On Narrative

One of the debates at the center of the modernist revolution is the freshness of the narrative form. In other words, to what extent was the tragedy that is Victorian literature and poetry a result of cultural drollness and the caricaturization and unnecessary concretization of conventional genre tropes, or to what extent might the narrative form itself, which served the authors of the Bible, Homer, and others so well, be in the need of some updating itself?

This concern is closely connected to other issues, including the use of form to more accurately represent content's message(s) and the attempt to allow for our cultural creations to more accurately represent real human condition.

One problem I have always had with all this is its inherent critique of great narrative art itself - something I love and have always held dear. While I agree that a tremendously successful modernist experiment (Ulysses, "Howl," Memento, Lost, Adam Resurrected, et al.) is the most satisfying engagement with human creativity, a failed modernist experiment is quite likely the worst. I also challenge the notion that "modernism," per se, is its own invention, pointing back not only towards the usual examples like Tristram Shandy (great movie too) but also to Shakespeare's great love of the "meta" (in Hamlet, most famously, and elsewhere), the Bible's ability to tell a story that is as richly confusing as the real human experience could have been (perhaps the best and most famous example is Exodus 19 when the people at the foot of Mount Sinai "see" the noises of the scene - והעם ראו את הקולות ואת הברקים). This to me is a powerful indication that though modernism may have extracted out a significant identifier of brilliant, compelling literature (i.e., that it is affective in part, because it does something unusual with itself or captures the human experience in a dead-on way), the revolution was not innovative in its newness but in its bringing to the fore an articulated attempt to replicate genius.

Another component of this discussion has to do with the type of experience the artist would like her audience to have. On one extreme is, as it were, the Victorian novel, which lays everything out for us to see. On the other is abstract painting - which demands of us that we interpret it ourselves because it offers us what amounts to nothing in the amount of content we have as grist for our mills. (Note that the interpretive act must be part of all experiencing of art, the difference here is in the amount of content handed, as it were, to the audience.) For me, personally, I prefer a maximum amount of quanta of data for my mind to process, as opposed to literature or poetry or art that makes me do most of the work on the front end. I thrive on doing lots of work, just on the back end. I imagine that people might fall into camps on this question based on their learning styles.

With brings us to the stimulus for this post, a review in Newsweek (again, the March 2 issue) of a new book called Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry (quite a title, no?), by Leanne Shapton. The book is, ingeniously, a novel masquerading as an auction catalog, purporting to present the 332 lots for sale of Lenore and Harold's property in the wake of their breakup.

As Jennie Yabroff, the reviewer in Newsweek puts it, this book "is the rare high-concept book that rises above gimmickry and succeeds, not just as a novel, but as a work of art." The book looks fascinating, and I hope to read it someday, even though it seems to require a great deal from me on the front end and, perhaps, less work to do on the back end. But Yabroff captures quite well a perspective on the issues I've laid out above and, most importantly, the colossal waste of time that modernist failures represent, though that wasted time is often outweighed by the sublime brilliance of modernism's successes.

When I imagine modernism's successes, I remind myself of the feeling of a master Torah reader chanting the scene at Mount Sinai or the עקדה, and I try to wrap my head around what it must have been like to listen to oral poetry as it was meant to be experienced, with a blind poet-prophet (Teiresias or Homer, it's all the same to me) speaking to me of the wine-dark sea and the divine fingers dancing across the sky at dawn. I also think of more modern modernist successes, and even pop-culture ones that chose to tell a story I needed to hear at that given moment. Good modernism is, in many ways, almost silent modernism, less interested in bashing you over the head with its 'newness' and more interested in telling a story as well as stories have ever been told.