Fight Club, Freight Trucks and Fictional Realities
A fair while ago, I was sitting on the bus, listening to my Ipod Shuffle. My Ipod shuffle is a hand-me-down from my fifteen year old sister who has an expendable income and a newer Ipod. I was excited when she handed it over. My mp3 player had died about a year ago and since then, I’ve gotten into audio and e books. Because I’m definitely a moneyless lass without a Kindle, I was excited at the ability to finally carry books around that won’t break my hand bags’ handles.
There was a truck stopped at an intersection, with signage that stated ‘sensitive freight’. I misread the word ‘sensitive’ as ‘cognative’ and my mind was sent on a whirlwind of thoughts.
The intersection of technology and books, which I have previously discussed in blogs for university courses, has me constantly thinking of postmodernist writing, and how we, as writers, can break the barriers of text.
Postmodernist writing is constantly changing the way we read literature.
J.M. Coetzee wrote Diary of a Bad Year, which is comprised of three literally linear narratives (shown in three sections on the one page of each page of the book). It is comprised of the essays of a writer, who asks a neighbour to type these essays, as well as the diary entries of each character. It is affronting as it changes the way in which a novel is read. In order to understand each narrative clearly, the novel cannot be read down the page but rather in sections that force the reader to begin back at the start of the novel at the end of each section.
Diary of a Bad Year by JM Coetzee
Mark Z. Danielewski is what is now considered the post-postmodern generation of writers. His first book House of Leaves is a hypertextual descent into madness, as shown through the unconventional page layout. The visual of the page is said to create a direction reflection of the emotional pull of the narrative. It contains single words on pages, endless footnotes, articles and a general sense of insensity. It is very hard to start, let alone finish–which I have not, on instruction from someone who has read it at least twice previous–as well as difficult to explain. Danielewski’s second novel, Only Revolutions, is a circular stream-of-consciousness narrative in that it can be turned upside down and read in the opposite direction.
Films display the easiest understandable visual depiction of postmodernism. Rather than discuss the novel, I’ve chosen Fight Club as my representation of postmodernism in film. As everyone probably knows, Fight Club deals with the masculine view of postmodern society. The existential novel since the absurdists, Fight Club dealt with the masculine place in the pop culture world. The game of the film is in the deception. For one who hasn’t read the novel, I won’t spill the secret but what makes Fight Club postmodern is the reality it creates inside itself. It’s not realistic in the same terms as the modernist realism film techniques as David Fincher, Fight Club’s director, deliberately utilises a cinematic metaphor of the narrator’s state of mind. The juxtaposition of visual styles leaves the audience unaware of which reality is their reality.
On the bus, listening to an audio book read by an actor after hearing one of his songs previously on the playlist, I realised that we don’t definitively look to songs for postmodern realities that film and literature create. Postmodernism often utilises a modified version of our ‘reality’ or a direct reference to the reality created inside the text.
Contemporary music doesn’t have this preconceived notion of reality. Concept albums are one example, as per Coheed and Cambria‘s science fiction story line The Amory Wars, and David Bowie’s alter ego Ziggy Stardust exemplified Bowie’s musical innovation.
I think this rule-less world of lyricism is fascinating. One verse can be completely different from the first, a whole different world and with the application of music, it allows a narrative to be told.
