Television and Identity in Literature
Television and identity in literature explores the complex interplay between television and the construction of personal and communal identities. Since the mid-20th century, literature has depicted television as both a crucial force shaping individual experiences and a medium that can dilute authentic identity. Works like John Updike’s Rabbit series illustrate how different generations engage with television culture, highlighting its pervasive role in American life. Ethnic identities also intersect with mainstream television, as seen in Oscar Hijuelos's The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, where characters navigate their cultural backgrounds through the lens of popular media.
While television can foster a shared cultural identity, it often imposes collective myths that may undermine individual distinctiveness. Authors like Jean-Claude van Itallie and Norman Mailer critically examine how Americans have increasingly relied on television to form their personalities and political beliefs. In more contemporary narratives, such as those by Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace, television emerges as a powerful and often sinister force that can lead to addiction and a loss of autonomy in personal identity. This interplay highlights the tension between the comforting communal myths created by television and the potential threats to individual selfhood, making it a rich topic for exploration in literature.
Television and Identity in Literature
Television and Suspicious Fascination
In literature as in other areas of modern discourse, the relationship between television and identity is ambiguous. This ambiguity reflects America’s suspicious fascination with technology and the mass media. Since the initiation of regular network broadcasting in the mid-1940s, television has been presented in literature as determining and undermining individual identity. Sometimes literature simply reflects the integral role that television plays in mainstream American culture. John Updike’s quartet of Rabbit novels, for example, illustrates the passage of time by depicting the initiation of three American generations into the television culture. In Rabbit, Run (1960), Updike’s hero Harry Angstrom studies The Mickey Mouse Club with a religious awe. Years later, in Rabbit at Rest (1990), he watches in fascination as his granddaughter demonstrates her mastery of the remote control. Even ethnic identity is drawn into mainstream television culture. A recurrent image in Oscar Hijuelos’s The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) is the appearance of the novel’s two Cuban protagonists on an episode of I Love Lucy.
Television creates a communal myth, a reassuring way of understanding the world. Through television, each person participates in a larger cultural identity. Partaking of America means partaking of television, which is why the presentation of the American Dream of happy home and family is so amenable to the medium of television; sitcoms such as I Love Lucy are a perfect example.
Sometimes, however, television creates communal myths at the cost of individual and group identity. In T.V. (1965), playwright and Belgian immigrant Jean-Claude van Itallie offers a scathing critique of the way Americans depend upon television for the construction of their personalities. In the play’s final moments, the world of television and the identities of the play’s three main characters become almost indistinguishable. Norman Mailer has traced the increasing use of television to define political identity during the 1960s. In St. George and the Godfather (1972), Mailer observes that “personality is close to the nature of the tube itself.” Don DeLillo encapsulates in White Noise (1985) how the images of television level individuality and produce a status quo of passive mediocrity. DeLillo refers to television’s “narcotic undertow and eerie diseased brain-sucking power.” The characters in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990) are at the mercy of this power. Called tubefreaks, one of them believes that “rays coming out of the TV screen would act as a broom to sweep the room clear of all spirits.”
David Foster Wallace’s 1,100-page Infinite Jest (1996) is, as Lit Hub's Emily Temple wrote, “certainly the longest novel ever written concerning television” (1 Feb. 2018). The novel’s plot centers on the search for the missing master copy of avant-garde filmmaker James O. Incandenza's videotape called "the Entertainment." Anyone who watches the video becomes essentially addicted to it, watching it over and over while losing interest in food, hydration, and hygiene, until they eventually die.
Television as Sublime Oracle
As writers describe the difficulty of maintaining individual identity in the television age, they often present television as a source of mysterious signals whose meaning takes on a sense of sinister, incomprehensible mystery. A character may be unable to decipher these signals, and the result is a feeling of conspiracy or chaos. Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49 (1967) notices a series of bizarre connections while watching television and fears that “it’s all part of a plot.” The character of Lee Harvey Oswald in DeLillo’s Libra (1988) loses himself in television as he receives sinister instructions from it: “He felt connected to the events on the screen. It was like secret instructions entering the network of signals and broadcast bands, the whole busy air of transmission. . . . They were running a message through the night into his skin.”
Bibliography
Coppa, Frank J., ed. Screen and Society: The Impact of Television upon Aspects of Contemporary Civilization. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1979.
Himmelstein, Hal. On the Small Screen: New Approaches in Television and Video Criticism. New York: Praeger, 1981.
McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium Is the Message. New York: Bantam, 1967.
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin, 1985.
Tichi, Cecelia. “Television and Recent American Fiction.” American Literary History 1, no. 1 (1989): 110-130.
Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken Books, 1975.