Anecdote 1: I am having an argument with my aunt. An owner of Halliwell's Film Guide, she fancies herself something of a film connoisseur and she does know an occasional thing or two, but when she tells me (it comes up) that the star of Rear Window is Cary Grant, I drop some science on her head. It's Jimmy Stewart, I tell her, look it up. She does. I am triumphant.

Though it is always a pleasure to annihilate my aunt in argument it feels a bit hollow this time around, for I have never seen Rear Window, neither the old nor the restored version. But I did see the episode where the Simpsons get a pool. Bart breaks his leg and he is watched, from across the street, by a Jimmy Stewart imitation; and I do know a Jimmy Stewart imitation when I see one.

I am, it occurs to me in the flush of triumph, Allan Bloom's worst nightmare. I have knowledge, but am shut off from its sources. Bloom must have seen legions of me, baseball caps backwards, shuffling through his lectures as he wrote The Closing of the American Mind. For this was the fear he expressed—aside from fear of a black planet, that is. Defending the canon against the multiculturalists, Bloom argued that we were losing touch, as a nation, with the well-springs of our moral and political judgments—that we were building a republic in the air. In the argument with my aunt, I demonstrated what we might call a Bloomean ignorance: I had the right answer, but not the knowledge surrounding it.

Does it matter? In a way, yes. Let's take T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," the last sustained effort to gather the lovely shards from the smashed edifice of Western culture—from Ovid, Dante, Spenser, Baudelaire—into one small room. "These fragments I have shored against my ruins," Eliot writes in the final, crescendoing stanza. These shored fragments have the obvious effect of pointing up the inadequacy of the present: when Eliot quotes Spenser, "Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song," and then, in the next line, writes, "The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers," the juxtaposition is startling. But this recoil from modernity is not the essential point. The revolutionary effect Eliot achieves is to bring entire universes into the cramped urban space of his poetry, and ordering them, or attempting to. He explains it best in a 1923 review of James Joyce's Ulysses: "In manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce... is controlling, ordering, giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history."

The Simpsons also orders and gives shape, but the function of allusion on the show differs in an important way. Unlike Eliot, The Simpsons alludes primarily to movies and television shows. In this way it actually represents a certain cultural moment that we might call, "1989." One can posit this happy, prelapsarian time, just after Allan Bloom's book and just before The Simpsons, when even the most unliterate among us had, like Eliot, a vast (if vapid) store of ready references. If our sources then were not Spenser or Marvell, they at the very least signified; they did not all point to the same place. When discussing a dysfunctionally functional family, one could allude to Leave it to Beaver; studied nonchalance, Gabe Kotter; cleavage, Lonnie Anderson's on WKRP; the black upper-middle class, Cosby; et cetera. For example, Rob Owen, in his book GenX TV, explains that The Simpsons "made fun of the Leave It to Beaver family life displayed on The Cosby Show." To the uninitiated, this is meaningless code‹how can they know that Owen is saying, "The Simspons mocked the sterile conflict-free family life displayed on prime-time shows oblivious to the increasing class and race prejudice of the Reagan years"? But we follow Owen's short-hand, we know just what he means.

The problem, however, is not so much that Owen's references are less rich or impressive than Eliot's, but that he is not actually directing us to those referents at all. That is, while "The Waste Land" draws out the parallels between the past and the present, lines up the different words of different ages, Owen and The Simpsons merely cannibalize our pop-cultural heritage: the past, for them, exists as elements in a sentence, not as the past. Herein lies the real trouble with the show's allusiveness.

Anecdote 2: Two friends are relating an episode (in the sense of event, not television episode, but the overlap is fortuitous, watch) from the other night. This episode could well be described as "suburban surreal" or simply "weird," but one friend declares it to have been "just like The Simpsons." "Yeah," says the other friend. "It was just like that."

But what does this mean? The Simpsons moves largely from allusion to allusion; it therefore contains multitudes. So unless these friends meant to underscore the cartoonish or allusive aspects of the scene they described, their statement made no sense, referred to nothing—because everything is like The Simpsons.

This loss of a referenceable reality will, in all likelihood, eventually destroy our civilization; and when the Northern peoples picking through the rubble of our cities want to know when it all went wrong, I—my face singed and deformed by the radiation, my limbs charred, missing, askew, my voice hoarse, mad, and haunted—I will tell them: 1995. That is when the overlords at Fox decided to put The Simpsons into twice-a-day syndication. The show started devouring the culture, migrating from a group of dedicated cognoscenti to a mass phenomenon. You couldn't make it through five minutes of collegiate conversation without a Burns-like "excellent," a Homerean "mmm...[something]," and even, if there was a talented ventriloquist in the group, without a Barney imitation ("I don't feel so good, Homer"). This was great fun—I've only recently weaned myself off saying "excellent" with Burns's demonic glare and evil finger-tapping—but, on the level of allusion, there was something amiss. These allusions seemed to lose meaning over time, instead of gaining it.

If we imagine the function of an allusion to be like notes played on a piano—an allusion to Spenser hitting some chord in the memory, and resonating beyond it—then allusions to television shows are like a piano played without pedals. We hear the notes but they do not resonate so deeply. But what happens if one show subsumes all these notes, if an allusion to a television show on The Simpsons actually replaces that show entirely, so that we do not hear the note at all? Or, put another way, it is as if all the world's piano concertos were on one compact disc—what would it mean to say that a melody reminds you of that disc? An entire universe, it seems, is lost; and our language of allusion, which for a long time now has not been alluding to anything actually in the world, begins to spiral inward on itself. A disturbing fact (if one wishes to be disturbed by such things) is that in recent years, while the references to movies and pop culture listed on The Simpsons Archive Web site have increased 75%, the references to previous Simpsons episodes have increased 300%.

To return to my aunt (Anecdote 1), what is to keep me from saying, if I am ever the object of a stakeout, that, "It's just like the pool episode, when Bart breaks his leg." And, supposing I assume an even greater knowledge on the part of my interlocutor, why wouldn't I just say, "It's like The Simpsons." To which the person I'm talking to, who, for example, is being stalked, like Bart in the "Cape Fear" episode, will say, "Yes, my life, too, is like The Simpsons." This is to say, in other words, that it's all on the CD.

There is a sense, of course, in which none of this matters very much; but if we think of the way fictions—whether written or televised—affect the way we live, it might matter quite a bit. There are the obvious areas: television tells us what to wear, how to talk, and so on. More fundamental, however, is its effect on the range of narratives we can tell. We order the anarchy of experience into usable narratives, which explain, comfort, charm. That, I think, is the most powerful sense in which the world is shaped by fiction. When Harold Bloom, in The Anxiety of Influence, insists that Shakespeare "invented the human," that Shakespeare "invented us," he means the playwright created the fundamental narratives of experience and therefore of modes of being: these are paradigms for behavior, stories that we tell in order to live. In our time The Simpsons are inventing us—creating the fundamental narratives of our experience. Bloom believes it impossible to think outside of Shakespeare because he "continues to contain us" —similarly, perhaps, their brilliance and inclusiveness and their twice-a-day pervasiveness makes it impossible to think outside The Simpsons, too.

This could become a problem as the reach of our memory diminishes. Rob Owen, for example, thinks Gen X-ers are particularly disillusioned. "In the Gen X lifetime," he explains "there's been corruption in just about every institution—families, churches, the government." It's the "churches" that gets me: for someone to claim that the past twenty years has added particular tarnish to the image of organized religion is indicative of a historical ignorance so vast it is almost beyond belief. Ever heard of indulgences, Rob? Ex-communication as a political tool? The captivity at Avignon? Paul Scofield in A Man for All Seasons?

But if Owen functions under the epistemological illusion that nothing happened before 1960, a steady diet of The Simpsons will lead to the conclusion that nothing happened before 1989. We are not so much disillusioned as over-allusioned. If Eliot had a historical sense that went back 500 years, and Rob Owen and the creators of The Simpsons have a historical memory that reaches back to television culture (50 years), then watchers of the show have a historical memory that reaches back only to its inception (10 years). The show could even mark a sort of generational Rubicon, for those raised on this Homer inherit a past so malleable as to be meaningless, full of signs without referents, knowledge without foundation, ammunition for arguments about movies they've never seen. The future, from where I sit, promises to be a dull affair, filled with crowds wandering the night streets like the undead, dully repeating, "Mmmm...[something]."

And then again, as Doctor Hibbert tells Bart on a tour of Springfield Hospital: "Bart, in this ward are the children who have been hurt by imitating stunts they saw on television, movies, and the legitimate stage." He looks around the ward, full of bandaged, broken children. "Well," says the doctor, "as tragic as all this is, it's a small price to pay for countless hours of top-notch entertainment!"