The Literary Mind.pdf

FIGURED TALES 55
literary thought by looking at expressions of popular culture, like the following.
In January 1993, a major computer corporation launched an intensive advertisement
campaign for a new laptop computer. Ads for the laptop appeared in many
markets and in many media. An airline passenger might have opened Delta's
glossy in-flight magazine to a slick two-page ad for the machine. In-flight magazines
are designed, of course, to appeal to thousands of potential customers from
all social stations, many of whom have never read a poem except at the point of
a pedagogical gun, and even then hated it. In-flight magazines hawk cologne,
cruises, air cleaners, anti-wrinkle suitbags, nightlife in Vegas, medicines to restore
hair or prevent it from falling out, gift notions, personalized mailing labels, lingerie,
ingenious labor-saving devices for every imaginable pointless activity in
the home or the office, alcohol, retirement communities, and an eerie assortment
of richly vulgar and sometimes hysterically colored consumer items. The
advertisement in this in-flight magazine carries a picture of the laptop in the
center, and underneath, in large type,
Its mother was a mainframe.
Its father was a Maserati.
Everyone, of course, understands immediately that the laptop is being described
as having the power and range we associate with a mainframe computer,
and the sleek design, speed, and excitement we associate with a Maserati racing
car. The laptop inherits these attributes. The logic of inheritance as part of the
story of birth is so routinely projected onto other stories that it has its own conventional
joke construction: "What do you get when you cross a such-and-such
with a so-and-so?" In most instances of this construction, such-and-such and
so-and-so are not reproductive organisms, and when they are, they usually do
not mate naturally. Milton uses the projection of inheritance onto theology when
he conceives of Sin as inheriting what he imagines to be the "feminine" aspects
of Satan (beauty, seduction, persuasion, blandishment) and of Death as inheriting
what he imagines to be the "masculine" aspects of Satan (direct power, absolute
courage, arrogance, violence, strength). Later, when Satan intends to exit
the gates of Hell, which are guarded by Sin and Death, Sin with honeyed speech
endeavors to dissuade him, while Death laconically threatens to destroy him.
The ad copy for the laptop widens the story of progeneration to include
genetics and evolution. Its opening sentence reads, "As they say, it's all in the
genes." The laptop's button for moving a pointer on the screen is described as
doing "what a mouse would do with a few million more years of evolution." We
are asked to project a detailed story of progeneration onto an extraordinarily
complex story of technological development.