Last week Ross Douthat posted a comparison of The Sopranos and The Wire. He sees the two shows in terms of psychology v. sociology, the former being the more insightful because it presents flesh and blood human beings while the latter reduces its characters to their surrounding culture in order to critique it.
He is rehashing an argument he made when comparing Mad Men’s Don Draper to Breaking Bad’s Walter White: White is the more interesting character because his motives are complex while Draper’s soul appears flat because Mad Men is first and foremost a show about 1960’s America.
Switching genres, Tom Wolfe famously argued the death of the novel is upon us because novelists since the 1960’s have retreated from realism. His essay ”Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” critiques the absurdist novels of Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Wolfe’s call was for contemporary writers to create ‘social novels’ in the tradition of Charles Dickens: The novelist should report on the cultural movements of his time.
What would Wolfe think of psychological novels like Dostoevsky’s? Does his call for more reporter-novelists apply to television’s storytellers as well? More importantly, aren’t the really great books timeless because they are not primarily about a particular time? And don’t they do that by presenting us with a person so particular, so real, it encourages us to reflect on what motivations all human beings share or don’t share in common?
April 2nd, 2012 | 1:01 am
I vaguely remember Wolfe’s essay criticizing Borges, et al. I suspect he was being critical of American writers taking these Latin American writers as critical darlings with complete ignorance of their language and circumstance. A better critique of the alienated, deracinated writer would be John Barth, Thomas Pynchon or William Gaddis. These writers would have nothing to do with their own American inheritance.
Nabokov is a special case. While Lolita is a typical European’s version of American eros, his brilliant descriptions of 1950s American small towns and highways is not as aliented as that found his epigones in Gaddis or Pynchon. The latter found nothing to praise in the U.S.
I would only caution against a critique of the Latin American writers as being far from from the very nice dichotomy between psychology and sociology that Douthat makes between Mad Men and Breaking Bad, or The Sopranos and The Wire.
I agree with Douthat’s dichotomy, if only because I find the Sopranos and Breaking Bad to be better stories in terms of human psychological motivation than the the others. Mad Men wishes to be a classy version (and magazine glossy) of Theodore Dreiser, while The Wire wishes to offer an updated, hip hop version of Richard Wright (without the horror of having to kill a rat in the opening scene).
I only wish erstwhile television critics knew their American lit better.
So when it comes to Borges, his stories and poems were deeply immersed in Argentina’s real history. For all of their phantasia, they borrowed heavily from foreign writers like Poe, Hawthorne, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Borges, for one, did not think sociologically. He presented society, no doubt, but Borges presented the difficult myth of the Argentine gaucho in real and complex terms for a contrast to his own land of 20th century Argentina and in its in own burgeoning national literature. Borges was attuned to the individual psychological motivations of human, and was a constant defender of a kind of liberty against both the rightest and leftist political programmes that presented themselves in 20th century Latin America. He defended a traditional culture from a “post-modernist” perspective. Most thought he was irrelevant to politics–as compared to Pablo Neruda in Chile–but Borges always remained skeptical of such claims to love in politics. His “sci-fi” maintained an awareness of the the two cities.
It may be that American writers take Borges without the complexity of blood and guts of the particular Argentine history and the profound choices that he presents to readers in the present day, but that is simply ignorance. In his poems and stories, Borges presents important issues that are more than rhetorical tropes and more than sociological types and more than the detritus of history–let alone the rhetorical, sociological, and historical theorizing of recent American storytellers.
Borges was as unrealistic to Argentina as Faulkner was to the American south.
So if Mad Men and The Wire suffer from anything, it is too much school–even if The Wire was written by cops and journalists who covered the Ball’more drug scene. Mad Men is a story about “ad men” in the ’60s written by “ad men” in the 2010′s. If only a real Theodore Dreiser and Richard Wright could write for those shows.
In general, I admit that I like Mad Men and The Wire too, but Ross Douthat’s dichotomy between these shows and The Sopranos and Breaking Bad is on to something.
However, I still prefer The Godfather, parts 1 and 2 (for the Sopranos), and the 1983 De Palma version of Scarface (for Breaking Bad). In two hours these films present all of the issues and questions that these series needlessly carry on–almost like soap operas.
There is nothing wrong with in depth continuous story telling, as Dickens himself did. But Dickens took a story to its catharsis rather than a black screen as in the Sopranos. I will admit that Breaking Bad has many novel elements–let’s hope it doesn’t end with a black screen. The more Walter White becomes like Tony Montana, we also all know he is dying of cancer. It is easy. “Say hello to my little friend” may be a microscopic cellular disease that takes over all his cells and kills him in the first place.
Regarding Dostoevsky, these stories also carry on their narrative with character types and ideas. Like Dostoevsky, Breaking Bad and The Sopranos deal with the darkest of questions regarding human life in terms of dialogue–or dialogically. This is all a good thing–there are big ideas in terms of dialogue. But can the television story bear such weight–or will we have an end in the “cop out” of a black screen (Sopranos) at the end of the series? Or will Breaking bad end with the Myth of Er (as the series Six Feet Under kind of ended)? For Breaking Bad, I would prefer some sort of Myth of Er to a black screen. If I can’t have some sort of Dickensian denouement, then i need a story of hereafter. Why does the Dickensian version of catharsis in the real world seem to be impossible today? Perhaps it could end in a Dostoyevsky, Job-like, Alyosha-like recognition of the true relationship of men to God (but this too seems to be impossible)? Unfortunately, like the Sopranos, Breaking Bad will also end in a black screen–but being original, Breaking Bad will find a way to have black screen without having a black screen.
Such is modern television.
This is just an opinion.
April 2nd, 2012 | 6:46 am
Two great analyses. My impression is that Wolfe overplays (as a disguise) his role as a mere “social secretary,” as I once heard him say. CHARLOTTE SIMMONS isn’t that realistic, and A MAN IN FULL even less so (his Atlanta is much less churchy than the real one, for example). Realism has many meanings, and the effort of MAD MEN to achieve historical realism is at the expense of psychological realsm, for example.
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