Posts tagged story
Since the first days of the [Telenovela] institute’s research, I began to notice common patterns in the way each country related to telenovelas, and, at the same time, the way in which a country’s relationship to telenovelas revealed something unique about it. A Canadian researcher, Denise Bombardier, described it perfectly with her phrase “Give me a telenovela and I’ll give you a nation.” In general terms, however, telenovelas implement what the critic Tomás Lopez-Pumarejo (my principal theorist at the Institute) described as “the drama of the subconscious”: They are stories that revolve around ontological questions: “Where is my son?” or “Where is my love?”
There is a clear relationship in the way in which the telenovela soap operas explore the social tensions of a country and convert them into collective therapy. This process worked very well in countries that had recently emerged from communism, where people were casting about in a psychological search to deal with the class taboos that had dominated for so long. As a result, a drama centered on the impossibility of love because of social or economic obstacles was extremely powerful. Several studies of the time during which Los Ricos También Lloran was broadcast in Russia indicate that programs simultaneously broadcast from the US (such as Dallas and Dynasty) were popular but never generated the same level of interest, because Russians could not identify with the family problems of an oil millionaire in Texas. The higher production quality of those programs didn’t seem to matter either, and so companies like Televisa did not overly concern themselves with investments in production. It was the drama, the emotions worn on the sleeve, and in part the exotic settings that gave the telenovelas a special attraction.
Visualizing the Bible
We enter into the work of cultural creativity not as people who desperately need to strategize our way into cultural relevance, but as participants in a story of new creation that comes just when our power seems to have been extinguished. Culture-making becomes not just the product of clever cultural strategy or the natural byproduct of inherited privilege, but the astonished and grateful response of people who have been rescued from the worst that culture and nature can do.
—Culture Making, p.227
This summer marks the 100th birthday of the late Joseph Mitchell, who helped to redefine the art of journalism. In 1938, when Mitchell wrote his first profile for the New Yorker, the notion of the reporter as stylist was still a novelty. By 1992, when the omnibus ”Up in the Old Hotel” hit bestseller lists, it was ubiquitous. The recent republication of Mitchell’s finest collection, ”The Bottom of the Harbor”, brings back into focus innovations that have faded into familiarity or fallen into neglect. It couldn’t have come at a better time. Our current crop of reporter-stylists would do well to study the qualities that make this book remarkable.
Chief among these is patience. Contemporary magazine journalism often seems torn between ratifying conventional wisdom and railing against it. The twin temptations of sensationalism and contrarianism hover over online discourse, in particular. Not that technology is solely to blame; as a newspaperman in the 1930s, covering the Hauptmann murder trial and interviewing George Bernard Shaw for the Herald Tribune and the World-Telegram, respectively, Mitchell was near the centre of the media circuses of his day. Once the New Yorker freed him from deadline pressure, however, Mitchell conserved his attention for (and lavished it on) subjects he felt it might dignify.
It turns out just about anything is fascinating if you look at it hard enough. What Mitchell chose to look at, in his increasingly lengthy “profiles”, were the remnants of Old New York that were disappearing beneath the city’s relentless growth: waterfront rooming-houses ("Old Mr Flood"), petty criminals ("King of the Gypsys"), Epicurean ritual ("All You Can Eat for Five Bucks") and, in “The Bottom of the Harbor“, the maritime life of a city most people forget is an archipelago.
As things stand, though, it’s not easy to see anything beating the far more famous Indian novel on the list - which might be more of an injustice if Midnight’s Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie weren’t also the best book of the lot. Nearly 30 years - and at least three more classic Rushdies - later, Midnight’s Children should, in theory, have lost its power to astonish. In practice, rereading it instantly returned me to that original state of awed disbelief that so much exhilarating stuff can be packed into a single novel. (Rushdie, you feel, could have knocked off the entire plot of Oscar and Lucinda in one chapter here.) At times, the unstoppable commitment to storytelling seems almost pathological. Yet, in the end, the book is so thrilling that wishing Rushdie had trimmed it into something less wild would be as futile as asking a hurricane to tone it down a bit.
