I've been struggling with the idea of a new blog for some time now. I have a blog, a screenwriting blog, which does what it's supposed to do. I talk about writing. I get a chance to teach, or rather to try out ways of teaching that I'll use in the classroom or with my own students and consultees.
I have a strange feeling that something new is going on with narrative. It's leaping out of the place it's been for centuries. I have no way of proving this. I am ready to be proved wrong, or to stumble across the proof as I scribble thoughts here. I need the chance to be wrong. I need to find others who think this way.
What is it I'm talking about? I'm talking about how McCain's defeat can be ascribed to some bad storytelling. I'm talking about how Obama seemed to rise as a more effective antipode to Bush than Hillary Clinton. I'm talking about Hamas and Israel firing volleys at each other on youtube. I'm seeing story rise up in a new way. I can't put my finger on it. Maybe you can help.
The Russian Symbolists of the early twentieth century foresaw the Russian Revolution of 1917. It's hard not to read Blok's poem "The Twelve" without feeling that. Andrei Bely, author of the monumental novel Petersburg, saw all life and history as a cycle. We move toward structure until it's crystalline, unchangeable, unmovable. Then it shatters into pure energy. You can see this same idea in numerous other thinkers and writers, of course. Bely and Blok have particular resonance for me because I studied and worked in the former Soviet Union just before and after it collapsed. There was something in the air for a few years before. Something I couldn't put my finger on. Something subtler and quieter than glasnost or hunger. Something, well.. read Blok. I feel that same something in 2009 in the United States. Somehow our energy is bound up in structures that don't work. And we're craving and creating innumerable ways of tearing down those structures.
My mother recently gave me an account my grandfather wrote of his experiences in the Battle of the Somme, in World War I France. (He was on the English side). I happened to be reading accounts of the Western Front battles at the same time. The Western Front was frozen for years. Bodies piled up as the line would move back and forth a few hundred meters. It was as hellish a place and time as you can imagine. Verdun, in particular caught my attention. The Germans knew that the French drive for glory would cause them to throw anything and everyone they had against them. They set up a position that the French could not breach, but would die trying. It was nicknamed 'the sausage machine'. Nearly 700,000 soldiers died there.
My grandfather's report is somewhat different. He was a dispatch rider for his brigade. When communication was lost, he was sent back to the British HQ in Amiens to get orders. When he got there, British HQ was nowhere to be found. He headed back to the unit, but encountered a German unit headed toward the road he'd followed in. He took back roads. His account is almost breezy -- much like my grandfather was to the end. He was sure he was getting close when he found a wounded Australian soldier waiting by a road, all alone. The soldier told him he was on the wrong side of the line. He'd accidentally broken through, as it were. He hightailed in back to Amiens. He eventually found the remnants of his own unit. And then, back to the trenches, where he stayed until the Americans showed up.
The war was fought face to face, head to head. That's how war worked. You didn't go around. You sat in the trenches. War was binary. It's was a 19th century war fought with 20th century weapons. It's hard even to imagine that mindset now.
I suspect our culture's in a similar situation. It's a 20th century battle fought with 21st century tools. We're stuck with the polar extremes of reason and ideology. We're starting to implement narrative as a way to, say, win a presidential campaign or root out Hamas.
We've learned to orchestrate narrative. We've brought narrative into the world in a new way. I'm thinking that we can now learn to listen to narrative actively. I'm thinking we can learn to hear what's happening just below the radar.
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