VLVL2 (1) TV Narrative

[Paul Nightingale]

Television is frequently mentioned in VL commentaries, but I've not seen
anything that offers a serious (ie detailed) analysis. Possibly the most
interesting brief summary comes from Madsen's chapter on VL in
Postmodernist Allegories:

"Television is represented not only substantively in VL, it also
provides the narrative model. As an artefact, a product of the culture
it analyses, VL imitates the form of a television programme. The
self-awareness of the narrative is represented by its form ..."

And:

"The narrative is characterised by short, discrete episodes, related
through flash-back and connected by shifts of angle, fading in and out
of different scenes of action."

Well, the use of flashback and different angles (POV) might be found in
any number of novels, so that doesn't necessarily demonstrate that TV
has provided the narrative model for VL. Pynchon's use of fades has
always been reminiscent of film: I think in TV fades are more commonly
used at the end of a programme segment, just before the commercial
break. Within TV narratives, cutting is more common. One approach to
analysis might be to distinguish between those moments in VL when
textual shifts approximate to fades and when to cutting.

However, the reference to "short, discrete episodes" does invoke
discussions of 'flow' as a characteristic of TV. The term 'flow' was
first used by Raymond Williams in Television: Technology and Cultural
Form (1974). He begins with the number of commercial breaks on American
television (which at the time far exceeded the number of such breaks on
British TV, but don't worry, we've caught up some):

"In all developed broadcasting systems the characteristic organisation,
and therefore the characteristic experience, is one of sequence or flow.
This phenomenon, of planned flow, is then perhaps the defining
characteristic of broadcasting, simultaneously as a technology and as a
cultural form."

Hence, "the replacement of a programme series of timed sequential units
by a flow series of differently related units"; that is to say, the
replacement of discrete narratives (a film or the episode of a given
series) by the combination of programmes, including commercial breaks
both within and between programmes, that constitutes 'watching
television'.

Williams' experience was one of confusion. The most obvious point is
that he had yet to be 'educated' to make sense of the TV-text.

>From John Ellis, Visible Fictions (1982):

"[F]or Williams, flow is a feature of TV that severely compromises and
alters the separate texts that TV has manufactured. His model is of
cinema-style texts which appear in a context that reduces their
separation one from another. In doing so he underestimates the
complexity of broadcast TV's particular commodity form, which has very
little to do with the single text."

However, an alternative take on flow comes from Sarah Kozloff,
"Narrative Theory and Television" in Robert C. Allen ed, Channels of
Discourse, Reassembled (1992):

"Television narratives have learned to compensate for and even take
advantage of the inevitable disruptions in various ways. First, they
typically tailor their discourse to fit 'naturally' around the
commercial breaks, so that, for instance, the exposition fits before the
first break and the coda after the last. Second, shows build their
stories to a high point of interest before each break to ensure that the
audience will stay tuned. [...] Finally, programs frequently time the
placement of commercials to coincide with a temporal ellipsis so that
while the viewer's attention has been diverted, the story can gracefully
leap ahead several hours or days."

Kozloff goes on to describe the way commercials have themselves been
turned into extended narratives that are interrupted by other
commercials.

This notion of 'narrative' includes something absent from Williams'
account: the audience/reader. Kozloff's account includes the way the
reader will negotiate such "inevitable disruptions".