Monday, February 11, 2013
Jack Hart on Narrative Arc in a Show about Nothing
We just read this for our creative non-fiction workshop:
The Narrative Arc
One of my favorite Seinfeld episodes began, as they usually did, with an agitated Kramer bursting into Jerry's apartment. Kramer gyrated. Jerry looked impatient. "What's wrong?" he finally asked. "I just realized," Kramer replied, "that I have no narrative arc!"
The gag resonated on several levels. A narrative arc is built from the orderly progression of facts through specific story elements. But at the time the Seinfeld episode aired, "narrative arc" was in vogue among the New York literati as an almost-meaningless catch phrase. We can assume Kramer was parroting the fad expression and probably wasn't quite sure what he was saying. The irony was that he was absolutely right -- his loose cannon life, devoid of order or consistency, did lack a narrative arc. And the bit also tweaked the critics who'd declared Seinfeld a show "about nothing, " a meander through aimless lives that never seemed to go anywhere.
The tone of the show's humor did indeed obscure any narrative momentum. But in fact, a typical Seinfeld episode incorporated several narrative arcs. Kramer's schemes took off and crashed. Elaine's latest relationship heated up and cooled. George got jobs and lost them."
Jack Hart, Storycraft, page 24
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pretty obvious but pretty funny and right!
ReplyDeleteI thought the narrative arc of an emerging (if not struggling) artist was well plotted in Lucky #1. I wish my decade in Portland, the other Brooklyn, had contained so many days at my desk. The recurring image of the narrator drawing at her desk tells a story of an artist's practice and discipline. The diary shows everything that also gets in the way, and is the action that interrupts the arc. The apartment hopping, odd nights out, the collision of exhibitionists and voyeurs that is NYC, mind numbing arguments with unseen room mates about whether the platform or the door gets to be the table? The narrator is often at her desk, ignoring her boyfriend, working through leaks in the ceiling, reworking illustrations that don't work, complaining when they still fail, selling her books on the street, carting them around, interning with an established artist who steals her work. I don't know, it seems to be all there.
ReplyDeleteI love storycraft! That chapter breaks down narrative arc like none other. Bell's novel has an obvious hole in the sense of narrative arc, but I get the sense that she was aiming to be aimless in the narrative sense. She does say in the beginning that she just wanted to collect a bunch of stories and commit them to a sort of "graphic journal."
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