Paradigms New and Old

I went to college a little before structural analysis set in, so I didn’t know what a syntagm was (though I had some idea of paradigm) until I met Don Starnes. Don went to San Francisco State in filmmaking. I’ve seen him, when editing a piece, plot the paradigm, what the piece means, against the syntagm, the sequence of things that happen. This is the simplest way I have been able to understand it. In filmmaking, it means that a visual language delivers the meaning, plotted against things that happen on the film’s “timeline.”

Don laments the lack of meaning in much of our current “entertainment.” This morning he told me about a reality show he has agreed to work on briefly. “It’s horrible,” he tells me. “Philosophical people don’t make good television,” I remind him. “They don’t even make good Facebook!” Nevertheless, people are hungry for stories that involve them, that encompass the complexity they live in without demeaning their sense of themselves and their possibilities.

Duane Elgin has taken this problem head-on. He notes that we are in a time of transition. New stories could involve the ideas that the human race is growing up; communication is awakening our consciousness to a global, rather than a local scale; and the hero’s journey could now be a story of return to living in harmony with the earth and each other. He suggests that the despair and destruction we see around us may be part of the difficult birth we are all going through. The project on which he collaborates to develop new stories is described here.

We will always need new stories. But, like most people deeply involved in literature, I am also happy with the old ones. Humans and their patterns have not changed very much, and a richly told story invites us in to watch. As Kenneth Rexroth says, in his book Classics Revisited, all great fiction is “the story of the immensely difficult achievement of personal integrity.” He is here referring to The Dream of the Red Chamber, sometimes called The Story of the Stone, a novel written in China between 1754 and 1764. In it, Cao Xueqin looks back at the aristocratic family he came from, writing in poverty at the end of his life. I am reading an English translation by David Hawkes.

Bao-yu, the protagonist, is surrounded by a hierarchical family structure which requires daily filial obligation. He lives in a beautiful garden, and knows the poetry of China so well he excels in composing allusive poems. His father, however, wants him to study the Four Books, the basis of the Confucian philosophy which structures Chinese society. When Bao-yu doesn’t, his father beats him badly “for the honor of the family.” His friend says, “I suppose you will change now.” But Bao-yu is intransigent. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I shan’t change. People like that are worth dying for. I wouldn’t change if he killed me.”

The paradigm of this book is unlike any Western novel. The syntagm is well-populated! One thing happens after another, the action shifting from one part of the huge family complex, in which more than 300 people live, to another. Servants and masters all take their turn. Characters die and are mourned. The family fortunes sink. Infighting and chaos begin to undermine the household. It’s a big melodrama which draws you into it with its lively characters, said to be based on real people.

Though willful and mercurial, gentle Bao-yu struggles against the hate that results from the difficulties around him. Rexroth suggests he embodies the Taoist principle of non-action, that of water seeking its own level and eventually wearing away mountains. It is a feminine, yin principle, reflecting the way the Chinese people see and interact with nature. Neither yin nor yang is evil. They alternate, each containing a little of the other. Knowing it cannot last, Bao-yu is determined to enjoy, appreciate and celebrate his young life.

The yin/yang interaction of the rise and set of phenomena is a more grown-up way of looking at the world than seeing it as black and white, good and evil. It does not pit people against nature, as we somehow do in the West. Evil certainly exists, and heroes and heroines must fight it where it arises. But the interaction is messy and our heroes and heroines would do well to look into their own hearts and motives as they go forth into battle. The paradigm of fighting and battle itself should be questioned. As Duane Elgin suggests, the hero’s journey might now be more about a return to harmony.