5. Summary

In the fictional worlds of "Little Expressionless Animals", White Noise and Vineland, television is ubiqitous and natural, at least for the fictional characters. In all three works we can witness characters who respond to their tubes, talk to it, and let it mediate their most personal matters. Television is the natural environment for Dee Goddard, Julie Smith, Jack Gladney, Murray Siskind, Zoyd Wheeler and Hector Zuñiga. They do not perceive it as some kind of cultural "other" or an intruder in their private spheres, but rather as something which is inseparable from their lives. It is this over-familiarity with the medium, its environmental character, which Wallace, DeLillo and Pynchon present. All fulfill the first rule of image-fiction in that they concern themselves with the seemingly banal and the trivial.
 
Through their representations they defamiliarize their object. Wallace's "Jeopardy" is not an easily consumable show anymore but the outcome of a complex network of decisions and personal relations. It can not be viewed in the usual passive mode of consumption but engages the reader. He must actively think for himself to put the events into a chronological order and make sense of the story. White Noise's hero Jack Gladney is not only an ordinary man to be identified with but also a kind of "Martian visitor" in our world. His perceptions are so much determined by the televisual formula and media images that they become strange again. They do not appear in their usual contexts but build the main repository of experience for an ordinary man. Finally, Vineland is full of references to commercial television known by every American, but its fictional world seems slightly deranged. Its form resembles a TV program, and its characters are not safe from visits from the other side of the TV screen.
 
Perhaps the most striking similarity between the three discussed works is the way in which the TV screen is represented as a kind of permeable boundary. The TV keeps company, it wards off fears, it entertains. Alas, these mindless pleasures seem to have their price: in all three works the televisual world impinges on the real one. In Wallace's story most people have become "Little Expressionless Animals". They are not concerned with the complex emotions of others or themselves anymore but only with easily consumable surfaces. In White Noise, the televisual and the real meet in Jack Gladney's consciousness. In his mind he conceptualizes reality in media terms, where everything he perceives carries the traces of familiar media representations. In Vineland, the boundary between real and televisual space is even more permeable. Not only are the minds of its characters deeply influenced by TV, but the "real" world of Vineland itself is invaded by TV. Its physical laws often resemble the rules of certain TV genres, and televisual figures can be seen to enter reality.
 
The televisual world impinges on the real one: this is only another way to express TV's impact on the world. "Little Expressionless Animals" and White Noise show how much television shapes the ways in which we perceive the world. The complexities surrounding us, especially those arising in personal relationships, undergo perceptual erasure in these works. If in Wallace's story some people have truly become "expressionless animals", this escape to a completely televisual understanding of the world is not as easy in White Noise. Jack Gladney's conscious and unconscious attempts to alleviate his fears through the use of conceptual language are constantly subverted by various "returns of the real": fear, awe, hate, sublime feelings and anxiety pervade White Noise.
 
Vineland is also concerned with altered perceptions due to television. But in this novel they are shown to have political implications. Pynchon illustrates how television changes the ways in which we understand history and politics or misunderstand them. Televisual representations in Vineland reinforce the political status quo because they capture the subject in imaginary power relations. Also, TV appears as a medium which does not allow for a working through of the past. Instead it presents an imaginary realm in which the repetitions of events has replaced their direct experience.
 
All three works thus represent television as a medium in which the complexities of the world, personal relationships, death, history and politics are reduced to easily consumable spectacles. Additionally, all three image-fictions attempt to restore the lost depth by defamiliarizing the almost imperceptible TV environment and make the far-reaching effects it has on our world visible, be they perceptual as in Wallace and DeLillo or political as in Pynchon. They arrive at their profound insights about television because they understand it to be not some cultural other, but the main "disseminator and a definer of the cultural atmosphere we breathe and process," to conclude with Wallace's words.