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| 201 5 Obsolescence, the Marginal, and the Popular Pynchon and DeLillo were ahead of their time. —David Foster Wallace Thomas Pynchon. Now there was someone you never saw on “Oprah Winfrey.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Anxiety of Obsolescence, Reconsidered Throughout this book, my intent has been to explore a particular group of postmodern novels by arguing not merely for a specific way of reading these texts but for a particular kind of hermeneutic in the textual encounter. This interpretive method looks to cultural studies in its exploration less of specific artifacts than of the circulation of discourses and ideas about those artifacts. By structuring my argument about the anxiety of obsolescence as a fruitful mode of reading around three conceptual categories—the machine, the spectacle, and the network—I have sought to examine the ways in which the novelists I consider mobilize popular and theoretical discourses about contemporary culture in formulating their own responses to television and the other forms of electronic media. My analysis has been aimed at another triad of connected (if potentially paradoxical) conclusions that focus less on what the anxiety of obsolescence means than on what it does: first, that the novelists reveal through their representations of the media a cluster of anxieties about being displaced from some possibly imagined position of centrality in contemporary cultural life; second, that these anxieties are in certain ways a pose, an assumed stance that provides access to a number of useful writing strategies that assist the novelist in trying to regain his ostensibly faltering importance as a cultural critic; and third, that this focus on the shifts in contemporary cultural life produced 202 | The Anxiety of Obsolescence by new media developments is at times employed to obscure other, unspeakable anxieties about shifts in contemporary social life that pose a lesser threat to the dominance of the novel than to the hegemony of whiteness and maleness long served by the structures of traditional humanism. Given this final implication of the anxiety of obsolescence, it may seem that I have unfairly set up Pynchon and DeLillo, overlooking the obviously critical positions that each has struck toward the contemporary status quo, asking these two novelists to take the fall for a failing endemic to the whole of Western culture. The question thus remains: is the anxiety of obsolescence, the novelist’s represented fears of an encroaching electronic media (and submerged fears of a similarly encroaching otherness), unique to the writers I have addressed in these pages? Or is it a formation common to the entirety of literary culture, all of which is apparently under threat by television and responding in similarly defensive fashion? In attempting to answer these questions , my work turns its gaze in this chapter from Pynchon and DeLillo to look both forward and outward: forward to David Foster Wallace, a writer often thought of as their descendant, and outward to Toni Morrison, a writer who, though very different from them, has often been considered their peer. In the work of these two exemplary novelists, I hope to unpack two related concerns. The first is the relationship between the representations produced by Pynchon and DeLillo, taken as metonyms for what might be thought of as a group of “first-wave” postmodernists (including Gaddis, Gass, Coover, Barth, et al.), and those more recently produced by a younger group of authors whom many critics have begun to think of as the “second wave” of postmodernism. Do these younger authors, born after television had made its incursions into the U.S. unconscious, carry the same anxieties about the medium that nursed them through their childhoods? The second is the correlation between the rise of new media and the waning social influence of humanism—an influence that has for centuries supported (or been misused to support) the putatively universal ideals that function to reinforce the hierarchies of racism, sexism, heteronormativity, ethnocentricity, nationalism, and individualism. Are those new media experienced and interpreted with the same anxiety by novelists who write from the social margins of contemporary U.S. culture, those who, in other words, write from and about a subject position that is not aligned with whiteness, maleness, Westernness, straightness, and so on? Is the novelist’s anxiety about television a historically specific phenomenon? Or is it socially specific? These two concerns come together in the incident with which I began this book, the Jonathan Franzen/Oprah Winfrey entente. This literary brou- [3.144.48.135] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 08:22 GMT...

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