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tombadyna
, February 28, 2010
(view all comments by tombadyna)
This is continuation of earlier review ...
I'd like to rebut this book's theses one by one as they seem not only largely idiotic but, given its apparently wide and mysterious appeal, dangerously so – so much so I'd label the literary philosophy of Mr. Shields Tea Party Poetics – but I don't know that it'd do any more good than using real-world logic on Palinistas. I leave off with brief counter-arguments to his foundational premise that 21rst c. society is so complex that invented narrative is inadequate to its understanding and, also, to his idea of reality in art, that for which he claims an unsatisfied hunger.
Since the beginning of the written word, old people have lamented the loss of the simpler times of their youths. That's provably true. It is also provably true that the act of history simplifies past times into, well, narrative. It necessarily leaves out most of the daily clutter of noise. Which does not mean that that static was not there. I think of one of my great-grandmothers who grew up in remote parts of a partitioned Poland. She worked her youth as a servant and spoke her own patois of Polish, Russian, German and French. It was a tricky, potentially deadly confusing confluence of three cultures with a fourth as a cultural overlay. She had to negotiate that within the confines of a backwoods Catholicism mixed in with goblins, jinns, evil spirits and a whole host of hocus pocus rigamarole to keep her safe between disease and death on one side, rape and indenturedness on the other – to say nothing of managing food supplies without refrigeration or supermarkets while learning to heart a thousand songs and fables to pass the nights. History has Poland neatly partitioned on maps and peasants simple inert markers on a board. I suspect we live in an ever-simpler world, that we're really not as smart as we used to be, but I wouldn't be able to prove it, not even to myself, and certainly would not use the claim but ironically, not even in the contriving of a new poetica. When I was twelve, I could take a discarded lawnmower and salvaged parts from trash heaps and make a serviceable go cart. Twelve year olds today can make a computer do some novel things. One, I don't see, is more complex than the other. I suspect Facebook is less complex than the social intricacies of hanging out unsupervised at the pharmacy's soda fountain with all its attendant perverts, bullies, theives, druggies, girls, so on, but why would I care to prove so one way or the other? How would I do so? When one of my great-grandfathers was twelve, he could run a farm – and did.
Mr. Shields says invented narrative served well in simpler times, but we're too advanced for the novelties of past dullards. Seems to me there's a fifty-three year old teacher a little lost in and intimidated by the world of his students. Also, he wishes to be young. And this is profound and challenging?
Lastly:
Mr. Shields states that the world has become so unbearably artificial that artists need to break ever-larger chunks of reality into their work. Best I can tell, these chunks of reality we're supposed to steal are the artistic efforts of the talented as well as untalented – which is to say, the manifesto-er here instructs that we create a new art out of the actual bricks and mortar of this unbearably artificial world. Honestly. That's what he's saying. It's the exact equivalent of the Tea Party idea of cutting taxes to reduce the deficit while keeping the government out of Medicare.
Narrative is a defining construct of the human mind, and invented narrative is the best way we have to understand that ideas, actions, words, even just being, all have consequences. Only in invented narrative can the philosophic contemplations of multiple souls play out not in the abstract but in the context of flesh and blood and reality.
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