It is through this mechanism that worlds are conjured up, through everyday details, which function "as the opposite of narrative".
When I was in graduate school in Iowa, my mentor, Ethan Canin, had discussed the attraction of opposites in narrative fiction--how to make someone cry, you need to make them laugh first.
What was happening was a gradual, unexpected transformation of high modernism's abstract language into something like its rhetorical opposite: something sentimental, narrative, populist.
The 'symbolic' and the 'legal' perspectives of those two islands are contradictory and pull their narrative in opposite directions.
"This is the polar opposite of the austerity narrative".
There was humor and a kind of narrative in opposites: stopping against starting; low notes against high, riffs against melodic form and bebop rhythm against pure smeared texture.
"I think our food and farming narrative is the opposite of what we said before the election".
The Tasso adaptations follow the opposite of the classic Romantic narrative, the Wagnerian valorization of a love capable of redeeming a broken world.
If this story must be written, we must have the courage to eliminate all adjectives that tend to excite wonder: they would achieve the opposite effect, of impoverishing the narrative.
Moving the musicians and a dancer (Elizabeth DeMent) around this space — as well as a small clearing with a card table, a stage at one end of the Winter Garden and a grand staircase at the opposite end — created a certain narrative drama.
