Tropes: The Différance Between Literature and Fiction

There are many stories worth writing. Each has a different purpose, whether its something as ambitious as political change or as mundane as mindless entertainment. 

Some stories can be written as either; it all depends on the person doing the writing.

For various reasons, it’s occurred to me that the difference between fiction and literature is the use of tropes, the most obvious of all being the chasm between such stories as War and Peace, or Pushkin’s Onegin, and the innumerable romance novels that play on similar ideas. One utilises culture and humanity as its sounding board, while the other uses cheap parlour tricks to create a background to tell a story on.

Tatiana, in Onegin, falls in love with Evgeny Onegin as a young, impressionable girl, and is calmly rejected due to the differences of, among others, age, experience, and class. In a romance novel of a similar bent, Tatiana would be the favoured princess of the town, and Onegin the new, intruding, cold noble. Her role would be to soften his heart, discover what sufferings had lead him to be so unfeeling, and she would, eventually, marry him, after sacrificing her good name and everything else to her soul-consuming love for him.

In Onegin, however, Tatiana is the slightly misunderstood, 19th century romantic who refuses to marry for anything but love. Eventually, due to social pressures, she marries a prince who she does not love, and lives a life of luxury diametrically opposed to the passionate, intellectual life she desired. Onegin reappears, and, smitten by the changes in her, attempts to woo her away from her husband.

Now, in one of the above, the story is, in fact, a story, with a setting and secondary characters, whereas the other is simply a narrative supported by gratuitously invented characters who serve only to reinforce the romantic girl’s need to pursue her love in the face of social disapproval and constant rejection. 

This isn’t to say that I disapprove of mindless entertainment, however. Hegel would have driven me entirely crazy by now if I hadn’t had pointless romance novels to kill braincells on. 

I’ll have to finish this thought when I finish War and Peace, in oh, say, five months?

 

White CARIBBEAN, damn you!

This has been upsetting me since we arrived in London, but now I’m just plain pissed off. 

Sample equal opportunities racial selections: White Irish; White British; White Other; Black African; Black American; Black British; Black Caribbean; Black Other; Asian Pakistani; Asian/British Pakistani; Asian Indian; Asian/British Indian; Asian Bangladeshi; Asian/British Bangladeshi; Asian Other; Chinese; Other.

Does something seem off to you? Because it does to me. What the fuck is the point of racial equality WHEN RACIAL EQUALITY DOESN’T TREAT THE RACES EQUALLY!!!! How is it fairer to Blacks and Asians when they get MORE choices than the privileged whites? It just emphasises their ‘otherness’–look, we’re so PC we’re going to give you twice the number of options that we give our own race! No, wait; three times!!! 

Making a point about something does not make you less ‘-ist’. Making a point about something shows that you’re afraid of being seen as ‘-ist’ and so are willing to draw more attention to the differences between human beings in order to show just how tolerant you are.

Okay, tolerance. To this end, there are quotas of minorities that companies have to fill. Take the Classics Department at Dalhousie University, for instance. White male, white male, white male, white male, white male, white male, white male, red-headed wild-haired female, Jewish female. The Jewish female went on maturnity leave–probably for good–and was replaced with … don’t make me say it … a Jewish female. You cannot tell me that all of the Latin Historians and Latinists who are looking for work right now are female and Jewish. You just can’t. 

So. Quotas. Good for ensuring that prejudiced HR Managers don’t keep qualified people out of work. …. Are we really still so backwards and racist/sexist/ageist/-ist that those requirements are still necessary? And, for another thing, let’s take a look around the large department stores in London. They all have their quotas of racial minorities filled, as with any other big city in the world. But … the quota of natives? Of English-blooded Englishmen and -women? Not filled. Not even existant. 

So tell me, how is it ‘fair-minded’ and ‘tolerant’ and ‘free world’ for us to have quotas for some people, but not others? In a weird, twisted way, that’s just as prejudiced against minorities as intolerance is. They’re categorised, marked up, counted towards company PC-ness. But their white colleagues aren’t, oh no, nobody counts them. They’re not numbered and named and split into as many different categories as possible (Jewish female–fills two quotas with one stone!), only the minorities are!

And I’m a white Caribbean. There. I said it. I’m a white Caribbean. I am not a black Caribbean; I don’t have a drop of non-white blood in me. But guess what, in my home country, I don’t dare go out after dark without a man for fear I’ll be attacked. My best friend’s mother doesn’t dare walk across the centre of the CAPITAL–ie, right past City Hall–with my best friend and my best friend’s sister and me until her boyfriend comes back. That’s three blocks. And almost as far away from the backatawn (back of town, for you super-tropicals) as you can get. And I would like to be offered the chance to select  my true ethnicity just like my black countrymen, bai. And you know what? While there are many more blacks than whites in the Caribbean, and while my awful, slave-owning ancestors brought them there, guess what–the first colonies were all white! So if you hear someone black claiming to be a Caribbean native, don’t believe them–not even the white families who’ve been there since the founding of Tucker’s Town claim that!

 

‘There’s probable no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’

The first link that follows has one of my favourite arguments of all time. Scroll down to ‘Why only “probably” no god?’ and you will see that the ‘probably’ was called for by the Committee of Advertising Practices in order that it ‘not cause offence’. ‘Not cause offence’ … hmmm. Offence like the pro-god campaign ‘Jesus Said’ that tells me that if I reject Jesus ‘I will rise from the dead and will face the Judge and know that you rejected His kind and merciful answer. You will be condemned to everlasting separation from God and then you spend all eternity in torment in hell. Jesus spoke about this as a lake of fire which was prepared for the devil and all his angels (demonic spirits) (Matthew 25: 41)’? Now I see these bus ads saying ‘There is God.’ How on Earth does the Committee of Advertising Practice get off on saying that ‘probably’ is necessary to prevent offence in one instance and not in the other? It sickens me.

At least it’s not government run.

I’m going to give Ariane Sherine the benefit of the doubt and assume that she’s making the best of what she’s been given, but I am wholeheartedly behind Richard Dawkins when he says that he regrets the ‘probably’ ever having been added.

 

Atheist Bus Campaign FAQs

Jesus Said

There’s Probably No Allah

Christian Voice

Three Steps to God

Atheist Evangelising

Christians Launch Counter Campaign

Discussion at Reddit

Christian Today

London Bus Wars

It reminds me of this raving bum we had in Halifax. He’d camp out on one of the busier cross-streets on Spring Garden, waving some poster about, telling everyone that they were going to hell without Jesus. We were walking past him one day, and just as he finished a particular rant, the little girl in front of us turns to her mother with a scared face and says, ‘What’s hell, mommy? Why am I going?’

 

Controller.Controller, and delimiting limits

Controller.Controller’s music, especially their song ‘The Raw No’, stands on the line that marks social outcaste personalities, the same sort of line that we stood on as teenagers, beginning, for the first time, to have an adult understanding of adult emotions. It still doesn’t feel right, or fair, but we somehow know that their is something happening that we aren’t seeing, just as we know that that something is legitimate and real.

‘The Raw No’ is a love song. A dark, forbidding love song that revels in its own despondency and depression.

That doesn’t sound romantic, in either sense of the word, but it is. Very deeply and truly, it is. There is nothing so sordidly romantic as loving and accepting that which you cannot understand and cannot change, and, knowing this, love it anyway, but always with the desire for it to be different. 

The singer knows that there is something else out there, something more that their lover wants and needs. She understands that, and, by not fighting directly against it, accepts it. 

‘Have we been here before?

There’s never been a before.

But you know I’m sure.

At least I know you’re sure.

We know it’s for sure.

We know that it’s sure.’

Her vision of the love affair is infinite and all-encompassing–as is his, with the crucial distinction that he can see beyond the infinite. He can accept change. To her, to the social outcaste personality, the infinite is all there is. There can be nothing outside what she wants, what she needs, what she loves now. 

‘I won’t get better than this.

It can’t get better than this.

Now sing of happiness.

Don’t go.

Don’t go.

Don’t go.

And then you go.

Don’t go!

Don’t go!

Don’t go!’

The outcaste social personalities–the depressed, the bipolar, the abused, molested, and misused, the tortured genius, the artiste, the non-analytic philosopher, the critical theorist, the self-obsessed poet, and on and on and on–don’t know how to change their definitions of themselves. The social personalities–the normal, boring, average, functional, breeder, and tonnes of other terms that offer much more than one thinks at first glance–can change these self-definitions. They may not want to, or believe that they ever will, but they can. It is their very ability to see beyond the infinite that makes their lives so much more malleable and adaptable in our society. While in it, the infinite is all their is to the social personality, while the outcaste social personality knows, deep inside, that their is more, no matter how hard they repress this. And they only know there is more because of their depression/particular foibles. They can see the how limited their infinite is, but they hold onto it all the more for that vision.

When someone can’t see past the infinite, it is infinitely easier to realise when it has ended, when the infinite has passed into finiteness and become nothing more than a singularity of the past. We, those of us on the outcaste side, may think that these social personalities can’t feel as deeply as we do–and in some cases, this may be true. But they are infinitely more able to appreciate what they do feel, and their feelings have such a greater range that the outcaste would experience a religious revelation if they could only see a glimpse of it through a mirror, darkly. 

 

I would die without you? Seriously?

 

Settled in London

Settled in London, with a few culture shock comments:

Security in a university? Really? I can’t go with my boyfriend to pay his tuition? ‘Cause I’m not a student? Really? I look a suspicious character in my grey stockings, peach and pink plaid skirt, grey sweater set and librarian glasses? Really?

In all honesty, she was just a little person in a little job who had compelet control over her little tiny corner of the world and was making sure that everyone bloody well knew it. In Halifax I could walk into the President of the University’s office any time I felt like it to say hello. (Didn’t do that very much, however.) 

People also snipe at each other out loud here. Some young first year forgot her swipe card, which you need to get OUT of the building, that’s right, you need a key card to get OUT of the university, and explained that she was late and didn’t have time to run back up to get it, and the little watch terrier asks where it is, and when the girl says in her ceat, she replies, ‘Well do you expect it to be there when you get back? Your keycard and your coat? And proceeds to say to us, sotto voce in an ‘oh I’m so much better than you’ tone, ‘Well, they learn the hard way I suppose.’

Everyone thinks of saying these things to stupid people, but it seems to me that it’s healthier to actually come out and say it. Otherwise you build up all this momentum of snippiness builds up until the only people we can take it out on are those we love.

But really, why does anyone need to be snippy in the first place? Come one, people, now, smile at your brother, everybody come together and feel all right. Why yes, I am from the Caribbean: why do you ask?

I’ve started reading a book by Richard Rorty that I’d never heard of before: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. In it, he discusses the divid that has been created, in philosophy, between the phenomenal and the noumenal (although he doesn’t use that terminology), and addresses the different critiques that have been offered, in an attempt to discover just where this preoriginal supposition of such a divide comes from. It’s more deconstructionist that I ever expected Rorty to be, which leads me to question everything I know of him, and makes me happy that I’ve decided to spend this year reading those theorists who supposedly stand at the opposite side of the spectrum to where I usually stand. 

‘But such neo-dualist philosophers are embarrassed by their own conclusions, since although their metaphysical intuitions seem to be Cartesian, they are not clear whether they are entitled to have such things as “metaphysical intuitions”. They tend to be unhappy with the notion of a method of knowing about the world prior to and untouchable by empirical science.’

Rorty is discussing the phenomena of the mind, things which we only know in their non-physical presence–emotions, mainly, dreams and other such perceptions–and how we are able to ‘know’ them if they cannot be empirically measured. But what, exactly, is empirical? It is what we can perceive by our own senses, what we can make of the world in which we live. All of which is informed by what we know of it, and it seems to me that we can see only those things that we already have some direct or indirect knowledge of. Empirical measurements are created and read by the mind–how can anyone then claim that they are outside our minds, separate from the ineffable logic that exists in the tangled neurons of our brain? Yes, we have maths and physics to validate these things, but what is maths and physics but our description of how we view the world? The movement beyond quantum mechanics has surely proved that we can only measure and describe what we can see, and if that perception is limited by our technilogical achievements, then we can only ever claim that what we know is objectively empirical in the universe as we now know it. 

Our conception of our universe seems to change yearly, with more than five possible structures floating about in the mumble-jumble of theoretical and cosmological physicists. If our measurements, and thence our knowledge, of the universe is based on what we know/see of the universe, then how can anyone claim that this mathematical universe is the true, the real universe? It’s only real for what they know in that very instant. 

 

Such dualist philosophers argue that what we measure and perceive in the world is of much greater import and accuracy than what goes on in our minds–but our minds are the only tools we have with which to measure and perceive such things. Yes, we have bodies, but what is a body without a mind? Our body is what our mind makes of it. The body cannot perceive anything objectively. It needs a mind as well.

Take, for instance, that experience we all have surely had as children, when our fingers were tangled up together, and we touched one with our thumbs, thinking it was this finger, when really it was that, and we couldn’t determine which one it was until our mind stepped in and said, right, let’s take a look at this. Our minds interpret and supply the world for us, and we might as well exist in some inpenetrable bubble of circular, self-referring knowledge, with the truth wholly without our perceptions.

I can see, of course, the argument that it’s the minds need for definition that confuses us at to which finger our thumbs are actually touching, but without the mind it really doesn’t even matter if the fingers even exist, so for now, I find that path of discourse a waste of time. What we see and know may be a self-contained bubble that we can never be sure of validating, but it’s all we can be sure of, so I might as well make the best of it.

It’s not like I do this for anything but fun, anyway, and what’s the point of goal-oriented fun?

 

Packing like a spider before a hurricane

Leaving Canada in just over forty-eight hours. Flying to wet, warm England, where curries take the place of pizzas and it doesn’t stay below 0 degrees for weeks at a time.

I’m fucking terrified, but at the same time so elated. This is what gave me the elated part. It’s just so very Halifax, and Halifax has been my home for all of my adult life.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to be from Canada, and I’ve realised that Canada is about choices. It’s about knowing yourself, and making the decision that’s right but not necessarily what you want most. We live with the knowledge of those choices, and while we never talk about them, we will face them if someone forced us to. We’re conscious of them, and we accept them, knowing we’re better off for not having everything we ever dreamed of.

I really don’t know how to say that any other way that doesn’t come out sounding so negative.

 

Two days, two hours, four minutes.

 

Weekends

This is weird, I think I finally figured out why weekends exist (other than as rest days). In school, you work everyday. There’s no such thing as a day off. In the real world, when you’re off work, you’re off work. It’s a new feeling.

It’s also something that makes we wonder if it’s just one more of those things keeping academics and professional intellectuals apart from the rest of the world. Intellectuals are always going on about how the masses don’t understand thus-and-such, or some political thing, but with the gap between the two so wide, can they really be expected to? We keep ourselves apart from the world, just as they keep themselves apart from us. 

Back to the weekend thing. Academics never really leave work. Work is in their head. It travels with them, whether they want it to or not. Nine to five jobs, however, are left in the office. So, when academics and non-academics meet, they’re in completely different head spaces that make it hard for them to communicate. It’d be good for intellectuals to leave our brains at home sometimes, and just go out into the world. If we want the rest of the world to understand what we find important, we need to bring ourselves to them first.

 

Fluffbunny Philosophising

Due to a recent dialectic with an uninformed polemicist, I’m changing the title of this blog. Yes, I think that everyone in this world has a kernel of goodness at their core if it can only be reached (excluding sociopaths and other such people), that somewhere out there is someone who will be reached by what I have to say and begin to think about things differently, and yes, I wholeheartedly ascribe to the naivete of this belief. I choose to. I wouldn’t choose anything else.

I’ve been disaffected and bitter and abused, misused, exploited. I don’t live in an ivory tower, and if I do, I built it myself out of ebony and onyx. 

That makes me a fluffbunny, apparently. So be it. The designation means nothing; it’s only a warning of what’s to come. 

So, if you can’t stand the opinions and thoughts of someone who believes that the world is inherently good, but that, try and try as we might, we can never eradicate its evils, go no further. If you don’t want to listen to someone who knows this, but who is going to keep on trying anyways, don’t read any more. But try I will, for to do otherwise would be nothing more than apostasy.

 

Hypocrisy

It’s always fun (in the interesting kind of way) when you look back over something you just said or wrote, and realise that you’re guilty of the same hypocrisy you were just ‘lecturing’ someone else about.

I just did that. I went back and apologised, something I wish more people would do, but it really made me think. I started out in a slightly indignant state, calmed down as my philosophical/critical theory part took over, and then realised, ‘Oops. My bad too.’

I also added that I wasn’t claiming to be perfect, but as the of what I was saying was very didactic in and of itself, I’m not sure they’ll believe me. I hope they do.

(More on this, and the issue that sparked it, later.)

 

Katy Perry, ‘I Kissed a Girl’

Why does a ‘bisexual confession song’ have to be full of tortured confusion or loss of self? Katy Perry isn’t losing herself in her song ‘I Kissed a Girl’, and most of the critical reviews that I’ve read seem to think that she should be, that it should be identity-throwing for her to have liked kissing a girl. Why can’t it just be fun? Why can’t someone just kiss a girl and discover they like it? There’s no need to be emo about it. I kissed a girl, and liked it. It didn’t make me lose my sense of self, I just liked it. Are we really so stuck in the prejudicial past that our own self-conceptions have to be so solid that a single, almost meaningless act has to overthrow them?

And, if Katy Perry did write the song ‘I Kissed a Girl’ as an attention-grabber, that doesn’t mean that the song itself is worthless or politically uncorrect. It is not her intent behind the song that gives it its meaning; it is my, and your, and everybody else’s interpretation that gives it its meaning. By reading such heterosexism or misogynism into, those reviewers are giving it that meaning, for themselves and for others, instead of just accepting it as a girl singing about kissing a girl, something she’d never thought of before–due to the prejudices of the society she was raised in–but has found that she really likes.

Did Katy Perry really spend an hour on every word, on every turn of phrase, trying to think of all the possible meanings, like these reviewers did, coming up with every single meaning possible to support their arguments?

Songs, like poetry, are far too subconscious an art to be left entirely to the intent of the composer or poet. Most of the time, the artist isn’t even aware of the unconscious connotations that they are invoking when they write their words. They’re just using whatever it is that feels right. We can’t lay the blame for any different meanings that other people pick up on at their feet. That blame belongs to the utter inadequacy of human language. Does this mean that because the pretence behind Katy Perry’s song is suspect I can’t enjoy this celebration of my own experiences?

One of the other criticisms is that there’s no emotion in it. The emotion is enjoyment, but, apparently, this isn’t as valid as the emotion in Jill Sobule’s song ‘I Kissed a Girl’. As far as I can tell, the emotion is the same, just one is almost in the folk-song lesbian genre, and the other is club-based. Neither song is going to appeal to the whole group of people who’ve had that experience, but together, they reach more than they do apart. And, in the end of Jill Sobule’s song, the two girls go back home to their men. I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean.

They really aren’t so different. One speaks of cherry chapstick, the other of pearls. One’s about a sudden attraction on the dancefloor, the other about the feelings between two friends. Jill Sobule sounds happier, I think, because this is a story about discovering love between two people who’ve already known each other for a while. Katy Perry’s song, on the other hand, is about the excitement of surprise. Which is much more amenable to a club atmosphere than a 1950’s household scene.

The main difference that I see is one that is so often ignored it makes me angrier than most anything can.

Katy Perry says, ‘I hope my boyfriend don’t mind.’ Jill Sobule’s characters say, ‘He’s such a hairy behemoth,’ ‘dumb as a box of hammers.’ Now, which one of those is more socially acceptable? Hoping that the person you love isn’t hurt (even if they probably will be), or calling the person you’re supposed to love a ‘hairy behemoth’ an ‘dumb as a box of hammers’? Men really need to start standing up for themselves. My boyfriend was telling me a quote from Seinfeld this morning. Elaine says, ‘Women are a work of art. Men are utilitarian.’ Okay, really. David? Akhilleus? Edward Pattinson? Stop being such submissive pieces of rock, men, and start claiming your bodies. Don’t let these stupid women call you ugly and blocks of rock. And even if you are, if she loves you, there’s no way in hell that she’s gonna be calling you things like that. She’s going to think you’re beautiful. And if she doesn’t, DTMFA.

Some people are saying that her songs ‘Ur So Gay’ and ‘I Kissed a Girl’ are ‘a classic example of the “Guys kissing is gross, girls kissing is hot” line of thought’, but the way I’ve interpreted ‘Ur So Gay’ is that she’s in love with a guy who isn’t the type of person she wants to be with. So why do we get to judge her for saying, you’re not the type of man I want to be with in one song–ie, she’s not allowed to have a ‘type’–when we’re criticising her for figuring out that maybe her ‘type’ might include girls in another? Why does her disappointment in the guy she likes have to have anything to do with derogatory gayness? She’s saying, you’re very similar to a gay man, and that’s not what I want in a boyfriend, and I can’t escape blaming myself for not liking you the way you are because you’re not actually gay. There’s no reason for me to be upset, you like girls. But you’re style doesn’t match what I need in my life. We don’t suit each other. So, she wants him to change, and is upset that he won’t, and, unless she wants to go into how he’s a fob and flops his hands around and wears nicer clothes than she does with such-and-such a cut, she’s going to use the descriptor ‘gay’. It works. Trying to stop people from using it for that purpose only invokes our attention, which can only strengthen the awareness of difference that leads to prejudice.

How many words have different meanings? Why can’t gay be one of those?

Some reviewers have said that if the song was called ‘I Kissed a Black Guy’, and if her song ‘Ur So Gay’ was called ‘Ur So Korean’, they would have been banned or something. Well, obviously. But let’s look at this for a second. Girl – noun. Black Guy – adjective plus noun. Gay – adjective. Korean – noun. If we’re going to do comparisons, let’s at least keep them in the same realm. Called someone gay isn’t saying they are gay. Calling someone Korean is saying that they’re Korean. You can act gay. Can you really act Korean? It’s a culture, not a stereotype. And, ‘I Kissed a Black Guy’ changes two parameters. It changes the gender, and the absent predicate. Katy Perry kissed a girl, any girl. Gender is the only otherness that is constant across all the other spectrums of otherness. There are male lesbians. You can change gender, but it’s not really possible to change race or ethnicity. Hormones control gender; there is no such control for race. Race goes back millions of years, gender goes back to you had two parents of opposite sexes, and you had to end up one of them (this discussion is not going to include any intersexed theory). You can be half-white and half-Korean, but if you’re half-male and half-female, it’s not a half-and-half thing. It’s a little of this, a little of the other. It’s an amalgamation, not a combination. 

Sexuality is fluid. Ethnicity and race are not. Gender isn’t either. It has to be changed by external interference. A straight girl can decide to be lesbian for a night. A gay guy can realise that he’s actually bi (no matter how rare this is). 

And while we’re critiquing the bisexual confession songs, where are the male confession songs? Oh, there aren’t really any? Is that because women tend to have more trouble with it? Oh, it is? So, doesn’t that mean there must be many different ways that women go through the process, if they don’t recognise it when they begin it? Yes? It does, because if there was only one process, they’d know what it was? That’s what I thought. Let’s stop trying to fit sexual realisation into one little track. 

Sexuality is an observer-based identification. It requires another to act. Ethnicity is there regardless of whether or not there’s someone there to notice it. Unless, of course, we’re talking about asexuality, but that’s something else that is outside the scope of this discussion. 

And while our society is so freakin’ obsessed with accepting everything and everyone, why are we rejecting the things we don’t like, that we find intolerant? We can’t be tolerant if we don’t listen to the intolerant. We can’t decide what’s right and what’s wrong and claim to be accepting of everything. If we deny one thing because we think it sounds one way at first listen, then how many more things, just as legitimate if not more so, are we likewise rejecting? 

An intolerant democracy may be the best way for us to rid our society of prejudices and hatred (intolerant democracies remove anything prejudicial and biased what their children are exposed to), but we really need to do better at figuring out what tolerance actually is before people start trying to close parts of society off.

 

And, really, how many people hadn’t even thought of any negative connotations in the songs before the reviewers started bringing up heterosexism and misogynism?

 

Lyrics to ‘Ur So Gay’ (refer back to paragraph 9):

I’m so mean cause I cannot get you outta your head.
I’m so angry cause you’d rather MySpace instead.
I can’t believe I fell in love with someone that wears more makeup than….

I wish you would just be real with me.