Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

In Les Misérables, Hugo expressed his views not only through narrative but also through formal analysis:

1831 and 1832, the two years which are immediately connected with the Revolution of July, form one of the most peculiar and striking moments of history. These two years rise like two mountains midway between those which precede and those which follow them. They have a revolutionary grandeur. Precipices are to be distinguished there. The social masses, the very assizes of civilization, the solid group of superposed and adhering interests, the century-old profiles of the ancient French formation, appear and disappear in them every instant, athwart the storm clouds of systems, of passions, and of theories. These appearances and disappearances have been designated as movement and resistance. At intervals, truth, that daylight of the human soul, can be descried shining there.  This remarkable epoch is decidedly circumscribed and is beginning to be sufficiently distant from us to allow of our grasping the principal lines even at the present day.  We shall make the attempt.  The Restoration had been one of those intermediate phases, hard to define, in which there is fatigue, buzzing, murmurs, sleep, tumult, and which are nothing else than the arrival of a great nation at a halting-place.  These epochs are peculiar and mislead the politicians who desire to convert them to profit. In the beginning, the nation asks nothing but repose; it thirsts for but one thing, peace; it has but one ambition, to be small. Which is the translation of remaining tranquil. Of great events, great hazards, great adventures, great men, thank God, we have seen enough, we have them heaped higher than our heads. We would exchange Cæsar for Prusias, and Napoleon for the King of Yvetot. "What a good little king was he!" We have marched since daybreak, we have reached the evening of a long and toilsome day; we have made our first change with Mirabeau, the second with Robespierre, the third with Bonaparte; we are worn out. Each one demands a bed. [Victor Hugo, Les Miserables (1862), Volume IV – Saint-Denis; Book First – A Few Pages of History, Chapter I, “Well Cut”.]

Revolt is a sort of waterspout in the social atmosphere which forms suddenly in certain conditions of temperature, and which, as it eddies about, mounts, descends, thunders, tears, razes, crushes, demolishes, uproots, bearing with it great natures and small, the strong man and the feeble mind, the tree trunk and the stalk of straw. Woe to him whom it bears away as well as to him whom it strikes! It breaks the one against the other.  It communicates to those whom it seizes an indescribable and extraordinary power. It fills the first-comer with the force of events; it converts everything into projectiles. It makes a cannon-ball of a rough stone, and a general of a porter. [Victor Hugo, Les Miserables (1862), Volume IV – Saint-Denis; Book Tenth – The 5th of June, 1832, Chapter I, “The Surface of the Question”.]

Janice Hallett “likes to whittle down her stories to their constituent parts so that we can sort through the evidence ourselves, like chefs puzzling through a box of discordant ingredients that are meant to become a meal.” Her novels include:

• The Examiner: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2024): “Six students begin a one-year master’s degree program in multimedia art at a British university that has recently been forced to cut many of its fine art programs and redesign the degree with an eye toward art’s business relevancy. They come together as strangers, representing an eclectic mix of ages and backgrounds. . . . Played for comedy, the whole thing would have seemed superficial, but as a commentary on art’s current role in academia and business, as well as the darker side of human ambition and gullibility, Hallett’s unconventional novel proves both creative and astute.”
• The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2023): “. . . it’s told mostly through the emails, texts, and WhatsApp messages of Amanda Bailey, its main character. Amanda is an ambitious journalist and true-crime aficionado who garners a book deal to tell the story of the Alperton Angels, a cult whose members allegedly committed suicide in London in 2003.”
• The Twyford Code: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2022): “Forty years ago, Steven ‘Smithy’ Smith found a copy of a famous children’s book by disgraced author Edith Twyford, its margins full of strange markings and annotations. When he showed it to his remedial English teacher Miss Iles, she believed that it was part of a secret code that ran through all of Twyford’s novels. And when she disappeared on a class field trip, Smithy became convinced that she had been right.”
• The Appeal: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2022): “The Fairway Players are a close-knit drama group in a small town outside London, socially centered around the club's founders, the Haywards and their children. Plans for their upcoming production of Arthur Miller's All My Sons are upended when Martin Hayward, the patriarch of the family and leader of the drama group, announces that his 2-year-old granddaughter, Poppy, has been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer.”

Novels:

• George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life (Random House, 2021): analyzing seven classic Russian short stories.
• Frederic Tuten, The Bar at Twilight: Stories (Bellevue Literary Press, 2022): “. . . full of bittersweet portraits of artists and the places that shaped them.”
• Curtis Sittenfeld, Romantic Comedy: A Novel (Random House, 2023): “So much of Sittenfeld’s work exists in the dissection and comprehension of female desire: what we want, what we absolutely don’t and, maybe paramount, what we’re even allowed to have.”

Poetry

Books about poetry:

• Brad Leithauser, Rhyme’s Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry (Knopf, 2022), “is loosely arranged as a guide to poetry’s structures and devices — stanzas, slant rhyme and so forth . . . But Leithauser’s approach is essayistic rather than procedural; this book is not a how-to so much as a how-about.”

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

Ludwig van Beethoven knew he was approaching the end of his life when he composed his final opus, the String Quartet No. 16 in F major, Op. 135 (1826) (approx. 24-27’) (list of performances). To the untrained ear, or to those who are unaware of Beethoven’s history, this quartet may sound conventional. But others have noted that it is a distillation. This work brings to mind a T.S. Eliot poem,  “Little Gidding”: “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” However, the value of synthesis is not merely to die in peace or remembrance. The greater message in Beethoven’s music is that we can reflect on all the places we’ve been – physically, emotionally, intellectually – take stock, and move forward, renewed and enriched. 

Other compositions:

• Inspired by the great transcendentalists who thrived in Concord, Massachusetts in the mid-19th century, Charles Ives constructed his Piano Sonata No. 2, “Concord, Mass., 1840-1860” (1915) (approx. 43-48’), in the reverse order of complexity from the usual. Each movement is at its most dense at complex in the beginning, then trims down to one or two ideas. Thus, the work is a musical analog to the process of simplification by analysis. “Ives explained that, taken together, the music and the essays were ‘an attempt to present (one person’s) impression of the spirit of transcendentalism that is associated in the minds of many with Concord, Mass., of over half a century ago. . .’” “. . . the sonata is a series of meditations on four great Transcendentalist writers: Emerson, Hawthorne, 'The Alcotts,' and Thoreau.”
• In Reich/Richter for large ensemble (2019) (approx. 37’), composer Steve Reich worked off a painting by Gerhard Richter, with whom he collaborated on the project, to create a musical composition that reduced sound to simple components, then expanded it again. This mirrored a process that Richter had used with his work of visual art. Reich explains the process, referencing Richter’s painting: “It starts with one of his abstract paintings from the ’90s. He scanned a photo of the painting into a computer and then cut the scan in half and took each half, cut that in half and two of the four quarters he reversed into mirror images. He then repeated this process of ‘divide, mirror, repeat’ from half to quarter, eighth, sixteenth, thirty-second, all the way up to 4096th. The net effect is to go from an abstract painting to a series of gradually smaller anthropomorphic ‘creatures’ (since the mirroring produces bilateral symmetry) to still smaller ‘psychedelic’ abstractions to very fine stripes.”
• Jóhann Jóhannsson, Drone Mass (2015) (approx. 51’): “. . . the work represents what the Icelandic composer called ‘a distillation of a lot of influences and obsessions’. As the title suggests, those obsessions include his fascination with the musical device of the drone. This was something Jóhannsson felt as a visceral presence, ‘a fundamental vibration that anchors music and gives you a foundation’. He often used both acoustic and electronic drones – sometimes gently underpinning the music, sometimes drowning out everything else.”
• Benjamin Frankel, Symphony No. 1, Op. 33 (1958) (approx. 24-26’): In the first movement, per the composer, “the tonal debate, between tonic and dominant, is raised to the higher and more complex area of multitonality, and where the constant renewing of thematic elements replaces the notions of 1st subject, 2nd subject, development, etc.”; the second movement presents contrasting textures and a kaleidoscope of scenes [Buxton Orr]; the concluding movement offers a plain melody, which is turned on its head but persists until the work concludes.
• John Foulds, Dynamic Triptych for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 88 (1929) (approx. 29’): the three movements are titled “Dynamic Mode”, “Dynamic Timbre” and “Dynamic Rhythm”, suggesting the analysis of music through component parts. “Fundamentally this is a piano concerto by another name. I suppose ‘Dynamic’ simply means that it moves and ‘Triptych’ means that it is in three parts.”
• Heitor Villa-Lobos, Symphony No. 12 (1957) (approx. 24-26’) is a “synthesis between European style and Latin soul”. 

Divanhana “is a Bosnian sevdah band that performs traditional music in new arrangements, influenced by jazz, pop, and 20th century classical music. Divanhana’s mission is to cherish and represent urban traditional music not only from Bosnia and Herzegovina, but from the whole Balkan region with a particular attention to the Sevdalinka genre.” For more than a decade, it has been releasing outstanding work, which has remained remarkably consistent despite personnel changes. “'Zavrzlama represents our lives in Bosnia and Herzegovina which are so tangled and influenced by different traditions, religion and culture. It represents our rivers, their tributaries, and streams which thigh our mountains that reach so high from where we can see the whole planet. Zavrzlama is also our sevdah tangled with instruments brought from east and west, rhythm structure from different ends of the world, lyrics with a pinch of love, a pinch of joke and a pinch of tragedy. In the end Zavrzlama is the music of this album.' said the members of the band about their new album” in 2021. We could analyze the components, or just absorb and be uplifted by the music.

Albums:

• Christian McBride & Inside Straight, “People Music” (2013) (56’): on this album of swing music, McBride’s aptly-named quintet brings soaring solos together in brilliant synthesis.
• Ran Dank, “Vers le silence” (2021) (73’): “By interpreting William Bolcom’s Twelve New Études with works of Chopin, Dank casts provocative light on these composer-pianists, resulting in intriguing juxtapositions.”
• Ches Smith, “Interpret It Well” (2022) (70’): “Throughout the album, subtle sketches are explored and exploded, minimal ideas often turning into cathartic group journeys.”
• Nduduzo Makhathini, “In the Spirit of Ntu” (2022) (68’): on this album, Makhathini brings together his previous work.
• Billy Mohler, “Anatomy” (2022) (43’): what it is all about.

Music: songs and other short pieces

Analyzing:

• The Beatles, “Eleanor Rigby” (lyrics)
• Pink Floyd, “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” (lyrics)

Synthesizing:

• Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime” (lyrics)
• Daft Punk, “Digital Love” (lyrics)  (in blending digital sounds and human emotions)

Visual Arts

Syntheses:

• Gail Rothschild, Difficult Synthesis of Indigo (1961)
• M.C. Escher, Synthesis (1947)
• Wassily Kandinsky, Composition X (The Great Synthesis) (1939)

Film and Stage