Further Introspection on the Topic of Posmodernism

Last week, I talked about the failure of Cloverfield as an experimental/postmodern film. This week, I want to resurrect a nice little essay I wrote some time ago about John Barth's National Book Award winning Chimera. Like Cloverfield, Chimera uses a significantly different dramatic structure than our standard expectations, however, in this book, the dramatic structure sustains, and completes itself in a structurally and entertaingly sound manner, leaving us with a book that is both experimental and entertaining. Here's the Essay:


Narrative Schmarrative: Interesting Bits from Chimera

With a book such as John Barth’s Chimera, writing a paper examining its craft can become rather daunting. Which elements to choose? How can I relate through analyzing craft, the great feeling I get from reading a book so well written? Easy. Emulate his voice (But you’ve done that already--see “Self Serving [ ] [Another Essay I Wrote on John Barth {I tend to be very self referential at times}]”). Right. So rather than dive into emulation as a means of description, I think this time I’ll try to focus upon the narrative elements within this book, and hopefully avoid dropping myself into a large writing project. So narration it is.

About the book: Chimera, like the mythical creature is really three novellas, which are connected through one medium (which of course works in a couple of ways: self referral, connection to other works by Barth, and all appearing in the same book --> notice the three, chimera like aspect of the connections as well). Each novella examines some old myth, the 1001 nights, Perseus, and Bellerophon. However, in doing so, Barth examines these tales from different circumstances, such as from the point of view of Scheherazade’s sister Dunyazade, or Perseus at age forty looking back upon his life and wishing he was young and heroic again (likewise, somewhat, in the case of Bellerophon.) Therefore, though the stories told through the novel are largely unchanged from their original form (save that the language is spiced up), Barth tells the stories in a different manner in effect to revitalize an old lost form of literature, as mentioned in his essay, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” when talking about Jean Louis Borges’ Quixote (a novel where a fictional character authors Don Quixote). Barth describes this rejuvenating action because “[Borges] confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it against itself to accomplish new human work” (31). Therefore we can expect to find similar with Barth’s treatment of these mythical subjects.

I guess what I’ll do here is devote a section upon his narrative actions within each of the three novellas.
SECTION 1: DUNYAZADIAD
The “Dunyazadiad,” as I’ve previously stated tells the tale of the 1001 Nights. However, the tale starts after Scheherazade has told the last tale, in the king’s brother’s bedroom, to be exact. However, the only indication that the reader is given alluding to the story starting after the end of the tales lies with the opening character, a set of double quotes—we are being told a tale. As it so happens, this tale starts on the 1000th night of Scheherazade’s storytelling. He narrates the tale in a kind of looping manner, making use of multiple narrators and viewpoints. Because of the looping story aspect of the novella, the structure of its plot is directly affected by its narration.
The entire first part of the three part novella is told as a massive monologue from the perspective of Dunyazade, which interestingly enough does not end with a complete thought: “Your brother’s docked; my sister’s dead; it’s time we joined them’” (38). Barth uses this open ending sentence as a sort of launching point into the next section and a more or less third person objective narration. Until the very end of the first chapter, the last lines to be exact, the reader has no real idea where Dunyazade is, nor does the reader know how far in the future this monologue is taking place. By doing this, Barth has set up a great deal of reader suspense, stringing us along, knowing that she is talking to Shah Zaman, brother of Shahryar, but not knowing the circumstances. Thus when we are revealed the location of the speaker, standing over Shah Zaman with a razor to his privates, we are interestingly justified for the great sense of suspense that has been building, a sense of suspense that would likewise be growing in Shah Zaman as Dunyazade neared the end of her story and likewise the possible end of his sex life. Thus the first section goes from the almost present (1000th night of the Nights) back to the pre-night days and then forward clear to the present—a large loop, with wavy bits in the middle (not all 1001 tales are retold).

The second chapter of the book follows a similar, yet slightly altered pattern. As I said, it’s told in 3rd objective, and the two argue back and forth during this middle section. However, while we do hear Dunyazade’s voice here, largely the chapter follows Shah Zaman’s tale concerning his role over the past six and some odd years with the raping/murdering thing. He then, like Dunyazade, loops back to the beginning and tells his tale to the present time, which of course has advanced some since the first chapter. In essence, Barth tells parallel tales in a strangely separate manner, which though Shah Zaman’s story is unwritten in the original publication of the 1001 Nights, its ending sufficiently meets the requirements of the original ending: “the royal couples…emerge from their bridal chambers after the wedding night, greet one another with warm good mornings…bestow Samarkand on the brides’ long-suffering father, and set down for all posterity The Thousand Nights and a Night” (55).

One of the rather interesting things that comes out of this double looping narrative is that it manages to create two almost equal climaxes in the story, of which the third chapter becomes the dénouement. The first climax comes at the very end of the first chapter and beginning of the second, as the reader is first shown the situation of Shah Zaman, and his impending and possible doom. Since he is allowed to tell his tale, we are again given rise of suspense, this time wondering if Dunyazade will believe him, which comes to its own climax at the very end of their conversation: “Good morning, then! Good morning!”--They had made it through the night without killing each other (54). In a sense, Barth has achieved double the efficiency out of the same setting and characters; he does this through using the first climax as a sort of springboard towards the second climax, creating a slightly different, extended, arrangement of the basic parts of the story: exposition, rising action, climax, dénouement:

Because Barth is employing a slightly modified story pattern he also uses a slightly different method to finish the story. The main necessity for modification here is required due to the skipping of the proper dénouement of the first climax, so thus both dénouements need to be picked up in the third chapter. However, the third chapter itself does nothing to further the story, so in a sense the story has no true dénouement (i.e. the small ‘e’ in the above diagram referring to the perpendicular line immediately following the climax indicates the true end of the story’s progression). The remnants cleaned up in the denouement chapter, therefore represent at once an authorial defense of the reasoning behind the novel and the end of the first triangle, which concerns Dunyazade. At this particular junction, Barth is at liberty to explain the need for Dunyazade’s story to end after Shah Zaman’s story, which
must end in the night that all good mornings come to. The Arab storytellers understood this; they ended their stories not “happily ever after,” but specifically “until there took them the Destroyer of Delights and Desolator of Dwelling-places, and they were translated to the ruth of Almighty Allah, and their houses fell waste and their palaces lay in ruins, and the Kings inherited their riches.” (56)

Without realizing the morning after, the story, thus cannot end, and therefore, this is why Barth’s slightly mutated plotting pattern comes into making good sense.
Although there are many other aspects of narration that apply themselves throughout this novella, I believe Barth’s use of narration to control plot in this unique manner is, by far, the most interesting aspect of the narration employed. Although he starts his story in a position that would not normally allow for a proper ending (the end of Dunyazade’s story would not lead to the good morning after in any way or form, thus breaking the Arabic standard), he uses an extended plot diagram, through controlling the narration of the story, and efficiently ties the story up without any real required denouement (save one to explain why he couldn’t stop the story with the end of Dunyazade’s story).

SECTION 2: PERSEID
-text missing-
SECTION 3: BELLEROPHONIAD
-yep, same here-
Works Cited
Barth, John. Chimera. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1972.
Barth, John. “The Literature of Exhaustion.” The Atlantic. Aug. 1967: 29-34.


In case you're wondering, I believe we had a 5 page limit to the essay, so Sections 2 and 3 were never completed. Sadly, I rented this book out and never got it back. Going to have to re-buy it someday, as it was one of Barth's best.

The Failure of Cloverfield, Or, Why Experimental Art is Reviled

******HOLY SHIT! CLOVERFIELD SPOILERS! *******

Sigh. This will be long, but necessary.

I do love experimental art forms. There is something magical, to me, about the notion of taking an existing system, breaking it, rebuilding it and forming a new artistic experience out of the ashes of the contemporary form. However, doing so always incurs a certain amount of danger. When you break something, take it apart, fiddle around with the nuts and bolts, you always run the chance of fucking it up beyond repair...and then you end up with a piece of shit that will generally offend (on some level) everyone in the vicinity.

I'd like to think that my particular vein of experimentation sides with the audience in mind. I want to do some structural screwity, but I want to do it in a way that I don't leave people standing a quarter mile down the road, scratching their ass and saying, "Do what, now?" What I'm getting at, is, I think the difference between Avant Garde kind of experimentation, and a more blue collar type (for lack of a better term). Avant Garde experimentation operates on the following notion: "I am doing something artistic, and it is awesome. If you are too stupid to figure out why it's awesome, then you aren't a member of the cool kid club." I've read some of that stuff, and some of it is good...if you're willing to lay down a lot of effort to become a member of the cool kid club (I think Ben Marcus' Age of Wire and String would be a pretty decent example of this kind of writing). The cool thing about Avant Garde, though, is that it's fearless.

Cloverfield, too is fearless in design (in the movie, everyone is pretty fucking terrified). In addition to being fearless, it was surrounded by an incredible amount of hype (which should have been a clear warning sign). Cloverfield is an example of an Avant Garde art form, but it is also a flawed experiment in theatrical form. It used a lot of good ideas, but it alienated its audience. And with movies, far more with books, you can't ever alienate your audience. For the rest of this post, I want to illustrate the experimental attributes of the movie, as well as how these attributes led to the the movie's failure instead of it's success.

First, let's identify what I would qualify as the "experimental" elements of Cloverfield.

1. The entire movie is shot on a home video camera.
   
2. It uses a framing structure that insinuates that the home movie that you're watching is part of some Department of Defense project
3. It uses a modified version of Freitag's triangle for its establishment of dramatic structure.
4. It avoids standard, Hollywood, events and structures
5. The movie presented itself in a metafictive situation, ala the Blair Witch Project's "this is real" argument

Now, let's establish some things we take for granted, things that come as standard equipment for movies, and literature in general:

1. There is an identifiable beginning, middle, and end
2. The protagonist character struggles against some form of antagonist and either succeeds or fails in his/her struggle
3. somewhere between the middle and the end the climax of the protagonist's struggle is reached. The character is forever changed from this point on.
4. The nature of the artform is transparent (the author is invisible); focus is placed upon the action/plot/characters of the story rather than the story's construction
5. the purpose of the artform is to entertain its audience
6. the artform is accessible to a large number of people

The big experiment in Cloverfield is to distance the audience from many of the assumed trajectories, and create a new kind of monster movie. If done well, Cloverfield could have launched a new wave in cinematic style for monster movies. And if you look at what a lot of people are saying on RottenTomatoes.com, they're saying exactly this, that Cloverfield has breathed life back into the dead monster movie genre. The problem is that Cloverfield is making such a big scene, and getting good reviews, because it's different, not genius. Cloverfield is really a kind of Avant Garde monster movie, and since the masses can't quite figure all of it out, they've decided that it must be good because they can't understand it. You hear the same thing when folks read experimental literature for the first time. I've seen a lot of people pick up John Barth and give the same kind of reaction to a story like "Lost in the Funhouse." They'll say it was great, or that it blew their mind...but since they've never seen anything like it before, they lack the cognitive ability to analyze the work to see if it, well, works. And coming from the creator of Lost, I think Cloverfield is banking on people going with the "I liked it because I didn't understand it" mentality, because, Lost operates in the same manner. Not only that, but Cloverfield has a very extensive Alternative Reality Game attached to it, so moviegoers that didn't get involved in that are further made to feel inferior, leading them to assume that "they're just missing something, and that the movie must be better than what it is."

Sorry folks. You're not missing anything. Cloverfield is broken on the structural level, and because of that, it cannot aspire to be a complete movie. I wouldn't be surprised if Cloverfield 2 came out in six months from now (with Cloverfield 3 coming out six months after that).

Let's start with the framing. We all know the framing motif in movies: movie starts and is framed by another ontological layer of existence. Think of The Princess Bride--it's a movie of a grandfather telling his grandson a story, and then we go into the story, which becomes the movie. At the end of The Princess Bride, we then shift back up one ontological layer, and finish with the grandfather finishing the story. This is a well established gimmick, and works with varying degrees of success. In Cloverfield, the movie opens with an interesting Department of Defense reel, as if the movie is part of some manner of collection. As part of this reveal, it seems to suggest, also (by the titling) that there are other such videos/clips available, and to appear in the movie. However, we only get the one video. Once the video starts, we remain with it to the end of the movie. Once the video camera dies, we get maybe 10 seconds of Department of Defense do not copy footage and then end credits. The framing element, then, really does nothing for the movie. It suggests that the army found the tape amid the wreckage of New York, but it doesn't explain why it's being shown to us.

A frame, in the best sense, always should act as an element that defines the purpose for the thing it contains. This frame really doesn't provide any useful depth to the story, nor does it explain or otherwise validate the film it contains. In short, the frame was used as a flashy way to roll opening credits without "making it look like a movie."

Since the frame doesn't give us a true sense of purpose to the film, we turn to the content itself--a horribly shot (My God, if you go to see the movie, take Dramamine if you have ever gotten motion sick in your life) home movie of a party and then four friends trying to survive in the aftermath of the monster attack. It doesn't explain why the monster attacked, what the monster is, or even if the monster was finally destroyed, nor should it do any of those things--this camera is tied to the viewpoints of the characters that control it. However, by putting the audience in the hands of unreliable narrators, the film makers have sacrificed a large portion of audience appeal; they've sacrificed the reward of finding out "what really happened."

Had the movie included multiple viewpoints from several sources, not only would the frame be more strongly defined, but also we would be able to view the incident from several viewpoints, and thus be able to piece together "what happened." But the movie makes no amends to explain any of those things--this is a purely avant garde move. People don't like not knowing what's going one, ever. If you're going to withhold information, you better damn well come up with it later, otherwise, you're establishing a Red Herring, because your audience will spend the entire time trying to find out "what happens," and they hate it when they can't get some form of resolution. Remember how pissed off you were when you never found out what was in the suitcase in Pulp Fiction? Things like that eat at you. We're wired to want to know why. This movie not only keeps the answers from us, but it punches us in the gut at the end when the lead character says to the camera, "If you're seeing this then you probably know more about what's going on than we do."

I think if you asked one of the makers of Cloverfield why they chose not to reveal things, they'd probably say something like, "it's not about the monster; it's about the characters' relationships, and coming to terms with their love for each other." And deep down, Cloverfield is exactly that: a love story about friends who are about to be separated (the guy is going to work in Japan), and they just realized they love each other. The climax of the movie following this model is when Guy saves girl from girl's apartment--they have united in their love for each other and forgiven each other for the fight they had at the party. But this is a monster movie, not a love story. However, only the love story gets any sense of resolution; the characters do change, and their dramatic arc is upheld. And since this is a monster movie, the audience gives less of a shit about the protagonist and his girlfriend, and a lot more about identifying the monster, and seeing how it gets killed--such is the nature of monster movies. Unfortunately, we learn very little about the monster. We don't know what it is (alien, water creature, other). We don't know why it attacked. We don't know why it isn't being harmed by FUCKING TANKS, BAZOOKAS, and BOMBS. Nor do we know if the military managed to kill it.

So, structurally speaking, Cloverfield also departs from the standard scheme of dramatic structure to it's very own modified version. Now let's take a look at Cloverfield's Dramatic Structure
First look at the standard dramatic structure model. Line AB represents a story's exposition. BC is the story's rising action, which climaxes at point C. CD is the Denouement of the story, which should be resolved relatively quickly. This model of dramatic structure is the standard model used in most forms of art and film; it's predictable and we expect it.

Cloverfield uses a modified model. In Cloverfield, AB is the party scene--this is the portion of the story that is wholly exposition. Once the Monster attacks, however, the movie's true plot takes off, leading on a steep incline of increasing tension. The reason Cloverfield's BC line is so steep is because Cloverfield abandons the traditional pattern of building and releasing tension throughout the progression to the climax. The tension levels in Cloverfield continue to rise, because the danger never abates, nor is a resolution met. Essentially Cloverfield is all rising action that climaxes with the characters' deaths at point D. Notice how there is no Denouement here. Denouement is important, and though it should be kept short, it shouldn't be left off unless it is well justified. Had the movie made use of its framing structure, the denouement could have been relayed within the frame--much like the Princess Bride.

Also notice how Cloverfield's climax isn't really the climax of the film. Point C in Cloverfield represents the point in which they save the girlfriend from the tower. But since no one is safe, nor is anyone irrevocably changed, point C isn't the true climax of the film--it's more of a subplot climax, and within the subplot climax, the characters are finally together again, but they're not safely out of the city, so while the love plot is more or less resolved, it's still contained by the larger, unexplained arc of the monster plot.

Cloverfield uses its alternate dramatic model to keep viewers interested by overloading our sense of tension. We feel anxious and afraid, because for 84 minutes, we are constantly on the edge of our seats. Unfortunately, this model fails because it offers no real resolution at the end, and such an unresolved ending leads to audience dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction because we expect to gain some sort of reward for sitting through a movie made with bad video footage, and ultra-high tension. We get nothing. And because we get nothing, the movie fails in it's only true goal, entertainment.

It's unfortunate that many movie-goers think that this movie is too clever for them. It's not. It's unfinished, and it doesn't live up to our expectations, especially considering the hype surrounding it. And though most of this post seems to advocate a more mainstream approach, it's not what I'm calling for. I want to see more experimental films hit the big screen, and I have seen several that do a great job: Crank, Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, and Snatch all come to mind. But Cloverfield is not the new vein of monster movie. It's a failed attempt. And while it might garner some better copycats, its own nature is flawed. The movie has broken its bond with the audience, and did nothing to help restore that bond.

Those are my two cents; hopefully future film makers, fiction writers, and other creative types (including myself) will heed these paired pennies and make way for a future in experimental art where the masses aren't afraid to sample the weird, the strange, the unexpected.

(Self Promotion) About Writing Groups

I'm a real big fan of writing groups. After I graduated from college, I co-ran "The WordHungry Workshop"--a writing group for English-major aspirant High schoolers. That was one of the best summers, writing-wise of my life. And during that time, I realized that Writing Groups were the way to go when you don't have the regular stimulation of an ongoing educational program. So, today's blog entry will be about the two writing groups that I'm currently involved with. Thanks to the Internet, it's easier than ever to set one up--Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, or even something like Wikipages are all great locations to pick out as a place to start your own group.

As some of you may know, last year I started up a writing group for fellow students at Spalding called SWING (Spalding Writing is not a Group). The whole idea is for the group to be a sort of writing community meeting ground, where we can share creative endeavors, post information, all kinds of stuff, really. SWING members have shared ECEs, given feedback on stories and poems. We've run some small contests there, and posted a lot of useful information on writerly tools--places to submit, programs to use, job postings etc. It's pretty much a catch-all writer's group, and if you're a Spalding student and interested, shoot me an email and I'll send you an invite to the group.

Recently, Rod Dixon, Dave Harrity and I set up our own group. The Warrior Poet Writing Group. Rod came up with the initial idea--to establish a writing group that regularly explores both creative and academic elements of literature beyond the realm of academia. The idea is that we each take turns teaching a book, short story, poem, whatever to the other members of the group. We then, in turn also write a creative piece based off of our discussion of that author. Our goal is to broaden our literary horizons by attacking the world of literature from multiple angles: creative and critical. We also hope to be able to use our experience in the group to aid us in the classroom by helping us learn to become better teachers, thinkers, writers. Finally, we have some longshot distance goals for the group: attend writing conferences together, start up a Literary journal reflecting our views towards the literary world, and to create several public projects relating to reading, understanding, and writing literature. The above listed website will be where we host all of our goings ons, public info and the like. Our book discussions and creative endeavors, however, will be made available upon request.