David’s Comments (group member since May 08, 2012)

David’s comments from the Q&A with James Kunen group.

I'd better pick it up pronto. Thanks, Jim. David

Thanks, Harley. It looks a bit like the New Jersey Shore of its day. Jim, are you willing to settle for that or the literary equivalent as the literature of ordinary life? I also vaguely recall the socialist fascination with folk songs in the first half of the 20th century. The folk songs, of course, were a celebration of the folk and a mythicizing of their travails rather than a record of the day-to-day. I think I have to retreat back to my earlier point that in order to tell the story of an ordinary life you need an extraordinary storyteller, and these are more common in literary fiction than in memoir.

Reality TV, as much as sitcoms, is a warped expression of the desire to know about "normal lives," but one of the things warping it is the simultaneous desire for heightened narrative. Harley, I see that you've done books on a number of artists, including Jan Steen, whom I associate with the dutch genre painters who made the middle class (or merchant?) a viable subject. Would you say that his subjects were a better example of making popular art out of the "ordinary" or of elevating dramatic aspects of the "ordinary" so that it can be sold as art?

I think its a reflection of how hard it is to sell "ordinary," (for money or otherwise) to a reader who isn't a blood relative. When someone writes a popular novel about a normal life, we recognize her as a great writer -- an acknowledgement of how hard it is to make the ordinary attractive even when the author can "stack the deck" with made-up facts. Writing a gripping NON-fiction of the everyday is even harder-- which may be why the lives that are published are those that feature high drama.
Does that mean that "ordinary" lives are really ordinary, or of less value? No, as both Freud and social historians have shown us: every psyche is the stage for the domestic drama; and "small" lives participate in and --in aggregate-- drive great events. But I think it is a human impulse to want to see these drama magnified and bright-lined when we gather around the fire.
This doesn't explain why the dramas we pay money for these days seem so focused on the themes of "Behind the Music." There are plenty of other types of drama.