When you’re little, you hear a song and you fall in love with it. It’s energetic, it’s upbeat, and it has lyrics that you don’t care what they mean. Maybe it’s even a foreign song with lyrics you wouldn’t understand even if you came across it again years later. One day you somehow realise that the song you were dancing to with pure and childish feelings was actually the story of an adult summer romance. Your life has been a lie. But that’s OK, you danced hard back then. Anyway, we’ll get back to that.
In the creation of any work of art there is an order and, where appropriate, a balance. Although different techniques may bring variations to the event, there is generally a colour, mood or feeling that the characters reflect to the story or framework. Let’s illustrate this with an example.
You are watching a pastoral film, think of the 2018 film about the life of Van Gogh, starring Willem Dafoe. What comes to mind first? The harmony of yellow, green, orange, reflecting the colours of nature and perhaps of autumn, the simplicity of the painting, accompanied by soft music and even the sound of the wind. This order, which appeals to our senses, is designed to capture the harmony of the mood. You will have no difficulty in finding a similar balance in all kinds of works of art.
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Of course there is order and vice versa. It’s a bit more chaotic and unexpected. This is called Mood Dissonance. Broadly speaking, there are different types, such as Lyrical Dissonance (poetry, song, etc.), Scenery Dissonance (theatrical, cinematic, etc.), or Art-Style Dissonance (when different styles of art are mixed together to give a work a different meaning).
Today I was doing exactly what I mentioned at the beginning, so I decided to focus on the lyrics of some songs I had listened to a long time ago. I knew that the singer was a bit wild, but due to my lack of foreign language skills, I could not fully understand what was being said, either through the use of the vernacular or what the idioms conveyed.
She presented social or personal problems with a calm tone that contrasted with the negativity. Even the sarcastic and unexpected outbursts in her lyrics, which could be considered excessive or obscene, were an extraordinary contrast to her calm and attractive tone. This was enough to make her songs and music videos popular, especially at that time. The singer I am talking about is Lily Allen.
Now I want to talk about another favourite of mine, Bo Burnham, who started doing stand-up at a young age and has developed his own style. He gets a lot of help from music in his storytelling, using several instruments. His stories are critical and absurd. He occasionally laments psychological problems and current social issues, presenting them with an unexpected mixture of half-seriousness and half-humour. As the saying goes, he “makes you think while making you laugh”, and he succeeds in the literal sense of the word.
The point that adds lyrical dissonance to his narrative is this: accompanied by the relaxing sounds of the piano, he talks about (as an example from his last show) all the violence, fear and nonsense on the internet. He never loses his smile as he sings about one ugly reality after another.
Although his facial expressions and gestures reflect the comical part of the situation, he also conveys that the reality we are unaware of lies somewhere out there, perhaps secretly and menacingly. His smile and mad laughter, which symbolise people’s apathy, contradict reality and provide a great narrative. His last show was “Inside”, which he presented during the quarantine. I recommend you watch it.
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As these are the first things that come to my mind, I wondered if this could also be used in the field of literature. After all, the basis for the creation of a song lyric, a film script or a showpiece depends on its writing. However, I think that diversifying these in a visual and auditory context not only gives the situation more permanence, but also makes the dissonance in the narrative easier and more understandable.
I think that in order to do this in literary works, creating an unexpectedness that goes against the title or the genre written could be an example of narrating by creating dissonance. If a work in the horror genre is titled “The Ecstasy of the Beast”, but the narrative in it is the home provided by a welcoming family, I think the disharmony would be immediately apparent.
In addition, the author’s manipulation of the concept of time in the flow of events, the use of words that are inconsistent with the course of the narrative, the sudden mood swings of the characters in the story, deviations from the existing theme, or the use of an unfamiliar and archaic language in a modern style story would probably also be suitable for revealing dissonance.
But I was also thinking about absurdity. After all, dissonance can add strangeness and absurdity. As I researched, I realised that there are actually some fundamental differences. The use of dissonance does not always indicate an absurd structure. Yes, it creates a style that is funny, irrelevant or does not fit into the pattern, but leaves an impression. But the harmony is the main point. In other words, it’s a bit of a cheap expression, but we can talk about the harmony of dissonant elements.
Absurdism offers a more philosophical and conceptual approach. That is, while dissonance aims to create originality by deliberately contrasting elements within the work or adding an unusual point of view, absurdism generally expresses a deeper search for meaning.
In absurdism, the dissolution of meaning or the feeling of meaninglessness actually involves an existential questioning (think of Camus’s stories). Dissonance, on the other hand, aims to make the audience think, but usually within a framework in which the work is fundamentally meaningful. It is therefore the disharmony of what is being emphasised (social disorder, the conflict between two concepts or negative emotions) rather than the style itself that is sought to be conveyed.
Photo by Maddy Weiss on Unsplash
Sure, some colours may not go well together. But that does not stop you from wearing an eye-piercing combination of orange and brown in your clothes. If you have a desire that reflects your feelings, resists the overuse of other similar tones, expresses the unity of two colours in a similar spectrum, or shows that mismatches can exist, this may be the most appropriate method.
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