Questioning the Idea of Narrative

At the moment, I can’t help but circling a rather melancholy statement from Joan Didion: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live... We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of narrative upon disparate image, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience." Didion goes on to discuss her crisis of identity in the White Album, and it seems that her crisis is in some ways related to the themes that we’ve been working with in this class. Digital media disrupts the stories we have been telling ourselves about narrative and the primacy of print; this poses some challenging questions. How will communication and the industry surrounding it change in the new digital disorder? What relationship will our culture have to the authoritative formation of meaning in this new disorder, and how will this affect our ways of knowing? Finally how will our culture come to view narrative: as unified and self-contained, or as existing within a larger web of associations? The readings for this week were extremely interesting, and they caused me to start considering some of these questions. (Disclaimer: I never actually got around to answers.)

I’ll start with Bolton, who I largely agreed with and who seems to have made two important points. First, Bolton argues that we are in the late age of print and quotes Frederic Jameson to suggest that this “conveys… the sense that something has changed, that things are different, that we have gone through a transformation of the life world.” Second, Bolton discusses how our relationship--to print in particular, but also to narrative in general—has been culturally arranged and therefore shifts over time. The novel has changed since Don Quixote and the cultural role of story-telling has changed since Beowulf. This doesn’t seem like it’s all that debatable, but I’d be curious to hear what other people think.

Like Bolton, I nonetheless do feel that it’s uncertain what forms writing, story-telling, and meaning-formation will take in the new multi-modal environment. This is where Manovich and Vertov become interesting. Manovich proposed to “situate new media in relation to a number of other areas of culture, both past and present” (13). In other words, to consider the complex manner in which e-media is influenced by and influences the world of which it is a part. To go back to Didion, we tell ourselves stories about telling stories, and Manovich seems to propose that these narratives we tell ourselves are in a state of flux and disruption. Since I’ve only read his introduction, I don’t feel like I should really grapple with Manovich’s ideas, but I’m at least looking forward to reading the rest of his book. (… I’m probably going to regret having said this).

Tom suggested we watch The Man With the Movie Camera because Manovich refers back to him quite a bit. I’m guessing I was the only person dopey enough to become excited at the prospect of watching some obscure Russian film from 1929, but as I watched Vertov I realized there are slightly more digestible film-makers who have dealt with similar themes. As a sort of The Man With the Movie Camera to frame the rest of my discussion, I wanted to consider this short clip from the film Baraka:

(If the video doesn't work, you can also access it here.)

What’s interesting here—and what seemed interesting about The Man With the Movie Camera—is that both films consider the influence of technology on our way of being, while also challenging the conventional unities of narrative in film. In this clip from Baraka, the arguments being made that the homogenizing force of industrialization has parallels in the structure of our everyday lives and our relationship toward other living creatures. The broader point seems to be that shifts in technology, such as the advent of e-media, can cause broader shifts in our ways of knowing and being. Yet at the same time, the film Baraka also makes a point about the presentation of narrative, through its' organization. In traditional film, narrative is presented to the viewer as relatively self-contained, neat, and tidy. But in both Baraka and The Man With the Movie Camera, the viewer is invited to provide their own narratives, their own associations, through their reflections on the images being presented. In Baraka, meaning isn’t quite packaged for the viewer—it is instead left for the viewer to decipher. This shift in thinking about narrative seems to point toward the web itself, which seems to me like a giant playground for free-association.

So to actually get to something like my point… the stories we’ve been telling ourselves—about the value of print, the nature of authority, and the formation of meaning—are in a state of flux. Our readings seem to speak toward this. Though I think it’s entirely possible to make too much of this change, I nonetheless feel that there’s a real danger in dismissing the internet as just another mode of communication. I have no idea what to make of all the new digital miscellany. But I think it's possible that-- because we've been submerged in it-- we occasionally underestimate the value of the internet as a playground. It at least has the potential to shift the way people approach the value of narrative, especially as more and more people become involved in posting and publishing. I'm looking forward to delving in to the particulars of how this works as the semester goes on.