E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
Essays
Source: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
Context: The emergence of something called Metafiction in the American '60s was hailed by academic critics as a radical aesthetic, a whole new literary form, literature unshackled from the cultural cinctures of mimetic narrative and free to plunge into reflexivity and self-conscious meditations on aboutness. Radical it may have been, but thinking that postmodern Metafiction evolved unconscious of prior changes in readerly taste is about as innocent as thinking that all those college students we saw on television protesting the Vietnam war were protesting only because they hated the Vietnam war (They may have hated the war, but they also wanted to be seen protesting on television. TV was where they'd seen the war, after all. Why wouldn't they go about hating it on the very medium that made their hate possible?) Metafictionists may have had aesthetic theories out the bazoo, but they were also sentient citizens of a community that was exchanging an old idea of itself as a nation of do-ers and be-ers for a new vision of the U. S. A. as an atomized mass of self-conscious watchers and appearers. For Metafiction, in its ascendant and most important phases, was really nothing more than a single-order expansion of its own theoritcal nemesis, Realism: if Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing it. This high-cultural postmodern genre, in other words, was deeply informed by the emergence of television and the metastasis of self-conscious watching.
“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself”
“Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself.”
Source: Nightwood (1936), Ch. 7 : Go Down, Matthew
“The world is but a perpetual see-saw.”
Attributed
A veces creo que no existe todo lo que veo. Porque todo lo que veo es todo lo que vi. Y todo lo que vi no existe.
Voces (1943)
Source: A Scanner Darkly (1977), Chapter 17 (p. 275)
And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.
Last lines of the Apollo 8 Genesis reading, and adding his own closing to the message from Apollo 8 crew, as they celebrated becoming the first humans to enter lunar orbit, Christmas Eve (24 December 1968) http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/apollo8_xmas.html
Vistes que, com grandíssima ousadia,
Foram já cometer o Céu supremo;
Vistes aquela insana fantasia
De tentarem o mar com vela e remo;
Vistes, e ainda vemos cada dia,
Soberbas e insolências tais, que temo
Que do Mar e do Céu, em poucos anos,
Venham Deuses a ser, e nós, humanos.
Stanza 29 (tr. Richard Fanshawe); council of the sea gods.
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto VI
Ce corps qui s'appelait et qui s'appelle encore le saint empire romain n'était en aucune manière ni saint, ni romain, ni empire.
Essai sur l'histoire générale et sur les mœurs et l'esprit des nations, Chapter 70 (1756)
Citas
Variant: People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person. They didn't see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts, then they white-masked themselves by calling me the lewd one.
Source: On Being Blonde (2007), p. 54
