An object of interest in the third chapter of
White Noise, the
1985 National Book Award winning novel by
American author
Don Delillo.
The scene was later famously served up by
David Foster Wallace as an expression of how and why we're all so gut-wrenchingly
cynical, in his landmark
1993 essay
E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.
The scene is quite short and excerpted all over the internet (as well as in the
Wallace essay) -
The Most Photographed Barn in America
Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.
"No one sees the barn," he said finally.
A long silence followed.
"Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn."
He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.
We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies."
There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.
"Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism."
Another silence ensued.
"They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said.
He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film.
"What was the barn like before it was photographed?" he said. "What did it look like, how was it different from the other barns, how was it similar to other barns?" We can't answer these questions because we've read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We're here, we're now."
He seemed immensely pleased by this. |
Wallace and the Barn, or Why You Feel So Cynical About Being You
Wallace used
The Most Photographed Barn in America to unpack how
irony became a
zeitgeist.
He starts with
fiction writers.
E Unibus Pluram opens with
Wallace calling fiction writers
"oglers." We're
voyeurs, he says, creepily feasting on unaware humans for patches of
authentic behavior to sew into our stories.
This makes
television the greatest thing ever. It's like having an ogling device right in your own living room. We can watch human behavior
24-7.
Except there's a problem with this.
Television is not
authentic behavior. The people on
TV aren't unaware humans going about their lives. They know they're being watched. Billions of dollars count on it.
Television is a meticulously crafted
spectacle.
Yet we still recognize bits of ourselves in it, even while we know it's meticulously crafted to appeal to the widest audience possible (and thus, perhaps, the
lowest common denominator). So we relate to
television dualistically: we identify with it while simultaneously remaining cynical of its production. This is the
ironic disposition. We relate to
TV with
ironic distance: identifying and condemning at the same time.
It gets worse.
Wallace argues that
television has become so prominent that it's an ineluctable part of our culture. We can identify with the father or mother or child in the
family sitcom because they are based on American families. We see our own family
quirks humorously reflected back at us. We refer to our own mother-in-laws as the mother-in-law on TV. "I swear she's
Marie Barone, evil to the core." Then a commercial for
Downy laundry detergent comes on and we are reminded just how much
Everybody Loves Raymond is a fabrication. This is true not just for
television, but of
movies as well. People identify with
movie stars. They post pictures of them on their
Facebook pages. They dress like celebrities, stylize their hair like them, adopt their mannerisms, their attitudes, their ethics.
Delillo himself cuts right to the heart of the matter and says
film is the culprit. The invention of
film changed the way we see ourselves. It created a split not just in our relation to
television and
movies and
youtube clips, but to ourselves. Since we identify with
film we suffer the same
side effects of that identification: as we see our
Self in film, we also see the production of our
Self, creating the
fractured Self - at once
being and neurotically
aware of our
being. This is how
irony became king: because of
film, we relate to ourselves with
ironic distance, both
identifying and
analyzing at the same time.
It's a terrible, grinding way to go about life.
So while fiction writers don't want to rely on
TV because it's inauthentic,
TV itself is an ineluctable part of our contemporary lifestyle, and thus, argues
Wallace, kind of authentic in its lack of authenticity. We are
TV. We are
film. "We can't get outside the
aura,"
Delillo's Murray says above. "We're part of the
aura. We're here, we're now."
We're caught in a
feedback loop between ourselves and film. And we desperately want to escape.
The Toiletbowl Spiral of Recursion
This is what's going on in
The Most Photographed Barn in America.
The people are there photographing the barn. But, as Murray notes, they're there recording the barn not because it's worth recording per se, but because it's "The Most Photographed Barn in America." It's
famous for being famous. It's being recorded because it's known for being recorded, which is why people record it, which makes it known for being recorded, which is why people record it,
ad infinitum. It's caught in a
feedback loop.
Murray, a
pop culture professor (whom
Wallace calls a "poor shmuck of a popologist"), is there trying to escape the
feedback loop by expressing awareness that there is a
feedback loop. He does this by analyzing and commenting on the photographers.
This is the ironic move. Murray is the awareness of the production of the phenomenon. Only he admits he can't escape the
loop because he's ultimately there for the same reason as the photographers: because this is "The Most Photographed Barn in America." Knowing why it's being photographed doesn't change it from being "The Most Photographed Barn in America." It will not magically revert to a "real" barn just because you know how silly the
feedback loop is.
Irony does not privy you to
authenticity. It only makes you painfully aware of just how
inauthentic everything is.
Jack Gladney, the narrator of
White Noise, takes a further
recursive step by
retreating into silence. He even refuses to speak when directly addressed. "Can you feel it, Jack?" asks Murray. Jack says nothing. Why? By refusing to analyze and comment, Jack hopes to one-up Murray and himself escape the
feedlack loop. Silence must be authentic.
Is it?
Jack is, after all, the narrator. He is still narrating his silence, which itself is a type of commentary on the phenomenon that he too is there to witness, "The Most Photographed Barn in America." Even his second-level recursive step is sucked into the
feedback loop of the barn.
And what about us? The reader. Voyeuristically taking it all in, commenting in our minds, wondering, analyzing,
filling nodeshells with cute little write-ups about it. We too are sucked into the
loop. Recursion is no escape. It just turns the feedback loop into a toiletbowl flush, spiraling down down down, but never away.
Reality Hunger: How I Stopped Being Cynical and Learned to Love the U.S. Tax Code
There is hope yet.
Delillo's novel and
Wallace's essay are somewhat dated.
White Noise was written in
1985.
E Unibus Pluram was written in
1993. While both were landmarks that informed American fiction for decades, that period may be over.
With the publication of David Shields'
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, lit critic and essayist
Morgan Meis has declared the age of irony to be done. We found a way out of the toiletbowl by stripping off our ironic layers and diving naked into our hearts (and the world). Meis calls this
Neo-Sincerity. I won't go into the hows and whys as it's far beyond
The Most Photographed Barn in America. Read the linked articles if interested.
However.
David Foster Wallace killed himself in
2008. Considering who he was and what he meant to so many of us, the news was devastating and rather depressing. Why? If the greatest of us couldn't find a
living way out of the toiletbowl, what hope do the rest of us have?
This isn't entirely true. It's always dangerous to ascribe reasons to a suicide, especially in this case as the
The Most Photographed Barn in America probably had nothing to do with
Wallace's suicide.
Wallace left behind a mostly-completed-but-not-finished novel called
The Pale King. It's about
IRS agents. Yes.
IRS agents. The most boring people on the planet working the most boring jobs imaginable. But apparently that was
Wallace's point. It appears that
Wallace had found his own way out of the toiletbowl by making a very
Zen move toward
relishing every single minute stupid little thing in this ridiculous world. Even the hellishly boring figures and documents of the
U.S. tax code. If you can learn to appreciate this (and apparently his characters love it) then you can forget all the analysis and commentary and recording and irony and just lose yourself in the world. Hope is there,
Wallace seemed to be saying. It's in a box-like
IRS building, buried deep at the bottom under the chaos of the
U.S. tax code.
Morgan Meis on "The Pale King"
Morgan Meis on Neo-Sincerity