Competition With Cacophony:
To help explain what all this is about, it may help to have a copy of what I used to explain this stuff to the Humanities Professors.
Imagine that, instead of you everyday speaker, I am an ancient European tribal storyteller. That would mean that you, my audience, would not be sitting there so placidly. You’d be eating big slabs of meat, crude food. You would drink mead. It would be considerably colder in here. And I, with my story, would have to compete with all the camaraderie and cacophony of an ancient banquet. I would stand up on the table and yell!
Hwaet!
Bringing the Mountain to Mohamed
In fact, ancient literature often begins with similar attention getting devices. Those devices are have trickled down into today’s texts in a few ways, the lead paragraph of a newspaper article for example. That lead paragraph is weak compared to the ancient method though. A lead paragraph, a bunch of interesting words in print, it assumes you’ve already come to the page of your own accord. It doesn’t bring you to the text the way an ancient storyteller could. Its my contention that nothing in print does.
With all the things competing for people’s attention in our world today, its easy to imagine that whatever doesn’t compete doesn’t get seen, not by most anyway, and whatever isn’t seen by most is lost to most. Today, I would like to propose a method I have devised to make my writing more accessible, because I feel it is the first part of my job as a storyteller. I have found my own contemporary equivalent of yelling from the table. I have found it, first by looking at the things that are already yelling at everyone in society, and which of those actually get their message across, and secondly by examining ways in which my writing might borrow from these things in order for it to communicate more effectively.
Competition With Cacophony
Its an age old problem for storytellers. By Chaucer’s time, he makes a comment about the state of storytelling by integrating his characters’ stories into a contest in order to make them palatable. The promise of a prize, and the thrill of a contest is what keeps them listening.
Shakespeare had to compete with cock-fights. A writer in that day had to capture the attention of the same group of people who could just as easily be down the street watching two animals rend each other to bits. Those people were the bulk of his audience. If a playwright at that time, failed to win the attention of an audience, he would make no money and eat no food. Worse, the words would fall on deaf ears, or none.
The history of literature is dotted with cries for attention, because it is the attention that keeps literature alive. That cry will have to be a lot louder than a measly lead paragraph if it is to compete with all the other objects of our attention. We sit back, say “people should pay attention to literature more often”?, and wish that they did, but people’s attention doesn’t come out of nowhere. A merely wishful attitude will never put food on the storyteller’s table. Even ancient storytellers knew that much. It seems to have been forgotten these days
The language of literature is drowned out in contemporary society. It is drowned out by advertising language. It is drowned out by Cinematic imagery. It is drowned out by televised imagery. It is drowned out by rock lyrics, hip-hop lyrics, country music ballads, all of which could be much more lyrical than they are. If we’re not careful, the language of literature could be drowned out past the point of rescue. That may just be the way of things. The cock fight may win out in the end. What are we going to do about it? Academia insists that people read more “real”
literature, but what if they don’t want to? Personally, I am about to embark on a life’s work that will go unnoticed by most of the people I grew up with, most of my friends, and perhaps even a few of my family members. These people, literature isn’t attractive to them. If they do read anything I write, it will only be because they know me. Contemporary Literature doesn’t do much to attract an audience. It stands on its own merit, but only for those that recognize the merit of literature in the first place. The quality of literature, these days, is a sermon for the choir. The only people who foster an appreciation of literature are the people who read it because they appreciate it in the first place. This is because contemporary literature has lost touch with its ancient attention getting tactics. Gone are the days when literature could coexist with the cacophony of everyday life.
What Does Get Through the Noise?
How do you get that sermon for the choir out to the rest of the congregation? After all, those people need it. The answer to that question lies among the things that do get through to those people, among the things that are communicated to those people. For the most part, the language that gets through to us more than any other is advertising language. Advertising language has published itself on every medium ever known, from telemarketing to Internet banner ads. Its everywhere. I think that those tactics of advertising language are an unused fertile ground for a better language, the language of story. Those are the words that still get yelled from the table. It should be possible to yell just as loudly, and just as well, with different words.
How Would Writing Benefit from This?
If the problem is that Literature is a text that is drowned out and not received, then perhaps the solution lies in a medium designed to receive text. I propose that it should be possible to publish a novel, with a screen where there would be pages, and an audience where there would be none.
Can Writing Adapt to This New Medium?
Of course, a screen in place of a page poses a big set of creative challenges. How on Earth can you honestly expect to fit literature of any merit, let alone substance, onto something that is essentially a television? Volumes of “hypertext theory” have been written about this new medium, and what kinds of texts we can expect to come from it. In general, the most important aspect of this medium is the potential for non-linear communication. I think all of us, as fledgling internet users, quickly mastered the concept of the link. It may take much longer to fully realize its potential. Now, we’re no longer confined by the forced-linear structure of a book, where one pages leads naturally into the next. We can arrange ideas by association, in print, the way we keep them in our heads. It will be difficult to use a conventional plot structure. That’s fine with me. I don’t like the conventional plot structure. I’ll tell you why. The rising-climactic male-orgasmic way of things can not possibly be the only way events unfold. That structure can not possibly be the only one for a story. Its time for something new.
Conclusion
I will be telling a large story made of many smaller parts. The “Plot” will only be apparent as a sense of things comes together in the readers mind, after seeing enough of the text images.
These little snippets, on the screen, are important because they can be read in stolen moments, in line at the grocery store, or while standing on the subway. It will be a good thing to put literature on a screen, because there are so many screens already conveniently in front of so many people. Literature must thrive there, in front of so many people, in the midst of the cacophony of everyday contemporary busy-ness, where a good story might be needed most, if only it were given a moment of attention. Thank you for yours.
