Watching with The Simpsons

Television, Parody, and Intertextuality

Jonathan Gray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134233205
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

Using our favourite Springfield family as a case study, Watching with The Simpsons examines the textual and social role of parody in offering critical commentary on other television programs and genres.

Jonathan Gray brings together textual theory, discussions of television and the public sphere, and ideas of parody and comedy. Including primary audience research, it focuses on how The Simpsons has been able to talk back to three of television's key genres - the sitcom, adverts and the news - and on how it holds the potential to short-circuit these genre's meanings, power, and effects by provoking reinterpretations and offering more media literate recontextualizations.

Examining television and media studies theory, the text of The Simpsons, and the show's audience, Gray attempts to fully situate the show's parody and humour within the lived realities of its audiences. In doing so, he further explores the possibilities for popular entertainment television to discuss issues of political and social importance.

A must read for any student of media studies.

Part I

READING THROUGH INTERTEXTUALITY

Chapter 1

INTERTEXTUALITY AND THE STUDY OF TEXTS

BEHIND PARODY, MOTORING ITS COMEDY AND SEMIOTICS at a basic, fundamental level, is intertextuality. Thus, any attempt to explain the theoretical, comic, or political powers of The Simpsons specifically, or of parody more generally, must be preceded by adequate theorization of how intertextuality works. Before closely examining The Simpsons and its parody, as I will in Part II, then, we must first establish how one text can comment on and talk to another. Hence, this chapter will detail what intertextuality is, how texts interact, and why television and media studies scholarship could benefit from more use of an intertextual mode of practice.

The divine text in textual studies history

However, given that academia has added intertextuality to its vocabulary and critical repertoire only since the early 1970s, any discussion of television and intertextuality must itself be preceded by a brief archaeology of academic understanding of the text, so as to figure out why intertextuality has arrived so late in textual studies history. After all, as Foucauldian discourse theory informs us, the ways in which we delimit or conceive of a field feed back into how we study it and into what data or ‘knowledge’ the field will produce (Foucault 1972). Textual studies have a long history of festishizing the text as a solitary, pristinely autonomous object, and this notion of textuality has exerted considerable pressure particularly on literary and film studies, but also on media and television studies. Even now, intertextuality is often invoked in a merely hit-and-run manner, without its full ramifications for televisual form and phenomenology of reception being carefully considered. As is evident in the use of literary studies terminology of ‘texts’ and ‘readers’ to describe anything from blue jeans to television programs, media and television studies are in many ways outgrowths of literary studies, with the latter’s mental framings often still in place. The primacy of the text, and many scholars’ presumptions that it could be studied alone, reveals a dense history of overly text-centric analysis that any intertextual theory must move beyond.

So what has the text historically meant to literary studies? Wordsworth and Coleridge’s 1798 publication of Lyrical Ballads represents a landmark in literary studies and poetics’ conceptions of text, author, and reader, and hence a useful starting point. In the book’s preface (Wordsworth 1991), and in subsequent apologias for poetry by Coleridge (1991) and Shelley (1991), the English Romantics posited poetry as a thing divine. ‘[E]ndowed with a more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness [and …] a more comprehensive soul’ (Wordsworth 1991: 264), the poet was figured as a conduit for divine inspiration and ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling’ (1991: 260), or as a wind harp over which divine inspiration played (see Shelley 1991: 260). The Romantics thus denied any influence from previous writers and asserted the text’s utter uniqueness. Meanwhile, the text’s supposedly inherent boundaries were asserted by cutting off all connection to the reader. Theorists from Plato and Aristotle onward have frequently assumed reader response and refused readers any ability to construct meaning themselves, but the Romantics removed the reader altogether. To Wordsworth, the poet did not write to be read, and as such, the reader became irrelevant. Instead, fetishized as the locus of genius and enlightenment, the text and its creator pair of God and Author were the alpha and omega of textuality.

This view of poetry as pure benevolence carried through the Victorian era largely unchanged (see, for instance, M. Arnold 1978), and crystallized into discipline with the founding of literature departments across the United Kingdom and United States. Guiding this institutionalization of the study of texts were Leavis (1962) and I. A. Richards’ (1978) ‘practical criticism’ in England, and Brooks (1949) and Ransom’s (1979) ‘new criticism’ in the United States. Following proclamations of the text’s central contribution to a discourse of Kantian enlightenment, the intent behind studying the text became to extract its meaning, authority, and wisdom, as if some rare ore. Practical and new criticisms developed a theory of ‘close reading,’ whereby texts were to be studied in and of themselves, as if in a vacuum. Richards’ (1978) famous experiments with students at Cambridge represent the apex of this belief in the unitary text, as students were presented with poems with no background information or author’s names and asked to analyze them. Having supposedly placed extra-textual contaminants to the side, Richards believed that his students could best understand individual texts by burrowing deep ‘into’ them, and by engaging solely with what was ‘there.’ As might be expected, Richards’ students often produced vastly different readings of the ‘same’ text. His conclusion, though, was that better training was needed: students needed to be taught how to read a text properly, and the critic-professor would fulfill this task. In effect, the critic-professor was elevated to priest of textuality, as mediator between the power of the text and the inexperience of the reader.

Richards’ theory is rife with contradictions; most notable, though, is his notion that the critic-professor could hold an Archimedean vantage point over the text when his theory espoused that each textual structure and mode of enunciation is unique and self-contained. Paradoxically, then, Richards’ theory of close reading rules out the possibility of having obtained tools of reading from any other text: such tools would be extra-textual contaminants. Surely, Richards would defend his professorship and high priesthood of literature on the grounds that he had substantially more experience of reading than did his students, but experience and the ethos of close reading are incommensurable. Richards aimed to provide his students with a toolbox for reading texts, but that toolbox is filled with structures and tropes from other texts. Even a simple sentence requires a reading history to understand, and so the only way to square the circle of privileged readers and unique texts is to make compromises on one or other of these concepts.

Nevertheless, the theory remained and solidified into standard textual/analytical practice. As will be discussed, much literary and media theory from the 1970s onwards has challenged these beliefs, but many departments, universities, and particularly schools have resisted such theory, and thus the shadow of close reading and of the divine text remain with us, forming ‘common sense’ understandings of textuality for many.

The text and the world: four models of intertextuality

Intertextual theory truly arrived with the French Tel Quel school of theorists in the 1960s and 1970s, the word ‘intertextuality’ having been coined by Julia Kristeva (1980a, 1980b). Kristeva and Barthes (1990) developed the theory for literary studies, but its transference to media and television studies was slow in coming. Arguably, media and cultural studies’ first major (if only implicit) step toward a theory of intertextuality came with Stuart Hall’s (1980) encoding/decoding model and intervention, and subsequent work into decoding by what Alasuutari (1999) has dubbed the ‘first generation’ of reception analysts (see Ang 1985; Buckingham 1987; A. Gray 1987; Hobson 1987; J. Lewis 1986; Morley 1980, 1986; Radway 1987). Central to this generation of work was the idea that meaning comes not only ‘from the text’ or from its creator/‘encoder,’ but also from its reader/‘decoder.’ Taken together, first generation work provides compelling evidence to suggest that an individual reader’s positioning within societal structures and groupings, and his or her context of reception, frequently inflects what meanings that reader will ‘find’ in the text. Radway’s study of romance book readers, for instance, left her with the conclusion that, while a close reading would suggest conservative, patriarchal content, the ways in which her subjects interacted with the books suggested an opposition to patriarchy (1987: 209–10). As this and other work documented, text and context bleed into each other, becoming intermingled: the text is (of) the world, while the world is (made of) texts.

Here, intertextuality is born in media and cultural studies, for while none of these early commentators drew the direct connection themselves, their findings point naturally to intertextuality if we only interrogate what ‘context’ and ‘the world’ or our positioning within it entails. As numerous critics have argued, our world is in large part a textual one. We are, as Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998) and Bird (2003) document, audiences all the time, forever consuming more texts than we could even be aware of. Much of what we learn of the world we learn from texts, leading some commentators to question if a world beyond the text still exists (see Baudrillard 1983a, 1983b; Debord 1995). Almost everything in the world, from our sense of self (Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998: 106; Hartley 1999), ontological security (Silverstone 1994), and lifestyle (Chaney 2001; Lull 2001), to what we conceive of as our nation and our relationship to it (Cardiff and Scannell 1987; Dayan and Katz 1994; Morley 2000), our family (Morley 1992; Silverstone 1994), or even our intimate relations and feelings (Galician 2003) is in part pieced together from the texts that flow through our ‘mediascapes’ (Appadurai 1995). And when we talk to one another, much of that talk is of the media, and not only the topics but the vocabulary and grammar. Working with several studies of conversation, Allen (1982) has estimated that, on average, a third of our talk is about the media, and more so with strangers. What, too, of our sadness, happiness, anger, mirth, and lust? How much of these and other emotions (and the people to whom they are attached) are played out in texts (see J. Gray 2005a; Grossberg 1992; Harrington and Bielby 1996; Hills 2002)? Ultimately, everyday life is in many ways a series of texts, and when the first generation of reception researchers found text and world bleeding into each other, by implication they found texts bleeding into each other. They may not have intended to open the Pandora’s Box of intertextuality, but they certainly did.

Of course, though, to say texts interact with texts is overly vague, and critics have offered several models of what sort of interactions occur. Crudely, we can distinguish between four predominant models, and if we liken intertextuality to teamwork, we can talk of a hierarchical model, a working together model, a divided responsibility model, and a fully interactive model. In the first model, intertextuality is restricted to influence. Speaking of The Simpsons, for instance, we could observe the numerous instances in each episode when the show draws upon and references popular film, television, or art and literature. Under such a model, the single text now belongs to a network, becoming as literary theorist Harold Bloom has noted in his discussion of influence, ‘only part of a meaning; it is itself a synecdoche for a larger whole including other texts’ (Bloom 1975: 106; see also Bloom 1973). The close reader’s supposedly impervious textual borders begin to lose their sealant under this theory, and it becomes possible to talk of how one’s reading of one text may directly affect one’s reading of another. Influence, though, is itself but a part of, and a synecdoche to, intertextuality, as intertextuality in its fullness is significantly richer in possibilities for textual interaction. Although influence theory situates texts within a network, it posits this network as strictly vertical, allowing for meaning to go in only one direction, one of chronology from The Iliad to the present day. Influence theory also fails to allow for the possibility that texts might work together (or in spite of each other), rather than endlessly feed into one another. According to influence theory, Kubrick or Hitchcock, say, can talk to and inflect The Simpsons, but the reverse is impossible, nor can The Simpsons talk to its peers. Influence theory’s picture of textuality is also relatively lifeless, largely disinterested in the readers who might travel through such intertextual networks. As such, while it explodes the myth of the solitary text, it also denies the reader agency, and the text or author the ability to talk back, and hence the scope of its intertextual vision is strictly limited.

A second model of intertextuality envisions each text as a team member engaged in the same task as all other members, and the object of study becomes their combined work. Two clear examples of this model can be seen in work on the role of the media in articulating and/or creating nationality, and in cultivation analysis of long-term media effects. In the former, each text is seen to offer an image of the nation, and our individual notions of national identity will therefore be in part an aggregate of texts A, B, C, etc. These texts may well take on differential value (some team members work better than others), but each text is seen as fulfilling the same role within the ‘team’ (see J. Richards 1997; Street 1997). Similarly, cultivation analysis (see Gerbner et al. 1994; Shanahan and Morgan 1999; Signorielli and Morgan 1990) charts long-term media effects by looking not at, say, violence in one text, but at violence as a general theme in television, strung out over multiple texts as team members. Again, the interest is in the texts as aggregate, and in their combined effort.

The third model, by contrast, divides different responsibilities or roles between different team members. Under this model, the media are seen as fulfilling multiple functions, with each text or genre of texts concentrating on a different function. A particularly stimulating example of this model can be found in Marie Gillespie’s Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change (1995). Gillespie’s data, based on ethnographic work among Punjabi teenagers in the London suburb of Southall, suggest a model whereby, for instance, ads are used as modern myths of cultural citizenship and aspiration, television news is used to develop national citizenship, and imported Indian videos are used to maintain links to cultural heritage. Each genre, in other words, is routinely employed by its users for a different task. Another example of this model can be found in Joke Hermes’ (1995) work on women’s magazines, in which she concludes that not all media texts are consumed equally by users, with different texts serving different functions (women’s magazines being ‘putdownable’ and an ‘inbetween activity’). Both Gillespie and Hermes suggest that, in order to understand any text, critics must place it in the context of its user’s or reader’s overall media consumption and ask what role it is being asked to perform.

All three of these models have produced interesting and valuable insights into the nature and role of texts, showing how a significant amount of textual meaning and value is created across multiple texts, at the level of intertextuality. However, I would like to look beyond them to a fourth model that involves a more complex interaction between texts, seeing texts working on each other’s ground, setting up shop in each other’s offices and working through and sometimes against one another’s work. To do so, we turn to intertextuality’s genesis as term, and to its theoretical forefather, Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtinian theory was introduced to the Tel Quel theorists most prominently by Julia Kristeva, and Kristeva cites Bakhtin as source for many of her ideas on textuality, dialogism, doubling, and polyglossia. When Kristeva penned the term ‘intertextuality,’ it was while writing of Bakhtin. Bakhtin and fellow theorists Volosinov and Medvedev’s vision of intertextuality is an extremely dense, rich, and at times complex one, whose full ramifications have yet to be fully acknowledged and appreciated.¹

Bakhtin’s textuality takes root in a post-Saussurean, dialogic theory of linguistics. Saussure famously distinguished between parole, as any spoken or written utterance, and langue, the system of language, and his Course in General Linguistics (1983) sets an understanding of langue as the ultimate goal for linguistics and semiology, further positing that langue can be studied quite independently of parole. Bakhtin disagrees, centering his own linguistics on what he calls the ‘real unit’ of communication, the utterance (Bakhtin 1986: 71). Hence, where, as Tony Bennett (1979: 74–5) notes, Saussure’s langue was magic carpet-like, with no explanation offered of how it is propelled, Bakhtin proposes dialogism as this propeller. Saussurean linguistics was quite content to use the sentence as basic unit of language and to study it in a vacuum, but Bakhtin argues that nobody ‘is the first speaker, the one who disturbs the eternal silence of the universe’ (1986: 69). Rather, every utterance begins as a response to something else, and ends, prepared or otherwise, as something to be responded to. All communication, in other words, is ‘but one link in a continuous chain of speech performance’ (Volosinov 1973: 72), for ‘The word wants to be heard, understood, responded to, and again to respond to the response, and so forth, ad infinitum’ (Bakhtin 1986: 127). As opposed to the ‘abstraction’ (Volosinov 1973: 77) required by Saussurean structuralist linguistics and which has, as Volosinov points out, ‘always taken as its point of departure the finished monologic utterance – the ancient written monument, considering it the ultimate realium’ (1973: 77), the Bakhtin circle propose a ‘concrete’ (Volosinov 1973: 77) system sensitive to context, and, as a result, sensitive to the true nature of meaning-construction.

With such a system, understanding an utterance involves placing it into a context of other utterances. ‘The text lives,’ Bakhtin writes, ‘only by coming into contact with another text (with context). Only at the point of this contact between texts does a light flash, illuminating both the posterior and anterior, joining a given text to a dialogue’ (1986: 162). By itself, and isolated in a bubble, as new and practical criticisms tried to do with the text, the utterance is completely meaningless, for we only know how to make sense of it through having read and experienced other utterances. To understand, in Volosinov’s terms, ‘means to refer a particular inner sign to a unity consisting of other inner signs, to perceive it in the context of a particular psyche’ (1973: 35), where the particular sign is the text at hand, and the unity of other signs is the accumulation of already-experienced events and texts.² ‘[I]n the process of introspection, we engage our experience into a context made up of other signs we understand. A sign can be illuminated only with the help of another sign’ (Volosinov 1973: 36). Thus, where to Saussure langue could be studied separately, and where it acted as a ‘sort of contract signed by the members of a community’ (1983: 14), language to the Bakhtin circle is not simply handed down as contract with a ‘Sign on Dotted Line’ inscription, nor can it be stabilized. Instead, ‘it endures as a continuous process of becoming’ (Volosinov 1973: 81). Effectively, every utterance reaches us lifeless with thousands of protruding wires. For that utterance to make sense, for it to come alive, we must hook it up to active wires already-possessed. And those already-possessed wires will in turn have formed as a result of previous meaning-making activities.³

One of media studies’ finer examinations of intertextuality, significantly informed by Bakhtin, is Bennett and Woollacott’s (1987) Bond and Beyond. Bennett and Woollacott (1987: 7) boldly state that ‘“the text itself” is an inconceivable object’, for the text ‘is never “there” except in forms in which it is also and always other than “just itself,” always-already humming with reading possibilities which derive from outside its covers’ (1987: 90–1). Taking the case of James Bond, they explain that most readers viewing or reading a Bond text have already encountered this character elsewhere, from merchandising, ads, and texts within the Bond franchise. From reading these texts, then, most readers will have some concept of what a Bond film or book is likely to entail: it will ...