Content Versus Technique

Ptim Callan: When we're discussing art, one of the ways we can break it down is subject matter versus technique. Now, if you've been following the 20-something videos that I've made up to this one on this channel, you'll see that I've been heavily focused on technique. So I'm talking about structure and forms and various storytelling styles. So we've had a episode like what is concrete. Prose, or what is metafiction, or you know, imaginary books, or these things that are very technique-oriented in their nature. And That's not entirely by accident. So as I break down and build a vocabulary for all of us so we can all talk about postmodern literature, the massive and diverse corpus that is postmodern literature, what I want to start with is I want to start with a vocabulary. So we know what we mean. So when I say this story has a frame, or this story is metafiction. You know what I mean by that word, right? Now, we can do the same thing about subject matter. But the thing about subject matter is it gets much more tricky when we're defining a school like postmodernism. And that's what I want to talk to today. I want to talk about a little philosophy about how we break down and talk about a literary school. So, subject matter, there are all kinds of subject matter. That absolutely coalesces around postmodernism, and it would be easy, and lots of people look at that and say, that's very postmodern. But we've got to be a little careful about using our subject matter as a criterion or a signpost for postmodernism, as opposed to saying that it's highly correlative. So I'll give you an example. let's use probably the easiest and most obvious example. which would be literature about the annihilation of the human race race, about the atom bomb or various other ways that humanity might end. Now this is one hundred percent Subject matter that occurs in the postmodern era. You will not find any classical literature or modernist literature that discusses this. There's no Edwardian authors writing about this, no Victorian authors writing about this. And the reason for that is that it's a modern concept. It wasn't really until the atom bomb and the nuclear proliferation during the early days of the Cold War that people started to think. Wow, we may be in the last days of humanity. So if you go back to 1925. Hemingway and Virginia Wolfe and F. Scott Fitzgerald weren't writing about that because that wasn't a concept. But we need to be careful about turning around and saying, okay, literature of the annihilation of the human race is a function, is is a hallmark of postmodernism, or is a function of postmodernism or is a postmodernist trope. And the reason I want to be careful about Is I don't want to confuse literary movements with historical eras, right? So there are important hallmarks of postmodernism that differentiates it from modernism and traditionalism. And these hallmarks are important. And I think to me they're fascinating and interesting. And they're what that makes that the best literary genre, right? It's the one that I enjoy the most, it's the one that I love the most. But to to to just collapse it down to a historical era, like at that point we might as well say, well, postmodernism is written as everything that was written after we dropped the atom bomb. Right? Everything after 1945 and V-Day is postmodernism. But that's that's that's a bad definition. That's not a useful definition. There's no utility to that because At that point when you're saying postmodern, all you're saying is post-war. And you're not differentiating between a traditionalist work that was written after 1945 and a postmodernist work that was written after 1945. You're just lumping them all together, right? So we wouldn't do that just measuring by a date. But if we're measuring by subject matter, we're more or less measuring by a date anyway, depending on the subject matter. If you turn around and you say, well, you know what? Every single postmodern work that I see occurs in an era when people have automobiles. So I'm going to say that automobiles are part of postmodernism. Well, sure, there's no automobiles in Arthur Conan Doyle. But again, that's not what the literary school is. You're just looking at history and you're getting confused about history, right? So that's the first thing I don't want to do. I don't want to turn around and say, okay, well, just some subject, just by virtue of their subject matter, especially subject matter that's anchored to history and when things happened, that means it's postmodernist. I think that is reductionist, overly simplistic, and ultimately not useful in any way. On the other hand, there are certainly trends and tropes and topics and styles of dealing with subject matter that I think are very correlative with postmodernism. So let me just let me just give an example to illustrate this point about subject matter. Let's use something, let's talk about how about World War II, right? World War II movies that were written after World War II. So as we just talked about, V-Day, right? You know, everything after V-Day is gonna be postmodernism. Okay, well let's look at a couple things about World War II that came after V-Day. And I'm gonna compare two films. I'm gonna compare The Great Escape and Inglorious Bastards. They're both about the same topic. They're both about World War II. So they should both be the same thing, right? They're both postmodernism or they're both not postmod postmodernism, right? But the Great Escape is very traditional. It has a traditional movie story structure, has a three-act structure, has rising action, falling action, chase the monkey up the tree, throw rocks at the monkey, bring the monkey down from the tree, right? It has a conclusion in a denominant. There's characters as traditional storytelling. You become emotionally invested in the characters. Some of the good guys make it out, some of the good guys don't, right? There's victory, there's tragedy, there's tension, it's a linear story, starts in the beginning and goes to the end. Like in all of these ways, it is traditional storytelling. It's excellent storytelling, right? It's it's top of its craft, but it's very traditional. Now, if we turn around and we look at Inglorious Bastards, it is untraditional in all kinds of ways. It's extremely postmodernism. Or it's extremely post-modernism. It's extremely postmodernist, right? Tarantino jumps around from time to place. he He has all the languages and the languages there are in. When people are speaking French, they speak French. When people are speaking German, they speak German, right? We get to read the subtitles, right? So he's got this plurality of languages. He moves between styles and and and and moods and tones in in a very freewheeling way. I think about the scenario where they're interrogating where the bastard Right near the beginning are interrogating the soldiers. They want to know where the snipers are in the orchard. And they bring out the the leader of the of the Germans they've captured. And Tarantino turns around and he he he takes that guy, even though he's a Nazi, and he makes that guy into a hero. Right, with his music and his and and pr presentation of you know how he shoots the video and how he has the character and how he has the actor work and all that. He makes that guy into a brave hero who's gonna die for his country, right? And he makes that. And then as soon as he gets hit with the baseball bat, suddenly he instantly converts into this grotesque figure of this this dying person who's being beaten to death with a baseball bat. And it's you know, that kind of juxtaposition. It's very postmodern, right? We get the whole Hugo Stieglitz. section where all of the sudden the the this narrator comes in that we've never heard of before and he gives us the Hugo Schliegers thing and you've got the the guitar riffs and the big words showing up and the and the and the the the newspapers being posted over it and it becomes very kind of it's this pastiche and it's it's it's you know got the different documents and different styles and it's completely out of the era for World War Two. and of course most obviously the end, right? He reinvents history. He changed his history. And so when you look at all of that stuff together, it's just a very post-modern work. But it's about the same subject matter as The Great Escape, which is a classical, traditional work, as many World War II movies are, right? And we could have used the Guns of Navarrone or, you know, Kelly's Heroes or a bunch of other things as an example of the same thing. And they would have met that formula. And so that's why we have to be careful, right? We have to be careful about saying I am going to look for subject matter and I'm going to declare something to be postmodernist or not. I think it's much more useful in general to look at how the subject matter is dealt with. And that's why I kind of went into the detail on these two movies to show, right? It's the same thing, it's World War II, but what the creator is doing. What the storyteller is doing with that material is very different. And that's what makes it postmodern. So another way to think about this, and I think this is valuable, is postmodernism is a choice. As an author, you can decide to be a traditionalist, and you can say, I'm not gonna worry about the weight of a million people before me in 5,000 years of literature. I don't care, I'm just gonna write my story, right? Or you can say, I do care, and I want to make sure something that accounts for that. Right? I do care about the literature of Yos Goshen and the literature of replenishment. And if you haven't seen that video, go back and watch that video, and those two terms will make sense to you. That is what a you know a postmodernist does, as opposed to a traditionalist, even if they're working today, who says, I'm just gonna tell my story. And this is important. Because as we start to deal with subject matter and we've gotta deal with subject matter, right? And you can think of what's what are the some of the obvious things, right? Like let's talk about gender identity and postmodernism, right? That's an obvious one to talk about. Or, you know, cultural, diverse cultural backgrounds and multiculturality, multiculturality, whatever that word is, multicultural nature, that that would be a very postmodern idea. and you know, the weight of history. And then I'm gonna turn around and once again I'm gonna say technology, like it all, the concept of technology in our society, especially digital technology. And the concept of of science fiction at all, and writing science fiction just as an idea, these things are very rich for postmodernists. Identity is very rich for postmodernists, what's real and what's not. And so we have to get into those kinds of things, the subject matter. But as we do it, I'm going to emphasize that the subject matter itself does not make something postmodern or not. A work is not postmodern because it's feminist. A work is not postmodern because it's coming from a non feminist. White Anglo-Saxon college-educated perspective, right? These things do not make a work postmodernist, right? If the author is writing from their own experience and the author is not a white, college-educated Western European or American male, then that's not choice. That's that's they didn't choose to be that. They were born that. So we can't call that postmodernism. Postmodernism has to be what the author chooses to do with it. Right, it's a genre, it's a style, it's a school. And so, in that regard, we're going to have to be, it's gonna be careful and we're gonna be a little tricky. And what makes it trickier, of course, is that these things too flock together. So the same time we have postmodernism going on in our society, we're also getting much more open about a bunch of other things, right? we're willing to discuss queer issues in a way that we never were before. And that's happening the same time that postmodernism is happening. But that doesn't mean that if it's about queer issues, it must be postmodern. Any more than if it's postmodern it must be about queer issues right they they they tend to overlap the Venn diagrams have a whole lot of overlap because they're happening at the same time and a lot of people are interested in both right but that doesn't mean that one of them is a criterion or a requirement for the other And this is, you know, as we start to get into subject matter and we need to get into subject matter, or we can't address postmodernism properly, this is one of the things that's going to come up time and again. So I gave it an episode now. I'll probably refer back to this episode in the future. Watch my episode about subject matter versus technique. And so part of the reason that I focused so much on technique in the beginning is I knew we had to cover it all. We had to get through the technique, and we're not through the technique at all. There's a lot more technique to discuss. And we also had to get through the subject matter. And, you know, getting and going on this for, you know, out of kind of fresh out of the gate, not really knowing exactly how I was going to tackle this material, it struck me as More straightforward and less of a question mark about how I wanted to deal with technique. So I was dealing with technique, I was getting my legs under me, I was seeing how I feel about this material. And while I was doing that, I was kind of mulling on subject matter. And I still am mulling on subject matter, but I think we have to get into it. So we will get into it, and you're gonna start seeing episodes on that. And just remember that. Subject matter is not sufficient of itself to for us to declare something as postmodern, but at the same time, there is this huge correlation, so we can't ignore it. And then also at the same time, how the subject matter is dealt with can be postmodern or not. And I mean more than just the kind of the techniques and structures I've been talking about here. Some of it's the philosophy of it, some of it's the tone and manner of it. That stuff, how that's dealt with, is part of how we declare something to be postmodernism. And that's something we'll be discussing as well. So lots of fun stuff to come. Thank you.