Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on
—John Keats,
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”
This is insincere merely by being in English. I can’t express myself earnestly in English. That’s why this story is only half the story: the half defined by dissection, description, and, of course, joking. But that’s only half that story as well, its own superficial outward definition; it misses the capacity of the insincere to express a purity, to eschew the teleological obsession in cataloguing Love, Values, and Truth and, instead, find love, value, and truths in the disruption of such (re)presentations, the complication of such simple definitions. Seinfeld expresses this love as insincerely and with as much unrelenting irony as possible: while it “convinces” us—or was it just because I was a naïve child when I first entered its world?—of its bleak realism, its accurate representation of the cynical and sarcastic outlook of the cosmopolitan 90s ethos, it simultaneously underlines every element of its production, the extent to which it is contrived, and its difference from the reality it supposedly claims to describe.
What I above expressed as “a purity,” in describing the opposite of one’s statement within one’s statement without privileging one or the other, becomes especially evident at moments in Seinfeld in which a single scene, idea, line, juxtaposition or casting choice can stand for two precisely opposite propositions, what John Keats famously described as “Negative Capability” in a letter to his brothers. He describes an unfortunate dinner and the thoughts in his mind after a “disquisition” he had with a friend upon leaving the engagement:
several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.
Nothing describes Seinfeld’s ascription to the tradition of Shakespeare and Keats better than the episode that ends the season that began with Jerry and George’s foray into writing, the veritable transcription of the words of these Grecian epic poets, the encapsulation of a mythologized form of an oral culture. “The Pilot,” the two-part episode that tells the story of the production and broadcast of the first and only episode of Jerry, the show pitched by George and Jerry as “about nothing,” exemplifies this transcendental tension that, properly considered, expresses what cannot be anything other than a spiritually exuberant soul at the heart of the show and its creators, or, as Keats put it, a “sense of Beauty [that] overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”
Showing the process of how strange it is to make a sitcom from one’s own life masquerades as reinforcing the sincere expression of insincerity, that Seinfeld successfully and unproblematically expresses what it’s like to be Jerry Seinfeld starring in an eponymous sitcom and Larry David producing in the background, while actually tearing down the illusion that the infinitely deferred essence, the essence infinitely different from the words used to describe it—the life of Jerry Seinfeld and his friends—is a television show. A reoccurring joke appears in this episode that functions as a perfect symbol for this tension: George has convinced himself that he cannot be happy, that if the show succeeds God will strike him dead; moments before Jerry is performed and filmed for the first time he calls the doctor for the results of a test on a discoloration on his lip; he is told the results were “negative” and is crushed and begins to freak out because he thinks the news is bad—“negative”—and that he has cancer, not that it is not cancer—i.e. “negative.” David wrote a screenplay in the ‘80s that was never produced called Prognosis Negative; it is also the name of a film which figures prominently in an early storyline; the movie is terrible. This makes what is a simple joke—the double meaning of “double”—an indecidable paradox of conflicting meanings: the essential binary (positive/negative) is called into question and for a moment George lives in a world where “yes” means “no” and vice versa; the absurd neuroses of George suddenly prefigure the episode’s ultimate irony that the show is not picked up—the very show we thought we were watching is not produced: George’s feeling that his success would signify his death again reverses positive with negative: a positive test for cancer would represent the positive outcome for the show: his death would signify his success; instead the result is not just negative: it is a black hole of ecriture in which George is, negatively, diagnosed as positive for a neurotic hypochondriac in the moment he is, positively, diagnosed as negative for skin cancer, an eventuality no one really took seriously. Prognosis Negative represents the negative potential of Jerry: while Seinfeld describes its doppelganger’s failure simultaneous with its own success, Prognosis Negative is produced and widely released in Seinfeld when it was never produced in real life. [1]
What is ultimately at work here is a discussion between the written and the spoken, words in a book and words on a stage, what is conceived in solitude by a lonely genius and what is developed through conversation by a charismatic luminary, what is revised by word processors and erasers and what improves by groans and heckles, whether Jerry’s ultimate contribution comes from a made-up mythical world in which he pretends to interact in earnest or whether Jerry’s significance is the keen observation that transcends all context.
When I told her, in my simple, direct Spanish that I was writing a book she asked me what it was about. I said it was about the process of understanding something. This answer seemed to satisfy her and I didn’t want to talk about it any more either.
[1] “The Outing” provides us with a similarly brilliant symbol for the unity of perfect opposites in a two-line phone given to Jerry for his birthday by Kramer: It does not privilege Jerry to control two distinct dialogues; he thinks he has on hold a woman reporter, previously convinced of his and George’s homosexuality, he tells George that she will not imply in her article that they are a gay couple, joking that they had “fooled her”; however, Kramer’s gift allows the other caller to hear the other conversation and Jerry’s joke, in a context he hadn’t anticipated, means the opposite of his ironic intent: and that they are indeed gay; she hangs up and decides to “play up that angle of the story”; “The Wink” very succinctly provides George with the problem of winking his eye, that early in the episode was breached by grapefruit pulp, at a moment that would undermine what he sincerely was trying to say and expressing the exact opposite.
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