The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

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

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

  … 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 tight15

  which serves as a great example because, even though this stanza appears in the poem without anything you’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 literature is a further shift from television-images as valid objects of literary allusion to television and metawatching as themselves valid subjects. By this I mean certain literature 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…16

  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.17

  The true prophet of this shift in U.S. fiction, though, was the aforementioned Don DeLillo, a long-underrated conceptual novelist who has made signal and image his unifying topoi the same 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 cowpath 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.18

  I quote this at such length not only because it’s too good to edit but also to draw your attention to two relevant features. One 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 being 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 taken as implying sympathy with the sheeplike photograph-hungry crowd. These poor Joe Briefcases are no less objects of ridicule for the fact that their “scientific” critic is himself being ridiculed. The narrative tone throughout is a kind of deadpan sneer, irony’s special straight face, w/ Jack himself mute during Murray’s dialogue—since to speak out loud in the scene would render the narrator a part of the farce (instead of a detached, transcendent “observer and recorder”) and so himself vulnerable to ridicule. 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 persuade 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 fiction writers they pose especially terrible 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. Television, in other words, has become able to capture and neutralize any attempt to change or even protest the attitudes of passive unease and cynicism that television 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. Some of the younger readers and writers I know call it Image-Fiction. Image-Fiction is basically a further involution of the relations between lit and pop that blossomed with the ’60s’ postmodernists. If the postmodern church fathers found pop images valid referents and symbols in fiction, and if in the ’70s and early ’80s this appeal to the features of mass culture shifted from use to mention—i.e. certain avant-gardists starting to treat of pop and TV-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, 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 ’70s short story “The Oranging of America” projects an interior life onto the figure of Howard Johnson.

  But in the late ’80s, 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 ’80s medium, the arty Zelig, Purple Rose of Cairo, and sex, lies, and videotape, plus the low-budget Scanners and Videodrome and Shockers, all began to treat of mass-entertainment screens as permeable.)

  It’s in the last year that the Image-Fiction scene has really taken off. A. M. Homes’s 1990 The Safety 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.”19 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 Shield 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.”20

  One thing I have to insist you realize about this new subgenre is that it’s distinguishable 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 an actual 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 is a natural adaptation of the hoary techniques of literary Realism to a ’90s world whose defining boundaries have been deformed by electric signal. For one of realistic fiction’s big jobs 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 damn near everything presents itself as familiar—it’s not a surprise that some of today’s most ambitious Realist fiction is going about trying to make the familiar strange. In so doing, in demanding fictional access behind lenses and screens and headlines and reimagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago, and appearance, Image-Fiction is paradoxically trying to restore what’s 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, surfacey look “behind the scenes” of the very televisual front people already jeer at, a front they can already get behind the scenes of via Entertainment Tonight and Remote Control.

  The reason why today’s Image-Fiction isn’t the rescue from a passive, addictive TV-psychology that it tries so hard to be is that most Image-Fiction writers render their material with the same tone of irony and self-consciousness that their ancestors, the literary insurgents of Beat and postmodernism, used so effectively to rebel against their own world and context. And the reason why this irreverent postmodern approach fails to help the new Imagists transfigure TV is simply that TV has beaten the new Imagists to the punch. The fact is that for at least ten years now, television has been ingeniously absorbing, homogenizing, and re-presenting the very same 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 Image-Fiction aims to “rescue” us from TV, I again am not suggesting that television has diabolic designs, or wants souls, or brainwashes people. I’m just referring again to the kind of natural Audience-conditioning consequent to high daily doses, a conditioning so subtle it can be observed best obliquely, through examples. And so if a term like “conditioning” still seems hyperbolic or hysterical to you, I’ll ask you to consider for a moment the exemplary issue of prettiness. One of the things that make the people on television fit to stand the Megagaze is that they are, by ordinary human standards, extremely 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 appealing 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 people’s 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 TV-images we want 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 pre
tty 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… 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 enormous doses affects people’s values and self-perception in deep ways. Nor 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 those patterns, processing them, and then re-presenting them as persuasions to watch and to buy. Commercials targeted at the ’80s’ upscale Boomers, for example, are notorious for using processed versions of tunes from the rock culture of the ’60s and ’70s both to elicit the yearning that accompanies nostalgia and to yoke purchase 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”; the CA Raisin Board’s claymation raisins dance to “Heard It Through the Grapevine”; etc. If the cynical re-use 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 one instance of TV absorbing and pablumizing cultural tokens seem innocuous enough. The recycling of whole cultural trends, and the ideologies that inform them, is a different story.