1. The Dread of Narrative

There’s always music on in the background and the effort to make a point gets tangled in terms not immediately clear, not the way music is, up to a point.

A story can be told without concepts, but can its meaning be explained without them?  Meaning itself is a concept.  And so, no matter what the narrative does, no matter how the music sounds, no matter what the work of art is, materially, or no matter how it looks, we can’t get a handle on it, mentally, without recourse to ideas.  The mental constructs that tell us we have perceived it, apprehended it—a better word because it actually means seize, as in: get a grip on it: the policeman apprehended the subject; but it also includes the sense of anticipate with dread.  And all those meanings can be useful here: apprehending the work, as becoming aware of it (that music in the background slips in and out of conscious attention), perceiving it (I see!), grasping it (I understand!), and, yes, fearing it.  The dread of narrative, the anxiety of art, the fear of meaning.

And so I’ll say at the outset that this dread is intrinsic to whatever I expect from the process of not only seizing the work but being seized by it, otherwise it’s just entertainment, which may or may not be dreaded for other reasons.   Let’s say, the dread of narrative is not what is commonly called suspense.  That’s a literary effect, the built-in expectation of what happens next.  We need this effect to feel that we’re getting somewhere, that time, in the narrative, leads somewhere.  But this somewhere, to my thinking, can simply be: to the end of the book.  I don’t find an end as important to my expectation as it seems to be for some readers.  So the dread isn’t of the end, as in: whether it will be happy or sad.  I’m not saying I’m resistant to emotional effects, but that my dread has to be entailed in the act of reading or—if music or an art object—of apprehending, of being made to understand.  To understand what?  Something that comes from outside my own mind.  Something I didn’t think of myself.  Something I couldn’t or wouldn’t make or do or say.  I’m accosted.  Something is demanding my attention.  But to get my attention it has to overcome my resistance, and, in letting my resistance be overcome, there’s a certain dread, an apprehension.

Along with that apprehension can come many feelings, so called.  Curiosity—what is this getting at?  Surprise—didn’t see that coming!  Joy—how skillful! or beautiful! or amusing!  Sorrow—such pathos!  Delight—how thrilling!  And so on.  Or: annoyance, boredom, contempt—how dreadful!  I use the term deliberately.  Because, as with apprehend, there are three meanings here: dreadful: as in full of that feeling of dread, but now in its negative connotation: Oh, I see where this is going and I don’t want to go there—please, rescue me!  But it can also have that positive meaning: inspiring awe, and there is a certain awe of something that is truly boring, that stretches the mind with a test of its own resources.  Warhol’s Screen Tests come to mind.  But built into that feeling is the question: how long can you look at something that doesn’t really interest you?  Depending on what’s going on in your mind, indefinitely.  But the answer is: till you look away.  How long can you read something that doesn’t interest you?  Till you look away or close your eyes, but if you occupy your mind with something other than reading, you’re cheating.  You’re escaping the boredom, from dread of it, rather than conceding its awful fascination.  And, third, dreadful can mean extremely bad, and the bad there can inspire a host of synonyms, each tweaking the badness in a certain direction—toward taste, toward evil, toward lack of skill, but let’s just say, not inspiring curiosity, surprise, joy, sorrow, or delight.  Dullsville.  The bad dread.

So, yes, there is resistance to reading because of the dread of narrative in all its forms.  For even writing that is delightful, stories that are thrilling, fictions that teach, art that inspires strong emotions can also provide that nameless dread that mixes both awe—how is this possible!—and contempt—why waste my time!  In the end, to be readers we must submit—not close our eyes, not look away—to a practice, the practice (maybe our only relevant skill in this endeavor) of finding, making, apprehending meaning.

But there’s a further element to this dread of narrative: coming to an end.  Like our lives, there is awe, dread, apprehension in the idea that they will end, maybe also in the idea that they have an end, a purpose, a meaning.  In every ending there’s at least a glimpse of our possible ending and with that thought is the idea that, until we get to the end, we can’t know what it means, or meant.  We tell stories to get to the end ahead of time.  So, in every dread of narrative, also a dread of ending. –Donald Brown, 11/12/2010