I just finished reading some Trollope this week - ‘The Way We Live Now’ - allegedly his masterpiece. Seven hundred and sixty seven pages... and let me tell you, getting through the last hundred was brutal. It wasn’t helped by the fact that the most interesting character, the villain Melmotte (a Robert Maxwell-type figure) around whom the entire story revolves, dies with a hundred and twenty pages to go. It reminded me of Jude Law in Minghella’s version of ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’. Once he’s out of the picture the film dies. Same with the last Bond movie. Even though the bad guy ‘Le Chiffre’ isn’t much cop by Bond standards and his death bizarrely perfunctory, once he’s gone so is the movie, the tedious set-piece in Venice, Bond chasing another elusive figure in red, wearisome in the extreme.
It made me wonder about my attention span. Whether the modern world had indeed affected me to such a degree that I no longer had the capacity to stick with a story, to make that marathon commitment, to remain involved. In fact when I mentioned to friends I was reading Trollope they looked at me with a sense of admiration. As if I was willfully submitting myself to some sort of flagelletory self-betterment, something they felt that some day, long into the future, they might possibly consider doing themselves.
In Nicholas Carr’s recent piece in The Atlantic, ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ he wrote of this phenomenon, wondering if all this browsing, this clicking on links, these animated box-ads begging us to stop looking at whatever it is we are looking at and go elsewhere, wasn’t having the culminative effect of re-programming our brains. People were making similar claims about MTV when it first pitched up on our screens, that the rapid editing style of its videos would create a world of rapacious young viewers ever-hungry for their next visual feast.
Publicist Mark Borkowski has just published a peculiar study on Fame. Decrying Warhol’s 15 minutes - the length I always considered of sexual intercourse between two overly-familiar partners - Borkowski has come up with a playfully absurd equation by which he believes he can measure the true length of a person’s celebrity-heat. It’s fifteen months, unless you happen to employ the services of a particularly slick publicist, amongst which I am sure he counts himself.
The more interesting point he makes concerns the inevitable declining shelf-life of a person’s interest to the outside world. Like a programme set to self-destruct, without careful manipulation, the narrative, in this case an individual’s celebrity, will fade from the public’s attention like the light from a fluorescent neck-band worn at a summer music festival. And without such manipulation the length of the narrative become exponentially shorter.
Britain has just discovered ‘The Wire’ - at least its media journalists have. This seems logical for the UK as the show has just come to the end of its run in the US. Cancelled because of a lack of viewers, it has been pointed out that one of the reasons the show failed to hold an audience was because unlike the neatly-packaged story-lines of mainstream fare such as ‘Law & Order’, ‘CSI’ and ‘Without a Trace’, The Wire's narrative arc (how I loathe that term) stretched over each series’ thirteen episodes, and unlike a show like ’24’ the drama lacked a bona-fide clearly identified hero, something of which America seems forever in need.
So maybe it’s true. Maybe the public are indeed unable to focus on anything for any great length of time. Maybe the modern world has made it impossible for any of us to make a commitment - “Sure it looks interesting but - Tivo-less - I’m simply un-prepared to be in the same place at the same time for thirteen weeks anymore.”
Outside of the dwindling fascination for the freaks inhabiting ‘Big Brother’ and its ilk, the daily dose of emotional car-crash porn that is Britney, Amy and Lindsay (note how Britney’s own restorative arc is coming up to the 15-month time frame), or the PR-fed tales of female self-abuse - sex, weight, drugs and most strangely, pregnancy - the public does indeed seem to struggle to deal with the more complex through-lines both permeating and affecting their lives.
Hence their surprise at this sudden economic downturn. Never mind that economists had been predicting it for months, stating over and over again that the housing market was absurdly inflated and completely unsustainable.
The public took the stance of believing what they wanted to believe. If a mortgage broker was offering them free money then hell, why shouldn’t they take it? And despite the myriad of tomes bemoaning the decline in the world's natural resources the public figured hell, they’re building those 4X4’s, why shouldn’t I get me one?
Given the choice of standing back for a moment, taking a breath, reading the small print... or clicking on a clip of Star Wars Boy or another cute kitten, we the public allowed ourselves to be distracted by the ephemeral, the immediate, the here and now. Like crack whores we simply yearned for another fix. And of course there were plenty of new entrepreneurs ready to sell us one. How much worse our lives would be if we couldn’t take pictures with our phones, Twitter each other to death, or blog to our hearts’ content.
Problem is, none of these methods of understanding the world have an extended narrative anymore, nor a narrator. Hence no overseeing point of view, no skillful hand at the wheel like a Dickens, an Austen, and yes even a Trollope. Nowadays we have to make up and define the tapestry of the big picture ourselves. And being not only inept, unsuited and woefully unprepared for such a complex task, it should come as no great surprise that from time to time we find ourselves completely unable to make sense of it all.
The remedy? It’s already being sold to us. Slow down, slow food, grow your own, make do and mend. There isn’t a war on... not one which is actually affecting us, but the current hysterical mood feels reminiscent of World War Two.
They're telling us it’s time to batten down the hatches, to ride out the storm, reconnect with your loved ones...
Then again, it might simply be time to read that really big book.