In other words, the director has the choice of confining his cameras to a rigorous presentation of the game. a limited interpretation with a mildly moral or documentary import, or of escaping all interpretation by means of a passive expression of nihilism, which, intelligently carried out, could produce an effect similar to that of the absolutely objective descriptions of the nouveau roman.
This is what the director could do if his broadcasts were only apparently live and actually the result of a long elaboration, the realization of a new vision of the world rebelling against that instinctive mechanism that makes us connect events according to the laws of verisimilitude. Let’s not forget that according to Aristotle, poetic verisimilitude is determined by rhetorical verisimilitude; that is, it is not only logical but also natural that what happens in a plot is also what all of us would expect to happen in real life, what, according to the conventions of the form, we would think should happen given certain premises. The director is generally more than ready to accept, as the normal conclusion of his artistic discourse, what his audience would commonsensically see as the normal culmination of a sequence of real events.
Live TV broadcasts are determined, in their unfolding, by the expectations and demands of their public, a public that not only wants to know what is happening in the world but also expects to hear or see it in the shape of a wellconstructed novel, since this is the way it chooses to perceive «real» life—stripped of all chance elements and reconstructed as plot.’3 We shouldn’t forget that. after all, the traditional narrative plot corresponds to the habitual, mechanical, yet reasonable and functional way in which we are used to perceiving the events of the world, attributing to them a univocal meaning.
The experimental novel, instead, wants to demystify the habitual associations on which we base our interpretations of life, not so as to present us with the image of a nonlife but rather to help us experience life in a new way, besides and beyond all rigid conventions. But this involves a cultural decision, a «phenomenological» stance, the will to bracket assumptions—a will that the average TV viewer, who watches television in order to gather some information and to find out (quite legitimately) how it will all end, does not have.
Which does not mean that, in real life, toward the end of a real baseball game, at the very moment in which a tie has to be resolved in favor of one or the other team, the overwrought spectators won’t suddenly realize the vanity of it all and lapse into the most unlikely behavior, such as falling asleep, leaving the field, starting a fight with their neighbor, and so on. If this were to happen, and the TV director were to film it, he would produce an admirably realistic nonstory that would suddenly open up the currently held notion of verisimilitude. But until then, such a story will continue to be considered unlikely, whereas its opposite—the delirious response of the hopeful fans—will be considered likely, normal, the realistic climax of a realistic story. The public will demand it, and the TV director will feel compelled to give it to them.
But aside from these restrictions, which mostly have to do with the functional relationship between television as a news medium and a public that demands a particular product, there is also, as I have already suggested, another kind of restriction, a syntactic one, determined by the very nature of the production process and the system of psychological reflexes of the director.
Life, by virtue of the element of chance, is already dispersed enough to disorient the director who tries to interpret it narratively. He is constantly in danger of losing the thread and of becoming a mere photographer of the unrelated and the uniform—not of that which is intentionally unrelated but of that which is factually accidental, alien. In order to avoid this sort of dispersion, he must constantly impose some organization on the available data. And he must do it there and then, without preparation and in the shortest possible time.
Obviously, given the limited amount of time at his disposal, he will tend to rely on the psychologically most immediate and easiest way of connecting two disparate events—that is, the way dictated by habit and supported by public opinion. To bring two events together by means of an unusual connection demands critical reflection, and implies an ideological choice as well as a cultural deci sion. Of course, things would be quite different if we were more used to looking at the world in an unusual fashion, instinctively aiming at the unrelated, or the oddly related, or, to put it in musical terms, at serial rather than tonal connections.
This education of one’s sensibility can be acquired only after a long assimilation of new narrative techniques in which few if any TV directors have had the leisure to indulge, nor does the current organization of our culture demand it of them.
On the other hand, one should also consider the fact that in a sudden confrontation with a vital situation, even a writer who is perfectly familiar with new narrative techniques might resort to more elementary forms of communication based on both habit and a collective notion of causality, since, for the time being, these are still the common points of reference in our daily life.
In the summer of 1961, RobbeGrillet was involved in an airplane accident from which he escaped unharmed. He was immediately interviewed by a group of journalists, among them a reporter from L’Express, who, in a very amusing article, noted how RobbeGrillet’s intensely emotional account of the event had unfolded according to the most traditional, indeed the most Aristotelian, not to say Balzacian, narrative principles: not only did it have a beginning. a middle, and an end, but it was also charged with suspense and extremely subjective. The journalist felt that RobbeGrillet should have narrated the event in the same objective, impersonal. flat, nonnarrative style he used in his novels. The fact that he did not, the reporter facetiously concluded, proved that he was an impostor and that he did not deserve to occupy the place of patriarch of the new narrative techniques.
The article was amusing and highly ironic; on the other hand, had it been written in dead earnest, and had the accusation of insincerity been sincere (in suspecting RobbeGrillet of having, at a crucial moment, forsaken his vision of the world to assume the one he had always countered), the novelist would have been the victim of a very serious misunderstanding. Nobody, in fact, would expect a scholar of nonEuclidean geometry to use Riemann’s geometry to measure his room so that he could build a wardrobe for it; or a supporter of the theory of relativity to adjust his watch according to Lorentz’s transformations, after getting the time from the first motorist who happens to zoom by. New parameters can provide us with tools that are perfectly suited to experimental situations (whether in a lab or in the pages of a novel) but are not functional in everyday life. Which, of course, should not be taken to mean that they are not valid but that, on a daily basis (at least for the time being), more traditional parameters with a wider diffusion might be more effective.
The interpretation of something that is happening to us now and to which we must immediately respond—or that we must immediately describe televisually—may well be one of those cases in which the more conventional response is also the most effective.
This is the situation of televisual language in a particular phase of its development, and in a particular cultural context which demands that it fulfill a particular function visavis a particular public.
On the other hand, given different historical circumstances, live TV could well become some sort of initiation into a freer exercise of one’s sensibility and other enriching associative experiences; in other words, it could be a big step toward another psychological and cultural dimension. For the time being, however, a description of the aesthetic structures of live TV broadcasts must keep in mind the reality of the phenomenon and look at the medium and at its laws in relation to a particular audience. Today, a TV commentary resembling L’Avventura would probably still be considered a very bad broadcast, and its cultural reference would appear merely ironic.
For all its contemporariness, is not yet suited to every form of artistic communication. The structure with a «plot» in the most Aristotelian sense of the term, is still the most widespread, even at the highest levels (for, after all, aesthetic value doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the novelty of a technique—even though the latter is frequently the symptom of an originality of both thought and method on which art often thrives). As for live TV, as long as it responds to this deep need for
