What role do the arts have at a time of political change when little is certain except for a vast spillage of words? One answer is: to be succinct, entertaining and enduringly truthful. Fortunately, this is within easy reach in a wide range of disciplines. Take the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, which looks more satirically prescient with every passing year.
In 68 sublimely funny minutes, the 1933 comedy portrays two countries spiralling into war via a dirty tricks campaign waged by spies sent from one state to discredit the newly elected puppet president of its philanthrocapitalist neighbour. Even to themselves, everyone involved looks the same, as demonstrated in its famous mirror scene. All any of them really wants is to get rich.
Or if existentialism is more your bag, consider L’Etranger (The Outsider), a 120-page dissection of blame and shame, which packs France’s colonial guilt into the shooting of an unnamed Arab man by the affectless protagonist Meursault. A survey of “watershed” novels for men and women in the UK revealed Albert Camus’s 20th-century classic to be the book most often mentioned by men as having helped to steer them through difficult times (for women, it was Jane Eyre).
It would be wrong to say that economy is a defining characteristic of good storyelling. In the past few decades, everything seems to have been getting longer, from any number of great American novels to Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning Killers of the Flower Moon. Nor is this a new phenomenon. Nine out of the 10 highest-grossing films of all time clock in at over two hours, with three lasting over three hours, despite the protestations of a recent sample of American filmgoers that their favoured length was 92 minutes.
But popularity is not necessarily a measure of quality in any medium. “Very few really long novels earn their length,” said Ian McEwan on the publication of one of his own shorter works, The Children Act. Decades earlier, Dorothy Parker compressed the same sentiment into a poem entitled Two-Volume Novel: “The sun’s gone dim, and / The moon’s turned black; / For I loved him, and / He didn’t love back.”
Brevity has its own weaknesses, if it is merely a pragmatic response to an asset-stripping culture that favours a dog and a frog over a whole carnival of animals. But as an aesthetic choice, it has a power that will be familiar to anyone who loves The Great Gatsby or Wide Sargasso Sea, or the plays of Caryl Churchill and Sarah Kane. “Now, the pungent one-act piece that provides a metaphor for the wider world is everywhere … Today, form follows function. A play can be as long or as short as its subject dictates,” wrote Michael Billington in 2019 as he prepared to step down as the Guardian’s chief theatre critic.
His key point, about form following function, could stand for any narrative art form. It was echoed by Claire Keegan, one of the finest writers today, whose novella Small Things Like These has recently been adapted into a film. Fiction, she said, is a temporal art: “One of the things that makes reading possible, or pleasurable, is that everybody knows what a day is, whether you’re on a farm in Ireland or at the top of a building in Shanghai. And one day we won’t get to the end of that day. And that piece of time between now and then is called our lives.” There is no more piercing truth than that.
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