SERVANTS OF A POWERFUL MASTER (NARRATIVE)

Just read Jay Rosen's fascinating article entitled "The Master Narrative of Journalism." Here's the link:

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2003/09/08/basics_master.html

There's much food for thought here, especially in the concept of master narrative as story-generating machine. Never really thought of it that way before; my prior conceptual metaphor was of master narrative as a sun orbited by several smaller but related narrative planets. This new metaphor, however, strikes me as more accurate and more accessible from a creative standpoint.

Instead of having to think up the entire bloody solar system of ideas that would go into, say, a novel, all I have to do now is crank up the ol' master-narrative machine and see what sub-stories it spits out.

Rosen uses the example of "winning" as the master narrative of political election coverage. From this apparently simple concept comes the familiar treatment of elections as horse races, with all the attendant spicy details, heart-pounding urgency, and photo finishes (in other words, you might adapt a current series of track ads here in Edmonchuck and say it provides "a new story every fifteen minutes").

Or, to use an impromptu example in which a friend of mine has found himself enmeshed lately, try the master narrative of "control" in a story about coworkers in an office. What we're dealing with here, folks, is nothing less than the wellspring of office politics--and the nominal labels of "boss" and "employee" allow for some rich irony to develop alongside all the machinations. The literary possibilities are nigh endless...

You can see where this is going. The point is that those apparently simple concepts are loaded with connotations, contradictions, ambiguities, paradoxes, subtleties--all the stuff that makes art so delicious and life so difficult. The trick, I think, is to look over all the little stories the master narrative generates and pick the ones that serve the master narrative in some way (preferably not an immediately obvious or overtly didactic one). The result, if one can pull it off with skill, care, and finesse, is literature. If not, it can always pass for journalism.