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Tuesday, November 13, 2007
The Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis
I’d totally forgotten about this one, until it cropped up in Scott K.’s comment box. Do you know about the Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis? If not, go here.
Right. Now this is a silly parlor game, but lemme work something out.
They have some ‘exclusion’ rules that I’m about to protest. I’ll just clip from their key page. You aren’t allowed to count:
1. Crossovers with “real” shows and “real” people.
A. Episodes where reality shows exist within a fictional sphere are not included (such as the X-Files/COPS crossover and the Chicago Hope/Entertainment Tonight crossover)
B. Episodes where actual people exist within a fictional sphere are not included (such as Jay Leno, Alex Trebek, and professional wrestlers and athletes who have played themselves on many shows some of which are listed here).
C. These real/fictional crossovers are often great for a laugh and it is usually really interesting to see the real and fictional spheres meld briefly but there is no way to fully document all of these crossovers and there is no logical stopping point for the inclusion of a show on the grounds of a shared real space.
2. Cartoons & Puppets
A. There are a few legitimate cartoon & puppet crossovers that we would like to include (namely the Simpsons crossovers with Cheers and X-Files and the Sesame Street crossover with L&O:SVU) but opening the door for the Simpsons & Sesame Street would forces us to include more than a score of 1960s cartoon. Not only are most of those cartoons bad but cartoon crossover history is to poorly documented for even our best searching to yield a complete list and the cartoon crossovers were rarely more than cameos
B. The cartoons that are related by loose ties to shows on the grid include: The Simpsons, The Brady Kids, the entire 1960s DC cartoonverse (Superman, Justice League of America, Superboy, etc), the entire 1990s DC cartoonverse (Justice League, Batman Beyond, Gotham Knights, Static Shock, etc), The Addams Family cartoon, Scooby-Doo, and the rest of the Hanna-Barbera cartoonverse.
3. Movies with theatrical debuts
There are three more rules but they need not detain us.
There is one clear error in the upper left quadrant of the Westphall grid, explained in the grid key like so: “John Larroquette Show referenced Yoyodyne. Yoyodyne was also a client of Angel’s Wolfram & Hart.” But, as we all know, Yoyodyne is a Pynchon reference. There is no reasonable presumption that Angel is referencing Laroquette, not Pynchon. The way to fix this is just to include V. in the grid. This is not a type of inclusion the grid-makers consider. If they are not cool with theatrical debuts, then novels are clean out. It seems to me, however, that this is a less coherent option than simply including any kind of fiction. (Why stop with TV?)
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Another problem: not conceding a Simpsons/X-Files crossover is just plain arbitrary. (The Simpsons/Cheers crossover is maybe debatable. Plus I can only find it in the original German.) My rule is this: if you are going to include Cop Rock in the same fictional universe as Six Feet Under, you are really in no position to complain about how letting in The Simpsons would be ‘forcing open too many doors’. So we’re decided. The Simpsons is in, if the game is going to be played fairly. And, it suddenly occurs to me: God and the Devil have both appeared as fictional characters on The Simpsons. And if we are letting in V. then we ought to let in any other printed work of fiction in which either God or the Devil appear as fictional characters. Milton’s Paradise Lost, for example. More usefully: Dante’s Divine Comedy, which gets us characters like Odysseus, who is a crossover from Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, which gets us the whole Greek Pantheon and pretty much all of ancient pagan mythology, by extension.
I wonder how far one could take all this. Crossovers are more prevalent in literary history than we sometimes think.
You might argue that God is not really a fictional character. This is a controversial position.
Obviously the Westphall hypothesis is ridiculous as an account of the ‘true in fiction’ relation. Yes, I had noticed.
Comments
The entire run of the Valve is really a dream going through the mind of an autistic boy, Tomtit Inyir. Tomtit Inyir has so pwned Tommy Westphall, because Westphall’s entire universe is included within Inyir’s. I insist that this now be known as the Tomtit Inyir Universe Hypothesis.
I don’t know if they’ve discussed this issue, but if TW is himself a character on St. Elsewhere, doesn’t this lead to a regress?
Speaking of crossovers, I was just teaching M. R. James’ “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral,” which is set in that Barchester. Trollope would have been amazed (or amused).
This is terrific, so thanks. Crossing over may have been around for awhile, but it’s also the next big thing.
Video game designers (esp. of the simulated universe/avatar sort) are working on universal platforms where the SIMS meet WoW, etc. Rappers fashion themselves superheroes (think of Wu-Tang) and then guest-appear on other rappers’/superheroes’ albums. RZA shows up with a Wu-Tang emblem in “American Gangster,” a film set 20 years prior to Wu’s signature. It may be a bit of a trick (and just plain anachronistic), but the appearance of the Wu sign points to the intrinsic malleability of these mediums.
What a true crossover revolution requires is a new medium that can account for characters’ ontological distinctions. How can the rapping Method Man communicate with Super Mario, or with Raskolnikov? He does in my mind; he begins to on the world wide web. A platform where differences smooth out and integrity stays intact--it’s on the horizon.
This is an issue Jameson addresses in passing in *Postmodernism*, as he questions the ontological status of historical figures who show up in contemporary historical fiction. If history is merely story, what do we make of the Freud and Houdini and others who populate the world of *Ragtime*?
Linda Hutcheon suggested that these “real” people are merely themselves references to text: specifically, the texts of history. So that “historiographic metafiction,” as she calls it, refers not to a real world outside of text but to a world conceived of as text. From this perspective, contemporary historical fiction is not “about” the real past but rather about the texts we have about the past.
Now, Jameson basically said that in the first place, arguing that postmodernism is the loss of history as a concept for understanding the real and its replacement by the pure immanence of the archive, the material text, the anecdote, etc.
Now, historical fiction has always represented real historical people. Napoleon in *War and Peace* is probably the famous example.
Don’t know where I’m going with this. Blah.
Thanks. I must check out the Hutcheon article. History is a text, or a platform that can be crossed. Think of Steve Allen’s “Meeting of the Minds,” where actors dressed as historical figures from various periods get together and debate. Or image fiction, where Arnold Schwarzenegger might rendezvous with Marylin Monroe or Jessica Rabbit. I think literature--words on a page--can be the universal platform I discussed above--but only up to a point. Sinatra is little without his voice; Darth Vader needs John Williams’s “The Imperial March” for enormity and essence, etc.
At the moment, few avenues exist for this sort of convalescence: the mind, social interaction, academia, and the world wide web (where all theaters and ontologies--except live--might coexist on the same page). What I desire is a universal platform for fictions, where we can trap Hamlet, “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”, the collected works of Jackson Pollock, and Ol’ Dirty Bastard into a small room with an infinite number of doors. Language--words--can only take us so far: light and sound are of the essence.
When I was a child I thought that Ina Kleina Nachtmusik was someone’s name.
I wrote convalescence where I meant coalescence. Though convalescence might work in a different sort of way.
Eine Kleine would make a nice nickname for a little one.
There is no reasonable presumption that Angel is referencing Laroquette, not Pynchon.
But I think there is a reasonable presumption, or at any rate alternative hypothesis, that Angel is referencing Buckaroo Banzai rather than Pynchon.
Ummm… how are Eine Kleine Nachtmusik or the collected works of Jackson Pollock “fictions”?
Andrei,
It’s an interesting distinction. If an opera is fictive, than is all of the music in the opera fictive? How can some music be fictive and some not? Are Britney Spears’s lyrics fictive? If we think of traditional cinema as a sort of fiction, then certainly painting and music might be fictions.
OED on “fiction”: “That which, or something that, is imaginatively invented; feigned existence, event, or state of things; invention as opposed to fact.”
Of course, “fact” is a massive can of worms.
But per my argument, it’s the universal platform of fictions that itself is a fiction, or we might say the platform is fictional in ontology: it is not the “non-fictional” universal platform of academia (another space where characters from various texts, music, etc. might commingle).
Yoyodyne is also mentioned in The Crying of Lot 49, which contains not just a Beatles parody group (complete with songs) but an ancient conspiracy involving the Baron Von Thurn Und Taxis and the Pony Express, which means that perhaps Tommy Westphall is… Tristero?
Jordan--
it seems to me that, to have any use value, the term “fiction” needs to have in its definition the concept of representation.
Now, as it happens, both Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and Pollock occurred at times when the issue of whether representation is necessary to the work of art was highly contentious. This is well known for Pollock and what came before, the rise of abstract painting (Mr. Guggenheim himself decided to build a manifesto on this issue, by declaring his museum a “museum of nonrepresentational art.") Maybe less known is the fact that in the eighteenth century the issue was highly debated as to music. Rousseau, for example, who saw melody as an outgrowth of human speech as inflected by emotion, only accepted vocal music, or instrumental music that mimicked such emotion, as valid (so, for example, all of Bach’s fugues did not qualify). Similarly, Fontenelle, quoted by Rousseau, is supposed to have asked “Sonate, que me veux-tu?"--or, sonata, what do you want from me? In this case, “sonata” stood for any instrumental, and therefore non-representational, music, which Fontenelle was rejecting because, being just formal play, it could not have a hold on his emotions. So, clearly, the eighteenth century (or, I should say, one point of view during that period) saw some music--vocal music--as representational, and therefore fictional, and purely instrumental music as just decorative, formal play, and therefore as non-fictional.
Similarly with Pollock: clearly he intended his work to be non-representational. Now, of course, as Leo Steinberg and others have seen in his paintings, you can always somehow “find” the space, or at least spatial orientation, of landscapes in them, and therefore at least to hint that they offer a fictional space. But then what do you make of Frank Stella’s black stripe paintings, or of innumerable minimalist pieces, that aggressively presented themselves as nothing but objects in the viewer’s world, and not as windows onto any other kind of imagined space?
So, I think you can see how, even via the OED definition you posted, some works can be seen as fictional, some not, and we can even fashion a sliding scale from one to the other. I must say, sometimes I wonder if seeing any work as representational ex officio is not a particular professional deformation of literary critics--who specialize in artworks that are fashioned out of stuff that is representational from the beginning. Art historians (such as I am) or musicologists, whose objects of study are made up of brushstrokes, chisel marks or flute tweets and trumpet toots, are not quite as absolutist about it.
(Of course, I’ve just realized that much of what I’ve said here contradicts a sentence I wrote in my new book--but I guess that’s a good thing, since people will have to read my book to find out what I’m talking about.)
Andrei,
So then which is a fiction, your posting or the sentence in your book? Kidding.
It’s interesting to speculate and debate on what is or isn’t fiction, but we should know that it’s Barnes & Noble who’d be most interested in our conclusions.
“I must say, sometimes I wonder if seeing any work as representational ex officio is not a particular professional deformation of literary critics--who specialize in artworks that are fashioned out of stuff that is representational from the beginning.”
I’m not entirely sure what you mean about “stuff that is representational from the beginning.” Do you mean art that is explicitly about art? Here’s Barthes: “Are there objects which are inevitably a source of suggestiveness, as Baudelaire suggested about Woman? Certainly not: one can conceive of very ancient myths, but there are no eternal ones” (Mythologies 110).
In these terms, I paraphrase your posting: though it may be frustrating to see representational works dominate critics’ imaginations, there is such a thing as eternally representational stuff--even if it isn’t the only thing.
Regardless, how do literary critics’ obsessive-compulsions—our imposition of theory, our closing off meaning by extracting and fashioning it from a work—differ greatly from an absorption on brushstrokes, flute tweets, etc.? Either way it’s a closing, a focusing. If the brushstrokes belong to a work you consider (or the artist considers) non-representational, the brushstrokes still compose, or open up representation for, the piece.
These obsessive readings of ours—to see the trees in the forest, or our imagined forests enclosing forests—is not necessarily unnatural or counterproductive. When you know you have a pimple on your face and you look in the mirror, the pimple is all you’ll see; imagining people’s reactions is what you’ll think. And so you wash your face.
St. Elsewhere isn’t minimalism. But it does take epic, representational reality and, non-satirically, condense it back to one thought or fantasy. I write here about Reggio’s Qatsi trilogy doing a similar sort of thing—where the representation, the metaphoric expansion as we usually know it, closes in on the thing, the traditional opener (St. Elsewhere’s hospital; or brushstrokes).
I’ve visited your site. Your work is terrific. How do you think of it in terms of fiction/representation?
Jordan--
I just wrote a long, long answer to your last post, which a @#$% crash of IE completely ate up. I just don’t have the energy to rewrite it now. I’ll try again tomorrow, maybe.
Andrei,
One thing the theory speaks to is our inevitable reinterpretation of original. We watch reruns of Cheers knowing so much about Frasier—Cheers changes. Remember Back to the Future II, where Marty weaves in and out of I. This isn’t just a sequel. It’s next to impossible to watch I and not think how Marty from II is watching the movie with us; he’s hanging from the rafters.
II is a meta-narrative; it makes part of its plot that strange relationship any sequel/spinoff has with original. Not that II was the first work to do this. Faulkner’s characters cross over. Odyssey opens up Iliad. Back to the Future II, however, uses the perfect metaphor: time-travel. We’re not just traveling back to 1955; we’re traveling back to our memory of the first film.
Or think of jazz interpretations of standards: performers sing the melody while also revealing a shadow-melody, burying themselves in a nook of the song that we didn’t know was there until they showed us. Suddenly we can never hear the original as we originally heard it—it has the unmistakable nook, the crack no longer concealed.
By opening up the text (we know there may be an infinite number of Martys wandering through I, II, and III), the spin-off also closes in: it reveals and contentually centralizes the very physics of the stage. To do this without satirical or political aim, that should be our aim. II owes itself only to I. Paradise Lost owes itself to far more than the Bible.
The Westphall Hypothesis suggests that all televisual stages share the same physics, and that characters share the same essential DNA. It’s a welcome building block in the universal platform. Narratives and characters are evolving. We must build them new cities.
Then there’s Fred Thompson’s presidential campaign…