A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace Page A
Authors: David Foster Wallace
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life” made prettier,
sweeter, livelier by succumbing to a product or temptation. Today’s mega-Audience is way better trained, and TV has discarded
what’s not needed. A dog, if you point at something, will look only at your finger.
metawatching
It’s not like self-reference is new to U.S. entertainment. How many old radio shows—Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, Abbott and
Costello—were mostly about themselves as shows? “So, Lou, and you said I couldn’t get a big star like Miss Lucille Ball to
be a guest on our show, you little twerp.” Etc. But once television introduces the element of watching, and once it informs
an economy and culture like radio never could have, the referential stakes go way up. Six hours a day is more time than most
people (consciously) do any other one thing. How human beings who absorb such high doses understand themselves will naturally
change, become vastly more spectatorial, self-conscious. Because the practice of “watching” is expansive. Exponential. We
spend enough time watching, pretty soon we start watching ourselves watching. Pretty soon we start to “feel” ourselves feeling,
yearn to experience “experiences.” And that American subspecies into fiction writing starts writing more and more about…
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
this 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 doers 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 great theoretical nemesis, Realism: if Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw
itself seeing itself see it. This high-cultural postmodern genre, in other words, was deeply informed by the emergence of
television and the metastasis of self-conscious watching. And (I claim) American fiction remains deeply informed by television…
especially those strains of fiction with roots in postmodernism, which even at its rebellious Metafictional zenith was less
a “response to” televisual culture than a kind of abiding- in-TV. Even back then, the borders were starting to come down.
It’s strange that it took television itself so long to wake up to watching’s potent reflexivity. Television shows about the
business of television shows were rare for a long time.
The Dick van Dyke Show
was prescient, and Mary Moore carried its insight into her own decade-long exploration of local-market angst. Now, of course,
there’s been everything from
Murphy Brown
to
Max Headroom
to
Entertainment Tonight
And with Letterman, Miller, Shandling, and Leno’s battery of hip, sardonic, this-is-just-TV schticks, the circle back to
the days of “We’ve just got to get Miss Ball on our show, Bud” has closed and come spiral, television’s power to jettison
connection and castrate protest fueled by the very ironic postmodern self-consciousness it had first helped fashion.
It will take a while, but I’m going to
sweeter, livelier by succumbing to a product or temptation. Today’s mega-Audience is way better trained, and TV has discarded
what’s not needed. A dog, if you point at something, will look only at your finger.
metawatching
It’s not like self-reference is new to U.S. entertainment. How many old radio shows—Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, Abbott and
Costello—were mostly about themselves as shows? “So, Lou, and you said I couldn’t get a big star like Miss Lucille Ball to
be a guest on our show, you little twerp.” Etc. But once television introduces the element of watching, and once it informs
an economy and culture like radio never could have, the referential stakes go way up. Six hours a day is more time than most
people (consciously) do any other one thing. How human beings who absorb such high doses understand themselves will naturally
change, become vastly more spectatorial, self-conscious. Because the practice of “watching” is expansive. Exponential. We
spend enough time watching, pretty soon we start watching ourselves watching. Pretty soon we start to “feel” ourselves feeling,
yearn to experience “experiences.” And that American subspecies into fiction writing starts writing more and more about…
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
this 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 doers 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 great theoretical nemesis, Realism: if Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw
itself seeing itself see it. This high-cultural postmodern genre, in other words, was deeply informed by the emergence of
television and the metastasis of self-conscious watching. And (I claim) American fiction remains deeply informed by television…
especially those strains of fiction with roots in postmodernism, which even at its rebellious Metafictional zenith was less
a “response to” televisual culture than a kind of abiding- in-TV. Even back then, the borders were starting to come down.
It’s strange that it took television itself so long to wake up to watching’s potent reflexivity. Television shows about the
business of television shows were rare for a long time.
The Dick van Dyke Show
was prescient, and Mary Moore carried its insight into her own decade-long exploration of local-market angst. Now, of course,
there’s been everything from
Murphy Brown
to
Max Headroom
to
Entertainment Tonight
And with Letterman, Miller, Shandling, and Leno’s battery of hip, sardonic, this-is-just-TV schticks, the circle back to
the days of “We’ve just got to get Miss Ball on our show, Bud” has closed and come spiral, television’s power to jettison
connection and castrate protest fueled by the very ironic postmodern self-consciousness it had first helped fashion.
It will take a while, but I’m going to
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