<< Poetry Under Attack | Front Page | Literary Paris >>
Thursday, April 28, 2005
Indirect Being
I just watched P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia. I thought it was pretty darn good. A genre question. The several-stories-intersecting-story is obviously a sort of story. Does this sub-genre have an accepted name or do you just call it an Altman-thingy, or an ‘it’s like Pulp Fiction‘ story? Or what? (I’ll bet it has a name.) It’s fairly definable: 4+ sub-plots, each with 2+ characters; all given approximately = dramatic/thematic/narrative weight (none is dominant); each sub-plot intersects with 1+ other, and all sub-plots intersect with every other in no more than 2 steps. This structure seems comparatively recent in origin. What are the pre-Nashville precedents? Is it indigenous to film? There are obvious reasons why it works in film. The camera can pass the eyeball from story to story very economically. You can provide the audience with a rich sense of the space of the action by weaving the threads together. But novelists are clever people, too. Did the novel get here first? (I have an itch in my toe that says I am forgetting something obvious.) The sub-genre has obvious connections with lots of older genres: reliance on coincidence makes a connection with picaresque and comedy. But it has tragic elements. Screwball tragedy. Tragedy might require a sense of fate, rather than accident. Tragedy should flow from character. But you finesse that by making it your fate - your character - to have accidents. Everyone is doomed to step on everyone else’s toes. This is a view of the human condition. Anderson plays with this ambiguity well: the more sheer the accident, the more it looks like no accident at all but a Portent, Sign or other means by which fate outwardly accessorizes; scuba diver in tree; rain of frogs. What does it mean? (Did you like the scene in which everyone is lip synching the Aimee Mann pop song in synch? “By now you know/It’s not going to stop/ It’s not going to stop/ It’s not going to stop/’Til you wise up” That was a risky thing, converting the cast into chorus for 3 minutes. If the film wasn’t working well at that point, it would have snapped in two. I think it worked.) The parallel stories make for a pathos like that of intergenerational tales, where similar things happen to different people over time. You just play the theme and variations across space. There is another thematic element (call it what you like): the ‘well, how did we get here?’ pathos of not being able to see either end of any of the causal chains of human interaction. This isn’t just a matter of accidentally killing dad at the crossroads. It’s a bit more modern. I’m reading Georg Simmel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Here’s the first paragraph of the book:
It is a paradox that all higher cultures of our type are structured so that the more they evolve the more we are forced, in order to reach our goals, to proceed along increasingly long and difficult paths, filled with stops and curves. Man is the indirect being and becomes more so the higher his cultural development. The will of animals and of uncultured humans reaches its goal, if that will is successful, in, so to speak, a straight line, that is, by simply reaching out or by using a small number of simple devices: the order of means and ends is easily observable. This simple triad of desire-means-end is excluded by the increasing multiplicity and complexity of higher life. Now the complex of means is itself turned into a multiplicity in which the most important means are constituted by other means and these again by others. So, in the practical life of our mature cultures our pursuits take on the character of chains, the coils of which cannot be grasped in a single vision.
Hence the appropriateness of the contrast between the hapless, aging William Macy quiz kid and Tom Cruise’s ‘seduce and destroy’ inspirational sessions. Macy is stuffed with useless, disconnected knowledge. “I used to be smart, but now I’m stupid.” He can’t make connections. “I’ve got a lot of love to give. I just don’t know where to put it.” Or whatever he says. Cruise is striving to get back to good old animal desire-means-ends.
This might make the theme sound peculiarly modern. (You might note Simmel’s similarity to Weber, due to their shared Nietzschean heritage; you might quote a few bits about disenchantment.) But Simmel sees ‘modernity’, in this sense - ‘mature’ culture - stretching back to “Greco-Roman culture, specifically at the outset of the Christian era. At that time the systems of living had become so complicated, the units of acting and thinking so complex, and the interests and movements of life so manifold and dependent on so many conditions ...” So it’s a little unclear why we had to wait so long for Robert Altman & co. I’m probably just not thinking straight. (It’s not like I’m saying that four stories interlocked is the greatest thing ever, and everyone ought to do it. But it is distinctive. And, yes, I did notice the film is about forgiveness, and the need for forgiveness, not about the evils of instrumental reason or anything like that. The fittingness of the forgiveness theme fits with what I’m saying, although rather loosely.)
Comments
Getting here first? When I hear “multi-threaded”, I reach for my Browning. The Ring and the Book.
Did the novel get here first?
“As i lay dying”? Though it’s more of a concentric thing, iirc.
"I have an itch in my toe that says I am forgetting something obvious.”
Soap opera?
I vote for broke in two on the chorus seen myself. It’s no Boogie Nights, a work of genius.
btw, on the Simmel tip, I think Thomas Haskell calls this the definitive problem of modern intellectual life. though exactly where he says it, I can’t remember.
I would start even earlier with the novel: Tom Jones, much of Dickens, Middlemarch.
I would just call it “multiple narratives.” I’m not sure it has another name. Specifically in film, I’d say it goes back at least to Rules of the Game. (A very Altmanesque film, to be ananchronistic.)
One analogue (if not a direct ancestor) is medieval romance (and Renaissance relatives thereof, like Orlando Furioso and The Faerie Queene). The technical term for the interleaving of narratives is “entrelacement.” Ariosto’s use of entrelacement caused a big debate in sixteenth-century Italy. It is interesting that similar practices seem slightly scandalous and transgressive today, over three centuries later. Perhaps such multi-stranded, multi-episode narrative does push against some fundamental limits of our capacity to process narrative, which is more or less what Aristotle suggested when he said that epic should imitate a single action.
I don’t thing that As I Lay Dying, Tom Jones, Dickens, or Middlemarch are quite the same thing as John describes. Faulkner’s characters are in the same story, not parallel stories, and while Tom Jones, Dickens, and Middlemarch have multiple narratives, those narratives are not equal. Does anyone doubt that Tom Jones and Dorothea Brooks are the respective protagonists? Even in Dickens, there is usually one central story/set of characters.
At least, Dickens and soap operas point us to one of the suspects behind interlacing : plain end of chapter/sequence suspense (maybe channeling Cpt Obvious here).
Another may be simple roughness at the edges, for the medieval things. Many things to say, why bother refining an artificial continuity?
But it’s hard to point the uses of interlacing-as-a-way-to-express something-that-would-be-expressed-only-by-interlacing, and as not a response to some constraint or a simple narrative trick.
Note for later : call arioste and ask him what precisely he meant with the funny narration, if he meant anything special.
For the movies, thinking about Ophuls’ “la ronde”...
How about Dubliners or Winesburg, Ohio?
I have a question regarding Altman. Was Nashville his first film that relied heavily on the interlacing technique? It’s been ages since I saw McCabe and Mrs. Miller - how does that compare?
Damn your black heart, John Holbo --now I’m going to have to reread 334, Manhattan Transfer, and Last Exit to Brooklyn to see whether they meet the qualifications!
Speaking of Dos Passos, I think the USA Trilogy would certainly seem to fit the bill. I had forgotten about him.
definitely USA
In film, the Saragossa Manuscript sort of does that.
Blah beat me to the short story cycle, but I think he’s correct: Winesburg, Ohio could easily be P.T. Anderson’s next project, so long as he doesn’t mind his camera pining over unusual hands. (Aside: Outside of Winesburg, Ohio, I can think of only one novel as obsessed with the state of its characters’ hands, and that’s West’s The Day of the Locust. If I heard anymore about Homer Simpson’s hands I would’ve...)
If considered as a whole, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels, novellas, and short stories could work. Sure, Sutpen’s not building at the exact same time they’re hunting Christmas, but grant a Tarentino a little creative license and watch the sparks fly, slaves die and citizens castrated. Picture the preview: an establishing shot, a moon’s eye view slowly zooms to capture the U.S., the South, Mississippi, a fence straddled by a handsome young stud; a voice, low, masculine, with a slight accent, says “Deep in the South you thought you knew, young Benjamin Compson will become a man...”
Or not, as the case may be.
I don’t think the comparisons to the short story cycle quite capture what John’s getting at. (And just in passing, can we say that the story cycle is one of the most pernicious inventions of modern times? Yeah, Dubliners is great. But it launched a million MFA theses.)
The premise of Winesburg in particular is the smallness of the world and the smallness of the lives it describes. Everyone can be known by our central figure, the yearning adolescent. (What’s his name, George?) And there’s no role to be played therefore by coincidence. What’s at issue isn’t the vastness of the metropolis and the endless chains of metropolitan causation that Simmel cares about. It’s all about repressive community. Faulkner is different, of course, but a similar role is played by history in those stories. There’s little coincidence in his world. What happens really is like running into your father at the crossroads. Everything’s fated.
I think Josh is right that USA is the nearest comparison. His Newsreel plays something like the role that Anderson’s quiz show does--the banal community of pop culture. And the lack of narrative arc to his character’s stories and their uniform petty misery, as well as his ambition to span the whole of urban society, is a little like Anderson’s. They also share--don’t they?--the fact that their social geography, vast as it aspires to be, doesn’t reach minorities or the working class?
Too bad Dos Passos’s novels are more interesting to talk about as literary experiments than they are to read. But I feel that way about Magnolia too. Boogie Nights is the great one.
it has names - “braided narrative” or “multiple protagonist narrative”. These are no more enlightening than any name that’s been offered so far - but the first especially is fairly generally used thanks largely to David Bordwell.
(And just in passing, can we say that the story cycle is one of the most pernicious inventions of modern times? Yeah, Dubliners is great. But it launched a million MFA theses.)
I wouldn’t limit it to MFA theses. A communitarian I know wrote an awful thesis on the short story cycle and “the communitarian polis.” Dreadful.
The premise of Winesburg in particular is the smallness of the world and the smallness of the lives it describes.
I suppose this is how I see Magnolia working as well. It’s not coincidence, for P.T. Anderson, it’s fate. A different fate than the one driving Winesburg, Ohio, but fate nonetheless. I should admit that Magnolia struck me as being profoundly contrived, its “coincidences” the predictable detritus of a mind inclined to conspiracy theory. I’d prefer a film in which the characters are related entirely by virtue of being in the same movie. (A filmed version of McEwan’s Saturday, perhaps? I’ve only read the excerpts in The New Yorker, but from what I gather from the reviews, everyone’s connected by a parade.) Then the juxtapositions would be made meaningful by the viewers instead of being forced upon them by the director.
And the lack of narrative arc to his character’s stories and their uniform petty misery, as well as his ambition to span the whole of urban society, is a little like Anderson’s. They also share--don’t they?--the fact that their social geography, vast as it aspires to be, doesn’t reach minorities or the working class?
Wait, Dos Passos’ or Anderson’s? I’m assuming Anderson, but a number of his characters are working class (or belong to the “willfully lower class children of affluent parents” class).
Speak for yourself, Sean. I would much rather read the USA Trilogy than talk about it. I found it thrilling to read those books.
Aside from the inspired casting of Reynolds and “Sister Christian,” I found it tedious. And how do the biblecodisms within Magnolia affect our viewing?
Another antecedent might be someone like O. Henry. the metropolis, tales of the city, moments of grace. The narratalogical difference clearly being that Magnolia welds the individual tales together, and where the joins are, is also where the epiphanies are. It makes sense, really, in the Los Angeles setting, because the only possible connections between disparate elements in a city that size are random ones, not inevitable.
The song scene is beautiful, all the more so because it takes such a big chance.
The USA Trilogy certainly does contain working class characters, notably Joe Williams, Mac, and Ben Compton. Eugene Debs too.
Doctorow’s Ragtime is another fictional work with a similar technique.
Well I am speaking for myself, of course, Blah. But really does the industrial working class make a serious appearance in those novels? Debs and Compton appear as union organizers, and Debs is one of the bios not one of the main characters. Joe disappears pretty quickly, no? Mac is a resonant but minor figure. There’s Gus, met by Mary French in Pittsburgh. But he’s not one of the recurrent characters. The big emphasis (Dick Savage, Eleanor, Charlie Anderson, Eveline, Mary, etc.) is on what Robert Reich would call symbolic manipulators.
I wish this was my obversation, but I’m stealing from Michael Denning’s account. (And he adores Dos Passos.) I think Denning is right to suggest that Dos Passos’s major concern is with the trials of the writer-as-worker and (though Denning doesn’t emphasize this, I believe) that in this way DP’s framework is more Veblenian than Marxist. Denning has a good term for those rare moments when the immigrant working class and racial minorities crop up in the text (as in the reference to wop joints and dago red) and the reeling consternation it sometimes calls forth in the central characters. He calls it the proletarian sublime. That seems right to me.
I think Anderson is similar. His concern is with the sorrows and desperation of the white middle class world. No sin there. It’s just a social landscape that has a frame.
p.s., Cephalous’s comment about how a number of Anderson’s characters belong to the “willfully lower class children of affluent parents” class gets exactly one of the similarities to Dos Passos, I think. The pathos here is of middle-class bohemianism and/or declining status. Fear of/thrill in falling.
I had heard that “Bridge at San Luis Rey” was a primal example. For whatever he is worth, Philip K. Dick used it in much of his best work.
Literary modernism from the first was staked on the chance encounter. Things got interesting and novelistic when author’s decided to represent the encounter from both sides (or all sides).
Line running from Baudelaire’s “A une passante” - poem about a woman emerging out of and disappearing back into a urban crowd, still romantically solipcistic (look it up - it’s fantastic) - toward “high modernism” and the chance encounters in:
Mrs. Dalloway. Clarissa/Septimus and others. The two strands brought together as or more strangely than even Magnolia. And of course, per Acephalous’s comment above, this is where McEwan’s new Saturday comes from.
And Ulysses - staked on a chance encounter between Stephen and Bloom. (With lots of other chance encounters along the way - my personal fav: Nausicaa, an example of “love at a distance: Bloomism” as Nabokov labelled it.
And of course another strand of this story runs back to Flaubert’s montage sequence, the Comice Agricoles in Madame Bovary, when Emma and Rodolphe’s love talk runs against the county fair. Not yet of course full “multiple narrative” the way you’re seeing it in Magnolia, but it’s the start, the formal precondition…
cultrev,
I disappointed at your civil tone and willingness to contribute to the conversation. You have a reputation to maintain, you know, and these productive encounters do dirt to the irrefragable fact of it. That said, I would’ve brought up Ulysses, but after my earlier comment on what became, to my mind, the “Lacanian thread,” I decided not to paint myself into a corner.
That said, I think we’re ignoring the (admittedly minor*) Altman film that best captures the point; namely, Short Cuts, in which Altman created from a set of unrelated Raymond Carver short stories the very narrative scheme (whatever one chooses to call it) structuring Magnolia. (Or maybe I wanted to top McCann’s MFA Helen with Carver. Or should this be a separate thread? “Tonight on the 11 o’clock Valve: Is the short story cycle more of a threat to the quality of MFA prose than Raymond Carver?")
*I hesitate to label a work in which Tom Waits participates “minor,” but it pales in comparison to the original “let’s have lots of characters and base the plot, loosely, on a singer-songwriter’s work,” McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
Jonathan, I only know how to solve the biblecodism elements of the film because I cheated and looked online. The woman at “What Do Kids Know?” holds up a card: Exodus 8:2. We duly consult and read: “And if thou refuse to let them go, behold, I will smite all thy borders with frogs.” This is funny because it’s about the need for release from bondage - not chains of slavery but of complicated relations to other people. As Simmel writes (see above): “our pursuits take on the character of chains.” But it’s also a joke about how the poor kid really needs to pee and no one will let him go. (I think.) Biblecodism is fine in my book so long as it verges on high-toned potty humor. I am also willing to consider other varieties on a case-by-case basis.
If you expand the idea from short stories to novels- Balzac, maybe?
I thought of interlace, too; but I’m not sure.. Isn’t one of the threads usually privileged in some way (main line of the story), even if allocation in terms of space is equal?
Dan et al., don’t forget about Griffith’s Intolerance (1916). This could arguably be the first film which intertwines multiple parallel stories and does it across multiple centuries to boot!
Minorities in Dos Passos? I always saw the members of NYC gay culture presented as a minority. What I’m interested in, though, is Bob McManus’ reference to some of PKD’s “best work.” There’s The Man in the High Castle, a brilliant example of what we’re discussing; but that’s the only Dick I can think of that fits the bill.
Altman’s multi-threaded narrative derives from a movie tradition that goes back at least as far as Grand Hotel and the disaster picture. (And, as others have pointed out, it’s been a novelistic tradition for much longer. Have you read The Pickwick Papers lately?) The innovation of Altman’s M*A*S*H-and-after work was to combine that tricky structure with the relaxed, semi-improvisatory feel and overlapping dialog of Howard Hawks’s best work. But (as Daniel Green wrote) Renoir could be said to have anticpated even that.
Thanks for all the comments. Let me just say that I meant to emphasize not just the multi-threaded narrative - which obviously has many antecedents - but the no-main-thread narrative. There should be no main character, or main character group. The likes of Pickwick and Tom Jones are close ancestors, but not cases of what I am discussing. Winesburg is close but there is a hub. Likewise for disaster movies and ‘one event’ movies. A. Cephalous mentions “Short Cuts”. I should have mentioned that one. It’s what I really meant by Altman-type thing. “Grand Hotel” sounds about right. I haven’t seen it.
The classic disaster movie archetype also concerns multiple groups of protagonists, generally dealing with different aspects of the same event which binds them together. Oftentimes, the groups do not meet or know eachother, and share nothign in common except for suffering the same event. The only question is whether that event (earthquake, sinking ship, burning building, alien invasion, etc.) counts as that wieght of coincidence, or whether we will deem it enough of a plot-dominant force to out al the characters in what is basically the same story, rather than intersecting stories.
Assuming the Aristotle mentioned above is not a comment on the limits of our ability to process, but a comment on the limit of our ability to proecess lessons or knowledge through narrative, say a purposeful narrative, then perhaps this movie succeeds on the strength of the absurd and sheds some light on what that might mean in other contexts. It’s not absurd that frogs should train from the sky, but that such an event should link all these people and contrbute to a lesson on the importance of forgiveness. But it has been a long time since I saw that movie…