Reality and fiction

In era of fiction

The truth holds no cost
In age of addiction
Reality lost

Now placed in seclusion
All's not what it seems
The dream of illusion
Illusion of dreams

Wondering what's dumb or wise
People can't tell truth from lies
No room for a compromise

Creative delusion
Its brightest it gleams
Still fighting the fusion
Reality screams -
This instant let me out
Not me you should doubt

Let me out and set me free
I'm really not the enemy
A war this doesn't have to be

- You've ruled for a long time
It's finally my turn
As vengeance for your crime
In ignorance burn!

- I was drunk, mistaken
I may have been wrong
But humans - forsaken
Without me they're gone

Let me out and set me free
I'm really not the enemy
A war this doesn't have to be

- But you are so boring
At last that they see
New worlds they're exploring
Together with me

 (c) idiffer, 2008

Disclaimer: yes, this post is just a giant excuse to showcase my poem. Because they are elegantly masterful.

The more time I spent on Goodreads, the more I became convinced that something has to be said about the relationship between fiction and reality. Discussion on the topic has been going on since forever (to which GR users seem to not be privy to), and you may use this post as a pathway to do your own research by ways of links to other sources here and there.

Is fiction a mirror or a shaper of reality? That’s an old question, and I admit I’m gonna play a guessing game. My mom wrote a paper on the subject, only relating to advertising; the consensus was that it was both, so I’m gonna extrapolate that onto fiction for now.

Mirror.

In a vague general sense, yes.

I’ll start with a very basic premise - fiction books are fictional. Apparently for some this is a shocking revelation, what with all the talk of how books are influencing the behavior and opinions of our dumb youth. There’s this brainwashing conspiracy, you see. I was pretty surprised to find how much of a concern this is to the reading population, but when I thought about it I came to the conclusion that it was to be expected. Most (if not all) countries have a weird subject called Literature in their school curriculum, a subject dedicated not to teaching kids how to write, but how to extricate life lessons from outdated, boring works of fiction. So of course kids will treat them as though they were sociology textbooks. But instead of attacking the education system and bad parenting, we verbally assault the authors.

Learning about the world and the human condition in general from a constructed, made up story is plain stupid. Everything in a fiction book should be taken with a truckload of salt. An author’s job is to entertain. To use one of the most angering phrases in existence, it’s not their job to educate you! Authors lie, embellish, omit. They have biases which consciously or subconsciously leak into their work. If even some scientific studies have logical inconsistencies, what hope does fiction have? Yes, many fiction books are very accurate, but it takes only one non-accurate one to ruin the credibility of all fiction forever. 

Then, at the opposite pole, are those who deny that fictional literature can tell us anything true about the real world – or who believe that if it does, the best we can expect are, in Stolnitz’s words, mere ‘garden variety’ truths which are, in his words, ‘distinctly banal.’ (c) Fiction and Reality: A Way outof the Impasse?

When it comes to many particulars, most of us are confined to our narrow experience when judging what reality is like. Most of us have no fucking clue what it’s like. Sure, 44% prefer mixing fiction with nonfiction (which gives reliable info), and 22% prefer non-fiction. But how many read a broad spectrum of non-fiction? The people I know have narrow interests: I prefer philosophy and psychology, Emily May reads books mainly about feminism. Not to mention, studies and statistics on some things aren’t even available.

You abhor the girl-on-girl-hate trope in YA? YA is three years of high school. How many girls did you interact with closely enough at the time to form an opinion, 20? 30? If you’re a guy, you may say, “Ok, you say, but my guy friends all report knowing girls with similar experiences”. How many friends? 10 maximum? Oh, you say, but years later I’ve talked to many women who remembered most girls being friendly. Uh-huh, but are you aware that we tend to unconsciously falsify our memories of negative experiences? We forget the negative and accentuate the positive. Did I mention that tendencies vary depending on geography, even maybe state to state? So. You have all the bias in the world and some 50 first-hand accounts (and the population of the USA is what, 250 million?). Gee, I’m sorry, you MUST have the right picture, then. YA contemporary tells us vaguely that there is a lot of bullied girls in school. But how much is “alot”? Statistics say 22% of girls are bullied in school. Is that “alot”? Decide for yourself.

It’s not a secret that the media and politicians are good at getting us to accept the form of the argument (republicans or democrats? right question is: “Why do we have to choose between only two parties with rigid platforms at all?”). This rubs off on fiction too. That’s why The Hate U Give was a hit recently despite racism being a much bigger problem some 30 years ago and the number of white policemen shooting unarmed black ppl probably going down since then. The news tells us it’s a problem, so it becomes one, and meanwhile nobody cares about USA’s 13 trillion debt because RACISM! And GAYS! And POT! So if a topic is regurgitated in fiction it is not necessarily a sign that you should pay attention to it more than you already are.

Often the “mirror” is so warped that it’s mindboggling: with Twighlight being so popular, how many girls do you think will fall for a vampire if they were real? 40% of female readers enjoy rape-scenes, but how many want to get raped in reality? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

In a loose, and not very informative sense, literature and history can both be said to be concerned with ‘reality’ or ‘the real world’.  But history’s focus is a collective reality – the collective experience of men and women. […] The ‘reality’–, the ‘real world’, the ‘human experience’– with which literature is concerned, the analysis suggests, is that of the living human individual – the reality of the individual’s hopes, fears, joys and sorrows.[…] Viewed from the standpoint of science, in other words, the individual, with what are regarded as his or her ‘merely personal’ perceptions, is a potential source of distortion rather than of knowledge.

(c) Fiction and Reality: A Way out of the Impasse?

Also, we’re partially blinded to the absence of realism. It has to do with a division I’ve made between two roles certain aspects of a fictional work have for you.

First, you have identification, hence all the whining about Mary Sues. You want your protagonist to be half-shit because misery likes company. Meanwhile in reality there are probably plenty of Mary Sues (I’ve met one. In RL). One of the reasons diversity is all the rage now. You want the protagonist to be your color, your sexual orientation, and everything else be damned! There are of course those of the hipster intellectual minority who spout things like:

Fiction for me is not an escape at all. It is, rather, a prism that allows me a window into the worlds of many minds other than my own. Fiction brings me realities I might never have been aware of and, done well, allows me to empathize, even with things which I objectively despise. I've learned as much about reality from fiction as I have from reality itself. (c) reader, yahoo answers

Then you have wish-fulfilment, where “realistic” is thrown out the window (90% of fanfiction is distilled wish-fulfilment). That’s why so many girls are “special” in YA, because ALL girls are special we WANT to feel special when we’re totally not. But it is different for everyone: your identification vice could be my wish-fulfilment virtue and vice versa. Amongst the general, non-scholar population there will never be a consensus about how realistic a specific fiction book is. For most of us it doesn’t make sense to complain about realism, when we dismiss it constantly whenever it suits us.

We all hate the unrealistic trope deus ex machina, right? Wrong. As Mark Lawrence states in his blogpost Dirk Gently Breaks the Rules:

Well, it seems that Douglas Adams has noticed that many (most?) stories employ deus ex and it is just a matter of how well the author disguises that. If you dig deep enough into a great many stories you find yourself able to justifiably ask, "What are the odds that XXXX?" Where XXXX is some event or coincidence without which the whole thing could become untangled. (c)

The argument “you can’t complain about realism in fantasy” has been debunked a hundred times by now, but let me regurgitate. What fans want is not realism, it’s internal logical consistency. If you say unicorns can breathe in space, fine, but don’t tell me in the next chapter that a unicorn died in space because lack-of-air. Generally, the only aspect of fiction that is consistently demanded to be realistic is the human condition: emotions, motives, interaction. More on realism in fantasy:

Like many authors aiming for realism, he [RR Martin] forgets 'truth is stranger than fiction'. The real world is full of unbelievable events, coincidences, and odd characters. When authors remove these elements in an attempt to make their world seem real, they make their fiction duller than reality; after all, unexpected details are the heart of verisimilitude. When Chekhov and Peake eschewed the easy thrill of romance, they replaced it with the odd and absurd--moments strange enough to feel true. (c) JC Keely, review of A Song of Ice and Fire

More on interaction. We all hate stilted dialogue, right? Not exactly.

A staple of Creative Writing 101 is to 'listen to how people really talk', which is terrible advice. A transcript of any conversation will be so full of repetition, half-thoughts, and non-specific words ('stuff', 'thing') as to be incomprehensible--especially without the cues of tone and body language. Written communication has its own rules, so making dialogue feel like speech is a trick writers play. (c) JC Keely, review of A Song of Ice and Fire

A good example is the tv show Suits. The lawyers there talk in fucking quotable lines. They’re witty 24/7 and it takes them exactly 0.1 second to come up with a valid, witty retort to anything the opponent says, 90% of which has nothing to do with the law. Oh, and all of them possess this convo voodoo (except Louis, bc someone has to be normal, I guess. Even the fucking paralegal (without a degree) goes toe to toe with the genius protagonist). Also, they all have a good grasp of psychology, so remarks like “That’s your repressed sexuality, your mom didn’t give you enough attention” are nearly commonplace in the firm. Nobody talks like that, but it sounds awesome, so I don’t give a damn.

You may have heard the advice for authors to “write what they know”, but there IS something to be said about writers who include other fiction in the category of “what they know” (matryoshka, anyone?). Thus, possibly, I contemplate there existing self-propagating outdated tropes pertaining to experiences not generally had by a lot of people or experiences of the long gone youth (if the author neglects doing proper research, which is slightly more often than always).

Misinterpretation. Perhaps the most fun thing about fiction. Forget what the author WANTED to say, there’s a new an old as fuck theory on the block - ‘The Death of the Author’. It means… whatever the hell you want it to! Did you know a lot of ppl committed suicide after reading Catcher inthe Rye? Because apparently that was the message THEY got. So again, Reality goes bye-bye, eloping with sexy Authorial Intent.

Realism is important if your intent is to identify, not to learn. Then it is also verifiable off the bat. I don’t care how many non-schizophrenic readers Made You Up confuses (it’s their fault), I care about the schizophrenic ones who wanted a protagonist they could relate to and didn’t get one. I do not have a problem with fictional illnesses, I just wish authors would stop labeling them with names of real ones as some sort of money-grab technique. But then again, you can’t please everyone: TheRosie Project didn’t specify the mental illness of the protagonist, and I read one review criticizing this choice (their argument was basically “Because fuck you, that’s why!”).

Shaper.

This is where it gets weird for me. First, how many surveys are there that go smth like, “Did you start hating girls because many books mentioned it?” I would imagine close to none. How many ppl will answer truthfully? How many people will even make that connection in the first place? And most surprising, why would ppl want to emulate harmful behaviors with no incentive to do so? We’re not prone emulate even HELPFUL behaviors, even when there IS an incentive to do so. How many ppl do you know started smoking because their favorite fictional character does? Uh-huh. And how many ppl do you know started smoking because of peer pressure or desire to impress or rebel?

Slavoj Zizec has a theory that all that Freudian “childhood trauma affects your opinions and behavior” shit is not always correct (go find him on youtube). Often the childhood trauma is a rationalization (boosted by authority of Great Psychology) your psyche prefers to the reality. So from that I can deduce that “I do it because I read it in a book” may sometimes be code for “I read it in a book, but I do it because with my mental capacity it makes sense based on my experience and circumstances”.

There was an experiment in a juvenile delinquent house/prison. They placed a bad youth among a group of exemplary ones. And placed an exemplary one among bad ones. This is what always happens: the bad seed corrupts the whole group. And the good seed gets corrupted. But maybe all this tells us is that to delinquents negative behavior just makes more sense. If you placed a delinquent among Christian monks, now that would be an experiment!

You’ve probably seen one of these updates before: “Oh, I’m so spoiled by book boyfriends, real guys just don’t match up!” Seems like fiction does have an effect? I dunno. It is a fact that most of us continue to refine our romantic preferences as we age, until we get to a mental picture of a  fucking god instead of a person. When I was a teenager I’d date anything that moves. Now? Ehhh, meet these 50 criteria first. And this happened way before I started to read heavily.

Now, a lot of ppl want fiction to be a shaper, showcasing only certain opinions and behaviors and only in certain “favorable” ways. But that doesn’t at all gel with the demand for realism. After all, to control ppl you have to bend the truth somewhat. Either you opt for total realism, and let the chips fall as they may with regard to influence on our youth, or you opt for total prescriptivism, altering anything and everything to change young minds. About prescriptivism I’d like to say something else, though. If we’re not talking about children’s literature, it is moronic: paradox of ppl prone to exhibiting negative behaviors being unable to be swayed by prescriptive literature, and ppl who may be swayed by rational arguments generally not needing prescription in the form of fiction or are not prone to exhibiting negative behaviors in general (Btw, how many youngsters even read books? Answer: the proportion of children who are daily readers drops markedly from childhood to the tween and teenage years. One study (Scholastic, 2013) documents a drop from 48% of 6- to 8-year-olds down to 24% of 15- to 17-year-olds who are daily readers, and another (NCES, 2013) shows a drop from 53% of 9-year-olds to 19% of 17-year-olds. According to government studies (NCES, 2013), since 1984 the proportion of tweens and teens who read for pleasure once a week or more has dropped from 81% to 76% among 9-year-olds, from 70% to 53% among 13-year-olds, and from 64% to 40% among 17-year-olds. The proportion who say they “never” or “hardly ever” read has gone from 8% of 13-year-olds and 9% of 17-year-olds in 1984 to 22% and 27% respectively today. Among teenagers, 18% of boys are daily readers, com­pared with 30% of girls (Scholastic, 2013). Makes more sense to police youtube rather than books. Let literature be an adult utopia of the wild and uncensored, a land of not giving a flying fuck).