1990
Afterword
It’s tempting to read “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” through the filter of its moment; after all, the television culture Wallace critiques here no longer exists. Commercials, broadcast schedules, the primacy of the big screen… all have been transformed by the advent of the DVR, the computer, the tablet, the so-called smartphone. And yet, that’s not really true, for the core of the essay remains—as it has since I first read it in 1993, in the Review of Contemporary Fiction—in the closing pages, which dissect George Gilder’s digital glad-handing for the come-on that it is.
Gilder foresees a world in which networked televisions and computers “will forever break the broadcast bottleneck.” For Wallace, this is sophistry at best, and at worst a kind of co-optation, in which the imagination itself is jeopardized. “Whether I’m ‘passive’ or ‘active’ as a viewer,” he tells us, “I still must cynically pretend, because I’m still dependent.… My real dependence is on the fantasies and the images that enable them, and thus on any technology that can make images both available and fantastic. Make no mistake: we are dependent on image-technology; and the better the tech, the harder we’re hooked.”
Make no mistake, indeed, for we now live in the world that Wallace, and not Gilder, envisioned, in which “image-technology,” better and more ubiquitous screens, has transformed how we interact. It has become our water (to borrow a metaphor from Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement address), interchangeably medium and message. Even our language is degraded: What do friend and like mean anymore?
I say this not as a Luddite; I’m as wrapped up in the image culture as anyone. But that only makes “E Unibus Pluram” all the more resonant. Wallace’s long (and delightfully digressive) essay leads us to consider real emotion, real expression, not as some kind of game for saps but rather as the only thing that might redeem us, that might allow us to (re-)connect. “Irony,” he writes, quoting Lewis Hyde, “has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.”
This is an almost perfect evocation of the culture we’ve created, a culture “E Unibus Pluram” stands against. It is a cry in the dark, one that recognizes its futility and yet makes the effort all the same. (“It is entirely possible,” Wallace writes, “that my plangent noises about the impossibility of rebelling against an aura that promotes and vitiates all rebellion say more about… my own lack of vision, than they do about any exhaustion of U.S. fiction’s possibilities.”) Where is the place for writers in this culture? Where is the place for the human heart? These are the questions Wallace is asking, and his earnest plea for, yes, a return to earnestness is both quixotic and the most essential sort of radical aesthetic stance.
—David L. Ulin
Getting Away from
Already Pretty Much Being
Away from It All
08/05/93/0800h. PRESS DAY IS a week or so before the Fair opens. I’m supposed to be at the grounds’ Illinois Building by like 0900 to get Press Credentials. I imagine Credentials to be a small white card in the band of a fedora. I’ve never been considered Press before. My main interest in Credentials is getting into rides and stuff for free.
I’m fresh in from the East Coast to go to the Illinois State Fair for a swanky East-Coast magazine. Why exactly a swanky East-Coast magazine is interested in the Illinois State Fair remains unclear to me. I suspect that every so often editors at these magazines slap their foreheads and remember that about 90% of the United States lies between the Coasts and figure they’ll engage somebody to do pith-helmeted anthropological reporting on something rural and heartlandish. I think they decided to engage me for this one because I actually grew up around here, just a couple hours’ drive from downstate Springfield. I never did go to the State Fair, though, growing up—I pretty much topped out at the County Fair level.
In August it takes hours for the dawn fog to burn off. The air’s like wet wool. 0800h. is too early to justify the car’s AC. I’m on I-55 going S/SW. The sun’s a blotch in a sky that isn’t so much cloudy as opaque. The corn starts just past the breakdown lanes and goes right to the sky’s hem. The August corn’s as tall as a tall man. Illinois corn is now knee-high by about the 4th of May, what with all the advances in fertilizers and herbicides. Locusts chirr in every field, a brassy electric sound that Dopplers oddly in the speeding car. Corn, corn, soybeans, corn, exit ramp, corn, and every few miles an outpost way off on a reach in the distance—house, tree w/ tire-swing, barn, satellite dish. Grain silos are the only real skyline. The Interstate is dull and pale. The occasional other cars all look ghostly, their drivers’ faces humidity-stunned. A fog hangs just over the fields like the land’s mind or something. The temperature’s over 80 and already climbing with the sun. It’ll be 90+ by 1000h., you can tell: there’s already that tightening quality to the air, like it’s drawing itself in for a long siege.
Credentials 0900h., Welcome & Briefing 0915h., Press Tour on Special Tram 0945h.
I grew up in rural Illinois but haven’t been back for a long time and can’t say I’ve missed it—the yeasty heat, the lush desolation of limitless corn, the flatness.
But it’s like bike-riding, in a way. The native body readjusts automatically to the flatness, and as your calibration gets finer, driving, you can start to notice that the dead-level flatness is only apparent. There are unevennesses, ups and downs, slight but rhythmic. Straight-shot I-55 will start, ever so slightly, to rise, maybe 5° over a mile, then go just as gentle back down, and then you see an overpass bridge ahead, over a river—the Salt Fork, the Sangamon. The rivers are swollen, but nothing like out around St. Louis. These gentle rises and then dips down to rivers are glacial moraines, edges of the old ice that shaved the Midwest level. The middling rivers have their origin in glacial runoff. The whole drive is a gentle sine wave like this, but it’s like sea-legs: if you haven’t spent years here you’ll never feel it. To people from the Coasts, rural IL’s topography’s a nightmare, something to hunker down and speed through—the sky opaque, the dull crop-green constant, the land flat and dull and endless, a monotone for the eyes. For natives it’s different. For me, at least, it got creepy. By the time I left for college the area no longer seemed dull so much as empty, lonely. Middle-of-the-ocean lonely. You can go weeks without seeing a neighbor. It gets to you.
08/05/0900h. But so it’s still a week before the Fair, and there’s something surreal about the emptiness of parking facilities so huge and complex that they have their own map. The parts of the Fairgrounds that I can see, pulling in, are half permanent structures and half tents and displays in various stages of erection, giving the whole thing the look of somebody half-dressed for a really important date.
08/05/0905h. The man processing Press Credentials is bland and pale and has a mustache and a short-sleeve knit shirt. In line before me are newshounds from Today’s Agriculture, the Decatur Herald & Review, Illinois Crafts Newsletter, 4-H News, and Livestock Weekly. Press Credentials turn out to be just a laminated mugshot with a gator-clip for your pocket; not a fedora in the house. Two older ladies from a local horticulture organ behind me engage me in shoptalk. One of these ladies describes herself as the Unofficial Historian of the Illinois State Fair: she goes around giving slide shows on the Fair at nursing homes and Rotary lunches. She begins to emit historical data at a great rate—the Fair started in 1853; there was a Fair every year during the Civil War but not during WWII, plus no Fair in 1893 for some reason; the Governor has failed to cut the ribbon personally on Opening Day only twice; etc. It occurs to me I probably ought to have brought a notebook. I also notice I’m the only person in the room in a T-shirt. It’s a fluorescent-lit cafeteria in something called the Illinois Building Senior Center, uncooled. All the local TV crews have their equipment spread out on tables and are lounging against walls talking about the apocalyptic 1993 floods to the immediate west, which floods are ongoing. They all have mustaches and short-sleeve knit shirts.
In fact the only other males in the room without mustaches and golf-shirts are the local TV reporters, four of them, all in Eurocut suits. They are sleek, sweatless, deeply blue-eyed. They stand together up by the dais. The dais has a podium and a flag and a banner with GIVE US A WHIRL! on it, which I deduce is probably this year’s Fair’s Theme, sort of the way senior proms have a Theme. There’s a compelling frictionlessness about the local TV reporters, all of whom have short blond hair and vaguely orange makeup. A vividness. I keep feeling a queer urge to vote for them for something.
The older ladies behind me tell me they’ve bet I’m here to cover either the auto racing or the pop music. They don’t mean it unkindly. I tell them why I’m here, mentioning the magazine’s name. They turn toward each other, faces alight. One (not the Historian) actually claps her hands to her cheeks.
“Love the recipes,” she says.
“Adore the recipes,” the Unofficial Historian says.
And I’m sort of impelled over to a table of all post-45 females, am introduced as on assignment from Harper’s magazine, and everyone looks at one another with star-struck awe and concurs that the recipes really are first-rate, top-hole, the living end. One seminal recipe involving Amaretto and something called “Baker’s chocolate” is being recalled and discussed when a loudspeaker’s feedback brings the Fair’s official Press Welcome & Briefing to order.
The Briefing is dull. We are less addressed than rhetorically bludgeoned by Fair personnel, product spokespeople, and middle-management State politicos. The words excited, proud, and opportunity are used a total of 76 times before I get distracted off the count. I’ve suddenly figured out that all the older ladies I’m at the table with have confused Harper’s with Harper’s Bazaar. They think I’m some sort of food writer or recipe scout, here to maybe vault some of the Midwestern food competition winners into the homemaker’s big time. Ms. Illinois State Fair, tiara bolted to the tallest coiffure I’ve ever seen (bun atop bun, multiple layers, a veritable wedding cake of hair), is proudly excited to have the opportunity to present two corporate guys, dead-eyed and sweating freely in suits, who in turn report the excited pride of McDonald’s and Wal-Mart at having the opportunity to be this year’s Fair’s major corporate sponsors. It occurs to me that if I allow the Harper’s-Bazaar-food-scout misunderstanding to persist and circulate I can eventually show up at the Dessert Competition tents with my Press Credentials and they’ll feed me free prize-winning desserts until I have to be carried off on a gurney. Older ladies in the Midwest can bake.
08/05/0950h. Under way at 4 mph on the Press Tour, on a kind of flatboat with wheels and a lengthwise bench so ridiculously high that everybody’s feet dangle. The tractor pulling us has signs that say ETHANOL and AGRIPOWERED. I’m particularly keen to see the carnies setting up rides in the Fairgrounds’ “Happy Hollow,” but we head first to the corporate and political tents. Most every tent is still setting up. Workmen crawl over structural frames. We wave at them; they wave back; it’s absurd: we’re only going 4 mph. One tent says CORN: TOUCHING OUR LIVES EVERY DAY. There are massive many-hued tents courtesy of McDonald’s, Miller Genuine Draft, Osco, Morton Commercial Structures Corp., the Land of Lincoln Soybean Association (LOOK WHERE SOYBEANS GO! on a half-up display), Pekin Energy Corp. (PROUD OF OUR SOPHISTICATED COMPUTER-CONTROLLED PROCESSING TECHNOLOGY), Illinois Pork Producers, and the John Birch Society (we’ll be checking out that tent for sure). Two tents that say REPUBLICAN and DEMOCRAT. Other smaller tents for various Illinois officeholders. It’s well up in the 90s and the sky is the color of old jeans. Over a system of crests to Farm Expo—twelve acres of wicked-looking needle-teethed harrows, tractors, harvesters and seeders—and then Conservation World, 22 acres I never do get straight on the conserving purpose of.
Then back around the rear of the big permanent structures—Artisans Bldg., Illinois Bldg. Senior Center, Expo Center (it says POULTRY on the tympanum, but it’s the Expo Center)—passing tantalizingly close to Happy Hollow, where half-assembled rides stand in giant arcs and rays and shirtless guys with tattoos and wrenches slouch around them, fairly oozing menace and human interest—and I want a chance to chat with them before the Hollow opens and there’s pressure to actually ride the carnival rides, since I am one of those people who gets sick on Near-Death-Experience carnival rides—but on at a crawl up a blacktop path to the Livestock Buildings on the Fairgrounds’ west (upwind!) side. By this time, most of the Press is off the tram and walking in order to escape the tour’s PA speaker, which is tinny and brutal. Horse Complex. Cattle Complex. Swine Barn. Sheep Barn. Poultry and Goat Barns. These are all long brick barracks open down both sides of their length. Inside some are stalls; others have pens divided into squares with aluminum rails. Inside, they’re gray cement, dim and pungent, huge fans overhead, workers in overalls and waders hosing everything down. No animals yet, but the smells still hang from last year—horses’ odors sharp, cows’ rich, sheep’s oily, swine’s unspeakable. No idea what the Poultry Barn smelled like because I couldn’t bring myself to go in. Traumatically pecked once, as a child, at the Champaign County Fair, I have a longstanding phobic thing about poultry.
The ethanol tractor’s exhaust is literally flatulent-smelling as we crawl out past the Grandstand, where there will apparently be evening concerts and harness- and auto-racing—“WORLD’S FASTEST MILE DIRT TRACK”—and head for something called the Help Me Grow tent to interface with the state’s First Lady, Brenda Edgar. It occurs to me that the 366-acre terrain of the Fairgrounds is awfully hilly for downstate IL; it’s either a geologic anomaly or it’s been man-enhanced. The Help Me Grow tent is on a grassy ridge that overlooks Happy Hollow. I think it’s near where I parked. The dismantled-looking rides out below make the view complex. The Expo Center and Coliseum across the Hollow on an opposite ridge have odd neo-Georgian facades, a lot like the older buildings at the State U. over in Champaign. Nature-wise the view is lovely. The serious flooding’s well to the west of Springfield, but we’ve had the same rains, and the grass here is lush and deep green, the trees’ leaves balloon explosively like trees in Fragonard, and everything smells juicy and highly edible and still growing here in a month when I remember everything as tired and dry. The first sign of the Help Me Grow area is the nauseous bright red of Ronald McDonald’s hair. He’s capering around a small plasticky playground area under candy-stripe tenting. Though the Fair’s ostensibly unopen, troupes of kids mysteriously appear and engage in rather rehearsed-looking play as we approach. Two of the kids are black, the first black people I’ve seen anywhere on the Fairgrounds. No parents in view. Just outside the tent, the Governor’s wife stands surrounded by flinty-eyed aides. Ronald pretends to fall down. The Press forms itself into a kind of ring. There are several state troopers in khaki and tan, streaming sweat under their Nelson Eddy hats. My view isn’t very good. Mrs. Edgar is cool and groomed and pretty in a lacquered way, of the sort of female age that’s always suffixed with “-ish.” Her tragic flaw is her voice, which sounds almost heliated. The Mrs. Edgar/McDonald’s Help Me Grow Program, when you decoct the rhetoric, is basically a statewide crisis line for over-the-edge parents to call and get talked out of beating up their kids. The number of calls Mrs. Edgar says the line’s fielded just this year is both de- and impressive. Shiny pamphlets are distributed. Ronald McDonald, speech slurry and makeup cottage-cheeseish in the heat, cues the kids to come over for some low-rent sleight of hand and Socratic banter. Lacking a real journalist’s killer instinct, I’ve been jostled way to the back of the ring, and my view is obscured by the towering hair of Ms. Illinois State Fair, whose function on the Press Tour remains unclear. I don’t want to asperse, but Ronald McDonald sounds like he’s under the influence of something more than fresh country air. I drift away under the tent, where there’s a metal watercooler. But no cups. It’s hotter under the tent, and there’s a reek of fresh plastic. All the toys and plastic playground equipment have signs that say COURTESY OF and then a corporate name. A lot of the photographers
in the ring have on dusty-green safari vests, and they sit cross-legged in the sun, getting low-angle shots of Mrs. Edgar. There are no tough questions from the media. The tram’s tractor is putting out a steady sweatsock-shape of blue-green exhaust. Right at the edge of the tent is where I notice that the grass is different: the grass under the tenting is a different grass, pine-green and prickly-looking, more like the St. Augustine grass of the deep U.S. South. Solid bent-over investigative journalism reveals that in fact it’s artificial grass. A huge mat of plastic artificial grass has been spread over the knoll’s real grass, under the candy-stripe tent. This may have been my only moment of complete East-Coast cynicism the whole day. A quick look under the edge of the fake grass mat reveals the real grass underneath, flattened and already yellowing.