Plasma Pool

Marshall McLuhan, in his 1964 book Understanding Media, advances the notion that as the globe becomes increasingly interconnected by electronic technology it becomes “no more than a village. Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree.” The effect of this “implosive factor,” McLuhan maintains, is to alter the position of marginalized subjects, who “can no longer be contained, in the political sense of limited association. They are now involved in our lives, and we in theirs, thanks to the electric media.” For McLuhan and the many who follow him, this new level of involvement represented a major social advancement in addition to a major technological one. Others, like socialist theorist Hans Magnus Enzensberger, saw these developments as potentially politically useful, and “attempted to formulate a ‘socialist strategy’ for the emancipatory use of media,” pointing

out that in principle, technologies such as the transistor radio recognize no distinction between transmitter and receiver. Rather, these technical distinctions reflect the social division of labor into producers and consumers […]. If passive consumers were to become active citizens and producers, they would have to take charge of this untapped technological potential [and] install themselves as producers.

Marshall McLuhan

In contrast to the positive and even emancipatory visions of McLuhan and Enzensberger, still others, such as Jean Baudrillard—to whom we soon will return—saw the burgeoning ubiquity of electronic media as downright draconian in its potential for oppression of the subject. John Barth’s now-dated examples of these subjects—the long-marginalized but newly empowered, for McLuhan; the long-oppressed and now worse-oppressed, for Baudrillard—in his 1968 cycle of stories Lost in the Funhouse, appropriate and particular to the 1960s, are “the Negro and the teen-ager,” both of which were, in the most general but decisive of senses, in a state of ambiguous but persistent, and puissant, rebellion.

But beyond its emancipatory potential, a world suffused with electronic media signaled to Barth a potential abandonment of books and writing altogether—an abandonment that writers could perhaps avoid or at least forestall by adapting their modes and methods to explore and negotiate the rapidly changing media ecology of the 1960s. In “The Literature of Exhaustion,” an essay published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1967, Barth asks us to suppose that each of us is “a writer by vocation—‘a print-oriented bastard,’ as the McLuhanites call us,” and feel that “the novel, if not narrative literature generally, if not the printed word altogether” might have “by this hour of the world just about shot its bolt.” Fortunately, however, this “used-upness of certain forms and exhaustion certain possibilities [is] by no means a cause for despair” for us, so long as we recognize that “art and its forms and techniques live in history and certainly do change”; and that the burden is on us writers to “rediscover validly the artifices of language and literature—such far out notions as grammar, punctuation…even characterization! Even plot!” Although he couldn’t articulate it at the time, Barth was calling, as he clarified in a 1980 Atlantic essay, for “artistic conventions…to be retired, subverted, transcended, transformed, or even deployed against themselves to generate new and lively work.” In other words, the “old” medium of print could remain relevant, and become increasingly relevant, by interrogating the developing, largely electronic media that threatened to make it obsolete. “After the dust had settled on the theories of chaps like Marshall McLuhan in the sixties,” Barth says,

what we all came away with, whether we agreed with them or not, was a livelier sense of the differentiations between various media and the sense in which print is really print. In other words, a reader of nineteenth-century conventional fiction is not really dealing with Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary, he is dealing with a sentence on a page.

John Barth

Soon after the publication of 1967’s “The Literature of Exhaustion,” in 1968, Barth published Lost in the Funhouse, a series of short fictions that stretched the sentence on the page significantly. He cast the book as medial experiment designed to address “the moribundity of the print medium in the electronic global village,” subtitling it “Fiction for print, tape, live voice,” and even providing a guide as to how each fiction is to be taken in—as a collection of marks on a page, a recording of a voice, or a live voice. Many other postwar fiction writers have interrogated changing media ecologies using innovative strategies similar to and far different from Barth’s; among these are postmodernists Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, William Gaddis, and Thomas Pynchon, all of whom have, as Lisa Yaszek says,

contributed to the debates over the impact of advanced technologies upon various aspects of subjectivity throughout the postwar era by deploying similar narrative strategies to develop new models of storytelling—and new models of subjectivity—adequate to the task for representing life in a high-tech world.

Precisely because of their sensitivity to artistic conventions and their conviction to challenge them, these writers are uniquely positioned to document how emergent and transforming media ecologies can affect art, intellect, and culture.

Despite this capacity, Barth, Gaddis, and Pynchon are consistently under siege by cultural commentators and some literary critics who think of their unconventional work as too playful, contrived, or complicated to have any impact or even to make any sense. Madison Smartt Bell, for instance, sees metafictionists like Barth as “mercurial divinit[ies]” “stuck inside a “self-reflexive squirrel cage”—“whose chief end is to teach you not to trust [them]” and whose “whole work is predicated on bad faith.” Similarly, Mark Bowden, writing a defense of contemporary realist Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons in a recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly, bemoans the “critical prestige [that] is accorded writers of ‘experimental,’ or ‘postmodern,’ fiction”—“even giants like Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis”—“who play clever games with language and traditional storytelling forms, and whose works are dazzlingly hard to follow” and ultimately “just silly.” Wolfe, on the other hand, “scores” for Bowden “in every category”—unsurprising for someone who considers himself to be a qualified as a definitive arbiter of the “silly.”

Despite the rather generalized, unimaginative, and often downright snippy derision of postmodernist writers’ concertedly experimental fiction by the likes of Bell and Bowden, these writers persistently prove adept at engaging, through the medium of print, the evolving media that are some fear are gradually supplanting print, and that are certainly, in any case, pressuring it. The remainder of this essay will examine a single such engagement: a passage from William Gaddis’s 1994 novel A Frolic of His Own. Negotiating new media ecologies, especially with respect to the changing place of print within these ecologies, was, as Joseph Tabbi details, a constant concern for Gaddis:

The flourishing of the player piano, brought to a close by radio whose own star would be eclipsed, in turn, by video and TV, encapsulated for Gaddis the simultaneous waste and creativity within the culture of planned obsolescence. By closely following these intermedial struggles for representational dominance, Gaddis again makes failure and “the rush for second place” a principal means to success “precisely in the arts where one’s best is never good enough.” Even as his own widely referential, densely interlinked narratives anticipate hypertext, his particular sort of fiction, Gaddis knew, was both endangered and enlivened by the rise of new media and the business interests spawned by the media.

William Gaddis

In A Frolic of His Own, Gaddis dramatizes the saturation of culture by images and information via electronic mass media chiefly through juxtaposition, effecting what Tabbi calls “a satirical celebration of the conquest of technology” that “sheds light […] on how literature, an island of print in an electronic sea of information, communicates—and communicates differently.” Instead of distinguishing among narration, dialogue, thought, words, images, sounds, junk mail, newspapers, television chitchat, talk radio, etc., Gaddis meshes these different sorts of things together, uniting them into a single continuous string of sensory impressions:

Frozen fishcakes? and freeze dried, what were they, just add contents of package to 1 cup of cold water bringing to a full boil while stirring gently, turn heat down and simmer for 2 minutes. For a thicker sauce add less water, for a thinner sauce add more water, serve piping hot with your favorite fish, meat or other choice. For a delicious variation sprinkle with grated Parmesan cheese and season to taste following hard upon the visual banquet of Sikhs killing Hindus, Hindus killing Muslims, Druses killing Maronites, Jews killing Arabs, Arabs killing Christians, and for a delicious variation Christians killing each other seasoned to taste and served piping hot by the snappy dresser on the evening news but, frozen fishcakes? —Because they were cheap, she said scraping up the plates, and later, in the pall fallen over the room, the dark casements and the cold hearth, the only movement a fugitive couple kissing on the silent screen and the unascribed bleat of digestive juices —you know what I never understand here? where all this time we’re stuck together in this house, that I don’t ever see you read? I mean with all these books in there the library and these ideas and people from books you’re always talking about where all anybody reads here is the paper and bills and the crosswords and this junk mail and the dumb television but I mean books? reading a book?

A fishcake is a potato patty paired with a filleted piece of fish and fried. Preparing it is “a way of using up leftovers that might otherwise be thrown away,” of creating a less healthy derivate of a previous, unfried meal. Unhealthy derivatives are bad enough, but Gaddis’s fishcakes are not derivatives—they are the main event, and are frozen and boxed and sold as such. The sauce that accompanies them is meant for first-generation flounder—meant to be “serve[d] piping hot with your favorite fish”—but here it covers derivatives from scrutiny, helping them to pass as originals, while further covering-up is suggested by the sauce-preparation instructions: “[f]or a delicious variation sprinkle with grated Parmesan cheese and season to taste.” Despite the saucy, cheesy, spicy veneer there are no fresh fillets of fish here, only readymade, unhealthy derivatives ingested principally because they are TV-dinner cheap.

The TV watched over dinner is similarly prepackaged, unhealthy, and cheap. The “visual banquet” of worldwide religious violence “served piping hot by the snappy dresser on the evening news” appears to occupy the entire mealtime. Surely there are other things going on in the world, but the only “delicious variation” on religious violence the news can provide is different religious violence, “Christians killing each other seasoned to taste,” an aspect of world events that becomes the central aspect, validating and reiterating itself evening after evening, broadcast after broadcast. And all this despite being surrounded by a library full of books, an alternative form of informational sustenance. But “reading a book” won’t happen as long as there are “the paper and bills and the crosswords and this junk mail” and “the dumb television.” Books can’t compete. The result of all this unwholesome consumption? A “pall fall[s] over the room, the dark casements and the cold hearth, the only movement a fugitive couple kissing on the silent screen and the unascribed bleat of digestive juices.” Light, warmth and affection come from criminals confined to the silent tube, and the best a human can do to mirror them is emit a bleat of roiling fluids from the pelvis—both the squelch of digestion and the pathetic, halfhearted ejaculation of a lover’s stifled desire. Fishcakes, word games, the nightly news; Jews killing Arabs, Sikhs killing Hindus; love staged and curbed—estrangement in the forms of sickness, mindlessness, violence, loneliness. This is what we devour and digest, this is what we repeat and reinforce, this is our perpetual situation. So, depressingly, says Gaddis. The substance and spirit of his world is devoid of integrity, and so devoid of love.

Jean Baudrillard

Gaddis dramatizes a media ecology saturated by images that have destroyed reality and its simulations, leaving in their place mere simulacra: freefloating images or likenesses that possess neither the substances nor the qualities of their originals. In a media ecology such as Gaddis’s, “[s]imulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance,” but is instead, as Baudrillard says in Simulacra and Simulation, “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality.” Baudrillard would also see Gaddis’s rendering as an accurate model for the western media ecology of the latter 20th century, in which simulacra have become such mainstays that they now precede the reality that once gave them life. “The territory” Baudrillard speaks of “no longer precedes the map”: the map precedes and “engenders the territory.” Because simulacra are now for Baudrillard “models” for reality, the two become indistinguishable; now, neither “rediscovering an absolute level of the real” nor “staging illusion” is possible, and reality is replaced by what Baudrillard calls the “hyperreal.”

In Gaddis’s dramatization of this “hyperreal,” subjects are bombarded by simulacra and information, a pastiche of unhealthy imitations from literary to dietary. Gaddis’s style here, his conflation of elements of narrative, enables him to criticize American consumer culture, American health, American literacy, dilemmas of desire, the mass media, and proliferating electronic media simultaneously—precisely because he sketches them as interconnected components of a media ecology. For Baudrillard such an ecology, which represents for him the state of culture in the age of information and simulacra, is paralyzing; it is “a single nebula whose simple elements are indecipherable.” Fredric Jameson, in contrast, while admitting that conflations of this sort, of the “political [, the ] cultural [, the] the social [, the] economic [, the] sexual [, the] the historical [, and the] moral,” and so on, present “some signal disadvantages in the realm of thought and action,” also believes they “uniquely intensif[y] the signifying power of this work that, rotated on its axis, can be said to comment on any of the above, inexhaustibly.” Which is, of course, precisely what Gaddis does here, making the electronic media that threaten print with obsolescence the content of stylistically innovatively fiction, both reiterating the relevance of print and commenting, in his distinctively mellifluous way, on dangers of the ecologies these electronic media foster.

While we must in good conscience concur with many of Baudrillard’s conclusions regarding the effect of simulacra on the individual and the mass media, and although he is useful in illuminating Gaddis’s depiction of an evolving media ecology imbued with images and information, it must be said that his notions that “the real” has somehow eroded, and that we could ever “rediscover an absolute level of the real,” are specious insofar as they premise themselves on the fact that we did, at some point or points in history, have a concrete idea of what constituted this “absolute level of the real” to begin with.