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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press
Marc Chenetier, Beyond Suspicion: New American Fiction since 1960. Translated by Elizabeth A. Houlding. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. xvi + 321 pp. $38.95.
Television.
It seems just as impossible to exclude it from any discussion of late-twentieth-century American culture as to include it neatly in that discussion. At the same time completely superficial--a two-dimensional play of pixels--and problematically universal, television's waves fill our airspace. Its themes and allusions permeate our discourse; its commercial promotion underpins our consumer economy; and its looks shape our fashion and our self-fashioning. Television is both the most pervasive mode of American mass culture and the most effective conduit for most other chief modes, especially those represented through film and advertising. Thus to examine works of contemporary American fiction, as Philip E. Simmons does in Deep Surfaces: Mass Culture and History in Postmodern American Fiction, in the context of the media, especially as epitomized by the televisual, must be an appropriate choice. And the opening sentences of his book couldn't be more apt:
In thinking about the position of the postmodern novel in the larger
scene of American culture, one at some point confronts television,
which seems at once everywhere and nowhere, substance and shadow,
defining our cultural moment and distracting us from it. Together
with popular film and advertising in all media, television is one
of the primary means by which the postmodern conditions of knowledge
are established within everyday life. (1)
Simmons desires to describe the shape of the postmodern historical imagination at work in the exemplary texts of Thomas Pynchon, E. L. Doctorow, Ishmael Reed, Don DeLillo, Nicholson Baker, and Bobble Ann Mason, among others: "That shape is a paradoxical one: a 'deep surface' that both invokes and rejects traditional modes of historical understanding in 'depth,' as it reconfigures the human subject and ranges among local and contingent historical narratives organized at the mass-cultural 'surface'" (2). As his catch phrase "deep surfaces" suggests, Simmons wants to retain in some way the tradition of perspective upon which historiography depends, while also accounting for postmodernism's leveling of hierarchies, dissolving of metanarratives, and fracturing of frames. To put it another way, Simmons could be accused of wanting to have his cake and eat its picture too.
But in this age of television, conceivably, so might we all, and if we wish to heed the warning of the Sesame Street song about the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Don't eat the pictures in the museum," all we have to know is what constitutes "the museum" and which pictures ought to reside there. Acquiring that definitive cultural knowledge in a televisual culture, however, necessitates turning to a less-than-reliable authority, which is what we have been doing, I think, directly and indirectly, formally and informally, with increasing ease and transparency since the end of World War II.
By the time the average baby boomer had reached sixteen, she had watched between twelve thousand and fifteen thousand hours of television. And before mining Simmons's deep surfaces or probing the depth of his study, it is useful, I think, to speculate on the paradox of television-watching, so superficial an activity, engaged in so deeply and extensively by such a broad range of people. To start with one cliche of television theory (for which we are indebted to Raymond Williams), television is "flow"; it is the experience not of watching a specific drama or event but of entering into a flow of sensations disparate in form, content, and organization. This idea has been well elaborated, and I want to note only that the serial experience of the flow--the real time in which we experience news, commercials, dramas, promos, games, songs, et cetera--becomes the constant that requires other forms of narrative time to retain their historicity at the expense of their chronology. A weekly television series, for example, combines serial and episodic components. Some aspects of the narrative establish continuity from week to week, while other aspects depend on characters, actors, and circumstances that are self-contained within the week's episode. Although in the early days of television series were either serial (most typically soap operas) or episodic (Gunsmoke, 77 Sunset Strip), more recently shows such as Hill Street Blues or Murphy Brown have integrated the episodic and the serial. In either case, however, the original order, upon which the concept of a series depends, is extremely ephemeral. Reruns mingle from week to week with "all new" episodes. The "all new," however, becomes immediately old, part of the rerun repertoire that soon outnumbers the new, such that the old episodes are the normative body, with the new episodes--the stuff that makes a series a series--comprising the aberration....
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