Narrative Drive would make a good name for one of those winding streets up in the hills around Los Angeles. But for post-avant writing, it’s a conundrum. Jena Osman proposes the category in her poem “Starred Together.” I think it’s definitely worth exploring.

Kevin Davies writes:

The blog asks if the narrative drive that Jena proposes is related to eros or the death drive or what. I don't know either. But last week I was reading a book by the classicist Yun Lee Too. Socrates, in Plato's Symposium, recounts a speech by the prophetess Diotima. Her story is about the birth of Eros:

At the divine [drinking] party the deity Penia (whose name means "poverty" or "lack") enters uninvited to find Poros (whose name means "resource" or "plenty") lying in a drunken stupor. Contriving to remedy her condition as lack, Penia sleeps with the god of plenty and conceives and begets Eros, the supernatural being (daimon) who partakes of both his parents' natures. . . . Eros is accordingly a being of middles and in-betweens. He is neither god nor mortal, but a daimon who moves between the immortal and mortal spheres. . . . He is neither simply good and beautiful, nor for that matter base and ugly, but something between these extremes. Daimonic Eros is poor . . . squalid, unshod, and homeless. But in relation to others, he is resourceful, providing counsel to good and beautiful people. He is brave, a clever hunter, a weaver of tricks, a practitioner of philosophy, a clever sorcerer, and a sophist.* (66)

Death drive? For Lacan = Antigone. Eros and Antigone? In a tree? The combination of barefoot in-betweeness and steely-eyed, suicidal refusal of Creon's tyranny? Not sure it's a drive. Definitely a story.

I searched around on the Net for references to narrative drive but could find nothing that spoke of it in terms of psychological drives.  Most of what I found has to do with plot fluidity, dramatic construction or character motivation in fiction or cinema, mostly used in a judgmental fashion:

But whereas Distant Voices, Still Lives had at least the central conflict between the abusive father and his long-suffering wife and children to sustain audience interest, The Long Day Closes lacked even the rudiments of any narrative drive. The result was self-indulgent and tedious, as well as a critical and commercial failure.**

Where it does show up constructively from time to time is on creative writing “how-to” sites & ancillaries thereof. Thus Literary & Script Consultants offer, as one aspect of their screenplay analysis service, a critique that includes this category:

STORY: Plot, sub-plots, and story dynamics - story holes - narrative drive, logic, and focus - momentum - pace - theme -   subject matter - freshness - narrative and dramatic power

In an interview I found on Borzoi Reader Online, suspense novelist James Ellroy claims:

Language, style, narrative drive and characterization are a novelist's basic tools; they must always be deployed to the limits of their power.

But even in this frame of reference, nobody seems to define it.

But if narrative drive is a category without definition even in the best of circumstances – a James Ellroy novel– what does it mean to apply the concept to Bruce Andrews or Clark Coolidge or Lee Ann Brown? What, literally, motivates the eye – & the mind behind the eye – left to right along the line & down again until the page itself has been consumed? To use the category I borrowed from cognitive linguistics in The New Sentence, the Parsimony Principle, doesn’t seem adequate either. The Parsimony Principle may well explain how the reading mind invariably will make sense even from a phrase such as Wittgenstein’s “milk me sugar”***, but it doesn’t speak to the problem of why the mind joins words in the first place, moves through them, carries on.

What, I ask, is that about?

*Too, Yun Lee. The Pedagogical Contract: The Economies of Teaching and Learning in the Ancient World. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2000.

** Drowning in Style: Terence Davies Smothers Another Story, by Caveh Zahedi, at TheStranger.Com.

*** Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: MacMillan, 1953):

498.         When I say that the orders “Bring me sugar” and “Bring me milk” make sense, but not the combination “Milk me sugar”, that does not mean that the utterance of this combination of words has no effect. And if its effect is that the other person stares at me and gapes, I don’t on that account call it the order to stare and gape, even if that was precisely the effect I wanted to produce.

But this phrase can be entirely meaningful in a sexual context – one can hear it as a line from a rap song without much difficulty. & that interpretation is even more evident in the German where the capitalization of nouns – “Milch mir Zucker” – insinuates at one level that Sugar is a nickname. Thanks to Alex Young for bringing this passage to my attention (even though he was trying to debunk my “reading” of Bruce Andrews!).

For a very long time, Kit Robinson has been one of the finest writers of the lyric around, very possibly the finest. In an age that, for reasons more social than literary, has not been particularly kind to the lyric, Kit Robinson might well be the most underappreciated writer of my generation. There ought to be a large Selected Poems and a fat festschrift or two devoted to his accomplishments, but instead Robinson has slipped quietly under the radar.

There are several plausible reasons for this – Robinson has stayed out of the academy*, seems genuinely to dislike the hustle of self-promotion, doesn't haunt internet discussion lists – but I would suggest that focusing on the lyric has itself been a contributing factor.  To the degree that this form of poetry is too often not recognized as serious or "weighty," readers miss out on what Kit Robinson has also become: the most acute chronicler of the white-collar office environment we have.

Like the best poetry anywhere, this does not mean that Robinson focuses solely or obsessively on work or the office. Rather, he employs a discourse deeply informed by these vocabularies and terrains. It percolates up again & again. In this sense Robinson is truly a labor poet at a time when, with a few notable exceptions like Rodrigo Toscano & Kevin Magee, class has been largely erased from the post-avant landscape:

The sun is like an X-ray
that deletes old voicemail messages

This simple passage works on so many levels – as humor, as science**, & finally as the incorporation of this intense "natural" Other into a scale of cultural minutiae on a par with answering machines.  It's just one moment among many in The Crave, Robinson's new collection from Atelos, which I wish I'd written.

* An interesting choice for the son of an English professor.

** The sun really does give off rays & solar storms can erase data from magnetic media