The Value of Rubber-necking

My previous post included my favorite quotation about the purpose of art: “Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” Viktor Shklovsky, who wrote those words in an essay entitled “Art as Technique,” believed that the artist could accomplish this through “defamiliarization.” “The technique of art,” he wrote, “is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.” I like this sentence less than the stone stony one. Why?

I’ve often thought that the word “difficult” in that sentence has received too much emphasis. Many have interpreted it as a synonym for “obscure,” “confusing,” “opaque;” it implies that the job of art is to make the audience work really hard in order to “get it.” Art, then, becomes like a set of aesthetic barbells and artists are fitness coaches who make sure you’re sweating and pushing yourself hard enough. “Feel the burn, art lover!” And I’m not totally sure that that’s…really it.

J. F. Martel, in Reclaiming Art in an Age of Artifice, proposes an alternative: that art makes the stone stony through “astonishment,” which he sees as “the litmus test of art, the sign by which we know we have been magicked out of practical and utilitarian enterprises to confront the bottomless dream of life in sensible form. Art astonishes and is born of astonishment,” which is to be “caught unawares by the revelation of realities denied or repressed in the everyday.”

A week ago, my wife and I went to the Williamstown Theatre Festival to see solo artist Sara Porkalob’s fantastic performance of Dragon Mama, the second installment in her trilogy about her grandmother (Dragon Lady), her mother (Dragon Mama), and the as-yet-unwritten third part, which will focus on Ms. Porkalob herself. On the 30-minute drive home afterwards, we were traveling on a bucolic 4-lane Highway 8 as twilight arrived. At one point, the light traffic slowed down somewhat and we passed a motorcycle lying in the middle of the road and a few policeman milling about. There was no sign of the rider, or of another vehicle that might have been involved, just the motorcycle lying on its side. As we passed, I took in the details looking for a clue as to what had happened, and then we reaccelerated and drove on.

But suddenly I felt the stone get stony: I was more aware of my own safety, of how quickly things can happen, and how lucky I have been in my life; and when I looked up, the color of the setting sun on the trees seemed deeper and more vibrant, the sound of my wife’s voice sounded more beautiful. Previously, I had been casually driving down a road, chatting, and focused on whether the dog was going to be annoyed that we were late to feed her. But seeing a motorcycle lying on its side in a place where it shouldn’t have been “astonished” me into awareness.

We often condemn people as “rubber-neckers” who slow down to stare at accident sites, but I wonder whether we ought to do so. While an accident on the highway is not an aesthetic event, of course, it does have the effect of snapping us out of our automatic way of seeing and remind us of what it means to be alive, and how quickly things can change. The last line of Oedipus Rex, spoken by the stunned Chorus who has just witnessed the precipitous fall of their king and his being led blind away into exile, is “count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last.” That sometimes sounds bleak to me, but isn’t it really the opposite: the sudden realization of how quickly life can change, and an appreciation of one’s own life sans envy? The men of the Chorus might as well be looking at Oedipus’ motorcycle lying in the middle of the highway.

Aristotle, in his Poetics, talks about tragic catharsis as being caused by a combination of pity and fear. Pity, he says, is aroused when someone undeservedly falls into misfortune, and fear is evoked by recognizing it is someone like us who has encountered the misfortune. And isn’t that a form of astonishment, of fully experiencing the tragic stoniness of life?

But astonishment isn’t always about suffering. Perhaps some of us cry at weddings because the sight of two people happily joined makes us re-experience similar experiences we have had, or dream of those we might have. We are astonished by how, in a world of nearly 8 billion people, two were able to find each other and decide to create a life together.

If we’re looking at a scientific explanation, Psychologist Zanna Clay and neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni provide one:

‍“When we read about a fictional character experiencing a powerful emotion, neural mechanisms of mirroring may reevoke the neural representation of the facial gestures and bodily postures typically associated with that emotion, and trigger activity in emotional brain centres such that we end up experiencing the emotion associated with those facial gesture and bodily postures.”

In the same article where this quotation is found, playwright and creative systems thinker Sarah Wood discusses why the stories we tell ourselves are important to our future:

Just before the pandemic, I took a group of Danish Masters students to visit the Swedish Institute for Children’s Books in Stockholm. Each year, they review all the children’s and young adult fiction that has either been written in, or translated into, Swedish. I asked the librarian we met whether I was right in thinking that my children, who had grown up over the preceding twenty years, had had a diet of stories that were largely dystopian and apocalyptic. She said yes, that had been their findings – until the previous year, when a new theme started to emerge: that of a stranger arriving in a foreign land, and being cared for. There are two things that I think this long-term, comprehensive review reveals to us about the role and possibility for story in a time of seismic cultural evolutionary change. 

The first is our focus on dystopian narratives, even in the stories we create for our children and young adults. This focus has continued unabated and almost un-noticed for the last two decades or more, reflecting our lack of ability to imagine positive futures for ourselves as societies. This shows us that stories, as we [see] with Hamlet’s mirror, are a guide to where we’re at. They show us ourselves and the deeper patterns of our lives, in time. The second, in the new theme of the welcomed stranger which rises in opposition to the nationalistic and hostile environment many of us live in, is that stories can also model and support processes of change, working to challenge, shift and evolve dominant cultural narratives. Given their relationship to empathy and to decision-making, the possibility of their role looks strong.

In an essay entitled "The Deep Voice" in his book Rebuilding the Front Porch of America (a book that I recommend everyone in the arts read), my friend Patrick Overton talked about the "descendent" and "ascendant" functions of the arts, both of which are crucial polarities forever linked. The descendent, he explained, "reveals what is but shouldn't be," in other words, the dystopian storyline; while the ascendant "reveals what isn't but could be," in other words, utopian imaginary. I would add the “reverant”: stories about what is and should be celebrated. All three types of stories help make the stone once again stony and, perhaps, is why art has been ubiquitous in cultures throughout human history and across the globe. Art “magicks” us all into a deeper experience of what it means to be alive.