Wallace, David Foster. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments. Boston: Little, Brown and Co, 1997.

Dr. A’s Fowleresque dismissal of TV as just a “distraction” is less naïve than insane: there is nothing but television on this episode. 32

I, the pseudo-voyeur, am indeed “behind the scenes,” primed to get the in-joke. 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 my—our—own interior. 32

A dog, if you point at something, will look only at your finger. 33

But once television introduces the element of watching, and once it informs an economy and culture like radio never could have, the referential stakes go way up. Six hours a day is more time than most people (consciously) do any other one thing. How human beings who absorb such high doses understand themselves will naturally change, become vastly more spectatorial, self-conscious. Because the practice of “watching” is expansive. Exponential. We spend enough time watching, pretty soon we start watching ourselves watching. Pretty soon we start to “feel” ourselves feeling, yearn to experience “experiences.” And that American subspecies into fiction writing starts writing more and more about . . . 34

For Metafiction, in its ascendant and most important phases, was really nothing more than a single-order expansion of its own great theoretical nemesis, 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 the metastasis of self-conscious watching. 34

That products presented as helping you express individuality can afford to be advertised on television only because they sell to enormous numbers of people. 35

If even the president lies to you, whom are you supposed to trust to deliver the real? 36

But something is malignantly addictive if (1) it causes real problems for the addict, and (2) it offers itself as a relief from the very problems it causes. 38

Hence the networks’ bland response to its critics that in the majority of cases—and until the rise of hip metatelevision you could count the exceptions on one hand—“different” or “high-concept” programming simply doesn’t get ratings. High-quality television cannot stand up to the gaze of millions, somehow. 40

Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as by common images: what binds us became what we stand witness to. 42

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. 42

The status of Low-cultural images in postmodern and contemporary fiction is very different from those images’ place in postmodernism’s artistic ancestors, e.g. the “dirty realism” of a Joyce or the ur-Dadaism of something like Duchamp’s toilet sculpture. Duchamp’s aesthetic display of that vulgarest of appliances served an exclusively theoretical end: it was making statements like “The Museum is the Mausoleum is the Men’s Room,” etc. It was an example of what Octavio Paz calls “Meta-irony,” an attempt to reveal that categories we divide into superior/arty and inferior/vulgar are in fact so interdependent as to be coextensive. The use of Low references in a lot of today’s High literary fiction, on the other hand, serves a less abstract agenda. It is meant (1) to help create a mood of irony and irreverence, (2) to make us uneasy and so “comment” on / the vapidity of U.S. culture, and (3) most important, these days, to be just plain realistic. 43

We’re not different from our fathers in that television presents and defines our contemporary world. Where are different is that we have no memory of a world without such electric definition. This is why the derision so many older fictionists heap on a “Brat Pack” generation they see as insufficiently critical of mass culture is at once understandable and misguided.

commercial-length conversations 44

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. 45

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. 46

the television whose weird pretty hand has my generation by the throat. 49

It is a natural adaptation of the hoary techniques of literary Realism to a ’90s whose defining boundaries have been deformed by electric signal. 51

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. 51-52

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. 52

products billed as distinguishing individuals from crowds sell to huge crowds of individuals 56

The crowd is now, paradoxically, both (1) the “herd” in contrast to which the viewer’s distinctive identity is to be defined and (2) the 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 it’s also implicated as threatening, confusing, since after all Joe Briefcase is not an idiot, sitting here, and knows himself as a viewer to b e 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. 56

The surface of Stand-Out 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 at some basic level shaky, contingent, and that true actualization of self would ultimately consist in Joe’s becoming one of the images that are the object of this great herd-like watching. That is, television’s real pitch in these commercials is that it’s better to be inside the TV than to be outside, watching. 56

Maybe, though, the relation of contemporary viewer to contemporary television 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 television, 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—see e.g. catalysis for smog, S.D.I. for nuclear missiles, transplants for assorted rot. 57

Joe Briefcase might have been 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. 58

This in turn reflected a wider shift in U.S. perception 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 rejection of bogus values. 59

ads that today’s hip viewer finds old-fashioned and “manipulative.” In contrast to a blatant Buy This Thing, the Pepsi commercial pitches parody. The ad is utterly up-front about what TV ads are popularly despised for doing, viz. using primal, flim-flam appeals to sell sugary crud to people whose identity is nothing but mass consumption. 60

The commercial invites a 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. And entire crowds of Joe B.’s responded: the ad boosted Pepsi’s market share through three sales quarters. 61

Isuzu Inc. hit pay dirt in the late ’80s with its series of “Joe Isuzu” spots, featuring an oily, Satanic-looking salesman who told whoppers about Isuzu’s genuine llama-skin upholstery and ability to run on tapwater. Though the ads never 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’s 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 Audience is dumb to believe them. 61

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 now find successful television ads that mock TV-ad conventions almost anywhere you look. 61

The real authority on a world we now view as constructed and not depicted becomes the medium that constructs our world-view. 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, extra-televisual standards about depth, taste, 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, self-mocking irony is always “Sincerity, with a motive.” 63

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 inescapable 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. 63

TV’s institutionalization of hip irony. 63

Or, in 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,” or with the repetitive solmizations of a Glass or a Reich, or with the self-conscious catatonia of a platoon of Raymond Carver wannabes? 64

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. 64

Television has pulled the old dynamic 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. 64

Pynchon reoriented our view of paranoia from deviant psychic fringe to central thread in the corporo-bureacratic weave; DeLillo exposed image, signal, data and tech as agents of spiritual chaos and not social order. 66

The assumptions behind early postmodern irony, on the other hand, were still frankly idealistic: it was / assumed that etiology and diagnosis pointed toward cure, that a revelation of imprisonment led to freedom. 66-67

It’s not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As Hyde (whom I pretty obviously like) 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 almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. 67

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 pwerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. 67

And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself. 68

What do you do when postmodern rebellion becomes a pop-cultural institution? 68

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 Burker King sells onion rings with “Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules”? 68

Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism. 70

The 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 signal. 73

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 a particular construct’s quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience. 79

high-quality prose television 80

Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. 81