GM 03 September

GM, 03 September

In reading Jencks, De Saussure, Barthes, and Macherey, I found Jencks to be, at least, somewhat understandable to me. In particular, his explanation of “The most obvious new convention concerning beauty and composition.” A “dissonant beauty, or disharmonious harmony” has replaced “Renaissance harmony and Modernist integration” (282). Jencks states that instates that “Instead of a perfectly finished totality where no part can be added or subtracted except for the worse” we now see perfection in “fragmented unity.”
Jencks uses the movie The Gods Must be Crazy as an example of disharmonious harmony. The story alternates between the view of a scientist, journalist, bushman, and revolutionary and yet manages to move forward coherently. Since the release of The Gods Must be Crazy, scores of new movies have been released with fragmented points of view, or a disharmonious harmony, a story within a story, which all move forward to a coherent conclusion. Films such as Pulp Fiction, Crash, Syrianna all would contribute to Jencks’ theory. There are also numerous, contemporary works of fiction that include examples of Jencks’ disharmonious harmony.
For example, Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days, contains three separate stories or novellas and contains the characteristics of a composite novel bound together through Cunningham’s use of character names or variations thereof; i.e. Catherine, Simon, and Lucas, location, New York City, theme of a shared humanity, and, in a most interesting way, the American poet Walt Whitman, which Cunningham brings forth through Whitman’s physical presence, quotations from his poem “Leaves of Grass,” either through narration or a character, or by an expression of a Whitman idea either through narration or a character.
The use of disharmonious harmony can be seen in any story which contains multiple stories; each, which seemingly spin on it’s own separate axis, disharmonious, as the story progresses forward then comes to a conclusion as a whole, harmony.