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The development of new visual media has always provoked writers.
When they first entered the scene of representation photography and cinema
lead to reconsiderations of the other arts and their respective agendas.
In the middle of the last century painters, writers, scientists, physicians
and philosophers were challenged by the new medium of the daguerreotype.
Those artists who saw their raison d'etre in the exact reproduction of
nature suddenly were confronted with a mechanism more perfect than any
painting or literary technique. This led on the one hand to a stronger
mimetic trend in the arts, competing with photography (realism and naturalism
in literature); on the ther hand areas of human experience not recordable
by photography were discovered, especially in the human mind and psyche
(impressionism in painting, expressionism in painting and literature).
Similarly, cinema and montage had an important impact on literature. Cinema itself is an art form which responded to radical economical and technological changes (railroad, industrialization, big city life, etc.), which were also responsible for the "visual consciousness" of modernist literature.(1) All art forms reflect to a certain extent the material basis of their time. With its distinctive form cinema not only served this purpose, but reinforced new literary techniques (parallel narratives, montage of discontinuous story-pieces). The literary critic Alan Spiegel therefore identified the "Cinematographic Form" as one of the main features of modern literature.(2)
"Der Grundvorgang der Neuzeit ist die Eroberung der Welt als Bild":(3) the next big step in this conquest is definitely the arrival of television in the 1940s. Unlike photography and film, television in its infant years failed to provoke the interest of literature. According to Julika Griem, TV appeared to be too domestic to be interesting for serious writers, it lacked the "larger-than-lifeness" of the movies and its promise of a revolutionary aesthetics.(4) The TV set fitted too neatly into the home and was thus initially less understood as an important broadcasting medium than as a piece of furniture.
The new medium soon lost its innocence. Television became more pervading in American households and increasingly functioned as the people's window to the world. According to Cecilia Tichi, "the later 1950s mark the point at which the television environment was sufficiently established in the United States to engender a group of writers-to-be [...]. By 1960, 87.5% of all United States households had at least one TV set, a figure that climbed to 95.5% by 1970 and to 98% by 1980 [...]."(5) In 1959 the new medium witnessed its fall from grace. The Charles-Van-Doren-case revealed for the first time television's manipulative powers. Van Doren had publicly confessed that his long championship had intentionally been staged by the producers of the show "Twenty-One". They had provided him with ready-made answers to the questions.
The wide spreading of the new medium on the one hand and its manipulative powers on the other proved fertile ground for the writers of the sixties. Authors like John Updike (Rabbit Run, 1960), Norman Mailer (Armies of the Night, 1967) and Jerzy Kosinski (Being There, 1971) came to view television as some kind of cultural other, not a medium of truth and enlightenment but of manipulation and superficiality.(6) The oppositional stance of these writers towards TV is embodied in Harry Angstrom, the hero of John Updike's "Rabbit"-tetralogy. Julika Griem calls him a "pre-television Gutenberg man [who] along with his author Updike [...] stubbornly insists on drawing the line between 'real' and mediated worlds."(7)
The boundary between real and mediated worlds became more blurred in the work of postmodern authors like Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon and John Barth. Unlike the more realist authors such as Updike, these writers experimented with new kinds of writing. Often their works incorporated experiments with the forms and techniques of other media. Robert Coover's short story "The Babysitter" (1969), for example, with its montage-like technique and discontinuous narrative mimicks TV's form. Instead of a linear story the reader is faced with a collage of different narratives which resembles the collage achieved by channel-hopping on TV. In the story there is no perceivable boundary line between "real" and imaginary events (i.e. events which occur only in the minds of the characters or on television). The similiarity to TV lies in the difficulty of distinguishing between fictional and documentary footage. Furthermore, there is no real end or closure to the story. Its "end" resembles the switching off of a tube; the story could potentially continue without end.
A similar example of fiction mirroring television's form is Walter Abish's story "Ardor, Awe, Atrocity" (1984) in which the story of a young girl roaming through the mythological landscape of southern California is intermingled with the TV show "Mannix". "Real life" figures and televisual characters interact in both stories thereby creating ambiguity in the ontological status of these works. In Abish's story the appearance of Mannix is not reducible to any kind of misperception of the heroine, as he occupies the same ontological plane as her. Thus, television can be said to function as a kind of "ontological pluralizer" in these works: "The world of these texts [...] have something like the ontologically plural, centrifugal structure of TV itself."(8)
Both kinds of literary representations of TV discussed so far, the realist and the postmodern, treat television as an invader from a different cultural sphere. Although Coover's and Abish's playful texts experiment with formal correlatives of television and leave it to the reader to make sense of their works, they still "rely on the assumption that the gap between popular and elitist culture has by no means been bridged."(9) The writers mentioned so far all belong to a generation who "consciously experienced the introduction [...] of television into their lives and habitats and, therefore, understood it to be discontinuous".(10) They can all remember a world without the now ubiquitous box in the living room, a world devoid of its flickering images and pervading announcements.
The generation of writers coming of age in the 1980s on the other hand, "the succeeding generation, their children, never knew life without the small screen and have experienced television as integral and natural."(11) One of the most important of these younger writers whose works are characterized by a greater acceptance of television is David Foster Wallace. He is very self-conscious about his generation's changed attitude towards TV: "the American generation born after, say, 1955 is the first for whom television is something to be lived with, not just looked at . . . we, unlike any elders, have no memory of a world without such electronic definition. It's built in [...]."(12) For writers like Wallace, the tube has become such a natural part of their environment and public life, that they do not consider it to be a cultural "other" but an indispensable material for their fictions.
With his ground-breaking essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" David Foster Wallace establishes a kind of manifesto in which he not only analyses the ways in which television has become the main "disseminator and a definer of the cultural atmosphere we breathe and process,"(13) but also calls for a new kind of fiction which he calls "image-fiction". This fiction acknowledges the ubiquity and familiarity of television and does not handle it as a cultural "other", but as the pervasive environment which is made visible through the defamiliarizing strategies of fiction.(14)
After an introduction of David Foster Wallace«s concept of image-fiction and an analysis of his short story "Little Expressionless Animals", I will turn to Don DeLillo's novel White Noise, which according to Wallace served as "a kind of televisual clarion-call."(15) I will attempt a reading of this work as a piece of image-fiction. My central question being: In what ways does this novel represent television as a pervasive environment which is not so much a cultural other as a "disseminator and a definer of the cultural atmosphere we breathe and process?" The focal points of my close reading of this novel are DeLillo's defamiliarizing strategies which make the televisual environment visible and which are central to Wallace's notion of image-fiction. Another central theme will be the boundary between real and televised worlds, the increasing eradication of which being a major concern of image-fiction.
The last chapter will concern Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland. Again, I will concentrate on the literary strategies which allow Pynchon to show how much the lives of his protagonists are shaped by television, and how this medium is represented as "neither a dead mirror nor a window into the world, [...] but a significant perceptive frame and rhetorical site of American culture."(16) As in Wallace's fiction or DeLillo's White Noise, there is no clear boundary between "real" and simulated worlds in Vineland, a fact which offers interesting insights into the workings of television.
The works of Wallace, DeLillo and Pynchon differ in several ways which
will be discussed. Common to each author is a new literary stance in relating
to television. They do not treat it as something alien or foreign to society,
but as an integral part with far-reaching and serious implications: cultural,
psychological and political. These effects and implications are discussed
as they appear in the course of my literary analyses. However, my goal
is not to establish a comprehensive media theory. Perhaps image-fiction
would offer an interesting reference point for future studies of the media
as it elucidates upon some of the profound ways in which television shapes
our culture and consciousness.
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