Metanarrative
I want to thank Bob Harbor for his recordings of this speech, which lay out Mr. McKeeby's views on the Metanarrative. - Rahima Transcript by Bob Harbor
Thank you for having me, Ben. I first became interested in the idea of metanarratives after talking to Malcolm Barbour about his new show Cops, which he was trying to sell with his partner John Langley. Barbour, in case you have never heard of him, should be an icon of American media because he and Langley are largely responsible for reality television, and unlike later and more artificial efforts, they produced a program that was as close to a documentary as possible, but without any attempt to overtly politicize the subject they were covering. The genius of Cops was that, as much as possible, the production elements of the show were kept out of camera view. The camera operators, producers, and audio people occasionally appear in shots, but this is accidental, and the format of the show calls for the operators to train their cameras and microphones on three sets of actors: the police, the civilians they are assigned to assist, and the people who, for whatever reason, are under their scrutiny, sometimes for breaking the law. Now, rather than bore you with a three-hour droning lecture on meta-criticism of modernism, let me take an example and break it down for you. First, let me provide you with a start for my thinking, and that is Jean-François Lyotard, who wrote a book in 1979 called The Postmodern Condition, but let me apologize for stealing from him like a hungry thief but at the same time twisting his ideas around to fit my own concepts. If you follow Lyotard, he proposes that the postmodern movement is caused by people looking behind the curtains of these giant mega-narratives that are the unarguable status quo upon which Western thought is based and finding some pretty barren landscapes are hidden in plain view. What I mean is, can you imagine going to school where Marxism is the key element of your learning, and where the teachers are always making you participate in dialectics? Dialectics, by the way, have a root in the thought of a guy named Hegel who essentially thought that subjective discourse could be resolved by placing two options on a table and reasoning them out. Marx, though, grabbed the dialectic and told his followers it was the only way to figure out truth, and then defined how it could be used. His definition, though, hid a great big lie and totally screwed up Hegel's intent in that Marxist dualism restricts conversations to binary arguments on subjects of a narrow set of meanings, and the argument is won not by the comparison of logical stance but by the fact that one side in Marx's argument is a strawman. So as I said, you teachers are Marxist, or worse, the right-wing equivalents, and they are peddling this broken form of Hegelian truth, and you spend your life creating a toolbox filled with useful items such as glass hammers, opaque spyglasses, inkless pens, and invisible sunhats, and then one day you stop and you think that Marx has duped me in this elaborate game of keep-away, and the thing I was kept from was the way of logically arriving at truth. Here Lyotard argues is the birth of the metanarrative. Pissed off at being duped, the former seeker of fact turns his or her back on the idea that truth is an easy-to-reach thing, and starts to want the lens of his or her personal panopticon, hats off to Jeremy Bentham and a bow to Utilitarianism, to point not at truth, which they no longer trust thanks to Marx, but at the system which even purports there are easy truths at all. Metanarratives thus usually contain elements of self-intospection where the artificiality of the story is acknowledged, and either corrected by leaving the storyline, or simply accepted as an element of the flaws in all stories. Which brings us back to Cops. In the normal programming format of the story, a police officer is shown riding in a cruiser as they begin to talk about some aspect of the job of working in law enforcement. While most of these officers are well-spoken, somewhat artificially so through selection by their departments, producer selection of who the cameras follow, and because the editors are naturally on the lookout for erudite commentary that somehow applies to the program it appears in, what you do have is a compelling look at the lives of people who are on the front line of law enforcement. The problem with the tableau is that the show does not have television crews embedded with the civilians in the officers’ beat, or lawbreakers who are planning to or will accidentally come under the scrutiny of law enforcement. This disparity, even in a show which makes every effort to minimize bias, is one of the reasons for the development of metanarratives. The theory here, I think, is that if the grand narratives of the modern era are flawed by not allowing alternate paths of thinking, and if even the most objective optics of eyewitness accounts are flawed by a failure of point of view, then artistically it could be argued that a tool that exposes bias is a useful addition to the storyteller's arsenal, and this is where metanarrative fits. Now, I will sneak away from Lyotard before his supporting minions, and they are many, start pointing out how much more complex and comprehensive he is on these subjects, because my intention was never to colonize him but instead to steal some of his thoughts and leave the rest for other thinkers. Instead, I will offer up some small tales of metanarrative. "In a Grove" is a story by the Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa from the 1920s. In the story, a crime is committed that consists of robbery, rape, and murder. Despite this, the truth of what happened is obscured by the fact that each witness to the story tells the story differently. Taken in hand by Akira Kurosawa, this story forms the basis of Rashomon, a modernist film that actually pokes at the cracks of post-war logical positivism. It does this by demonstrating a common problem with eyewitness testimony, and that is its unreliability. Subjective visual evidence, if the films are to be believed, is inherently flawed. These stories form a metanarrative because the very truth of the evidence played out in front of the audience must be assessed and adjudicated. The audience member reading or watching the story cannot immediately assume that they can follow the story without some form of guidepost. And this is a lesson that the creative writer or visuals can teach the scientist, that truth can be more difficult to arrive at than the objective thinker can imagine when the fragility of human perception is factored in. Which brings me to the meat of this lecture, and why I hope you came to hear me speak. And that is to present the ultimate, although hopefully not penultimate, literary expression of this new form of romanticism, in the form of a discussion of William Goldman's book and later movie, The Princess Bride. If I had to choose a book that would go into the vault of human memory to be preserved forever, it would be this one. Now, Goldman has had an amazing creative career, penning the scripts for Marathon Man and Bruce Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which is enough kudos for any lifetime if you think about each work's importance in their proper era. With The Princess Bride, the audience is treated with an amazing tour d' force of metanarrative thinking. The book is supposedly Goldman's abridgment of another writer's longer and more pedestrian narrative. The other writer, "S. Morgenstern," is in fact a character himself, an alternate name for Goldman. Morgenstern supposedly wrote The Princess Bride, but in a much longer form that Goldman edits and annotates in telling the tale, a process seen clearly in the movie version of the book with Peter Falk.
{At this point, the recording is rough as the microphone gets moved. Apparently, there is a question raised from the audience, and Nelson begins to answer it, interrupting his lecture. - Rahima} Cops and Princess Bride are action and reaction, although in terms of epoch they are out of order. In Cops, if you remember, each episode starts with an ex-cathedra statement that the people seen are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, but we all know that is crap. The next thing shown is the police officer who makes an opening statement about the nature of policing, and that statement is never racist, or petty, or even tinged with fatigue and fatalism, even though I personally know officers who are infected by all of these things. The editorial process assures that we will only see the best officer on his or her best day. In contrast, imagine the people who we find breaking the law. They often run, fight, they lie continuously, they are seldom dressed well, their use of language is often slurred by alcohol or drugs, and unlike police, they have no script to follow. No senior command is selecting only the best of the alleged criminals to view, so the whole concept of guilt not being determined is espoused, it is immediately deconstructed because of course we know those guys the camera falls are guilty, or they would not be acting the way they act. In terms of forming a dominant narrative, the Princess Bride is even more honest than the honest documentary show Cops. Instead of hiding behind ex-Cathedra statements of honesty, it immediately reveals it is a metanarrative by showing its own redaction process. To make this even funnier, and I hope to use this gag myself someday, the process of redaction is not only transparent, it is a fiction in a nested loop of surreality. It is as if someone were to take my speech I am making here, recorded it, transcribed it, and then played it back, but when they got to the long-winded parts or the questions that were nonsense they simply zip-squealed through them to the next "pertinent," and I hope you see quotes around that word, part. {There are a series of questions here about other artists who use metanarratives before the main theme returns. - Rahima} I will conclude this lecture by offering you a small idea of how metanarrative sneaks into even the dullest and most staged works. Imagine the Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The work is often read to children, and of course it is an American classic, but most people do not read the entire work by Baum. Sometimes the entire work is not even published. All modern narratives attempt to reach a point called suspension of disbelief. That means you are so engrossed by the book or the movie that your lizard and squirrel brains (Nelson often talks about the concept of the Triune brain in his lectures - Rahima) convince your human brain that what you are seeing is real, and the aliens or stormtroopers or what have you are actual interactive mobiles whose actions could hurt the protagonist and even yourself. Baum, though, like many books, adds a forward, but that forward is not one that is played out on stage, but is actually written as Baum's voice. And in that forward, he essentially says that previous fantasy settings were always too scary and dangerous for the minds of children, so here is a tale where every character is two-dimensional and every scene solvable by some form of Deus ex Machina. The very definition of meta, hiding in the book that is otherwise one of the most modern.