Illusion and reality in american fiction

Popular culture, particularly television, music and other mass media assist modern Americans on a daily basis. In fact, for most of them life without radio or television seems hardly possible. Thus the omnipresent media exert an enormous influence on people's (both conscious and unconscious) mind, moulding their tastes and opinions.

John Brennecke and Robert Amich in Significance; the Struggle We share, have commented: "So, a stranger in a strange land, [a typical American adolescent] tries to find out where he is. And finds out he isn't where he thought he was. Remember his inputs. Conceptually most of them came from movies and television, some from comic books, a precious little from formal, conventional schooling, and perhaps a little from his family" (110).

According to Hall, popular culture falsifies reality and becomes an obstacle in experiencing it, which fact, eventually, fosters escapist attitudes among its consumers.1 In Mario Pernida's view, "Rather we must think of the media as if they were, in outer orbit, a sort of genetic code which controls mutation of the real into the hyperreal, just as the other, micromolecular code controls the passage of the signal from a representative sphere of meaning to the genetic sphere of the programmed signal" (365). (In many popular films mechanical impulses affect sensation centres, and incite lachrymal glands.) As pointed out by Baudrillard,

The slightest details of our behaviour are ruled by neutralised, indifferent, equivalent signs, by zero sum signs like those which regulate "game strategy" (but the genuine equation is elsewhere, and the unknown is precisely that variable of simulation which makes the atomic arsenal itself a hyperreal form, a simulacrum which dominates us all and reduces all "ground-level" events to mere ephemeral scenarios, transforming the only life left to us into survival, into a policy devaluated in advance) (367).

Similarly in J.C.Oates's story the border between the media- generated fiction marshalling inarticulate drives of the subconscious, and reality is also obliterated, with the ultimately traumatic consequences for the teenage protagonist, Connie. Since she is under the great impact of pop music, all her values, desires and dreams are akin to those presented in popular songs. So, Connie completely loses touch with reality and exists in her artificial world full of illusions. As presented by Oates, "Connie sat with her eyes closed in the sun, dreaming... and her mind slipped over onto thoughts of the boy she had been with the night before and how nice it had been, sweet and gentle, the way it was in movies and promised in songs; and when she opened her eyes she hardly knew where she was" (36). So, she constantly dreams that one day she will meet the boy who would be the external embodiment of the ideal celebrated in popular songs. With pop music accompanying her almost all the time, she has internalised the set of values promoted by the song lyrics. Joseph Wegs rightly notices: "It is the music that makes everything so good, which is always in the background, like music at the church service that has invested this bright-lit, fly-infested place with such significance. Indeed, trough the story music is given an almost mystical character, for it evokes in Connie a mysterious pleasure" (88). Connie's high esteem for romantic love and youthful beauty is visibly connected with the lyrics of teenagers' songs. In Walter Sullivan's view,

Oates's use of popular music as a thematic referent is typical also of her frequent illumination of the illusions and grotesquely false values which may arise from excessive devotion to such aspects of popular culture as rock music, movies, and romance magazines...., she employs a debased religious imagery to suggest the gods which modern society has substituted for conventional religion (78).

Bibliography

Baudrillard, J., "The Precession of Simulacra." [in:] J. Natoli & L. Hutcheon et al., A Postmodern Reader. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Brenecke, J., Amick, R., 1971, Significance: The Struggle We Share. Beverly Hills: Glencoe Press.
Hall, S., 1948, Adolescence. New York: Appleton.
Sullivan, W., 1979, "The Artificial Demon." [in:] ed. L.Wagner, Critical Essays on J.C. Oates. Boston: G.H.Hall &Company.
Wegs, J., 1979, "The Grotesque in Oates's 'Where Are Yoy Going, Where Have You Been?" , [in:] ed. L. Wagner, Crirical Essays on J.C. Oates. Boston: G.K. Hall & Company, Inc.

 

Opracowanie: Barbara Rokosz

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