Thoughts on a historic year at Newsless.org

Thoughts on a historic year

171CommentsThoughts+on+a+historic+year2008-11-06+23%3A48%3A55Matt

I’ve written a lot here about evolving journalism to enable it to tell larger stories. But how on earth do we tell the story of a year like this? This is a question I have no answer for.

The dominant story today is of course a narrative about race in America. A black man has been elected to lead a nation where just 40 years ago, you could be murdered for registering blacks to vote. It would be difficult enough to do justice to that story.

But race is only a segment of a deeply complex fractal of stories that emerged this year. And I find the greatest human pathos of the story of 2008 in the folds of that fractal, where the stories of race, class, sex, sexuality, gender, and generations intersect. If you’d frozen any moment of this year and traced the connections between the characters and incidents splashed on every front page, you’d have the setting for a drama as engrossing as any set to page or screen this year:

Jeremiah Wright and Hillary Clinton, each seemingly convinced that America is not ready for a black President, both seem to try all they can to prove that conviction right.
As Bill Clinton struggles to uplift his wife to office and thereby grasp some glimmer of redemption, John Edwards and Elliot Spitzer each re-enact his stunning fall from grace.
John McCain, whose immense estate has brought him unending pressure in a populist year, pins his hopes on a working-class Everyman and an accomplished PTA mom from Alaska.
As voters in California elect Barack Obama, who was born to a marriage which was then illegal in some states, they also amend their state constitution to prevent gays and lesbians from getting married.
Chicago in 2008 finds itself caricatured as a den of anarchists and terrorists, summoning the ghosts of 40 years prior.

Even the minor characters in these dramas could have come straight out of Shakespeare’s head. People like Patty Solis-Doyle, Ashley Todd, Todd Palin, Bill Ayers, and Elizabeth Edwards all emerge from the year with fascinating stories to tell.

It feels important to me that these intersecting stories be told. I think 2008 has quite a lot to teach us. But I have no idea what shape that story could take.

All that said, though, I think the story’s power lies in the links. And I imagine the answer to my question will involve the link as well.

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Written by Matt

November 6th, 2008 at 6:48 pm

Tagged with storytelling

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At the risk of coming across as hopelessly old school, I think the storytelling form you’re looking for here is called a “novel.”

I suppose it’s possible it could be a play, if you had Shakespeare or Tony Kushner to write it.

Howard Weaver

6 Nov 08 at 7:29 pm

If I were to tell the story of this political season through some kind of fictional form, I would focus not on the big demographic issues — race, gender, sex, wealth, age, politics, but come across it obliquely, through a single issue: health and medicine.

I can’t think of any other election where the health of the participants, where the image of a hospital bed, mattered more.

Sure, you might begin with the purple heart band-aids of 2004. But then think of John McCain’s broken arms, the injuries he suffered trying to commit suicide. Think of his melanoma, that sheaf of records scanned in an instant. Think of his first wife and her car accident, left disabled and eventually alone.

Think of Joe Biden’s first wife and his children, their car accident. Think of his aneurysm. Think of Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer, their son who died. Think of Sarah Palin’s pregnancy, the amniocentesis, that crazy childbirth. Think of Barack Obama’s mother, his grandmother.

You have scene after scene of amazing personal material. Weave in the stories of everyday Americans, soldiers and workers and retirees, and the policy issues at stake, and you have the makings of a drama (film or stageplay) with a genuine Kushnerian sweep.

Tim

6 Nov 08 at 10:05 pm

Not to take away from the likelihood that these stories will be retold many times in many ways, is it possible that this amount of interwoven drama is actually normal, except that decades ago, many of the details would simply not have emerged, at least not so quickly. Certainly some figures like JFK had more dramatic backstories than others, but with press complicity, JFK’s sexual peccadilloes only saw the light of day well after his death, and FDR’s handicap was not generally visible to the general public. But the accumulated personal dramas of most US campaigns would make a pretty good potboiler. (”Team of Rivals” comes to mind also.)

Newsmaven

7 Nov 08 at 10:07 am

Three excellent comments.

Newsmaven, I think it’s near-certain that the surfeit of information contributes to the heightened sense of drama. It’s also key to recognize that the falling threshold for high-profile stories has actually affected those stories. That is, while we may not have heard much about Ashley Todd, Bristol Palin or Joe Wurzelbacher in years prior, the essential nature of their stories is affected by the fact that we are hearing about them this year.

Tim, I love the idea of framing the year that way. I think that also sort of underscores my point, and this speaks to Howard’s response: that would be a classically novelistic framing. In order for the retelling to cohere nearly as richly it did in real life, I think a novelist would necessarily have to tell that particular story, emphasizing a singular theme (and hitting grace notes where possible on others).

Part of what makes 2008 such a compelling and knotty storytelling problem to me is the collision of themes rather than their coincidence. I’ve been asking myself these questions for a few months now (there’s still a draft post from April [!] somewhere in the guts of Snarkmarket called “The Mythic and the Media”), and the novel was my first conclusion as well, Howard. The format performs wonderfully when an author can elegantly juxtapose several key themes and a few iconic characters along a unifying narrative thread. E.g. Moby Dick, propelled by the drama of an obsessive captain pursuing a monstrous whale, elegantly refracts the central themes of conquest and revenge into stories about race, religion, empire and exploration.

But even if we were to agree that the novel is fluid and robust enough to handle this story well, I’m still incredibly curious what shape the story takes. I just can’t think of a novel or series of novels that take on the particular challenges of a tale like this. (I’ve never read the Baroque Cycle; might that give me a clue?) I find myself working through the question this way:

The web of divergent narratives really make this story interesting. So the most obvious core thread would be a classic hero’s journey, built around Obama’s quest for the Presidency. But you have to somehow embed that within a snapshot of the Civil Rights Movement, as three sub-movements — racial equality, gender equality and sexual orientation equality — find themselves somewhat at odds with each other, a giant story in itself. Plus, you need to incorporate the story of the Democratic Party’s resurrection, not to mention the corollary disintegration of what had seemed to be an ascendant GOP movement. And to lend the quest story some heft, authors typically evoke a parable about the allure of power and its capacity to corrupt, which might actually best be illustrated by the drama of the Bush Presidency and the campaign of his would-be successor, who transformed from railing against that corruption eight years ago to exemplifying it today, if you ask Joe Klein. My sentences are already recursing, and we’ve just touched the surface of the politics. We haven’t even gotten to the financial crisis or the two wars, which would be lame, if you were really talking about America in 2008.

Musing on character for a moment, I think monomyths typically take iconic characters, riven by some essential inner struggle (e.g. Frodo). Realist epics, on the other hand, seem to take complex characters with penetrating inner lives (a la Raskolnikov). Most of our characters in his drama would seem to merit the latter mold, but the events themselves seem best suited to the former. Plus, there are so many deeply complex and interesting characters in this drama that they would threaten to crowd either type of epic. At a minimum, you’ve got to do a deep and thorough job of portraying Barack and Michelle Obama, John and Cindy McCain, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, and possibly Sarah Palin. But you’d be remiss to neglect Ron Paul, Mark Penn, Mark Salter, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Steve Schmidt, John and Elizabeth Edwards, David Axelrod, David Plouffe, Patty Solis-Doyle, Jeremiah Wright, Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke, Dick Cheney, David Petraeus, and Nouri al-Maliki, among others. And then, for the full effect, you want Joe the Plumber, Bill Ayers, Colin Powell, the Kennedys, Ashley Todd, Joe Lieberman, Tom Daschle, I could go on. (And the year’s not over yet. In the past week, Rahm Emanuel got added to the list.)

Character complexity to me suggests play, but even Angels in America has only eight major characters, if you’re generous.

If it sounds like I’m obsessing over a Quixotic quest to re-render reality, well, welcome to my world.

Matt

7 Nov 08 at 7:29 pm

Also, I take complete exception to the characterization of the novel as “old-school.” The novel’s been reinvented at least once a decade. I cannot wait to see what the novel looks like when the successors to David Foster Wallace, Paul Auster and Mark Danielewski get ahold of the form and decide to replace the footnotes and recursion and idiosyncratic typesetting with, like, hyperlinks and ARG interludes.

Matt

7 Nov 08 at 7:40 pm

What do you think about Newsweek’s seven-parter on the campaign? It’s certainly long-form (over forty pages, I think, all told), it has plenty of these novelistic details of multiple characters (David Axelrod’s shoes, the way Mark Salter smokes), and it’s sort of multiperspectival and incomplete but still coherent. It’s also multimedia (check the paired video interviews).

Tim

7 Nov 08 at 7:55 pm

I was reading part 6 on my phone just as your comment popped up. Heh.

The Newsweek stories are fantastic. Catnip for the political junkie. I expect they’ll draw some minor enduring interest as part of the historical record.

But they don’t really offer any sort of literary thematics. I’m engrossed by them, but not particularly ennobled or enlightened.

What do you think?

Matt

7 Nov 08 at 8:18 pm

It’s almost like they touch on these literary modes of storytelling, and then back away. The last few pieces are more matter-of-fact, kind of scoop-y, secret-y, Palin spent all this money, etc. But the early ones, especially the first one, have some goodies.

1) Historic sweep (and snarky voice): As Obama saw it, the conservative tide in America was ebbing, and voters were turning away from the Republican Party. People were sick of politicians of the standard variety and yearned for someone new—truly new and different. Another politician with a superb sense of timing, Bill Clinton, perfectly understood why Obama saw a golden, possibly once-in-a-lifetime, opportunity. The former president believed that the mainstream press, whose liberal guilt Clinton understood and had exploited from time to time, would act as Obama’s personal chauffeur on the long journey ahead. “If somebody pulled up a Rolls-Royce to me and said, ‘Get in’,” Clinton liked to say, with admiration and maybe a little envy, “I’d get in it, too.”

2) Self-examination: Obama was something unusual in a politician: genuinely self-aware. In late May 2007, he had stumbled through a couple of early debates and was feeling uncertain about what he called his “uneven” performance. “Part of it is psychological,” he told his aides. “I’m still wrapping my head around doing this in a way that I think the other candidates just aren’t. There’s a certain ambivalence in my character that I like about myself. It’s part of what makes me a good writer, you know? It’s not necessarily useful in a presidential campaign.”

3) An eye for tragedy: Crisis, chaos, deceit and subterfuge. After eight years in the Clinton White House, it was all familiar to Hillary—a world she had bravely struggled in but not against; it was the only world she really knew.

Tim

7 Nov 08 at 8:40 pm

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