"The Bridegroom," an episode of Bonanza, is transformed into a parable of commerce in America by Wild Father, who lives in the margin of the show but tells all by becoming the ideal viewer. What "all" consists of is that "The Family Channel," owned by "Christian corporate interests," airs Bonanza because it "fosters family values in America," i.e., the "virtues of the landed gentry" - in this case, Pa Cartwright, owner of a ranch the size of Virginia. Here is a clear instance of the postmodernist autobiography Harris refers to; all anyone has to do to witness this reality is turn on the television and see how assimilation is portrayed as the process of buying products (such as minivans), while rebellion, according to television, is the buying of other products (such as off-road vehicles). White calls attention to this world by defamiliarizing it, defamiliarizing it by making literal what Bonanza implies. Indians and other minorities either assimilate by buying products or they die, while Maggi, the daughter in the episode, "thinks her father is trying to sell her like a horse" because he is. She's manacled to the hearth while her father and husband-to-be haggle over her, feel her ass. As in real televisionland, there are no people outside the narrow accepted aesthetic standards of the day (a person doesn't have to be that old to remember the days before blacks were identified as an untapped market and therefore invisible to television producers and ad agencies). And though Maggi has a model's beauty, they discuss her as if she's a nag, hair buns doing the trick because as the Wild Father explains, "Hair buns = homely in T.V. sign language." To this Wild Father's son says, "You a gangsta of funky-ass love."
"Why you talkin' like a nigger?" he answers. "Niggers don't count here." Then he goes on a rant, explaining that to fit in you got to become the products, make them your diet: "canned beef tamales, Dinty Moore beef stew, sardines in mustard sauce, potted meat ... (eat the Cheeze Whiz right straight from the aerosol container, boy)..." This of course, requires a mindset that cannot be achieved without participation, so Wild Father instructs his son to "sit in front of the TV and watch reruns of Perry Mason. Doze. Streets of San Francisco. Doze" until midnight and you have achieved "Wild Father nirvana....At two in the morning get out of the recliner, turn off the TV and go to bed." After three hours sleep "it's up and the regimen begins again."
In one of his prefaces, Henry James states that words and their relations stop nowhere but that it is the novelist's happy occupation to draw a circle which makes them seem as if they do. By White's light, it is the novelist's duty to show how words and their relations never end. To show how the politics of representation do not stop at the borders of genre. These are the monsters of White's title essay, "Italo Calvino and What's Next: The Literature of Monstrous Possibility." Against the traditions of mimesis - the nonmonsters that speak to our human core, the monsters of antimimesis speak to our intellect by breaking up the naturalness of the non-monsters. Or less proscriptively, the literature that emerges when, quoting Calvino, "'the barrier between monsters and nonmonsters is exploded and everything is possible again.'" White foregrounds here formal issues, breaking genre conventions, crossbreeding them until one can't tell if the novel is a dramatized essay or an essayistic drama. His stories are as much autobiography as fantasy and judging from his interview, he's being the most autobiographical when he's the most fantastic. See his father, for example, rising like the Creature of the Black Lagoon at the end of an episode of Sea Hunt. The fictions slide in and out of conventions seamlessly, sometimes becoming semiotic analysis, sometimes cultural criticism. What they don't do is become the glib word play of some postmodern works, for the point of all of this is to write a fiction that matters to real people, even nonreaders. Even nonmonsters.
The politics of the postmodern are in fact the backbone of both the novel and essay collection, manifest in human terms in the fiction, argued explicitly in the essays. Class warfare, as White calls it. More importantly in literary terms, White urges us to see aesthetics and politics as of a fabric, and this is his unique contribution: his re-inscription of aesthetics into literature, not as a nostalgic return but as an agent for change. In this, White stands apart from the majority of writers and academics on both sides of the traditional/anti-traditional divide who seem oblivious to aesthetics.
That is, White's argument against the aesthetics of the status quo isn't the common anti-aesthetic of the Left, which often throws the baby of literature out with the tepid bath of conventional realism - editors who turn the political into the aesthetic by championing as literature the writing of street people or cutters, for example, no matter how oblivious it is to the history of its own medium, no matter how it is, like naïve visual art, conventional in its one-dimensionality and child-like handling. Or conversely, his argument is far from that of the great wash of realist writers - masters of "craft" - who fail to see how the conventions of realism reinforce the status quo - and simultaneously perpetuates a dull, antique literature. Writers and critics like those within the journal Philosophy and Literature who criticize the politics of theorists and formally inventive work under the guise of "bad writing" - writers and critics and institutions who, to use White's phrase, are wholly satisfied with their own position of the "natural, adequate and proper."
