Reading some of the reactions to Deborah Pearson‘s “The Necessity of Narrative?” in Exeunt, to which I pointed last Friday, makes you think that Ms. Pearson had strangled somebody’s kitten. Isaac Butler suggests that Pearson needlessly reduces the idea of narrative to genre conventions rather than addressing more complex constructions, and that her idea that “people like stories because they’re babies in need of a security blanket” is condescending (though Butler puts those words into Pearson’s mouth). Tony Adams counters: “You cannot have a work of performance free from narrative. Something happens. That is an event. Our brains are hard wired to create them even if they may not exist. Even if you were hypothetically able to create a performance in a laboratory, where nothing happened. There were no events. The act of performing that work before an audience would create its own narrative.”
To be fair to Ms. Pearson, it should be noted that her essay is far more ambivalent about narrative than these reactions suggest, and she discusses two recent productions (Tim Crouch’s intriguing The Author and Ridiculusmus’ Tough Time, Nice Time) in which this ambivalence is theatricalized. In the latter play especially, as she describes it:
Surprisingly, given the company’s reputation for experimental performance, this piece employs several techniques that screenwriting guru Robert McKee describes in his book, Story. The characters are consistent and easy to describe in a sentence – one is unimpressed and the other is eager to please. There is a unity of time and setting, complete with the ultra realistic touch of steam occasionally rising from their bath. And as McKee advises writers to up their stakes as the story progresses, building to a final moment of climax or resolution, the non-writer’s stories follow this by rote. His anecdotes become gradually more extreme, more upsetting, until they build to one final story that could be argued to act as a kind of climax.
And yet the writer remains unimpressed throughout – bored and over saturated by the very act of story telling. The audience leaves the theatre aware that they have been pulled in to a narrative by the same principles that the piece itself condemns. And yet the “controlling idea” (another term often employed by McKee) is clear and cohesive – there is a moral to the story: Narratives are a problematic way of processing experience. The content and form of the piece contradict each other. The piece successfully proves its point by employing the very device it criticizes. Narrative emerges from the experience as dangerous, effective, possibly inescapable …
Both Pearson and her critics circle around an issue which is central to this question of narrative in the theatre but which goes unexamined, and that’s narrative authority: who is telling the story, who is making the decisions about which events are crucial to the unfolding of a narrative and which events are inessential. The saying that “History is written by the victors” is, in a nutshell, an exemplar of the issue of narrative authority.
Some dramatists have seized upon the problem as a central theme of both their discourse and their formal experimentation, and, instead of attempting to tell a compelling story or present a compelling narrative, concentrate on the interstices of the on-stage events that make up an evening of theatre. In this work the impulse to storytelling (and to being subsumed within the telling of a story) is constantly undermined by violent fragmentation of the human urge to both telling and listening to a well-rounded narrative — and, in fragmenting and frustrating this desire, to invite the individual audience member to fit these on-stage events into their own matrix of interpretation instead of having this matrix imposed upon the events by the artist: to create one’s own story, rather than having a story eliminate alternative interpretations through the logic of its expected progression through time, in conforming to the “well-made” story, as that “well-making” is ideologically defined by the dramatist and the director.
This is a politically and socially as well as individually liberating radical project, as the work of Richard Foreman and Howard Barker demonstrate, though their radicalism is of distinctly different types. Foreman disdains any claim to creating narrative, explaining in a 1990 interview with Ken Jordan his moment of epiphany:
I’m slightly embarrassed to tell you what I saw in my head, but it did lead to my theater. I saw a particular static moment from my seat in the Circle in the Square where I watched a rather dreadful production of The Balcony. And I remember seeing Shelley Winters, on one side of the stage, and Lee Grant on the other, and it was just a moment of stasis, and a moment of a kind of tension between them, and I just wanted to make a whole play that had nothing except that unresolved tension between them. And I wrote out of that. I said that’s what I want in the theater, just that moment, and it doesn’t develop into any of the other awful stuff, the psychological stuff, the narrative stuff, the adventure stuff that it always develops into.
Undermining received ideas of the well-made story is also Howard Barker, who develops not only what he calls “anti-histories,” but anti-canons as well. In Barker’s version of the Chekhov play Uncle Vanya, Vanya’s bullet finds its target, killing Serebryakov and utterly undermining the traditional interpretation of the play as an elegy for lost or wasted possibility, particularly in the way the play has been approached in the second half of the twentieth century. (He has done the same with plays by Middleton, Shakespeare and Lessing.) In this radical rewriting Barker explodes the original narrative to explore alternative imaginations, interpretations and narratives beneath the existing narrative, leaving the audience to wrestle with both the original narratives and his reconceptions of them. But ultimately it’s the individual audience member, not Barker, who must sort through the shards left by the explosion and find in them their own significance.
What is one left with, if narrative is decentered in the theatrical experience? Well, one needn’t look to Foreman and Barker, but can look to Hollywood itself. One of the great classics of the American cinema is the 1946 Howard Hawks film The Big Sleep. Based on a novel by Raymond Chandler, the Philip Marlowe detective story presents a hopelessly muddled narrative — the kiss of death, one would think, for a genre with such severe conventions as the mystery story; when screenwriters Jules Furthman and William Faulkner asked Chandler to clarify the endlessly convoluted plot, even Chandler said that, in the end, it made no sense — it was a bad story, a poor narrative, especially given the genre. But lacking this, what is there left to watch? Well, it turns out, there’s quite a bit: the pleasures of watching and interpreting the relationships between the characters (like Shelley Winters and Lee Grant in The Balcony or Juliana Kelly and T. Ryder Smith in King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe, so Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall); the language; the design. And it repays repeated viewing.
But this is a bit of a digression from my main point, which is that those formal experimentalists who dispense with traditional narrative, in at least some cases, are engaged in the politically and metaphysically radical project of restoring meaning-making authority to the individual spectator rather than imposing that interpretation on an audience-as-collective. When one gives oneself over to or “loses oneself” (in that particularly evocative term) in a narrative, one gives that authority over to another — that is, the storyteller, who always has ideological ends of his own, even if that end is “merely” to entertain (and it never is, the term “entertainment” itself an ideologically-loaded construct): the listener drinks the Kool-aid, in that oft-used term. But that term originated with Jonestown, and drinking the Kool-aid in its original context didn’t mean becoming an automaton or a True Believer: it meant death. In this case, it means the death of the imagination, the suicide of individual agency itself. Aesthetically speaking, there is something profoundly conservative and authoritarian, if not reactionary or paleo-conservative, about this. It is this individual agency that artists like Foreman and Barker intend to restore and celebrate, even if it must be at the cost of allowing the self to be absorbed in a story told over the campfire — indeed, to find oneself, not to lose oneself, in the theatrical experience.
I’d argue that both Foreman and Barker make narratives. It’s a very broad term, I think, which relates to performance as much as words and is by no means confined to “well-made story”. Fascinated too by what writers like Roberto Bolano do to narrative…
And you may do so. But it’s too broad in the way that some define it — “First one thing happens, then another,” is a mere description of causality. (And in Kantian terms it refers only to the empirical world and not to the Thing-in-itself, but I imagine that’s getting into some rather deeper waters than we’d wish.) Narrative interprets causality. For example, I might say that “If you drop a glass, it will break,” two events, one after another, is valid. But a moment’s thought indicates that there are far too many variables to consider: Am I dropping it on a carpet? Is it made of Pyrex? What about the temperature of the glass, which will lead it to break at one temperature but to keep it whole at another? The narrator chooses which of these variables is at play and leaves out a host of others — and so the issue of authority arises. (I’m reminded of that wonderfully funny scene in Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle in which he drops one of the plastic glasses in his hosts’ home — he’s surprised that it bounces back up to him instead of breaking. So he merrily bounces the other glasses in the set off the kitchen floor, then takes a glass pitcher and throws it down — and it promptly shatters.)
And when it comes to the issue of human motivation, the question becomes even more acute. We must be precise and define as well the difference between what we might call “open-field” narrative, in which other possibilities are assumed, and “closed-field” narrative, in which no other possibilities are assumed. Otherwise, the term “narrative” becomes so broad as to be meaningless — if everything is narrative, then everything is political; and this gets us nowhere, quite quickly.
In any event I find that Ms. Pearson’s essay was profoundly misinterpreted.
But that’s no more than saying that there are different kinds of narrative. I do think it’s true that (for good and ill) we are narrative creatures – it’s how we make sense of the world around us. Narrative authority is another thing altogether (and isn’t always present – how do you follow the narrative authority of a phenomenon like gossip, for instance?) The kinds of artistic narrative I enjoy most (like you, I suspect) are those that suspend all sorts of questions about that authority, which open the possibilities of other kinds of meaning that those singularly imposed by, for example, authorities such as the state. In this sense they are, yes, deeply political.
Thanks for reminding me of that scene from Mon Oncle, btw. Wonderful film. I remember taking Josh, aged about six years old, to see M. Hulot, where he laughed so much that bespectacled young intellectuals out for some art were giving him filthy looks. I like to think that Tati would have been pleased.
I do need to disagree with you that because we’re narrative creatures that the significance these narratives present to us are sufficient or even meaningful. One of Ms. Pearson’s arguments (and Barker’s and Foreman’s), I believe, is that they’re not: they are inadequate to describe the range of possibilities inherent in human experience in that they foreclose alternative imaginations and experiences. You may call these imaginations and experiences “narratives” if you wish. But I’m doubtful that the matrix of interpretation that this implies would be acceptable to these dramatists in the terms we’re using.
I’m not sure that gossip (itself a narrative construct, taking into account some events and motivations, eliminating others) is as benign as you think, Alison. Gossip — at least as it comes to us about movie stars and the like — is also filtered through various moral and professional perspectives, and I’m coming more and more to believe that it’s a profoundly malignant thing, however inescapable and even fun it might be. One needn’t trace it to its source to recognize a certain amount of moral judgment or envy, even when it comes down to the gossip of a Melbournian or Manhattan theatre community.
And the state isn’t necessarily the only source of moral authoritarianism. Any institution or community has it. That too is political, whether the state is explicitly a part of it or not. In so far as narrative serves that authoritarianism — well. That’s something for another time.
Me think gossip benign? No!! But I do think its authority is very uncertain, which is indeed one of the troubling things about it. By definition it is a kind of Chinese whispers, in which things shift through each re-telling and in each context.
I guess it’s all semantics, though. “Narrative” to me is kind of pretty phylum in these categories of meaning, and the subdivisions and arguments all occur underneath its umbrella. Agree too that moral authoritarianism comes from many sources: the state is merely an example. All fiendishly complex, as human beings are.
And with that “fiendish,” I think we can conclude at least this colloquy on a note of agreement.
Aside from my scrambled syntax… I meant “pretty much a phylum” rather than a pretty phylum. Though I don’t see why I wouldn’t approve of a pretty phylum, either.
Hello all!
Thanks for taking the time to read, and thank you to George for pointing me in the direction of these responses.
For those who argue that narrative simply means that one thing happens after another, meaning everything has a narrative, I would agree with Allison – narrative is not causality, narrative is the meaning from that causality, or the meaning an author or creator would have us draw. Many facts and scenes are omitted in pursuit of that meaning – both in journalism and in fiction. (That is, when the two are mutually exclusive.) And of course as conscious beings (as I wrote in the essay) we are obsessed with our own personal narratives. Our memories are constantly editing out or railing against events that don’t fit into the overall meaning we wish to create for ourselves. There is an entire field of psychology about narrative – it is by no means my invention (or someone like Robert McKee’s.) Although the three act structure is just one way of achieving a story, I would argue that a “controlling idea”, i.e. meaning, is somewhat inescapable – our treatment of it is what makes for a sloppy or tight story – and it is pandering to this idea that, as I wrote, when applied to history, can edit out real people with real experiences.
I have to admit I find it hilarious that once the name “Robert McKee” is raised, many writers either guiltily look to their own copy of “Story” and read on, or bristle that the definition of story I’m using must be evil and sorely misguided. McKee represents something past what he writes in his book, primarily because of what most people believe him to be from having watched “Adaptation”, and I suspect it is the fact that I evoke what he represents that makes the essay a target for misinterpretation. Bringing up “Story” was in no sense meant to be a be all and end all with regards to narrative, although having read his book selectively, which I suspect mostly draws from Aristotle, I would say that I am hard pressed to think of a single story (be that an anecdote, a film which is linear or non-linear, a novel or a play) that does not either fit into or consciously rail against SOME of his conclusions/generalisations. Most notably, “The Controlling Idea.”
But ironically with this essay I was always aware of the fact that I was walking a fine line – and I did not mean to criticise the skill or craft of story telling, only to raise questions about the human need for the act – (in fact, if you read the essay, in the last two paragraphs I make this abundantly clear.) The first editor of this essay thought that it should be titled, far less controversially, “The Necessity of Narrative”, and I argued for that question mark. For him the essay was a straight forward argument for Team Narrative, whereas I was not interested in the concept of teams full stop. I was not aiming to write an essay that claimed that narrative was necessary, but to write an essay that raised questions about the concept of narrative, as opposed to drawing a reductive conclusion. . But alas, we are human, and we need to take meaning from what we read. George is right, the essay is meant to be far more ambivalent than someone reading through it, especially if it’s been contextualised as needlessly critical of story telling, might conclude. But in that sense the essay has fallen prey to the same mentality it critiques, and maybe this teaches us something. Or maybe not?
(Just kidding. Nothing teaches us anything!)
George,
Aren’t you really arguing for a Brechtian “Verfremdungseffekt”, where is one is continuously made aware that one is watching a narrative (and thus is prevented from “losing” one’s self in over-identification), rather than an eschewing of narrative altogether? Brecht, it must be said, wrote ripping good yarns.
I don’t think defining narrative as the recounting of events is too broad. I’d tend to agree with Alison as well.
To borrow a scientific metaphor, everything in our universe is made of atoms. Nothing exists outside of a lab devoid of atoms. However the qualities of those atoms and how they are arranged, combined and recombined can create the seemingly limitless possibilities of our universe. I don’t think an artist can have a serious beef with narrative, nor pander to it–any more that I can have a serious beef with atoms.
How narratives are constructed, ordered, selected for inclusion or exclusion from a work; aesthetic and cultural frameworks, authority et al. Those are all fascinating areas for exploration. But I don’t think there can be any thing such as a Team Narrative. You can have Team Well-Made Play, Team Fornes, Team Barker, Team Classical Indian Dance, Team du Soleil, Team Foreman, Team Dancetheatre, Team Contemporary Noh, Team Spanish Golden Age, etc.
But all of those are made of narrative even though their modes of performance are vastly different.
As a doctrinaire communist, Brecht was playing a bit of sleight-of-hand. He believed that his work was preparing audiences for a reconstruction of society upon Marxist-Leninist lines, and Brecht (like all other dramatists) manipulated his narrative material towards that end, Verfremdungseffekt or no Verfremdungseffekt.
While Brecht’s work has a strong narrative thrust, as you mention, he pretty much stole all his stories from others (John Gay for Threepenny Opera, Klabund for The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Grimmelshausen for Mother Courage). Which suggests that it was not the story itself, but his technique, which made these plays “ripping good.”
Ah — and let me add a thanks to Ms. Pearson for writing in; I hope you’ll continue to contribute if you see fit.
Tony: Yes, as Ms. Pearson acknowledges in the very first paragraph of her piece, narrative construction may be as “hard-wired” (whatever that means) into our consciousness as self construction. When I watch a Richard Foreman play I naturally try to piece together the causal connections between one moment and another; it is second nature, or perhaps even first nature, to us.
But as you acknowledge, there are other issues, so this is merely a first step, the very beginning of the conversation rather than the end of it — along with authority there’s the question of whether a narrative drives characters or characters drive narrative (a chicken-and-egg question, I suppose), intentionality versus reception, and so on.
And thanks to you, too, for contributing.
It really is a question of manipulation. We do not like to feel purposely manipulated by storytelling, and so we tell ourselves that the artists we champion aren’t doing that, when in fact they are just acheiving it through subtler, more devious means.
Brecht, Barker, Foreman et al–they are all taking us for a ride. The fact that they drive down dark and unpaved paths and not brightly lit, sign-festooned interstate highways makes little difference.
That’s a bit of a cynical dismissal tinged with bad faith, Ken. But you’re entitled to your opinion.
George, et al:
This narrative thing is like existential, dude. But seriously — I explored aspects of narrative in my master’s thesis (how long ago those halcyon days!), which dealt with news stories about interracial people and families (specifically black/white — the “controlling idea,” I guess.) I began with this question: “Who is allowed to speak, and with what words?” The epigram for the piece is from Bakhtin: “To be means to communicate. Absolute death (nonbeing) is the state of being unheard, unrecognized, unremembered …” People such as Foucault and Derrida (and many others) have helped us examine the other side of narrative — what, or who, is left out or margnalized, or, in effect ontologically erased.
I agree with Deborah that narrative is built in to human beings, and also agree that narrative, however fundamental, is rarely benign. As Deborah so aptly puts it: “our desire for story (through history and the media) has edited out so many lives, so much suffering and joy” A quotation from my thesis: “Individuals who cannot find their identity in available categories become invisible, in a sense: without a label, without a vocabulary, their stories are untellable and they themselves are unnarratable.” (Citation available upon request.) There are more than a few people, black and white, who want multiracial people to shut up and just find their place in existing narratives, to get “lost in the story,” in a sense or “drink the Kool Aid.” Such a position is, as George puts it, “profoundly conservative or authoritarian, if not reactionary or paleoconservative.” In Bakhtin’s term, getting lost in the story is to receive it as “authoritative discourse,” which comes “with its authority already fused to it,” and not subject to interpretation, analysis or debate. What the participants in this thread favor (I think) is for the audience member (or reader, viewer or listener) to participate in an open narrative, to engage, interpret and participate.
Such an ideal does require more of both the author (unless his death outside Paris is confirmed) and the audience, many of whom might object if the money they forked over purchased something other than “mere entertainment.”
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it!
I just read your essay again, Deborah. I think the problem I had with it was in its swinging into narrative concepts like “beginning, middle and end”, which always make me think of Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty: “Once there was a boater”. And I have a bit of problem with the word “hard-wired”, which is determinative in a way that I’m not sure the brain actually is. Eg, “hard” evolutionary biologist on gender.
Narrative need not have beginnings, middles and ends, except in the strictly linear (and inescapable) sense of its being made by one word – or gesture or image – after another. However, I do (I think) agree with you on inner structure. I enjoy watching a lot of contemporary dance (although I am by no means expert on dance), and one of the things I’ve had to learn is how not to project a narrative onto the movement, or at least, to attempt to see just the movement that is there. I often refer to poetry in writing about it, because the logic that applies in dance seems to be parallel. Work that I respond to has a pleasing shape, a formal structure, however abstract, that I find in some way legible. And I guess this operates at quite deep levels of unconscious emotional response. Certainly I often find myself thinking of terms of something I privately call “emotional narrative”, the transition from one state of feeling to another. But that seems to me to be fairly protean, not necessarily subject to McKee-type rules, which more often get in the way, forbid certain possibilities, etc.
Not sure if this is clear. I’m thinking quite a lot about narrative at the moment, but it’s very much in progress.
Victor Kulkosky: Thank you so much for writing that post. That’s it.
Although the context is the novel, the question of narrative as elucidated by Bowles in the video I posted above is pertinent:
“What’s in a novel is not important to me; it’s how it’s told; how the words go together. What makes a good sentence. But after all there’s nothing in writing except words. The invention of sympathetic characters, the invention of fascinating plots, I don’t think that counts. It may count with the big public, I’m sure it does, but it doesn’t count with me. What counts with me is the language.”
A similar view was expressed by Flaubert, whose ultimate task was to write a novel of pure form. In Madame Bovary, he describe the writer’s task thus: “The Fact distills itself in the Form and rises up, like a pure incense of the Spirit, towards the Eternal, the immutable, the absolute, the ideal.”
There is no “controlling idea” but language itself becomes the force of continuousness, which is not to state that narrative is entirely dispensed with, but that narrative as previously conceived no longer has validity for our epoch. When presented or employed, if we do not wish to be anachronistic, it must be presented as something fragmented. So Foreman et al are hardly taking us for a ride, not in the sense that I believe is implied, but are taking us into heighetened states of awareness, or are forming works in alignment with an ontology analogous to our knowledge of reality.
But this rupture of course predates our era: prior to Bowles, narrative as fractured consciousness is the guiding rubric of Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and, most famously, Joyce’s Ulysses. One can even trace this back to Tristam Shandy and to Rabelais and Swift, where character and plot are continuously displaced by language itself, by opposition to narrative progression, which is disrupted by anarchic laughter, digressions, or other means. The Jena Romantics are really the thinkers par excellence of this event, which is born of an ontological rupture: mimetic representation or any form of truthfulness is no longer valid and is to be ceaselessly short-circuited through fragmentation.
Language itself reaches its limit, is stretched to its absolute frontier, moving even towards nonsense (Dada), or to silence (Beckett). Subsequent to such an ontological rupture, digression as opposed to linear narration is what releases us from anthropomorphic delusions. The fragmentary imperative is however lost on all too many, and particularly American writers, who often employ narrative strategies as if Romanticism and the European avant-garde never occurred. It is a real anachronism. But we have it with Bowles, and with James Purdy, who often illustrates in his novels and short stories the failure of narrative to encompass existence through disrupting narrative coherence through various means. So Purdy truly responds to the crises that Victor elucidates, refusing authoritative discourses, refusing authoritative narratives, refusing authoritative forms of identity formation. I wouldn’t say though that narrative is built into us, if what is implied by that is that it is intrinsic. If it is built into us, we ourselves over centuries have carved it into ourselves and have the capacity to reconfigure what has been carved, but that is the task of generations if not epochs.
I didn’t intend to sound dismissive, really. I, like many others, enjoy the manipulation that goes on in storytelling when I realize it’s been done–the way I enjoy seeing sleight of hand magic done up-close. All my wisdom (and cynicism, if you insist) is for naught when I’m in the hands of a master. I consciously abhor the sentimental and obvious, as we all do (though occassionally I fall victim to that as well). But an artist on the level of a Barker or a Foreman can circumvent my knowningness and make me feel what they want me to, and I don’t object, the way I do to the hacks who trod out the shopworn cliche’. I wasn’t knocking them. I was just saying that they are master craftsmen, using the tools of narrative a lot more skilfully than most, but using them just the same.
Just a quick note,
(1) I don’t think Pearson strangled anybody’s cat. She wrote an essay I very much disagree with about an issue I very much care about. I don’t think the tone of my blog post is out of line with one exception that I noted in the comments to my post.
(2) I don’t put words in Pearson’s mouth. The phrase “security blanket” comes from her article. The image is linked with childhood (only children need security blankets) and so the idea that the need for narrative makes someone a child yearning for a security blanket is in the essay itself.
I think you bring up some interesting points here. I’ve directed work that disrupts these kinds of narrative authority and work that doesn’t. Where I think you and I part ways is in the idea that there’s some moral (or perhaps ethical) superiority to the former. I think we’d by much better off thinking more seriously about why people crave narrative and using work that explores that.
I also think that here you make a similar error to Pearson in using the term “narrative” to mean a very narrow subset of narrative. Uncle Vanya with a different ending is still a narrative work, for example. I know you’ve already talked that out with Allison above, but I just thought it was worth mentioning.
One thing the idea of narrative as “controlling idea” fails to take into account is the possibilities of generic subversion. It is entirely possible to tell a story using all sorts of recognisable conventions that nevertheless undermines, rather than reinforces, the ideas of authority. Pearson talks about work that appears to critique structure, while simultaneously making its own, which is one example: I’m thinking of work that takes an existing structure and does something new with it. China Mieville is a good example. So is Jane Austen (Edward Said’s essays on her novels are deeply interesting). (Another slightly sideways example, in terms of subverting form, is Catullus’s poem in the style of Cicero.) I don’t believe that form is determinate, and perhaps the major problem I have with the essay is that seems to be the assumption. That Paul Bowles quote is one reason why.
The two specific examples of theatre that Deborah explores in connection with her essay, The Author and Tough Time, Nice Time, both appear to critique storytelling and narrative through conventional storytelling and narrative forms — a neat trick — and her citation of these plays to me suggests that Deborah is quite well aware that form is not ultimately determinate (though the Modernist assumption that, as Beckett put it in his 1929 essay on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, “form is content and content is form,” at least in connection with Joyce’s novel, murks up the question even more than it’s already murked up, opening the possibility that content and form are co-determinate). There are enough examples of what is commonly called “genre fiction” that overturn these conventions from within as well. Deborah would need to speak to the assumptions underlying the essay, since for me to do so would … well, assume too much, I suppose.
Howard Barker’s 2004 play The Dying of Today, a two-character piece which takes place in a barber shop, that den of masculinist stories, explores some of the same issues.
I appreciate all of you continuing this conversation so thoughtfully.
Of all the great poems of Europe–and it is indeed among that greatest–Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) is perhaps the most improbable. Here is a poem without people in it, without any story; instead, it offers a treatise on science and philosophy. The philosophy, moreover, is a strict materialism, which denies the existence of anything magical, mysterious or transcendent. It does not sound like promising matter for poetry at all, let alone for a work of more than 7,000 lines. Yet the result is a masterpiece.
Alison’s point about the failure to take into account the subversion of genre is in fact a fundamental one, and that subversive act is the quintessence of the fragmentary imperative, inaugurated by the Jena Romantics as never before, with an entirely different consciousness. For there is indeed no single controlling idea but a panoply of ideas, events, etc. that a text is comprised of. Genre in a sense doesn’t exist, or is quote volatile, in the chemical sense. To Schlegel, at the end of the 18th century, “every novel is a genre in itself.” Blanchot pursues that thought further claiming that “All that matters is the book, such as it is, far away from genres, outside the categories—prose, poetry, novel, chronicle—with which it refuses to align itself, and whose power to impose its place and determine its form it denies. A book no longer belongs to a genre, every book pertains to literature alone.” The only real authority is language itself.
I believe there’s probably a not insignificant difference between the aesthetics of the Jena Romantics and those of Robert McKee. Those of McKee may today be more prominent among both screenwriters and playwrights (Amazon bestsellers’ rank for McKee’s “Story”: 1,989; Schlegel, in Cambridge UP’s “Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics”: 345,754. And that’s the paperback edition).
Your point aside, the accuracy of that ranking system is highly contentious and none too trustworthy. On my own book, I’ve seen it fluctuate from over 1 million to under 100,000 in a matter of 10 days, but it’s highly doubtful that many people are reading my novel. If so, my publisher owes me a rather significant royalty check.
(Rainer, the amazon ranking system depends on a closely guarded algorithm which uncountable authors try to translate into actual sales. It’s much more volatile in the larger numbers: at the million-ranking end, the sale of one book can bump you up several hundred thousand places. The closer you get to No 1, the more sales it takes to make an impact. If you have an idle minute, you can google countless graphs explaining it all.)
The examples Pearson explores are interesting, but aren’t what I mean. The danger of thinking that certain kinds of narrative support/reinforce societal norms by their very nature, independent of any other considerations, is that a priori dismissal of certain kinds of writing as therefore inherently less interesting or radical than others, which is very familiar to genre authors. Also the kind of work that supposes it is undermining such assumptions by virtue of a superficial formal radicalism, while in fact doing nothing of the kind. (There’s a lot of that about in contemporary literary writing). Complexity and destablisations can occur in all sorts of ways. And form is a very supple beast indeed.
I’m not trying to tr. the numbers into sales; that was more of a joke. I still doubt the veracity of the ranking system. Government computer systems are also closely guarded but continually hacked into; more, when is it even to be trusted, as Amazon. Amazon also notes that only one copy of a print-on-demand book is in stock when that’s a patent lie. They have all kinds of tricks for generating sales.–
That bit about Lucretius is actually a quote but the quote marks got lost. It’s from an intro to the book.
George and all, thanks for the rich discussion. Wish I had the time to fully participate.
Rainer and Alison point to subversion. Yet the acute erosion of narrative authority we are experiencing in our contemporary lives is not so much a deliberate act as it is a shift of consciousness back to a human mindset predating Socrates. The most pointed example for me is the hyperlink of our digital world. We hop from domain to domain, from one AUTHORity to another, instantaneously. This mirrors the consciousness of Heraclitus’ “all is flux.” If Logos must be conceived as story, then it is a narrative with only momentary authority. “You cannot step twice into the same stream”.
@Allison–RE: “The danger of thinking that certain kinds of narrative support/reinforce societal norms by their very nature, independent of any other considerations, is that a priori dismissal of certain kinds of writing as therefore inherently less interesting or radical than others, which is very familiar to genre authors. Also the kind of work that supposes it is undermining such assumptions by virtue of a superficial formal radicalism, while in fact doing nothing of the kind.”
The big problem I have with this statement is that it contains a fairly strong bias towards the dominant means of realist art, in theater and literature at the very least. You’re defining anything that falls outside of it in its terms, rather than approaching it as a diversity of conventions. Realism does not have a greater claim to representing what’s actually real than other modes of representation.
And yes, I would argue that the formal structure of a given mode imposes all sorts of things onto reality. Method-based or any other sort of psychological-realist mode of acting is making all sorts of interpretive assumptions about why someone is doing something, and as I’ve argued elsewhere, we can’t exclusively focus on the performance text outside the realm of the text as it’s actually performed.
@Rainer–Just a note, as a former Amazon employee I can assume you that the sales rankings are perfectly accurate; it’s just a matter of what it is they’re doing that’s confusing, which is in part of Amazon’s fault for not disclosing more info, but they try to prevent from gaming the system (too frequently). Suffice it to say that whereas newspaper best-seller lists capture the top sellers over a given period of time, Amazon has to rate everything over, essentially, all-time. So the sales rank on Amazon is more of a sales trend function than an absolute count.
Hi Jeremy – no, you misread me. I don’t especially have a “bias” towards “realist” art. I just know that art and form can be many things, and that prescriptive statements about both of them are usually wrong.