js_thrill | This Year 365 songs: February 26th (Reply)

Today's song is Heights

This isn't as discordant as Blood Royal was, but there is something that feels intentionally jarring about some of the music here. I don't dislike the song, but it took a bit to get accustomed to that element of it. Darnielle's annotations are entirely about his curiosity about the narrator, which is a return to a theme that I've noted many previous times in my notes. It's not just about the elliptical nature of his storytelling, but about the way in which these partial stories are presented as things he is merely glimpsing through a telescope or uncovering. There are determinate answers to all our questions about the narrator. There is a complete story there, and yet somehow, Darnielle only has fragmentary access to it.

In some ways, it is easier for me to get my mind around the less appealing—and more dismissive—Mamet view of fiction, as propounded in an SF Gate interview:

M.L.: There's a scene in "Oleanna" in which the woman says "I never told anybody this" — and then gets interrupted by the phone ringing. What was she about to say?

MAMET: Aha! Well, we don't know, do we?

M.L.: Well, / don't know. You don't either?

MAMET: No.

M.L.: I thought, in my naive way, that you're supposed to know as you're writing the line —

MAMET: Nope. (Laughing) We never got that far. We in the audience have to believe that she's about to make an extraordinary confession. What that confession is we don't get to find out.

M.L.: But you don't know —

MAMET: The woman doesn't actually exist, Mick. She's a bunch of black scribbles on a blank page.

M.L.: But when you're thinking about it as you're writing the play you're not really thinking about scribbles on a blank page. You are thinking of some kind of person, I would think.

MAMET: No. Black scribbles on a white page, that's all it is.

So, like, for Mamet, there are no answers that aren't on the page, but that's because all there is is words on the page. And I can get my head around that view, but I don't like that view. For Darnielle, the words on the page are all we know about the characters and the story, but somehow those words succeeded at singling out a fully defined and realized character and world, that has (unknowable) answers to all the questions we might ask. Which is a more appealing view of what happens, but also a much more perplexing one.