The Suffusion of the Televisual in The Crying of Lot 49

Abstract

To say that technological media play a prominent role the narrative of The Crying of Lot 49 is to state the obvious. The thematic importance of media systems within the novel is apparent to any attentive reader, and such a substantial portion of the voluminous body of criticism that has been written on the novel deals with this topic that one feels hard pressed to bring anything to the conversation that has not already been said so many words. Still, there is one aspect of the novel's engagement with media that has yet to receive the critical emphasis it deserves: its pervasive televisuality. Television looms large the novel from the very beginning, when Oedipa Maas, having just discovered that she is going to be executor of the estate of her former lover Pierce Inverarity, stands in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube (1). It continues to play a formative role throughout, at times explicitly through the content of the narrative, but also a subtler way, by providing the text with a shape and a model. The novel's structure adapts a range of uniquely televisual experiences into textual ones, foregoing the more traditional pleasures of reading the process. Although critics have often made reference to the novel's explicit treatment of television alongside its treatment of other forms of communication and dissemination media, it is to be my contention that television as the novel engages with it is not one instance of a technological medium among others but rather the ultimate technological medium through which all the others must be understood, including the medium of the novel itself. A main critical line on Thomas Pynchon's overall attitude toward television is best exemplified by the approach taken Kathleen Fitzpatrick's The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel the Age of Television, which focuses on the ways which Pynchon's novels endeavor to close themselves off and distance themselves from the televisual order to shore up the distinction between popular and high art media. According to Fitzpatrick, Pynchon and some of his like-minded contemporaries have used their writing to perpetuate a two-sided narrative about the role of media post-modern American culture. On one side are the high-tech media of sight and sound, a proliferating network of signals that threatens individualist subjectivity with its vastness and homogeneity. Television is usually figured as the primary aggressor or technological medium par excellence here, with radio, the telephone, film, photography, and the mainstream press acting as its accomplices. On the other side is the supposedly marginalized (despite being white and male) novelist, a protesting, underdog voice scarcely heard over the electronic din of the never-ending audiovisual spectacle. This posturing is both strategic and bad faith. Paradoxically, by painting a picture of a media landscape which the novel is a fading relic and newer media are the usurpers of its role as cultural arbiter, the art novel is able to maintain its identity as a distinctive and morally superior medium. The feigned death that this cadre of literary novelists continually acts out constitutes the interior logic of their survival, their renewed livelihood through martyrdom. Fitzpatrick's argument represents a school of thought that I do not intend to oppose here. Rather, I hope to compliment and extend the work that readings such as hers have done toward explicating the relationship between the postwar American novel and television, a relationship that remains under-theorized despite many attempts. (1) The qualification I would like to append to this argument is that it leaves unaddressed what seems to me to be the more formative dimension of the relationship between television and at least some of the novels that are so invested critiquing it. This is because, while the argument accounts for the logic that sustains these pseudo-marginalized art novels qua art novel, it fails to address what makes them viable as novels. …