Prologue

Nine months ago, I left, as the Americans call post-secondary education of nearly all forms, "college". I took with me six years of memories and reams of papers I may never look at again, and I fear that my two degrees - a Combined Honours B.A. in English and French (University of Western Ontario), and an M.A. in Comparative Literature (University of Toronto) - may be among them.

University education, at least in the above disciplines, has never seemed to me to be more similar to alchemy than it does at this point in my life, as it professes to magically turn any form of artistic sensibility, creativity and or general humanism into the well-developed critical faculties required for seeking out, as Matthew Arnold would have it, "the best that is known and thought in the world." With a shock, any form of emotional or personal attachment to a significant work of art is torn to shreds upon entrance into the academy, and ever so slowly over the years beyond the first, the last ribbons of the historical document that is one's life experience fall gently to the floor, drifting slightly on the winds of establishment. Artwork after artwork fell from its secure place in my (for lack of a more precise term) soul based on the "teachings" of the institution, and I was normalized even to the point where I must now regard even my tightly- held John Steinbeck (no less than the winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize for literature) with grains of skepticism.

True, everything should to an extent be taken with the proverbial grain of salt. And yet, in all the years of learning what I should not be studying, the foundational place of one work of art in my personal make-up could not be shaken. That piece of art is the animated television series currently mid-way through it's 19th season: The Simpsons.

The reasons to revile this television program - at least, from the perspective of the critic of art - are based not only on the fact that, like Steinbeck, it has a populist appeal, but rather, that it is delivered by way of a populist medium. Not only is it on television, it is the lowest form of television: further, as a cartoon, The Simpsons rank even lower on these critics' radars as the animated descendant of the plebian comic book. Television, after all, is no more than an instrument for the promotion of consumption, with programs existing to do no more than fill the space between commercials, to ensure that large numbers of viewers see the ads which pay the network's bills. And yet, when confronted with it, the academy more often than not has to at least accept that the show is well-written and good example of satire, though in my experience, it has done so begrudgingly more often than not. There seems almost to be an element of shame in the teacher when the series is discussed in a classroom setting beyond high school, as I discovered several times (particularly during discussions of parody, pastiche, intertextuality and/or post-modernism) during my so-called education. The Simpsons, however, has been responible for a large part of my learning - not the same as education, it should be noted - be it through its emotional impact, cynicism, realistic portrayal of the world it inhabits, allusion and quotation, and occasionally, through nothing more than the telling of a well-designed and well-executed tale with an emotional impact that embarrasses the floating corpses of live-action television actors and their lame-duck writers who are often little more than slaves to the media empires they serve and write for little more than to increase their market share.

When you live in a media-rich society like that which we enjoy, however, this is a creation that is readily consumed, and thanks to syndication based on the show's high ratings, it is a work of art that is available to be consumed repeatedly: with the standard digital cable package, there are usually between six and 12 different episodes aired per day. Inevitably, this will lead to closer scrutiny, and things not evident in the first consumption of an episode will emerge that fourth, fifth or ninety-eighth time it is watched. The true joy of The Simpsons is in its ability to stay somewhat relevant, for even in episodes from those first years (with animation the show's creators are the first to call, among other epithets, "squishy"), the potential to be re-thought through the lens of a new (or more likely, "classic") work of art one has experienced since seeing that episode, be it a high art form such as painting, sculpture, "classical" music or architecture, or a lower form, such as other cartoons, television shows, films or comics. It is by entering into dialogue with art and history that Simpsons can be timeless, and its continued popularity - particularly in syndication and in DVD sales - runs against the grain, as this is not sold a "classic television" product, but as something which enrages its detractors by proving itself to be as relevant nearly twenty years on as it was in its first years.

The difficulty with The Simpsons, however, is that it is very hard to work from in an academic context. This is not to say that I don't dream of the day where a proposal for a Ph.D. on this television series gets me into Harvard (or equally, Ryerson...) and leads me into a career of teaching undergraduates of the value of this television program - in fact, this blog will most likely serve as a series of rough notes for just such a purpose - but there are difficulties beyond the reputation of its medium. For one, the episodes are short, and rarely allow for a prolonged discussion of any given topic - just when an allusion or reference is made, it's more often than not over before it can really make an extended comment on the matter discussed. These insertions for the erudite, however, are gratifying for not only the viewer, but also the writer, and by recognizing these allusions and other minutia as doors through which we can access the show, an episode's tone can shift drastically. It is for this reason that these references are more than simple gratification of the slumming intellectual, as reading this work of art through some of the chosen intertexts can truly alter the viewing, and make what we can accept as a somewhat formulaic and slapstick-based oeuvre into a work that can equally be seen as creative criticism of the world in which "we" live (Canadians, Americans and all global citizens included). The Simpsons enters into dialogue not necessarily with a given canon of artworks, but it is the quintessential text of cultural studies, a synthesizer of the zeitgeist and that which came before.

It is these tensions and many others that I will set out to explore in a series of readings of Simpsons episodes. The readings come really in no particular order than whatever I have recently seen or read about, and may in some cases be on a single episode (as will be my first planned commentary, "Hey, that's not the Wallet Inspector..."), sometimes on a single allusion, or character (I don't know what it will be, but I have to say something about Sideshow Bob), or sometimes on a theme taken up between several episodes: Sports is another one that I feel I will have to get out my system early on, as some of my personal favourite episodes include Homer at the Bat, Lisa on Ice and the Pee-Wee Football episode whose title escapes me for the moment. I feel also that the odd entry (such as this one, I guess) will be one with no purpose other than to engage popular and/or academic criticisms of the series, in some cases specific books or articles and in other cases comments from people around me (the most common being those where people debate when the show "jumped the shark"). My studies will be somewhat limited, as until seasons beyond the tenth are released to DVD I will be stuck watching more recent episodes on television (and therefore, sometimes in cut-for-syndication mode), and I will come clean and admit that, like most Simpsons fans, my most used sources will likely include Wikipedia and the SNPP (Springfield Nuclear Power Plant) archive, at http://www.snpp.com/.

Please feel free to comment on anything written in any of these entries should you be either a frequent reader or should you stumble across this page, and should you stumble across this page, please feel free to become a frequent reader. I look forward to sharing most of what this television show has been teaching me since, just before Christmas of 1989 (as a six-year old), I discovered a show that would become a bigger part of my life than I could ever have imagined.