The evolution of storytelling: have stories become more complex?
June 15th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
I recently had a discussion on the evolution of storytelling – as you do – with a Canadian friend who is an English teacher in an American school. I suggested that storytelling has become more opaque but she rather contested that. She pointed out that the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” – both, of course, very old works – are examples of complex storytelling.
I’m been thinking more about our discussion.
First, a few introductory points:
1. I used the word opaque. I could have used other words like less straightforward, less conventional, more complicated, more challenging, more sophisticated.
2. I did not mean this as a criticism, so much as an observation. At its best, this trend makes storytelling richer and more nuanced; at its worst, such storytelling becomes confusing, even indulgent.
3. Our discussion was mainly about storytelling in novels, but my favourite storytelling genre is cinema and I think that hers is theatre. Perhaps later we will look at various arts of storytelling including poetry (which I find particularly hard) and even art itself.
4. My friend rightly pointed out that there has always been sophisticated storytelling. I agree. I’m talking about general trends, particularly over the last century or so, and about more literary works rather than common fiction.
OK – now to the substance of my assertion:
I think that we both accept that essentially traditional storytelling has three elements: exposition, complication, resolution. Structurally this usually means a beginning, a middle and an end (but not necessarily in that order).
Beginnings have become more variable these days. Rarely is a story told chronologically; there are usually multiple flash-backs (and sometimes flash-backs within flashbacks). Endings in particular have become more opaque in modern storytelling with frequently uncertain, ambiguous or open endings.
I’ve been rereading an essay titled “Approaches To The Novel” contained in the book “Novels And Novelists: A Guide To The World Of Fiction” edited by Martin Seymour-Smith. This was first published in 1980 and I bought it in 1987.
In support of my basic assertion on the growing opacity of storytelling, I would like to quote some points from this essay:
“In its evolution over the last 250 years, the novel has moved from simplicity to complexity.”
“One mark of growing complexity has been the defiance or undermining of conventional structures, codes and constraints. Open-ended novels … are common in the twentieth century (in the nineteenth century, they occurred only when the novelist died while writing).”
As regards the phases exposition, complication, resolution: “Since fiction in the twentieth century has become increasingly sophisticated, the phases are not always clear cut, or are sometimes deliberately flouted.”
“According to one epigrammatic account, ‘the history of fiction is simply the decay of plot’. The writer is alluding to the increasing ‘inconsequentiality’ of modern and post-modern fiction.”
“In the modern ‘literary’ novel, the reader has no secure sense that everything will fall into place.”
These comments are predominately about the structure of the modern literary novel but, in our conversation, I also instanced important changes in style:
– instead of one point of view, we often have two or more
– instead of a reliable narrator, we often have a narrator who is unreliable, either intentionally or through trauma, alcohol, drugs, or mental illness
– instead of classic punctuation, speech marks may be omitted or some or all punctuation marks may be omitted or pronouns may be used instead of names.
Any thoughts? Any examples?
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (3)
A review of the novel “The Beekeeper Of Aleppo” by Christy Lefteri
June 11th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
There is a certain fashion for novels to have a title in the format “The [common noun of an occupation] Of [proper noun of a place of peril]” – think “The Bookseller Of Kabul”, “The Tatooist Of Auschwitz” and “The Cellist Of Sarajevo”. I was particularly attracted to this particular work because I spent a few days in the city of Aleppo just a couple of weeks before the outbreak of the civil war in 2011.
For Lefteri who teaches creative writing at London’s Brunel University, this is clearly a deeply personal and even polemical novel. Her own parents were refugees from Northern Cyprus after the Turks invaded the island and later she spent two summers in Athens working as a volunteer in a centre supporting refugees mainly from Syria and Afghanistan. So this is not storytelling merely for entertainment and, at the end of the book, the reader is invited to engage with the issues raised by the story through support for one of a number of relevant groups.
The narrator of the novel is the eponymous apiarist Nuri Ibrahim and the beginning of the work finds him with his artist wife Afra in a bed and breakfast in a seaside resort on the south England coast awaiting the outcome of their claim for asylum. As the story moves forward by weeks, there are a whole series of flashbacks to explain how, over a traumatic period of months, they fled the Syrian war and travelled via Turkey and Greece to the safety and security of a Britain which is not universally welcoming of refugees.
Lefteri’s writing style is deceptively plain but, as the story unfolds, we learn the true scale of the suffering of Nuri and Afra (and other refugees) and we find that the writer deploys a number of stylistic devices. It is a tale about “the randomness of pain, how life can take everything from you all at once”, but it is an immensely moving narrative that ultimately offers compassion and hope.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
How many men have walked on the Moon and how many of them are still alive?
June 8th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
In July 1969, the first men walked on the Moon and I watched it live on television. The previous year, the film “2001: A Space Odyssey” was released which portrayed a community on the Moon at the turn of the century. At that time, we assumed that there would be a growing programme of lunar landings with a developing colony on the surface.
Five decades later, we see nothing of that. Indeed the last time that anyone walked on the Moon was 11-14 December 1972 and we have no clear timetable for humans to return which makes those who went there between 1969-1972 all the more special.
NASA assigned 32 American astronauts to the Apollo lunar landing programme, and 24, flying on nine missions between December 1968 and December 1972, orbited the Moon. During six two-man landing missions 12 astronauts walked on the lunar surface, and six of those drove Lunar Roving Vehicles. Three flew to the Moon twice, one orbiting both times and two landing once apiece. Apart from these 24 men, no human being has gone beyond low Earth orbit.
So, only 12 men have ever walked on the Moon and a mere four of them are still alive today – a rare breed indeed.
Posted in Science & technology | Comments (0)
Word of the day: weathering
June 6th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Of course, you know this word in relation to the physical effect of weather on materials like wood or metal. But do you know the use of the word in relation to people, especially ethnic minorities, to describe the health effects of sustained discrimination?
This use of the word was first proposed by. Arline Geronimus, now a public health researcher and professor at the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Center in the United States.
As she puts it: “what I’ve seen over the years of my research and lifetime is that the stressors that impact people of color are chronic and repeated through their whole life course, and in fact may even be at their height in the young adult-through-middle-adult ages rather than in early life. And that increases a general health vulnerability — which is what weathering is.”
More information here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
A review of “The History Of The World In Bite-Sized Chunks” by Emma Marriott
June 5th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
In terms of ‘punch per page’, this is a winner: nearly 5,000 years of world history in less than 200 pages with every sentence offering information. Yet, for all its conciseness, it covers a great deal in an accessible manner, so that it can be read from beginning to end and/or used as a reference work. Also it is a balanced account, totally avoiding the Euro-centric bias of many early world histories, each of the six chapters being structured in the order: Middle East and Africa, Far East, Europe, The Americas and Oceania with sub-headings on almost page .
If there is a theme. it is that so much history has been about empire: creating, sustaining, and losing it. Maybe we are entering a new era in which geographical empires are literally history.
Of course, all empires are temporary and, as one reads this book, one learns of a succession of empires which at the time were the greatest or largest in history up to then: Sumeria in 5,000 BC, the Indus civilisation of around 2,500 BC, Assyria in the seventh century BC, the Achaemenian empire of around 560-530 BC, the Chinese Han dynasty of 206 BC – 220 AD, the brief but large empire of Alexander the Great, the mighty Roman Empire of 509 BC – 476 AD, the huge and cruel Mongol empire of the early 13th century, and of course the European colonial empires of Portugal, Spain, The Netherlands, France and most especially Britain.
Not all empires or civilisations were ended or broken by conquest; so often collapse was the result of climate change or disease: the transition of the Sahara from farming societies to desert, the destruction of Minoan civilisation by a tidal wave, the Black Death of the 14th century which devastated Asia, the Middle East and Europe, the decimation of the population of the Americas by diseases such as smallpox and influenza brought by Spanish settlers and conquistadors, the deaths of so many Aborigines from infectious diseases such as smallpox, and – worst of all – the so-called Spanish flu of 1918 which killed approximately 3% of the entire world population.
Sadly the story of humankind involves so much misery – not just war and disease but slavery. The slave trade between Africa and the Americas in the 18th and 19th century is described as “the largest forced migration in history” with the transport of 9.5 million slaves and the deaths in transit of around two million.
I read this book during the coronavirus global pandemic, the most dramatic reminder in a century that we are ultimately one world with one fate. A vital part of working together is to understand each other’s history and Emma Marriott’s book is an excellent primer.
Posted in History | Comments (2)
A review of the 2016 rom-com “Mother’s Day”
June 4th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Who doesn’t love a good rom-com and these days the genre usually manages to include a bit of social commentary. This movie is an attempt by director Garry Marshall – who had such a huge success with “Pretty Woman” in 1990 – to follow up on the formula developed for his rom-coms “Valentine’s Day” (2010) and “New Year’s Eve” (2011).
The winning formula involves multiple storylines and lots of well-known actors weaved together around a special day in the calendar. This time the cast-list includes such watchable stars as Jennifer Aniston, Kate Hudson and Julia Roberts and, although the whole thing is very middle-class and largely white, it does explore (lightly) issues such the loss of a partner through divorce or death, the loss of a child through adoption, the challenge of shared parenting, plus opposition to same-sex and inter-racial relationships.
Of course, this is a money-spinning rom-com, so it all works out fine.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
A review of the new movie “Godzilla vs Kong”
June 1st, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Over the years, I’ve seen the two American versions of Godzilla and the three versions of Kong, so I was up for a movie pairing these two mega-monsters – and there were some extra factors.
It was the end of the third British lockdown of the global pandemic and I was desperate for some cinematic entertainment. It was showing at a local IMAX cinema and, if there’s a film that cries out for a huge screen, it’s this one. Finally, I was with friends including a 14 year old boy. So, I went for it.
The acting is mediocre and the dialogue is dire, while the plot is pretty crazy, but the special effects are impressive, the action is non-stop, and the noise is incredible. Prepare for a trip to Hollow Earth, the home world of the Titans, but beware of the strong reverse-gravitational effect. Exciting, huh?
No mega-monster movie would be complete without the smashing up of a well-known city and, in this case, the final titanic battle takes place in Hong Kong. The tag line for the movie is “One will fall” and, of course both monsters have their fans – but, don’t worry, it all works out and we enjoyed it.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
How does the death toll from Covid-19 compare with that for the Spanish flu?
May 27th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
I did an earlier posting comparing the current coronavirus pandemic with the so-called Spanish flu.
We don’t know the death toll from the Spanish flu. It is usually estimated as between 20 – 50 million, but the lowest estimate is 17 million and the highest is 100 million. The current pandemic is far from over, but currently the death toll stands at just over 3.5 million.
The situation for Britain is interesting. The death toll from Spanish flu was 228,000. So far, the official death toll for Covid-19 is nearly 128,000 – one of the highest per capita rates in the world.
Posted in Science & technology | Comments (0)
How many people die from HIV/AIDS?
May 27th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
As we begin to see a way of eventually eliminating Covid-19 when the global death toll is around 3.5M and still rising, we should remember that HIV/AIDS is still a global killer and so far we do have a vaccine for it.
Around 700,00 people die from HIV/AIDS each year; in some countries it is the leading cause of death. HIV/AIDS is one of the world’s most fatal infectious diseases – particularly across Sub-Saharan Africa, where the disease has had a massive impact on health outcomes and life expectancy in recent decades.
According to the World Health Organisation, it is estimated that 33 million people have died of HIV since the beginning of the epidemic. Some 40 million people are living with HIV today.
Posted in Science & technology | Comments (0)
A review of the new film “Sound Of Metal”
May 27th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Ruben (British Pakistani actor Riz Ahmed) is a drummer and Lou (Olivia Cooke) is the guitarist and singer in a punk-metal duo called Blackgammon. Both are recovering addicts in a loving but complicated co-dependent relationship. They seem to be on the cusp of some professional success when Ruben suffers a sudden and catastrophic loss of hearing.
What can he do? He wants to go for cochlear implants but they are incredibly expensive and not always successful. An alternative – espoused by Joe (Paul Raci) who runs a small rural deaf community – is that Ruben should learn to live with his deafness: “the belief that being deaf is not a handicap. Not something to fix.”
I haven’t seen a film which puts deafness front and centre since the 1986 movie “Children Of A Lesser God”, but “Sound Of Metal” actually places the viewer in Ruben’s world with brilliant sound design by Nicolas Becker (and, in the cinema where I saw the film, there are closed captions to further give us the perspective of the deaf community).
It is a remarkable directorial début by Darius Marder who co-devised the story with Derek Cianfrance and co-wrote the script with his brother Abraham Marder and, in part, he was inspired by the experience of his grandmother who dramatically lost her hearing.
A large number of the cast were hired from the deaf community and, although Raci is not deaf, he is a native ASL (American Sign Language) user. Of course, the beating heart of this film is the wonderful performance by Ahmed who has come a long way since the “Star Wars” spin-off “Rogue One”. For this role, he learned to play the drums and to use ASL.
“Sound Of Metal” is often a disturbing film to watch, partly because of the distorted and discordant sound, partly because of the pain and anger in Ahmed’s performance, and party because of the hard message that disability should be embraced. But it is definitely a must-see work.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)