"Nothing's Going to Change My World": Narrating Memory and Selfhood with the Beatles
2010; University of Arkansas Press; Volume: 44; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2374-6629
Autores Tópico(s)Globalization and Cultural Identity
Resumosuppose all is reminiscence from womb to tomb. - Samuel Beckett Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book? It took me years to write, will you take a look? - The Beatles, Paperback Writer The Beatles unashamedly believe in a form of moral center that exists in sharp contrast with postmodernism' s subjective elevation of personal and cultural malaise. Yes, the Beatles modernists alright, and - whether we care to admit it or not - their modernist stance is one of the factors behind their lasting popularity and influence. While we look outwardly at an endlessly complex and nihilistic postmodern world, the Beatles afford us with a comforting firmament from which we can awake from our golden slumbers, bask in the glory of the morning sun, and simply let it all be. Time and time again, we can revisit their unifying vision of love, hope, and community. From their earliest work through the waning days at EMFs Abbey Road Studios, the Beatles imagined themselves to be creating a coherent body of work. For Western culture, the Beatles clearly function as a master-text, as a sociohistorical touchstone, as a grand narrative. And make no mistake about it: the Beatles believed in the existence of a grand albeit not an exclusionary macronarrative for understanding the world. The Beatles' modernism involves the invocation of a universal, unifying ethical center and a persistent optimism about an unknowable future in contrast with a lingering nostalgia for the past. In Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers (1988), Hugh Kenner identifies nostalgia as a distinctive feature of modernism that involves a turning-away from contemporary and a subsequent retreat into the soothing interstices of memory. The Beatles accomplish this end through an explicitly nostalgic reverence for the past that evinces itself in nearly every nook and cranny of their remarkable musical canon. The Beatles' overarching textual nostalgia assists us in exploring the remarkable musical arc that characterizes the band's progress from such adolescent-oriented love songs as I Saw Her Standing There and I Want to Hold Your Hand through the more verbally mature Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) and the unabashed nostalgia of the symphonic suite that marks the zenith of their career. How, indeed, do the Beatles make such an astounding musical and lyrical leap in the space of only a few scant years? The vocabulary of family systems therapy, Jerome Bruner's concept of life as narrative, and James Olney's theories of autobiography afford us with a valuable interpretive matrix for revealing the manner in which the band's familial structure predicated both their artistic evolution and their creative demise. In many ways, the band's musical forays from Please Please Me (1963) through Abbey Road (1969) represent the very act of life- writing itself: by authoring the text of their lives via their music in the 1960s, the Beatles engaged in a self-conscious effort to tell their own stories about the inherent difficulties that come with growing up and growing older. As a created family of sorts, the Beatles served as each other's kin, in the parlance of marriage and family studies, for at least a decade from the late 1950s through 1969, their bittersweet final year as a quasi-family unit. Yet, as with so many families-of -origin, their irrevocable ties-that-bind would continue to resound for years to come. In addition to denoting an absence of blood ties, the concept of fictive kin refers to a group of nonrelatives who accept each other as de facto family members. As Nijole V Benokraitis observes in Marriages and Families: Changes, Choices, and Constraints (2001), such families may be as strong or stronger and more lasting than the ties established by blood or marriage. In short, these units emphasize affection and mutual cooperation among people who are - for all intents and purposes - living together (4). …
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