The Preeminence of Narrative

In the January 25^th issue of “The New Yorker,” Jane Mayer writes about the rebranding of David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who have worked so hard and spent so much time and treasure to champion and shape American conservatism.  The two hired Steve Lombardo, formerly a senior executive of the global P.R. company Burson-Marsteller as their chief of communications and marketing to orchestrate their rebranding.  According to Mayer,

“Lombardo believed that the key to creating a positive brand was to reach the public’s “subconscious mind,” as he wrote in O’Dwyer’s, the public-relations trade journal. The most effective “pathway” to the subconscious, he argued, was “storytelling,” in part because it tapped into emotions. He expanded on this in a Koch Industries newsletter. “Building a brand is telling a story…”

I wouldn’t be surprised if many marketing professionals find it a rather banal observation about a concept they’ve actually used for decades.  However, it does allude to an important, consistent current in media, politics and academia, something I would call the preeminence of narrative, for lack of a better term.  Quite simply, nearly all discourse is leveled, understood and evaluated as “narrative” with a spectrum of effects, from the subliminal, to the emotional and the intellectual.  Often, as a consequence, validity and accuracy are complex, secondary issues, dependent upon perspective, semantics, cultural frame and audience. Truth is relative.

We’ve lived in an intellectual landscape shaped by Barthes, Foucault and Derrida long enough to see what a multiple edged sword such an intellectual stance that is.  It may seem that there is no rational, reasoned alternative, unless we resort to Kierkegaard’s reasoning.

But there is, at least, another way to look at the issue, and basic, formal Euclidean Geometry suggests a point of view.  Euclid begins with a very small number of intentionally undefined common-sense concepts: a point, a line and a plane and 5 postulates about them, for example, a straight line segment can be drawn between any two points.  From just those very basic concepts all of Euclidean geometry is derived by proving theorems, special kinds of stories, if you like, which are rigorously logical.  Inevitably, at some stage, anyone encountering Euclidean Geometry for the first time steps back and is amazed at how much, some of which is subtle and beautiful, can come from so little.

A narrative is not as simple and unambiguous as a point, a line or a plane, and that’s the point I’m coming to.  Narratives are dangerously complex, mutable even mercurial.  That’s a large part of why we love stories.  But choosing that idea as an elemental concept for discourse is fraught with dangerous consequences, not least of which is the challenge of evaluating very basic, necessary concerns, such as truthfulness and accuracy.

The Tolkien Mystery

I’ve been a mostly consistent reader of the New Yorker for more than forty years, since I discovered it, very improbably, in an elementary school library. I’ve read the magazine during the long sunset of William Shawn’s editorship, through Gotlieb’s, through Tina Brown’s revolution and have been delighted by David Remnick’s elevation of the magazine even as he’s broadened it to have a strong web presence and character. I’ve grown particularly fond of several of the staff such as Steve Coll, George Packer and Adam Gopnik. Gopnik’s recent personal essay, in particular, relating his experience as an art historian learning to draw was both delightful and revelatory as only the best personal essays can be. Somewhat to my surprise, I find myself reading the magazine cover to cover most weeks.

All of which is pertinent because I found Gopnik’s most recent article “The Dragon’s Egg” about fantasy literature so deeply disappointing and provocative at the same time. The subtitle of the article is “High Fantasy for Young Adults,” which gives a lot away. It was as if I’d stepped back in time to the 1970’s when there existed, more or less, a coherent literary establishment which pronounced judgment on fantasy as not serious and suitable only for young adults. Gopnik’s more than reductive set of examples includes Paolini, Tolkien, Stephanie Meyer with nods to Terry Brooks J. K. Rowling and T. H. White. Gopnik admit’s to a sneaking admiration for the intensity of emotion of Meyer’s characters but at best damns the rather curious collection of authors with faint praise while making time to suggest that for the most part fantasy fiction has the same plot that Tolkien revived from the Nibelungenlied.

I don’t read that much fantasy but even in my limited experience that criticism rings particularly hollow and ironic especially when George R. R. Martin’s highly sexed and discordant series has entered popular cultural via a very successful HBO mini-series.

I wouldn’t take time to comment except that Gopnik’s piece is provocative in an entirely different way. Midway through he attempts to identify what makes Tolkien’s fiction compelling. He writes,

"This is surely the most significant of the elements that Tolkien brought to fantasy. It’s true that his fantasies are uniquely “thought through”: every creature has its own origin story, script, or grammar; nothing is gratuitous. But even more compelling was his arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and “The Wind in the Willows”—big Icelandic romance and small-scale, cozy English children’s book. The story told by “The Lord of the Rings” is essentially what would happen if Mole and Ratty got drafted into the Nibelungenlied."

Now this is interesting. But it’s just a start, and the same start others have made, in trying to understand what makes Tolkien's fiction important, compelling and lasting. I recall a rather dismissive article the late John Gardner wrote in which he described rereading Tolkien and found so many reasons to dismiss it even as he himself was attempting to legitimize fantasy with his dark fictions such as Grendel. The truth is I’ve never read any criticism that provides anything like a comprehensive exegesis of the strength of Tolkien’s work. My sense is that that is still a mystery hidden in the plain sight of popular culture.

How does a fencer beat Goliath?

Fencing is nearly unwatchable. The things that are important are so subtle and interpreting them is equally difficult. For example, when is one competitor’s forte (the third of the blade closest to the guard) overlapping the others foible (third of the blade toward the tip)? Does a slightly lifted arm after a parry indicate a mistake or is it a provocation? Who is provoking whom? And there’s the footwork. And all of it is happening so quickly. Even if you’re an experienced fencer it can be a challenge to know what to watch when.

But if you do have an eye for what to look for it can be compelling. The final of the senior mixed epee event of the last tournament I attended was such an event. The eventual winner had had a mixed day at best. He’d lost a pool bout he should have won and his quarter-final and semi-final direct elimination bouts were precarious. The latter was won by one point with a toe touch, if I remember correctly. And then, he had to immediately proceed into the final against a well-rested opponent. Nevertheless, he focused and rose to the occasion, which is archetypical element of almost every sports story. What was more interesting to me, however, was how he won. To my mind the single most important element was the breadth and diversity of his game. Besides being an obvious advantage to him it was also a significant disadvantage for his opponent in an interesting way. Because, there were so many possibilities, his opponent simply had to think more and more often. That made him necessarily slower, as Czajkowski points out. It increased his latency period.

A related theme is the subject of Malcolm Gladwell’s article How David Beats Goliath, currently available in the New Yorker online. Gladwell focuses predominantly on National Junior Basketball for girls and one coach’s innovative application of the full court press. The theme is that the outsider, the underdog, can win if he or she is willing and creative enough to find an unconventional strategy and sufficiently diligent to apply it successfully (as it often requires more work). He mentions several other examples, T.E. Lawrence’s innovative strategy for defeating the Turks in WWI by not attacking Medina but by disrupting the Hejaz railway instead, a naval war gamer who used an AI program to surmount nearly insurmountable odds coupled with labyrinthine rules and conventions, and George Washington’s early strategy in the US War of Independence.

Needless to say, it’s a particularly appealing stance for me as a fencer. The problem is that fencing is very old, fencers are very clever, so they’ve institutionalized the idea of stepping outside of the ordinary. Finding something truly innovative is less easy than it might be in other endeavors.

The illustration is a cartoon T.E. Lawrence drew of himself for "7 Pillars of Wisdom," one the greatest and simply enjoyable books written in the 20th century.