Narrative Power: Power Narratives, Pt. 1

There are many ways of looking at a thing. Some are more comprehensive than others, some more pointed. Even among the comprehensive views, there can be competing narratives. And that is the subject of this post.

In my previous posts, Aftermath and Post Mortem: Moral Morass, I've looked at the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election from the points of view of the philosophico-ethical theories driving the two campaigns and of the moral sentiments of the two audiences the two campaigns sought to engage. This post will examine the competing narratives the two campaigns sought to convey to their targeted constituencies—and their relative successes.

A political campaign seeks to tell a story—to present a narrative—about itself (and, of course, its adversary) that will persuade enough voters of the power of its cause. In this most recent election, roughly speaking, the Trump campaign narrative was something like: a smug Pepe the Frog vs. a corrupt, collapsing Meemaw. The Clinton campaign narrative, in broad strokes, was something like: Hermione Granger vs. Amateur Voldemort.

Those of us who write stories understand the power of narrative. But what is a narrative? And how does understanding the nature of narrative help us understand what happened in the 2016 Election?

Simply put, a narrative tells a story. Stories, first and foremost, seek to entertain us. They often provide examples that instruct us as well. Stories serve a further societal purpose—and have done so probably since the earliest peoples sat around fires and recounted their battle with a mastodon or their escape from a saber toothed tiger—they serve to bring people together.

Narratives satisfy at least two basic human needs: (a) the need for authority and (b) the need for meaning. They do this because every story: (a') must have a teller, i.e., a point of view or an authority and (b') carries some message or moral. Thus, stories essentially serve to: (a") salve the psychic wounds from the pervasive anxiety of existential insecurity and (b") reinforce our sense of the order of things. These are, by the way, essentially conservative functions.

A coherent narrative posits that everything is somehow connected and orderly, and that there is some author(-ity) behind this order providing meaning. That is why we turn to stories—on television, at the movies, in books, etc.—for comfort and a retreat from an otherwise indifferent and chaotic world.

I will end the first part of this essay with a quote from David Foster Wallace's essay "The Empty Plenum," his analysis of David Markson's experimental novel Wittgenstein's Mistress, where he puts it, inimitably, like this:

T. Pynchon, who has done in literature for paranoia what Sächer-Masoch did for whips, argues in his Gravity's Rainbow for why the paranoid delusion of complete & malevolent connection, whacko & unpleasant though it be, is preferable at least to its opposite—the conviction that nothing is connected to anything else & that nothing has anything intrinsically to do with you.

Narratives inflate our sense of self. Often falsely. At the same time, they comfort us with the illusion that things are somehow under control, and that it's probably better that they are.

[to be cont'd]

Taking a Wild Guess, Here

For those of you playing along at home: This is not strictly what you could call a spoiler (because I haven't read the entire book [I'm still in the very low three figures]), but it's a bit of a guess about where Infinite Jest is going. Don't play if you care about not finding things out till the very end of the book. Me, I like to think ahead. Guess at the author's direction the first time through.

And if you're not reading along with the Infinite Summer project. Too bad. Still, a couple of these videos you'll find pretty funny.

Maybe our author was trippin' on some serious weed (or something) when he saw this particular episode, to wit from the first episode of the first season of the Pythons:



Could that really have been the inspiration for IJ?

Then there's (anachronistically w/r/t the film but not necessarily the novel) this:



Not half-bad music by Sakamoto Ryuichi.

And, of course, there's this (uncensored) Matt & Trey classic:



For those of you who've read it: am I on the right track?

Scramble(-d)

I played golf last week with my father. He's 85. Can almost shoot his age. That, to me, is a kind of accomplishment akin, in regular guys who are not professional athletes devoted body and soul to their sport, to winning a major. Shooting your age. 72 at 72, e.g. 80 at 80. A couple of birdie putts dropping, a truer seven iron from the rough: that sort of thing would have done it for him. Remarkable. Anyway, we were early off the starting tee. Nobody in front of us for a few holes and nobody behind us. It looked to be a leisurely round. Play. Rehit (for funsies, for sure) those putts that didn't break the way you thought they were supposed to—and always making them. Make fun of my brother, the best golfer of the three of us. In our own time. At our own pace. I mean the guy's 85 after all. Why hurry when you're having fun. Anyway. Just as we're about to tee off on six, a foursome of cigar-chomping thirty-somethings go buzzing by us in their carts to seven. Then we see (and hear) another foursome piling on on the fifth tee. They were having some sort of tournament, and instead of everybody starting off seriatim on the first tee or even doing first and tenth tees, they were scrambling: that is to say playing eighteen, but starting on all the odd tees all at once in order to get it done more quickly. So much for our leisurely pace. We were sandwiched between them for the rest of the morning.

And that's what the first hundred pages or so of Infinite Jest feels like. A scramble. A whole bunch of characters starting off on different holes at the same time. Looks like to me they're all about to play eighteen, and we'll just have to keep up with all their strokes along the way (I guess that last carried the metaphor too far, huh?). May need a database (or database-like mind) just to keep up. Do they all morph in some way or another (or choose not to)? Do their story arcs parallel, intersect, mirror, converge? We'll have to read on to see.

All-in-all, off to a good start.

------------
Lots of other folks are participating in Infinite Summer. This guy pointed me to this guy's reading.

Days of Yorick

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? (Hamlet, V.i)

With a tip of the hat to Bud Parr at the fine Chekhov's Mistress, this looks interesting: a Summer of Jest. No, no, check that, an Infinite Summer: an on-line group read of David Foster Wallace's monumental Infinite Jest.

Sad to say, I've never read it. This just might be my opportunity. Here's the reading schedule, lifted from their site:

Date Page Location % Complete

Fri, Jun 26 63 1522 6%
Mon, Jun 29 94 2233 9%
Fri, Jul 03 137 3236 13%
Mon, Jul 06 168 3900 17%
Fri, Jul 10 210 4844 21%
Mon, Jul 13 242 5561 24%
Fri, Jul 17 284 6545 28%
Mon, Jul 20 316 7250 32%
Fri, Jul 24 358 8174 36%
Mon, Jul 27 390 8869 39%
Fri, Jul 31 432 9832 44%
Mon, Aug 03 464 10556 47%
Fri, Aug 07 506 11510 51%
Mon, Aug 10 537 12243 54%
Fri, Aug 14 580 13233 59%
Mon, Aug 17 611 13925 62%
Fri, Aug 21 653 14900 66%
Mon, Aug 24 685 15628 69%
Fri, Aug 28 727 16554 74%
Mon, Aug 31 759 17293 77%
Fri, Sep 04 801 18315 81%
Mon, Sep 07 833 19021 84%
Fri, Sep 11 875 19972 89%
Mon, Sep 14 907 20767 92%
Fri, Sep 18 949 21708 96%
Mon, Sep 21 981 22403 100%

Not really all that arduous—even including the endnotes.  (N.b.:  But don't take my listing the locations above as an implied endorsement of Kindle as to which I'm neutral at this point.  If, however, the Kindle has the effect of actually reinvigorating the moribund publishing industry and providing me with the opportunity to find an agent who is actually taking new authors and get my novel published, well...I just might be tempted to take sides!)

Anybody with me? Of course, that means I might have to blog about my experience.

Or, maybe we could all just take tennis lessons.

Ur-story: Theory—Is It Good for You?

Some Principles of Narrative Theory:

• A1. The work of fictional narrative is to modulate an event or sequence of events into a scene or scenes. (Genette)


• A2. A character is a linguistic construction representing a person whose actions are in some wise important: The metaphor systems used to depict a character reveals certain things about that character, conceals others, and implies still other illusory qualities about that character. (Lakoff)


• A3. The time, or pace, of a narrative is a function of the relation of the length of a scene to the duration of the event it depicts, where (ideally) straight dialogue bears a one-to-one relationship ("isochrony", real time = 'showing') to the time of an actual conversation. (Genette) Corollary: it is important to vary the pace of scenes; this is also known as rhythm.
  


• A4. Narrative (fictional or non-) is essential to understanding events. (DeCerteau)
  


• A5. In narrative, historical scenes need not be presented chronologically; this has been called "achrony". (Genette) Corollary: no historical time need pass during a scene.
  


• B1-13. The realist story is a product [even a commodity] in today's culture. Through its effects, Its production, however, can be examined and, in point of fact, is structurally and syntactically quite similar to the sentence, or the posing of a question and its subsequent resolution. (Barthes)
  


• C1. With respect to point of view, there really is not that much substantive difference between 'quoted monologue' (a/k/a omniscient: '"I am late," he thought'), 'narrated monologue" (a/k/a free indirect:: 'He was late.'), and psycho-narration (a/k/a limited omniscient 'He knew he would be late.'). "Narrated monologue represents, in the third person, the exact thoughts of a character who is narrated in the third person," and, out of context, is indistinguishable from straight narration. (49) (Cohn)
  


• C2. The real author and the real reader are irrelevant to the narrative. Yet, the implied author and the implied reader, important as they are, are distinct from the true voice of the narrative: the narrator, whose values (as, e.g., to truth and reliability) differ significantly from the implied author and who addresses a narratee (either identified or implied). Point of view, then, can be formulated as "access by a narrator (who could be a character) to historical information (events in the story) and thoughts of other characters and even their own)." (57) (Chatman)
  


• C3. A brief anatomy of types of narrator:
  

"1. An external observer who narrates actions and dialogue. (camera, fly-on-the-wall)
2. An internal observer capable of narrating the characters' conscious thoughts.
3. An external omniscient narrator who knows things about the history the characters do not.
4. An internal omniscient narrator capable [sic] who knows the characters' unconscious motivations." (57)

• C4. Sensory input is the basic unit of human experience. No narration can adequately show this. There are only degrees of and kinds of telling, more or less detailed, more or less vivid.
  


• C5. Like metaphor systems (A2), narratives are important tools for understanding complicated social and historical situations, revealing and concealing aspects of life at the same time as they create certain illusions. (Lakoff)
  


• C6. The narrator stands in one of three relations to the character: he knows/says more than any of the characters knows/says, he knows/says as much, he knows/says less. Similarly, the narrator stands in the same set of knowledge relations to the reader. (Todorov)
  


• C7. [This section is like the scene in Woody Allen's Annie Hall in which a scene of dialogue is accompanied by subtitles showing what the characters were actually thinking.]
  


• C8. The author's choice of person (first, second, or third), singular or plural, does not significantly limit what it is possible to narrate. (Reagan, et al.)
  


• D1. Female characters in male, realist fiction are often used merely, or mostly, either to provide a sexy background or otherwise motivate or constrain the central male characters. (Chynoweth)
  


• D2. Yet, it is possible to have a narrative without a character (male or female), or, rather, without the illusion of the character's presence. [One thinks, here, of Tyrone Slothrop's disappearance two-thirds of the way through the narrative of Gravity's Rainbow. We still feel the effects of his having been 'present', or having just missed him, etc.]

-------------------------
You can find these principles discussed in fuller detail in William Gillespie's short book The Story That Teaches You How To Write It.

The text consists of explanatory essays on each of these topics on the recto pages of the book, while on the verso pages we find the narration of a story that putatively puts each of these theoretical points into play. Along with this, there are footnotes throughout claiming to be critical comments on the story and essays from participants in the author's graduate creative writing seminar—for which this was his final project. At the end, there is a bibliography, a letter from 'William' to someone named Dave, and, on the back there is a letter to 'William' from someone named Ben.

The story itself concerns two lesbian grad students (one brilliant, the other struggling) in a theory-oriented, creative writing program, and the affair one of them has with their married, male professor.

The author states his purpose as follows: "My attempts to translate narrative theory into instructions on how to write a story are part of a larger process of turning the world into instructions on how to write a story." (3) A noble, ambitious aim, comprehensive and well-stated.

Gillespie claims to have been a student in one of David Foster Wallace's seminars, and this book even includes some critical commentary from a 'DFW', as well as a letter to 'Dave'. At face value, it appears to be a fairly literalistic attempt to apply narrative theory to fictional praxis (as grad students are presumably instructed to attempt to do): theory is stated, indexed (A1., A2., etc., as above), and seemingly applied to correspondingly numbered segments of narrative. Thus, we are called upon to read the pieces as separate: a) story and b) theoretical essays. As such, it is the story that also tries to teach us how to read it. But the attempt feels mechanical and heavy-handed: rote and clunky. And, frankly, we don't have to obey.

A struggling English grad student writing a story about a struggling English grad student writing a story should be our first clue that something else is going on here. Identities are at stake. Per C2 above, the real author is irrelevant; let's leave him be for now. So we follow the chain down: implied author —> narrator. The 'Gillespie' who has penned these essays on theory and the love-triangle story about creative writing grad students (the narrator) should not be equated with the Gillespie who apparently lives in Illlinois and has written this book (about a narrator/character named 'William Gillespie') and who appears to have a Web presence here. But neither should he be confused with the 'William Gillespie' who is the implied author of this text, including the prefatory material, the footnotes, bibliography, and assorted interjections here and there.

The narrator tells us he has written some essays on narrative theory and attempted to apply them to his fiction writing. As such, the work is divided. It's kind of stale and dry, an interesting intellectual exercise. But nothing, as they say, to write home about.

One feels there must be something more, some unifying principle that brings the disparate materials of this pastiche of a book together. That, we learn, is the role of the implied author. (C2) If there is an implied author who provides some overarching unity to this seemingly divided book, it must be the 'Gillespie' who has created the 'Gillespie' narrator/character. The implied author of the grand, totalizing narrative knows more than the narrator/character. (C6) The narrator 'Gillespie' has composed both the story and the essays and claims to have fit the square peg of theory into the circle of practice. 'Gillespie' the implied author recognizes this as a delusion.

At the end, in a letter putatively penned by this implied author 'Gillespie' to DFW, we read:

"I seem to have written myself back into a corner of my own brain so remote that not even you and Jason and a team of English graduate students working together with searchlights, helicopters, and bloodhounds, can find me. My writing has improved so much since I entered graduate school that there is no longer anyone qualified to read it." (78)

It is a difficult matter to untangle. 'William Gillespie' (narrator) claims to be the master of theory and claims to have successfully applied all these grad school tools to his narrative. Story prevails, absorbing all theory into the black hole of its narrative flow. 'William Gillespie' (implied author), on the other hand, claims to be a singular genius who has included all these theoretical essays in the book so he can justify his story's shortcomings to his classroom critics:

"In class for the first time I received more sadness than hostility: a room full of blank faces, letters which read like page-long apologies, and meanwhile Jason accusing me of misrepresenting theories I wasn't, in many cases, even trying to represent. I've seldom gone to so much trouble to do such a small segment of a possible readership so little good. ... I started writing like this, in fact, because of a workshop. I needed decision-making criteria so that, when I received a flood of individually contradictory but collectively discouraging instructions about what to change, I would have the original structure as a guide to know which advice I could use and which I couldn't." (78)

Contempt, confusion, hurt, resentment, anger, perhaps even madness. These are the words of a sensitive soul who has been beat up once too many times in a writing workshop, someone who took it all too personally and is lashing out the only way he can: "Nobody understands me!" This 'William Gillespie' does not appear in the text of the story (D2) except, perhaps, in drag (D1) and multiply (C8), and is specifically concealed behind the illusion of the in-control, imperious theory master (C5, C6) like a Bunraku puppeteer. (C3)

What raises this seemingly dry theory-exercise to the level of Ur-story is the re-visioning of the narrative necessitated by 'William's' letter to 'Dave':

"Dave, Class last week brought up a number of interesting questions. Questions like what the hell am I doing with my life? ... After working on the paper it occurred to me that I actually know what the hell I'm doing. I know exactly what I'm doing. I'm going broke and insane trying to teach the English language to dance." (78) 'William' ("P.S. Please stop calling me 'Bill.'") is self-aware enough to recognize that he is an uninspired "blocked writer" who, paradoxically, must yet strive to "constrain the impassioned diuretic flow of cliches in [a] confident writer[]." (78) The experience of loss—loss of inspiration, loss of focus, loss of girlfriend(?) (C8, D1), loss of time, loss of ideals, loss of faith in humanity, loss of faith in himself and his ability to understand his world, and a near-Nietzschean loss of sanity—the experience of loss permeates this book.

Whereas 'Gillespie' the narrator is vain and cocky, 'Gillespie' the implied author is pathetic and insecure.

The Story That Teaches You How To Write It is a complex, disjointed "model of consciousness." 'William Gillespie', the implied author (not necessarily the "real author" (C2)), is a brilliant, but very nearly unhinged character attempting to find some creative grounding for the ungainly welter of theoretical dicta that have been plaguing his mind for nearly a decade. This book represents his life's work (B1-13), and it is a failure—though an interesting and ambitious one. This makes him, and his story, compelling—especially to someone (such as, ahem, yours truly) whose ambitions and failures find remarkable resonance in this short, powerful effort of the spirit.

----------------------

A quote from the letter on the back of the book, which Gillespie refers to as a "preface" (77), inspired me to revive one of my favorite pictures from a previous post on my blog for this post:

"I am the Eskimo watching the basketball game. Except I'm more like an Eskimo who thinks he's watching a basketball game, but isn't really sure because he doesn't really know what basketball is, so he may not be watching a game at all. My relationship with literary theory; most theory, hell any theory, is like a monkey riding a bicycle. He can do it; the monkey, he can ride the bike if he tries hard enough. But he never looks or feels comfortable doing it. It's possible; it's been done, but it sure as hell isn't pretty."

Damn...

David Foster Wallace apparently found dead of suicide at the age of 46. Sheesh. That's no jest. Love it or hate it, IJ is a major work and DFW's work must be reckoned with. May Oblivion find you at peace.

No, Not that James Woods

Disambiguation. A good word I learned, frankly, from Wikipedia.

The other James Wood (no 's') gives a close analysis of the free indirect style in a passage from Henry James's What Maisie Knew. He focuses on one word in one passage that shows James's true mastery; that is to say, he shows us how James steps back and allows us to see the scene through the eyes of Maisie through the use of one perfectly-modulated word: embarrassingly. [Of course, you can hear the chorus of MFA students bellowing in the background about the use of -ly adverbs.] Wood then traces the use of this technique back, interestingly, to the mock-heroic poetry of Alexander Pope. All he is really saying is: the writer needs to stand back and let the language reflect the character's own POV. The writer's style interferes with our being able to see the world through the eyes of the characters. With any given word or phrase or literary device, as a writer, ask yourself: "Is this my character speaking or am I intruding?" Call it "method writing"—after so-called method acting. The greater artistry, Wood is telling us, comes in getting the characters just right.

Now, what's fun about Wood's first chapter, called "Narrating", is his delicious take on other writers. He takes Updike to task for grievous authorial interference (or, offsides in soccer jargon) in Terrorist. He takes a first run at Nabokov, in Pnin saying: " Nabokov is here using a kind of free indirect style, probably without even thinking about it." I guess VN got lucky, huh? Wood notes how Faulkner's, Joyce's, and Shakespeare's characters all manage to sound like Faulkner, Joyce, and Shakespeare respectively.

But then, then my friends, he breaks out the stiletto: "David Foster Wallace is very good at becoming the whole of boredom." Pow! Do you get the feeling he doesn't particularly care for DFW? Wood praises Chekhov's use of what he calls the unidentified free indirect style, or the "village chorus." Then, he shows how Wallace takes that style to extremes in imitating the jargon and mangled lingo of Madison Avenue. Wallace's predecessors, he notes, include Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Pynchon, and DeLillo who let the "debased" language of the contemporary American idiom debase their own language. His point is a good one. There really is a balancing act, let's call it 'artistry', involved. But, then, Wood really drives the point through the heart of DFW. And twists.

In concluding this section, Wood gets it just right, I think:

So the novelist is always working with at least three languages. There is the author's own language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; there is the character's presumed language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; and there is what we could call the language of the world—the language which fiction inherits before it gets to turn it into novelistic style, the language of daily speech, of newspapers, of offices, of advertising, of the blogosphere and text messaging.

In essence, the novelist is a bit of a juggler. The balancing act is to keep these three balls (if you will) of language in the air simultaneously. Writers often talk about getting the words just right. Wood provides the matrix, or context, in which we can locate this rightness.