe Briefcases passively trapped into watching too much TV. What explains the pointlessness of most published TV criticism is that television has become immune to charges that it lacks any meaningful connection to the world outside it. It's not that charges of nonconnection have become untrue. It's that any such connection has become otiose. Television used to point beyond itself. Those of us born in like the sixties were trained to look where it pointed, usually at versions of "real life" made prettier, sweeter, better by succumbing to a product or temptation. Today's Audience is way better trained, and TV has discarded what's not needed. A dog, if you point at something, will look only at your finger. Metawatching It's not like self-reference is new to mass entertainment. How many old radio shows - Jack Benny, Martin and Lewis, Abbott and Costello - were mostly about themselves as shows? "So, Jerry, and you said I couldn't get a big star like Miss Lucille Ball to be a guest on our show, you little twerp." Etc. But once television introduces the element of watching, and once it informs an economy and culture like radio never did, the referential stakes go way up. Six hours a day is more time than most people (consciously) do any one thing. How people who absorb such doses understand themselves changes, becomes spectatorial, self-conscious. Because the practice of watching is expansive. Exponential. We spend enough time watching, pretty soon we start watching ourselves watching. We start to "feel" ourselves feeling, yearn to experience "experiences." And that American subspecies into writing starts writing more and more about.... The emergence of something called metafiction in the American sixties was and is hailed by academic critics as a radical aesthetic, a whole new literary form unshackled from the canonical cinctures of narrative and mimesis and free to plunge into reflexivity and self-conscious meditations on aboutness. Radical it may have been, but thinking that postmodern metafiction evolved unconscious of prior changes in readerly taste is about as innocent as thinking that all those students we saw on television protesting the war in southeast Asia were protesting only because they hated the war. They may have hated the war, but they also wanted to be seen protesting on television. TV was where they'd seen this war, after all. Why wouldn't they go about hating it on the very medium that made their hate possible? Metafictionists may have had aesthetic theories out the bazoo, but they were also sentient citizens of a community that was exchanging an old idea of itself as a nation of do-ers and be-ers for a new vision of the U.S.A. as an atomized mass of self-conscious watchers and appearers. Metafiction, for its time, was nothing more than a poignant hybrid of its theoretical foe, realism: if realism called it like it saw it, metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it. This high-cultural postmodern genre, in other words, was deeply informed by the emergence of television. And American fiction remains informed by TV ... especially those strains of fiction with roots in postmodernism, which even at its rebellious zenith was less a "response to" televisual culture than a kind of abiding-in-TV. Even back then, the borders were starting to come down. It's strange that it took television itself so long to wake up to watching's potent reflexivity. Television shows about television shows were rare for a long time. The Dick Van Dyke Show was prescient, and Mary Moore carried its insight into her own decade-long study in local-market angst. Now, of course, there's been everything from Murphy Brown to Max Headroom to Entertainment Tonight. And with Letterman, Arsenio, and Leno's battery of hip, sardonic, this-is-just-TV shticks, the circle back to the days of "So glad to get Miss Ball on our show" has closed and come spiral, television's power to jettison connection and castrate protest fueled by the same ironic postmodern self-consciousness it first helped fashion. It's going to take a while, but I'm going to prove to you that the nexus where television and fiction converse and consort is self-conscious irony. Irony is, of course, a turf fictionists have long worked with zeal. And irony is important for understanding TV because "T.V.," now that it's gotten powerful enough to move from acronym to way of life, revolves off just the sorts of absurd contradictions irony's all about exposing. It is ironic that television is a syncresis that celebrates diversity. That an extremely unattractive self-consciousness is necessary to create TV performers' illusion of unconscious appeal. That products presented as helping you express individuality can afford to be advertised on television only because they sell to huge hordes. And so on. Television regards irony the way the educated lonely regard television. Television both fears irony's capacity to expose, and needs it. It needs irony because television was practically made for irony. For TV is a bisensuous medium. Its displacement of radio wasn't picture displacing sound; it was picture added. Since the tension between what's said and what's seen is irony's whole sales territory, classic televisual irony works not via the juxtaposition of conflicting pictures or conflicting sounds, but with sights that undercut what's said. A scholarly article on network news describes a famous interview with a corporate guy from United Fruit on a CBS special about Guatemala: "I sure don't know of anybody being so-called |oppressed,'" the guy in a seventies leisure suit with a tie that looks like an omelette tells Ed Rabel. "I think this is just something that some reporters have thought up."(7) The whole interview is intercut with commentless pictures of big-bellied kids in Guatemalan slums and union organizers lying there with cut throats. Television's classic irony-function came into its own in the summer of 1974, as remorseless lenses opened to view the fertile "credibility gap" between the image of official disclaimer and the reality of high-level shenanigans. A nation was changed, as Audience. If even the president lies to you, whom are you supposed to trust to deliver the real? Television, that summer, presented itself as the earnest, worried eye on the reality behind all images. The irony that television is itself a river of image, however, was apparent even to a twelve-year-old, sitting there, rapt. There seemed to be no way out. Images and ironies all over the place. It's not a coincidence that Saturday Night Live, that Athens of irreverent cynicism, specializing in parodies of (1) politics and (2) television, premiered the next fall. On television. I'm worried when I say things like "television fears" and "television presents itself" because, even though it's an abstraction necessary to discourse, talking about television as if it were an entity can easily slip into the worst sort of anti-TV paranoia, treating of TV as some autonomous diabolical corrupter of personal agency and community gumption. I am anxious to avoid anti-TV paranoia here. Though I'm convinced that television lies, with a potency somewhere between symptom and synecdoche, behind a genuine crisis for U.S. culture and lit today, I don't share reactionary adults' vision of TV as some malignancy visited on an innocent populace, sapping IQs and compromising SAT scores while we all sit there on ever fatter bottoms with little mesmerized spirals revolving in our eyes. Because conservative critics like Samuel Huntington and Barbara Tuchman who try to claim that TV's lowering of our aesthetic standards is responsible for a "contemporary culture taken over by commercialism directed to the mass market and necessarily to mass taste"(8) can be refuted by observing that their propter hoc isn't even post hoc: 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."(9) It's undeniable that television is an example of "low" art, the sort of art that tries too hard to please. Because of the economics of nationally broadcast, advertiser-subsidized entertainment, television's one goal - never denied by anybody in or around TV since RCA first authorized field tests in 1936 - is to ensure as much watching as possible. TV is the epitome of low art in its desire to appeal to and enjoy the attention of unprecedented numbers of people. But TV is not low because it is vulgar or prurient or stupid. It is often all these things, but this is a logical function of its need to please Audience. And I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be really similar in their vulgar and prurient and stupid interests and wildly different in their refined and moral and intelligent interests. It's all about syncretic diversity: neither medium nor viewers are responsible for quality. Still, for the fact that American humans consume vulgar, prurient, stupid stuff at the sobering clip of six hours a day, for this both TV and we need to answer. We are responsible basically because nobody is holding any weapons on us forcing us to spend amounts of time second only to sleep doing something that is, when you come right down to it, not good for us. Sorry to sound judgmental, but there it is: six hours a day is not good. Television's biggest minute-by-minute appeal is that it engages without demanding. One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving. In this respect, television resembles other things mothers call "special treats" - e.g., candy, or liquor - treats that are basically fine and fun in small amounts but bad for us in large amounts and really bad for us if consumed as any kind of nutritive staple. One can only guess what volume of gin or poundage of Toblerone six hours of special treat a day would convert to. On the surface of the problem, television is responsible for our rate of its consumption only in that it's become so terribly successful at its acknowledged job of ensuring prodigious amounts of watching. Its social accountability seems sort of like that of designers of military weapons: unculpable right up until they get a little too good at their job. But the analogy between television and liquor is best, I think. Because I'm afraid Joe Briefcase is a teleholic. Watching TV can become malignantly addictive. TV may become malignantly addictive only once a certain threshold of quantity is habitually passed, but then the same is true of whiskey. And by "malignant" and "addictive" I again do not mean evil or coercive. An activity is addictive if one's relationship to it lies on that downward-sloping continuum between liking it a little too much and downright needing it. Many addictions, from exercise to letter-writing, are pretty benign. But something is malignantly addictive if (1) it causes real problems for the addict, and (2) it offers itself as relief from the very problems it causes. A malignant addiction is also distinguished for spreading the problems of the addiction out and in in interference patterns, creating difficulties for relationships, communities, and the addict's very sense of self and soul. The hyperbole might strain the analogy for you, but concrete illustrations of malignant TV-watching cycles aren't hard to come by. If it's true that many Americans are lonely, and if it's true that many lonely people are prodigious TV-watchers, and if it's true that lonely people find in television's 2D images relief from the pain of their reluctance to be around real humans, then it's also obvious that the more time spent watching TV, the less time spent in the real human world, and the less time spent in the real human world, the harder it becomes not to feel alienated from real humans, solipsistic, lonely. It's also true that to the extent one begins to view pseudo-relationships with Bud Bundy or Jane Pauley as acceptable alternatives to relationships with real humans, one has commensurately less conscious incentive even to try to connect with real 3D persons, connections that are pretty important to mental health. For Joe Briefcase, as for many addicts, the "special treat" of TV, begins to substitute for something nourishing and needed, and the original hunger subsides to a strange objectless unease. TV-watching as a malignant cycle doesn't even require special preconditions like writerly self-consciousness or loneliness. Let's for a second imagine Joe Briefcase as now just average, relatively unlonely, adjusted, married, blessed with 2.5 apple-cheeked issue, normal, home from hard work at 5:30, starting his average six-hour stint. Since Joe B. is average, he'll shrug at pollsters' questions and say he most often watches television to "unwind" from those elements of his day and life he finds stressful. It's tempting to suppose that TV enables this "unwinding" simply because it offers an Auschlanderian distraction, something to divert the mind from quotidian troubles. But would mere distraction ensure continual massive watching? Television offers more than distraction. In lots of ways, television purveys and enables dreams, and most of these dreams involve some sort of transcendence of average daily life. The modes of presentation that work best for TV - stuff like "action," with shoot-outs and car wrecks, or the rapid-fire "collage" of commercials, news, and music videos, or the "hysteria" of prime-time soap and sitcom with broad gestures, high voices, too much laughter - are unsubtle in their whispers that, somewhere, life is quicker, denser, more interesting, more ... well, lively than contemporary life as Joe Briefcase knows and moves through it. This might seem benign until we consider that what average Joe Briefcase does more than almost anything else in contemporary life is watch television, an activity which anyone with an average brain can see does not make for a very dense and lively life. Since television must seek to compel attention by offering a dreamy promise of escape from daily life, and since stats confirm that so grossly much of ordinary U.S. life is watching TV, TV's whispered promises must somehow undercut television-watching in theory ("Joe, Joe, there's a world where life is lively, where nobody spends six hours a day unwinding before a piece of furniture") while reinforcing television-watching in practice ("Joe, Joe, your best and only access to this world is TV"). Well, Joe Briefcase has an average, workable brain, and deep inside he knows, as we do, that there's some kind of psychic three-card monte going on in this system of conflicting whispers. But if it's so bald a delusion, why do we keep watching such 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 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 heck 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 we usually punish them for it by not watching novel forms 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 didn't get ratings. Quality television cannot stand 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 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. But it's still 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 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 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 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 foreign to addictive cycles) is one of two ingenious ways it's consolidated its six-hour hold on my generation's cajones. The other is postmodern irony. The commercials for Alf's Boston debut in syndicated package feature the fat, cynical, gloriously decadent puppet (so much like Snoopy, like Garfield, like Bart) 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 escape, comfort, reassurance. The cycle is self-nourishing. Guilty Fictions Not, again, that this 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 a 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 lit. One of the most recognizable things about this century's postmodern fiction was 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 Mickey Rooney in Gravity's Rainbow to "You"'s fetish for the New York Post's COMA BABY feature in Bright Lights, 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."[10] The apotheosis of the pop in postwar art marked a whole new marriage between high and low culture. For the artistic viability of postmodernism is 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 feelings as by common images: what binds us became what we stood witness to. No one did or does see 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 their place in postmodernism's artistic ancestors, the "dirty realism" of a Joyce or the Ur-Dadaism of a Duchamp toilet sculpture. Duchamp's 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,"[11] 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 today's 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 forty 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 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 insofar as television presents and defines the contemporary world. But we are different in 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 simultaneously apt and misguided. It's true that there's something sad about the fact that young lion David Leavitt's sole descriptions of certain story characters is that their T-shirts have certain brand names on them. But the fact is that, for most of the educated young readership for whom Leavitt writes, members of a generation raised and nourished on messages equating what one consumes with who one is, Leavitt's descriptions do the job. In our post-'50, inseparable-from-TV association pool, brand loyalty is synecdochic of identity, character. For those U.S. writers whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, who are big on neither Duchamp nor Paz and lack the oracular foresight of a Pynchon, 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 suffered through, an earnest gray eminence kept trying to convince our class that a literary story or novel always eschews "any feature which serves to date it," because "serious fiction must be timeless." When we finally protested that, in his own well-known work, characters moved about in electrically lit rooms, drove cars, spoke not Anglo-Saxon but postwar English, 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 just didn't imagine the "serious" world the same way. His automobiled timeless and our FCC'd own were different. If you read the big literary supplements, you've doubtless seen the intergenerational squabble the prenominate scene explains. The plain fact is that certain key things having to do with fiction production are different for young U.S. writers now. And television is at the vortex of much 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 myopic car-crash witnesses might ask each other - "Did you just see what I just saw?" And, realism-wise, the paucity of profound conversation in Brat-esque fiction seems to be mimetic of more than just our own generation. Six hours a day, in average households young and old, just how much interfacing can really be going on? So now whose literary aesthetic seems "dated"? In terms of lit 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. 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 fecund. And let's not even talk about Balzac. It was in post-atomic America that pop influences on lit became-something more than technical. About the time television first gasped and sucked air, mass popular U.S. culture became 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 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 I think particularly of the Barth of The End of the Road and The Sot-Weed Factor, the Gaddis of The Recognitions, and the Pynchon of The Crying of Lot 49; but the movement toward treating of the pop as its own reservoir of mythopeia fast metastasized and has transcended both school and genre. Plucking from my bookshelves almost at random, I find poet James Cummin'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 1980 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 part of poet Bill Knott's 1974 "And Other Travels": . . . in my hand a cat o'nine tails on every tip of which was Clearasil I was worried because Dick Clark had told the cameraman not to put the camera on me during the dance parts of the show because my skirts were too tight[12] which serves as a lovely example because, even though this stanza appears in the poem without anything we'd normally call context or support, it is in fact self-supported by a reference we all, each of us, immediately get, conjuring as it does with Bandstand ritualized vanity, teenage insecurity, the management of spontaneous moments. It is the perfect pop image: at once slight and universal, soothing and discomfiting. Recall that the phenomena of watching and consciousness of watching are by nature expansive. What distinguishes another, later wave of postmodern lit is a further shift, from television images as valid objects of literary allusion, to TV and metawatching as themselves valid subjects. By this I mean certain lit beginning to locate its raison in its commentary on, response to, a U.S. culture more and more of and for watching, illusion, and the video image. This involution of attention was first observable in academic poetry. See for instance Stephen Dobyns's 1980 "Arrested Saturday Night": This is how it happened: Peg and Bob had invited Jack and Roxanne over to their house to watch the TV, and on the big screen they saw Peg and Bob, Jack and Roxanne watching themselves watch themselves on progressively smaller TVs....[13] or Knott's 1983 "Crash Course": I strap a TV monitor on my chest so that all who approach can see themselves and respond appropriately." The true prophet of this shift in U.S. fiction, though, was the prenominate Don DeLillo, a long-neglected conceptual novelist who has made signal and image his unifying topoi the way Barth and Pynchon had sculpted in paralysis and paranoia a decade earlier. DeLillo's 1985 White Noise sounded to fledgling fictionists a kind of televisual clarion-call. Scenelets like the following seemed especially important: Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove twenty-two miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the signs started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. . . . We walked along a cow-path to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides - pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book. "No one sees the barn," he said finally. A long silence followed. "Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn." He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced at once by others. "We're not here to capture an image. We're here to maintain one. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies." There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides. "Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism." Another silence ensued. "They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said. (12-13) I quote this at such length not only because it's too darn good to ablate, but to draw your attention to two relevant features. The less interesting is the Dobyns-esque message here about the metastasis of watching. For not only are people watching a barn whose only claim to fame is as an object of watching, but the pop-culture scholar Murray is watching people watch a barn, and his friend Jack is watching Murray watch the watching, and we readers are pretty obviously watching Jack the narrator watch Murray watching, etc. If you leave out the reader, there's a similar regress of recordings of barn and barn-watching. But more important are the complicated ironies at work in the scene. The scene itself is obviously absurd and absurdist. But most of the writing's parodic force is directed at Murray, the would-be transcender of spectation. Murray, by watching and analyzing, would try to figure out the how and whys of giving in to collective visions of mass images that have themselves become mass images only because they've been made the objects of collective vision. The narrator's "extended silence" in response to Murray's blather speaks volumes. But it's not to be mistaken for a silence of sympathy with the sheeplike photograph-hungry crowd. These poor Joe Briefcases are no less objects of ridicule for their "scientific" critic himself being ridiculed. The authorial tone throughout is a kind of deadpan sneer. Jack himself is utterly mute - since to speak out loud in the scene would render the narrator part of the farce (instead of a detached, transcendent "observer and recorder") and so vulnerable to ridicule himself. With his silence, DeLillo's alter ego Jack eloquently diagnoses the very disease from which he, Murray, barn-watchers, and readers all suffer. I Do Have a Thesis I want to convince you that irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive of those features of contemporary U.S. culture (of which cutting-edge fiction is a part) that enjoy any significant relation to the television whose weird pretty hand has my generation by the throat. I'm going to argue that irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that at the same time they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that for aspiring fictionists they pose terrifically vexing problems. My two big premises are that, on the one hand, a certain subgenre of pop-conscious postmodern fiction, written mostly by young Americans, has lately arisen and made a real attempt to transfigure a world of and for appearance, mass appeal, and television; and that, on the other hand, televisual culture has somehow evolved to a point where it seems invulnerable to any such transfiguring assault. TV, in other words, has become able to capture and neutralize any attempt to change or even protest the attitudes of passive unease and cynicism TV requires of Audience in order to be commercially and psychologically viable at doses of several hours per day. Image-Fiction The particular fictional subgenre I have in mind has been called by some editors "post-postmodernism" and by some critics "hyperrealism." Most of the younger readers and writers I know call it the "fiction of image." Image-fiction is basically a further involution of the relations between lit and pop that blossomed with the sixties postmodernists. If the postmodern church fathers found pop images valid referents and symbols in fiction, and if in the seventies and early eighties this appeal to the features of mass culture shifted from use to mention, certain avant-gardists starting to treat of pop and TV and watching as themselves fertile subjects, the new fiction of image uses the transient received myths of popular culture as a world in which to imagine fictions about "real," albeit pop-mediated, public characters. Early uses of imagist tactics can be seen in the DeLillo of Great Jones Street, the Coover of Burning, and in Max Apple, whose seventies short story "The Oranging of America" projected an interior life onto the figure of Howard Johnson. But in the late eighties, despite publisher unease over the legalities of imagining private lives for public figures, a real bumper crop of this behind-the-glass stuff started appearing, authored largely by writers who didn't know or cross-fertilize one another. Apple's Propheteers, Jay Cantor's Krazy Kat, Coover's A Night at the Movies, or You Must Remember This, William T. Vollmann's You Bright and Risen Angels, Stephen Dixon's Movies: Seventeen Stories, and DeLillo's own fictional hologram of Oswald in Libra are all notable post-'85 instances. (Observe too that, in another eighties medium, the arty Zelig, Purple Rose of Cairo, and Sex, Lies, and Video-tape, plus the low-budget Scanners and Videodrome and Shockers, all began to treat screens as permeable.) It's in the last couple of years that the image-fiction scene has really taken off. A. M. Homes's 1990 The Safely of Objects features a stormy love affair between a boy and a Barbie doll. Vollmann's 1989 The Rainbow Stories has Sonys as characters in Heideggerian parables. Michael Martone's 1990 Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler's List is a tight cycle of stories about the Midwest's pop-culture giants - James Dean, Colonel Sanders, Dillinger - the whole project of which, spelled out in a preface about image-fiction's legal woes, involves "questioning the border between fact and fiction when in the presence of fame."[15] And Mark Leyner's 1990 campus smash My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, less a novel than what the book's jacket-copy describes as "a fiction analogue of the best drug you ever took," features everything from meditations on the color of Carefree Panty Shields wrappers to "Big Squirrel, the TV kiddie-show host and kung fu mercenary," to NFL instant replays in an "X-ray vision which shows leaping skeletons in a bluish void surrounded by 75,000 roaring skulls."[16] One thing I have to insist you realize about this new subgenre is that it's distinguished, not just by a certain neo-postmodern technique, but by a genuine socio-artistic agenda. The fiction of image is not just a use or mention of televisual culture but a response to it, an effort to impose some sort of accountability on a state of affairs in which more Americans get their news from television than from newspapers and in which more Americans every evening watch Wheel of Fortune than all three network news programs combined. And please see that image-fiction, far from being a trendy avant-garde novelty, is almost atavistic. It's a natural adaptation of the hoary techniques of literary realism to a nineties world whose defining boundaries have been deformed by electric signal. For realistic fiction's big job used to be to afford easements across borders, to help readers leap over the walls of self and locale and show us unseen or -dreamed-of people and cultures and ways to be. Realism made the strange familiar. Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a Soviet-satellite newscast of the Berlin Wall's fall - i.e., when darn near everything presents itself as familiar - it's not a surprise that some of today's most ambitious "realistic" fiction is going about trying to make the familiar strange. In so doing, in demanding fictional access behind lenses and screens and headlines and re-imagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, image, and appearance, image-fiction is paradoxically trying to restore what's (mis)taken for "real" to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights. That's the good news. The bad news is that, almost without exception, image-fiction doesn't satisfy its own agenda. Instead, it most often degenerates into a kind of jeering, surfacy look "behind the scenes" of the very televisual front people already jeer at, and can already get behind the scenes of via Entertainment Tonight and Remote Control. The reason why today's imagist fiction isn't the rescue from a passive, addictive TV-psychology that it tries so hard to be is that most imagist 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 imagists transfigure TV is simply that TV has beaten the imagists to the punch. The fact is that for at least ten years now television has been ingeniously absorbing, homogenizing, and re-presenting the very cynical postmodern aesthetic that was once the best alternative to the appeal of low, over-easy, mass-marketed narrative. How TV's done this is blackly fascinating to see. A quick intermission contra paranoia. By saying that the fiction of image aims to "rescue" us from TV, I again am not suggesting that television has diabolic designs, or wants souls. I'm just referring again to the kind of Audience-conditioning consequent to high doses, a conditioning so subtle it can be observed best obliquely, through examples. If a term like "conditioning" still seems either hyperbolic or empty to you, I'll ask you to consider for a moment the exemplary issue of prettiness. One of the things that makes the people on TV fit to stand the mega-gaze is that they are, by human standards, really pretty. I suspect that this, like most television conventions, is set up with no motive more sinister than to appeal to the largest possible Audience. Pretty people tend to be more pleasing to look at than non-pretty people. But when we're talking about television, the combination of sheer Audience size and quiet psychic intercourse between images and oglers starts a cycle that both enhances pretty images' appeal and erodes us viewers' own security in the face of gazes. Because of the way human beings relate to narrative, we tend to identify with those characters we find appealing. We try to see ourselves in them. The same I.D.-relation, however, also means that we try to see them in ourselves. When everybody we seek to identify with for six hours a day is pretty, it naturally becomes more important to us to be pretty, to be viewed as pretty. Because prettiness becomes a priority for us, the pretty people on TV become all the more attractive, a cycle which is obviously great for TV. But it's less great for us civilians, who tend to own mirrors, and who also tend not to be anywhere near as pretty as the images we try to identify with. Not only does this cause some angst personally, but the angst increases because, nationally, everybody else is absorbing six-hour doses and identifying with pretty people and valuing prettiness more, too. This very personal anxiety about our prettiness has become a national phenomenon with national consequences. The whole U.S.A. gets different about things it values and fears. The boom in diet aids, health and fitness clubs, neighborhood tanning parlors, cosmetic surgery, anorexia, bulimia, steroid use among boys, girls throwing acid at each other because one girl's hair looks more like Farrah Fawcett's than another's . . . are these supposed to be unrelated to each other? to the apotheosis of prettiness in a televisual culture? It's not paranoid or hysterical to acknowledge that television in large doses affects people's values and self-esteem in deep ways. That televisual conditioning influences the whole psychology of one's relation to himself, his mirror, his loved ones, and a world of real people and real gazes. No one's going to claim that a culture all about watching and appearing is fatally compromised by unreal standards of beauty and fitness. But other facets of TV-training reveal themselves as more rapacious, more serious, than any irreverent fiction writer would want to take seriously. Irony's Aura It's widely recognized that television, with its horn-rimmed battery of statisticians and pollsters, is awfully good at discerning patterns in the flux of popular ideologies, absorbing them, processing them, and then re-presenting them as persuasions to watch and to buy. Commercials targeted at the eighties' upscale boomers, for example, are notorious for using processed versions of tunes from the rock culture of the sixties and seventies both to elicit the yearning that accompanies nostalgia and to yoke purchases of products with what for yuppies is a lost era of genuine conviction. Ford sport vans are advertised with "This is the dawning of the age of the Aerostar"; Ford recently litigates with Bette Midler over the theft of her old vocals on "Do You Wanna Dance"; claymation raisins dance to "Heard It Through the Grapevine"; etc. If the commercial reuse of songs and the ideals they used to symbolize seems distasteful, it's not like pop musicians are paragons of noncommercialism themselves, and anyway nobody ever said selling was pretty. The effects of any instance of TV absorbing and pablumizing cultural tokens seem innocuous. But the recycling of whole cultural trends, and the ideologies that inform them, are a different story. U.S. pop culture is just like U.S. serious culture in that its central tension has always set the nobility of individualism on one side against the warmth of communal belonging on the other. For its first twenty or so years, it seemed as though television sought to appeal mostly to the group side of the equation. Communities and bonding were extolled on early TV, even though TV itself, and especially its advertising, has from the outset projected itself at the lone viewer, Joe Briefcase, alone. Television commercials always make their appeals to individuals, not groups, a fact that seems curious in light of the unprecedented size of TV's Audience, until one hears gifted salesmen explain how people are always most vulnerable, hence frightened, hence needy, hence persuadable, when they are approached solo. Classic television commercials were all about the group. They took the vulnerability of Joe Briefcase, sitting there, watching, lonely, and capitalized on it by linking purchase of a given product with Joe B.'s inclusion in some attractive community. This is why those of us over twenty-one can remember all those interchangeable old commercials featuring groups of pretty people in some ecstatic context having just way more fun than anybody has a license to have, and all united as Happy Group by the conspicuous fact that they're holding a certain bottle of pop or brand of snack - and the blatant appeal here is that the relevant product can help Joe Briefcase belong. "We're the Pepsi Generation...." But since, at latest, the eighties, the individualist side of the great U.S. conversation has held sway in TV advertising. I'm not sure just why or how this happened. There are probably great connections to be traced - with Vietnam, youth cultures, Watergate and recession and the New Right's rise - but the relevant datum is that a lot of the most effective TV commercials now make their appeal to the lone viewer in a terribly different way. Products are now most often pitched as helping the viewer "express himself," assert his individuality, "stand out from the crowd." The first instance I ever saw was a perfume vividly billed in the early eighties as reacting specially with each woman's "unique body chemistry" and creating "her own individual scent," the ad depicting a cattle line of languid models waiting cramped and expressionless to get their wrists squirted one at a time, each smelling her moist individual wrist with a kind of biochemical revelation, and then moving off in what a back-pan reveals to be different directions from the squirter (we can ignore the obvious sexual connotations, squirting and all that; some tactics are changeless). Or think of that recent series of over-dreary black-and-white Cherry 7-Up ads where the only characters who get to have color and stand out from their surroundings are the pink people who become pink at the exact moment they imbibe. Examples of stand-apart ads are ubiquitous nightly, now. Except for being sillier - products billed as distinguishing individuals from crowds sell to huge crowds of individuals - these ads aren't really any more complicated or subtle than the old join-the-fulfilling-crowd ads that now seem so quaint. But the new stand-out ads' relation to their chiaroscuro mass of lone viewers is both complex and ingenious. Today's best ads are still about the group, but they now present the group as something fearsome, something that can swallow you up, erase you, keep you from "being noticed." But noticed by whom? Crowds are still vitally important in the stand-apart ads' thesis on identity, but now a given ad's crowd, far from being more appealing, secure, and alive than the individual, functions as a mass of identical featureless eyes. The crowd is now, paradoxically, both the "herd" in contrast to which the viewer's distinctive identity is to be defined, and the impassive witnesses whose sight alone can confer distinctive identity. The lone viewer's isolation in front of his furniture is implicitly applauded - it's better, realer, these solipsistic ads imply, to fly solo - and yet also implicated as threatening, confusing, since after all Joe Briefcase is not an idiot, sitting here, and knows himself as a viewer to be guilty of the two big sins the ads decry: being a passive watcher (of TV) and being part of a great herd (of TV-watchers and stand-apart-product-buyers). How odd. The surface of stand-apart ads still presents a relatively unalloyed Buy This Thing, but the deep message of television w/r/t these ads looks to be that Joe Briefcase's ontological status as just one in a reactive watching mass is in a deep way false, and that true actualization of self would ultimately consist in Joe's becoming one of the images that are the objects of this great herdlike watching. That is, TV's real pitch in these commercials is that it's better to be inside the TV than to be outside, watching. The lonely grandeur of stand-apart advertising not only sells companies' products, then. It manages brilliantly to ensure - even in commercials that television gets paid to run - that ultimately TV, and not any specific product or service, will be regarded by Joe B. as the ultimate arbiter of human worth. An oracle, to be consulted a lot. Advertising scholar Mark C. Miller puts it succinctly: "TV has gone beyond the explicit celebration of commodities to the implicit reinforcement of that spectatorial posture which TV requires of us."[17] Solipsistic ads are another way television ends up pointing at itself, keeping the viewer's relation to his furniture at once alienated and anaclitic. Maybe, though, the relation of contemporary viewer to contemporary TV is less a paradigm of infantilism and addiction than it is of the U.S.A.'s familiar relation to all the technology we equate at once with freedom and power and slavery and chaos. For, as with TV, whether we happen personally to love technology, hate it, fear it, or all three, we still look relentlessly to technology for solutions to the very problems technology seems to cause - catalysis for smog, S.D.I. for missiles, transplants for assorted rot. And as with tech, so the gestalt of TV expands to absorb all problems associated with it. The pseudo-communities of prime-time soaps like Knots Landing and thirtysomething are viewer-soothing products of the very medium whose ambivalence about groups helps erode people's sense of connection. The staccato editing, sound bites, and summary treatment of knotty issues is network news' accommodation of an Audience whose attention-span and appetite for complexity have atrophied a bit after years of high-dose spectation. Etc. But TV has tech-bred problems of its own. The advent of cable, often with packages of over forty channels, threatens networks and local affiliates alike. This is particularly true when the viewer is armed with a remote-control gizmo: Joe B. is still getting his six total hours of daily TV, but the amount of his retinal time devoted to any one option shrinks as he remote-scans a much wider band. Worse, the VCR, with its dreaded fast-forward and ZAP functions, threatens the very viability of commercials. Television advertisers' sensible solution? Make the ads as appealing as the shows. Or at any rate try to keep Joe from disliking the commercials enough so that he's willing to move his thumb to check out two and a half minutes of Hazel on the Superstation while NBC sells lip balm. Make the ads prettier, livelier, full of enough rapidly juxtaposed visual quanta that Joe's attention just doesn't get to wander, even if he remote-kills the volume. As one ad executive underputs it, "Commercials are becoming more like entertaining films."[18] There's an obverse way to make commercials resemble programs: have programs start to resemble commercials. That way the ads seem less like interruptions than like pace-setters, metronomes, commentaries on the shows' theory. Invent a Miami Vice, where there's little annoying plot to interrupt an unprecedented emphasis on appearances, visuals, attitude, a certain "look."[19] Make music videos with the same amphetaminic pace and dreamy archetypal associations as ads - it doesn't hurt that videos are basically long record commercials anyway. Or introduce the sponsor-supplied "infomercial" that poses, in a light-hearted way, as a soft-news show, like Amazing Discoveries or those Robert Vaughn-hosted hair-loss "reports" that haunt TV's wee cheap hours. Still, television and its commercial sponsors had a bigger long-term worry, and that was their shaky detente with the individual viewer's psyche. Given that television must revolve off antinomies about being and watching, about escape from daily life, the averagely intelligent viewer can't be all that happy about his daily life of high-dose watching. Joe Briefcase might be happy enough when watching, but it was hard to think he could be too terribly happy about watching so much. Surely, deep down, Joe was uncomfortable with being one part of the biggest crowd in human history watching images that suggest that life's meaning consists in standing visibly apart from the crowd. TV's guilt/indulgence/reassurance cycle addresses these concerns on one level. But might there not be some deeper way to keep Joe Briefcase firmly in the crowd of watchers by somehow associating his very viewership with transcendence of watching crowds? But that would be absurd. Enter irony. I've said, so far without support, that what makes television's hegemony so resistant to critique by the new fiction of image is that TV has co-opted the distinctive forms of the same cynical, irreverent, ironic, absurdist post-WWII literature that the imagists use as touchstones. TV's own reuse of postmodern cool has actually evolved as a grimly inspired solution to the keep-Joe-at-once-alienated-from-and-part-of-the-million-eyed-crowd problem. The solution entailed a gradual shift from oversincerity to a kind of bad-boy irreverence in the big face TV shows us. This in turn reflected a wider shift in U.S. perceptions of how art was supposed to work, a transition from art's being a creative instantiation of real values to art's being a creative instantiation of deviance from bogus values. And this wider shift in its turn paralleled both the development of the postmodern aesthetic and some deep philosophic change in how Americans chose to view concepts like authority, sincerity, and passion in terms of our willingness to be pleased. Not only are sincerity and passion now "out," TV-wise, but the very idea of pleasure has been undercut. As Mark C. Miller puts it, contemporary television "no longer solicits our rapt absorption or hearty agreement, but - like the ads that subsidize it - actually flatters us for the very boredom and distrust it inspires in us."[20] Miller's 1986 "Deride and Conquer," the best essay ever written on network advertising, details vividly an example of bow TV's contemporary appeal to the lone viewer works. It concerns a 1985-86 ad that won Clios and still occasionally runs. It's that Pepsi commercial where a Pepsi sound van pulls up to a packed sweltering beach and the impish young guy in the van activates a lavish PA system and opens up a Pepsi and pours it into a cup up next to the microphone. And the dense glittered sound of much carbonation goes out over the beach's heat-wrinkled air, and heads turn vanward as if pulled with strings as his gulp and refreshed, spiranty sounds are broadcast; and the final shot reveals that the sound van is also a concession truck, and the whole beach's pretty population has collapsed to a clamoring mass around the truck, everybody hopping up and down and pleading to be served first, as the camera's view retreats to overhead and the slogan is flatly intoned: "Pepsi: the Choice of a New Generation." Really a stunning commercial. But need one point out, as Miller does at length, that the final slogan is here tongue-in-cheek? There's about as much "choice" at work in this commercial as there was in Pavlov's bell kennel. In fact the whole thirty-second spot is tongue-in-cheek, ironic, self-mocking. As Miller argues, it's not really choice that the commercial is "selling" Joe Briefcase on, "but the total negation. of choices. Indeed, the product itself is finally incidental to the pitch. The ad does not so much extol Pepsi per se as recommend it by implying that a lot of people have been fooled into buying it. In other words, the point of this successful bit of advertising is that Pepsi has been advertised successfully."[12] There are important things to realize here. First, this ad is deeply informed by a fear of remote gizmos, ZAPping, and viewer disdain. An ad about ads, it uses self-reference to seem too hip to hate. It protects itself from the scorn today's viewing cognoscente feels for both the fast-talking hard-sell ads Dan Akroyd parodied into oblivion on Saturday Night Live and the quixotic associative ads that linked soda-drinking with romance, prettiness, and group inclusion - ads today's jaded viewer finds old-fashioned and "manipulative." In contrast to a blatant Buy This Thing, this Pepsi commercial pitches parody. The ad's utterly up-front about what TV ads are popularly despised for doing: using primal, flim-flam appeals to sell sugary crud to people whose identity is nothing but mass consumption. This ad manages simultaneously to make fun of itself, Pepsi, advertising, advertisers, and the great U.S. watching/consuming crowd. In fact the ad's uxorious in its flattery of only one person: the lone viewer, Joe B., who even with an average brain can't help but discern the ironic contradiction between the "choice" slogan (sound) and the Pavlovian orgy (sight). The commercial invites Joe to "see through" the manipulation the beach's horde is rabidly buying. The commercial invites complicity between its own witty irony and veteran-viewer Joe's cynical, nobody's-fool appreciation of that irony. It invites Joe into an in-joke the Audience is the butt of. It congratulates Joe Briefcase, in other words, on transcending the very crowd that defines him, here. This ad boosted Pepsi's market share through three sales quarters. Pepsi's campaign is not unique. Isuzu Inc. hit pay dirt with its series of "Joe Isuzu" spots, featuring an oily, Satanic-looking salesman who told whoppers about Isuzus' genuine llama-skin upholstery and ability to run on tap water. Though the ads rarely said much of anything about why Isuzus are in fact good cars, sales and awards accrued. The ads succeeded as parodies of how oily and Satanic car commercials are. They invited viewers to congratulate Isuzu ads for being ironic, to congratulate themselves for getting the joke, and to congratulate Isuzu Inc. for being "fearless" and "irreverent" enough to acknowledge that car ads are ridiculous and that the Audience is dumb to believe them. The ads invite the lone viewer to drive an Isuzu as some sort of anti-advertising statement. The ads successfully associate Isuzu-purchase with fearlessness and irreverence and the capacity to see through deception. You can find successful television ads that mock TV-ad conventions almost anywhere you look, from Settlemeyer's Federal Express and Wendy's spots, with their wizened, sped-up burlesques of commercial characters, to those hip Doritos splices of commercial spokesmen and campy old clips of Beaver and Mr. Ed. Plus you can see this tactic of heaping scorn on pretensions to those old commercial virtues of authority and sincerity - thus (1) shielding the heaper of scorn from scorn and (2) congratulating the patron of scorn for rising above the mass of people who still fall for outmoded pretensions - employed to serious advantage on many of the television programs the commercials support. Show after show, for years now, has been either a self-acknowledged blank, visual, postmodern allusion- and attitude-fest, or, even more common, an uneven battle of wits between some ineffectual spokesman for hollow authority and his precocious children, mordant spouse, or sardonic colleagues. Compare television's treatment of earnest authority figures on pre-ironic shows - the FBI's Erskine, Star Trek's Kirk, Beaver's Ward, Partridge Family's Shirley, Five-O's McGarrett - to TV's depiction of Al Bundy on Married, with Children, Mr. Owens on Mr. Belvedere, Homer on The Simpsons, Daniels and Hunter on Hill Street Blues, Jason Seaver on Growing Pains, Dr. Craig on St. Elsewhere. The modern Sitcom,[22] in particular, is almost wholly dependent for laughs and tone on the M*A*S*H-inspired savaging of some buffoonish spokesman for hypocritical, pre-hip values at the hands of bitingly witty insurgents. As Hawkeye savaged Frank and later Charles, so Herb is savaged by Jennifer and Carlson by J. Fever on WKRP, Mr. Keaton by Alex on Family Ties, boss by typing pool on Nine to Five, Seaver by whole family on Pains, Bundy by entire planet on Married, w/ (the ultimate sitcom parody of sitcoms). In fact, just about the only authority figures who retain any credibility on post-eighties shows (besides those like Hill Street's Furillo and Elsewhere's Westphal, who are surrounded by such relentless squalor that simply hanging in there week after week makes them heroic) are those upholders of values who can communicate some irony about themselves,[23] make fun of themselves before any merciless group around them can move in for the kill - see Huxtable on Cosby, Belvedere on Belvedere, Twin Peaks' Special Agent Cooper, Fox TV's Gary Shandling (the theme to whose show goes "This is the theme to Gary's show"), and the ironic eighties' true Angel of Death, D. Letterman. Its promulgation of cynicism about all authority works to the general advantage of television on a number of levels. First, to the extent that TV can ridicule old-fashioned conventions right off the map, it can create an authority vacuum. And then guess what fills it. The real authority on a world we now view as constructed and not depicted becomes the medium that constructs our worldview. Second, to the extent that TV can refer exclusively to itself and debunk conventional standards as hollow, it is invulnerable to critics' charges that what's on is shallow or crass or bad, since any such judgments appeal to conventional, extratelevisual standards about depth, taste, and quality. Too, the ironic tone of TV's self-reference means that no one can accuse TV of trying to put anything over on anybody: as essayist Lewis Hyde points out, all self-mocking irony is "Sincerity, with a motive."[24] And, more to the original point, if television can invite Joe Briefcase into itself via in-gags and irony, it can ease that painful tension between Joe's need to transcend the crowd and his status as Audience member. For to the extent that TV can flatter Joe about "seeing through" the pretentiousness and hypocrisy of outdated values, it can induce in him precisely the feeling of canny superiority it's taught him to crave, and can keep him dependent on the cynical TV-watching that alone affords this feeling. And to the extent that it can train viewers to laugh at characters' unending put-downs of one another, to view ridicule as both the mode of social intercourse and the ultimate art form, television can reinforce its own queer ontology of appearance: the most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others' ridicule by betraying passe expressions of value, emotion, or vulnerability. Other people become judges; the crime is naivete. The well-trained lonely viewer becomes even more allergic to people. Lonelier. Joe B.'s exhaustive TV-training in how to worry about how he might come across, seem to other eyes, makes riskily genuine human encounters seem even scarier. But televisual irony has the solution (to the problem it's aggravated): further viewing begins to seem almost like required research, lessons in the blank, bored, too-wise expression that Joe must learn how to wear for tomorrow's excruciating ride on the brightly lit subway, where crowds of blank, bored-looking people have little to look at but each other. What does TV's institutionalization of hip irony have to do with U.S. fiction? Well, for one thing, American literary fiction tends to be about U.S. culture and the people who inhabit it. Culture-wise, shall I spend much of your time pointing out the degree to which televisual values influence the contemporary mood of jaded weltschmerz, self-mocking materialism, blank indifference, and the delusion that cynicism and naivete are mutually exclusive? Can we deny connections between an unprecedentedly powerful consensual medium that suggests no real difference between image and substance and the rise of Teflon presidencies, the establishment of nationwide tanning and liposuction industries, the popularity of "vogueing" to a bad Marilyn-imitator's synthesized command to "strike a pose"? Or, in serious contemporary art, that televisual disdain for "hypocritical" retrovalues like originality, depth, and integrity has no truck with those recombinant "appropriation" styles of art and architecture in which past becomes pastiche,[25] or with the tuneless solmization of a Glass or a Reich, or with the self-conscious catatonia of a platoon of Raymond Carver wannabes? In fact the numb blank bored demeanor - what my best friend calls the "girl-who's-dancing-with-you-but-would-obviously-rather-be-dancing-with-somebo dy -else" expression - that has become my generation's version of cool is all about TV. "Television," after all, literally means "seeing far"; and our 6 hrs. daily not only helps us feel up-close and personal at like the Pan Am Games or Operation Desert Shield but, obversely, trains us to see real-life personal up-close stuff the same way we relate to the distant and exotic, as if separated from us by physics and glass, extant only as performance, awaiting our cool review. Indifference is actually just the contemporary version of frugality, for U.S. young people: wooed several gorgeous hours a day for nothing but our attention, we regard that attention as our chief commodity, our social capital, and we are loath to fritter it. In the same regard, see that in 1990, flatness, numbness, and cynicism in one's demeanor are clear ways to transmit the televisual attitude of stand-out transcendence - flatness is a transcendence of melodrama, numbness transcends sentimentality, and cynicism announces that one knows the score, was last naive about something at maybe like age four. Whether or not 1990s youth culture seems as grim to you as it does to me, surely we can agree that the culture's TV-defined pop ethic has pulled a marvelous touche on the postmodern aesthetic that originally sought to co-opt and redeem the pop. Television has pulled the old dynamics of reference and redemption inside-out: it is now television that takes elements of the postmodern - the involution, the absurdity, the sardonic fatigue, the iconoclasm and rebellion - and bends them to the ends of spectation and consumption. As early as '84, critics of capitalism were warning that "What began as a mood of the avant-garde has surged into mass culture."[26] But postmodernism didn't just all of a sudden "surge" into television in 1984. Nor have the vectors of influence between the postmodern and the televisual been one-way. The chief connection between today's television and today's fiction is historical. The two share roots. For postmodern fiction - written almost exclusively by young white males-clearly evolved as an intellectual expression of the "rebellious youth culture" of the sixties and early seventies. And since the whole gestalt of youthful U.S. rebellion was made possible by a national medium that erased communicative boundaries between regions and replaced a society segmented by location and ethnicity with what rock music critics have called "a national self-consciousness stratified by generation,"[27] the phenomenon of TV had as much to do with postmodernism's rebellious irony as it did with peaceniks' protest rallies. In fact, by offering young, overeducated fiction writers a comprehensive view of how hypocritically the U.S.A. saw itself circa 1960, early television helped legitimize absurdism and irony as not just literary devices but sensible responses to an unrealistic world. For irony - exploiting gaps between what's said and what's meant, between how things try to appear and how they really are - is the time-honored way artists seek to illuminate and explode hypocrisy. And the television of lone-gunman Westerns, paternalistic sitcoms, and jut-jawed law enforcement circa 1960 celebrated a deeply hypocritical American self-image. Miller describes nicely how the 1960s sitcom, like the Westerns that preceded them, "negated the increasing powerlessness of white-collar males with images of paternal strength and manly individualism. Yet by the time these sit-coms were produced, the world of small business [whose virtues were the Hugh Beaumontish ones of 'self-possession, probity, and sound judgment'] had long since been . . . superseded by what C. Wright Mills called 'the managerial demiurge,' and the virtues personified by . . . Dad were in fact passe."[28] In other words, early U.S. TV was a hypocritical apologist for values whose reality had become attenuated in a period of corporate ascendancy, bureaucratic entrenchment, foreign adventurism, racial conflict, secret bombing, assassination, wiretaps, etc. It's not one bit accidental that postmodern fiction aimed its ironic cross hairs at the banal, the naive, the sentimental and simplistic and conservative, for these qualities were just what sixties TV seemed to celebrate as "American." And the rebellious irony in the best postmodern fiction wasn't only credible as art; it seemed downright socially useful in its capacity for what counterculture critics call "a critical negation that would make it self-evident to everyone that the world is not as it seems."[29] Kesey's dark parody of asylums suggested that our arbiters of sanity were maybe crazier than their patients; Pynchon reoriented our view of paranoia from deviant psychic fringe to central thread in the corporo-bureaucratic weave; DeLillo exposed image, signal, data, and tech as agents of spiritual chaos and not social order. Burroughs's icky explorations of American narcosis exploded hypocrisy; Gaddis's exposure of abstract capital as dehumanizing exploded hypocrisy; Coover's repulsive political farces exploded hypocrisy. Irony in sixties art and culture started out the same way youthful rebellion did. It was difficult and painful, and productive - a grim diagnosis of a long-denied disease. The assumptions behind this early postmodern irony, on the other hand, were still frankly idealistic: that etiology and diagnosis pointed toward cure; that revelation of imprisonment yielded freedom. So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today's avant-garde tries to write about? One clue's to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after thirty long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It's not a mode that wears especially well. As Hyde puts it, "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage." This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an 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. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find them sort of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I've had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow ... oppressed. Think, if you will for a moment, of Third World rebels and coups. Rebels are great at exposing and overthrowing corrupt hypocritical regimes, but seem noticeably less great at the mundane, non-negative tasks of then establishing a superior governing alternative. Victorious rebels, in fact, seem best at using their tough cynical rebel skills to avoid being rebelled against themselves - in other words they just become better tyrants. And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All irony is a variation on a sort of existential poker-face. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don't really mean what I say." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it's impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it's too bad it's impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today's irony ends up saying: "How very banal to ask what I mean." Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself. This is why our educated teleholic friends' use of weary cynicism to try to seem superior to TV is so pathetic. And this is why the fiction-writing citizen of our televisual culture is in such deep doo. What do you do when postmodern rebellion becomes a pop-cultural institution? For this of course is the second clue to why avant-garde irony and rebellion have become dilute and malign. They have been absorbed, emptied, and redeployed by the very televisual establishment they had originally set themselves athwart. Not that television is culpable for true evil, here. Just for immoderate success. This is, after all, what TV does: it discerns, decocts, and represents what it thinks U.S. culture wants to see and hear about itself. No one and everyone is at fault for the fact that television started gleaning rebellion and cynicism as the hip, upscale, baby-boomer imago populi. But the harvest has been dark: the forms of our best rebellious art have become mere gestures, shticks, not only sterile but perversely enslaving. How can, even the idea of rebellion against corporate culture stay meaningful when Chrysler Inc. advertises trucks by invoking "The Dodge Rebellion"? How is one to be a bona fide iconoclast when Burger King sells onion rings with "Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules"? How can a new image-fiction writer hope to make people more critical of televisual culture by parodying television as a self-serving commercial enterprise when Pepsi and Isuzu and Fed Ex parodies of self-serving commercials are already big business? It's almost a history lesson: I'm starting to see just why turn-of-the-century America's biggest fear was of anarchists and anarchy. For if anarchy actually wins, if rulelessness becomes the rule, then protest and change become not just impossible but incoherent. It'd be like casting ballots for Stalin: how do you vote for no more voting? So here's the stumper for the 1990 U.S. fictionist who both breathes our cultural atmosphere and sees himself heir to whatever was neat and valuable in postmodern lit. How to rebel against TV's aesthetic of rebellion? How to snap readers awake to the fact that our TV-culture has become a cynical, narcissistic, essentially empty phenomenon, when television regularly celebrates just these features in itself and its viewers? These are the very questions DeLillo's poor schmuck of a popologist was asking back in '85 about America, that most photographed of barns: "What was the barn like before it was photographed?" he said. "What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can't answer these questions because we've lead the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We're here, we're now." He seemed immensely pleased by this.[30] 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. -- End --
NOTES_
Republished in ASFT

Keywords: Academic; General; Television_Criticism and interpretation; Fiction_Criticism and interpretation; Irony_Analysis; Criticism and interpretation; Analysis

Wallace, David Foster

1994

It Was a Great Marvel That He Was in the Father Without Knowing Him (I)

article

Wallace, David Foster

1994

It Was a Great Marvel That He Was in the Father Without Knowing Him (II)

article

Wallace:1994oy ~

ABSTRACT_
Source: Harper's Magazine, July 1994 v289 n1730 p35(20). Title: Ticket to the fair. (Illinois State Fair) (Cover Story) Author: David Foster Wallace Abstract: A journalist presents an hour-by-hour account of two days of activity at the Illinois State Fair. He characterizes the fair as one of the public spectacles that are an integral part of life in the Midwest. Subjects: Midwestern States Illinois State Fair - Personal narratives Fairs - Personal narratives Magazine Collection: 74E0774 Electronic Collection: A15533054 RN: A15533054 Full Text COPYRIGHT 1994 Harper's Magazine Foundation AUGUST 5, 1993, INTERSTATE 55, WESTBOUND, 8:00 A.M. Today is Press Day at the Illinois State Fair in Springfield, and I'm supposed to be at the fairgrounds by 9:00 A.M. to get my credentials. I imagine credentials to be a small white card in the band of a fedora. I've never been considered press before. My real interest in credentials is getting into rides and shows for free. I'm fresh in from the East Coast, for an East Coast magazine. Why exactly they're interested in the Illinois State Fair remains unclear to me. I suspect that every so often editors at East Coast magazines slap their foreheads and remember that about 90 percent of the United States lies between the coasts, and figure they'll engage somebody to do pith-helmeted anthropological reporting on something rural and heartlandish. I think they asked me to do this because I grew up here, just a couple hours' drive from downstate Springfield. I never did go to the state fair, though--I pretty much topped out at the countyfair level. Actually, I haven't been back to Illinois for a long time, and can't say I've missed it. The heat is all too familiar. In August it takes hours for the dawn fog to bum off. The air is like wet wool. Eight A.M. is too early to justify turning on the car's AC. The sun is a blotch in a sky that isn't so much cloudy as opaque. The corn Starts just past the breakdown lanes and goes tight to the sky's hem. August corn in Illinois is as tall as a tall man. With all the advances in fertilization, it's now knee-high by June 1. Locusts chirr in every field, a brassy electric sound that Dopplers oddly inside the speeding car. Corn, corn, soybeans, corn, exit ramp, corn, and every few miles an outpost way off on a reach in the distance--house, tree with tire swing, barn, satellite dish. Grain silos are the only skyline. A fog hangs just over the fields. It is over eighty degrees and climbing with the sun. It'll be over ninety degrees by 10:00 A.M. There's that tightening quality to the air, like it's drawing itself in and down for a siege. The interstate is dull and pale. Occasional other cars look ghostly, their drivers' faces humidity-stunned. 9:00 A.M. It's still a week before the fair, and there's something surreal about the emptiness of parking facilities so huge and cornplex that they have their own map. The parts of the fairgrounds that I can see are half-permanent structures and half tents and displays in various stages of erection, giving the whole thing the look of somebody half-dressed for a really important date. 9:05 A.M. The man processing print-press credentials has a mustache and short-sleeve knit shirt. In line before me are newshounds from Today's Agriculture, the Decatur Herald & Review, Illinois Crafts Newsletter, 4-H News, and Livestock Weekly. Credentials are just a laminated mug shot with a gator clip for your pocket. Not a fedora in the house. Two older ladies behind me from a local horticulture organ engage me in shoptalk. One lady is the unofficial historian of the Illinois State Fair: she gives slide shows on the fair at nursing homes and Rotary lunches. She begins to emit historical data at a great rate--the fair started in 1853; there was a fair during the Civil War but not during WWII, and not in 1893, because Chicago was hosting the World's Columbian Exposition; the governor has failed to cut the ribbon personally on opening day only twice; etc. It occurs to me that I ought to have brought a notebook. I'm also the only person in the room in a T-shirt. It is a fluorescent-lit cafeteria in something called the Illinois Building Senior Center, uncooled. The local TV crews have their equipment spread out on tables and are lounging against walls. They all have mustaches and short-sleeve knit shirts. In fact, the only other males in the room without mustaches and golf shirts are the local TV reporters, four of them, all in suits. They are sleek, sweatless, deeply blue-eyed. They stand together up by the dais, which has a podium and a flag and a banner reading "Give Us a Whirl"--this year's theme. Middle-management types enter. A squelch of feedback on a loudspeaker brings the official Press Welcome & Briefing to order. It's dull. The words "excited," "proud," and "opportunity" are used repeatedly. Ms. Illinois County Fairs, tiara bolted to the tallest coiffure I've ever seen (bun atop bun, multiple layers, a ziggurat of hair), is proudly excited to have the opportunity to present two corporate guys, sweating freely in suits, who report the excited pride of McDonald's and Wal-Mart to have the opportunity to be this year's corporate sponsors. 9:50 A.M. Under way at 4 mph on the Press Tour, on a kind of flatboat with wheels and a lengthwise bench so queerly high that everybody's feet dangle. The tractor pulling us has signs that say "ethanol" and "agripowered." I'm particularly keen to see the carnies setting up the rides in the fairgrounds' "Happy Hollow," but we head first to the corporate and political tents. Most every tent is still setting up. Workmen crawl over structural frames. We wave at them; they wave back; it's absurd: we're only going 4 mph. One tent says "Corn: Touching Our Lives Every Day." There are massive many-hued tents courtesy of McDonald's, Miller Genuine Draft, Morton Commercial Structures Corp., the Land of Lincoln Soybean Association ("Look Where Soybeans Go!"), Pekin Energy Corp. ("Proud of Our Sophisticated Computer-Controlled Processing Technology"), Illinois Pork Producers, the John Birch Society. Two tents that say "Republican" and "Democrat." Other, smaller tents for various Illinois officeholders. It is well up in the nineties and the sky is the color of old jeans. We go over a system of crests to Farm Expo--twelve, acres of wicked-looking needle,toothed harrows, tractors, seeders, harvesters. Then back around the rear of the big permanent Artisans' Building, Illinois Building Senior Center, Expo Center, passing tantalizingly close to Happy Hollow, where half-assembled rides stand in giant arcs and rays and shirtless guys with tattoos and wrenches slouch around them, fairly oozing menace and human interest, but on at a crawl up a blacktop path to the livestock buildings. By this time, most of the press is off the tram and walking in order to escape the tour's PA speaker, which is tinny and brutal. Horse Complex. Cattle Complex. Swine Barn. Sheep Barn. Poultry Building and Goat Barn. These are all long brick barracks open down both sides of their length. Some contain stalls; others have pens divided into squares with aluminum rails. Inside, they're gray cement, dim and yeasty, huge fans overhead, workers in overalls and waders hosing everything down. No animals yet, but the smells still hang from last year--horses' odors sharp, cows' rich, sheep's oily, swine's unspeakable. No idea what the Poultry Building smelled like, because I couldn't bring myself to go in. Traumatically pecked once, as a child, at the Champaign County Fair, I have a long-standing phobic thing about poultry. The ethanol tractor's exhaust is literally flatulent-smelling as we crawl out past the Grandstand, where later there will be evening concerts and harness and auto racing--"World's Fastest One-Mile Dirt Track"--and head for something called the Help Me Grow tent, to interface with the state's First Lady, Brenda Edgar. The first sign of the Help Me Grow area is the nauseous bright red of Ronald McDonald's hair. He's capering around a small plastic playground area under candy-stripe tenting. Though the fair is ostensibly closed, troupes of kids mysteriously appear and engage in rather rehearsed-looking play as we approach. Two of the kids are black, the first black people I've seen anywhere on the grounds. No parents in view. The governor's wife stands surrounded by flinty-eyed aides. Ronald pretends to fall down. The press forms into a ring. There are several state troopers in khaki and tan, streaming sweat under their Nelson Eddy hats. Mrs. Edgar is cool and groomed and pretty in a lacquered way. She's of the female age that's always suffixed with "-ish." Her tragic flaw is her voice, which sounds almost heliated. The Help Me Grow prograim, when you decoct the rhetoric, is basically a statewide crisis line for over-the-edge parents to call and get talked out of beating up their kids. The number of calls Mrs. Edgar says the line has fielded just this year is both de- and impressive. Shiny pamphlets are distributed. Ronald McDonald, voice slurry and makeup cottage-cheesish in the heat, cues the kids to come over for some low-rent sleight of hand and Socratic banter. Lacking a real journalist's killer instinct, I've been jostled way to the back, and my view is obscured by the towering hair of Ms. Illinois County Fairs, whose function here is unclear. I don't want to asperse, but Ronald McDonald sounds like he's under the influence of something more than fresh country air. I drift away under the tent. All the toys and plastic playground equipment have signs that say "Courtesy of" and then a corporate name. A lot of the photographers in the ring have dusty green safari vests, and they sit cross-legged in the sun, getting low-angle shots of Mrs. Edgar. There are no tough questions from the media. The tram's tractor is putting out a steady sweatsock shape of blue-green exhaust. I notice that the grass under the Help Me Grow tent is different--pine-green and prickly-looking. Solid investigative bent-over journalism reveals that it is artificial. A huge mat of plastic artificial grass has been spread over the knoll's real grass, under the tent. I have my first moment of complete East Coast cynicism: a quick look under the edge of the fake-grass mat reveals the real grass underneath, flattened and already yellowing. AUGUST 13, 9:26 A.M. Official opening. Ceremony, introductions, verbiage. Big brass shears, for cutting the ribbon across the main gate. It is cloudless and dry, but forehead-tighteningly hot. Noon will be a kiln. No anthropologist worth his pith helmet would be without the shrewd counsel of a colorful local, and I've lured a Native Companion here for the day with the promise of free admission, unlimited corn dogs, and various shiny trinkets. Knit-shirt press and rabid early fairgoers are massed from the gate all the way out to Springfield's Sangamon Avenue, where homeowners with plastic flags invite you to park on their front lawn for five dollars. We stand near the back. I gather that "Little Jim" Edgar, the governor, isn't much respected by the press. Governor Edgar is maybe fifty and greyhound-thin, with steel glasses and hair that looks carved out of feldspar. He radiates sincerity, though. After the hacks introduce him, he speaks sanely and, I think, well. He invites everybody to get in there and have a really good time and to revel in watching everybody else -also having a good time--a kind of reflexive exercise in civics. The press corps seems unmoved. But this fair, the idea and now the reality of it, does seem to have something uniquely to do with state-as-community, a grand-scale togetherness. And it is not just the claustrophobic mash of people waiting to get inside. The fair occupies space, and there's no shortage of empty space in downstate Illinois. The fairgrounds take up 300-plus acres on the north side of Springfield, a depressed capital of 109,000 where you can't spit without hitting a Lincoln-site plaque. The fair spreads itself out, and visually so. The main gate is on a rise, and through the two sagged halves of ribbon you get a specular vantage on the whole thing--virgin and sun-glittered, even the tents looking freshly painted. It seems garish and endless and aggressively special. Kids are having little epileptic fits all around us, frenzied with a need to take in everything at once. I suspect that part of the self-conscious community thing here has to do with space. Rural Midwesterners live surrounded by unpopulated land, marooned in a space whose emptiness is both physical and spiritual. It is not just people you get lonely for. You're alienated from the very space around you, for here the land is not an environment but a commodity. The land is basically a factory. You live in the same factory you work in. You spend an enormous amount of time with the land, but you're still alienated from it in some way. I theorize to Native Companion (who worked detasseling summer corn with me in high school) that the state fair's animating thesis involves some kind of structured, decorated interval of communion with both neighbor and space--the sheer fact, of the land is to be celebrated here, its yields ogled and its stock groomed and paraded. A special vacation from alienation, a chance, for a moment, to love what real life out here can't let you love. Native Companion gives me a look, then rummages for her cigarette lighter, quite a bit more interested in that. 10:40 A.M. The livestock venues are at full occupancy animalwise, but we seem to be the only fairgoing tourists from the ceremony who've dashed right over to tour them. You can tell which barns are for which animals with your eyes closed. The horses are in their own individual stalls, with half-height doors and owners and grooms on stools by the doors, a lot of them dozing. The horses stand in hay. Billy Ray Cyrus plays loudly on some stableboy's boom box. The horses have tight hides and apple-sized eyes that are set on the sides of their heads, like fish. I've rarely been this close to fine livestock. The horses' faces are long and somehow suggestive of coffins. The racers are lanky, velvet over bone. The draft and show horses are mammoth and spotlessly groomed, and more or less odorless: the acrid smell in here is just the horses' pee. All their muscles are beautiful; the hides enhance them. They make farty noises when they sigh, heads hanging over the short doors. They're not for petting, though. When you come close they flatten their ears and show big teeth. The grooms laugh to themselves as we jump back. These are special competitive horses, with intricately bred high-strung artistic temperaments. I wish I'd brought carrots. Animals can be bought, emotionally. Stall after stall of horses. Standard horse-type colors. They eat the same hay they stand in. Occasional feedbags look like gas masks. A sudden clattering spray-sound like somebody hosing down siding turns out to be a glossy dun stallion peeing. He's at the back of his stall getting combed, and the door is wide open. The stream of pee is an inch in diameter and throws up dust and hay and it looks like even chips of wood from the floor. A stallion is a male horse. We hunker down and have a look upward, and suddenly for the first time I understand a certain expression describing certain human males, an expression I'd heard but never quite understood till now. You can hear the cows all the way from the Horse Complex. The cow stalls are all doorless and open to view. I don't guess a cow presents much of an escape risk. They are white-spotted dun or black, or else white with big continents of dun or black. They have no lips and their tongues are wide. Their eyes roll and they have huge nostrils, gaping and wet and pink or black. Cow manure smells wonderful--warm and herbal and blameless--but cows themselves stink in a rich biotic way, rather like a wet boot. Some of the owners are scrubbing down their entries for the upcoming beef show over at the Coliseum (so says my detailed media guide). These cows stand immobilized in webs of canvas straps inside a steel frame while ag-professionals scrub them down with a hose-and-brush thing that also oozes soap. The cows do not like this one bit. One cow, whose face is eerily reminiscent of Winston Churchill's, trembles and shudders and makes the frame clank, lowing, its eyes rolling up almost to the whites. Native Companion and I cringe and make soft appalled noises. The cow's lowing starts other cows lowing, or maybe they just see what they're in for. The cow's legs keep half-buckling, and the owner kicks at them. White mucus hangs from its snout. Other ominous drippings and gushings from elsewhere. The cow almost tips the frame over, and the owner punches her in the ribs. Swine Barn. Swine have fur! I never thought of swine as having fur. I've actually never been up very close to swine, for olfactory reasons. A lot of the swine in here are show hogs, a breed called Poland China, their thin fur a kind of white crewcut over pink skin. A lot of the swine are down on their sides, stuporous and throbbing in the barn's heat. The awake ones grunt. They stand and lie on very clean large-curd sawdust in low-fenced pens. A couple of barrows are eating both the sawdust and their own excrement. Again, we're the only tourists here. A bullhorn on a wall announces that the Junior Pygmy Goat judging is under way over at the Goat Barn. A lot of these swine are frankly huge--say a third the size of a Volkswagen. Every once in a while you hear about farmers getting mauled or killed by swine. No teeth in view here, though their hoofs are cloven and pink and obscene. I'm not sure whether they're called hoofs or feet on swine. Rural Midwesterners learn in second grade that there's no such word as "hooves." Some of the swine have large fans blowing in front of their pens, and twelve ceiling fans roar, but it is still hellish in here. Pig smell is both vomity and excremental, like some hideous digestive disorder on a grand scale. Maybe a cholera ward would come close. The swineherds and owners have 6n rubber boots nothing like the L.L. Bean boots worn on the East Coast. Some of the standing swine commune through the bars of their pens, snouts almost touching. The sleeping swine thrash in dreams, their legs working. Unless they're in distress, swine grunt at a low constant pitch. It is a pleasant sound. But now one butterscotch-colored swine is screaming. Distressed swine scream. The sound is both human and inhuman enough to make your hair stand. The professional swinemen ignore the pig, but we fuss on over, Native Companion making concerned baby-talk sounds until I shush her. The distressed pig's sides are heaving; it is sitting up with its front legs quivering, screaming horribly. This pig's keeper is nowhere in sight. A small sign on its pen says it is a Hampshire. It is having respiratory trouble, clearly: I'm guessing it inhaled either sawdust or excrement. Its front legs now buckle, so it is on its side, spasming. Whenever it can get enough breath it screams. It's unendurable, but none of the ag-professionals comes vaulting over the pens to administer aid. Native Companion and I wring our hands with sympathy. We both make plangent little noises at the pig. Native Companion tells me to go get somebody instead of standing there with my thumb up my butt. I feel enormous stress--the nauseous smell, impotent sympathy, plus we're behind schedule. We are currently missing the Junior Pygmy Goats, Philatelic Judging at the Expo Building, a 4-H Dog Show at Club Mickey D's, the semifinals of the Midwest Arm-Wrestling Championships, a Ladies Camping Seminar, and the opening rounds of the Speed Casting Tournament. A swineherd kicks her Poland China sow awake so she can add more sawdust to its pen; Native Companion utters a pained sound. There are clearly only two animal-rights advocates in this Swine Barn. We both can observe a kind of sullen, callous expertise in the demeanor of the ag-pros. Prime example of spiritual-alienation-from-land-as-commodity, I posit. Except why take all the trouble to breed and care for and train a special animal and bring it to the Illinois State Fair if you don't care anything about it? Then it occurs to me that I had bacon yesterday and am even now looking forward to my first corn dog of the fair. I'm standing here wringing my hands over a distressed swine and then I'm going to go pound down a corn dog. This is connected to my reluctance to charge over to a swine pro and demand emergency resuscitative care for this agonized Hampshire. I can sort of picture the look the farmer would give me. Not that it's profound, but I'm struck, amid the pig's screams and wheezes, by the fact that these agricultural pros do not see their stock as pets or friends. They are just in the agribuginess of weight and meat. They are unconnected, even at the fair's self-consciously special occasion of connection. And why not?--even at the fair their products continue to drool and smell and scream, and the work goes on. I can imagine what they think of us, cooing at the swine: we fairgoers don't have to deal with the business of breeding and feeding our meat; our meat simply materializes at the corn-dog stand, allowing us to separate our healthy appetites from fur and screams and rolling eyes. We tourists get to indulge our tender animal-rights feelings with our tummies full of bacon. I don't know how keen these sullen farmers' sense of irony is, but mine's been honed East Coast keen, and I feel like a bit of an ass in the Swine Barn. 11:60 A.M. Since Native Companion was lured here for the day by the promise of free access to high-velocity rides, we make a quick descent into Happy Hollow. Most of the rides aren't even twirling hellishly yet. Guys with ratchet wrenches are still cranking away, assembling the Ring of Fire. The Giant Gondola Wheel is only half-built, and its seat-draped lower half resembles a hideous molary grin. It is over 100 degrees in the sun, easy. Happy Hollow's dirt midway is flanked by carnival-game booths and ticket booths and rides. There's a merry-go-round and a couple of tame kiddie rides, but most of the rides look like genuine Near-Death Experiences. The Hollow seems to be open only technically, and the ticket booths are unmanned, though little heartbreaking jets of AC air are blowing out through the money slots in the booths' glass. Attendance is sparse, and I notice that none of the ag-pro or farm people are anywhere in sight down here. A lot of the carnies slouch and slump in the shade of awnings. Every one of them seems to chain-smoke. The Tilt-a-Whirl operator has got his boots up on his control panel reading a motorcycle-and-naked-girl magazine while guys attach enormous rubber hoses to the ride's guts. We sidle over for a chat. The operator is twenty-four and from Bee Branch, Arkansas, and has an earring and a huge tattoo of a flaming skull on his triceps. He's far more interested in chatting with Native Companion than with me. He's been at this gig five years, touring with this one here same company here. Couldn't rightly say if he liked it or not. Broke in on the Toss-a-Quarter-Onto-the-Plates game and got, like, transferred over to the Tilt-a-Whirl in '91. He smokes Marlboro 100's but wears a cap that says "Winston." All the carny game barkers have headset microphones; some are saying "Testing" and reciting their pitch lines in tentative warm-up ways. A lot of the pitches seem frankly sexual: You got to get it up to get it in. Take it out and lay 'er down, only a dollar. Make it stand up. Two dollars, five chances. Make it stand up. Rows of stuffed animals hang by their feet in the booths like game put out to cure. It smells like machine grease and hair tonic down here, and there's already a spoiled, garbagy smell. The media guide says Happy Hollow is contracted to "one of the largest: owners of amusement attractions in the country," one Blomsness-Thebault Enterprises, of Crystal Lake, Illinois, near Chicago. But the carnies are all from the middle South--Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma. They are visibly unimpressed by the press credentials clipped to my shirt. They tend to look at Native Companion like she's food, which she ignores. I lose four dollars trying to "get it up and in," tossing miniature basketballs into angled baskets in such a way that they don't bounce out. The game's barker can toss them behind his back and get them to stay, but he's right up next to the baskets. My shots carom out from eight feet away; the straw baskets look soft, but their bottoms make a suspicious steely sound when hit. It's so hot that we move in quick vectors between areas of shade. I'm reluctant to go shirtless because there'd be no way to display my credentials. We zigzag gradually westward. One of the fully assembled rides near the Hollow's west end is something called the Zipper. It's riderless as we approach, but in furious motion, a kind of Ferris wheel on amphetamines. Individual caged cars are hinged to spin on their own axes as they go around in a tight vertical ellipse. The machine looks less like a Zipper than the head of a chain saw. It sounds like a shimmying V-12 engine, and it is something I'd run a mile in tight shoes to avoid riding. Native Companion starts clapping and hopping, though. The operator at the controls sees her and shouts down to git on over and git some, if she's a mind. He claims they want to test it somehow. He's elbowing a colleague next to him in a way I don't much care for. We have no tickets, I point out, and none of the cash-for-ticket booths are manned. "Ain't no sweat off my balls," the operator says without looking at me. The operator's colleague conducts Native Companion up the waffled-steel steps and straps her into a cage, upping a thumb at the operator, who pulls a lever. She starts to ascend. Pathetic little fingers appear in the cage's mesh. The Zipper's operator is ageless and burnt-brown and has a mustache waxed to wicked points like a steer's horns, rolling a Drum cigarette with one hand as he nudges levers upward and the ellipse of cars speeds up and the individual cars themselves start to spin on their hinges. Native Companion is a blur of color inside her cage, but operator and colleague (whose jeans have worked down his hips to the point that the top of his butt-crack is visible) watch studiously as Native Companion's spinning car and the clanking empty cars circle the ellipse once a second. I can barely watch. The Zipper is the color of unbrushed teeth, with big scabs of rust. The operator and colleague sit on a little steel deck before a panel of black-knobbed levers. The colleague spits Skoal into a can he holds and tells the operator, "Well then take her up to eight then you pussy." The Zipper begins to whine and the thing to spin so fast that a detached car would surely be hurled into orbit. The colleague has a small American flag folded into a bandanna around his head. The empty cars shudder and clank as they whirl and spin. One long scream, wobbled by changes in vector, is coming from Native Companion's cage, which is going around and around on its hinges while a shape inside tumbles like stuff in a clothes dryer. My neurological makeup (extremely sensitive: carsick, airsick, heightsick) makes just watching this an act of great person, al courage. The scream goes on and on; it is nothing like a swine's. Then the operator stops the ride abruptly with her car at the top, so she's hanging upside down inside the cage. I call up--is she okay? The response is a strange high-pitched noise. I see the two carnies gazing upward very intently, shading their eyes. The operator is stroking his mustache contemplatively. The cage's inversion has made Native Companion's dress fall up. They're ogling her nethers, obviously. Now the operator is joggling the choke lever so the Zipper stutters back and forth, forward and backward, making Native Companion's top car spin around and around on its hinges. His colleague's T-shirt has a stoned Ninja Turtle on it, toking on a joint. There's a distended A-sharp scream from the whirling car, as if Native Companion is being slow-roasted. I summon saliva to step in and really say something stem, but at this point they start bringing her down. The operator is deft at his panel; the car's descent is almost fluffy. His hands on the levers are a kind of parody of tender care. The descent takes forever--ominous silence from Native Companion's car. The two carnies are laughing and slapping their knee. I clear my throat twice. Native Companion's car descends, stops. jiggles of movement in the car, then the door's latch slowly turns. I expect whatever husk of a person emerges from the car to be hunched and sheet-white, dribbling fluids. Instead she bounds out. "That was fucking great! Joo see that? Son of a bitch spun that car sixteen times, did you see?" This woman is native Midwestern, from my hometown. My prom date a dozen years ago. Her color is high. Her dress looks like the world's worst case of static cling. She's still got her chewing gum in, for God's sake. She turns to the carnies: "You sons bitches, that was fucking great." The colleague is half-draped over the operator; they're roaring with laughter. Native Companion has her hands on her hips, but she's grinning. Am I the only one who's in touch with the sexual-harassment element in this whole episode? She takes the steel stairs several at a time and starts up, the hillside toward the food booths. Behind us the operator calls out, "They don't call me King of the Zipper for nuthin', sweet thang!" She snorts and calls back over her shoulder, "Oh, you." I'm having a hard time keeping up. "Did you hear that?" I ask her. "Jesus I thought I bought it for sure, that was so great. Assholes. But did you see that one spin up top at the end, though?" "Did you hear that Zipper King comment?" I protest. She has her hand around my elbow and is helping me up the hillside's slick grass. "Did you sense something kind of sexual-harassmentish going on through that whole sick little exercise?" "Oh for fuck's sake, it was fun--son of a bitch spun that car sixteen times." "They were looking up your dress. You couldn't see them, maybe. They hung you upside down at a great height and made your dress fall up and ogled you. They shaded their eyes and commented to each other." "Oh for Christ's sake." I slip a bit and she catches my arm. "So this doesn't bother you? As a Midwesterner, you're unbothered? Or did you just not have a sense of what was going on?" "So if I noticed or didn't, why does it have to be my deal? What, because there's assholes in the world I don't get to ride the Zipper?" "This is potentially key," I say. "This may be just the sort of regional eroto-political contrast the East Coast magazine is keen for. The core value informing a kind of eroto-willed political stoicism on your part is your prototypically Midwestern appreciation of fun--" "Buy me some pork skins, you dip-shit." "--whereas on the East Coast, eroto-political indignation is the fun. In New York a woman who'd been hung upside down and ogled would get a whole lot of other women together and there'd be this frenzy of eroto-polit