To Be About Something
In a NYT article titled Questions You Should Never Ask A Writer, Doris Lessing writes of political correctness, legacies of communism, and the “demand that stories must be “about” something”.
This one phrase speaks volumes to me, of people who shun fiction entirely, of others who spend an academic career studying but one or a few works of literature, of people’s fear of human imagination, of how many millions of times someone asked what Seinfeld was about, feeling so wickedly delighted to know that the clever answer was ‘nothing’. Meanwhile, emotions, passions, spirituality, the wondrous mystery of life itself, overflow beyond hope of classification and micro-management, gloriously incomprehensible through logical deduction.
Why, indeed, must everything be ‘about something’? What is this almost compulsive need many people have to identify and explain everything in so minimalist a manner that it can be safely enclosed and, then, put away?
This compulsion applies to much more than just literature. Any artist’s life’s work should be describable in one term or phrase. Any new business idea should be reduced to an ‘elevator pitch’. Many community projects are most likely to gain backing when the answer to what goal is to be achieved can be stated in one sentence. Politicians actually get elected based on a statement of intention to ‘fix’ something with little or no explanation as to how they will do so. This list goes on and on.
Every one of these ‘abouts’, these simplified and symbolic reasons people seem to crave, only has meaning within the full context of a human story, a multi-faceted and dynamic panorama of intertwined moments and lives, about many things simultaneously.
We can be without being about something.
We cannot be about something without being.
October 17th, 2007 at 12:57 am
I always find it strange when people say Seinfeld is the show about nothing - that was their catchphrase and it is the clever answer but when you watch every show in order you realise it is about so much stuff. It’s the show about minutiae, the little things that happen but turned into huge things for the purpose of the show.
I love that episode about the chinese restaurant - an entire episode where they waited for a table. It was genius!
Hmm, now I’m hungry for spring rolls.
I don’t think stories need to be about one particular thing. I love stories that go in so many directions. One that I loved and re-read recently was Amy Tan’s Saving Fish From Drowning.
I’m thinking of writing something bigger than a blog post, sometime soon. Maybe I’ll give it a go.
Snoskred
www.snoskred.org
October 17th, 2007 at 10:03 am
Snoskred
… what’s it about … ?
October 17th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
hi Snoskred, how is your migration to WordPress going?
Yes everything is about something …my point is that nothing can be about just one thing, and insisting on that one thing can obscure and deny what is important.
lol@goldenpres
my guess is …Life in the Country?