The Politics of Narrative →
John Reed’s barrage in The Rumpus is far-ranging and unsparing of establishment and alternative alike. He’s incisive—and for fiction writers, practical—on theories of narrative:
Max Brand (Frederick Schiller Faust), a prolific pulp western writer of the 1920s and 30s, maintained that there were two types of stories: coming home, or leaving home. The assertion neatly correlates to the classical definition of comedy and tragedy, as well as a content-first v. structure-first division of the arts. The coming home story (usually comedic or “feel good”): the cowboy accepts and/or is accepted by society. The leaving home story (usually tragic or “dark”): the cowboy rejects and/or is rejected by society. Structure-first stories, i.e. coming home, tend to be about assimilation, while content-first stories, i.e. leaving home, tend toward dissent.
But he’s after much bigger game:
In the present-day United States, art exists within authorized cultural parameters—there is very little in the way of the “degenerate art” that the Nazis, for example, saw fit to stamp out. The testing of cultural parameters, contraction and expansion, is ongoing, but anything wildly obstreperous is relegated to obscurity, or at best, to an object of marginal or local curiosity. In comparison to the United States of the 60s, we are pitifully apathetic and square, though perhaps we should be relieved that degeneracy is no longer a presumption of radicalism, given what drugs did to the decade of peace and love. As London riots, as Wall Street is occupied, news outlets chorus conservative refrains: the actions aren’t political in nature—the ranks are filled by thugs and criminals, or uninformed flakoids who can’t muster a demand. In the 70s, the U.S. media resorted to such surmises of counterculture, effectively diffusing the radical agenda. Today, however, whether or not people believe that the London rioters are thugs and criminals, that the Wall Street rioters are without impetus, there’s no indication that thugs or flakoids are the foundation of alternative thinking. There are way too many of us, and we’re not just cultural dropouts.
His concluding paragraph seems at once to me overreaching and aiming too low, but the observations that get him there are bracing and well-taken.
