Spot on, Sam. Although, I suspect the non-story sensibility is actually still what makes great stories great, but our modern entertainment addictions have murdered it.
Wonderful! I completely agree. I think Campbell's influence has been, on balance, bad for art. Story is powerful. It is a force of nature. It is a mind hack that exploits our evolved sense of pattern recognition and provides comforting structure against the chaos of real life. That's the soothing, compelling, need that story meets. It scratches our existential itch.
There was a phenomenon of beetles in Australia that nearly went extinct because the bumpy brown bottles that beer drinking Aussies threw out their windows resembled the backsides of the lady beetles. The male beetles kept desperately trying to mate with the bottles, foregoing the actual beetles. They had evolved just enough sensory perception to know what to rub against to make more beetles. But they could not distinguish the poetry and magnificence of a female beetle and the lifeless nub of an empty bottle.
That's us with story. We love it. But it's a simulacrum of something far more mysterious and moving, which we can also access through art and literature, but it's a different experience and a different ambition. Art can be, but is not always, entertainment.
An issue adjacent to this is the idea of difficulty and art. Does difficult art bring us closer to the truth? Is entertaining writing a type of pandering? Is true literature an embrace of life, while genre writing is mere titillation, not worthy of the designation of literature? I love these questions, I have no answers.
Jonathan Franzen has a wonderful essay that touches on some of this as well.
Great points Sean! The story about the beetles made me laugh out loud. I've been very influenced by the Franzen essay. I really like the idea of writing that invites a reader into your home. It's not about accosting the reader on the street and selling them something, not about being on display and subject to the reader's judgment. The reader is invited into a writer's home - i.e. into their soul - and may not enjoy themselves, may find that it's not really for them, but should at least respect that they are being invited into a space that is of immense importance for another person and should comport themselves accordingly. Like you, I really enjoy thinking about these kinds of things.
I'm taking advantage of your admitted Cline-envy, but I think a merit of The Guest and its non-ending is that it was less of a story as you outlined it in this post.
Thank you David! That's a good point. I guess I felt that The Guest promised a story and didn't really deliver on it. Planted a bunch of threads early on that didn't really return. But it is true that if I had been reading less with that in mind - and just appreciative of Cline's sentence-to-sentence writing - I would have enjoyed it more!
I find it interesting that you say this, and yet you didn't seem to like Past Lives, which in my view was this very type of "non-storytelling" that highlighted our dependence on technology to mediate our relationships. Am I misunderstanding the concept?
Hi Andrew! Feel like we haven't chatted in a while. My analysis of Past Lives was fairly superficial and all about the execution. I just didn't think the actors were very good, and for a story like that, chemistry is really everything. But I thought the basic idea of it was pretty brilliant - that you have these people who you are deeply connected to, who are "soul-partners," but that it just doesn't work out with them in this life. There is a really good movie in there, I just felt that it didn't quite come together. La La Land is a similar idea, actually.
Fair enough. Wondering though, do you feel like--despite its flaws--it's an example of the type of non-storytelling you were talking about here?
I can see it in some ways, and not in others: the films runs in a basically linear fashion, but it also eschews a lot of the Joseph Campbell/hero's journey tropes you were arguing we should set aside, and spends a lot of time focusing on elements of modern life and relationships (eg. our reliance on technology).
Wondering if you can share some other examples you think fit into this "non-storytelling" category, just so I can get a better idea of what you mean.
Also: Hi Sam! I'm still here, reading pretty regularly. Your posts on Israel/Gaza have been so helpful and grounding. I appreciate them tremendously, especially now knowing that they're a Jewish perspective. Hadn't realized that until the last one.
Houellebecq’s translators (or whomever) seriously pick the worst titles. The Elementary Particles > Atomized, and Extension of the Domain of Struggle >>> Whatever.
From my experience, titles are usually chosen by the editorial team of a publishing house, not by the translators themselves. I agree though, those are lame.
What I feel has been especially lost is character and feeling.
I definitely agree with and like your post a bit. I do think it's possible that, especially after reading your post, we are not as exhausted with stories as traditional story structure.
You mentioned stand-up. I'm a comedy geek, so I couldn't help but think of storytelling comedians like Mike Birbiglia or even Comedy Central shows like This is Not Happening. I'm not saying they throw out the rulebook on structure entirely, but they rely more on character (their character, as the storyteller) and feeling than on the hero's journey.
I suspect autofiction has had its moment because it fits our moment best. It's lacking in flourishes but often has an immediacy that gives it vitality. I think not only are you not the only one but history will see that, for this era anyway, you -- we -- were right.
That’s interesting. Do you think character is action (aristotle) or character is trauma (the now). What you do or what happened to you? Im interested that you separate character from story. There’s something there.
Interesting questions! Character as trauma is a new concept for me!
Mo, I really agreed with your blockbuster piece. Hollywood has basically assumed that there is a single story structure that can work for mass audiences and has tried to consistently deliver that for a century. They're not wrong, but when it gets tired they just pump the same structure full of special effects and cheap-o variations. The more interesting direction is towards movies that have more of the texture of lived life - that was certainly true for the New Wave, and also for '90s-style indie filmmaking - but these kinds of innovations, almost by definition, are always going to come from outside the industry.
Yes, except for a few magical years in the late 60s and throughout the 70s, when Hollywood's backs were against the wall and they said anything goes. Thanks
What I feel has been especially lost is character and feeling.
I definitely agree with and like your post a bit. I do think it's possible that, especially after reading your post, we are not as exhausted with stories as traditional story structure.
You mentioned stand-up. I'm a comedy geek, so I couldn't help but think of storytelling comedians like Mike Birbiglia or even Comedy Central shows like This is Not Happening. I'm not saying they throw out the rulebook on structure entirely, but they rely more on character (their character, as the storyteller) and feeling than on the hero's journey.
I suspect autofiction has had its moment because it fits our moment best. It's lacking in flourishes but often has an immediacy that gives it vitality. I think not only are you not the only one but history will see that, for this era anyway, you -- we -- were right.
Very insightful. One of the reasons I often mention the role of literature as pharmaceutical is because of what you mentioned toward the end regarding all the recent "clever" literature. The unwillingness of literature to talk about themes like alienation. To do so in this day and age would be to violate the happy directive, an essential component of literature as pharmaceutical. Incidentally, I'll go into that on my post next Tuesday about how the distinction between high literature and the lowbrow remains pertinent today. To tease a bit: today's literature, basically, is lowbrow lit in high literature's clothing. We attribute high literature characteristics to what, in fact, follows lowbrow directives. That's just one element though: many of these recent writers are creative writing program automatons, and they are more like bureaucrats than writers. (They are, in fact, almost no different from academics) As Michael Mohr has been almost at pains to point out in the past, writers are a specific breed of people.
I appreciate this post, by the way, because it makes me feel better about a criticism I've gotten for my work: namely, that I have too much of a penchant for "asshole characters." Given how much the nation is currently consumed with hatred of one another, I guess it would be a pity to do away with that. Speaking of my work, anyone who wants a novel that isn't afraid of boring one's audience (but that is also, unusually, asshole-free) should check out my novel Calm Before an Earthquake. A novel in part about the very "active" pastime of chilling. https://swampratbooks.com/bookshop/
Agree with so much of what you've written here: "Today's literature is lowbrow lit in high literature's clothing." "Recent writers are more like bureaucrats than writers."
There really is a writing nomenklatura that's based far more on connections and inside baseball than it is on anything related to the quality of the actual work. My feeling is the more you let in from outside - on condition that that work is sincere and/or ambitious - the healthier literature will be as a whole.
Great essay. Thanks. Raises so many questions. Who is a story teller and equally important who are their audience ? The progressive ideological structure of Greek myth and Campbell’s heroic template seem to me to be necessary webs of deception for societies that lack true cohesion.
Fit for that purpose but restrictive for those who are emotionally connected. For instance, the plays of Samuel Beckett as displays of artistry for fellow artists. Alternatively his life could be perceived as a story of an erudite hermit scholar satirically negotiating an alien ignorant society.
Thanks for the interest. Yikes. Will try to unpack it as best.
How and why we remember whether as individuals or as societies is a subject that continues to fascinate. Narratives are structured place holders of memory. They can be all things to all people in a public arena. However, remembering is an embodied paradox: a conservation of ideas through intellectual re enactment. When in the company of those who share deep experiences the self becomes fluid, individual memory dissolves into a perpetual group renascence. Place and time collapsing, becoming immanent. For example, this confluence of emotion and intellect in shared action is what musicians experience when they are in ‘the groove’ of improvisation.
Another metaphor to illustrate the different narratives of webs of deception and social cohesion could be the difference between a masked ball of individual strangers or a Masque enacted as a private ritual.
"Choose the non-story sensibility, and life becomes almost immediately richer and more complicated — anything can be interesting, anything can be rewarding, the only limits on expression and on wonder become your own anxiety, your own lack of imagination."
I think it's the same kind of sensibility from which the Haiku poetry has sprung, along with the Kishōtenketsu structure, which informs most of Japanese literature and cinema, a movie like "My Neighbour Totoro", for instance.
Love this: "If people a hundred years in the future were to read the award winners of the last decade or so, I’m not sure that they would learn very much about our actual lives." Actually I hate it, but you say it perfectly.
Everything you say here lines up with my ongoing ambivalence about whether to keep trying for a traditional publisher for my novel or go the Samuél route. The external review I received was impatient with my refusal to follow conventional storylines. I have a young character with not a single spoken word (intentional) -- though he does communicate through his action. I have a protagonist who drifts out of a relationship without his partner making any demands of him. His family demands nothing of him either. The reviewer wanted more of this kind of thing to set up starker choices, I guess, but the story I was trying to tell was more about indecision, how even major life ruptures don't clarify everything. It's possible that my narrator is too ruminative, and that the story could move along more briskly at times, but what some might see as a lag in the narrative I believe is precisely what you've found lacking in literature: attention to life as it is rather than life dressed up to sell copies.
Obviously a challenging decision - so no one right way to choose. I notice in my fiction that I've been interested less and less in the audience's response, or if there ever will be an audience, and more just in trying to do justice to whatever is in the fictional world or is 'the idea' of the novel. Nothing wrong with trying to make things flow for an audience!, I just find that it's hard to serve too many masters at once, and the 'truth of the fictional world' is already a challenging enough taskmaster.
'When I read most work that’s out now — let alone most movies — what I see, basically, is fear. A fear of boring an audience. A fear of alienating an audience. And so there’s an obsession with a clever style. There’s an obsession above all with economy — with making sure that there is nothing extraneous in a work of art, nothing that detracts from the optimized story structure.'
Absolutely agree on this. This is also something I have to try and fight against in my own life day to day - the unwillingness to be bored. But most of my favourite books have bored me at times, especially on the first read. I think a sense of boredom is an almost inevitable consequence of an attempt to render some image of life that really feels genuine.
There are times, or moods, when works of art that would bore me ordinarily enthral me, and there are times when I do just crave a well-told story, but the breakneck speed of most modern storytelling does get tiresome quite quickly, and it's usually not long before I find myself again craving something that's willing to take its time and let me linger from moment to moment without rushing me into the next scene as if they were scared of what a slightly slower pace might reveal.
Thank you Jacob. When I've gotten into meditation, I've found it basically to be a conversation with boredom. Boredom turns out to be such a powerful, all-driving force - the mind will do almost anything to stave off boredom - but then if you let yourself relax and really sink into it, peace is underneath the boredom, as well as, I suspect, true happiness. Some really great art - Beckett comes to mind - tries to get at that feeling of boredom, but it takes a real effort, of course, to relax into boredom.
Absolutely, meditation is something I've been practicing over the past year or so too. Particularly body-stillness meditation which I find helps my mind achieve mirror that stillness. And I do notice the peacefulness and attentiveness spilling out into daily life the more I keep up the practice.
I love your diagnosis of noisy modern storytelling as fearful. I think you’re spot-on about that.
I think of story-time and lyric-time as necessary to our mortal and immortal gropings. As mortals we want meaningful, logical action and completion. With our intimations of immortality, we sense that those stories do not (ahem) “tell the whole story” (or song) of who we are. We are a both-and people, but your point about fear is important.
We don’t need a single fearful story, and those are the ones clogging the airwaves (mostly, fear of not getting enough attention or making enough money). Expansive stories of trial and error and trying again - those we might need as much as stillness and messy reality. Maybe it’s just a certain co-opting of story that we could dispense with entirely.
"We don’t need a single fearful story, and those are the ones clogging the airwaves (mostly, fear of not getting enough attention or making enough money). Expansive stories of trial and error and trying again - those we might need as much as stillness and messy reality." So beautifully said! Those are my favourite stories too.
I agree with this being a salient phenomenon and that structured fast-paced stories tend to be dull. I for one want my dramas super small with as few set changes and extra characters as possible e.g Carnage.
But part of the wider commercial issue is that non-story people have used the opportunity in the last few decades to abandon *all* structure and discipline and made a maddening amount of what they would describe as “post-modern” art that continues to demand too much of the audience without equal contribution from the author. I think this makes the average intelligent media consumer think they have to decide between Story and Dissociated/Tedious/Pretense. Just making a traditional family drama with super polished dialogue (with current relevance and that breaks a few rules) would be a noble endeavor at this point, but will be viewed with the same contempt by the critical class as working in the trades.
Agreed with that Ari. I have the same trouble with a great deal of "post-modern" art. A lot of post-modern art, famously, is just pretentious nonsense. But I think the main story with post-modern art is that it evolved to become a self-referential "guild" activity, in which there is an abstruse insider language that the members of the guild speak and that confers authority without much connection at all to an audience or lived life.
Spot on, Sam. Although, I suspect the non-story sensibility is actually still what makes great stories great, but our modern entertainment addictions have murdered it.
Thank you Adrian! "Modern entertainment addiction" is exactly right.
You might find unentertaining:
https://open.substack.com/pub/adrianconway/p/the-selfie-of-zorian-green?r=wzsrn&utm_medium=ios
Wonderful! I completely agree. I think Campbell's influence has been, on balance, bad for art. Story is powerful. It is a force of nature. It is a mind hack that exploits our evolved sense of pattern recognition and provides comforting structure against the chaos of real life. That's the soothing, compelling, need that story meets. It scratches our existential itch.
There was a phenomenon of beetles in Australia that nearly went extinct because the bumpy brown bottles that beer drinking Aussies threw out their windows resembled the backsides of the lady beetles. The male beetles kept desperately trying to mate with the bottles, foregoing the actual beetles. They had evolved just enough sensory perception to know what to rub against to make more beetles. But they could not distinguish the poetry and magnificence of a female beetle and the lifeless nub of an empty bottle.
That's us with story. We love it. But it's a simulacrum of something far more mysterious and moving, which we can also access through art and literature, but it's a different experience and a different ambition. Art can be, but is not always, entertainment.
An issue adjacent to this is the idea of difficulty and art. Does difficult art bring us closer to the truth? Is entertaining writing a type of pandering? Is true literature an embrace of life, while genre writing is mere titillation, not worthy of the designation of literature? I love these questions, I have no answers.
Jonathan Franzen has a wonderful essay that touches on some of this as well.
https://adilegian.com/PDF/FranzenEssay.pdf
Great points Sean! The story about the beetles made me laugh out loud. I've been very influenced by the Franzen essay. I really like the idea of writing that invites a reader into your home. It's not about accosting the reader on the street and selling them something, not about being on display and subject to the reader's judgment. The reader is invited into a writer's home - i.e. into their soul - and may not enjoy themselves, may find that it's not really for them, but should at least respect that they are being invited into a space that is of immense importance for another person and should comport themselves accordingly. Like you, I really enjoy thinking about these kinds of things.
I'm taking advantage of your admitted Cline-envy, but I think a merit of The Guest and its non-ending is that it was less of a story as you outlined it in this post.
This was a great meditative essay, Sam.
Thank you David! That's a good point. I guess I felt that The Guest promised a story and didn't really deliver on it. Planted a bunch of threads early on that didn't really return. But it is true that if I had been reading less with that in mind - and just appreciative of Cline's sentence-to-sentence writing - I would have enjoyed it more!
I find it interesting that you say this, and yet you didn't seem to like Past Lives, which in my view was this very type of "non-storytelling" that highlighted our dependence on technology to mediate our relationships. Am I misunderstanding the concept?
Hey Andrew - what is Past Lives?
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/past_lives
Hi Andrew! Feel like we haven't chatted in a while. My analysis of Past Lives was fairly superficial and all about the execution. I just didn't think the actors were very good, and for a story like that, chemistry is really everything. But I thought the basic idea of it was pretty brilliant - that you have these people who you are deeply connected to, who are "soul-partners," but that it just doesn't work out with them in this life. There is a really good movie in there, I just felt that it didn't quite come together. La La Land is a similar idea, actually.
Fair enough. Wondering though, do you feel like--despite its flaws--it's an example of the type of non-storytelling you were talking about here?
I can see it in some ways, and not in others: the films runs in a basically linear fashion, but it also eschews a lot of the Joseph Campbell/hero's journey tropes you were arguing we should set aside, and spends a lot of time focusing on elements of modern life and relationships (eg. our reliance on technology).
Wondering if you can share some other examples you think fit into this "non-storytelling" category, just so I can get a better idea of what you mean.
Also: Hi Sam! I'm still here, reading pretty regularly. Your posts on Israel/Gaza have been so helpful and grounding. I appreciate them tremendously, especially now knowing that they're a Jewish perspective. Hadn't realized that until the last one.
Houellebecq’s translators (or whomever) seriously pick the worst titles. The Elementary Particles > Atomized, and Extension of the Domain of Struggle >>> Whatever.
From my experience, titles are usually chosen by the editorial team of a publishing house, not by the translators themselves. I agree though, those are lame.
Right. I assumed it was something akin to journalists not picking their headlines.
Lol. Maybe this means that I'm un stupid américain, but I kind of like those two titles! No question that they dumb it down though.
Sam, I have a two-word reply: Alice Munro.
Agreed!
I thought of her too!
What I feel has been especially lost is character and feeling.
I definitely agree with and like your post a bit. I do think it's possible that, especially after reading your post, we are not as exhausted with stories as traditional story structure.
You mentioned stand-up. I'm a comedy geek, so I couldn't help but think of storytelling comedians like Mike Birbiglia or even Comedy Central shows like This is Not Happening. I'm not saying they throw out the rulebook on structure entirely, but they rely more on character (their character, as the storyteller) and feeling than on the hero's journey.
I suspect autofiction has had its moment because it fits our moment best. It's lacking in flourishes but often has an immediacy that gives it vitality. I think not only are you not the only one but history will see that, for this era anyway, you -- we -- were right.
That’s interesting. Do you think character is action (aristotle) or character is trauma (the now). What you do or what happened to you? Im interested that you separate character from story. There’s something there.
Again not necessarily separate from story, I guess I'm talking about the classic divide between character driven and plot driven
Interesting questions! Character as trauma is a new concept for me!
Mo, I really agreed with your blockbuster piece. Hollywood has basically assumed that there is a single story structure that can work for mass audiences and has tried to consistently deliver that for a century. They're not wrong, but when it gets tired they just pump the same structure full of special effects and cheap-o variations. The more interesting direction is towards movies that have more of the texture of lived life - that was certainly true for the New Wave, and also for '90s-style indie filmmaking - but these kinds of innovations, almost by definition, are always going to come from outside the industry.
Yes, except for a few magical years in the late 60s and throughout the 70s, when Hollywood's backs were against the wall and they said anything goes. Thanks
What I feel has been especially lost is character and feeling.
I definitely agree with and like your post a bit. I do think it's possible that, especially after reading your post, we are not as exhausted with stories as traditional story structure.
You mentioned stand-up. I'm a comedy geek, so I couldn't help but think of storytelling comedians like Mike Birbiglia or even Comedy Central shows like This is Not Happening. I'm not saying they throw out the rulebook on structure entirely, but they rely more on character (their character, as the storyteller) and feeling than on the hero's journey.
I suspect autofiction has had its moment because it fits our moment best. It's lacking in flourishes but often has an immediacy that gives it vitality. I think not only are you not the only one but history will see that, for this era anyway, you -- we -- were right.
Very insightful. One of the reasons I often mention the role of literature as pharmaceutical is because of what you mentioned toward the end regarding all the recent "clever" literature. The unwillingness of literature to talk about themes like alienation. To do so in this day and age would be to violate the happy directive, an essential component of literature as pharmaceutical. Incidentally, I'll go into that on my post next Tuesday about how the distinction between high literature and the lowbrow remains pertinent today. To tease a bit: today's literature, basically, is lowbrow lit in high literature's clothing. We attribute high literature characteristics to what, in fact, follows lowbrow directives. That's just one element though: many of these recent writers are creative writing program automatons, and they are more like bureaucrats than writers. (They are, in fact, almost no different from academics) As Michael Mohr has been almost at pains to point out in the past, writers are a specific breed of people.
I appreciate this post, by the way, because it makes me feel better about a criticism I've gotten for my work: namely, that I have too much of a penchant for "asshole characters." Given how much the nation is currently consumed with hatred of one another, I guess it would be a pity to do away with that. Speaking of my work, anyone who wants a novel that isn't afraid of boring one's audience (but that is also, unusually, asshole-free) should check out my novel Calm Before an Earthquake. A novel in part about the very "active" pastime of chilling. https://swampratbooks.com/bookshop/
Hi Felix, look forward to reading the novel!
Agree with so much of what you've written here: "Today's literature is lowbrow lit in high literature's clothing." "Recent writers are more like bureaucrats than writers."
There really is a writing nomenklatura that's based far more on connections and inside baseball than it is on anything related to the quality of the actual work. My feeling is the more you let in from outside - on condition that that work is sincere and/or ambitious - the healthier literature will be as a whole.
Great essay. Thanks. Raises so many questions. Who is a story teller and equally important who are their audience ? The progressive ideological structure of Greek myth and Campbell’s heroic template seem to me to be necessary webs of deception for societies that lack true cohesion.
Fit for that purpose but restrictive for those who are emotionally connected. For instance, the plays of Samuel Beckett as displays of artistry for fellow artists. Alternatively his life could be perceived as a story of an erudite hermit scholar satirically negotiating an alien ignorant society.
Would love to hear more on this! - "necessary webs of deception for societies that lack true cohesion."
Thanks for the interest. Yikes. Will try to unpack it as best.
How and why we remember whether as individuals or as societies is a subject that continues to fascinate. Narratives are structured place holders of memory. They can be all things to all people in a public arena. However, remembering is an embodied paradox: a conservation of ideas through intellectual re enactment. When in the company of those who share deep experiences the self becomes fluid, individual memory dissolves into a perpetual group renascence. Place and time collapsing, becoming immanent. For example, this confluence of emotion and intellect in shared action is what musicians experience when they are in ‘the groove’ of improvisation.
Another metaphor to illustrate the different narratives of webs of deception and social cohesion could be the difference between a masked ball of individual strangers or a Masque enacted as a private ritual.
Work in progress as ever 🐈⬛
"Choose the non-story sensibility, and life becomes almost immediately richer and more complicated — anything can be interesting, anything can be rewarding, the only limits on expression and on wonder become your own anxiety, your own lack of imagination."
I think it's the same kind of sensibility from which the Haiku poetry has sprung, along with the Kishōtenketsu structure, which informs most of Japanese literature and cinema, a movie like "My Neighbour Totoro", for instance.
A riveting read, Sam, thank you.
Thank you Portia! I've never heard of the Kishotenketsu structure. Look forward to learning about it!
Love this: "If people a hundred years in the future were to read the award winners of the last decade or so, I’m not sure that they would learn very much about our actual lives." Actually I hate it, but you say it perfectly.
Everything you say here lines up with my ongoing ambivalence about whether to keep trying for a traditional publisher for my novel or go the Samuél route. The external review I received was impatient with my refusal to follow conventional storylines. I have a young character with not a single spoken word (intentional) -- though he does communicate through his action. I have a protagonist who drifts out of a relationship without his partner making any demands of him. His family demands nothing of him either. The reviewer wanted more of this kind of thing to set up starker choices, I guess, but the story I was trying to tell was more about indecision, how even major life ruptures don't clarify everything. It's possible that my narrator is too ruminative, and that the story could move along more briskly at times, but what some might see as a lag in the narrative I believe is precisely what you've found lacking in literature: attention to life as it is rather than life dressed up to sell copies.
"attention to life as it is rather than life dressed up to sell copies." Yes!
Obviously a challenging decision - so no one right way to choose. I notice in my fiction that I've been interested less and less in the audience's response, or if there ever will be an audience, and more just in trying to do justice to whatever is in the fictional world or is 'the idea' of the novel. Nothing wrong with trying to make things flow for an audience!, I just find that it's hard to serve too many masters at once, and the 'truth of the fictional world' is already a challenging enough taskmaster.
Let me add to the anti-story canon: Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal
I need to watch that!
It’s a masterpiece.
'When I read most work that’s out now — let alone most movies — what I see, basically, is fear. A fear of boring an audience. A fear of alienating an audience. And so there’s an obsession with a clever style. There’s an obsession above all with economy — with making sure that there is nothing extraneous in a work of art, nothing that detracts from the optimized story structure.'
Absolutely agree on this. This is also something I have to try and fight against in my own life day to day - the unwillingness to be bored. But most of my favourite books have bored me at times, especially on the first read. I think a sense of boredom is an almost inevitable consequence of an attempt to render some image of life that really feels genuine.
There are times, or moods, when works of art that would bore me ordinarily enthral me, and there are times when I do just crave a well-told story, but the breakneck speed of most modern storytelling does get tiresome quite quickly, and it's usually not long before I find myself again craving something that's willing to take its time and let me linger from moment to moment without rushing me into the next scene as if they were scared of what a slightly slower pace might reveal.
Thank you Jacob. When I've gotten into meditation, I've found it basically to be a conversation with boredom. Boredom turns out to be such a powerful, all-driving force - the mind will do almost anything to stave off boredom - but then if you let yourself relax and really sink into it, peace is underneath the boredom, as well as, I suspect, true happiness. Some really great art - Beckett comes to mind - tries to get at that feeling of boredom, but it takes a real effort, of course, to relax into boredom.
Absolutely, meditation is something I've been practicing over the past year or so too. Particularly body-stillness meditation which I find helps my mind achieve mirror that stillness. And I do notice the peacefulness and attentiveness spilling out into daily life the more I keep up the practice.
I love your diagnosis of noisy modern storytelling as fearful. I think you’re spot-on about that.
I think of story-time and lyric-time as necessary to our mortal and immortal gropings. As mortals we want meaningful, logical action and completion. With our intimations of immortality, we sense that those stories do not (ahem) “tell the whole story” (or song) of who we are. We are a both-and people, but your point about fear is important.
We don’t need a single fearful story, and those are the ones clogging the airwaves (mostly, fear of not getting enough attention or making enough money). Expansive stories of trial and error and trying again - those we might need as much as stillness and messy reality. Maybe it’s just a certain co-opting of story that we could dispense with entirely.
"We don’t need a single fearful story, and those are the ones clogging the airwaves (mostly, fear of not getting enough attention or making enough money). Expansive stories of trial and error and trying again - those we might need as much as stillness and messy reality." So beautifully said! Those are my favourite stories too.
Totally agreed Tara! Nicely put.
I agree with this being a salient phenomenon and that structured fast-paced stories tend to be dull. I for one want my dramas super small with as few set changes and extra characters as possible e.g Carnage.
But part of the wider commercial issue is that non-story people have used the opportunity in the last few decades to abandon *all* structure and discipline and made a maddening amount of what they would describe as “post-modern” art that continues to demand too much of the audience without equal contribution from the author. I think this makes the average intelligent media consumer think they have to decide between Story and Dissociated/Tedious/Pretense. Just making a traditional family drama with super polished dialogue (with current relevance and that breaks a few rules) would be a noble endeavor at this point, but will be viewed with the same contempt by the critical class as working in the trades.
Agreed with that Ari. I have the same trouble with a great deal of "post-modern" art. A lot of post-modern art, famously, is just pretentious nonsense. But I think the main story with post-modern art is that it evolved to become a self-referential "guild" activity, in which there is an abstruse insider language that the members of the guild speak and that confers authority without much connection at all to an audience or lived life.