So Narrative... pt 3—Apollo and Dionysus

Nietzsche had his own way of discussing the subject of these blog posts. He defined the Yin/Yang division as the eternal war between Apollo and Dionysus, using his favored Greek symbolism. Camille Paglia talks about this contrast extensively in her book Sexual Personae.

Apollo is the god of light, strength, Classical form and beauty. He is defined by sharp contours, whereas Dionysus, the god of drunken revelry and dissolution into darkness and death, is his opposite in every way. Rather than sharp outline and hard surface, Dionysus is characterized by a melting away of contour, the loss of individuality and identity. He was worshiped by the Maenads, women who would attend the nocturnal revelries and dance themselves into a manic frenzy of destruction, ending with one of the revelers being torn limb form limb and mashed underfoot into the earth like grapes being rendered into wine (Dionysus' staple beverage).

In the book, Paglia dissects many works of art in terms of the struggle between these opposed/interlinked forces—the clean beautiful lines and contours of graceful strength and youthful beauty vs the destructive influences of death, old age, drunkenness, emotional overload, and other uncontrollable influences.

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I ran across this amazing idea in the book in Into The Woods:

"You must have seen children playing with a string and a pebble. They tie the string to the pebble and swing it around over their head. They pay out string and it makes bigger and bigger circles. The pebble is the revolt against the tradition, it wants to break away. The string is the tradition, the continuity—it's holding it. But if you break the string the pebble will fall. If you remove the pebble the string cannot go that far. The tension of tradition and revolt against tradition are in a way contradictory, but as a matter of fact are a synthesis. You will always find this kind of synthesis in any good art."

"However radical the work, it is radical in relation to the primal shape. And the shape seems undeniable."​

Well shit!! This is once again the inevitable and fascinating push-pull of Order and Chaos, tradition and the anti-traditional!

All of these ideas I've discussed in these recent blog posts (So, Narrative Form is the Masculine way... ) present what at first seem to be pairs of opposites (yin and yang, order and chaos, the masculine and the feminine), but actually turn out to be complementary. Each depends on the other and together they form a synthesis or a symbiosis that's far stronger than either alone could be. They're puzzle pieces that fit together to complete the picture.

I think it's necessary to learn about both halves in order to better understand each individual side of the equation—meaning if you really want to understand what Narrative is, you should see it as half of the union with the Poetic or the Feminine aspect of story. Otherwise you're like the fish who, when asked how the water is, said "What's water?" He was so immersed in his element he wasn't even aware it existed. Once a fish has been out of water briefly he understands it, and I'm sure it takes on a powerful meaning.

What I'm interested in isn't getting completely 'lost in the woods' of the Poetic or the Feminine, but setting up the vital push-pull dynamic between it and Narrative structure. It would involve maybe getting lost in pure unconscious reverie at times, but then finding some form in the formlessness. Ultimately what I'm looking for is a way to write something I call Poetic Narrative, that I discussed in the first 7 entries on this blog, especially in this entry. It's a blending of the 2, a loose framework of narrative structure that leaves plenty of room for lengthy poetic passages and drifting meditations—a nice slow pace.

I think it's very difficult to do this, it requires a special kind of organization so the conscious and the unconscious aren't fighting each other, or so one doesn't just completely dominate. Normally they don't get along at all. But by using a very minimal narrative structure and then filling it in in a much more poetic way, they can work together loosely as allies I think.

McKee lists only 3 kinds of story: Traditional Narrative, Minimalism, and Anti-Narrative. I believe his Minimalism category is what I call Poetic Narrative. There is some traditional narrative structure there, but it's minimized to such an extent that it's hard to find, and some people would say it isn't there at all.

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To answer a question I asked a couple of posts back, yes—the right hemisphere's viewpoint is what we call the feminine, but it's more than just that. It also includes the world of animals, nature and objects, as discussed in my first post. It includes everything that isn't of the conscious mind with all its order and deliberation and structure. In the right hemisphere things blend together to a large extent. There's little to no language, and it's not precise, it's more dreamlike. Time doesn't have the same constant forward momentum, there are no clocks (if there are they were designed by Dali or Lewis Carroll and don't run properly). There's no rush in the unconscious, you have all the time in the world, as long as you're in a tranquil mood. If you're anxious then you're always already out of time—mood shapes everything in the unconscious. Movies made in the poetic mode are often tone poems.