ENGL 6310/7310
Popular Culture
Studies
Fall 2011
PH 300
M 240-540
Dr. David Lavery
My colleagues (I teach in an English Department), convinced television is a
sinister force destined to destroy literacy and dumb down culture and
appalled at my traitorous introduction of its study into hallowed halls that
once echoed with the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Keats, Conrad, and
Faulkner, were not amused when I suggested we tout our rich-in-popular
culture course offerings in new promos, updating the old curricular formula,
inviting study of “Beowulf to Buffy (and Virginia Woolf, Too).” Not convinced
by recent arguments to the contrary like Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is
Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter,
television’s antagonists, in their ignorance, would have us believe the “vast
wasteland” offers nothing (with the exception of an occasional Masterpiece
Theatre) to the literary minded.
Though I am under no illusion they will listen, allow me to survey
contemporary television in search of but one manifestation of the literariness
the rabid book-loving-TV-haters imagine absent from the medium: the
allusion. Allusions, of course, are direct or indirect references in a work of art,
usually “without explicit identification, to a person, place or event” or to
another work (Abrams 8). Wherever they appear, allusions are, of course,
part of that vast and intricate system of intertextuality carefully examined in
Jonathan Gray’s recent book. Allusions are not, of course, limited to the
literary, even though they carry with them, because of their bookish past, a
kind of literary cache.
It would, of course, be easy to find in the wasteland allusions to other
inhabitants of the wasteland. When Ed Hurley and Agent Cooper visit OneEyed Jacks in Twin Peaks using the aliases of Barney and Fred, the teleliterate
(Bianculli) picking up on a reference to The Flinstones is much easier than
understanding the series’ vatic mysteries. When, on Lost, a British
businessman buys the Slough branch of the Wernham Hogg paper company,
we may not immediately recognize the momentary diegetic intersection with
the BBC’s Office, but the allusionary crossing is there to follow nonetheless. I
want to examine here not television’s incestuous televisual allusions but its
literary ones. For with surprising regularity, the wasteland invokes not just
Eliot’s “Wasteland” (Wilcox) but the whole world of literature to which it
remains a seldom respected heir.
First, consider series like Seinfeld (NBC, 1989-1998), Twin Peaks (ABC, 19901992), and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB, 1997-2001; UPN, 2001-2003)—all
series famous for being rife with popular culture references. “It’s so sad. All
of your knowledge of high culture comes from Bugs Bunny Cartoons,” Elaine
laments to Jerry in the Season Four Seinfeld episode “The Opera,” but the
series itself exhibits more than a cartoony awareness of the literary, giving us
references to Death of a Salesman (Jerry repeatedly refers to George as
“Biff”), The Great Gatsby, Moby-Dick, Salman Rushdie, Tropic of Cancer and
Tropic of Capricorn, and Tolstoy and War and Peace.
Twin Peaks hardly limited itself to movie, television, and music references,
though full of them. Remember that discussion of the Heisenberg
indeterminancy principle at the Double R Diner? By the series’ premature
end, the attentive Peaker had no doubt noticed that Edmond Spenser’s Fairie
Queene (Windom Earle and Leo Johnson’s “verdant bower”), the Arthurian
legends (Glastonbury Grove, King Arthur’s burial site, is home to the Black
Lodge as well), and Knut Hamsun (the Nobel-Prize winning Norwegian
novelist and fascist, much admired by Ben Horne), have all set up
housekeeping in Twin Peaks.
In seven seasons under the creative control of fanboy/comic book geek/pop
culture genius Joss Whedon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was crammed with
references to television, comics, film, music, and literature. The poetry of
Robert Frost, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Emily Dickinson; a plethora of
books and writers—Alice in Wonderland, The Call of the Wild, Brave New
World, Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, William Burroughs, The Lion, the Witch,
and the Wardrobe, Of Human Bondage, Heart of Darkness, C. S. Forester,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Vanity Fair, The Open Road, Where the Wild Things Are,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Ann Rice; and a variety of plays—Oedipus Rex (hilariously
performed in a talent show in Season One), The Merchant of Venice, Othello,
Waiting for Godot, Death of a Salesman (a dream version with a cowboy and
a vampire), all these and more put in cameo appearances in Sunnydale.
In Buffy’s most extraordinary allusional moment, in the astonishing
“Restless,” an episode made of four dream sequences, Willow
inscribes Sappho’s lesbian poem “Mighty Aphrodite” on her lover
Tara’s naked back.
Not surprisingly, the Buffy spinoff Angel makes abundant use of literary
allusions as well. I will limit myself here to only one. In a Season One episode
the series’ titular hero, an over-two-centuries-old vampire, is forced to briefly
masquerade as a docent in an art museum. Luckily he has personal
knowledge of the painting before which he stands:
And this brings us to Manet's incomparable
La Musique Aux Tuileries, first exhibited in
1863. On the left one spies the painter
himself. In the middle distance is the French
poet and critic Baudelaire, a friend of the
artist. Now, Baudelaire . . . interesting fellow.
In his poem “Le Vampyre” he wrote: “Thou
who abruptly as a knife didst come into my
heart.” He, ah, strongly believed that evil
forces surrounded mankind. And some even
speculated that the poem was about a real
vampire. (He laughs) Oh and, ah, Baudelaire's
actually a little taller and a lot drunker than
he's depicted here.
Perhaps the first mention on television of the
French symbolist poet and drug enthusiast, but
then again Angel may well have been the first
television character who knew Baudelaire
personally.
Literary allusions crashed on mystery island along with the survivors of
Oceanic 815 in ABC’s huge international hit Lost. Not only are well known
philosophers—England’s John Locke and France’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau—
evoked by character names, several books become images in the frame,
including Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, Flann O’Brien’s The Third
Policeman, Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, and Richard Adams’
Watership Down, and still others—Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, James
Hilton’s Lost Horizon, and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe—are clearly
brought to mind.
Seen in “Not
in Portland”
Books on The
Island/In the Diegesis
Seen in
“Maternity
Leave”
Books on The
Island/In the Diegesis
Seen in “A
Tale of Two
Cities”
Books on The Island/In
the Diegesis
Seen in
“Catch-22”
Books on The
Island/In the
Diegesis
Seen in “Par
Avion”
Books on The
Island/In the Diegesis
Seen in “The
Man from
Tallahassee”
Books on The
Island/In the Diegesis
Seen in
“Eggtown”
Books on The
Island/In the Diegesis
Seen in
“Maternity
Leave”
Books on The
Island/In the Diegesis
Seen in
“Flashes
Before Your
Eyes”
Books on The
Island/In the Diegesis
Seen in “The
Long Con”
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek
Bridge”
“The Damn Thing”
“A Psychological Shipwreck”
Books on The Island/In
the Diegesis
Seen in “Every
Man for
Himself”
Books on The Island/In
the Diegesis
Seen in “He’s
Our You”
Books on The
Island/In the Diegesis
Seen in
“Orientation”
Books on The
Island/In the Diegesis
Seen in
“Orientation”
Books on The
Island/In the Diegesis
Seen in “316”
Books on The
Island/In the Diegesis
Seen in
“Confidence
Man”
Books on The
Island/In the Diegesis
Seen in
“Numbers”
Books on The Island/In
the Diegesis
Seen in
“Eggtown”
Books on The
Island/In the Diegesis
Ancestor Texts
Ancestor Texts
Ancestor Texts
1.
Harry Potter and the
Sorcerer’s Stone
2.
Harry Potter and the
Chamber of Secrets
3.
Harry Potter and the
Prisoner of Azkaban
4.
Harry Potter and the
Goblet of Fire
5.
Harry Potter and the Order
of the Phoenix
6.
Harry Potter and the HalfBlood Prince
7.
Harry Potter and the
Deathly Hallows
Ancestor Texts
Ancestor Texts
Ancestor Texts
Ancestor Texts
Ancestor Texts
Ancestor Texts
Ancestor Texts
Ancestor Texts
Ancestor Texts
Lost Philosophers:
John Locke
Lost
Philosophers:
David Hume
Lost Philosophers: JeanJacques Rousseau
Lost Philosophers: Jeremy
Bentham
Since, until recently, television
routinely kept its episode titles to
itself, it has been easy to miss the
many literary references to be found
there, then and now.
Consider, for example, the final
episode of the short-lived but
watershed ABC series My So Called
Life (1994) entitled “In Dreams Begin
Responsibilities”—a somewhat
obscure allusion to a book of the same
name by the American poet and writer
Delmore Schwartz;
or the Steinbeck-evoking pun in the title of
an upcoming Veronica Mars episode “The
Rapes of Graff” (compare to The Simpsons’
“The Crepes of Wrath”);
or The Gilmore Girls’ “Say Goodbye
to Daisy Miller,” with its reference
to the Henry James novella (one of
a score of literary show titles in the
series);
or “The Betrayal,” Seinfeld’s famous
“backward” episode, which takes its title from
Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter’s similarlythemed (though opposite in tone) play of the
same name.
Taking great pride, and capitalizing on a
great branding opportunity, in being
“not TV,” HBO programs are just as rich
in literary allusions as in nudity and
vulgarity. Not surprisingly, Deadwood,
created by former Yale University English
professor David Milch and written in a
language indebted to both Shakespeare
and the Victorian novel, offers many a
literary reference (did Alma Garrett just
compare Miss Isringhausen to Cotton
Mather?).
But it is on HBO’s flagship series The Sopranos, where the literary allusions by
far outnumber the whacks, the wiretaps, and the lapdances, that the not-TV
allusions find their true home. (The following catalog is limited to Seasons
Four and Five only.)
Mr. Wexler explains to Carmela that A. J. has turned in a “surprisingly
cogent” draft on George Orwell’s fable Animal Farm.
With Rosie Aprile’s depression in mind, Janice laments “Ah, Bartleby. Ah,
humanity,” quoting the final lines of Melville’s novella.
Another Melville novella puts in an appearance when A. J. has to write a
paper on “Billy Budd,” an assignment which leads to a later discussion
(evoking the iconoclastic critic Leslie Fiedler) about its possible gay subtext.
(His next reading assignment is Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.)
Meadow tells her mother she read “half the canon” while lying by the
pool.
Tony B. confesses to Christopher that “some very sorry people” once called
him Ichabod Crane (the main character in Washington Irving’s “The Legend
of Sleepy Hollow”).
New York underboss Johnny Sack cites Shakespeare’s Macbeth—“creeps in
this petty pace”—in complaining about his long wait for the overboss to die.
In after-extra-marital sex pillow talk, Mr. Wexler tells Carmela Soprano
about Heloise and Abelard, after she finds their letters as reading material in
the English teacher’s bathroom.
One of Tony’s captains speaks enviously of the earning potential of the
Harry Potter books.
Ready to embark on a trip to Europe, Meadow recommends her parents
read Henry James in order to learn more about “the restorative nature of
travel.”
A. J. buys a paper on Lord of the Flies on the Internet. Carmela reads
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.
Melfi quotes Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” to an uncomprehending
Tony.
A fifth season episode takes its title from Flaubert’s A Sentimental
Education.
Machiavelli. Nicolo (1469–1527) Italian writer,
statesman, and political theorist, author of The Prince.
Tony recalls (after reading Sun Tzu) his encounter (via
Carmela's Cliff Notes version) with "Prince
Matchabelli" (3.6).
Quasimodo
Bobby Bacala insists that he predicted 9/11 (4.1).
The hunchback bell ringer in Victor Hugo's The
Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831)
Nostradamus
See Quasimodo (4.1).
“Nostradamus (1503–1566), born Michel de
Nostredame, is one of the world's most famous
authors of prophecies. He is most famous for his book
Les Propheties, which consists of rhymed quatrains . . .
grouped into sets of 1., called Centuries” (from
Wikipedia.com).
Northern Exposure (1900-1995) was always a
supremely literary television series. In the Season
Three episode "Cicely" (3: 23), for example, we learn
that Franz Kafka once visited the small Alaskan town,
where he was first inspired to write "Metamorphosis."
In Season Five’s “Una Volta in L'Inverno" (5: 17),
septuagenarian store owner Ruth Anne Miller sets out
to learn Italian so she can read Dante’s Divine Comedy
in the original. Season Six’s "Up River" (6: 8) evokes
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (not to mention its
cinematic reimagining in Apocalypse Now), with Ed
Chigliak playing Harry Marlow/Benjamin Willard and
Joel Fleischman as Kurtz. And from first episode to last,
morning DJ Chris Stevens’ radio monologues are full of
references to great writers and thinkers.
“Deconstruction at Bat: Baseball vs. Critical Theory in Northern
Exposure’s ’The Graduate.’” Critical Studies in Television 1.2 (Autumn
2006): 33-38. Republished in Baseball/Literature/Culture: Essays. Ed.
Ronald E. Kates and Warren Tormey. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008:
98-104.
As Robert J. Thompson has observed,
Sometimes Northern Exposure wasn't just like reading a good book, it
actually presented people reading good books. Throughout one entire
episode [Season Two’s "War and Peace"], for example . . . Chris Stevens . .
. reads passages from War and Peace. In the meantime, according to the
producers' plot synopsis, the residents of Cicely "experience Tolstoyesque
nightmares and Dostoyevskian passions." Chris, an intellectual dilettante
who seemed to be taking all of his on air rambling patter from a college
syllabus, went a long way in giving the show its cerebral if somewhat selfimportant veneer. At one time or another during the course of the series,
Chris made references to works by Hegel, Kierkegaard, Kant, Nietzsche, de
Tocqueville, Jefferson, Whitman, Baudelaire, Melville, Shakespeare, Jung,
Jack London, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and many other authors. No nerd,
Chris was just as fluent with Raymond Chandler or Def Leppard, but it was
his perpetual name-dropping and passage citing from the Great Books
that seemed to announce, as [John] Falsey and [Joshua] Brand [the series’
creators] had often boasted, that Northern Exposure wasn't written for
the "mass audience."
No single installment of Northern Exposure seemed less directed to a
mass audience than "The Graduate," written by Sam Egan and
directed by James Hayman, an episode, very near the end of the
series’ run, concerned with Chris’ defense of his thesis, in partial
fulfilment of an M.A. in a University of Alaska extension program.
Indeed, the intended audience for "The Graduate" would seem to be
not someone with a Nielsen box but the faculty of an English
department. Chris has, it seems, penned a deconstructionist/postcolonial reading of the Ernest Lawrence Thayer classic "Casey at the
Bat" and finds himself forced to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of
his openly adversarial committee members.
Professor Dick Schuster, a traditional literary scholar who (in his own
words) wants to treat "a poem as a poem and not just a code," dislikes
reading presentist political implications into a poem from 1888, and
refuses to grant a "diploma for glibness, nor even erudition."
Prof. Aaron Martin, on the other hand, an advocate for "interpretive
freedom" and "hermeneutic license," is a young Turk, impressed by
the candidate’s outlaw status (a high school drop-out, Chris had once
done hard time back in West Virginia) and predisposed to the thesis’
understanding of the big guy at the plate as a combination
Nietzschean übbermensch and emblem of American manifest destiny.
As Chris’ orals begin, we get a taste of the opposing forces.
At the outset, Professor Schuster reminds Chris that "brevity is the
soul of wit," and Martin counters his senior colleague’s quotation of
Alexander Pope by evoking Dorothy Parker’s "Brevity is the soul of
lingerie." In response to Schuster’s question, Chris successfully defines
"objective correlative," identifies T. S. Eliot as the source of the term,
and recites William Carlos Williams’ “Red Wheelbarrow” as an
example. Then Martin asks a question that would seem like a parody if
it weren’t frighteningly representative: "In what way does the
relativism embodied in Melville"s duality of evil presage the moral
ambiguities of twentieth century colonialism?" "Heaven help us,"
Schuster groans, but Chris answers in the spirit of the question,
proclaiming radical notions about the "whole paradox of colonialism,
the benevolent imperialist, the hubris of the first world, the marine
corporal with a Zippo in Nam who had to burn down the village in
order to save it."
Though I cannot be absolutely certain, I would venture to say that this
may have been the first, and perhaps the only, time "objective
correlative" was ever discussed in prime-time. It may also have been
the network television debut of the word "presage." At this point,
however, tensions are only simmering. No one is taking Chris to task
for his mangled metaphors—how precisely does one bring a "great
white whale to its knees"?—or his ideas. Prof. Martin is pleased,
deeming Chris rant "right on," and Professor Schuster bites his tongue,
not yet ready to go to war.
After Martin and Schuster hit up Maurice for endowing a chair
(clearly an ongoing discussion), talk turns to Derrida and Barthes,
and the death of the author (a moment in literary history praised
by Martin as a releaser of all the hidden meanings buried in a
text), and Chris expresses for the first time misgivings about his
poststructuralist way of approaching literature, wondering what
happens to "beauty is truth, truth beauty" (Keats—from "Ode on
a Grecian Urn") under such an episteme. Banter between Martin
and Schuster becomes increasingly confrontational, and this time
it’s personal. To the former’s accusation that his senior colleague
clings to old ideas in order to remain department chair, Schuster
responds with sarcastic glee “You better get used to those faculty
apartments.” When Schuster scolds Martin that “You and your
carjacking protégé . . .have put 2000 years of accumulated
knowledge into a rhetorical Osterizer and grinded it all into
oblivion.” he characterizes Schuster’s old- fashioned mindset as
“bigotry with panache.” As Chris looks on in wonder, they go for
each other’s throats but are separated by the powerful
Minnifield, who angrily (and hilariously) reminds them
"Gentleman, it’s only literature.”
Earlier Chris had offered a toast to academia: "in a world of ever more
compromise and pettiness, the last refuge for ideas and idealism for
their own sake." At Maurice’s Chris begins to realize his naiveté and
sees for the first time that the hostility critical theory has spawned
may be a sublimation of such non-intellectual petty matters as who
holds the department chair, or secures the office with a window, or
gets the best housing. As the cliché we all know has it, the
competition is so fierce because the rewards are so small.
Television doesn’t get any better, or any more literary, than this.
Shakespeare, of course, gets all the best lines—his "They got Eddie!"
lament upon the death of Poe, his anachronistically fatal quotation of
Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. But it is Chris who comes away terrified
but enlightened by his dream-shattering ouroboric recognition that
the canon-terminating sniper—and take note how well the metaphor
works—is really himself. The next day, "Chris in the Morning" is all
about his doubts. As Ray Charles wails the appropriately titled "Tell me
What I Say" in the background, Chris acquaints all of Cicely (and the
television audience as well) with his growing methodological
concerns. "You analyse something too much you just grind it into
dust," he has come to think, wondering if his whole pursuit of a
degree may have been a misguided venture: "I should never have
opened that matchbook. We are looking for people who like to think.’’
But such musings are, in fact, rhetorical, for Chris has concocted a new
plan for his thesis defense.
Anyone who has been around universities for a time has probably
heard Academic Legends about theses and dissertation defences—the
one making the rounds when I was working on my M.A., for example,
about the doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota who lost
his lunch all over the conference table. Thesis and dissertations have
even found their way into films. In Irvin Kershner’s The Eyes of Laura
Mars (1978), for example, released the year I finished my own
dissertation, a serial killer is revealed to be a detective (played by
Tommy Lee Jones) driven to psychopathy by his inability to even finish
his treatise. Earlier in the decade, in Richard Rush’s forgotten semiclassic Getting Straight (1970), Elliott Gould plays a deeply confused
graduate student named Harry Bailey who inadvertently brings to his
thesis defense at Berkeley a hollowed-out book filled with pot and
then, as riots erupt outside and his committee becomes embroiled in
a debate over Leslie Fiedler-esque ideas about the homoerotic subtext
of The Great Gatsby, goes nuts. After insisting that the major verse
form in English is, in fact, the limerick (and reciting a particularly
profane one), Bailey jumps up on the conference table and brings the
defense to an end by planting a sloppy kiss on the lips of his
committee chair.
"What’s the meaning of this?" Schuster asks, appropriately enough,
as they arrive at Minnifield Field, and Chris, punning, replies that he
wants to “take another swing” at Thayer’s meaning. To Martin’s
surprised rejoinder, "I thought you were beyond authorial
reference," Chris asks him to take a bat and go to the plate. As Chris
recites the poem from memory, Martin goes down on strikes three
snow-covered pitches later, the last two whiffs, just like the Mighty
Casey. Striding toward his vanquished examiner, Chris intones
Thayer’s final lines:
Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are
light;
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children
shout,
But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out.
Pointing to Martin’s stomach, he explains "That’s what Casey at the
bat is about—that feeling in your gut."
"I thought you were beyond authorial reference." It’s one of those
meta-media moments that make a proselytiser for television,
especially what I have been calling of late "television creativity,"
squirm with joy on my couch potato couch. Mirroring in its
development its antecedent media literature and the movies, both
slow to discover the author/auteur and then surprisingly anxious to
finish him off, television, you see, is supposed to be made in
anonymity. Only now, as we speak, are TV auteurs emerging. Only now
are we beginning to recognize the creative human beings who make
television, a medium, nearly everyone agrees, supremely friendly to
the writers who produce such brilliant fare as “The Graduate” while
toiling largely in obscurity. I know next-to-nothing about Sam Egan, its
author, which doesn’t seem quite fair, since he seems know a lot
about me—about us. But I do know this: like me he believes that
deconstruction has had its turn at bat, its innings even, and has now
struck out.
Allusions, the great literary scholar M. H. Abrams,
observes, “imply a fund of knowledge that is shared by an
author and an audience. Most literary allusions are
intended to be recognized by the generally educated
readers of the author’s time,” though some have always
been “aimed at a special coterie” and, in modernist
literature, may be so specialized that only scholarly
annotators will be able to decipher them (8-9). TV’s
allusions likewise imply a mutual “fund of knowledge.”
When they are merely to the rest of the vast cosmos of
television, as they often are, they presume nothing more
than the commonality of many hours before the small
screen. But television’s proliferating literary references
stand as a testimony to the medium’s increasing
sophistication as its begins to partake in “the conversation
of mankind” (Rorty), to the wider, deeper repertoire of its
writers, and to new, much more flattering, assumptions
about the intellectual qualities of the Quality TV audience.
If some of the allusion of television are now so arcane only
English professors can elucidate them, well do we not
need new challenges, new work to do?