Television and Literature: David Foster Wallace's Concept of Image-Fiction

TL;DR

A university thesis (recovered from the Wayback Machine; this capture holds the introduction, the David Foster Wallace chapters, and the summary — the DeLillo and Pynchon chapters were not captured) that reconstructs Wallace's concept of "image-fiction" from "E Unibus Pluram" and reads his story "Little Expressionless Animals" as its exemplar. Its primary text is a Girl with Curious Hair story, not Infinite Jest, so its bearing on the novel is indirect — but the argument it lays out (television as "a disseminator and a definer" of the cultural atmosphere, irony as TV's self-protective mode, "serious" art as defamiliarization that forces perceptual work) is the theoretical substrate underneath Infinite Jest's Entertainment and its whole diagnosis of televisual addiction. The most useful single exposition of the EUP framework as applied to Wallace's early fiction.

Key claims

• Image-fiction as manifesto. With "E Unibus Pluram," Hummel argues, Wallace "establishes a kind of manifesto" for a fiction that treats TV not as a cultural "other" but as the pervasive environment; image-fiction "uses the transient received myths of popular culture as a world in which to imagine fictions about 'real,' albeit pop-mediated, public characters", and "is deeply concerned with the media-saturated consciousness of people".
• TV as a mirror of desire. She glosses Wallace's account: "television's whole raison is reflecting what people want to see. It's a mirror … Television, from the surface on down, is about desire." TV must reconcile the viewer's competing wishes to stand apart from and belong to the crowd, and its solution is irony — "the perfect means to keep the ordinary viewer both alienated from and integrated in the TV-crowd is irony"; "television was practically made for irony" because it is a bisensuous medium where the seen can undercut the said.
• Irony's destructive turn. Once irony becomes TV's general mode it drains its own liberating power: it is "singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks." An "authority vacuum" opens that TV itself fills, and TV becomes "invulnerable to critical charges."
• Defamiliarization as the serious-art answer. Drawing the Shklovsky ("Sklovskij") parallel, Hummel frames Wallace's technique as making the familiar strange — fiction's job is to "restore strange thing's ineluctable strangeness" — so that the reader must do perceptual "work," the opposite of TV's rewarded passive spectation. Wallace's own line she cites as the ethical test: "there's an unignorable line between demonstrating skill and charm to gain trust for the story vs. simple showing off."
• "Little Expressionless Animals" as image-fiction. Reading the "Jeopardy!" story, she shows it defamiliarizes the game show by presenting it "behind the scenes" as "the outcome of a complex network of interpersonal relations and emotions", and organizes it around four motifs: the financial logic of TV, the breakdown of the boundary between inside and outside the set, TV's reductive "psychologizing formulas," and "the expressionless face, which is above all distinguished by a blank stare" — the gaze that turns people into images. The central tension is between Julie Smith's permeable, communicative face and the expressionless watchers around her.
• The through-line. All of it keys back to the essay's thesis, "a disseminator and a definer of the cultural atmosphere we breathe and process": the danger is not TV's content but the perceptual and psychological effects of six hours a day of watching.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Wallace's fiction is built on the "E Unibus Pluram" diagnosis — television as the ubiquitous environment whose co-opted irony breeds passivity, which "serious" defamiliarizing fiction exists to resist

• Crux: eup-connection
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [author] "E Unibus Pluram," as quoted: TV is "a disseminator and a definer of the cultural atmosphere we breathe and process"; "television was practically made for irony"; irony is "singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything". [ch. 2.1]
  • [author] The McCaffery-interview "low"/"serious" art distinction, and the "skill and charm … vs. simple showing off" line, as Wallace's test for non-passive art. [ch. 2.1]
  • [secondary] The reading of "Little Expressionless Animals" as the technique in practice — defamiliarizing "Jeopardy!" to force the reader's perceptual work. [ch. 2.2]
• Notes: The exhibit text is a Girl with Curious Hair story, not Infinite Jest; the block records the EUP framework's content, which the archive treats as the substrate for the novel's Entertainment/anti-Entertainment cruxes. No IJ-specific claim is advanced here.

Themes

Television and the media environment; irony and its exhaustion; "serious" vs. "low" art; defamiliarization; the expressionless face / watching as reduction. These are the pre-Infinite Jest statements of the concerns the novel dramatizes in the Entertainment, the pleasure-cartridges, and figurant theory.

Cross-references

• redinger-diagnosing-dfw — applies the very same "E Unibus Pluram" argument (irony co-opted, serious art as work) directly to Infinite Jest's form; Hummel supplies the fuller theory and the LEA exhibit.
• The image-fiction/defamiliarization framework is the conceptual backdrop for the archive's Entertainment and figurant material (the pleasure-cartridge as the asymptote of televisual passivity).

Notable passages

• "David Foster Wallace establishes a kind of manifesto".
• "Television, from the surface on down, is about desire."
• Fiction's job: to "restore strange thing's ineluctable strangeness."
• On the motif: "the expressionless face, which is above all distinguished by a blank stare."