Hemming In The Great White Ways

[Paul Nightingale]

Mentioned here a while ago ...

The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television
(Kathleen Fitzpatrick, 2006)

Fitzpatrick gives Delillo more space than Pynchon, and pretty much ignores
VL altogether. The starting point is the so-called 'death of the novel',
more specifically the literary novel as represented by DD and TRP, who
"remain, arguably, the Hemingway and Faulkner of the postwar period" (47).

Put simply, and perhaps crudely, summarising 200 pages in a few words--the
postmodernist novel turns its fears about mass culture/contemporary media
into its source material; and how it does so is the book's subject. And yes,
it is significant that the "canonical" authors in question are, for the most
part, both male and white (Fitzpatrick discusses the statement, incorrectly
attributed to Wallace, in which he was supposed to have referred to his
generation of writers as New White Guys).

The pessimism of DD and TRP (hmmm...) is contrasted to the optimism of a
writer like Toni Morrison, for whom tv helps maintain the "patriarchal,
racist status quo" (221). Morrison is optimistic because the writer can
intervene to challenge the way tv operates; according to Fitzpatrick the
focus of the white male writers isn't content/representations so much as
technological change rendering the novel obsolete.

Hence, for Morrison, it isn't the literary novel/ist that tv threatens.

>From the conclusion:

"However, in the process of representing the dangers he perceives in the
media, he at times reveals another locus of anxiety--not television itself
but the television audience. In these moments, concerns about technology
bleed into concerns about race and gender, about the otherness in US culture
that threatens to displace not just the novelist's productions but the
novelist himself from centrality" (230).

And then:

"Marginality thus becomes, in a literary culture obsessed with fragmentation
and decentering, a paradoxical source of return to dominance, a melodrama of
beset white manhood" (233).