Lennon, Brian. "Entertainment and the Avant-Garde." Review of Memories of My Father Watching TV by Curtis White. The Boston Book Review 5.6 (July/August 1998): 41.

Reproduced here in edited form, for personal or classroom use but not for republication. Citations should follow the original printed version.

Entertainment and the Avant-Garde
Brian Lennon

Postmodernism succeeded literary modernism---so the story goes---when it was realized that high modernists, far from raising the stakes of literary art as a whole, had instead sealed it off in an embattled and elaborately defended keep, in which they planned to expire. With the advance of television, future highbrows, middlebrows, and lowbrows alike were born into a mass-mediated culture so pervasive as to make high-modernist taste and discrimination seem merely the defensive or reactionary expressions of a pessimistic contempt for life and the world. Why resist dimestore paperbacks, Hollywood, comic books, hit singles, all the disposable artifacts of a consumer society? These artifacts, not those of high culture, reflect the essential character of life in a capitalist democracy: transitory, episodic, ephemeral, egalitarian. They comprise what may be the only truly coherent cultural heritage we have. And overt or latent in much postmodernist rhetoric is the suggestion that to ignore, to segregate oneself from, to reject this heritage is to fail in a kind of moral responsibility to act in a fundamentally plural reality.

Though it is invariably reductive to read individual writers through the manifestoes of movements, Curtis White is most often associated with the Avant-Pop group of fiction writers and media and performance artists who see themselves reconciling the elitist subversions of the modernist avant-garde with the coolly neutral appropriations of Pop Art. White is a director of Fiction Collective Two, the vanguard press which, with its sibling Black Ice Books and a few independently supportive little magazines, comes under fire now and then from senators leading the assault of the Bible Belt on the N.E.A., while somehow managing to publish some of the most committed and inventive prose writing that we have in this age of superstores and dwindling mid-lists.

As one might expect, White's sixth book is fiercely antagonistic to the entire range of conventions that govern the aesthetics, the publication and the criticism of mainstream literary fiction. Divided into mock-Manichean hemispheres of "Gloom" and "Glee," the novel is structured like the archive that is the setting of an early section: "I conducted my meditation on Broderick Crawford and his peerless show Highway Patrol seated atop a bone mound in Madison, Wisconsin, known as the Wisconsin Center for Film Research." Numbering, screen- and teleplay tags ("Location," "Scene," "Voice-over"), interpolated script fragments, captions, diagrams, transcripts, reproduced stills, bits of line dialogue, and other formal structures lend the text the feel of a notebook or a shooting schedule or a cutting-room floor montage. Each chapter deploys a different structural and stylistic combination of these, and takes its name and its narrative thread from early television.

What binds them together is the venerable trouble of father-son relations---so often a territory of the unspoken and witheld, the reliefs of which can be haplessly absurd and poignant. For the narrator, who is sometimes a boy, sometimes a reflecting adult, television-watching is the sole medium of communication with his male parent:

Note: As I've mentioned, my father has been in a cataleptic trance before the T.V. since November of 1963. I think there was something hypnotic in the Kennedy funeral procession. The clipclop of the horses in the streets of Washington D.C. The lonely depairing echo of those hooves in our little suburban home. You must realize that in spite of appearances this story was not told as stories are ordinarily told. On the porch. Over some beers. Rather, my father's coma would occasionally crack and fall open like an egg. Then he could jabber for a few moments.

A good-natured flirtation with psychoanalytic reading produces bits of wry astringent humor, as when, inhabiting the son of a television character who has been bludgeoned to death with an iron pineapple, the narrator laments the loss of his Oedipal rite of passage: "Murderers take heed: the man you kill may be somebody's father. Somewhere there is a little boy who needs to kill that father himself in order that he may grow up strong and true"; or when he accompanies his mother to the Nassau Trauma Center (a shark bite treatment center to which they are admitted after telling the admitting nurse "that 'trauma' is German for dream" [83]) to wait for his depressed father, who has secluded himself underwater:

"Mom, why is Dad under the water?"

"Oh, Son, he's not happy. He's sad."

"Well, wouldn't he be happier up here with us?"

"It's hard to explain, dear. You'll understand in another year. When you're a man. But sometimes when people are very sad, they want to be alone."

"I guess there are lots of fish down there to keep him company."

The ghosts of German modernism haunt these precincts, particularly in the first and most powerful chapter, "Combat": "In the episode of Combat titled 'Command,' my father was a German pontoon bridge built over a narrow French river." In this chapter, as throughout Memories of My Father Watching TV, White blends intellectual acumen, brusque lyricism, and a cartoony flair for character into a prose that is equal parts cultural critique, personal essay and fictional narrative. Ritual reference to depression and mental illness hints at the darker implications of invoking the German cultural tradition: "Was my father's fervently held notion, conveyed regularly during wee-hour confessions... that he was a pontoon bridge for the Nazis delusional?" "The distal cause in hopelessness depression is negative life events exacerbated by personal inferential styles." But meanwhile, or at the same time, White manages to be very funny. Interpolated into an episode of Bonanaza, a naked, smelly, hairy "Wild Father" reveals the secrets of his art of life:

To get the Wild Father attitude you get up real early because your brain chemistry is so fucked up you can't sleep through the night. So you get up at five. Don't eat anything yet, that's for later. Do all your eatin' at one time. Now drink a pot of coffee to scour the GI tract, read the newpaper and get a good coughin' jag going. Don't be shy about it. Rattle the damned walls. If you do it right, your children will think they woke up in a tuberculosis ward. Soon as you feel that last cough gone, light up. You've got three, four packs of cigarettes to do today so you've got to get started early.

If White's humor tends toward the scatological, it is also (or in that) humane: along with the stubbornly coping child-narrators, the novel's most poignant characters are those of a quiz-show participant who describes himself as "a turd with a hat on" and a wretched dog named Poochie, so dirty and matted that "you could only tell if he was walking forward or backward if his tongue happened to be hanging out... otherwise he was just this irritable dust rag that watched over a pile of crap as if it were the Taj Mahal."

Humane, perhaps, because all successful comedy harbors and transforms despair. Sometimes one wonders if the postmodernist appropriation of mass culture doesn't screen an estrangement as secretly horrified as high modernism was horrified openly: if a meta-reveling in popular culture, in other words, isn't as problematically distant from popular culture's generative forces as is openly elitist contempt. Sometimes one wonders, that is, if it isn't fundamentally nihilistic, more complicit in than productively critical of the rapid commodification circuit of late-stage capitalism. The Avant-Pop sensibility aims to subvert the dominance of mass culture by appropriating it, as it were, wholesale; and yet it isn't clear whether mass culture as we know it is not, at least in part, a manifestation of the same hoarding of resources that restricts much of Avant-Pop's audience to the "underground" served by marginalized presses such as FC2, Black Ice Books, and Dalkey Archive Press. To his credit, White moves explicitly to address this in the novel's unmistakable anti-thesis:

But what of my own intellectual performance here?... Is this not a way of demeaning popular culture and the entertainment it provides? Do I not seek to demonstrate my own "difference" and thus the distance at which I stand from ordinary people and their world? More to the point, do I not distance myself from my father, who watched these programs?

The truth that complicates is painful, and often the only possible. Like the German writer and critic Walter Benjamin, whose conflicted Marxist aesthetics is an ancestor of the struggles here, White is trying to live in and with the contradictions of his narrator's roles as a son after Freud, a writer after the death of the author, and an artist in the age of mechanical reproduction.

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