From: rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson)
Newsgroups: alt.postmodern,alt.is.too,alt.cascade
Subject: Re: Madonna (was: Re: Curriculum changes)
Date: 26 Sep 92 15:51:52 GMT

gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:

> gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
> |> Just think of that country club face and those pale eyes
> |> staring out at you from between these letters.  Think of
> |> the space that lies behind them and stretches away to
> |> what blue skies, what far climes, what many-digited
> |> bank accounts.  Think of the money slumbering in its
> |> dream, multiplying and dividing and eating the future.
> |> 
> |> And then there's the teeth....
> 
> rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson):
> | But whatever else you say about Dan, he did start the first
> | serious discussion of the interaction of narrative and social
> | reality. ...  . Fictional characters may be more important
> | role models than real people, for good or ill. ...
> | Last Sunday Sam Donaldson let the David Brinkley team in a long
> | and surprisingly insightful discussion of the social impact of
> | Hollywood's narratives.  And there's also a surprisingly good
> | summary of the issues in the current _Time_.  We can thank Dan for
> | all that!
> 
> I hope this is satirical, but satire has not been your 
> forte, Richard.  There have been many, endlessly many 
> serious discussions of the interaction of narrative and 
> social reality, but what Dan started, outside of about a 
> hundred thousand mostly bad jokes, was yet another
> vulgarization and banalization of the topic.  

You're right.  I wasn't being satirical.  I was serious.  You are
also right that not only are American narratives vulgar and
trashy, but the discourse concerned with their vulgarity and
trashiness is itself vulgar and trashy.  The problem is that you
take the observation no further.  I've been asking myself for 43
years why that is so.  As soon as you raise that question you
realize that it _is_ a question, i.e., why is the discussion of
the banality of American narrative itself so banal?

I remember commenting on the vulgarity and trashiness of American
narrative back in the 6th grade.  That was in 1949 when the
narratives I was commenting on then now appear almost Sophoclean
or Shakespearian compared to the narratives circulating now! (They
are clearly deteriorating at an exponential rate.)  But what I got
from my more intelligent classmates was a charge that I wanted to
impose my own values and tastes on others, that I wanted to censor
artistic freedom and that I was un-American.  No one addressed the
substantive question of whether or not the narratives I cited were
good or bad, although I gradually discovered that precisely the
kids who had been most vocal in criticizing me for characterizing
the narratives as junk were themselves the most convinced that
these narratives were in fact junk, only they regarded that as a
matter of private taste and they regarded it as almost a violation
of the American constitution to express the valuation publicly.

That experience was the basis for my long interest in the ideology
of Enlightened thought and the movement of ideological and
rhetorical elements within the Enlightenment.

> Now, just about everything on network television is 
> vulgar and banal, including Murphy Brown and Dan Quayle, 
> and I have no quarrel with those who like that sort of 
> thing, but to say this is some kind of innovation is 
> silly.  Even in my teenagerhood, so long ago, there was
> an interminable, vulgar, banal discussion of how certain
> comic books corrupted the youth.  And before that, it was
> the crime movies.  

Psychological evidence is now indubitable that those comic books
and crime movies did in fact corrupt youth.  Indeed the L.A.
drive-by shootings and even the riot owe more to those junk
narratives than they do to the evident injustice of the Rodney
King verdict. But no discourse -- at least no meaningful discourse
-- could take place because anyone who raised the issue was
himself trivialized and even demonized the way I was back in the
6th grade.  Well, Dan Quayle has the whole Republican brain trust
of campaign and rhetorical wizards to draw on, so it's harder to
do it to him.  I doubt whether Dan himself realized that Candice
and Diane were winning the debate by falsely attributing a general
putdown of all single mothers to him.  I'm sure one of the White
House rhetoricians helped him draft his response.  But he did
respond reasonably well and didn't allow Candice and Diane to
define him as a stupid, mindless bigot.  So I think the current
debate is miles ahead of those discussion of the bad influences of
trashy comic books and crime movies.  And we really do have Dan to
thank for that.

> No doubt the subject was being thoroughly hashed between 
> the teeth of aficionados of vulgarity and banality as they 
> lounged about the hoardings where the ziggurats of Babylon 
> were under construction; but I would prefer not to hear of 
> it, if it can possibly be avoided.

Here I am sure you are wrong.  The persistent emergence of junk
narrative is a historical phenomenon, not a constant, existential
one.  It doesn't always happen everywhere.  The first serious
discussion of junk narrative was by German philosophers of the
_Aufklaerung_ around the end of the 18th Century when the newly
educated bourgeoisie was inundated with junk "Gothic" horror
novels (which were the template for Mary Shelley's
_Frankenstein_).  American critics did not seem to realize that
American narrativity never progressed beyond the most primitive
stages of development until toward the end of the 19th Century, at
which time we had the start of those _Closing of the American
Mind_ books, which are themselves a recurring genre.

--
Richard Carlson
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