Television Series as Literature 981154719X, 9789811547195

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Television Series as Literature Edited by Reto Winckler · Víctor Huertas-Martín

Television Series as Literature

Reto Winckler · Víctor Huertas-Martín Editors

Television Series as Literature

Editors Reto Winckler South China Normal University Guangzhou, China

Víctor Huertas-Martín University of Valencia Valencia, Spain

ISBN 978-981-15-4719-5 ISBN 978-981-15-4720-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4720-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Alex Linch shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgements

This book is the result of an international co-operation of quite astounding proportions. We, the editors, met once for about 20 minutes at the ESRA conference in Gdansk, ´ Poland in 2017. Two years, a few email exchanges between Spain and China and a call for papers later, we had chosen 16 out of more than 80 abstracts sent to us from around the globe. Another two years later, we are now looking at the finished chapters with awe and a deep sense of gratitude—if it isn’t amazing that these outstanding scholars, most of whom we have never met in person, have devoted hundreds of hours to writing the following chapters for this volume, then what is? Our first big thank you therefore goes out to the people whose essays make up the bulk of this volume: Juan José Bermúdez de Castro, Kelly Beck, Natalja Chestopalova, Jenna Clake, Susan Cosby-Ronnenberg, Hyo-Jeong Lee, Giancarlo Lombardi, Pedro López-Osa, Walter Metz, Arturo Mora-Rioja, Jack Nicholls, Richard O’Brien, Sarah Olive, Karen Renner, Louie Jon A. Sánchez, Lukas Schepp, Katre Talviste and Sara Tanderup Linkis. We would also like to thank our no longer anonymous peer reviewer, Sarah Cardwell, for her enthusiastic and encouraging response to our project. In addition, we would like to extend our gratitude to Prabhu

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Elangali, Manikandan Murthy, Connie Li and Sara Crowley-Vigneau at Palgrave-Macmillan for teaching us first-time editors about the ins and outs of editing and publishing a volume such as this. Reto Winckler V´ictor Huertas-Mart´in

Contents

1

Introduction: Considering Television Series as Literature Reto Winckler and Víctor Huertas-Martín

1

Part I Theory 2

“As Literature” Approaches and the Academic Canonization of Television Studies Karen J. Renner

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Toward Sphere Theory Lukas Schepp

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The Poetics of Screenwriting: Approaching the Teleplay from a Literary Perspective Pedro López-Osa

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From Frenetic to Vivid: Phenomenological Reading of Immersive Television Narratives in Black Mirror and Russian Doll Natalja Chestopalova Simone de Beauvoir Meets Walter White: Breaking Bad as Authentic Literature Kelly Beck

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CONTENTS

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Literary Remediations of Contemporary Television Series: From The Familiar to Storytel Originals Sara Tanderup Linkis

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The Literary in Television, or Why We Should Teach TV Series in Literature Departments Giancarlo Lombardi

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The Teleserye as Literature and Pangako Sa ‘Yo Louie Jon A. Sánchez

Part II 10

Practice

Rat Phones, Alligators, Lemon Pepper Wet: The New Absurd of Atlanta Jenna Clake

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Reading a Police Procedural as a Lyrical Text Katre Talviste

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Contemporary Fables in the Digital Age: A Literary Approach to Black Mirror Juanjo Bermúdez de Castro

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‘University Politics’: Change and Continuity in Representations of Higher Education Between ITV’s Series Inspector Morse and Colin Dexter’s Morse Novels Sarah Olive

167 185

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221 241

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Musical Paratexts: Song Lyrics in Television Series Arturo Mora-Rioja

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“It’s the Beauty that Hurts the Most”: Rectify as Televisual Novel Susan Cosby Ronnenberg

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“Draped in the American Flag, Burning”: Mad Men and the Literary Tradition Hyo Jeong Lee and Walter Metz

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“Read a Fucking Book!”: Reading for Redemption in Boardwalk Empire Víctor Huertas-Martín

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CONTENTS

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Shakespearean Sitcom: Upstart Crow, Shakespeare’s Plays and the Problem of Literature on Television Reto Winckler

Part III 19

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Postscript

Married at First Sight: A TV Literature Experiment Richard O’Brien and Jack Nicholls

Index

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345

Notes on Contributors

Kelly Beck was recently awarded a Master of Philosophy from the University of Queensland. Her thesis examined the relationship between philosophy and literature in the work of Simone de Beauvoir. Her current research interests focus on the way philosophical and literary experiences shape perceptions of our contemporary everyday worlds. Natalja Chestopalova is a Writer and Researcher at the Centre for Indigenous Visual Culture at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada. Her work is informed by the study of phenomenology, archival aesthetics, and psychoanalysis, and focuses on the transformative sensory experience and multimodality in film, graphic novel and theatrical site-specific performances. Jenna Clake is a Poet and academic who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham and lectures in Creative Writing at Teesside University. Her debut poetry collection, Fortune Cookie (Eyewear 2017), received the Melita Hume Prize, an Eric Gregory Award, and was shortlisted for the Somerset Maugham Award. Her pamphlet, CLAKE/ Interview for, was published by Verve in 2018. Her second full-length collection, Museum of Ice Cream, was published by Bloodaxe in 2021. Juanjo Bermúdez de Castro is a Lecturer at the University of the Balearic Islands. He has written several books and articles on political violence and the misrepresentation of minorities. His research interests are currently

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

focused on how LGBTIQ+ and Immigration Applied Theatre and Film empower minorities. Víctor Huertas-Martín received his Ph.D. from the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia and is a lecturer at the University of Valencia. His research focuses on screen-stage relations in Shakespeare adaptations and Shakespearean intertexts in contemporary TV series. His work has been published in Atlantis, Sederi, Literature/FilmQuarterly, Shakespeare Bulletin, etc. Hyo-Jeong Lee is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. She is interested in cinematic representations of memory, trauma, and history, and indexicality and spectatorship in digital media. She studies the role of cinema in creating cultural memories of war and conflict. Giancarlo Lombardi is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the College of Staten Island and at The Graduate Center. He published on Italian screen studies and American serial drama. He is the author of Rooms with a View: Feminist Diary Fiction and co-editor of Terrorism Italian Style, Remembering Aldo Moro and Italian Political Cinema. He is working on a monograph on the uses and functions of religion in serial drama from the Global North. Pedro López-Osa is doing a Ph.D.—supervised by Margarita Carretero (University of Granada)—that deals with the literary analysis and reading of the screenplay. He has contributed to the monograph on ecocriticism entitled Cultural Representations of Other-Than-Human Nature. Walter Metz is a Professor in the Department of Cinema and Photography at Southern Illinois University. He is the author of three books: Engaging Film Criticism: Film History and Contemporary American Cinema (2004), Bewitched (2007), and Gilligan’s Island (2012). His research centres on the ekphrastic relationships between film, television, novels, short stories, and theatre. He runs a website devoted to re-inventing film criticism located at: http://waltermetz.com. Arturo Mora-Rioja is Assistant Professor at KEA (Copenhagen School of Design and Technology) and Ph.D. student at the Spanish National University of Distance Education (UNED), where he obtained his M.A. in English Literature and Culture and Their Social Impact and his

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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BA in English Studies. He also holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science Engineering (UPM). A performing musician for over twenty years, his main philological research explores the relationships between music and literature. Jack Nicholls is the Author of Meat Songs (The Emma Press, 2017), and his poetry has been published in The Poetry Review, The Tangerine, and The Scores. His play Harsh Noise Wall (2019) received rehearsed readings at the Royal Court and Northern Stage, Newcastle. He lives in Manchester. Richard O’Brien has published The Emmores (The Emma Press, 2014) and A Bloody Mess (Valley Press, 2015) as a poet. He won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2017. After completing a practicebased Ph.D. on Shakespeare and the development of verse drama with the Shakespeare Institute, Richard has been a Teaching Fellow in Shakespeare and Creativity and Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham; he currently teaches early modern literature at Maynooth University. Sarah Olive is a Senior Lecturer in Education at Bangor University, UK. Her first book, Shakespeare Valued: Education Policy and Pedagogy, 1989– 2009 was published by Intellect in 2015. Her forthcoming book with Kohei Uchimaru, Adele Lee and Rosalind Fielding, Shakespeare in East Asian Education, is forthcoming with Palgrave. Previous publications on television series include work on early modern drama in ITV’s Lewis and the Shakespearean make-over in British reality television. Karen J. Renner is an Associate Professor at Northern Arizona University, where she teaches classes in American literature and popular culture, specializing in horror. Her book Evil Children in the Popular Imagination was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016, and she is currently at work on a follow-up monograph tentatively titled Killer Kids: Juvenile Homicide in U.S. Popular Culture, which is under contract with the University Press of Mississippi. Susan Cosby Ronnenberg is the Dean of the Undergraduate College at Saint Mary’s University, Winona, Minnesota, where she lives with her husband and a rescue cat. She is the Author of Deadwood and Shakespeare: The Henriad in the Old West (2018).

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Louie Jon A. Sánchez is an Assistant Professor at Ateneo de Manila University. His pioneering works on the history and reception of the teleserye or Filipino TV soap opera are in press. He is currently at work on a book-length explication of the teleserye as cultural form. Lukas Schepp earned his BFA in Film Production from NYU Tisch and his MFA in English Literature from LMU Munich. He is currently working on his Ph.D., “Identity and Consciousness in the Performative Versions of Wagner’s Nibelung’s Ring, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire”, supervised by Prof. Dr. Christoph Bode. His publications include “Kubrick’s Ambiguous Translation of Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon” and “Identity and Consciousness in Black Mirror”. Lukas Schepp has written for ZDF’s prime-time procedural The Criminologist and has created the original podcast series Lifepoints for Random House. Katre Talviste is an Estonian literary historian with research interests in poetry, translation, reception studies and literary pedagogy. She’s a coeditor of the collective monograph Histoire de la traduction littéraire en Europe médiane (2019) and the author of La poésie estonienne et Baudelaire (2011), as well as various articles, essays, textbooks, and digital study materials. She works at the educational publishing house Avita Publishers and at the University of Tartu. Sara Tanderup Linkis Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, is a postdoc at Lund University. Her research on serialization is funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. She has published articles in, e.g. Narrative, Orbis Litterarum, Image & Narrative, and Paradoxa,as well as the book Memory, Intermediality, and Literature (Routledge 2019). Reto Winckler received his Ph.D. from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and is now an associate research fellow at South China Normal University, Guangzhou. His research focuses on Shakespeare, philosophy and adaptation, especially with respect to contemporary television series. His articles have appeared in Adaptation, Shakespeare and Cahiers Élisabéthains, among others.

List of Figures

Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 7.1

Fig. 7.2

Google Ngram “Film as Literature” Google Ngram “Auteur Theory” Google Ngram “Film Studies” Google Ngram “Graphic novel” Google Ngram “Showrunner” The sphere The sphere: plot-layer The sphere: perspective-layer The sphere: style-layer The Familiar 1. Source Excerpt(s) from The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May by Mark Z. Danielewski, copyright © 2015 by Mark Z. Danielewski. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved The Familiar 2. Source Excerpt(s) from The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May by Mark Z. Danielewski, copyright © 2015 by Mark Z. Danielewski. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved

22 23 23 24 26 38 45 48 51

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List of Tables

Table 12.1 Table 12.2 Table 12.3 Table 12.4 Table 12.5

Bal’s classification of “events” and Greimas’ Actantial Model Bremond’s possibilities Technological devices as literary “power”: Greimas’ “helpers” or “opponents” Themes I. society Themes II. Identity and posthumanism

205 209 214 216 218

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Considering Television Series as Literature Reto Winckler and Víctor Huertas-Martín

This volume constitutes the first edited collection which attempts to understand television series as forms of literature. In this introduction, after giving an overview of the public and academic debate, we will try to outline what we mean by reading TV series as literature. Then, we will make an argument as to why we think this is worthwhile. To do so, we will situate our project in the context of the various disciplines traversed by it: in the main, television studies, literary studies, and adaptation studies. Our main thesis is that reading television series as literature provides valuable perspectives from which to comprehend and appreciate one of the predominant forms of popular storytelling in the twenty-first century.

R. Winckler (B) South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China V. Huertas-Martín University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Winckler and V. Huertas-Martín (eds.), Television Series as Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4720-1_1

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It might appear that it was in the last two decades or so, in line with the American-dominated global proliferation of “quality TV” series (McCabe and Akass 2008), that the literature-television association became firmly established. And it is indeed true that the association increased exponentially in public media discourse during this time period. The proliferation, which started around the year 2000 and is continuing today, has both economic and aesthetic facets. As discussed by Marc Leverette (2008) and various other critics since, it was the US-American premium pay TV network HBO which first began to push the association in marketing campaigns.1 Constructing a concept of visible authorship for original series around the concepts of a “creator” and/or “showrunner” as whose “work” the series were marketed constituted a strategic attempt to lift the cultural prestige of TV series by association. Along with this aspect of authorship as created for marketing purposes, the pervasive association with literature also resulted from a wave of formal, narrative, and aesthetic innovations in television series, a development influentially described by Jason Mittell as an increase in “complexity” (2015). And yet, as Toni de La Torre has shown (2016), the history of television series, ultimately pointing back to nineteenth-century “penny dreadfuls” and novels published in installments, as well as to the radio— which presented in its early forms serial adaptations of literary works—and to early serialized films such as Nick Carter, le roi des detectives (1908) or What Happened to Mary (1912), has from the beginning been one of collaboration between the literary and the audiovisual arts. In fact, labels such as “novel,” “play,” “teleplay,” or “audiovisual novel” have been used throughout television history to refer to programs of an exceptional quality or an overtly enlightening or educational bent, to series displaying literary or theatrical credentials, a distinctive script by some prestigious writer or producer or a specific socio-political commitment, or even just to shows which required sustained interest from the viewer. As Sarah Cardwell indicates, the best television has frequently been seen to be “non-televisual” (2002, 34). For many, such “non-televisual” qualities are synonymous with literariness. In the public discourse, we can roughly distinguish three camps, each composed of writers, journalists, fans, users, and intellectuals, when it comes to exploring the potential literariness of contemporary TV series. The first camp takes the association of and collaboration between literature and television seriously and often endorses

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the perceived literariness of television series as an indication of “quality” (Doherty 2012). Members of the second camp, by contrast, are critical of the popular associations made between television and literature. Laure Miller, for instance, regards comparisons between TV series and nineteenth-century novels as “facile cocktail-party insight” (2012). The third camp takes the comparison humorously. Argentinian writer Rodrigo Fresán summarizes anxieties about the comparison in these terms: “Hardly a week passes without some renowned intellectual saying: ‘Were Cervantes/Shakespeare/Austen/Dickens/Dumas/Proust alive today, they would be writing scripts for HBO’” (2014, 76). Michael Sean Robinson and Joy DeLyria’s piece of faux criticism Down in the Hole: The Unwired World of H. B. Ogden, on the other hand, involves a “serious” analysis of a mock-nineteenth-century source for The Wire (2002–2008). Containing literary discussions of the televisual strategies in works by Mark Twain, Victor Hugo, etc., this piece constitutes a hilariously creative satirical intervention, which nonetheless, to our mind, ultimately contributes to proving the viability and value of looking at television through a literary lens. The collaborative camp, to which our book ultimately—if not uncritically—belongs, proposes embracing and pursuing the relation between literature and television in both creative and scholarly formats, through acknowledging the similarities of increasingly complex television with works of literature and/or establishing connections between TV seriality and literary works (Velarde 2012; Doherty 2012; Agresta 2012; de Biasio 2017). Writers such as David Foster Wallace, Mark Z. Danielewski, Jorge Carrión, Salman Rushdie, and others have publicly acknowledged the influence of television series on their literary works. Therefore, we agree with Ana de Biasio that, “if used as a wide-ranging analytical tool… the association of television series with literature, and in particular with the novel,… can prove to be productive” (2017). In light of how commonly the comparison of television series to works of literature has been made in the past twenty years in public discourse, it seems surprising that so far there has been so little academic engagement with the notion. Exceptions are few and far between. In his co-edited volume, Thomas Elsaesser argued that “literature on television [couldn’t] merely be a matter of making the classics and the bestsellers accessible to the broader public on literature’s own terms”; rather, he claimed that the development of “a new understanding of literature itself, or at any rate, a

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recognition that literature [was] undergoing mutations in its social existence and consequently in its definition” (1994a, 91–92) was in order. Jorge Carrión, for his part, defines television series as “expanded literature,” taking into account their insertion in a macrocosm of multiplied languages and vehicles of transmission (2011, 46). However, with the exception of a special issue of the journal TV/Series edited by Shannon Wells-Lasagne in 2017 and a few isolated books and articles which mostly focus on a single series,2 scholars have largely refrained from making the connection, much less theorize it in any detail. This is in spite of the fact that works of literature feature prominently not just in extra-academic critical discussions and fan discourses about many series and in the promotional paratexts accompanying them, but also in the televisual texts themselves, and in spite of the obvious interest on the part of many literary scholars to engage with this exciting and relevant form of narrative art. While the reasons for the above-mentioned academic oversight are complex, it is clearly related to the various disciplines involved in the academic discussion of television series. As Amanda Lotz and Jonathan Gray (2019) have outlined, the field of television studies has grown out of the sociologically inflected tradition of critical media studies and cultural studies in the 1970s and 1980s, resulting in a strong focus on questions of power and a close attention to the social contexts and conditions of television production and reception. Seminal works such as John Fiske and John Hartley’s Reading Television (1988 [1978]), Robert C. Allen’s introduction to Channels of Discourse, Reassembled (1992 [1987]) and John Fiske’s Television Culture (2012 [1987]) reinforced TV studies’ movement away from literature in favor of the sociological and cultural angles pursued by communication studies. Aesthetic and evaluative approaches to television series have played a relatively minor role in the field (Jacobs and Peacock 2013, 2; Mittell 2009). Much of this development can be read as motivated by the routine derision of television programs as “low” or “mass” culture in the early years of television by cultural authorities and old-fashioned literary scholars, who, operating under the precepts of New Criticism, celebrated canonical works of literature as supreme examples of human achievement without sufficiently interrogating the cultural and political origins of their own criteria of judgment. As a result, a perceived gap opened up between television series and works of literature, to the point where, as Thomas Elsaesser has put

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it, “to mention television and literature in one sentence is… to touch a raw nerve in our cultural sensitivities” (1994b, 137). This phenomenon can be seen to cut in two directions. While from the point of view of television studies as understood by Gray and Lotz, using literature as a lens for reading TV series might appear as an act of disciplinary usurpation or a questionable attempt to “legitimize” an elite subset of television series by moving them up in an exclusionary hierarchy of cultural forms, rather than attacking the hierarchy itself (Newman and Levine 2012, 3), a traditionally minded literary scholar might ask why people who study literature would want to squander their time and energy writing about TV series. We hope that framing the issue in this (highly simplified) way makes it evident that such attitudes are obsolete, even if their shadows still linger. The hierarchy of value which underlies both literary canons and the division between high and low/popular culture has been thoroughly critiqued throughout the humanities (Dasgupta 2012). Literary studies itself has been transformed by the influence of the paradigms and politics of cultural studies, especially cultural materialism, feminism, and post-colonialism. Rather than havens of reactionary elitism, literature departments, at least in the Anglophone world, are now frequently at the forefront of radical progressive politics. As a result of these developments, forms of literature which had been traditionally regarded as beneath the dignity of a literary scholar, such as travel writing, pulp, and genre fiction, are now routinely studied alongside Shakespeare and other canonical authors, and the canonicity of the latter group has itself become an object of critical analysis rather than a reason for unquestioning veneration. Likewise, literary studies have embraced convergence, transmedia, remediation, electronic literature, hyper-textuality, and technology-based literary modes, all of which challenge dominant notions of literature. In saying that we want to study television series as literature, our purpose is thus not to return to either down- or upgrading specific TV series with regard to their alleged literary qualities or lack thereof. Rather, we are interested in closely attending to a broad range of television series in the same serious and respectful manner which has been traditionally afforded to canonical works of literature, and to explore in these series issues traditionally associated with literature and its study. The essays in this volume analyse how aspects of the poetic, literary intertextuality, meta-literature, literary genres, conceptions of authorship, scriptwriting, the mobilization of literary competence and knowledge, and the series’

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treatment of reading and books as a theme interact with and influence the form and production of television series and transform the strategies of appealing to viewers in the current century. Following critical models such as the one proposed in Sarah Cardwell’s Adaptation Revisited (2002), our book does not treat literature and TV series as opposites but as elements in continuous relation. In addition to the de-canonization of the term “literature,” this perspective also utilizes two other closely related developments, which again stem from the conceptual revolutions which began in the 1960s: the expansion of the term “text” and the corresponding shift in the definition of “literature.” In the course of the transformation of literary studies outlined above, it became apparent that the concept of literature itself could be properly understood only if it was regarded as referring at least as much to a way of attending to a particular text as to any particular quality inherent in the text itself. As summed up by Jonathan Culler, the seminal work of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and others shows that there are no straightforward necessary and sufficient conditions for determining whether a text is “literature” or not based on any properties inherent to that text itself. This realization has had the effect of redirecting critical attention from the question “What is literature?” to “What is involved in treating things as literature in our culture?” (Culler 1997, 22, original emphasis). In the context of the relevant academic disciplines today, the categorizing term “literature” thus comes to function as “a tool for opening and working on real texts” (Rainsford 2014, 44); what is and is not “literature” is at least as much a result of a special kind of attention given to a text, a certain attitude with which it is approached, as anything that is inherent to that text (Culler 1997, 25). Since a “text,” in the semiotic sense developed by scholars like Barthes and Yuri Lotman now used pervasively in film and TV studies as well as in literary studies, is “any item of culture that users deem to have enough coherence to treat as a single object” (Gray and Lotz 2019, 90), there seems to be no prima facie reason, from a theoretical point of view, why one should not decide to treat and analyze the texts of television series as forms of literature. A common objection to approaching TV series from a literary angle is the one formulated by Jason Mittell in his seminal book on complex TV (2015). Formulating a position shared by Gray and Lotz, Mittel states at the very beginning of the book that in spite of the fact that the poetics he draws on were first developed in literary studies (and film

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studies), and that the connection between TV series and works of literature is so commonly drawn, televisual and literary complexity should not be mixed up. Mittell’s declared goal is to develop a way to “think about contemporary television storytelling on its own terms, rather than in the language of literature or film” (2015, 52), because, in his view, what makes complex series distinct are features unique to the medium and genre. The mistrust evident here toward the idea of applying tools and ideas from literary scholarship to television series can be read as a variant of a tendency evident in film studies, whose practitioners, in a bid to distinguish their field from the established discipline of literary studies out of whose shadow it emerged, have likewise commonly insisted that film, constituting an art form in its own right, should be analyzed on its own terms. However, at the same time, film studies has also made extensive use of literary conceptions of authorship (which morphed into auteurship) in order to heighten the prestige of their own discipline by association (see Karen Renner’s essay in this volume), in a similar manner to how the “creator” or “show runner” emerged as an authorial figure in public discourse about TV, as noted above (Mittel 2015, ch 3; Newman and Levine 2012). In Marxism and Literature, Raymond Williams pointed at the dangers of restricting the concept of literature to a single medium rather than regarding it as a set of active practices (1977, 158–160). In fact, he foresaw, long before Elsaesser and his co-contributors predicted a change in literature, that the literary craft would move beyond pen and paper and dissolve into new media (163). In light of the recent developments of electronic literature, transmedia, hyper-textuality, and various forms of digital and web-based literature (see Katherine Hayles 2008; Henry Jenkins 2006; Vicente Luis Mora 2012; Scott Rettberg 2019, etc.), Williams’s prophecy has hit the nail on the head. A similar dissolution of forms might arguably be proposed for television scripts, which by nature straddle the realms of literature and television. For this reason, as Ronan Ludot-Vlasak says, “To limit the exploration of television series only to the methods developed by media studies–whose validity of interest is not to be questioned–… deprives one of an insight into what these objects say about literature and its capacity to leave its own territory” (2017). It is our point of view that, like sociological and aesthetic or evaluative approaches to TV series, Mittel’s criteria for assessing the poetics of complex TV on its own terms, television studies’ sociologically inflected approaches and tools and concepts derived from literary studies can

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jointly contribute to understanding TV series’ current ubiquity. As Gray and Lotz acknowledge, “other disciplines would be remiss in their duties if they did not study it [television] at times” (Gray and Lotz 2019, 71). Our volume intends to bring literature back into play in the interpretation of TV series, arguing that literary theory and television-specific approaches can complement each other, rather than being in competition or mutually exclusive. The discipline which has most prominently and explicitly linked literature and audiovisual texts (primarily film, but also television series) is adaptation studies. As influentially put by Linda Hutcheon, adaptation can be understood as both a process of “transcoding” (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 2013, 8) which is “a creative and an interpretive act” (8), and as the artistic product of this process, “an acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works” (8). While adaptation studies has significantly broadened its scope over the past two decades (Leitch 2017; Cardwell 2018) to include transpositions between all kinds of media, for most of the discipline’s history it was, and to a significant extent still is, mainly concerned with how novels are adapted into films–that is, in how literary texts become audiovisual ones (Bluestone 1957; McFarlane 1996; Cartmell and Whelehan 2007). Many of the essays collected in this volume are, accordingly, inspired by and indebted to the work of adaptation study scholars, among them Linda Hutcheon, Sarah Cardwell (2002), and the group of contributors to Shannon Wells-Lasagne’s special issue. Yet while adaptation studies focuses on the relation of a given film or television series with its literary sources, the essays in this volume explore the literariness of television series themselves. What all the essays collected in this volume share is a desire to shed light on the complex interweaving of literary works and concepts with the audiovisual texts of contemporary television series, an interweaving so far only informally discussed. Since we conceive of this book as an attempt at opening up of an area of enquiry, no unified methodology or theoretical framework was imposed on the contributors. On the contrary, we encouraged every one of our essayists to bring their own perspective and academic background to bear on the issue of the literariness of television series. Likewise, we did not dictate which television series were to be put under scrutiny. To our considerable delight, this has resulted in a broad focus, which, while tilting toward the anglophone primetime drama series which have traditionally dominated critical writing on

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the subject, also features chapters on detective and police shows, reality shows, comedy dramas, sitcoms, and soap operas. In light of the skepticism with which literary approaches to television series have been greeted in the past, we start the volume with an essay which discusses some of the root causes of that skepticism in the academic context. The first section, “Theory,” starts with Karen Renner’s examination of the canonization process to which television studies as an academic discipline has been subjected. Taking into account precedents such as film and comic book studies, Renner describes the processes of legitimizing television series and their study in the humanities through the association with literature, as well as their ideological consequences. This is followed by Lukas Schepp’s contribution, which bridges the gap between creative and critical writing, introducing sphere theory—at once a methodology to critically analyze theme, setting, character, plot, narrative perspective, and style as strata in corpuses of fiction works from both television and print media, and a systematic guide to the writing of teleplays. Pedro López-Osa then departs from prescriptive scriptwriting manuals and blueprint theory in his chapter on screenwriting. He examines two teleplays to support his argument that such scripts can be read as creative works beyond the exigencies of the end-product. Natalja Chestopalova explores the series Black Mirror (Channel Four, 2011–2014; Netflix, 2016–2019) and Russian Doll (Netflix, 2019–) from the perspective of literary phenomenology, arguing for a greater appreciation of the potentialities of intense, prolonged viewing—aka “binge watching”—and the effects of immersion and absorption they produce: watching complex TV series, in her argument, allows the viewer to experience and cognitively address complex emotional phenomena in ways similar to reading literary fiction. Relying on the philosophy of existential freedom as developed by Simone de Beauvoir, Kelly Beck’s chapter challenges the hegemonic notion that potential artistic freedom lies solely in the outside world and places it in the intimate space of the home to interconnect reading and viewing experiences—a connection so strong that the viewer, Beck argues, may be drawn into the unfolding of televisual narrative processes in ways which potentially rearticulate her/his attitudes and stances toward freedom in the literary and the televisual realms. Sara Tanderup Linkis shows that derivative relations between TV series and literature, often conceived as a one-way street in which televisual borrows from literary fiction, aren’t unproblematic or straightforward at all. Focusing on two examples of contemporary literary fiction—Mark Z. Danielewski’s The

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Familiar (2015–2017) and the Swedish audiobook Storytel series— Tanderup Linkis traces the increasing influence that TV series exert on literary texts, exploring the difficulties and potentialities of creative literary transference across media. Basing his contribution on pedagogical practice, Giancarlo Lombardi in turn uses the concepts of “thickness” and “plurality”—rather than Mittell’s “complexity”—to closely read intertextuality in television series, detecting “areas of porosity” which permit literary interpretation beyond surface readings. The section concludes with Louie Jon A. Sánchez’s historical reflections on the Filipino teleserye’s affiliation with the local drama and novel. In the context of the ongoing decolonization process in the Philippines, the essay argues that appreciating television series as literary works can serve progressive political purposes. In the case studies assembled in the second section, “Practice,” the contributors consider television series through a variety of literary lenses. Jenna Clake reads Atlanta (FX, 2016–2018) in light of contemporary absurdist poetry, highlighting the oft-neglected lyrical potential of television series while situating Atlanta’s poetical absurdity in the context of racial, political, and existential considerations. Katre Talviste likewise explores the lyrical quality of television in her reading of the police procedural NCIS (CBS, 2003–2020). Focusing on an analysis of the show’s non-narrative motives from the perspective of poetry, Talviste shows how the overall meaning of the show emerges from the combination of narrative and lyrical modes. Juan José Bermúdez de Castro then employs narratological tools to understand Black Mirror episodes as televisual fables. For Bermúdez de Castro, the dystopian series relies on the fable’s moralizing gaze to create its social and political impact. Sarah Olive outlines the complex webs of non-linear adaptation in her chapter on the novels and TV episodes (ITV, 1987–2000) which collectively form the Inspector Morse phenomenon. In showing that the TV episodes are more overtly political than the novels, and that this political quality worked as a magnet to audiences, Olive questions the received wisdom that successful televisual adaptations of literature dumb down their sources. In Arturo Mora-Rioja’s chapter, the paratextual functions of songs in sitcoms and drama series are examined. Mora-Rioja distinguishes various levels of interaction of songs and texts in the series and proves that seemingly peripheral songs often exert a powerful impact on the series in which they can be heard. Susan C. Ronnenberg compares the reading experience of contemporary novels with the experience of

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viewing Rectify (Sundance TV, 2013–2016), focusing on aspects such as the meditative tone, slow pace, and character analysis evident in both, pointing out points of divergence related mainly to the sets of cognitive skills required for the reading and the viewing process. Ultimately, for Ronnenberg, watching a television series cannot (yet) be equated with reading a novel. The next two essays focus on the significance of linking literature to contemporary critique. Walter C. Metz and Hyujeong Lee argue that the sprawling intertextual quality of Mad Men (AMC, 2007–2015) necessitates a new, free form of criticism. Situating the central character, Don Draper, in a vast web of literary references and historical traditions, Metz and Lee cast the series as a work of art in which the distinctions between literature and television become irrelevant. Víctor HuertasMartín explores the literary substratum of Boardwalk Empire (HBO, 2010–2014). Drawing from trauma theory and narratology, HuertasMartín’s results reveal that embedded literary texts address traumaredemption dialectics differently according to sex, gender, and race in this popular gangster series. Reto Winckler’s chapter focuses on the clash between the popular medium of television and William Shakespeare’s supposedly elevated literary art in the BBC sitcom Upstart Crow (2016– 2020). Winckler argues that the show constitutes an attempt to reclaim Shakespeare for popular entertainment—a process which ironically results in sitcom becoming literature. Finally, in “Postscript,” the poet-researcher Richard O’Brien and poet Jack Nicholls co-author a “self-directed reception study” of their own sonnet sequence written in response to their viewing of the reality show Married at First Sight (FYI, 2014–2016). Taking the antithetical ontology of the sonnet as their vantage point, they follow the show’s images to capture its inherent contradictions and absurdities. By letting televisual images suggest literary ones, the poets extract the literary substance of television. Through their poetic mediation, the characters appear fairer, more complex, the contents more imaginative and creative. Crucially, this last contribution therefore proves that “as literature” approaches to TV don’t necessarily serve hegemonic purposes—indeed, more often than not they do the opposite by posing questions about and offering alternatives to our relationships with the screens that surround us. Overall, we hope that the essays collected in this volume show that we can grasp the literariness of television series through the careful and attentive use of our critical gaze.

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Notes 1. We begin with the USA and HBO because our book focuses strongly (if not exclusively) on TV series which were produced and broadcast after 2000. Yet, as we elaborate below, the term “quality TV” itself has a much longer history, as has the association of literature and TV series, especially in the European context. See Jancovich and Lyons (2003). 2. Jorge Carrión’s Teleshakespeare contains analyses of eighteen television series through a literary lens and presents key principles to theorize relations between television series and literature based on the TV series’ debt to literary tradition, readerly recognition of character types, etc. (2011). Sarah Clarke Stuart’s Literary Lost (2011) presents a sustained series of case studies on the literary sources of Lost . Spanish publisher Errata Naturae’s collection The Wire: 10 Dosis de la Mejor Serie de Televisión focuses on David Simon and Ed Burns’ The Wire and features articles by various writers and literary scholars as well as an interview with David Simon and Simon’s own account of the creative process. Susan C. Ronnenberg’s monograph Deadwood and Shakespeare (2018) examines Shakespearean intertexts in David Milch’s HBO series. Wells-Lasagne’s special issue on literature and television in TV/Series (2017) compiles three critical strands: (a) conventional source-centered analyses of adaptations of literary and non-literary texts; (b) analyses of the “readerly” and the “writerly” aspects of television series, following Barthes’ terminology, which challenge the viewer and grant power to the creator; c) analyses “beyond adaptation,” which intend to emancipate television series’ relations with single sources and place intertextual allusion embodied in actors and aspects of the narrative beyond the written text.

References Agresta, Michael. 2012. “‘Girls,’ ‘Mad Men,’ and the Future of TV-asLiterature.” The Atlantic, June 15. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertain ment/archive/2012/06/girls-mad-men-and-the-future-of-tv-as-literature/ 258469/.

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Allen, Robert C. 1992. “Introduction to the Second Edition: More Talk About TV”. In Channels of Discourse, Reassembled (Television and Contemporary Criticism), 2nd ed., edited by Robert C. Allen, 1–30. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Bluestone, George. 1957. Novels into Film. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Cardwell, Sarah. 2002. Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. ———. 2018. “Pause, Rewind, Replay: Adaptation, Intertextuality and (Re)defining Adaptation Studies.” In The Routledge Companion to Adaptation, edited by Dennis Clutchins, Katja Krebs, and Eckart Voigts, 7–17. London and New York: Routledge. Carrión, Jorge. 2011. Teleshakespeare. Madrid: Errata Naturae. Cartmell, Deborah, and Imelda Whelehan. 2007. “Introduction: Literature on Screen: A Synoptic View.” In The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, edited by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, 1–12. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Culler, Jonathan. 1997. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dasgupta, Sudeep. 2012. “Policing the People. Television Studies and the Problem of ‘Quality’”. NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies 1 (1): 35–53. http://www.necsus-ejms.org/policing-the-people-television-stu dies-and-the-problem-of-quality-by-sudeep-dasgupta/ (accessed 13 August 2020). De Biasio, Ana. 2017. “Contemporary Television Series and Literature: An Intense, Transformative Embrace.” Fushion Magazine (Global Art, Words and Music), August 8. https://www.fusionmagazine.org/contemporary-televi sion-series-and-literature-an-intense-transformative-embrace/. De La Torre, Toni. 2016. Historia de Las Series de Televisión. Barcelona: Roca Editorial de Libros SL. Doherty, Thomas. 2012. “Storied TV: Cable is the New Novel.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 17. https://www.chronicle.com/article/CableIs-the-New-Novel/134420. Elsaesser, Thomas. 1994a. “Introduction.” In Writing for the Medium: Television in Transition, edited by Thomas Elsaesser, Jan Simons, and Lucette Bronk, 91–97. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. ———. 1994b. “Literature After Television: Author, Authority, Authenticity.” In Writing for the Medium (Television in Transition), edited by Thomas Elsaesser, Jan Simons, and Lucette Bronk, 137–148. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Fiske, John. 2012 [1987]. Television Culture. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge.

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Fiske, John, and John Hartley. 1988 [1978]. Reading Television. Bungay, Suffolk: Richard Clay Ltd. Fresán, Roberto. 2014. “Baltimore Time.” In The Wire: 10 Dosis de la Mejor Serie de Televisión, edited by Errata Naturae, 75–90. Madrid: Errata Naturae. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2008. Electronic Literature (New Horizons for the Literary). Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame. Hutcheon, Linda with Siobhan O’Flynn. 2013. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge. Jacobs, Jason, and Steven Peacock. 2013. “Introduction.” In Television Aesthetics and Style, edited by Jason Jacobs and Steven Peacock, 1–20. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Jancovich, Mark, and James Lyons (ed.). 2003. Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry and Fans. London: British Film Institute. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture (Where Old and New Media Collide). New York and London: New York University Press. Leverette, Marc. 2008. “Introduction: The Not TV Industry”. In It’s Not TV: Watching HBO in the Post-Television Era, edited by Marc Laverette, Brian L. Ott, and Cara Louise Buckley, 13–17. New York and London: Routledge. Leitch, Thomas. 2017. “Introduction.” The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, edited by Thomas Leitch, 1–22. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lotz, Amanda D., and Jonathan Gray. 2019. Television Studies. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity. Ludot-Vlasak, Ronan. 2017. “Les Séries Télévisées au Prisme de L’intertextualité: Quelques Perspectives sur les Frontières du Littéraire.” TV/Series (Littérature et Series Télévisées), no. 12. https://journals.openedition.org/tvseries/2183. McCabe, Janet, and Kim Akass. 2008. “It’s Not TV, It’s HBO’s Original Programming Producing Quality.” InIt’s Not TV, Watching HBO in the PostTelevision Era, edited by Marc Leverette, Brian L. Ott, and Cara Louise Buckley, 83–94. New York and London: Routledge. Mc Farlane, Brian. 1996. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Miller, Laura. 2012. “‘The Wire’ Is NOT Like Dickens (Stop Comparing the HBO Series to Victorian Novels, Already!)”. Salon, September 13. https:// www.salon.com/2012/09/13/the_wire_is_not_like_dickens/. Mittell, Jason. 2009. “Lost in a Great Story: Evaluation in Narrative Television (and Television Studies).” In Reading Lost: Perspectives on a Hit Television Show, edited by Roberta Pearson, 119–138. London: I.B. Tauris. ———. 2015. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York and London: New York University Press. Mora, Vicente Luis. 2012. El lectoespectador (Deslizamientos entre literatura e imagen). Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, S.A.

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Newman, Michael Z., and Elana Levine. 2012. Legitimating Television. New York and Oxon: Routledge. Rainsford, Dominic. 2014. Studying Literature in English: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge. Rettberg, Scott. 2019. Electronic Literature. Medford, MA and Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Robinson, Sean Michael, and Joe DeLyria. 2011. “When It’s Not Your Turn (The Quintessentially Victorian Vision of Ogden’s The Wire).” The Hooded Utilitarian, March. https://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2011/03/whenits-not-your-turn-the-quintessentially-victorian-vision-of-ogdens-the-wire/. Ronnenberg, Susan C. 2018. Deadwood and Shakespeare: The Henriad in the Old West. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Stuart, Sarah Clarke. 2011. Literary Lost: Viewing Television Through the Lens of Literature. London: Continuum. Velarde, Robert. 2012. “Television as the New Literature: Understanding and Evaluating the Medium”. CRI , September 26. https://www.equip.org/art icle/television-as-the-new-literature-understanding-and-evaluating-the-med ium/. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Television Series Mentioned Atlanta. 2016–2018. Directed by Hiro Murai, Donald Glover et al. Written by Donald Glover, Stephen Glover et al. United States: FX. Black Mirror. 2011–2019. Directed by Charlie Brooker et al. Written by Charlie Brooker et al. United Kingdom: Channel Four. United States: Netflix. Boardwalk Empire. 2010–2014. Directed by Various Directors. Written by Terence Winter et al. United States: HBO. Inspector Morse. 1987–2000. Directed by Various Directors. Written by Various. Writers. United Kingdom: ITV. Mad Men. 2007–2015. Directed by Various Directors. Written by Matthew Weiner et al. United States: AMC. Married at First Sight. 2014–2016. United States: FYI. Rectify. 2013–2016. Directed by Ray McKinnon et al. Written by Ray McKinnon. United States: Sundance TV. Russian Doll. 2019–. Directed by Natasha Lyonne, Leslye Headland and Jamie Babbit. Written by Natasha Lyonne, Amy Poehler, Leslye Headland et al. United States: Netflix. NCIS. 2003–2020. Directed by Donald P. Bellisario et al. Written by Donald P. Bellisario and Don McGill. United States: CBS.

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Upstart Crow. 2016–2020. Directed by Matt Lipsey and Richard Boden. Written by Ben Elton. United Kingdom: BBC2. The Wire. 2002–2008. Directed by various directors. Written by David Simon. United States. HBO.

PART I

Theory

CHAPTER 2

“As Literature” Approaches and the Academic Canonization of Television Studies Karen J. Renner

As its title indicates, this book seeks to answer if and how current-day television series can be read as forms of literature. This chapter takes a step back to ask why we might want to do so in the first place. What does an “as literature” approach imply about the current state of Television Studies, and how might it impact the status of television and its study? Fortunately, scholars of other art forms—such as film and comics—have also faced these questions, and we can gain much by studying the history of these fields. What we learn is that “as literature” approaches seem to be a necessary stage in the “academic canonization” of new art forms in the humanities, the process by which new disciplines become standard fields of study. As this chapter argues, the predominance of “as literature” approaches to television implies that the canonization of Television

K. J. Renner (B) Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Winckler and V. Huertas-Martín (eds.), Television Series as Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4720-1_2

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Studies within the humanities is still very much in process; however, the recent rise in scholarship pointing out the problems with such approaches suggests that the field is also entering an important next stage, when Television Studies will no longer need to rely on other, more established art forms for legitimization. It is not only the humanities that must reshape its boundaries to accommodate new fields, of course; all new disciplines undergo a comparable process as they carve out their academic niches. Donald C. Hambrick and Ming-Jer Chen, for example, who studied the history of Strategic Management, argue that any developing academic area must balance two seemingly contradictory needs at once: “differentiat[ing] itself from other existing fields, making claims about how a class of important problems cannot be solved by these status quo entities,” and “build[ing] legitimacy in the eyes of the academic establishment ... by adherence to the norms, styles, and standards of adjacent established fields” (2008, 35). In other words, all new disciplines must prove themselves sufficiently unique to warrant inclusion while at the same time demonstrating that they bear some resemblance to already approved fields. Academic canonization takes on a particular shape in the humanities, where fields tend to revolve around the so-called high arts—art forms that command unquestioned cultural capital. In order to demonstrate that a new form of art warrants inclusion in the humanities, scholars first have to demonstrate that it has qualities similar to these already established art forms. This stage of canonization often involves the introduction of individual texts that have earned cultural status into already established disciplines. Art Spiegelman’s Maus , for example, earned inclusion in The Norton Anthology of American Literature in 2007 after it had been incorporated into individual classes and served as the subject of scholarship (Loman 2010). One can see a similar progression with the field of Children’s Literature, a subject area first taken up by scholars in already established fields until it had gained sufficient status to become its own recognized discipline. Catherine Butler points out that whereas “those writing about children’s literature once typically emigrated from other fields of research and practice (adult literature, education, cultural studies etc.),” the field is now recognized as a legitimate subject of study for earlycareer academics, which they consider a sign of “children’s literature’s maturity as an academic discipline” (2014, 2).

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Not surprisingly, at some point during canonization, scholars working within the new field begin to protest the imposition of critical approaches from without, rightly asserting that such approaches ignore the new art form’s unique features and sideline its most idiosyncratic texts. Claims like these—which are steeped in arguments for medium specificity—are also an important stage of canonization, for they justify the need for specialized scholars who understand the unique features of the art form; the creation of dedicated courses, then minors, majors, and eventually graduate degrees; the founding of academic societies, journals, and book series; and perhaps “the formation of new arts-educational departments, such as film, video, photography” (Carroll 1985, 17). Canonization in the humanities thus resembles mitosis: an area first expands to include individual examples of new art forms and then, when the art form has gained enough recognition and interest to exist independently, the subfield splits off to become its own autonomous discipline.1 Once their territory has been carefully staked out, scholars can interrogate the politics of canonization as well as the purposeful and incidental industrial and technological changes that have fostered the “rise” of the art form. This stage is well under way in Television Studies and informs this collection’s “as literature” approach. The forms of art to most recently seek academic canonization in the humanities—such as film, video games, and television—are distinctive in that they are technologies as well as economically lucrative commodities. These characteristics have led to them being treated with suspicion. Writing from the field of Video Game Studies, Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca, argue that there is an almost instinctive skepticism leveled at new media. … Many issues factor into the battle for cultural acceptance that most new media must fight. Some are formal, for example, a strong visual basis usually does not help, as this hints that the medium may be one suited for the illiterate; others are social, for instance, the perceived intentions of the producers. Media that are seen as primarily market-driven fare poorly in the quest for acceptance as a culturally valuable activity. (2013, 158)

Like video games, television thus starts out with several strikes against it. Therefore, it is no surprise that Television Studies has depended on “as literature” approaches for legitimation.

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Fig. 2.1 Google Ngram “Film as Literature”

Film once faced similar scrutiny. Although it came into existence at the end of the nineteenth century and colleges and universities began introducing classes on film into their curricula as early as 1915 (Polan 2008, 93), the incorporation of film into the humanities came much later. It was only during the 1960s that the field really took off, with the formation of the Society for Cinematologists in 1959 (later renamed the Society for Cinema Studies in 1968). Furthermore, aside from Film Quarterly (1945–), Cahiers du Cinéma (1951–), and Screen (1952–), the most well-known film journals still in existence were founded in the 1960s and 1970s, including what would become the official publication of the SCMS, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (1961–), as well as Film Comment (1962–), Cineaste (1967–), The Velvet Light Trap (1971–), Jump Cut (1974–), and Camera Obscura (1976–). The flourishing of Film Studies coincided with the promulgation of approaches that drew connections to other art forms, primarily theater and literature.2 Prominent among them was auteur theory,3 which proposes that directors exercise the same sort of creative control over their films as an author does over a literary text, and “film as literature” approaches that privileged narrative over cinematic qualities. Using Google Ngram Viewer, an online search engine that graphs the frequency of phrases in an enormous corpus of books, we can see that the term “Film Studies” became more commonplace after “film as literature” and “auteur studies” grew in usage. “As literature” approaches helped to confer status on both film and Film Studies, allowing the study of film in the humanities to become more acceptable (Figs. 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3). Fifty-ish years later, universities now host departments dedicated to both the production and study of film, and the two are even seen as

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Fig. 2.2 Google Ngram “Auteur Theory”

Fig. 2.3 Google Ngram “Film Studies”

mutually dependent endeavors, with the study of film art now considered essential to its artful production. Comics Studies is in a far earlier stage of canonization. The cultural reputation of comics rose sharply during the 1990s, signaled (and in turn aided) by the awarding of a Pulitzer to Spiegelman for Maus in 1992. Over the next decade, Comics Studies became an increasingly familiar fixture of the higher education landscape, such that Paul Buhle could announce “The New Scholarship of Comics” in The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2003; the number of comics-related MA theses and doctoral dissertations would reach double-digits two years later (Steirer 2011, 266). As with Film Studies, the artistic reputation of comics and the academic reputability of Comics Studies were both aided by “as literature” approaches, indicated by the use of the term “graphic novel,”

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Fig. 2.4 Google Ngram “Graphic novel”

which first entered the cultural vocabulary in the mid-1980s and increased dramatically after the year 2000 (Fig. 2.4). The term, Hilary Chute claimed in her 2008 PMLA article “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative,” was “urgently needed ... as a label that could distinguish serious, adult work from comics for children” (452). Chute’s language suggests that only certain comics deserve the status of art, namely the “graphic narratives” of her subtitle, which not so coincidentally also bear the strongest resemblance to that more respectable cousin of the comic—literature. Chute also chose as objects of study Joe Sacco’s Palestine (2001) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2002), texts that could also bring diversity to the curriculum and thus serve another important mission of the humanities. Protests against “as literature” approaches to comics, however, were already being voiced by creators and scholars alike. When Alan Meskin posed the question of “Comics as Literature?” in an article for the British Journal of Aesthetics published just a year after Chute’s, he had different intentions, including a careful consideration of the ways that “as literature” approaches could be harmful to the field. Meskin notably quotes one of the foremost creators in the field, Alan Moore, author of Watchmen (1986–1987), From Hell (1989–1996), and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999–2000), whose objections are grounded in medium specificity: “Rather than seizing upon the superficial similarities between comics and films or comics and books in the hope that some of the respectability of those media will rub off upon us, wouldn’t it be more constructive to focus our attention upon those ideas where comics are special and unique?” (2009, 223). Other critics, such as Gregory

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Steirer (2011) and Bart Beaty (2017), also noted that “as literature” approaches led to a problematic hierarchizing of works in the field, such as that found in Chute’s essay, as well as a limited canon. Such protests undoubtedly aided the creation of specialized journals, including Studies in Comics (2011–), The Comics Grid (2011–), and The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (2011–), and dedicated book series from the University Press of Mississippi, Rutgers, Palgrave Macmillan, and Bloomsbury, most of which appeared in the 2010s (Aldama 2018).4 Suggestively, however, the editors of the 2017 Cambridge Companion to the field— the publication of which serves as a weighty marker of canonization in the humanities—still chose to use the term “graphic novel” rather than “comics” in their title. The academic canonization of Television Studies is harder to track, largely because television, like video games, was first taken up by the social sciences. Because of this, Bruce E. Gronbeck could claim in 1988 that the field was already twenty years old (345). Significantly, however, Gronbeck’s review was published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, a communications journal. Canonization in the humanities has taken far longer. Writing in 1994, Michelle Hilmes claimed that “television history and criticism is just now entering its first decade as a legitimate field of research” (793). Even Horace Newcomb, whose 1974 book TV: The Most Popular Art is frequently cited as one of the first in the field, agrees with this later date, noting that the Journal of Television and New Media Studies, the first scholarly journal that “approximate[d] the ‘television studies’ designation,” was launched in 2000 (2005, 15); it would be joined a year after the publication of Newcomb’s article by Critical Studies in Television (2006–). One could also look to job postings as further evidence; only 6 out of 67 tenure-track job postings on the SCMS job list mentioned Television Studies in 2000, but by 2010 that figure had risen to 11 out of 31 (Newman and Levine 2012, 158). As with Comics Studies, the flourishing of Television Studies was accompanied by a rise in the cultural status of television itself. Arguments for the artistic potential of television—or at least certain types of television—began to proliferate during the later twentieth century, and many adopted “as literature” approaches. As Christopher Anderson argues, “[a]t irregular intervals since at least the 1970s, one critic or another has asserted that television drama series demonstrate the narrative complexity and subtle delineation of character normally associated with the novel (in

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Fig. 2.5 Google Ngram “Showrunner”

fact, this has become a tiresome critical cliché)” (2008, 25). These assertions only became dominant around the turn of the twenty-first century, however, with the New York Times declaring “The Triumph of the PrimeTime Novel” in 1995 (McGrath) and one of its writers, Caryn James, drawing connections between The Sopranos and Proust (2001) and later calling The Wire “The Television Show That Thinks It’s a Novel” (2004); other critics used the word “Dickensian” to describe both (Thomas 2001; Weisberg 2006). A more recent “as literature” strategy used to legitimize television is the promotion of a form of auteur theory centering around the socalled showrunner, a writer-producer who is also typically credited as being the show’s original creator and who is seen as having an extraordinary amount of creative control over its production, akin to a novelist. Early examples include Steven Bochco, the showrunner for Hill Street Blues (1981–1987), L.A. Law (1986–1994), and NYPD Blue (1993– 2005), all of which won Emmys for Outstanding Drama Series at least once. However, it wasn’t until the end of the twentieth century that the term “showrunner” came into frequent usage (see Fig. 2.5) and famous showrunners became household names. These include David Lynch for Twin Peaks (1990–1991); Chris Carter for The X-Files (1993–2002); Joss Whedon for Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and Firefly (2002– 2003); David Chase for The Sopranos (1999–2007); Alan Ball for Six Feet Under (2001–2005); David Simon for The Wire (2002–2008); Matthew Weiner for Mad Men (2007–2015); Vince Gilligan for Breaking Bad

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(2008–2013); David Benioff and D. B. Weiss for Game of Thrones (2011– 2019); Nic Pizzolatto for True Detective (2014–); and Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy for Westworld (2016–). Television Studies scholars have since charted and critiqued the use of the showrunner as a strategy for legitimation (Newman and Levine 2012, 38–58; Mittell 2015, 86–117; Dunleavy 2017, 71–97), noting that it elides the many complex stages through which a television show inevitably progresses before it is even made as well as the many people involved in each stage.5 However, the tendency continues. As the list of showrunners and their associated programs demonstrates, the “as literature” strategy of elevating the showrunner has been deployed primarily in relation to a certain type of television show, the serial drama, the same type of show that has been hailed as equivalent to literature in artistic value and a central focus of the present collection as well. As Newman and Levine argue, “Serialized dramas are heralded as a chief reason that ‘television is just better’ than ever before, even as certain other genres and programs are routinely derided” (2012, 2). The result is often what Christopher Pizzino, writing about comics, calls a Bildungsroman narrative, in which an art form’s current popularity and success is imagined to be the result of it finally achieving artistic maturity (2016). Martin Shuster is one critic who employs this sort of framework: in his 2017 book New Television, he writes, “A medium is here somehow coming to fruition, finally finding itself as capable of producing serious, sincere, and sustained art—art, that, in turn, calls for serious and sustained reflection” (2017, 2). Note that Shuster does not confer artistic status on television as a whole but rather claims that television is “capable” of producing art. His study focuses on one type of television program he considers an example of this artistic potential: “certain television series” that are “comparable in their form and function to (great) novels or films” (2). Shuster’s parenthetical demonstrates his adherence to a hierarchy that not only elevates the high arts but that also embraces a traditional canon—works that have already been determined to be “great.” His bias is more poignantly demonstrated by his admission that his interest lies only “in a very small segment of what appears on television (much in the same way—to invoke an admittedly problematic analogy—an art historian or art critic is generally not interested in everything that is, say, painted)” (2).

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Shuster’s language also suggests that the television series he has selected must be capital-a Art because of their resemblances to already established art forms rather than entertaining the possibility that such resemblances might be the result of careful machinations on the part of the industry and incidental changes to technologies that allowed a certain type of television narrative to flourish. The television industry has certainly forged connections between its medium and literature in order to capitalize on the reputability that such connections might confer. Greg Metcalf, for example, points out how DVDs of films and television series, first released in the mid-1990s, are housed in cases “taller than wide in a way that does not reflect the[ir] circular shape” but which allowed them to take on the “cultural signification of a book” (2012, 7). Television’s fondness for adapting literary classics, a tendency that has increased in the twenty-first century (Wells-Lassagne 2017), serves a similar function, as do the literary references common in so many television shows (Lavik 2011; Stuart 2011; Parrott 2012; Bellis 2013). The show Heroes (2006– 2010) even appropriated literary terms by calling its episodes “chapters” and referring to story arcs (which were not the same as “seasons”) as “volumes” (Newman and Levine 2012, 3), and other shows have followed suit (VanArendonk 2017). Furthermore, as Jason Mittell and others have demonstrated, supposedly literary qualities like “complexity” only became possible and desirable thanks to the invention of various technologies. The availability of television shows on DVD and then through streaming services, for example, allows viewers to easily rewatch episodes. As a result, intricate plots and symbolic nuances that might have proven frustrating when viewers had no ability to replay a show might now be considered appealing, a sign of the show’s “complexity” and an invitation for the viewer to use their perseverance and intelligence to “drill” into that complexity (Mittell 2013). Paratexts, such as episode-recaps, interviews with cast and crew, and other special materials that often accompany prestige television series further encourage the idea that “prestige” television requires special training to fully understand—or the help of a well-educated expert or helpful showrunner. As Eric Thurm (2017, n.p.) puts it in “It’s Not Prestige, It’s Just TV,” such shows “invite viewers to pore over every frame in all of the very serious ways viewers have available—recaps, pages of theorizing about the hidden significance of minor production design choices, and, always, hunting for clues.” And it invites its viewers to do so together, as a community knit together by social media, YouTube video essays, and blog

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posts, or what Mittell refers to as a network of “transmedia storytelling” (2015, 292–318). If this community and its practices sound a great deal like an English literature class, that is no accident. After all, a large number of American showrunners share a similar educational background in the humanities, and specifically in English, from some of the most prestigious universities in the nation.6 Some colleges, like Yale, even boast about the connections they can supply their “Ivy League-educated Hollywood hopefuls” (“Yale’s Big Break”). The most famous television critics have similar academic credentials,7 as do many scholars. In many ways, these facts suggest that “as literature” approaches to certain television shows may actually be the most appropriate, seeing as how the series have been created by people schooled in this field. However, one could also view the elevation of various television shows due to their literary qualities as a prestige-enhancing feedback loop. Those who oversee the production of such shows inject them with literary qualities traditionally viewed as markers of prestige and artistry, such as symbolic meanings and intertextual references as well as characteristics frequently pointed to as justifications for the inclusion of texts in the humanities—including their ability to accurately reflect historical realities or to uncover the neglected experiences of a minority population. In turn, such texts are championed by critics attuned to such markers as well as scholars who take them up as objects of study to which they can apply the methodologies of literary study. Validation by scholars may prove even more valuable to generating viewership: not only do the shows benefit from the cultural prestige associated with the university as an institution of “higher” learning but also scholars may be perceived as more objective than TV critics who operate in closer proximity to the industry. Viewers then may become convinced that they are indeed in the presence of Art, which they have learned requires special training and knowledge to fully appreciate and understand. As Polan writes, “there is certainly a milieu trained through years of classes in interpretation to want thematic resonance from its culture, and in this way academic buzz may point to larger interpretive communities ready to be flattered for their willingness to engage in hermeneutic work” (2007, 273, emphasis mine). Polan’s well-considered choice of the word “flattered” suggests that these shows offer college-educated viewers—the target demographic of so much “literary” television—a chance to exercise the interpretive strategies taught to them by the academy.

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Regardless of how well informed they are, “as literature” approaches run the risk of demoting television texts or subgenres which do not participate in this feedback loop, regardless of their popularity. HBO, the company behind many of the most heralded television shows, has based its reputation on the claim that it is “not TV” (McCabe and Akass 2008), implying that programming that does not resemble its most famous fare may be examples of television but not televisual art. As long as serial dramas as a genre monopolize scholarship and “as literature” approaches dominate, other types of programming, such as reality television or talk shows, will garner less if any analysis—a problem that John Fiske pointed out as early as in 1978 in his groundbreaking Reading Television.8 Even television series—as opposed to serials—risk neglect.9 For example, of the top 100 shows of the 2018–2019 season in terms of total viewers, both The Big Bang Theory (2007–2019) and NCIS (2003–) rank higher than Game of Thrones , and Young Sheldon (2017–) lands just slightly behind (Schneider 2019). However, “as literature” approaches to such popular shows, like those offered by Katre Talviste, Sarah Olive, Reto Winckler, and Louie Jon A. Sánchez in this volume, remain rare. And it is not only individual shows that are ghettoized by critical inattention, of course, but also the intended or perceived audiences of those shows. Since the most acclaimed serial dramas are marketed toward educated, middle- to upperclass audiences, the result could be a body of criticism similarly limited in scope.10 A text’s amenability to “as literature” approaches should not be treated as an exclusive criterion for artistic value nor used to justify the exclusion of texts less amenable to such frameworks. Finally, “as literature” approaches might reinforce an outdated hierarchy that ranks film below literature, television below film, etc.—a hierarchy that becomes quickly evident when BuzzFeed boasts that it has managed to find “24 Movies That Are Actually Better Than The Book They’re Based On” (Woodward 2018, n.p., emphasis mine) or a critic like Emily Nussbaum (2009, n.p.) feels the need to pinpoint the exact moment “When TV Became Art.” And they will continue to do so until “as television” approaches to literature—such as those undertaken in this collection by Sara Tanderup Linkis and Richard O’Brien and Jack Nicholls—begin to flourish or a definitive shift in the hierarchy allows novelizations of film to be as viable an area of study as film adaptations of novels. As long as established art forms are allowed to bestow their methods and theories upon other fields without expecting them to do the same in return, and as long as “Television Studies” remains classified

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under “Media Studies” in higher education organizational charts and in the names of academic societies, journals, and specialty areas of university presses, “as literature” approaches to television will be a welcome-to-theclub handshake—a sign of earned membership that comes packaged with the second-class status implied by the need for invitation. As a fan of television—and one excited to learn more about it from scholars in the field—I hope that the treatment of television as a second-class citizen of the humanities ceases soon.

Notes 1. The game scholar Espen Aarseth has a far more cynical view of the process. In his introduction to the first issue of Game Studies, what he calls the “first academic, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to computer game studies,” he writes, “Making room for a new field usually means reducing the resources of the existing ones, and the existing fields will also often respond by trying to contain the new area as a subfield. Games are not a kind of cinema, or literature, but colonizing attempts from both of these fields have already happened” (2001). 2. Janet Staiger argues, “Among the earliest writings about cinema were those involved in proving film was art” (1985, 4). Francesco Casetti concurs, claiming more specifically that the “the desire to ‘valorize’ cinema as an art form and as an object of inquiry…, which is apparent in critical writings from the 1920s to the 1980s, has led to the application of categories used in literary studies— such as author, work, poetics, and so on—and in aesthetic theory to the cinema” (2007, 81). 3. Michelle Hilmes similarly argues that “[f]ilm’s status in the academy, steadily ascendant since the 1960s, was initially predicated on the identification of the director as the ‘author’ of an individual film, turning film from a mass-produced object into a work of art” (2005, 112). 4. According to an email dated June 24, 2019, from Craig Gill, the Director of the University Press of Mississippi, the press’s three series devoted to comics, Conversations with Comics Artists, Great Comics Artists, and Critical Approaches to Comics Artists, were begun in 2000, 2005, and 2013, respectively. However, only the latter could really be said to be Comics Studies. For a more detailed

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look at the history of the field, see Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan’s The Secret Origins of Comics Studies (2017). 5. For a detailed description of this process, see Charlie Jane Anders, “The Whole Crazy Process.” Trisha Dunleavy claims, “In complex serials it is a practical impossibility for there to be instances of authorship akin to the extent and/or nature of individual creative expression that has been celebrated by ‘auteur’ theory” (2017, 71). 6. To mention just a few examples: D. B. Weiss, co-showrunner of Game of Thrones received an English degree from Wesleyan before going to Trinity College, where he completed a master’s thesis on Finnegan’s Wake. It was there he met David Benioff, who was writing his thesis on Samuel Beckett. Both ended up getting MFAs, Weiss at the highly prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop and Benioff at UC Irvine. David Milch (NYPD Blue and Deadwood) also earned an MFA at Iowa after finishing a BA in English at Yale. Matt Weiner (Mad Men) has a degree from the College of Letters at Wesleyan and an MFA from the University of Southern California. David Chase (The Sopranos ) studied at Wake Forest, NYU, and Stanford; Lisa Joy, of Westworld, is an English major from Stanford, while Jengi Kohan of Orange is the New Black attended Brandeis before transferring to Columbia, from which she graduated with a degree in English. 7. Caryn James, the first television critic for The New York Times who penned the pieces comparing The Sopranos to Proust, has a doctorate in English Literature from Brown University. Ken Tucker, television critic for Entertainment Weekly between 1990 and 2013, holds a BA in English from NYU; James Poniewozik (the chief TV critic for the New York Times since 2015) and Emily Nussbaum (TV critic at The New Yorker since 2011) have all completed post-graduate work there. 8. Fiske, writing long before our post-network era, might have overestimated the divide between literature and television, but his points still have bearing here: “[a]ny attempt to decode a television ‘text’ as if it were a literary text is thus not only doomed to failure but is also likely to result in a negative evaluation of the medium based on its ability to do a job for which it is in fact fundamentally unsuited” (2004, 2–3). 9. Kozloff differentiates between “series” and “serial” as follows: “Series refers to those shows whose characters and setting are

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recycled, but the story concludes in each individual episode. By contrast, in a serial the story and discourse do not come to a conclusion during an episode” (1992, 91). 10. Levine argues that “in many of the recent assertions of television’s cultural credibility there remains a denigrated ‘television’ against which the elevated television is contrasted, adding ideological weight to the categories of social distinction, particularly those along lines of gender and class, that are so often articulated to these cultural hierarchies” (2008, 394).

References Aarseth, Espen. 2001. “Computer Game Studies, Year One.” Game Studies 1 (1) (July): n.p. Aldama, Frederick Luis. 2018. “Comic Studies Here and Now: An Introduction.” In Comic Studies Here and Now, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, 1–6. New York: Routledge. Anders, Charlie Jane. 2015. “The Whole Crazy Process of Creating a TV Show, from Pitch to Pilot.” io9.com, January 23, https://io9.gizmodo.com/whydo-so-many-tv-shows-get-greenlit-but-then-never-1681405688. Anderson, Christopher. 2008. “Producing an Aristocracy of Culture in American Television.” In The Essential HBO Reader, edited by Gary R. Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones, 23–41. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Beaty, Bart. 2017. “Some Classics.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Graphic Novel, edited by Steven Tabachnick, 175–191. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316258316.013. Bellis, Rich. 2013. “Which Literary Works Explain Breaking Bad Best?” The Atlantic, October 2, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/ 2013/10/which-great-literary-work-explains-em-breaking-bad-em-best/280 149/. Buhle, Paul. 2003. “The New Scholarship of Comics.” The Chronicle Review, May 16, https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-New-Scholarship-of-Com ics/36438. Butler, Catherine. 2014. “Introduction.” In Modern Children’s Literature: An Introduction, edited by Catherine Butler and Kimberley Reynolds, 1–8. London: Red Globe Press. Carroll, Noël. 1985. “The Specificity of Media in the Arts.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 19 (4) (Winter): 5–20. https://www.jstor.org/stable/ 3332295.

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Casetti, Francesco. 2007. “Adaptation and Mis-adaptations: Film, Literature, and Social Discourses.” In A Companion to Literature and Film, edited by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, 81–91. Malden, MA: Wiley. Chute, Hillary. 2008. “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.” PMLA 123 (2) (March): 452–465. Dunleavy, Trisha. 2017. Complex Serial Drama and Multiplatform Television. New York: Routledge. Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Simon, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca. 2013. Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Fiske, John. 2004. Reading Television. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Gronbeck, Bruce E. 1988. “Book Reviews: The Academic Practice of Television Criticism.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74: 334–347. Hambrick, Donald C., and Ming-Jer Chen. 2008. “New Academic Fields as Admittance-Seeking Social Movements: The Case of Strategic Management.” Academy of Management Review 33 (1): 32–54. Hilmes, Michele. 1994. “Born Yesterday: Television and the Academic Mind.” American Literary History 6 (4) (Winter): 792–802. ———. 2005. “The Bad Object: Television in the American Academy.” Cinema Journal 45 (1) (Autumn): 111–117. James, Caryn. 2001. “‘Sopranos’: Blood, Bullets and Proust.” The New York Times, March 2, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/02/movies/tv-wee kend-sopranos-blood-bullets-and-proust.html. ———. 2004. “The Television Show That Thinks It’s a Novel.” The New York Times, September 19, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/arts/tel evision/the-television-show-that-thinks-its-a-novel.html. Kompare, Derek. 2011. “Filling the Box: Television in Higher Education.” Cinema Journal 50 (4) (Summer): 161–165. Kozloff, Sarah. 1992. “Narrative Theory and Television.” In Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism, edited by Robert C. Allen, 67–100. New York: Routledge. Lavik, Erlend. 2011. “The Poetics and Rhetoric of The Wire’s Intertextuality.” Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies 6 (1): 52–71. Levine, Elana. 2008. “Distinguishing Television: The Changing Meanings of Television Liveness.” Media, Culture & Society 30 (3): 393–409. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0163443708088794. Loman, Andrew. 2010. “‘That Mouse’s Shadow’: The Canonization of Spiegelman’s Maus.” The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Context, edited by Paul Williams and James Lyons, 210–234. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

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Martin, Tim. 2009. “How Comic Books Became Part of the Literary Establishment.” Telegraph.co.uk, April 2, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/ books/bookreviews/5094231/How-Comic-Books-became-part-of-the-lit erary-establishment.html McCabe, Janet, and Kim Akass. 2008. “It’s Not TV, It’s HBO’s Original Programming: Producing Quality TV.” In It’s Not TV: Watching HBO in the Post-Television Era, edited by Marc Leverette, Brian L. Ott, and Cara Louise Buckley, 83–94. New York: Routledge. McGrath, Charles. 1995. “The Triumph of the Prime-Time Novel.” The New York Times, October 22, https://www.nytimes.com/1995/10/22/mag azine/the-prime-time-novel-the-triumph-of-the-prime-time-novel.html. Metcalf, Greg. 2012. The DVD Novel: How the Way We Watch Television Changed the Television We Watch. Santa Barbara: Praeger. Mittell, Jason. 2013. “Forensic Fandom and the Drillable Text.” Spreadable Media, http://spreadablemedia.org/essays/mittell/. Accessed 26 January 2020. ———. 2015. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press. Newcomb, Horace. 2005. “The Development of Television Studies.” In A Companion to Television, edited by Janet Wasko, 15–28. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Newman, Michael Z., and Elana Levine. 2012. Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status. New York: Routledge. Nussbaum, Emily. 2009. “When TV Became Art.” New York Magazine, December 2, http://nymag.com/arts/all/aughts/62513/. Parrott, Billy. 2012, “The ‘Mad Men’ Reading List.” NYPL.org, February 27, https://www.nypl.org/blog/2012/02/27/mad-men-reading-list. Pizzino, Christopher. 2016. Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature. Austin: University of Texas Press. Polan, Dana. 2007. “Cable Watching: HBO, The Sopranos, and Discourses of Distinction.” In Cable Visions: Television beyond Broadcasting, edited by Sarah Banet-Weiser, Cynthia Chris, and Anthony Freitas, 261–283. New York: New York University Press. ———. 2008. “Young Art, Old Colleges: Early Episodes in the American Study of Film.” In Inventing Film Studies, edited by Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson, 93–117. Durham: Duke University Press. Schneider, Michael. 2019. “100 Most-Watched TV Shows of 2018–19: Winners and Losers.” Variety.com, May 22, https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/ most-watched-tv-shows-highest-rated-2018-2019-season-game-of-thrones1203222287/. Shuster, Martin. 2017. New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Smith, Matthew J., and Randy Duncan (eds.). 2017. The Secret Origins of Comics Studies. New York: Routledge. Staiger, Janet. 1985. “The Politics of Film Canons.” Cinema Journal 24 (3) (Spring): 4–23. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1225428. Steirer, Gregory. 2011. “The State of Comics Scholarship: Comics Studies and Disciplinarity.” International Journal of Comic Art 13 (2) (Fall): 263–285. Stuart, Sarah Clarke. 2011. Literary Lost: Viewing Television Through the Lens of Literature. New York: Continuum. Thomas, Michael M. 2001. “Like Ibsen or Dickens, Sopranos Is Our Peak.” Observer, June 4, https://observer.com/2001/06/like-ibsen-or-dickens-sop ranos-is-our-peak/. Thurm, Eric. 2017. “It’s Not Prestige, It’s Just TV.” Esquire.com, April 27, https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a54762/the-flaws-of-presti ge-tv/. VanArendonk, Kathryn. 2017. “13 Signs You’re Watching a ‘Prestige’ TV Show.” Vulture.com, March 28, https://www.vulture.com/2017/03/pre stige-tv-signs-youre-watching.html. Weisberg, Jacob. 2006. “The Wire on Fire: Analyzing the Best Show Ever Broadcast on American Television.” Slate.com, September 13, https://slate. com/news-and-politics/2006/09/the-wire-the-best-tv-show-ever-broadcaston-american-television.html. Wells-Lassagne, Shannon. 2017. Television and Serial Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Woodward, Ellie. 2018. “24 Movies That Are Actually Better Than the Book They’re Based On.” Buzzfeed, September 28, https://www.buzzfeed.com/ell iewoodward/movies-that-are-actually-better-than-the-book “Yale’s Big Break.” 2013. Yale News, April 5, https://yaledailynews.com/blog/ 2013/04/05/yales-big-break/.

CHAPTER 3

Toward Sphere Theory Lukas Schepp

In the oft-cited ‘golden age of television’ (Doherty 2012), TV drama series have garnered serious scholarly attention and, because of their length and narrative complexity, some critics have even deemed them the ‘new novels’ (ibid.) of our age. Statements like Doherty’s have caused controversy among two groups of critics whom we might call ‘comparativists’ and ‘non-comparativists’—‘comparativists’ stress the similarities of both media,1 while ‘non-comparativists’2 emphasize their differences. Navigating between these two views, my goal for this chapter shall be the examination of the actual and ostensible similarities and dissimilarities of the two art forms. I will try to organize and represent various categories of comparison in a new, three-dimensional graphic system entitled ‘Sphere Theory,’ using multiple TV series and novels as case studies and examples. Similar to planet Earth, the Sphere I propose below consists of several consecutive strata. These are, from the inside out: Theme, setting, character, plot, narrative perspective, and style (Fig. 3.1). Over the course of this essay, I will progress from the kernel of the Sphere (theme) to the outmost layer (style), outlining how stories in

L. Schepp (B) Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Germany

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Winckler and V. Huertas-Martín (eds.), Television Series as Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4720-1_3

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Fig. 3.1 The sphere

novels versus TV series gradually grow apart while still displaying some degree of commonality. In order to embark on this endeavor, I will blend the perspectives of academic scholarship, screenwriting theory, and creative writing. Thus, I will build on some existing narrative theories by McKee, Aristotle, Schlegel, Stanzel, and Chatman among others, and then use these scholars’ works to outline the organic formation of narratives in novels and TV series throughout the creative writing process. This creative writing process as I perceive and execute it myself provides the foundation for the specific order of spherical layers that I have suggested. This way, I hope that by the end of the paper, the progression through

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the Sphere will seem logical and intuitive, offering both creative writers and academic scholars a new analytical and constructive tool.3

Theme and Setting We will begin our analysis at the very kernel of the Sphere, i.e., the theme layer. This innermost stratum is concerned with the philosophical problem a given story circles around. In screenwriting scholar Robert McKee’s terms, it corresponds to the Controlling Idea: A CONTROLLING IDEA may be expressed in a single sentence describing how and why life undergoes change from one condition of existence at the beginning to another in the end. (1997, 115)

Such a statement constitutes the seed that gives rise to all the subsequent layers to come. In this central layer, all stories are still essentially similar regardless of their specific medium, since any given theme can be grappled with in any presentational form. For instance, Breaking Bad’s (Gilligan 2008) Controlling Idea could be interpreted the following way: ‘If one attempts to gain the recognition of an unjust and rigged society at all costs, one will lose one’s soul in the process.’ Leo Tolstoy’s novel The Death of Ivan Ilyich, for example, can be read as revolving around the same Controlling Idea, although it differs vastly in its plot and belongs to a different medium. The philosophical core element of both stories is similar, showing that the same theme can lead to two (or more) very different settings . In this sense, we will regard the term ‘setting’ not as a mere backdrop of time and place, but rather as an integral part of a story. Literary scholar Jerry Watson suggests that ‘(an) integral setting (…) exerts a great deal of influence upon the values (…) and the presentation of theme and mood (in a story)’ (1991, 638). However, while Watson rightfully notices the correlation between setting and theme, I will suggest the reverse order of influence between the two: a given theme gives rise to a corresponding setting rather than the other way around. For instance, the aforementioned Breaking Bad with its Controlling Idea needs a financially constrained lower middle-class setting to have Walter White embark on his journey. Indeed, if it were set in an affluent upper-class family instead, the entire story would change: Walter’s existential fear for his relatives’

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material welfare would be mostly unjustified, thus significantly altering his (alleged) central motivation of providing for them. While a story’s individual setting is necessarily specific, it can theoretically be as complex, vast, and immersive as the respective writer desires. Today, the setting hardly imposes any limits on either novels or TV series anymore. For the latter, this was not always the case, since technical constraints and limited budgets used to confine what was considered possible on the small screen. However, both of these restrictions have become ever more irrelevant over the last years. First, the rapid advancement in VFX (visual effects) technology has ensured that virtually anything writers can imagine can also be realized audiovisually. Second, TV budgets have continued to grow, with networks like HBO willing to spend up to 15 million US dollars per episode (Mitrokostas 2018). Hence, no level of spectacle is out of reach for showrunners any longer. Novelists, of course, have faced fewer such limitations to begin with, as their medium has always allowed them to conjure up vast, elaborate, and complex environments for their stories.

Character Next, the layer of ‘character’ springs from the layers of theme and setting —rather than the other way around, like scholars such as August Wilhelm Schlegel have suggested (1840, 133–135). Indeed, it is possible to imagine both a theme and a setting without referring to a specific character (see section “Theme and Setting”), yet it is extremely difficult to imagine a character in a vacuum. Instead, in a conventional narrative, any given character usually implies his own setting—we intuitively picture lung cancer-ridden high school teacher and family father, Walter White, in his natural surroundings, namely his family home and the school at which he teaches. Turning to the character layer’s content, we will begin to see why so many parallels between TV series and novels have been drawn. Any character in a given narrative will experience some level of inner conflict regardless of the medium. The complexity of this internal conflict is dependent on many different factors—the philosophical depth of the theme and the talent of the writers among others—yet one decisive external parameter limits all stories: narrating time (Müller 2011, 67– 83). Both novels and TV drama series are at a great advantage here, since their narrative time is theoretically unlimited. For instance, Robert

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Jordan’s fantasy epic The Wheel of Time spans 14 volumes and over four million words (Klein 2018), while The Sopranos lasted for six seasons and 86 hour-long episodes (Murray 2019). Compare this to a standard two-hour feature film, for which a typical screenplay contains about 7,500–20,000 words (Wyatt and Schnelbach 2019), thus approximately corresponding to a long short story or a novella. Length, of course, then dictates the degree to which any given character’s inner conflict can be explored. Robert McKee defines a character’s inner conflict as a struggle between a character’s conscious and subconscious goals (1997, 137–140). As we connect McKee’s approach back to the previous layers of the Sphere, a given character’s conscious and subconscious goals are directly related to the particular story’s theme and setting. For instance, in Netflix’s drama series YOU (Berlanti and Gamble 2018), self-proclaimed last chevalier Joe Goldberg’s conscious goal is to win the heart of his lady (aptly named Guinevere) through courtly love—in 2018 New York, where chivalry is long dead, meaning that Joe’s environment is naturally rigged against him on the conscious level. Subconsciously, however, Joe wants to possess not only Guinevere’s body but also her soul, leading to some extreme stalking and manipulation on his part that is arguably worse and more objectifying than the promiscuous and detached modern ways of dating he so detests. Therefore, Joe seems to be the logical product of the story’s combined inner layers: ‘True love in our jaded urban Western world (setting ) is not possible because we cannot, and never could, sublimate our rampant narcissism and desire to control our lovers (theme).’ YOU taps into very similar territory as Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita some 65 years earlier. Humbert Humbert, just like Joe, attempts to convince himself of the nobility of his feelings for Lolita, and out of a misunderstood protection instinct for the supposed ‘damsel in distress,’ embarks on a violent revenge quest.4 Thus, although they are set in different media, both works allow for the development of complex and multilayered protagonists based on their themes and settings. Novel and series closely examine their antiheroes’ inner contradictions, which McKee labels dimensions (1997, 377–379): opposing traits between which the respective character oscillates, such as controlling vs. permissive, selfless vs. egotistical, honest vs. self-deceiving, and soft-spoken vs. aggressive. As both works span a considerable amount of narrative time, these dimensions can be explored in great detail.

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Like in the previous layers, no major differences between novels and TV series appear in this stratum yet, although both media begin to stand out from other presentational forms such as feature films or short stories.

Plot Next, the inner conflict described in section “Theme and Setting” needs to be dramatized, whether it be on page or screen. At this point, it seems pertinent to address the age-old debate of what comes first—character or plot . In The Poetics , Greek philosopher Aristotle famously argues that at the core of any story lies plot, and all the characters in it, particularly the protagonist, serve to advance it (2013, 24–25). However, German scholar August Wilhelm Schlegel disagrees, proposing that it is truly character that lies at the center of storytelling and that the respective plot simply revolves around him or her (1840, 133–135). Here, I will disagree with the Aristotelian idea that characters are mere vessels of the plot, and instead agree with Schlegel that the plot (yet not the setting) naturally grows out of the respective character’s inner conflict. McKee puts it this way: The function of (PLOT) STRUCTURE is building pressures that force characters into dilemmas where they must make more and choices and actions, gradually revealing their 105–106)

to provide progressively more and more difficult more difficult risk-taking true natures (...). (1997,

From this point of view, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous axiom ‘Plot is character, character is plot’ (Cowan 2013, 99)5 is correct in the sense that when analyzing the completed story, the two can become virtually indistinguishable. Yet organizationally, character comes first, and plot can be understood as the character’s subsequent dramatization. Fittingly, literary scholar Norman Friedman delineates various ‘plots of character’ that protagonists can embark on. For instance, in the ‘Disillusionment Plot,’ the character in question gradually replaces the positive ideas he had about the world with more negative and pessimistic ones (1955, 252). Given the general direction of this arch, the writer will then design all story events to further the respective protagonist’s development toward his disillusionment, and leave out those events not pertinent to the character’s inner journey. For instance, in The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald

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2013), Gatsby learns that the American Dream is not only built on exploitation but leaves even those who achieve it ultimately unfulfilled. Consequently, every scene in Gatsby’s plot revolves around this inner journey toward despair. Meanwhile, AMC’s Mad Men (Weiner 2007) takes a very similar approach to the character arch of its protagonist Don Draper, an advertisement agent who will stop at nothing to achieve material success. Yet he ends up isolating himself from his loved ones until he realizes the shallowness of his pursuit—at least to a greater extent than before. As in The Great Gatsby, all scenes in his arch serve to gradually propel Don’s growing discontentment. At this point, some critics might object that so-called character-driven and plotless stories could jump the plot layer altogether.6 Indeed, e.g., Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (2003), for instance, essentially consists of a long, seemingly uneventful walk through London. However, this only holds true on the surface. In McKee’s terms, anything that happens in a story constitutes an event, including any line of dialogue spoken by another character—or by the protagonist herself (2016, 5).7 Let us consider how McKee’s ideas would work in practice: (...) Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up (...); but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (...) do the same (...) for that very reason: they love life. (2003, 6)

This could be read as a discussion between Clarissa’s nihilistic self and her life-affirming self on the subject of mortality: the former argues for the meaninglessness of life in the face of death (represented by Big Ben’s strike), while the latter sees beauty even in mortality itself (‘musical’) and emphasizes humanity’s inescapable will to live. Clarissa’s inner dialogue thus ties into her fundamental inner conflict: consciously, she longs for a deeper meaning in her life, but subconsciously, she is unwilling to pay the price—namely to leave the shallow upper-class parties behind and engage with the outside world. Yet that would involve hardship and suffering, the very notion of which she detests and fears, as becomes clear in her derogatory comments on the city’s poor.

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In this light, the position that ‘plotless’ novels exist seems hard to defend. However, the level on which a given plot mostly unfolds can indeed differ significantly between the respective media. Here, McKee distinguishes between inner, interpersonal, and outer conflict (1997, 215– 216). According to McKee, TV drama series excel at the interpersonal level, whereas novels usually shine at the personal level (2016, 67–76). At this point, a visual advantage of Sphere Theory begins to become apparent: while most novels tend to gravitate toward conflict within the self, they can also incorporate elements of conflict among different characters or conflict with the outer world. Meanwhile, most TV series tend to center around interpersonal conflict, but they are equally free to meander through the stratum toward outer and inner conflict. In this sense, the Sphere graphically does for plot levels what Stanzel’s typological circle does for narrative perspective (Fig. 3.2).

Narrative Perspective In this layer of the Sphere, we can observe further divergences between TV series and novels. Narratologist Stanzel distinguishes between three basic narrative situations: first-person narration, i.e., a character tells her own story; authorial narration, i.e., an omniscient extradiegetic narrator tells the story8 ; and figural narration, i.e., the story is told from the point of view of a third-person reflector character (2008, 15–16; 399). Let us begin with the first-person narrator, perhaps a natural choice to portray conflict within the human mind itself. Indeed, many novels gravitate toward it (among those already mentioned, The Great Gatsby and Lolita), thus taking full advantage of the unique window it offers into the minds of their protagonists. TV series occasionally follow in their footsteps in the hopes of sharing the creative upsides of this narrative perspective (e.g., Mr. Robot and YOU ). However, while in novels, first-person narrators enjoy virtually unlimited freedom with regard to the content and length of their inner dialogues, in TV drama series, the narrators and their natural means of expression—voiceover—face far greater constraints. Indeed, voiceover enjoys a dubious reputation in film and TV, since it can be misused as a cheap crutch for exposition—or, even worse, as a gimmick to repeat audiovisual information that is already on the screen (c.f. Chatman 1980, 128). Thus, good cinematic voiceover will almost always have to avoid direct visual and auditory descriptions—unlike Virginia Woolf in the

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Fig. 3.2 The sphere: plot-layer

excerpt from Mrs. Dalloway cited above. Instead, voiceover tends to work best when it adds something to the story that the visuals do not yet express. Consider, for instance, the cynical narration by Mr. Robot’s (Esmail 2016) hacker protagonist Elliot as the latter contemplates the true nature of his fellow office workers: ‘I remember when I was a kid, I got into web design by ripping off sites I liked. All you had to do was “view source” on your browser, and there it was, the code. (…) What if we had that for people? Would people really wanna see?’ (Season 1, Episode 9). Meanwhile, the visuals onscreen show several employees wearing signs saying ‘I’m scared of sex,’ ‘I pretend to love my husband,’ and ‘I am

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empty inside,’ thus resembling a modern version of the medieval pillory. In that sense, Elliot’s first-person narration connects one of the series’ thematic elements, namely surveillance, with another, namely identity, making a bold statement about both of them at once: from Elliot’s point of view, it is possible to read people like computer programs. Still, we would be better off just letting them wear their social masks—not to keep their dignity, but because the truth is hideous. Here, voiceover and images are both equally important and mutually dependent on each other: the images would not make sense without the voiceover, and the voiceover would be trite without the images. Meanwhile, bad voiceover for this scene might sound like this: ‘Sometimes, I imagine my coworkers walking about the office with signs around their necks spelling out all of their greatest weaknesses: one of them says ‘I’m scared of sex’… (etc.).’ In this hypothetical case, the voiceover would double the visual information already onscreen and therefore be redundant. However, the same inner dialogue might work in prose because the readers generate their own accompanying visuals in their minds. Thus, TV voiceover narrators are limited with regard to the content of their voice-overs—yet also with regard to the latters’ degree of associativity and length. Most voiceovers are ostensibly and directly connected to the images onscreen as opposed to entirely free-floating and whimsically following the protagonists’ trains of thought. They progress logically, and generally do not cover more than one subject at a time. Furthermore, even in more experimental TV series, such as Mr. Robot , the voiceover mainly works as a transitional device between scenes as opposed to covering the entire narrative like in the case of Mrs. Dalloway’s inner dialogue. Therefore, while first-person narration can be embraced by TV series to some degree, it likely cannot reach the uncompromisingly introspective level of novels due to the limitations listed above—they can, however, push TV series to artistic heights in their own right. Nonetheless, the default position for the vast majority of TV series in Stanzelian terms still seems to be figural narration: the audience follows the story from the point of view of one or several third-person reflector characters who, however, do not act as narrators (2008, 16).9 Both in literature and on TV, this can be a very unobtrusive way of storytelling, allowing the audience to identify with characters while simultaneously ensuring an efficient, objective flow of exposition. An example of this more direct brand of figural narration would be HBO’s The Wire (Simon 2002), whose stark social realism could probably not be achieved any

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other way. Like in a documentary, the camera follows detective McNulty as well as several drug dealers through the story, showing events exclusively as each of the characters would realistically experience them, even if that means having crucial plot points occur off-screen. Thus, this narrative choice reflects on the thematic idea at the kernel layer of The Wire: ‘The environment shapes its inhabitants rather than the other way around, and this holds true whether somebody is a police officer or a drug lord.’ Meanwhile, novels offer the possibility of an intensely stylized and personal subcategory of figural narration, such as in the excerpt from Mrs. Dalloway mentioned above. Indeed, the quote from the novel is so close to first-person narration that the only separating factor seems to be the pronoun. Here, Woolf combines the intensity and intimacy of first-person narration with the greater ‘depth of field’—to use a cinematic term—of third-person figural narration. At least in this direct form, Woolf’s technique is difficult to replicate onscreen: voiceover of this kind would likely seem involuntarily comical. However, TV series can create a similar effect by making use of several audiovisual techniques. Let us again consider Breaking Bad as an example. The close-ups of Walter White are frequently shot from extremely high or low angles, or they are tilted sideways, thus letting the viewer participate in Walt’s increasingly erratic and psychotic view of the world—as does the stylized color palette and the psychedelic music. In this last example, we can already see how ‘narrative perspective’ naturally transitions into the outmost layer of the Sphere, style (Fig. 3.3).

Style As was already hinted at with regard to Breaking Bad’s psychological realism, both TV shows and novels can take advantage of a whole variety of styles to enrich and augment their narrative perspectives, and through them, their plots, characters, settings, and themes. The array of artistic techniques in both genres is endless, and we cannot hope to cover even a fraction of them here. Therefore, we will merely focus on two brief sample scenes from the television series The Handmaid’s Tale 10 (Miller 2017) and The Bluest Eye (Morrison 2007). On the surface, the two of them differ significantly in their settings: the former takes place in a speculative future dystopian world where women are enslaved as broodmares, whereas the latter is a historical novel about a young black woman serving a white family in 1940s America. However, both the TV series and the novel circle around a similar Controlling Idea: ‘In an oppressive and

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Fig. 3.3 The sphere: perspective-layer

discriminatory society, everybody will eventually lose their humanity and dignity.‘ This holds true in particular for the respective female protagonists, June and Pecola Breedlove, whose inner conflicts of compliance versus rebellion drive their respective plots. Let us begin with the ending of Season 1 Episode 2 of The Handmaid’s Tale (00:42:51–00:44:29). In the events leading up to this scene, June had been ordered into her Commander’s private bedchamber, fearing that he would rape her. However, it turns out that the latter simply wanted to play Scrabble with his protégé. June, who acts as a first-person narrator, is relieved as she exits the house in slow motion—a specifically cinematic

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technique delineating her mental state through a ritardando in narrating time. Meanwhile, Don’t You Forget About Me by The Simple Minds is playing in the background. On the surface, the song further delineates June’s dissolving inner tension. However, when taking a closer look, it actually works in counterpoint to the images, much like Elliot’s voiceover discussed in section “Narrative Perspective”, thus creating several levels of ambiguity. Lines such as ‘Won’t you come see about me?’ could either be attributed to the Commander who ordered June to his chamber, or to her love interest Nick the gardener, whom she passes and whose potential jealousy she addresses in her voiceover. However, the lyrics could also be a profoundly cynical foreshadowing of the twist about to come, namely that June’s friend Ofglen has been deported and replaced by another woman. Finally, the song could also refer to June’s own humanity in its manifestations of playfulness and hope (‘When the light gets into your heart’), which she has had to suppress so often in the brutal society she inhabits. These various levels of audiovisual interplay would simply not work to the same extent in conventional prose, even if the song lyrics and June’s interior monologue were printed right next to each other; the various associations would be spelled out rather than subtly implied, thus robbing them of their artistic impact. Here, the Handmaid’s Tale takes full advantage of its medium’s innate strengths. Let us now turn to a scene from Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, following the actual rape of Pecola Breedlove by her white boss Cholly. While Morrison switches between narrative perspectives regularly throughout the novel, this particular segment features figural narration with Pecola as a reflector character: It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights—if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different. Her teeth were good, and at least her nose was not big and flat like some of those who were thought so cute. If she looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different, and Mrs. Breedlove too. Maybe they’d say, “Why, look at pretty-eyed Pecola. We mustn’t do bad things in front of those pretty eyes.” (2007, 45)

Referring back to Inner Dialogue, this could be characterized as Pecola’s Justifying Self trying to convince her Ashamed Self that in order to be treated with dignity by the white community, she herself must be

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white and have blue eyes. Emphasizing the particular strengths of her medium, Morrison pulls out all linguistic stops here. First, she deliberately draws attention to the words themselves both through frequent and almost rhythmical repetition (‘eyes,’ ‘different,’ and ‘beautiful’). This could hint at Pecola’s limited vocabulary that she never had the chance to expand upon due to her being denied a full formal education. Furthermore, Pecola uses run-on syntax that mimics her confused and anxious inner state; the girl is trapped in a non sequitur intellectual loop. Next, Morrison’s prose covers sensory experiences—in this case, sight (‘those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights’), conjuring up imagery from previous scenes in the reader’s mind, perceived through Pecola’s particular point of view. Finally, Morrison even manages to introduce interpersonal conflict through Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove’s hypothetical line of dialogue—which is, of course, the polar opposite of what the actual characters would say to Pecola. Thus, even in this short passage, we can observe a threefold, purely linguistic counterpoint that, due to its innate complexity and intensity, does not necessarily require any additional intermedial counterpoint to be artistically interesting. In the following paragraph, Morrison then pushes things even further through her idiosyncratic choice of jumping to Pecola’s stream of consciousness11 in which all of the previous techniques12 intensify: Pretty eyes. Pretty blue eyes. Big blue pretty eyes. Run, Jip, run. Jip runs, Alice runs. Alice has blue eyes. Jerry has blue eyes. Jerry runs. Alice runs. They run with their blue eyes. Four blue eyes. Four pretty blue eyes. Bluesky eyes. Blue-like Mrs. Forrest’s blue blouse eyes. Morning-glory-blueeyes. Alice-and-Jerry-blue-storybook-eyes. (2007, 45)

This form of perspective change would be difficult to achieve onscreen in this fashion and is a uniquely novelistic technique of escalating inner conflict. As Pecola’s rational Justifying Self is unable to resolve her dilemma, her Manic Self takes over, frantically cheering Pecola on to pursue an unachievable (and unworthy) dream, that will unavoidably keep evading her. Still, the idealized fantasy (‘morning glory’ and ‘storybook’)13 develops a tantalizing undertow that Pecola finds impossible to escape and ultimately succumbs to in the form of mental illness. She cannot claim her own dignity because the system is rigged against her.

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Thus, while The Handmaid’s Tale and The Bluest Eye are relatively similar up until the ‘narrative perspective’ layer (safe the different settings), they still differ vastly in their respective executions. This is symptomatic for the two media at hand: the most significant differences between them emerge with regard to medium-specific style. Therefore, while critics such as Doherty are correct in pointing out structural similarities between TV series and conventional novels, calling TV series ‘the new novels’ can at best be partially correct (Fig. 3.4).

Fig. 3.4 The sphere: style-layer

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The Sphere’s Interdependency As we have come to the end of our discussion of Sphere Theory, let me readdress the claim I have made at the beginning of this paper: the order of the Spheres suggested above is the most organic and efficient from a creative writing perspective. This does not mean it is necessarily the only one. Indeed, it would be possible to progress in the exact opposite order, starting with style and gradually working one’s way back to theme. Yet I believe that this would take much longer. For instance, those writers who first start pondering how to tell the story from a specific point of view might later on find out that they want to eliminate the corresponding character for reasons integral to their story, thus rendering all their work in the ‘narrative perspective’ and the ‘style’ layers irrelevant. Likewise, creating a host of arbitrary story events in the ‘plot’ layer is more or less futile until the writer knows what the story is actually about, thus having established his theme and setting. In practical application, some back and forth between the layers of course cannot entirely be avoided and are a natural part of the creative process. Also, the suggested order does not make any of the given layers any less important—just like in an engine, the ignition plug is not more important than the cylinder. Yet, the ignition plug still has to come first, because otherwise, the engine will not start. Finally, I hope to have shown that the Sphere lends itself well to discussing the differences between novels and TV series by displaying various paths through the respective layers visually. I believe that Sphere Theory constitutes a helpful tool in the analysis of stories in both media, while also providing a useful guideline for creative writers working in either form. Building on the existing theories of Aristotle, McKee, Stanzel, and others, I have tried to connect and expand upon them. I hope that the new way in which I have consecutively, dynamically, and causally ordered the strata provides an additional angle to the analysis and creation of TV series and novels that does not yet exist in this form in other theoretical approaches.

Notes 1. C.f. among others Doherty (2012), Damico and Quay (2016). 2. C.f. among others Hoel (2016), Agresta (2012).

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3. The idea of developing Sphere Theory emerged when I was working on my dissertation, “Identity and Consciousness in the Performative Versions of Wagner’s The Nibelung’s Ring, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire” (forthcoming with Palgrave). With regard to A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones , I examined the growing divergences between the book series and its TV adaptation, and attempted to find theoretical reasons for the showrunners’ creative decisions. Thus, I began developing a conceptual model, which eventually turned into Sphere Theory. 4. Both stories are respectively told from Joe’s/Humbert’s point of view, addressed in section “Narrative Perspective”. 5. Henry James, among others, had a similar idea in mind when he wrote: “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?” (1972, 37). 6. C.f. among others van Gunsteren (2019, 141), D’hoker (2016, 211). 7. Contemporary psychology backs up this claim and acknowledges the presence of several sub-personalities within the human psyche (c.f. among others Kevin Fall et al. (2010)). 8. For the purposes of this chapter, we will leave out this narrative situation, since it has hardly any relevance for TV drama series and is on the decline even in contemporary novels. 9. For instance, Walter White. 10. Which is, in turn, based on Margaret Atwood’s novel. 11. As defined by Seymour Chatman: “the random ordering of thoughts and impressions (…) The mind is engaged in that ordinary flow of associations, at the opposite pole of ‘thinking something on purpose’” (Tay 1984, 8). 12. Minus the complex syntax, which becomes a neverending staccato. 13. Again, note the sensory experiences implied by a minimum amount of words.

References Agresta, Michael. 2012. “‘Girls,’ ‘Mad Men,’ and the Future of TV-asLiterature.“ The Atlantic, June 15. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertain

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ment/archive/2012/06/girls-mad-men-and-the-future-of-tv-as-literature/ 258469/. Accessed 25 January 2020 Damico, Amy M., and Sara E. Quay. 2016. 21st-Century Dramas. Exploring the New Golden Age. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. Aristotle. 2013. Poetics. Translated by Sir Arthur Kenny. Oxford: Oxford World Classics. Benioff, David, and Dan Weiss. 2011–2019. Game of Thrones. New York: HBO. Berlanti, Greg, and Sera Gamble. 2018–present. YOU . Los Angeles: Netflix. Chase, David. 1999–2007. The Sopranos. New York: HBO. Chatman, Seymour. 1980. “What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (And Vice Versa).” Critical Inquiry 7 (1): 121–140. Cowan, Andrew. 2013. The Art of Writing Fiction. London and New York: Routledge. D’hoker, Elke. 2016. Irish Women Writers and the Modern Short Story. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Doherty, Thomas. 2012. “Storied TV: Cable Is The New Novel.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 17. https://www.chronicle.com/article/ Cable-Is-the-New-Novel/134420. Accessed 25 January 2020. Esmail, Sam. 2016–2019. Mr. Robot. New York: USA Network. Fall, Kevin A., Janice M. Holden, and Andre Marquis. 2010. Theoretical Models of Counseling and Psychotherapy. New York: Routledge. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. 2013. The Great Gatsby. London: Penguin Classics. Friedman, Norman. 1955. “Forms of the Plot.” Journal of General Education (7) (July): 241–253. Gilligan, Vince. 2008–2013. Breaking Bad. New York: AMC. Hoel, Henry. 2016. “Fiction in the Age of Screens.” The New Atlantis no. 49, Special Section The Integrity of Science: pp. 93–109. James, Henry. 1972. A Theory of Fiction. Edited by James E. Miller. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Klein, Kevin. 2018. “A Statistical Analysis of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time.” February 16. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/ statistical-analysis-wheel-time/. Accessed 3 March 3 2020. Kuhn, Markus. 2011. Filmnarratologie. Berlin: De Gruyter. McKee, Robert. 1997. Story. New York: Harper Collins. ———. 2016. Dialogue. New York: Hachette Book Group. Miller, Bruce. 2017–present. The Handmaid’s Tale. Los Angeles: Hulu. Mitrokostas, Sophia. 2018. “14 of the Most Expensive TV Episodes of All Time.” Insider, November 14. https://www.insider.com/most-expensive-tvepisodes-2018-10. Accessed 25 January 2020. Morrison, Toni. 2007. The Bluest Eye. New York: Vintage Books. Müller, Günther. 2011. “Erzählzeit und erzählte Zeit.” In Morphologische Poetik. Gesammelte Aufsätze, 269–286. Darmstadt: WBG.

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Murray, Noel. 2019. “The Sopranos at 20: Here’s Your Complete Guide to Rewatching It.” New York Times, January 12. https://www.nytimes. com/2019/01/09/arts/television/the-sopranos-seasons.html. Accessed 25 January 2020. Nabokov, Vladimir. 2000. Lolita. London: Penguin Classics. Simon, David. 2002–2008. The Wire. New York: HBO. Stanzel, Franz Karl. 2008. Theorie des Erzählens. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Tay, William. 1984. “Wang Meng, Stream-of-consciousness, and the Controversy over Modernism.” Modern Chinese Literature 1 (1): 7–24. Tolstoy, Leo. 2016. The Death of Ivan Ilyich. London: Penguin Classics. Van Gunsteren, Julia. 2019. Kathrine Mansfield and Literary Impressionism. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Verstraten, Peter. 2009. Film Narratology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. von Schlegel, August Wilhelm. 1840. A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. Translated by John Black. London: Templeman. Digitalized by Harvard University. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.320440189 50311&view=1up&seq=11. Accessed 25 January 2020 Watson, Jerry J. 1991. “An Integral Setting Tells More than When and Where.”The Reading Teacher 44 (9): 638–646. Weiner, Matthew. 2007–2015. Mad Men. New York: AMC Network. Woolf, Virginia. 2003. Mrs. Dalloway. London: Collector’s Library. Wyatt, C. S., and Susan Schnelbach. 2019. “How Many Words? Tameri Guide for Writers.” https://www.tameri.com/format/wordcounts.html.

CHAPTER 4

The Poetics of Screenwriting: Approaching the Teleplay from a Literary Perspective Pedro López-Osa

Introduction The script—as screenplay or teleplay1 —has often been regarded as an object of difficult definition, stuck somewhere between the verbal and the audiovisual. Yet the renewed academic interest in the screenplay as an object of study proves that the script is a much more complex work of art than is suggested in screenwriting manuals. So far, such manuals have constituted the bulk of the theoretical work available on the subject. There is very little literature available on the script as a literary form. In this chapter, I intend to contribute to filling this critical gap. My central argument is that screenwriters often turn to literary devices when writing a script, which means that at least some scripts can and should be read as literary works.

P. López-Osa (B) University of Granada, La Solana, Spain e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Winckler and V. Huertas-Martín (eds.), Television Series as Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4720-1_4

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Most discussions of the script fail to address its literary merits and qualities. Its artistic autonomy denied (Maras 2009), regarded as “a structure endowed with the will to become another structure” (Pasolini 2005, 193), defined by what it is not rather than what it is (Sánchez-Escalonilla 2014, 15), the script remains critically subordinate to the end product. Yet scripts are obviously written works, and it is possible to find the cinematic value of the end products they precede forecast in their written language. Despite the increasing scholarly interest in the field of screenwriting studies, the script has so far rarely been discussed as a literary work. To see if at least some scripts can be read as works of literature, it seems sensible to begin this discussion by looking at the different ways in which the script can be approached theoretically. By revising standing concepts of the orthodoxy of screenwriting, in particular the blueprint hypothesis, I will argue that teleplays reveal creative literary practice and intentionality on the part of the scriptwriter. I will discuss the concept of the poetics of the screenplay as an alternative to the standard theory, able to account for the literary traces evident in scripts which do not conform to the orthodoxy of screenwriting, but rather reveal the presence of distinctive narrative voices. Finally, I will illustrate the theoretical points by discussing the scripts of two episodes of recent television series—Lost ’s “Pilot” and Black Mirror’s “San Junipero”, which, under close reading, emerge as literary works of art in their own right.

2. From the Orthodoxy of Screenwriting to a Poetics of Screenwriting The origins of the practice of screenwriting are often associated with the transition triggered by the technical developments between the first non-narrative films and the birth of narrative cinema in Europe in the first decade of the twentieth century. During this transitionary period, the script, in its early forms known as the photoplay, scenario, continuity or treatment,2 became an established stage in pre-production. At this stage, as conventional film history has it, “[w]riting had no value in a medium that […] (often termed ‘primitive’ by film historians) could not begin to approximate the intellectual and artistic revolutions taking place in modernist literature” (Price 2010, 2). And yet, we may encounter early scripts such as that by Carl Theodor Dreyer for his silent classic The Passion of Joan of Arc which contain vivid descriptions of the setting

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and scenes, clearly concerned with other elements beyond mere technical or structural aspects of the final screen product. Dreyer’s text, in Kevin Boon’s view, is an example of obvious literary quality, showing that as early as “[b]y the mid-1920s the screenplay had risen from the simplicity of practical necessity to a literary form in its own right” (Boon 2008, 11). The emergence of sound in cinema and the establishment of a more defined format for the script which progressively led to the screenplay as it is known today gave the writing stage more and more prominence in the creative process. It was not until the publication of the first screenwriting manuals in the late 1970s that literature on the subject became popular, especially among young aspiring screenwriters. These manuals advocated for an orthodoxy of the practice, a series of principles screenwriters should take into account when writing scripts. Most influentially, Syd Field’s (2005) seminal Screenplay, originally published in 1979, promoted a three-act structure, based on the theory provided in Aristotle’s Poetics . This has been regarded as the paradigm followed by most great scriptwriters. But while Aristotle’s work is descriptive, screenwriting manuals are by nature prescriptive: they assume that certain principles are right in an absolute sense and push writers to follow, rather than question, them. This can affect creativity negatively, since it leads to form taking precedence over style and content. Kathryn Millard (2006) accordingly labels the prescriptive principles frequently found in manuals as “gospel” (10). And while it is true that manuals include some effective tools to describe the structure of scripts and serve as a useful reference for writers, reducing the screenwriting process to a set of principles to be followed seems ultimately counterproductive. Prescriptive orthodoxy seems at least partly responsible for the pervasiveness of the blueprint metaphor, which considers the script as merely a planning tool, bound to the production of films or TV serials (Maras 2009, 48) and devoid of artistic intent, with the screenwriter, restricted by its limitations, having very little creative freedom and little influence on the final screen product. The blueprint concept has also contributed to the conception of the script as a transitory object, bound to disappear eventually. This perspective has occluded its study as an artistic object in its own right. The script text, however, is intermediate only when considered within the production process, but not as creative practice. The script is not an

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audiovisual product, but a text written in a way that makes it compatible with the cinematic/televisual. Emphatically, “no screenplay furnishes us with an instance of a film” (Nannicelli 2013a, 151). This means that the blueprint hypothesis leaves crucial questions about the screenplay’s ontology unanswered. It can therefore be regarded as a notion built around the avoidance of the artistic aspects of screenwriting, rather than a promising approach to comprehensively define its products. The fact that the script has traditionally been treated as intended for a specific type of reader—i.e. people involved in production, so-called blueprint readers—has contributed to the consolidation of the blueprint metaphor. Nevertheless, as Claudia Sternberg (1997) has observed, these readers constitute only one of multiple possible readerships “associated with the three functional text stages: property, blueprint and reading material” (48). It is reasonable to regard the script as “a text of suggestive incompletion that demands the writerly activity of others” (Price 2010, 41). However, in fact, every “[text] is necessarily, given the nature of intertextuality, incomplete” (Allen 2000‚ 86), so that the incompleteness hypothesis might be regarded as a reason for, rather than against, considering scripts as literature. In fact, as will be shown, screenwriters often turn to literary techniques and devices to compensate for the lack of audiovisual means of expression at the writing stage. A look at the formal features of screenwriting and the poetics of the practice, that is, its distinctive aesthetic and formal features, can shed light on what is at stake in understanding scripts as literary works. Sternberg’s (1997) pioneering approach to the script text identifies four “modes” in it: description, report, comment and speech. The modes of description and report, concerned with technical indications relevant for production and the description of actions, combine two qualities: “frozenness”, broadly corresponding to narrative pause, and camera movement indications. The comment mode describes and interprets what is to appear on screen, a practice categorically rejected in screenwriting manuals (McKee 1997, 27). And yet, Sternberg (1997) notes, “screenwriters rarely miss the opportunity to use the mode of comment” (74), suggesting that the script can contain narrative information that may differ from the screenwork and thus lead to different interpretations. Finally, the last mode, that of speech, is the one part of the text that “reaches the spectator directly” (Sternberg 1997, 107). Yet even dialogue is in the screenwork filtered by several factors, such as direction, editing and the cast’s performances, before reaching the audience. Furthermore,

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cases of improvised speech on the part of actors are not infrequent, and neither are dialogue segments added during production or cut during editing. These changes are yet another reason for considering the script separately, as a text preserving the writer’s intentionality.3 It would therefore be a mistake to isolate the speech as it appears in the screenwork and identify it with the script. The cinematic product does not fully incorporate the script text, which in turn cannot be reduced to just the dialogue. Sternberg’s classification of screenwriting modes should not be understood as a clear-cut analysis of separable parts, but rather as a way to describe an interaction of elements in script texts which are in fact inseparably linked in the final text. It is at the centre of such interaction that the unique narrative of the script takes place by creating a cinematic effect through words. The text itself cannot be defined in cinematic terms: rather, it constitutes the textual idea of the screenwork, what Macdonald (2013) calls the “screen idea” (1). Macdonald’s term seeks to express the notion that the screenplay is written with the screenwork in mind, as its goal, and yet is a product other than the screenwork (2013, 4–5).4 All the elements at work in the script text serve to emulate the screen illusion and therefore to compensate for the lack of audiovisual resources by literary means. Hence, the script is certainly not devoid of literary qualities. To the claim that screenplays are not works of art in their own right […] we may reply that, in fact, a screenplay that is used to make a film is in fact not ontologically bound to it […]. [T]heatrical scripts are works of art solely in virtue of the fact that they are literary works. So, too, are screenplays works of art in their own right if they are literary works. (Nannicelli 2013a, 137–138)

After consulting several definitions of literature, Nannicelli (2013a) concludes that “many screenplays easily meet the conditions for literary status” (148). However, the script cannot simply be analysed in the same terms as novels or poetry are, for such an analysis would necessarily fail to account for the idiosyncrasies of the script text: the script has to be acknowledged as a literary genre with a poetics of its own.

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The Teleplay as Literature Much of the literature on screenwriting is dedicated to the screenplay. Television came much later than film and, consequently, teleplays have been much less discussed than film scripts. Those discussions that do exist focus mostly on ontological questions, rendering analyses of specific teleplays as literature secondary. While it is true that the principles of screenwriting research “apply to all forms of moving image screen narrative” (Macdonald 2013, 1), the particular idiosyncrasies of the television industry, and the changes within it, have had some effect on the television screenplay. Following this line of thought, Redvall and Cook (2015) note that there has been a shift from a focus on the figure of the producer to that of the screenwriter in recent decades in the television industry (132). However, this shift has not been accompanied by a corresponding scholarly focus on the script. Rather, television narrative has often been approached from the perspective of the so-called final product, and scholars have rarely looked at the elements out of which that final product is composed.5 The main distinguishing feature of television scripts is the fact that teleplays are usually serialised and must therefore account for continuity throughout different instalments, while the greater length of a series compared to a feature film allows for the blurring of genres, non-linear temporality and narrative complexity. Analysing the poetics of screenwriting may shed some light on whether such complexity is already present in the teleplay or not. A look at almost any quality TV serial from the twenty-first century could be illustrative of this, even if this is applicable to all television seriality. The limited length of the present chapter makes it impractical to look at many different instalments of a single show here. I will therefore focus the discussion on two teleplays from different series in order to show how both of these scripts introduce certain serialised elements through literary techniques that will become central in the future episodes of the series. In this study, the work of Damon Lindelof (together with J.J. Abrams) and Charlie Brooker, showrunners and cowriters of their shows, has been chosen for an analysis of the idiosyncrasies of teleplays—one serialised, the other from an anthology series—in terms of their intentionality and potential literary quality, as well as their role within the creative process of the production of TV serials as a whole. I argue that the doctrine that screenwriters should not indulge in the literary (McKee 1997, 408) is, in fact, often ignored by the scriptwriters

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themselves. On the contrary, the screenwriters frequently turn to literary devices to create narratives that emulate the desired screen experience through words. “Two Players. Two Sides”: The Narrative of Lost’s “Pilot” Lost (ABC, 2004–2010) is undoubtedly one of the most popular television serials of the 2000s. It generated a strong worldwide fan base as well as much academic discussion about the show’s mysterious mythology, complex narrative, unexpected twists and eclectic ensemble of characters (see Clarke 2010; Mittell 2009; Pearson 2009; Stuart 2011; Woscoboinik 2018). Mittell (2009) argues across his chapter on Lost that the show’s aesthetics is a key factor in its success, along with its unity of purpose, narrative complexity and encouragement of forensic fandom. As is the case with most TV series, the teleplay of the “Pilot” episode establishes many of the aesthetic norms which characterise Lost as a TV serial. Although these aesthetic qualities are not the sole source of the show’s value, I will argue here that they are crucial in establishing and developing the complex narrative of the script and the challenge it poses to television conventions and readers’, as well as viewers’, expectations. The “Pilot” episode shows few differences from the script in the way the narrative unfolds and in terms of the events both of them depict. Following orthodox instruction, the teleplay for the “Pilot” starts with an image, rather than dialogue (Seger 2010, 35–36). However, the text as a whole cannot be described as orthodox at all. McKee (1997) consistently insists that “[t]he most powerful, eloquent moments on screen require no verbal description to create them, no dialogue to act them” (27). Yet the text for Lost ’s “Pilot” opens with several pages of mostly descriptive passages, creating in words the opening scenes of the show’s spectacular premiere. The opening pages of the script of Lost ’s “Pilot” are illustrative of the distinctive narrative voice present in the script. Seymour Chatman (1990) has defined the cinematic narrator as a “composite of a large and complex variety of communicating devices” (134), rather than an identifiable human agent. This complex variety is a result of the medium, where narration occurs through various channels and in various ways, affected by the content and treatment of the image as well as that of the sound.6 On a script page, however, narration takes place through a single channel, that of the written word; therefore, we cannot talk about a cinematic

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narrator as defined by Chatman when talking about a script. Rather, when looking at the opening excerpt of Lost ’s “Pilot” script, there is an obvious literary intentionality: we are being told something in a way that draws our attention to how the events are presented. The text doesn’t merely give a descriptive account of what is to be seen on screen. It also suggests, through the comment mode, how it will be seen, in an attempt to create a screen experience for the reader. This experience cannot be understood as something fixed or unified, since it can be interpreted in various ways (cf Nannicelli 2013a, 212). Still, the screen idea is clearly at work in the way the sequence is planned in the text,7 describing the move from tighter to wider shots, for example, and thereby giving the reader a clue as to how the information will be manipulated as the story unfolds for the screen audience. Lindelof and Abrams thus lay out many of the defining features of the subsequent screenwork through comment and description. In screenwriting manuals, the writers are encouraged to restrain their literary ambition. The screenwriter’s task, following McKee (1997), is not to create literature, but rather, “[t]o describe in such a way that as the reader turns the page, a film flows through the imagination” (395). But the purported conflict between literature and screenwriting is imaginary: the description which lets a film flow through the reader’s imagination conjures up mental imagery and thus does precisely the same thing as most other types of literary work (Nannicelli, 2013a, 215). Admittedly, when reading the opening passage from Lost ’s “Pilot”, a reader familiar with the screenwork may be reminded of the opening images of the episode, but the experience might be different depending on the reader, and will definitely be utterly different for someone unfamiliar with the serial. Lost is well-known for its intermingling of narrative timelines through flashbacks, flash-forwards and flash-sideways, in which repetition and cyclical narration is a common motif (Pérez Latorre 2007). This is clearly anticipated in the script: someone reading the beginning of the teleplay is nudged by the screenwriters’ use of adjectives to expect that something strange is about to happen on this island. The sounds are “other-worldly” and the bamboo forest is “alien-looking” (Lindelof and Abrams 2004, 1). A reader who is already familiar with the series, on the other hand, may interpret the bamboo forest as anticipating the characters’ struggle to survive on what appears to be a deserted island. Another could also see the “odd tableau” of Jack and the Labrador staring at each other described in the first scene as a mark of one of the features

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of the serial’s narrative structure, namely that of foreshadowing or anticipating future events, since this opening tableau is evoked several times throughout the serial and is eventually repeated in the closing scenes of the last episode. Similarly, a reader might regard the opening passages as an anticipation of the genre mixing characterising the show. Mittell (2009) notices that what, at first sight, appears to be the premise of the show—the story of a group of plane crash survivors on a deserted island—seems peculiar for a serialised narrative (21). Expectations of course change once the fantasy element intervenes and genre fusion becomes one of the trademarks of the serial. Soon after the depiction of the plane crash, we start to get enough information to realise that Lost is not merely a survival story, but a narrative marked by intertextual pastiche, with elements from science fiction, horror, drama and romance, as well as echoes and references to other texts and writers—like the Bible, Stephen King, C. S. Lewis, John Steinbeck and H. G. Wells (Ndalianis 2009; Stuart 2011).8 In the teleplay, all this is foreshadowed from the first page, through the language hinting at the “other-worldly” nature of the island. The focus on several characters, unlike in the subsequent episodes, also makes it easier for the double opening episode to exploit genre mixing as characters are introduced. After the intensity of the plane crash sequence, a character like Hurley brings some lighter, even comic, moments contrasting with the shock of the previous experience—for instance, when failing to spell the word “bodies” in front of Walt, or refusing to eat a sea urchin offered by Jin. While these also occur in the episode, the teleplay text includes interpretive commentary more explicitly evaluative than the scenes in the screenwork. For example, shortly after the crash, Shannon is lying in the sun, wearing a bikini. In the writers’ words: “[o]f all the things, she’s SUNBATHING”. They then compare the image to “a damn Coppertone commercial”, as the camera moves to reveal “the huge PLANE WRECK […] in the distance” (Lindelof and Abrams 2004, 47). Here again, the text interprets what is later to be seen on screen by directing the reader’s attention towards Shannon’s immature attitude, in contrast to the rest of the survivors at work in the frame’s background. We again find the narrative intervention not equivalent to Chatman’s cinematic narrator, but rather to that of a literary one, a third-person omniscient narrator familiar with the story universe and the characters in it, trying to emulate the screen experience through the verbal description of cinematic discourse. That is to say, it is the screen

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idea that characterises the script’s implied narrator as a different agent from the cinematic narrator. While many of Lost ’s aesthetic and narrative features are to be found in the script text, it still needs to rely on the screen idea expressed in verbal form, as it lacks the audiovisual qualities of the medium which it seeks to emulate. It is only in the end product that the screen experience is fully realised. Nevertheless, the script is not a blueprint of merely technical value. On the contrary, its pages serve as the foundation of a large part of Lost ’s narrative features and are the space where the screenwriters express themselves creatively. Furthermore, the writer’s contribution can be fully appreciated only by reading the script, since the screen idea is never fully realised in the screenwork, in the same way that the cinematic experience cannot possibly be anticipated by the screenwriter. Looking at them separately throws some light on the relationship between the written word and the audiovisual medium. If literature in our technological era, as Vicente Luis Mora (2012, 41–42) suggests, is characterised by a closer relationship between image and text than ever before, this relationship is palpable in the screen idea at the heart of the poetics of screenwriting. “Heaven is a Place on Earth”: The Screenwriter as Controlling Agent in Black Mirror’s “San Junipero” Much like Lost , Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror (Channel 4/Netflix, 2011-present) has been widely discussed by academia (see Altunay and Aškan 2006; Boren 2015; Sculos 2017; Cirucci and Vacker 2018; Utichi 2019). In contrast to Lost and most other quality TV series, Black Mirror opts for an episodic narrative, in the manner of an anthology series. As the series advances, though, it starts to include more internal references to previous episodes, creating a sense of connectedness, thereby combining episodic TV with the complexity typical of serials. In this way, the show progressively develops its own mythology surrounding the narrative. However, unlike in Lost , the mythology of Brooker’s dystopia acts as a complement to the show’s universe, but never determines the events taking place in it. The episodic form allows Brooker to play with the possibilities of the medium, first television and now online streaming platforms. While the scripts for both Black Mirror and Lost serve as foundations for the aesthetic and narrative features of their respective episodes, the teleplay for “San Junipero” clearly contrasts with that of Lost in the way the

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narrative unfolds. Lindelof and Abrams weave a story with frequent time shifts where repetition and anticipation become central motifs, whereas the implied narrator in Brooker’s text unfolds the information slowly as the story progresses, and the reader becomes fully aware of what is going on. Rather than anticipating future events and showing a dependency on cliff-hangers, the teleplay “San Junipero” opts for disguising its final revelation behind a story set in the late 1980s. The story follows Yorkie, a shy woman who has just arrived in the coastal tourist town of San Junipero, as she falls in love with Kelly, an adventurous woman who is trying to make the most of her stay in town. At first sight, there seems to be nothing strange about the setting. Even if Yorkie cannot help but look “a little like a tourist” (Brooker 2015, 1), she finds her way to Tucker’s, one of the popular nightclubs in town. The use of the comment and description modes in this scene is indicative of a narrative agency which is not as explicit in the end product. The writer is clearly intervening throughout the passage. The club is a “cavern” (Brooker 2015, 2)‚ the music being played is specified, and Yorkie’s intentions and feelings are hinted at. Much of this information has to be perceived by the viewers of the episode through multiple channels—e.g. soundtrack, editing, camera movements, frames or Mackenzie Davis’s performance. However, since the information in the script text is transmitted only through the written word, readers experience the story with a more specific focus, as their attention is directed to certain details by the screenwriter. Brooker’s text makes sure we notice the distinctive 1980s music anthem, the poor quality of the translation of the on-screen instructions of the arcade game Yorkie ends up playing, the fact that the videogame music is 8-bit, and so on. The attention of the reader is explicitly pointed to this information through narrative pause, in a more direct way than in the screenwork— the viewer of the final episode might not know that the song playing in the scene is Robbie Nevil’s “C’est la vie”, for example, and the introductory message of the arcade game might pass unnoticed. Furthermore, the script includes additional information revealing the presence of an omniscient narrator—Yorkie is described as being “overwhelmed”, for example (Brooker 2015, 2). The script narrator is therefore, again, closer to the perspective of the traditional literary narrator as a personal agent than to that of a cinematic narrator.

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What seems to be an introductory sequence is indeed foreshadowing the narrative twist to be revealed at the end of the story. The other characters are soon revealed to always leave at midnight; the guests at Tucker’s are “trying too hard” (Brooker, 7) to look the way they are supposed to and details change every week. These details include the movie billboard by the shoreline—first promoting The Witches of Eastwick, then Spaceballs and, finally, the “doomed Village People movie Can’t Stop the Music” (Brooker 2015, 1, 25, 29), which was released in 1980, as well as the diegetic music constantly specified in the text. Such elements may strike the reader as odd. The teleplay, however, treats them as anecdotal, as the characters do not find them strange and the text does not delve into detail. Eventually, San Junipero is revealed to be a simulated reality for elderly people, where they can live even after death, if they choose to. The attitude in the script towards the anecdotal details mentioned above also changes as the episode progresses. When Yorkie tries the 1990s, the teleplay ironically refers thus to the billboard: “ONE WEEK LATER. The billboard? Independence Day” (Brooker 2015, 30). An apparently unimportant detail at first, the presence of the billboard turns from mere nostalgic detail to a source of concern and irony. In the end, Kelly and Yorkie reunite in San Junipero, where they will presumably spend eternity together. The script is the object where the writer’s literary intentions are realised, suggesting through literary means what the screenwork should be like, whether the end product sticks to or differs from those suggestions (Nannicelli 2013a, 197). This literariness is not part of the audiovisual product, and can only be found in the script text. The literary narrator’s emphasis on details such as music choices and characters’ feelings highlights bits of information for a reader of the script which might pass unnoticed for viewers of the resulting screenwork. While the dynamics of the screen idea compensate for the lack of cinematic devices, they increase the sensation of being told something in a similar way to other literary texts. This is most noticeable in the closing pages of the script, where Kelly and Yorkie reunite in San Junipero. The descriptions here are written in meticulous detail. I will pay particular attention to how the screen idea, shaped by literary devices, emulates the editing, and how the sequence fits the lyrics of Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a Place on Earth”: EXT. SAN JUNIPERO HIGHWAY

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The two women roar along the freeway at speed. BELINDA CARLISLE In this world we’re just beginning To understand the miracle of living […] INT. TCKR SYSTEMS - SERVER FARM - DAY We’re panning past server after server, each labelled SAN JUNIPERO and an assigned number... SAN JUNIPERO SERVER 1, SAN JUNIPERO SERVER 2... And so on. BELINDA CARLISLE Ooh baby do you know what that’s worth? Ooh heaven is a place on Earth. We move close on a bank of LEDs, winking like crazy.

In the script, the images of Kelly and Yorkie’s happy life together in San Junipero are complemented with Carlisle’s song, echoing the idea that they are in paradise. The textual medium of the script, however, makes more obvious than the screenwork how the screenwriter wants particular parts of the visual sequence to correspond to each specific song verse, as the intertextual relationship between the lyrics and the images is of clear relevance for the narrative. INT. TUCKER’S - 1987 - DANCE FLOOR - NIGHT Kelly and Yorkie on the dance floor - in 1987 gear, but Yorkie minus glasses, laughing, embracing. BELINDA CARLISLE They say in heaven, love comes first. We’ll make heaven a place on Earth. INT. TCKR SYSTEMS - SERVER ROOM - DAY Extreme close up on a pair of flickering blue LEDs. BELINDA CARLISLE Ooh heaven is a place on Earth.

The screen idea does not combine the lines from Carlisle’s song randomly with images of Kelly and Yorkie’s apparent happily ever after. Rather, Brooker’s text specifies how the lyrics relate to the story and how the images of Kelly and Yorkie relate back to the music on the soundtrack, revealing a darker side to the apparently optimistic ending. For a show often labelled as bleak and pessimistic, “San Junipero” turns out to be a rather optimistic instalment. Such optimism, however, is not

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indebted to a nostalgic look at the past, but rather to using it as a critical lens through which the present disguised as future gains meaning. The irony is that eternity in the past is only reachable through the future (Hutcheon and Valdés 2000, 20). Such irony is explicitly self-reflexive in the teleplay in the bittersweet aftertaste that what seems a happy ending is not entirely so after all. The contrast in the text between the images of Kelly and Yorkie in San Junipero and the LEDs flickering in the server room do in fact contribute to that idea, for, even if this paradise is in fact a simulated artifice, they are able to spend eternity together. At the same time, however, this contraposition is a reminder of the unreachability of the past, ultimately not real, and that turning to it cannot be matter of simply “sigh and lament” (Pickering and Keightley 2006, 920). Certainly, Brooker does not randomly combine the lines from Carlisle’s song with the images of Kelly and Yorkie’s happily ever after. Rather, his writerly intention is evident in the emphasis on the irony behind the characters’ choice to stay in their own simulated paradise. Their consciousnesses are being stored in a server facility, their LEDs flickering forever—or perhaps just until the next blackout.

Conclusions The analysis of teleplays reveals that, though much of the story content and aesthetics in the script are presented in the show, the teleplays’ content is not equal to the content of the end product and leads to different readings. The screenwriter’s narrative intentionality, unlike the cinematic narrator’s, is transmitted through one single medium: the written word. The written discourse allows the screenwriter to draw the readers’ attention to specific details and additional information which can only be provided by an omniscient narrator. A script still lacks many of the idiosyncrasies of the medium for which it is intended, a lack compensated for by the screen idea, created through the use of literary devices. Only by reading the script text can one be fully appreciative of the extent of the screenwriter’s creative, and that is to say literary, contribution. The poetics of screenwriting, therefore, constitutes a stepping stone for the study of the audiovisual narrative, at a time in which literature itself increasingly combines text and image.

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Notes 1. When speaking about scripts in general (both teleplays and screenplays), I will use the term “script”. I will use the specific terms only when referring to either cinema or television scripts particularly, or to textual instances written for a specific medium. 2. Although some of these terms are still in use today, they no longer refer to the script itself, as they have become separate elements in pre-production. 3. By a writer’s “intentionality,” I refer to categorical intentions, a term used by Nannicelli and borrowed from Jerrold Levinson’s distinction between semantic and categorical intentions. Categorical intentions do not refer to what a specific work is supposed to mean but rather “determine the sort of thing an artisan or artist creates” (2013a, 200). In other words, the focus is on the object as a product of an agent’s intention rather than on what the object itself means. It may seem implausible to present this as a clear-cut division where an author’s intentions have no connection whatsoever with the meaning of what he creates. However, it does help to emphasise that while “authorial intent [is not] the sole arbiter and guarantee of the meaning and value of a work of art (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 2013, 106–107, orginal emphasis), it is certainly relevant. 4. The generally assumed inseparable relationship between screenplay and screenwork is not an intrinsic feature of the screenplay. There are in fact, for example, series of scripts—so-called ‘scriptfics’—being written without the intention of being turned into films or serials, whose writers pay special attention to aesthetic and creative features. These scripts are read by others purely for the pleasure of reading (Nannicelli 2013b, 151–152). 5. There are some exceptions to this, such as the research conducted by some screenwriting scholars (see, e.g. Redvall and Cook 2015; Russo 2017). Studies such as these make a case for the growing importance of television screenwriting in the changing production modes of the medium and analyse the narrative structure of specific teleplays. 6. For example, a voice-over can be a narrative element and one of the manifestations of the cinematic narrator, but so can cinematography and editing.

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7. However, the sequence is not realised in the episode exactly as described in the text, as the description and report modes allow for narrative pause in the latter but not the former. 8. This idea is confirmed later in the “Pilot” by John Locke’s reference to the two sides in the game of backgammon, which foreshadows the opposition between Jacob and the Man in Black.

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Hutcheon, Linda, and Siobhan O’Flynn. 2013. A Theory of Adaptation. London: Routledge. Lindelof, Damon, and J. J. Abrams. 2004. “Pilot.” http://leethomson.myzen. co.uk/Lost/Lost_1x01_-_Pilot.pdf. Lost. 2004–2010. Created by Jeffrey Lieber, J. J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof . USA: ABC. ———. 2004. Season 1, Episodes 1 and 2. “Pilot.” Directed by J. J. Abrams. Aired September 22 and 29 2004. Macdonald, Ian W. 2013. Screenwriting Poetics and the Screen Idea. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan UK. Maras, Steven. 2009. Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice. London: Wallflower Press. McKee, Robert. 1997. Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York: HarperCollins. Millard, Kathryn. 2006. “Writing for the screen: Beyond the gospel of story.” Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jep. 2011.11.008.An. Mittell, Jason. 2009. “Lost in a great story: Evaluation in narrative television (and television studies).” In Reading Lost: Perspectives on a Hit Television Show, edited by Roberta Pearson, 119–138. London: I. B. Tauris. http:// web.mit.edu/uricchio/Public/television/mittell evaluation.pdf. Mora, Vicente Luis. 2012. El Lectoespectador. Barcelona: Seix Barral EPUB edition. Nannicelli, Ted. 2013. A Philosophy of the Screenplay. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Nannicelli, Ted. 2013. The ontology and literary status of the screenplay: The case of »Scriptfic«. Journal of Literary Theory 7 (1–2): 135–153. https://doi. org/10.1515/jlt-2013-0006. Ndalianis, Angela. 2009. Lost in genre: Chasing the white rabbit to find a white polar bear. In Reading Lost: Perspectives on a Hit Television Show, ed. Roberta Pearson, 193–210. London: I. B. Tauris. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 2005. Heretical Empiricism. Edited by Louise K. Barnett and Ben Lawton. Washington: New Academia Publishing. Pearson, Roberta, ed. 2009. Reading Lost: Perspectives on a Hit Television Show. London: I. B. Tauris. Pérez Latorre, Oliver. 2007. “El Bucle Del Arrepentimiento: Sobre El Universo de Ficción y La Autoría de Perdidos.” In La Caja Lista: Televisión Norteamericana de Culto, edited by Concepción Carmen Cascajosa, 117–130. Barcelona: Laertes. Pickering, M., and E. Keightley. 2006. The modalities of nostalgia. Current Sociology 54 (6): 919–941. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392106068458.

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Price, Steven. 2010. The Screenplay: Authorship, Theory and Criticism. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Redvall, Eva Novrup, and John R. Cook. 2015. “Television screenwriting: Continuity and change.” Journal of Screenwriting 6 (2): 131–136. doi:https://doi. org/10.1386/josc.6.2.131_2. Russo, Paolo. 2017. Storylining engagement with repulsive antiheroes. Towards a cognitive poetics of TV serial drama narrative: The case of Gomorrah – The series. Journal of Screenwriting 8 (1): 5–21. https://doi.org/10.1386/josc. 8.1.5_1. Sánchez-Escalonilla, Antonio. 2014. Estrategias de Guión Cinematográfico: El Proceso de Creación de Una Historia. Barcelona: Ariel. Sculos, Bryant W. 2017. “Screen savior: How black mirror reflects the present more than the future.” Class Race Corporate Power 5 (1). doi:https://doi. org/10.25148/crcp.5.1.001673. Seger, Linda. 2010. Making a Good Script Great. Beverly Hills: Silman-James Press. Sternberg, Claudia. 1997. Written for the Screen: The American Motion-Picture Screenplay as Text. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. Stuart, Sarah Clarke. 2011. Literary Lost: Viewing Television through the Lens of Literature. London and New York: Continuum. Utichi, Joe. 2019. “Charlie Brooker & Annabel Jones talk ‘Black Mirrror: Bandersnatch.’” Deadline, 2019. https://deadline.com/2019/05/black-mir ror-bandersnatch-charlie-brooker-annabel-jones-disruptors-interview-120261 0099/. Woscoboinik, Emily. 2018. “Looking at Damon Lindelof and the television auteur.” Scripps Senior theses., Scripps College.

CHAPTER 5

From Frenetic to Vivid: Phenomenological Reading of Immersive Television Narratives in Black Mirror and Russian Doll Natalja Chestopalova

Introduction A carnivalesque prison sentence televised as a bridge between broadcasting and memory erasure technology. A delirious lover taunted by his memory implant goes on a rampage. A parent breaking all privacy and emotional boundaries to virtually stalk her daughter. These stories are all part of Black Mirror’s (Channel 4/Netflix, 2011–2018) technologically inspired oeuvre capturing the essence, or phenomenology, of human emotion through the immersive narrative theater on the screen. The Groundhog Day-esque study of temporality in Russian Doll (Netflix, 2019), meanwhile, is a TV series which is similar to Black Mirror in its call on the audience to read these narratives as aesthetic as well as emotional revelations. While many TV series could be said to be not

N. Chestopalova (B) York University and OCAD University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Winckler and V. Huertas-Martín (eds.), Television Series as Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4720-1_5

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unlike a newspaper comic strip—entertaining but passive pleasures—this paper turns to the opposite end of the spectrum: TV shows that explore raw human emotions wrapped inside a narrative enigma which the viewer has to actively engage and unravel to appreciate. Black Mirror and Russian Doll , as I come to argue in this chapter, form multimodal narrative spaces, at the intersections of spatial, aural, and cognitive dimensions, that bind the viewer to read human complexities as rich emotional kernels, rather than mere echoes of experience. Specifically, Black Mirror’s storytelling allows viewers to approach emotions built up by technological ubiquity and familial, in particular maternal, relationships, while Russian Doll comes close to capturing the uncapturable affect-based nature of temporality. To show this, the chapter first turns to phenomenology as defined in the literary practices of Henry Miller and Ernest Hemingway, both storytellers whose work is underscored by an intrinsic search for ways to seize rather than merely transmit meaning. Phenomenology in the context of this argument is about learning how to see that which refuses to be easily seen or felt. It is about coming face-to-face with human emotions that are elusive and confounding. Instead of focusing on the differences between TV series and literature, the readings of Black Mirror and Russian Doll performed here point to the series’ propensity to embody the psychological depth and vividness of the “surrounding phenomenal world” (1964, 114) Henry Miller saw as the essence of literature and reading. In the second half of this chapter, I then explore episodes from Black Mirror and Russian Doll , reading them as narratives capturing specific affects: the anxiety accompanying technological ubiquity, the uncanny psychology of familial relationships, and the affective essence of temporality. While it is commonly claimed that television series may not be read in the conventional sense—that is, television storytelling may not be processed and built by the reader in the same cognitive manner as a printed novel or story—part of this chapter’s work is to reimagine this proposition. Considered within the context of Black Mirror and Russian Doll , reading is less of a media-specific action and more of an audience-centered process concerned with revelatory and shared emotional potential. To read the Black Mirror and Russian Doll TV series as narratives, and specifically phenomenological narratives, requires understanding their immersive ability to convey the complex, unexpected, and painful emotions at the center of human interactions. My argument in this chapter is that Black Mirror and Russian Doll are structured to engage

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the viewer in an intense phenomenological reading process which requires affective intentionality and active meaning-making. This line of thinking draws on the inherent affinity between literature and phenomenology, both of which are concerned with capturing and conveying human experience and feeling. To begin unpacking the shared connections between television series and literature, it is necessary to turn to the phenomenological potential within literary narratives and the demands placed on the reader by the act of reading. Recounting his relationship with narrative, Miller wrote that he was compelled “to take the disparate and dispersed elements of our life – the soul life, not the cultural life – and manipulate them through my own personal mode, using my own shattered and dispersed ego as heartlessly and recklessly as I would the flotsam and jetsam of the surrounding phenomenal world” (1964, 113–114). This definition of literature as a way to negotiate disparate elements of experience arrives at the centrality of what the reading process is all about: offering the audience a sophisticated engagement that allows the subject to phenomenologically experience affective range and emotional intensity through the story being told. The cultural context, narrative particulars, and logistics of style and function become secondary in reading as a process, and instead the emphasis is on the emotional density of human experiences and psychic structures conveyed. Miller was well aware of the power of narrative, and in that he was not alone. Ernest Hemingway too understood the phenomenological potential within a narrative to communicate specific intricacies and truths of human experience. In a 1958 interview with The Paris Review, he broke down this potentiality of conceptualizing experience: “From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive” (2006, 61). Hemingway was constantly searching for the narrative elements generating profound emotion within the underwater narrative depths, the “unnoticed things” at the bottom of the iceberg (Hemingway 2006, 58). The “principle of the iceberg,” where for every part of the story there are seven-eights of hidden knowledge, was the methodology Hemingway championed throughout his life (2006, 57). It is also indicative of the kind of cognitive work that phenomenological storytelling and reading entail, in that they prioritize depth over

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surface and immersion over passivity. The immersive quality of any narrative, from text to theater to television, is defined by the storytelling’s potential to build on its respective multimodalities and to empower the audience as they become submerged in and an active part of the narrative. Reading in this sense is the process of coming into contact with the fundamentals of the “lived experience of human existence” (Van Manen 2017, 26)—a practice of intricate analysis and delineation, not unlike Miller and Hemingway’s struggle to capture unconscious or hidden parts of human experiences. To employ Max Van Manen’s definition, the “phenomenological method is driven by pathos: being swept up in a spell of wonder about phenomena as they appear, show, present, or give themselves to us” (Van Manen 2017, 26). There is almost a physicality to how phenomenology can inform this type of reading process as it directs the reader’s attention to where “meanings and understandings originate, well up, and percolate through the porous membranes of past sedimentations – then infuse, permeate, infect, touch, stir us, and exercise a formative and affective effect on our being” (Van Manen 2017, 26–27). In both literary and television narrative, this is part and parcel of storytelling, the invention, and fictionalization of reality that results in a story or TV series episode that is even “truer,” as Hemingway would say. Van Manen’s insight here is telling since he approaches phenomenology from a strictly philosophical perspective, instead of a media-centric one. And yet—he is keenly grasping the creative intensity and immersivity that exists not just in Miller and Hemingway, but in contemporary TV series like Black Mirror and Russian Doll . Phenomenological reading is occurring whenever the audience is “surrendering to a state of wonder” (Van Manen 2017, 27) and experiencing the essence of a phenomenon, event, or emotion, as the closer examination of Black Mirror and Russian Doll below will make clear. Meaning-making in the form of phenomenological reading is akin to releasing an emotional flood that succeeds at submerging the audience in the psychological richness and vividness so valued by Miller and Hemingway. The nonlinear temporality in Russian Doll and utter anxiety of existence overtaken by surveillance and technology in Black Mirror metaphorically rub off on the audience’s cognitive and affective skin. But, as Henry Miller put it: “I have looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth” (1964, 114).

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Seven-Eights Below: Black Mirror and Russian Doll In an autobiographical story told by Sartre in The Words, a young Jean Paul was instructed by his grandfather to take care and consider what it means to truly see the meaning behind everything we experience. The lesson was: “it’s not enough to have eyes. You must learn how to use them” (Sartre 1981, 159). Just so, it is not enough to recognize that there is a narrative backbone structuring every novel and TV episode. Sartre’s lesson here is that deeper perception and conceptualization of meaning takes storytelling that works on a conscious as well as unconscious level. And it takes phenomenological reading and a state of wonder to come in contact with emotions restrained by our unconscious. As part of the phenomenological literary tradition, Miller and Hemingway have succeeded in not only using their own eyes to perceive what lies at the core of human experience, but have also relayed that the surrounding phenomenal world is perceptible only through the work occurring in the iceberg’s seven-eights hidden below. In Miller and Hemingway this is closely connected to their storytelling techniques and preoccupations with describing the indescribable, from existential crises to the horror of familial loss. Black Mirror and Russian Doll are part of this storytelling tradition, a tradition that has made its mark not only on the page but on the screen as well. Many directors and cinematographers have explored phenomenological narratives, approximating the formation and structure of unsettling emotional experiences that leave scars of meaning apparent and permanent. They have become part of our enjoyment through the works of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, and Peter Greenaway. Black Mirror and Russian Doll share the same intense preoccupation with emotional phenomena as Vertigo ( Hitchcock 1958), The Birds (Hitchcock 1963), Blue Velvet (Lynch 1986), Twin Peaks (CBS Television, 1990–1991), and A Zed and Two Noughts ( Greenaway 1985). For example, in Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet , Lynch employed surrealist cinematography to focus in on the phenomenology of social taboos, parental abuse, childhood trauma, and the Freudian Oedipal economy. Greenaway experimented with abject boundaries as a way to isolate the traumatic phenomenology of grief, loss, and dying in A Zed & Two Noughts. In this work, Greenaway relies on provocative time-lapses of decomposing tissue and splicing imagery to lock the audience in an uncomfortably close stare at the process of dying.

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In a similar though less sinister fashion, Russian Doll ’s iterations of life, death, and rebirth likewise take the audience up close and personal with the banality of death. Let us now turn to the phenomenological narratives in Black Mirror and Russian Doll . Black Mirror initially came out in 2011 and has over time acquired notoriety as a television series that has a profound effect on its audience by exploring the phenomenology of human emotion through narratives about surveillance, memory, subjectivity, reality-formation, and realitytesting. In part, it owes its popularity to its function as an anthology tracking the use and misuse of technology within a wide range of social, communitarian, familial, and subjective contexts. Hinting at its “notorious” reputation, the writers from Hypable online magazine included a cautionary note for the viewers in their Black Mirror season 4 review. This is what they had to offer: “With only six episodes to binge you’ll find yourself done with the season in less than your average work day, but take it from us: You don’t want to go through this rollercoaster of emotions all at once, and if you do want to, then you’ll need to watch something extremely happy to make up for all the sad and fucked up things you’re putting yourself through” (Kyle 2017). Although this warning is humorous, it is also telling because it picks up on two key components that make the show so successful as an instance of phenomenological narration. First, the show’s hybridity of serialized as well as anthology formats embodies the nature of binge watching practices, media addiction, and the frenetic activity Slavoj Žižek points to as a practice which is much more dangerous and inauthentic than mindlessness (Žižek, 2019). Second, each episode in Black Mirror is a stand-alone narrative that locksin, or brackets in Edmund Husserl’s sense, the viewer in an affect-rich experience unique to each episode. Husserl’s notion of phenomenological bracketing, or epocé—defined as a repeated process of isolating specific topologies, affects, and facets of being in the world (Husserl 1999, 60– 85)—provides a key way of thinking about the phenomenological reading process. Bracketing, or binding, is a method of understanding how storytelling, literary or otherwise, can position the viewer to first identify and then become immersed in acute emotional experience. In an almost symbiotic relationship, phenomenological television narratives can bind,

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or bracket, the viewer to identify with a complex psychological event or emotional experience that may not otherwise be accessible or perceivable. The show’s anthologized structure, in conjunction with the bracketing of particular affects, is further reinforced by Black Mirror’s explicit, as well as implicit, concerns with the psychology at the core of the subjects’ relationship with technology, access, privacy, memory, spectatorship, boundaries, and intersubjectivity. The narrative complexity of the Black Mirror universe is closely linked to the show’s fascination with technology. Surveillance and recording technologies are portrayed as extensions of the subject and as such have the power to represent human subjective reality. Not only that, but the technology’s ability to act as a “living” extension of subjective reality shapes this perception as a linear narrative. For instance, in “Arkangel” (Foster, 2017), examined more closely below, an implanted parental surveillance unit explores the human conception of subjectivity as a traceable as well as rewind-able linear narrative thread. The series builds on the idea of technology-as-extension, by offering a set of immersive storytelling experiences grounded in an archive-like universe that plays with the definitions of temporality, space, memory, and ways of being. The archive quality of Black Mirror comes from each episode acting as a room within a room, comparable to Borges’s “The Library of Babel” (2013, 137–145), built to house phenomena wrapped, or bracketed, in storytelling. Thus, not only do we have a television series that explores the complexities of narrating human reality using technology-as-extension, but a storytelling mode that re-interprets human subjectivity itself as an affect-based phenomenon. The phenomenology of anxiety is a constant narrative thread in Black Mirror. While it can take a variety of forms, each episode brackets the audience by inciting a reading of the interaction with technology as one of uncanny anxiety. In the episode “The Entire History of You”(Welsh, 2011), for example, a couple’s relationship becomes toxic due to a recording technology that combines social media access, continuous personal archiving, and memory implants. The fictionalized technological set-up allows users to continuously record and incessantly replay memories on demand. There is a deeply rooted emphasis on how practical and terrifyingly seamless this technology is as an extension of the subject and the subject’s sense of self. A user can retrieve information, return to treasured memories, or review their work meetings in search of signs and subtle language indicators of how well the meeting went. Despite the fact that much of the process is virtual, there is still a materiality to it,

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a haptic presence in terms of how the technology works and how the user’s experience is tied to a linear narrative and a linear understanding of temporality. In Black Mirror there is a curious and uncanny relationship with technology because the latter simultaneously exists within the subject’s immediate psychic reality and within the greater context of the fictionalized cultural and dystopian realities. What this entails for the Black Mirror universe is that each episode is ripe with phenomenological intentionality. In Henry Miller’s terms, this ripeness of intentionality is closely aligned to a phenomenological sense of inquiry. To inquire is to experience curiosity, to incessantly long for meaning, to embrace a sense of wonder whatever the cost. Miller talked of the “mysterious aura in which we live and struggle […]. If I tell of facts, events, relationships, something strung along like beads on a string, it is only to bring to the reader’s consciousness the all-pervasiveness of the dark, mysterious realm without the existence of which nothing could happen” (1964, 121). This mysterious realm, or the iceberg’s seven-eights submerged beneath the surface, becomes the narrative space that brackets the specificity of human emotional experience as the reader engages in the phenomenological reading process. Within this mysterious realm, Black Mirror episodes focus in on the particularity of the subject’s mediated emotional experiences, that is, the phenomenology of subjectivity, reality-formation, and reality-testing. The attempt to isolate the subject’s being-in-the-world becomes accessible through the narratives of trauma, some of which resurrect classical literary tropes and fascinations with monster stories. Sarah Artt (2018) points to one of the episodes as a reinvention of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1993) as such an instance. In addition to offering a critique of the gendered relationship to the male technological body in “Be Right Back” (Harris, 2013), Artt teases out the emotional complexities of living with an android copy of a “resurrected” loved one. The synthetic subject mimicking the protagonist’s deceased husband becomes an emotional burden and a source of uncanny abjection in Kristeva’s sense—“impure and unclean,” locked “between different physical, psychological, [and] ontological states” (Kristeva 1986, 133). The “Arkangel” episode (Foster, 2017) provides one of the strongest examples of a televisual narrative structured to evoke a phenomenological reading, since it embodies Black Mirror’s intentional self-reflexivity and the desire to question and capture the complexity of the human

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affective experience through a symbiotic relationship with technology. Similar to most of the other episodes in the series, “Arkangel” is set on uncovering the risks of technological ubiquity, deepening emotional disconnect, and human bonds driven by visceral complexity, while at the same time focusing on finding a way to convey a specific affective state—utter, almost unspeakable maternal anxiety. The “Arkangel” episode looks at the traumatic psychology at the core of parenting, grounded in an archive-like experience shared by a dysfunctional mother and her daughter through the use of invasive surveillance and memory recording technology. Written by Charlie Booker and directed by Jodie Foster, the episode can be read as having a specific phenomenological intentionality. Its phenomenological agenda is to capture the affective economies at the core of maternal anxiety as a state of being. While the episode does try to “extrapolate technological nightmares” (Famke 2017) within the Black Mirror universe, the dissection of the mother-daughter bond is what makes the storytelling so emotionally compelling. The narrative begins with a restless single mother, Marie, deciding to implant a tracking device that allows her to observe her daughter Sara’s location, physical state, and anxiety levels. The sinister parental control system grants Marie access to what her daughter is seeing and enables her to block unwanted or disturbing content, such as a barking dog, a human in pain, or the sight of blood. During the installation process, the wording of this feature is curious because the technician tells Marie that these are fairly straightforward “parental controls” (Foster, 2017). Through these “content limitations, if she witnesses something that causes her cortisol levels to rise,” the mother can choose to “paint out whatever is triggering it” (Foster, 2017). From the very beginning, the system’s basic controls are described using trauma-conscious language. The content gleaned by the mother on the Arkangel parental unit is at first relatively innocent, for example, the grandfather painting a picture or a game of hide-and-seek. As the narrative progresses, however, Sara encounters content considered to be anxiety-inducing, such as her grandfather having a heart attack. Since this event is classified as disturbing, Sara cannot access it and instead sees a pixelated area. While the invasive surveillance seems to work with Sara as a child, the mother makes a decision to stop using it when her daughter begins to experiment with self-harm and shows developmental issues due to Arkangel’s content blocking. When Sara is older, Marie resolves to use it again to track her whereabouts, creating various conflicts

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such as witnessing Sara losing her virginity in a van and later attempting to abort her daughter’s pregnancy. The mother’s escalating sense of dread brings her into contact with images of an intimate and traumatizing nature that transgress the boundaries of parental concern into a pathology of maternal anxiety. So begins the Arkangel’s descent into the horror of the mother’s experience of the real, that for the audience reads as a controlled or bracketed explosion. No other Black Mirror episode illustrates so well Miller’s point that, “The book which comes alive is the book which has been penetrated through and through by a devouring heart” (1969, 139). Translated to “Arkangel”: The maternal heart is devoured by the unspeakable anxiety, while we devour the narrative. This Black Mirror episode triggers a phenomenological reading process by bracketing the phenomenon and asking: What does it mean to be a parent? What constitutes a mother, or a maternal figure? Does parenthood imply a constant state of anxiety? How should a mother respond to the real and the imaginary dangers with which her child comes into contact? Is the mother’s state of being ever really separated from her infant, even as an adult? When does a mother’s concern and sense of responsibility turn into fear, anxiety, and even an abject type of horror? And can a mother ever come back from that almost unspeakable anxiety? Even the use of the Arkangel parental unit offers a multiplicity of psychic functions when the mother begins to interact with it as a type of transitional object in D. W. Winnicott’s sense (2009, 1–34, 51–70). For Winnicott, the transitional object stands in for an object, person, or experience and can act as a special possession that allows the subject to learn how to separate from something that is disruptive or traumatic (2009, 1–34, 51–70). Whether the Arkangel parental unit is successful as a transitional object or in fact creates further pathologies and feeds maternal anxiety is one of the episode’s uncertainties. It does, however, establish a way to test and negotiate the affective frameworks Marie has to live through on a dayto-day basis. The “Arkangel” episode can therefore be read as providing phenomenological access to maternal traumatic and traumatizing anxiety. Whereas each episode in the Black Mirror series narrows in on particular affective phenomena, Russian Doll relies on a recurring narrative structure in order to entangle the audience in a phenomenological reading process. It uses the show’s cyclical storytelling to convey the affect-based nature of time and temporality and the anxiety accompanying it. Created by Natasha Lyonne, Leslye Headland, and Amy Poehler, Russian Doll

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gained instant recognition as one of Netflix’s most original shows. With only 8 episodes, each lasting between 24 and 30 min, the pacing of the story is strategic in how it builds affective economies. A binge-worthy series that is “probably too weird to win a bunch of Emmys” (VanDerWerff 2019), its premise is comparable to Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993). The protagonist, Nadia, is celebrating her birthday when she begins to repeatedly die, always returning to the cycle’s starting point— staring at her own reflection in a bathroom mirror at the party. The act of looking and learning how to look at the “surrounding phenomenal world” becomes part of Nadia’s journey. While she may not have the benefit of Sartre’s grandfather, her grandmother encourages Nadia to look within and without, into the future and the past as she reality-tests her new state of being. The series can be read as a jarring chain of cycles, each one an anxietyinducing interruption of the “normal” linear flow of time. During the first iteration of Nadia’s cycle, in response to the host’s inquiry, “Hey, birthday baby! […] Are you having fun?”—Nadia responds—“Fun is for suckers, Max. Two minutes ago, I turned 36. Staring down the barrel of my own mortality always beats fun” (Lyonne, Headland, Poehler, 2019). There is a sophisticated level of symbolism within the series, where Nadia’s “loop of life, death, and rebirth” can become “symbolic of just about anything you want it to be symbolic of, from addiction to mental illness” (VanDerWerff 2019). However, temporality and the subject’s apprehensive feelings toward it enter the narrative from the very beginning. Time is not only about aging, but also focuses the viewer’s attention on the nature of the subject’s choices and the reality they help create. As Nadia continues to loop through each iteration, the audience learns of her mother’s history of mental illness and suicide, as well as how some of these patterns resurface in her own life. Although each iteration of Nadia’s life-death-rebirth cycle is targeting an aspect or existential consideration shaping her being-in-the-world, the show’s phenomenological potential lies within the experience of nonlinear temporality as an affect-based phenomenon. Paul Booth views the increased concern with temporality in television series as indicative of both: “an industrial resistance to and an audience’s resolution of postmodern schizophrenia” (2011, 371). For Booth, the condition of postmodern schizophrenia, understood through a Lacanian lens, is an “affective experience” that “can be seen as a reaction to a subjective

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loss of temporality” and coherence (2011, 372)—an apt characterization of Nadia’s own temporally displaced state of being. In this sense, what Booth identifies as schizophrenia can become a metaphor for how audiences “respond to temporal complexity” (2011, 371). The spectacle of temporal discontinuity can take a number of forms, including time travel, flash-forwards, flashbacks, and fluctuations in memory (Booth 2011, 371). In Nadia’s case, the loss of temporal coherence is primarily caused by displacement and flashbacks. From the perspective of a phenomenological reading of Russian Doll , the series’ narrative structure allows the audience to perceive time not as external and objective, but as an internal and highly subjective affectframed phenomenon. In line with one of Miller’s metaphors where the “facts, events, relationships, [are like] something strung along like beads on a string,” Russian Doll builds a sequential narrative structure that brings to the reader the all-pervasiveness of the dark, mysterious realm”(Miller 1964, 114)—a realm which is implicitly bound by a form of temporality. Media and literature theorist Eugenie Brinkema contributes to this discussion by fundamentally rethinking the phenomenology of affect and how it is embodied through textual and cinematic construction. Temporality is one of the affective embodiments Brinkema pays close attention to, especially in relation to Open Water (Kentis, 2003). Her analysis is key here because it accounts for the deeply rooted anxiety of temporallybound existence in Russian Doll . Brinkema writes: “time is cruel and implacably violent in its movements–ever forward, progressing toward the certain instant of annihilation” (2014)—a sentiment echoed by Nadia as well. Elaborating on Freud’s theory of anxiety, Brinkema adds that it is not time’s “movement’s interruptibility but its inability to cease that provokes dread, it is the fact that time is what moves forward that constitutes the unique form of violence of the bounded temporal frame” (2014). Russian Doll ’s televisual narrative capitalizes on this form of violence both in terms of the show’s cyclical structure and Nadia’s subjectivity. The uncanny sense of anxiety lingers long after the show’s last episode is over. Miller would call this the “right” kind of reading—seeping deeper into the unconscious with each temporal displacement, recklessly fighting to get to the soul of life, and set to the ever-repeating soundtrack of Harry Nilsson’s “Gotta Get Up” (1971).

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Conclusion While television series cannot be read in the conventional sense, the arguments outlined in this chapter support the possibility of a phenomenological reading of television narratives. This reading relies on the same type of immersive fantasy space and a sense of being ‘swept up in a spell of wonder’ which is both present and defined in Miller and Hemingway’s storytelling. The possibility of a phenomenological reading goes a long way toward reconfirming television’s function as a narrative medium of cognitive sophistication and immersiveness. To cite John Fiske, even though “popular culture is often denigrated by its critics for appearing to offer not representations of the world, but avenues of escape from it” (Fisk 2011, 320), this “escapism” is not a mere flight of fantasy, but rather a complex representation, a means of “making sense” of the world (Fiske 2011, 321). Television and web series, including Black Mirror and Russian Doll , prioritize such phenomenological complexities to help audiences access and make sense of emotions that are otherwise very difficult to comprehend. Black Mirror and Russian Doll form immersive spaces that not only entertain but also incite viewers to come in contact with the phenomenal world—as far as Miller was concerned, the only world worth reading about. They are part of an increasing number of shows that take on the challenge of phenomenological intentionality by expanding the scope of their narratives and focusing on emotions inherent to human subjectivity, but often left hidden, unconscious, inaccessible. The utter claustrophobia of temporal existence, the unspeakable fears framing parental relationships, and the bloody perils of technological ubiquity—all of these unsettling affective economies are crafted with the aim of submerging the audience below the surface into the phenomenological depths. Television is catching up with the vividness of the enigmatic realm that is human cognition.

References Artt, Sarah. 2018. ‘An otherness that cannot be sublimated’ Shades of Frankenstein in Penny Dreadful and Black Mirror. Science Fiction Film and Television 11 (2): 257–275. Black Mirror. 2011–2019. Created by Charlie Booker. Written by Charlie Booker, William Bridges, Jesse Armstrong, KonnieHuq, Rashida Jones,

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Michael Schur, and Penn Jillette. United Kingdom: Channel 4, 2011–2014. World-wide: Netflix, 2014–2019. ———. 2011. “The entire history of you.” Directed by Brian Welsh. Written by Jesse Armstrong. Aired December 18, 2011. ———. 2013. “Be right back.” Directed by Owen Harris. Written by Charlie Booker. Aired February 11, 2013. ———. 2017. “Arkangel.” Directed by Jodie Foster. Written by Charlie Booker. Aired December 29, 2017. Booth, Paul. 2011. Memories, temporalities, fictions: Temporal displacement in contemporary television. Television and New Media 12 (4): 370–388. Borges, Lorge Louis. 2013. “La Biblioteca de Babel/The library of Babel.” In Cuentos Completos, 137–145. Mexico: Penguin Random House. 1941. Brinkema, Eugenie. 2014. The Forms of Affects. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Famke, Caroline. 2017. “Black Mirror’s ‘Archangel’ takes parental surveillance to its darkest, most obvious extreme.” VOX , December 29, 2017. Accessed June 20, 2019. https://www.vox. com/culture/2017/12/29/16791518/blackmirror-arkangel-recap-season-4-review. Fisk, John. 2011. Television Culture, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Greenaway, Peter. 1985. A Zed & Two Noughts. London, UK: Channel Four Films. Hemingway, Ernest. 2006. “Ernest Hemingway (1958).” The Paris Review Interviews, vol. 1, 34–61. New York: Picador. Hitchcock, Alfred. 1958. Vertigo. Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures. ———. 1963. The Birds. Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures. Husserl, Edmund, 1999. The Essential Husserl: Basic Writings in Transcendental Phenomenology, edited by Donn Welton. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kentis, Chris. 2003. Open Water. Santa Monica, CA: Lions Gate Films. Kristeva, Julia. 1986. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Kyle, Tarique. 2017. “Black Mirror season 4 review: Equal parts terrifying, hopeful, haunting.” Hypable, December 6, 2017. Accessed June 20, 2019. https://www.hypable.com/black-mirror-season-4-review/. Lynch, David. 1986. Blue Velvet. Wilmington, NC: De Laurentiis Entertainment Group. Miller, Henry. 1964. Henry Miller on Writing: Selected by Thomas H. Moore from Published and Unpublished Works of Henry Miller. New York: New Directions Publishing. ———. 1969. The Books in My Life. New York: New Directions Publishing.

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Nilsson, Harry. 1971. “Gotta get up.” In Nilsson Schmilsson. Side B. Prod. Richard Perry. London, UK: Trident Studios and Island Studios. Hollywood, CA: RCA Studios. Ramis, Harold. 1993. Groundhog Day. Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures. Russian Doll. 2019. Directed by Leslye Headland, Jamie Babbit, and Natasha Lyonne. Created by Natasha Lyonne, Leslye Headland, and Amy Poehler. World-wide: Netflix. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1981. The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre. New York: Vintage Books. Shelley, Mary. 1993. Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Twin Peaks. 1990–1991. Created by David Lynch and Mark Frost. United States: CBS Television Distribution. VanDerWerff, Emily Todd. 2019. “Netflix’s Russian Doll is a show you should know nothing about except how good it is.” VOX , February 9, 2019. Accessed June 25, 2019. https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/2/1/ 18205534/russian-doll-review-spoilers-netflix-natasha-lyonne-loop. Manen, Van, and Max. 2017. Phenomenology of Practice: Meaning-Giving Methods in Phenomenological Research and Writing. New York: Routledge. Winnicott, D.W. 2009. Playing and Reality. New York: Routledge Classics. Žižek, Slavoj. n.d. “Will you laugh for me, please.” https://www.lacan.com. Accessed June 1, 2019. https://www.lacan.com/zizeklaugh.htm.

CHAPTER 6

Simone de Beauvoir Meets Walter White: Breaking Bad as Authentic Literature Kelly Beck

Introduction The approach taken in this chapter is to think philosophically about the relationship between the contemporary television series and literature as consisting in the way both forms of art communicate with readers and viewers. Thinking about these aesthetic objects as being in a relationship with each other provides a way to prise open the conceptual space that exists within and between different modes of aesthetic contemplation that are taken for granted within the context of everyday life in post-industrial societies. Appreciating the relationship between the television series and literature through Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy of freedom will help us to consider how viewing practices can be linked to reading practices, in the sense that both practices can be constitutive of a sense of authentic freedom in the individual that heightens awareness of the nature of the individual’s relationship to his or her community.

K. Beck (B) Independent Researcher, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Winckler and V. Huertas-Martín (eds.), Television Series as Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4720-1_6

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From this perspective, the notion of private space as the place for aesthetic contemplation is distinguished from places of leisure. The domestic space is often the place where reading and viewing are imagined as taking place as a form of leisure; however, through using Beauvoir’s philosophy, we can begin to think of the domestic space as a place where revolutionary action is seeded. This is a shift in thinking about revolutionary action as belonging to the street. The place of aesthetic contemplation may seem devoid of action if we look at it from the outside, where we see an individual sitting motionless absorbed in a screen or the surface of a page. However, if we think about the television series and the literary text as potential sources of action, then the apparent inertia associated with the image of the contemplative individual can be seen as a form of resistance to unmitigated, unrelenting change wrought from external sources. This chapter focuses on the series Breaking Bad (AMC 2008–2013) as an example of a television series that can be considered literature within the purview of Beauvoir and other existentialist philosophers’ thinking. In particular, I am interested in the way the quest of the main character Walter White (Bryan Cranston) is analogous to and expressive of the relationship between the television series and literature. Breaking Bad has been the subject of much philosophical writing.1 However, this chapter will not directly add to that body of literature because it is not an analysis of the diegetic of the show per se. That is, I am not so much interested in understanding the fictional world of Breaking Bad and what it tells us about its mirrored world as in how the series functions as literature through Beauvoir’s ideas about being metaphysical and understanding the responsibilities that go hand in hand with freedom. Walter White interests me because he embodies a particular movement towards an understanding of what authentic freedom in Beauvoir’s terms should be, even though I will argue that he does not ultimately achieve it. Nevertheless, Walter White enacts the problems associated with recognising authentic freedom when he encounters the ambiguous, blurred boundaries of experience that confuse his sense of right and wrong and anchors his actions in bad faith, general duplicity and destruction. While Walter White appears to be a radical character because of his ingenuity in being able to surpass impossible conditions, he is at heart an everyday patriarchal man seeking recognition for his existence. In this chapter, I do not make a definitive argument that the television series can be taken as literature. Even though many television series

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including Breaking Bad demonstrate characteristics in common with literature as textual artefacts, I think that the mode of delivery of the television series—which nowadays happens, for the most part, via web streaming— is problematic because of the way digital platforms and algorithms are able to shape the individual viewing experience in advance of the experience itself. This is not to say that the individual does not have the power to resist the coercion into particular viewing patterns, however, because if the individual has a deep engagement with the literary qualities of the television series, then that communication in itself is a kind of circuit breaker to a potentially totalitarian experience. In the first section, I outline some aspects of Simone de Beauvoir’s theories of literature and freedom with an emphasis on how literature is essentially a communicative form of action between author and reader that aims to distinguish between the truths and fictions in the everyday realities of the world of the individual. The second section primarily focuses on the way televisual devices deliver the television series in the form of entertainment through a rationalised, scientifically programmed informational digital environment. The final section takes a look at how Walter White’s quest, wrongheaded though it may be, arguably resembles an authentic reading process designed to bring clarity to understanding one’s own situation.

Simone de Beauvoir, Literature and Existential Freedom For Simone de Beauvoir, the reality of the world exists within the contours of our lived experiences and, as such, is a reality that is universal to all of us but is impossible to discern through the language of abstraction. In contrast to the kinds of language used to communicate objective information about the world which presumes that all individuals are uniform, however, the language of the metaphysical novel is a mode of communication that speaks directly to the unique individual. In “Literature and Metaphysics” (1946/2004), Beauvoir argues that the metaphysical novel amounts to more than fictionalising a philosophical treatise through literary language; it represents an “adventure of the mind” (275). The authentic author does not write about abstract, logical principles and forms them into doctrines of truths about reality under the guise of fiction. Rather the author of the metaphysical novel uses his or her own experience of reality in the form of an experimentation: its reality

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and truth is tested by the writing process itself (Beauvoir 1946/2004, 272). Beauvoir wrote “Literature and Metaphysics” (1946/2004) in response to the intellectual debate that occurred during the postOccupation of France about whether the “metaphysical novel” was a corruption of literature. According to opponents of the metaphysical novel, the introduction of philosophy into a literary work nullified the literary experience. Beauvoir agrees with these claims to a certain extent in that she argues that if a work of fiction is merely the vehicle for the elaboration of a pre-given philosophical treatise, then it will indeed fail as literature. However, for Beauvoir, the metaphysical novel is less to do with systematic philosophy (which she rejects as an abstraction of everyday individual experience and therefore unable to accommodate its truth) than it has to do with the experience of being metaphysical. To be metaphysical is to realise in oneself the metaphysical attitude, which consists in positioning oneself in one’s totality before the totality of the world. Every human event possesses a metaphysical signification beyond its psychological and social elements, since through each event, man is always entirely engaged in the entire world (1946/2004, 273).

Beauvoir argues that reading literary fiction is more likely to produce the “metaphysical attitude” she believes is necessary to understanding oneself as a “totality before the totality of the world” than reading abstract theories about the relationship between individuals and the world. This means that the individual must experience the ambiguity of his or her relationship with the world at large. To experience oneself as ambiguous is to experience a fundamental truth about one’s being in the world, namely that one’s being is not predetermined or prescribed through descriptions rooted in universal understandings. This can be summed up through one of the key tenets of Existentialism, namely that “existence precedes essence” (Sartre, Existence & Humanism 1948/1973, 28). Breaking Bad is not a television series that communicates a pre-existing reality or philosophy to its viewers (even though it may belong to a particular genre), nor is it merely entertainment produced to satisfy the demand for persistent distraction. This is, in part, because the character Walter White paradoxically embodies the standard set by Beauvoir that the authentic author must

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participate in the same search he has invited his readers on; if in advance he predicts the conclusions to which his readers must come, if he indiscreetly pressures the reader into adhering to preestablished theses, if he allows him only an illusion of freedom, then the work of fiction is only an incongruous mystification. The novel is endowed with value and dignity only if it constitutes a living discovery for the author as for the reader (1946/2004, 271).

While Walter White is not the author of the series, he can be understood as carrying the authorial values mandated by Beauvoir. Importantly, we do not know in advance the outcome of Walter’s quest, because he is performing the functions of the authentic author: … as the story unfolds, he sees truths appear that were previously unknown to him, questions whose solutions he does not possess. He questions himself, takes sides, and runs risks; and, at the end of his creation, he will consider the work he has accomplished with astonishment. He himself could not furnish an abstract translation of it because, in one single movement, the work gives itself both meaning and flesh. Thus the novel will appear as an authentic adventure of the mind (Literature and Metaphysics 1946/2004, 272).

According to Beauvoir, all humans have an original capacity and desire to express their freedom in the concrete world. She argues in The Second Sex (1949/2011) that Every subject posits itself as a transcendence concretely, through projects; it accomplishes its freedom only by perpetual surpassing toward other freedoms; there is no other justification for present existence than its expansion toward an indefinitely open future (16).

This means that freedom is integral to the nature of one’s being in the sense that everyone has the capacity to change their situation. While this idea is not unique to Beauvoir, her originality is to argue that to be free for oneself must incorporate being free for others. Therefore, the individual cannot be authentically free unless he or she does so in relation with others. In Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter (2017), Lori Jo Marso describes this in terms of the encounter:

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For Beauvoir, to encounter others is not only a fact of existence; it is also the only way to produce and experience freedom. Being with others is a foundational quality of freedom. Ambiguity, contingency, situation, and nonsovereignty characterise encounters, and each produces, diminishes, or destroys freedom (2).

Walter White is an example of a transcendence in action in that he claims to be pursuing an abstract kind of freedom in the form of money in order to provide materially for his family after he dies. However, as Breaking Bad unfolds, we see how this patriarchal notion of freedom, justified on the basis that an individual man is responsible for ensuring the well-being of his family, is exposed as failing to support the notion of being responsible for a larger community and, in fact, causes the destruction of that community: the law, the families of others and of course Walter’s own family. Perhaps if Walter had a consciousness of the community as a repository of care, the drive to dominate and destroy others in his individual quest for freedom would be unnecessary. The concept of the open future is a key idea in Beauvoir’s philosophy of freedom because it speaks directly to her view that life is not predetermined; therefore, the individual is required to take responsibility for the actions he or she takes in the concrete world to ensure that the future remains open for others to work on their own developing projects. Freedom cannot be purchased. Rather, we are, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s view, “condemned to be free” (Existentialism & Humanism 1948/1973, 34). As such, freedom is the primary struggle that drives one’s being in the world. However, such freedom needs to be tempered by the notion of the primacy of the community. In Beauvoir’s terminology, we all exist in a “situation”. This is an important concept because the situation shapes one’s capacity for action towards freedom. For Beauvoir, a situation is not only something outside our conception of ourselves—our external environment, for instance—but also something that exists as a part of ourselves—for instance, through attitudes and beliefs that are shaped by ideology. Beauvoir also argues that “the body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and a sketch of our projects” (The Second Sex 1949/2011, 46). Because Beauvoir’s idea of freedom is one that is embodied and intimately connected with one’s concrete community, there can be no recourse to abstract notions of freedom in order to bypass one’s concrete situation; rather freedom must be fashioned out of one’s circumstances as one finds

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them. Beauvoir wants us to see that the communities we belong to, and the circumstances that arise from them, are the results of human actions and therefore are capable of being changed. The idea that freedom is embodied is important to the argument that the television series can be taken as a literary text because both watching television and reading literature are embodied experiences that allow for meanings to arise within a heightened experience of the individual’s situation. However, if the television series is to be taken as a literary text, it must address the freedom of the individual as it appears within the individual’s situation. If individuals such as Walter White can be seen to be alienated from the concept of community in that his struggle to gain control over his situation entails the destruction of his community, then how is this distance from others to be overcome? In her essay “What Can Literature Do?” (1964/2011), Beauvoir argues that “literature is an activity carried out by men, for men, in order to disclose the world to them, this disclosure being an action” (197). At the time of writing this essay, Beauvoir was concerned about “the social changes brought about by television, advertising, and scientific management which seemed to have displaced the novel and its characteristic subjectivity from a central place in French culture and which she associated with structuralism’s aversion to the social and emotional (if not the political) functions of literary writing” (Hengehold 2011, 195). Beauvoir argues that information and literature are predicated on different understandings as to what constitutes the world. In Beauvoir’s view, radio and television, for instance, are capable of communicating information to people about the world, but, compared to literature, they cannot help people to overcome the distance that exists between them. Beauvoir says that Literature—if it is authentic—is a way of surpassing the separation by affirming it. It affirms the separation because when I read a book—a book that counts for me—someone is speaking to me; the author is part of this book. Literature only starts at that moment, the moment when I hear a singular voice (200).

She goes on to say that: “There is no literature if there is not a voice, and therefore a language that carries the mark of someone” (200). On the separation between individuals, she argues that communication is of course possible, and that we can communicate across a totalised world because “each situation is open onto all the others and it is open onto

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the world, which is nothing other than the swirling [tournoiement ] of all these situations which envelop each other” (199). However, the problem here, she says, is that at the heart of this communication there is a separation that remains irreducible. I who am speaking to you am not in the same situation as you who are listening, and none of those who are listening to me is in the same situation as his neighbour. He did not come here with the same past, nor with the same intentions, nor the same culture. Everything is different … (199).

So the problem with everyday communication or the communications we take for granted such as that through television and the internet is that we are communicating through our understanding of the totalised world: that is, the world that is constructed through information and through which we agree that it exhibits an acceptable form of reality. In What is Literature? (1948/2001), Jean-Paul Sartre, whose views closely align with those of Beauvoir, argues that literature is more of a political action on the world, rather than simply an aesthetic object that exists within the world. He thinks this is so because literature can produce changes in the world by raising in the reader a consciousness of the conditions that support oppression, and thereby lead the reader to finding ways to change those conditions. Sartre thinks that literature is distinctive from other forms of art such as poetry, music and painting, because the writer of prose inhabits language in a way that makes it possible to disclose the world in its lived reality: “Prose is first of all an attitude of mind” (Sartre 1948/2001, 12). Words are an action on the world, they are signifiers that the writer utilises to bring the experience of particular realities to bear on the world. Sartre argues that language is: our shell and our antennae; it protects us against others and informs us about them; it is a prolongation of our senses, a third eye which is going to look into our neighbor’s heart. We are within language as within our body. We feel it spontaneously while going beyond it toward other ends, as we feel our hands and our feet; we perceive it when it is the other who is using it, as we perceive the limbs of others (1948/2001, 12 ).

So, for Sartre, writing is a recognition that humans are constituted through language. Therefore, the perception of reality is defended and/or promulgated through a sensitivity to the tenor of the particularity of

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language, especially as it is found in literature. In other words, the literary text has the power to affect and change the nature of relations between individuals. When an individual engages with literature, he or she is consequently engaged in a political act that has the potential to initiate changes to oppressive situations.

Television, Information and Freedom If literature is a means of overcoming the separateness that exists between individuals as Beauvoir asserts, then how can we think about the television series as a literary text when digital technologies have the capacity to impose particular kinds of communities of interests upon individuals through scientific knowledge or information about viewers? Breaking Bad, for instance, is often classified as a “quality” television series, and this “quality” is commonly associated with literariness, in this case motivated by the show’s novelistic, longform narrative. With the capacity digital streaming services such as Netflix have to produce a multitude of searchable genres and sub-genres and its goal to push recommendations to individuals, the television series as literature might easily become a sub-genre itself within the genre of “quality television”, or even “television and literature” or “television based on literature” and so on.2 Elliot Logan argues that the “frameworks of quality and distinction tend to direct attention away from an interest in the expressive, aesthetic dimensions of the series they address” (2016, 146). However, even if the television series can be classified by the industry as belonging to a category based on a particular idea of “quality” and marketed as such, this in itself cannot predetermine that the experience of the individual will necessarily be a literary experience in the sense developed above. With a plethora of viewing choices available at one’s fingertips through digital platforms such as Netflix, Stan, Disney, Hulu and others, individuals in technologically saturated societies are theoretically free to access a wide range of televisual content seemingly tailored for the enjoyment and illumination of the individual’s particular situation in life. On the face of it, the importance of choice to the notion of democratic freedom is alive and well for consumers who are now relatively free to pursue their leisure time away from the fixed network television schedules that dominated past viewing behaviors. However, in The Tyranny of Choice (2011), Renate Salecl argues that choice can make us anxious because, in a capitalist society, we feel the pressure to create ideal lives out of our

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experiences that will not only make us happy, but also attract the approval of others (17). Salecl observes that while “we obsess about our individual choices […] we may often fail to observe that they are hardly individual at all but are in fact highly influenced by the society in which we live” (13). Salecl further argues that “the problem today is not that choices are available to us in the developed world. Rather, the problem is that the idea of rational choice, transferred from the domain of economics, has been glorified as the only kind of choice we have” (42). The proliferation of new televisual content available through streaming services plays into this idea in that the act of choosing what to watch is an expression of a rational choice that affirms an individual’s sense of themselves as free subjects. Netflix, for instance, offers thousands of genres and sub-genres that are used to tailor recommendations to the individual according to his or her previous viewing history. Catherine Johnson (2019) argues that the use of data and algorithms by online television services such as Netflix complicates the idea that individuals may have more control over how they choose which content to watch than in earlier eras of television. Algorithms “shape online TV services and the protocols that structure behaviour within those services” (Johnson, 2019, 143). According to Johnson, the operation of algorithms means that “online TV services have more in common with the push media of traditional broadcasting (where the service exerts significant control over the users’ media experience) than might be apparent” (2019, 152). Adding to this idea, Alex Anikina (2020) argues that this can be seen in platforms such as Netflix, as well as other services using recommendation algorithms. In this sense, the dangerous aspect of algorithmic superstructuring lies not only in its pervasiveness, but in the loop of commodification of experience and affect that it enables. Where data collection participates in infinitely updating feedback loops, it guarantees continuous commodification: as data analysis turns human choices, experience and attention into rationalised models, these models, in their turn, create more and more refined and precise definitions of what kind of experience is marketable” (39).

However, in spite of the fact that technology structures the viewing experience by hyperactively linking the act of choice to a repetitious act of pleasure, I want to argue here that an authentic experience of

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freedom via the televisual text is nevertheless still possible if the television series is capable of communicating with the viewer through the uniqueness of their situation, in the manner of literature. In The Pleasure of the Text (1975), Roland Barthes muses that the “pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas I do” (17). One of the ways that the television series matters is the way pleasure is intensified through “binge-watching”, a practise that immobilises the body and allows for an unimpeded conscious and unconscious reception of the pleasures of time unfolding through the show. Harvey Cormier (2015) discusses the ways in which binge-watching can bring characters such as Walter White from Breaking Bad and Omar Little from The Wire to life in ways that exceed their apparent fictionality. Cormier points out that bypassing the regulated unfolding of time that serial television typically demands, viewers access the unique particularities of their lives as well as the lives of the characters (2015, 12). Cormier observes that “real-life human beings all live over days, weeks, and seasons, but as we do so each of us creates and reflects, in her or himself and in the world, unique patterns that are not to be observed or understood exclusively in real time” (2015, 12): by compressing time through binge-watching television series viewers become aware of themselves as authors of their own fictional selves. In his book The Journeying Self: a study of philosophy and social role (1970), Maurice Natanson argues that art is an object that cannot be changed (110), cannot be possessed (111) and cannot be utilised (112). In the everyday world the art object is “bothersome, irritating, unsettling, and suggestively troublesome” (113). Natanson argues that the art object is an existential problem for individuals because its physical embodiment or vehicle is part of the physical world, yet its meaning transcends nature. Further the art work combines disparate qualities, for it is at once this particular, concrete unity and yet something unbounded and illimitable. Nor is this a matter of distinguishing between the art work as physical and as aesthetic object. The paradox of the art work as a presence to us in the world is its power to liberate a universal significance at the same time that it remains itself, given here and now in concrete form (1970, 114).

In this chapter the viewer is taken to be an active participant rather than a passive consumer in his or her engagement with the television

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series. Because the television series is encountered in the private domain of the viewer, it differs from the experience of other works of art found in galleries, museums or the cinema where the viewer is prepared to encounter something out of the ordinary because the setting for the art work demands that it be so. Natanson (1970) argues that in these circumstances, “there is an aesthetic mode of consciousness which allows the aesthetic object to appear, come into view” (110). The privacy afforded the viewer of the television series in the everyday context is similar to that afforded to the reader of literature. However, the device through which the television series is encountered differs from the literary page. As with the encounter with art in the art gallery, the viewer approaches the television series already orientated to the space as it is intended: that it is a space for leisure, luxury, entertainment, immobilisation and atemporality. This experience can be, to some extent, thought through Jean Baudrillard’s observation in America (1986/2010) that there is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you. Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what it really is: a video of another world, ultimately addressed to no one at all, delivering its images indifferently, indifferent to its own messages (you can easily imagine it still functioning after humanity has disappeared) (52).

The use of space in the everyday context tends to push the materiality of the device to the background of the viewing experience. However, if we think about the television series through the function of the device in the way Baudrillard frames it above, then we can see how the television series theoretically addresses both nobody and everybody at the same time. This can be a problem for equating the television series with literature because the device highlights how two of the most defining features of television shows—sound and vision—pre-imagine the materiality of the fictional world of the text. In essence, the televisual artwork takes on some of the burden of the imagination that is necessarily at play in the reading of literature. The televisual device is not only the deliverer of content, but also functions as a prosthetic form of the imagination for all kinds of televisual content. In terms of Beauvoir’s philosophy of freedom and literature, this can problematise the argument that the literary can be found in the television series (or at least some televisions series), because the device

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effectively performs some of the work normally reserved for the reader of the page. As with the way in which algorithms recalibrate the meaning of freedom, the device modifies the imaginative possibilities available to the viewer as reader. Speaking about Brazilian author Luiz Costa Lima, Michelle Boulous Walker (2013) argues a point that is also relevant to this discussion, namely that, at its best, literature resists the institutionalisation of thought, the move of any system, discourse or state to control what can be thought, what can be said, and what can be seen. As a consequence, this control is an everpresent threat that the imagination—expressed in certain forms of literature or fiction—constantly hits up against (198).

Algorithms can influence the way we think about our situations through what can be omitted as well as through putting forth recommendations based on our viewing histories. The point here is that our imaginations are shaped by the kinds of fictions accessible to it, so the danger here is that we may unwittingly become isolated within a bubble that provides only the illusion of freedom, whether that be freedom of choice or authentic freedom. The problem is that the distinctions between these concepts are blurred.

Breaking Bad, Literature and Freedom Breaking Bad is a television series that produces an inhabitable fictional world. Through entering this world the individual viewer becomes immersed in the processes of an unfolding narrative in which the familiarity of representations of ideal suburban family life is decentred. Mark Fisher (2018) argues that “(one) of the series’ subversive achievements is to draw attention to the way that our sympathy and identification with a character are a structural effect; one that is created both by the demands of genre and by the class structure of wider society.” According to Fisher, the characterisation of Walter White as a culturally recognisable downtrodden family man who positions the audience to sympathise with his plight is deconstructed once Walter continues to do bad things in excess of his rationalisation that his criminal acts are to provide for his family after his death: the “difference between the “good”, “ordinary” man and a ruthless criminal is the thinnest of lines” (Fisher, 2018).

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In the final minutes of the final episode—“Felina” (2013)—of Breaking Bad, Walter White lies on his back on the floor of a brandnew ideal meth lab dying from a bullet wound he sustained in the midst of the ambush he set up to kill his enemies. Walter is looking directly at us through the overhead shot. We see that he is not only not anguished, he looks pleased, accepting and complete: his crusade has reached its conclusion. The question raised by this ending and, in particular, the choice of the final song “Baby Blue” by Badfinger (1971)3 is: did Walter get what he deserved? Did he deserve to die on his own terms, or would it have been more fitting if he had died at the hands of the law or at least within the confines of the law? Ostensibly it is left to the viewer to judge the relative merits of Walter’s life and the actions he has taken that have brought that life to this particular conclusion. Walter may feel morally justified at the direction his life has taken, particularly given that he has realised his freedom; but how does this square with an existential ethics account of how Walter’s life should have unfolded? That is, can we think about Walter’s life in humanistic terms or does Walter ultimately become inhuman given the force of destruction he wields? From Walter’s perspective this ending is deserved not because of his crimes, but because he understands in the end that the nature of his struggle has been for freedom and love. However, this is not Beauvoir’s meaning of freedom where the individual assumes the responsibility for the freedom of others. Regardless of Walter White’s claims that his actions are for the love and protection of his family, he grasps freedom through the love that is generated by his own creativity and effort in producing the blue meth. That this struggle has taken place through a process fraught with brutality, deceit and community destruction shows how Walter’s desire for mastery cannot be achieved through any abstract notion of freedom as choice, but must be won through violent encounters with the materiality of his particular world: a world carved out of the Platonic love between men. Out of the violence, love emerges as the prize of recognising that love and freedom are intertwined as the creative, yet violent, force driving his project that enables Walter to die on his own terms. This death, for Walter, is the freedom that has been won through the love of his creative work. In this sense, it is a death that Walter deserves. In Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical work Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885/2006), Nietzsche says that one aspect of real freedom is

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the freedom to “die at the right time!” (53). In the section “On Free Death”, the prophet Zarathustra proclaims that The consummated one dies his death, victorious, surrounded by those who hope and promise. Thus one should learn to die; and there should be no festival where such a dying person does not swear oaths to the living! To die thus is best; second best, however, is to die fighting and to squander a great soul. But your grinning death, the one that creeps up like a thief and yet comes as master—it is hated as much by the fighter as by the victor (53).

Rebecca Bamford (2015), argues that Nietzsche here “individualises death […] understanding and assessing death in the terms of the individual’s life as the individual has lived it” (442). Walter is ultimately defined through the manner of his death because he avoids the “grinning death, the one that creeps up like a thief and yet comes as master” that Bamford argues is the negative characterisation of death that Nietzsche opposes in this text. However, even though Walter wins his freedom through his confrontation with death, he does so at the expense of the freedom of many others. Walter effectively denies his own humanity in the way that algorithms do in that he thinks of other people through a rationalist, technological lens wherein the value of their lives are calculable according to how they will best serve his own interests. This approach to freedom is linked to freedom as choice and clearly fails to account and take responsibility for the freedom of others. Indeed, Walter’s embrace of this kind of freedom leads to the destruction of the very thing he claims to care for most: his family, and ultimately his community whose existence he fails to recognise. However, an interesting parallel can be drawn between Walter’s freedom as an act of destruction and reading literature as an action of authentic freedom. As I have argued throughout this chapter, engaging with authentic literature is a means of encountering one’s situation in a way that can potentially change that situation. Therefore, it too can be a destructive action. However, while Walter destroys his world in order to master it, reading authentic literature as an encounter with freedom entails taking responsibility for the freedom of others within one’s situation and learning how to master the desire for the kind of freedom that Walter pursues.

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For me, Walter White is the face of the patriarch that haunts Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949/2011): violent, driven, competitive, hypocritical, scientific, rationalist, calculative, inventive, ingenious and more. The publicly visible part of his life is defined through his relationships with his family, but this is the cover that allows his pursuit of freedom through his relationships with other men. For another viewer, however, other aspects of Walter White, or other characters, will form a meaningful relationship within the context of that individual’s own situation. The value of the television series as literature is that the intensity of the viewing experience illuminates the particularity of one’s own situation through a parallax effect. Our individual embodied situations not only mean that we may interpret the show differently, but that we will also see the show differently. Recognising that Breaking Bad shines a light on our own particular situations, and recognising that this does more than simply disclose a predetermined moral universe, is in itself an authentic engagement with the literariness of this televisual text.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have sought to show that at the heart of the relationship between the television series and literature is the concern for freedom. Thinking about this relationship through the lens of Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy draws our attention to the distinctions between literature and information as well as between literature and entertainment. For Beauvoir, freedom is a primary ontological condition of being human, so literature at its most authentic speaks to this condition by disclosing to the individual the particular ways in which freedom cannot belong only to oneself. Beauvoir is concerned with bringing attention to the way the community functions to shape the situation of the individual. While it may seem more difficult for the television series to function as authentic literature given the scientific, rationalist mode of delivery of the narrative, individuals have the capacity to overcome these obstacles through the particular ways they view these shows. Literature may appear to present a more direct relationship between the author and reader since it is mediated via the page only; however, the prevalence of a multitude of replicas of the “quality” television series and the technological power to monopolise an individual’s free time means that literature in this form may fade into the margins of social life. The television series is not interchangeable with literature, even though they are both capable of providing experiences of

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authentic freedom. However, if the capacity to read authentic literature is dissolved through the dominance and shaping powers of technological forms of literary expression, then the capacity to make distinctions between different kinds of freedom may also be lost.

Notes 1. See, for example, Decker et al. (2017). 2. See Madrigal (2014). 3. See Knopper (2013).

References Anikina, Alex. 2020. Algorithmic Superstructuring: Aesthetic Regime of Algorithmic Governance. Transformations: Journal of Media Culture and Technology 34: 35–48. Badfinger. 1971. “Baby Blue.” Track 2 on Straight Up. Apple. LP. Bamford, Rebecca. 2015. ‘Moraline-Free’ Virtue: The Case of Free Death. Journal of Value Inquiry 49 (3): 437–451. Barthes, Roland. 1975. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. Baudrillard, Jean. 1986/2010. America. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1946/2004. “Literature and Metaphysics.” Translated by Veronique Zaytzeff and Frederick M. Morrison. In Philosophical Writings, edited by Margaret Simons, 269–77. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 1949/2011. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1964/2011. “What Can Literature Do?” Translated by Marybeth Timmermann, 197–209. In “The Useless Mouths” and Other Literary Writings, edited by Margaret Simons and Marybeth Timmermann. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Breaking Bad. 2008–2013. AMC. Cr. Vince Gilligan. ———. 2013. Season 5, Episode 16. “Felina.” Directed by Vince Gilligan. Aired September 29, 2013 on AMC. Cormier, Harvey. 2015. “Binge-watching television with Walt and Omar.” In Philosophy of Emerging Media: Understanding, Appreciation, Application, edited by Juliet Floyd and James E. Katz. Oxford Scholarship Online: Oxford University Press.

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Decker, Kevin S., Koepsell, David R., and Arp, Robert, eds. 2017. Philosophy and Breaking Bad. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Fisher, Mark. 2018. “Beyond good and evil: Breaking Bad.” In K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher 2004–2016, edited by Darren Ambrose. London: Repeater. Hengehold, Laura. 2011. Introduction to “What Can Literature Do?”. In “The Useless Mouths” and Other Literary Writings, edited by Margaret Simons and Marybeth Timmermann. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Johnson, Catherine. 2019. Online TV . London: Routledge. Knopper, Steve. 2013. “Why ‘Breaking Bad’ Chose Badfingers’ ‘Baby Blue’”. Rolling Stone. October 1, 2013, https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-news/ why-breaking-bad-chose-badfingers-baby-blue-191097/. Logan, Elliott. 2016. ‘Quality television’ as a Critical Obstacle: Explanation and Aesthetics in Television Studies. Screen 57 (2): 144–162. Madrigal, Alexis C. 2014. “How Netflix Reverse-Engineered Hollywood,” The Atlantic, January 2, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/arc hive/2014/01/how-netflix-reverse-engineered-hollywood/282679/. Marso, Lori Jo. 2017. Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter. Durham: Duke University Press. Natanson, Maurice. 1970. The Journeying Self : A Study in Philosophy and Social Role. Reading: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1883–1885/2006. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Adrian Del Caro. Edited by Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Salecl, Renate. 2011. The Tyranny of Choice. London: Profile Books. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1948/1973. Existentialism is a Humanism. Translated by Philip Mairet. London: Methuen. ———. 1948/2001. What is Literature? Translated by Bernard Frechtman. London: Routledge Classics. Walker, Michelle Boulous. 2013. Imagining Happiness: Literature and the Essay. Culture, Theory and Critique 54 (2): 194–208.

CHAPTER 7

Literary Remediations of Contemporary Television Series: From The Familiar to Storytel Originals Sara Tanderup Linkis

Introduction Television series are the “new novels,” according to such critics as Brett Martin (2013) or Jim Collins (2013), who argue that TV series are acquiring the traditional cultural status and function of literature. This argument reflects a linear concept of influence as something that moves from older to younger media and art forms: in this case, from literature to television. However, as a result of the recent rise and cultural re-evaluation of modern television series, literary authors and producers of literature also increasingly look to television as a source of inspiration. Arguing that in order to understand the developing relation between television series and literature it is necessary to consider how the influence moves both

S. Tanderup Linkis (B) Vanløse, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] Lund University, Lund, Sweden

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Winckler and V. Huertas-Martín (eds.), Television Series as Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4720-1_7

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ways, this chapter will focus on this tendency. Thus, I will investigate how contemporary literature imitates and remediates contemporary television series.1 My investigation specifically focuses on the use of the serial format within the two art forms. Serialization was originally associated with literature and first became popular in the form of nineteenth-century feuilleton novels. When the literary value of modern television series such as The Wire (2002–2008) or Breaking Bad (2008–2013) is discussed, they are often compared to classic works in this genre, by authors such as Dickens, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy (Kelleter 2017; Mittell 2015). As these examples suggest, not only popular genres, but also novels of high cultural status were then published in serial form. However, the serial publishing model was largely abandoned during the twentieth century, since bound printed books became cheaper and more widespread. Seriality hereafter became primarily associated with modern mass media, e.g. in the form of soaps, comics and video games, and, within a literary context, with popular genres such as romance or detective fiction.2 While it is certainly possible to trace a long and, to a limited extent, unbroken tradition of serial literature from the nineteenth century to the present day, recent years have brought a resurgence of the serial format within literary culture. Concurrently with the cultural rise of modern television series, literary serials have become more widespread, especially beyond the popular genres. The format dominates the contemporary book market, with such diverse titles as Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autobiographical My Struggle, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, or Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. Furthermore, new media and technologies have paved the way for new modes of distributing and consuming literary series, e.g. in the form of serialized e-books and audiobooks or via social media, as exemplified by Julian Fellowes’ Belgravia series (2016) and Jennifer Egan’s serialized Twitter story “Black Box” (2014).3 I will argue that this resurgence of serial literature reflects how contemporary literature is influenced by new media and technologies, especially contemporary television series. Thereby, I hope to contribute to a broader discussion of how literature is currently being affected and even transformed by other media and media cultures.4 I investigate how contemporary literature remediates the logics of modern television series, focusing, first, on Mark Z. Danielewski’s book series, The Familiar (2015–2017). Drawing on the work of Jason Mittell, I demonstrate how Danielewski imitates the narrative complexity that characterizes many contemporary

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television series, while also developing this complexity through experiments with the printed book. I move on to trace the influence of television series at an institutional level, focusing on series produced by the Swedish audiobook subscription service Storytel. Often described as “the Netflix of literature”, Storytel has in recent years become the biggest producer of serialized content in Europe, with a library of more than 200 serials, including so-called Storytel Originals, which are written specifically for the audio format.5 I investigate how these born-audio series imitate the style and structure of television series, while also considering how Storytel adjusts the stories to the affordances of the digital audiobook. In tracing similarities and influences between television series and literary series, I am not trying to reduce them to the same thing. Rather, I aim to explore how the serial narrative format is developed and transformed when used within different media and genres. While Storytel’s Originals may be categorized as popular literature, Danielewski’s novel is radically experimental, both in its complex content and in its extraordinary use of the serial format. The two cases reflect the influence of television series on different levels and in relation to different types of contemporary literature: while Danielewski’s work reflects a movement towards further narrative complexity, as described by Mittell for television series, Storytel’s series suggest the opposite development: moving towards more straightforward storytelling, accommodating consumption via audiobook. By comparing the two cases, the chapter will not only provide new insights into the developing relation between television and literature, but also contribute to a discussion of how new media influence the content as well as the concept of literature today. If television series are becoming literary, what happens to literature?

The Familiar: Remediating Televisual Complexity If this were like on a TV show, they might CGI in these cheesy rocks over everyone’s eyes, but that wouldn’t be right… Of course, since when is a TV series ever this life? Maybe some stuff you can never show (Danielewski 2015, 572).

“If this were like on a TV show…” speculates 12-year-old Xanther, the protagonist in Danielewski’s The Familiar.6 The phrasing is repeated in many posts in the Facebook group devoted to the series, where readers

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discuss which scenes from the novel they imagine to be presented in slow motion, suggest which music should accompany these scenes and reveal which actor they imagine to play Xanther’s step-father Anwar—if the novel were a television series. The comments reflect the contemporary cultural moment, in which literary works are compared to, and function within the same context as, television series. The Familiar is a result of this situation. Danielewski directly points to television series as an important inspiration. He states, It [The Familiar] had been impossible to conceive had it not been for the sudden efflorescence of great television. Looking at the five seasons of The Wire or the wild speculations of Battlestar Galactica. Certainly Mad Men, certainly The Sopranos , certainly Breaking Bad. These visual novels that have come into our living rooms and bedrooms and they tell a story in much greater detail and with much greater patience (Rath 2015, n.p.).

Describing television series as “visual novels”, Danielewski points to their literary value and emphasizes the connection between these shows and his own 27-volume project The Familiar, which may be considered as an attempt to translate the “detail” and “patience” of contemporary television storytelling into literature. The work refers to series such as The Wire and Stranger Things (2016–), suggesting how these shows have become a part of a broad cultural frame of reference. But The Familiar is not an adaptation of a specific television series, and neither has it been adapted into one. Rather, it imitates—remediates—the overall logics of television series at several different levels.7 The inspiration from television series is evident in the novel’s narrative organization. The Familiar was, as mentioned, planned to unfold in 27 volumes, five of which were published from 2014 to 2017. Recalling the typical organization of television series, these five volumes are presented as “season one.” Opening the books, the reader is confronted with a series of paratexts, which emphasize the connection to the logics of television. Before reaching the title page, the reader has to go through more than 40 pages that are presented with the label “New This Season” and which may be compared to trailers, “prequels” and intro-sequences of television series. All volumes close with a teaser for the following volume, for instance, in volume five: “Coming Soon: vol. 6 (summer 2018)” (Danielewski 2017, n.p.). Furthermore, all volumes end with credit pages, referring to people who have assisted with translations, design, research,

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etc., as stressed in an announcement at the end of each volume, stating (in somewhat different phrasings) that, No cats, dogs, snow leopards, or markhors were harmed during the making of THE FAMILIAR. THE NOVEL. The same, however, might not be said of artists, agents, inventors, editors, publishers, proof-readers, publicists, and the various brave hearts who faced the many doubts always born of so many moving parts—more than parts, more than just moving (Danielewski 2015, n.p.).

Humorously recalling the standard declaration in film and television that no animals were hurt in the production process, the sentence also points to the work as a product of collaboration, thus connecting it to the logics of collective television production.8 The Familiar also imitates the complex narrative structure of modern television series, as described by, e.g. Jason Mittell (2015). Mittell traces a development towards complexity in series such as Lost and Breaking Bad, pointing to the extended use of such features as the complex representation of temporality, character building and meta-referentiality. He presents this development as specific to television and frames it as a reaction against previously dominating episodic modes of television storytelling. However, I want to argue here that the tendency towards complex seriality may also be traced in contemporary literature, as exemplified by The Familiar. The novel adapts several characteristics of what Mittell calls narrative complexity, while also transforming and developing this complexity by playing with the medium and the materiality of the printed book. The Familiar may, first and foremost, be related to Mittell’s concept of narrative complexity because of its multi-stringed form. The novel is constructed around different plotlines, focusing on nine characters. The central story is about the girl Xanther, who lives in Los Angeles and who finds a mysterious cat. Her story is narrated partly from her point of view, partly from her mother Astair’s and her step-father Anwar’s perspective. Five other characters are presented: the gang leader Luther in Los Angeles, the Turkish police officer Özgür, the Armenian taxi driver Shnorhk, the drug addict Jing Jing from Singapore, the Mexican traveller Isandòrno and the computer specialist Cas, situated in Texas. Their stories make up initially separate plotlines which take place at different geographic locations from Singapore to Mexico and Los Angeles. The

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serial narration of the work emphasizes the process of gradually weaving these plotlines together, eventually making the characters meet and allowing a larger plot to emerge. Adding to this complex structure, the novel connects each of the central characters to a specific colour and typography. Chapters narrated from Xanther’s perspective are marked with pink in the upper right corner of each page and printed in the style Minion; her mother’s chapters are marked with orange and printed in Electra LH; her father’s chapters are marked with green and printed in Adobe Garamond, etc. At the end of each volume, a list indicates which typography refers to which character. The Familiar is generally characterized by such experiments with layout and typography and also includes several typographic images. Along with an extensive use of other illustrations, these experiments emphasize the intermedial aspect of the work, presenting it as a visual novel while also drawing attention to its status as a printed book. The result is a radically hybrid, experimental product which not only combines several different media, but also features a variety of languages. Large parts of the text are illegible for the common reader since they are presented in Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Hebraic, and in the Singapore dialect Singlish and other parts are written in computer code. Thus, it appears that the work not only imitates the complexity of contemporary television series, but also further develops this complexity by experimenting with written language, typography and the printed book. Apart from the multiple plotlines and complex multimodal aesthetics, The Familiar may be related to Mittell’s notion of narrative complexity through its explicit narrative self-consciousness—as most explicitly expressed in the presence of so-called Narcons or narrative constructs. The Narcons are computer programmes that have, apparently, written the story, although their identity and the circumstances for their writing it has not yet been fully clarified at the end of season one. They occasionally interrupt the story, drawing attention to the fact that the story is, indeed, constructed, reflecting a situation where literature is affected or directly produced by new media. This self-reflective level is further supported by the novel’s temporal complexity; something also described by Mittell in relation to the modern television series, since, as he notes, “many complex narratives play with chronology to engage viewers and encourage them to try to actively parse the story” (Mittell 2015, 26). We see this in The Familiar as the seemingly simple story about the girl who finds a cat in 2014 is connected to a much more complex story that reaches far into

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the future, as well as into the past. All volumes are introduced with a section of the posthuman story “Astral Omega,” which takes place thousands of years in the future, and with stories from pre-historic time, taking place, respectively, 243.243, 106.101, 73.656, 29.988 and 5517 years ago. These stories function as a series within the series, presenting the main story within a larger pre- and posthistoric frame. Danielewski explicitly presents his overall use of the serial format as part of a project to represent temporal duration. He says, really, it’s about how we have a conversation with the sensation of time that exceeds a decade. Your lifetime might last somewhere around a century. You’re building a family, or starting a company, and it takes decades. And if you’re just on Twitter and Instagram experiencing these momentary things, you’re going to be deprived of how to understand something that’s in a much larger scale (Dy 2017, n.p.).

Notably, this idea of duration is opposed here to the logics of social media, which function in and emphasize the moment. Contrary to these media, literary series—as well as many television series—exemplify a timeconsuming form of narration: the publication of The Familiar would literally “exceed a decade”, lasting from 2014 to 2027 when volume 27 would have been published had the series not been paused. The series not only takes a long time to produce, but also a long time to tell, as reflected in the fact that the story, beginning in May 2014, still takes place in 2014 in volume five, which came out in autumn 2017. The events in the first book take place during just one day. Danielewski thus uses the serial format as well as the aesthetics of print to slow down the representation of time, complicating the relation between narrated time and narrative time, as emphasized by his typographical experiments and experiments with the material book. For instance, when describing Xanther’s epileptic seizures, the text is presented with large blank spaces between words and sentences, so that it takes a long time to read the description of the few seconds, resulting in a sense of time standing still. Similarly, the large number of actual images, drawings and typographical images that are included in the text demand that the reader stop reading, instead focusing on decoding the images; thus, they are, visually and literally, stopping narrative time (Figs. 7.1 and 7.2). Apart from the experiments with the aesthetics of print, Danielewski also uses the design of the physical books to highlight the temporal aspect

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Fig. 7.1 The Familiar 1. Source Excerpt(s) from The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May by Mark Z. Danielewski, copyright © 2015 by Mark Z. Danielewski. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved

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Fig. 7.2 The Familiar 2. Source Excerpt(s) from The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May by Mark Z. Danielewski, copyright © 2015 by Mark Z. Danielewski. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved

of the series. Each massive volume is designed to be collected and placed on a bookshelf as part of a series, as reflected by the fact that the back of each book displays a part of a drawing, presumably the tail of a cat, which would appear as a whole cat if all of the planned 27 volumes were published and placed together on the shelf. The design points to the “shelveability” of the books. The concept of shelveability has once again been developed by Mittell, who points out how television series become shelveable when they are distributed in the form of DVD boxes and, accordingly, gain the status of cultural objects to be collected like books9 —such as Danielewski’s serial novel. The Familiar takes a long time to read, not only because of the many pages (880 per volume) but also because its complex multimodal

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and multi-lingual content demands careful and time-consuming deciphering by the readers. Accordingly, the work is surrounded by a very active reader community, as represented by the aforementioned Facebook group. Devoted readers discuss the developing story and help each other decode or translate passages in foreign languages. Notably, serial narratives in both literature and television, etc. have always been surrounded by active audiences, as discussed by, e.g. Jennifer Hayward (1997) and Frank Kelleter (2017). Since series are typically consumed continuously, as they are produced, readers or users discuss the story as it unfolds, and in some cases, even influence the outcome of the story: this was the case with the readers of Dickens’ novels, as well as contemporary television fans. In this way, serial audiences may be considered a forerunner of the tendency towards participatory practices, that, generally, characterize cultural consumption in today’s convergence culture, according to, e.g. Henry Jenkins (2006). However, according to Mittell, the recent turn towards narrative complexity in television has significantly affected these modes of serial engagement. He notes, “complex television encourages, and even at times necessitates, a new mode of viewer engagement. While fan cultures have long demonstrated intense engagement in storyworlds […] contemporary programs focus this detailed dissection onto complex questions of plotting and enigmatic events in addition to storyworld and characters” (Mittell 2015, 52) Describing this tendency as “forensic fandom” (2015, 52), Mittell emphasizes a shift from the traditional celebratory fan cultures towards more analytic activities.10 The reading culture surrounding The Familiar exhibits the same tendency, as the readers focus on deciphering the difficult text. Danielewski encourages a social and participatory engagement with the work, to the extent that he himself organizes reading groups on Facebook, participates in discussions of the novel and encourages readers to contribute content—e.g. photographs of their cats—to be included in forthcoming volumes. “Literature is capable of being a subject that people want to catch up on or discuss, whether at a coffee shop or a water cooler,” he states. “It can become an intrinsic part of their dialogue” (Bosman 2011, n.p.)—thus again presenting his project as an attempt to produce the literary equivalent of a television series and encouraging the types of social engagement that surround series such as Game of Thrones or Lost . The Familiar reading group on Facebook testifies to the fact that the work is fairly successful in producing this engagement, at least within this small group of highly dedicated readers.

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However, Danielewski’s efforts to keep readers engaged are not merely motivated by an idealistic ambition of promoting a participatory culture. As is the case with most television series, the work depends on the readers’ engagement—and money—to stay alive. Danielewski openly admits that the continuation of The Familiar depends on sales: “[A]s with a TV series, every season marks a moment of vulnerability”, he wrote in a Facebook reading group in 2017, when the last volume (so far) had just been published. “Pantheon will look at the sales figures in early 2018 and decide the details about Season 2”. In early 2018, he then announced that the series had been paused because “the number of readers is not sufficient for justifying the cost of continuing”.11 Apparently, the work is too complex, leaving it with only a small number of readers who are willing to spend the time required to decipher the complex multimodal and multilingual text. Thus, following the logics of commercial serial storytelling, the series was, in effect, cancelled.

Storytel Originals---Towards Serial Simplicity? While Danielewski may be said to remediate the narrative complexity of modern television series, Storytel’s serialized audiobooks move in the opposite direction: they use the serial format to develop simple, straightforward stories that fit the audiobook format and its presumed audience. The Storytel Originals are organized in episodes and seasons, with each season consisting of 10 episodes. They thus reflect how producers of literature today imitate the narrative format of contemporary television series. In a recent report, Storytel comments on their use of the serial format: in a highly competitive environment—fighting to occupy users’ free time— producers and distributors of content depend more than ever on the engagement of the services they offer. The sustained, consistent and recurring consumption of narrative series has demonstrated its effectiveness above any other format (such as short videos or movies) in building up that engagement (Quoted in Anderson 2018, n.p.).

The serial format is therefore used by Storytel to promote the users’ loyalty towards the service as a whole, encouraging them to maintain their subscription by encouraging “sustained, consistent and recurring consumption”. The comment reflects the company’s orientation towards the broad market of the entertainment industry. Storytel wants to

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compete with other producers of cultural “content”, rather than merely operate within a specifically literary publishing sphere. The Originals series, accordingly, appear as hybrid media products which imitate and incorporate the logics of other media, such as television series and podcasts, in order to attract new users, while also adjusting the serial form and content to the medial affordances and presumed usage of the digital audiobook. The series reflect an orientation towards the logics of television series at the start of each audiobook at a paratextual level, as indicated by the use of introductory music at the beginning and end of each episode. Furthermore, the cover images, trailers, etc. for the series resemble marketing material for films or television series. In this material, there is a strong emphasis on the performing narrators, who are usually famous actors known from television and film and who are often staged on the cover images as characters in the story. The author, on the contrary, becomes less important than he is traditionally imagined to be within literary contexts: sometimes, the author is not mentioned at all on the cover images for the Originals series, which instead focus on promoting the brand—Storytel Originals—and the performer. Storytel owns all rights to the series; the authors become mere writers, quite similar to the scriptwriters in television series, who do not own their work and thus can be replaced should Storytel wish to lead the series in a new direction. Storytel’s ambition to compete with other cultural producers also affects the narrative content of the series. Originals series are straightforward stories in popular genres, such as romance, thriller, crime fiction and science fiction. Rather than resembling modern complex television series such as Breaking Bad or The Wire, they may be compared to the soap operas and crime series which dominated earlier twentieth-century television drama (and are still very popular today). Thus, Storytel Originals make use of the serial format in radically different ways than Danielewski. While he, and the series discussed by Mittell, uses the serial format to represent complex stories that take time to tell and to consume, Storytel focuses on the series as a way to provide an easy listening experience. In the aforementioned report, they note that, “[f]iction needs to be concentrated to adapt to an attention span, which […] is becoming more and more reduced. Most original productions of streaming platforms last less than one hour” (quoted in Anderson 2018, n.p.).

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This emphasis on short formats is remarkable when compared to the development within television, especially Mittell’s ideas of the development of complex content. Rather than using the serial format to expand and complicate the story, Storytel uses the serial format to adjust the content to new modes of distribution and consumption that are—presumably—implied by digital culture. They relate to a widespread association of digital media with shortening attention spans and “laid-back” modes of reading or consuming content. Since these media, and digital audiobooks especially, make it possible to consume literature while doing other things, such as commuting, exercising or doing housework, several critics argue that they promote a distracted approach to literature.12 This idea may be questioned, since, as discussed by Lutz Koepnick and others, it is indeed possible to “close-listen” to audiobooks, emphasizing the aural aspects of literature. According to Koepnick, the audiobook may thus promote new forms of—complex—literary experiences (Koepnick 2013). Following this logic, I want to stress that it is not necessarily the digital audiobook form that shapes the Originals series and makes its products less complicated than Danielewski’s novel; rather, the series are the result of the industry’s, in this case, Storytel’s, ambition to produce content that is able to compete with other media products, accommodating an uncomplicated listening experience. Looking at Storytel’s author guidelines for the Originals series provides insight into the ways in which the company seeks to adjust the literary content of the series to audiobook consumption. They ask the authors to avoid writing texts that are “heavy with metaphors” and stories that “have too many vague characters or a disrupted timeline that stands in the way of the listening experience” (Mofibo 2021); instead, they emphasize that the Originals series are characterized by a “more straightforward timeline, where you follow distinct characters with a clear goal in mind, without compromising the quality of the content” (Mofibo 2021). Thus, again contrasting with the tendencies described by Mittell and Danielewski, Storytel’s series promote narrative simplicity: straightforward stories that support easy listening. Accordingly, the Originals series navigate between, on the one hand, imitating contemporary television series, and, on the other hand, adjusting the content to the digital audiobook and its presumed users. This tension becomes apparent when considering the three most successful Storytel series in Sweden, Virus , Svart Sjärna and Byvalla, all of which have been translated from Swedish into several other languages

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and marketed in other countries. The science fiction-series Svart Stjärna (“Black Star”) and the post-apocalyptic series Virus are both highly action-packed stories, with cliff-hangers at the end of every passage, episode and season. Both are marked by Storytel’s concept of straightforward storytelling, yet they are also oriented towards the logics of television series and even recall specific series. Svart Stjärna focuses on the survivors of a plane crash in a mysterious location, calling to mind the opening plot of the television series Lost —the difference being that Svart Stjärna is a straightforward story without the complex representation of time, flash-backs and flash-forwards that characterizes the latter. Virus , on the other hand, focuses on the outbreak of a deadly virus in Stockholm, leading (almost) to the extinction of humanity. Following a small group of survivors, the series recalls and refers to the popular postapocalyptic television series The Walking Dead. Reflecting their success, both Svart Stjärna and Virus have been continued for several seasons, and Virus was even continued in a spin-off series, Smittad (“Infected”) in 2018–2019. The third example, Byvalla, represents the popular genre of romance and feel-good drama. Accordingly, it focuses less on narrative drive and more on characters and setting. The series focuses on life in the small Swedish village of Byvalla outside of Stockholm. In the first season, a conflict is introduced into the story through the arrival of a television team from Stockholm. The team is producing a reality television show entitled “Love on the farm” in the village, making their protagonist, Micke, date different girls from the city. In this way, the series focuses on the contrast between the village and the big city. The idyllic—yet somewhat eventless—life in the village is interrupted by the people from the city, who introduce the villagers to the logics of television drama as they focus on promoting conflicts and intrigues to be presented in their show: for instance, Micke is instructed to play the girls out against each other. In this way, Byvalla may be said to reflect how the logic of television breaks into the familiar province of literature, introducing new modes of telling and consuming stories. In the series, Micke sees through the falseness of the show and the city girls, eventually choosing Hanna from his hometown as his girlfriend. Yet while the television team leaves Byvalla at the end of the season one, the Storytel series itself is still marked by the logics of commercial serial storytelling, as the story continues to unfold across two more seasons (and a Christmas special), securing the listeners’ “sustained, consistent and recurrent” consumption.

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Conclusion: Serial Complexity and Straightforward Stories Considered together, The Familiar and Storytel’s Originals reflect a situation where literary culture is turning towards the serial format. While recent television series such as The Wire, The Sopranos (1999–2007) and Breaking Bad are ascribed literary value, the cases demonstrate how the influence also goes the opposite way, as literature remediates the logics of television series at the levels of narrative organization and aesthetic content as well as production, distribution and (intended) reception. Despite their differences, or because of them, the two cases reflect how contemporary literary series navigate between transmediality and medium-specificity, imitating the logics and aesthetics of television series while also transforming the serial format according to the medial, commercial and social contexts in which they are embedded. This latter aspect becomes important in the context of recent discussions about what happens to literature, and literary value, in the golden age of television. Several critics have pointed to the rise of television series as an indication that the traditional media hierarchies are being challenged. Jim Collins notes that, “great stories don’t have to come from books anymore, because the most sophisticated stories are no longer restricted to a print-based literary phenomenon” (2013, 652) and further suggests that, [S]ophisticated stories of indefinite length are no longer medium specific […] The screen on which I watch BBC/HBO’s version of Parade’s End is the same screen on which I read my e-book edition of Ford Maddox Ford’s novel, and both form part of the personal digital libraries which sit inside that screen and I take with me wherever I go. When novels, films, television programs, and songs are all files downloadable from the same sites, all playbackable on the same portable devices, they are all incarnations of the same screen culture (2013, 654).

Similarly, Don Katz, director of the audiobook service Audible, notes that “[w]e’re moving toward a media-agnostic consumer who doesn’t think of the difference between textual and visual and auditory experience […] It’s the story and it is there for you in the way you want it” (Alter 2013). Thus, the rise of television series as well as the increasing popularity of audiobooks apparently implies that literary value is no longer

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exclusively associated with printed books, or indeed any other specific medium; what matters is the “story”, “in the way you want it.” However, this argument may be questioned. The cases presented above demonstrate the continuing relevance of considering how different media and media cultures shape serial stories and the ways in which these stories are produced, distributed and consumed. The Familiar and Storytel’s Originals transform the serial format according to the logics of the printed book and the digital audiobook, respectively. Although they are, in different ways, inspired by television series, they are also literary works in the sense that they emerge out of (different parts of) literary culture. When considered together, the two cases thus reflect the influence of modern media culture on literary series and on the content and concept of literature. Experimenting with the aesthetics of print, Danielewski produces a complex novel which has much in common with contemporary television series. Literary value, in this context, is connected to the idea of narrative complexity, which The Familiar shares with the modern television series as described by Mittell. Storytel’s audiobooks move in the opposite direction, towards a more straightforward storytelling, resulting in stories which may be compared to pre-twenty-first-century television drama. The differences between the two cases illustrate how television and other media affect contemporary literature in different ways, depending on genres as well as commercial and medial conditions. By comparing them, it becomes possible to demonstrate how literary series today navigate between transmediality and medium specificity: imitating, remediating and transforming the logics of modern television series and thus also affecting what literature is and may become.

Notes 1. This chapter was written as a part of the project “Serialization in Contemporary Literary Culture” (2018–2020), which is funded by Independent Research Council Denmark. 2. For a detailed account of the history of serial narratives, see Hagedorn (1988). 3. For a discussion of the resurgence of serial literature, see Andersen (2017).

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4. This discussion has focused especially on the influence of digital media on print literature. See, e.g., N. Katherine Hayles (2008) and Jessica Pressman (2009). 5. The serialized audiobooks may be compared to other forms of audio storytelling, e.g. podcasts and audio drama; however, they are characterized by a literary or scripted quality: they are read aloud, rather than spoken. I thus refer to them here as literary series, even though they also challenge the traditional—and printbased—definition of the literary. 6. The analysis af Danielewski’s novel presented below is partly based on my analysis of the work in Linkis (2018). 7. I refer to the remediation, in the sense of Bolter and Grusin, as “the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms” (1999, 273)—although in this case, it is the old book which refashions and imitates the newer television series. 8. See Mittell (2015) on the production of television series. 9. Mittell notes that, “[t]he physical collectability of DVD boxes adds to their aesthetic positioning—the ability to shelve a television series next to a classic film or novel creates the possibility of aesthetic equality in a way that the ephemeral system of broadcasting never did” (Mittell 2015, 37). However, it might be argued that the DVD-boxes are increasingly being replaced by online streaming services such as Netflix. Obviously, these services still allow viewers to re-watch complex series, but the aspect of material shelveability is lost. 10. For more on forensic fandoms, see Mittell (2015). See also Jenkins (1992). 11. See e.g. Schaub (2015). 12. Cf. Birkets (1993).

References Andersen, Tore Rye. 2017. Staggered Transmission. Twitter and the Return of Serialized Culture. Convergence 23 (1): 34–48. Anderson, Porter. 2018. “Storytel in Spain: When Entering the Audiobook Market means Making New Serials.” Publishing Perspectives, June 6, 2018. https://publishingperspectives.com/2018/06/storytel-spain-aud iobook-market-original-serials/.

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Alter, Alexandra. 2013. “The New Explosion in Audio Books.” The Wall Street Journal, August 1, 2013. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-explosionin-audio-books-1375980039. Birkets, Sven. 1993. “Close Listening.” Harper’s Magazine, January 1993. Bolter and Grusin, 1999.Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation. Understanding New Media. M.I.T Press. Bosman, Julie. 2011. “Periodical Novel, Coming Soon”. The New York Times, February 22, 2011. https://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/ 11/20/periodic-novel-coming-soon/. Breaking Bad. 2008–2013. Written by Vince Gilligan. AMC. Collins, Jim. 2013. The Use Values of Narrativity in Digital Cultures. New Literary History 44: 639–660. Danielewski, Mark Z. 2015. The Familiar vol. 1. One Rainy Day in May. New York: Pantheon. Dy, Philbert. 2017. “A Conversation with Mark Z. Danielewski”. Rogue Books. http://rogue.ph/conversation-mark-z-danielewski/. Hagedorn, Roger. 1988. “Technology and Economic Exploitation: The Serial as a Form of Narrative Presentation”. Wide Angle 10 (4). Hayles, N. Katherine. 2008. Electronic Literature. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press. Hayward, Jennifer Poole. 1997. Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers. Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. ———. 2006. Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide. New York and London: New York UP. Kelleter, Frank. 2017. Media of Serial Narrative. Ohio State University Press. Koepnick, Lutz. 2013. Reading on the Move. PMLA 128 (1): 232–237. Linkis, Sara Tanderup. 2018. “Volumes! Den litterære serie på tværs af medier” Passage 79: 117–134. Martin, Brett. 2013. Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution. London: Faber and Faber. Mittell, Jason. 2015. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press. Mofibo. 2021. “What is a Mofibo Original”. October 27, 2021. https://sup port.mofibo.com/hc/da/articles/115001070410-Hvad-er-en-Mofibo-Ori ginal. Translated by the author. Pressman, Jessica. 2009. “The Aesthetics of Bookishness in 21st Century Literature” Michigan Quarterly Review XVLIII (4).

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Rath, Arun. 2015. “Danielewski Returns with a Long Sideways Look at The Familiar,” NPR Books, May 10, 2015. https://www.npr.org/2015/05/10/ 404917355/danielewski-returns-with-a-long-sideways-look-at-the-familiar. Schaub, Michael. 2015. “The Familiar by Mark Z. Danielewski Review: What the Font is Going on?” The Guardian, May 12, 2015. https://www.thegua rdian.com/books/2015/may/12/the-familiar-mark-z-danielewski-review. Stranger Things. 2016–. Written by Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer. Netflix. The Sopranos. 1999–2007, Written by David Chase. HBO. The Wire. 2002–2008. Written by David Simon. HBO. Van de Ven, Inge. 2016. “The Serial Novel in an Age of Binging. How to Read Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar”. Image & Narrative 17 (4). “What is Storytel Originals.” Storytel website: https://support.storytel.in/hc/ en-us/articles/115001670910-What-is-Storytel-Original-

CHAPTER 8

The Literary in Television, or Why We Should Teach TV Series in Literature Departments Giancarlo Lombardi

Competent viewers of Game of Thrones (2011–2019) cannot deny that its grandiose narrative impact calls to mind that of the Classic and Renaissance epic, just as TV and film critics have long identified in the intricate urban fresco of The Wire (2002–2008) echoes of the detailed portrayal of nineteenth-century London in Charles Dickens’ novels. By the same token, the last season of Lost (2004–2010) and Les Revenants (The Returned, 2012–2015) reveals their creators’ direct homage to Dante’s Divine Comedy, manifested through the repurposing of key tropes and settings. The critical attention dedicated to Mad Men (2007–2015) evidences its ability to offer a new, disturbing take on the founding myth of the self-made man, which played so central a role in twentiethcentury American Literature. In recent years, prestige television has found

G. Lombardi (B) The Graduate Center/CUNY, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Winckler and V. Huertas-Martín (eds.), Television Series as Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4720-1_8

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in literature not merely its inspiration for countless adaptations but a true aspirational peer model of excellence.1 A recent episode (4.7, “Proxy Authentication Required”) of Mr. Robot (2015–2019), which interrupted its multifocal narrative to concentrate instead on a single storyline through a five-act tragedy following the three Aristotelian units, replete with Shakespearean tropes, clearly proves the extent of such métissage. With this in mind, this essay sets out to build on such convergence by proposing, on the one hand, an alternative approach to the study of serial drama, tightly informed by French Critical Theory, while reflecting, on the other, on the direct pedagogical application of such a framework through the revisitation of two graduate seminars I offered in the past five years. Glen Creeber, the TV scholar who called for renewed attention to textual analysis in a field so dominated, as of late, by studies of production, distribution, circulation, and reception, recently ventured to consider contemporary television drama as ‘the small screen novel’ (2015, 32). In an essay dedicated to the analysis of the far-reaching influence of Nordic Noir, Creeber stressed that its lasting impact was largely due to its representing “television drama coming-of-age, harnessing the sheer breadth and power of the long-form narrative to embrace and nourish stories that are as visually stunning as film and as complex and multi-layered as the novel” (2015, 31). Complexity is a concept that is now strictly tied to Jason Mittell’s important theoretical contribution to the study of US television drama. Yet the ‘thickness’ of Creeber’s multi-layered televisual text begs to be considered through a critical lens that is not solely germane to the narratological framework informing Mittell’s Complex TV (2015). In my view, the rich textuality described by Creeber calls for the post-structuralist “teasing out of the conflicting forces of signification” (Johnson 1985, 140) more akin to the early deconstructive approach of the Roland Barthes of S/Z (1974). I believe that a televisual text, or in this specific context, a TV series, should be investigated not merely through its ‘complexity’ but, to borrow from Barthes, through its intrinsic plurality, that is, through its ability to offer access “by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one” (1974, 5) and by its predisposition to be viewed multiple times and be the object, therefore, of a repeated, recursive fruition. This is because, as the French critic says, “rereading […] saves the text from repetition (those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere), multiplies it in its variety and its plurality” (1974, 15).2

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It is this shift from complexity to plurality, still inflected through tools often associated with literary theory, that motivates my advocacy for the study of television in comparative frameworks, and most specifically within the disciplinary purview of a field such as Comparative Literature. Given the current dominance of SVOD (Subscription Video on Demand), Raymond Williams’s (1974) theorization of television as flow should be considered obsolete, and with it the understanding that priority should be given to industry concerns traditionally addressed within the disciplinary confines of Communication. Once television programs (of which drama should be considered a subset) can be watched on demand, on any number of platforms and screens, what was once considered the biggest obstacle to textual analysis is overcome; the clear demarcation of discrete units and the ensuing possibility of isolating the given text from its institutional surroundings create a space on which the analyst can intervene with theoretical tools long pertaining almost exclusively to literary studies. To return to Roland Barthes, and to my claim that comparative frameworks thrive on the intrinsic plurality of any given text, let me add here that the presence of subtitles, considered a necessary evil in the Anglophone culture so rarely exposed to television drama produced in languages other than English, forces attentive viewers to a repeated, recursive fruition of non-Anglophone drama series. By virtue of the dual reading that occurs simultaneously, that of the actual subtitles and of the very image they partially occupy and potentially take over, the viewer is not afforded any room for distraction, as the rich amount of information conveyed on the screen often necessitates rewinding, and renewed access to the text. In my opinion, serial drama, thanks to its multiple addressees, is the ideal plural text in that its reception depends on the activation of cultural, semantic, or symbolic codes that may occur differently across time and space.3 As SVOD thrives globally thanks to the multiplication of what Amanda Lotz (2017) has defined as portals , the circulation of drama series worldwide has increased exponentially, and this is not only true of American, British, Turkish, and Indian series, traditionally destined to a wide audience, but it also applies to emerging districts such as Denmark, Israel, and much of Western Europe.4 And while productions that were created with global distribution in mind implied multiple addressees, many others were made for a domestic audience yet found a larger following that located its viewing pleasures in the intrinsic plurality of these series. The sedentary tourism implicit in the reception of non-domestic drama often grants viewers one of the greatest benefits of tourism per se: the widening

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of perspective that has long been associated not only with traveling across the world, but also with the intense consumption of world literature. My decision to submit a contribution to this edited volume on Television Series as Literature speaks to a direct concern I have long felt in my parallel activities as researcher and instructor of Screen Studies, formerly trained in Literary Studies and Critical Theory, and currently chair of a large doctoral program in Comparative Literature. At a time in which the increasing quantity of scholarship, mandated by the “publish or perish” mentality, appears to be inversely proportional to its quality, shouldn’t we give primacy to research that advances knowledge inside the classroom as well? And when the scope of our investigation is limited to the margins of a given text, namely to its modes of production, distribution, circulation, and reception (as much of British Cultural Studies scholarship is wont to do), aren’t we disregarding, by eliding the importance of the text, the one portable skill useful to all the students who populate our classrooms, that close textual reading which has long been the purview of scholars and instructors of Literature and Critical Theory alike? The close reading of a visual text, be it a painting, a film, or a television program, calls for the employment of a vast array of theoretical tools specific to the medium, although the interweaving codes that constitute any given text (to return to Barthes) can and should still be considered, in my opinion, of linguistic nature. The biggest challenge for the literary scholar is the acquisition of specific competence in a nuanced understanding and decoding of audiovisual language, which is a foundational component of the televisual text itself. It is for this reason that I take issue with Jason Mittel’s limited consideration of audiovisual components: While the use of visual and aural techniques to convey narrative is an essential part of television, with many complex television programs embracing a broader palette of stylistic techniques to help make them distinctive innovators, I only consider such elements in service of other storytelling goals such as atemporality or character development. (2015, 10)

Although I greatly respect Mittell’s tight narratological focus (as well as his overall contribution to the study of serial drama), I find that stylistic innovation in A/V (Audio/Video) is not merely in service of storytelling, but actually deploys a citational function that invites viewers to exit momentarily from direct engagement with characters and storylines in order to draw connections with a set of extra-textual and inter-textual

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references that greatly enhance the fruition of the text. The color correction of Gomorra (Gomorrah, 2014–) or The Handmaid’s Tale (2017–) and the audio track of the credit sequence of Bron/Broen (The Bridge, 2011–2018) or Les Revenants evoke far more than questions related to character development: They are responsible for setting a mood that connects these series to a wider textual network that exceeds their genre and medium. Furthermore, their semantic function leads to multiple forms of decodification, enhanced by the coterminous presence of other linguistic components, be they lighting, editing, camera angle, frame composition, speed, or actual spoken dialogue. The task of the analyst is thus, in my view, that of identifying in any given text areas of porosity that invite the viewer’s active participation in decoding not only the larger hermeneutic questions related to what Barthes defined as enigmas which are underlying most storylines, but also in activating those sets of cultural references nested in each text which may or may not appear immediately on its surface, or which could lead to divergent interpretations. It is such areas of porosity and their intrinsic polysemy that drive heated conversations among viewers in watercooler conversations, social media, and online forums, and among professional critics in conferences, journals, and blogs. With these questions in mind, three years ago I taught the very first graduate seminar in Television Studies ever to be offered in the doctoral program in Comparative Literature in my home institution. By then, Mad Men and The Wire had become common references for most of my students, and Salman Rushdie had already made the controversial statement that in television “what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel” (Thorpe 2011). What was missing, I believed, was a wider, less provincial understanding of seriality, now possible thanks to the growing presence of non-Anglophone drama on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. The pursuit of a comparative approach to drama series felt particularly appropriate to our institutional setting, fitting nicely alongside graduate seminars in World Literature tightly informed by the theoretical contributions, among others, of Emily Apter, David Damrosch, and Franco Moretti. Entitled Television Without Borders: Transnational Perspectives on Prestige Serial Drama, my course set out to investigate serial drama in its global positioning and in its nationalistic investments, identifying its national aesthetics and its political dependencies, its loci of assimilation, and its forms of rebellion against dominant paradigms dictated by Hollywood. In doing so, it followed

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closely the trajectory delineated for literary studies by one of the most influential critical works of the last few decades, Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters (2004), which allowed us to inflect critical readings of any given drama through its geopolitical position in the wider context of production and reception. Danish and Israeli television dramas were thus analyzed both in their specificity and in conversation with their anglophone adaptations: Borgen (2010–2013), Forbrydelsen (The Killing , 2007–2012), Bron/Broen, and Hatufim (Prisoners of War, 2010–2012) were introduced in their context of production and immediate fruition, and only later juxtaposed to The Killing (2011–2014), The Bridge (2013–2014), The Tunnel (2013–2017), or Homeland (2011– 2020). Not having been the object of a direct anglophone adaptation, since Madam Secretary (2014–2019) was only loosely based on its initial premise, critically acclaimed Borgen came to represent an unicum in successful Danish exports also because of its not being a Nordic Noir, and for that reason it constituted one of the core texts in our seminar. The same was true of Gomorra and Les Revenants , which for a few years represented the only Italian and French series destined to global circulation. Following Casanova, students were invited to identify areas of innovation and resistance in all these series to the tenets of contemporary quality drama produced in the USA, be it produced by networks, premium channels, or streaming platforms. Establishing a connection with drama production from lesser exported districts such as Norway, Belgium, and Germany proved to be particularly useful in this context, as series such as Okkupjert (Occupied, 2015–), Cordon (2014), and Deutschland 83 (2015) betrayed how efforts to emulate American standards were effectively undercut by a strong national identity, evidenced in the specific case of these series by their thematic foregrounding of patriotism. The very mention of ‘quality’ or ‘prestige’ drama, which served as an overarching rubric throughout the seminar, evoked theoretical questions already present, in literary theory, in Stanley Fish’s conceptualization of interpretive communities (1976, 483–484), and later spelled out by Jane Feuer in her groundbreaking essay on ‘quality TV’(2007, 145–146). In order to understand the role played by cultural mediators in steering the choices and value judgments of viewers worldwide, students read Fish and Feuer alongside Pierre Bourdieu’s (1993) meditation on power and capital, drawn from his study of sites of force(s) and struggle(s) in the field of cultural production. These theoretical readings, further complementing Casanova’s argument, called for direct comparisons among

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dramas. International series were thus put in direct conversation with established anglophone dramas which have long been considered as staples of television drama worldwide: Broadchurch (2013–2017), Orphan Black (2013–2017), Black Mirror (2011–), The Good Wife (2009–2016), The Walking Dead (2010–) and, taking a step back in time, Breaking Bad (2008–2013), Lost and The Sopranos (1999–2007). Extensive training in literary studies proved crucial for my students when we analyzed Israel’s unique contribution to POV (Point of View) television: adapted in several countries under the American title In Treatment , the Israeli series Be Tipul (2005–2008) was only the beginning of Hagai Levi’s experimentation with seriality grounded in intradiegetic, and often unreliable POV narrative. Contrasted with True Detective (2014–), another complex series thriving on a spiraling narrative structure, Levi’s first American series The Affair (2014–2019), posed an exciting challenge for students trained in narratology and psychoanalysis. And while True Detective brought into play questions related to the Gothic genre, as well as a clear debt to Nordic Noir amply noted by Creeber (2015, 30– 32), The Affair drew the attention of scholars of deconstruction thanks to an evident textual discomfort which matched that of its protagonists. Gérard Genette (1987, 1997a, b), already evoked for his systematization of point of view in western literature, became particularly useful for his study of thresholds (which so frequently vary and overlap in this series) and of textual palimpsests, markers of intertextuality particularly evident in The Affair, not only in narrative terms but also through the use of principals such as Dominic Purcell and Ruth Wilson, who had risen to fame, respectively, in The Wire and Luther (2010–), through the portrayal of characters whose flaws returned, with significant differences, in this new show. Each week, students were asked to watch one season of a given series at home, and during the four hours of class time, they watched one or two episodes from another series, with the express purpose of comparing and contrasting relevant elements. We thus analyzed a cult series such as The Americans (2013–2018) against Deutschland 83 in order to identify areas of commonalities and difference in the stylistic portrayal of Cold War spy stories, placing particular emphasis on the diverse pleasures activated from their consumption, inherent to their intrinsic plurality. Questions of genre, theme, and format drove our comparative reading of dramas such as Orphan Black, The Walking Dead, or American Horror Story (2011– ) which, over the years, had proven particularly effective in engaging

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viewers worldwide, fostering the creation of Benedict Anderson’s (1983) imagined communities , and proving the effectiveness of Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) definition of Imagination as social force in identity creation. A comparison between the strikingly different use of the horror genre in The Walking Dead and American Horror Story proved to be particularly useful, because it allowed us to circle back to other genres which each of these two series effectively recoded and repurposed with dramatically different results. The mandatory use of social media was particularly effective in community building among classmates and to foster a steady ongoing discussion on the series being screened at home throughout the entire week: Students were asked to tweet at least five times per week producing snippets of textual analysis of the series assigned. Each tweet included the official hashtag of the course, (#TVWithoutBorders), so that each tweet could be seen immediately by the entire group, as well as the official hashtag of the series being screened. Most students took immediately to tweeting, producing concise but sophisticated textual readings, often accompanied by screenshots or references to secondary sources; they exchanged opinions in real time, turning the solipsistic screening activity into a communal intellectual experience. The inclusion of the official hashtag of each series allowed for the occasional intervention of industry players (actors, producers) as well as fans of the shows, granting different depth to our discussion, and effectively merging what are too often considered to be isolated communities, as scholars and students of television drama were given the opportunity to share their opinions, and most frequently their textual interpretations, with the institutional senders and receivers of the text itself. During sessions that were particularly crowded with material to be screened, since students increasingly voiced their interest in being exposed to an extensive catalog of international series, live tweeting replaced class discussion, proving to be particularly effective in eliciting solid participation from all students. The output of the seminar reflected the varied interests of the students enrolled in the course: Traditional essays employed critical theory in service of the close reading of one or more series brought together through thematic or genre-specific concerns, whereas video essays addressed similar questions through a medium that more directly confronted and mirrored the language it analyzed. Just as Western philosophy, narratology, and Russian formalism informed a reading of speculative realism in The Affair, trauma theory was the theoretical filter

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adopted in a close examination of the portrayal of rape culture across a wide spectrum of series. Character studies and close readings of individual episodes from series such as Breaking Bad and Mad Men were produced alongside critical discussions of complexity in animated series as well as procedurals. Questions of viewer identification, inflected by discussions of race and lack of diversity, drove the analysis of the shortcomings of female representation in Les Revenants and, even more so, a study of the stilted process of othering at work in the portrayal of Asian-Americans in American serial drama. By the time I decided to revisit this seminar for a second offering, three years later, my research had veered away from general questions on transnational television drama, narrowing its focus on a specific theme running through a vast corpus of series produced across several countries. As a matter of fact, the same narrowing process which had led me to single out a theme also drove the identification of geographic confines of the series to be analyzed: the Global North.5 In its current state, my project finds its entry point into the analysis of comparative serial drama in a study of national productions with a global audience as well as transnational co-productions, focusing on the uses and function of religion as a theme or trope. In doing so, it places at the center of its inquiry religious characters, storylines, or imagery in order to query their role in the text as well as their perlocutionary effect. In treating serial drama as speech act, my investigation deploys textual analyses that are aimed to tease out common and different strategies in the portrayal of religious figures and themes, with the express purpose of identifying their intended or unintended effects on the viewer. In treating national or transnational serial drama as a speech act that reaches a diverse audience, I ask how each series negotiates the portrayal of specific religions, and how it manages to transcend the specific in order to speak more generally about ethical concerns. The new seminar, offered in Spring 2019, reflected this same focus, albeit with a tighter concentration on Christianity, and looked at a considerably different corpus of series from those discussed in the previous course. Following the same chapter breakdown as my current manuscript, the course sought to investigate how religion inflected, in storylines, iconography, or subtext, the different codes woven in each text, and as a consequence, it queried how viewers experienced each of these texts in its innate plurality. Each time we analyzed a drama (and for this course, the intensive study of one series each week was preferred to the extensive, comparative approach of the previous seminar), we began our analysis

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of its textual plurality by reflecting on its target audience, and on the kind of audience the text eventually produced. In some cases, we broke down the elements that constituted the ‘catechizing’ effects of series that did not strive to hide their open interpellative function, in spite of the loudly declared atheism of their creators or showrunners. This was particularly true of three European series, Ainsi-soient-ils (Churchmen, 2012–2015), Broken (2017), and Herrens Veje (Ride Upon the Storm, 2017–2018). Respectively portraying the travail of French and British Catholic priests and of a family of pastors of the Danish National Church, these three series question the vocation for priesthood of their protagonists while often exposing their profound loneliness amid parishioners who are increasingly more distant. Matters pertaining to secularism were thus central in our investigation of these three series, as being in (and of ) the world constitutes a key concern which each series, steeped in its specific national culture, tackles and resolves in dramatically different fashion. Because of its tight narrative focus on the figure of the struggling priests, and because of a common trajectory leading to the reaffirmation of their faith amidst communities that may or may not appreciate their value, these series ultimately seem to invite viewers to commune with their protagonists. Students took on the challenge of acting as resisting viewers, attempting what Stuart Hall (1980) called an oppositional reading of these series, so as to be alert to their ideological pitfalls and identify those textual pockets which served more effectively an interpellative function. The interwoven discussion of belief, visibility, and corporeality drove our discussion of three apparently unconnected HBO series: Westworld (2016–), The Young Pope (2016), and The Leftovers (2014–2017). The intricate plot of Westworld revolves around the rebellion of replicants (‘hosts’) gifted with the power of reflection against a creator who clearly suffers from a God complex, whereas The Young Pope grounds its narrative on a newly elected pontiff who stages his own rebellion against a system he now dominates by calling for renewed ascetic reflection. In both cases, a crisis of belief is tied to a body whose excessive visibility bespeaks its essential vulnerability. These televisual narratives pivot on the actual fetishization of bodies that are often withdrawn intradiegetically (and the layers of diegesis, in Westworld, are effectively complicated by their internal doubling) while being constantly on display for the viewer. Likewise, as its very title evokes, The Leftovers grounds its narrative on the duality absence/presence. Essentially dedicated to portray the upshot of a devastating event, the unexplainable disappearance of millions of people

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worldwide which occurred simultaneously in a single moment, this series portrays a world in spiritual turmoil which turns to old and new forms of religion when science fails to offer reasonable explanations. Aggregating into cults or turning inward while pretending to remain functional, the eponymous leftovers bear markers of their trauma on their bodies, which are silenced, punished by compulsive smoking and only clothed in white, or covered in tattoos that bespeak such suffering. Clothed or laid bare, the bodies of the leftovers signify trauma more effectively than their speech does. Trauma theory (Caruth 1996; Felman 1991) as well as Levinas’s (1998) reflections on ethics constituted the tools with which students analyzed each series, eventually bringing them in conversation with one another. Religious concerns, less central than in the three series previously discussed, were rather evoked through powerful mise-en-scène that called for close textual reading of frame composition, lighting and camera movements, and for the activation of cultural codes specifically pertaining to the field of Art History. Corporeal imagery continued to be a central concern, inviting further connections and comparisons, as we discussed a Belgian sci-fi series, Transferts (Transfers, 2017–), which imagines a near future when scientists have successfully isolated the particle that separates the body from the mind, and are thus able to transfer minds into new bodies, once the old ones are nearing death. Originally filmed in French, but also destined for immediate global distribution through Netflix, this series thrives on a plurality springing, first and foremost, from the contrast between original language and subtitles: translated in English as mind, the original French word esprit has a dual meaning, one of which opens a spiritual dimension clearly woven into the text as a central theme: it means in fact, both mind and spirit. Set a few years after the discovery, at a time in which such transfers have caused considerable political and religious backlash, the series portrays a universe in which a very conservative wing of the Catholic Church has sought political and emotional control of the entire population. While we covered considerable theoretical ground, in class discussion, through genre-specific readings that had also been useful for our interpretation of Westworld, the Althusserian understanding of the workings of ideology through interpellation allowed us to embark on a contrastive examination of a series that, unlike the first three discussed earlier, invited the analyst to side with the viewer in performing a Hallian dominant reading. Placed in the uncomfortable position of the protagonist, who awakens to the realization of having

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been subjected to a transfer he did not approve, the spectator never loses contact with such discomfort: students necessitated considerable distancing from the diegesis, granted by the doublespeak of the contrasting connotations arising from the juxtaposition of audio track and subtitles, in order to gain further critical insight in a series that, released only a few weeks before the course began, proved to be a key addition to the syllabus. The extremely convoluted structure of Dark (2017–) posed yet another significant challenge for my students. Indeed, more than any other drama on the syllabus, the German Netflix original thrives on what Mittell (2019) would call its ‘drillable’ nature, so students made the most of their cultural repertoires to activate disparate intertextual references disseminated throughout the series. As they pursued a religious subtext that gradually became more evident, they gained distance from their forensic viewership so as to identify the specific ways in which Dark could almost be juxtaposed to Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979) as a metafictional reflection on the role of the addressee. More than any other series screened throughout the semester, Dark proved to be the ultimate plural text, demanding critical attention from students, and continually forcing them to pause, rewind and rewatch individual segments of its early episodes, as one would often leaf back through a novel in search of cross-references deeply nested in the text. Literature and serial drama came together even more evidently as we discussed Les Revenants and Il miracolo (The Miracle, 2018), penned by famous novelists Emmanuel Carrère, who only wrote the first season of the former, and Niccolò Ammaniti, who conceived, scripted, and served as actual showrunner of the latter. While obvious thematic considerations led us to contrast Les Revenants to The Leftovers , since the French series portrayed a world in which the dead suddenly returned home, and those who had mourned them were suddenly confronted with the profound emotional turmoil caused by their reappearance, closer inspection of the text urged us to turn to literary subtexts such as Dante’s Divine Comedy, as the setting gradually disclosed the presence of an ‘underworld’ separated by a gulf of water, and only attainable through a Charonian journey. Locus of eternal returns, since many a character defies death through recursive reappearance, the Alpine setting of Les Revenants is an ideal stage for raising questions of guilt, accountability, predestination, and trauma.

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Because of its absolute reliance on what Eva Novrup Redvall, in her study of Danish television drama production, called one vision (2013, 69), Ammaniti’s Il miracolo begged to be juxtaposed and contrasted to The Young Pope, if only to consider that, while Paolo Sorrentino had envisioned his first television series as a 10-h movie, Ammaniti had employed in Il miracolo some of the most recognizable stylistic elements of his most famous novels. Thus, students familiar with Ammaniti’s previous work immediately recognized the coterminous presence of vastly diverse storylines that eventually interweave, as well as a diegetic universe of profoundly unlikeable characters who seem to walk on the verge of destruction. Indeed, the entire cast of principals, with very few exceptions, shares an essential solitude defined through their aloofness, which partakes of the distance they all feel toward the spiritual dimension directly evoked by the title of the series. In spite of the title’s declared centrality of a religious trope, Ammaniti’s series is more preoccupied with the correlation between sight and faith than with actual religion per se. The trope of visibility, already central to so many series discussed during our seminar, acquired significant relevance as it permeates the text not only on a thematic level, but also on a figurative one: The study of frame composition, lighting, camera angles, and color correction thus went hand in hand with a forensic inquiry into cultural cross-referencing that harked back, among others, to disparate fields ranging from the Scriptures to zoology. The diverse background of my students correlated directly to the Barthesian plurality of this specific text, making for vastly divergent interpretations which resulted from a composite ideological activation of several cultural references largely related to current Italian and EU politics. As a matter of fact, the very ideological position of the text begged to be considered, in relation not only to the institutional discourse in which it was originally inscribed, but also with respect to its intervention in the debate between science and faith, already discussed through the strikingly different scenario of Transferts . The world without faith portrayed in Il miracolo returns in the series that appeared to be least connected to the theme of our seminar, yet better represented the relationship between seriality and literature that is so central to this volume, as well as to the mission of my department: L’amica geniale (My Brilliant Friend, 2018–), the highly anticipated RAI/HBO adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. Indeed, the biggest challenge for my students, many of whom had already read Ferrante’s novels in a previous seminar on Naples, was to locate the

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elements that would motivate the inclusion of this series in our course, to be found deeply nested in one of the two sequences that, following Millicent Marcus’s (1999) theorization, constitute the ‘umbilical scene’ between the series and its source text. Always identified by Marcus as “‘meta-moments’ – instances which work both to advance the narrative, but which simultaneously operate at a higher level of abstraction to comment self-reflexively on the act of re-invention” (1999, 20) the ‘umbilical scenes’ often foreground reading with the implicit goal of establishing themselves as mise-en-abîme of source text and adaptation. In the case of L’amica geniale, this sequence staged the very first time the written work of the narrator, destined to become a famous novelist and essayist, had been read and edited (upon her request) by her closest friend and co-protagonist. Portrayed briefly onscreen, but never translated with subtitles, the handwritten essay questions the existence of “an infinitely good and ever present God” in a world compared to “a city that is burning in hell”.6 Advocating for the necessity of public engagement, so as to change the world through daily secular struggle and not through divine intervention, the essay not only incapsulates a central argument of both source text and adaptation, but also stages the power relations and core priorities of the two protagonists, as the narrator’s friend, destined to a life of conflict and civic engagement, rearranges the essay’s argument so as to prioritize engagement even further. The literary competences of my students became even more important as they were called to activate several key references to one of the major subtexts of Ferrante’s work, Virgil’s Aeneid, and to locate in the protagonists’ acquisition of Latin (to which the second umbilical scene is dedicated) an intellectual struggle that eventually comes to define their difference and their titular brilliance. The major difference between the two seminars I taught on this subject possibly resided in the degree of presence of literary materials directly discussed or simply evoked in our conversation. Whereas the first time I offered this course, I felt the need to separate television from literature, concentrating exclusively on comparisons between series, if only to establish the validity and the urgency of teaching television drama per se, in its second outing my seminar breached the wall separating literature and television, thriving on the very possibility of a conversation between the two media. As a matter of fact, my investment in the importance of teaching television series in the disciplinary context of Comparative Literature was greatly rewarded by the work done by my students in this last course: Religion and the literary Gothic tradition were employed in service of a

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brilliant reinterpretation of Twin Peaks (1990–91, 2017), just as psychoanalysis and eco-criticism became the theoretical frameworks informing close readings of several American and Scandinavian series. The interdisciplinary nature of these essays fully demonstrated, in my belief, the urgency of a reconsideration of the boundaries that have far too long insulated subjects that could instead benefit from ongoing exchange and conversation. Through their natural predisposition to bring together Television Studies, World Literature, and Critical Theory with agility and rigor, my students proved that prejudicial attitudes hidden behind the enforcement of disciplinary boundaries belong to the past, since the fruition and the understanding of television drama, thanks to its textual plurality, can only be enhanced by multiple venues of interpretive access.

Notes 1. For a discussion of prestige or quality TV, see McCabe and Akass (2007). 2. In Television Culture, John Fiske connected Roland Barthes’ plurality to David Morley’s ‘structured polysemy’ and concluded that “Barthes in S/Z has demonstrated that even the most apparently closed narrative, a realist one with its closing reliance upon ‘truth to reality’ as its final pleasure, is available to open, ‘writerly’ readings and, indeed, requires them” (Fiske 1987, 143; Morley 1980). 3. In his analysis of Balzac’s “Sarrasine” contained in S/ Z, Roland Barthes identifies five codes: semantic (or semic), hermeneutic, proairetic, cultural, and symbolic (1974, 18–20). 4. For a discussion of TV’s emerging districts, see Distretti produttivi emergenti, Link. Idee per la televisione 21 (2017). 5. Following Lemuel Ekedegwa Godeh, the Global North is to be understood as “the economically developed societies of Europe, North America, Australia, Israel, South Africa, among others” (2010, 338). 6. My Brilliant Friend, season 1, episode 8, “The Promise” directed by Saverio Costanzo, aired December 10, 2018, on HBO, translation mine.

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References Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Barthes, Roland. 1974. S/Z . Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production. Translated by Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Casanova, Pascale. 2004. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M.B. DeBevoise. Boston: Harvard University Press. Creeber, Glen. 2015. “Killing Us Softly: Investigating the Aesthetics, Philosophy, and Influence of Nordic Noir Television.” Journal of Popular Television 3 (1): 21–35. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. 1991. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. London: Routledge. Feuer, Jane. 2007. “HBO and the Concept of Quality TV.” In Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond, edited by Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, 145–157. London: I.B.Tauris. Fish, Stanley. 1976. “Interpreting the ‘Variorum.’” Critical Inquiry 2, 3 (Spring): 465–485. Fiske, John. 1987. Television Culture: Popular Pleasures and Politics. London: Routledge. Genette, Gérard. 1987. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 1997a. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Omaha: Nebraska University Press. ———. 1997b. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Godeh, Lemuel Ekedegwa. 2010. “A Comparative Analysis of Global North and Global South Economies.” Journal of Sustainable Development in Africa 12 (3): 338–348. Hall, Stuart. 1980. “Encoding/decoding.” In Culture, Media, Language, edited by Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Love, and Paul Willis, 128–138. London: Hutchinson. Johnson, Barbara. 1985. “Teaching Deconstructively.” In Writing and Reading Differently: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Literature and Composition, edited by G. Douglas Atkins and Michael L. Johnson, 140–148. Kansas: University of Kansas Press.

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Levinas, Emmanuel. 1998. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Lotz, Amanda. 2017. Portals: A Treatise on Internet-Distributed Television. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing Services. Marcus, Millicent. 1999. “Umbilical Scenes: Where Filmmakers Foreground Their Relationships to Literary Sources.” Romance Languages Annual 10: 19–24. McCabe, Janet, and Kim Akass, eds. 2007. Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond. London: I.B.Tauris. Mittell, Jason. 2015. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: NYU Press. ———. 2019. “Forensic Fandom and the Drillable Text.” Spreadable Media. Accessed August 4, 2019. https://spreadablemedia.org/essays/mittell/#. XTGPY1BS8q8. Morley, David. 1980. The Nationwide Audience: Structure and Decoding. London: British Film Institute. Thorpe, Vanessa. 2011. “Salman Rushdie Says TV dramas Comparable to Novels.” The Guardian, June 12, 2011. Williams, Raymond. 1974. Television: Technology and Cultural Flow. London: Fontana.

CHAPTER 9

The Teleserye as Literature and Pangako Sa ‘Yo Louie Jon A. Sánchez

Introduction I begin with a personal story that was critical in my study of the romance of Filipinos with the television soap opera or teleserye. As I was about to defend the study of its evolution in the context of my PhD thesis in 2018, I was made to rethink my scholarly orientation, which often goes unreflected in Philippine critical practice. My orientation took off from a default scholarly practice—that of “appealing to literature,” or what may be described as the use of literary lenses in the study of popular culture. The teleserye, true enough, may be considered a social text and may be pursued independently from literary studies through the dynamics and intertextuality of the soap opera and the audience. I still went ahead using a literary frame, but made a mental note to return to the question raised in my defense about the deeper justification of this critical framework.

L. J. A. Sánchez (B) Ateneo de Manila University, Quezon City, Philippines e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Winckler and V. Huertas-Martín (eds.), Television Series as Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4720-1_9

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In this chapter, I will explore the logic behind the practice, rooting it in the conception of the literary as evident in the Philippine critical tradition. Through the reading of a specific teleserye as literature, I argue that using literature as a frame of reference is essential for understanding the teleserye, and not only because it has served to legitimize the study of popular culture texts throughout Philippine critical history. The teleserye is literature because its form and content engage the world and times of Filipino audiences. Following Catherine Belsey (2013, 22), I come to this discussion understanding that literature, reoriented from a term of canonical distinction, potentially encompasses all forms of “fiction,” and thus includes the teleserye. In Belsey’s definition, the concept of “literature” is reconfigured to mean “any text that allows itself to be shaped by imperatives other than pure accuracy.” It also situates literature as a site of pleasure, one that may be taken seriously and, as Belsey puts it in another work, “pursued with sufficient vigor” (2011, 11). The teleserye as soap opera certainly imparted pleasure as it entertained millions of Filipinos through the years. When taken seriously as literature, however, the teleserye can also be regarded as a distillation of Philippine social realities in a popular format. As fiction, the teleserye reflects the said realities and refracts or breaks them down for audiences, with the potential to spark collective action, or, at least, to give rise to awareness and vigilance, in the way literature has always been expected to do in the Philippines. So far, only a few studies have focused on the soap opera in the Philippines, despite its existence for eight decades on radio (early forms first appeared in 1938 [Enriquez 2008, 117], before the Second World War, and six on television—the first Filipino TV soap opera aired in 1962 [Santos 2009]). My own study, entitled Ang Drama ng Ating Búhay: Isang Kultural na Kasaysayan ng Teleserye [The Drama of Our Lives: A Cultural History of the Teleserye], currently in press, pursues what I thought was a necessary project: a literary history that traced the evolution of the teleserye as form and culture. My study focuses on the televisual permutations of the soap opera, nowadays called “teleserye,” a compound of “television” and the Filipino word “serye” or “series.” The permutations were identified by way of three periods of Philippine broadcast history, with the teleserye, first introduced in 2000 by Philippine broadcasting titan Alto Broadcasting System-Chronicle Broadcasting Network (ABS-CBN), marking its high

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point of prestige and popular success. The term is reminiscent of “telenovela” and was indeed meant to directly respond to it after a wave of Latin American telenovelas swept the country in the mid- to late- 1990s (Coronel 1999). This chapter builds on my study of the Philippine soap opera tradition and explores further how the teleseryes can be productively discoursed as literature. This, in turn, serves as a retrospective justification of the method used in the original study, as well as an explication of its theoretical foundations in Philippine literary and critical history.

The Teleserye as Novel Performed In its televisual form, the teleserye is a confluence of two genres, the novel and the drama, which have existed and thrived in the country for centuries. I first developed this thesis in response to what I find to be a key but limiting definition of soap operas first offered by Robert Allen—a “narrative text in service of an economic imperative” (1985, 100). There is clearly no debate for me as regards the narrativity and economic imperative of soap operas, but the definition seems to leave out what is clearly a central element of the genre—drama. My insistence on drama as part of any satisfying definition of the soap opera in turn implies an emphasis on what makes the teleserye literary: it is a novel performed. It is not difficult to tackle the teleserye as novel and drama all at the same time, not only for its obvious narrative and theatrical features, but also in the way it shares an unmistakable popularity with the two genres. If, on the one hand, Filipino drama (both “high” and popular/mass theater, that is, as well as its modern forms [Fernandez 1996]) has been said to have evolved from popular ritualistic practices of indigenous Filipinos, the Filipino novel, as a modern creation, thrived in its widespread serialization in magazines which used the major languages of the nation (Mojares 1983). An additional important contention is that the teleserye is not only a performance, but a purposeful performance of both melodramatic and romantic narratives. It is not only meant to entertain, but also to expose, and thereby potentially instruct and compel action about, certain aspects of Philippine society. This social function is key for a country where 9.5 million families rate themselves as poor (Gonzalez 2019) and where television intervenes daily to alleviate poverty, among many other social ills, through popular reality gameshows (Ong 2015).

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The teleserye pursues a contemporary literary operation by presenting Filipino audiences with a new form of literature, understood as a vigorous engagement with history and an expressive distillation of reality in fictional form throughout time, rather than merely an inventive composition in language (as Russian Formalists thought), or an evocation of universal insight through organically whole works, unfettered by relations to the author, the world, and the audience (as New Critics had it). The Philippine concept of the “literary” has always been haunted by Philippine history, according to the Filipino critic Caroline Hau (2000, 11). This is evident in the fact that virtually all of Philippine literature pays homage to national hero José Rizal, whose two expositional novels in Spanish, Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not or The Social Cancer, 1887) and El Filibusterismo (The Subversive or The Reign of Greed, 1891), were instrumental in the overthrow of the Spanish who had colonized the country in 1521 and governed it for four centuries. Accordingly, the concept of the literary in the Philippine critical tradition builds on what is perceived in many literary contexts as a “special structure of exemplarity” (Culler 2011, 36) as it assumes “a powerful national function” (ibid, original emphasis). It can be considered as formative of what Benedict Anderson (2006) calls “imagined communities…by their postulation of and appeal to a broad community of readers, bounded yet in principle open to all who could read the language” (Culler 2011, 37). In its various forms and conceptions, Philippine literature has long been regarded as an exposé of social affliction, “on the steps of the temple so that each one would come to invoke the Divine, would propose a cure for them,” to cite from Rizal himself in his first novel’s dedicatoria (2006, n.p.). It is, now to borrow from Hau, a “necessary fiction” of the nation, where the literary becomes “the means and ends, of radical political imagination and transformation” (Hau 2000, 11). As a contemporary combination of the novel and drama, the teleserye can be seen as a serial attempt, to borrow once more from Rizal, “to faithfully reproduce [the country’s] condition without much ado” (Rizal 2006, n.p.). The teleserye’s soap opera contemporaneity, that is, its nature of “marking [its] contemporary setting” and “real-time orientation” that reflects an “everyday world” (Wittebols 2004, 3), makes it a contemporaneous form of Philippine literature as originated by Rizal. For this reason, the teleserye also embodies a potential for a “utopian or transcendent function,” in the manner of Fredric Jameson, because it represents the

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“deepest and most fundamental hopes and fantasies of the collectivity, to which [it] can therefore, no matter in how distorted a fashion, be found to have given a voice” (Szeman and Kaposy 2011, 69).

The Literary Position as Decolonising the Mind My consideration of the teleserye as literature is enabled by a theoretical shift in Literary Studies in the Philippines, decades in the making and centering around what may be deemed its core operation—“decolonising the mind,” in the words of Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o (2005). This shift found Filipino scholars interrogating colonial culture, as well as recuperating local cultures, popular culture included, long neglected and ignored by a Western-influenced Philippine academia. The rise of Philippine Studies in what was once called the “long 1970s” of Philippine history (Rafael 2013)—because this period lasted until the 1990s and may indeed be argued to still be an on-going affair—led to a comprehensive reappraisal of many undervalued literary formations as well as cultural texts.1 Scholars involved in the movement engaged in a protracted effort to resist the marginalizing impact of American colonial education (called the “miseducation of the Filipino” by Filipino critic and historian Renato Constantino (1982)) by questioning intellectual perspectives that diminished the value of the local and the popular. Part of this is the trite high art-low art dichotomy, inherited by Filipinos through a literary education steeped in American New Criticism, also referred to as Formalism. The Filipino version of the New Critical frame had successfully propagated notions of literary sophistication, universality of literary insight, and the meritoriousness of the canon inherited from the Anglo-American traditions. The paradigm also elevated the English language introduced in the public education system by the Americans in 1901. In a popular consciousness schooled by Hollywood and American culture, English became a preferred medium of instruction as well as a language of the intellect. The New Critical approach that came with it valorized Philippine writings in English. From the 1950s until the 1970s, Philippine Literature in English was the de facto Philippine literature in the education system. This denigrated much of the writings in the many Philippine languages, including the basis of the Filipino national language, Tagalog. In this atmosphere, everything in English was considered highly, while the rest was pedestrian and popular. This notwithstanding, Tagalog and

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the other Philippine languages persisted and were used by mass media. These languages shaped the soap opera, in both radio and television, and hence also structured its novelistic and dramatic form. Its accompanying popular orientation made it generally antithetical to the prescriptions of New Criticism. New Criticism was so potent that through the years, strong opinions have been hurled against supposedly low cultural formations. Terms like “bakya,” literally “wooden clogs” or “sandals,” were used to collectively refer to these cultural forms, and simultaneously slur the bakya-wearing populace which consumed them. The phrase “bakya culture” was first used to criticize the phenomenal success of locally produced melodramatic, Hollywood-inspired films among the common people who flocked to the movie houses of the 1930s and the 1940s.2 In the 1960s and 1970s, “bakya” was already a byword, a “description of a style or sensibility” that is “cheap, gauche, naive, provincial, and terribly popular; and in this sense it [was] used more as an adjective than as a noun” (Nograles-Lumbera and Maceda 1977, 212). “Bakya” consciousness is still very much at work at present, as teleseryes, being deemed low culture, are often reviled by the educated because, for instance, they cannot measure up to “Hollywood-Level” (Bayabos 2014). Beginning in the long 1970s, an increasing number of critics preoccupied themselves with problematizing the New Critical paradigm’s limitations as well as its disdain for the local and the popular. As they embraced the socialist and dialectical theories of Marxism, they democratized the field previously dominated by Western and Anglo-American canons. It was these scholars who initialized germinal studies on folk and vernacular literatures; local poetry, drama, and the novel; and film and mass media. The political orientation also made the works socially engaged, as scholars took up the question of identity and the nation in literature, emphasizing its social orientation. By the 1980s, it may be said that the paradigm shift began to gain traction, so that a cursory survey was able to show the new paradigm’s “dimensions and directions” (Fernandez 1981, 26–44). Still, the survey concluded that “much of [Filipino popular culture studies at this point] is diffuse, unstructured, and not always focused on either the significance of the popularity of the cultural form, or the meaning of the cultural form that has achieved such popularity” (ibid., 39). The field had become more defined and formalized by the 1990s, after the restoration of democracy and civil liberties in 1986.3 The academic

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horizon at this time was also broadened by the dissemination of critical theory, contributing to the growing complexity of discourses in Philippine Literary Studies. An exemplar of this shift is Filipino scholar and critic Soledad Reyes, whose work inspired my own study of the Philippine TV series. Reyes is a pioneer in the systematic assessment of Philippine literature, particularly of the Tagalog novel from 1905 until 1975. From a theoretical standpoint, her central work Nobelang Tagalog, 1905–1975: Tradisyon at Modernismo (The Tagalog Novel, 1905–1975: Tradition and Modernism) had already moved from a formalist to a sociological frame when it first came out in 1982. Reyes’ book had a very pointed claim: that the novel is a mirror of Philippine life, and thus must be understood in relation to reality and history—something that I echo in my own argument. This effectively debunked Formalist ideas about organic unity and emphasized that Filipinos, in general, and from early on, understood that literature had a social and redemptive function. Reyes’ argument was rooted in the Tagalog novel’s history of serialization in popular vernacular weekly magazines around the country. The genre evolved for popular consumption and whetted the appetite of a wider reading public through sustained narrative seriality. Back then, the writers for these periodicals, Reyes reported, knew the social function of art, that is “to be a stream of lessons that may possibly transform the lives of readers” (1997, 25, translation mine). Formalists may consider the orientation distasteful in its didacticism, but it was at the core of the notion of the literary for practitioners and the Filipino reading public alike. Philippine literature has a very strong didactic tradition, one which an Americanized sensibility and the education system attempted to subdue through the formalist principles of subtlety and implication. Awareness of this enabled Reyes to broaden her forays into popular culture, mostly in fields where women writers thrived, like the soap opera. Reyes was also able to salvage popular culture from the elitist trash bin by reiterating the importance of the audience. The audience can be said to comprise the entirety of popular culture, and is in fact, a co-creator of its meaning (1997, 25). This fact had long been ignored by the elitist Formalist conception of the literary work.

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Reading the Teleserye and Pangako Sa ‘Yo Consequently, the position I pursued also enabled me to bring to the fore my larger assumption—that the teleserye can be understood as the drama of Filipino life.4 As the teleserye evolved, it distilled, in serial narrative and performance, the human affairs and struggles of Filipinos. This strongly implies reading its text as literature—regarded as “equipment for living,” to borrow from Kenneth Burke (1941, 293–304). Burke refers to literature as symbolic action. In my perspective, the teleserye can also be understood in these terms: like other forms of literature, it participates in what Burke calls the “naming” of social relations and situations, “not for the sheer glory of the thing, but because of its bearing upon human welfare” (1941, 294). Applying Burke’s ideas further, the teleserye as literature may be considered a set of “strategies” for “dealing with situations” (1941, 296) on both individual and communal levels. This way of thinking about the teleserye stresses its roots in, and belonging to, everyday culture, calling out Philippine everyday and current affairs from within its crafted conflicts and worlds to talk about realities confronting the Filipino. The teleserye, then, is emphasized here to be a serialized novel and drama of Philippine realities, distilling relations and situations, and at the same time providing viewers with a televisual frame from which these relations and situations may be understood, and perhaps acted upon. This may be properly illustrated by the case of the very first teleserye, Pangako Sa ‘Yo (2000–2002; international release title: The Promise). As a novelistic performance of two generations of star-crossed lovers and their quest to fulfill their vows of eternal love against all odds, it was marketed as combining “the magnitude of a continuing series and the sophisticated artistry of filmmaking” (Sicam 2000, C5), with the term “teleserye” being specifically created to set the new televisual product apart from its serial predecessors. Epic by Philippine standards, Pangako Sa ‘Yo serially presented its complex, intertwined narratives in a largely chronological fashion, where the story of the first generation of lovers worked as an elucidation of the second generation’s story. In episodes, flashbacks were used to sustain plot points and clarify primary and ensuing secondary conflicts. Meanwhile, as the soap also maintains an openness in form, it inserted (as well as excised, if necessary) situations and characters in the course of its run,

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depending on audience reception and market response. But its narrative performance was still largely dependent on the chronology it strived to develop. In many instances, Pangako Sa ‘Yo, which ran nightly for two years in a strategically significant slot right after the evening news, refers to current events as it embeds them into its story. Its setting is a hacienda or estate run by the influential and powerful Buenavista family. The first episode features the rallying of the estate’s farm workers to the family mansion, to seek redress on the issue of just wages. The rally turns violent after the scheming family matriarch Doña Benita (Liza Lorena) gets upset and calls the police for crowd control. When the episode was broadcast, the scene resonated with the unfinished agricultural land reform and distribution first instituted by President Corazon Aquino. Aquino, herself a scion of a sugar-plantation owning family in the central region of the Philippine island of Luzon, toppled the dictatorship via the People Power Revolution in 1986. Filipinos, then and now, live in a world of contradictions. Pangako Sa ‘Yo sets its backstory during the tail-end of the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, as oligarchs like the Buenavistas were scrambling to keep their privileges by throwing their support to the opposition. At the time the teleserye aired, many perceived the unfinished land reform program to be the work of the influential landed gentry, which continued to block emancipation and social justice. Clearly, the gaping divide between the “haves” and “have nots” persisted when Pangako Sa ‘Yo was broadcast, and indeed persists today, as many Filipino people are forced to find work in the metropolis, with some ending up scavenging trash to sell from landfills. This is what happens to the lead heroine of the first generation’s storyline, the maidservant Amor (played by Eula Valdez). After Doña Benita discovers Amor’s romantic relationship with the Buenavista heir Eduardo (Tonton Gutierrez), she is banished from the Buenavista household, pregnant and with nowhere else to go. It is implied that she flees to Manila with her mother, where she later gives birth to a child named Maria Amor, to be known as Yna or Ynamorata later in the story. They live in a landfill on the outskirts of the metropolis. Life in the landfill is very difficult. Eventually, Amor finds herself at a dramatic turning point while she is scavenging for trash. She picks up some pages from a newspaper announcing the wedding of Eduardo to Claudia Zalameda (Jean Garcia), daughter of one of Doña Benita’s rich

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business associates. The marriage is for convenience, to salvage whatever power and prestige the family has left. Devastated, Amor sits on a pile of trash pledging to the high heavens, a la Scarlett O’Hara, that she will get back at everyone who caused her sufferings. The camera zooms out to show her surrounded by a wasteland, a visual metaphor of her wretched life. After two years of striving to provide for her child and mother, Amor finds herself working as a bar girl in one of the red-light districts of the city. There she meets a rich African-American named Mr. Powers, who marries her and brings her to the United States. However, she is not allowed to bring Maria Amor/Yna and leaves the child in her mother’s care at the landfill. Some months later, the mounds of trash cave in because of a storm, an accident which claims her mother’s life. The tragedy is reminiscent of a real disaster that happened in a metropolitan landfill six months prior to the airing of Pangako Sa ‘Yo.5 At first, having heard nothing about her child’s fate, Amor believes that her daughter is dead. As Amor hears of the disaster in the United States via international news, she is rendered helpless, like many people forced to stomach living around and making a living out of trash. What makes her situation worse is the beating she receives nightly from her abusive husband. However, Mr. Powers dies eventually of a lingering illness and leaves Amor immensely rich. As promised, she returns to the Philippines with the resources to avenge herself, while being weighed down by the need to find forgiveness in her heart—thus, her new allegorical name “Amor Powers.” In both its references to the revolution and the tragedy at the landfill, the series can be said to perform a biting critique of current and historical events, framing these as resonant fictional stories. This tendency toward naming and critique was carried over into the 2015 reboot of Pangako Sa ‘Yo, which marked the fifteenth year of the success of both this series patronized in many parts of the world and the term “teleserye,” which managed to perpetuate itself beyond the mere marketing label as which it had been created. In the new version, the scene was slightly revised, the setting transported from a landfill to an industrial mining site in the mountains owned by the Buenavistas, at a time when the Philippines was being swept by campaigns for responsible mining.6 This time, tragedy strikes when the mines cave in because of an earthquake—an event which viewers

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immersed in current affairs naturally associated with much-criticized mining tragedies across the country. After hearing the news via international television, the new Amor (Jodi Sta. Maria) returns from the United States to search for her child, as well as her mother and father. Tugging her luggage into the wasteland of the mining complex, she is crushed to find nothing but mounds of earth and rock, abandoned hardhats, and what she recognizes as her daughter’s doll, all muddied up—making her conclude that her whole family perished. The daughter, of course, ultimately turns out to have been saved by kindhearted souls, as in the 2000 edition. In the scene, Amor once again delivers the unforgettable cry for vengeance monologue, this time in a slightly revised version after picking up a flyer that apologizes for the mining tragedy, which also contains the images of the newly weds Eduardo (Ian Veneracion) and Claudia (Angelica Panganiban). Before leaving town for the States, she joins the miners in campaigning for safety in the workplace. Obviously, the pleas for mining safety had fallen on deaf ears. Amor’s sorrows intensify because of the tragedy, powering up her resolve to avenge her losses. All’s well that ends well in both editions, and despite all odds, the generations of lovers end up together—Amor and Eduardo; and their love child Maria Amor/Yna (played by Kristine Hermosa in 2000 and Kathryn Bernardo in 2015) and Angelo (played by Jericho Rosales in 2000 and Daniel Padilla in 2015), Claudia’s son from another man. The happy ending thus corresponds to the conventions of the soap opera genre. In the process of getting there, however, the characters’ quests were made to mesh with Philippine social phenomena and current events, anchoring the series in national literary history and tradition. Pangako Sa ‘Yo, as serial novel performed, contains a wealth of references that may be deemed figures of symbolic action, serially exposing realities begging to be resolved in real life—political profiteering (in the second edition, Claudia had hopes to enable Eduardo win the Philippine Presidency, using her money and influence); unfair labor practices; and even the notorious metropolitan traffic at a time of rapid urbanization. I conclude this reading with two vital points. Firstly, the recognition of literariness in texts like the teleserye necessitates a critical reorientation. It is imperative for any successful intervention to take place. In this, distinctions of what is and is not literature have to be reconsidered and deemed “historically relative”: literature itself, from this perspective, is “material of cultural history, which is a history of differences” (Belsey 2013, 15).

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Secondly, a sufficient and vigorous critical intervention lays bare not only the literary form(s) of the teleserye, but also the realities it mirrors. Within the teleserye’s seriality may be found co-existing qualities of the novel and drama, which in our illustrative case creates an epic narrative of an intergenerational romance meant to withstand the tests of time. However, this narrative does not play out autonomously from the real, historic time period in which it emerged. Narrative and context are very much entangled in the teleserye. While the series remains fictional, it is at the same time reflective of contemporary life. As illustrated, issues of the day and history permeate the melodramatic plot-points of Pangako Sa ‘Yo. All were concealed and revealed along with the main narrative enigma, that of Amor’s search for her long-lost daughter, in the process of sustaining audience interest and viewership. In the teleserye, narrative and historical time crisscrossed in several instances. The blurring of fiction and reality contributes to the telerserye’s specific social function. In this regard, I insist on the teleserye’s being ang drama ng aming búhay, the drama of our lives as Filipinos, because in form, as in content, it cannot help but be. As literature, the teleserye performs symbolic action by reflecting and refracting social realities, and, by turns, naming and framing the ills that afflict the Filipino nation. This may be observed in the readings we have just performed, where Pangako Sa ‘Yo points to social inequality, urban poverty, migration, and environmental degradation, and frames them as current conditions that require faithful rendition, without much ado. In turn, the teleserye transforms into a necessary fiction, one that demands close examination of what was named, and, consequently, reflected, and refracted. Its popular and even international success is another story, and more empirical research is required to investigate whether and how symbolic action indeed stirred audiences to take specific courses of action. This may apply to the Philippines as well as to other countries which patronized the series—many of them in the Global South. In my opinion, the stirrings of symbolic action have at least created a level of awareness about the named and framed pressing social concerns, and that may be enough, for now. There were, after all, many other reasons for Pangako Sa ‘Yo’s success, such as the famous actor/character team-ups (“love teams” in Philippine entertainment parlance) that doubtlessly contributed to sustaining viewership and fandoms.

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Meanwhile, Filipina newspaper columnist Katrina Stuart Santiago (2015) described Pangako Sa ‘Yo as “iconic,” attributing its popularity to the representation of “strong complex women on television, ones that hew much closer to reality than to fantasy and camp” (n.p.). In its yearlong run, Pangako Sa ‘Yo 2015 registered a peak of 44.5% in audience share (LionheartTV.org), and along the way, was reported to have forced a presidential campaign event to be cut short for fear that people might leave once it started airing (Ranada). Pangako Sa ‘Yo’s impact as teleserye is simply undeniable.

Conclusion In exploring the logic behind my decision to treat the teleserye as literature, I have here attempted to clarify the notion of literariness I subscribed to, and then built on it by historicizing the way literature had been perceived in Philippine literary scholarship. In doing so, my goal has been not only to fortify my position, but also to contribute to the critical appraisal of reading the television series as such as literature, in light of studying popular cultures. To me, literature comprises all forms of fiction which are meaningful, as well as powerful, in and for a specific community. This notion aligns with the social orientation of Philippine literature at large. The teleserye, as both novel and drama, exemplifies this quality, making it deserving of the scholarly attention afforded to it here. Establishing and reiterating the literariness of the teleseryes is not least about emphasizing popular culture’s important role in the lives of Filipinos as a site of signification and struggle. In the case of Pangako Sa ‘Yo, the narrative performed not only sustained a nation’s penchant for romance and melodrama, at a transforming millennial threshold. It also mirrored a reality in which social justice has been most sought after. Pangako Sa ‘Yo held the promise of a Filipino televisual form adapting to changes and global influences, while also providing a serial scrutiny of a locally specific reality, which becomes more apparent when the teleserye is considered as literature. Thus, to explicate the teleserye as literature is precisely to consider it as a social text, encoded and decoded in complex ways. What the appeal to literature brings into play is an assembly of reading tools that makes it possible to regard the text, firstly, as a narrative performed; secondly, as embedded in its contexts of production; and,

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thirdly, as inflected by its registers of reception. In the case of my study, the appeal made these three aspects cohere and turned the teleserye into a more readable social text. The appeal to literature also enabled me to navigate the teleserye’s inherent polysemy and unwieldiness, as well as to consider both form and medium as mirrors by which audiences are made to reflect on current and historical realities. In the end, the task of teleserye/soap opera studies is to examine how popular culture formations evince historical or contemporary social situations and conditions—the way Philippine Literature has always done.

Notes 1. Filipino translation scholar and historian Vicente Rafael called this period “the long 1970s” (2013). 2. The coinage of “bakya” and “bakya cultures” is attributed to Philippine national artist for film Lamberto Avellana. He wrote some reminiscences of this in “The Cinema in the Philippines” (1963). 3. A high point of this are the initiatives of Filipino critic and scholar Soledad Reyes that led to the publication of her critical anthologies Reading Popular Culture (1991) and Aliw [Pleasure or Entertainment]: Selected Essays on Popular Culture (2000). 4. In this, I made use of the ambiguity of the Filipino concept of “drama” which points both to literal and literary drama and to the deprecatory Filipino expression which criticizes the cultural penchant for framing life and experiences as melodramatic: “ang drama naman” [“that’s too dramatic” or “don’t be so dramatic”]. 5. The incident is referred to in Philippine contemporary history and affairs as the “Payatas tragedy,” after the dumpsite’s name. Payatas is in Quezon City, in the northern part of Metropolitan Manila. English-language broadsheet Philippine Star reported that “(a) total of 232 people were killed while 655 families were rendered homeless because of the incident” (Sison Jr.). Victims sued the Quezon City government but “lost their bid to each claim P3 million in damages,” in a ruling by the courts in July 2020; Philippine Daily Inquirer, another English-language broadsheet reported: “In a 133-page decision, the Quezon City Regional Trial Court instead awarded P110,000 in damages to each of the heirs of the 57 victims” (Torres-Tupas). The victims were never completely served justice after 20 years of seeking redress.

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6. In the lead up to the airing of Pangako Sa ‘Yo’s reboot in 2015, clamor for responsible mining became daily fare in the news because of the tragedy that struck the open-pit coal mines of Semirar Mining Corporation in Semirara Island in the central Philippine islands of the Visayas. The mines collapsed, claiming three people dead (“3 dead, 6 missing in Semirara mining accident”). Two years before, in 2013, five of its workers had been killed “when a section of the mine’s wall caved in, also due to heavy rains” (ibid.).

References "3 dead, 6 missing in Semirara mining accident.” Rappler.com, July 17, 2015. https://www.rappler.com/nation/99636-dead-semirara-mining-accident. Adorno, Theodor. 2008. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London: Routledge. Aliw. 2000. [Pleasure or Entertainment]: Selected Essays on Popular Culture. Manila: De La Salle University Press. Allen, Robert. 1985. Speaking of Soap Operas. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Avellana, Lamberto. 1963. “The Cinema in the Philippines.” Unitas (September 1963): 382–383. Bayabos, Paulo. 2014. “8 Reasons Why Pinoy Teleseryes Will Never Upgrade to Hollywood-Level”. 8List.ph, August 26, 2014. https://8list.ph/reasons-whypinoy-teleseryes-will-never-upgrade-to-hollywood-level/. Belsey, Catherine. 2011. A Future for Criticism. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 2013. The Fictive Institution: Counterfactual Spaces and the Practice of Reading. Manila: De La Salle University Publishing House. Burke, Kenneth. 1941. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press. Constantino, Renato. 1982. The Miseducation of the Filipino. Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies. Coronel, Shiela, ed. 1999. From Loren to Marimar: The Philippine Media in the 1990s. Quezon City: Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. Culler, Jonathan. 2011. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford. Enriquez, Elizabeth. 2008. Appropriation of Colonial Broadcasting: A History of Early Radio in the Philippines, 1922–1946. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press.

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Fernandez, Doreen. 1981. “Philippine Popular Culture: Dimensions and Directions, The State of Research in Philippine Popular Culture.” Philippine Studies 29 (1): 26–44. ———. 1996. Palabas (Show or Drama) Essays on Philippine Theater History. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press. Gonzalez, Mia. 2019. “‘Record-low’ Number of Filipino Families Who Consider Themselves Poor in Q1 2019”. Rappler.com, June 19, 2019. https://www. rappler.com/nation/233415-self-rated-poverty-sws-survey-march-2019. Hau, Caroline. 2000. Necessary Fictions: Philippine Literature and the Nation, 1946–1980. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press. Lionheart TV.org. 2016. “Top 20 Most Watched TV Programs in 2015”. January 8, 2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20160621214541/http:// www.lionheartv.net/2016/01/top-20-most-watched-tv-programs-in-2015/. Maslog, Crispin, ed. 2007. Philippine Communication Today. Quezon City: New Day Publishers. Mojares, Resil. 1983. Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel: A Generic Study of the Novel until 1940. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press. Nogales-Lumbera, Cynthia, and Teresita Maceda, eds. 1977. Rediscovery: Essays on Philippine Life and Culture. Quezon City: Department of English, Ateneo de Manila University. Ong, Jonathan. 2015. The Poverty of Television: The Mediation of Suffering in Class-Divided Philippines. London: Anthem Press. Pangako Sa ‘Yo. 2000–2002. Produced by Ellen Nicholas Christe. Directed by Rory Quintos. Philippines: ABS-CBN. Pangako Sa ‘Yo. 2015–16. Developed by Olivia M. Lamasan and Henry King Quitain. Philippines: ABS-CBN. Rafael, Vicente. 2013. “Contracting Colonialism and the Long 1970s.” Philippine Studies 61 (4): 477–494. Ranada, Pia. 2016. “The Time Duterte Had to Make Way for KathNiel”. Rappler.com, February 17, 2016. https://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/ins ide-track/122759-duterte-kathniel-proclamation-rally. Reading Popular Culture. 1991. Quezon City: Office of Research and Publications, Ateneo de Manila University. Reyes, Soledad. 1997. Pagbasa ng Panitikan at Kulturang Popular, Piling Sanaysay, 1976–1996 (Reading Literature and Popular Culture, Selected Essays, 1976–1996). Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press. Reyes, Soledad, ed. 1982. Nobelang Tagalog, 1905–1975: Tradisyon at Modernismo [The Tagalog Novel, 1905–1975: Tradition and Modernism]. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press. Rizal, José. Ma. Soledad Lacson Locsin, trans and Raul Locsin, ed. 2006. Noli Me Tangere. Makati City: Bookmark.

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Sabillo, Kristine Angeli. 2016. “‘Kilig,’ ‘Teleserye’ Included in Oxford English Dictionary.” Philippine Daily Inquirer.net, April 15, 2016. https://globalnat ion.inquirer.net/138631/kilig-included-in-oxford-english-dictionary. Santiago, Katrina Stuart. 2015. “‘Pangako Sa ’Yo’ Redux”. Manila Times.net, July 25, 2015. https://www.manilatimes.net/2015/07/25/weekly/the-sun day-times/pangako-sa-yo-redux/203357/203357/. Santos, Simon. 2009. “Jose Miranda Cruz’s ‘Hiwaga Sa Babay na Bato’ (Mystery at the Stone House) (1962–63): Local TV First Teleserye.” Video 48.blogspot.com, December 10, 2009. http://video48.blogspot.com/2009/ 12/jose-miranda-cruz-s-hiwaga-sa-bahay-na.html. Sicam, Edmund. 2000. “ABS-CBN’s ‘Teleserye’ to Run for One Year”. Philippine Daily Inquirer, November 4, 2000. Sison Jr., Bebot. “Payatas Tragedy: One Year After.“ Philippine Star.com, July 10, 2001. https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2001/07/10/91819/ payatas-tragedy-one-year-after. Szeman, Imre, and Timothy Kaposy, eds. 2011. Cultural Theory: An Anthology. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Tomada, Natalie. 2006. “Pinoy Soap Meets World?” Philippine Star.com, September 4, 2006. https://www.philstar.com/cebu-entertainment/2006/ 09/04/356366/pinoy-soap-meets-world. Torres-Tupas, Tetch. “Kin of Payatas Tragedy Victims Lose Bid to Each Claim P3M in Damages.“ Philippine Daily Inquirer.net, January 16, 2020. https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1214071/kin-of-payatas-tragedy-vic tims-lose-bid-to-each-claim-p3m-in-damages#ixzz6MU1xjJs6. Wa Thiong’o, Ng˜ ug˜ı. 2005. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Oxford: James Currey-EAEP-Heinemann. Wittebols, James. 2004. The Soap Opera Paradigm: Television Programming and Corporate Priorities. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.

PART II

Practice

CHAPTER 10

Rat Phones, Alligators, Lemon Pepper Wet: The New Absurd of Atlanta Jenna Clake

Introduction In his review for Vulture of the television series Atlanta (dir. Hiro Murai 2016, 2018), Jesse David Fox comments on the series’ closeness to the Theatre of the Absurd, disputing creator Donald Glover’s statement that Atlanta is ‘Twin Peaks with rappers’ (2016). Instead, Fox opines that each episode is an Absurdist play. But rather than as Absurd plays, I want to argue here that Atlanta should be understood in terms of what I have elsewhere termed the new literary aesthetic of the New Absurd (Clake 2018) and is thus at least as much akin to Absurdist poetry as to drama. The New Absurd is prominent in twenty-first century British and US poetry; it utilises a gauche, self-effacing humour, destabilises binaries of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, and blurs imagination and reality to explore existential dread. My argument is thus that in an era of political and social turmoil on both sides of the Atlantic—where issues of race, class,

J. Clake (B) Teesside University, Middlesbrough, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Winckler and V. Huertas-Martín (eds.), Television Series as Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4720-1_10

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gender, and sexuality are irrevocably linked with concerns of how the individual can survive in a capitalist society—a new iteration of the Absurd has emerged. In this chapter, using examples and theory from Absurd drama, and poems by Rachael Allen, Jennifer L. Knox, and Luke Kennard, I offer a new critical perspective on the relationship between television and poetry. In comparing Atlanta and poems of the New Absurd thematically, rather than in terms of their mediality, I explore the New Absurd and Atlanta’s focus on perpetual disappointment. I explicate the New Absurd’s and Atlanta’s focus on ‘static quests’, the loss of grand narratives, and human fallibility in the face of neoliberalism, and demonstrate how these concerns deliberately foster readers’ and viewers’ investment in conspiracy theories; I thereby establish that Atlanta treats its viewers as readers of New Absurdist poetry, deliberately undermining its viewers’ critical perceptions and understanding of narrative. Considering Atlanta’s focus on race, I must note that the poets selected for this chapter are white. This is not to say that writers of colour do not write the New Absurd (Morgan Parker and Jane Yeh write poetry that belongs to the aesthetic [Clake 2018]); the poems in this chapter have been selected on the basis that they provide the clearest insight into how Atlanta treats its viewers as readers of the New Absurd. I use the terms ‘the reader’ or ‘the viewer’ in a collective sense, drawing on my own critical responses to the New Absurd in poetry and Atlanta, as well as viewer responses taken from the Atlanta subreddit.1

The Absurd The Absurd originated in twentieth-century France: Martin Esslin applied the term ‘Absurdism’ to a group of playwrights, and his subsequent book, The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), became an authority on the matter: Albert Camus, Daniil Kharms, and Samuel Beckett are now hallmark names of the Absurd. As Neil Cornwell notes, the Absurd is ‘born out of nihilism, existentialism, fuelled by certainty of death’ (2006, 5). The following are also indicative of the Absurd: Digressions, inflated similes, snatches of zany dialogue, hyperbole, narrative and syntactic non-sequiturs, superfluous detail and irrelevancies, nonappearing characters and other forms of redundancy. (Cornwell 2006, 45)

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However, much writing on the Absurd (Esslin 1968; Cornwell 2006; Gavins 2013; Bennett 2015) has neglected a deeper analysis of the relationship between the Absurd and poetry. Cornwell identifies surrealist prose poet Russell Edson’s work as belonging to the Absurd, but, as Gavins notes, ‘academic analyses which approach poetic texts as manifestations of an absurd sensitivity are […] scarce’ (2013, 140–141), and ‘the majority of authors whose works are identified as “absurd” […] are white and male and writing towards the second half of the twentieth century’ (2013, 58). Even so, her study focuses mainly on prose fiction, and when it does turn to poetry, three white, male poets are discussed: Charles Simic, James Tate, and Ted Hughes. Michael Y. Bennett identifies ‘(later) female absurdists’ (2015, 119): Adrienne Kennedy, Beth Henley, Maria Irene Fornes, and Caryl Churchill; however, these playwrights’ notable outputs were also all produced between 1950 and 1980. Bennett argues that Esslin’s definition of the Absurd is reductive due to his focus on ‘one main theme’ (2015, 3, 7), contending that we might loosely group ‘writers and their work’ as Absurd by focusing on how their plays ‘function as ethical parables, forcing the audience, themselves, to make sense of contradictions’ (2015, 17). I understand ‘parable’ in Dave Coates’s terms: a ‘semi-narrative piece that uses a central metaphor or repetend to explore an idea’ (2013).2 In this chapter, I aim to demonstrate that Atlanta exploits and ridicules attempts to ‘make sense’ of narratives and meaning through the idea of the ‘static quest’. I draw on thematic characteristics to identify work that has New Absurdist sensibilities. I aim to bring the New Absurd in poetry into conversation with the Absurd in drama and show that television series are another medium in which the New Absurd finds expression.

Understanding Atlanta and the New Absurd Atlanta follows four main characters. Earn (Donald Glover), who dropped out of Princeton University, is living in semi-poverty. He has a daughter, Lottie, with Van (Zazie Beetz), a teacher, on whom he relies to take care of their daughter and provide him with somewhere to live. Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry), Earn’s cousin, is a rapper known as ‘Paper Boi’. Darius (Lakeith Stanfield), Alfred’s best friend, provides much of the comic relief. Atlanta’s pilot, ‘The Big Bang’, begins with a confrontation between Alfred and another man. The confrontation is a flash-forward, and Darius hints that the viewer will see this exact scene again: ‘Hold on,

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hold on, man, I’m getting crazy déjà vu right now. Okay, where’s the dog with the Texas on him? Oh, there he is. That’s a trip, man’ (2016). Darius seems to have uncanny insight into larger goings-on in the world. However, the legitimacy of his perception is called into question later in the episode, when Darius, Alfred, and Earn smoke marijuana on a sofa outside Alfred’s house: EARN Not real homeless. I’m not using a rat as a phone or something. ALFRED Don’t be racist, man. That make you schizophrenic, that don’t make you homeless. DARIUS Wait, wait, not if it worked, man. No, if you could use a rat as a phone, man, that’d be genius. I mean, there’s like five rats for every one person in New York alone. Everybody would have an affordable phone. Yeah, man, I mean, it’d be messy, but worth it.

Darius’s optimism can be understood as what Kathleen Rooney terms ‘accidental surrealism’. In her discussion of the relationship between comedian Jack Handey’s Saturday Night Live segment, ‘Deep Thoughts’, and modern poetry for The New York Times Magazine, she writes: ‘Deep Thoughts’ […] were designed to satirize the genre of the feel-good affirmation. Examples include: ‘If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.’ And: ‘As the evening sun faded from a salmon color to a sort of flint gray, I thought back to the salmon I caught that morning, and how gray he was, and how I named him Flint. (2013)

Rooney asserts that ‘Handey starts with a cliché, then both punctures and reanimates it through an ostensibly gauche and accidental surrealism’ (2013). She notes that Handey achieves this by ‘assaulting the convention of poetic metaphor’ (2013) revealing ‘that a lot of allegedly “poetic” writing is a fraudulent and circular game’ (2013). Rooney’s analysis highlights key characteristics of the New Absurd: gaucherie, and a deflation of ‘high’ culture. In the New Absurd, poetry, which is so often seen as

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‘elite’ or ‘difficult’ is ridiculed: as in Handey’s examples, the poet reaches for—and misses—profundity. This is apparent in Rachael Allen’s poem ‘Rodeo fun on a Sunday’ (2019). Allen’s poem is set in England, but the speaker’s gaucherie parallels Atlanta’s destabilisation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Allen’s speaker describes being in love with ‘a man who loves me more than the last man’ (2019, 7). As with Rooney’s ‘Handeyesque’ poetry, rather than delivering lyrical insight, Allen’s speaker states that love is like ‘falling off a cliff’, and ‘if it feels like you’re falling from a cliff | you just might be’ (2019, 7). Her comparison is deliberately underwhelming, undercutting the flight of fancy, thus creating overwhelming pointlessness. This is typical of the New Absurd’s self-effacing existential dread: the speaker is unable to create an exceptional comparison because the world is disappointing. The speaker laments to the reader, wanting her partner to try to ‘impress’ her father: taking him fishing, pulling up long waders and just striding into the lake until he’s actually drowning why will no one put themselves through that for me? (2019, 17)

She wants her partner to enact the idealised, heteronormative tropes of romantic love by partaking in a stereotypically ‘masculine’ activity. However, even her fantasies are bathetic: the only declaration of love she can imagine is unglamorous. While the fantasy is grounded in the trope that a dedicated lover will die for her, the manner of death is also gauche. The speaker’s plea, then, for someone to ‘put themselves through that’, exposes a real discontent, one that cannot be cured by a fantasy conjured through grim reality. These lines have insightful bearing upon reading Atlanta. Towards the end of ‘The Big Bang’, Earn is taking the bus home at night. His daughter is asleep in his arms. The bus is quiet, and all the other passengers are looking forward. Earn is sitting on a sideways-facing seat. A man, credited as ‘Stranger’, wearing a light-coloured suit and bowtie appears opposite Earn. Earn is wearing a faded t-shirt and shorts: the ‘high’ and ‘low’ are facing each other. STRANGER Your mind’s racing. Tell me, yo.

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EARN I just keep losing. I mean some people just supposed to lose? For balance in the universe? I mean like, are there just some people on Earth who supposed to be here just to make it easier for the winners? Like, really. STRANGER Resistance is a symptom of the way things are. Not the way things necessarily should be. Actual victory belongs to things that simply do not see failure. Let the path push you like a broken branch in a river’s current. (2016)

Stranger’s opening seems straightforward and sincere; Earn’s response points to legitimate existential concerns. However, Stranger’s advice to Earn is platitudinous and abstract—a Handeyesque construction—and deflates the seriousness of Earn’s response. While Earn is talking, Stranger moves to sit next to him—blurring the lines between ‘high’ and ‘low’—and then becomes distracted, making a Nutella sandwich. Stranger undermines Earn’s appeal to greater meaning; his faux-discerning responses cause Earn to deflect and retreat: ‘No, no, I’m not going out like that, but thanks for the advice’ (2016). Stranger then imbues the Nutella sandwich with magical qualities, telling Earn to bite it, as though it might have transformative effects. Like Allen’s poem, Atlanta creates a sense of disappointing interlude: Earn’s supposed epiphany is meant to occur on a bus, and the sandwich is deliberately gauche—childlike, and limp—another grim fantasy. Atlanta’s fanbase is obsessive in its discussion of theories: if one searches ‘theory’ on the Atlanta subreddit, hundreds of discussion threads are returned, with viewers trying to ascertain if Earn is in a coma, if Darius is an alien or time traveller. Indeed, u/nolaninthedeep writes: ‘I wonder if [Stranger] possibly doesn’t exist at all and is actually just representative of some internal monologue’ (2016), a ‘giant metaphor for using self-reflection to admit you’re wrong, figure out where you can improve, and act on it’ (2016). Atlanta leaves whether the sandwich is magical or not open to speculation, as a police car siren distracts Earn. As he follows the passing car, the camera pans. Stranger has seemingly disappeared, but then walks into nearby bushes, accompanied by the dog from Darius’s episode of déjà vu. This loads Stranger’s remarks with a kind of mystic significance, which will again be deflated in a later episode. Like Allen’s poem—which is unceasingly gauche and bleak, and builds

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a layered satire—Atlanta sets up a complex joke in this scene, which becomes clearer as the series progresses. The ‘grim fantasy’ is a hallmark of the New Absurd. In discussing Beckett’s work, Louis MacNeice describes a kind of Absurdism which ‘takes the guise of a quest, and either Waiting for Godot or Endgame could be described, if paradoxically, as a static quest’ (1965, 119). MacNeice turns back to Esslin, who claims that Beckett is working ‘at a level where neither characters nor plot exist’ because ‘plot can exist only on the assumption that events in time are significant’ (in MacNeice 1965, 119). This sensibility is directly alluded to in Atlanta, when Darius says: ‘I don’t believe in time as a concept, so I’ll just say we always met’ (‘Alligator Man’ 2018). By setting up events as important, and then later destablising their meaning, Atlanta uses the ‘static quest’ to foreground that the characters’ successes will always be underwhelming. After the shooting in ‘The Big Bang’, Alfred is bailed from jail before Earn. Alfred and Darius go to a bar. Their server praises Alfred for the shooting, describing Alfred as a ‘rapper that would just blow’ someone’s ‘brains out on the street’ (2016). Alfred looks uncomfortable, as though the server’s portrayal of him does not match his own understanding of himself. However, this ‘fame’ does have its benefits. The server tells Alfred he has asked the chef to make ‘the lemon pepper joints, but these got the sauce on them’ (2016)—or, as Alfred says, ‘Lemon pepper wet’ (2016). As Darius opens the chicken box, triumphant music plays, and the chicken wings emit a golden glow. Darius is filled with emotion, and says, ‘Oh my God’ (2016). His reaction seems unfitting because the distinctions between success and failure are blurred: while Darius and Alfred enjoy their chicken wings and relative freedom, Earn is witnessing transphobia, homophobia, and brutality of the jail’s guards. Even with their heavenly glow, the chicken wings will soon be consumed and forgotten. Alfred will still be a rapper more famous for his criminal record than his music; Darius will still be stumbling through his next business venture (he invests in breeding dogs, and tries to buy a rare piano, with frightening consequences); Earn will still try to make ends meet and wind up in more trouble as a result of his endeavours; Van will still struggle to fit in as a mixed-race woman, to be seen as anything other than ‘Lottie’s mom’ (‘Helen’ 2018). The chicken wings are just another interlude in an underwhelming world.

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Grand Narratives: The Sleepy Hippo and Ahmad White The Absurdist sense of disappointment is connected to the loss of grand narratives—for Jean Francois Lyotard, the narratives of legitimation, ‘the life of the spirit and/or the emancipation of humanity’ (1984, 51)— that of religion, for instance, or the possibility of equality. Indeed, in the Absurd, as Esslin notes, ‘the decline of religious belief has deprived man of certainties’ (1968, 391). The grand narrative, as Lyotard writes, ‘has lost its credibility’ (1984, 37) and the Absurd can be read as a symptom of and reaction to this loss. In Atlanta, the lost grand narrative is not one of religion; Atlanta focuses on the impossibility of equality. The viewer must understand that characters’ hopes, successes, and insights will be constantly deflated, because, as Caroline Framke writes in her review of Atlanta for Vox, the characters face ‘blatant racism’ everywhere they go (2018). They achieve ‘just enough success to be impressed with themselves, but not enough to navigate their world with anything resembling security’ (2018). In the New Absurd, the inability to control one’s life circumstances is likewise a paramount feature. This fixation might originate in a general cultural malaise, caused by modern politics, capitalism and inequality, or demonstrate a resistance to attempt to provide answers. Poetry that attempts to offer ‘universal’ platitudes ultimately fails, because the poem neglects to reflect everyday life—the state of living in anxiety and doubt— whereas the New Absurd reflects this state through depictions of specific and widespread habits. Jennifer L. Knox’s poetry embodies this aspect of the aesthetic. Rather than casting the poet or speaker as an enlightened figure, Knox questions grand narratives and enlightenment in her poem ‘Small on Sunday’, another grim fantasy. The speaker and her companion wake up under an overpass ‘in the front seat of a yellow toy car’ (2007, 27). Some guy had shrunk us again and penned us in with giant orange traffic cones. We must’ve looked pretty damn stupid. The cars above us sounded on their way to see the Sleepy Hippo in His shrine (and to be seen by the Hippo at His shrine). (2007, 27)

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Knox plunges the reader into doubt: it is not clear where the speaker is. The opening scene suggests that the speaker has not woken up at all; they are either dreaming or dead. In emphasising that the speaker is under the overpass, Knox suggests that the speaker has, in fact, come to in some form of afterlife. As the speaker and her companion have been shrunk by ‘some guy’, Knox insinuates the existence of a godlike being or power (it is noteworthy that the poem takes place on Sunday, the sabbath, as does Allen’s poem). However, this godlike being is ostensibly disappointing: it uses its power to play a practical joke, repeatedly shrinking the speaker and making her wake up inside a yellow toy car, with no route to the Sleepy Hippo. Rather than using their power for divine good, this godlike figure seems to be playing with people in petty ways. The yellow toy car, giant orange traffic cones and Sleepy Hippo fill the poem with a garish, childlike whimsy. While everyone is distracted by the Sleepy Hippo, the real god is playing the shrinking game. The speaker is ultimately powerless under the real god’s authority; she comments that there is ‘nothing to do but wait for that guy to come back | and spirit us out from the cones’ (2007, 27) with his ‘little black remote control box’ (2007, 27). This is the closest Knox allows the reader or speaker to come to epiphany, and it is ultimately pessimistic. The speaker’s grand revelation is an apathetic resignation; the frenzy surrounding the Sleepy Hippo, and the garish colours of this dreamlike world, fade into a bleak realisation. Rather than offering enlightenment, this poem reveals the enduring nature of banal reality, ultimately deflating any sense of authority the poet possesses, or the poem holds as an epiphanic mode. Furthermore, the mention of the ‘remote control’ deflates the epiphany further, as though to the godlike figure this is as insignificant as a practical joke, or even a television programme—something to pass the time. Knox’s poem has direct bearing on Atlanta’s episode ‘B.A.N.’ (Black American Network), which returns to Stranger and his mystique, and similarly deflates his perceived importance. ‘B.A.N.’ ridicules the form of the ‘current affairs’ talk show, with a television series called Montague, on which Alfred is a guest. The viewer watches the episode as though it is live, with adverts. The adverts are bizarre and awkward and, like each segment of Montague, focus on issues of race, class, and gender. ‘B.A.N.’ deftly explores these issues in humorous and subtle ways, but I wish to focus on a single ‘advert’ involving Stranger.

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Stranger stands in front of a green screen, a video of clouds moving rapidly behind him. The illusion is unconvincing: cheap ‘word art’ appears and bounces around the screen, mirroring his speech, immediately undermining Stranger’s previous mysterious aura. Much like the Nutella sandwich, this advert is disappointing. STRANGER/ AHMAD WHITE Questions? The universe? Paternity tests? – Salutations. Hi. My name is Ahmad White. You may know me from your dreams. Call this number below and get the answers you deserve. (2016)

As Stranger (now revealed to be someone called Ahmad White) speaks, upbeat music plays, and the tone of the advert changes. Customers give testimonials in front of green screen projections of middle-class living rooms or conservatories. The illusion is poor: the speakers are clearly not in the room. Here, the ‘high’ and ‘low’ crash into one another, and all of Stranger’s import is punctured. Like Knox’s Sleepy Hippo, he is a false god. MAN When I called Ahmad White, I was three months behind on my car loan. My stepson, he was in jail. My life was in shambles! But now, I got a truck, I got a girlfriend, I got the answers I deserve. Thank you, Ahmad White. STRANGER/ AHMAD WHITE Most people don’t realize their chakra’s in another universe. Don’t be dumb. Call now. WOMAN Me and Ahmad found out I was a moon sign, and I wasn’t getting enough crystal in my diet. Now, I live in a beautiful home. STRANGER/ AHMAD WHITE Come to our Liberty Center and get a free juice and Nutella sandwich. (2016)

The low production values destroy any residual sense of mystery: Stranger becomes a joke. The viewer, in remembering Stranger, the mystery he offered in the first episode, now realises that they have been tricked, just like one of Stranger’s customers. The advert acts as a taunt:

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Stranger is not a godlike figure, or the solution to Earn’s problems. He is most likely a self-help con artist, tricking unwitting people into parting with their money to achieve enlightenment in a time of hopelessness. As Miya Tokumitsu writes for The Baffler: Neoliberalism has not only given us crippling anxiety, but also its apparent remedy. It is no coincidence that as we become more nervous, ‘wellness’ and ‘self-care’ have become mainstream industries. (2018)

The testimonies from Stranger’s customers are tellingly vague, and rely on stereotypical signs of cons: crystals, astrology, new diet plans. Stranger continues to use abstract aphorisms, attempting to build a sense of enlightenment and authority, but these are ultimately undercut by the advert itself, and his inability to maintain a consistent tone. The Nutella sandwich, which possibly had magical power in the first episode, becomes another marker of Stranger’s fraud; when paired with the juice, it seems juvenile. Knox’s poem again provides crucial insight into reading Atlanta. The poem’s godlike figure’s game might be a form of contrapasso, in which the speaker’s punishment reflects her sin. While everyone else is travelling to see the Sleepy Hippo, the speaker and her companion are missing out on seeing ‘the Hippo and His shrine’, and the enlightenment this experience will offer. This is a perpetual cycle of preparing to see the Sleepy Hippo, waking up diminished, and sitting around thinking ‘of all the things we wouldn’t do that day’ (2007, 27), resignedly accepting their fate. The speaker and her companion lack agency and resources to change their circumstances; what happened in life is reflected in death. Moreover, Knox casts aspersions over the accuracy of the speaker’s account: if the speaker takes ‘E’ (2007, 27), how is the reader to ascertain whether this whole episode is reality, a dream, the afterlife, or a drug trip? Knox provides no authorial comment, leaving the reader in doubt. Knox also suggests that the speaker and her companion are ultimately powerless to change their circumstances. The speaker wonders ‘why did we keep on taking a rain check?’ (2007, 27) and ‘Why all this wandering into xenophobic fish frys’ (2007, 27). By gesturing towards xenophobia, the speaker acknowledges that, to some extent, humans are doomed to repeat destructive behaviours. As in Atlanta’s exploration of racial inequality, the New Absurdist concern with social inequity is apparent: the characters in Atlanta are powerless to change their circumstances because

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they buy into fraudulent schemes, looking for meaning or reform. The viewer is also the subject of the joke: they have bought into Stranger’s mystery, hoping for a positive outcome for Earn. It might be tempting to read Knox’s poem, published in 2007, as a comment on George Bush’s presidency, or the Iraq war, and Atlanta as a straightforward response to issues of race in America, but the New Absurd is rarely so politically straightforward. Indeed, in both poetry and television, the New Absurd captures a broad sense of cultural issues (race, poverty, class, gender), and to comment on specific real-world events would suggest that the poem or television series might offer a solution—which is antithetical to the New Absurd’s nihilism. In exposing Stranger’s fraudulent status, Atlanta destabilises the viewers’ expectations. For the last six episodes, they have believed that Stranger might hold the key to Earn’s problems. After the original airing of ‘B.A.N.’, viewers began generating new conspiracy theories. On the Atlanta subreddit, u/nolaninthedeep wrote that Stranger was ‘representative of some […] realization that people have to go through to push them to happiness or success’ (2016), while others began to notice when adverts from ‘B.A.N’ where referenced in later episodes. u/RobertHarmon was convinced that Glover’s ‘Twin Peaks with rappers’ comment was a clue that ‘things are going to start tying together in odd, potentially dark ways’ (2016). The New Absurd communicates the meaningless disappointment of the world, and our inability to find concrete meaning in the face of anxiety and existential dread. Indeed, Atlanta wants its viewers to create conspiracy theories because this reflects a search for meaning in a meaningless world. Rather than being a positive metaphor for self-reflection, Stranger is a foil, an embarrassing revelation of how easily we can be fooled through hope. As I have explored elsewhere, New Absurd poetry exposes this behaviour, ridicules it, and reveals a pervading sense of anxiety and dread (Clake 2018). Atlanta similarly admits that its characters are hopelessly stuck in a cycle of dreaming and being disappointed. It is telling that all the coincidences in Atlanta have not yet revealed a greater meaning; after ‘B.A.N’, Stranger disappears, and in the second season, he seems all but forgotten.

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Conspiracy Theories: Alligator Man and a Rag Doll Made of Dish Cloths If viewers had any hope that Atlanta’s second season would break this meaningless cycle, they were disappointed by its first episode, ‘Alligator Man’ (2018). Alfred asks Earn and Darius to go to his Uncle Willy’s; Willy has seemingly kidnapped his girlfriend, Yvonne, trapping her in a bedroom in his house. Yvonne still has her mobile phone and has called the police. When Earn and Darius arrive at Willy’s house, Willy tells Earn that he cannot enter a specific room because it contains an alligator. The alligator growls and scrapes at the locked door; its shadow moves in the gap between the door and floor, so the viewer is provided with ‘evidence’ of the alligator existing. Still, the viewer, knowing Atlanta’s tendency to wrongfoot, likely expects the alligator to be something else. Luke Kennard’s sequence of prose poems ‘The Solex Brothers’ (2010) demonstrates how the New Absurd disrupts grand narratives to undermine readers’ sense of authority. In this sequence, an unnamed speaker goes to stay with the Solex Brothers, who are ‘twice the size of ordinary men’ (2010, 1), and have employed him to teach a young girl, Lucida, ‘a prodigy’ (2010, 3). The grand narrative surrounding prodigies is deflated as quickly as it is established: the speaker discovers that Lucida is ‘a rag doll made of dish cloths’ (2010, 3). Here, the poet-reader relationship is destabilised once the reader discovers that Lucida is not human: her body acts as a symbol of the reader’s deflation. Simultaneously, the speaker is also a reader, ‘reading’ the Solex Brothers’ narrative of Lucida; he too is wrong-footed by the narrative. Atlanta and Kennard’s sequence reveals a ‘truth’ of the human condition: that we simultaneously believe and doubt grand narratives. In Atlanta, when the police arrive at Willy’s house, he is uncooperative, and claims to have an alligator that he will set loose. Willy holds a mythical power in his community as The Alligator Man. However, the truth is more complex: Willy, for all he is respected as The Alligator Man, picks petty arguments. The alligator acts as a symbol of his normative masculinity—his power, his right to be feared—but he ultimately releases the alligator as a distraction and exits his house via the back door, running away from the police. While this might be a sensible decision—Willy is a black man having a confrontation with two police officers (one of whom is white)—Willy fails to fulfil the narrative of The Alligator Man, cutting a pathetic figure as he runs away.

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Despite Darius commenting that the alligator is a ‘full-grown caiman […] surrounded by chicken carcasses’ (‘Alligator Man’, 2018), when it is released The Delfonics’s ‘Hey Love’ plays, and the alligator walks out slowly. The bystanders and officers look on, dumbfounded, as the alligator moves along the outside of the house in an unthreatening way. There is a sense that the narrative around The Alligator Man has, until this point, been folkloric: the community has never completely believed that Willy owns an alligator. When he releases the alligator, they are at once triumphant and disappointed; they were right, but the reality of the situation is gauche—much like a prodigy made from dish cloths. Indeed, this mirrors viewers’ experience of the episode as a whole: they have been waiting for a big reveal, generating theories of what is behind the closed door. u/chuckxbronson notes that ‘Monique Grant, the actress who played Yvonne in “Alligator Man,” was also featured in Ahmad White’s commercial (from “B.A.N.”)’ (2018) and theorises that ‘this connection could be a hint to further plot lines involving Ahmad White’ (2018). When the alligator is revealed to be an alligator (albeit a disappointing one), and nothing more about Yvonne comes to light, viewers like u/chuckxbronson are once again wrong-footed. Similarly, in ‘The Solex Brothers’, once Lucida’s narrative is revealed to be fake, the Solex Brothers’ story crumbles, and the speaker joins a murder plot, learning that the Solex Brothers have enemies: They had upset filing systems and undermined the quartz mine by building another mine underneath it. […] But what of all their visitors and friends? ‘Nonsense,’ said the Father. ‘Their visitors are paid actors – each brother takes it in turn to hire.’ (2010, 6)

Even this conversation is not immune from ridicule. Kennard literalises ‘undermine’, having the Solex Brothers build a mine beneath another mine. The joke is complex, mocking the Solex brothers, and the authority they seem to have won through their giant statures, political manoeuvring, and wealth; the speaker, for believing the Solex Brothers; the townspeople, who have allowed the Solex Brothers to do these things; the very nature of narratives, via the townspeople who fill stereotypical rural roles of The Father and arable farmer (2010, 6), and the language

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with which we tell stories; and the reader, for engaging with this ridiculous and derivative tale, and for allowing themselves to be wrong-footed by Kennard throughout. As Kennard mocks authority, Atlanta critiques the narratives of ‘great men’ and the power they hold. Darius offers another analysis of conspiracy in the same episode as Willy’s diminishment, building a story based on a linguistic literalisation. As Earn and Darius drive around, Darius makes small talk, asking Earn about his parents, who are visiting Florida, and suggests they should ‘watch out for Florida Man’ (‘Alligator Man’ 2018). Darius then narrates the stylised vignettes over dramatic, horror film music. The vignettes follow an unidentified white man, who wears a yellow cap, grey vest, denim shorts, and brown boots: DARIUS Think of him as an alt-right Johnny Appleseed. No one knows his true identity, date of birth, what he looks like. That’s why headlines always say, ‘Florida Man’. ‘Florida Man shoots unarmed black teenager’. ‘Florida Man bursts into ex’s delivery room, and fights new boyfriend as she’s giving birth’. ‘Florida Man steals a car, goes to Checkers.’ (2018)

This may seem like another one of Darius’s daydreams, especially as the stylised vignettes create a sense of melodrama. However, Darius’s narrative is a comment on how Atlanta asks its viewers to create conspiracies, and how they can only offer disappointment. Darius claims that Florida Man and the state government are in ‘fucking cahoots’ (2018), and when Earn questions why they would do this, he claims that their motivation is ‘to prevent black people from coming to and/or registering to vote in Florida’ (2018). As much as the ‘Florida Man’ narrative seems far-fetched, it has validity in a world where the political climate is fraught, alarmingly strange, and fails to make sense. For all its sensationalism, Darius’s conspiracy offers a bleak truth: that the narratives a group or individual creates often hide a darker reality. As such, through its use of hyperbolic situations, the New Absurd recreates grand narratives, and then deflates them, revealing stories, and our tendency to believe them, to be ridiculous.

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Conclusion As New Absurdist poetry manipulates the reader-poet relationship to destabilise ideas of enlightenment and authority, exposing the gauche reality of life, Atlanta plays with audience expectations, suggesting that each episode might be the one where a character achieves success or epiphany, only to find Atlanta is actually a cycle of discontent. Atlanta treats its viewers as readers of poetry: intelligent people who are able to make logical leaps, and take images as symbols of emotional or critical importance. Yet, Atlanta also treats its viewers as readers of New Absurdist poetry, undermining that critical faculty to demonstrate our gullibility, shortcomings, and existential dread. What makes us return to these New Absurdist poems, and to Atlanta, then, is their emotional resonance. No matter how much we want to believe in self-help aphorisms, the possibility of rat phones, or the healing powers of chicken wings, we endure the mundane and unbreakable cycles of our everyday lives. The gaucherie of New Absurdist poems, and the friendships in Atlanta suggest that, even if there is no way out, at least we are not alone in the endeavour.

Notes 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/AtlantaTV/. 2. Coates explores the influence of parables in contemporary poetry in his review of poet Caroline Bird’s The Hat-Stand Union (2013).

References Allen, Rachael. 2019. Kingdomland. London: Faber and Faber. Atlanta. 2016. Directed by Hiro Murai. Los Angeles: FX. Atlanta: Robbin’ Season. 2018. Directed by Hiro Murai. Los Angeles: FX. Bennet, Michael Y. 2015. The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clake, Jenna. 2018. ‘A Noisy Situation’: The Feminine and Feminist New Absurd in Twenty-First Century British and American Poetry. University of Birmingham. Coates, Dave. 2013. “Caroline Bird—The Hat-Stand Union.” Dave Poems. https://davepoems.wordpress.com/2013/11/11/caroline-bird-thehat-stand-union/. Accessed 8 October 2017.

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Cornwell, Neil. 2006. The Absurd in Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Delville, Michel. 1998. The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press. Esslin, Martin. 1968. The Theatre of the Absurd. 2nd edn. Middlesex: Penguin Fox, Jesse David. 2016. “Donald Glover’s Artistic Journey Has Been Building to Atlanta’s ‘Black Justin Bieber’ Episode.” Vulture, September 28. https:// www.vulture.com/2016/09/donald-glover-atlanta-black-justin-bieber.html. Framke, Caroline. 2018. “Atlanta Robbin’ Season Isn’t Here to Make Anyone Feel Better.” Vox, March 1, 2018. https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/2/ 28/17059740/fx-atlanta-robbin-season-2-review. Gavins, Joanna. 2013. Reading the Absurd. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kennard, Luke. 2010. The Solex Brothers (Redux) and Other Prose Poems. Cromer: Salt Publishing. Knox, Jennifer L. 2007. A Gringo Like Me. New Jersey: Bloof Books. Lyotard, Jean Francois. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennigton and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press. MacNeice, Louis. 1965. Varieties of Parable. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rooney, Kathleen. 2013. “And Now, Deep Thoughts About ‘Deep Thoughts’.” The New York Times Magazine, April 12. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/ 04/14/magazine/and-now-deep-thoughts-about-deep-thoughts.html. Tokumitsu, Miya. 2018. “Tell Me It’s Going to be OK: Self-Care and Social Retreat Under Neoliberalism,” The Baffler, October 3. https://thebaffler. com/salvos/tell-me-its-going-to-be-ok-tokumitsu. u/chuckxbronson. 2018. “Yvonne/Ahmad White Connection.” Reddit, March 3. https://www.reddit.com/r/AtlantaTV/comments/81pk44/yvo nneahmad_white_connection/. u/RobertHarmon. 2016. “Theory About Ahmad White (Guy from Bus).” Reddit, October 13. https://www.reddit.com/r/AtlantaTV/comments/576 wsl/theory_about_ahmad_white_guy_from_bus/?utm_source=share&utm_ medium=web2x. u/nolaninthedeep. 2016. “Theory About Ahmad White (Guy from Bus).” Reddit, October 12. https://www.reddit.com/r/AtlantaTV/comments/576 wsl/theory_about_ahmad_white_guy_from_bus/?utm_source=share&utm_ medium=web2x.

CHAPTER 11

Reading a Police Procedural as a Lyrical Text Katre Talviste

Introduction: The Art and Science of Moments In the summer of 2012, I was using the former Fox Crime channel for home-improvement purposes. The network’s constant reruns of a few series, several episodes at a time from relatively random seasons, provided a soothing background of vaguely familiar faces and voices. The TV screen became a window into unobtrusive fictional worlds whose storylines didn’t necessarily demand attention. Until one day there was a moment that did—two middle-aged men sitting on a park bench, in the rain, sharing an umbrella and having the following conversation: “You smell like a wet dog. — Well, there was one here underneath the bench when I got here. I put him in the gazebo. — Why aren’t you in

This study was supported by the Estonian Research Council grant PRG1106, and by the European Union European Regional Development Fund (Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies). K. Talviste (B) University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Winckler and V. Huertas-Martín (eds.), Television Series as Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4720-1_11

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the gazebo? — Dog smells like hell. — So why didn’t you leave him under– Never mind.” There is no narrative development in that situation, nor information for reconstructing any, other than the unmistakable allusion to something grave probably happening in the background by the motif of indifference to foul weather, pushed beyond simple cliché by the quirky dialogue and shots alternating between the two characters and the dog who is indeed there and perfectly irrelevant. I later found out that this scene was from the second episode of the third season of NCIS (NCIS 2010, 30:59–31:18), an investigative procedural, originally produced by Belisarius Productions and Paramount Network Television (2003–2006) and since 2006 by CBS. Season 3 started with a mini-arc following the first major character death in the series, which makes it a particularly fascinating starting-point for a viewer, story-wise, because the first two episodes feature a character killed in the season 2 finale. The usual task of determining characters’ roles and relations was thus further complicated by learning to tell dead characters from live ones, the “real” fictional world from the “unreal.” Sorting that out was fun. It was like reading a book of poetry. Single texts in a collection of poems, unlike chapters of a narrative, can be appreciated and understood individually or in a variety of selections and sequences. Any one of them can open a reader a way into the poetical world created in the book, a world that doesn’t owe its coherence to a narrative continuity, but to a network of lyrical motifs. In the words of Rainer Nägele (1996, 123, emphasis mine), “The concept of the literary motif presents us with the difficulties of the simple and evident: we seem to recognize a motif when we see it, but its definition is elusive.” A motif is simultaneously a perceptible poetic reality and an interpretive device—a fragment of text that is perceived as meaningful, suggestive of a poetic image. Motifs that create the imagery of an individual poem also relate to other motifs in other poems within a collection, or in a poet’s body of work in general. Collections of poetry can be read in their intended order, but are often read in different orders or selectively, exploring the complementary, analogous or oppositional relations between motifs and the moments of experience they represent. My first brief look into the world of NCIS made me realize that the series had the potential of being viewed much in the same way—there could be good character moments without the viewer having any idea whatsoever who the characters were or what their story was. So after obtaining all seasons of the show available at the time, instead of focusing

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on the overall storyline of the show, I hunted for more such moments— captivating motifs, fragments of the audiovisual material and dialogue, each producing an independent viewing experience, while also lending meaning to and gaining it from other fragments elsewhere in the series. In other words, I read my way into the series as I would into a collection of lyrical texts. Conceptual understanding of what a lyrical text is or does has varied over time, along with the evolution of literary practices, but lyric has kept defying attempts of positive definition. It has proved rather fruitless to search for a set of necessary and sufficient qualities that make a text lyrical, but more fruitful to view the lyric as a “system of possibilities” (Culler 2015, pos. 218), to look for potential qualities that make readers perceive texts as lyrical, for an appropriate “discursive pact” (see Rodriguez 2003, 88). Key characteristics that tend to emerge from that search are related to temporality and action. Lyric is characterized by a “relative unimportance or even lack of external action and (suspenseful) narrative development” (Wolf 2005, 39), focused on a moment of experience rather than the passage of time in action (see Rodriguez 2003, 168–184; Culler 2015, chap. 6.4–6.5). A moment being a part of time and experiences potentially triggered by events or actions, the lyric isn’t as much the opposite of narrative as a complementary cognitive and poetic mode of structuring human experience. Increasing attention to this complementary nature of the narrative and lyric mode constitutes an important shift in literary theory, which had long construed them as each other’s conflictual or mutually exclusive opposites. Heather Dubrow has called for a closer study of their cooperation and interplay, arguing that “rather than attempting to impede, suppress, or supersede each other, lyric and narrative may further common agendas,” (Dubrow 2006, 256) and that “rather than blocking narrative, lyric often enables it […] it often functions not as an icon of stability but rather as source and symbol of an intensification, a wind-up that must be discharged in action […] as a kind of heightening of emotion and sensation leading to its release via narrative” (Dubrow 2006, 261, 262). At the same time, predominantly, lyrical texts have been observed to make regular use of fictional elements and narrative devices. In her analysis of medieval lyrics, Monika Fludernik speaks of “residual narrativity” and “scenes” (Fludernik 2005, 100, 106) when describing the lyric’s manner of projecting fragments of implicit plotlines, quasi-settings, and quasi-characters that remain undeveloped in terms of narrative art.

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TV series tend to be regarded as narrative art and are expected to establish fictional worlds where events evolve in a coherent manner. However, they are often also rich in non-narrative material and poetic devices. Narrative-oriented meta-language tends to have difficulties explaining these lyrical elements. For example, Vincent Colonna underlines the importance of repetition (return of characters, motifs and situations, redundant addition of dialogue and soundtrack to the image) and of recurring, essentially non-narrative motifs in TV series (Colonna 2015, 38, 40), but he has trouble appreciating these characteristics from the perspective of narrative art, as they clearly do not contribute to the progressive development of characters and events. However, his analysis grows more convincing when he draws the occasional parallel with lyrical literature, comparing the function of recurring motifs to that of the refrain in a song: articulation and emphasis (Colonna 2015, 38). The parallel is even clearer when compared to Jonathan Culler’s observations about similar phenomena in poetry: “the ritualistic dimensions of lyric: rythm, lyric address and invocation, and sound patterning of all kinds. These incantatory elements are very often what initially attracts us to a poem – prior to exploration of its meaning – and of course they are what make lyrics different from prose reflections on the world.” (Culler 2015, pos. 7048). A comparison of the main features of the lyric according to Culler and of Jeremy G. Butler’s characterization of what he terms “nonnarrative television” and empirically limits to TV commercials reveals even more striking similarities. Butler points out traits such as evocative imagery and enticing audio, repetition and redundancy, “utopian,” i.e., hyperbolic style, direct address, reflexivity and intertextuality, a disregard both for narrative continuity and coherent mimetic representation of reality (Butler 2010, chap. 3). Culler finds similar characteristics (hyperbolization, importance of apostrophe, reflexivity, and resistance to fruitful interpretation in terms of mimetic fiction and plots) essential to lyrical literature. It is interesting to note that while Butler describes these poetic devices in television as a medium, he doesn’t consider the presence of these elements in TV series. Such has actually long been the case in literary theory as well—it has taken time to realize that while certain forms and genres (such as versified poetry) lend themselves particularly well to the lyrical mode and have been historically associated with it more than other forms (such as prose), this association itself is not a defining characteristic. Both lyrical and narrative mode can be at work within a single

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literary—or televisual—creation. This complementary dynamic of the two essentially different, yet also essentially linked modes of expression can best be explained by Yuri Lotman’s distinction between paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations: The ordered quality of any text can be realized along two lines. In linguistic terms it can be characterized as ordering in terms of paradigmatics and syntagmatics [...] If in narrative genre the second type predominates, then texts with a strongly expressed modelling function (and it is precisely here that poetry, especially lyric poetry, belongs) are constructed with marked predominance of the first. Repetition figures in the text as the realization of ordering on the paradigmatic plane, of ordering in terms of equivalency. [...] In contradistinction to the syntagmatic nexus that unites different elements of the text by contrast, paradigmatics provides the comparisoncontrast of elements which on a certain level form mutually differentiated variants. In each concrete case, the text selects one of these. Thus, a paradigmatic relationship is the relationship between an element that actually exists in the text and a potential multiplicity of other forms. (Lotman 1976, 37)

A story is a linear structure combined of various elements that are supposed to make sense when presented together in a specific order. A paradigm of elements is not expected to make sense in the same manner. Operations on the paradigmatic axis consist of choosing one element over all its potential equivalents and counting on the audience’s ability to understand the meaning of that choice. This ability results from knowing what other options are potentially available and what constitutes their equivalence and their differences. A lyrical text, according to Lotman, focuses on exploring such relations of equivalence and difference by expressing some sort of experience in a variative series of poetic figures and images. It does so in order to develop our “repertoire of discursive possibilities,” to borrow a term from Culler (2015, pos. 521). The lyric is a poetic practice that reflects upon our capacity to express what we experience. This reflexive nature has been a key element in the conceptualization of the lyric at least since Roman Jakobson’s model of language (1960) posited autoreferentiality as an essential function of language and the predominant function in poetry. Autoreferentiality is closely related to the kind of temporality characteristic of the lyric: the lyric is a step out of the course of time, an interruption in the telling of the action, a momentary intense focus on where we stand and how best to say it.

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This essay is an exercise in motif analysis, which consists of tracing and interpreting a paradigm of analogous motifs in a text or a corpus of texts, in this instance a TV series. I shall analyze the development and interrelations of some recurrent motifs in NCIS, which are also featured in the episode quoted above. At a later point in the dialogue in the rain, FBI agent Tobias Fornell (Joe Spano) asks the main character, NCIS agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs (Mark Harmon), if he ever goes to the movies. “I build a boat,” Gibbs replies (NCIS 2010, 31:50–31:56). The reply remains undeveloped in the scene, as Fornell’s investigative clues given in the guise of a movie recommendation steer the action back toward the plot. However, the significance of Gibbs’s reply resonates through the whole series. In the following reading of NCIS, I’ll show how this significance builds up over seasons and across plotlines; how the motif of Gibbs’s boat is presented and developed on screen and through other characters’ perspectives; how it participates in the creation of broader character-related space, and how these spatial images contribute to the expression of the character’s inner world and become an autoreferential device both on the level of character and for the series as a whole. Reading an essentially narrative work of art in this manner will provide an example of how narrative and non-narrative modes of meaning-making function together in a single work of art.

The Case of a Boat in a Haunted Basement NCIS is an ensemble show, or what Jean-Pierre Esquenazi terms a chorus series (2014, 121–132), built around a group of characters whose individual growth and mutual dynamic add another level of narrative progression to episode plots and multi-episode arcs. Despite the equal importance of all main characters to the functioning of this dynamic, the character of the lead investigator, Leroy Jethro Gibbs, stands out as the most diversely developed and clearly established at the nexus of the characters’ interaction for the first eighteen seasons. From the first episode, Gibbs is regularly shown in the basement of his house where he is building a boat. It becomes clear over the first half of the season that his boat-building is common knowledge among other characters. Gibbs’s woodworking hobby is thus established early on as a distinctive gimmick, as Vincent Colonna terms a recurrent trait whose purpose is to define a character and remind the viewers of the character’s

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idiosyncrasies. Colonna also points out that gimmicks operate independently of storylines and plots (Colonna 2015, 38). Over the course of the series, Gibbs’s woodworking projects occasionally get involved in the plot, but generally they fit Colonna’s category well. Gibbs’s boat can be considered an incantatory element created by visual means instead of verbal ones. The boat makes for an impressive image, produces an immediate and powerful effect that precedes interpretation, and does so with frequent recurrence, shaping the viewing experience. In the opening scene of the series, Gibbs starts out as a character defined by a half-finished, usually upside-down boat set in an underground space with no obvious exit. From the start, the basement is established as the home space from which Gibbs views the outside world. In early seasons, it is claimed to be, for instance, the place where he keeps his only TV set. In later seasons, he is sometimes shown reading various case files there. These are the rare moments when viewers are able to share Gibbs’s perspective of an investigation instead of being left to wonder along with the other characters about how the notoriously silent and intuitive Gibbs figures out the key to solving a case. The basement is also an important element of Gibbs’s image in the eyes of other characters. Throughout the series, they tend to regard Gibbs with awe and perplexity, and the basement becomes an iconic attribute of his enigmatic lifestyle and personality. While it remains a symbol of Gibbs’s individuality and privacy, the basement gradually becomes the interface of Gibbs’s connection to other characters. Most of the main characters make it to the basement at some point for a significant conversation. There is a clear correlation between a character’s basement time with Gibbs and the closeness of their relationship. An even more significant marker of trust and intimacy is the kind of activity allowed to a visitor—many are invited to share a drink of bourbon, but only very few are tolerated to wield any woodworking tools. In all these functions, the basement participates in the overall narrative development of the series. Yet, beyond this, the basement can be considered a lyrical image, a poetic figure with its own evolution. At the beginning of the series, Gibbs’s world starts out as just the basement. He’s shown working there, even sleeping there. From season 7 onwards, Gibbs’s home space ‘grows’ other rooms, at first on the ground floor, then upstairs. The addition of new rooms and their arrangements bring new layers to the character. We see him progressively adopt new spaces:

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at first successive parts of his own house and, in later seasons, a diner situated somewhere between his house and his office. Also, the outside world progressively infiltrates these intimate spaces of his. In earlier seasons, he’s shown building a boat, alone and for purposes known to him alone. The boat’s completion and eventual move out of the basement and out to sea are closely associated with his increased openness to relationships, whose significance to him is often represented by some sort of shared connection to the boat: in season 4, when the hull disappears from the basement, Gibbs is sometimes shown working on the boat with the woman he is seeing; in season 7, it is revealed that when the completed boat disappeared at the end of the previous season, he gave it to his goddaughter as a gift. Also, in later seasons, Gibbs builds other things, usually for other people. His carpentry grows in functionality, as well as in exposure and connectivity to the outside world much in the same manner as the character himself; and when the character exits the series, the viewers last see him surf fishing in Alaska (Great Wide Open, 19.4), having left behind his house with a huge hole in the basement wall, through which his last boat was moved out to its short life on the water. The spatial images illustrate the difference between narrative and lyric modes, between mimetic and figurative logic, but they also illustrate the ways these two modes of expression and interpretation complement each other. Obviously, when viewers first see Gibbs’s living room after several seasons of only having seen his basement, they assume that in the fictional universe of the series, the living room has always existed in the house, along with the basement and various other rooms. When Gibbs is first shown in his favorite diner (Life Before His Eyes, 9.13), it is clearly implied, by his use of the waitress’s first name and by her familiarity with his coffeedrinking habits, that he’s been a regular customer for a long time. When reading a narrative text, this kind of reconstruction of what the narrator doesn’t explicitly tell us is a typical interpretive action and depends very much on the mimetic nature of the narrative: the reconstruction is based on analogies between what we know from experience about spatiotemporal connections—for example, that basements are usually attached to houses or that certain communication patterns reflect certain levels of acquaintance. This knowledge enables us to recognize representations of space in a work of fiction and to perceive the narrative coherence of characters’ actions in that space. The lyrical coherence of spatial images stems from a different type of recognition, the kind Gaston Bachelard explores in The Poetics of Space:

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“It therefore makes sense from our standpoint of a philosophy of literature and poetry to say that we ‘write a room,’ ‘read a room,’ or ‘read a house.’ Thus, very quickly, at the very first word, at the first poetic overture, the reader who is ‘reading a room’ leaves off reading and starts to think of some place in his own past” (Bachelard 1994, 14). Bachelard describes here what might be viewed as the initial moment of making sense of an image in the paradigmatic mode—the actual image that is present sparks an association, a memory of another that is currently absent, but somehow related. Hence, Bachelard’s dedication to the study of space—he views spatial images as having particularly strong potential for anchoring memories and sparking imagination. The value of Bachelard’s method of reading poetic space does not reside in his choice of the house as the ultimate intimate space, “one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams” (Bachelard 1994, 6), although it is a most fortunate framework for “reading” Gibbs’s house, to which some observations that Bachelard has drawn from reading poetry could directly apply. “The house, even more than the landscape, is a ‘psychic state,’ and even if reproduced as it appears from the outside, it bespeaks intimacy,” Bachelard says (1994, 72). His reading of houses, and space in general, shows how poetic imagery fundamentally functions—it finds powerful perceptible forms for what is otherwise abstract, unattainable to senses and immediate experience. This, as Esquenazi has argued, is also an important poetic characteristic of TV series, which have developed a diverse and ingenuous repertoire of devices for expressing the intimate—the inner world of characters and their perception of the fictional universe they inhabit (Esquenazi 2014, 172). Gibbs’s basement and his other home spaces are one such device in NCIS. The evolution of Gibbs-related spatial images is parallel to his journey as a character: a journey out of subterranean isolation. Over the course of the series, he opens up in two respects: in the eyes of the viewers and other characters, as they learn new and increasingly significant things about him; and in the sense of emotional healing and personal growth, as he gradually deals with his tragic past and rebuilds relations of trust and friendship. The paradigms of enclosement and openness, of subterranean and above-ground existence, of destruction and (re)construction, of wholeness and the yearning for it run through the characters’ backstories, plots and dialogue, but also through visual imagery and scenes of residual narrativity, as Gibbs’s boat-building gimmick might be qualified in Fludernik’s terms (2005, 100).

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Another device for the externalization of the inner world, the appearance of dead characters, grows more prominent in later seasons. After the death of Gibbs’s mentor Mike Franks at the end of season 8, Gibbs sometimes has conversations with what appears to be Franks’s ghost, and on a few occasions, notably at the end of seasons 12 and 16, sees other significant dead characters from past seasons. These scenes are different from various flashback, dream and near-death vision sequences, which also occur in the series. In the “ghost” scenes, Gibbs is not depicted as being elsewhere in his mind or memory, but as interacting with “ghosts” in the situation, he actually is in and is aware of. In terms of narrative and fictional coherence, ghosts which are visible to just one character on a plane of fictional reality he or she shares with others, and which are neither a generally recognized presence nor a generalized diegetic device, may raise questions as to what is happening to the character or to the narrative itself. Is Gibbs hallucinating or losing his mind? Is the show turning away from its so far essentially realistic premise? In terms of lyrical coherence, on the other hand, Gibbs’s encounters with his ghosts, which often, although not exclusively, take place in his basement, are just as credible as the ghosts in Emily Dickinson’s “Ghosts” (Dickinson 2019, pos. 1134–1139), a poem that likens our inner world to a haunted house and suggests that, by comparison, being surrounded by actual ghosts in an external space might feel less uncanny. The coherence and credibility of a lyrical text depend on the relations between the image, enhanced by the focus on the here-and-now, and the reader or the viewer. The meaning of the image doesn’t result from a syntagmatic sequence, such as a plot, but from the possible paradigms of other images and experiences the reader is able to associate with it. Even if the image, for example, a ghostly appearance of a dead character, is not credible as an element of the narrative in an essentially realistic fictional universe, it may well resonate with perfectly real experiences, all the more so because real-life experiences are not only, or even primarily, syntagmatic, nicely ordered in one causal and temporal sequence, but actually involve dealing with many different, often unrelated but simultaneous, sometimes contradictory or mutually exclusive categories at the same time. For example, we may not see ghosts around us or actually hear them talk to us, but we most certainly continue to consider, at least for a time and to a degree, the opinions of dead loved ones and may wonder what their reactions or their counsel might be in situations we find ourselves in without them. Poetic imagery, the figures, and motifs

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that constitute the core of the lyric expression, are a means to concretize these types of inner experiences and relations with the outer world, no matter if it is materially present or represented in mind and memory. As Culler puts it (2015, pos. 7048), the lyric speaks of this world, not of a fictional one. It does so by bringing a motif forcefully into focus, positing it as meaningful and thus turning the reader’s attention and reflection on it in terms of its real-life significance. The lyrical realism lies in its insight, not in representation. It is a form of “emotional realism,” which Rhonda Wilcox has brought out as a characteristic of various TV series from the late 20th and early twenty-first century: These series, while practicing what Buffy creator Joss Wheldon calls “emotional realism,” also contain elements of the unreal [...] These unreal elements are used not merely for plot convenience or escapist action but to layer the series with symbolic depth: as in traditional literature, symbols in these shows constitute a means of exploring themes not immediately apparent on the surface, in the plot and dialogue. (Wilcox 2008, pos. 2429–2434)

On the level of emotional realism, Gibbs’s basement-bound boat and the ghosts that populate his mindspaces make perfect sense. On the level of representational realism, they constantly mystify other characters and viewers, and consequently feed a powerful loop of autoreferentiality. Questions about the meaning behind and his intentions for the boat are as iconic as the boat itself, both within the fictional world and in the reception of the series. Other characters never tire of making baffled references to the boat in conversation. The boat has become a staple in fanfiction (as can be observed, for example, by numerous contributions at the website www.fanfiction.net), even more so than in the series, where the basement is actually boat-free for several seasons. The boat also features in a season 16 DVD extra where the cast and producers are interviewed by Kevin Frazier on the set of Gibbs’s basement (NCIS 2019). The autoreferentiality evident in the way the motif travels between various levels of the fictional world, its reception and creators’ comments are characteristic of TV series in general. Frank Kelleter has explained TV series’ tendency to reflect upon their own material and means of expression by the recursive progress of their production—a series is not composed as a closed work that will be set before viewers only after being completed, but “is being watched or read while it is developing, that is,

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while certain narrative options are still open or have not yet even materlialized as options” (Kelleter 2017, pos. 373–386). This mode of creation commands an awareness of stories already told, motifs and images already established, available and familiar to the audience, ready to be activated by new installments. New activations don’t just develop the motif, but reflect upon its earlier use and respond to its reception, intensifying the effect of autoreferentiality. In the final episode of season 16, Gibbs’s ghosts evolve from a recurring motif to an object of dialogue between characters, as Gibbs’s friend Fornell overhears him speaking out loud to the ghost of an ex-wife, Diane, whose appearances emphasize the dilemmas that Gibbs is struggling with in this episode. Fornell’s bewildered questions about Gibbs’s sanity mirror those that some viewers have asked since the early appearances of the ghosts, recognizing the interpretive issue, but not bringing interpretive closure. The lyric, in its autoreferential and atemporal nature, is not oriented toward closure. The power and meaning of its images depend on a potentially endless capacity for associations and analogies. In a TV series, the means of expression that contribute to the creation of open-ended paradigms of associations are arguably even more numerous and diverse than in a traditional literary text, not least because literary texts themselves actually feature among TV series’ potential repertoire of creative devices. The final scenes of the episode Scope (13.18) feature a performance of Jeff Buckley’s version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” by Taye Diggs (here in the role of an injured veteran participating in a therapeutic music program). Cohen’s lyrics to this song are a textbook illustration of autoreferentiality. To begin with, the song speaks of music, of singing, and of itself up to the point of being technical: Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord That David played, and it pleased the Lord But you don’t really care for music, do you? It goes like this The fourth, the fifth The minor fall, the major lift The baffled king composing Hallelujah. (Cohen 2011)

As a poem, the text is rich in intertextual allusions, poetic images, subtle irony and poetic autoreflection. Between the original poem, numerous versions of the song performed by Cohen himself and others, and the particular version performed in Scope, it establishes yet another

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paradigm of potential associations between present elements and related absent ones, because song versions and their performances don’t usually contain all strophes, but the selections vary, as do the exact vocabulary and the resulting figurative nuances. In Scope, other layers are added by the particular context and medium. The opening chords of “Hallelujah” appear in the background of the final dialogue between Gibbs and the veteran he has been trying to help battle a post-traumatic, near-suicidal depression. “You know, the thing is, I was fighting myself, trying to be some empty version of what I was before. But I think I need to try and find a way to be who I am now. Know what I mean?” the veteran says, to which Gibbs replies, “Yeah.” (NCIS 2016, 38:11–38:49) The pace of the dialogue is slow enough for the same exchange to be concluded first on the visual plane, via the actors’ expressions, glances and nods, while the music fills the pauses in their speech. Then follows a series of images that are no longer set in the narrative time: four sequences of the concert where veterans perform “Hallelujah” (continued from the opening chords of the background) with Gibbs sitting in the audience are alternated with two sequences showing Gibbs’s colleagues sharing moments of friendship and three sequences of Gibbs at home: first sitting on his living room sofa, then going up to his bedroom and finally falling asleep on the bed. These moments and images, as well as Cohen’s lyrics, are connected to central narrative themes in Scope: defeat and victory, destruction and elevation, ecstatic faith in face of debilitating loss of power, mourning the past and kindling hope for a future. To additionally emphasize these themes, the series turns to its own recurrent motifs: after emerging from his basement in season 7, Gibbs has been shown sleeping on the sofa in his living room on the ground floor of his house. At the beginning of Scope, strings in his sofa give out, depriving him of sleep, because he hasn’t really “reconquered” the upper floor of his house and, most importantly, his and his late first wife’s bedroom. At the end of Scope, he finally does so. The significance of the episode’s last image of the character falling to sleep on his bed stems from the series’ own established paradigm of spatial restrictions he has had in relation to his house over the seasons. The lyric can thus activate paradigms of motifs belonging to narratives, whether the narratives originate from within the same work of art or from other sources. In Cohen’s poem, the biblical figures of David and Samson blend into a single lyrical motif associated with the overwhelming, simultaneously destructive and elevating power of sexual desire. A single image or a brief sequence of a TV series can call to mind a character’s whole

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story, without retelling it, by focusing on its affective meaning and on reflecting upon it through a constant search for a more adequate and poignant expression.

Polyvalence of Moments, Symbiosis of Modes It might be said that lyric emerges at the intersections of narratives, where the linear course of time and action stops for a moment of intense observation and introspection. The lyric takes experiences out of sequential temporality in order to examine them from different angles and consider the possibilities of their communicability. But turning attention away from the linear flow of moments doesn’t necessarily mean entering into a static perception of self and surroundings. The lyric creates new patterns of connections between non-sequential moments: from the here-and-now to past experiences or expectations for the future, belonging to personal, reported or imagined narratives. Lyric is dynamic and inquisitive. This does not exclude moments of static and descriptive contemplation, long considered as its main function; but it makes them only one possibility among many. The temporality of lyric relies on memory and imagination. Immediately perceptible motifs in the text become meaningful due to our capacity to see them as related to analogous motifs encountered elsewhere, often in other narratives. Building characters through such meaningful moments planted into years’ worth of narratives is a method frequently used by the creators of NCIS. In the commentary to the season 12 episode Cabin Fever, director Bethany Rooney and actor Mark Harmon point out a brief moment of very uncharacteristic behavior for Gibbs— he leaves an investigation—and agree that its full significance would be impossible for the viewers to appreciate without the groundwork of a number of previous seasons (NCIS 2015, 12:53–13:17). That moment functions simultaneously in the narrative mode, moving events in a certain direction, and in the lyrical mode, offering insight into the character’s state of mind and intentions by the way it relates to analogous moments in the character’s history. A moment read in the lyrical mode opens a deep perspective into a character as well as into ourselves, as we follow the character into the moment and are invited to share the experience of introspection. A TV screen, in its narrative mode, can be a window into fictional worlds where experiences other than our own can be observed, but it

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can also be a mirror for self-reflection and insight into our own experience. These two functions respond to different but equally important and authentic needs that inspire artistic creation and art consumption. Today, as we question traditional, sometimes oppositional relations between different art forms, such as television and literature, we may be better positioned than ever to study these functions without getting caught in the web of the traditional configurations of their formal manifestations, and to move toward a deeper understanding of their symbiotic contribution to the articulation and expression of human experience.

References Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. Butler, Jeremy G. 2010. Television Style. New York and London: Routledge. Kindle. Cohen, Leonard. 2011. The Lyrics of Leonard Cohen. Omnibus Press. Kindle. Colonna, Vincent. 2015. L’art des séries télé. 1. L’appel du happy end. Paris: Payot & Rivages. Culler, Jonathan. 2015. Theory of the Lyric. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kindle. Dickinson, Emily. 2019. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. CDED. Kindle. Dubrow, Heather. 2006. “The Interplay of Narrative and Lyric: Competition, Cooperation, and the Case of the Anticipatory Amalgam.” Narrative 14 (3): 254–271. Esquenazi, Jean-Pierre. 2014. Les séries télévisées. L’avenir du cinéma? Paris: Armand Colin. Fludernik, Monika. 2005. “Allegory, Metaphor, Scene and Expression. The Example of English Medieval and Early Modern Lyric Poetry.” In Theory into Poetry. New Approaches to the Lyric, edited by Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Margarete Rubik, 99–124. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi. Kelleter, Frank. 2017. “Five Ways of Looking at Popular Seriality.” In Media of Serial Narrative, edited by Frank Kelleter, pos. 266–1248. Columbus: The Ohio State University. Kindle. Lotman, Yuri. 1976. Analysis of the Poetic Text. Translated by D. Barton Johnson. Ann Arbor: Ardis. Nägele, Rainer. 1996. “The Poetic Ground Laid Bare (Benjamin Reading Baudelaire).” In Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions, edited by David S. Ferris, 118–138. Stanford: Stanford University Press. NCIS: The Third Season. “Kill Ari: Part 2.” DVD. 2010. Hollywood: CBS Studios.

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NCIS: The Twelfth Season. “Cabin Fever. Audio Commentary by Mark Harmon, Bethany Rooney and Joe Spano.” DVD. 2015. Hollywood: CBS Studios. NCIS: The Thirteenth Season. “Scope.” DVD. 2016. Hollywood: CBS Studios. NCIS: The Sixteenth Season. “NCIS Season 16: The Conversation.” DVD. 2019. Hollywood: CBS Studios. Rodriguez, Antonio. 2003. Le pacte lyrique. Configuration discursive et interaction affective. Hayen: Pierre Mardaga. Wilcox, Rhonda. 2008. “Unreal TV.” In Thinking Outside the Box. A Contemporary Television Genre Reader, edited by Gary R. Edgerton & Brian G. Rose, pos. 2429–2755. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Kindle. Wolf, Werner. 2005. “The Lyric: Problems of Definition and a Proposal for Reconceptualisation.” In Theory into Poetry. New Approaches to the Lyric, edited by Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Margarete Rubik, 21–56. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi.

CHAPTER 12

Contemporary Fables in the Digital Age: A Literary Approach to Black Mirror Juanjo Bermúdez de Castro

Introduction: Black Mirror as a Collection of Twenty-First-Century Fables In The Fable as Literature (1985) H. J. Blackman provides a formal definition of the fable: “a narrative device, to provoke and aid concrete thinking, focused on some general matter of concern” (1985, xvii). According to him, fables are not straightforward true stories, but thought-provoking narrative devices aiming to tell the truth; tactical literary manoeuvres that include switching contexts, shifting perspectives, reorganizing power relations and unsettling plot twists, which take hold of things as they seem in order to show the way they are. What makes a fable is its brevity and the purpose or final moral that governs and shapes the entire material of the conceptual narrative artefact (1985, xix). In “The Fable as Literary Genre” (1987) Vindt points out that the basic feature of the fable is its “semantic bi-planirity: the event described has meaning not only in itself, it serves as a symbol or a sign. A general outline is usually

J. B. de Castro (B) University of the Balearic Islands, Palma, Spain

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Winckler and V. Huertas-Martín (eds.), Television Series as Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4720-1_12

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reduced to a moralizing maxim, which is always visible beyond the narrative plane” (89). Vindt also emphasizes that the idea of the fable as a genre exists in the literary consciousness of all epochs, and that the initial storyline usually brings out an unexpected, often paradoxical conclusion (91). This chapter will perform a close textual analysis of the TV series Black Mirror from a narratological perspective to show how it can be read as a collection of twenty-first-century fables. Black Mirror, initially commissioned and broadcast by Channel 4 in the UK, was created by showrunner Charlie Brooker and premiered in December 2011. It was an instant success and was acclaimed by both critics and audiences alike. The only common thread of its standalone episodes is the theme of humanity’s relationship to new technologies. As Cirucci and Vacker describe in their “Introduction” to Black Mirror and Critical Media Theory (2018), the series “confronts the proliferation of information bombs, the billions of screens and mobile media that have colonized human consciousness… [it] expresses the philosophical angst and technological fears for millennials in the twenty-first century” (ix). Black Mirror so far has won two BAFTA Awards and seven Emmy Awards and is already considered a philosophical contemporary classic that grasps the zeitgeist of our digital era (Cirucci and Vacker 2018, vii). Due to the leading-edge, controversial topics that Black Mirror addresses, such as surveillance culture, spectacle and hyperreality, dystopian futures, and our quest for meaning in the technological era, the series has been widely explored by contemporary academia in the light of critical theorists such as McLuhan, Debord, Baudrillard and Foucault. However, the series has not so far been considered from the point of view of literary theory and textual criticism, that is to say, as narrative. Relying on the work of the literary theorists Propp, Tomashevsky, Greimas, Bremond, Hendricks, Barthes, Bal, and the work on fables by Blackham, Vandendorpe and Vindt, this chapter will carry out a formalist analysis of the popular series. The starting point of this research project, which began in 2015,1 are the apparent similarities between Black Mirror and the literary genre of the fable. The 23 episodes of Black Mirror—including the film Bandersnatch—are standalone, with different actors, plots and settings, and can be watched independently, similar to fables contained in a collection such as Aesop’s; they tackle cross-national themes, “presenting global-current problems” (Altunay 2015, 330), recalling the ways in which the very same fables from ancient India and Greece have been reworked and are

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still used in countries including France, Nigeria, Russia, Iran, England and China for purposes of instruction (Vindt 1987, 95; Blackham 1985, xx, 2–4); the brief but thought-provoking story lines of the 23 Black Mirror episodes and their unsettling and paradoxical plot twists resemble the structure of fables, brief tales in which the initial settings give rise to unexpected turns and results; and, most importantly, all Black Mirror episodes feature a moralizing ending, a lesson to be learnt, related to our current relationship with technology and how it is operating in the background of our consciousness. This last feature mirrors how, in fables, “a general outline is… reduced to a moralizing maxim… the individual work is perceived not in isolation, but against the background of the idea of the total genre existing in the literary consciousness” (Vindt 1987, 89– 90). As Charlie Brooker himself assured The Guardian before the series was launched: “If technology is a drug – and it does feel like a drug – then what, precisely, are the side effects?” (1 December 2011, n.p.). In ancient Greece, Aesop’s fables were cautionary tales that illustrated foolish or bad conduct in order to teach prudence in an amusing way, and in the first century AD the Roman Phaedrus versified and adapted Aesop’s Fables into Latin, asserting that they were aimed to correct “the mistakes of mortals” (Blackham 1985, 8). Black Mirror “dramatizes these behaviours… technology is never neutral in its effects… our technology and civilization have evolved far faster than our species, leaving our brains the challenge of making sense of the world” (Cirucci and Baker 2018, x). In this chapter, I will analyse each of the 23 episodes of the TV series Black Mirror in terms of events and actants, structure and possibilities, themes and moralizing endings concerning technology. In a detailed structuralist and narratological analysis, I will trace the intricate ways in which the series has been crafted as a collection of narratives. I will try to show how such an analysis of Black Mirror as a collection of twentyfirst-century fables can significantly improve our critical understanding of the series. At the end of this chapter I have included some tables to be consulted while reading, which graphically illustrate the sections and provide a brief overview of how the literary methodology has been adopted to examine the TV series as literature.

Actants and Events A. J. Greimas, based on and in an attempt to simplify Vladimir Propp’s model of 31 narrative “functions” ([1928] 1968, 38–85), proposes what

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he calls the “actantial model” of narrative. He divides the action of a given narrative into six components that he calls “actants” according to their function in the narrative: the subject, the object, the helper, the opponent, the sender and the receiver ([1966] 1983, xiii). For Greimas, an “actant” is therefore a person, creature or object that plays any of a set of active roles in a narrative. I will use this “actantial model” to scrutinize the characters’ motivations in Black Mirror through a narratological approach. Regarding “events,” Mieke Bal defines them as “the transition from one state to another state, caused or experienced by characters” (1985, 182). Bal proposes three criteria to limit the number of events to be investigated. The first criterion is “change” and distinguishes a fact or condition from a modification that alters the state of the actant. The second criterion is “choice”—which implies volition—when the actant decides to act or not, with consequences for the rest of the story. Bal’s criterion of “choice” corresponds to what Roland Barthes describes as a “functional unit” (1975, 246) in the tradition of Propp’s “functions” ([1928] 1968, 25) and Boris Tomashevsky’s “dynamic motifs” ([1925] 1965, 75). Significantly, Barthes states that “some narratives, among them fables, are predominantly functional” (1975, 247), meaning that they contain characters making decisions and performing actions that determine the progression of the story. Finally, Bal’s third criterion for classifying events is “confrontation,” or what Hendricks calls “paradigmatic sub-structures” (1973, 166), which means that opposition determines the structure of the story, and the actant starts the story by confronting something or some other actant (Bal, 186). I will apply these two narratological criteria, Bal’s classification of events and Greimas’ classification of actants, to the episodes of Black Mirror. First considering Bal’s classification of events, we find that out of 23 episodes, in nine of them the narrative progresses because of the actants’ choices, eight of them present explicit confrontations and in six episodes choice and confrontation are combined. However, in only four of the episodes the actants are moved by an unintentional change, and this is always combined with either an immediate confrontation or a choice (see Table 12.1). Since the presence of choice and confrontation in the actants’ motivations is almost identical, there is no big difference in the series’ tendency towards one or the other. A representative example of choice is S4E4 (“Hang the DJ”), in which Frank and Amy voluntarily use a dating app called the System to meet people in their quest for

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Table 12.1 Bal’s classification of “events” and Greimas’ Actantial Model Season and episode

Bal’s events Change

S1E1 The National Anthem S1E2 Fifteen Million Credits S1E3 The Entire History of You S2E1 Be Right Back S2E2 White Bear S2E3 The Waldo Moment White Christmas S3E1 Nosedive S3E2 Playtest S3E3 Shut Up and Dance S3E4 San Junipero S3E5 Men Against Fire S3E6 Hated in the Nation S4E1 USS Callister S4E2 Arkangel S4E3 Crocodile S4E4 Hang the DJ S4E5 Metalhead S4E6 Black Museum Film Bandersnatch S5E1 Striking Vipers S5E2 Smithereens S5E3 Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too

Greimas’ actants Choice

Confrontation

Wish

X X X

X X X

X

X X

X X

X X

X X X X X

X X X

X X

X

X X X X

X X X X X X

X

X

X X X

X X X X X X

Fear

X X X

X X

X X X X X X

love. The interactive film Bandersnatch even takes the idea of choice to a meta-fictional level by making the audience itself choose between two possibilities throughout the episode as an exercise of the illusion of free will. Similarly, in a great number of fables the motivating force that makes the plot advance is either choice or confrontation. For example, in Aesop’s The Lion and the Mouse the lion chooses to set the mouse free after capturing it, and in return, when some hunters catch the lion with a net, the mouse decides to gnaw through the net and free the lion. In

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the opposite way, Black Mirror’s S2E2 (“White Bear”) presents a manifest confrontation, when Victoria wakes up in her house with amnesia and on the street a man starts shooting at her for no apparent reason, while people follow and record her on their phones. Likewise, in Aesop’s fable The Miller, his Son, and the Donkey the miller has to confront from the very beginning constant criticism from passers-by about the way he and his son treat the donkey. This shows that both in classic fables and Black Mirror the narrative advances either when the characters make decisions or when they are forced to confront adverse situations. One example of the six episodes in which choice and confrontation are combined is S4E1 (“USS Callister”), in which new hire programmer Nannette’s clone “confronts” Daly who has cloned—in an act of choice— his co-workers to abusively command them in a simulated spaceship. In the same way, the fabulistic genre usually presents two actants who act out of choice and end up confronting each other. Aesop’s fable The Ant and The Grasshopper is a representative example of this kind: the grasshopper’s “choice” is to spend the summer singing and making fun of the ant, whose choice is to store up food for winter. When winter comes, they confront each other: the grasshopper asks the ant for food, but the ant refuses and holds the grasshopper’s idleness against it. Finally, there are only four episodes in Black Mirror in which a usually negative accidental change affects the actant, but these changes are always combined with either confrontation or choice. For example, in S3E3 (“Shut Up and Dance”) Kennie is recorded accidentally through his laptop camera while masturbating, which leads him to confront the hackers who blackmail him. However, it was Kennie’s initial choice of downloading an anti-malware program that activated his laptop camera to the blackmailers. In the special episode “White Christmas,” Joe is blocked and pixelated against his will by his pregnant girlfriend after a quarrel, but he confronts this blocking by following her and the kid for years. These episodes indicate that there is little room in Black Mirror for accidental changes: in all 23 episodes of the series, even in those four which on the surface might seem to contradict the pattern, the actants either willingly make a choice to change their initial state or are forced to confront an initial adverse situation. Similarly, there are few fables in which things occur accidentally to the actants, and when this happens, it is also combined with either choice or confrontation. Aesop’s The Fox and the Crow is a representative example, in that the reluctant crow

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is convinced (change) by the fox’s flattering words to open its mouth (choice) and let the piece of cheese fall down. The analysis of the actants in Black Mirror, showing the absence of change and the consistent importance of choice and confrontation, thus evinces that it shares its fundamental structure and content with the classic fable. A character wants, needs or is forced to do something, but cannot, does not want to, or is not allowed to do it. Only by forcing the actant to make decisions or confront obstacles does the plot advance. While this is true of narrative in general, in the particular cases of both literary fables and Black Mirror episodes, their brevity privileges action over description, so that the forced decision or confrontation appears sooner than in longer narratives such as novels or films. Greimas’ “actantial model” of six character roles is crucial to Bal’s research and her reduction to only two kinds of actants by dividing and merging Greimas’ six roles into two groups. According to Bal, actants “aspire towards an aim. That aspiration is the achievement of something agreeable or favourable, or the evasion of something disagreeable or unfavourable” (1985, 197). The verbs to wish and to fear are key in the kind of motivations the actants have. Regarding the fabulistic genre, Blackham suggests how “fear” is often present in the actants’ intentions in the form of suspicion, because many fables show “how dependence on others is certainly unsafe,” while “wish” is the opposite motivating force, when fables show “how what is won by cunning has to be kept by force” (1985, 8–9). When we apply this either-wish-or-fear pattern to the analysis of the actants’ intentions in Black Mirror, we find that in fifteen of the 23 episodes the actants are moved by a wish, while in the remaining eight they are moved by fear (see Table 12.1). A clear example of an episode in which the actant is moved by a wish is S3E1 (“Nosedive”), in which Lacie, who lives in a society where people rate their interactions on a five-star scale, is rated 4.2, but wants to reach a 4.5 rating to qualify for a discount on an apartment in a luxury suburb. By contrast, an example of an episode in which the actant is manifestly moved by a fear is S1E1 (“The National Anthem”), in which Prime Minister Michael Callow is blackmailed into having sex with a pig live on television. The entire episode revolves around the PM and his cabinet trying to prevent him from having to satisfy this bizarre demand. The fact that the number of episodes of Black Mirror in which the actants are moved by a wish is almost twice as high as those in which the actants are moved by a fear is striking and surprising in a series that

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approaches the dangers of technology and that has been described as “dystopia on television” (Altunay 2015, 1). One conclusion that may be drawn from this prominence of wishes over fears is that it can be precisely the frustration of these wishes via plot twists or their deviant nature that causes unsettling feelings in the audience. It might also be understood as a critique of current capitalist society, which incites a non-stop wishing for new things or goals, leaving no room to tolerate the frustration so necessary in the process of becoming an adult: “Instant gratification, on social media or otherwise, has led to a decrease in what therapists call ‘frustration tolerance’ among millennials… who have to make a super-extra effort to enter adulthood in full” (Livemint 30 November 2018, n.p.). It seems no coincidence that the fable genre has traditionally been used for the instruction of children due to its allegorical nature and the links it establishes between the concrete and the abstract (Blackham 1985, 4; Vindt 1987, 96; Vandendorpe 1989, 31); and indeed not only for children, as the example of John Locke, who thought Aesop’s collection of fables was “almost the only book he knew… which would join childhood to manhood” (Blackham 1985, 9), impressively illustrates. In conclusion, Black Mirror can be understood as aiming to be a modern equivalent of the educational fable, trying to entertain and educate its viewers at the same time.

Structure and Possibilities In her analysis of narratives, Bal refers to Aristotle, as well as Bremond, when describing the three phases that can be distinguished in every story: “the possibility (or virtuality), the event (or realization), and the result (or conclusion) of the process” (1985, 189). Vandendorpe also assures, concerning the structure of the fable, that a great number of them have a “mode d’organisation constant ” (1989, 31). For my analysis of the structure and story lines of the episodes of Black Mirror, I will use Bremond’s “model of possibilities,” in which he suggests that the structure of every narrative follows two basic types of sequences of events or possibilities that can be satisfied or not: amelioration—what Bal calls “improvement” (1985, 192)—which, through a sequence of processes, can be achieved or not; and “deterioration,” which, again through a sequence of processes, can be avoided or not (Bremond 1980, 390). Concerning the structure of each of the 23 episodes of Black Mirror, in three of them—“White Christmas,” S4E1 (“USS Callister”), and S4E6

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(“Black Museum”)—there are two main actants whose intentions follow different trajectories, so instead of 23 it is necessary to analyse 26 possibilities of either improvement or deterioration. Out of the 26 possibilities of events in the Bremondian sense that are present in Black Mirror, twelve are of improvement and fourteen are of deterioration (see Table 12.2). Thus, the difference is so small that it doesn’t yield any meaningful conclusions. However, what is significant is the analysis of whether or not Table 12.2 Bremond’s possibilities Season and episode

S1E1 The National Anthem S1E2 Fifteen Million Credits S1E3 The Entire History of You S2E1 Be Right Back S2E2 White Bear S2E3 The Waldo Moment White Christmas: Matt White Christmas: Joe S3E1 Nosedive S3E2 Playtest S3E3 Shut Up and Dance S3E4 San Junipero S3E5 Men Against Fire S3E6 Hated in the Nation S4E1 USS Callister: Ninnete S4E1 USS Callister: Daly S4E2 Arkangel S4E3 Crocodile S4E4 Hang the DJ S4E5 Metalhead S4E6 Black Museum: Nish S4E6 Black Museum: Haynes Film Bandersnatch S5E1 Striking Vipers S5E2 Smithereens S5E3 Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too

Bremond’s possibilities Improvement

Deterioration

Achieved and happy end

Avoided and happy end

Yes

No

Yes

No

Yes No

No No

Yes No

No

No

Yes

No

No

No

No No No No

No Yes No No

No Yes

No Yes

No

No

No

No

No No

No No

No

No

Yes No

No No

No No

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

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these improvements or deteriorations are fulfilled, that is, if the improvement is achieved and/or if the deterioration is prevented. In the same way that fables usually end in “an unexpected, often paradoxical conclusion” (Vindt 1987, 91), some episodes of Black Mirror also end in a paradoxical way, in that what seems an achievement is a resultant deterioration, and the other way round, in that what seems a defeat turns out to be an achievement. On account of this, out of the 26 possibilities or story lines in the TV series, ten end definitely in failure, in nine the actants fulfil their intentions but with tragic consequences, in two they do not achieve an improvement or prevent a deterioration but this denouement eventually benefits them, and only in five episodes (all of which feature, unsurprisingly, events of improvement) the actants reach their goals (see Table 12.2). A closer analysis of this pattern allows drawing further conclusions about the essence and evolution of Black Mirror as a whole. Among the episodes in which the actant neither achieves a goal nor prevents deterioration, S3E5 (“Men against Fire”) is a representative example. When soldier Stripe’s implant is deactivated by what Stripe thinks is a mutated “roach,” he confronts the system that implants a device called MASS into soldiers’ heads to make them kill humans unknowingly. However, under the threat of torture, Stripe consents to get MASS implanted again. Therefore, the improvement is not achieved. Another example is the interactive film Bandersnatch: in twelve out of the thirteen possible endings of the film, Stefan ends up killing somebody, goes to prison or dies. The resultant deterioration of his sequence of events is not prevented in the overwhelming majority of outcomes, in spite of the free choices made by the spectators. Among the episodes in which the actant achieves an improvement or prevents deterioration, but the ending is nevertheless tragic, a clear example is S1E3 (“The Entire History of You”). Liam is suspicious of his wife having cheated on him, but when he eventually discovers that he was right, thus achieving his wish to know the truth, he ends up alone missing his family. Another example of this category is S1E2 (“Fifteen Million Credits”) in which Bing is part of a capitalist system that makes people ride stationary bikes in exchange for “merits” in order to be part of a talent show. Bing decides to confront the system and goes to the show to express his anger on the stage where he threatens to commit suicide. His speech becomes so popular that he’s offered to be the host of his own TV programme, which he accepts. He achieves his improvement, but his attempted revolt is absorbed by the system.

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The only two episodes in which the actants do not achieve their initial improvement but this ending paradoxically turns out to be beneficial for them are S3E1 (“Nosedive”) and S4E4 (“Hang the DJ”). In the former, Lacie tries desperately to live in a luxury suburb where she imagines herself with a black boyfriend. After a sequence of deterioration events, her rating decreases to 1 because she starts speaking and acting without worrying about being rated. Lacie ends up arrested and in prison but more free than ever, revelling in the use of swear words together with the man in the cell opposite hers, who turns out to be black.2 In S4E4 (“Hang the DJ”), interracial couple Frank and Amy decide to rebel against “System” and run away together. But when they discover at the end that they are not humans and just copies within an app, the real Frank and Amy meet, with a high probability of ending up as a couple. Finally, there are only five episodes in the entire series in which the actants achieve their goals: S3E4 (“San Junipero”) in which the interracial couple formed by lesbian white cis actant Yorkie and bisexual black cis actant Kelly decide to live their love story in the virtual limbo of San Junipero permanently; S4E1 (“USS Callister”) where white cis actant Nannete’s clone releases her co-workers from digital “slavery”; S4E6 (“Black Museum”) in which black cis actant Nish avenges the repeated torture of her father’s consciousness; S5E1 (“Striking Vipers”) in which “heterosexual” black cis men and best friends actants Karl and Danny have sex for months in the virtual reality of a videogame through the artificial bodies of heterosexual Asian cis videogame characters Roxette and Lance, respectively; and S5E3 (“Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too”) in which white cis girl actant Rachel, with the help of her sister Jack and a robot called Ashley Too, saves white cis popstar Ashley O.’s life. Some of the conclusions that can be derived from this analysis are related to the series’ evolution throughout the years. It seems no coincidence that out of the 36 possibilities to be fulfilled, all seven episodes with a happy ending belong to the seasons run by Netflix. After Netflix purchased the series in 2015, the previously frequent dystopian and nightmarish denouements broadcast on Channel 4 were substituted by happy endings at an escalating rate: the later the episode was released, the higher the probability of a happy ending. Regarding race, the series has included black main actants from the very beginning in all seasons. However, the only three episodes that include real or virtual interracial couples as protagonists belong to Netflix seasons three and four, and all three of them end positively. The only episode in which all the real actants

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are black belongs to the latest season: S5E1 (“Striking Vipers”). It is also the first episode in the entire series that includes Asian main virtual actants, Roxette and Lance, through which black actants Karl and Danny fulfil their sexual pleasure. Regarding LGBTIQ+ concerns, there are only two episodes belonging to seasons three and five that include them as a main theme in the entire Black Mirror series, both of which end with a fortunate denouement: S3E4 (“San Junipero”) and S5E1 (“Striking Vipers”), which obliquely and superficially tackles transgender issues, as Karl gets sexual pleasure only within the body of Roxette, a virtual Asian cis woman. Finally, three episodes could be considered straightforwardly feminist: S3E4 (“San Junipero”) in which posthumanist feminism fully operates; S4E1 (“USS Callister”) in which Nannete’s clone saves the rest of her co-workers; and S4E6 (“Black Museum”) in which Nish eventually sets fire to the racist museum.3 The systematic way in which these episodes give positive visibility and relevance to feminism, LGTBIQ+ and racial themes in public discourse in their surprising happy endings once more aligns Black Mirror with the genre of the fable, in that they end on a moral which the audience is invited to reflect upon.

Moralizing Lessons: The Dangers of Technological Devices The moralizing ending is one—if not the most—quintessential feature of fables (Vandenlorpe 1989, 30). As Vindt assures, “the basic feature of the fable is that… a general outline is usually reduced to a moralizing maxim” (1987, 89). A fable is a composition “in the sense that it is occasioned, there is a reason for it… a message is cast in the form of a fable to baffle or deceive the official mind” (Blackham 1985, xiii). Bal, in her analysis of narratives, assures that “the intention of the subject is in itself not sufficient to reach the object. There are always ‘powers’ which either allow it to reach its aim or prevent it from doing so” (1985, 198). These “powers” are what Greimas calls “helper” and “opponent” ([1966] 1983, xiii). I would include in Bal’s description the possibility of “forcing,” so that these powers can force, allow or prevent the subject from fulfilling its intention. These powers are precisely the technological and media devices that appear in all episodes of Black Mirror, and whose use, misuse or abuse by the actants lead to the moralizing lessons of every episode. Like all fables, all Black Mirror episodes, which usually present “paradoxical situations” that end up in a “devastatingly twisted ending” (Cirucci and

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Vacker 2018, viii), are crafted towards the final moral they convey about the dangers of technology. I will analyse the way the series has evolved throughout the years in its moralizing treatment of a few of these devices. Thus, I will only refer to three kinds of devices, which tackle important themes in the series still unmentioned in this chapter, and which are presented in oppositional ways in different episodes, negatively in some of the first episodes, and positively in some of the most recent ones. In S1E3 “The Entire History of You” actants have a device called the “grain” inserted in their heads below their ears, which allows them to record, play and delete their memories at will. Liam, suspecting that his wife is cheating on him, misuses this device to prove he is right, and when he ends up alone obsessively replaying past memories of her, he decides to remove it himself from his head; however, in S4E3 “Crocodile,” the digital device is a machine that allows to visualize memories from eyewitnesses, which can help to solve crimes. Another example is S2E1 (“Be Right Back”) in which pregnant Martha buys a robot that is an identical replica of her late boyfriend, but when she realizes the robot cannot replicate every little detail of her boyfriend’s behaviour authentically, she ends up locking the robot in the attic; by contrast, in S5E3 (“Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too”) it is the robotic replica of Ashley O. which encourages and carries out the rescue of the popstar after whose model it was created, and which provides a happy denouement to the episode. Therefore, we can say that while robots are portrayed as creepy and unnatural in the 4th episode of Black Mirror, in the 23rd and latest episode of the series so far, they become an actant in the story who is responsible for its positive closure. Finally, in S3E2 (“Playtest”) actant Cooper accepts to participate in a playtest of a virtual reality videogame and is implanted a device in his neck to be part of the experiment. However, some interference during the initialization process makes him mix tormenting memories with enduring mental and physical pain, which eventually causes him to die in real life, and at the end of the episode it is revealed that he actually died only 0.04 seconds after the playtest started. On the contrary, in both S3E4 (“San Junipero”) and S5E1 (“Striking Vipers”) virtual reality and videogames are presented as unique spaces in which Yorkie and Kelly can fully live their love relationship, and Karl and Danny fulfil their sexual pleasure, respectively. We have examined so far three technological devices whose use changes from negative to positive as the series has evolved throughout the years.

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However, it must not be forgotten that only in six episodes of the entire series these devices help the protagonists, while in 18 of the episodes technology opposes the protagonists and prevents them from achieving their goals (see Table 12.3). Indeed, the plot of most episodes of Black Table 12.3 Technological devices as literary “power”: Greimas’ “helpers” or “opponents” Season and episode

Technological devices

Existing

S1E1 The National Anthem S1E2 Fifteen Million Credits S1E3 The Entire History of You S2E1 Be Right Back

Social Media

X

X

TV Realities

X

X

S2E2 White Bear S2E3 The Waldo Moment White Christmas S3E1 Nosedive S3E2 Playtest S3E3 Shut Up and Dance S3E4 San Junipero S3E5 Men Against Fire S3E6 Hated in the Nation S4E1 USS Callister S4E2 Arkangel S4E3 Crocodile S4E4 Hang the DJ S4E5 Metalhead S4E6 Black Museum Film Bandersnatch S5E1 Striking Vipers S5E2 Smithereens S5E3 Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too

Grain Memory Implant Human Replica. Robot Delete Memory Drug Virtual Puppet Z-eyes, Real Pixelation Social Eye-Implant Videogames Webcam

New

Helper

X

X

X

X

X

X X

X

X

X

X X X

X

X X

Virtual Limbo MASS. Brain Implant ADI. Drone Insects

X X X

Cloning in Videogame Controlling Implant Memory on a Screen Time-limiting Dating App Robotic Guard Dogs Consciousness Transplants Videogames VR Videogame Social Media Robot

X X X X X X X X X X

Opponent

X X X X X X X

X Nish

X X Haynes X

X X X

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Mirror can be read as an excuse to introduce a technological device and show its dangerous potential in the lesson to be learned at the end of the episode. In conclusion, the outline of all Black Mirror episodes is addressed, as in fables, towards the moralizing ending regarding these technological devices, which serves as the instructional lesson to be learnt in this collection of 23 fables of the twenty-first century that the series Black Mirror comprises.

Conclusions In this chapter I have outlined the results of a five-year research project on the TV series Black Mirror. Although the series can be analyzed from a lot of perspectives related to cultural studies due to the numerous and wideranging themes that it addresses (see Tables 12.4 and 12.5), Black Mirror had never been examined under rigorous narratological and literary techniques, as it has been here. This detailed formalist analysis of the series has proved how Black Mirror is a modern equivalent of a collection of classic educational fables, trying to entertain and educate its viewers/readers at the same time. All episodes convey a moral at the end that the audience is invited to reflect upon, and the plot of all Black Mirror episodes is indeed directed, as in fables, towards these moralizing endings regarding the technological devices they refer to, whose misuse serves as the instructional lesson to be learnt. The arguments in this chapter show the kinship of Black Mirror and fables, and thereby of TV series and literature. The examination of a TV series under narrative theory and textual criticism principles is a more than adequate choice to understand Black Mirror as a whole, inviting other scholars interested in analysing TV series from literary and narratological perspectives to follow in its footsteps.

X X X X

X X

X

X

X

X

X

X X

X X

X X X

X

X

X

X

Spectacle and social media

X X

X

X

X

X

Tech. vs. politics

X X

X

X

X

X

Individual control

X

X

X

X X X X

X

Prison and torture

DE

X

Surveillance culture

Themes I. society

J. B.

S1E1 The National Anthem S1E2 Fifteen Million Credits S1E3 The Entire History of You S2E1 Be Right Back S2E2 White Bear S2E3 The Waldo Moment White Christmas S3E1 Nosedive S3E2 Playtest S3E3 Shut Up and Dance S3E4 San Junipero S3E5 Men Against Fire S3E6 Hated in the Nation S4E1 USS Callister S4E2 Arkangel S4E3 Crocodile S4E4 Hang the DJ S4E5 Metalhead

Season and episode

Table 12.4 Themes I. society

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S4E6 Black Museum Film Bandersnatch S5E1 Striking Vipers S5E2 Smithereens S5E3 Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too

Season and episode

X

Surveillance culture

Themes I. society

X

Tech. vs. politics

X X

Spectacle and social media

X X

X X

Individual control X X

Prison and torture

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218

J. B.

DE

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Table 12.5 Themes II. Identity and posthumanism Season and episode

Themes II. Identity and posthumanism V. Reality, videogames and robots

S1E1 The National Anthem S1E2 Fifteen Million Credits S1E3 The Entire History of You S2E1 Be Right Back S2E2 White Bear S2E3 The Waldo Moment White Christmas S3E1 Nosedive S3E2 Playtest S3E3 Shut Up and Dance S3E4 San Junipero S3E5 Men Against Fire S3E6 Hated in the Nation S4E1 USS Callister S4E2 Arkangel S4E3 Crocodile S4E4 Hang the DJ S4E5 Metalhead S4E6 Black Museum Film Bandersnatch S5E1 Striking Vipers S5E2 Smithereens

Memory

Race

Gender and feminism

LGTBI+ and Queer theory

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X X X

X

X

X

X X X

X

X X

X

X X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

(continued)

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Table 12.5 (continued) Season and episode

Themes II. Identity and posthumanism V. Reality, videogames and robots

S5E3 Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too

Memory

Race

X

Gender and feminism

LGTBI+ and Queer theory

X

Notes 1. See my articles “Organic vs. Digital Memory: Memory Representation in British TV Series Black Mirror” (2016), and “MediaTerrorism, Cyber-Democracies and Contemporary Fiction: British TV Series Black Mirror” (2016). 2. From now on I will purposefully refer to the race and gender identity and orientation of some of the actants because the way Black Mirror approaches race, interracial couples and LGBTIQ+ themes is a topic that will be addressed at the end of this section. 3. For a deep analysis of these themes regarding gender and race in the series, I recommend Drage’s “A Virtual Ever-After: Utopia, Race and Gender in Black Mirror’s San Junipero,” and Cirucci’s “Digitally Natural: Gender Norms in Black Mirror,” both in Cirucci and Vacker (2018)’s. Unfortunately, I have not found any work analysing Black Mirror in depth regarding LGBTIQ+ concerns.

References Altunay, Melten. 2015. “Dystopia on Television: Black Mirror.” Eskisehir: Anadolu University. Accessed Online on April 1, 2019. Bal, Mieke. 1985. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Barthes, Roland. 1975. “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives.” New Literary History 6 (4): 237–272. Blackham, H. J. 1985. The Fable as Literature. London: Bloomsbury.

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Bremond, Claude. 1980. “The Logic of Narrative Possibilities.” New Literary History 11 (3): 387–411. Brooker, Charlie. 2011. “The Dark Side of Our Gadget Addiction.” The Guardian, December 1. Accessed online on June 13, 2015. Cirucci, Angela, and Barry Vacker. 2018, eds. Black Mirror and Critical Media Theory. Lanham: Lexington. Greimas, Algirdas Julien. (1966) 1983. Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method. Translated by Danielle McDowell, Roland Schleifer and Alan Velie. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 1973. “Les actants, les acteurs et les figures.” In Sémiotique narrative et textuelle, by Claude Chabrol. Paris: Larousse. Hendricks, William. 1973. “Methodology of Narrative Structural Analysis.” Semiotica 7 (2): 163–184. Livemint. 2018. “Why Millennials are Suffering from Depression.” November 30. Accessed online on May 12, 2019. Mittel, Jason. 2015. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press. Propp, Vladimir. (1928) 1968. Morphology of the Folktale. Austin: University of Texas Press. Tomaschevsky, Boris. (1925) 1965. “Thematics.” In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. 2nd ed., translated and edited by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Vandendorpe, Christian. 1989. “Lire des fables pour apprendre à lire.” Quebec français 74 (May): 30–33. Vindt, Lidiya. 1987. “The Fable as Literary Genre.” Ulbandus Review 5 (Fall): 88–108.

CHAPTER 13

‘University Politics’: Change and Continuity in Representations of Higher Education Between ITV’s Series Inspector Morse and Colin Dexter’s Morse Novels Sarah Olive

Introduction This chapter focuses on the phenomenon of Inspector Morse. I use the term ‘phenomenon’ throughout to cluster together two media: the Morse books by Colin Dexter and the Inspector Morse television series, inspired by Dexter, advised on by Dexter, but written and directed by numerous people. The stories of ‘Inspector Morse, an ageing, cultured but cantankerous loner, solv[ing] mysteries with the help of his assistant, …Lewis’ (Wickham, n.p.) are told across both media over a quarter of a century. The phenomenon can therefore be described as an example of ‘transmedia’, the notion that Henry Jenkins elucidated in Convergence

S. Olive (B) Bangor University, Bangor, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Winckler and V. Huertas-Martín (eds.), Television Series as Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4720-1_13

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Culture of ‘a [storytelling] process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed…across multiple delivery channels’ and ‘each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story’ (2007, see also Bird 1998, 12). The transmedial nature of the phenomenon is evident not just in its reception by readers and audiences but also in the history of its making. Dexter wrote thirteen Morse novels, and some short stories, between 1975 and 1999. Free-to-air British broadcaster ITV screened thirty-three episodes of Inspector Morse between 1987 and 2000: Central Television was ITV’s contractor for the English Midlands and they initiated work on the programme, then made for them by their subsidiary Zenith Productions (Sanderson 1995, 26). Each book and each episode involve a new murder: they are stand-alone plots, but with recurrent characters involved in the investigation, particularly the police and forensic pathologists based in Oxford, where most of the action is set. This is echoed in the premise for the television series: ‘Inspector Morse was never envisaged as anything but a collection of films’ (Sanderson 1995, 26, see also 53, 82). At the start of the series, when some of the novels waited twelve or thirteen years to be televised, the novels were not filmed in the order they were published. Later on, the novels were filmed almost as soon as they were published. All of the novels were adapted for television, although some were renamed and heavily reworked: when I use the word ‘televisation’ in this chapter, it is specifically these programmes I want to invoke. For example, The Secret of Annexe 3 became The Secret of Bay 5B, with a new setting and plot. Sometimes changes to the novels in the television series were taken up by Dexter in his subsequent writing of Morse novels—Lewis becomes a Geordie, fresh-faced policeman with a wife and children, for instance, leaving behind his original incarnation as an older, ex-boxer Welshman (Sanderson 1995, 20). Television not only affected the content Dexter wrote, but his style: ‘the television technique of brief, quick-fire scenes has had a beneficial influence, since my own chapters have grown steadily shorter’ (Dexter’s foreword in Bird 1998, 6). As noted above, there are far more titles in the television series than novels: thirty-three compared with thirteen. The first two and last five years of the television series rely almost exclusively on the novels, with the second and third years of its run increasingly using detailed storylines, ideas, ‘little stories and sketches’, especially commissioned for television from Dexter (Sanderson 1995, 21, 69; Bird 1998, 10).

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Dexter found the required writing of ‘fifty or sixty or seventy pages in five months’ overwhelming (Sanderson 1995, 21). Subsequently, Dexter told interviewers he was merely sent the almost completed scripts, which he read and made a ‘few suggestions’ about: ‘I occasionally write a bit of dialogue, otherwise I just keep an eye on Morse. You’ve got to have someone keeping an eye on the characterisation, his vocabulary and attitudes. I’m a kind of consultant’ (Sanderson 1995, 23, see also Bird 1998, 6). Dexter is also entwined into the series through his Hitchcock-style cameo appearances, which saw him spending a day on set for each episode (Sanderson 1995, 21). The producers at the outset, Kenny McBain and Ted Childs (the latter, executive producer and Central Television’s Controller of Drama) hired ‘the best writers [they] could’ to work on the show from the outset and, in its busiest years, there was a tradition of bringing in a new writer each year to prevent the programme from staling (Sanderson 1995, 25, 115). Storylines were commissioned by the writers about six months ahead of filming, with one more storyline than the series needed being commissioned to allow a ‘margin for error’ (Sanderson 1995, 81). The series’ writers also flag up the way in which any given episode could have additional writers, making it a highly collaborative script—even before it was interpreted during filming by the director and editor (Sanderson 1995, 71; also cf. Bradbury in Elsaesser et al. 1994, 103). A particularly impressive example of the convoluted textual history of many of the television instalments and their related novels is The Wolvercote Tongue (1987). Dexter wrote the plot outline for the television episode, before it was written for screen by Julian Mitchell. Then, four years later, Dexter published a novel, The Jewel That Was Ours (1991), which has marked differences to the plot of the television programme but is, according to the prefatory material to the novel, ‘based in part on an original storyline written by Colin Dexter for Central Television’s Inspector Morse’. Elsewhere, however, an anecdote more loosely describes the writing as a ‘Dexter/Mitchell double act’ (Sanderson 1995, 74). I detail this example here because it usefully highlights the rather enmeshed and messy relationship between the television series and the novels, reminding us that the Morse phenomenon should not be treated as the straightforward adaptation of a set of established texts from page to screen, but as something often more collaborative. The multifaceted entwinement of novels and episodes thwarts any attempt to read the books in a simplistic way as the progenitor of the television series. Indeed,

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the official website for the television programme—rather tautologically— emphasises its primacy in making the phenomenon a household name: ‘Inspector Morse had existed…in the books of Colin Dexter but it was the ITV version that was to catapult the character into TV’s stratosphere’ (ITV 2009). The show was sold to television stations internationally, screening to an audience of 750 million people in over forty countries (Sanderson 1995, 9). This chapter aims to make two contributions to the focus of this volume on the relationship between television series and literature. The first is to demonstrate that the creation of books and television series can develop in an intensely enmeshed way, so as to challenge linear notions such as hypo- and hyper-text, source text and adaptation, print and broadcast, author and adapter (Jenkins 2006, 2007; Cardwell 2002). The second aim builds on decades of work in adaptation studies to challenge a deficit or inferiority model of television ‘adaptation’ of books (Cardwell 2002). Although I discuss Inspector Morse in relation to notions of ‘quality’ generally, this chapter seeks to refute one accusation specifically: that television dumbs down and depoliticises the books that inspire some of its programming. The chapter concludes that, on the contrary, Inspector Morse embraces a greater role than the novels in articulating and critiquing higher education policy in 1980s and 1990s Britain.

‘We’re Not Politicians’: Challenging the Claim That Television Robs Books of Their Politics The reactionary claim that television adaptations are necessarily less intellectually sophisticated and politically engaged than the novels on which they are based has been previously problematised in relation to other programming involving adaptation and/or appropriation (Hutcheon 2013, 94; Sanders 2006, 97–98; Cardwell 2002, 21, 71), but not in relation to commonly-maligned genre works, nor in relation to a transmedia phenomenon. In spite of the denial in the quotation taken from the television version of Death Is Now My Neighbour for the above subheading, the television series Inspector Morse shifts the attention away from the eponymous literary character’s personal politics. Instead, it has a range of characters comment repeatedly on national policy concerning higher education in Britain, almost entirely under the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major (a brief reminder: the novels were published 1975–1999, the series ran from 1987 to 2000, and that

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Conservative reign spanned 1979–1997). However, before talking politics, I first offer a brief explanation of my methodology in choosing and analysing Morse/Inspector Morse. When I saw the call for chapters towards a book on the relationship between television series and literature, I knew I wanted to contribute a chapter on Morse/Inspector Morse. It is a phenomenon that relishes its literariness: its creator, novelist and short story writer Dexter, its television writers, and the lead character all love literature (classical literature is particularly well represented, as both Dexter and Morse’s degree subject), and both enjoy playing with verbal and visual allusions to literature. The use of epigraphs in the novels, for example, is described by Dexter as ‘a harmless bit of self-indulgence’ (Sanderson 1995, 15). Some of its screenwriters even describe the process of writing, including that of scripts for the television series, by using a discourse of literary composition: the title sequence that previews each episode was referred to as the proagon, after a similar tradition in Greek drama; one of the writers describes it as like writing ‘some kind of very formal poem…like writing a sonnet…similar to writing rhyme schemes…like writing for the theatre as well’ (Sanderson 1995, 32, 68). Furthermore, those involved in making the television series also constantly invoke the quality of the series in a way that feels aspirationally literary: they repeatedly stake a claim to the series as an example of high culture, viewed by a middle-class (read: ‘cultured’, ‘cerebral’) audience (Childs; Lewis actor, Kevin Whateley; writer Mitchell, producer David Lascelles, cited in Sanderson 1995, 26–27, 35, 57, 64, 67, 85). A billboard advertising The Oxford Playhouse declared, for instance: ‘Inspector Morse is no longer Oxford’s only decent drama’ (Sanderson 1995, 118). This perceived literariness was foregrounded in spite of the phenomenon being an example of the detective genre, which, as genre fiction and indeed television as a whole, is often set outside the bounds of literature or even television drama ‘proper’. Indeed, it could be argued that the television programme outstrips the novels’ literariness, if formal innovation is taken as the qualifying feature (which it is by critics such as Carter 1990). The novels were popularly and critically well-received, selling an estimated 200,000 copies by 1998 and receiving five awards from the Crime Writers’ Association. However, it was the television series that gained critical acclamation for its formal innovation. The British Film Institute page on the TV series explains that, even though the series adopts the familiar patterns of the English ‘“whodunnit” … formally, Inspector Morse set a new mould for TV drama’,

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especially with respect to its two hour running time and ‘languid’ pace (Wickham, n.p.). Indeed, ITV were initially concerned that the series was too high-brow and artsy to attract the large audiences they had in mind (Sanderson 1995, 26). However, their fears that literature and television would prove oil and water for their audience were quickly allayed, as Morse became ‘appointment TV’, viewing figures were in the tens of millions, and episodes gained places as ‘highest performing drama on UK television’ and in the top five ‘most watched individual programme of the year’ (ITV 2009; Sanderson 1995, 113, 121). The positive way in which Dexter, Inspector Morse’s makers, and critics write about the television series in relation to the novels offers an exception to the rule posited by Cardwell that television adaptations tend to be ‘valued not for their potential to develop or improve upon the original’ (2002, 13), arguably because the Morse phenomenon transcends adaptation. Although the phenomenon gelled with this volume’s declared mission of examining the relationship between television series and literature, I knew I did not want to reprise analysing literary allusions in the series. Besides me, other academics have published on literature in one or (much more occasionally) both of the Morse media. Others yet have analysed it as genre literature or television: detective or campus novels or drama (Baker 1994, 1995; Piper 2015; Carter 1990). Being a researcher in an Education department, looking at its representations of higher education felt like a good fit disciplinarily. I had already used an old article by Thomas Brooke Benjamin, an Oxford mathematician, on representations of higher education in popular culture, which mentions Morse, for teaching the campus novel for several years (1993). So, I (re)read all the novels, read the short stories for the first time and (re)watched the whole television series. My coding involved annotating the books and programme transcripts for instances of higher education. Usually this annotation was a one-word note in the margins: ‘undergraduate’, ‘college’, ‘assessment’, ‘conference’ and so on. Then, I re-read the excerpts I had coded from both media, thinking about similarities and differences between representations of higher education they contained: for example, between different characters, between the start and end of the books series, between the start and end of the television series and between the two media. What most caught my attention was the way in which the television series, to a greater extent than the books, seemed to draw attention to, even to critique, higher education policy in a fictional context (a fictionalised Oxford University and its colleges) that had strong, synchronous

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parallels in the actual UK sector. The television series uniquely obsesses over ‘university politics’ (Twilight of the Gods ): I use this phrase a little perversely to refer not just to internal, institutional politics, but to describe national politics impacting on higher education, in Britain, during the span of the series (cf. Showalter 2005, 145). My work builds on that of Helen Piper who argues that the ‘voice’ of the television detective works to articulate ‘profound dissatisfaction with the world around us’, ‘extending the question “what went wrong?” beyond the text [i.e. the dead body] and inviting audiences to reflect more generally on the social [and political] world around them’ (2015, 3, 1–2). The final three episodes of Inspector Morse were seen by about one-third of the British population (ITV 2009): I include these figures here because the reach of the programmes is crucial for my argument that the television show becomes a space for airing debate about national, government higher education policies of the time. Not only did viewers not turn off because of this content: perhaps they turned on in order to watch these political debates play out?

‘These Dreadful Cuts’: Thatcher’s Fiscal and Education Policy, Neoliberalism in the University Sector and Associated Changes to Higher Education Changes in higher education are articulated in both the novels and the television series. The novels tend to invoke them as part of a ‘history lesson’ for the reader stretching back to Oxford’s medieval origins. In contrast, the television series focuses on changes contemporary with the setting of the action and treats them in a way that is more pointedly political. The novels uniquely offer some detailed explication by Dexter of nineteenth-century reforms to the university spanning reforms to the range of academic subjects offered; standards; the diversity of the student and staff body, in terms of gender, faith, nationality and class (The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn, 24; Secret, 18; Last Bus to Woodstock, 99; The Riddle of the Third Mile, 47; The Dead of Jericho, 71; Jewel; Death). Dexter’s novels also include views on change in the academy from the perspective of teachers, perhaps informed by his own previous career as a secondary school Classics teacher. In the 1976 novel Last Seen Wearing, a modern language teacher, Roger Acum, is shown mid-INSET (in-service

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education and training) conference, listening to an academic expounding on the joys of teaching Racine, and beginning ‘to wonder if the premier universities were not growing further and further out of touch with his own particular brand of comprehensive school’ (159–160). His musings are not part of the equivalent television episode, perhaps because of the difficulty of rendering interior monologues on television, but clearly also because it represents a diversion from the plot and, in terms of the overall series, from university into secondary education. Only a little of Dexter’s evolving novelistic history of the university is sewn into the television series. For instance, heated debate about equal opportunities for university job applicants with disabilities and women features in the televisation of The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn. However, by far the most-invoked education ‘reforms’ impacting on the university in the television series are the contemporary funding cuts to higher education and the fostering of neoliberalism in the university under successive Thatcherite governments. It is possible to argue about the ‘real’ nature, size, and effect of these cuts and other aspects of higher education policy at the time. However, for the purpose of this chapter, their actuality is almost irrelevant: what matters is the prevalence of negative perceptions of them and their deleterious effects. Factors such as the television series spanning a slightly shorter and later period than the novels; the scripting of some of the novels over a decade after they were written by Dexter; and the need to avoid sudden changes in the atmosphere of the series, especially as it approached its end, perhaps explain why the politics of higher education seem to linger on Tory government policy even after its demise in 1997 (Roth 1995, 10, 17; cf Showalter, 15). An explicit focus on funding in higher education often occurs in episodes not based on a specific Dexter novel or represents the introduction of this focus into the script-writing where a novel is being adapted. In Ghost, a senior academic bemoans ‘these dreadful cuts’ when probed by Morse about the suitability of a diplomat appointed to the role of master of the college: ‘a college needs friends in high places’, he adds, presumably to protect, intermediate or negotiate benefits for particular institutions. There are rare moments when the insider perspective of the direness of Oxford’s situation is questioned, for example, when Morse points out that ‘the University is always moaning about how it hasn’t enough money. And yet there’s always enough for a college dinner for 200 guests’ (Twilight ). In another episode, audiences are invited, through a college member’s conversation with Morse, to understand such extravagant

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events as the institution speculating to accumulate, inviting prospective donors to dinner (Happy Families ). Oxford’s relative poverty, compared to American institutions, is discussed in The Daughters of Cain, with the former described as looking increasingly ‘like an ancient, down-atheel uncle. Someone in an old and none-too-clean cardigan, whom you ask to Christmas dinner simply for old times’ sake’. All of this demonstrates that paucity of funding is seen to be an issue in higher education throughout the television series. In the next few paragraphs, I demonstrate the solutions that the series shows, and usually problematises. They include moving to American universities, moonlighting, collaborating with industry, speculating financially and courting donations from corporations and individuals. The better academic pay that American institutions can supposedly afford is invoked in Cherubim and Seraphim and Fat Chance, along with the generous, alternative income streams afforded to scientists that can maintain them at Oxford, in spite of its low pay (see also The Infernal Serpent for more ‘science pays’ rhetoric). Some of these, such as consultancy, are legal; some, such as manufacturing and selling party drugs on the side of a research project, blatantly illegal. Carter demonstrates that science itself has been characterised as ‘barbarous’ in university fiction (1990, throughout chapter 6), but the lengths that scientists are supposedly prepared to go in navigating the funding cuts is a fresh seam mined by the television series. In the threat posed to the wider community through the deaths of young people who take the drugs this researcher has concocted, it is perhaps possible to read a ‘lesson’ to policymakers on the dangers of underpaying academics. It is not that such moonlighting is not present in the novels—giving lectures to tourists is mentioned as bringing in an additional £100 in Jewel (276). Rather it is the greater scale and calamity of the human consequences, in the television series, that freshly characterises lack of funding in higher education as a slippery slope that damages society. In the television series, scarcity of funding makes senior members of the colleges and university susceptible to fraudsters who appeal to their hunger, often greed, for money (Ghost, Masonic Mysteries ). Lewis, the spin-off series based on characters established in Morse/Inspector Morse, continued to pursue episodes concerned with an uneasy relationship between education and industry in the sciences, exploring research ethics in sleep-science studies (Reputation) and experimentation on animals in neurosurgery (Entry Wounds ).

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The television series is saturated with examples of canny investments, even financial speculation, many of which involve academics turning a blind eye to their unethical nature and the conflicts of interest they entail. The Infernal Serpent involves a college Master, formerly its successful investment bursar, popular with the college, but who has invested in an agro-chemical company. The company’s products have been subsequently linked to child cancer in the areas in which they have been used by academic and journalistic investigations. The interrogating academic—a well-known and much published environmentalist—dies from a heartattack after being assaulted in what looks to be an attack intended to silence him. Presciently fearing he would be killed, and unable to get any of the three newspapers he approached to carry his story, he taperecorded his allegations for the detectives to find in the event of his death. Morse has to tussle with Chief Superintendent Strange to pursue the case, with the implication that his superior is hobbled by his social relations with influential members of the university. In response to his superior’s resistance, Morse presses the conflict of interest, constraint on academic freedom wrought by the situation, and (in the light of the murder) criminal suspiciousness of ‘a CORBI representative [being] among the college’s advisors’. To this, Strange briskly offers the rejoinder: ‘Nothing unusual in that these days. Business subsidises universities’. In another episode, a college’s prospective investment with ‘rapacious bastards’ in an electronics export business is described by the college’s alumni and financial consultant on the matter as: ‘oil and water. Economic argument compelling. Politically, there were risks. On the whole, I thought, prospects were good for them’ (Happy). The television series is rife with examples of investment by Oxford colleges which serve to highlight for audiences the ‘tensions between the modern university and the world of business’ (noted by Showalter in relation to academic fiction 2005, 9, 78) and which it suggests are the product of contemporary UK higher education policy. Similarly, the television series includes numerous instances of donation from corporations and individuals to the colleges, some of which are at the heart of plot structures and murderous motivations. It depicts academics desperate, often fatally so, to secure such gifts to alleviate the supposed dearth of funding caused by higher education funding cuts. There are specific allusions to Thatcherite policy in terms of funding that will get around her moratorium on the creation of academic posts. These include ‘Allied Steel Engineering’ donating enough money for two

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college fellowships (Death); the donation of ‘two million to finance a new chair’ (Who Killed Harry Field?); plus a donation from the ‘demigod of third world education’, who ‘made his fortunes selling educational hardware to Asia’, which ‘will allow the college to unfreeze 10 of 16 frozen chairs’ (Twilight ). That the donor is receiving an honorary doctorate in law from the university implicitly as a ‘thank you’ is a nod towards the corrupting of academic standards, as well as perhaps ironically inviting audiences to recall the scandal eight years earlier around the decision of Oxford University Congregation (its governing assembly) not to award Thatcher an honorary doctorate of civil law in 1985, making her the only Oxford-educated Prime Minister that century not to receive one (Carter 1990). Indeed, also receiving an honorary doctorate in the episode is a Welsh opera star from a working-class, coal-mining background—it is barely implicit here that this is a community broken by the demise of British mining and Thatcher’s attempt to break the trade unions. The award is explained to Morse as an act of defiance from the singer’s childhood neighbour, the Vice-Chancellor, in the face of establishment politics and discrimination against the Welsh in England, during a prolonged period of strained Anglo-Welsh relations under Thatcher. It also represents an attempt by the Vice-Chancellor to balance the politically right-leaning award to the donor with a left-leaning ‘antidote’ to the neoliberal climate. Elsewhere, the wily ways of money-hungry colleges are not ameliorated by characters in the episodes and are left by the series as apparent warnings about the consequences of neoliberalism for the sector. Examples include the decision to rusticate rather than send-down an offending undergraduate because it is hoped his wealthy father will make a donation to the college (Daughters). In the same episode, a college fundraising campaign is callously rebranded a memorial appeal in ‘honour’ of a murdered don, knowing his popularity with alumni. This don was described in life by financially-minded colleagues thus: ‘his worth to the college wasn’t just his scholarship, it was keeping all this standing. And students and dons in it’ (Daughters ). Speeches by the University Chancellor become cynical fundraising ploys. We witness his notes being tweaked to draw forth donations from Oxford’s namesakes internationally, and he jokes with colleagues about the way in which any one with enough money can buy posterity at Oxford, getting their name into ‘the Bidding Prayer’: ‘lt’s something we say at the beginning of each academic year. Naming our benefactors. Thanking God…Your name does get recited, and the Warden

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and Fellows have to listen’ (Twilight ). The spectre of donors getting a say on everything from architectural designs, which are perceived to threaten Oxford’s existing aesthetics, to the content of degree programmes is raised in the same episode (though resistance to these changes is also problematised in the episode as rooted in xenophobia and racism). Where is Morse positioned in all of this? The novels clearly establish him to be a life-long Labour voter. He articulates several critiques of neoliberalism in the university throughout the series—especially where the academic characters are complacent about, or even criminally driven by, it. In Twilight, he rails against the attack on the humanities under the Tory government of the period (see Carter 1990, 251), positioning as his enemy, and the enemy of the law, anyone who ‘hates arts and ideas’ (this is his attempt to profile the killer in this particular episode). The episode concludes with Morse sighing: ‘Art and life, Lewis. Art and life… Always preferred art, myself. Don’t know about life’, suggesting not just his characterisation in the television series as a lonely, unworldly bachelor (unlike his strip-club visiting incarnation in the novels) but the value he places on the escapist functions of art, a related sector despised by Thatcher. Yet Morse is not above occasionally voicing a critique of higher education from a seemingly neoliberal standpoint—or at the very least, demonstrating what Brooke Benjamin claims was widespread negative bias in public attitudes to higher education and misconceptions of research (1993, 47). For example, Morse derides the futility of academic research in the novel of The Way Through the Woods, rather mocking a doctoral dissertation on the bodyweight of the great tit (223). In the television version, Silent, he extends the target of his railing from niche research topics to include teaching and assessment, echoing a populist critique of academia as lacking real-world application: ‘These dons! There’s enough brains here to save the British economy. What do they do? Obscure research and teaching loutish undergraduates. A lot of important research goes on, cancer and that. Yes, of course. But it’s pretty rarefied, setting exams’. Some possible explanations for Morse’s slippery stance suggested in the series include that his character’s attitude is influenced by bitterness at his own failure to carve an academic career, and therefore jealousy (Dexter’s foreword in Bird 1998, 7); but also the fact that the multiple script-writers of the series inflected the character slightly differently—even within an episode, since in the televised Silent, Morse rebukes academia for being too worldly and not worldly enough, all in the space of two hours. Ultimately, however, Morse is a voice against the

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monetisation of higher education on the basis of its potential to corrupt academics and institutions and to lower standards, decrying the ‘service industry’ set-up of the English language testing syndicate in Silent and rebuking the college leadership that ‘economic considerations seem to play an inordinate part in this college’s thinking, sir’ (Daughters ). Both of these exchanges are introduced to existing Dexter titles by the television script-writers. Before concluding the chapter, I want to consider two further phenomena highlighted by the television ‘adaptations’ which Inspector Morse does not explicitly link to funding cuts in the series, but which are often connected to funding issues in public debates on higher education policy: outreach activities by academics and the marginalisation of students. One of these is a proliferation of academics undertaking outreach activities in the television series, compared to the novels. By ‘outreach’, I mean activities intended to reach a public audience beyond members of the university. Both the novels and the television series include mention of academics working on traditional outputs—monograph publications loom particularly large. However, the television series also shows academics engaged in making documentaries (Greeks Bearing Gifts ); being lured to London by the prospect of a television appearance—Morse and Lewis discuss ‘What would flatter a university man in his sixties?…Appearing on television in something intellectually respectable’ (The Last Enemy); and newspaper reporters profiling current and prospective Masters, heads of college (Infernal, Death). While the emphasis on these activities fits the general pattern of the more intensive investment of the television series in the politics of educational funding, it is important to keep in mind that it might also be practically motivated: showing an academic writing a book is better suited to novels, with their reliance on words, than television, with its emphasis on movement and dialogue (Sanderson 1995, 21). A final difference between the television series and the novels is the former’s relegation of student experience: we do not see or hear from many of them as central characters; certainly, we do not see or hear from them engaged in mundane university life other than fleetingly, by way of dressing the shots of the colleges and city streets. When we do occasionally hear from or about them, it is in the direst of circumstances: an undergraduate reprimanding an academic for his research glorifying war, as she sees it, in an ironic vote of thanks (Greeks ); an undergraduate experiencing an attempted rape by her tutor (Enemy); an undergraduate falling

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to their death while on a drug-induced trip (Daughters ); and a female PhD student being exploited by her supervisor academically and sexually (Bus ). What we do not get here that we do in the novels—apart from much attention to everyday student experiences—is much of a glimpse into their minds. In the novels, we read Morse’s reflections on his own undergraduate days; reflections by other characters on their student days (Anne in Jericho); or the working-class history undergraduate enraptured by the intellectual and romantic thrill of supervision: ‘Being with Cornford, talking with him for an hour every week– that had become the highlight of her time at Oxford’ (Death, 100). Once more, there are practical reasons for this in the television series, such as the need to concentrate the focus on a small number of core characters throughout, rather than being able to momentarily flit to a peripheral character (Sanderson 1995, 20). However, the reduced student perspective in the television series further contributes to the series’ critique of UK higher education’s neoliberalist trajectory. The series enacts the marginalisation of students within the university sometimes posited as a consequence of the monetisation of academia: the academics seem to be far too busy thinking about smart college investments or entertaining prospective donors to devote much time or thought to them. The television series concluded in the year 2000. As such, it does not capture any effects of the tuition fees introduced under New Labour in 1998 that might be expected to make students, as clients of the university, a greater focus of the dons. Interestingly, the sequel programme, Lewis—which comfortably spanned the raising of tuition fees in England in 2004 and 2010—features students as main characters, including in student theatre productions and student magazines, and also represents undergraduate lectures. Whether a comment on the centrality of student experience in a fee-paying regime or part of a drive to recruit younger audience members to the programme, it effectively throws attention onto students within the university to a greater extent than many instalments of Inspector Morse.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have identified the Morse novels and television series as a transmedia phenomenon: one in which each medium makes a distinctive and valuable contribution, but in which the media developed alongside

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each other in an intensely enmeshed way. Although I have suggested some practical reasons for differences between the Inspector Morse television series and the Morse novels, I have also argued that the television series offers a more sustained, explicit engagement with the British social and political climate of the late 1980s and the 1990s, specifically higher education policy under successive Tory governments, than the novels. That it does so with such consistency is all the more remarkable given the variety of writers involved, but also because of the need for the series to sell well internationally (Sanderson 1995, 26–27, 53, 82). Perhaps this domestic political content was felt not to get in the way of the gripping detective plot. Perhaps it was seen as part of the quintessential Britishness that made the series so successful overseas (Olive 2013). Perhaps debate about the neoliberal university was held to be sufficiently globally prevalent to be of interest beyond the UK. Another possibility is that those involved in the series’ production were piqued enough to let their creation of a fictional space for debating the neoliberal university triumph no matter what. Alan Pater describes ‘a quality of British [television] writers’ thus: ‘we love to preach about the state of the nation…What a writer offers is a passionate and personal view of the world. In the best British television, these personal views were able to flourish, and profound questions were asked of the audience’ (Elsaesser et al. 1994, 125). Many of Inspector Morse’s writers, and directors, had themselves known and benefitted from greater state funding of higher education and the arts than subsequent generations. For example, Anthony Minghella was a university teacher before giving up that job to write full-time; similarly, Malcolm Bradbury, best known for his novel The History Man—which, adapted for television ‘under Thatcherismus’, became a critique of the excesses of 1960s liberationism and radicalism in higher education (Sanderson 1995, 28; Elsaesser et al. 1994, 100). Another writer, Julian Mitchell, ‘received a first-class degree in history while attending Wadham college and later spent a year doing research at St Antony’s College’ (Sanderson 1995, 67). Daniel ‘Danny’ Boyle and John Madden have worked as theatre and film directors, sectors also smarting from cuts to state funding during the period Inspector Morse was made. Or, perhaps, ITV felt that critiques of the prevailing political regime would sit well with its audience, themselves feeling the pinch of recessions during the series’ span. The television series’ frequent engagement with the politics of higher education refutes patronising, paternalistic ideas

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about the nature and audiences of television evident in writing, at the time, on universities in popular culture by the likes of Oxford academic Brooke Benjamin (1993). Indeed, Childs and McBain are on the public record as having resisted initial pressure to dumb down the show because they were passionate about not patronising audiences (Sanderson 1995, 26). The consistency with which Inspector Morse embraces a greater role than the novels in articulating and critiquing higher education policy in 1980s and 1990s Britain makes the phenomenon a useful example with which to challenge pervasive over-generalisations about the depoliticising nature of literary adaptation for television.

References Morse Novels and Short Stories Cited Dexter, Colin. 1975. Last Bus to Woodstock. London: Macmillan. ———. 1976. Last Seen Wearing. London: Macmillan. ———. 1977. The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn. London: Macmillan. ———. 1981. The Dead of Jericho. London: Macmillan. ———. 1983. The Riddle of the Third Mile. London: Macmillan. ———. 1986. The Secret of Annexe 3. London: Macmillan. ———. 1991. The Jewel That Was Ours. London: Macmillan. ———. 1992. The Way Through the Woods. London: Macmillan. ———. 1993. Inspector Morse: Morse’s Greatest Mystery and Other Stories. 2016. London: Macmillan. ———. 1994. The Daughters of Cain. London: Macmillan. ———. 1996. Death Is Now My Neighbour. London: Macmillan.

Inspector Morse and Lewis Episodes Cited Boyle, Daniel. 1992. “Happy Families.” Inspector Morse. Television program. London: Zenith Productions/Central Independent Television/Carlton Television. Bradbury, Malcolm. 1998. “The Wench Is Dead.” Inspector Morse. Television program. London: Zenith Productions/Central Independent Television/Carlton Television. Buckman, P. 1989. The Last Enemy. Inspector Morse. Television program. London: Zenith Productions/Central Independent Television/Carlton Television.

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Case, Geoffrey. 1991. “Who Killed Harry Field?” Inspector Morse. Television program. London: Zenith Productions/Central Independent Television/Carlton Television. Cullen, Alma. 1989. The Secret of Bay 5B. Television program. Inspector Morse. London: Zenith Productions/Central Independent Television/Carlton Television. ———. 1990. “The Infernal Serpent.” Inspector Morse. Television program. London: Zenith Productions/Central Independent Television/Carlton Television. ———. 1991.“Fat Chance.” Inspector Morse. Television program. London: Zenith Productions/Central Independent Television/Carlton Television. Ellice, Thomas. 1988. “Last Seen Wearing.” Inspector Morse. Television program. London: Zenith Productions/Central Independent Television/Carlton Television. Jenkins, Helen. 2014. “Entry Wounds.” Lewis. Television program. London: ITV. Lewis, Russell and Stephen Churchett. 2006. “Reputation.” Lewis. Television program. London: ITV. Minghella, Anthony. 1987. “The Dead of Jericho.” Inspector Morse. Television program. London: Zenith Productions/Central Independent Television/Carlton Television. Mitchell, Julian. 1987a. “The Silent Word of Nicholas Quinn.” Inspector Morse. Television program. London: Zenith Productions/Central Independent Television/Carlton Television. ———. 1987b. “The Wolvercote Tongue.” Inspector Morse. Television program. London: Zenith Productions/Central Independent Television/Carlton Television. ———. 1989. “Ghost in the Machine.” Inspector Morse. Television program. London: Zenith Productions/Central Independent Television/Carlton Television. ———. 1990. “Masonic Mysteries.” Inspector Morse. Television program. London: Zenith Productions/Central Independent Television/Carlton Television. ———. 1992. “Cherubim and Seraphim.” Inspector Morse. Television program. London: Zenith Productions/Central Independent Television/Carlton Television. ———. 1993. “Twilight of the Gods.” Inspector Morse. Television program. London: Zenith Productions/Central Independent Television/Carlton Television. ———. 1996. “The Daughters of Cain.” Inspector Morse. Television program. London: Zenith Productions/Central Independent Television/Carlton Television.

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———. 1997. “Death Is Now My Neighbour.” Inspector Morse. sion program. London: Zenith Productions/Central Independent sion/Carlton Television. Nichols, Peter. 1991. “Greeks Bearing Gifts.” Inspector Morse. sion program. London: Zenith Productions/Central Independent sion/Carlton Television.

TeleviTeleviTeleviTelevi-

Reference List Baker, Susan. 1994. “Comic Material: ‘Shakespeare’ in the Classic Detective Story.” In Acting Funny: Comic Theory and Practice in Shakespeare’s Plays, edited by Frances Teague, 164–180. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. ———. 1995. “Shakespearean Authority in the Classic Detective Story.” Shakespeare Quarterly 46 (4): 424–448. Bird, Christopher. 1998. The World of Inspector Morse. London: Boxtree. Brooke Benjamin, Thomas. 1993. “Public Perceptions of Higher Education.” Oxford Review of Education 19 (1): 47–63. Cardwell, Sarah. 2002. Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Carter, Ian. 1990. Ancient Cultures of Conceit: British University Fiction in the Post-war Years. London: Routledge. Elsaesser, Thomas, Jan Simons, and Lucette Bronk. 1994. Writing for the Medium: Television in Transition. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Hutcheon, Linda. 2013. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. ITV. 2009. Inspector Morse. http://www.itv.com/Drama/copsandcrime/morsew eekend/Abouttheshow/default.html. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: When Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. ———. 2007. “Transmedia Storytelling 101.” Confessions of an Aca-fan. http:// henryjenkins.org/blog/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html. Olive, Sarah. 2013. “Representations of Shakespeare’s Humanity and Iconicity: Incidental Appropriations in Four British Television Broadcasts.” Borrowers and Lenders 8 (1): n.p. http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/700/show. Piper, Helen. 2015. The TV Detective: Voices of Dissent in Contemporary Television. London: Bloomsbury. Roth, Marty. 1995. Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. Sanders, Julie. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Palgrave. Sanderson, Mark. 1995. The Making of Inspector Morse. London: Pan.

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Showalter, Elaine. 2005. Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wickham, Philip. n.d. “Inspector Morse.” British Film Institute. Accessed 8 November 2019. http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/523493/.

CHAPTER 14

Musical Paratexts: Song Lyrics in Television Series Arturo Mora-Rioja

Introduction For the last four decades, part of the scholarly community has demanded more attention to the role of music in television. Hicks claimed that TV theme songs constitute a “category of music [that] has yet to be investigated” (1992, 13), Tagg highlighted the “need for a greater understanding of the role of music in contemporary mass media” ([1979] 2000, n.p.), and Negus and Street, in their introduction to a full issue of the Popular Music journal devoted to “Music and Television,” complained about television having “been conspicuously neglected in studies of popular music, … music [being] notably absent from most accounts of television” (2002, 245). In the specific context of TV series, music can perform several functions related to the narrative process: defining genre, supporting characterisation and giving the audience clues about place, culture, class and value systems by establishing a sense of atmosphere

A. Mora-Rioja (B) Copenhagen School of Design and Technology (KEA), Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Winckler and V. Huertas-Martín (eds.), Television Series as Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4720-1_14

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and locale (Stadler and McWilliam 2009, 74). Besides fulfilling these purposes, also present in film, music can create community by deepening television’s ritual function, especially through recurring musical pieces (Gorbman 2011, ix–x). Moreover, sound’s relation with television has a particular nature: “Unlike film, which initially used intertitles and mime to convey meaning, television piggybacked on the popularity of both radio and cinema, and was introduced in the 1950s with synchronised sound. As a consequence, sound has been central to television content” (Stadler and McWilliam 2009, 67). A common practice in TV series is to use music with lyrics, not only for the opening credits, but also along the televisual narration. This technique influences the viewing at different levels, since the spectator deals simultaneously with the on-screen action, the dialogue, the instrumental musical layer, and the content of the sung lyrics, pop music performing the soundtrack function previously granted to instrumental music (Donnelly 2002, 331). This tendency, already present in series from the 1980s and 1990s like Miami Vice or Ally McBeal (Brown 2001, 275; Deaville 2011, 20), has intensified with time (Stadler and McWilliam 2009, 73), even to the point of having some of the actors singing soundtrack songs (Vonda Sheppard in Ally McBeal , Madeleine Martin in Californication, Katey Sagal in Sons of Anarchy). Song lyrics bear a relation of intertextuality to the main televisual text surrounding them, with both elements contributing to the weaving of the final cultural product. In fact, an etymological approach is relevant here, since the word “text” comes from the Latin “textum,” which refers to both “[a] woven fabric” and to the process of styling and patterning the weaving (Glare 2016, 2133). The televisual text—which I will call the text of the series from now on—involves the weaving together of narrative, plot, action, pace, characterisation, camera framing, script and any other elements contributing to the perception of the TV series the song lyrics are inscribed in. As this analysis focuses on the relation of the lyrics with the text of the series, I will scrutinise the former in terms of transtextuality, defined by Genette as “[the text’s] textual transcendence – namely, everything that brings [the text] into relation (manifest or hidden) with other texts” ([1979] 1992, 81). Since song lyrics are part of the series, but their content does seem secondary and not strictly necessary to understanding its text—an assumption which is challenged below—their function can be said to mirror that of what, in the context of literature, Genette calls a paratext —“a title, a subtitle, intertitles; prefaces, postfaces, notices, forewords, etc.; marginal,

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infrapaginal, terminal notes; epigraphs; illustrations; blurbs, book covers, dust jackets, and many other kinds of secondary signals … [which] provide the text with a (variable) setting and sometimes a commentary” ([1982] 1997, 3). Genette does not understand the relation of transtextuality between text and paratext as a closed border, but as a threshold, “a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that … is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it” ([1987] 1997, 2). This is the approach I will use to analyse the relation between the text of the series and the song lyrics (its musical paratexts). As both TV series and pop songs are instances of contemporary popular culture, they are the object of fan analysis on the Internet. The website tunefind.com provides information about the songs being played in every episode of a comprehensive list of TV series, including a description of the action going on while the music is playing. At songfacts.com, users can browse through a series of factual and anecdotal comments on different types of songs, including those used in the soundtrack of TV series (in fact, they provide a page named “Songs Used in TV Shows” (Songfacts, n.d.). Some blog posts remark on the importance of music in TV series (Villasenor 2018; Cot 2017), and Quora users have discussed “the best use of a song during a movie or tv show scene” (Quora, n.d.). On a scholarly level, the topic of songs in TV series has been addressed by Hicks (1992), Brown (2001), Donnelly (2002), Deaville (2011), Gorbman (2011), and Stadler and McWilliam (2009). Stanitzek has studied the paratext in audio-visual media (2005) and Mehta has analysed the concept in relation to the film Fan (2017). I will broaden the scope by studying a larger corpus that covers some of the most acclaimed TV series of the last two decades, regardless of their genre or geographical origin. For this purpose, I divide the songs under scrutiny into two broad categories, and then subdivide them into more specific subcategories. The main division identifies songs as either non-diegetic (audible only to the spectator) or diegetic (also audible to characters), while the subdivision sorts the subcategories based on the lyrics’ level of interaction with the text of the series in ascending order.

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Non-diegetic: Closing Credits The songs playing while the closing credits roll present the lowest level of interaction with the text of the series, since they do not interact with the characters and, unlike songs in opening credits, do not anticipate elements from the main text. In fact, their interaction scope is so limited that most TV series nowadays end their episodes with instrumental music. The function of closing credits’ songs finds a parallel with that of a postface, a literary paratext also in decline in present times. An exception is Extras , where Cat Stevens’ “Tea for the Tillerman” (1970) blends in with the final scene of each episode providing a mood counterpoint. The series, which depicts in comic fashion the struggle of television extras to secure acting jobs and gain recognition, presents its protagonists as losers whose lofty expectations get invariably undermined at the end of each episode. By focusing on the simple life of a tillerman and painting a positive image of children playing—“Oh Lord, how they play and play / For that happy day, for that happy day”—Stevens’ song contributes a stark contrast with the gloom of each episode’s ending. The series establishes a dialogue with an audience that has already watched the full instalment, as a novel does with its readers via its postface (Genette [1987] 1997, 237). In the case of Extras , this paratext is a reminder—ironic, since the characters cannot hear it—about the pleasures of a simple life as opposed to the psychological unrest resulting from unfulfilled expectations. There are TV series whose closing credits music varies from episode to episode, so that it adapts to the particular mood of each instalment. A prime example is “Walk of Punishment,” an episode from the medieval fantasy series Game of Thrones , whose shocking last scene—one of the show’s main characters, a top right-handed swordsman, has his right hand amputated—is followed by a totally unexpected punk rendition of the most popular song in the show, in the words of showrunner D. B. Weiss, “[t]o really hammer home the shock of that moment” (Hibberd 2013). This effect is particularly useful in season-closing episodes, as occurred in the first season finale of Treme, a drama series which focuses on the plights neighbours face in post-Katrina New Orleans and on their strong will to reconstruct their lives in the face of adversity. Steve Earle’s “This City” (2011) was specifically written for season one’s final episode. Its lyrics hyperbolically forecast the immortality of the city despite common climate catastrophes—“This city won’t wash away / This city won’t ever drown”—rely on the relevance of its cultural heritage—“This city

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won’t ever die / Just as long as her heart beats strong / Like a second line steppin’ high / Raisin’ hell as we roll along”—and remarks on its inhabitants’ determination to resume their lives in the Crescent City— “Doesn’t matter ‘cause there ain’t no way / I’m ever gonna leave this town.” The verses evoke the sorrowful yet hopeful atmosphere the season distils, blending resignation and will, and giving spectators a hint about the series’ future developments without disclosing key information. As Genette explains, a postface such as “This City” allows for a balanced communication where the author tells the spectator: “Now you know as much about [the series] as I, so let’s have a chat” ([1987] 1997, 237).

Non-diegetic: Opening Credits The first episode of a series begins. The sky appears behind a wired fence followed by a succession of close-ups of women’s faces. As the opening credits roll, the following lyrics are sung: The animals, the animals Trapped, trapped, trapped ‘till the cage is full The cage is full, the day is new And everyone is waiting, waiting on you And you’ve got time

As the word “time” is uttered, a frame shows a woman in the orange uniform inmates wear in American prisons. The song is “You’ve Got Time,” by Regina Spektor (2013), and the series, which depicts women’s life in prison, is Orange Is the New Black. “Time” alludes to time served. Before the text of the series is fully unveiled, the spectator thus receives a solid hint about the series’ setting thanks to a musical paratext. Song lyrics for opening credits play the part of the preface in a novel, which is “to account for the title, something that is all the more necessary when the title … is allusive, indeed, enigmatic” (Genette [1987] 1997, 213), as is the case with the series under scrutiny. This type of paratext “constitutes an unbalanced … situation of communication: its author is offering the reader an advance commentary on a text the reader has not yet become familiar with” ([1987] 1997, 237), which is why its level of interaction with the text of the series is higher than that of song lyrics for closing credits—the televisual postface.

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There are many further examples of opening song lyrics as paratexts. The Sopranos tells the story of an Italian-American mobster. The opening credits show the protagonist driving, while the lyrics of Alabama 3’s “Woke Up This Morning” (1997) anticipate the character’s darkness and violence: “Well, you woke up this morning / Got yourself a gun … you were born under a bad sign with a blue moon in your eyes … Your papa never told you about right and wrong.” The lyrics may not completely define the character, but they can be read as the author’s “statement of intent” (Genette [1987] 1997, 221). Outlander addresses the history of Scotland using time travel as a narrative device. Its opening song, arranged by Bear McCreary (2015), presents several levels of intertextuality: its being the nineteenth-century Scottish tune “The Skye Boat Song” provides a national context; however, its original lyrics, which tell of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s escape after the Jacobite uprising of 1745, were later rewritten by Robert Louis Stevenson in his poem “Sing Me a Song of a Lad That Is Gone” (2012). The series takes two steps further: first by altering the poem to fit the gender of the series’ protagonist—making reference to a “lass” instead of a “lad”; and second by translating part of the lyrics to French in the series’ second season due to the story switching its geographical setting to France. This instance emphasises Genette’s concept of transtextuality and suggests powerful possibilities in the use of paratextual devices. A particularly subtle case is that of the Choir of Young Believers’ “Hollow Talk” (2008), which opens and closes the episodes of the Swedish-Danish thriller The Bridge, where a pair of police officers solve one crime per season. The title song depicts Swedish detective Saga Norén’s internal struggle to come to terms with her own life. Her having Asperger’s syndrome impairs her knowledge of herself and her relations with other persons. The song lyrics start describing her inner landscape: Echoes start as a cross in you Trembling noises that come too soon Spatial movement which seems to you Resonating your mask or feud

However, upcoming verses are more enigmatic: And then you cut You cut it off

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And everything Goes back to the beginning

The subtlety lies in the fact that it is not until well into the series that the spectator learns about Saga’s backstory: her sister committed suicide when she was fourteen, and their abusive mother put the blame on the detective’s inability to communicate, which is why Saga always felt guilt. After the mother kills herself in the third season, Saga is accused of murder and incarcerated due to her inexpressiveness when facing her charges in court. It is only in the last season of the series when, once free after a retrial, Saga discovers that the origin of her guilt and the cause of her sister’s suicide were rooted in their mother’s psychological illness. Throughout the four seasons, the protagonist always introduces herself as “Saga Norén, länskrim, Malmö” (“Saga Norén, Malmö County Police”). The last scene of the series shows a renewed Saga who quits the police force and uses only her name when answering the phone. As the opening lyrics prophetically stated, she cuts her ties in order to find a new beginning. As with Orange Is the New Black’s “You’ve Got Time,” these lyrics fulfil the function of a literary preface where the author offers “an advance commentary on a text the reader has not yet become familiar with” (Genette [1987] 1997, 237). In this case, however, the commentary is so cryptic that the spectator will only realise the full implications of the lyrics after the final reveal in the text of the series.

Non-diegetic: Incidental Songs When contemplating TV series from the point of view of literature, there is one single element that clearly delimits the main differences between both media: time. In the case of literature, the reader decides his/her reading pace, which is usually discontinuous: some pages are simply skimmed, others slowly savoured; certain sentences are re-read; reading pauses vary in length. TV series’ episodes, on the contrary, have a predetermined viewing length and a preestablished pace the spectator’s mind needs to adapt to. This time factor shapes the different mechanisms both media employ to use authorial asides. In literature, these asides take the form of notes (footnotes, endnotes, marginal glosses); in TV series, they are incidental songs that, although inaudible to characters, comment on the text of the series and establish a direct communication

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with the spectator. Genette considers a note “a local detour or a momentary fork in the text … [which] belongs to the text almost as much as a simple parenthesis does. With this kind of note we are in a very undefined fringe between text and paratext” ([1987] 1997, 328). However, thanks to the time factor in TV series, the incidental song runs parallel to the sequence of frames that constitutes the main narration, providing a running commentary on it instead of interrupting its flow, as literary notes do. The viewer focuses on the action, the dialogue, the imagery; at precisely the same time, music plays in the aural background of the visual landscape, and lyrics comment on the text of the series, thus serving a paratextual function. Grey’s Anatomy is a drama series about the lives of medical personnel at an American hospital. In the second season’s episode “Superstition,” a scene depicts stressful moments where doctors undergo different surgeries and make quick decisions affecting their patients’ lives. In the operating room, Doctor Shepherd states “it’s a beautiful afternoon to save lives, people,” shortly after The Fray’s “How to Save a Life” (2005) starts playing in the background. Its chorus says: Where did I go wrong? I lost a friend Somewhere along in the bitterness And I would have stayed up with you all night Had I known how to save a life

The drama inherent to those words matches both the episode’s overall mood and the particular circumstances depicted in the scene under scrutiny. Throughout the episode, Doctor Meredith Grey treats Nikki, a patient who refuses to give her consent for the surgery she needs based on a superstition. Since Nikki is constantly mentioning her boyfriend, Grey calls him, only to discover that the couple is no longer together. As the song chorus progresses, Nikki’s situation becomes critical, but she still resists being operated. Grey tries persuading her: “Your boyfriend called. He said he doesn’t want you to die … Will you let us operate?” The patient smiles intensely, then passes out and dies. The song lyrics play on different narrative dimensions: first by pointing out that Nikki’s boyfriend was unable to save her life by not being with her anymore, and then by suggesting that Nikki’s life was, in fact, saved by Grey’s pious lie: believing that her former boyfriend still cared about her, she could die in peace. “How to Save a Life” also comments on a major topic of

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the series: the loneliness and alienation of the doctors, usually involved in failing attempts at establishing friendships and love relations among each other. According to executive producer Betsy Beers, the producers “wanted a sound that reflected what the show is about, which is young people who don’t know what they’re doing” (Hiatt 2007). A powerful instance of transtextuality, the song became so strongly identified with Grey’s Anatomy that it was used to promote the following season of the series (Albiniak 2006) and gave its name to another episode late into its eleventh season. The following two examples, by contrast, refer to song lyrics that describe a particular state in the narrative arc of a character. The Punisher tells the story of Frank Castle, a former US marine turned vigilante. In the first season finale, American Homeland Security discovers that Billy Russo, Castle’s antagonist and owner of a military corporation, has been involved in criminal activity. As Russo disposes of several agents who try to capture him, he leaves his penthouse apartment as an outlaw who still has a card to play, were he successful in defeating Castle. The song that accompanies his escape is the Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Penthouse Pauper” (1969), whose title and lyrics seem tailor-made for the occasion: “If I were a gambler, you know I’d never lose, / And if I were a guitar player, / Lord, I’d have to play the blues.” As he detonates a bomb that destroys the building he lives in, the lyrics explain how low in his life he has just sunk, but they also point towards the possibilities the future offers (he “can be most anything”): I’m the penthouse pauper, baby, I got nothing to my name. I can be most anything, ‘Cause when you got nothin’ it’s all the same.

Breaking Bad takes this conceit to the extreme by having a song feature prominently at the very end of the series. The five-season journey that turns protagonist Walter White from serene high school teacher and exemplary family man to illegal drug manufacturer finishes with his death as a consequence of a gunshot wound in his stomach. Knowing that his end is near, he spends his last moments beholding and caressing equipment used to produce the drug while Badfinger’s “Baby Blue” (1972) plays. The song’s first verse—“Guess I got what I deserved”—describes

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the very moment the character is experiencing: his involvement in criminal activity has led to his having been shot to death. Moreover, the song helps answer a question spectators had posed throughout the run of the series: did White get involved in the drug world as a means to help his family economically, as he keeps repeating throughout the show, or did he actually enjoy the experience? Further lyrics state the following: Didn’t know you’d think that I’d forget Or I’d regret The special love I had for you My baby blue.

“Blue” here works as an allusion to blue methamphetamine, the drug the protagonist had been producing for the last few years. The verse “My baby blue” is heard right after White collapses to the floor, where he lies dead with a smile on his lips. His swan song is not dedicated to his family, but to his drug. The identification between images and song lyrics is so strong that the song competes for attention with the televisual action. The verses do not only fulfil their paratextual function: they integrate with the text of the series, thus highlighting the relevance of songs in the weaving of the televisual text.

Diegetic: Background Songs The effect of incidental songs intensifies in the case of diegetic songs, since their comment reaches not only the spectators, but also the characters. When addressed as paratexts, background song lyrics are still notes, but their higher level of interaction with the text of the series, as compared with non-diegetic songs, sets their function closer to that of marginal glosses than to footnotes or endnotes. In Mad Men’s episode “Three Sundays,” the Drapers (Don and Betty) are spending an idyllic Sunday at home. It is the 1960s and the married couple are reading on their sofa while listening to Perry Como’s version of Hart and Rodgers’ “Blue Room” (1956) on their record player. The song starts with the following verses: We’ll have a blue room A new room for two room Where ev’ry day’s a holiday

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Because you’re married to me.

The perfect moment is interrupted by their little son Bobby messing with the stereo right after “Because you’re married to me” is sung. In fact, the song lyrics are ironic in this context, since the marriage is strained due to Don’s infidelities. It is not only the spectators, but the characters who are exposed to the lyrics’ comment, although the latter decide to look the other way. Once Betty makes evident her self-inflicted blindness by stating: “I love this song … you can really hear the words,” the couple gets up from the sofa and dance together to the music. The last three verses of the song are “And Robinson Crusoe / Is not so far from worldly cares / As our blue room far away upstairs.” However, the last two lines cannot be heard, as the scene finishes right after “And Robinson Crusoe / Is not.” These words, uttered along a frontal frame of Don’s, pairs the man with the castaway and points to his increasing isolation from his wife. It may be no coincidence that the ideal room described in the song is blue, since it is the colour of sadness and melancholy. Besides offering a complicit comment to the spectators, the paratext is also warning the characters, although they choose to ignore it. The miniseries Show Me a Hero tells of the struggle between the city of Yonkers, New York, and the American federal authorities over the construction of a public housing project. Part four finds mayor Nick Wasicko running for re-election. He is driving around town looking at electoral advertisements in his neighbours’ gardens and notices that his popularity has experienced a significant decline. The song which he is playing on his car stereo is Bruce Springsteen’s “Cadillac Ranch” (1980), whose lyrics evoke freedom and power: Cadillac, Cadillac Long and dark shiny and black Open up your engines let ‘em roar Tearing up the highway like a big old dinosaur.

In contrast to what the verses state, Wasicko is losing his political power, and what is being torn up is not the highway, but his electoral campaign. Moreover, the song’s ironic comment extends further into the realm of social and class implications. As a brand, Cadillac is famous for manufacturing luxury cars; however, the mayor drives a medium segment

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Chrysler. The lyrics provide an ironic commentary on the disconnect between Wasicko’s expectations and the crude reality he is facing.

Diegetic: Songs Interacted with by Characters In this part of the proposed classification, the boundary between text and paratext becomes especially blurry. If a character sings a song, the lyrics become part of the script. Therefore, the musical paratext now becomes an integral part of the text of the series. Genette had already considered such a possibility in a purely textual context: “The paratext,” properly speaking, does not exist; rather, one chooses to account in these terms for a certain number of practices or effects, for reasons of method and effectiveness or, if you will, of profitability. The question is therefore not whether the note does or does not “belong” to the paratext but really whether considering it in such a light is or is not useful and relevant. ([1987] 1997, 343)

Songs sung by characters offer the highest level of interaction possible with the text of the series. The lyrics are not speaking to the characters: they are being uttered by them. Better Call Saul is a Breaking Bad spin-off prequel that portrays how con artist Jimmy McGill becomes criminal defence lawyer Saul Goodman. McGill had always lived in the long shadow of his older brother Chuck, successful lawyer and partner of a law firm, who had never been especially supportive of his younger sibling becoming a lawyer. When Jimmy passes the bar exam, as the episode “Winner” (2018) shows in flashback fashion, the brothers celebrate in a karaoke bar with some co-workers. Jimmy sings ABBA’s “The Winner Takes It All” (1980), whose first stanza suggests an effort to make amends between them: I don’t wanna talk About things we’ve gone through Though it’s hurting me Now it’s history. I’ve played all my cards And that’s what you’ve done too Nothing more to say No more ace to play.

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Jimmy is in partying mood: his tie knot is loose, his shirt wrinkled, and his sleeves rolled up. Singing constantly out of tune, he invites his brother mid-song to share the stage. After a few verses singing together, Chuck—whose singing is more than proficient—takes the microphone out of Jimmy’s hand and starts singing alone, charming the audience with his vocal qualities and immaculate personal image, and relegating his sibling to the background. The scene cuts right after Chuck sings the line “The winner takes it all,” making evident the unequal power relations between the brothers. As the character of Vonda Sheppard used to do in Ally McBeal , interpreting herself and singing her own songs throughout the series, rapper Method Man appears as himself in Luke Cage’s episode “Soliloquy of Chaos” (2016). Luke Cage is a bulletproof-skinned African-American superhero who tries to keep peace in the streets of Harlem, New York. As the series’ first season approaches its end, Method Man is interviewed in a local radio station, where he unleashes his verbosity in a freestyle rap (“Bulletproof Love” [2016]) which summarises the series’ events so far. In this particular case, the social-geographical context (Harlem) and the chosen art form (hip-hop) help shape the meaning of the lyrics, which describe the characters and the setting—both temporal and geographical—in minute detail. Method Man characterises Harlem as a tough place to live in—“Roaches in the crib, ain’t got no food up in the fridge / Plus the crime running rampant and it’s screwin’ up the kids”—traces African-Americanness back to the times of slavery, where newly freed slaves were supposed to be granted forty acres of land (Bankston III 2006, 653)—“I just want some 40 acres and some carats on the wrist,” uses a slogan previously uttered by the Black Panthers—“Power to the people, and Luke Cage the cause”—and compares Cage to historical AfricanAmerican heroes—“Look, dog, a hero, never had one / Already took Malcolm and Martin, this is the last one.” These words revel in describing the surrounding socio-cultural environment, “engag[ing] with a ‘real’, contemporary, and rough-and-ready social space” (Donnelly 2002, 332). A similar situation, albeit a hilarious one, occurs in the Extras episode “David Bowie,” named after the famous British musician who not only acts in it, but performs a song, co-written by Gervais and Bowie himself and dedicated to Andy Millman, the series’ protagonist. Millman’s sitcom has received very negative reviews after its first episode has been aired. However, he is praised by some fans at a local pub. Not considering them worthy of his new status, the actor leaves for a celebrity bar where

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he meets Bowie, to whom he explains how he had to compromise in order to have the TV station accept his project. Inspired by the story, the singer turns to a piano and composes “Little Fat Man” (2006) on the spot. The lyrics focus on Millman’s physical appearance—“Pathetic little fat man … See his pug-nosed face”—on his attempt at becoming a famous actor—“He sold his soul for a shot at fame / Catchphrase and wigs and the jokes are lame”—and on the series’ poor reception—“No one’s bloody laughing.” The episode finishes with Millman going back to the pub and enjoying his minor celebrity status there. This instance shows a paratext that becomes a central narrative element, the blurring of boundaries being so intense that the story cannot be understood without its musical paratext. Here, the song lyrics are an integral part of the text of the series.

Conclusions Although music in TV series has been usually assessed as subordinated to the cinematic narration, songs with lyrics play a vital role in the spectators’ perception, no matter their level of interaction with the text of the series. Whether they are pre-existing songs used as “stock music … simply ‘cut in’ to action” (Donnelly 2002, 342) or specifically created for the series—“This City,” “You’ve Got Time,” “Bulletproof Love,” “Little Fat Man”—their lyrics play the part of paratexts that comment on action, characterisation or locale, establishing a relation of complicity with the spectator, warning the characters about the situations they face, or being an integral part of their own dialogue. This parallelism between the function of songs in TV series and that of paratexts in literature narrows the gap between both types of media, allowing for the analysis of TV series as literature by focusing on the similarity of the processes through which both forms of cultural expression weave their particular texts. As with Genette’s literary paratexts, the five proposed categories of musical paratexts are present in all types of TV series, independent of their genre, temporal and geographical setting, or country of production. Moreover, and expanding on the literature-reading experience, the spectators register a simultaneous identification with the televisual narration and the song lyrics due to the aforementioned time factor, which allows the musical paratext to be performed along the text of the series, suiting the action to the words, the words to the action.

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References Discography ABBA. 1980. “The Winner Takes It All.” By Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus. Track 2 on Super Trouper. Atlantic TP 16023. LP. Alabama 3. 1997. “Woke Up This Morning.” By Jake Black and Rob Spragg. Track 3 on Exile on Coldharbour Lane. Elemental Records ELM 40 CD. CD. Badfinger. 1972. “Baby Blue.” By Pete Ham. Track 2 on Straight Up. Apple Records SAPCOR 19. LP. Bowie, David. 2006. “Little Fat Man.” By Ricky Gervais, Clifford Slapper and David Bowie. Unreleased. Choir of Young Believers. 2008. “Hollow Talk.” By Anders Rhedin and Jannis Noya Makrigiannis. Track 1 on This Is for the White in Your Eyes. Tigerspring TIGERLP-004. LP. Como, Perry. 1956. “Blue Room.” By Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers. Track 5 on A Sentimental Date with Perry Como. RCA Victor LPM 1177. LP. Credence Clearwater Revival. 1969. “Penthouse Pauper.” By John Fogerty. Track 5 on Bayou Country. Fantasy 8387. LP. Earle, Steve. 2011. “This City.” By Steve Earle. Track 11 on I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive. New West Records NW 165. CD. The Fray. 2005. “How to Save a Life.” By Isaac Slade and Joe King. Track 3 on How to Save a Life. Epic EK 93931. CD. McCreary, Bear, featuring Raya Yarbrough. 2015. “The Skye Boat Song.” Traditional music, lyrics by Robert Louis Stevenson and Bear McCreary. Track 2 on Outlander, Original Television Soundtrack, vol. 1. Madison Gate Records, Sparks & Shadows 043396406490. CD. Method Man. 2016. “Bulletproof Love.” By Adrian Younge, Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Method Man. Track 22 on Luke Cage: Original Soundtrack. Mondo MOND-094. LP. Spektor, Regina. 2013. “You’ve Got Time.” By Regina Spektor. Online single. Sire Records. AAC file. Springsteen, Bruce. 1980. “Cadillac Ranch.” By Bruce Springsteen. Track 13 on The River. Columbia PC2 36854. LP. Stevens, Cat. 1970. “Tea for the Tillerman.” By Cat Stevens. Track 11 on Tea for the Tillerman. Island Records ILPS 9135. LP.

Filmography Better Call Saul. 2018. Episode 40, “Winner.” Directed by Adam Bernstein. Written by Peter Gould and Thomas Schnauz. Aired October 8, 2018, on AMC.

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Breaking Bad. 2013. Episode 62, “Felina.” Written and directed by Vince Gilligan. Aired September 29, 2013, on AMC. The Bridge. Original title: Bron (Swedish), Broen (Danish). 2011. Created by Hans Rosenfeldt. Aired 2011–2018, on SVT1 (Sweden), DR1 (Denmark). Extras. 2005. Created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. Aired 2005– 2007, on BBC Two. ———. 2006. Episode 8, “David Bowie.” Written and directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. Aired September 21, 2006, on BBC Two. Game of Thrones. 2013. Episode 23, “Walk of Punishment.” Directed by David Benioff. Written by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. Aired April 14, 2013, on HBO. Grey’s Anatomy. 2006. Episode 30, “Superstition.” Directed by Tricia Brock. Written by James D. Parriott. Aired March 19, 2006, on ABC. ———. 2015. Episode 241, “How to Save a Life.” Directed by Rob Hardy. Written by Shonda Rhimes. Aired April 23, 2015, on ABC. Luke Cage. 2016. Episode 12, “Soliloquy of Chaos.” Directed by Phil Abraham. Written by Akela Cooper and Charles Murray. Aired September 30, 2016, on Netflix. Mad Men. 2008. Episode 17, “Three Sundays.” Directed by Tim Hunter. Written by Andre Jacquemetton and Maria Jacquemetton. Aired August 24, 2008, on AMC. Orange Is the New Black. 2013. Created by Jenji Kohan. Aired 2013–2019, on Netflix. Outlander. 2014. Developed by Ronald D. Moore. Aired since 2014, on Starz. The Punisher. 2017. Episode 13, “Memento Mori.” Directed by Stephen Surjik. Written by Steve Lightfoot. Aired November 17, 2017, on Netflix. Show Me a Hero. 2015. Episode 4, “Part 4.” Directed by Paul Haggis. Written by William F. Zorzi and David Simon. Aired August 23, 2015, on HBO. The Sopranos. 1999. Created by David Chase. Aired 1999–2007, on HBO. Treme. 2010. Episode 10, “I’ll Fly Away.” Directed by Agnieszka Holland. Written by David Simon. Aired June 20, 2010, on HBO.

Bibliography Albiniak, Paige. 2006. “How Grey’s Got That Catchy New ‘Theme’ Song.” New York Post, September 24. https://web.archive.org/web/200705 12193239, http://www.nypost.com/seven/09242006/tv/how_greys_got_ that_catchy_new_theme_song_tv_paige_albiniak.htm. Bankston III, Carl L., ed. 2006. African American History, Vol. 1: Abolition— Fugitive Slave Law of 1793. Pasadena: Salem Press. Brown, Julie. 2001. “Ally McBeal ’s Postmodern Soundtrack.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 126: 275–303.

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Cot, Laura. 2017. “The Importance of Music in the Television Series.” Lost in the Series (blog), October 11. https://lauracotobal.wordpress.com/2017/ 10/11/the-importance-of-music-in-the-television-series/. Deaville, James. 2011. “A Discipline Emerges: Reading Writing About Listening to Television.” In Music in Television: Channels of Listening, edited by James Deaville, 7–34. New York: Routledge. Donnelly, K. J. 2002. “Tracking British Television: Pop Music as Stock Soundtrack to the Small Screen.” Popular Music 21 (3): 331–343. Genette, Gérard. (1979) 1992. The Architext: An Introduction. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. (1982) 1997. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. (1987) 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Translated by Jane E. Lewin and Richard Macksey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Glare, P. G. W. 2016. Oxford Latin Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gorbman, Claudia. 2011. “Foreword.” In Music in Television: Channels of Listening, edited by James Deaville, ix–x. New York: Routledge. Hiatt, Brian. 2007. “Grey’s Anatomy.” Rolling Stone 1018, January: 8. Hibberd, James. 2013. “‘Game of Thrones’: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau on Jaime’s Big Surprise.” Entertainment Weekly, April 14. https://ew.com/article/ 2013/04/14/thrones-jaime-hand/. Hicks, Jeffrey Alan. 1992. “Television Theme Songs: A Content Analysis.” Popular Music and Society 16 (1): 13–20. Mehta, Monika. 2017. “Fan and Its Paratexts.” Framework 58 (1) (October): 128–143. Negus, Keith, and John Street. 2002. “Introduction to ‘Music and Television’ Special Issue.” Popular Music 21 (3): 245–248. Quora. n.d. “What Is the Best Use of a Song During a Movie or TV Show Scene?” Accessed November 8, 2019. https://www.quora.com/What-is-thebest-use-of-a-song-during-a-movie-or-tv-show-scene. SongFacts. n.d. “Songs Used in TV Shows.” Accessed November 8, 2019. https://www.songfacts.com/category/songs-used-in-tv-shows. Stadler, Jane, and Kelly McWilliam. 2009. Screen Media: Analysing Film and Television. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin. Stanitzek, Georg. 2005. “Texts and Paratexts in Media.” Translated by Ellen Klein. Critical Inquiry 32 (September): 27–42. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 2012. “Sing Me a Song of a Lad That Is Gone.” In Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson. Hastings: Delphi Classics. Adobe Digital Editions EPUB.

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Tagg, Philip. (1979) 2000. Kojak—Fifty Seconds of Television Music: Towards the Analysis of Affect in Popular Music. 2nd ed. New York: University of Göteborg. Villasenor, Ashlee. 2018. “The Importance of Music in Television and Film.” theMusifesto (blog), January 16. https://themusifesto.com/2018/01/16/ the-importance-of-music-in-television-and-film/.

CHAPTER 15

“It’s the Beauty that Hurts the Most”: Rectify as Televisual Novel Susan Cosby Ronnenberg

Introduction Increasingly, complex, long-form fictional television series such as The Wire and Mad Men have been compared to long novels. Thomas Doherty (2012, n.p.) claims that the more complex television series’ “real kinship is literary, not televisual.” Comparing these shows to novels by Dickens, Dreiser, Trollope, and Wharton, he says, “the series are thick on character and dense in plot line…” Many scholars have observed that the segmented structure of serial television invites, if not requires, viewer intellectual and imaginative participation in filling in gaps, an experience like that of reading a novel. In this chapter, I will first establish and pursue a number of parallels between novels and complex television series through a case study of Sundance’s Rectify (McKinnon, 2013–2016), and then discuss why I believe that, on balance, the differences between the two forms of storytelling remain marked and significant.

S. C. Ronnenberg (B) Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota, Winona, MN, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Winckler and V. Huertas-Martín (eds.), Television Series as Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4720-1_15

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Applying a literary lens can certainly be beneficial for a deeper understanding and appreciation of contemporary drama series. This is especially true for Rectify, a hybrid of historical mystery, psychological character study, and exploration of post-trauma family dynamics. Both series creator and cast have referred to Rectify as “a novel brought to life,” with the episodes as chapters (Travers 2014; Bell 2013). Like a novel, it presents the creative vision and control of primarily one person, creator/writer/director Ray McKinnon. Sarah Cardwell (2002) notes that the element of comparatively slow narrative pacing, borrowed from classic-novel adaptations to television mini-series (which, in turn, borrowed them from film) “implicitly reject[s] the new, the young, emphasizing their connections with the durable, the old, the past” (113). This association is likely one of the main reasons for the frequent comparison of many complex television series to literature. McKinnon’s Rectify indeed provides compelling evidence supporting the argument that fictional long-form drama on television is, in many ways, analogous with the long literary novel. Undeniably, the series’ slow pacing and meditative tone, as well as its rich, complex characterization and character-driven narrative are some of its strongest formal features, easily comparable to that of mainstream late twentieth/early twenty-firstcentury realistic novels focusing on character, such as Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides (1986) and Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies (2012). The Prince of Tides traces Tom Wingo’s attempt to support his suicidal poet-sister while seeking therapy to recall and address their shared childhood trauma. Bring Up the Bodies follows Thomas Cromwell’s political ascension in advising Henry VIII and facilitating the downfall of Anne Boleyn. I chose these novels for comparison with Rectify because of a number of potentially fruitful structural and thematic parallels. Both are essentially psychological character studies of articulate and self-aware men, just as Rectify is; both were popular with mainstream fiction readers but also received critical acclaim. Both novels fluctuate between the main character’s present adult life and his past as he questions his identity and place in the world, another similarity to Daniel Holden’s story on Rectify. Finally, the authors of these texts are contemporaries of McKinnon, creating artistic works in similar cultural environments.

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Rectify ’s Literary Pacing and Meditative Tone In novels, narrative pacing is controlled through sentence and paragraph length; description and reflection also serve to slow plot movement. As one example, Tom Wingo, the narrator of Conroy’s The Prince of Tides , spends much of the novel observing the world around him and questioning his own place in it. Wingo affectionately watches his daughters playing on the beach, reflecting on his relationship with them and with time as he does so: They were ten, nine, and seven, two brown-haired girls divided by one blonde, and their ages and size and beauty always startled me; I could measure my own diminishment with their sunny ripening. You could believe in the birth of goddesses by watching the wind catch their hair and their small brown hands make sweet simultaneous gestures to brush the hair out of their eyes as their laughter broke with the surf. (Conroy 1986, 12)

The plot movement slows as readers are forced to take in the scene not at-a-glance, but one sentence at a time, one word at a time. Readers encountering the reflective description in the three sentences of 23, 10, and 39 words above are required to envision the girls’ appearance, their actions, the setting with the ocean tides, beach, and wind, and their father’s facial expression as he watches them play. In television series, pacing or momentum can be examined on multiple levels; Rectify is slow on every one of them. Rectify’s four seasons cover six months for the characters, an unusually slow passage of time for a television drama. Season one’s six episodes take place over the first six days after Daniel Holden’s release from prison, an even more drastic example of slow pacing. Most significantly, at the episode level, Rectify resists the conventions of serialized television, which “organize their stories into rather short segments, often less than two minutes in length”; these “scenes,” as viewers might label them, called “beats” by writers, constitute “television’s most basic storytelling unit” (Newman 2006, 17). Newman emphasizes that “it is exceedingly rare to see long, drawn-out beats on prime-time television” and that, in the interest of sustaining audience attention, “most forms of television present a rapid succession of short segments” (2006, 17). O’Sullivan (2010) argues that “the beats of each episode [as] the separate scenes, sometimes less than a minute long,” have the function to “move us from one location or

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plot strand to another, creating parallels, dialectical contrasts, and interruptions…but always requiring us to see the pieces as…independent contractors participating in a larger project” (62). Rectify regularly breaks the convention of the one-to-two-minute scene/beat. In “Plato’s Cave” (Gordy and Fuller 2013), Sheriff Daggett and Trey Willis share a four-minute scene; another between Teddy and Tawney Talbot runs for six minutes. In “Weird as You” (Herbert 2014), a scene between Teddy and Roland Faulks runs for over four minutes; later in the same episode Trey and Daniel’s drug-induced altered sense of reality is reflected in a twelve-minute scene, six full beats, an extraordinarily long time by television standards. These are just a few examples of many extended scenes with little action but significant interactions between characters. According to Newman (2006), the beat count for a fifty-minute episode is usually “between twenty and forty” (18). Like many TV series, Rectify’s pilot contains about forty-one beats, but almost immediately as the series proceeds, that number is reduced by half. The second episode contains approximately twenty-three beats. Season two’s “Weird as You” (Herbert 2014) contains a mere nineteen beats. Clayne Crawford (Teddy Talbot, Jr.) says, “Even compared to …Mad Men, which is a slow show, [Rectify] just really breathes”; Aden Young (Daniel Holden) claims that “a different network … probably would have said, ‘No. This is not television’” (Bell 2013). In some ways, McKinnon’s pacing and editing with Rectify are influenced by the classic-novel television adaptations mentioned above, which, in turn, take their inspiration from literature: like reading, watching Rectify is “a more leisurely, measured and thoughtful pursuit… carried out more slowly and quietly” than watching conventional television shows (Cardwell 2002, 112). While flashbacks are not unique to the novel, including first-person introspective insight from the character experiencing them often is. Reflecting on his childhood, Conroy’s Wingo ponders how he and his sister reached their present lives. Such verbose details of memory frequently interrupt the plot movement in the present storyline, creating a delay for readers in discovering Wingo’s progress in helping his sister’s recovery. He recalls: There are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot recapture entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart. There is a river, the town, my grandfather steering

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a boat through the channel, my sister fixed in that suspended rapture she would later translate into her strongest poems, the metallic perfume of the harvested oysters, the belling voices of children on the shore…(Conroy 1986, 323)

Conroy captures the often-fragmented but sensory-heavy aspect of childhood memories in these lines, as well as Wingo’s deep nostalgia and longing. The description steers readers through the impressions that remain with Wingo, one at a time, in this specific order, carefully pacing our visualization of the two scenes, Wingo the adult, alone, trying to remember, and Wingo as a child in the midst of the shared experience. Any scene might segue into a philosophic analysis of memory or selfdoubt for Wingo—and they often do, with memories of the distant and recent past carrying across several pages. A similarly slow-paced exploration of loss, identity, forgiveness and redemption, Rectify features a consistently meditative tone. Commenting on the series that inspired his own, McKinnon has said that Mad Men “allowed you to sit there and observe as opposed to being dictated to with this shot after this shot after this shot…When I saw [the] … meditative quality… I thought maybe … there still is a place for the kind of storytelling that requires the viewer to observe rather than be dictated to” (as cited in Travers 2014, n.p.). This “languid quality” of Rectify is one of its more striking features, commented on in every review of it (Bell 2013). Matt Zoller Seitz (2016, n.p.) says that Rectify “went against nearly every trend that had been established in so-called ‘quality TV’ since the debut of The Sopranos . It was intimate rather than overwhelming, talky and meditative instead of busy and densely packed, drily rather than raucously funny, and more horrified by violence than fascinated with it. Scenes often played out at length, in close-up…” Scenes between two characters linger, focused on their extensive dialogue, its diction and tone, their facial expressions in close-up, and their body language with one another.

Rectify ’s Complex Characterization and Character-Driven Story Contemporary novels often develop a deep psychological study of a character. One prominent example is Thomas Cromwell in Hilary Mantel’s (2012) Bring Up the Bodies . Readers are provided with insight into

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Cromwell’s thinking, his motivation and his self-awareness through the third-person limited omniscient narration. When Henry VIII is injured and thought dead in the novel, the narrator says, “in the next seconds, he, Cromwell, seems to body out and fill all the space around the fallen man. He sees himself, as if he were watching from the canvas above: his girth expands, even his height. So that he occupies more ground” (Mantel 2012, 170). The reader is placed in the position of Cromwell through this narration, recognizing his swelling determination as he prepares to stand and defend his ground against his enemies gathered around the monarch’s body. Like both Mantel’s Cromwell and Conroy’s Wingo, Rectify’s Holden is an intelligent and self-aware adult male character. While Mantel’s Cromwell is laconic, Conroy’s Wingo is very articulate. Describing an encounter with his sister’s therapist, Wingo thinks, “I had somehow become the repository of memory in a family where memory had entered a fatal concubinage with suffering. I was the only witness available to explain why my sister’s madness was only a natural response to an indiscriminate curriculum of ruin” (Conroy 1986, 190). Like Wingo, Holden has a way with words and is highly self-aware; both characters demonstrate an extensive and elevated vocabulary, reflecting their love of reading. Yet Holden doesn’t talk much, and when he does, it’s rarely what viewers, or the other characters, expect. Rectify is a character-driven series; plot development and character development are closely intertwined. Unlike, for example, the protagonist of The Fugitive (ABC, 1963–1967), Holden isn’t established up-front as clearly innocent and framed, the audience’s hero. Instead, he is portrayed as complex and difficult to read, an immediate, constant, and sometimes troubling surprise. Upon his release from death row, Holden speaks to the press at the prompting of his lawyer. Instead of a simple expression of gratitude for those who worked to free him, Holden offers a philosophical meditation on his twenty-year practice of disallowing hope in his thinking, adding: I had convinced myself that kind of optimism served no useful purpose in the world where I existed. Obviously, this radical belief system was flawed, and was, ironically, a kind of fantasy itself. At the least, I feel that those specific coping skills were best suited to the life there behind me. I doubt they will serve me so well for the life in front of me. So, I will seriously have to reconsider my world view. (McKinnon et al. 2013)

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His attorney later describes him as “esoteric,” wishing he had been less so (McKinnon et al. 2013). Holden uses elevated diction to articulate his self-aware critical thinking; he is unaccustomed to having an audience to consider. His solitary confinement, autodidacticism, and reading habits show in his speech and in his awkward interactions with others. He sounds like a philosophical narrator in a novel, rather than a conventional television character. One aspect that has been said to distinguish literary fiction from genre fiction and non-fiction—and is applicable to most television series, too—is that rather than following familiar plot formulas in far-fetched situations, with rather predictable characters, literary fiction “focuses more on the psychology of characters and their relationships” (Chiaet 2013, n.p.). In such literary fiction, “often those characters’ minds are depicted vaguely, without any details, and we’re forced to fill in gaps to understand their intentions and motivations” (Kidd as cited in Chiaet 2013, n.p.). Holden is presented to the audience in this way, that is, vaguely; it is often difficult to tell what is going on inside him, and we feel sympathy for this character who obviously feels lost and alone amidst a world constantly in motion around him. Emily Todd VanDerWerff (2016, n.p.) writes of the Rectify series finale’s focus: “None of this was the sort of high-stakes, pulse-pounding TV that tends to dominate headlines. It was quiet and small, driven by the innermost self.” This focus illustrates a new development in complex television. Rectify manages this without voice-over narration or viewer insight into Holden’s thoughts, motivations, or even clarification of his guilt or innocence until the end of the third season, highly unusual for conventional television series. Daniel Holden struggles with loss and the question of his capacity for both violence and adaptation. When he lies in a medically-induced coma after being assaulted, we’re shown scenes from his psyche, where he admits to Kerwin, his adjacent cell-neighbor on death row and best friend, that he fears disappointing him, explaining, “I don’t think I can do this. Everything out here…it’s just so complicated. There’s so much pain and hate. And I think I may just be…just too broken, you know?” (McKinnon 2014). In his self-aware assessment of his ability to transition into the mainstream world again, he has described not only himself but the state of modern humanity. Holden regularly delivers thoughtful insight into the human condition, startling those around him. These comments are a key ingredient of the sophisticated, richly dense storytelling which “repays close scrutiny” (Doherty 2012, n.p.).

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Rectify can therefore be said to share a deliberately slow narrative pace, a meditative tone, character-driven stories, as well as complex and often vague characterization—especially in articulate and self-aware main characters—with some modern realistic novels. Both appeal to audiences’ growing interest in psychologically complex main characters. In other ways, however, significant medium-based distinctions remain—including, for now, how some aesthetic elements affect audience engagement, their impact on audience cognition and the nature of audience engagement itself.

Audience Engagement Distinctions Between Reading and Watching Narratives Building on the work of several studies, Dasgupta (2017) defines the term “aesthetics” as applied to television viewing “as a sensory experience produced in an encounter” (185). In addition to casting and performance, the aesthetic elements most frequently and powerfully employed on Rectify include its use of silence, music, and visual images, by which I mean setting, lighting, paintings and sculptures, as well as perspective and space. The casting of actors as characters influences the audience’s relationship to those characters in ways that are necessarily absent from novels. As Rothman (2013) has observed of Justified (2010–2015, FX), “viewers don’t have to imagine Raylan [the main character], but they also lack the freedom to do so. Compensating for this loss of freedom is the fact that the story cannot enable readers to imagine this Raylan,” since the one that “Timothy Olyphant incarnates on screen is a particular human being” (177). Likewise, it is also hard to imagine anyone other than Aden Young as Daniel Holden, embodying Daniel’s towering paralytic awkwardness through expressions, vocalization, movement, appearance, and gestures. McNamara (2013, n.p.) says that “Young…deliver[s] an exquisitely textured physical performance.” Whereas novels depend upon readers’ imagination to envision the physicality of characters and settings, etc., based on the diction describing them, television audiences are prohibited from that imaginative participation in creating the characters. The work is done for them, by casting agents, directors, and actors. This results in a much more removed and passive experience of someone else’s artistic creation.

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Some viewers have described Rectify as an “entire show [that] is sensory,” comparing its employment of visual and audio elements’ significance in the narrative to that of film-maker Terrence Malick (Richardson 2013). Richardson 2013 claims that McKinnon, like Malick, has created “a mysticism of the common, a ‘sacramentality’” within Rectify “that is truly beautiful.” Zoller Seitz (2017) says that Rectify was also, at times improbably, cinematic, conveying subtle shifts in the relationships between Daniel, his family, and his friends through silent close-ups, wide shots that placed the characters in context of architecture or nature, split-screen effects and focus shifts that conveyed the barriers that prevented understanding, and glorious bursts of sunlight timed to philosophical insights and affirmations of love and respect.

With Rectify’s emphasis on creating memorable, moving sensory experiences for its audience—and for Holden, at times—it moves beyond what both television and the novel’s text usually offer, into the realm of auteur cinema, conveying themes through sensory elements. Cardwell (2002) says that such aesthetic components as the beautiful camera shot keep viewers “detached” and “outside the frame,” admiring the technical aspects employed by the director, set designer, and lighting specialists (120–121); she refers to these elements as embodying “a heavily stylized and emotive filmic style” (119). Rectify effectively conveys the transcendent capabilities of visual and aural artistic pieces embedded in the series, and of some created momentarily in how a scene has been shot and edited; it’s difficult to ignore the masterful technical elements of the series that contribute to the aesthetic experience for the audience. In this way, the audience is not immersed in the fiction, but its attention is drawn by the technical proficiency in maximizing cinematic storytelling devices, such as the arresting use of light and shadow, the framing of the shot, and the sound of a soft gasp in an otherwise silent scene. There are multiple examples of such technical proficiency on Rectify. In the pilot episode especially, the sound editing, camera work, and silences combine to accentuate Holden’s surreal perspective of his initial freedom. This series isn’t afraid of using prolonged silences to emphasize awkwardness between characters, for example, Teddy and Jared in the Holden-Talbot kitchen, and Teddy and Tawney at home, in “Sleeping Giants” (Teems 2014). Richardson (2013, n.p.) compares McKinnon’s work to that of Malick in the use of “long periods of silence”; he notes

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that “McKinnon and company use focus and bodies and environments to complicate Holden’s reentry, as well as to speak the truth after the speaking has been done.” Novels can’t incorporate impactful aesthetic experiences like these—drawn out silences, for example; the nature of the printed textual medium is words, requiring the reader to encounter them, process them, and interpret them in the context of a sentence, paragraph, and chapter, as well as the larger work. Repeatedly, the sensory stimulation of music and visual art plays an important role in Holden’s reclaiming of his humanity, growth, and healing. This is evident in the prison chaplain’s use of music to draw an emotional response from Holden (Feehan 2014), Holden relistening to Hanna’s mixtape (Dunsky et al. 2013), Holden’s trek to Atlanta to see a painting from a book (Powers and McKinnon 2014), and the artist Chloe’s appeal for him. Beauty plays a significant role in reawakening Holden’s capacity for compassion. In “Drip, Drip,” during his surreal encounter with The Stranger viewing the nymph with goats statue in the grove, The Stranger says, “It’s the beauty that hurts the most, son, not the ugly” (McKinnon 2013). The abstract (beauty) made tangible through art, sound or image, plays a powerful role throughout Rectify’s four seasons in both direct and indirect ways as we observe Holden’s attempt to navigate change and his own dark and light tendencies. Holden’s experiences with visual and aural beauty are shared with the audience with less remediation than a printed novel’s descriptive narration could; we’re shown the art and we hear the music embedded in the televisual medium. From the beginning, the series uses perspective and space in deliberate ways to emphasize the smallness of the individual, isolation, and distance between people. We see it in the long shot when the Holden-Talbot family is physically reunited with a newly freed Holden in the pilot. It takes his sister Amantha to close the distance and embrace him. Zoller Seitz (2014, n.p.) observes, This series makes its points about freedom and incarceration as states of mind by crowding characters into the corners of the frames, or turning doors, door frames and window frames (some seen in God’s-eye view) into partitions that break the frame into a series of boxes…A lot of times you glean what, exactly, the show means to say about its characters by staring at frames that are held on screen just long enough to stare at.

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This is a deliberate maximization of the visual, taking only a few seconds to convey these messages through parallel visual images. In a novel, descriptions of these scenes conveying the same information would take several pages, taking the reader longer to process, envision, and interpret. Thus, despite increasing parallels, television and the novel remain distinct mediums through how their aesthetic elements work to engage audiences and in their differing impact on the audience’s cognitive abilities. The distinction between reading and watching narratives can also be described in terms of their different neurological impact. Neuroscientists in recent studies have found that reading fiction improves the reader’s ability to put themselves in another person’s shoes and flex the imagination, in addition to increasing brain function (Bergland 2014; Clark 2013; DesMarais 2018; Chiaet 2013). The practice of reading book-length fiction creates cognitive engagement that improves vocabulary, thinking skills, and concentration, empathy, social perceptions, and emotional intelligence—all of which contribute to an enhanced quality of life (DesMarais 2018). The psychological awareness of characters’ thoughts and feelings carries over into the real world (Chiaet 2013). According to Clark (2013, n.p.), changes caused by reading a novel registered “in the left temporal cortex, an area of the brain associated with receptivity for language”; participants in this study “retained this heightened connectivity” days beyond reading the novel. In contrast, the picture that emerges from comparable studies on the impact of watching TV series is ambiguous. Some studies indicate that it reduces theory of mind, “the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending; knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, and intentions that are different from one’s own” (Bergland 2014, n.p.). However, neuroscientists are only just beginning to study the impact of adult audiences’ viewing of complex television series, and some have drawn a different conclusion. Black and Barnes (2015, n.p.) claim to have discovered that watching complex fictional TV narratives can enhance participants’ theory of mind abilities, just as literary fiction has been shown to do; they state that “the complexity of the characters presented and the degree to which the audience is forced to work to construct their own understanding of those characters” engage audiences in similar ways, regardless of the medium. However, Rooney and Balint (2018) conclude that shot scale improves viewers’ theory of mind tendency, but not ability; in other

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words, close-ups of faces with sad expressions increased viewers’ tendency to be able to recognize the mental state of the individual, but didn’t increase viewers’ ability to imaginatively place themselves in someone else’s position. A further significant difference between reading and watching is the collaborative, co-creative envisioning required when reading a novel and the critical thinking required to predict a character’s next action. As readers process words on a page, screen, or recording, they must possess an adequate vocabulary to understand the words’ meaning, then imagine the character, setting, and actions being described, and interpret meaning in the text; in doing so, they bring their own experiences to the words on the page, screen, or audio recording and their individual imagining of these elements may vary, individualizing each reader’s experience with the text. In my experience and observations, they become, in a sense, co-creators of the text through this process. In a filmic visual illustration of such co-creating, The Fall (Singh 2006), set in a 1920s Los Angeles hospital, portrays a Hollywood stuntman making up stories for a Romanian child migrant worker, both recovering from injuries. His stories feature cowboys and Indians set in the American West, clearly based on his films and informed by his personal life, but the audience sees the story come to life visually through the little girl’s imagination—and for her, the cowboy is the actor and the Indian is one of her co-workers from India, sporting a turban, mustache, and beard. From a different perspective of audience intellectual engagement, Johnson (2005, n.p.) claims that our television-viewing “culture is getting more cognitively demanding” and that “the cognitive benefits conventionally ascribed to reading,” those of “attention, patience, retention, the parsing of narrative threads” are all now a standard part of complex television narratives. For Johnson, this is evident in the fact that “multithreading is the most celebrated structural feature of the modern television drama.” Using examples such as 24, The Sopranos , and E.R., Johnson (2005) shows that these stories employ a “thick network of affiliations” that require viewers “to focus to follow the plot” and in doing so, “exercise the parts of your brain that map social networks, that fill in missing information, that connect multiple narrative threads.” To me, Johnson is describing critical thinking here, not imaginative envisioning to co-create the scene, characters, etc., an aspect of novel-reading that he does not address but one that seems vital in this discussion, moving beyond plotline analysis.

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Rectify raises questions focusing on two related plotlines, one tied to the past and one connected to the present: What really happened twenty years ago to Hanna Dean? How can the truth be verified, if it can? Can Holden re-enter society after nineteen years on death row in solitary confinement? How has his incarceration for over half his lifetime changed him? The impact of his release without exoneration is complicated by his taped confession and his younger sister’s vehement belief in his innocence. The audience is left to make its own assessment of Holden, past and present. Is he a danger to others, including his own family? Was he before he went to prison? O’Sullivan (2019) notes that “segments imply gaps filled in by viewers through intellectual and imaginative labor” (51). In a similar vein, Dasgupta (2017) says that “[t]he fan’s investment in the text takes the form of detective work” (183). We watch Holden’s stilted interactions with others and decide for ourselves as to what he seems capable of, in the past and the present, and wonder about the impact of prison on his behaviors. Despite a few fleeting moments in the series where sound and/or visual editing and effects attempt to place viewers in Holden’s position, for the most part, the audience remains an observer at a distance to the mystery that is this series’ main character. Hoel (2016, n.p.) asserts that “Prose requires a certain activity on the part of the consumer: one can zone out and still watch, but not still read. In that activity prose is further disposed to engender reasoning, following a logical sequence is critical for maintaining attention during reading ” (italics mine). Hoel’s description captures my own experience with reading novels versus watching a TV show; it is impossible to multi-task while reading printed or electronic fiction, but ubiquitous to watching television. However, McKinnon challenges this traditional view of television, saying, “If you multitask and watch ‘Rectify,’ you’re going to go, ‘That was the dullest show I’ve ever seen…’ It does require a kind of immersion. There’s a lot that goes on between the lines that you have to observe” (as cited in Shattuck 2016). In other words, McKinnon holds that details of a scene must be closely noted by the viewer in order to properly appreciate the meaning of the series. This suggests focusing on visual or aural clues to interpret a facial expression, body language, or tone of voice, elements that contribute to our understanding of a character, and would be provided by descriptive detail in diction in the novel. It is, therefore, not the same as the imaginative co-creating involvement required of readers.

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I therefore want to argue that in novels the collaborative, imaginative, co-creating participation of the reader in processing the words on the page and translating them into characters’ appearance, behaviors, and actions, as well as envisioning the setting, is a completely different experience, one that is unique to audience interaction with aural, printed, or electronic word-based texts. It requires of the reader a consistently active mental and imaginative role in experiencing the diction on the page, one that televisual narratives eliminate. I therefore find the claims about the similarities of TV series and novels in terms of audience engagement and the effect of that engagement somewhat problematic—at least for now, given the ongoing evolutionary hybridization of transmedia texts. In my view, each medium continues to have distinct strengths that the other cannot (yet) replicate.

Conclusion Using a literary lens to analyze Rectify and other complex TV series in general can lead to valuable insights, some of which arise from commonalities between the two mediums’ storytelling devices and others from the contrast between the two which can serve to highlight, emphasize, and appreciate aspects unique to TV and to the literary novel, unachieved by the other, at least so far. Zoller Seitz (2017, n.p.) describes this new hybrid thusly: “scripted television raid[s]…literature for devices that it places in service of its own storytelling, then transforms into something that’s part literature, part cinema, but ultimately and distinctively television.” In the final analysis, I agree with his assessment, especially in the case of Rectify. Complex television series constitute their own art form, albeit one that more frequently than ever utilizes conventional literary devices, such as slower pacing, character-driven storylines, and complex characterization; all of these devices are effectively employed by McKinnon’s Rectify. Elements that continue to distinguish even the most “literary” television series from the novel include audience engagement via aesthetic components, imaginative co-creating aspects, and the cognitive impact of the series on audiences—although recent studies suggest this last aspect may be changing, in the wake of new filming and editing techniques. Still, it’s valuable to examine the shared elements of TV and the novel, as well as the limitations of each medium; such comparisons can significantly enhance our understanding of each, especially since transmedia

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texts are evolving rapidly, continually exploring new options for effective and engaging storytelling.

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CHAPTER 16

“Draped in the American Flag, Burning”: Mad Men and the Literary Tradition Hyo Jeong Lee and Walter Metz

Section I: Mad Men, the Novel Who is Don Draper? This is the central question that recurs throughout Mad Men (USA, AMC, 2007–2015). At the beginning of Matt Weiner’s novelistic television show, Betty (January Jones) desperately asks her slumbering husband, Don (Jon Hamm): “Who is in there?” (“Ladies Room,” 7/26/2007). Almost a decade later, Don’s daughter, Sally (Kiernan Shipka) declares, “I realize I don’t know anything about you” (“The Crash,” 5/19/2013). The family members who should have been most intimate with Don are tormented by him, a human enigma. Don himself grapples with the same uncertainty about his identity, oscillating

H. J. Lee (B) · W. Metz Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] W. Metz e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Winckler and V. Huertas-Martín (eds.), Television Series as Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4720-1_16

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between his born and his self-invented persona. This is a struggle that, by no coincidence, also dovetails with the trajectory of literary history. This chapter jettisons conventional methods for doing television criticism. We instead want to perform a hyperkinetic dance in essayistic form, one that provides methodological tools to understand our intermedial joy as viewers of Mad Men. We want to argue here that in Matt Weiner’s television series, as in a lot of great literature, the encoding and decoding, the making and the watching/reading, become a mutual quest among author, characters and critics to better understand ourselves and each other (Hall 1993, 507). In the particular case of Mad Men, this understanding is rendered challenging and intriguing by the fact that Weiner’s show is not about “sane” men: it is our claim in this chapter that the abandonment of sanity that the show’s quest enjoins demands a new form of scholarship. Our essay is a work of adaptation studies in the widest sense, designed to push the limits of the discipline into a fully intertextual domain where texts (literary and audio-visual) grapple with social contexts in vast webs of significance. Building upon the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, we will explore how the character of Don Draper may be illuminated by catching him in a web of polyphonic references that define his relationship to American society, both in the 1960s (when the events of the show take place) and the early twenty-first century (when the show first aired on the AMC basic cable television network). In the pages that follow, you will encounter canonical literature (The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, Paradise Lost , The Divine Comedy), poets (Walt Whitman, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg), novels (Robinson Crusoe, Les Misérables , Don Quixote), novelists (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Emile Zola, William Faulkner), sociologists (Erving Goffman, William White, Pierre Bourdieu), television shows (I Love Lucy, Bewitched, Gilligan’s Island), and music (“What’ll I Do,” “My Way,” and Scheherazade). Our work will crescendo by attending to Madame Bovary (1856), a turning point in the history of the novel, a moment when Gustave Flaubert attempted to use the form to disinter the physiognomy of what we will call a “characterological chronotope”, to reveal the face of a figure who embodies a specific cultural location and historical period. When asked who Emma Bovary was, Flaubert responded, “C’est moi” (qt. Ender, 147). Our critical project replicates Flaubert’s novelistic one. We intend an intertextual autopsy of Don Draper, an emblem of the 1960s created, we argue, to reveal the ugly face of the United States in the early twentyfirst century. While Mad Men does not predict the overwriting of Barack

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Obama by Donald Trump, Weiner’s portrait stands on the threshold of that tectonic change to the previously unimaginable. To know how to make the right critical incisions here, we must begin with an understanding of how Western literature focused its storytelling tradition on the individual, a grandiose cultural construct that fused one person’s experience with a social field full of other social actors, most importantly readers. In his play, Oedipus Rex (429 B.C.E.), Sophocles presented a king whose tragic story was familiar to everyone via myth, for the purpose of reminding his spectators that even the most powerful are at risk of succumbing to the fundamental human flaw of hubris. In The Rise of the Novel (1957), Ian Watt argues that literature in the early eighteenth century then discarded its Renaissance grounding in ancient Greek and Roman tragedy for a new realistic mode of expression, “a definitive repertoire of human experience” (Watt 2001, 14). Watt presents Robinson Crusoe (1719) as inaugurating a new form, the novel, a literary exploration of an everyday human being thrown into remarkable circumstances. In Daniel Defoe’s tale, the protagonist writes in mock autobiographical prose of his experiences shipwrecked in the Caribbean Sea. Mad Men swirls the entire span of this literary tradition from Sophocles to Defoe, positioning Don Draper as both an epic, tragic hero like Oedipus and as the protagonist of a novel, including an examination of his complex motivations for living his life as a man, husband, adulterer, father, and advertising executive. We argue here that Mad Men in fact represents a new form of literature, one in which the televisual has caught up with, and surpassed, the novel in its ability to merge tragedy, epic and Bildungsroman. The life trajectory of Don Draper inverts Watt’s literary historiography. Robinson Crusoe was so successfully innovative in its use of first-person narration that readers mistook Defoe’s prose for a non-fiction travelogue. In Mad Men, Dick Whitman equally convincingly uses Defoe’s literary tools within a television show to invent his new persona, Don Draper, a name stolen from a fellow soldier who dies next to Dick during the Korean War. An abandoned waif stealing the identity of an officer in the U.S. Army, Don finds great success in his grandiose lie. But this is not merely a cynical version of the American Dream; Don’s experience straddles literary history. His deceitful path from poverty to a pillar of the business world is also that of Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean, the protagonist of a similarly sprawling sociological novel, Les Misérables (1862). Born in poverty,

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Valjean hides his identity as a former convict and becomes a celebrated capitalist entrepreneur and the respected mayor of a town. Don’s lie allows him to similarly rise in status, abandoning the rural for New York City, and then the streets for an office in a skyscraper. Like Samantha and Darrin in Bewitched (ABC, 1964–1972), Don regularly saves his company’s fortunes by fabricating yet another magical advertising campaign. Don’s most celebrated coup is his representation of the new Kodak slide projector not as a technologically cold wheel, but instead a nostalgic, child-like carousel. Don does not find this work difficult because he is the embodiment of the novelistic: his very identity is the result of a narration of the self, of the fashioning of personhood to meet the demands of the surrounding social world. Yet this process comes with a great cost. His fake identity crumbles as his humility and hubris waxes and wanes. A modern Oedipus, every time Don saves the advertising firm by tricking the sphinxes of the 1960s, the scheming corporate executives who surround him, his stock rises. But the active brain capable of producing that magic is also one that must self-evaluate, exposing the horrors it takes to maintain the façade. Modernity intervenes between Draper and Oedipus. Don is tortured by time and repetition in a way Sophocles’ hero is not. An exemplar of the unities outlined in the Poetics (Aristotle 1986), Oedipus’ experiences embody the reversal, recognition, and scene of suffering all in one (very bad) day. Draper’s torture is prolonged over a decade, his punishments doled out like water torture, episode by episode, season by season. In this sense, he is more akin to Sisyphus, forced by the gods to perpetually roll a rock up a hill, only to have gravity overcome the work of Man. No matter how many advertising campaigns Don creates, the capitalist economy defines him by his potential to create future sales, and does not celebrate his past achievements. While television scholars might revel in the poesis of Draper’s carousel, the inexorable flow of consumer novelty and of the episodic television narrative that Weiner sandwiches him in between condemns Don to forever run to keep that carousel turning. In “The Myth of Sisyphus,” a 1942 reading of the myth, Sisyphus is an emblem of modern Man’s existential condition (Camus 2018). Yet the onset of Western literature indicates the ancient roots of his crisis. In Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, Ulysses is also condemned by the gods to hop between islands in a narrative quest of seemingly perpetual deferral, hoping to return home to Greece to resume his domestic life with Penelope (Homer 1999). Oedipus is a victim of hubris, producing

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a closemindedness which denies him the ability to see the truth about himself. Ulysses instead uses deceit as a strategy of war, as in his victory over the Cyclops, Polyphemus. Draper is likewise a warrior, cunning in his publicity assaults, but gnawed away from the inside by his self-knowledge of the emptiness of the late capitalist world he helps create, in a manner that is more reminiscent of James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom than Homer’s Ulysses. Unlike Oedipus, Don suffers the full consequences of his self-deception long before his life story’s ending. In Mad Men’s credits sequence, week after week, we witness Don, a titan of 1960s American advertising, suffer a tragic fall from the height of his Madison Avenue skyscraper. We read the fact that in the series finale, Don does not blind himself under the pain of self-discovery as Oedipus did not as a marker of the show’s mangling of literary history, but rather as an indication that Don has always been torturing himself by means of what he knows about himself. Unlike Jean Valjean in Les Misérables , there is no Christian redemption awaiting Draper upon his death. Indeed, Don neither dies, nor do we see him escape the pushing of the corporate rock back up the skyscraper hill, or escape his last island to finally return home. Don has long since decimated his family life, causing two manifestations of Penelope to flee, no pursuing suitors required. In Hugo’s novel, the bishop lies to the police about having given the silver candlesticks to Valjean, when in fact they had been stolen by the latter. Valjean finds salvation when he pays forward the bishop’s act of kindness. As a reward, Valjean dies in warmth, surrounded by those he has saved, for they have in return saved him. Draper learns no such lesson; indeed, any religious practice is glaringly absent throughout Mad Men. Even New Age spirituality is mocked, on various communes and as Don meditates at a New Age cult in California in the series finale, secretly returning to his wicked ways, apparently devising yet another way to sell carbonated sugar water to incipient diabetics through co-opting the very spirituality he pretends to aspire to, inventing the most famous advertising campaign of all time, “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke.” Unlike Valjean, Don ends his story in spiritual isolation. In her essay, “Contemporary Television Series and Literature,” literary critic Anna De Biasio explores Draper’s position within the novelistic tradition. De Biasio characterizes Don, with his Dickensian life story as an orphan who struggles to leave behind a world of poverty to self-actualize as a successful adult in a morally complex city, as akin to the hero of a nineteenth-century Bildungsroman (De Biasio 2017, n.p.). By the end

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of the series, however, Don has become what De Biasio calls “a perfect Western hero,” drawn from the “classic American novel of initiation.” Like Sal and Dean in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), Don ultimately “rejects the (male) protagonist’s integration into society” and “embarks upon a solitary journey of self-discovery towards California” (De Biasio 2017, n.p.). It is our argument in this chapter that beyond postmodern platitudes of pastiche and fragmentation, a dizzying show like Mad Men is properly met with a personal and intuitive form of criticism, which swirls analysis in an analogous way to how Matt Weiner slings literary references, both actual (the characters in the show are often seen to be reading great literature) and implicit, as in our conjuring of Draper as a mangling of Oedipus and Ulysses. Is this essay’s opening, a franticly performed blending of ancient Greek drama and poetry, French Romantic literature and English novels itself an absurdity? Very well then, because it is this chaos that defines television as a postmodern literary machine, in both a positive (Collins 1992) and negative sense (Jameson 1984). Television is technologically, aesthetically, and narratively a fragmentation device. Yet a talented showrunner like Matt Weiner fine-tunes the apparatus to achieve, out of the fragmentation, equivalent thematic and ideological results to any of the great achievements of the novel, another foundation of which is Don Quixote (Cervantes 1615). Mad Men is a twenty-first-century examination of the dissolution of identity, tracing the connections with the post-Renaissance novel, which has morphed into televisual form. Both Dons—Quixote and Draper— tilt at windmills. But Draper’s Romantic quest is even more hollow than his predecessor’s. Don lives within American capitalism’s delirium, that consumer goods will bring happiness. Don’s windmills are made of plastic, and aren’t built to harness renewable nature to grind grain; the twentieth-century United States has filth-producing oil and coal-fueled machines to do such work. Every time Don triumphs, he sells off a piece of the productive, loving human he could have become. In doing so, he forsakes the companionship of a Sancho Panza, and loses any chance of wooing a Dulcinea. The closest he comes is an unrequited love for the real Don Draper’s wife, Anna, whom he visits in California until she dies of cancer. It could be that this woman, to whom he confesses his deepest secrets, is only a figment of his imagination. After all, Don does not really invent the Coca-Cola

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advertising campaign at the end of Mad Men. Real human beings did that, those who acted far out of the control of Matt Weiner. In his essay, “Discourse in the Novel” (1935), Mikhail Bakhtin celebrates the modern novel as a form of heteroglossia, dialogical and polyvocal (Bakhtin 1981, 263). While there is only one author, the fact that narrative consists of multiple characters speaking in different voices and with varying motivations results in a literary form that is built out of arguments and contradictions, not unified, monological meanings (Bakhtin 1981, 263). In his book, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929), Bakhtin argues that this psychologically complex form of the novel, ubiquitous by the dawn of the twentieth century, germinated in the earlier work of Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Bakhtin observes that, given how commonly misunderstood novels are as monological works by a single author, we need a polyvocal criticism that is up to the task of tracing the functions of the many voices contained therein (Bakhtin 1981, 263). The televisual achievements of Mad Men push Dostoevsky’s nineteenth-century polyvocal writing into a twenty-first-century idiom. The aesthetics of twenty-first-century visual culture extend the fragmentations of television technologies and forms into a terrain beyond anything that early television theory could possibly have imagined. Long since have we passed the segmentation and flow model of television narrative (Williams 1974, 3); Mad Men consists of textual shards caught within swirling cultural eddies. Bakhtin positions novels as the result of “artistic fusion,” a collision of characters integrating into the social landscape surrounding them (Bakhtin 1984, 79). In Crime and Punishment (1866), Dostoevsky tells the story of Rodion Raskolnikov, a poor student who kills a pawnbroker because he believes he will be able to get away with the murder, and that her money will lead to his liberation from suffering. Of course, Raskolnikov is horribly self-deluded, and soon discovers that human emotions such as self-hatred for having engaged in evil acts are more powerful than he can control. Draper in Mad Men echoes Raskolnikov, presented by Weiner in a slower reveal. For most of the show, Don seems shorn of the Russian villain’s outwardly murderous narrative art; instead, Don’s actions seem only to share with Raskolnikov a murder of self. Weiner leads us to believe that Dick Whitman does not kill anyone, merely immorally taking advantage of the death of his fellow soldier, Don Draper. Whitman as Draper

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then spends the rest of his life attempting to atone for the crime of having symbolically killed Draper in order to succeed, we think. However, when Weiner finally reveals that Whitman actually deliberately killed Draper during a battle by lighting him on fire, he retrospectively grinds Dostoevsky into the very fabric of Mad Men. In so doing, Weiner fully explores precisely the “problems” in Dostoevsky that Bakhtin finds fascinating. The Russian novelist artistically “fuses” his central protagonist as an individual with considerations of the larger social world, the backward feudalism of nineteenth-century Russia. Mad Men employs Dostoevsky’s fusion of character to social context to profound effect. Dick Whitman is not just struggling with his theft of Don Draper’s life, but also with the phoniness of the post-war American world of consumerism that threatens to swallow him. Weiner tells Don’s story under the banner of heteroglossia; the advertising executive’s discontents with himself and the society around him are fueled both by Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger 1951) and the radical sociological understandings of the self-interestedness of the rich and powerful in the United States in the post-war era. Artistically fusing character and social context, Weiner builds on the foundations of Naturalism. In late nineteenth-century France, Emile Zola wrote a cycle of novels, the Rougon-Macquart series, in which each volume concerned a particular genetic flaw in the Lantier family (dipsomania, homicidal tendencies, and the like) while simultaneously critiquing the failures of the institutions of French social life. For example, in La Bete humaine, Zola entwines the story of Jaques Lantier, a man doomed to want to murder women with whom he falls in love, with a presentation of the French railway grid, a metaphor for the blood which circulates through both France’s collective and Lantier’s individual human body (Zola 1890). Mad Men similarly fuses its study of Don Draper with a critique of the Madison Avenue institutions of advertising. The cold plasticity of Don’s personality leads to his many failures, as a husband and father particularly. Don’s professional successes ironically reinforce his personal shortcomings. Corporate capitalism demands diabolical lies to keep the financial system working to the advantage of the rich, but the application of those skills dooms his place in the domestic sphere.

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Section II: Beyond Bakhtin: The Characterological Chronotope of Don Draper In his essay, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (1938), Bakhtin argues that the novel crystalizes around tropes, specific intertextual linkages that transcend genre. Using Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity as his guide, Bakhtin argues that literature coalesces around what he calls the “chronotope,” literally “time–space” (Bakhtin 1981, 84). Bakhtin postulates: “[T]he intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships… are artistically expressed in literature… [which] expresses the inseparability of space and time” (84). In the concept of the chronotope, Bakhtin finds the artistic fusion of literature more complex than the spatial and temporal aesthetic issues implied by banal talk of the “setting.” Instead, the chronotope describes with analytic force the thematic dynamics of the spatial and temporal locations of narrative. In one example of an intensive study of a particular chronotope, literary scholar Timo Muller traces the importance of the “road” in the history of literature (Muller 2016, 590). Oedipus kills his father, Laius in a confrontation on the road to Thebes. The Joad family abandons the Dust Bowl to travel westward to California, the same land of milk and honey sought by Don in the final season of Mad Men (Steinbeck 1939). The road is a physical location whereupon narrative conflict arises at particular temporal conjunctions, mythological in ancient Greece, and economic throughout the United States in the twentieth century. The chronotope of the road features prominently in Mad Men. Draper’s escape from the East to the West coast replicates American literature’s most famous tale of automotive flight, On the Road (Kerouac 1957). At first glance, the highways do not seem the appropriate metaphor, as Don and his advertising cronies constitute the “jet set.” But, their advertising industry is built around the allure of the American automobile. An entire plot arc of Mad Men features the company attempting to land their largest account ever, with Chevrolet, one of the iconic pillars of the postwar American economy, the collapse of which by the twenty-first century Weiner uses to grand ironic effect. In the penultimate episode of Mad Men, “The Land of Milk and Honey” (May 10, 2015), Don’s automotive journey slows the seemingly triumphant pace of “The Jet Set” of five seasons prior (October 12, 2008). Purportedly attempting to escape his life as an advertising executive, Don drives westward, in a Cadillac. This particular car is the

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status symbol required of him, indeed constructed by him via the lies he sold both to himself and others. The quest after the Chevrolet deal notwithstanding, Don poisons his society by arguing that particular cars are better than others, not because their physical mechanisms work better, but because they display one’s cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986). As divine justice has it, the Cadillac breaks down, stranding Don in Oklahoma, in the socially uncharted middle of the country over which the jet set merely glances in passing. Don meets a young grifter, advising him to not make his mistakes, pursuing a life of deceit. He takes the kid, Andy, to a bus stop in the middle of a field of crops, and donates his Cadillac to the mission of redeeming the young man. The car serves Mad Men as the silver candlesticks given by the bishop to Jean Valjean in Les Misérables . Yet Weiner refuses to inform us whether Don’s redemptive gesture saves the boy. Mad Men presents a pessimistic vision of the historical flow of the 1960s, whereby political crisis is the norm (from the Cuban missile crisis to the executions of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King). Weiner’s collision of fleeting individual liberty with a stifling social milieu links Man Men to Emile Zola’s fusion of the novel as a form of interrogating the individual, but also one capable of political resistance. Yet our essay pushes against the limits of Bakhtinian theory here, suggesting that the chronotope encapsulates both characterological and sociological dimensions. Mad Men positions Draper caught within a net of fundamental cultural forces out of his control, despite his despicable behavior and individual culpability in physical and psychological assaults on the people around him. One of the “problems” Dostoevsky presents, and that Weiner’s narrative art compounds, is that social events and characters are intertwined, a complexity explored even more aggressively at the beginning of the twenty-first century than it was at the end of the nineteenth. Pursuing the implications of Bakhtin’s work on Dostoevsky, we want to chart a new methodological direction to understand the complexities of Mad Men: Don is a characterological chronotope. Embedding exterior spatial and temporal conditions within his character, the schizophrenic crisis that is the Whitman/Draper dyad demands acute self-awareness. Don, but not Dick, is knowledgeable enough to know how he can pursue his salvation. He watches international art cinema and reads great literature. However, Draper deploys that knowledge not to transform himself, but instead to live hedonistically and create marketing campaigns. Don

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is a fictional nexus for the changing dynamics of American capitalism in the 1960s. Matt Weiner’s choice of America’s most turbulent decade to house his narrative is thus not just a clever writing choice, but a maneuver that turns television into the polyphonic discourse Bakhtin celebrates in the modern novel. Draper’s character is caught in a web of heteroglossia. His story is part of the war genre. He expresses the artificiality of advertising culture. He is a vastly creative artist who refuses to self-interrogate, foolishly siding with corporate America. His encounters with the transformative cultural voices with which he surrounds himself give hope, for a while, that Don may engage a productive resistance to that which gnaws at his psyche, that his behavior places him on the wrong side of history. However, at the last minute, Don abandons his embrace of the counterculture of the late 1960s. With a wry smile, in the series’ final shot, the Mona Lisa (1503) of the twenty-first century, Don snaps back to the selling of lies, forestalling the possibility of finally charting a course to a life of moral substance. Don’s seeming creation of the greatest ad campaign in history interrogates the space–time of early 1970s California. While the others at the commune meditate to find personal fulfillment, Don backs out of this countercultural possibility, instead returning to a world in which advertising parasitically takes advantage of the hippie revolution, in this case via the marketing of empty calories as a cure for what ails us. Seemingly so unrelated to the ancient Greeks, Don’s fall strikes us as even more tragic than that of Oedipus. He, and we, would be better off with him jumping off the cliff behind him, a possibility dangled before us at the end of the credits sequence that opens every episode.

Section III: Do Advertising Executives Dream of Canonic Literature? Literary references not only set the scene and undergird the narrative of Mad Men, but also provide the context for how Don makes decisions, how his often deplorable actions produce socially negative consequences. Mad Men uses an intertextual system in a way best compared to footnoting in academic writing. Televisual annotations give spectators extra information about the intellectual roots of each idea, and how they are

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related to larger contexts. Mad Men’s intertextual infrastructure illuminates post-war American society via Don Draper’s reading and viewing habitus (see Bourdieu 1990, 54–56). Without advanced literacy, we can follow the narrative of Mad Men and take a guess as to who Don Draper is. So too can we understand an academic article without reading the footnotes. However, if the viewer appreciates the intertextual field, then she can more fully understand not only one man’s story, but also the sociological nature of the times for which he serves as a characterological chronotope. In the following, the final part of our chapter, we offer an analysis of intertextual televisual systems as an academic spectator’s guide to Don Draper, the world of Man Men, and 1960s American society. Part of the New York School of post-war poetry, Frank O’Hara details the social context from which Don Draper’s crisis originates. The first episode of the second season of Mad Men, “For Those Who Think” (July 27, 2008) finds Don reading O’Hara’s book of poetry, Meditations in an Emergency (1957). The poet informs us, “Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again” (O’Hara 1957, 51). O’Hara’s words capture the troubles of post-war masculinity, decimated under the weight of the phoniness of the American Dream collapsing on top of human frailty. This is Don Draper in a nutshell: he is a quintessential post-war American figure, confident, talented, yet in full-blown Existential crisis. Don’s adulterous affairs and his business shenanigans repeatedly force him to confront that his flight from his horrible stepparents has not resulted in the fulfillment that he so desperately seeks. In his best-known work, Lunch Poems (1964), O’Hara describes his wanderings around New York City during his lunch hour, escapes from a desk job at the Museum of Modern Art. The poems express the ephemeral nature of everyday life. O’Hara begins “A Step Away from Them” casually: “It’s my lunch hour, so I go / for a walk among the hum-colored / cabs. First, down the sidewalk / where laborers feed their dirty / glistening torsos sandwiches / and Coca-Cola” (O’Hara 1964, 12). The poet follows a path that Draper dares not tread. He commits to using art to express the human condition. Equally learned, Don chooses a different path: his series finale invocation of Coca-Cola is to sell, not to ironize. In the second season’s penultimate episode, “The Mountain King” (October 19, 2008), Don finds his copy of O’Hara’s 1957 book in

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Anna’s house in California. The season finale, itself entitled “Meditations in an Emergency” (October 26, 2008) demonstrates that the referent of “emergency” is two-fold, both Don’s wife Betty finding out about his adulterous nature, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Don’s reunion with the estranged Betty, at which she shocks him with her announcement of her pregnancy, takes place as American warships steam to intercept Russian vessels attempting to run the blockade. Toward the end of another second season episode, entitled “The Jet Set” (October 19, 2008), the morning after having sex with yet another beautiful girl, Joy, while hiding out in Los Angeles, Don wakes up and makes a phone call. For the first time in the show, he calls himself by his real name, Dick Whitman. A very different Whitman, Walt, once span wordy celebrations, songs of self, of the potential of American individual freedom in the wake of the Civil War (Whitman 1855). The United States in the post-World War II period finds the nation’s foundational Romanticism murdered off by consumer capitalism, overtaken by the sociological crisis explored by Frank O’Hara’s poetry a century later. Through flashbacks, we learn that after returning home from the Korean War and having taken the identity of Don Draper, Dick befriended the dead man’s widow, Anna. As Don talks with Anna on the phone in Los Angeles, he writes down her new California address on the only paper available, Joy’s copy of the 1929 novel, The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner 2019). Earlier, Joy and Don lie in bed. He asks her if the novel is any good. She replies that sex is good, but Faulkner is just OK. Don mutilates Joy’s copy of The Sound and the Fury so that he can go visit Anna. He writes her address on the white space on the last page of the novel. Faulkner’s words on that page describe the decaying Compson family, left by history to self-destruct. The ne’er-do-well patriarch Jason screams at Luster, one of the family’s few remaining African-American servants, for taking his mentally handicapped brother Benji to the left around the town square, instead of the way he is used to going, the right. The inversion that infuriates Benji is visually represented at the end of “The Jet Set” episode of Mad Men. As Don sits on the couch in Joy’s house after finishing talking with Anna on the phone, he stretches his arm out to the left to relax. This mirrors the image that ends the show’s credit sequence in which Don falls out of his skyscraper office, tumbling through advertising images on the sides of the buildings, only to land comfortably on his couch, his arm stretched out to the right holding a

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cigarette. The image in “The Jet Set,” which echoes the reversal of direction in Faulkner’s novel, registers a vital transformation that has occurred over the second season of Mad Men. Don has been revealed as a charlatan, an advertising creation built by Dick Whitman out of another man’s identity, a doppelganger of inverted morality. The music during the end credits of this episode allows us to read the meaning of this transformation through yet another literary filter. We hear “What’ll I Do,” the haunting 1923 song by Irving Berlin used to express the tragedy in the 1974 Robert Redford film version of the 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald 2004). Like the poor Jay Gatz’s transformation into nouveau riche Jay Gatsby in the wake of World War I via the hiding of his prior identity, Dick Whitman returns from the Korean War to re-fashion himself a post-war identity built on advertising fraud. The song provides another point of entry into the characterological chronotope that is focalized by Don Draper: American artists have struggled with the inability to do anything beyond document, with increasing hysteria, the disconnect between the promise of the American Dream and, respectively, the space–time of the 1920s (the Lost Generation), post-war America (the failure of Frank O’Hara and the Beats to escape the dominance of corporatism, the apotheosis of which is embodied in Don Draper), and Matt Weiner’s televisual indictment of these trans-historical failures from his vantage point in the 2000s and 2010s. Ostensibly, Draper is a perfect self-made man. However, to keep a convincing surface persona, his actual identity as Dick needs to be kept hidden, just like the farmers from whom Jay Gatz descends. For both Don and Jay perform self-fashioning by means of murder, the latter via the gangsters like Meyer Wolfsheim with whom he works. When Adam, Dick’s younger brother, lights upon a photo of Don in an advertising magazine, he comes to New York to meet Dick, hoping to rebuild a bond with his half-brother whom he thought to have been dead. Adam’s genuine feeling of brotherhood threatens Don’s fake identity. Don rejects his little brother’s offer and gives him $5,000 dollars to disappear. Eventually, Adam hangs himself in a squalid hotel. Don is seized with remorse, but only for the duration of one brief commercial break. What lies within the chasm of Don’s dual identity? A critique of Ayn Rand hints at the answer: Don’s crisis is intertwined with capitalism. In “The Hobo Code” (September 6, 2007), Don receives an unexpected invitation to visit Bert Cooper, one of the owners of the advertising agency. The senior partner compliments him on his work. Giving Don

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a bonus check for his talent, Bert mentions Atlas Shrugged (1957) to underline their similarity as leaders of capitalism: “I believe we are alike. You are a productive and reasonable man, and in the end, completely self-interested.” Following capitalist logic, Bert can quantify a person’s worth, and accepts life at face value. Don’s talent tallies to a $2,500 figure. Bert tells his protégé to buy a copy of Atlas Shrugged with a portion of the bonus. Bert cannot imagine Don’s very different literary sensibilities hidden behind the advertising trickster’s “presentation of self” (Goffman, 1959). Don’s backstage persona eschews the crackpot philosophy of Ayn Rand in favor of Modernist literature. Meanwhile, Don’s hidden identity, Dick, embodies the failure of capitalism to bring wealth and prosperity to all. He was born to an impoverished farmer and a sex worker. His mother died in childbirth, and his father is a boorish man. Bert’s presentation of Atlas Shrugged, rather than furthering Don’s commitment to capitalism, causes him to question it. Don visits his girlfriend, Midge, and spends the evening with her Bohemian friends. Surrounded by people who refuse the conventional life of consumer society, Don remembers a childhood encounter with a hobo who left a strong impression on him. In flashback, Dick’s father disdains the hobo, but the impoverished man shows good manners, with faith in the lifestyle of an enforced wanderer. Feeling an inexplicable connection to the hobo, Dick confesses that he is “a whore-child.” Sympathetically, the hobo shares chalk signs, the secret language through which hobos communicate with one another, via symbols they leave on the houses they visit. After the hobo leaves, Dick finds a code on the gate, a picture of a knife. A dishonest man, Dick’s father, lives in this house, the hobo inscribes. Despite his desperate intentions to do otherwise, the grown-up Don finds that, in stealing another man’s identity, he has continued his adopted father’s legacy of the knife. Don knows perfectly well that he should dislodge this bitter past. Yet he cannot commit to what he knows to be the right path, the way of the hobo’s code, turned boho by the early 1960s. Don encounters bitter criticism from Midge’s friends. After suggesting a trip to Paris with Midge using his bonus, Midge’s Bohemian friends denounce Don’s lifestyle. They berate him: “You make the lie; You invent want.” Just when Don believes he has reached the pinnacle of his career, achieving the opposite of his father’s position, the bohemians find his father’s identity in him. The Madison Avenue world of bright lights into which Draper steps to get out of the nefarious shadow of Dick’s father indelibly relegates our

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anti-hero back into his father’s realm, forever falling off of the skyscraper, torn down by the gravity of capitalism. Don hides his dark side through his careful building of a bourgeois lifestyle, coincident with advertising’s reliance on the mass-production of goods for creating the illusion, not the reality, of a perfect life. Like the black silhouette of the cartoon Don falling off of the skyscraper amid the stark white background during the credits of each episode, the greyscale of capitalist society outlines the chasm of Don’s dual identity. Mad Men finds us as critics in the location we desire, tracking the wide referential flows of great ideas, about literature, about the American Dream, on the shores between the written word and the moving image. Don Draper is caught in the oceanic swirl that is American masculinity, leaving us, as spectators, also caught in that void, breathlessly falling. We marvel at the power of literature and television as languages for Weiner to assist us from falling off of our own precipices. Don’s tragic story produces pity and fear, an Aristotelian catharsis that forces us to realize that Draper is a distorted reflection of our tenuous selves.

References Aristotle. 1986 [c. 335 B.C.E.]. The Poetics, edited by Stephen Halliwell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984 [1963]. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1981a [1975]. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel [1938].” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. 84–258. ———. 1981b [1975]. “Discourse in the Novel [1935].” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. 259–422. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. “Structures, Habitus, Practices.” The Logic of Practice, translated by Richard Nice. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. ———. 1986 [1979]. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London and New York: Routledge Classics. Camus, Albert. 2018 [1942]. “The Myth of Sisyphus.” The Myth of Sisyphus. New York: Vintage. Collins, Jim. 1992. [1987]. “Postmodernism and Television”. Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, 2nd ed. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. De Biasio, Anna De. 2017. “Contemporary Television Series and Literature: An Intense, Transformative Embrace.” Fusion Magazine. (August). https://

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www.fusionmagazine.org/contemporary-television-series-and-literature-an-int ense-transformative-embrace/. Accessed June 6, 2020. De Cervantes, Miguel. 2003 [1615]. Don Quixote. New York: Penguin Classics. Defoe, Daniel. 2015 [1719]. Robinson Crusoe. New York: Penguin. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 1993 [1866]. Crime and Punishment. New York: Vintage Classics. Ewen, Stuart. 2001 [1976]. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture. New York: Basic Books. Faulkner, William. 2019 [1929]. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage Press. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. 2004 [1925]. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner. Genette, Gerard. 1992. The Architext: An Introduction. Berkeley: University of California Press. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor. Hall, Stuart. (1993). “Culture, Community, Nation.” Cultural Studies. 7 (3), 349–363. Hall, Stuart. 1993 [1973]. “Encoding, Decoding.” The Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Simon Durang. 2nd Ed. London and New York: Routledge. 507–517. Homer. 1999 [c. 800 B.C.E.]. The Odyssey, edited by Robert Fagles. London and New York: Penguin Classics. Hugo, Victor. 1992 [1862]. Les Misérables. New York: Modern Library. Jameson, Fredric. 1984. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review. 146. (July–August). Kerouac, Jack. 1999 [1957]. On the Road. New York: Penguin Classics. Mellencamp, Patricia. 1992. High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal, Age, and Comedy. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Muller, Timo. 2016. The Ecology of Literary Chronotopes, 590–604. Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology. Berlin: De Gruyter. O’Hara, Frank. 1964. Lunch Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Books. O’Hara, Frank. 1957. Meditations in an Emergency. New York: Grove Press. Rand, Ayn. 1996 [1957]. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Signet. Salinger, J. D. 2001 [1951]. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Back Bay Books. Steinbeck, John. 2006 [1939]. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin Classics. Watt, Ian. 2001 [1957]. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press. Whitman, Walt. 2005 [1855]. Leaves of Grass. The Complete Poems. New York: Penguin Classics. Williams, Raymond. 2003 [1974]. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London and New York: Routledge Classics. Winckler, Reto. 2019. Personal communication.

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Zola, Emile. 2009 [1890]. La bete humaine, translated by Roger Pearson. Oxford and New York: Oxford World’s Classics.

CHAPTER 17

“Read a Fucking Book!”: Reading for Redemption in Boardwalk Empire Víctor Huertas-Martín

Introduction As Nucky Thompson, bootlegger and secretary treasurer of Atlantic City, speaks to a group of workers in episode 3 of the first season of Boardwalk Empire (HBO 2010–2014), he compares African-American gangster boss Chalky White to Simon Legree, slave master in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Not hearing correctly, Chalky responds: “I don’t care a bleep if they agree or not” (Broadway Limited). Does Chalky’s mistaking “Legree” for “agree” point to his Illiteracy? Or does it indicate a refusal to acknowledge the impact of this literary allusion? An icon of slavery’s brutality, Simon Legree stands for the horror haunting the black consciousness in Boardwalk Empire (henceforth BE). Nucky’s allusion implies agreement with Beecher Stowe’s view that “the negro overseer is always more tyrannical and cruel than the white one. This is simply saying that the negro mind has been more crushed and debased than

V. Huertas-Martín (B) University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Winckler and V. Huertas-Martín (eds.), Television Series as Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4720-1_17

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the white” (325). Stowe’s problematic remark sheds light upon Chalky’s double consciousness as master and as a descendant of slaves marked by trauma. Literacy in the series is likewise associated with Chalky’s traumatic past. It was, as his “I ain’t building a bookcase” tale tells (Anastasia), while building a bookcase for a white man that his father was strangled by vigilantes. Literacy and self-improvement, in Chalky’s view, thus go hand in hand with violence. Meanwhile, new urban spaces and ideas agglutinate aspirations of black Americans inspired by Claude McKay, poets and artists whose forward-looking gaze take black identity beyond the traumatic past. Somewhere between these two worldviews Chalky revisits his past. And various symbols and references of this journey may be read through Beecher Stowe’s novel. In Pilot, Nucky addresses his subordinate Mickey Doyle–who doesn’t recognize a Shakespearean quote–in typical HBO fashion: “Read a fucking book!” The statement establishes a premise pervading the whole series. It isn’t only that, as Kim C. Sturgess says, Shakespeare illustrates “moral values” in traditional American education (2004, 146)1 : literacy is the main road to redemption in the series. Later, Nucky is impressed by his future paramour Margaret Schroeder’s knowledge of the French writer George Sand (The Ivory Tower). Though no titles are provided, part of Margaret’s journey resembles that of the heroine in Sand’s Indiana. Like Indiana, Margaret is an exile on account of a sexual scandal in Europe. Yet Margaret’s literary imagination—similar to Indiana’s—facilitates her survival. Bemoaning his protégé Jimmy Darmody’s failures, Nucky says Jimmy used to be like Horatio Alger’s hero Raggy Dick (Broadway Limited). Ragged Dick, originally published in 1865, became a 1920s symbol of the American Dream, which, as the series discloses, is revealed to mark Nucky’s character. His “little boy” tale is an abbreviated version of Alger’s novel in which Nucky depicts himself as a child working his way up from poverty to become treasurer of Atlantic City, though he hides aspects of his criminal record (Boardwalk Empire). As twenty-firstcentury viewers, we may be skeptical of rags-to-riches stories. Indeed, Nucky admits backstage that the story is not entirely true. Nonetheless, Nucky’s endorsement of Alger’s myth to cure himself from his traumatic past isn’t to be dismissed. Regarded as a visually and cinematically appealing series (McCabe 2013), BE presents a substantial literary substratum. Literary works in BE have been pointed to as vehicles of “exchange and reasoning”

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(Cobb 2013, 199) and as refractions of characters’ attempts to reach happiness (Brace and Kingsbury 2013). Forming a mesh made of canonical literature, gangster narrative conventions and redemption narratives, BE’s semiotic complexity, as occurs with other series, renders it writerly through “challenging the viewer’s expectations” (Shannon Wells-Lasagne 2017). Jorge Carrión argues that literary references in series usually respond to psychological patterns or are used as interpretive keys (2011, 44). Following this logic, exploring BE’s “bookshelves,” to use Billy Parrott’s term (2012), enriches our interpretation of the series. Parrot’s pointing at works not mentioned—but plausible reads—in the series in his catalog of the literary works cited in BE constitutes an instance of “drillability”, defined by Jason Mittell as the possibility of discovering in the series something “buried beneath the surface… new playful realms of narrative experience” (2015, 289). Reviews like Nate Pedersen’s (2011) suggest that BE’s drillability appealed to its viewers, although little has been done to explore this phenomenon thoroughly—as, say, Sarah Clarke Stuart did for the literary references in Lost (2011). This chapter establishes relationships between the embedded texts which form the characters’ readings and the primary story. It argues that the embedded texts address the series’ dialectics of trauma and redemption. Often taken as a refutation of the American Dream (Nochimson 2012), the series displays webs of embedded texts which multiply alternative and hopeful interpretations for characters and viewers. I will rely upon two strands of theory. The first takes into account the distinctions of the primary text—which, in this case, encompasses the audiovisual realization—on the one hand and its literary embedded texts on the other. Mieke Bal (2000) suggests to differentiate various functions of embedded texts. These include explanations or determinations of and resemblances to the primary fabula which may—or not—lead to change and present degrees of identity with this primary story (58–59). As Bal continues, embedded texts may provide indications to readers to predict or comprehend the significance of the primary fabula (62–63) and, in the same way, they may be read as diegetic guidelines to characters which use their readings as clues to interpret their own fabula’s outcomes or take them as opportunities to rethink their destinies (63–64). The second strand considers the series’ traumatic context. Though primarily associated with tragic rise and fall narratives (Warshaw [1948] 2009, 579), gangster narratives are also socially grounded. According to

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Shdoian, they realize “our dreams, expose our psychic urges” (2003, 3). Set during the Prohibition, the series warns global viewers about the foundations of a capitalism whose contradictions appeared barefaced during the 2008 crisis (Vega Garrido 2013–2014, 35–36). In an interview with Martha Nochimson, showrunner Terence Winter links the present to the series’ period: “We’re pulling back the curtain. America holds out an enormous promise to its people and those immigrants who struggle to come here, but it’s all based on a litany of lies” (Quoted in Nochimson 2012, 26–27). Critique of American progress points at an individual and collective void, echoing post-9/11 revisions of America’s place as a world leader. Trauma theorists have nuanced this view. For Ann Kaplan, 9/11 produced “a new subjectivity,” more fluid and less disciplinary than the government’s official response (2005, 15), identifiable as a form of recent traumatic experience non-transferable between individuals (4). To explore these ideas in the series, Hannah-Wolfe Eisner’s dialectical model to explore trauma-redemption relations proves fertile (2017). Eisner proposes the analyses of spiritual voids of social groups unsatisfied by the failure of the American Dream. As an alternative to normative teleology, Eisner’s study proposes (1) to admit the need to take the void produced by traumatic experience into account and (2) to root individual experience in the void of trauma to produce alternative narratives for marginalized individuals. For Eisner, stories of the margins expose the representational manipulations of official teleologies (95). Nucky tailors Alger’s story to fit his life’s journey so it reads as teleology. Thus, his childhood appears as a quest which justifies his suffering. But season five, corresponding more to the critical take of Eisner’s model, challenges Alger’s ideology—as embodied in Nucky—by exposing the hero’s prosperity obtained at the expense of others. Indeed, outlaws’ readings can be interpreted along redemption lines. Stories—such as Nucky’s “little boy” tale or Arnold Rothstein’s “cue ball” tale (The Ivory Tower)— achieve different levels of commitment to redemption. Rothstein’s “cue ball” tale acquires the tone of what George Schulman describes as the Biblical notion that fidelity to authority brings security to the collectivity (2008, 26). Assassin Frankie Yale needs to correctly interpret the meaning of Arnold’s tale, as his life depends on it. Eisner describes such redemption tales as “future-oriented” insofar as they require the right understanding of authority (24). Nucky’s “little boy” tale, by contrast, is “past-oriented” (ibid) and, for Eisner, such tales occlude traumatic pasts—as occurs with Nucky’s sanitizing of a lifetime of corruption.

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And yet, Nucky’s stance isn’t entirely cynical. When Gyp Rossetti momentarily dethrones Nucky amidst a gang war, he discovers in the treasurer’s closet an old copy of Alger’s book with an inscription by Nucky’s mother: “To my brave Enoch on the occasion of his 12th birthday from his doting mother” (Under God’s Power She Flourishes ). Rossetti’s recurrent caricaturizing of Nucky’s manners brings to light the extent of the weakness of the protagonist’s adherence to an Algerian myth, one he intends to live up to at all costs and whose principles—disseminated in Alger’s book—he keeps very close to him in his own closet. For twenty-first-century viewers and readers, the American Dream teleology needs to reckon with post-9/11 trauma. Eisner proposes reading stories from the middle of narratives and detecting the many directions trauma may take (78). The multi-dimensionality resulting from this complexity expands points of inquiry (78), and disentangles official narratives (79–80). An example of this disentanglement may be appreciated at the opening of season five, which unfolds how Alger’s work ethic-based ideology goes hand in hand with chaotic competition—at least, it is so in practice in Atlantic City. The commodore tosses a coin into the sea (Golden Days for Boys and Girls ), and children need to struggle to reach the prize while a woman’s voice recites George Birdseye’s “Be honest and true, boys!”—published in Golden Days for Boys and Girls, volume VIII, no. 25, May 21, 1887. Rival kids—and the commodore himself— are shown to despise Nucky’s penchant for fair play. Additionally, Nucky’s progress involves detaching himself from his father, one of the city’s outcasts. As Ethan Thompson says to his son, “We’re here! We’re always gonna be right here! Wherever you think you’re running!” (El Dorado). Ethan’s anguish indicates that Nucky’s self-fashioned narrative is countered by a pattern of trying to make amends to ever-present neglected family members. Eisner’s Derridean reading presents “order” and “disorder” as equivalents to healing and to trauma respectively, though they are not in paradoxical relation to each other (38–39). Nucky’s rise to power and a façade of respectability is grounded in his family’s degradation and in the criminal activities he and his team routinely carry out. Many scenes do resemble sections from Ragged Dick, yet these anecdotes generally reveal a dark underbelly. The darker tones intensify when, near the end of his life, Nucky listens to Raggy Dick-like “street arabs” mockingly singing lines of Robert W. Service’s “The Spell of the Youkon.” These lines expose the poet’s concerns about the effects of the gold rush, dropping thousands of youth “into a grave” searching for

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riches. The loss of youth in Service’s poem echoes Nucky’s unhappy childhood memories which haunt him for life. As in Eisner’s account, attempts to achieve redemption undo themselves (15) via endless repetitions of the redemption-downfall pattern. Nucky’s remembrance of his past, taking place in season five repeatedly, depicts this unresolved conflict. However, BE doesn’t entirely dismiss teleology. Nucky’s encounter with his latest protégé Joe Harper points to the fact that it isn’t Alger’s ethics but human behavior which fails. As Gary Scharnhorst says, the popular Alger formula disseminated in the 1920s was widespread and popular in light of Progressive Reform (2008, 188). As such, the ethical element it contains shouldn’t be dismissed. Harper’s refusal to accept Nucky’s dirty money strikes against Nucky’s cynicism. Intentionally or not, “Joe Harper” isn’t just any name; it is the name of one of Tom Sawyer’s best friends in Mark Twain’s novel. The friendship between Joe, Tom and Huck symbolizes the pleasure of sharing in the children’s adventurous mischief, but also a nostalgia for a rural society. Following Svetlana Boym’s reasoning, as opposed to a conservative view, “creative rethinking of nostalgia” enables understanding it as a “strategy of survival, a way of making sense of the impossibility of homecoming” (2001, 28). The symbolic value of Harper’s name—standing for a relatively secondary character in Twain’s novel—discloses an unknown set of possibilities, but the implication seems to be that honesty exists out there somewhere. Twain’s novel is mentioned by Chalky in jail as he pretends to be reading Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (Ourselves Alone). So, Twain’s spectral presence at these two points implies that this is a potential site for the “drilling” mentioned above. In line with Eisner’s ideas (24), the presence of Twain’s optimistic novel—which reinforces collective and community values—suggests an alternative set of processes of interconnection and an opening up of new possibilities despite the fact that this relatively insignificant anecdote stands against the monstrous consumerist display of advertisements and logos alongside the boardwalk. If men in BE see books as authorities whose values they accept (if ambivalently), women’s redemptive approach to books is less dependent on embracing grand narratives than on these narratives’ critical interpretation. Many of the works read by women in the series—e.g. Frances Lynde’s The Girl, a Dog and a Horse (1920) or Sinclair Lewis’ Free Air (1920)—endorse the Alger myth, but express women-specific concerns which the series negotiates. Denouncing the way in which women were excluded from the memories of American progress, Mary Wroth Walsh

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claims that “this period [the 1880s to the 1920s] was a crucial one in the history of women’s efforts to expand their opportunities for advancement” (2008, 200). The series illustrates part of this process, though not unproblematically. Partly, BE’s female readers discover through literature the hypocrisies of the American Dream. For instance, Gillian Darmody’s readings of Nelly Bly’s Around the World in 72 Days —which proves her desire to achieve education and respectability—doesn’t save her from prostitution and social exclusion. Margaret’s relationship to reading is likewise ambiguous. Based on the “housewife” overwhelmed with debt in Nelson Johnson’s non-fiction source, her bookishness increases the depth of her character in the series. Like Nucky, she is cut off from her family, which she leaves behind in Ireland after a sex scandal. Her relationship to literature implies a commitment to finding clues to her own redemption and to raising her children via storytelling and reading. An avid storyteller, she transforms any story into a fairy tale, as she does while reading Anastasia Romanov’s story in the paper to the children (Anastasia). Such inventive reading—which evinces her great resourcefulness—foreshadows her upcoming rise to the top as Nucky’s future wife. Margaret’s mind works like a literary magnet, transforming her readings into keys to address contingency as it emerges. Like the gangsters, she uses stories—such as the “Bantam Rooster” tale—to humiliate rivals like Lucy Danziger (Family Limitation) after displacing her in Nucky’s esteem. While she reads The Road to Oz, for example, she discovers a way to overcome her revulsion at Richard Harrow’s deformity as she, clumsily, compares him to the “mighty Tin Woodsman,” the fantasy hero in Frank L. Baum’s popular tales (The Emerald City). For Brace and Kingsbury, Margaret’s readings of the Oz saga render her uncritical of the consumerist fancies and fake happiness surrounding her (2013, 58–59). To my mind, her readings give her—and the viewer— an indication of the caution with which such consumerism and the pleasures of the American way of life need to be understood. While at the hospital, sheriff Elias Thompson, Nucky’s brother, intends to win her complicity with a combination of veiled threats and money. Her reading of Henry James’ The Ivory Tower before Elias’s arrival warns us of the grey moral areas in Nucky and Margaret’s relationship. In James’s novel, Gaw and Betterman—two older magnates—intend to redeem themselves by giving the ivory tower to the European visitor. They expect to marry him to Rosanna to cleanse the souls of their two respective families. But the

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novel is unfinished and breaks off before the plan can come to fruition. James’ novel warns Margaret and, to an extent, might be said to determine, that what begins as a sensitive and tender relationship between Margaret and Nucky ultimately cannot redeem the gangster, and that her implicit complicity in her husband’s murder is the price she has to pay for obtaining Nucky’s protection. If we observe Margaret’s journey, paying attention to its contingency— that is, without a teleology in mind,—we may find in her character, as Eisner would put it, a narrative matrix expanding interpretive movement, dimensions and points of enquiry (78). This leads her to establish connections with members of her lost family. Bonding with her elder sister Margaret, Aylesh reveals a simplified view of Nucky: “He’s very mysterious and very powerful. He has minions… it means people do his bidding or they pay the price. Don’t they?… But he has a secret tragedy. His heart was broken and he’ll never let anyone near it again” (Peg of Old). While Nucky’s “little boy” tale transfigures his own criminal experience by endowing it with meaning, Aylesh’s surprisingly accurate depiction of Nucky exposes Nucky’s melodramatic pose, rendering it “senseless” in ways similar to the way in which Eisner (54) opposes “disfiguration” to meaningful representations of sacrifice and pain. This momentary feminine bonding unmasks the series’ obsessive masculine ethos of downfall, sacrifice and redemption recurrent in this and other HBO narratives, an aspect of these shows which has been mocked by reviewers interested in unmasking masculinist ethoi. But the critique of the gangsters’ martyr status doesn’t dismiss progress as implausible. Women’s involvement in reading shows up alternative ways of interpreting the contradictions of the American Dream. Margaret passes Frances Lynde’s novel The Girl, a Dog and a Horse (1920) to Aylesh. In the book, the male protagonist, Stannie, well-read and educated, achieves wealth and fortune through honest work with Hiram. Meanwhile, he falls in love with Hiram’s daughter Jeanie. Jeanie’s worldview sums up a defense against the puritanical view which condemns love for luxuries: “Perhaps if you had lived the way Daddy and I have, ever since I can remember, your imagination would be more elastic” (1920, 131). Jeanie’s materialism and pragmatism—as opposed to Stannie’s self-conscious work ethic and fantasies—leads everyone to triumph, but Stannie regards Jeanie’s strategic maneuvering against the villain Bullerton as an expression of her desire to redeem herself for her former association with him rather than as loyalty, a value which, for him, seems

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to be available to hardworking men only. Margaret passes this knowledge to Aylesh, the crude knowledge which instructs women like them to be cautious against teleological misinterpretations which, by definition, exclude them. It has already been pointed out that, because of his illiteracy, Chalky’s readings do not amount to much in the overall story. Nonetheless, his early description of his father’s bookcase (Anastasia) shows a deep, unrealized yearning for learning. His pal Purnsley invokes an anti-Uncle Tom spirit while leading a strike (Battle of the Century), indicating that he won’t accept an ethos which glorifies sacrifice or exploitation. Implicitly and explicitly, Chalky’s redemptive journey is inflected by literary texts, even though his relation to these texts is blurry and distant. Aspects of Chalky’s escape with his lover Maitland reflect on Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom. Taking refuge from Narcisse’s gunmen at the ancient Havre du Grace mansion run by a black family, they confront the void left by abolition which needs filling. This sequence responds to St. Clare’s fears in Uncle Tom of what will happen to slaves once they are free. Chalky’s return to a place which continues to exist in the past means an immersion into a backward state which contrasts with Van Trompe’s household in the novel, where the enlightened slaves George and Eliza find refuge. Maitland in BE, however, is subjected to a barbaric patriarchal rule under Oscar’s gaze. Chalky’s redemption takes on a transfigurative shape in line with Eisner’s ideas (53). For Chalky’s final journey of suffering— from Havre du Grace to experiencing his first daughter’s death to prison to Harlem where he offers his life in exchange for Maitland’s and their daughters’ futures—is sublimated. Though Chalky’s knowledge of Uncle Tom seems scanty, his redemptive sacrifice borrows some of Beecher Stowe’s reliance on songs and lyrics as a means to improve the souls of slaves. Chalky’s transfiguration runs across various episodes, from his attendance at Maitland’s rendition of M. J. Cartwright’s “Old Ship of Zion”—which causes Chalky to perspire heavily, noted by everyone at church (The Old Ship of Zion)—to the words of “Dream a Little Dream of Me” sung by Maitland—while he waits for his death at the hands of Narcisse’s firing squad. Rather than a backward move, Chalky’s situation in this transition between the past and the utopian future of black collectivities in Harlem reflects Boym’s reasoning. For Boym, reflective nostalgia presents “an ethical and creative challenge” allowing the distinction of “national memory” from “social memory,” the latter consisting of “collective frameworks that mark but do not define the

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individual memory” (31). While denouncing the degradation of many representatives of so-called negro improvement, the series shows glimmers of hope represented by Maitland, her son and the couple’s new-born babe, all to be saved to be part of the new black history thanks to Chalky’s sacrifice. Meeting at the hospital, reading Victor Appleton’s Tom Swift and His Submarine Boat and Irene Temple Bailey’s The Tin Soldier, Richard and Jimmy seem to agree that reading doesn’t suffice to overcome pain. Richard argues: “It occurred to me that the basis of fiction is that people have some sort of connection with each other… mmm, but they don’t.” For Jimmy, Temple Bailey’s novel is “malarkey” (Home). Following Van der Volk and McFarlane’s model of healing for veterans suffering from PTSD, Eisner critiques attempts to heal trauma which imply conflictresolution narratives since they obscure how trauma works (49). Jimmy’s recurrent attempts to make sense of his own service to his country reflects a desire to confirm that his sacrifice had meaning and social significance. Yet, as Eisner’s diagnosis would indicate, Jimmy’s attempts are futile. In his case, we discover that social resentment and Oedipal conflicts are added motivations to his ambition, though Jimmy intends at all costs to think of his own journey as a heroic soldier tale. Unsurprisingly, Jimmy lends himself to comparison with Shakespearean characters from history plays and tragedies (Huertas-Martín 2019). But while Al Capone is explicitly described as “Shakespearean” (Devil You Know), Jimmy—often fancying himself a monarch—reveals, as his Princeton teacher suggests, a larger Jacobean identity which may be read through John Webster’s plays. Like Webster’s upstarts in The White Devil , Jimmy’s ambition appears boundless, as he himself seems to declare while reading Webster in class: FLAMINIO: My father proved himself a gentleman, Sold all’s land and, like a fortunate fellow, Died ere the money was spent. You brought me up At Padua, I confess, where I protest For want of means–the university judge me– I have been fain to heel my tutor’s stockings At least seven years. Conspiring with a beard Made me a graduate; then to this duke’s service. I visited the court, when I returned More courteous, more lecherous by far, But not a suit the richer. And shall I, Having a path so open and so free

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To my preferment, still retain your milk In my pale forehead? No, this face of mine I’ll arm and fortify with lusty wine ‘Gainst shame and blushing. (The White Devil, 1.2.233–238)2

Despite various differences—Jimmy didn’t complete his studies at Princeton, for example,—Flaminio’s passage parallels some of Jimmy’s own frustrations. His father, the commodore, is a wealthy man. Nucky, a prominent parental figure in Jimmy’s life, had Jimmy work for him for years until he went to college and then off to World War One. Despite his service to both Nucky and his country, he hasn’t received the favors he expected. Crucially, like Flaminio, he is ready to achieve all by whatever means necessary, including going down immoral roads. That Jimmy’s life is, as the teacher says, Jacobean (Georgia Peaches ) doesn’t mean that Temple Bailey’s novel doesn’t impact the overall primary fabula. The Tin Soldier tackles the love story of aristocrat Derry Drake and Jean-Joan Mckenzie, a doctor’s daughter. When Derry joins the army, Jean-Joan and he compare their behavior in the light of the European war to what they judge as the cynical attitudes of other US citizens. This patriotic spirit isn’t present in BE, where war veterans are socially excluded and where epic war narratives pale in comparison to realpolitik. Like the Tin Soldier in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, Darmody’s leg has been hit and half of Harrow’s face replaced with a prosthesis. Such losses symbolize their return as people who, as Temple Bailey remarks, have jumped into “an open grave” (1918, 34). As Jimmy says before Nucky shoots him, he already died “in the trenches” (To the Lost ). His life has become a No-Man’s-Land between life and death. The grave and the earth become, in Jimmy’s mind, undistinguishable spaces. Yet at a different level, affirmative redemption narratives are built into BE by borrowing from Temple Bailey’s family symbology, which aligns with part of Jimmy’s journey. While Jimmy develops an abhorrence for family symbols—he stows away a statue of the hunter and the child, symbolizing his childhood with Nucky, in a closet, for example— Richard develops an attachment to pictures and objects symbolizing family. His narrative, though exempt from the impositions of teleology, affects a nuanced healing process. Eisner points at models of redemption and healing involving the laying out of story fragments which place the survivor at the center of a narrative-in-the-making. This is intended to restore the survivor’s connection to social and physical realities by

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progressive healing toward a future telos (67). From this perspective, Richard, not considered a complete person, is the potential protagonist of a story which isn’t complete either. Accumulating tokens, mementos and interactions with loving people, Richard’s healing is deeper and more progressive than Jimmy’s. Brace and Kingsbury’s interpretation of Richard’s cutting and pasting of fashion magazine pictures into his sketchbook as only constituting fake happiness (56–57) is incomplete. With these objects—motifs that later develop into real forms of connection to Jimmy’s and Julia Sagorsky’s families, Richard’s journey presents a recuperative narrative strand to viewers. Even in Jimmy’s case, Richard’s initial concept of fiction seems to be accurate. Cut off from his family, Jimmy bonds with Pearl, a prostitute, through fiction. En route to Chicago from Atlantic City, he reads Sinclair Lewis’ Free Air (1919). Signifying a split from his son Tommy—whose picture he keeps in the book’s pages,—Lewis’ novel adds an adventurous dimension to BE’s primary story which Jimmy romanticizes at his return. In Lewis’ novel, Claire Boltwood travels to the West Coast, deliberately associating the trip with her “voyage into democracy” ([1922, 2013, 47). The progressive novel agglutinates working-class entrepreneurs and the democratically-driven upper classes of New York. Claire and Milt Dagget’s connection and rebalancing of socio-economic and gender distinctions suggest a light-hearted pulling down of barriers. Jimmy’s westward move stops in Chicago, where he and Pearl dream of reaching Hollywood, Free Air being a common inspiration for the trip (Anastasia). This and other cultural products—e.g. David W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (a film with a clear resemblance to Jimmy and Pearl’s story) (ibid) —or Jimmy’s therapeutic storytelling to Pearl (Nights in Ballygran) mark their bonding which, as in Lewis’ novel, relates to various embedded texts. As Shdoian says, “If there’s a problem the society is worried about or a fantasy it is ready to support, odds are it can be located in the gangster” (5). Pearl and Jimmy co-construct redeeming narratives at the very heart of the violent environment conducive to extend traumatic experience. Eisner recalls our presence in a relational social world (81) and the multidimensionality of intermingling temporalities (82), which, in this case through fiction, form a meshwork agglutinating past experiences—Jimmy’s memories,—present experiences—the impact of Griffith’s films on both characters’ hearts—and future experiences— delineated by their common perception of Lewis’ optimistic message. The common search for intertextual multidimensionality reflects the couple’s

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relatability to what Eisner refers to as expanding the reality of traumatic nihilism (82). The most optimistic stories they share don’t determine their fates. However, the ideas contained in Lewis’ novel support Jimmy’s frequent streaks of optimism. Driving westward, Claire sees a road where: there were no fences; she was so intimately in among the grain that the fenders of the car brushed wheat stalks, and she became no stranger, but a part of all this vast-horizoned land. She forgot she was driving, and she let the car creep on, while she was transported by Armadas of clouds, prairie clouds… (67).

Jimmy’s romanticized recounting to Tommy of the landscape he envisaged during his journey to Chicago—presented in terms similar to Claire’s westward trip though it never took place—is summarized by: “You only see opportunity” (Belle Femme). Such a statement can hardly come from Jimmy’s actual journey to Chicago; rather, it comes from his emotional travelings inside the Four Deuces’ room in the company of Pearl. The fact that Jimmy’s simplicity pales in comparison to Lewis’ elaborate prose proves that Jimmy eagerly appropriates the experience extracted from the text. Bookishness affects characters differently depending on gender, race and class in BE. For male outlaw characters, embedded texts function mainly as pedagogical tools for achieving redemption. Examples like Ragged Dick are appropriated as teleology, consciously erasing dark aspects of history and one’s own biography. Female characters cannot afford to uncritically accept teleology. Therefore, their road to redemption through reading requires an inventive stance on interpreting stories. Reading, women anticipate the future, understand their present, adjust their prejudices on an ad hoc basis and negotiate available opportunities with caution. Black characters, such as Chalky, present a more indirect relationship to reading. Yet anti-slavery narratives operate as foundational redemption myths they look to for revisionary purposes to rethink redemption in the face of a changing utopian present. Veterans’ relations to embedded texts acquire the zig-zagging features Eisner proposes. Possibilities for redemption and re-connection to social experience and mankind—signified through embedded texts—arise. The analysis of texts whose values foster bonding reveals hopeful interpretive alternatives across this tragic gangster narrative. Looking into these

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hopeful threads works in favor of a spirit of resistance. As C. J. Polychroniou affirms, Noam Chomsky would say, “despair is not an option. No matter how horrendous the current world situation appears to be, resistance to oppression and exploitation has never been a fruitless undertaking” (2017, 2). Pervaded by HBO’s violent sensationalism, Boardwalk Empire’s “bookshelves” contain hopeful clues to the characters’, and maybe the viewers’, way out of despair. Acknowledgements This book chapter is part of my research contribution as a member of American Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies (Instituto FranklinUniversidad Alcalá de Henares). It was developed both at Instituto Franklin and at Universitat Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona. Acknowledgments are owed to Francisco Manuel Sáez de Adana Herrera (IF-UAH), Carlos Herrero (IF-UAH) and Xavier Pérez Torrio (UPF).

Notes 1. For a more thorough exploration of Shakespearean intertexts in Boardwalk Empire, see Huertas-Martín (2019). 2. Jimmy reads a trimmed version of this speech. See Webster (2019).

References Bal, Mieke. 2000. Narratology (Introduction to the Theory of Narrative), 3rd ed. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press. Brace, Patricia and Maria Kingsbury. 2013. “How to Be Happy on the Boardwalk,” in Boardwalk Empire and Philosophy (Bootleg this Book), edited by Richard Greene and Rachel Robinson-Greene, Chicago, Open Court, 47–63. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Carrión, Jorge. 2011. Teleshakespeare. Madrid: Errata Naturae. Cobb, Cam. 2013. The Stories Some People Tell. In Boardwalk Empire and Philosophy (Bootleg this Book), ed. Richard Greene and Rachel RobinsonGreene, 191–204. Chicago: Open Court. Eisner, Hannah Wolfe. 2017. “Into the Middle of Things: Traumatic Redemption and the Politics of Form.” https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/30bb/bf0 0a55b0fbfb239c0ce3a04b34822594101.pdf?_ga=2.76361949.953715643. 1594025677-794057618.1594025677. Huertas-Martín, Víctor. 2019. Winter. “Rethinking Shakespeare in the Culture of Traumatic Redemption: Shakespearean Intertexts in Boardwalk Empire (HBO

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2010–2014).” Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics 42 (3): 151– 170. Kaplan, E. Ann. 2005. Trauma Culture (The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature). New Brunswick, New Jersey, London: Rutgers University Press. Lewis, Sinclair. Free Air. HardPress Publishing, 2013. Lynde, Francis. The Girl, a Horse and a Dog. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433074879168& view=2up&seq=1. McCabe, Janet. 2013. “HBO Aesthetics, Quality Television and Boardwalk Empire,” in Television Aesthetics and Style, ed. Jason Jacobs and Steven Peacock. London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 185–198. Mittel, Jason. 2015. Complex TV (The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling). New York: New York University Press. Nochimson, Martha P. 2012, Fall. “Boardwalk Empire: America Through a Bifocal Lens.” Film Quarterly 66 (1): 25–39,3. Parrott, Billy. 2012. “The Bookshelves of Boardwalk Empire.” New York Public Library. Last modified June 1. https://www.nypl.org/blog/2012/06/01/ bookshelves-boardwalk-empire. Pedersen, Nate. 2011, January. “The Books of Boardwalk Empire.” Fine Books and Collections. https://www.finebooksmagazine.com/blog/books-boardw alk-empire. Polychroniou, C.J. 2017. Introduction. In Optimism over Despair, ed. Noam Chomsky, 1–2. United Kingdom: Penguin Random House. Scharnhorst, Gary. 2008. “Demythologizing Alger,” in Horatio Alger Jr., Ragged Dick or, Street Life in New York with Boot Blacks (A Norton Critical Edition), edited by Hildegard Hoeller, New York and London: W. W. Norton and Norton Company, 182–198. Schulman, George. 2008. American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture. University of Minnessota Press. Shdoian, Jack. 2003. Dreams and Dead Ends (The American Gangster Film). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stuart, Sarah Clarke. 2011. Literary Lost (Viewing Television Through the Lens of Literature). London: The Continuum International Publishing Group. Sturgess, Kim. C. 2004. Shakespeare and the American Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Temple Bailey, Irene. 2018. The Tin Soldier. Okitoks Press. Vega Garrido, Eduardo. 2013–2014. “Evolución de la mirada panóptica en Deadwood, Boardwalk Empire y The Wire: De las sociedades disciplinarias a las de control en su contexto geográfico y biopolítico”. Masters dissertation for the Postgraduate Programme at the Communication Department (Universitat Pompeu Fabra).

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Webster, John. 2019. The White Devil, edited by Benedict S. Robinson, London, New York, Oxford, New Delhi and Sidney: Bloomsbury Academics, Plc. Walsh, Mary W. 2008. “Selling the Self-Made Woman” in Horatio Alger Jr., Ragged Dick or, Street Life in New York with Boot Blacks (A Norton Critical Edition), edited by Hildegard Hoeller, New York and London: W. W. Norton and Norton Company, 199–208. Warshaw, Robert. 2009. “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” in Film Theory and Criticism (Introductory Readings) (seventh edition), edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, New York, Oxford, 576–580. Wells-Lasagne, Shannon. 2017. “Literature and Series.” TV/Series 12. https:// journals.openedition.org/tvseries/2249.

Boardwalk Empire episodes cited Boardwalk Empire. 2010–2014. Directed by Various Directors. Written by Terence Winter et al. United States: HBO. ———. 2010. Episode 1, “Boardwalk Empire (Pilot).” Directed by Martin Scorsese. Written by Terence Winter. Aired September 19, 2010. ———. 2010. Episode 2, “The Ivory Tower.” Directed by Tim Van Patten. Written by Terence Winter. Aired September 26. ———. 2010. Episode 3, “Broadway Limited.” Directed by Tim Van Patten. Written by Margaret Nagle. Aired October 3. ———. 2010. Episode 4, “Anastasia.” Directed by Jeremy Podeswa. Written by Lawrence Konner and Margaret Nagle. Aired October 10. ———. 2010. Episode 5, “Nights at Ballygran.” Directed by Alan Taylor. Written by Lawrence Konner. Aired October 17. ———. 2010. Episode 6, “Family Limitation.” Directed by Tim Van Patten. Written by Howard Korder. Aired October 24. ———. 2010. Episode 7, “Home.” Directed by Allen Coulter. Written by Tim Van Patten and Paul Simms. Aired October 31. ———. 2010. Episode 9, “Belle Femme.” Directed by Brad Anderson. Written by Steve Kornacki. Aired November 14. ———. 2010. Episode 10, “The Emerald City.” Directed by Simon Cellan-Jones. Written by Lawrence Konner. Aired November 21. ———. 2010. Episode 12, “A Return to Normalcy.” Directed by Tim Van Patten. Written by Terence Winter. Aired December 5. ———. 2011. Episode 14, “Ourselves Alone.” Directed by David Petrarca. Written by Howard Korder. Aired October 2. ———. 2011. Episode 19, “Peg of Old.” Directed by Allan Coulter. Written by Howard Korder, Steve Kornacki and Bathsheba Doran. Aired November 6. ———. 2011. Episode 21, “Battle of the Century.” Directed by Brad Anderson. Written by Steve Kornacki. Aired November 20.

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———. 2011. Episode 22 (season 2), “Georgia Peaches.” Directed by Jeremy Podeswa. Written by Dave Flebotte. Aired November 27. ———. 2011. Episode 35, “Under God’s Power She Flourishes.” Directed by Allan Coulter. Written by Howard Korder. Aired December 4. ———. 2011. Episode 24 (season 2), “To the Lost.” Directed by Tim Van Patten. Written by Terence Winter. Aired December 11. ———. 2011. Episode 25, “Resolution.” Directed by Tim Van Patten. Written by Terence Winter. Aired September 16. ———. 2013. Episode 44, “The Old Ship of Zion.” Directed by Tim Van Patten. Written by Christine Chambers and Howard Korder. Aired October 27. ———. 2013. Episode 47, “Havre de Grace.” Directed by Allen Coulter. Written by Howard Korder. Aired November 17. ———. 2013. Episode 48, “Farewell Daddy Blues.” Directed by Tim Van Patten. Written by Terence Winter and Howard Korder. Aired November 24. ———. 2014. Episode 49, “Golden Days for Boys and Girls.” Directed by Tim Van Patten. Written by Howard Korder. Aired September 7. ———. 2014. Episode 54, “Devil You Know.” Directed by Jeremy Podeswa. Written by Howard Korder. Aired October 12. ———. 2014. Episode 56, “El Dorado.” Directed by Tim Van Patten. Written by Howard Korder and Terence Winter. Aired October 26.

CHAPTER 18

Shakespearean Sitcom: Upstart Crow, Shakespeare’s Plays and the Problem of Literature on Television Reto Winckler

Introduction In Upstart Crow (BBC Two, 2016–20), writer Ben Elton makes William Shakespeare into the protagonist of a sitcom. Upstart Crow thereby positions who is generally recognized as one of the greatest literary writers of all time at the centre of what is commonly seen as the most humdrum kind of contemporary popular entertainment. In this chapter, I argue that by making Shakespeare the hero of a sitcom in the British working class tradition, Upstart Crow sought to transform Literature with a capital L into television. With the subsequent printing and publication of the Upstart Crow scripts, however, sitcom and television also became literature, and potentially Literature, themselves. As an example of both televisual literature and literary television, Upstart Crow therefore

R. Winckler (B) South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Winckler and V. Huertas-Martín (eds.), Television Series as Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4720-1_18

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embodies the complex relationship that exists between the two media, and provides an illuminating case study of television as literature. Upstart Crow takes its cue from the insult which the writer Robert Greene famously levelled against Shakespeare in 1592, in the first extant printed reference to the Bard in a theatrical context: there is an vp=start Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey. (Greene 1592, sig. F1v, cit. Holland 2019, 18)

Today, the historical Greene’s own poetic output is largely forgotten outside of specialist circles. What continuing fame he enjoys rests, in a beautiful historical irony, precisely on his having insulted the supposedly inferior Shakespeare in his posthumously published pamphlet Greene’s Groatsworth Of Wit (1592), which Greene likely did not even write (Jowett 1993; also see Schoenbaum 1991, 23–30). Historically, the superior airs Greene puts on in this passage were based on his Cambridge education rather than blue blood—he was, like Shakespeare, the son of a craftsman (Van Es 2013, 2). This notwithstanding, the choice of the word ‘upstart’ and the evident prejudice against common players certainly reveal a considerable amount of snobbery on Greene’s part.1 As its title indicates, Upstart Crow is premised on the class antagonism between the English social and cultural elite and the commoner Shakespeare implicit in Greene’s comment—with Shakespeare representing the common populace. A sense of outrage at the social injustice of class divisions provides the central thematic axis around which Upstart Crow revolves from the very first episode. In “Star-Crossed Lovers”, Greene (played by Mark Heap) uses his institutional influence as Master of the Queen’s Revels to bully Shakespeare (David Mitchell) into taking care of his posh boy nephew, the ‘lovelorn loon’ Florian (Kieran Hodgson), until the latter can be shipped off to Cambridge. This is the first of numerous instances in which Elton makes Greene into the series’ representative of the upper-class establishment by unhistorically elevating him to gentle status and putting him into an official position from which he tries to thwart the social climber Shakespeare’s rise to success. These attempts usually backfire, in this case because Fabian’s antics help Shakespeare in conceptualizing the character of Romeo, leading to a major theatrical

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triumph at the end of Season 2—although this and other successes, in line with sitcom convention, never change Upstart Crow’s fundamental ‘situation’ of the little man struggling against the social forces that hold him back: WILL And all because Robert Greene be made Master of Revels. Why be he Master of Revels? What qualifies him to be my judge? BOTTOM: Well, he’s posh and he went to Cambridge. WILL: Exactly. His very birth did guarantee him advancement, whilst mine precluded it. It is almost as if there be suspended over this sceptred isle a ceiling made of glass against which men of lower birth such as I must always bonk our noggins. (Elton 2018, Loc 246)

The pattern is repeated in the first episode of Season 2 (“The GreenEyed Monster”), in which Shakespeare’s social aspirations take on the more concrete form of applying for a coat of arms for his father in order to become a gentleman. Again, Greene is there to keep Shakespeare down, this time as Chief Herald. Upon finally realizing in the second episode of Season 3 (“Wild Laughter in the Throat of Death”) that his attempts to stop Shakespeare’s rise will probably fail, Greene takes even more sinister action in a plot to kill Christopher Marlowe (Shakespeare’s best mate, played by Tim Downie), whose plays Will has been shown as writing in a number of previous episodes, and insinuate that, conversely, it was really Marlowe who wrote Shakespeare’s plays, in order to tarnish Shakespeare’s reputation posthumously. As Lisa Starks has remarked, Upstart Crow thereby ‘comically responds to the authorship conspiracy theory that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare’s plays by positing the reverse’ (Starks 2019, 219), while also purportedly explaining how the conspiracy theory came into being in the first place. Upstart Crow relies on a Bakhtinian inversion of values for much of its humour. Bringing the generally idealized figure Shakespeare from Literary heaven down to sitcom earth can be understood as a carnivalesque maneuver which injects Upstart Crow with a healthy dose of the subversion which the genre of sitcom is often supposed to lack (Grote 1983). This is reinforced by what Shakespeare looks like and by how he talks and behaves in the show. In pointed contradistinction to the romanticizing image of Shakespeare (Holland 2019, 17) in recent decades most prominently embodied by Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love (Madden 1998) in the cinema and by Laurie Davidson in the drama series Will

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(TNT 2017) on television, Upstart Crow’s Shakespeare is anything but dashing or good-looking.2 He is also, in spite of his uncanny ability to arrogantly foresee his own future literary stardom, anything but a genius who transcends his time and place. Elton’s Shakespeare is a family man who spends his evenings sitting by the fire while smoking a pipe and chatting with his wife Anne (played by Liza Tarbuck), with whom he is reasonably happily married, rather than ditching her in order to pursue the Gwyneth Paltrows of his day in London. At the same time, this Shakespeare uses words like ‘corker’, ‘blimey’ and ‘totty’, relishes his superiority over his illiterate servant, is (initially at least) strictly unconvinced by the idea that female roles might be acted by women, complains endlessly about his coach commute between Stratford and London, yearns to (but ultimately does not dare to) cheat on his wife, who is a much better person than he is (and from whom he steals a great many ideas for his plays), and is rather very self-conscious about going bald—‘I am not going bloody bald! I … I have a very big brain’ (“StarCrossed Lovers”). Elton’s sitcom Shakespeare is thus not necessarily more sympathetic than the familiar Romantic version—he is just a lot more ordinary. Upstart Crow portrays Shakespeare as a bumbling average Joe, veering helplessly between, as David Mitchell puts it, ‘those feelings of, you know, on the one hand self-loathing and self-doubt, on the other hand sort of little glimpses of megalomania’—that is, ‘a classic sitcom figure’ (Mitchell 2018). Upstart Crow transforms Shakespeare, icon of Literature, into a telly character.

Shakespeare: The Working Class Sitcom While Shakespeare’s drama has come to represent the heights of Literary achievement, television programmes have frequently been described as one of the lowest forms of modern cultural product (Newman and Levine 2012, 6), with television itself being regarded as both a ‘classed’ and a ‘feminised’ medium (Wood 2017, vii) of a ‘domestic, ordinary, everyday nature’ (Mills 2009, 21). Within this medium, sitcom has been one of the most consistently popular genres (Dalton and Linder 2016, 319–320), and has, at the same time, always been held in particularly low critical esteem (Mills 2009, 2). More consistently and unapologetically than other forms of comedy, sitcom shows, in Renée Dickason description, the ‘minor tribulations of ordinary people, like the viewers, whose trivial problems are resolved, using the classic narrative structure for comedy’

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(2016, 37). As ‘the most prominent instance of a TV-specific genre development’ (Voigts-Virchow 2005, 214; also see Williams 1974/2003, 64), sitcom is exemplary of the medium for which it was created. Shakespeare’s plays, by contrast, remain firmly associated with Literature. For the purposes of this chapter, I will use ‘literature’ to refer to creative or imaginative writings such as poems, novels and dramas. In addition, much of my discussion will focus on what I will term ‘Literature’ with a capital L: that is, literature as an institution, associated with cultural prestige and elite ‘high culture’, embodied most readily nowadays by the medium of the printed book—and frequently conceptualized in contradistinction from what is now nicely called ‘popular culture’, stereotypically represented by the medium of television. The association of Shakespeare with Literature remains firmly in place despite decades of efforts to adapt, appropriate and integrate Shakespeare into modern popular culture (Lanier 2002), and equally long-standing attempts by cultural institutions such as the British Council and the Royal Shakespeare Company to ‘popularize’ and ‘democratize’ the plays. While there are many complex historical and political reasons for this situation (Hawkes 1986; Taylor 1989), the main one seems to me to be the brute fact that for most people, reading Shakespeare is not a choice. Rather, it is a duty imposed upon them by the most powerful cultural institution in existence: school. As Sarah Olive has put it, ‘formal education’ is still ‘the most common way in which the population encounters his [Shakespeare’s] work, and hence formative of attitudes towards it’ (Olive 2015, 4). Shakespeare remains the only compulsory author on the British National Curriculum (‘2 plays’, as the Curriculum sternly specifies (Anonymous. 2014, n.p) and one of the dominant literary authors in North American education,3 and his works are, in one form or another, taught in secondary schools in an astonishingly wide range of countries around the world.4 This situation gives rise to, as Douglas Lanier has aptly put it, a ‘tension between reverence and resistance’ (Lanier 2002, 55) in attitudes towards the Bard and his works in the general population—a tension which Upstart Crow exploits for humorous purposes by staging and performing a clash between the general image of Shakespeare as an embodiment of Literature and its own Shakespeare as an incarnation of a typical sitcom protagonist. Intriguingly for a consideration of the Shakespeare sitcom, most of the specific reasons for the low esteem in which sitcom has generally been held stem from the genre’s origins in, and continuing affinities with, popular

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forms of live theatre. The first American and British television sitcoms, produced in the late 1940s, were shot on a proscenium stage and broadcast live (Neale and Krutnik 1990, 209–261; Mills 2005, 37–42; Smith 2005). Although the live broadcasting was quickly replaced by filming and subsequent distribution to different television stations, the conventions of production which serve to identify the genre to this day all stem from the original setup which is based on, and in some ways quite simply is, theatre (Butler 2010, 178 and 196). Like the vast majority of sitcoms which were produced between the days of I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951–1957) and roughly the turn of the millenium, Upstart Crow is shot on a soundstage in front of a live audience, is filmed simultaneously by multiple cameras, and features a laugh track that captures the live audiences’ reaction, which makes the theatrical, artificial nature of the programme obvious to the television viewer at any given moment (Savorelli 2010, 24; Smith 2005; Kalvinkes Bore 2011). The individual episodes revolve around the interactions of an unchanging cast of strongly stereotyped characters (Savorelli 2010, 26), and narrative progression between episodes is very limited and never changes the fundamental ‘situation’. By all the usual measures, Upstart Crow is a traditional sitcom. More specifically, even though the show gives the genre and its hero a rural bend, Upstart Crow can be read as a faithful installment of the British working class sitcom tradition. While classic American sitcom was only occasionally concerned with issues of class, ‘in Britain, the emphasis was less on fast-paced comedy, songs and wisecracks, than on the sometimes static observation of life with a socio-realistic perspective’ (Ducray 2012, 3), a focus which from the beginnings fastened with particular acuteness on the working classes in sitcoms such as The Likely Lads (BBC2, 1964–1966), Steptoe and Son (BBC1, 1962–1974) and On the Buses (ITV, 1969–1973). The rather cramped single room in the Stratford scenes in which multiple generations of the Shakespeare family are shown to spend their time together aligns Upstart Crow with working class Britcom settings such as the Steptoe’s house in Steptoe and Son, the Garnett’s home in Till Death Do Us Part (BBC1, 1965–1975) or the living room of The Royle Family (BBC1 and BBC2, 1998–2000 [original run]). The thick, put-on Brummie accents in which all the actors playing members of Shakespeare’s family speak likewise function as a traditional indicator of working class origin in British sitcoms (Dickason 2016, 41).

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Although both features can be read as contextually motivated—Shakespeare’s farm house by the historical period and the accents by the fact that Stratford-upon-Avon lies in the Midlands—they reinforce the leitmotif of the show. Its very title situates Upstart Crow within the tradition of the ‘comedy of frustration’ (Ducray 2012, 3) characteristic of many early Britcoms: it indicates its protagonist’s humble origins and social ambitions, but also, via sitcom convention, implies that he will eternally remain trapped in the ‘situation’ defined by the title—an arrangement which employs the oft-criticized ‘degree of fixity’ (Savorelli 2010, 28) characteristic of traditional sitcom to draw attention to the lack of social mobility in British society. In imitating and continuing the tradition and production style of the working class Britcom, Upstart Crow swims against the stream of television comedy development since the 2000s, a period which has been increasingly dominated by single-camera sitcoms such as, in Britain, The Office (BBC2, 2001–2003) and David Mitchell’s own Peep Show (Channel 4, 2003–2015), and, in the United States, Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO, 2000–present) and Modern Family (ABC, 2009–present). These series usually shoot on location (but in any case without a live audience present) and do not feature a laugh track, while retaining traditional sitcom’s half-hour running length and the reliance on the dynamics between a small set of stereotyped characters for much of their humour (Thompson 2007; Vermeulen and Whitfield 2013). The rise of this ‘new comedy’ (Savorelli 2010, 14) has led some to proclaim the impending demise of the traditional format: ‘single-camera is generally regarded as the superior form […] because edgier, more experimental, more “serious” comedies tend to be shot that way now, where the multi-camera sitcom is seen as ephemeral and old-fashioned’ (Lloyd 2019, n.p.; also see Newman and Levine 2012, 61). The same is true on a thematic level: while class was a central concern in traditional Britcom, it has largely disappeared from view in new comedy (Wickham 2017). Upstart Crow is well-aware of this situation, and jollily reflects on an ironic meta-level on its own old-fashioned mode of comedy and manner of production, chiefly by satirizing the new-fangled single-camera comedy in the character of Will Kemp, historically the major comedian and also the major star of Shakespeare’s first acting troupe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (Wiles 1987). In Upstart Crow, Kemp is played by Spencer Jones (at Elton’s instigation (Jones 2016)) as a parody of Ricky Gervais’ character David Brent from The Office, arguably the most representative

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of the new single-camera sitcoms. Kemp constantly boasts about being able to make edgier, more relevant comedy (in the Upstart Crow context equated with Italian Commedia Dell’arte) than the old theatre hands Burbage (Steve Speirs) and Condell (Dominic Coleman). Shakespeare’s own theatre thereby becomes identified with Upstart Crow’s outdated model of sitcom.5 The presentation of Shakespeare in Upstart Crow is thus, in television’s own terms, wilfully old-fashioned. Why so pointedly choose the traditional format? My argument here is that the formal features of Upstart Crow, as well as its focus on issues of class, have to be understood in the context of Ben Elton’s attempt to reclaim Shakespeare, fictionally and historically, from Literature and establish him as belonging to the common people. In an article published around the time of the premiere of Upstart Crow, Elton intervenes in the authorship debate—did Shakespeare really write his plays?—with what can only be described as righteous vehemence, proclaiming that instead of the mysterious cipher he is commonly portrayed to be in popular discourse, the historical Shakespeare is actually quite well-known: he was ‘in fact, a dedicated family man. An over worked commuter. A homeowner who dreamed of upsizing… in fact the perfect character to make into the hero of a British sitcom’ (Elton 2016, n.p.). This hero of the ordinary, in Elton’s narrative, later fell victim to Britain’s ‘snobbish elitism’ (Elton 2016, n.p.) in the form of, on the one hand, authorship conspiracies—only a university-educated aristocrat could have written such great Literature—and, on the other, elitist Romanticism—Shakespeare was a creator of the highest form of Literary art, a singular, solitary genius, far removed from the rabble which originally paid to see his plays. Making Shakespeare, icon of Literature and darling of the cultural elites, the hero of a traditional working class sitcom can thus be understood as Elton making a political point. For Elton, ‘Shakespeare was that classic cog in the English class machine, the lowly born but talented, aspirational figure surrounded by a bunch of posh boys’ (Elton 2016, n.p.), who had to struggle for recognition in a system biased and rigged against him—a system which, as Elton insists, remains just as biased and rigged against the working classes today, in a Britain still ruled by class prejudice and still dominated and run by Oxford and Cambridge graduates like Greene. The Shakespeare sitcom Upstart Crow represents Elton’s attempt to wrench Shakespeare out of the hands of the elite and give him back to the people. In the political scenario as envisioned by Elton, Literature belongs to the realm of the elitist snobbery against which Elton positions his

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telly Shakespeare. On the one hand, Elton’s sitcom dad Shakespeare is calculated to create the maximum amount of friction with Literary circles invested in Shakespeare’s cultural prestige and beyond. On a deeper level, making Shakespeare a typical protagonist of what is commonly regarded to be among the least sophisticated kinds of television programme can be read as Elton’s attempt to try to save Shakespeare from Literature, by which he has been annexed, and hand him back to the realm of popular entertainment, in today’s world, television—because that is where, for Elton, he originally belongs. The problem for Elton is thus not that Shakespeare wrote literature—like Elton’s writing of the scripts for Upstart Crow, that literature served the purpose of feeding an entertainment industry which mainly (if not exclusively) sought to bring joy to, and profit from, the common people. The problem is that Shakespeare’s literature was later made into Literature, and thereby co-opted, by the very posh boy system against which the historical Shakespeare had to struggle. This explains the generally benevolent attitude towards Shakespeare in Upstart Crow. Unlike many other, far nastier fictional portrayals of Shakespeare to be produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (see Franssen 2016, ch. 4), Upstart Crow finds a source of comedy, and ultimately humanity, in taking Shakespeare down a few notches.

Televisual Literature/Literary Television Yet the relationship between literature, Literature and television series such as sitcoms is much more complex than the rather schematic opposition described so far seems to allow for. Given the pride Upstart Crow takes in its own, old-fashioned telly-ness, and given the distaste Elton exhibits for the cultural establishment, one might expect that the very last thing Upstart Crow would want to do is to become literature (and thus, potentially, Literature) itself. Yet in a delightful bit of irony, that is exactly what happened when the scripts of the first two seasons of Upstart Crow were published by Bantam in 2018 (Elton 2018). Elton is once again well aware of the deep transmedial, as well as transhistorical, irony of his own satirical bits of popular entertainment about Shakespeare passing into literature in a manner which closely mirrors the fate of Shakespeare’s own. In the printed version he not only divides up his scripts into two “Crow Folios” (which correspond to the two seasons) (Elton 2018, loc 22), but also prefaces them with an introduction and a Principal Dramatis Personae and annotates them with pseudo-learned (and

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occasionally, actually learned) notes which revive, as Peter Holland (2019, 20) has pointed out, the tradition of satirical, mock-scholarly Shakespeare editions started by John Poole in his 1810 Hamlet Travestie. In doing so, Elton once more ridicules the pretentiousness of Shakespeare scholarship and the educational and cultural establishment which guards the Bard’s elevated reputation as a whole. Elton makes his TV scripts into Literature and thus repeats satirically, in person and fast forward, the process Shakespeare’s own scripts passed through on their way from the theatre, first into printed form and then into scholarly editions (Dobson 1992). In spite of the facetious manner in which this act of transformation is performed—the introduction claims that the following scripts are not fictional, but, ‘in fact, the most important discovery in the history of English literature and nothing less than direct verbatim transcripts of episodes from the life of William Shakespeare’ (loc 22)—the fact that Elton does take the step of making his scripts into Literature seems to acknowledge, while also questioning, the connection and established hierarchy between the two cultural forms. If Shakespeare’s plays could become Literature, and Upstart Crow can also become Literature, does this validate Upstart Crow’s episodes as equivalent to high cultural Shakespearean plays, or does it democratize Shakespeare’s plays as a form of sitcom? Or does this act of remediation undermine the very idea that there is such an opposition between the media and the cultural spheres they are taken to represent? Crucially, Elton claims not that Shakespeare’s writings, but rather that ‘direct verbatim transcripts of episodes from the life of William Shakespeare’ (loc 22) are this ‘most important discovery in the history of English literature’, implying that everyday spoken language, when medially recorded and transmitted, can lay just as much claim to literary value as intentionally literary language. Once again, this claim can be understood in the context of the overall collision of Literature and television around which Upstart Crow revolves. As John Fiske and John Hartley have noted, ‘the codes which structure the “language” of television are much more like those of speech than of writing… its “logic” is oral and visual’ (2003, 2–3). By making this television-specific oral and visual language into Literature in the Crow Folio edition of Upstart Crow, by adapting a sitcom to a printed book, Elton contributes to the process of establishing television as a form of literature. And, once again, this act closely follows Shakespeare’s own lead. If, as Fiske and Hartley claim ‘Television… is ephemeral, episodic, specific, concrete and dramatic in

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mode’ (2003, 3), in opposition to ‘the written word (and particularly the printed word) [which] works through and so promotes consistency, narrative development from cause to effect, universality and abstraction, clarity, and a single tone of voice’ (2003, 3), then Shakespeare’s plays certainly share more characteristics with television than with other literature. Like the Upstart Crow scripts, the plays became literature to be read when they were first printed, in most cases long after the lines had first been spoken by actors on stage, and Literature only when they were assembled in the grander folio format in 1623, prefaced by laudatory poems—or perhaps even later than that, when the first critical, ‘fulsomely annotated’ (Elton 2018, cover) editions started to appear in the eighteenth century, leading up to Shakespeare’s elevation to ‘the paradigmatic figure of literary authority’ (Dobson 1992, 1) from the nineteenth century onwards (Henderson 2007, 21). However, I find it hard to agree with the conclusion which Hartley and Fiske draw from the contrast between television and literature, namely that, ‘we have the example of Shakespeare to remind us that non-literate entertainment can be as demanding, and satisfying, as the most profound works of literature’ (2003, 4). This implies a clear distinction between oral and written language which drama, and sitcom as a televised form of drama, precisely call into question. Shakespeare was, after all, a literary author, who beyond his plays also wrote and published more unambiguously literary works in the form of narrative poems and sonnets, and who did see his plays into publication and arguably wrote them with publication, and thus a reader, in mind (Erne 2013). The same is true for Ben Elton, who, apart from being a script writer for television, is a successful novelist (and writer of plays and musicals). Moreover, the co-existence in Shakespeare’s plays of more obviously literary verse lines in iambic pentameter (for which, ironically, Greene criticized him) and more oral-language-like prose, with their respective cultural and social associations, renders any unambiguous characterization of his language and works as ‘spoken’ or ‘written’ language problematic (Henderson 2007): pace Fiske and Hartley, Shakespeare’s art can certainly not be classified as ‘non-literate’ in any straightforward fashion. The ‘spoken language’ that can be heard at the performance of a Shakespeare play is, of course, written language which is orally performed, no matter how much it might seek to mimic spoken discourse. Ben Elton, for his part, lets his Upstart Crow characters speak in what Peter Holland has called ‘fake-historicised language’ (Holland 2019, 17),

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filled with, in a very Shakespearean manner, a wealth of newly coined words designed to sound Elizabethan, most of them with profane under or overtones—‘arsemongle’, ‘bolingbrokes’, ‘boobingtons’, ‘cod-dangle’ and ‘hugger-tugger’ prominently among them—but with some also referring to the class distinctions which structure the series—‘pamperloins’ and ‘cock-snobbled folderols’ for the posh boys like Greene, ‘country bumshank/le or bumsnot’ for the lowly-born country folk like Shakespeare (see the “Glossary” in Elton 2018, loc 5509–5530). In line with the sitcom’s overall approach to history and brand of humour, this language seeks to capture more what twenty-first-century Britons think Shakespeare spoke like, based on limited and probably annoying exposure in secondary school—lots of verbs ending in ‘-th’, for example, and lots of funny-sounding words whose meaning seems only vaguely familiar but usually can be glimpsed from the context—than what he actually might have sounded like, but nevertheless seeks to evoke a sense of ‘how people spoke back then’. And yet, this ‘spoken’ language is written by Elton, based on samples of Elizabethan language which likewise have reached us only in written form. The line between ‘literate’ and ‘non-literate’ art, in both cases, is thus much more fuzzy than Fiske and Hartley seem to allow. This seems especially true because the passing into literature of both Upstart Crow and Shakespeare’s plays was facilitated by the fact that the authorship of the two sets of texts can be, relative to other texts in their respective media and time periods, clearly delineated (centuries of pamperloin conspiracy theories in Shakespeare’s case notwithstanding). While both an Elizabethan play and an episode of a contemporary sitcom obviously depend on a great number of contributors for their ultimate realization on the stage and on television, the written texts on which both are based were produced by an identifiable author who features prominently in the marketing campaigns for the texts: in the case of Shakespeare, through his name on the cover of printed editions of his plays (Stern 2006), in the case of Elton through media appearances, promotional material and articles such as the one discussed above. Shakespeare, who at the beginning of his writing career participated in a mode of authorship in which collaboration was the norm, afterwards acted, with a few exceptions particularly towards the end of his career, as the sole author of most of his plays (Vickers 2002), or was at least presented as such by his publishers (Marino 2011, esp. loc 2315) when his plays were made into Literature in the folio in 1623. A roughly similar trajectory

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can be sketched for Ben Elton, who began his television career as a cowriter on The Young Ones (BBC 2, 1982–1984, with Rik Mayall and Lise Mayer) and then co-wrote the final three seasons of Blackadder with Richard Curtis, before going on to write sitcom episodes, and then entire sitcoms, on his own (The Thin Blue Line (BBC 1, 1995–1996); Blessed (BBC 1, 2005); Upstart Crow), alongside stand-up routines, sketch shows and other projects.7 As Michel Foucault has pointed out, having an identifiable author gives a text a particular, elevated position in discourse; without it, a text will not readily be considered literature, and certainly not Literature, in Western culture (Foucault 1979, 19). This returns us to the co-existence of written and spoken language in scripted drama and television series. It has by now become a commonplace among critics that a significant factor in the critical and popular rise of ‘quality TV’ series since the early 2000s in the United States television industry (and subsequently elsewhere) has been the promotion of a visible form of authorship in the form of a ‘creator’ or ‘showrunner’, because this kind of authorship enables and encourages comparisons with literature and auteur cinema (Newman and Levine 2012, ch. 3; McCabe and Akass 2008, 67). In Britain, however, a similar mechanism had been at work for much longer, with Jon Cook, writing in 1994 and referring to programmes written by Andrew Davies and Dennis Potter (as well as to programmes written by writers known for other forms of literary output, maybe most famously Malcom Bradbury): When a television narrative is... identified with a named and known writer, it confers quality on the programme... Television reproduces a distinction established in the print culture of the nineteenth century between the work of quality identified by a known author, whose life and reputation are the subject of fascination, and the work of genre fiction [such as soap operas] where the name of the author is little more than a cipher... television reproduces boundaries established within a literary culture. (Cook 1994, 131)

Yet the sitcom, in Britain, has from the beginning been a genre dominated creatively by writers, even though the writers did not usually acquire personal fame. Sitcoms were and are generally considered to be ‘the brainchild of a writer’ (Jones 1978, cited in Eaton 1978, 75), written by one or two writers (rather than in collaboration by a team, as was and is common in the US (Ducray 2012, 9; Berman 2011, XVI–XVII)). As

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the quintessential televisual genre, British sitcom participates in television’s oral logic, seeking to reproduce the way that ‘real people’ speak, and trying to ‘deliver a product, in which the voice of the author is not to be heard’ (Elsaesser 1994b (2) 93). And yet, many sitcoms start their existence as scripts produced by a specific writer, and this facilitates their ultimate passing into literature through the print publication of the scripts. In the publication process, the voice of the author, in the screen work lost in the voices of the actors who speak his words, is recovered through being emphasized on the title page and in promotional paratexts—if the author in question is able to acquire the necessary stature to be ‘named and known’, either through being a performer him—or herself (like John Cleese and Connie Booth in Fawlty Towers, whose complete scripts were published in 1988 (Cleese and Booth 1988)), or through being known for other literary works. Ben Elton fulfils both of these criteria. So, in his own historical and cultural context, did Shakespeare, poet and player. Like Shakespeare’s plays, sitcom can thus be said to make visible the permeability of the line between oral and literary language, and straddle the media of television and literature. Both contemporary sitcom and Elizabethan plays exist in a space which encompasses literature and performance, the spoken and the written word. Both are potentially, but not necessarily, literature/Literature, and therefore transcend not only media boundaries, but also divisions of class and prestige. In the case of Shakespeare’s drama, the almost complete absence of performance records makes it easy to forget this: the printed word, after all, is virtually all we have left of the plays. In the case of Upstart Crow, the situation is reversed. Given the availability of the performance itself, it is easy to forget that this television sitcom is also a work of literature.

Notes 1. The slur proved prophetic, but not in the way Greene seems to have hoped for. In the years following the publication of his pamphlet, Shakespeare would indeed rise to gentle rank though the acquisition of a coat of arms for his family in 1596, and eventually become a personal servant of King James I upon the latter’s ascension in 1603 as a leading shareholder of the King’s Men, the king’s personal acting troupe (Schoenbaum 1991, 16–19).

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2. As Mills has argued, in contrast to film stars, who are usually ‘more attractive, more interesting, more exciting than us… the success of many people who appear on television rests on their being “like us”’ (Mills 2009, 20). Also cf Elsaesser in Elsaesser 1994a (1), 96: ‘television produces not stars like the cinema—remote beings from another planet—but “personalities”, individuals able to elevate ordinariness exponentially.’ In terms of historical accuracy, Mitchell’s look in Upstart Crow definitely gets closer to the authentic Droeshout engraving than any other film (or television) Shakespeare I have witnessed, who all tend to be modelled after the more romantic Chandos portrait, ignoring the latter painting’s uncertain degree of authenticity (and it’s equally strong emphasis on Shakespeare’s baldness). 3. In the 1980s, a survey found that Shakespeare was taught in 91 percent of US high schools. See Strauss 1999 and Coeyman 2002. Also see Albanese 2010, 67–93. 4. Just one example is the high school curriculum in the People’s Republic of China, which features (scenes from) The Merchant of Venice as compulsory for year nine students. See Levith 2004, 120 and Yang 2018. 5. Especially in Season 1, Episode 6, “The Quality of Mercy”. 6. On the development of TV authorship from the 1980s onwards in comparison to authorship in Elizabethan drama from 1580 onwards, see Winckler 2017, 172–173.

References Anonymous. 2014. National Curriculum in England: English programmes of study, July 16, 2014. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ national-curriculum-in-england-englishprogrammes-of-study/national-curric ulum-in-england-english-programmes-of-study. Berman, Garry. 2011. Best of the Britcoms: From Fawlty Towers To The Office. Revised Edition. Lanham et al: Taylor Trade. Blackadder. 1983–1989. Written by Richard Curtis, Rowan Atkinson and Ben Elton. United Kingdom: BBC1. Blessed. 2005. Written by Ben Elton. United Kingdom: BBC 1. Butler, Jeremy G. 2010. Television Style. New York and London: Routledge.

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Cleese, John, and Connie Booth. 1988. The Complete Fawlty Towers. London: Methuen. Coeyman, Marjorie. 2002. “In Love with Shakespeare.” The Christian Science Monitor, May 28, 2002, https://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0528/p13s02lecl.html. Cook, Jon. 1994. “Television and Literature.” In Writing for the Medium: Television in Transition, edited by Thomas Elsaesser, Jan Simons, and Lucette Bronk, 131–136. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Curb Your Enthusiasm. 2000–present. Created by Larry David. USA: HBO. Dalton, Mary M. and Laura R. Linder. 2016. The Sitcom Reader: America Reviewed, Still Skewed. Albany: State University of New York Press. Dickason, Renée. 2016. “Social Class and Class Distinctions in “Britcom” (1950s-2000s).” In Social Class on British and American Screens: Essays on Cinema and Television, edited by Nicole Cloarec, David Haigron and Delphine Letort, 34–57. Jefferson: McFarland & Company. Dobson, Michael. 1992. The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ducray, Amandine. 2012. “Sharing the Joke? ‘Britcom’ Remakes in the United States: A Historical and Socio-Cultural Perspective.” Media: The French Journal of Media Studies 12 (1): 1–16. https://journals.openedition.org/inm edia/132. Eaton, Mick. 1978. “Television Situation Comedy.” Screen 19 (4): 61–90. Elsaesser, Thomas. 1994 (1). “Part 2: Literature on Television: Introduction.” In Writing for the Medium: Television in Transition, edited by Thomas Elsaesser, Jan Simons and Lucette Bronk, 91–97. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. ———. 1994 (2). “Literature After Television: Author, Authority, Authenticity.” In Writing for the Medium: Television in Transition, edited by Thomas Elsaesser, Jan Simons and Lucette Bronk, 137–148. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Elton, Ben. 2016. “Ben Elton: Only Snobbish, Elitist Britain Could Say That Shakespeare Didn’t Write His own Plays.” RadioTimes, May 9, 2016. https://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-05-09/ben-elton-only-sno bbish-elitist-britain-could-say-that-shakespeare-didnt-write-his-own-plays. ———. 2018. Upstart Crow: The Scripts. London: Bantam Press. Erne, Lukas. 2013. Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fiske, John and John Hartley. 2003. Reading Television. With a new Foreword by John Hartley. London and New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1979. “What Is an Author?” Screen 20, vol. 1: 13–34. Franssen, Paul. 2016. Shakespeare’s Literary Lives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Newman, Michael Z., and Elana Levine. 2012. Legitimating Television. New York and Oxon: Routledge. Olive, Sarah. 2015. Shakespeare Valued: Education Policy and Pedagogy 1989– 2009. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect. On the Buses. 1969–1973. Created by Ronald Chesney and Ronald Wolfe. UK: ITV. Peep Show. 2003–2015. Created by Andrew O’Connor, Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain. UK: Channel 4. Savorelli, Antonio. 2010. Beyond Sitcom:New Directions in American Television Comedy. Jefferson and London: McFarland & Company. Smith, Jacob. 2005 “The Frenzy of the Audible: Pleasure, Authenticity, and Recorded Laughter.” Television & New Media 6 (1): 23–47. Schoenbaum, Samuel. 1991. “Shakespeare’s Lives.” New Edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Starks, Lisa. 2019. “Queering Will and Kit: Slash and the Shakespeare Biopic.” In Shakespeare On Stage and Off , edited by Kenneth Graham and Alysia Kolentsis, 212–229. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Steptoe and Son. 1962–74. Written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. UK: BBC1. Stern, Tiffany. 2006. “‘On Each Wall and Corner Poast’: Playbills, Title-pages, and Advertising in Early Modern London.” ELR 36 (1): 57–89. Strauss, Valerie. 1999. “A Shakespeare for All Ages.” Washington Post, March 7, 1999. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1999/03/07/ a-shakespeare-for-all-ages/9e016d21-3e00-4872-ab77-5aac5e81eb60/. Taylor, Gary. 1989. Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. The Likely Lads. 1964–66. Produced by Dick Clement. UK: BBC2. The Office. 2001–2003. Written and directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. UK: BBC2. The Royle Family. 1998–2000 (original run). Created by Carline Aherne and Craig Cash. UK: BBC1 and BBC2. The Thin Blue Line. 1995–1996. Written by Ben Elton. UK: BBC 1. The Young Ones. 1982–1984. Written by Ben Elton, Rik Mayall and Lise Mayer. UK: BBC 2. Till Death Do Us Part. 1965–1975. Created by Johnny Speight. UK: BBC1. Thompson, Ethan. 2007. “Comedy Verité? The Observational Documentary Meets the Televisual Sitcom.” The Velvet Light Trap 60: 63–72. Upstart Crow. 2016–20. Directed by Matt Lipsey and Richard Boden. Written by Ben Elton. UK: BBC2. - 2016. Episode 1, “Star-crossed Lovers.” Directed by Matt Lipsey. Written by Ben Elton. Aired May 9, 2016. - 2016. Episode 4, “Love is not Love.” Directed by Matt Lipsey. Written by Ben Elton. Aired May 30, 2016.

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- 2016. Episode 6. “The Quality of Mercy.” Directed by Matt Lipsey. Written by Ben Elton. Aired June 13, 2016. - 2017. Episode 7, “The Green-Eyed Monster.” Directed by Richard Boden. Written by Ben Elton. Aired September 11, 2017. - 2018. Episode 15, “Wild Laughter in the Throat of Death.” Directed by Richard Boden. Written by Ben Elton. Aired September 5, 2018. van Es, Bart. 2013. Shakespeare in Company. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vermeulen, Timotheus, and James Whitfield. 2013. “Arrested Developments: Towards an Aesthetic of the Contemporary US Sitcom.” Television Aesthetics and Style, edited by Steven Peacock, Jason Jacobs, 103–111. London: Bloomsbury. Vickers, Brian. 2002. Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Voigts-Virchow, Eckart. 2005. “History: The Sitcom, England: The Theme Park – Blackadder’s Retrovisions as Historiographic Meta-TV.” In Narrative Strategies in Television Series, edited by Gaby Allrath and Marion Gymnich, 211–228. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wickham, Phil. 2017. “Twenty-First Century British Sitcom and ‘the Hidden Injuries of Class.’” In Social Class and Television Drama in Contemporary Britain, edited by David Forrest and Beth Johnson, 201–214. London: Palgrave. Will. 2017. Created by Craig Pearce. Directed by Shekhar Kapur and Craig Pearce. Canada: TNT. Wiles, David. 1987. Shakespeare’s Clown. Actor and Text in the Elizabethan playhouse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Raymond. 1974/2003. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Routledge. Winckler, Reto. 2017. “This Great Stage of Androids: Westworld, Shakespeare and the World as Stage.” Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 10 (2): 169–188. Wood, Helen. 2017. “Foreword.” In Social Class and Television Drama in Contemporary Britain, edited by David Forrest and Beth Johnson, vii–ix. London: Palgrave. Yang, Yuan. 2018. “The Bard in Beijing: how Shakespeare is subverting China.” Financial Times, October 5, 2018. https://www.ft.com/content/cd997246c57b-11e8-bc21-54264d1c4647.

PART III

Postscript

CHAPTER 19

Married at First Sight: A TV Literature Experiment Richard O’Brien and Jack Nicholls

Married at First Sight (2015)—is a dating reality show, produced for the British television network Channel 4 by CPL Productions. In 2018, two poets—myself, Richard O’Brien, and Jack Nicholls—were commissioned to assemble a set of (loosely defined) collaborative works by the ‘Grizzly Pear’ reading series, hosted by the University of Birmingham’s creative writing society, Writers’ Bloc. We decided to write a sonnet sequence tracing, episode-by-episode, the journeys of one couple introduced by the programme, property developer Ben and police officer Stephanie. In this post-script, along with the poems themselves (mine about Ben, Jack’s about Stephanie), I combine in roughly equal parts my own observations with an interview with my writing partner, to offer a kind of self-directed reception study: an appropriately collaborative account of our experimental process of producing literature about TV.

R. O’Brien (B) Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK J. Nicholls Manchester, UK

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Winckler and V. Huertas-Martín (eds.), Television Series as Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4720-1_19

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An episodic TV series about romance shares certain parameters with the episodic form and repeated tropes traditional to the English sonnet sequence since its sixteenth-century inception. Nonetheless, we were hand-wringingly desperate to avoid the potential for cynicism in marrying ‘high culture’ and pop culture. Our primary strategy to avert that danger, as we explain below, was to stick closely both to the visual images presented by the programme-makers, as a form of ekphrastic adaptation, and to the emotional sincerity of the participants in their search for genuine human connection. Both Jack and I viewed a certain thoroughness, in terms of formal poetics, as part of this sincere engagement. In reflecting on the historical connection between sonnets and the concept of literary immortality, however, we conclude by considering whether contemporary poetry publishing is any less ephemeral than the reality TV format on which this project is dependent, and yet to which it might initially appear to be opposed. The premise of the Married at First Sight format, originated in Denmark as Gift Ved Første Blik, is that two strangers matched as potentially compatible romantic partners ‘by science’ meet for the first time at the altar and have to negotiate the early stages of married life together, including the honeymoon, co-habitation, and meeting their spouse’s friends and family members (Married 2018). This is our version of that initial meeting. S03e01 Ben The earth revolves for funtime Benny-boy, property millionaire at thirty six — the axis of his mother’s tepid joy, his father’s bluff vox-poppery. What sticks in the mind is the man’s utterly naked faith: his apelike walk, his lion-print moccasins. He rolls the dice, pictures each card an ace, then we’re in Poland, baby, sinking gins and never questioning what love is. Or bowling about a bare-brick house in Bromley done up smart for a girl who isn’t there; hope etched black on his skin which a single smarmy shop assistant folds into despair.

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One kiss: it’s back. Let’s leave them at the door. Stephanie Outside the cock balloon: the club, the hen, the sash round Stephanie, the future twirled like loo roll round a Sindy, six wrong men who changed their minds, the churning of the world distilling grief to scent to Chardonnay to flippin eck to is this a mistake to morningmorningMORNING it’s my day, like nested dreams. They’re smooching over cake. He wears no socks! Will she witness his death? For work she has to dress up as a cop. Today? Princessier than the real thing. Hair, stay. Body, be fictional. Sweat, stop. Earth, still. She screams and laughs. Enters the ring. Inside the cock balloon: dark air, held breath.

Though the programme’s concept rests on the idea that this kind of data-driven arranged marriage might create more stable unions than traditional dating, Jack notes that at least on the surface the series reads as a ‘cynical exercise’: though ‘ostensibly a scientific experiment in matchmaking,’ ‘year on year it yields zero positive results, almost as though it weren’t an experiment but rather a reality television show.’ Similarly, Elizabethan sonnets have less to do with romanticized (and indeed postRomantic) notions of reciprocated ‘true love’ than it might seem to the casual reader. For Catherine Bates, a ‘negative condition’ of wanting and not having is ‘what lies at the heart of every sonnet sequence,’ and indeed what sustains and impels them: [H]owever passionately the speaking voice might insist that he aches for his beloved — however urgently he might call on her name, however devoutly he might wish for or earnestly beseech her — the one thing he does not want, or not yet, is for her actually to materialize, to come down from her pedestal, or to acquiesce in his demands. (Bates 2011, 106–107)

This deferred gratification is necessary to create ‘a situation in which there is necessarily an addressing, importuning, apostrophizing “I”’ (Bates 2011, 107). Our sonnets did not themselves inhabit the voices of

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desiring subjects: they spoke of ‘he’ and ‘she’ rather than ‘I.’ I found, however, that the episodic nature of the TV format—its weekly cliffhangers and continuations, wherein desired ends are ‘achieved … as temporary stopping-off points or provisional moments when desire pauses all too briefly before it is off again on its hopeless, endless quest,’ and its repetitive nature across multiple seasons, a form of ‘go[ing] round in circles […] never to get anywhere’—was well-suited to what Bates calls ‘the rehearsal of intransitive desire’ (Bates 2011, 117, 120, 112.). A format ultimately about ‘chasing without catching,’ ‘discontent could be said to be’ the ‘very content’ of Married at First Sight as of the Elizabethan sonnet sequence (Bates 2011, 112, 117). There is a comedy in this self-fulfilling misery which, Bates observes, its early modern proponents often exploit, because ‘the sonnet tradition already contains its own negative — its own opposite, contrary or antithesis — within itself’ (Bates 2011, 120). This is a ‘self-parodying genre,’ wherein ‘the true parodist […] will be as attached to the tradition as he says he wants to be detached from it,’ and ‘to that extent he must remain within the circuit of desire’ (Bates 2011, 120). Nonetheless, despite the aspects of irony and parody in Elizabethan sonnets, Jack was keen that our work should resist such mockery, and that his own poems should observe a certain sincerity in their approach to the form. Certainly we were both, in Jack’s phrase, ‘absolutely terrified’ that ‘the sequence could be reduced to, or thought of as, us translating something “lowbrow” into something “highbrow,” and what a wheeze that was. Mortifying.’ This desire to avoid a tone of smug pastiche led Jack to reject certain tropes that might be associated with the arched-brow frame of postmodernity. Although he himself had previously written ‘sonnets that aren’t quite sonnets, not quite rhyming or following meter,’ with the sonnet form functioning ‘as baggy clothes that a poem can slip on to lend it a little formality, like two children in a trenchcoat pretending to be an adult,’ for this sequence, instead, my collaborator aimed ‘to be absolutely meter-perfect, with no forced stresses, and for each rhyme to work totally.’ The reasons behind this attempt were ‘simple. While Stephanie and Ben had consented to be part of the television programme,’ they had not consented to someone who did not personally know them ‘writing in such an in-depth manner about their emotional journey, as real people.’ In his close adherence to the sonnet form, Jack therefore ‘hoped that if the subjects of the poems were to read them, they might be heartened by

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the fact that in demonstrating at least a surface-level technical proficiency, the poet basically knew what he was doing.’ Jack also consistently followed the roughly Petrarchan rhyme scheme used in the sestet of my first sonnet about Ben, noting that ‘diverging from the Shakespearean sonnet felt like a useful way to avoid gimmickry,’ demonstrating that ‘we weren’t writing pastiche, but rather trying something in earnest, and making artistic choices at a small, technical level.’ This conscious earnestness extended to Jack’s use of visual imagery from the series: It’d have felt disingenuous using images such as the ‘cock balloon’ that is bounced around on Stephanie’s hen night, or the ‘loo roll’ she reports wrapping her Sindy doll in as a child to make her a bride, as fodder for an argument against institutions that Stephanie buys into; rather, I hope I present them as the television screen does —recording that they were there, that they mattered to somebody, and passing that on.

Nonetheless, this choice becomes a way to ‘honour the reality’ and the truthful lived experience of Jack’s subject, Stephanie, rather than an endorsement of the production company’s decisions which, narratively, ‘prop up received notions of heterosexual, state-ordained monogamy as an ultimate goal — a not unpolitical act.’ I shared Jack’s desire to respond to both my focal character, Ben, and the programme ‘with empathy, and write from a position of empathy’ which would do each of them ‘justice as a subject.’ Though Jack didn’t ‘have much in common with Stephanie, seeing her earnestly express a wish to stop being lonely made me feel, quite totally, that she deserved the things she wanted.’ S03e02 Stephanie Morning! Hotel bathrobes, hotel sunlight, eating yoghurt off each other’s faces, growing old. Marriage is a playfight. Mallorca and Majorca aren’t two places, and so they go to both. He butterknifes the suncream on her back with his bare chest. She bears the weight with care, for it’s his wife’s. It’s lovely. Overboard, the whitecaps crest

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or crash. He sheds the skimpy vest she hates, but tolerates, because hey look at him!!! This is her husband, asking You okay? before he plunges, crooked, blue, to swim the distance that’s between el el and jay. He surfaces and calls. She watches, waits. Ben A dive-bomb into the uxorious! The honeymoon is one long boat trip. Don’t these sangrias, this moonlit waterfront, these sunset-orange trams look glorious? This is a lonely planet. But there are guides: we blunder through by touch first, skin on skin, and then – bonita. Mi mujer – begin to find the words to navigate the ride. True, anyone can work in paradise. Each sunscreened heart becomes an oily smear; held breath still has to surface, even here. Old heat diminishes; new’s not new twice. Am I up to love’s bar, more class than crass? I wanna be. I think I thought I was.

In practical terms, Jack and I composed the poems separately and episode-by-episode, meaning that we both only read each instalment of the other’s person’s work once our own for that episode was finished. (A qualification from Jack: ‘I read your first one before writing mine, but then tried not to.’) This approach felt, to my collaborator, like ‘we wrote as TV watchers,’ allowing us to ‘expunge from the work any knowing foreshadowing’ and instead to write about our subjects, not as ‘a definitive, reflective statement on the series as a whole,’ but by ‘responding to their actions as presented in the show episode-by-episode’: I didn’t want to know if they ended up happy or miserable. I didn’t think we’d be able to write our first sonnets — accounts of the episode in which Ben and Stephanie get married — truthfully; I’d have been sneaking in foreboding glances and saying that his dinner jacket was the colour of an “unknown future,” or some such dross. Ditto if I’d read all of your poems before or while I wrote mine — I’d unavoidably respond not just to the episode I’d watched but also to your work, and second-guess what your suppositions were, and try to tie things together nicely.

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This self-imposed formal restriction—composing in a spirit of ‘deliberate not-knowing’—meant our eight poems, which were already a departure from their early modern forebears in that the sequence emerged from two different subject positions, had the potential for polyglossic narrative fracture (this was not a ‘single camera’ sequence). But surprising elements of ‘organic’ unity also emerged: ‘if an image was to be found in both mine and your poems,’ Jack notes, ‘then it must have been quite important to both of us.’ S03e03 Stephanie Be gentle when you knock on your own door. Dress up, go out, come in, kiss and unpack bacon and beans in bed. Make sure you’re sure he’s sure. Sing in the car. Keep him on track. In Melton Mowbray, two Thai boxers clash, one flags... your husband stands and whoops for joy. You love his every tooth, tattoo, eyelash, the body trained to weather and destroy that he retreats inside, a silver ring left on a bedside table before work. You Skype a wobbling Part of me’s concerned and first-date on a boat that skims the murk. He holds you while, below, the Thames is churned. Oh, go on, do it, that titanic thing. Ben The art of eight limbs: marriage, meet Thai boxing. Steph, meet the Midlands; bond with parents, friends. Ben, meet your memories: old Brut, uncorking. Emotions that erupt. Remember them? Under the pyroclastic flow of heartbreak, under the ash of love, he ducks and dives. Lust is the undercard. Now it gets hard, mate. Now it’s TV protocol, framed snaps, shared lives, and washing up. After the princess jag, he’s keeping the law at the length of one long arm, fighting to shield his tenderest self from harm:

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a shrill pink sausage hauled from a freezer-bag, thrown in an early pan. Gloves on. Raised fists. Send in the bio-anthropologists.

In assembling, collage-like, our ‘small collections of significant images,’ we still hoped to create poems that were not merely ekphrastic transcriptions, artefacts related to but distinct from the content and emphases of the TV series. For Jack, we were ‘actively adapting’ the show ‘into another form, allowing a space to criticise, celebrate, or at the very least, allow [its film-making choices] our focus and consideration.’ Concerned not to mock the biographical material we were appropriating, our creative critique perhaps came through most clearly in Jack’s muted hope that, in the process of adaptation, ‘the form of the poem perhaps afforded Stephanie more dignity than the form of the programme.’ Of course, in this Jack comes close to a trope we both understood as central to the Elizabethan models we were bearing in mind: the immortality topos, wherein ‘while love, the lover and beloved may all succumb to the passing of time, the writing will endure for ever,’ with the sonnet sequence becoming ‘a permanent record […] in which the fame of all parties is guaranteed’ (Bates 2011, 114). Familiar from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55 (‘Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme’) and dating back at least to Horace, whose boast Ezra Pound rendered—with Futurist vigour—‘This monument will outlast metal and I made it,’ this motif sees the writer’s poetic skill and assiduity ‘preserve’ their (often rapidly-ageing) mortal subject (Shakespeare 2016; Horace 1964, 36–37). Whereas the beloved in Spenser’s Amoretti 75 scorns the ‘vain man’ who ‘dost in vain assay, / A mortal thing so to immortalize’ by writing her name upon the wave-washed ‘strand’ (Braden 2005, 326) Jack expressed an equal, inverted suspicion towards the ‘murky notion’ that, in 2018, in throwing the spotlight on a perhaps forgettable bit of telly, one is immortalising it, when in actuality putting something into a sonnet is probably a much less effective way of immortalising anything than filming it and putting it into a quite popular television programme.

Bates would probably, and justifiably, argue that our desire not to aim for immortality is simply one more self-negating parodic demurral. That Ben and Stephanie might, in some sense, last longer as a couple in our

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poems than in their lives subsequent to the television show documenting their marriage, however, strikes me as a kind of muted victory for the human urge towards connection over and against our (justified) cynicism, and that of the programme makers. But without consciously claiming that our ‘verse [their] vertues rare shall eternize, / And in the heavens write’ their—or our—‘glorious name[s]’ (Braden 2005, 326) Jack observes that we were nonetheless still as interested as any Elizabethan sonneteer in the interplay between the ephemeral experience of romantic love (here, four episodes’ worth of screened, curated images) and its archival residue, as filtered through our poetic work: As time passes, these poems become increasingly unmoored as their subject matter becomes forgotten. If even in the quite near future readers happen to see them, they’ll find a series of clashing images representing a quite baffling media object. I hope these poems, if they’re doing anything, will provide a tiny, tiny reflection of a bit of telly — a very specific type, existing in a boom time for the medium but in no way prestigious or well-regarded — and, almost by accident, a real person, who wanted to be loved. S03e04 Ben No one predicts this turn: a house in Clapham, air full of wife, pink terry dressing-gown, and fear of something that’s already happened. The kettle on, the timer counting down. You can’t just go to Portugal or Cyprus — no, wait, you can. It’s paradise regained! Except, and that’s the thing now, this is life, this, it’s all stress-spots and someone getting blamed. A hundred and a million percent. That’s what his brother says — he even lifts — she’s took it with both hands, she plans, she’s on it. The question is: should you return a gift? One team, one dream. What we said. What we meant. Some turns can only happen in a sonnet. Stephanie In Cyprus, empty wine, al fresco crying.

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Fucking hell. I miss you. I’m a dickhead. Husband-in-the-dumps sipping, replying, leaping from his darling like a sickbed. She’s dragging a sun-lounger with one arm. She’s hugging pals and sticking out her lip. Her skin explodes in untexted alarm until he reappears, a dazzle ship. What if I don’t want to give you a kiss? They taxi to the wood-panelled room where cod-science matched the two, with stats and force. Politely, they are asked: Will you divorce? They eye each other in the warm, still air. Fast forward a few months: I love him, yes.

References Bates, Catherine. 2011. “Desire, Discontent, Parody: The Love Sonnet in Early Modern England.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, edited by A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Braden, Gordon (ed.). 2005. Edmund spenser, ‘75’ from amoretti in sixteenthcentury poetry: An annotated anthology, 326. Oxford: Blackwell. Horace. 1964. “This Monument Will Outlast.” In Confucius to Cummings: An Anthology of Poetry, edited by Ezra Pound and translated by Ezra Pound, 36–37. New York: New Directions Publishing. Married at First Sight. “Stephanie & Benjamin and Carrie & Wayne.” Season 3, Episode 1. Directed by Nicola Bathurst and Richard Lovering. Channel 4, February 15, 2018. Nicholls, Jack. 2019. Facebook Message to Author, September 20. Shakespeare, William. 2016. “Sonnet 55.” in The New Oxford Shakespeare: Modern Critical Edition, edited by Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan. Oxford Scholarly Editions Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780199591152.book.1.

Index

A ABBA, 252 ABC, 63, 264, 280, 319 Abrams, J.J., 62, 64, 65, 67 Absurd, 167–169, 174 absurdist poetry, 10, 167, 168, 182 actantial model, 204, 207 actant(s), 203, 204, 206, 207, 209–213, 219 adaptation, 1, 2, 8, 10, 12, 30, 53, 112, 130, 134, 141, 142, 223, 224, 226, 233, 236, 260, 262, 265, 278, 336, 342 Aeneid, 142 Aesop, 202, 203, 205, 206, 208 aesthetic, 2, 4, 7, 31, 60, 63, 66, 70, 71, 75, 91, 92, 98, 99, 101, 102, 114, 115, 123–125, 133, 167, 168, 174, 232, 266–269, 272, 282, 283, 285 Affair, The, 135, 136 Ainsi-soient-ils , 138 Alger, Horatio, 296, 298–300 algorithms, 93, 100, 103, 105 Allen, Rachael, 168, 171, 172, 175

Ally McBeal , 242, 253 Alto Broadcasting SystemsChronicle Broadcasting Network (ABS-CBN), 148 Amazon Prime, 133 AMC, 11, 43, 92, 277, 278 American Horror Story, 135, 136 Americans, The, 135 Anderson, Benedict, 136, 150 Aristotle, 38, 42, 52, 59, 208, 280 Around the World in 72 Days , 301 art, 2, 4, 7, 11, 19–24, 27–31, 37, 57, 58, 61, 71, 91, 98, 101, 102, 109, 110, 139, 151, 153, 176, 185, 187, 188, 190, 197, 199, 232, 235, 253, 268, 272, 283, 286, 288, 320, 323, 324, 341 Atlanta, 10, 167–169, 171–175, 177–179, 181, 182, 268 Atlas Shrugged, 291 audience engagement, 266, 272 audio-book, 10, 110, 111, 119–121, 123–125 auteur theory, 22, 26

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 R. Winckler and V. Huertas-Martín (eds.), Television Series as Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4720-1

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INDEX

authentic, 91–95, 97, 100, 103, 105–107, 199, 213 author, 5, 11, 22, 24, 31, 71, 93–95, 97, 101, 103, 106, 109, 110, 120, 121, 150, 169, 224, 245–247, 260, 278, 283, 317, 323–326 authorship, 2, 5, 7, 32, 315, 320, 324, 325, 327

B Bachelard, Gaston, 192, 193 background songs, 250 Badfinger, 104, 249 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 278, 283–287 Bal, Mieke, 202, 204, 207, 208, 212, 297 Barthes, Roland, 6, 12, 101, 130–133, 141, 143, 202, 204 Baudrillard, Jean, 102, 202 Baum, Frank L., 301 BBC, 11, 123 Beckett, Samuel, 32, 168, 173 Beecher Stowe, Harriet, 295, 296, 303 “Be honest and true, boys!”, 299 Belgravia, 110 Belsey, Catherine, 148, 157 Benioff, David, 27, 32 Bete humaine, La, 284 Be Tipul , 135 Better Call Saul , 252 Bewitched, 278, 280 Big Bang Theory, 30, 169, 171, 173 Bildungsroman, 27, 279, 281 binge watching, 9, 80 Birdseye, George, 299 Birds, The, 79 “Black Box”, 110 Blackham, H.J., 202, 203, 207, 208, 212

Black Mirror, 9, 10, 58, 66, 75, 76, 78–84, 87, 135, 201–204, 206–210, 212, 213, 215, 219 blueprint, 9, 58–60, 66 Bluest Eye, The, 47, 49, 51 Blue Velvet , 79 Bly, Nelly, 301 Boardwalk Empire, 11, 295, 296, 308 Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin, 125 bookshelves, 297, 308 Borgen, 134 Borges, Jorge Luis, 81 Bourdieu, Pierre, 134, 278, 286, 288 Bowie, David, 253, 254 bracket/bracketing, 80–82, 84 Breaking Bad, 26, 39, 47, 92–94, 96, 99, 101, 103, 104, 106, 110, 112, 113, 120, 123, 135, 137, 249, 252 Bremond, Claude, 202, 208, 209 Bridge, The, 133, 134, 246 Bring Up the Bodies , 260, 263 Broadchurch, 135 Broken, 138 Bron/Broen, 133, 134 Brooker, Charlie, 62, 66–70, 203 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 26 Burke, Kenneth, 154 Byvalla, 121, 122

C Camus, Albert, 168, 280 canonization, 9, 19–21, 23, 25 Cardwell, Sarah, 2, 6, 8, 224, 226, 260, 262, 267 Caruth, Cathy, 139 Casanova, Pascale, 134 Catcher in the Rye, The, 284 CBS, 10, 79, 186, 318 Cervantes, Miguel de, 3, 282

INDEX

Channel 4, 66, 75, 202, 211, 319, 335 chapter, 9–11, 19, 28, 37, 53, 57, 62, 63, 76, 87, 91, 92, 101, 105, 106, 110, 111, 114, 124, 137, 148, 149, 168, 169, 186, 202, 203, 213, 215, 221, 222, 224, 225, 228, 229, 233, 234, 259, 260, 268, 278, 282, 288, 297, 308, 313, 317 character, 9, 11, 12, 21, 25, 29, 32, 37, 40–44, 46, 47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 63–65, 68, 70, 92–94, 96, 97, 101, 103, 106, 110, 113, 114, 118, 120–122, 132, 133, 135, 137, 140, 141, 154, 157, 158, 168–170, 173, 174, 177, 178, 182, 186–198, 204, 206, 207, 211, 222, 224–226, 229, 231–234, 243, 244, 246, 247, 249–254, 259–272, 278, 282–284, 286, 287, 296, 297, 300–302, 304, 306–308, 314, 316, 318–320, 323, 339 characterological chronotope, 278, 285, 286, 288, 290 Chase, David, 26, 32 Chatman, Seymour, 38, 44, 53, 63–65 chronotope, 285, 286 cinematic, 22, 44, 47, 48, 58, 60, 61, 63, 65–68, 70, 71, 86, 254, 267, 296 cliff-hanger, 67, 122, 338 close textual reading, 132, 139 closing credits, 244, 245 cognitive, 9, 11, 76–78, 87, 187, 269, 270, 272 Cohen, Leonard, 196, 197 Colonna, Vincent, 188, 190, 191 comic book, 9 Comics Studies, 23, 25, 31 Como, Perry, 250

347

complexity, 2, 7, 10, 25, 28, 37, 40, 50, 62, 63, 66, 81–83, 86, 110, 111, 113, 114, 118, 119, 123, 124, 130, 131, 137, 153, 269, 286, 297, 299 Conroy, Pat, 260–264 conspiracy theory, 315 Controlling Idea, 39, 47 convergence, 5, 118, 130 Cordon, 134 creative writing, 38, 52, 335 creator, 2, 7, 12, 24, 26, 129, 138, 153, 167, 195, 198, 225, 260, 270, 320, 325 Crime and Punishment , 283 Culler, Jonathan, 6, 150, 187–189, 195 D Danielewski, Mark Z., 3, 9, 110–113, 115–121, 124, 125 Dante, Alighieri, 129, 140 Dark, 140 David Copperfield, 300 Death of Ivan Ilyich, The, 39 de Beauvoir, Simone, 91, 93, 106 de Biasio, Ana, 3, 281, 282 de-canonization, 6 Defoe, Daniel, 279 Derrida, Jacques, 6 Deutschland 83, 134, 135 Dexter, Colin, 221–228, 232, 233 Dickens, Charles, 3, 110, 118, 129, 259, 281, 300 Dickinson, Emily, 194 digital, 7, 93, 99, 111, 120, 121, 123–125, 202, 211, 213 Disillusionment Plot, 42 Divine Comedy, 129, 140, 278 Don Quixote, 278, 282 Dostoevsky, Fiodor, 110, 278, 283, 284, 286

348

INDEX

drama, 8–10, 24, 25, 27, 37, 40, 41, 44, 53, 65, 120, 122, 124, 125, 130, 131, 133–138, 140–143, 149, 150, 152, 154, 155, 158–160, 167–169, 181, 225, 226, 244, 248, 260, 261, 270, 282, 315–317, 322, 323, 325–327 Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 58 drill, 28, 140, 297, 300 DVD, 28, 117, 125, 195 dystopia, 10, 47, 66, 82, 202, 208, 211 E Earle, Steve, 244 Egan, Jennifer, 110 Eisner, Hannah-Wolfe, 298–300, 302–307 Elsaesser, Thomas, 3, 4, 7, 223, 235, 326, 327 Elton, Ben, 313–316, 319–326 embedded, 123, 159, 267, 268, 297, 306, 307 embedded (literary) text, 11 epocé, 80 event(s), 42, 43, 47, 48, 52, 63–67, 78, 81–83, 86, 94, 115, 118, 138, 155–157, 159, 173, 178, 187, 188, 198, 201, 203, 204, 208–211, 229, 230, 253, 278, 286 existentialist, 92 Extras , 244, 253 F fable, 10, 201–208, 210, 212, 215 Fall, The, 270 Familiar, The, 10, 110, 112–115, 117–119, 123, 124 Familiar, The, 111

Faulkner, William, 278, 289, 290 Fellowes, Julian, 110 Ferrante, Elena, 110, 141, 142 Feuer, Jane, 134 Field, Syd, 59 Filibusterismo, El , 150 film, 2, 6–9, 19, 21, 22, 24, 27, 28, 30, 31, 41, 42, 44, 58–62, 64, 71, 113, 120, 123, 125, 129, 130, 132, 139, 152, 160, 181, 202, 205, 207, 210, 222, 223, 235, 242, 243, 260, 267, 270, 272, 290, 306, 318, 327, 342 Film Studies, 7, 22, 23 Firefly, 26 first-person narration, 44, 46, 47, 279 Fiske, John, 4, 30, 32, 87, 143, 322–324 Fitzgerald, Francis Scott, 42, 290 Flaubert, Gustave, 278 Forbrydelsen, 134 forensic fandom, 63, 118, 125 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus , 82 Fray, The, 248 Free Air, 300, 306 freedom, 9, 44, 59, 91–93, 95–97, 99, 101–107, 173, 230, 251, 266–268, 289 French Critical Theory, 130 From Hell , 24 Fugitive, The, 264 function(s), 6, 10, 27, 28, 42, 77, 80, 84, 87, 92, 95, 97, 102, 106, 109, 112, 115, 132, 133, 137, 138, 149, 150, 153, 158, 187–191, 193, 198, 199, 203, 204, 232, 241, 242, 244, 247, 248, 250, 254, 261, 269, 283, 297, 307, 318

INDEX

G Game of Thrones , 27, 30, 32, 53, 118, 129, 244 Genette, Gérard, 135, 242–248, 252, 254 Gervais, Ricky, 253, 319 Gilligan, Vince, 26, 39 Girl, a Dog and a Horse, The, 300, 302 Global North, 137, 143 golden age of television, 37, 123 Gomorra, 133, 134 Good Wife, The, 135 graphic novel, 23, 25 Great Gatsby, The, 42–44, 290 Greenaway, Peter, 79 Greene, Robert, 314, 315, 320, 323, 324, 326 Greimas, Algirdas Julien, 202–204, 207, 212 Grey’s Anatomy, 248, 249 Groatsworth Of Wit , 314 Groundhog Day, 75, 85

H Hall, Stuart, 138, 278 Handmaid’s Tale, The, 133 Hartley, John, 4, 322–324 Hatufim, 134 HBO, 2, 3, 11, 12, 30, 40, 46, 123, 138, 143, 295, 296, 302, 308, 319 Headland, Leslye, 84, 85 Hemingway, Ernest, 76–79, 87 Hendricks, William, 202, 204 Heroes , 28 Herrens Veje, 138 heteroglossia, 283, 284, 287 hierarchy, 5, 27, 30, 322 Hill Street Blues , 26 Hitchcock, Alfred, 79, 223

349

Homeland, 134 Hugo, Victor, 3, 279, 281 Husserl, Edmund, 80 Hutcheon, Linda, 8, 70, 224 I iceberg, 77, 79, 82 Il miracolo, 140, 141 imagined communities, 136, 150 immersion, 9, 78, 271, 303 immersive, 40, 75, 76, 78, 81, 87 incidental songs, 247, 248, 250 Indiana, 296 Inspector Morse, 10, 221–227, 229, 233–236 interpretive communities, 29, 134 intertextuality, 5, 10, 60, 135, 147, 188, 242, 246 intimate, 9, 84, 96, 192, 193, 263, 277, 307 ITV, 10, 222, 224, 226, 227, 235, 318 Ivory Tower, The, 296, 298, 301 J Jakobson, Roman, 189 James, Henry, 301, 302 Jameson, Frederic, 150, 282 Jenkins, Henry, 7, 118, 125, 221, 224 Jordan, Robert, 41 Joyce, James, 281 Justified, 266 K Katz, Don, 123 Kennard, Luke, 168, 179–181 Kerouac, Jack, 282, 285 Killing, The, 134 Knox, Jennifer L., 168, 174–178 Kristeva, Julia, 82

350

INDEX

L L.A. Law, 26 L’amica geniale, 141, 142 League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The, 24 Leftovers, The, 138, 140 legitimation, 21, 27, 174 Lewis, Sinclair, 65, 300, 306, 307 literariness, 2, 3, 8, 11, 68, 99, 106, 157, 159, 225 literary, 1–12, 22, 28, 29, 31, 32, 39, 42, 57–65, 67, 68, 70, 76–78, 80, 82, 92–94, 97, 99, 102, 107, 109–112, 115, 118, 120, 121, 123–125, 131, 132, 134, 135, 140, 142, 147–151, 153, 157–160, 167, 186–189, 196, 201–203, 207, 215, 224–226, 236, 244, 247, 248, 254, 259–261, 265, 269, 272, 278, 279, 281–283, 285, 287, 290, 291, 295–297, 301, 303, 313, 315–317, 320–323, 325, 326, 336 literary competence, 5, 142 literary tradition, 12, 79, 279 Lolita, 41, 44 Lost , 12, 58, 63–66, 113, 118, 122, 129, 135, 297 Lotman, Yuri, 6, 189 Luke Cage, 253 Lunch Poems , 288 Luther, 135 Lynch, David, 26, 79 Lynde, Frances, 300, 302 Lyonne, Natasha, 84, 85 Lyotard, Jean Francois, 174 lyrical, 10, 171, 186–189, 191, 192, 194, 195, 197, 198 lyric(s), 49, 68, 69, 187–189, 192, 195–198, 242–254, 303

M Madame Bovary, 278 Madam Secretary, 134 Mad Men, 11, 26, 32, 43, 112, 129, 133, 137, 250, 259, 262, 263, 277–279, 281–286, 288–290, 292 Mantel, Hilary, 260, 263, 264 Married at First Sight , 11, 335, 336, 338 Martin, Brett, 109 Maus , 20, 23 McCabe, Janet, 2, 30, 140, 296, 325 McKay, Claude, 296 McKee, Robert, 38, 39, 41–44, 52, 60, 62–64 McKinnon, Ray, 259, 260, 262–265, 267, 268, 271, 272 meaning-making, 77, 78, 190 media, 2, 7–10, 21, 24, 28, 37, 41, 42, 44, 51, 52, 76, 78, 80, 81, 86, 100, 109–111, 114, 115, 120, 121, 123–125, 133, 136, 142, 152, 202, 208, 212, 221, 226, 234, 241, 243, 247, 254, 314, 322, 324, 326, 343 media-specific, 76 media studies, 4, 7, 31 mediation, 11 medium, 7, 11, 21, 24, 27, 32, 39, 40, 49–51, 58, 63, 66, 69–71, 87, 113, 124, 132, 133, 136, 151, 160, 169, 188, 197, 222, 234, 251, 266, 268, 269, 272, 316, 317, 343 medium-specificity, 123 metaphor, 59, 60, 78, 86, 121, 156, 169, 170, 172, 178, 284, 285 Miami Vice, 242 Miller, Henry, 76–79, 82, 84, 86, 87 Misérables, Les , 278, 279, 281, 286

INDEX

Mittell, Jason, 2, 4, 6, 7, 10, 27–29, 63, 65, 110, 111, 113, 114, 117, 118, 120, 121, 124, 125, 130, 132, 140, 297 Morse, 221, 222, 225, 226, 229, 234, 235 Mr. Robot , 44–46, 130 Mrs. Dalloway, 43, 45–47 multimodality, 76, 78, 114, 117

N Nabokov, Vladimir, 41 Nannicelli, Ted, 60, 61, 64, 68 narrative perspective, 9, 37, 44, 47, 49, 51, 52 narratology, 11, 135, 136 NCIS, 10, 30, 186, 190, 193, 195, 197, 198 neoliberalism, 168, 177, 227, 228, 231, 232 Netflix, 9, 41, 66, 75, 85, 99, 100, 111, 125, 133, 139, 140, 211 New Absurd, 167–171, 173, 174, 177–179, 181 New Criticism, 4, 151, 152 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 104, 105 nihilism, 168, 178, 307 Nolan, Jonathan and Joy, Lisa, 27 Noli Me Tangere, 150 non-narrative, 10, 58, 188, 190 novel performed, 149, 157 novel(s), 2, 3, 8, 10, 11, 25, 27, 30, 37–42, 44, 46, 47, 49, 51–53, 61, 76, 79, 93–95, 97, 109–114, 117, 118, 121, 123–125, 129, 130, 133, 140, 141, 149, 150, 152–154, 158, 159, 207, 222–229, 232–236, 244, 245, 259–272, 277–279, 281–287, 289, 290, 296, 300–307, 317 NYPD Blue, 26, 32

351

O Odyssey, The, 278, 280 Oedipus Rex, 278, 279 O’Hara, Frank, 278, 288–290 Okkupjert , 134 On the Road, 282, 285 opening credits, 242, 244–246 oppositional reading, 138 Orange Is the New Black, 32, 245, 247 Orphan Black, 135 Outlander, 246 P Palestine, 24 Pangako Sa ‘Yo, 154–159 Parade’s End, 123 Paradise Lost , 278 paratext(s), 4, 10, 28, 112, 120, 242–246, 248, 250–252, 254 Passion of Joan of Arc, The, 58 Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, 24 Phaedrus, 203 phenomenological narrative, 76, 79, 80 phenomenology, 9, 75–82, 86 Pizzolatto, Nic, 27 plot, 9, 28, 37, 39, 42–44, 47, 48, 52, 114, 118, 122, 138, 154, 158, 173, 180, 188, 190, 191, 193–195, 201–203, 205, 207, 208, 214, 215, 222, 223, 228, 230, 235, 242, 259, 261, 262, 264, 265, 270, 285, 315 plurality, 10, 130, 131, 135, 137–139, 141, 143 plural text, 131, 140 Poehler, Amy, 84, 85 poetics, 5–7, 11, 31, 58, 60–62, 66, 70, 169, 170, 186–189, 191, 193, 194, 196, 314, 336, 342, 343

352

INDEX

Poetics, The, 42, 59, 280 poetry, 10, 61, 98, 152, 167–171, 174, 178, 182, 186, 188, 189, 193, 282, 288, 289, 336 Polan, Dana, 22, 29 police procedural, 10 popular culture, 5, 87, 147, 148, 151–153, 159, 160, 226, 236, 243, 317 porosity, 10, 133 portals, 131 practice, 7, 10, 20, 29, 43, 58–60, 76, 78, 80, 91, 118, 147–149, 157, 187, 189, 242, 252, 264, 269, 281, 299 prestige, 2, 7, 28, 29, 129, 134, 143, 149, 156, 317, 321, 326 Prime-Time, 26 Prince of Tides, The, 260, 261 printed book, 110, 111, 113, 114, 124, 317, 322 Propp, Vladimir, 202–204 psychology, 53, 76, 81, 83, 265 Punisher, The, 249 Q quality, 2, 3, 6, 10, 11, 59, 62, 67, 78, 81, 96, 99, 121, 125, 132, 134, 159, 189, 224, 225, 263, 269, 325 quality television, 2, 12, 62, 66, 99, 106, 134, 143, 235, 325 R Ragged Dick, 296, 299, 307 RAI/HBO, 141 Ramis, Harold, 85 reading, 1, 5, 6, 9–11, 58, 60, 64, 66, 70, 71, 76–82, 84, 86, 87, 91–94, 97, 102, 105, 115, 118, 119, 121, 131, 132, 134–137,

139, 142, 143, 148, 153, 154, 157–159, 171, 177, 179, 186, 190–193, 203, 243, 247, 250, 254, 259, 262, 264–266, 269–271, 278, 280, 282, 288, 297–304, 307, 317, 335 Rectify, 11, 259–268, 271, 272 redemption, 11, 263, 281, 296–298, 300–303, 305, 307 remediation, 5, 125, 268, 322 Revenants, Les , 129, 133, 134, 137, 140 Reyes, Soledad, 153, 160 Rizal, José, 150 Road to Oz, The, 301 Robinson Crusoe, 278, 279 Ronnenberg, Susan Cosby, 10–12 Russian Doll , 9, 75, 76, 78–80, 84, 86, 87

S Salinger, J.D., 284 Sanders, Julie, 224 Sand, George, 296 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 79, 85, 94, 96, 98 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 38, 40, 42 screen idea, 61, 64, 66, 68–70 screenplay, 41, 57–62, 71 screenwriter, 57, 59, 60, 62–64, 66, 67, 69, 70, 225 screenwriting, 9, 38, 39, 57–62, 64, 66, 70, 71 script, 2, 3, 7, 9, 57–64, 66–71, 125, 140, 223, 225, 228, 232, 233, 242, 252, 272, 313, 321–323, 325, 326, 335 Seitz, Matt Zoller, 263, 267, 268, 272 serial drama, 27, 30, 130–133, 137, 140 serye, 148

INDEX

setting, 9, 32, 37, 39–42, 47, 51, 52, 58, 67, 102, 122, 129, 133, 140, 150, 155, 156, 173, 187, 202, 203, 222, 227, 232, 243, 245, 246, 253, 254, 261, 266, 270, 272, 285, 318 Shakespeare, William, 3, 5, 11, 12, 130, 296, 313–324, 326, 327, 339, 342 Shelley, Mary, 82 show, 2, 6, 7, 9–11, 26–30, 32, 39, 45, 47, 59, 62, 63, 65–67, 69, 70, 76, 78, 80, 81, 83–87, 92, 99, 101, 102, 104, 106, 111, 112, 122, 135, 136, 152, 156, 169, 175, 186, 190, 193–195, 197, 201–203, 206, 207, 210, 215, 223, 224, 227, 229, 233, 236, 243–247, 249, 250, 252, 254, 259, 262, 265, 267, 268, 270, 271, 277–279, 281–283, 289, 291, 302–304, 315, 316, 318, 319, 325, 335, 337, 340, 342, 343 Showalter, Elaine, 227, 228, 230 Show Me a Hero, 251 showrunner, 2, 26–29, 32, 40, 53, 62, 138, 140, 202, 244, 282, 298, 325 Simon, David, 12, 26, 46 sitcom, 9–11, 253, 313, 315–326 Six Feet Under, 26 Smittad, 122 soap opera, 9, 120, 147–150, 152, 153, 157, 160, 325 social text, 147, 159, 160 Sons of Anarchy, 242 Sophocles, 279, 280 Sopranos, The, 26, 32, 41, 112, 123, 135, 246, 263, 270 Sound and the Fury, The, 289 Spektor, Regina, 245

353

“Spell of the Youkon, The”, 299 sphere, 9, 37, 39, 41, 44, 47, 52, 53, 120, 284, 322 Springsteen, Bruce, 251 Stevens, Cat, 244 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 246 story, 33, 37, 39–47, 52, 53, 64, 65, 67–70, 75–79, 82, 85, 95, 110–115, 118–124, 130, 133, 135, 147, 154–156, 158, 180, 181, 186, 189, 196, 198, 201, 203, 204, 208, 210, 211, 213, 221, 222, 226, 230, 246, 249, 254, 260, 261, 263, 266, 270, 279, 281, 283, 284, 287, 288, 292, 296–299, 301, 303, 305–307 story arcs, 28 Storytel, 10, 111, 119–124 storytelling, 1, 7, 29, 42, 46, 76–81, 83, 84, 87, 111–113, 119, 122, 124, 125, 132, 222, 259, 261, 263, 265, 267, 272, 273, 279, 301, 306 Stranger Things , 112 stratum, 39, 42, 44 streaming, 28, 66, 93, 99, 100, 120, 125, 134 Stuart, Sarah Clarke, 12, 28, 63, 65, 297 style, 9, 20, 37, 47, 51, 52, 59, 77, 111, 114, 152, 188, 222, 223, 267, 319 substratum, 11, 296 Sundance, 259 surveillance, 46, 78, 80, 81, 83, 202 Svart Stjärna, 122 T technology, 5, 21, 28, 40, 75, 78, 80–83, 99, 100, 110, 202, 203, 208, 213, 214, 283

354

INDEX

telenovela, 149 teleplay, 2, 9, 57, 58, 62–68, 70, 71 teleserye, 10, 147–152, 154–160 Television Studies, 1, 4, 5, 7, 9, 19–21, 25, 27, 30, 133, 143 televisual narrative, 9, 82, 86, 138, 272 televisual novel, 259 Temple Bailey, Irene, 304, 305 temporality, 62, 75, 76, 78, 81, 82, 84–86, 113, 187, 189, 198 text, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 20–22, 24, 29, 30, 32, 59–61, 63–70, 72, 78, 92, 97, 99, 101, 102, 105, 106, 114, 115, 118, 119, 121, 130–134, 136–142, 148, 149, 151, 154, 157, 159, 169, 186, 187, 189, 190, 192, 194, 196, 198, 223, 224, 227, 242–245, 247, 248, 250, 252, 254, 260, 267, 270–273, 278, 297, 303, 306, 307, 324, 325 theme, 6, 9, 37, 39–41, 47, 52, 135, 137, 139, 141, 169, 195, 197, 202, 203, 212, 213, 219, 241, 267 theory, 8, 9, 30–32, 37, 38, 44, 52, 53, 58, 59, 86, 93, 94, 131, 132, 134, 136, 143, 152, 153, 168, 172, 178–180, 187, 188, 202, 215, 269, 283, 285, 286, 297, 324 thickness, 10, 130 third-person narrator, 44, 46, 47, 65, 264 threshold, 135, 159, 243, 279 Tin Soldier, The, 304, 305 Tolstoy, Leo, 39, 110 Tomashevsky, Boris, 202, 204 Tom Sawyer, 300 Transferts , 139, 141

transmedia, 5, 7, 29, 123, 124, 221, 222, 224, 234, 272, 321 transtextuality, 242, 243, 246, 249 trauma theory, 11, 136, 139 Treatment , 135 Treme, 244 True Detective, 27, 135 Tunnel, The, 134 Twain, Mark, 3, 300 24, 270 Twin Peaks , 26, 79, 143, 167, 178

U Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 295 Upstart Crow, 11, 313–327

V Vandendorpe, Christian, 202, 208 Vertigo, 79 VFX, 40 video games, 21, 25, 110 viewing, 9, 11, 91–93, 99, 100, 102, 103, 106, 131, 187, 191, 226, 242, 247, 266, 268–270, 288 Vindt, Lidiya, 201–203, 208, 210, 212 Virgil, 142 Virus , 121, 122 visual novel(s), 112, 114 voiceover, 44–47, 49

W Walking Dead, The, 122, 135, 136 Watchmen, 24 Web, 7, 10, 11, 45, 87, 93, 199, 278, 287, 297 Webster, John, 304 Weiner, Matthew, 26, 32, 43, 277–280, 282–287, 290, 292 Weiss, D.B., 27, 32, 244

INDEX

Wells-Lasagne, Shannon, 4, 8, 12, 297 Westworld, 27, 32, 138, 139 Whedon, Joss, 26 Wheel of Time, The, 41 White Devil, The, 304 Whitman, Walt, 278 Williams, Raymond, 7, 131, 283, 317 Winter, Terence V., 298 Wire, The, 3, 26, 46, 47, 101, 110, 112, 120, 123, 129, 133, 135, 259 Woolf, Virginia, 43, 44, 47

X X-Files, The, 26 Y YOU , 41, 44 Young Pope, The, 138, 141 Young Sheldon, 30 Z Zed and Two Noughts , 79 Žižek, Slavoj, 80 Zola, Emile, 278, 284, 286

355