Author: Susanna

Week 3: Frow, the Gilmore Girls, and Apocolyptic Media

“White Noise is obsessed with one of the classical aims of the realist novel: the construction of typicality…Social typicality precedes the literary type–which is to say that the type is laid down in the social world; it is prior and to and has a different kind of reality from the secondary representations of it. First there is life, and then there is art. In White Noise, however, it’s the other way round…” (John Frow, p. 409)

I have found, during the course of the past few weeks, with all this pontificating over postmodernism and such, that two things keep cropping up in my mind. The first is the TV show Gilmore Girls. The second is the nagging doubt that much of what, so far, seems to constitute the postmodern dilemma/framework/philosophy/what-have-you is anything particularly new, groundbreaking, or unique to its time.

As to the Gilmore Girls, several discussions have brought them to mind; however, none so applicably, I believe as John Frow’s critical essay on White Noise. Frow spends a great deal of time discussing the way in which the media and simulated experience/cultural fictions script reality and our understanding of what is typical. This sort of reversed typicality, which he most concisely describes in the above quote, plays out frequently in DeLillo’s novel, where commercials and television often become metaphors or explanations for the things Jack experiences and observes. If DeLillo does this frequently, the Gilmore Girls do this to the point of near absurdity (I recommend viewing the short videos linked here which help clarify my example). All the characters often call upon fictional scenarios or roles to explain their feelings and situations and describe their reality. What is interesting to me is that for those who love the show (myself included), its frequent and often over-the-top pop-culture and media references are much of what we love about it. They represent to us a kind of ideal or aspiration. If only we could really talk like that in real life.

This however, brings me to my second pontification. Is this concept of the simulated or fictitious norm creating expectations for reality really anything that new or unique. Granted, we have a much deeper pool of mediated experiences to draw on. Still, haven’t people been doing this for a good long time? I’m taking a class in which we’re comparing Jane Austen to her Gothic novelist predecessors. Both Austen and Gothic novelists created fictitious types which, particularly in the case of teenaged girls both then and now, persist in acting as a basis for our expectations of romance, heroism, adventure, and the like. Gothic literature in particular was a far cry from realistic. Austen pokes fun at certain impressionable readers of such novels through her own heroine–an avid novel-reader herself–who interprets how the events of her life should play out based upon what she has gleaned from the fictions she has immersed herself in. This was two hundred years ago. Or consider the term “quixotic.” This adjective was preceded by a fiction which established a typicality upon which we draw every time we use this word to describe the real social world. So really, apart from the abundance of simulations from which we now can draw, what’s the difference? I echo Frow’s final words: “Television is about everything. It is about the ordinary, the banal, information for living our lives. It is rarely the voice of the apocalypse” (p. 431)

Inquiry #1 (a bit out of context, I realize)

My greatest difficulty with this assignment was feeling like I truly grasped the meaning of a “power haunt” or “source” in the way that DeLillo uses the terms. Along with that, I struggled somewhat with asserting why certain places were important. I think, for me at least, I have a harder time with this sort of thing when I don’t feel I have all the information. Having, at that point, only read part of the book, I didn’t really feel qualified to form any concrete opinions.

On the other hand, I also found it challenging to narrow down my focus appropriately. Originally, I had intended to talk about the place through two specific passages that mostly very different things with the place. It didn’t take me too long to realize I didn’t have space for that, but I was frustrated because there were some other connections to other parts of the book that I wanted to tie in. In particular, I wanted to explore what I noted as an absence of smell in the Boy Scout barracks in light of the whole and in light of Murray’s tendency to smell essentially odorless things (packaged paper towels, utensils, and so forth). I had to be careful not to allow myself to become distracted by things I would not have time or space to address.

Week 2: Utter Mayhem…

In chapter 14, Gladney describes his family’s response to watching disaster documentaries on television: “Heinrich was not sullen, I was not bored. Steffie, brought close to tears by a sitcom husband arguing with his wife, appeared totally absorbed in these documentary clips of calamity and death…Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping” (p. 64).

When I first read this section, I immediately thought of my own experiences with televised real-life horrors. 9/11 came to mind, when I sat frozen in front of the TV set in shock, watching the flames billow from the Twin Towers as they tottered and collapsed. I distinctly remember two dichotomous and silmutaneous thought processes as I watched the footage being replayed countless times. Part of me, the logically oriented part, registered fear, horror, and shock at  the unbelievable event. The thing was, underneath that, coursed a whole other sensation that, though I attempted to suppress it, nonetheless, held fast. It was hard for me to truly grasp the reality of the disaster. It just all seemed so detached from me, from my reality and existence. Even the Pentagon situation felt far removed, almost fictional, almost like something we were all going to talk about in hushed tones with grave looks, while we all really just felt like it was something to talk about. As DeLillo writes, “It is when death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak, that you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself” (p. 142).

The experience of those people who actually witnessed the disasters with their naked eye, who deeply felt the impact of the devastation in the loss of loved ones, were undoubtedly keenly aware of the tangible reality that sprawled before their eyes and left aftershocks of pain and grief echoing through their lives for years to come. I think for most people that would be the case. Indeed, we see this in the second part of White Noise, when Gladney and his family experience the airborne toxic event, in all the family members–except Heinrich. Rather than respond to this disaster in a way that would indicate he is aware that he is in the midst of the mayhem, Heinrich exhibits a disturbing “enthusiasm for runaway calamity,” discussion the technical details of the toxic chemicals and their effects on the community without any apparent realization that the community includes him.

In class this week, Professor Sample suggested that Heinrich is a representation of postmodern ideology, a sort of postmodern poster child. Heinrich’s detached attitude towards death and disaster, even in his own life, appears to confirm this interpretation. But if this is the case, I couldn’t help wondering what that says about me. Granted, I would sincerely hope my response in the midst of such an experience wouldn’t mirror Heinrich’s, but it got me wondering how much we really do operate and respond this way to catastrophic events. And it got me wondering how much of it has to do with this idea of a disconnect between death and self through graphic rendering.

Ruminations

Several particular aspects of postmodernism and Western culture, primarily from our class discussions but also from the readings, have been ruminating in my mind since we last met.

I have found the discussion of the “real” vs. simulation–the question of authenticity–most troubling. What exactly are the implications of redefining our concept of what is “real”? Jameson, it would seem, believes that in a postmodern society, an original and real object distinguishable from its substitute or reproduction would essentially not exist. “This omnipresence of pastiche is not incompatible with a certain humor, however, nor is it innocent of all passion: it is at least compatible with addiction–with a whole historically original consumers’ appetite for a world transformed into sheer images of itself and for psuedoevents and ‘spectacles‘ (the term of the situationists). It is for such objects that we may reserve Plato’s conception of the ‘simulacrum,’ the identical copy for which no original has ever existed.” (pp.27-28) This brought to mind an essay I recently read by the decidedly UNpostmodern author C.S. Lewis, in which he quite insightfully discusses the question of distinguishing the real from from the substitute (or the simulation). Even at the time in which he was writing (the late forties and fifties, primarily), this question was one wrestled with by the society. Although his discussion addresses primarily the concept of religion as a reality or a substitute, he makes several points that came to mind as I contemplated the possibility of our society coming to a point when we can no longer determine any difference between the original and its imitation. Lewis first notes that our initial conclusions, when based upon whether something feels or seems reality or original is often deceptive and must be further scrutinized before we make a final analysis. But he also suggests that a copy or substitution for something real (“real,” as we are assuming this is in question) is ultimately always distinguishable as exactly that: “Authority, reason, and experience; on these three all our knowledge depends…I am not now saying that no one’s reason and no one’s experience produce different results. I am only trying to put the whole problem right way round, to make it clear that the value given to the testimony of any feeling must depend on our whole philosophy, no our whole philosophy on a feeling.” (p.41) Granted, Lewis was not addressing the exact same questions of authenticity which we now face, but it made me wonder if indeed we would come to similar results in our determining the real from the simulation if we employed those three tools to test the things in question. However, perhaps it isn’t even a matter of social anxiety at all. Perhaps the reason alarmists such as Jameson bring the issue of originality up in the first place is because they believe that in a postmodern society, those questions would be irrelevant or at least that no one would care or think it mattered much.

Pastiche, which, according to Jameson is directly linked to the loss of originality, could indeed have a lot to do with a loss of historicity which Jameson seems to fear. A YouTube video I saw recently (don’t worry, it’s short, and, I think, quite absurdly amusing, and you’ll need to watch it to understand the following discussion) is an excellent example of verbal pastiche. The creator of the film used clips from an actual interview with Salvador Dali to create a cartoon “interview” that, while ridiculous and funny, entirely lacks a real historical context, at least for me. I have never heard the interview itself, nor have I recently seen a picture of Dali. In watching this video, I found that I constructed a sort of vague structure of Dali as a person, in which he says utterly absurd things (which is, given what I DO know about him, perfectly plausible) and takes on a cartoonlike appearance in my head. And really, in watching and laughing at the video, I’m really not thinking all that much about the actual historically real person of Dali. He is a foil for entertainment. I was actually a little surprised at the ubiquitousness of pastiche in the world around me, and it does cause one to question how much we as a society may indeed have lost a sense of context and meaningful history. I am not saying I agree entirely with Jameson’s “doomsday” theorizing, but I think he raises some valid questions.