IJ study archive

E Unibus Pluram

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TL;DR

DFW's long 1993 essay on television, irony, and U.S. fiction — the theoretical companion to IJ, written while the novel was being drafted and published in the same RCF issue as the McCaffery interview. It argues that TV has metabolized postmodern irony into an invulnerable, addictive cultural environment, and ends with the famous "anti-rebels" prophecy that IJ then attempts to fulfill.

Key claims

  • Fiction writers are "oglers"/voyeurs, and TV is the perfect voyeurism-engine for lonely people: watching furnishes the illusion of human connection without the risk of being watched back. Average viewing of six hours a day is treated as the statistic of a mass addiction.
  • TV is explicitly analyzed in addiction terms: it's not evil, it's "malignantly" self-protective — the more you watch, the more watching becomes the easiest relation to the world, and the lonelier you get, the more you need to watch. This vicious circle is the structural template for IJ's Entertainment (and for the substance-addiction spirals generally).
  • TV absorbed postmodern fiction's weapons (self-reference, irony, ridicule of earnestness) and turned them into its own armor: a medium that mocks itself cannot be mocked. Institutionalized irony forecloses sincerity — anyone who asks "what do you actually stand for?" is pre-emptively ridiculous.
  • Irony "tyrannizes": it's "singularly unuseful" for constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. The essay's irony critique is the argument of which IJ's AA sections (clichés that work, the ban on irony at meetings) are the fictional proof.
  • "Image-fiction" (Leyner, etc.) — fiction that responds to TV by ironizing it — is diagnosed as "hilarious, upsetting, sophisticated, and extremely shallow — doomed to shallowness by its desire to ridicule a TV-culture whose mockery of itself and all value already absorbs all ridicule."
  • The closing prophecy: the "next real literary 'rebels'" will be "anti-rebels" with "the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles," who risk "the yawn, the rolled eyes... the 'Oh how banal.'" and "accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity." IJ — with its sincere AA wisdom, Gately's unironized heroism, and its refusal of cool — is the attempt to be that anti-rebel book.

Themes

Entertainment/irony (the master theme: this essay is IJ's thesis statement); addiction (TV as Substance; spectation as the easiest pleasure); communication/ solipsism (watching vs. being-with; lonely oglers); the seduction dynamic of audience-pleasing that the McCaffery interview applies to writers.

Cross-references

  • McCaffery interview: published together; the interview's first question is about this essay; "The TV essay's really about how poisonous postmodern irony's become."
  • Salon interview: post-IJ restatement — fiction must compete with "so much mass commercial entertainment that's so good and so slick" without "becoming more shit in the pop culture machine."
  • IJ connections: the samizdat as terminal-stage TV (entertainment so perfect it kills); InterLace teleputers and the essay's speculation about on-demand viewing; Himself's career inside avant-garde irony vs. his attempt to make something "too perfect" to be ironic; AA's "Analysis-Paralysis" and hostility to irony; Hal's anhedonia chapter ("hip cynicism" as mask).
  • This Is Water: the late, plain-spoken sequel to the anti-irony program — endorsing single-entendre values out loud.

Notable passages

  • "The next real literary 'rebels' in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue."
  • "These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point. Maybe that's why they'll be the next real rebels."
  • "The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the 'Oh how banal.' To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity."
  • On Leyner/image-fiction: "doomed to shallowness by its desire to ridicule a TV-culture whose mockery of itself and all value already absorbs all ridicule."

Connections to Infinite Jest

Connection kinds: direct (IJ stages the essay's claim), inversion (IJ flips it), extension (IJ carries it past the essay's stopping point), vocab (word-level echo).

The Entertainment / terminal spectation

  1. Malignant addiction defined — TV "may become malignantly addictive", where malignant means "(1) it causes real problems for the addict, and (2) it offers itself as relief from the very problems it causes" [pp. 163-64]; restated as escapism that renders one "dependent on the device that affords escape from just what my escapism makes unpleasant" [p. 188]. → IJ's whole Substance/Entertainment isomorphism: Erdedy's quit/binge loop (scene 004, pp. 17-27), the attaché's rigged death-loop serial (007/011/014/025/028, pp. 33-93), the entertainment-casualties catalogue (101, pp. 507-508). The samizdat is this definition run to its asymptote: relief so total it re-creates nothing but the need for itself. Kind: extension.
  2. "[T]he better the tech, the harder we're hooked" — "My real dependency is on the fantasies and the images that enable them, and thus on any technology that can make images fantastic" [p. 189]. → The lethality gradient of JOI's filmography ending in the perfect cartridge; the master-copy temptation (098, pp. 489-491); Marathe/Steeply on a weapon that is only a copy of pleasure (029/035/088). Kind: direct.
  3. The Leyner jacket copy — image-fiction's flagship blurbed as "a fiction analogue of the best drug you ever took" [p. 172]; Leyner's sole aim "to wow, to ensure that the reader is pleased and continues to read" [p. 191]; its challenge "ABSORB ME—PROVE YOU'RE CONSUMER ENOUGH" [p. 192]. → The Entertainment as the art-object whose only content is the will to please terminally; the something JOI joked was "too perfect" to release — Joelle's report, and she insists the remark was an ironic joke (cross-ref first-pass note). IJ the novel is built as the announced alternative to exactly this. Kind: direct + inversion (IJ contains the wow-machine as its MacGuffin while refusing to be one).
  4. Fetal position of passive reception — the Alf ad's "ironic permission slip" to "assume, inside, a sort of fetal position; a pose of passive reception to escape, comfort, reassurance. The cycle is self-nourishing." [p. 165] → The fetal/supine/horizontal motif ledger (the motif index "Fetal / supine / horizontal"): Erdedy splayed/entombed (004, p. 27), the attaché's recliner, the "uprightly fetal" post-hit posture (062, pp. 239-40), horizontal Hal and Gately as twin heroes of non-action (170, pp. 896-902). Kind: direct (posture made literal plot).
  5. The anaclitic viewer — solipsistic ads keep "the viewer's relation to his furniture at once alienated and anaclitic" [p. 176]; TV's fantasy is being "inside the set, imago'd, 'anyone, anywhere'" [p. 188]. → IJ re-uses both rare words: the anhedonia section's U.S. interior as an "infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map" (135, pp. 692-98; quote verified byte-exact against the raw print text for scene 135); Gately's dying-mother vision, "His mother's tiny rotating imago faded against the ceiling" (161, pp. 809-827, verified). And the Entertainment's known mechanics are anaclitic regression: the crib's-eye wobble lens and the leaning, apologizing mother-Death figure (178, pp. 938-940; 159, pp. 787-795). Kind: vocab + direct (the essay names the mechanism; the film executes it).
  6. Depend Adult Undergarments — the essay's own sample of hooting-back irony is "a withered June Allyson... for Depend Adult Undergarments" ("If you have a bladder-control problem, you're not alone") [p. 156]. → Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment; the attaché wetting the recliner rather than stop watching (014, pp. 54-55); the Depend banners möbiusizing over the I-Day gala (121, pp. 621-22). IJ's grim punchline inverts the ad: the incontinent viewers are each utterly alone. Kind: vocab + inversion (the novel's calendar is named out of this page's example).

The lonely watcher / audience of one

  1. One-way watching for the people-allergic — TV as "A psychic ball-check valve. We can see Them; They can't see Us"; the lonely "decline to bear the emotional costs associated with being around other humans. They are allergic to people." [p. 152]; "We are the Audience, megametrically many, though most often we watch alone. E unibus pluram." [p. 153] → Erdedy waiting where phone and door can each pin him (004); Madame Psychosis's scattered 3-digit-share insomniac listenership, each alone with the radio (053, pp. 181-193); Joelle performing to an audience she cannot see, hidden even from her engineer (053, pp. 187-190). Kind: direct.
  2. Watchableness as human worth — six daily hours teach "that the most significant quality of truly alive persons is watchableness," worth "rooted in the phenomenon of watching" [p. 155]; the stand-apart ads' deep pitch, "it's better to be inside the TV than to be outside, watching" [p. 176]. → The wraith's figurant speech (162, pp. 827-845): background players as "human furniture" (verified verbatim in the raw print text for scene 162 — note the word furniture, EUP's own recurring term for the viewer's TV-relation, pp. 176/189), the unwatched as the living dead; Orin, who switched sports for the crowd-roar and whose punting is one of their "dances of devotion to the spectacle" (068, pp. 283-299; n234). Kind: direct + vocab.
  3. "[B]etter to believe I was a TV character than not to believe I was anybody" — the St. Elsewhere amnesiac's creed [p. 158]. → The figurant logic again (162), and JOI's motive for the Entertainment as the wraith states it: a desperate device to pull a mute, fading son back into being seen and heard (162, pp. 838-840). Kind: direct.
  4. Metawatching — "We spend enough time watching, pretty soon we start watching ourselves watching" [p. 160]; Dobyns's couples watching themselves watch on progressively smaller TVs [p. 169]. → JOI's The Joke: theater audiences filmed live and projected to themselves as the entire film (n024 filmography, pp. 985-993); the attaché serial's outer frame, in which we watch watchers die of watching. Kind: direct.

Irony's cage / the anti-rebel program

  1. Irony as cage — Hyde: "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage" [p. 183]. → IJ's cage ledger (the motif index "Cages"): "What looks like the cage's exit is actually the bars of the cage" (058, p. 222), Lyle's "Fame is not the exit from any cage" (082, p. 389), the figurant "completely trapped and encaged" (162). The essay hands the novel its master image with the tenor pre-installed. Kind: vocab + direct.
  2. The interdicted question — institutionalized irony's tyranny is "...the ability to interdict the question without attending to its content"; asking an ironist what he actually stands for makes you "a hysteric or a prig"; "How very banal to ask what I mean" [p. 184]. → AA's irony-proof discourse: the White Flag meeting's ban on Analysis-Paralysis and the clichés that work because the question of whether you mean it is life-or-death there (074, pp. 343-367; 090, pp. 434-436); Hal's private theory that hip cynicism masks "fear of being really human" (135, pp. 694-95). Kind: direct.
  3. Flatness as transcendence, naïveté as crime — TV-trained cool: "flatness is a transcendence of melodrama, numbness transcends sentimentality, and cynicism announces that one knows the score…" [p. 181]; "the crime is naïveté" [p. 181]. → The anhedonia section nearly re-writes the page: U.S. arts as "guide to inclusion," the young fashioning "masks of ennui and jaded irony", naïveté "the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America" (135, pp. 692-698, incl. JOI's The American Century as Seen Through a Brick on exactly the cynicism/naïveté myth EUP debunks [p. 181]). Kind: direct (the tightest prose-level correspondence in the novel).
  4. The anti-rebels prophecy — [pp. 192-93, quoted in the first-pass note]. → Mario, the born anti-rebel: drawn to Ennet House "because it's very real," puzzled that "It is increasingly hard to find valid art that is about stuff that is real in this way", while everyone over Kent Blott's age "finds stuff that's really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed" (117, pp. 589-593; fragments verified against the raw print text for scene 117) — the yawn/rolled-eyes risk dramatized as Hal calling him Booboo for bringing up real stuff. Gately's unironized endurance arc is the prophecy at novel-length. Kind: direct (program → character).
  5. Rebels become better tyrants — "Victorious rebels... seem best at using their tough cynical rebel skills to avoid being rebelled against themselves — in other words they just become better tyrants" [p. 183]; the too-successful rebel as "the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself" [p. 184]. → JOI's après-garde: a career inside the ironic avant-garde whose late work strains toward un-ironizable sincerity and produces the perfect tyrant-object instead (n024 filmography; 085, pp. 395-398, Hal on his father's films); arguably also the A.F.R., liberation politics matured into pure coercion (029→149 serial). Kind: direct / extension.

The tech future: teleputers, videophony, ads

  1. The teleputer, by name — Gilder's "'the telecomputer, a personal computer adapted for video processing and connected by fiber-optic threads to other telecomputers around the world'" [p. 187]; "We will, in short, be able to engineer our own dreams" [p. 187]; cartridge-like storable, manipulable digital video [pp. 186-87]. → InterLace TelEntertainment's teleputers, cartridges, and "spontaneous dissemination" order (017, p. 60; 087, pp. 410-418, the network collapse and InterLace history). IJ builds Gilder's world — and then runs EUP's own rebuttal inside it: "Jacking the number of choices and options up with better tech will remedy exactly nothing, so long as no sources of insight on comparative worth... are permitted serious consideration" [p. 189]. The bind survives the technology, exactly as the essay predicts [pp. 188-89]. Kind: direct dramatization of the argument, not just the gadget.
  2. Videophony — the essay's telepresence logic assembled from parts: seeming unwatched as an impossible "act natural" [p. 154], viewers' "own security in the face of gazes" eroded by prettiness-conditioning [pp. 173-74], Gilder's two-way fibrous future [pp. 186-87]. → The videophony rise-and-fall interpolation (047, pp. 144-151): callers discover they cannot bear being watched, masking services escalate to masks handsomer than their wearers, then full-body Tableaux, then retreat to blessed voice-only — Joe Briefcase's self-consciousness defeating telepresence on schedule. IJ's most compact essay-to-fiction transposition. Kind: direct.
  3. TV as its own most profitable critic — [p. 157]; the Pepsi ad whose point "is that Pepsi has been advertised successfully" [p. 178]; Isuzu's lying salesman [p. 179]; ads mocking ads to flatter the lone viewer he sees through it all [pp. 178-80]. → IJ's ad-history: the NoCoat-panic era, networks self-cannibalized by ever-more-abject ads, the Honda-friend spots, collapse into InterLace (087, pp. 410-418); the U.H.I.D.-adjacent anti-ad whose single competent decoder walks past it (060, pp. 223-26). Kind: extension (IJ writes the terminal chapter of the ad-history the essay periodizes).

Prettiness, deformity, and one startling seed

  1. Acid over prettiness — the prettiness-conditioning passage's list of national symptoms ends: "...girls throwing acid at each other because one girl's hair looks more like Farrah Fawcett's than another's... are these supposed to be unrelated to each other? to the apotheosis of prettiness in a televisual culture?" [p. 174]. → Joelle: the P.G.O.A.T., "lethally" pretty, deformed (on the pro-acid reading) by thrown acid (150, pp. 736-747; 159, pp. 787-795); U.H.I.D.'s veiled "scopophobic empathic fellowship" (060, pp. 223-26) as the support group for casualties of the gaze-economy the essay diagnoses [pp. 173-74 name real support groups for the deformity-lonely at p. 152]. The essay contains, in one sentence, prettiness + thrown acid
    • televisual worship — Joelle's whole crux-cluster in embryo. Kind: seed/direct. (Not previously recorded anywhere in the archive.)
  2. E unibus pluram ↔ O.N.A.N. — the title's inverted E Pluribus Unum (one Audience, watching alone, out of many) [p. 153; title credited to Michael Sorkin, n. 1, p. 193]. → IJ's Organization of North American Nations, whose acronym is onanism: the continent as solitary self-pleasurer. Same joke-grammar — a Latin motto of union curdled into solo spectation. Kind: vocab/inversion (flagged as our inference; the essay never makes the pun).