From: rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson)
Newsgroups: alt.postmodern
Subject: Deconstructing bullies and wimps
Date: 29 Sep 92 11:59:19 GMT

Gary Lawrence writes:

RC:
>   More recently I've come to ask myself if
>   there is a center or core or narrative engine -- an ur-narrative
>   or deep structure or core phantasy underneath the shifting
>   "surface" of the phenomenal or evident narrative.
GL:
>Is there any need?  Try telling someone directly what you think they
>should think (like me here ;-) ) --- how successful is it?  Now try
>telling the same person a story where a wise person tells Simplissico
>the same moral 'truth' with no more supporting evidence.  Which
>technique is more likely to provoke a strong negative reaction?

No. You have not seen the question I was raising.  It's related to
that "formula" writing you mention later.  Certainly one
"function" of narrative is propaganda, and it works for reasons
like the one you suggest, like "over the shoulder advertising,"
where the real receiver (reader or viewer) feels like an
eavesdropper or feels h/erself to be at some kind of neutral
Olympic heights outside of space and time.

But the thing I had in mind had to do with the "essence" of the
narrative itself.  Post-structuralists have presented narrative as
a center-less play of surfaces.  But maybe there really is an
invariant kernel. That's the question I was considering.  It's one
of those times I wish I were really well-connected.  I'd really
like to hear what Jacques Derrida would have to say on the matter:
are there at least _some_ narratives, maybe inferior "formula" or
"popular" or pornographic or propagandistic ones, which have a
statable and invariant center, with the surface being a spin or
transformation of this invariant center?  I don't think anyone has
asked Derrida that question in exactly that way.

[Btw, that "wise person" of yours seems to be a kind of universal
archetype.  Isn't Tim's omniscient neighbor, Wilson, a
contemporary embodiment of the archetype on _Home Improvement_?]

RC:
>   But depth psychology, particularly Freud's version, especially as
>   developed by Melanie Klein and Theodore Reik, does suggest a
>   phantasy "engine" at the core of the narrative.  That encounter
>   between the bully and the wimp, which is such a poor mirror of
>   "reality," does apparently mirror _something_, and that something
>   seems to be ...

GL:
>So it shows our brains can generalize and then generate novel narratives
>based on the generalizations being characatured.  What is so amazing
>that you must postulate, without basis, some 'engine' peculiar to this
>theme? A phantasy engine phantasy engine perhaps?

I was suggesting something very specific, namely the conscious
fantasies we find both in clinical paraphiliacs -- and also in
"normal" people when thy let their imaginations have free vein.  I
don't think you understood that specificity. Maybe I didn't make
it clear enough.

RC:
>   I think it is worth noting that these narratives, from _Tom
>   Brown's School Days_ down to the latest episodes of _Step by Step_
>   or _Home Improvement_, are written by adults.  Even if children
>   are the intended receivers and the narrative purports to teach
>   some "valuable lesson about life," to quote Homer and Bart
>   Simpson, it still came out of the teeming unconscious stew of an
>   adult author.  Thus the unathletic wimp is able to defeat a bully
>   who became a bully in part because of his superior muscular
>   strength. Even if the intended moral of the story is that getting
>   mad or really trying or having right on your side will enable you
>   to triumph, underneath all that there is the more primal psychic
>   drama of one person in combat with another.

GL:
>If you choose to see it as such (but then Freud always chose
>correctly ;-)) Why not try to fit at least three alternatives?
>Maybe the allegory of personal combat relieves the writer of
>finding a vehicle for his moral teaching?  In the profession, if
>you ask the writers and it seems you are reluctant to, they call
>this "formula writing" because it is almost guaranteed to evoke
>the much needed identification of the consumer with the plot;
>nearly everyone over the age of one understands what it is like to
>be in interpersonal conflict and nearly everyone likes a story
>about themselves.

I'm very interested in finding practicing creative writers to
discuss these things with.  I even posted on bit.listserv.infonets
asking if anyone knew a network or echo where creative writers
hang out.

I did have a long discussion about 2 years ago in the ILink
Writers echo on the topic.  What happened was interesting.  Most
of the writers hated the term "ur-narrative," which sounded
pretentious to them.  But I just kept posting and asking for
further clarification of what they were saying.  We more or less
decided that we couldn't find any "unspinning" ur-narratives, an
actual "formula" that could be stated with grammatical or logical
precision of the form:

boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back again.

(Yes, yes, I know that that _looks_ like one, but it is too
general.)

RC:
>   It may be that there is no way to start with the
>   traditional narrative involving the bully and the wimp and
>   creatively resolve it in any way that provides any kind of
>   normative guidance, that "valuable lesson about life," or any
>   moral or aesthetic balance.

GL:
>How dreadfully dull!  Are you now postulating that there exists
>(in Freudian unreality terms) some story which, if written, would
>preclude all neccessity for further stories?  Here's a big secret
>for you: the Universe is dynamic!  Yes, it is true!  Two
>completely contradictory versions of any tale are possible because
>the situations were the lessons are to be applied can be
>different!  Amazing, isn't it!

The "ur-narrative" -- I think Derrida uses a term like "one true
text," or something like that -- is a theoretical construction or
abstraction, like a quark or a lepton.  It might turn out to have
the binary or dialectical structure you suggest, like Kantian
antinomies, so that the same story teaches the contradictory
lessons of "look before you leap" and "he who hesitates is lost,"
based, as both you and Kant suggest, on gross or subtle
differences in the situation.

Or there may be more "lessons" in that sometimes you should hold
them, sometimes you should fold them, sometimes you should walk
away and sometimes you should run!

--
Richard Carlson
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