Saw Mother Courage this weekend-- thinking about the author's deliberate alienation of the audience

Bertolt Brecht used the German term Verfremdungseffekt (don't ask me to pronounce it) to define the authorial choice to force a distance between the audience and the character. This is of course antithetical to the more common desire to encourage the audience to identify with the character. This choice to estrange the audience from the character is often accomplished by making her unappealing or her actions incomprehensible. The point is, I think, to force us out of the comfortable companionship of thinking, "She is like me, and therefore good" and into evaluating her more objectively (and perhaps evaluating ourselves  more objectively).

Brecht's most famous expression of the "distancing or alienation effect" is in the title character of his play Mother Courage.  He wrote this while in self-exile from his native Germany during Hitler's reign, and that might give us some idea of why "distancing" or "alienation" might have been a particularly valued goal at that point in history.

What's interesting about this choice is that it discards the enlistment of an audience's most valued ability, empathy, in order to present human action and interaction in a more unsparing fashion. Brecht meant Mother Courage to be a more "true" representation of humanity perhaps than a character shaped to draw the audience's fellow feeling. Techniques that can cause the alienation—well, the most important would be presenting the character's action without justification, and the character's flaws without mitigation.

That was what Brecht was playing with in Mother Courage, alienating the audience from her by using her as a representative of the capitalist and mercenary set. I think he wimped out enough -- making her a mother who loved her children-- that the audience wasn't nearly as appalled by her as he wanted, or maybe we just naturally have fellow feelings with most other humans. In fact, I tend to think that characters who are presented rather starkly in their unappeal end up winning the audience over (Sherlock Holmes, Scarlett O'Hara). I might go so far as to say that characters who are hard to identify with early in the story are often the ones who attain sort of cult status or become cultural icons like Sherlock.

Without the easy empathetic identification, the audience will have to judge the character on her own actions and interactions rather than empathy. I think when it works, the audience ends up really in deeper identification because they have to really think about how and why this character is this way and does these things. It's like you might love a difficult friend more because you actually had to work to love her at all.

I'm wondering if comedy might rely more on distancing—we don't, after all, laugh at ourselves usually, so too close an identification with the comic character might diminish our ability to find those pratfalls funny. 

Alicia

Synecdoche thoughts part 2

(Part 1 here)

Now this willingness of Kaufman (the filmmaker) to bore and annoy audiences to get the point across reminded me, as so much does, of Edgar Allan Poe's unreliable narrators. (I wrote my MA thesis on this, so once I did understand it! No longer, alas.) Poe deliberately (I think) sacrificed his own credibility as an author – and as a man-- to create a creepy experience for the reader, that of identifying with murderers and maniacs. (You know, now that I think of it, Nabokov does the same thing in Lolita, only it's a child molester we're supposed to identify with—and Nabokov explicitly uses Poe as an inspiration, most notably his poem Annabel Lee.)

Poe supposedly chose (it's not entirely clear that he made this appointment or if Griswold just took charge after Poe's death) as a literary executor and biographer the notoriously nasty Rufus Griswold, who had been something of a rival for magazine editor jobs. You probably didn't realize what a vicious business editing can be. :) Anyway, Griswold created a portrait of Poe as a drunk, an incompetent writer and an abusive husband, a misconception that Poe's friends tried in vain to remedy. But they found it difficult to restore the reputation of the man who had pretty much invented the horror genre, not to mention written so many stories about horrible husbands. So Poe destroyed his own credibility by first writing stories with first-person narration by murderous men, and second, by choosing a biographer who took such glee in trashing him. But in a way, this caused the stories to be that much more experientially horrific.

(By the way, I see in Griswold's bio something that I should have put in my thesis, which was about some of the stories where Poe's narrator buries his wife/fiancee alive—Berenice, Ligeia, Morella. Talk about life imitating art. Griswold had left his first wife and children behind while he went to make his fortune in magazine editing— no wonder he was so bitter!—and so talk about projection... he was something of a negligent husband himself, sounds like. Anyway, his wife died in childbirth soon after that, and he wasn't there, but returned to "kiss her dead lips". A month after the death, he entered her tomb—really, this is SO like a Poe story!—and stayed by her presumably decaying body until his friends found him there—30 hours later. Poe's stories were written in the decade previous, so he wasn't basing them on Griswold's guilty grief. But as if previewing Griswold, Berenice starts with a Latin epigraph that translates to: "My companion said I might find some alleviation of my misery in visiting the grave of my beloved." Cue Twilight Zone music.)

So... well, there's a concept (devised by literary critic Stanley Fish) called the Self-consuming artifact, which has become well-known enough to have its own abbreviation: SCA. Fish uses this term to refer to artwork (mostly books) which transfer the reader's attention from the text, from what is on the page, to the effect it actually provokes, and that the work succeeds most "when it fails, when it points away from itself to something its form cannot capture." That is, the effect on the reader is paramount. In reading this work, the reader experiences something that is beyond the simple form of the story, some combination, I think, of author intent, reader response, and... magic.

The "self-consuming" part doesn't exactly mean what I want it to mean—that the author willingly sacrifices his/her own credibility or authority as the reader reads the story. True to the New Critics dictum of the "text is the text" (which I do agree with, I just don't think it's sufficient), the SCA theory seems to focus more on the "artifact" (the story) than the artist (the author), that is, the story consumes itself in the telling or reading. (William Gibson actually created a book that was supposed to consume itself —the ink was supposed to burn away when exposed to sunlight, and the electronic version was supposed to eat itself as it was read – and only on a Mac, talk about a self-consuming artifact... that's always been my experience with anything connected with Steve Jobs. No, no, Mac fans, I don't mean it's a bad machine that eats itself, but rather that Jobs's and Apple's focus on design and trendiness has doomed the products to mere cult status, which is, of course, exactly the experience they want, I guess!)

Fish, anyway, said that the reader learns of the futility of looking for truth in art by experiencing the art. But as in the liar's paradox ("I am telling you a lie now"), of course the very act of that realization means that you have indeed found truth in art, the truth that you can't find truth in art... and stop thinking of that right now, or you'll give yourself a headache! (He also sort of suggested that self-consuming ended with the Age of Reason began—18^th C—because reason depends on the assumption that you can, in fact, determine the truth.) (BTW, I was talking to the husband about this, and he said, "Well, then there's quantum mechanics—" and I ran out of the room. Talk about headaches....)

Well, I do think you can find truth in art, and not just the truth of the futility thereof. So I find myself appreciating the technique (self-consumption), but not the conclusion. I'm sure it's fashionable and ironic to proclaim there is no truth, but anyone who writes or paints or sculpts believes there is some truth, and it can be captured (and is) in art. Else why bother? That "there is no truth" is what got us into this economic mess, a maze of mirrors called "derivatives," which bears an intriguing resemblance to Synecdoche's mirror structure (the actor playing the author and another actor playing that actor, etc.). If there is no anchor in some reality, well, everything's just a Vegas-style roulette game, right? I guess we saw that this last couple months on Wall Street, anyway. And there's no need for the rest of us to be so jaded—it's would be a good way to work ourselves into a creative block. (Why try, if there's no truth?)

But, as I said, the notion of self-consumption is quite useful. So I'm going to invent my own term, Authorial Negation (or Negation of Author—maybe we should vote on that :), meaning that the author of the work willingly and deliberately subverts his/her own authority by doing something that is destructive (of the author in some way) but helps to create for the reader an experience that is deeper, richer, fuller, something-er, than the story events alone would create. That is, the process of reading this particular work leads to an experience which is, to use a much-used phrase, greater than the sum of the work's parts. And the additional ingredient, whatever it is, is added by the author... and in adding that whatever, the author is sacrificing some essential element of authorship, whether it's reputation, credit ("Anonymous"), acclaim, control, pride of prose quality, voice, control of character, efficiency, orderliness, permanence, narrative logic, whatever the author would ordinarily take pride in and claim authority for. (See how I sacrificed my pride of prose by ending those both on a preposition?)

Let's look back at Poe—he subverted his own credibility by giving authority for the story over to these unreliable narrators, who lied and told bald untruths and didn't even try to make sense of what was happening, and often hiding the coolest and most thrilling events (like Morella's husband strangling her without ever admitting it).

Or Gibson, with his self-consuming book—what does he sacrifice? Permanence, surely. Maybe royalties—I mean, if I paid good money for a book that self-destructed, I'd take the fragments back to the bookstore and demand a refund. (Come to think of it, I have bought some paperbacks that have fallen to pieces, the spine breaking after one reading... I bet the author didn't actually choose that self-consumption.)

And what do they achieve, or allow the reader to achieve?

Poe's sacrifice lets the reader have the vicarious experience of getting away with murder, and maybe also the interactivity of solving the mystery of what's going on (because Poe doesn't solve it for us).

Gibson's sacrifice gives the reader an experience of the ephemerality of life (this poem is about his father's death) and of art, too, and also of the inability (cf. Synecdoche) of making a life into a poem.

And Charlie Kaufman, by sacrificing his skill at pacing and his knowledge of how film works, has created an experience that leads viewers to know something in their bones—life is not art, cannot be art, shouldn't be art. The risk is, of course, that the viewer will (as did everyone in the theater when I saw it!) walk on grumbling about how boring the film was, and maybe he should have cast Jim Carrey in this film too.

A big gamble, no doubt about it. The author is giving up some essential aspect of authorship in order to give over to the reader an opportunity to experience something new, even take ownership by creating her own meaning while perhaps scorning the author's ability.

Now about how this relates to fiction....

Just a few thoughts here. Readers now expect a more interactive experience, and to create it, fictionwriters are changing traditional approaches to narrative and prose. The element with most interest to me is, of course, is point of view. The tighter, closer the point of view, the more the author cedes of control over voice. That is, the author voice gives way to the character voice, which takes over the narration of the scene. What this does is give the reader not just a sense of what happens but an experience of what it's like to be this person—but at the cost of the perfectly grammatical sentences, the lush poetic prose, the omniscient panoramic viewpoint. Sometimes the narrator has an ugly voice; sometimes he sounds sullen and unpleasant and does a pretty lousy job of telling the story. Sometimes he even disses your favorite Dickens book:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two haemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They are nice and all -- I'm not saying that -- but they are also touchy as hell. Besides, I'm not going to tell you my whole goddamn autobiography or anything. I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.

(That's JD Salinger channeling Holden Caulfield.)

Letting the character voice dominate is a great surrender for authors who have spent years honing their voice. Yes, characters can have their own rough poetry, but if it's their voice, it's not yours, is it? You are giving something of yourself up, aren't you? And why? Because you think the reader will get more out of the story.

That's an authorial negation, I think, letting the reader hear and feel the character's narration rather than yours.

What's another "authorial negation" for the sake of greater truth-in-fiction?

Sequencing and selection of event are certainly part of the authorial arsenal. The author can coax all sorts of response from the reader that way—suspense, amusement, emotion. You know all that. You carefully assemble your scenes into just the right sequence to propel the character journey, to arc the emotion, to build the suspense.... But sometimes the traditional mode of transit isn't going to get the reader to the destination, maybe because it's too predictable, or because you want to highlight ambiguity, or--

For example, Synecdoche's emotion climax (which would usually happen near the end) is out of the traditional sequence. After years of searching, Caden finds his daughter, but she is dying. (Oh, in another amplication of the "life as art" dynamic, she has become a work of art herself, and is dying from it—the tattoos all over her body are killing her.) She has been deceived about him by her mother, and believes that he abandoned her in order to go with his lover "Eric". She says she can't forgive him unless he confesses, and, weeping, he "confesses" to this false story (again, notice the echo of the life as art dynamic). She weeps too, but says that she can't forgive him after all, and then dies. It's a very powerful moment (in fact, the only true emotion, I thought, in the whole film—by design, probably), but instead of happening at the end, so we could stumble to the exit, disquieted and sorrowful, it comes near midpoint, and we endure almost another hour of the tedium of all those actors "acting" out much lesser moments in Caden's life.

So Kaufman used a less traditional and actually less effective sequence. Why? Not because he doesn't know how to pace his film. (In his earlier film Adaptation, Nic Cage having to call his mother to tell her about his brother's death was similarly emotional, and happened just as you'd expect at the end.) He was subverting his own ability there. Why?

I'm not sure, but I know there's a reason. I think it might be to provide a contrast between Caden's real real life—what he doesn't want to turn into art—and his supposed "memoir play". He has to strain for emotion in the play—he doesn't actually seem much more interested than we are—but as his daughter dies, we see the difference between sorrow and depression, between, I guess, life and art (only maybe it's art and life... mirror, mirror).

I've seen this before in Patrick O'Brian's great sea-adventure stories. He's a much more charming writer than Kaufman, well, than anyone, and so I never quarreled with his odd narrative choices, like setting a battle scene not up on the deck with the Marines but down in the sick bay with the ship's surgeon. But now I suspect that the experience created was an approximation of war—that is, the unpredictability of it, the "they also serve who stand and wait" aspect of it. Waiting anxiously belowdecks with the ship's surgeon, unable to know how the battle was going, who among my favorite characters was in trouble, deprived me of the adrenaline rush of a battle scene... and the pleasure of vicarious war. It was, perhaps, a more honest portrayal of war—the fear, the dread, the impending loss—than a battle scene might have been.

Another authorial imperative that you might forgo is the satisfactory ending. How pleasurable it is to wrap it all up, to make everything fit, to answer all the questions the plot has posed—to give your characters the ending they deserve. But closure might not be the experience you want the reader to have. Maybe (replicating life :), the ending is unsettled, uncertain, unpredicted—not because you as the author don't know what you're doing, don't know what organic or holistic ending is called for here, but –

Of course, you and I know that, just as Charlie Kaufman had control over how Synecdoche developed, the author has some control over the reader's experience—yes, even while surrendering control. The act of surrendering control, after all, is in itself showing a certain control—and I suspect, just as Kaufman knew what experience he wanted the reader to have, we have some control in choosing what authorial prerogative we'll forego and what we'll surrender, and what we'll keep to ourselves.

Maybe that's all part of the mirror-mirror effect, an infinity of images, of possibilities, of replications.

But... but there is truth in art. Whenever we're surprised, whenever we are settled, whenever we are moved by a work of art, there is some truth there that perhaps can't be captured any other way. Take that, Stanley Fish.

Oh, must quote Keats here—he was talking, I'm sure, about that Romantic inspiration, that creative frenzy, that mystic connection. But I've always thought (since I have never imagined Shakespeare as a romantic :) that in fact, negative capability (at least as regards S) has more to do with the ability to let go of this authorial imperative and let the story unfold and the characters change. Shakespeare was the one, after all, who kept turning villains into compelling characters, so they were never just evil, and heroes were never just good.

Anyway, here is Keats, and then a snatch of one of his odes:

I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration. (John Keats, 1817)

She dwells with Beauty - Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

Alicia

Synecdoche thoughts part 1

I saw Synecdoche (film by Charlie Kaufman) this weekend, and want to talk about something it brought up in my head. So spoiler alert, only this is not like a murder mystery—it's not likely I'll say anything that will actually spoil the film, as it's not all that comprehensible anyway. :) However, if you don't want to know what little I understood of the movie, stop now.

Okay, so this film with a title no one can pronounce (sin-neck-duck-key) or define (the device of using a part of a thing to represent the whole thing, like "wheels" to represent "a car"). It's about a writer, so hey! Yay! After all those films about cops and strippers, finally! Films about REAL people like us! Anyway, Caden Cotard is a playwright. (The Cotard Syndrome is worth reading about—the delusion that you don't actually exist.) When the film opens, he is directing to great acclaim a performance of Death of a Salesman, and I think that is significant, as it bookends the "play" trope—that is, here it is, fifty years after the play was written, and audiences are still loving it. (Keep that thought, as his own play lasts for fifty years... that is, it takes fifty years to "write", and it never gets performed.)

So then his wife leaves him and he gets a Genius Grant (a fair trade, given his wife is not really all that appealing :), and he decides to use the money to fund a new project, a play that replicates life. And then it gets sort of weird as Caden starts hiring actors to BE him and the others in his life, and that lasts a REEEEEEALLLL long time. But it's sort of interesting, in a tedious way. I mean, the idea is interesting, even if the actual scenes are pretty boring. (The film is worth seeing... just don't feel bad if there are long stretches you have to concentrate to follow).

What does it all mean? Well, I don't pretend to understand film, but at least it sparked a few thoughts for me.

1) Art isn't life. Art can imitate life (and vice versa), but art can't be life, or even replicate life. Caden spends decades trying to make a play that is like life, and guess what? It's boring and interminable. Life is about living. Art is about selection, conflict, focus. Life is diffuse. Art is concise. This is shown with the contrast of Death of a Salesman (two concentrated hours) and Caden's unnamed masterpiece-manque. Death of a Salesman focuses on a few significant moments, and has lived for 50 years. Caden's M-M has no focus, and outlives most of its actors.

2) Audience makes meaning. Death of a Salesman is performed in the first few minutes of the film, to great reviews and audience rapture. And it's been performed thousands of time, but everytime is new. Caden's version has very young actors performing the older parts, and as he comments, the contrast makes the audience think about mortality—that is, the audience is a maker of meaning, a part of the process.

In Caden's own play, there is no audience, just the creator and the performers... and there is no meaning. At one point, one of the actors points out they've been rehearsing for 17 years and never performed, but Caden's narcissism is such that he doesn't need an audience. The meaning for him is just that... well, I think that he's important and his life is important. This is ratified by all these people who are spending their lives replicating his life. But they are not the audience. There is no audience. So there is no meaning.

3) Art is about selection. Generally it's created in retrospect, in reflection (there are some poetry and rap jams, not to mention jazz and comedy improvs, of course, but usually the improvisers have been preparing all their lives). Revision means you can shift events and words for greater effect. Effect—effect on the audience, of course. In fact, the initial creation might be all about the artist, but revision is all about the audience, about making this make sense for the audience. Caden's M-M never gets to the revision stage, the "audience-effect" stage-- it's all created on the fly, and revised only as life requires (like a character dies or an actor quits).

4) Art is also about permanence. In drama and music, which rely so much on the performer, that means repetition. That is, part of the power of Death of a Salesman is that certain elements cannot be changed without it ceasing to be Death of a Salesman. Caden can cast it with young actors; Arthur Miller can present it in China in Chinese. The setting can be, I don't know, a space station in 2090. But something essential must remain, Willy's salesman persona, the line about attention, the theme of family disappointment. Caden's life-art has no permanence, because it has no ending—it's constantly changing as he changes his understanding of what's going on in his life.

Ars longus, vita brevis. Arthur Miller is gone, but Death of a Salesman remains with us. But when Syndecdoche ends, Caden is still alive, wandering in the derelict precincts of his set, deserted by all his actors and presumably his muse too. His life lasted longer than his art, which I guess suggests it wasn't really art at all... just his narcissism?

Well, okay, I'll think of other "art is" items. But now I'm going to just free-associate rather than try to be organize, or I'll never finish this!

The film is intriguing to me because, like the actor who gets drunk to play the drunk, Kaufman is willing to be boring in order to show how life isn't art.

Theatrical Bookends (motif here):

Death of a Salesman and Caden's Masterpiece-manque (MM)—

Hmm. Well, as I've said, Death is very contained, though actually non-linear—that is, there are those flashbacks that break the chronology. MM is tediously linear, moving only forward in time, though there are sudden jumps forward—suddenly the play has been in progress (or at least rehearsal) for 17 years, for example.

The most famous line in Death is "Attention must be paid!" That is, Willy's important, and someone should notice. His wife speaks this.

In Synecdoche (that is, Kaufman's film, not Caden's play), the actor/stalker who has been playing Caden jumps off a roof to his death (replicating more successfully Caden's suicide attempt). At the actor's funeral, Caden suddenly says, "No one is an extra. They're all leads in their own story." Then, when this event is subsumed into the play, instead of Caden, the minister says this as part of a (nutso) funeral eulogy. Not sure why it's changed from Caden. But I notice that in Death, the corresponding line is spoken by Willy's wife, that is, not by the protagonist Willy. Maybe Caden understood that distance was needed for that sort of pronouncement, but since he's so much lesser a playwright than Arthur Miller, he gives the central realization not to a major character, but to a walk-on, never seen before or again. That weakens the importance of the realization by making it extraneous to plot events—that is, the minister just announces this, and since we don't know him, we don't know what has led to this understanding. (With Willy's wife, we know all that has led to this, her love of Willy, her disillusionment, her identification with him, her vicarious humiliation....)

So by assigning it to a walk-on, Caden is diminishing the power of this, and this is deliberate, at least on Kaufman's part. With Caden, I think it's interesting—this wilderness of mirrors. The actor playing him committed suicide. He is both playwright and character. Both he and Kaufman decide to take his own understanding and give it to the minister.

Well, I think with Caden it could be a desire to distance himself from his own guilt—that is, if he hadn't unsuccessfully attempted suicide, the actor wouldn't have been led to replicate that. And Kaufman certainly wants to pose that question. But he could also be doing what I suggested in a recent post—put the Big Realization in the mouth of a non-credible character, and since the minister has a breakdown during the eulogy and starts cussing, he's pretty non-credible. :)

Funeral too—that is, Willy commits suicide, like the actor/stalker. Willy has been thinking of his own funeral for a long time, hoping it will be well-attended. In fact, one of the saddest moments in Death is when Willy predicts that many will pay their respects when he dies—he's looking forward to his funeral because death will provide the validation life hasn't. (And of course, no one comes to his funeral.) The actor's funeral is actually fairly well-attended, but the truth is, he is important to no one (I can't even remember his name :). He is, no matter what Caden says, an extra, a marginalized character whose importance is just in his role, and who is quickly replaced. He isn't the lead in his own life, because he has chosen to be an extra in someone else's play. So Willy actually has more of a life, more of a reality. He is living his own life, however sad, and his funeral is his own.

So, anyway, Death of a Salesman and Caden's MM are bookends of this film and are meant to thematically resonate and echo, and I'm sure the rest of you can find more resonances!

Off to bed—more thoughts later, including how this all connects to fiction-writing.

Alicia

(Part 2 here)