A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (12 page)

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

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

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

… 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
¹⁵

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.
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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