Students who saw Sonya Renee Taylor’s presentation "The Body Is Not An Apology" last Wednesday might remember her aversion toward “the binary.” Usually this refers to the gender binary, or the categorization of gender into just male and female, but Taylor spoke about how other binary systems, such as gay/straight, rich/poor or black/white, can be just as discriminating by excluding everything that falls in the in-between categories.
In the same way, people tend to separate human creations into discrete categories, such as “music” or “literature,” or categorize them even further into “fiction,” “opera” or “narrative.” Here are five pieces of art that complicate these categories in some way and show that exploration of the in-between space can be a great thing.
My Struggle" — Karl Ove Knausgaard
"My Struggle," first published in 2009, is a series of six novels that have enjoyed a level of success that's difficult to explain. It describes the life of its Norwegian author, Karl Ove Knausgaard, in endless detail, which can feel like an eternal therapy session. It’s not as if Knausgaard has had an unusual life — the strongest parts of the books explore his troubled relationship with his father, his mediocre high school band and his tense marriage. But the real honesty and brilliance of the work doesn’t come from the details Knausgaard reveals. It comes from the passages in which he articulates his fears about death, his frustration at his self-referential thoughts and his longing for his childhood. For much of the series, Knausgaard the character pines for fame and expects it to bring him a feeling of relevance and significance. But now that Knausgaard the writer has achieved fame, he has said publicly that he wishes he hadn’t, as his book has alienated many of his friends and family members. Despite being a beautiful piece of art, "My Struggle" almost feels like a cruelly insensitive comment, defended by the phrase “I was just being honest!”
"Nixon in China" — John Adams
John Adams’s 1987 opera "Nixon in China" is an exploration of how legends and heroes are made. Everything about it is earnest, but its subject is the man who generated more cynicism than anyone else in the 20th century. What really makes "Nixon in China" unique is its complete lack of irony. In 1972, President Nixon shook hands with Chairman Mao after a quarter-century of separation between the U.S. and China, and Adams uses opera to capture the excitement of that event. Overwhelming and playful, "Nixon in China" is often categorized as “minimalist,” but in reality it's complex, dynamic and fast-paced. Audiences with preconceived ideas about opera are bound to be surprised.
"The Pale King" — David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace is famous for "Infinite Jest," his 1,088-page novel about entertainment, but his third novel, "The Pale King," is all about boredom. It kind of has to be, since most of it takes place in an IRS office in Illinois around 1985. The novel itself manages to not be boring, but it does take some effort to read. The boundary between fiction and nonfiction takes its first hit when Wallace introduces a character by the name of David Wallace, an employee of the IRS with some standard college backstory. Some quick research on the reader’s part will reveal that none of the details align with the life of the real David Foster Wallace, the author, but a third David Wallace appears in Chapter 9. “Author here,” it reads, “meaning the real author, the living human holding the pencil, not some abstract narrative persona.” He goes further to assert that the only fictional part of the novel is the disclaimer on the copyright page stating that the rest of the book is fictional. At its core, this is the same paradox as the famous statement “this sentence is a lie.” Sadly, the real Wallace committed suicide before finishing the book, which was pieced together by his editor and published posthumously, but it’s fascinating to read even in its unfinished state.
"Here" – Richard McGuire
Richard McGuire’s “Here” was six pages long when it was published in Raw, a comics anthology, in 1989. It was something like a comic strip, and was recently published as a 300-page book by Pantheon Books as something like a graphic novel. Three-hundred pages sounds like a lot until you realize that “Here” takes place over a period of 500,957,408,106 years. It also takes place in a single room (or sometimes, the physical space where the room will later be built). Most of the events depicted are mundane, and there’s never an explicit narrative for more than a few pages at a time, but “Here” does tell a story. It’s about losing and finding things, whether it's following a woman who loses and finds a book in her living room or members of an archaeological association discovering artifacts from Native Americans making love in the woods. Other characters include a dinosaur, a baby and a sea creature that hasn’t evolved yet. Often three or four different time periods are shown on the same page in different areas of the room. With all of this going on, “Here” still manages to be beautifully understated. It’s difficult not to gain some perspective while reading it.
"The Idea of North" – Glenn Gould
Glenn Gould is a pianist known equally for his Bach-playing skills and for his weirdness. "The Idea of North" is Gould’s first “contrapuntal radio documentary.” It’s an hour-long sequence of monologues about the Canadian wilderness, often played over each other in ways that create fascinating juxtapositions. Words are different from music, though, and two speakers are more difficult to listen to than two lines of music, so the documentary is often confusing. The key, and what Gould was envisioning, seems to be to listen to the music of the speech rather than the words themselves. This allows words and phrases to drift in and out and to interact with each other while taking pressure off of the listener to keep up. The piece works well for a kind of meditation, and with an open mind, the hour goes by surprisingly fast.
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