"realism" = perception

In Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf describes the dilemma of Charles Steele, who’s painting a still-life portrait: a cloud drifts into view, Mrs. Flanders’s sons run around the beach, she grows upset about the letter she’s writing, and she won’t stop moving. If Charles instructs Mrs. Flanders to stop moving, he’s altering the world in order for it to match what he wants to paint, rather than shaping his painting to reflect what’s actually occurring in the world.

There’s no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.

There is properly no history, no biography.

narrative-->modernism-->reality show

Reality is messy, it doesn't fit a neat, compelling narrative. As art gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more true to reality, it breaks into fragments. Our lives aren't prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality-based art, underprocessed, underproduced, splinters and explodes. An unfiltered documentary is fragmented, its meaning and purpose ambigious, ambivalent.

In contrast, memoir is constructed, because it's based on memory. Narrative is like memory. It is unreliable, constructed to create a certain effect.

How can we enjoy memoirs, believing them to be true, when nothing, as everyone knows, is so unreliable as memory? Many memoirs make a virtue of seeming unadorned, unvarnished, but the first and most unforgettable thing we learn about memory is that it's fallible. Memories, we now know, can be buried, lost, blocked, repressed, even recovered. We remember what suits us, and there's almost no limit to what we can forget. Only those who keep faithful diaries will know what they were doing at this time, on this day, a year ago. The rest of us recall only the most intense moments, and even these tend to have been mythologized by repetition into well-wrought chapters in the story of our lives. To this extent, memoirs really can claim to be modern novels, all the way down to the presence of an unreliable narrator.

Memoir is a construct used by publishers to niche-market a genre between fact and fiction; an attempt to close in on its twin sister, the reality-show.

People in the 19th century started to get sick of narrative with all of its refined literary and plot devices. Modernism was the shift back to simplicity, a turn back toward messy, hard to understand, fragmented reality.

Modernism ran its course, emptying out narrative. Novels became all voice, anchored neither in plot nor circumstance, driving the storytelling impulse underground.

Abstract expressionism in art was a similar attempt to recapture reality through its technique of spontaneous creation on the canvas. Rejected at first, it was accepted by the Establishment in the mid-20th century. Pollack and Rothko are now considered artistic geniuses because they forced artists to rethink the role and purpose of painting.

Then people got sick of abstract, difficult documentary-art. A longing for narration, story, archetype rose up again. But we didn't go right back to poetry with rhyme, novels with plot, art with representation, music with melody and harmony...we got jazz, the reality-show, the memoir, the remix, a hybrid of real and fake, the authentic fake. It had both the spontaneity of life (reality) with the order and appeal of narration and myth.

Morality, Truth, Beauty

Who sees the variety and not the unity must wander on from death to death.

- Katha Upanishad

The word religion comes from the Latin ligare, to bind, as in ligature and ligament. The prefix ‘re-‘ implies the re-establishment of a connection which has been lost.

The primary purpose of myths is to bring human beings into contact with a deeper component in their psyche, which gave them the sense of belonging to something far transcending their own individual ego-existence. Where this level could be reached, it gave a sense of meaning and purpose to life; a sense of connection, not just to other people and all the world but to a dimension beyond time and existence altogether.

Compared with the majesty of God which has created every last minute detail of the universe, man knows nothing. Yet the very fact that he is part of this creation, that he is part of its complex purposes and that it is somehow connected with his existence, gives man a sense that, although in himself he is nothing, he is also identified with something infinitely greater than himself. He is part of the totality, ‘the One’.

Man used to be an animal, part of nature, life completely dictated by instinct.

Then man opened up Pandora’s Box, ate the Apple, was awoken and became aware, conscious. Instinct no longer dictated man’s life. Ego ruled.

With freedom and consciousness, man was free from nature’s bound, and soon fell prey to envy, greed, lust, hatred, cruelty, depression, loneliness, sin.

Now humans live in lives of constant tension. At the deepest level, there is nothing they want more than to re-establish the lost unity to live at peace with each other, with nature and with themselves.

But to do this they have to make a constant, conscious efforts. To assist them in that effort they have evolved a whole array of devices, mechanisms and rituals: from laws and political institutions to codes of morality; from every kind of artistic expression to the framework of religion. What all these creations have in common is that they all originate in a desire to underpin or to re-establish that sense of unity which every animal enjoys without thinking all its life long.

...The need to resolve this psychic split gives rise to other distinctive features of human behaviour for which the animal kingdom offers no real parallels. One conspicuous means whereby human beings sublimate their tendency to egocentricity is through their love of games and sport. Not only does the rivalry between teams and individuals provide a socially acceptable channel for competitive impulses which might otherwise become socially disruptive. By disciplining physical or mental activity within a strict framework of rules, the participants in a game or sport become subordinated to something higher than themselves. A psychological model for all sporting activity is the spiritual discipline of Zen archery, in which the archer's purpose is so to eliminate the distortions arising from his own ego that the arrow naturally flies to its target. Whenever a game is played well it produces those moments when body and mind come into such instinctive co-ordination that the players seem to have been lifted above themselves. This was why, until it became corrupted, the original Olympic Games were one of the central religious ceremonies of the ancient Greek world. The skill of the competitors expressed an ideal of perfection which elevated not only the athletes themselves but all those who watched them. Something of the same sense of transcendence, although it is similarly open to corruption by the ego, accounts for the extraordinary glamour which surrounds sport in our modern world.

An even more significant instance of how human beings express this urge to transcend the limitations of their ego-existence is through every kind of artistic expression. The underlying purpose of all art is to create patterns of imagery which somehow convey a sense of life set in a framework of order. From music to painting, from architecture to poetry, from a finely worked piece of jewellery to the disciplined exuberance of folk-dance, any effective work of art always combines these two elements: on one hand, the imagery of movement, vitality, imagination and colour we associate with the energy of life; on the other, that sense of pattern, rhythm and harmony by which it is structured. Whatever its outward form, the aim of any artistic creation is to weave these essential elements together in a way which gives us a sense of a perfect resolution. Any work of art thus seeks to create a marriage between those complementary aspects of the psyche we see as masculine and feminine. Analyse the appeal of a Beethoven symphony and we see how it is made up of that familiar fourfold combination of strength and mind, heart and soul. The music commands our attention by its masculine power. It appeals to our intellect by the formal subtleties of its structure. It moves us by its feminine grace and delicacy, its flowing life, its appeal to our feelings. It elevates us by evoking something beyond ourselves, a sense of perfect totality. Like all great art it thus harmonises consciousness with the ego-transcending Self.

Any work of art can be analysed along similar lines, even if only in terms of how it may fall short of such perfect balance. Whenever we sense any artistic creation to be in some way deficient, this is either because it somehow lacks life or because it is inadequately organised, or both. Any work of art which succeeds, however, can make us feel mysteriously more alive, by connecting us with the sense of a perfection beyond the limitations of our own ego. Such is what the artistic impulse in mankind is all about. But no device for re-establishing that sense of unity with our inner life is more ingenious than one coded into us by the process of evolution itself: to conjure up inside our heads those patterns of imaginary events we call stories.

- Christopher Booker

interplay between pain and safety in narrative

Safety help us solve a long-standing puzzle of fictional pleasure, one that was beautifully summarized by David Hume in 1757:

It seems an unaccountable pleasure which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more they are touched and affected, the more they are delighted with the spectacle. . . . They are pleased in proportion as they are afflicted, and never are so happy as when they employ tears, sobs, cries, to give vent to their sorrow, and relieve their heart, swollen with the tenderest sympathy and compassion.

Hume is marveling at the fact that viewers of a tragedy get pleasure from emotions that are normally not good ones to have, such as sorrow, terror, and anxiety—the more of these emotions they get, the happier they are.

Fictional narrative appeals to us because ultimately we are safe from the dangers that afflict the characters. But indeed it is pleasurable and exciting because though we are safe, we are not in total control of what we experience in the narrative. And the lack of control and suspense is exactly what makes it pleasurable.

However it is important that we do have control over the intensity of the pain. The lover of spicy foods needs to have power over what's going into her mouth; the horror-movie fan gets to choose the movie and is free to close his eyes or turn his head. And in sadomasochism (S/M) it's critical for the person experiencing the M to have some sort of signal that means Stop and for the person doing the S to immediately respond. The signal is sometimes called, appropriately enough, a "safe" word.

Thus masochism isn't really about pain and humiliation, it's about suspense and fantasy. Control is essential and this is what makes masochistic pleasure so different from ordinary pleasure. In a disturbing discussion, the writer Daniel Bergnci describes how a horse buyer named Elvis chose to be basted with honey and ginger, tied to a metal pole, and roasted on a spit for three and a half hours. This is a lot of pain. My bet, though, that if Elvis woke up one morning, stepped out of bed, and badly stubbed his toe, he wouldn't enjoy it at all, because it is not what he signed up for.

The ultimate test case here is going to the dentist. One article on sadomasochism describes a woman with a high need for pain in S/M sessions with her boyfriend, but who hated going to the dentist. The boyfriend tried to get her to construe a dental exam as an erotic masochistic adventure, but failed. There was no getting around the fact that the dentist was necessary pain, in something she chose.

- Paul Bloom

Imagination is Reality Plus

Imagination is Reality Lite--a useful substitute when the real pleasure is inaccessible, too risky, or too much work.

If you enjoy winning the Word Series of Poker, flying around Metropolis, or making love to a certain someone, then you can get some limited taste of these pleasures by closing your eyes and imagining these experiences.

But in some sense, unreal events can be more moving than real ones, similar to how artificial sweeteners can be sweeter than sugar. There are three reasons for this:

First, fictional people tend to be wittier and more clever than friends and family, and their adventures are usually much more interesting. I have contact with the lives of people around me, but these people tend to be professors, students, neighbors, and so on. This is a small slice of humanity, and perhaps not the most interesting slice. My real world doesn't include an emotionally wounded cop tracking down a serial killer, a hooker with a heart of gold, or a wisecracking vampire. As best I know, none of my friends has killed his father and married his mother. But I can meet all of those people in imaginary worlds.

Second, life just creeps along, with long spans where nothing much happens. The O.J. Simpson trial lasted months, and much of it was deadly dull. Stories solve this problem—as the critic Clive James once put it, "Fiction is life with the dull bits left out." This is one reason why Friends is more interesting than your friends.

Finally, the technologies of the imagination provide stimulation of a sort that is impossible to get in the real world. A novel can span birth to death and can show you how the person behaves in situations that you could never otherwise observe. In reality you can never truly know what a person is thinking; in a story, the writer can tell you.

Such psychic intimacy isn't limited to the written word. There are conventions in other artistic mediums that have been created for the same purpose. A character in a play might turn to the audience and begin a dramatic monologue that expresses what he or she is thinking. In a musical, the thoughts might be sung; on television and in the movies, a voice-over may be used. This is commonplace now, but it must have been a revelation when the technique was first invented, and I wonder what young children think when they come across this for the first time, when they hear someone else's thoughts expressed aloud. It must be thrilling.

As another case of intimacy, consider the close-up. Certainly voyeurism has long been a theme of movies, from Rear Window to Disturbia, but the technique of film itself offers a unique way to satisfy our curiosity about the minds of others. Where else can you look full into someone's face without having the person look back at you? "Some viewers thrill to the prospect of views into the bedroom and bathroom," the philosopher Cohn McGinn writes, "but the film viewer can get even closer to the private world of his subject (or victim) —to his soul."

So while reality has its special allure, the imaginative techniques of books, plays, movies, and television have their own power. The good thing is that we do not have to choose. We can get the best of both worlds, by taking an event that people know is real and using the techniques of the imagination to transform it into an experience that is more interesting and powerful than the normal perception of reality could ever be. The best example of this is an art form that has been invented in my lifetime, one that is addictively powerful, as shown by the success of shows such as The Real World, Survivor, The Amazing Race, and Fear Factor. What could be better than reality television?

Story

Imagine, in one global day, the pages of prose turned, plays performed, films screened, the unending stream of television comedy and drama, twenty-four-hour print and broadcast news, bedtime tales told to children, barroom bragging, back-fence Internet gossip, humankind’s insatiable appetite for stories. Story is not only our most prolific art form but rivals all activities—work, play, eating, exercise—for our waking hours. We tell and take in stories as much as we sleep—and even then we dream. Why? Why is so much of our life spent inside stories? Because as critic Kenneth Burke tells us, stories are equipment for living.

Day after day we seek an answer to the ageless question Aristotle posed in Ethics: How should a human being lead his life? But the answer eludes us, hiding behind a blur of racing hours as we struggle to fit our means to our dreams, fuse idea with passion, turn desire into reality. We’re swept along on a risk-ridden shuttle through time. If we pull back to grasp pattern and meaning, life, like a Gestalt, does flips: first serious, then comic; static, frantic; meaningful, meaningless. Momentous world events are beyond our control while personal events, despite all effort to keep our hands on the wheel, more often than not control us. Traditionally humankind has sought the answer to Aristotle’s question from the four wisdoms—philosophy, science, religion, art—taking insight from each to bolt together a livable meaning.

But today who reads Hegel or Kant without an exam to pass? Science, once the great explicator, garbles life with complexity and perplexity. Who can listen without cynicism to economists, sociologists, politicians? Religion, for many, has become an empty ritual that masks hypocrisy. As our faith in traditional ideologies diminish we turn to the source we still believe in: the art of story.

The world now consumes films, novels, theatre, and television in such quantities and with such ravenous hunger that the story arts have become humanity’s prime source of inspiration, as it seeks to order chaos and gain insight into life. Our appetite for story is a reflection of the profound human need to grasp the patterns of living, not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience. In the words of playwright Jean Anouilh, “Fiction gives life its form.”

Some see this craving for story as simple entertainment, an escape from life rather than an exploration of it. But what, after all, is entertainment? To be entertained is to be immersed in the ceremony of story to an intellectually and emotionally satisfying end. To the film audience, entertainment is the ritual of sitting in the dark, concentrating on a screen in order to experience the story’s meaning and, with that insight, the arousal of strong, at times even painful emotions, and as the meaning deepens, to be carried to the ultimate satisfaction of those emotions.

Whether it’s the triumph of crazed entrepreneurs over Hittite demons in Ghostbusters or the complex resolution of inner demons in Shine; the integration of character in The Red Desert, or its disintegration in The Conversation, all fine films, novels, and plays, through all shades of the comic and tragic, entertain when they give the audience a fresh model of life empowered with an affective meaning. To retreat behind the notion that the audience simply wants to dump its troubles at the door and escape reality is a cowardly abandonment of the artist’s responsibility. Story isn’t a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality, our best effort to make sense out of the anarchy of existence.

- Robert McKee