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The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Reflections of Time Past: Pattern, Time, and Memory in Norman Mailer: Difference between revisions
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In the humanities, music, literature, and art are quite obviously patterning devices. These different art forms take a few basic elements and arrange them—often as transformations in time—in a profusion of ways, all in order to express human meaning. The basic elements are often simple: in Western music a mere eleven notes from A to G# are arranged as a progression in time; in English Literature just twenty six letters and a few other symbols are required, arranged in linear time progression, a text decoded on a page from left to right, a story placed in time! or maybe in non-linear form. In the visual arts, a few primary colors and a set of basic shapes, point, line, square, circle, etc.! and sufficient to generate the diverse beauty of Western art. The elements, then, may well be simple: the resulting patterns are very complex. What we know as the artifacts of culture and civilization could be regarded as a vast array of meaningful patterns—from the sculpture of Ancient Greece to the late string quartets of Beethoven, from the poetry of Eliot to the colors and shapes of Picasso. Scientific theories and mathematical models can also be seen as patterning devices, an insight, I would argue, that goes back to William Herbert George and his The Scientist in Action. | In the humanities, music, literature, and art are quite obviously patterning devices. These different art forms take a few basic elements and arrange them—often as transformations in time—in a profusion of ways, all in order to express human meaning. The basic elements are often simple: in Western music a mere eleven notes from A to G# are arranged as a progression in time; in English Literature just twenty six letters and a few other symbols are required, arranged in linear time progression, a text decoded on a page from left to right, a story placed in time! or maybe in non-linear form. In the visual arts, a few primary colors and a set of basic shapes, point, line, square, circle, etc.! and sufficient to generate the diverse beauty of Western art. The elements, then, may well be simple: the resulting patterns are very complex. What we know as the artifacts of culture and civilization could be regarded as a vast array of meaningful patterns—from the sculpture of Ancient Greece to the late string quartets of Beethoven, from the poetry of Eliot to the colors and shapes of Picasso. Scientific theories and mathematical models can also be seen as patterning devices, an insight, I would argue, that goes back to William Herbert George and his The Scientist in Action. | ||
Developing this approach, we could argue that the novel and the story—like any other works of art—also create such patterns: we can regard story as a complex pattern of narrative, grammar, metaphor, metonymy, and other rhetorical devices. We may well be homo faber, but we are also Mankind the Storyteller. Peter Brooks has argued, “We live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of past actions, anticipating the outcome of future projects, situating ourselves at the intersections of several stories not yet completed. The narrative impulse is as old as our oldest literature." Certainly the modern novel—unlike previous literary genres—does not offer simplistic explanations of the world or unchanging religious dogmas. Today, Grand Narratives are not much in fashion. But the novel does offer, I suggest, an implicit pattern, a bold attempt—indirectly and tacitly—to grasp the complexity of life. Actually, in contemporary religion, not all preachers and theologians would stress fixed dogmas rather than that kind of implicit pattern. Frederick Buechner, both novelist and preacher, has suggested that | Developing this approach, we could argue that the novel and the story—like any other works of art—also create such patterns: we can regard story as a complex pattern of narrative, grammar, metaphor, metonymy, and other rhetorical devices. We may well be homo faber, but we are also Mankind the Storyteller. Peter Brooks has argued, “We live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of past actions, anticipating the outcome of future projects, situating ourselves at the intersections of several stories not yet completed. The narrative impulse is as old as our oldest literature." Certainly the modern novel—unlike previous literary genres—does not offer simplistic explanations of the world or unchanging religious dogmas. Today, Grand Narratives are not much in fashion. But the novel does offer, I suggest, an implicit pattern, a bold attempt—indirectly and tacitly—to grasp the complexity of life. Actually, in contemporary religion, not all preachers and theologians would stress fixed dogmas rather than that kind of implicit pattern. Frederick Buechner, both novelist and preacher, has suggested that | ||
<blockquote> All theology, like all fiction, is at its heart autobiography, and that what a theologian is doing essentially is examining as honestly as he can the rough-and-tumble of his own experience with all its ups and downs, its mysteries and loose ends, and expressing in logical, abstract terms the truths about human life and about God that he believes he has found implicit there. <blockquote> | <blockquote> All theology, like all fiction, is at its heart autobiography, and that what a theologian is doing essentially is examining as honestly as he can the rough-and-tumble of his own experience with all its ups and downs, its mysteries and loose ends, and expressing in logical, abstract terms the truths about human life and about God that he believes he has found implicit there. <blockquote> | ||