North Georgia is under another tornado watch, but the only thing that makes me run to the downstairs bathroom and hide in the tub is that TV preview for The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Am I right? Eh? Eh?
I'm getting unconfirmed reports that the students in my major have a couple screw loose. I think it's ironic because, while the students purport to be little Straussians or Bloom disciples, the present faculty in the program don't seem to be the caretakers of any kind of secret society at all. At least my advisor doesn't. The last time I met with him, we talked for 20 minutes about cream soda.
What I do like about the program is this book I'm reading for it called The Rhetoric of Fiction. The project of the book is to examine the modern critical assumption that the superior novel is the one that "shows" not "tells." The most important criteria for the modern novel the book examines is the "invisibility" of the author or narrator; in other words, Conrad, who characterizes by example, is better than Austen, who comes out and says, "Mr. Baker was a conniving, evil man." The argument the book is gearing up to make (I'm only on page 50) is that really the only difference between the two methods, showing and telling, is different styles of rhetoric; and what makes a novel superior isn't just realism or the objectivity of the author, but something else. He hasn't revealed what that something is, but I think it's probably illustrations and a character named "Mrs. Whipplebottom."
Strangely, but not too strange since it's the only other thing I've been doing this summer, the book keeps reminding me of improv. The reason is that the improv at Dad's emphasizes storytelling as the most important element in scenework. At the start of every scene you can tell that the instincts of the performers immediately seek out character relationships and conflicts that will advance a "story" somehow. Normally the stories are based on stock storylines and characters, or archetypes and myths; for example, in the dozens of shows I've watched this summer, I keep seeing scenes about a boy taking a girl out but sparring with her father. That's a familiar "story," but it's played out in different ways every time.
In The Rhetoric of Fiction, the author examines the Decameron, a 14th-century collection of Italian stories by a man named Boccaccio. The comedic and romantic stories in Boccaccio are told in a highly orchestrated manner that skirts the realism of the modern novel. The book says that, "Boccaccio's artistry lies not in adherence to any one supreme manner of narration but rather in his ability to order various forms of telling in the service of various forms of showing." That sentence is actually ugly and confusing. But I think what he means is that to tell his perfectly orchestrated comedy, Boccaccio selects which character to follow at what time. In any story told by an omniscient narrator, there are at least two main characters and more often more that the author has to know when to "select" in temporal sequence. Little Red Riding Hood can't start with the point of view of the Wolf (unless you're telling some post-modern shake-up); the storyteller "selects" Red Riding Hood because that point of view will produce the better-crafted story. In a larger story with an ensemble of characters and a complex story that involves many people, the selection process is even more elaborate to create a story that pleases.
This selection process by the narrator is exactly what happens in one of these improv scenes; the only difference is that it has to be immediate and it has to be instinctual. What it proves, I think, is that everyone raised in a society like ours immersed in storytelling (books, movies, TV, etc.) has the instinct to produce artificially-created story structures like the Decameron stories. We know who the most important character to follow is; we can recognize a conflict just as we can recognize when the conflict is resolved and the story should end; and we know which events to play up or play down in the sequence leading to the conflict resolution. In my improv class this summer (it was on storytelling, actually), we did an exercise where we all just sat in a circle and told anecdotes or interesting personal stories to each other, those stock stories that we tell people we meet all the time. We found at the end that everybody "knows how to tell stories." All our stories had a common structure, length, and ordering of temporal events that we take for granted.
I'm getting unconfirmed reports that the students in my major have a couple screw loose. I think it's ironic because, while the students purport to be little Straussians or Bloom disciples, the present faculty in the program don't seem to be the caretakers of any kind of secret society at all. At least my advisor doesn't. The last time I met with him, we talked for 20 minutes about cream soda.
What I do like about the program is this book I'm reading for it called The Rhetoric of Fiction. The project of the book is to examine the modern critical assumption that the superior novel is the one that "shows" not "tells." The most important criteria for the modern novel the book examines is the "invisibility" of the author or narrator; in other words, Conrad, who characterizes by example, is better than Austen, who comes out and says, "Mr. Baker was a conniving, evil man." The argument the book is gearing up to make (I'm only on page 50) is that really the only difference between the two methods, showing and telling, is different styles of rhetoric; and what makes a novel superior isn't just realism or the objectivity of the author, but something else. He hasn't revealed what that something is, but I think it's probably illustrations and a character named "Mrs. Whipplebottom."
Strangely, but not too strange since it's the only other thing I've been doing this summer, the book keeps reminding me of improv. The reason is that the improv at Dad's emphasizes storytelling as the most important element in scenework. At the start of every scene you can tell that the instincts of the performers immediately seek out character relationships and conflicts that will advance a "story" somehow. Normally the stories are based on stock storylines and characters, or archetypes and myths; for example, in the dozens of shows I've watched this summer, I keep seeing scenes about a boy taking a girl out but sparring with her father. That's a familiar "story," but it's played out in different ways every time.
In The Rhetoric of Fiction, the author examines the Decameron, a 14th-century collection of Italian stories by a man named Boccaccio. The comedic and romantic stories in Boccaccio are told in a highly orchestrated manner that skirts the realism of the modern novel. The book says that, "Boccaccio's artistry lies not in adherence to any one supreme manner of narration but rather in his ability to order various forms of telling in the service of various forms of showing." That sentence is actually ugly and confusing. But I think what he means is that to tell his perfectly orchestrated comedy, Boccaccio selects which character to follow at what time. In any story told by an omniscient narrator, there are at least two main characters and more often more that the author has to know when to "select" in temporal sequence. Little Red Riding Hood can't start with the point of view of the Wolf (unless you're telling some post-modern shake-up); the storyteller "selects" Red Riding Hood because that point of view will produce the better-crafted story. In a larger story with an ensemble of characters and a complex story that involves many people, the selection process is even more elaborate to create a story that pleases.
This selection process by the narrator is exactly what happens in one of these improv scenes; the only difference is that it has to be immediate and it has to be instinctual. What it proves, I think, is that everyone raised in a society like ours immersed in storytelling (books, movies, TV, etc.) has the instinct to produce artificially-created story structures like the Decameron stories. We know who the most important character to follow is; we can recognize a conflict just as we can recognize when the conflict is resolved and the story should end; and we know which events to play up or play down in the sequence leading to the conflict resolution. In my improv class this summer (it was on storytelling, actually), we did an exercise where we all just sat in a circle and told anecdotes or interesting personal stories to each other, those stock stories that we tell people we meet all the time. We found at the end that everybody "knows how to tell stories." All our stories had a common structure, length, and ordering of temporal events that we take for granted.
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