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Pippin wrote:
I think there are two different styles being used on the list, which results in confusion or unfulfilled expectations.
Absolutely agreed! In fact, this conversation is beginning to remind me very much of a discussion I had with a housemate a while back over Naomi Wolf's _The Beauty Myth._
Now, _The Beauty Myth_ is a book that I like, and the reason that I like it is because it is written with such passion, and such skill, and such rhetorical force. It makes extreme statements, and it makes them with courage. It does not vacillate, and it does not waffle. It is not wishy-washy. It is not balanced, it is not careful, and it is not fair. It does not try to see both sides of the argument. That is not its purpose. It is at base a work of polemic, and I personally think that it is a very enjoyable one.
My housemate, on the other hand, disliked this book intensely, not because he disagreed with its basic premises (he did not), but rather, because he felt that the book's "case" was weakened by the fact that its author was in places extremely sloppy with her facts and figures, by the fact that she was not careful to qualify her statements, by the fact that she did not give any attention to the other side of the argument, by the fact that the work is not "fair."
This bewildered me, frankly, because I know that my housemate is very fond of many other works of polemic and apology. I therefore could not understand why he should have been so bothered on those grounds. After a long and mutually frustrating discussion over this, we finally came to the realization that the reason for our disparate readings of this text had really been rooted in our expectations. My housemate had sat down with the book expecting it to be a kind of academic social science text. He had therefore been reading it with the expectation that it would present certain types of material (facts, figures, statistics), and that it would then analyze this data in a very particular way.
I, on the other hand, had sat down with this book with the understanding that it was a book-length essay. I had therefore been reading it in a frame of mind which recognizes polemic as one of the acceptable—and, indeed, expected—forms of discourse that the narrative might take. Unsurprisingly, therefore, I was in the end pleased with the work, while my housemate was taken aback and disappointed.
Literary analysis is in part such an interesting field, IMO, because it incorporates quite a wide variety of narrative approaches. There are people who do things like tallying up the number of occurrences of specific words in texts and compiling concordances of them. These people are engaged in literary analysis.
Then there are books like William Empson's _Milton's God,_ which launches an all-out attack on the character of God in Milton's "Paradise Lost" -- and in the process, attacks quite a number of aspects of standard Judeo-Christian theology as well. This book is a work of polemic. It is also a work of literary analysis.
And then there are works which fall somewhere in between these two extremes: Stanley Fish's _Surprised By Sin,_ for example, which evaluates "Paradise Lost" neither through concordance nor polemic, but instead, by proposing a very particular interpretation of reader response to the text. This, too, is a work of literary analysis.
I think that it is important for us to bear in mind that polemic has its place—and a very well-established place, at that—in discussions of works of literature. Literary analysis is not a court of law. We are not judges, and the characters are not on trial for their lives. There is no onus upon us to be "fair" to fictional characters, or to give both sides of an argument over their qualities either equal weight or equal hearing.
I also think that we might want to keep in mind that the discussions taking place on this forum are conversations. They have more than one participant. This even further reduces the onus on any one person in a thread to try to cover all sides of an issue, or to give equal time to various interpretations of the text. We are having a conversation here, not drafting a constitution.
All that said, there are rules of "fairness" that I do think we try to engage in. We try not to be rude to real people. We try not to utilize ad hominem attacks against our fellow list-members. We try not to insult real human beings, people who are made of flesh and blood and bone, people who have feelings that can be hurt.
Fairness to the characters, though? Sparing the characters' feelings? Refraining from saying mean things about them? Giving them the benefit of the doubt?
I see no moral obligation to do any such thing. The characters are not real, but fictional, and they can no more be hurt by anything that we say on this forum than my desk chair can be. I am therefore often taken aback by statements that seem to draw conclusions about people's relationships with other people based on their favored style of discussing a text.
Amy:
I suppose the disagreement between us may come down to the fact that we may speak differently about real-life people.
But fictional characters aren't "real-life people!"
I think that the disagreement here may actually come down more to the difference between literary and fannish reading practice: in other words, between the conception of the fictional characters as constructs, and the conception of them as real people.
These are slightly different ways of viewing the text. Both of them are valid, and nearly everyone engages in both types of reading simultaneously when they sit down to enjoy a story. We also usually engage in both types of thinking on this list when we sit down to discuss the story.
Usually...But not always. And that's when we get into trouble.
Interestingly enough, the "trouble" nearly always starts up when somebody expresses a negative opinion about a popular character.
Funny, how that works.
I am not going to use the Dread "M Word" here
So Maria, for example, says that she did not like Cho Chang. She felt a strong sense of dislike for her, and on reflection, realized that this was probably because she didn't care for Cho's narrative function in the story.
Now, this is a perfectly valid—and, indeed, very common—reason for a reader to feel a strong sense of dislike for a fictional character. It is, in fact, precisely the same reason that Eileen cited a while back for feeling such a strong dislike for Bartemius Crouch Sr's dear departed wife.
Yet when Maria said this, she got responses which implied that her reader response was somehow "unfair," that it was unjust to "hold Cho accountable" for her own narrative function in the text. The argument here, if I have it right, is: "It's not Cho's fault that she serves a function you don't like!"
Okay. Now the thing about this is that in real life, it is indeed very unfortunate when people dislike or speak badly of people they do not know based on the "functions" they fill, or based on other people with whom they associate them. That's prejudice, right? It's unjust.
Cho Chang and Barty Crouch Sr., however, are not real people. They are like real people, in that they can come to feel so very real to us that we start responding to them with the same depths of emotion that we ordinarily reserve for genuine human beings, but at the end of the day, they are fictive constructs. It is therefore perfectly "fair" to feel a liking or a disliking for them on account of the narrative functions that they play in the story, or because they remind us of people we have known in real life, or because we simply do not like their "types."
Cho and Barty and Ron and Harry and Remus are not being "maligned" by such reader responses. How can they be? They have no feelings which we the readers can hurt. To the extent that they can be said to exist as "people" at all, they exist on a different plane of reality than we as readers do. To the extent that they can be said to have "feelings" at all, those feelings can only be hurt by the people who exist on the same plane of reality that they do -- in other words, by the other fictional characters. Cho and Ron and Harry and Remus Lupin (whether Ever So Evil or not) can all hurt each other. But we the readers?
Nah. We can't touch 'em.
We can, however, hurt each others' feelings.
Accusing other people of rhetorical dishonesty is an effective way of doing this.
Another is expressing the opinion that other people's ways of discussing or responding to literary characters must in some way reflect upon how they treat real people in real life.
—Elkins
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on January 23, 2003 5:30 PM
2 comments (link leads to main site)
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