storytelling rules

In describing this blog, I’ve written:

That “infotainment rules” is merely an observation about the state of the news, not a hearty endorsement of the sound bite and the publicity stunt and the emotional storytelling and the slugfests and the takedowns and the tug at the heartstrings or the kick in the gut delivered by infotainment, which has all but replaced the “news” on television.

When I call for better infotainment, it’s not because I don’t like serious news. [But I know that if the mass audience liked that documentary series much as I do, TV would be wall-to-wall Frontline clones. …

High-quality infotainment may in fact be superior to dry “news” as a vehicle for delivering information to audiences.

When I read this essay by Susan Sontag—the last she wrote before she died in 2004, and just now being published—I was reminded of how hollow a triumph it would be if infotainment were ever to really rule.

Literature tells stories. Television gives information.

Literature involves. It is the recreation of human solidarity. Television (with its illusion of immediacy) distances - immures us in our own indifference.

The so-called stories that we are told on television satisfy our appetite for anecdote and offer us mutually canceling models of understanding. (This is reinforced by the practice of punctuating television narratives with advertising.) They implicitly affirm the idea that all information is potentially relevant (or “interesting”), that all stories are endless - or if they do stop, it is not because they have come to an end but, rather, because they have been upstaged by a fresher or more lurid or eccentric story.

By presenting us with a limitless number of nonstopped stories, the narratives that the media relate - the consumption of which has so dramatically cut into the time the educated public once devoted to reading - offer a lesson in amorality and detachment that is antithetical to the one embodied by the enterprise of the novel.

In storytelling as practiced by the novelist, there is always - as I have argued - an ethical component. This ethical component is not the truth, as opposed to the falsity of the chronicle. It is the model of completeness, of felt intensity, of enlightenment supplied by the story, and its resolution - which is the opposite of the model of obtuseness, of non-understanding, of passive dismay, and the consequent numbing of feeling, offered by our mediadisseminated glut of unending stories.

Television gives us, in an extremely debased and un-truthful form, a truth that the novelist is obliged to suppress in the interest of the ethical model of understanding peculiar to the enterprise of fiction: namely, that the characteristic feature of our universe is that many things are happening at the same time. (”Time exists in order that it doesn’t happen all at once … space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.”)

To tell a story is to say: this is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.

To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.

Indeed. And yet. And yet: so many of us have ADD.

Read the essay: “Pay Attention to the World.”