That is, this patriarch is as much victim as aggressor, simultaneously present and absent. Or as White draws it up in the prologue:
As the kids howl about him, Carl lays oblivious on the couch, a silent enigma doing his damage by doing nothing. Nothing but watch TV. "The defining childhood memory of my father," writes Chris, Curtis's fictional surrogate, "is of a man (but not just a man, of course; it is my father - young, handsome, capable!) reclined on a dingy couch watching TV." In this, Carl is reminiscent of the father in White's other family portrait, The Idea of Home, who drives a bread truck all day and has one emotion, exhaustion. For as White implies, Carl is what his culture has made him. And for this reason, our sympathies are ultimately with him.
Yet to discuss Carl (or any of the characters) as if he was a person is to miss the point. For as Harris notes, he is "less a character than an intertextual nexus." Indeed, to summarize the "story" of Memories is to sidestep what is for Harris its actual subject, what White calls "that which saturates consciousness without having to be meaningful." Not that this excuses Carl's neglect of his real-world or fictional children, characterized in the book as child abuse. Rather, it helps us understand Carl's watching and absorbing television's Geist to the point where he is a father made of gray pixels. An American tragedy: Father, i.e., 'First and Best Source of Wisdom' to his children, literally becomes to young Chris a "shadow memory," that phenomenon in which a person remembers having lived an experience that was in actuality only seen on television.
Initially, this takes the form of a transcript of Dotto, a crooked quiz show Carl participates in, and through his participation demonstrates to the nation how to take its first baby steps down the road of its own self-betrayal. After the introductions during which Carl is unable to explain his position at a cat food company, the host continues:
Which is NOT to ask, Why is it that the spell-checker of the word processor I'm using to write this review never knows words like "transgressive" or "postcolonial" but it always knows words like "Microsoft" and "Internet"? Throughout the novel we see a working out of the themes White addresses in his essays, especially representation, and how the dominant discourse continuously exerts its influence over what is said, how it is said, what is valorized and what is suppressed. Specifically, as White formulates it at our moment in literary history, this is a critique of how the conventions of realism have become "a part of the machinery of the political state." Conventions by which "the State explains to its citizens the relationship between themselves and Nature, economics, politics and their own sexuality." Reading Memories and Monstrous Possibilities against each other, it's easy to conflate game-show host, State, television, commerce and all the millions of large and small ways that, as White says by quoting Italo Calvino, seek "'to confirm and consecrate the established order of things.'" In the title essay to Monstrous Possibilities he continues, "This massive epistemological exercise takes place every day, right before our eyes on television, in the movies, in Time magazine, in the simpleminded, casual rhetoric of politicians, and so on." The totalizing reality of literary realism, or any all-embracing idiom, is, in fact, what White says postmodernism and its critical, theory-driven language opposes - the homogenization of literature, the homogenization of personality.
