by Paul Klemperer

In a previous issue, I posed questions about the idea of art as fiction and, like most things, finding a few answers has raised more questions. Given that the act of artistic creation (regardless of the medium -- paint, film, words, music) results in a fiction, a personal synthesis of reality, such an act can be very liberating.

Sometimes our fictive abilities just give us symbolic control; sometimes they enable us to change objective reality. For example, in art we anthropomorphize things like death and evil into quaint fictions resulting in literature like The Devil and Daniel Webster or music like "The Devil Went Down To Georgia." However, we also create fictions like money and the 7-day week, things that have objectively altered our reality through the organization of time, labor and technology.

So a question for artists is whether the fiction we create actually alters our objective reality or only alters our view of it. Architects reorganize the physical space in which we live. Radio broadcasts allow a song to be heard around the globe. Rap music playing through humongous stereo systems out of car windows rattles the walls of our houses and make us psychotic. These things affect our objective reality.

Another question for artists is whether the narrative structure we employ to shape our art is something we control or something that controls us. We have inherited many narrative structures through the cultural continuum. Writers have genres like the novel, the play and the short story. Composers have genres like the concerto, the opera and the pop song. These genres shape and delimit the ideas that they express.

On a daily basis we employ narrative forms to create the fictions of our lives: stories, jokes, dialogues and arguments. All may feel spontaneous, but most follow underlying patterns and structural cues. If you've ever had a conversation with a debate team graduate, religious zealot or member of a political party, you know what I mean. The point is that these various narrative structures are so familiar to us that we don't give them a second thought, and that can cause us to limit the way we imagine and comment upon our world. Info-tainment TV, newspapers written at a third grade reading level, shock-talk radio and the like do little to challenge our imaginations. Slogans touted by UFO buffs ("The truth is out there.") and conspiracy theorists ("Question authority.") may have more to do with our imprisoned imaginations than with specific political agendas.

What are the most prevalent narrative structures of our time? This is something of a rhetorical question, but I do think that two structures predominate: the sitcom and the soap opera. As narrative structures, they are seductive in their simplicity. In the former, simple character types deal with mundane plot devices, giving us snappy one-liners that do nothing to actually change the static reality. In the latter, the demons and desires of the subconscious are acted out by characters in an ever-changing hyperbolic landscape. These two structures represent different distorted versions of our world: one static, the other constantly changing. Between them they contain our imagination and limit the narratives we use to describe our own lives. N'est-ce pas?

A further question for artists is how often do such confining narrative structures cross over into other art forms and structures. For example, I often see my life and art as bordering either on being a sitcom or a soap opera. (But then the bandleader pays me, and I push these disturbing thoughts to the back of my mind.) Thus, it might follow that if the sitcom depends on clever, banal phrases and the soap opera on overwrought, maudlin images, then both of these narrative structures describe most of contemporary American mass culture. Blink your eyes once if you agree, twice if you don't.