More anachronisms

A few months ago I wrote about the trope often appearing in Patricia Highsmith's work -- that of characters following developments in their cases (be they cases of murder, assault, or disappearance) in the daily newspaper. Last night I went to the film noir festival at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco and saw two obscure films which had another kind of mid-20th century narrative trope which has largely disappeared: the insurance investigator.

In both films -- Highway 13, which is about sabotage at a trucking firm, and The Devil's Henchman, which is about thefts of cargo from ships -- the protagonist was not a policeman or a private detective but a secret agent for an insurance company.

This trope reminded me of something I'd read about "Death of a Salesman" -- that the whole reality of life insurance was new to middle class people in the 1930s and 1940s, and that the concept, and the unintended consequences that can result when the death of one person can result in a windfall for another, had to be explained to people. And then when the play was presented to audiences in China for the first time, in 1983, the whole concept had to be explained anew for audiences to understand the plot.

Nowadays you don't see many plots hinging on insurance fraud, and I wonder why. Have the insurance companies simply gotten too good at detecting it? Is it easier these days to scam Medicare, for example?

Eugenides not pushing the envelope this time, maybe feels okay about it

Q: People are starting to notice that a generation of writers, which includes you and Jonathan Franzen, are wrestling with the question of how you create a novel after postmodernism.

Jeffrey Eugenides: Schoenberg said it's still possible to write music in C major, and that’s coming from Mister Experimental himself. That strikes a chord in me; I think with the novel, at a certain point you realize it's still possible to write in C major and have some kind of narrative content. And meaningful characters that readers can, you know it's an old-fashioned term, but people can fall in love with the characters and become caught up in their lives. If you don't have that, you cease to have the kind of novel that can be compelling.

--Interview with novelist Jeffrey Eugenides
in the L.A. Times

This is a real issue. I constantly struggle with the imperative to create new ways of seeing and story-telling, which is what the word "novel" implies, and this traditional approach. I've written before about how I love mid-century writers, and how Larry McMurtry's now obscure early novel "Moving On" was a model for me for many years. The roomy character-driven traditional narrative informed the writing of my first novel, "Make Nice." But in my current project I'm trying to get away from it.

It's a struggle, and not only because I love the mid-century novel (by which I mean the thoughtful character-driven novels of McMurtry, Heller, Highsmith, Roth, Mailer, Salter and others) but because this approach seems so natural to me. But I also love the mid-century departures from this model (Kerouac, Henry Miller) and post-modernists from DeLillo to Acker. (And DeLillo's accomplishment in the 1970s and 1980s is now awe-inspiring to me. He didn't have a model for what he was doing, he really was making up a new way of story-telling.) Not to mention the Latin Americans, including You Know Who.

Having never read a Jeffrey Eugenides novel, I can't say whether it's working for him. Maybe Eugenides is trying to fend off criticism in advance here. Maybe he feels a little bad for not pushing the envelope in his latest work. Without reading it and knowing his work, I can't say.

Summer of Infinite Jest 13 -- up to page 800

Well, after all the mystery, many facts are revealed in an interrogation of the previously unpromising Molly Notkin, the film grad student and friend (and roommate? I forget) of Joelle, by secret agents. Not the same secret agents who are, creepily and comically, in wheelchairs. Among Molly's revelations:

• The title of the magically compelling videotape;
• A confirmation of the previously suggested fact that Joelle stars in it;
• A description of its actual contents;
• A possible explanation for its magical qualities (to wit: lenses)
• Joelle's backstory, including how she came to be among the "deformed."

(There's a whole trope about how the deformed are a special class, and go around wearing veils. Yeah okay sure.)

And then after this, several climactic events at the tennis academy. In other words, the plot is suddenly rocketing forward, at least in comparison to its progress up to page 740. I guess this would cause some readers to expect there is candy at the end, or something. But there's already plenty of plot for me. Really I don't care if the secret agents of various vague nationalities catch up to the magically compelling video. Isn't the whole book a coming-of-age story, or rather multiple coming-of-age stories? Yes, they're coming to a climax, but that's the thing about coming-of-age stories -- they never end satisfactorily, because they're just the beginning of someone's story.

Maybe that analysis would get me a C in English class, but that's how the book strikes me now.

Summer of Infinite Jest 12.1 -- page 740

(The oeuvre of James Incandenza) was amateurish, she'd seen, when Orin had had his brother... lend them some of The Mad Stork's Read-Only copies. Was amateurish the right word? More like the work of a brillian optician and technician who was an amateur at any kind of real communication. Technically gorgeous, the Work, with lighting and angles planned out to the frame. But oddly hollow empty, no sense of dramatic towardness -- no narrative movement toward a real story; no emotional movement toward an audience.

Ha! I get it.

Of course DFW's work does not really meet that description at all. That's more a description of, say, Alain Robbe-Grillet. But this passage is the author saying "Yeah, I know all about your anxiety about narrative, and I can play with it, and I'll continue to do so." And also saying that he has this anxiety about his own work, that he's afraid his technical brilliance will keep people from enjoying it. And also that he knows something about alienation, the gulf between his mentally ill self and others, and anxiety about whether his novels can bridge that gulf where nothing else can.

Later on that page the expression narratively anticonfluential is coined with reference to Incandenza's work. Anticonfluential! I bow in admiration.

Summer of Infinite Jest 12 -- page 726

I'm not cheating. It's Indian Summer in San Francisco, temps in the 80s, a dry, calm and smoggy atmosphere. Street fairs abound.

Page 726 reveals what the reader has been suspecting for at least the last couple hundred pages, that Joelle Van Dyne, aka the Prettiest Girl Of All Time (PGOAT), aka Madame Psychosis of MIT's student radio station, is in fact the person who appears in the mysteriously compelling video. Aka The Entertainment.

We're in the middle of a long section in which the Wheelchair Assassins (whom I don't find nearly as compelling as I think the author did; in my opinion they're a minstrel show) zero in on a copy of the magically compelling videotape at a Boston-area video store. A bunch of bodies are piling up, it's not clear why, when their methodical search finally uncovers the McGuffin. And in a bit of indirect narration, the author explains the W.A.'s tactics of having various people under surveillance, including Hal the tennis prodigy.

In fact, several of the seemingly disparate plot threads are finally being drawn together. Joelle is in Ennet House, down the hill from the tennis academy; she appears in the videotape, which it is now clear is one of the works (perhaps the final work) of Hal's father James Incandenza; a menacing organization is on their trail. And she's in love with Don Gately, who just got royally beaten and shot in an extremely entertaining dust-up. ("Just" meaning a hundred pages ago.)

And I'm kind of sad that after 725 pages of free-ranging exposition a plot has started to raise its head. I was reading an essay on PopMatters, "The Collision of Roadside Picnic and Infinite Jest," where a critic says something I've read in other places, that there is no big payoff to the story in I.J., that the book just sort of stops, like the final episode of "The Sopranos."¹ And I've read that this failure to bring the book to a standard ending is regarded universally as simply one last joke on the part of the author.

Surely if you've read all the way to the end of "Infinite Jest," you're doing so for other reasons than wanting to know what happens at the end. That's why I find the somewhat obvious intrusion of narrative plot annoying. At this point I don't even care if there's a plot; it's like watching early seasons of "Big Brother" when all you're doing is watching the people in the house just being people in a house -- the quality of observation and language alone justify the time and expense of reading.

But I better get a move on, or I'll never finish before the end of Indian Summer.

1. See my comment on this sort of narrative frustration in a post I wrote on The Rumpus, The Limits of Narrative.

Mystery crash in the desert

A weekend roll-over crash in the Mojave Desert led to the discovery of a dead 23-year-old Twentynine Palms man, San Bernardino County coroner's officials say.

The dead man suffered head injuries believed to be unrelated to the wreck, which now has prompted a homicide investigation, according to coroner's officials.

-- story in the Riverside Press-Enterprise

Never seen anything more like a "Law and Order" opening.

EXT. -- DESERT HIGHWAY -- DAWN

A car comes along a desert highway, veering across the yellow line, then finally off the road and overturning several times before coming to rest on its side. Silence as the dust settles. Hold on the car's wheels spinning to a stop.

EXT. -- CRASH SITE -- LATER IN THE DAY

The car from a different angle. The site is now crawling with emergency workers. into the foreground come DETECTIVE LENNY and a SHERIFFS DEPUTY.

DEPUTY

I figure he left the roadway over there, did a header into the wash, and then flipped over about four times til he wound up over here.

RACK FOCUS to the wreck in the BACKGROUND. DETECTIVE ED stands up and waves and shouts.

ED

Lenny! Check this out!

OPPOSITE ANGLE as LENNY and the DEPUTY walk over to the wreck, with ED in the foreground, kneeling with the driver's body which is under a sheet.

ED (lifting sheet slightly)

Looks like head injuries.

LENNY

Yeah, I would have figured that.

ED

Well, unless you see a Louisville Slugger in the wreckage, I don't think it's from the crash.

LENNY

What do you mean?

ED

Something made this reverse Mark McGuire signature on his temple.

LENNY (to the deputy)

Pick up everybody carrying a baseball bat.

The DEPUTY goes off.

LENNY (Shouting after the deputy)

He definitely doesn't play for the Angels!

RUN TITLES.

Life not as exciting as stories, except perhaps for the mentally ill

Most everybody has seen this brief retelling of Kurt Vonnegut explaining narrative arcs and coming to the conclusion that "people think their lives are supposed to be like" those of the characters in stories.

Our lives drifts along with normal things happening. Some ups, some downs, but nothing [that will] go down in history. Nothing so fantastic or terrible that it'll be told for a thousand years. "But because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies," [says Vonnegut,] "we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs! So people pretend there is drama where there is none."

I recalled that lecture when I read this passage in the May 30, 2011 New Yorker about mentally ill people:

If a person goes from being a political martyr to a mental patient in just a few days -- the sign of a successful hospital stay, by most standards -- her life may begin to feel banal and useless. Insight is correlated with fewer hospital re-admissions, better performance at work, and more social contacts, but it is also linked with lower self-esteem and depression.

This also recalls the end of the Albert Books film "The Muse," when Sharon Stone's character, who had presented herself as a magical character with the power to evoke brilliance from blocked writers, is nabbed by the men in white coats. Yes, I guess real life as most people lead it is pretty dull compared to a schizophrenic's identity as a world-saver or a hotly pursued secret agent.

Mystery narratives partake of ritual

"The whodunits we make," says Marlowe Producer-Writer Gene Wang, "are as ritualistic as a bullfight." A veteran of Perry Mason and radio's Thin Man, Wang speaks with authority. "The bullfight parade," he explains, "is, for us, the parade of suspects. The entrance of the torero is the entrance of the detective, the point at which he takes the case. You cannot leave the audience wondering why the detective's clients have not gone to the police. The cape work is when the detective sees his various suspects. The picadors come on, and it's the time of murder. The moment of truth is when the Private Eye says, 'You killed Cock Robin.'"

-- TIME magazine article on TV detective shows, 26 October 1959

He ascribes the longevity of the show to its formulaic plot and format. "It's almost like a ritual. You know there's going to be a body found, and we're going to look for who did it, and then there's going to be some twist at the trial. People tune in. They know what's coming and they like it that way."

-- Law and Order star Jerry Orbach, quoted in the Boston Globe, 4 January 2004

"It's like a ritual," Jerry Orbach is fond of saying of Law and Order, "like the Latin high Mass." Nothing on the show ever changes; every episode of Law and Order is just like every other one. Some are a little better than others, some a little worse, but in the end they're all interchangeable, and that's precisely what makes them so valuable.

-- From a 2003 New York Times article on Law and Order's appeal

Natural conflict

Rossellini even said that you shouldn't write scripts -- only swine write scripts -- that the conflict in a film should simply emerge from the facts. A character from a given place at a given time is confronted by another character from a very different place: and voilá, there exists a natural conflict between them and you start from that. There's no need to invent anything.

-- Francois Truffaut, interviewed in 1984,
just reprinted in the New Yorker

Dept. of Everybody's a critic: Soldiers are impatient with narrative

I had never been to Cape Fear. It was one of the many places in America I had never visited. I had seen the movie, through. Couldn't remember where, exactly. In a tent, somewhere hot, maybe. Black and white, with Gregory Peck having some kind of a major problem with Robert Mitchum. It was good enough entertainment, as I recalled, but fundamentally annoying. There was a lot of jeering from the audience. Robert Mitchum should have gone down early in the first reel. Watching civilians dither around just to spin out a story for ninety minutes had no real appeal for soldiers.

-- from the Lee Child novel The Enemy, in which a military detective is the hero.

Yes, soldiers, those arbiters of what's essential and important in culture. They have no patience for the slow "spinning" of narrative. You got a bad guy, take him out early. Why dither around, indeed. Of course, The Enemy is some 465 pages in trade paperback. Not sure why a military detective would narrate a story at that length when the bad guy is probably evident in the first hundred pages. Waste of space, really.

'All that matters' in a film

The novel [The Shining, by Stephen King] is by no means a serious literary work, but the plot is for the most part extremely well worked out, and for a film that is often all that really matters. ... There is no doubt that a good story has always mattered, and the great novelists have generally built their work around strong plots. But I've never been able to decide whether the plot is just a way of keeping people's attention while you do everything else, or whether the plot is really more important than anything else, perhaps communicating with us on an unconscious level which affects us in the way that myths once did. I think, in some ways, the conventions of realistic fiction and drama may impose serious limitations on a story. For one thing, if you play by the rules and respect the preparation and pace required to establish realism, it takes a lot longer to make a point than it does, say, in fantasy. At the same time, it is possible that this very work that contributes to a story's realism may weaken its grip on the unconscious. Realism is probably the best way to dramatize argument and ideas. Fantasy may deal best with themes which lie primarily in the unconscious. I think the unconscious appeal of a ghost story, for instance, lies in its promise of immortality.

--filmmaker Stanley Kubrick in an interview
commenting on adapting the novel to film

technorati: cinema, Kubrick

Interview with Yiyun Li -- the personal and political

Yesterday I interviewed author Yiyun Li, whose new novel The Vagrants is the best literary novel I've read in a long time. Get used to me mentioning it, because it's one of those books you feel everyone who appreciates great writing should read.

One of the questions I addressed in the interview has to do with her intention in depicting the lives of people living in a provincial Chinese town in 1979, a few years after the close of the Cultural Revolution. She depicts those lives as very grim, filled with brutality and violence. Some of the details on the smaller scale strike one as particularly heartless, as when she talks about a family where the parents, disappointed after having six female children, don't even bother to give names to the youngest three, who are referred to as Little Fourth, Fifth and Sixth. Other details, about the way the government treats political prisoners, are violent in a more physical way -- for example, they stage a "denunciation ceremony" for a political prisoner, and cut her vocal cords before the rally so she can't shout any counter-revolutionary slogans in front of a crowd.

Given this cruel picture, I asked the author if she intended the book to be an indictment of Chinese society, and she answered very forcefully:

I don't have any intention for the novel to be an indictment of anything. That is a big NO. NO. NO. The situation may seem Chinese and specific to this era, but if you look at history, horrible things happen all the time. Brutality and violence happen all the time. On all scales. I can't shy away from that if I am writing a book.... My story happens to be set in China, and the characters happen to be Chinese. But if you read, say, Toni Morrison's novels, would you say she is depicting an unfairly negative picture of America?

I replied, "Certainly negative, but I would not say unfairly so." But there's more to say. Most Americans are secure enough in their views of their country that they don't object to negative, yet fair, criticism. I don't think China is yet secure enough in its reputation to feel the same way. You'll remember how sensitive they were last year to criticism of their human rights record, and how they took pains to ensure that the picture of China -- during the Olympics, at least -- was a positive one.

Regardless of her intention, I wouldn't be surprised if some people see Li's book as an indictment of Chinese society. But she went on to say:

I think that is a very narrow way of looking at literature... a very soviet, socialist view of how literature should represent certain things. I feel that as a writer the only people I feel responsible to are my characters. And I would need to treat them very fairly.

Of course, that's the right approach for any artist to take. But what strikes me is that, as far as the content of her book is concerned, she feels her first allegiance is not to either the country of her birth or her adopted one -- one she had to struggle to stay in, as I mentioned yesterday -- but to her book's characters.

I admire that very much, and I found much else to admire in the book itself, as I state in the interview.

technorati: writers, Yiyun Li, China

Mystery vs. thriller vs. farce

The detective story is about solving the problem, getting to the center of the labyrinth and restoring some sort of order. The crime story is about chain reaction, about events and the ripples that move outward from them. The detective story demands greater story coherence; crime stories are more about style and energy. Chandler, who wrote mysteries, made story mistakes, and we forgive him what we wouldn't countenance for a second in Agatha Christie because his style was just so utterly, joyfully, mind-blowingly wonderful. ... Story works best when it just happens on the page. At the same we, as readers, crave shock and event. From the writer's point of view, the big and surprising twist creates a huge amount of energy -- and always, always problems later. Novels, even novellas written to order for Playboy, are written over time and tend not to be seamless. Perhaps this is for the best -- it's another way in which they can reflect the mess of life.

From the Jacket Copy book blog on the LA Times site.

(Not sure what he's referring to when he mentions "novellas written for Playboy." Do they publish serial novellas?)

This is like something Cris and I were discussing earlier this year. I wrote in my notes for my current novel:

Thrillers and farces, she said, work by ratcheting up tension, and by setting up a precarious situation and then setting everyone loose. Everyone has a goal, usually conflicting, and as they all try to fulfill their goals, things get more and more chaotic whether it's a thriller or a farce. People feel compelled to thrust themselves into a situation, thus destabilizing both the new situation and making it impossible for them to return to their previous state. She used the word "pressure" to describe this effect: the characters' character traits create "internal pressure" that compels them to do these things. Add the other characters and the setting and you have the ingredients of a farce, or a thriller if the characters' goals are sinister enough.
Situation comedy, she went on, works a different way: by setting up what she called traps for the characters. She referred to a film we saw part of on TV, "The 40 Year Old Virgin," in which the characters suffer a series of situational setbacks -- for example, when Steve Carrel and Catherine Keener first try to have sex, her teenage daughter bursts in on them. ... She also said something that was very pithy, if slightly unrelated: In a mystery, the story is resolved when the crime is solved. In a thriller, the mystery may be solved without a resolution to the story.

technorati: narrative, writing technique, novel writing

Coppola enters his sage period

From an interview with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola in the December-January Bookforum:

One of the most wonderful things about being a filmmaker is doing the research. When I made The Godfather I got a number of books about the Five Families and how they came about and about the families before that. Knowledge is a string that keeps going back and back. ... I've always felt that when you're making a movie, you're essentially asking a question. And when you're done, the film you have is the answer.

technorati: narrative, Francis Ford Coppola, filmmaking

237 reasons why

The New York Times tells of a University of Texas study of reasons why people have sex. Four hundred forty-four Texas students and hangers-on came up with a total of 237 different reasons why they have sex; 1500 others were then asked to list how much each reason applied to them. Here's the whole list (MS Word document at the utexas.edu server), but among the reasons are:

Someone dared me.

I wanted to make the person love me.

My friends pressured me into it.

I wanted to capture someone else's mate.

I was slumming.

The longer you read the list, the more it starts to sound like those lists of "classic plots" which are supposed to contain the boiled-down themes of every story, play and film ever written. There are 36 of them, or seven, or perhaps twenty. Things like:

Rivalry of kinsmen

Murderous adultery

Madness

Fatal imprudence

Involuntary crimes of love (example: discovery that one has married one's mother, sister, etc.)

Personally my main reasons for having sex are:

It feels great

I'm fascinated with the other person's responses

I like and feel comfortable with my persona in bed

Now let's compare with the list. Let's see... Those are reasons 15, 41 (sort of), and 95 (sort of). Of course, many of the other reasons have applied at different times.

I think my favorite reason from the list is "The person was famous and I wanted to be able to say I had sex with him/her." Not because it applies, but because it's really funny. I had sex with a slightly famous person once, not for that reason, but because I was curious whether the sexual persona she had displayed in her writing was anything like her real sexual self (reason 41). It was.