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,” 12 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.
Pynchon and DeLillo were ahead of their time. Today, the belief that pop images are basically just mimetic devices is one of the attitudes that separates most U.S. fiction writers under c. 40 from the writerly generation that precedes us, reviews us, and designs our grad-school curricula. This generation gap in conceptions of realism is, again, TV-dependent. The U.S. generation born after 1950 is the first for whom television was something to be lived with instead of just looked at. Our elders tend to regard the set rather as the flapper did the automobile: a curiosity turned treat turned seduction. For younger writers, TV’s as much a part of reality as Toyotas and gridlock. We literally cannot imagine life without it. We’re not different from our fathers in that television presents and defines our contemporary world. Where we 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. It’s true that there’s something sad about the fact that David Leavitt’s short stories’ sole description of some characters is that their T-shirts have certain brand names on them. But the fact is that, for most of Leavitt’s educated young readership, members of a generation raised and nourished on messages equating what one consumes with who one is, Leavitt’s descriptions really do do the job. In our post-1950s, inseparable-from-TV association pool, brand loyalty really is synecdochic of character; this is simply a fact.
For those U.S. writers whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, those who are big on neither Duchamp nor Paz and who lack the oracular foresight of a DeLillo, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction’s seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always where it ought to reside. In one of the graduate workshops I went through, a certain gray eminence kept trying to convince us that a literary story or novel should always eschew “any feature which serves to date it” 13 because “serious fiction must be Timeless.” When we protested that, in his own well-known work, characters moved about electrically lit rooms, drove cars, spoke not Anglo-Saxon but postwar English, and inhabited a North America already separated from Africa by continental drift, he impatiently amended his proscription to those explicit references that would date a story in the “frivolous Now.” When pressed for just what stuff evoked this F.N., he said of course he meant the “trendy mass-popular-media” reference. And here, at just this point, transgenerational discourse broke down. We looked at him blankly. We scratched our little heads. We didn’t get it. This guy and his students simply did not conceive the “serious” world the same way. His automobiled Timeless and our MTV’d own were different.
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”: