Early in P.D. James’ mystery Death in Holy Orders (2001), she establishes that her characters will speak formal, allusive, complex English of the type that an average reader could never master in real speech. Here, for example, a divinity teacher is addressing his student:

“You might as well take your essay. It’s on the desk. Evelyn Waugh wrote in one of his travel books that he saw theology as the science of simplification whereby nebulous and elusive ideas are made intelligible and exact. Your essay is neither. And you misuse the word ’emulate.’ It is not synonymous with ‘imitate.'”

“Of course not. Sorry, Father. I can imitate you but I cannot hope to emulate you.”

A few pages earlier, in discussing an anonymous letter, another character says, “And the writer is educated, I’d say. He–or she–has got the punctuation right. In this under-educated age I’d say that means someone middle-aged rather than young.”

I think this is a relatively easy game to play. In the quiet of her study, the author composes careful sentences that incorporate quotes from books she happens to have at hand. In the text, she explicitly mentions the difference between educated, erudite speech and ordinary talk. She thereby creates an air of superiority that some readers seem to enjoy.

Thus I have to admit I was pleased to encounter the following sentence of narration early in the novel: “In addition to its size, Father Sebastian’s office contained some of the most valuable objects bequeathed to the college by Miss Arbuthnot.” This is a howler–the room doesn’t contain its own size. The Baroness James has committed a basic grammatical error. Ha! I only hope the plot turns out to be good.

I’ve recently read two reviews that are highly pessimistic about narrative. Daniel Mendelssohn reviews 300, the film by Zack Snyder about the Battle of Thermopylae. He notes that the movie (which I have not seen) lacks a meaningful plot. Neither side seems to be fighting for any particular reason. Their characters and their choices have no discernible consequences. He compares the film to a video game, meaning a shoot-em-up game in which the hero mows down aliens or monsters. The popularity of “300” strikes him as deeply ironic since the first great original narratives of the Western tradition (Herodotus’ History and the attic tragedies) came soon after the Battle of Thermopylae itself. Mendelssohn suspects that the grand narrative of the Persian invasion stimulated the Greeks’ interest in meaningful stories. As they saw it, a Persian king of cruelty and hubris was defeated in a struggle against freedom and virtue. Thus ethos (character) and daimon (destiny) were meaningfully linked. That was the mainstream spirit of Western literature until–well, possibly until the movie “300.”

Meanwhile, Edward Rothstein reviewed Lawrence Kramer’s book, Why Classical Music Still Matters in The New York Times. Rothstein argued that the Western art music tradition produced complex and lengthy narratives in which the components were abstractions (melodies or themes). That was an impressive achievement, but it is dying with the manifest decline in classical music since 1950.

These two arguments are parallel, and they are both worth worrying about. I’m not actually too concerned about narrative in films and books. “300” sounds like a shoot-em-up video game, but there is nothing profoundly new about such entertainment. (There were very popular bear-baiting shows right next door to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.) In our time, fictional and historical narratives seem to be in pretty robust condition.

However, I agree with Rothstein that power and vitality is slipping away from the Western art music tradition, which includes not only classical music but also ambitious forms of jazz. That doesn’t mean that the future is barren; we could see a revival. But the Western art music tradition was much shorter than the tradition of meaningful text narrative. It started with the sung masses of the late Middle Ages but really flourished, as Rothstein says, during the “long 19th century” (ca. 1775-1914). There’s no guarantee that it will recover, whether in the form of jazz or any other style.

(Indianapolis) I’m attending a meeting on teacher education. During a morning session on the teaching of American history, there was some criticism of a certain national historical narrative that’s often retold by children when they are asked what they’ve learned in school. According to this story, from time to time, Americans have realized that there are problems, such as slavery or segregation; and then the government has solved each problem by law.

Even though this is a celebratory and patriotic narrative, it’s not a conservative one. It emphasizes progress by and through government, contrary to a truly conservative national history, which would begin with a self-reliant, faithful people and end with a decadent welfare state. For similar reasons, conservatives should dislike the patriotic iconography of official Washington, with its monuments to Jefferson and Washington as the founders of the government that now occupies vast marble office buildings (including the 3.1 million-square-foot structure named for Ronald Reagan). Certain kinds of populist or participatory leftists may be equally hostile to the progressive/statist story, because it ignores citizens and their agency.

With such thoughts in my mind, I walked over to the Indiana State Museum and saw an exhibition of paintings by William Edouard Scott (1884-1964), an African American artist born in Indianapolis and educated in Chicago and Paris. His works tell a strongly progressive narrative of American history, although not one centered on the government. An easel painting (“Freedom,” 1960) shows, from bottom to top, Crispus Attucks being shot by the British in 1775, John Brown (1850), “Abe Lincoln and Fred Douglas” (1863), Thurgood Marshall raising his hand to testify (1954), and an eagle marked “NAACP” downing a bird marked “KKK.”

In 1915 alone, Scott painted 20 murals in public high schools in Chicago and Indianapolis. The same year, he painted murals for the office buildings of the Chicago Defender, a major African American newspaper. The Defender editorialized, “When our new buildings are decorated by the works of our own artists we are contributing something substantial to American progress, especially if we obtain the services of well trained men or women.”

Note the evocations of racial identity and solidarity, contributions to the American commons, progress, patriotism, excellence, expertise, and equality of women and men. This was a common kind of discourse in the mid-1900s, and one that the state sometimes funded. For instance, Scott won a Federal Arts Project competition in the war year of 1942 to decorate the Recorder of Deeds building in Washington, DC. He produced a mural — shown above — of Frederick Douglass appealing to President Lincoln to enlist Black troops in the Union Army. (Douglass himself became the Recorder of Deeds in 1881.) Credit: dbking; some rights reserved.