Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young

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TL;DR

Wallace's 1988 aesthetic manifesto (written late 1987), reviewing the "Brat Pack"/"Conspicuously Young" fiction of the mid-eighties as occasion for the argument he would expand two years later in "E Unibus Pluram" — the collection's Copyright Acknowledgments note that some of its ideas and language reappear in EUP (apparatus-attested; and the EUP formulation "complicated relations with our very ideas of the world and the self" is verbatim in this essay), making this the archive's earliest documentary node for the whole televisual-fiction genetics strand. Its load-bearing IJ material: TV as constitutive of the post-1955 psyche ("We quite literally cannot “imagine” life without it"); the diagnosis that entertainment which denies death makes us "lose any sense of eschatology" so that "if we forget how to die, we’re going to forget how to live"; the opposition of entertainment that is "engaging without being at all demanding" to art that can "transfigure" (with a prostitution analogy for trash fiction that rhymes with "The Nature of the Fun"'s seduction motive); and the "watchableness" critique — the self remade as "an actor at a great audition whose end is seeming," in "a Berkeleyan esse-est-percipi universe in which God is named Nielsen." It predates IJ by eight years and never names it; it is the genetics strand, running essay → novel.

Key claims

TV as lived environment, not object. "the American generation born after, say, 1955 is the first for whom television is something to be lived with, not just looked at"; "We quite literally cannot “imagine” life without it"; "it presents and so defines our common experience" (raw continues with a semicolon). TV and its lessons "have entered into complicated relations with our very ideas of the world and the self" — the phrase EUP later carries.
Watchableness and the seeming/being shift. Broadcast drama "makes each one of us at once more self-conscious and less reflective"; we absorb "the thesis that the most significant feature of persons is watchableness," a shift "from an understanding of self as a character in a great drama whose end is meaning to an understanding of self as an actor at a great audition whose end is seeming, i.e., being seen." "Imagine a Berkeleyan esse-est-percipi universe in which God is named Nielsen."
The immortal hero and the death of eschatology. "try to recall the last time you saw the “hero” die within his drama’s narrative frame"; heroes are now "immortal" within their frames, so "We the audience, and individual you over there and me right here, lose any sense of eschatology, thus of teleology," living "a moment that is, paradoxically, both emptied of intrinsic meaning or end and quite literally eternal." "if we forget how to die, we’re going to forget how to live."
Engaging vs. demanding; entertainers vs. artists. "Television’s greatest appeal is that it is engaging without being at all demanding"; trash fiction is most like televised narrative: "engaging without being demanding"; "Entertainers can divert and engage and maybe even console; only artists can transfigure."
The prostitution analogy for trash. The trash writer "affords his customer a narrative structure and movement, and content that engages the reader" … "without demanding of him any of the intellectual or spiritual or artistic responses that render verbal intercourse between writer and reader an important or even real activity" (the ellipsis bridges the raw's "—titillates, repulses, excites, transports him—" catalogue).
The post-metafiction turn. Metafiction and Minimalism are "simple engines of self-reference" (raw continues "(Metafiction overtly so, Minimalism a bit sneakier)"), "self-reference being just a tiny wrinkled subset of aboutness"; the cutting-edge shares "its fall into time, a loss of innocence about the language that is its breath and bread"; "We are the recipients of a knife unprecedentedly vulnerable to its own blade" (raw continues ", and all the Writing Program prizes and Mary Tyler Moore Show reruns in the world can’t h[elp]…"). (Also: a long critique of Creative Writing Programs and the "Three Camps" — Neiman-Marcus Nihilism, Catatonic Realism a.k.a. Ultraminimalism, Workshop Hermeticism — of C.Y. fiction.)

Theories & evidence

None advances an interpretive claim about an IJ crux (the essay predates the novel by eight years and never names it); the IJ-bearing signal is genetic preoccupation — the aesthetic program IJ would execute — carried in the CONNECTION blocks below; every connection runs essay → novel. The essay has numbered footnotes cited [fn N] (1–5) and no section numbers; prose located by essay-position descriptor. All [e-text].

CONNECTION: Television as constitutive of consciousness — the EUP genetics seedbed

Crux: eup-connection
Early text: "the American generation born after, say, 1955 is the first for whom television is something to be lived with, not just looked at"; "We quite literally cannot “imagine” life without it"; TV's ways of seeing "have entered into complicated relations with our very ideas of the world and the self". [the television section] [e-text]
IJ echo: IJ's whole televisual-entertainment substrate — the InterLace culture, the Entertainment, the argument (carried forward in EUP) that TV has entered "complicated relations with our very ideas of the world and the self." That formulation is byte-exact in this 1988 essay — the 1988 piece is EUP's documented seed, and EUP is the essay the archive already treats as IJ's aesthetic charter.
Weight: prefiguration (genetics)
Notes: [author]-grade and the load-bearing block. This is the earliest documentary node for the eup-connection lane — a 1988 draft of the argument EUP (1990/93) and then IJ (1996) carry. Pairs with e-unibus-pluram-ij-connections as its acknowledged successor; the "image-fiction" concept is the EUP term for the fiction-of-a-TV-generation this essay first describes.

CONNECTION: Entertainment that denies death — the loss of eschatology

Crux: eup-connection (also entertainment-lethality)
Early text: "try to recall the last time you saw the “hero” die within his drama’s narrative frame"; heroes made "immortal" so that "We the audience, and individual you over there and me right here, lose any sense of eschatology, thus of teleology," and "if we forget how to die, we’re going to forget how to live." We are the only animals "who would submit so cheerfully to the sustained denial of this undeniable and very important truth" — death. [the eschatology passage] [e-text]
IJ echo: IJ's death/entertainment nexus — an Entertainment so pleasurable it is lethal, a culture whose managed pleasures deny death (the Marathe/Steeply debate on a nation dying of its own pleasure-freedom; the entertainment-casualties). The 1988 essay names the mechanism — entertainment that edits out death and so hollows out life — eight years before the novel literalizes it in a film that kills by pleasure.
Weight: prefiguration
Notes: Routes to eup-connection (the TV-and-death diagnosis) with a bearing toward entertainment-lethality (IJ's Entertainment as the lethal limit-case). The essay's "single greatest organized threat" passage (nuclear annihilation, and the challenge "Try to name, say, two." serious works about it) is a faint neighbor of Eschaton's nuclear-war game — noted, not routed. Cf. asft-cruise-essay's despair-beneath-managed-pleasure and its teen-suicide frame: the same denial-of-death-by-pleasure argument in reportage.

CONNECTION: Engaging vs. demanding — the anti-entertainment ethic and the prostitution analogy

Crux: book-as-entertainment
Early text: "Television’s greatest appeal is that it is engaging without being at all demanding"; "Entertainers can divert and engage and maybe even console; only artists can transfigure"; the trash writer "affords his customer a narrative structure and movement, and content that engages the reader" … "without demanding of him any of the intellectual or spiritual or artistic responses that render verbal intercourse between writer and reader an important or even real activity." [the trash-fiction section] [e-text]
IJ echo: IJ built as the opposite of the frictionless, engaging-without-demanding artifact — a novel that demands of its reader (the endnotes, the withheld closure, the labor), precisely so as not to be the Entertainment it depicts. The prostitution/seduction figure here is the same one "The Nature of the Fun" uses for the wish to seduce the reader; both are the compositional counter-value to the samizdat's total, will-dissolving pleasure.
Weight: prefiguration (aesthetic program)
Notes: Routes to book-as-entertainment (art that demands vs. entertainment that engages). Direct sibling of bfn-nature-of-fun's seduction motive and of asft-cruise-essay's "ad that pretends to be art" critique — the maker's ethic against the Entertainment's logic.

CONNECTION: Watchableness and the self as actor — "God is named Nielsen"

Crux: worship-attention (also eup-connection)
Early text: broadcast "makes each one of us at once more self-conscious and less reflective"; "the most significant feature of persons is watchableness"; the shift to "an understanding of self as an actor at a great audition whose end is seeming, i.e., being seen"; "Imagine a Berkeleyan esse-est-percipi universe in which God is named Nielsen." [the watching passage] [e-text]
IJ echo: IJ's preoccupation with watchedness and self-consciousness — the figurants and the fear of being watched, JOI's films and the crib's-eye camera, Hal's paralytic self-observation, the whole worship-of-attention diagnosis (the Kenyon/"worship" line the archive tracks). The 1988 essay's "watchableness" and seeming-over-being is the germ of the novel's anatomy of a culture that exists to be seen.
Weight: prefiguration
Notes: Routes to worship-attention (attention as the thing sought and worshipped) with eup-connection (the televisual mechanism). Faint neighbor figurant-design (the watched/background self) — interpretive, ours, not routed. The seeming/being distinction also touches the novel's sincerity themes.

CONNECTION: The post-metafiction turn — self-reference exhausted, the "fall into time"

Crux: none (aesthetic-program texture; see Notes)
Early text: metafiction and minimalism as "simple engines of self-reference", "self-reference being just a tiny wrinkled subset of aboutness"; the cutting edge's "fall into time, a loss of innocence about the language that is its breath and bread"; "We are the recipients of a knife unprecedentedly vulnerable to its own blade". [the closing sections] [e-text]
IJ echo: Wallace's move beyond self-referential metafiction toward a fiction of meaning and feeling — the post-postmodern stance the archive tracks in the Westward/EUP lineage and in IJ's refusal of pure irony. The essay is the early statement that self-reference is "a tiny wrinkled subset of aboutness", the diagnosis IJ answers with a maximal, other-directed book.
Weight: shared-preoccupation (oeuvre-aesthetic)
Notes: Crux left none: this is aesthetic-program texture, not a claim about an IJ plot/design crux (confirmed). Nearest oeuvre neighbor is westward-anti-entertainment (the Barth-answering move), interpretive on the IJ side and not routed. The writer-catalogue name-drops are too thin to support barth-influence (proposed) beyond a bare mention — recorded, not asserted.

Themes

Television as constitutive environment (the post-1955 psyche) · watchableness and seeming-over-being ("God is named Nielsen") · entertainment's denial of death and the loss of eschatology · engaging-without-demanding vs. art that transfigures (trash fiction; the prostitution analogy) · the post-metafiction "fall into time" · the sociology of the Conspicuously Young (the "Three Camps"; the Creative Writing Program critique).

Cross-references

e-unibus-pluram-ij-connections — the acknowledged successor essay; this 1988 piece is EUP's documented seed (the "complicated relations…world and the self" formulation is verbatim here).
bfn-nature-of-fun — the seduction/ prostitution figure for entertainment that engages without demanding, restated from the writer's side.
asft-cruise-essay — the denial-of-death-by-managed-pleasure argument in reportage; "An ad that pretends to be art" (its sec. 11/fn 40 despair passage).
asft-greatly-exaggerated — the authorship/self-reference question this essay's "fall into time" anticipates.
The Entertainment / InterLace material of the novel and the Marathe/Steeply pleasure-and-death debate — the dramatized forms of this essay's diagnosis.

Notable passages

Prose by essay-position; footnotes [fn N]. All [e-text].

"the American generation born after, say, 1955 is the first for whom television is something to be lived with, not just looked at" [the TV section]
"We quite literally cannot “imagine” life without it." [same]
"entered into complicated relations with our very ideas of the world and the self" [same — the phrase EUP carries forward]
"the most significant feature of persons is watchableness" [the watching passage]
"Imagine a Berkeleyan esse-est-percipi universe in which God is named Nielsen." [same]
"try to recall the last time you saw the “hero” die within his drama’s narrative frame" [the eschatology passage]
"if we forget how to die, we’re going to forget how to live" [same]
"Television’s greatest appeal is that it is engaging without being at all demanding." [the trash section]
"Entertainers can divert and engage and maybe even console; only artists can transfigure." [same]
"self-reference being just a tiny wrinkled subset of aboutness" [the metafiction section]
"We are the recipients of a knife unprecedentedly vulnerable to its own blade" [same]