I’m reading Talking Heads frontman David Byrne’s book, How Music Works. The book is largely about his claim that context is the most important thing in determining musical form.

The same music placed in a different context can not only change the way a listener perceives that music, but it can also cause the music itself to take on an entirely new meaning. Depending on where you hear it— in a concert hall or on the street— or what the intention is, the same piece of music could either be an annoying intrusion, abrasive and assaulting, or you could find yourself dancing to it. How music works, or doesn’t work, is determined not just by what it is in isolation (if such a condition can ever be said to exist) but in large part by what surrounds it, where you hear it and when you hear it. How it’s performed, how it’s sold and distributed, how it’s recorded, who performs it, whom you hear it with, and, of course, finally, what it sounds like: these are the things that determine not only if a piece of music works— if it successfully achieves what it sets out to accomplish— but what it is.

Byrne, David (2012-09-12). How Music Works (Kindle Locations 44-50). McSweeney's. Kindle Edition.

In a sense, we work backward, either consciously or unconsciously, creating work that fits the venue available to us. That holds true for the other arts as well: pictures are created that fit and look good on white walls in galleries just as music is written that sounds good either in a dance club or a symphony hall (but probably not in both). In a sense, the space, the platform, and the software “makes” the art, the music, or whatever. After something succeeds, more venues of a similar size and shape are built to accommodate more production of the same. After a while the form of the work that predominates in these spaces is taken for granted— of course we mainly hear symphonies in symphony halls.

Byrne, David (2012-09-12). How Music Works (Kindle Locations 90-94). McSweeney's. Kindle Edition.

He explains that different types of music, including African drumming, Gregorian chants, Mozart’s chamber music, symphonies, jazz, and rock ‘n roll, should not be seen as part of a progressive evolution of music towards some higher form, but as designed for the spaces that they were played in. Drums are loud enough to be heard when played outdoors. Stone cathedrals have too much reverberation, at too large time-scales, for anything with rapidly-changing notes. Mozart could play trills and add frills because the private homes he played in had plush furniture and tapestried walls that absorbed sound. Improvisational jazz developed so that musicians could accommodate the whims of dancers. The crooning of Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby was only possible because they had microphones. Disco isn’t bad, unless you’re trying to listen to it instead of dance to it. Hip-hop is music designed as an acoustic weapon [my interpretation] or as a way of participating in a re-performance [his interpretation] by blasting it at people from cars.

But none of this seems to apply to fiction. There are hipster graphic artists who say that the font or the paper make a significant difference to them. They don’t, for me; and I’m inclined to believe that readers who are strongly affected by presentation are poor readers. The text is supposed to disappear; the story exists in your head, whether you read it on Addison’s Walk at Magdalen College or on the subway. Awareness of your surroundings while reading means the story is failing.

But Byrne says this is true for all kinds of art!  “Context largely determines what is written, painted, sculpted, sung, or performed.”  Is that right? I’m uncomfortable disagreeing with him, because he’s a genius. (And I don’t just mean a musical genius. This guy could have done well in semiotics or nuclear physics.) So what role does context play in fiction?

Story, Byrne suggests, can emerge mystically when the space of possible stories is restricted by some artificially-imposed constraint:

Writing words to fit an existing melody and meter, as I did on Everything That Happens and many other records, is something anyone who writes in rhyme does naturally and intuitively— every rapper improvises or composes to a meter, for example. I had been encouraged to make this process, which is usually internalized, more explicit when I was writing the words for Remain in Light. That was the first time I tackled a whole record of lyrics this way. I found that, remarkably, solving the puzzle of making words and phrases fit existing structures often resulted, somewhat surprisingly, in words that have an emotional consistency and sometimes even a narrative thread, even though those aspects of the texts weren’t planned ahead of time.

How does this happen? With Remain in Light and even before that, I would look for words that fit pre-existing melodic fragments that I or others had come up with. After filling lots of pages with non-sequitors, I would scan them to see if a lyrically resonant group emerged. Phrases that would hint at the beginning of an actual subject often seemed to want to emerge. This might seem magical— claiming that a text “wants” to come into being (and we’ve heard this said before), but it’s true. When some phrases, even if collected almost at random, begin to resonate together and appear to be talking about the same thing, it’s tempting to claim they have a life of their own. The lyrics may have begun as gibberish, but often, though not always, a “story” in the broadest sense emerges. Emergent storytelling, one might say.

Byrne, David (2012-09-12). How Music Works (Kindle Locations 3103-3114). McSweeney's. Kindle Edition.

That’s interesting, and might be an effective way of writing, or of developing a theme. But it’s internal to the story, so I don’t think it’s context.

Maybe the context for fiction is on a larger scale: The culture that you live in, the life experiences that you’ve had, and your view of what the world is like. Frank Miller’s graphic novels work best for people who believe that the world’s problems have simple, often violent solutions, and are caused because men are too weak and corrupt to implement them. One of my favorite stories is Jorge Luis Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" (even though it was the fore-runner of most pretentious post-modern literary critcism). Borges describes an author who rewrote Don Qixote line-by-line centuries later, and then reviews this work, finding it to mean something very different from the original by Cervantes:

It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):

. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “lay genius” Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases—exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor —are brazenly pragmatic.

I briefly had the ambition to write a children’s story that would seem charming to a child, and dark and chilling to an adult. Unfortunately the market for such a book is probably small.

But these games with worldviews seem unsatisfying. A musician can switch from concert hall to subway platform, and adapt to the new surroundings. Neither a writer nor a reader can switch, within a day, into the worldview of another culture and another life-stage. The kinds of contexts that Byrne is speaking of are alternatives that can be used creatively; the context of a story is a mental straitjacket.

Genre is a context. It creates expectations. But it doesn’t seem to be a context the way Byrne talks about them. If someone reads your fantasy as autobiography, you can say that they are wrong. You can’t change a story by moving it into the wrong anthology; you can only mislead the reader. And it would be very hard to take a story that was a good example of one genre, and rewrite it in another genre.

Am I missing something? What good can it do an author to imagine the circumstances of the reader? How can an author use context creatively?