Apropos of Deborah Pearson’s article we put up on Exeunt yesterday - I’ve been wondering whether this is any space for meaning beyond the reach of narrative, and what is the function of non-narrative art.
I’ve always bought Pierce and Saussure’s contention that meaning is difference - that meaning arises in the gaps. And now it seems to me, that in these gaps lies the seed from which narrative flowers - if to signify is to relate one thing to another, if the sign is always what it is and what it isn’t, if it is laid out in a systemic chain - narrative, there, inescapably woven into the core of meaning.
To leave this then, is to the leave the symbolic, to become Kristeva’s “abject”, as good a definition of depression, or nothingness, as I’ve ever come across.
I started thinking, and narrative seemed applicable in so many places. Those who subscribe to the dialectic, those Great Men of force, have a narrative move encoded at the Cthonic heart of the universe. There is an Existential reliance on narrative, being always as becoming, the story of how we are. I recalled Frank Kermode linking narrative to death, and the “narrative turn” in the humanities. Lyotard and his death of the grand story. I remembered a lecture I once heard a lecture by a couple of NY English professors arguing for emotion as a narrative event. Coming across an advert for narrative therapy on gumtree.
I thought about the stories that define my life, as a man, as a boy, a son, a brother, a lover, an outsider, an insider - between Propp and social interactionism all these roles had their narratives into which I would schematise experience. Sometimes retroactively, searching to accommodate or deflect an unwanted feeling. Sometimes as if it was the form my will took, my action poured into these containers.
So if narrative is implicated in being, history, time and emotion, what then of non-narrative art? How do you interpret the gesture that resists interpretation? What is it that non-narrative art provides, or can possibly hope to achieve? Is its meaning in fact non-meaning? Are we all so many Prufrocks, still mourning the loss of sense? The bourgeois, still shocked by a dadaist urinating on a lamp-post?
Andrew Haydon turned on to An Introduction to Speed Reading by Chris Goode, an Imagist, non-narrative poem and performance piece.
“Make your rucking Hispanic pool-cleaner move the book while you keep your eyes absolutely still as if you were in some kind of academic catatonia or waking lifestyle narcosis”.
There’s an interesting comparison here, between this and a moment in sociology, sometime in the 90s after 20 years of identity politics and three times that of Curtis’s Century of the Self, when the Self came to prominence as a theme.
Stevi Jackson, Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens amongst others, saw the building blocks of the self as narrative positions, buying the ‘narrated life’ (bios-graphie) and importing it into their definition of modernity.
Giddens set upon lifestyle journalism and self-help books, positioning them as the texts of the age, building a sort of mediatised compound person, wherein the actor of modernity was reflexively organising their lives around available narratives, where our traditional ancestors just stuck to Gods, crops, winds and Nobles.
Which all sounds like commonsense, until, what begins to form in the afterthoughts of the page, is some sort of Frankenstein’s monster. A monster which bears an uncanny resemblance to the type of person addressed in self-help books. If Shelley invoked some pure truth of spirit, Giddens was too busy reading the manual. It was a bit like commissioning a documentary on Hollyoaks and recreating Hollyoaks shot for shot. Like reviewing a play by writing it out.
In attempting to describe, taking this literature as determining of ourselves, Giddens had produced a representation that was closed off. Here was a reflexivity devoid of critical reasoning. Where a self-help narrative was the same as a territorial one in Pinter, or one of inaction in Hamlet. Wherein the text could show us nothing but a clean, unified self.
“Hollyoaks is Hollyoaks” was a critical failure.
I think this is where non-narrative art steps in. Not to defy meaning, to throw us back onto the absurd, but on the contrary to open up the text to its mutual constitution with the audience, to allow us agency in following our own narratives.
Much better than the question, “how can we understand people through these texts?”, is the question Goode asks, “what relationship do we have these texts”? Here Goode does the work of the artist, critic and critical sociologist; looking at speed reading as a means of acquiring knowledge, to what ends, as a symptom, as an epistemic tactic, as an interpretive act.
He discursively takes on narrative linearity, leaving us with impressions, small narratives, which jostle and eclipse one another, building a picture, interested, condemning, contradictory - always polysemic, never foreclosing the subject position.
You don’t need to escape narrative. In the end perhaps it’s enough just to know that speed-reading and self-help books can be made to yield different stories.
