From “flash mobs” to “flesh mobs”: toward a new narrative/rhetorical device that embodies orgies-for-free
(The below won’t make (much) sense if you haven’t read the previous posts.)
KEY lessons from the history of the novel:
A genre’s exemplary works (i.e., masterpieces) are often produced very soon after the genre takes shape [1].
A key to producing an exemplary work is originating narrative/rhetorical devices that become conventions of that genre [2].
Again, OfF will be a blend of two new genres: startup comedy and flowmantic comedy. But it’s likely that OfF will also be the first of m-m-many serial novels that center on orgies-for-free (i.e., OfF may be the first o-f-f novel, en route to OSG spinning-off o-f-f novels . . . and the Spin-offCos spinning-off . . . and competitors of OSG . . .).
So I’m always ALERT to the possibilities re: a new narrative/rhetorical device that embodies orgies-for-free.
Recently, said variant of a flash mob occurred to me.
Too briefly, flesh mobs will result from:
A group of people meeting to advance o-f-f (e.g., some meeting in person, others of the group joining via videoconference).
Members of the initial group wanting/needing to bring other people into the meeting (e.g., via sourcing people from Adver-ties a/o Adver-tease).
Said other people wanting to bring in others . . .
The dynamic yielding group flow . . . flowmantic attraction . . .
To be sure, the (erotic-)comedy possibilities will be many [3] . . .
And, of course, flesh-mob formation will embody orgies-for-free (literally, because systems that exhibit self-organized criticality also exhibit scale invariance) . . .
But the KEY virtue of flesh-mob formation as a literary device will be that it STRONGLY hints at the inevitability of full-blown o-f-f: The act of trying to advance o-f-f will itself advance o-f-f!
Precedent for a rhetoric of inevitability
From 1987 book The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (my emphases):
“Balzac cannot be relegated to the past quite so easily because, from time to time, capitalism’s ‘primitive’ features do breathe new life; and because precisely those features enabled Balzac to conceive a narrative rhetoric that is perhaps the most widespread of the last two centuries. They enabled him, in short, to finally write novel of capitalism.”
“[A] rhetoric of far-sightedness: it is a sort of compulsive fore-vision, which can always discern in the present the germs of the future: which indeed seems to see only the outline of the future: as if what is barely discernible, but does not as yet exist, were the only reality worthy of notice.
Here we finally have it, the narrative technique which captured the pace of that famous passage:
Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainly and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier times. All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their train of venerable ideas and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become obsolete before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned . . . ”
Notes
[1] From 2013 book Distant Reading, for which the author received the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism:
In twenty years, with a striking rapidity, all the forms that will dominate Western narrative for over a century find their masterpiece. The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794, for the Gothic; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1796, for the Bildungsroman; Elective Affinities, 1809, for the novel of adultery; Waverley, 1814, for the historical novel. In another fifteen years, with Austen and Stendhal, Mary Shelley and Pushkin, Balzac and Manzoni, almost all the main variations on the basic forms are also in place.
lt’s a spiral of novelties — but of lasting novelties, with long-term consequences . . .
. . . [I]n the course of the nineteenth century, the urban audience has split. Poe, Balzac, Dickens are still appealing both to Baudelaire and to his philistine double. But the synthesis does not last, and in France and England (always there) a handful of new narrative forms — melodrama, feuilleton, detective fiction, science fiction — quickly capture millions of readers, preparing the way for the industry of sound and image. Is it a betrayal of literature, as cultivated critics have long maintained? Not at all; it is rather the coming to light of the limits of realism [i.e., of the “realist novel”]; at its ease in a solid, well-regulated world, which it makes even more so, the realistic temper doesn’t know how to deal with those extreme situations, and terrible simplifications, that at times history forces one to face. Realism does not know how to represent the Other of Europe, nor yet — which is perhaps even worse — the Other in Europe: and so, mass literature takes over the task. Class struggle and the death of God, the ambiguities of language and the second industrial revolution; it is because it deals with all these phenomena that mass literature succeeds.
From The Way of the World, by the author of Distant Reading (my emphasis):
[T]he metamorphosis of the [literary] image of youth in our century is by now a familiar fact. Less familiar is its rapidity . . . Marlow and Kroger will be among the last novelistic heroes to grow up and achieve maturity. Which is to say that Conrad’s and Mann’s Bildungsromane are morphologically closer to Goethe’s than, say, to Kafka’s or Joyce’s: or also, turning the matter around, that [after Europe’s youth were TRAUMATIZED by World War I] there were more structural novelties in a decade than in an entire century . . .
From the description on Amazon.com of 2002 book Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945–1970, published by Harvard University Press:
The twenty-five years after the Second World War were a lively and fertile period for the American novel and an era of momentous transformation in American society. . . . [Author] Morris Dickstein shows how a daring band of outsiders reshaped the American novel and went on to dominate American fiction for the rest of the century.
[2] From 2005 book Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, by the author of Distant Reading:
[I]f language evolves by diverging, why not literature too?
For Darwin, ‘divergence of character’ interacts throughout history with ‘natural selection and extinction’: as variations grow apart from each other, selection intervenes, allowing only a few to survive. In a seminar of a few years ago, I addressed the analogous problem of literary survival, using as a test case the early stages of British detective fiction. We chose clues as the trait whose transformations were likely to be most revealing for the history of the genre, and proceeded to chart the relationships between Arthur Conan Doyle and some of his contemporaries as a series of branchings, which added up to the (modest) tree of figure 30 [see below].
Here, from the very first branching at the bottom of the tree (whether clues were present or not) two things were immediately clear, the ‘formal’ fact that several of Doyle’s rivals (those on the left) did not use clues — and the ‘historical’ fact that they were all forgotten. It is a good illustration of what the literary market is like: ruthless competition — hinging on form. Readers discover that they like a certain device, and if a story doesn’t seem to include it, they simply don’t read it (and the story becomes extinct). This pressure of cultural selection probably explains the second branching of the tree, where clues are present, but serve no real function: as in ‘Race with the Sun’, for instance, where a clue reveals to the hero that the drug is in the third cup of coffee, and then, when he is offered the third cup, he actually drinks it. Which is indeed ‘perplexing & unintelligible’, and the only possible explanation is that these writers realized that clues were popular, and tried to smuggle them into their stories — but hadn’t really understood how clues worked, and so didn’t use them very well.
[3]
