There have always been problems (8)

Of course, the idea that we’re in a crisis is nothing new.

 

Specifically the notion of a crisis of self-consciousness or artificiality in the arts dates to at least the end of the 18th century. And it was clearly already then a response to the upheaval of modernism. So in some sense the whole history of the 19th century novel is "troubled" from the start. And of course the world has always been full of problems. The problems of the present are related to, grow out of, have similarities with the problems of the past, and we can learn a lot from studying carefully what has come before. But that's not my purpose in this "trail of crumbs."

 

Whatever happened in past eras, good and bad, happy and miserable, I think it's clear that there's a crisis now that is substantially different from anything previous. My purpose is to understand this crisis and to find how to respond to it. Because the world is made of stories and stories are made of the world, I am thinking about one to help me think about the other— and vice versa.

 

So far I've focused on two separate (but obviously related) issues:

(1)  the lack of a sense of an eternal ordinary world out of which a story arises and into which it resolves; and

(2)  an atmosphere (i.e. a texture—material, social, spiritual) in everyday life that feels dull, flimsy, empty, flat and that one therefore struggles to know how to depict or whether to depict or what to do with it.

 

I turned to the second issue, because the first gave itself too easily to a discourse that focuses on big political-historical-environmental events that are far from our everyday lives and actions, and I believe that this placement of the locus of the problems very far from us is false, a kind of projection, and also paralyzing.