Soaps

In her later years, after suffering a stroke at age 74, my maternal grandmother closely followed soap operas on afternoon television. She called them her “stories,” which makes sense because I don’t recall her ever reading a book or newspaper. Nothing else held her attention so absolutely. From my 10-year-old’s perspective, the shows blurred into one long convoluted narrative defined by an endlessly repeated scene: People standing in a living room hollering at each other, rather like life in my house or an Edward Albee play. As a kid I couldn’t imagine anything drearier – watching people behave like my family, but better dressed.

I spoke with an undergraduate who is taking a class devoted to the history of soap operas, including their purported roots in Roman comedy, and is writing a paper on how soaps portrayed “empowered” women. She is bright and well-spoken, and treated the academic recognition of television with a predictably breezy sense of irony, today’s universal solvent. I wanted to avoid sounding stricken with end-of-civilization gloom, so I let her do most of the talking. Modern life trumps satire.

In “Facing Reality,” an essay collected in The Death of Adam, Marilynne Robinson takes on what she calls “this collective fiction, this Reality,” “this work of grim and minor imagination which somehow or other got itself acknowledged as The Great Truth and The Voice of Our Time because of rather than despite its obvious thinness and fraudulence.” She addresses this widely recognized but rarely acknowledged phenomenon from the perspective of a creator of “real” fiction. Robinson’s discussion of religion in the essay came to mind while listening to the student and her soap operas:

“Where did religion go? I know I risk being unfair in characterizing television religion, because I have not paid much attention to it. But it seems to me more television than religion by a good margin. It is adept at exciting minor emotions and at stimulating viewer loyalty. It bears about the same relation to religion All My Children bears to King Lear. I can see how someone stuck at home might prefer it to golf. There is no snobbery in saying things differ by the measure of their courage and their honesty and their largeness of spirit, and that the difference is profoundly one of value. Television has not taken over the expression of religious sensibility, any more than vendors of souvenir Eiffel Towers have deprived Paris of a monument.”

Let’s first praise the pungency of Robinson’s prose, her humor (“minor emotions,” “might prefer it to golf”), and the bracing clarity of her thought. I invite you to read the entire essay, and all The Death of Adam, but for now note the scale Robinson holds in her hands: On one side, King Lear; on the other, All My Children. The student I spoke with knows which way the scale tips. So do her professor and classmates. So do the producers, writers and actors who make soap operas. But this “Reality,” as Robinson calls it, “this work of grim and minor imagination,” in collusion with our soothing sense of irony, says otherwise. In her essay’s final, forgiving, unexpected sentence, Robinson writes:

“And Dante, who knew the world about suffering, had a place in hell for people who were grave when they might have rejoiced.”