E Pluribus Pluram

[deusvulture]

Thoughts on David Foster Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction”, almost thirty years later:

- The good news is that Wallace’s intelligent “Joe Briefcase”, the hypothetical lonely shut-in tyrannized by the addictive power of TV to replace human interaction, now has a healthier, happier, alternative that despite being equally addictive is more personal, less homogenized, more interactive, and more enriching: lurking online. The falseness of TV’s purported voyeurism can be supplanted by real(er) voyeurism of people who post too much, who at least are less uniformly shallow than TV characters. This part gets better, David Foster Wallace! All is not lost!

- Similarly, it seems quaint in retrospect to read Wallace lamenting how pervasive irony leads to mass political acquiescence. If only! The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, I suppose. And in all seriousness his diagnosis makes me feel better about our current moment, which starts to seem like a necessary reaction against the shallow ironic nihilism of what was once mass culture.

- Wallace underestimates how important cable would turn out to be in terms of weakening the cultural monopoly of TV, although of course that’s all small fry next to the big kahuna of The Internet.

- Wallace spends a lot of time making fun of George Gilder’s prognostication that digital media will upend the hierarchies of broadcast media. Whoops! In fairness, Gilder’s concrete idea of what this would consist of – something about remixable travel shows where you climb mountains and chat with lifelike Henry Kissinger chatbots – is stupid.

- Wallace correctly diagnoses that avant garde novels at the time were competing to be more screamingly ironic than each other and that one can only go so far with that. I don’t know enough to accurately describe how this conundrum was eventually resolved; my knee-jerk snarky summary is something like “it turns out you can just write normal books.”

- I don’t know if anyone still adheres to the “no brand names in literary fiction” thing, but I think Wallace is exactly right about how ridiculous that is and why.

- Just like “We Didn’t Start the Fire” was written just slightly too early to know it was about the Cold War, this essay makes a nice, unsentimental capstone to four decades of non-cable TV. People like to eulogize this era with rose-tinted lenses (ctrl-f “Walter Cronkite” in any article about our present moment), but honestly, it sucked. And it was replaced by something better.

Comments

[flamingsword]

There is a reason I don't read "literature", and a large part of it is that people trying to turn me on to it back in high school loved the screamingly ironic stuff and I thought it was pretentious and hated it.

Also: Camus should come with a mental health warning label. The Stranger was so depressing it set off a mixed episode trying to get through it.