The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television

3: Spectacle

98 | 3 Spectacle Seeing comes before words. —John Berger Let us begin with a brief return to the scene from DeLillo’s Americana referenced in the last chapter, David Bell sitting before his television set: I looked at the TV screen for a moment and then found myself in a chair about a foot away from the set, watching intently. I could not tell what was happening on the screen and it didn’t seem to matter. Sitting that close, all I could perceive was that meshed effect, those stormy motes, but it drew me in and held me as if I were an integral part of the act, my molecules mating with those millions of dots. (43) David’s television, which has drawn him in, and holds him fast, acts in a manner quite different from Pynchon’s television, into which the couch potatoes of the past are physically wired. Here, the television’s “meshed effect” produces a new kind of intertwining of human and television set, one that functions “as if” human perception were required to complete the broadcast. In this meshing, the “stormy motes” of the set’s image pattern seem transformed into reproductive cells, “mating” with David and creating a new potential form of life. The interconnection David perceives is fundamentally imaginary, however , in both the common sense of unreality and in the Lacanian sense of a preverbal realm of the visual, because those reproductive cells themselves do not have a physical existence; they are merely the effect of the scatter pattern of an electron-scanning beam striking a phosphor-coated screen. These motes are pure evanescence, because they exist only as light, and only for a fraction of a second. They are, in other words, the purest form of image, pure visuality, communicating with the unconscious, fleeting and gone. David’s confusion of these image parts, these flashes of light, with a kind of materiality is not unique in DeLillo’s fiction. One might remember Lyle’s “discipline” of television watching in Players: Spectacle | 99 Sitting in near darkness about eighteen inches from the screen, he turned the channel selector every half minute or so, sometimes much more frequently. He wasn’t looking for something that might sustain his interest. Hardly that. He simply enjoyed jerking the dial into fresh image-burns. He explored content to a point. The tactile-visual delight of switching channels took precedence , however, transforming ever random moments of content into pleasing territorial abstractions. (16) The “image-burns,” like David’s stormy motes, communicate something beyond content that remains an abstraction and yet penetrates beyond consciousness . That this undiluted visuality is connected to a kind of tactility, however, suggests that these image-burns take on a sort of physical existence, at least in Lyle’s conception of them. Such a bleed between the visual and the tactile, between the ephemerality of the image and the solidity of the physical can be further seen in the transformation of Babette into a screen image in DeLillo’s White Noise, and her family’s response to that transformation. Having accidentally stumbled across a broadcast of her posture class on a local public-access cable station, the family races through a series of silent, terrified questions: “What did it mean? What was she doing there, in black and white, framed in formal borders? Was she dead, missing, disembodied? Was this her spirit, her secret self, some twodimensional facsimile released by the power of technology, set free to glide through the wavebands, through energy levels, pausing to say good-bye to us from the fluorescent screen?” (104). This apparent disappearance is rapidly transmuted into a kind of reappearance, however, as the disembodied state of Babette’s image mutates into a new form of embodiment: With the sound down low we couldn’t hear what she was saying. But no one bothered to adjust the volume. It was the picture that mattered, the face in black and white, animated but also flat, distanced, sealed off, timeless. It was but wasn’t her. Once again I began to think Murray might be on to something . Waves and radiation. Something leaked through the mesh. She was shining a light on us, she was coming into being, endlessly being formed and reformed as the muscles in her face worked at smiling and speaking, as the electronic dots swarmed. We were being shot through with Babette. Her image was projected on our bodies, swam in us and through us. Babette of...