The Lost Column

One night over winter break, I dreamed that I was in Hell with the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I don’t know what this says about me—I don’t really want to know—but it did get me thinking about the way Star Trek, and storytelling in general, has changed in the twenty years since that show first premiered.

I’m no expert in this. I declared English as a major, then undeclared it a year later. So this is purely speculation based on observation—and maybe too much observation, thanks to my TIVO.

On that note—first, television. What I’ve witnessed is a transition toward “story arcs” in TV series. Arcs are plots that span multiple episodes, in which regular characters can change, have their eyes poked out, even die (see Buffy, or The Sopranos.) In Star Trek and most other weekly shows, writers were instructed to make sure that the cast ended each episode approximately in the same place as they started. If Data manufactured himself a daughter, you could be pretty sure she would expeditiously disappear, be destroyed, or sacrifice herself by the end of the episode. The same went for any character’s new love interest. Similarly, Gilligan and company would never find a way off the island, the fugitive wouldn’t be caught, Alf wouldn’t be found out, etc.

But later versions of Star Trek began to experiment with story arcs, like prolonged wars with evil shapeshifters. These weren’t exactly groundbreaking: daytime soap operas had been doing them for decades. Otherwise, how could you have last season’s villain return for this season’s finale? Strangely, though, a show about the twenty-fourth century took thirty years to catch up to Dawson’s Creek. Story arcs have several advantages: they drive existing audiences to come back every week, they allow for more interesting plots, they require writers to come up with fewer “new ideas” and instead to focus on creating a few really good ones. Characters can pay the price for their mistakes in one episode several episodes down the line. Their disadvantage is that they make it harder for new viewers to get involved, which may explain why very good shows like Angel, Jack and Bobby and even the recently cancelled Enterprise (which I heard was good but hardly ever watched for that very reason) tend not to grow their audiences over time.

Different things have happened to literature over the same period. Consider my sophomore year roommate, Sasha. When he was little, he wanted to be a postmodern philosopher. Eventually he became an international tax attorney, then ran away to music conservatory in Holland. In between he experimented with writing “postmodern fiction.” His stories were ostentatiously weird. In one, a romantically involved pair of older Jewish women (one of whom becomes a man around page four) walk from Burbank into sub-Saharan Africa while nearby monks chant in honor of the Big Mac and then visit Wal-Mart. It was whimsical, almost nonsensical—yet deftly written. I remember him showing me a book called something like Eight Devices of Postmodern Fiction. “I included all of them,” he said.

What’s happened, the way I see it, is a lot of these devices that back then very forcibly stylized have been internalized by writers and readers as quirky but no longer revolutionary. Thus, a novel like Middlesex can switch between a first-person and third-person narrator as naturally as the plot moves back and forth through three generations and two continents. In The Confessions of Max Tevoli, a man is born old and becomes younger as he ages—but the science of this is never questioned, and parts of his story are told in reverse order. What used to be referred to as “magic realism” (a literary genre in which unconventional things are accepted as existing in the everyday world) has bled over into fiction in general. Maybe this is why science fiction clichés, like time travel and memory manipulation, can form the bases of critically acclaimed films like The Butterfly Effect and Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind without their even being branded as sci-fi.

One result of all this is that plain old linear storytelling seems increasingly dated. Instead we have novels like The Time Traveler’s Wife—a selection of the very mainstream Today Show Book Club—in which a woman is married to a man who skips around in time, so that in each scene, he is a different age. Things happen at the beginning of the book that actually take place late in the plot. Trust me, it makes sense when you read it. Part of this new comfort with complex narratives might be blamed on (or credited to) the Web, where hyperlinks have gotten us used to reading in bits and pieces that connect in different ways.

Today in Corpus Christi, I talked to a high school junior who was writing a set of short stories. “Each one follows the other,” she explained, “But is from a different person’s point of view. And sometimes they see the same things through different eyes.”

She didn’t seem to think it was anything that unusual.

It used to be that if an author hung a shotgun over the fireplace at the start of a novel, it had to be fired by the epilogue. These days, it’s more likely that in the last scene, it turns out that the shotgun was the narrator all along.