I just watched Stranger than Fiction, a really bizarre romantic comedy starring Will Ferrell, Queen Latifah, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Emma Thompson, and Dustin Hoffman where Will Ferrell’s character discovers that he’s a character in a book that Emma Thompson is writing and that as she writes her book, his destiny is also written. When he learns that Thompson is planning to kill him off, Ferrell confronts her, she gives him a copy of her manuscript, and he in turn gives it to Hoffman, who plays a professor of literature. One of the stranger elements of the film appears when Hoffman insists that Thompson’s book is a masterpiece and tries to convince Ferrell to let her finish the book as she intends to, which would result in Ferrell’s death, thereby transforming Ferrell’s life from meaninglessness as an IRS agent to an embodiment of (Greek) tragedy. Although this theme isn’t explicitly described in the film as Nietzschean, it nonetheless sounds a criticism of the philosophy for life Nietzsche builds in The Birth of Tragedy:
The metaphysical joy in the tragic is a translation of the instinctively unconscious Dionysian wisdom into the language of images: the hero, the greatest phenomenon of the will, is negated for our pleasure, because he remains only phenomenon and the eternal life of the will remains untouched by his annihilation. ‘We believe in eternal life’, such is the cry of the tragedy; while music is the unmediated idea of this life.
Compare this to Hoffman’s injunction to Ferrell that he let Thompson kill him off so that his life can be invested with meaning and he can live on forever through literature. Ferrel reads Thompson’s book and comes to the conclusion that her creation is better for his death, and here again he appears as the figure of the tragic hero who, reminding “us of another being and of a higher joy for which with a sense of foreboding … prepares himself through his destruction rather than through his triumphs.” He offers his life to her in sacrifice for her art.
Until she was confronted with Ferrell, Thompson also embodied Nietzsche’s ideal of the tragic artist who “shares with the Appolonian sphere of art the full pleasure in appearance and in seeing, and at the same time … negates this pleasure and takes an even higher satisfaction in the annihilation of the visible world of appearance.” This game of pleasure in appearance and its negation breaks, however, when Thompson realizes at least one of her characters (and perhaps all of them) is real, that in killing them off (which she does in all her books), she is not destroying mere appearance but actual people, and here the film confronts Nietzschean ideology full on.
Nietzsche wanted us to adopt the life of the tragic hero as our own, to actually live as if our lives were Greek tragedy. The film explicitly rejects this ideology, however, when it portrays Thompson’s character as deeply disturbed by her game of appearances become reality, when she is unable to complete her book as intended after she realizes that doing so would result in actual death. She doesn’t, in the end, really believe in the tragedy she writes, because she can’t bring herself, given the opportunity, to make it reality. The tragic life, the film’s writer seems to want to say, looks fine on paper, but as a life lived is bunk.
Hoffman’s character expresses the view that literature can be divided into two types: tragedy and comedy, where tragedy embodies the Nietzschean ideal and comedy in terms of contemporary genres most closely resembles the romantic comedy. The film never strays from this characterization, and insofar as life resembles literature (an at least implicit, if not in-your-face explicit theme adopted by the film), therefore leaves us two models for the good life: tragedy or comedy.
Since it rejects tragedy, though, the film offers us only one option around which to structure our lives: Romantic comedy.
In the preface to The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Foucault has some interesting things to say about lists:
[I]t is not simply the oddity of unusual juxtapositions that we are faced with here. We are all familiar with the disconcerting effect of the proximity of extremes, or, quite simply, with the sudden vicinity of things that have no relation to each other; the mere act of enumeration that heaps them all together has a power of enchantment all its own: ‘I am no longer hungry,’ Eusthenes said. ‘until the morrow, safe from my saliva all the following shall be: Aspics, Acalephs, Acanthocephalates, Amoebocytes, Ammonites, Axolotls, Amblystomas, Aphilisions, Anacondas, Ascarids, Amphisbaenas, Angleworms, Amphipods, Anaerobes, Annelids, Anthozoans….’ But all these worms and snakes, all these creatures redolent of decay and slime are slithering, like the syllables which designate them, in Eusthenes’ saliva: that is where they all have their common locus, like the umbrella and the sewing machine on the operating table; startling though their propinquity may be, it is nevertheless warranted by that and, by that in, by that on whose solidity provides proof of the possibility of juxtaposition. It was certainly improbably that arachnids, ammonites, and annelids should one day mingle on Eusthenes’ tongue, but, after all, that welcoming and voracious mouth certainly provided them with a feasible lodging, a roof under which to coexist.
And that is one of the powers of lists: They provide that common locus and do the work of making the dissimilar similar; they glue things together into enormously complex structures in which we find meaning and utility. In fact, suppose I were to make a list of things that were dissimilar: cats, laundry baskets, water, sunlight. These dissimilar things, in the context of my list become similar through their very dissimilarity. We can begin to see in them the similarities we started by denying. We can even create a narrative through which these objects become similar above and beyond their dissimilarity, pushed along by the montage of things merely in proximity.
Now look back on Aldiss’ lists: The dissimilar things on the shelves become similar through their placement on those shelves and on the page. The things themselves and their proximity tell a story above and beyond what Aldiss is willing to come out and say. And their contrasts further that story: Why would S have a copy of ‘Pregnancy–Conception To Childbirth’ and an issue of ‘Boy’s Own Paper’? Why an oily rag and a chair leg? Aldiss doesn’t give any clues, beyond what the other characters in the book do with this information. These characters are in the same position as the reader – their task, and the reader’s, is to decipher the meanings of these lists.
Rape is bad. I’m all for there being less of it, even none of it. But blaming rape on pornography seems not only a clear case of scapegoating, but (and this is a problem endemic among anti-porn feminists) to deny agency to rapists in a way that clearly undermines other feminist projects in dangerous ways. Moreover, the continual looking-for-reasons that this is an example of is a culturally dangerous sort of Othering. The rationale seems to go something like this: So-and-so has done something bad that I could never picture myself doing. Since I couldn’t do it, and it was bad, there must be something wrong with So-and-so that caused So-and-so to do this Bad Thing.
Of course the Bad Thing that So-and-so did may not be as obviously and unanimously wrong as rape. So-and-so may have hit someone, may like eating foods that aren’t healthy, may be gay, or may not feel comfortable speaking in public. But as with the rapist-pornographers, since we can’t, and don’t want to, see ourselves doing what he has done, we feel compelled to go around busying ourselves, looking for a cause, and reconstructing So-and-so into something decidedly, and comfortably, different from ourselves. Because, of course, in a different situation we could never do anything like what So-and-so has done, and isn’t that satisfying to know?
I’m going to leave this unargued, but some, maybe even most, anti-porn feminist literature seems motivated by a desire to bind, display, and objectify those women in the sex industry to a degree perhaps greater than porn ever did.
There’s a Gogolian element to Aldiss’ storytelling: the use of lists: lists of objects, of actions, of movements, and most interestingly, of layers of glass. Gogol, though, would never do what Aldiss does – Aldiss uses lists like Tolstoy would have used lists had Tolstoy used lists (which I’ll get back to in a later post). For now, three examples of Aldiss’ love of the list:
His legs were doubled under him, so that he sat on the tawny planking with the following parts of his anatomy touching it: some of his right buttock, the outer side of his right thigh, his right knee, the outer side of his right calf, his right ankle, and his right foot, while his left leg copied the attitude of his right one, overlapping it so that from the knee down it also touched the planking and the tip of the left shoe pressed against the heel of the right shoe. The shoes were dusty. His right shoulder and part of the right-hand side of his body pressed against the brickwork beside the round window.
I like this one because its a weird way to use a list. He’s describing the position in which this guy was crouched by listing, in detail, body parts and proximities. It just gives you a funny sense, not of the croucher, but of the observer who is writing all this down.
On and in these shelves was a collection of articles belonging to or acquired by S, including three empty jam jars and a jar containing runner bean seeds; a bowler hat, in the rim of which lay a patent inhaler designed to fit up a nostril; a worm-eaten leg of an upright chair; a tartan plastic fountain pen; a perished hot water bottle; a brass handle off a drawer; a cotton reel containing brown thread; an empty pigskin purse; a china candlestick of an earlier age, on which was printed a representation of a devil breathing fire; a paperbound book entitled ‘Low Point X’, the cover of which was curled upwards, exposing brown pages; a broken coach lantern lying cheek-by-jowl with a group of three walnuts; a straw hat of the kind called ‘boater’, bound round by a red and blue ribbon; an umbrella with a handle representing a fox’s head lying under the boater; two enamel notices bearing the legend Beware of the Dog in black letters; a small collection of groceries and eating utensils, including a cracked blue and white cup and an unopened tin of sardines; a small brass crocodile; a bundle of newspaper; an enamel chamber pot with no handle; some shaving things lying in a small basin with floral decorations on it; a brass hinge and an iron key; an ancient tennis ball with most of its knap missing; a briefcase; the skeleton of a long-eared bat with its left ear missing; a pottery carthorse with its head missing; and a mousetrap still bearing a crumb of cheese on its single rusty tooth. Most of these articles were covered with a fine dust.
This one, to me, is notable not only for its obscene length but also because this isn’t the first occurrence of this list in the book. The one above occurs on 115-116. On 61-63 we see:
Some of this equipment still remained, though in the main the shelving was monopolized by articles belonging to or acquired by S.
Among these articles, the following could be distinguished: a storm lantern of antique design; a bowler hat; two empty jam jars; a patent inhaler made to fit the nostril; a streamlined pottery representation of a carthorse, the head missing; a pair of nail clippers; a collection of nail clippings, gathered in an ash tray; a mousetrap; part of the skeleton of a long-eared bat, discovered during an expedition to the chamber below; a brief-case purchased on the day that S had been given the post of secretary to Mr. Mary; the leg of an upright chair, worm-eaten; a fountain pen constructed of a tartan plastic; a hotwater bottle; a brass handle off a drawer; a cotton reel on which was wound brown thread, with a needle balanced on the top of it; a pigskin purse, lying open and empty; a chipped china candlestick on which had been printed a crude representation of the devil; a paperbound book with a curled-up cover entitled ‘The Penguin Handyman’; three walnuts; a coach lantern with its glass smashed; another empty jam jar; an umbrella, across which lay a straw hat with a red and blue band round it; an oval notice made of metal coated with enamel, on which was printed the legend Beware of the Dog; an oblong notice of the same materials bearing the same legend; a punched bus ticket; a comb with teeth missing; a hair brush with hair missing; an upright shaving mirror with the mirror missing; an elaborate iron key; a cigarette packet; a free luncheon voucher; another jam jar, this one containing purple runner bean seeds; a brass hinge; an oily rag; a small basin with a floral design containing a razor, a shaving brush, and a spoon; a rag; a slice of green soap; an enamel chamber pot without handle; a brass crocodile eight centimetres long; a small collection of groceries and eating utensils, among which a blue and white striped cup and a packet of tea were noticable; a row of books, including a ‘Typist’s Desk Book’; ‘Low Point X’; Victor Hugo’s ‘Les Miserables’; ‘Pickwick Papers’ without its cover; ‘Pregnancy–Conception’ To Childbirth’; Band I of Spengler’s ‘Der Untergang des Abendlandes’; ‘Toys Through the Ages’; ‘Living for Jesus’; ‘First Steps in the Bible’; ‘First Steps in Chemistry’; ‘First Steps in Philosophy’; ‘Understanding God’; ‘A Shorter Shorthand Manual’; ‘Sex in Practice’; ‘Black’s Picturesque Tourist of England’; ‘My Alps, by Mrs. Meade; and the ‘Boy’s Own Paper’ for the second week in August, 19–.
The lists of layers of glass and other objects between an observer and someone observed are by far the most interesting use of lists in Report on Probability A. These mostly occur when S is watching Mr. Mary’s wife (presumably Mrs. Mary?) through a telescope:
These lips were viewed through six thicknesses of glass, four consisting of the little lenses in the telescope, one consisting of the square of glass that formed the central panel of the nine glass panels together comprising the round window in the front of the old brick building, and one consisting of the openable but closed portion of the kitchen window. So near was this closed portion of the kitchen window to the moving lips that the breath issuing between them had fogged the pane, obscuring still further both the right cheek already obscured by the towel and a part of the towel itself.
and:
Between her head and the eye of the watcher were interposed the glass of the kitchen window, the glass of the round window in the old brick building that had once housed a gentleman’s private coach, and the four lenses of the telescope.
