E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction

As someone who lives in a TV-less household (by choice), I thought that this essay wouldn’t be very relevant to me. Oh boy. I was wrong. Or David Foster Wallace wrote it in such a way that it seems relevant to me. As usual.

Even though I really had to guess at what a lot of the words he used meant (no dictionary* handy in that particular reading situation). I mean, I thought synecdoche was a town in New York*. And really. How do you even pronounce that?

Really.

He uses that word a lot. I mean. A. LOT. I finally asked Patrick what it meant.

It’s just a tragedy that DFW isn’t still alive and writing. I’d love to read (maybe he’s written this already and I just haven’t gotten to it. Fingers decidedly crossed….) a sort of follow-up piece to this.

This particular piece was written in 1990. So it’s about television as it was then. And in the 80s. Before everybody was using the Interwebs. Watching shows on Hulu and Netflix. And YouTube. Before reality shows.

I think he’d write some wonderful words about today’s TV. I do.

This is the third post in a series.

• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
• Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley
• E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
• Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All
• Greatly Exaggerated
• David Lynch Keeps His Head
• Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again… Again