Reviewing "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction"

Upon suggestion, I have decided to read E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction by David Foster Wallace. Here is my review of the essay along with my personal reflections as it relates to me.


The essay starts by calling us voyeurs. This is an acceptable premise, given his citation of the statistic that American watch on average six hours of television a day. He goes on to say that fiction writers are particularly good at voyeurism and that the root of this is our self-consciousness and the affliction so many of us face about being being around others. TV is a gateway to observation that helps us find our voice.

Of course, fighting our loneliness and finding our voice through voyeurism is a effort in delving into illusion. He provides the example that people are asked to "act natural" while on camera, but acting natural while on camera for most people doesn't look natural at all. It is an illusion of looking natural.

He goes on to examine how television is viewed in a strange light of criticism. People love to hate television. He says we have a weird "hate-need-fear-6 hrs.-daily gestalt" about it. He goes from this point to talk about syndication and the self-referential tendency of television. The subject of television has become itself. This is no new idea, Umberto Eco famously wrote that "The media is the message."

He goes on to discuss "metafiction" - or a sort of inverse of realism. Whereas realism is a practice of showing what it sees, metafiction is the practice of telling it as it sees itself telling it as it sees it. Jean Baudrilland's "Simulation and Simulacra" discusses this a little - reality has slipped away to simulacra, copies without an original. This discussion of metafiction discusses how fiction fictionalizes itself, which sounds impossible until you understand the self-referential void these narratives emerge from.

Irony is the domain of postmodernism because meaning is lost in the procession of simulacra. Television is the best media for irony because what you see conflicts with what you hear so often. Images of dead bodies juxtaposed with the words of someone saying "there is no oppression" or people caught saying things that don't match reality - "Newt Gingrich said Obama said this, but you can see Obama actually said this." Irony is dangerous for television because it undermines its authority, but it gains validity by highlighting these ironies.

Wallace goes on to describe how we become more addicted to television, and how television creates a system that enforces this. This is more than self-evident to me, as we all know that advertising agencies and network executives pay big money to find ways to manipulate us - and we know it works.

This addiction to television has lead to a change in literature, because television is a major shared experience that we apparently spend more waking time doing than anything else. He writes about how pop references in literature work because we know these references, and because we are uncomfortable that we know these references.

It goes on to discuss how pop references have become a necessary part of contemporary literature. Whereas bloviated old college professors would make weird claims that literature is "timeless", Mr. Wallace notes that television and the postmodern condition requires a new sensitivity toward contemporary references due to the universal experiences we have in the system of understanding that has been created from television.

Finishing the first half of the essay, he examines an excerpt from White Noise by Don DeLillo(which I totally need to read now). The scene involves two guys following signs to the "World's Most Photographed Barn" and upon arriving one character realizes that this mutually enforced reality is a complete farce. "No one sees the barn" as everyone takes pictures of it. The scene around the barn loses the barn. As the character complains, the other character responds with silence.

The second half of the essay finally posits the thesis: irony, stone-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are key features of contemporary U.S. culture. In this vein, he sees a push to transfigure the power television has over the vast American landscape and the dominating presence is so extreme the it may be beyond transfiguration.

He provides examples of commercials and television shows and contemporary literature that address these themes, but already these examples are outdated compared to the intensity of newer material that is saturating our world. For example, he provides the example of the Pepsi commercial showing a Pepsi sound van manipulating people to come off the beach and eagerly get refreshed - "Pepsi: The Choice of a New Generation". The ironies throughout this ad about choice, and being an individual that stands out from the crowd but fits into the crowd, and so forth are still present in current ads, and newer ads are better about this. Consider the Axe ads with the sea of women forcefully telling younger men what they want and jumping all over them when they spray themselves. Consider the old Sprite ads with Grant Hill ironically selling a product whilst dollar signs are flashing on the screen with each comment he makes. The PBS Frontline documentary "The Merchants of Cool" addresses these themes to some degree, but also the new research methods that take these problems to a new level.



A common theme throughout this essay and "The Merchants of Cool" is the building of authority by television by being on your level with understanding that the authority of television is a fraud. This is maintained by continually attacking itself ironically and putting newer versions of itself up as authorities. There is an endless destructive force at work here, yet even once an authority is discredited it can return to favor by discrediting that which usurps it. Regardless, television is always looking inward at itself and continues to feed on its own world to a greater degree all of the time.

Irony, being the central feature of our times, he goes on to argue is oppressive. Irony is good at showing hypocrisy, it is a great destructive force, however it is not good at replacing what it destroys. He makes the analogy of irony being like a military coup in a third world country - once the coup takes place, the rebels rarely are good at running things, and, in fact, usually are just as tyrannical as the previous regime, if not more. The connection to this passage of the essay to "The Merchants of Cool" is clear - rebellion itself becomes marketed, there is no real escape route (including avoiding television).

He soon after makes the claim that television "discerns, decocts, and represents what it thinks U.S. culture wants to see and hear about itself." Being obvious that we don't want to see ourselves and mindless tools to authority, rebellious irony is of course where we are led.

Near the end of the essay, the author takes a futuristic journey of a man named Gilder. Unfortunately, Gilder's predictions are a little off. He assumed that television would be combined with the computer world in a way that hasn't exactly happened. Television is still unidirectional, and the interactivity that he predicted television to transform toward is almost entirely in the computer's domain. Text messaging, message boards, blogs, IMs, and even YouTube live in a separate domain. In fact, many people now spend more time on the internet than watching television, or they'll watch television on something like Hulu while IMing in another window, for example. We may feel more involved in the lives of celebrities by reading blogs or watching "bonus" footage or random YouTube clips, but the total interactivity that was imagined did not transpire, and I don't see that distance disappearing.

Regardless of the reality of it all, the author's overall prediction remained true - the passivity of the audience remains intact. He discusses how the fantastical nature of television keeps us hooked, and that hook helps prevent a real sort of shift.

Finally, he discusses Leyner's My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist which embraces irony with reverence. This is a cyberpunk book that wildly moves from image to image and leaves you feeling disoriented, but in a somewhat serious and humorous way. You can connect with and enjoy the book by recognizing that the references that the author uses collide together in a way that let you know he sees how defunct the system is and he brings you into that world. Instead of standard plot development, the book reads like a person flicking through the channels watching parts fade in and out of the story.

The conclusion of the essay quickly surmises that there is no way to rebel against a system based on rebellion. He claims not to know where literature can go from here because he is "in the aura" of the system. He plaintively suggests that maybe the next wave of writing that will take on this system is the "anti-rebels" - those who aren't afraid of being overly earnest, of causing eyes to roll, of making us yawn.

Overall, I found this essay interesting in an almost historical way. How far have we come since 1993? Television doesn't have 40 channels anymore, it has hundreds of channels. The discussion about television and its effect on us is almost completely drowned out by the discussion of what the internet is doing to us. Parents are afraid of cyber-bullying and online predators. Interestingly enough, television is the backdrop to how the internet has developed the way it has. Our conditioning to understand monitor screens as televisions helped to move in a direction allowing us to view computer information in the same light.

This ecstasy of communication that does exist via the internet actually allows us to have interactivity in relation to the aura of television. Conversations are built around showing pictures and video to each other and discussing them. The ironic twitch of thought leads people to attempting to transcend their boredom or ennui with communication based on communication to find more extreme ways of interacting and getting attention. And believe me, getting attention is the primary use of the internet. Television provides us with the fantasy of what it is like to be a star. The internet allows everyone to be a star. Whether this involves getting naked, or being a writer, or a commenter on a blog, or whatever. The internet provides you with an extended identity, a televisual identity.

Reality television is a phenomenon that hadn't exploded yet in 1993, and its effect draws right into the online phenomenon. Suddenly, "real people" in "real situations" are showing us how they really act in real life. This unscripted world is a world that we can relate to, because our world in unscripted - we could be those people. There is nothing spectacular about them, other than they're generally more attractive than the average joe... but they're just attractive average joes. The template of reality shifts as people adjust to this supposed mirror. It is one thing to watch a sit-com and realize these are staged, fictional stories; it is another thing to watch reality television and have no concept of how these real people are or are not real in the least.

We begin to see ourselves as the stars of our own reality television show - our own lives. Only there is no camera, but our cell phones take pictures and video. And thus, for so many people, this electronic world of communication becomes a lifeline - the reflexivity of getting constant texts and calls on the cell phone helps us realize that we are stars of our life.

Whereas Wallace talks about the isolating loneliness of television, the internet helps to bring that loneliness to the forefront so that we can confront it and feel like stars. Do a search on MySpace for "Princess" - how many names come up? How many friends does Paris Hilton have on MySpace? Tila Tequila gets her own show on MTV after already being a star on MySpace. Stardom is not something that is achieved by the few anymore, stardom is a state of being - a way of living.

No longer do you see yourself as an audience, you are looking for your audience. But this is isolating as well - how do you make real connections with others? Our insecurities and extreme self-awareness (imagination of how others perceive us) is crippling and we either voice those insecurities and look for an audience by exploiting our feelings, or attempt to look past these feelings. Self-awareness then is a confusing fragmentation, and identity is only preserved by finding real talents and embracing and fostering them - but even then the temptation to want an audience for our talents is immense.