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FIFTY-THREE

“Bemoaning the demise of the serious novel, or the disintegration of literary fame, as the consequence of the loss of history makes Vidal’s satirical stance reminiscent of Alexander Pope. He thus might seem to support those who believe in the decline of the intellectual or of literary seriousness. But Vidal simultaneously overrides Pope’s famous definition of wit—‘What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed’—by expressing it so well, so often, verbatim. Such reproduction, enabled by the central position of television in Vidal’s writing, points to the future possibilities suggested by Myra’s utopian mission, to ‘re-create the sexes and thus save the human race from certain extinction.’ Exploiting the television commercial as ‘the last demonstration of necessary love in the West,’ Vidal successfully negotiates a public role for the author as intellectual on the basis of the circuit that he establishes between the page and the movie screen, a circuit that relies on the mediation of that amnesia-inducing and immortality-producing medium: the television. Vidal uses TV to ward off the blurring of the boundaries between culture and politics in identity-based politics. He exploits the congruencies among critiques of genetic, genital, and technological determinism. By these means, he has refused to be ghettoized…in TV he has found both a vehicle through which to convey his politics and a mode of address for a new televisual public, that is, a public conditioned by television even when it reads. Vidal’s career teaches us that it is possible to remain a universal intellectual in the age of TV. He has done so by negotiating the print-screen circuit.”