Tuesday, March 1, 2011
What Is Reality? Does It Matter?
I just wanted to comment on what is my biggest problem with understanding this novel and this entire course: the idea of reality and truth. Throughout the entire course we have been wrestling with this idea of what is true, what is real, what is factual, and what do these things even mean. My problem with all of this is that throughout high school most of my english teachers taught me that none of this matters. Most of them were in the reader response school of thought, and taught us that the most important thing about reading a book is your own view of it and what you learned or gained from it, not necessarily what the author actually intended you to think. Although we can all contemplate other truths, we can only experience life from one perspective and that is our own. This is why it only makes sense for Juliana to react the way she does to the revelation that her world is fictional. This is the world that she is experiencing and the only one she ever will, so in her life it is still true. We could all be characters in a fictional world right now, but it simply does not matter because we will only ever be able to experience this world, so contemplating other realities is ultimately frivolous.
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Yes and no. I agree that interpretation is a largely perspectival exercise, meaning that we do in fact only ever "experience" the world through our own eyes. (But there can of course be collective experiences that many agree on... and disagree on. For example, there remain Holocaust deniers in the midst of all the collective proof of its having happened.) Nonetheless, it is also possible to gain an understanding of others' experience through, for example, literary texts (nonfiction, memoir, fiction, poetry, etc.). This is to say that Reader Response is not the *only* response one can have to a text... or to the world at large. (And just to continue pushing against this, Reader Response is itself a critical approach that many argue had its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. This is appropriate, on the one hand, given that PKD's novel was written during this time. On the other hand, this is in no way the only critical approach to bring to a text.) So I say all this to suggest that perhaps we begin reorienting our desire to find "the real" or determine truth from fiction, and instead begin looking into what "fiction," as the literary genre that we are reading exclusively (but not without its challenges) in this course, can teach us. In other words, return to the question I asked today in class: "what is the function of fiction"?
ReplyDeleteThis was a great post, Sheeri. I appreciate and respect the fact that you are continuing to wrestle with the texts in question, as well as with the purpose or goal of the course as a whole. Keep it up!
Sheeri,
ReplyDeleteYour post interests me, and it is actually the first one on this blog that I am choosing to respond to. I have only two things to comment on.
First, I don't think that what we're doing in class is trying to determine "what the author actually intended [us] to think." Rather, all we've been doing is looking at the text itself and trying to make sense of it. Admittedly, we have talked about Philip K. Dick himself, but his intentions certainly haven't played a significant part in our discussions.
Two, I'm not sure if I agree with your final statement, that "We could all be characters in a fictional world right now, but it simply does not matter because we will only ever be able to experience this world, so contemplating other realities in ultimately frivolous." My skepticism arises partly by using the example of a character from the novel itself, Mr. Tagomi. Using what you said as a framework, Tagomi, like ourselves, could be (and as we know he is) "in a fictional world." Next you say that "it simply doesn't matter because we will only ever be able to experience this world," but Tagomi's case proves differently, as he transcends the reality he thought he knew and finds himself in another (whether it is the one of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy or PKD's--as well as our own--reality, I cannot say). Tagomi managed to do this by keeping after the pin--in other words, by keeping after something--rather than dismissing the whole idea as "frivolous."
By this point, I have to strongly disagree with your statement that "contemplating other realities is ultimately frivolous." So much twentieth-century analytic philosophy is built off of thought experiments that do exactly this (Hilary Putnam is an example of a philosopher who has made a living off of this concept), and I would argue that philosophy as a whole is stronger because of it. Also, don't you think that, in some sense, whenever you read a work of fiction you're "contemplating other realities"? Is this frivolous, too? And, if reality is a subjective thing and different for everyone, then simply by contemplating the perspective of someone else, anyone at all, you're engaging in frivolity. And what if you're own reality changes (perhaps by an author who's manipulating your fictional world, or some other force entirely)? What then?
I don't mean to be a prick with my objections to what you've said here; in fact, I don't even know if my objections are even any good. But I do think that you should try to refrain as much as you can from dismissing the ideas present in this novel, for I'm totally convinced that there is much to gain from Dick's novel. You could even try to go one step further and try to refrain from totally rejecting opposing ideas in general. Rather, consider them, even if you don't embrace them.
While I will agree that there is much to be learned from non-fiction and fictional texts, I guess my definition of an alternate reality is just more narrow. I am absolutely not trying to say that there is nothing to gain in reading this novel or any other novel. That being said, although Mr. Tagomi does find himself transitioning from one reality or world to another, I don't think the experience of character in a science fiction novel is proof that we can experience another reality. Also, I think there is a big difference between gaining an understanding in other people's experiences and actually living those experiences through their eyes. As we read "The Things They Carried" we were able to experience a lot of the emotion that the soldiers felt in those events, but O'brien does note that there is just no way to truly convey that experience. I believe that this goes for any experience anyone might have, as our perception of the exact same event and situation may vary greatly. Yet I will never experience any one else's perspective but my own. There was a lot of discussion in class about how this novel made people wonder whether or not we are characters in a fictional world, and to me this just doesn't matter. So what if this world is fictional? We only experience it through our own eyes, and to us it is real, and honestly I'm pretty sure I'm not going to accidentally switch into a world where the axis powers won World War II while I'm meditating on a squiggle/triangle. Basically what I'm trying to say is that this is your reality so the main focus should be on that.
ReplyDeleteanyway, that first post was kinda shitty and not very affective at getting my point across, so sorry about that. but for me, it is Juliana's experience that we should be learning from. She realizes that she is living in a fictional world, but accepts it and continues to live her life. This is the only option that makes sense to me, because being upset by this revelation will not change her situation. I think that the lesson about reality that should be taken from the book is that we are dealt a certain hand in life, we experience and perceive things in a certain way, and we should concern ourselves with how we are going to better our lives in this reality rather than contemplating the validity or relative superiority (or inferiority) of other realities.
I'm glad I just spent all of that time writing this response instead of writing my essay. Clearly my pride is more important to me than my grades...