The Literary Value of Taylor Swift's Teenage Love Trilogy

 This is another look at songwriting from a literary point of view, in the wake of Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize for literature a few years back, and this time around, a recent Taylor Swift trilogy, or song cycle, is under consideration.

One of the first things any writer of fiction has to decide upon is point of view, or POV as it is called. From whose perspective will the story be told and why?  Early novelists (and many since) tended to use an all-seeing narrator -- a sort of god-like figure, often unidentified -- who knows everything and tells readers what they need to know about every character and everything that happens and why.  This makes for a clear and often convincing tale and if one is reading simply for pleasure, one that is also very satisfying.

But it is far from what life is like -- what we don't know often overwhelms what we do, with any degree of certainty at least -- which brings me to Taylor Swifts songs "Cardigan," "August" and "Betty" from her recent "Folklore" album.  Nate Jones, of Vuture.com, has a good take on the trio, which you can read by clicking that link.

In this case, Swift employs three different POVs to take a look at what apparently happened with respect to a rather sappy teenage love triangle one summer, but a problem with what filmmakers would call "continuity" muddies the result -- a distinct minus from a literary point of view.

Taking the songs in the order in which they appear in the album, "Cardigan" is sung from the POV of Betty, a woman apparently now well out of her teens who seems to think of herself as left behind in the fashion of an old sweater, still comfortable but otherwise probably pretty drab after having been forgotten and left for some time under a bed. She's obsessing over her failed teenage romance with a boy called Jimmy who she believes was stupid to lose her as a result of a fling with another girl.  But did he?  We'll come back to that -- and this is where the problem of continuity may arise.

Moving backwards in time, "August," is the next song and the POV is that of an unnamed younger woman griping about the fact that Jimmy didn't really care for her when they had a summer romance, or more likely from Jimmy's POV, an extended hook up. Interestingly, she initiated what one might call the "situationship," picking Jimmy up off a street with a command to get in her car. She doesn't sound like much of a prize on that basis so perhaps Jimmy wasn't as dumb as he appears in the last song of the trio. When Jimmy calls it quits, she complains  "you were never mine" and mopes around waiting for a call that never comes. 

"Betty" is told from Jimmy's POV back when the incidents in question took place -- a breakup with Betty at a school dance when they were 17, his subsequent summer fling which Betty hears about from a friend or acquaintance named Inez and Jimmy's apparently unsuccessful attempt to get back together with Betty,

Jimmy first pleads innocence on the notion that people at 17 know nothing, but then goes on to blame everyone he can think of, including himself. He's clearly the sort of person for whom whatever happens, there is always some excuse (if he were to blame it was because he couldn't be expected at that age to know better).

Jimmy comes across as such a lightweight that Swift could be accused of misandry.

Now comes the continuity problem. In "Cardigan," Betty references events that took place in "downtown bars" and on the "High Line," a park in New York City. These seem distinctly unrelated to that high school dance at age 17 and Jimmy's summer romance that was clearly immediately thereafter in what appears to be a suburban setting.

In the Vulture review referenced above, Nate Jones (commendably in my view) mulls that one over and comes down in favor of artistic license -- as opposed to the possibility that Betty and Jimmy did get back together again after than problematic summer, only to discover as the years went by, the relationship still didn't work. Listeners can decide for themselves or, more likely, simply bathe in the musical moods of the three different songs. 

But the issue here is literature and that brings me back to POV.  Ms Swift gets good marks for deciding to zero in on an event from three different points of view -- a form of triangulation -- but at the end of the day, I don't think she made good use of the device. All three of the characters seem to be thinking almost entirely of themselves (what else is new?) and as a result, readers fail to gain much additional insight into what happened and why.

Thus, this falls short of Nobel Prize fodder.

I took a look at these songs because New York Times music critic Jon Caramanica listed "Betty" as one of the best pop songs of 2020. 

A Few More Thoughts About the Prevailing Climate for Art

In recent posts, I've been talking about the notion that at present (in the U.S. at any rate), the significance or worth of a piece of art is determined more by the racial/gender/sexual orientation of the artist than by the attributes of the object in question. Pictures, music, literature, whatever -- don't stand on their own merits when it comes to critical acclaim. It's an approach, one could argue, that stands what was once the very nature and meaning of art on its head: the art in question stood on it's own. Of course one might then be interested in who created it because more works of equal or even greater beauty could be forthcoming.

Which brings me to the Oct. 10, 2020, "Arts" section of the New York Times, the lead article of which, plus a lengthy sidebar, is all about Louise Glück, an American poet, who was just awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

How did she feel about that?

 "Completely flabbergasted that they would choose a white American lyric poet. It doesn't make sense.... I come from a country that is not thought fondly of now, and I'm white, and we've had all the prizes. So it seemed unlikely that I would ever have this particular event to deal with in my life."

Glück, who has been writing poetry for decades and has won an array of other prestigious awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, would certainly seem to be a candidate in the Nobel tradition -- except, that in her view, reflecting the tenor of the times, her race would be a more important factor than the quality of her poetry. Well, it apparently wasn't in this case, but her comments are nonetheless revealing.

The NYT identified Glück as a poet who isn't afraid to use her work to explore cruelty. And an excerpt printed in the paper from one of her poems includes the line "I ask you, how much beauty can a person bear?"

Well, it's an interesting question these days because in the age of Political Correctness, pretty much everything or everyone that isn't downright evil is "beautiful," more or less by definition. In the article, Glück said she didn't want to be like the early American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow because his poetry was too easily understood. So, who knows, perhaps that line has a double meaning.

If Glück frequents major art museums these days to see exhibitions of contemporary work, she won't be troubled by too much in the way of beauty.  That's not what it's about.

For instance, another article in the same section of the NYT, notes that a group of prominent museums recently decided to postpone a retrospective exhibition of Philip Guston's work because of the current sociopolitical climate. Guston's work contains, among other things, images of the Ku Klux Klan.

According to a joint statement by the museums, the exhibition was postponed "until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston's work can be more clearly interpreted."

In other words, art these days is primarily viewed, evaluated and judged not on the basis of aesthetic considerations, but rather as just another form of politics.

Guston, by the way is white, and the main subject of the article noted above was how a group of Black trustees of American art museums have formed an alliance aimed at bringing greater diversity to such institutions. The goal, a statement quoted by the NYT  said is "to increase inclusion of Black artists, perspectives and narratives in U.S. cultural institutions by: addressing inequalities in staffing and leadership; combating marginalized communities lack of presence in exhibitions and programming; and incorporating diversity into the institution's culture."

Well, it is hard to argue that such goals don't have merit, but at the same time, one can't help wondering what, in the current climate of who the artist is matters more than the nature of the art, whether the Guston exhibition would have gone forward on schedule if the artist were Black.