Reality Hunger (34 page)

In
Jacob’s Room
, Virginia Woolf describes the dilemma of Charles Steele, who’s painting a still-life portrait: a cloud drifts into view, Mrs. Flanders’s sons run around the beach, she grows upset about the letter she’s writing, and she won’t stop moving. If Charles instructs Mrs. Flanders to stop moving, he’s altering the world in order for it to match what he wants to paint, rather than shaping his painting to reflect what’s actually occurring in the world.

The bachelorette on the brink of true love with one of several men she has known for seven hours; the cad who manipulates his beloved on cue—two narratives: false actualization and authentic shame. The success of the genre reflects our lust for emotional meaning. We really do want to feel, even if that means indulging in someone else’s joy or woe. We have a thirst for reality (other people’s reality, edited) even as we suffer a surfeit of reality (our own—boring/painful).

Forms serve the culture; when they die, they die for a good reason: they’re no longer embodying what it’s like to be alive. If reality TV manages to convey something that a more manifestly scripted and plotted show doesn’t, that’s less an affront to writers than a challenge.

collage

I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors-and-paste man.

If you grow up not with toys bought in the shop but things that are found around the farm, you do a sort of bricolage. Bits of string and wood. Making all sorts of things, like webs across the legs of a chair. And then you sit there, like the spider. The urge to connect bits that don’t seem to belong together has fascinated me all my life.

Collage is a demonstration of the many becoming the one, with the one never fully resolved because of the many that continue to impinge upon it.

While we tend to conceive of the operations of the mind as unified and transparent, they’re actually chaotic and opaque. There’s no invisible boss in the brain, no central meaner, no unitary self in command of our activities and utterances. There’s no internal spectator of a Cartesian theater in our heads to applaud the march of consciousness across its stage.

Collage’s parts always seem to be competing for a place in some unfinished scene.

The law of mosaics: how to deal with parts in the absence of wholes.

Resolution and conclusion are inherent in a plot-driven narrative.