In fact, one of My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist’s unifying obsessions is this latter juxtaposition of parts of selves, people and machines, human subjects and discrete objects. Leyner’s fiction is, in this regard, an eloquent reply to Gilder’s prediction that our TV-culture problems can be resolved by the dismantling of images into discrete chunks we can recombine however we wish. Leyner’s world is a Gilderesque dystopia. The passivity and schizoid decay still endure for Leyner in his characters’ reception of images and waves of data. The ability to combine them only adds a layer of disorientation: when all experience can be deconstructed and reconfigured, there become simply too many choices. 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.
Leyner’s own novel, in its amphetaminic eagerness to wow the reader, marks the far dark frontier of the Fiction of Image — literature’s absorption of not just the icons, techniques, and phenomena of television, but of television’s whole objective. My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist’s sole aim is, finally, to wow, to ensure that the reader is pleased and continues to read. The book does this by (1) flattering the reader with appeals to his erudite postmodern weltschmerz and (2) relentlessly reminding the reader that the author is smart and funny. The book itself is extremely funny, but it’s not funny the way funny stories are funny. It’s not that funny things happen here; it’s that funny things are self-consciously imagined and pointed out, like a comedian’s stock “You ever notice how…?” and “You ever wonder what would happen if…?”
Actually, Leyner’s whole high-Imagist style most often resembles a kind of lapidary stand-up comedy:
Suddenly Bob couldn’t speak properly. He had suffered some form of spontaneous aphasia. But it wasn’t total aphasia. He could speak, but only in a staccato telegraphic style. Here’s how he described driving through the Midwest on Interstate 80: “Corn corn corn corn Stuckeys. Corn corn corn corn Stuckeys.”
there’s a bar on the highway which caters almost exclusively to authority figures and the only drink it serves is lite beer and the only food it serves is surf and turf and the place is filled with cops and state troopers and gym teachers and green berets and toll attendants and game wardens and crossing guards and umpires
Leyner’s fictional response to television is less a novel than a piece of witty, erudite, extremely high-quality prose television. Velocity and vividness replace development. People flicker in and out; events are garishly there and then gone and never referred to. There’s a brashly irreverent rejection of “outmoded” concepts like integrated plot or enduring character. Instead there’s a series of dazzlingly creative parodic vignettes, designed to appeal to the 45 seconds of near-Zen concentration we call the TV attention span. In the absence of a plot, unifying the vignettes are moods — antic anxiety, the overstimulated stasis of too many choices and no chooser’s manual, irreverent brashness toward televisual reality. And, after the manner of films, music videos, dreams, and television programs, there are recurring “Key Images,” here exotic drugs, exotic technologies, exotic foods, exotic bowel dysfunctions. And it is no accident that My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist’s central preoccupation is with digestion and elimination. Its mocking challenge to the reader is the same one presented by television’s flood of realities and choices: ABSORB ME — PROVE YOU’RE CONSUMER ENOUGH.
Leyner’s work, the best Image-Fiction yet, is both amazing and forgettable, wonderful and oddly hollow. I’m concluding by talking about it at length because, in its masterful reabsorption of the very features TV has itself absorbed from postmodern art, Leyner’s book seems like the ultimate union of U.S. television and fiction. It seems also to cast the predicament of Image-Fiction itself into stark relief: the best stuff the subgenre’s produced to date is hilarious, upsetting, sophisticated, and extremely shallow — doomed to shallowness by its desire to ridicule a TV-culture whose mockery of itself and all value already absorbs all ridicule. Leyner’s attempt to “respond” to television via ironic genuflection is all too easily subsumed into the tired televisual ritual of mock-worship. It is dead on the page.
It’s entirely possible that my plangent noises about the impossibility of rebelling against an aura that promotes and vitiates all rebellion say more about my residency inside that aura, my own lack of vision, than they do about any exhaustion of U.S. fiction’s possibilities. The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeaclass="underline" shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. Today’s most engaged young fiction does seem like some kind of line’s end’s end. I guess that means we all get to draw our own conclusions. Have to. Are you immensely pleased.
1990
getting away from already pretty much being away from it all
08/05/93/0800h. Press Day is a week or so before the Fair opens. I’m supposed to be at the grounds’ Illinois Building by like 0900 to get Press Credentials. I imagine Credentials to be a small white card in the band of a fedora. I’ve never been considered Press before. My main interest in Credentials is getting into rides and stuff for free.
I’m fresh in from the East Coast to go to the Illinois State Fair for a swanky East-Coast magazine. Why exactly a swanky East-Coast magazine is interested in the Illinois State Fair remains unclear to me. I suspect that every so often editors at these magazines slap their foreheads and remember that about 90 % of the United States lies between the Coasts and figure they’ll engage somebody to do pith-helmeted anthropological reporting on something rural and heartlandish. I think they decided to engage me for this one because I actually grew up around here, just a couple hours’ drive from downstate Springfield. I never did go to the State Fair, though, growing up — I pretty much topped out at the County Fair level.
In August it takes hours for the dawn fog to burn off. The air’s like wet wool. 0800h. is too early to justify the car’s AC. I’m on I-55 going S/SW. The sun’s a blotch in a sky that isn’t so much cloudy as opaque. The corn starts just past the breakdown lanes and goes right to the sky’s hem. The August corn’s as tall as a tall man. Illinois corn is now knee-high by about the 4th of May, what with all the advances in fertilizers and herbicides. Locusts chirr in every field, a brassy electric sound that Dopplers oddly in the speeding car. Corn, corn, soybeans, corn, exit ramp, corn, and every few miles an outpost way off on a reach in the distance — house, tree w/ tire-swing, barn, satellite dish. Grain silos are the only real skyline. The Interstate is dull and pale. The occasional other cars all look ghostly, their drivers’ faces humidity-stunned. A fog hangs just over the fields like the land’s mind or something. The temperature’s over 80 and already climbing with the sun. It’ll be 90+ by l000h., you can telclass="underline" there’s already that tightening quality to the air, like it’s drawing itself in for a long siege.