When I was about 6 years old, my mother was reading my brother and me The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. I loved listening to her read–it was always a real performance, with voices for every character. But I grew impatient reading only a bit of the books every night, and began racing through the later books on my own.
I’m not sure if anyone remembers how wild the ending of the final Narnia book, The Last Battle, gets. The book’s climax reads like an apocalyptic, Christian Christopher Nolan movie. The series’ central characters enter a kind of hyperreal purgatory where they can climb vertically up waterfalls and watch time progress at hyperspeed. When they are accepted by Aslan (a talking lion who is also God) they enter an inner, even more heightened level of Narnia where they meet characters who have been dead for hundreds of years and learn they themselves died in a train crash before the story of the first book even began (or something along those lines–even the plot summary on Wikipedia is confusing).
As a small child, it was the first time I’d ever read a work that bent the rules of reality this way and it was absolutely mindblowing. Witnessing these layers of narrative bending and melting gave me a new, indescribable feeling: reality wasn’t as solid as I thought it was. It’s a feeling that can easily tip from miraculous into terrifying.
Lewis once wrote:
“You cannot go on 'seeing through' things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to 'see through' first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.”
The feeling of standing on ontologically moving ground is something almost all of us have experienced through the infinite, fractal realities presented to us on the internet. So many of us are lost within an endless deluge of stimulation that threatens our humanity and leaves us overwhelmed and empty. Often, all I want is to feel something that is simple, pure and whole. Something real. And without something like C.S. Lewis’ ultimate faith in a god or savior, it feels like there is nowhere to turn. Every so often, though, I find a piece of art that feels like it can hold our broken reality in its hands.
Metamodernism is a descriptor that emerged in recent years to describe what comes after postmodernism, the era of art we’ve arguably been living in since the 1970s. While modernism of the 20th century suggested grand, unified narratives should guide our morality, and postmodernism deconstructed, satirized and criticized those narratives, metamodernism allows for a return to sincerity and meaning without a return to modernism’s certainty. It acknowledges the chaos, inconsistency and absurdity of our world and its lack of consistent or reliable narratives, while still suggesting that we might find meaning and hope (or at least that’s my understanding, based largely on this fantastic Thomas Flight’s video essay).
While Lewis’ atheism and later conversion to Christianity was informed by his experiences of trench warfare in World War I, today’s artists are inspired by new varieties of man made horrors–namely, the alienation and dissociation of being constantly bombarded with the worst and best of humanity through the firehose of stimulation that is the internet. The shattered multiverse of Everything Everywhere All at Once, the self-reflexive self-loathing of Bo Burnham’s Inside, and the compulsively niche references in Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This are both inspired by and evocative of this feeling of being trapped inside the world of our devices, while the “real world” outside becomes increasingly distant.
When I’m very anxious, often prompted by reading ten articles about a horrific disaster on the other side of the world or thinking too hard about climate change, I feel like I’m seeing the world like Nathan Fielder in The Rehearsal, living in a meticulously created false reality of my own construction. There is no truth, no beauty, no reality at all. There is nothing but the endless churn of information, like endlessly fracturing realities that Evelyn experiences in Everything Everywhere All at Once, or a list of horrors sung by The 1975 or Lana del Rey in one of their transcendent cringe anthems. The walls are closing in and there is nothing to save me from myself.
But despite this deluge of chaos, none of these metamodern works drown in this desperation. They do not make the mistake of “seeing through” everything, of putting up a wall between themselves and the world, no matter how overwhelming it gets. They have found the antidote to irony poisoning–deep emotional truths that save them from total dissociation.
The transformation from ironic distance to ecstatic gratitude and connection is particularly stark and beautiful in Lockwood’s novel, where an exaggerated version of the author is finally yanked out of her extremely online existence by the birth of her sister’s disabled and terminally ill baby. The title of the novel, a reference to an often-used and usually bullshit phrase, comes from her realization of her transformation in this time of crisis:
“It was a marvel how cleanly and completely this lifted her out of the stream of regular life. She was a gleaming, sterilized instrument, flashing out at the precise moment of emergency… she wanted to stop people on the street and say, “Do you know about this? You should know about this. No one is talking about this!”
In the last year, I’ve experienced long stretches of depersonalization/derealization disorder–the feeling that there is a separation between the “me” out in the world doing things and the “me” I am inside my head. There is a part of myself sitting back and watching, thinking “oh look, she’s doing the dishes. Look, she’s talking!” There’s nothing really to do about this other than wait it out and try to reduce anxiety and stress that seems to make it worse. But the relentless feeling of dissociation that depersonalization causes just enhances the preexisting feeling that these metamodern artists explore: that we are floating further and further away from solid ground. As Baudrillard put it, the map has well and truly replaced the territory.
Sometimes this sense of doom, this dissociation, this anxiety feels like all I can think about, all I really experience as the world relentlessly rushes by. On this level, I like metamodern art because it’s simply a relief to hear others discussing this feeling, and offering their own takes on surviving it. But these works also give me hope that maybe one day I’ll feel like making art myself again, and it might resonate with someone the way their art resonates with me.
I quit writing professionally a few years ago. Having a steady paycheck and no longer fearing the latest round of media layoffs was deeply relieving. But I still feel somewhat empty without any creative outlet, and it’s one of the things my brain uses to beat myself up.
Being trapped in the multiverse of digital anxiety can make expression feel pointless–as one of my favorite current artists often says. I sometimes feel that by making anything I’m just adding to the noise that crushes us. That I’m part of the problem–the last thing we need is more content. But if I can revel in the beauty of Patricia Lockwood’s unexpectedly profound meme poems or cry to the silly-serious lyrics of “That Funny Feeling” I know there is still a use for making things, even just for myself.
But deep down, of course, I do think that art and connection still matter in this era of fragmentation and dissociation. I just need to find a way to believe that what I have to say matters, too.