“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)