The Columbia History of the American Novel

recently in John Gardner's October Light (1976), which again positions the book against TV. Still, a generation of younger writers have grown up with television and the cognitive processes characteristic of it. -480-

They reject the binary oppositional division between the worlds of television and literature. The narrator of a William Warner story remarks, without embarrassment, on 'some writers first trained by reading Dickens or Fitzgerald. . others by watching TV.' Warner and others reject the position that television is alien, even inimical, to the literary imagination. They simply refuse those terms of engagement and the hierarchy explicit in the terms. One recent novel, Jill McCorkle's The Cheer Leader (1984), presents at length the holistic relation of television and literary texts. It mixes the two freely, even promiscuously, to represent the contemporary consciousness of the writer, who reads Proust and Emily Dickinson but also watches sitcoms and reruns ('I Love Lucy,' 'Then Came Bronson') and plans to continue doing so in adult life.

The ways in which television affects the form of the novel in the 1980s and 1990s may be approached through theorists of the video medium, especially Raymond Williams, who in Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974)cautioned that television reviewers were misguidedly, anachronistically operating like drama or film critics or book reviewers, approaching individual programs as 'a discrete event or a succession of discrete events.' Williams, the British Marxist social analyst with particular interests in the cultural institutions of print, had been a BBC television reviewer between 1968 and 1972, and he became convinced that forms of broadcasting in the TV age were altering perceptual processes. Prior to broadcasting, Williams observes, 'the essential items were discrete. . people took a book or a pamphlet or a newspaper, went out to a play or a concert or a meeting or a match, with a single predominant expectation or attitude.' The fundamental expectation was of a discrete program or entity.

But increasingly, Williams finds, in the era of television broadcasting the discrete program has yielded to a structure far more fluid. 'There has been a significant shift from the concept of sequence as programming to the concept of sequence as flow.' He goes on: 'there is a quality of flow which our received vocabulary of discrete response and description cannot easily acknowledge.'

Williams's identification of 'flow' has proved a benchmark in differentiating the experience of broadcast television from other narrative forms. Conceding that vestigial elements of discrete programs -481- remain intact in the timed units of a 'show,' he argues nonetheless that the intervals between these units have disappeared. In American broadcast television the advertisements are incorporated into the whole, so that 'what is being offered is not, in older terms, a programme of discrete units with particular insertions, but a planned flow, in which the true series is not the published sequence of programme items but this sequence transformed by the inclusion of another kind of sequence, so that these sequences together compose the real flow, the real 'broadcasting.''

Turning to a group of writers cognitively informed by this kind of flow, writers who from childhood belonged to a world that has spent untold hours watching television, the analyst of televisual form can prove heuristically helpful. The concept of flow, applied to the TVage novel, can help us understand the new fictional structures that otherwise draw censure for their apparent defection from form itself. By implication, Williams and others enable readers to understand that the experience of flow, enacted cognitively in fiction, makes certain formal traits become virtually inevitable.

These will not be narratives of the beginning-middle-end structure. Flow enables entry at any point. The narrative of flow is continuous, open, apparently without end. Thus it is unsurprising that a school of novelists, including Ann Beattie and Bobbie Ann Mason, begin to 'violate' a onetime cardinal rule of fiction writing, namely, that the principal fictional tense be the simple past. Instead, in the 1970s and 1980s, they began to cast narrative in the present tense, the tense that best enacts the experience of flow and the primacy of the present moment within it. The television-age novels, one is made to feel, could start anywhere. They are not a version of in medias res, a concept that presupposes the Aristotelian structure of beginningmiddle-end. They do not work to show symmetry and proportion. Ideas of the bounded text change in the television era, when the primacy of flow takes precedence. Fluidity supersedes boundary. Indeed, these texts do not begin, they simply start, as if turned on or come upon. And they can now exploit the accelerated flow of the channel-changing remote, as the African American novelist Trey Ellis does in his satirical Platitudes (1988), in which an entire chapter is structured according to a ten-second-interval change of channels through all cable stations. - 482-

One TV characteristic dominates all others — the screen itself, by now so naturalized in the culture that it has become an environment susceptible to incorporation in the novel. And the contemporary fiction writer has been quick to exploit the potential of the TV screen for his or her own work. An onscreen moment represented in a novel can take the place of the excursion into characters' minds usually signaled by the speech tags 'he thought,' 'she felt.' It can supplant the often awkwardly triggered flashback into past events. The televised scene can reveal new dimensions of the fictional characters' lives directly in the moment, as Richard Ford shows in one scene in his novel The Sportswriter (1986), in which the protagonist and his girlfriend watch championship ice skating on TV, an occasion that ramifies to include the sportswriter's musings about his own life by interpreting the onscreen event. Ford's novel shows how the televised scene can reveal new dimensions of the fictional characters' lives directly in the moment. The screen becomes the locus of the bared psyche. If the onscreen images seem at first unrelated to the fictional scene in progress, readers must understand that the writer positions the two — the images onscreen and off — in a kind of fictional haiku, in which two seemingly unrelated sets of images are juxtaposed, the reader challenged to discover their apposition.

One additional TV-era trend is insurgent in recent fiction, that of the hyperreal or virtual reality. At this point we necessarily revert to Umberto Eco's paradox that says the 'completely real' becomes identified with the 'completely fake.' This is the realm also addressed by the French anthropologist Jean Baudrillard, who argues that categories like real/unreal, authenticity/imitation, firsthand/ vicarious, and actual/illusory are now superannuated, persisting in our discourse because we invoke them from unexamined convictions inherited from a previous age. These categories, Baudrillard says, no longer pertain to the condition of things in a media age. Even such terms as imitation or reduplication are now beside the point, he says, are in fact invalid. Baudrillard writes: 'It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself. . simulation is. . the generation of models of a real without origin or territory: a hyperreal.' And the contemporary American novel participates in that hyperreal, one case in point being Mark Leyner's My Cousin, My-483- Gastroenterologist (1990), a blatantly hyperreal fiction self-evidently indebted to TV:

I am on every channel and that infuriates you that I have the ability to jump out of the television screen, burrow into your uterus, and emerge nine months later tan and rested bugs you very much you're using the violent vocabulary of the u.s.a., you're violently chewing your cheez doodles and flicking the remote control.

Disjunctive, flaunting discontinuity and simulation, this kind of writing evidently finds an audience who welcome the print text that can ratify their TV-age cognitive reality. This is the simulation of the hologram, the 3-D instead of the fully dimensional. This kind of technological trend will probably continue in the American novel as the computer screen merges with the TV screen and the simulated space of cyberpunk fiction, formerly engaging principally to a coterie of computer amateurs, becomes more culturally widespread. In due course, finally, a generation growing up with the video game will doubtless take its turn in the innovation of the American novel.

Cecelia Tichi

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Society and Identity

Between the violence of World War II and Vietnam lay the relative calm called the American 1950s. The period is not popular with modern critics. From our current vantage, the postwar generation seems most notable for its isolationism, consumerism, conformity, and apathy. The rise of competitive individualism may have been a natural reaction against the compulsory cooperation of the New Deal and war years. It may have