Wednesday, June 23, 2004

The Metaphysics of Fiction

I live only to serve. You ask for more blog entries, I will give you more blog entries.

But truly, I have nothing much to say.

You might have noticed that I have added a music section to this weblog, with a WMA file that is about 900 KB in size, so hopefully most people with broadband and cable and the likes will be able to listen to it without too many problems. Otherwise just press the "Stop" button on your browser to stop the loading. I will change the music file regularly to keep you from getting too bored.

The Last Exile soundtrack is awesome. I listen to it over and over again on the computer and discman. Wonderful. Brave Willing is one of my more favoured songs, though of course there are a lot of other great pieces like A Fleet of Littleships, Ceremonious Play, Chivalrous Spirits, Cover Stories, etc. I could go on forever.

Paranoia Agent, by the way, is one hell of a brain-screwing anime. Some of the episodes are so disturbing I get goosebumps watching them. And apparently Ani-Kraze says they refuse to be responsible for any adverse effects caused by watching more than two episodes of the anime back-to-back. Which is not an exaggeration. I am getting more and more confused and puzzled by the storyline, though I think the reflection of social decay is really thought-provoking.

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I finally finished reading Infinite Jest. No proper ending, which made me rather irritated. But then again IJ really isn't your conventional narrative. You could probably call it a 1097-page long descriptive novel that is somewhat narrative as an afterthought. The main point of the novel is, after all, the exploration of addiction. I feel totally out of my depth. Imagine, one of my first major contemporary fiction readings, and I read this magnum opus about addiction. No wonder.

I always have this question floating around in my head when I read novels. How does the author describe the feelings of characters in certain situations (say, in drug withdrawal, for example) if the author has not personally been in such a situation? Which generates a branching tree of possible answers.

Firstly (let us call this Category One), of course, the author might have actually been in such a situation before, which makes his description wholly accurate according to his personal experience. Which is really impressive. I mean, millions of people have probably experienced your common fall or fainting spell, but to have experienced really strange things like being knocked out by a bat, or drowning, or near-death experiences, or drug addiction and withdrawal - not many of your typical guys-on-the-street would have experienced these and gone on to think, Hey I could write this in a book and earn some good money!

Secondly (and this would be Category Two), assuming the person has not had any prior experience vis-a-vis whatever scenario he writes about. Thus there can be two possibilities. Possibility A is that he is bluffing you, and if you are taken in by what he writes, then he is either possibly not bluffing or is a very good bluffer. Possibility B is that he writes according to his experience in reading about or listening to narrations of other people's real-life experiences. And you nod and say, Well yes I think most writers probably fall into Possibility B.

The most mind-boggling thing that strikes me now, at this point in my exploration of the possible loopholes in the authenticity of descriptions provided by authors, is that the authors that fall into Category 2, Possibility B would thus have to rely on other authors' descriptions, and really (these authors in C2, PB) have no idea whether the authors they are relying on for "authentic" descriptions themselves fall in Category One (i.e. they have truly experienced this before) or fall into Category Two (not having experienced this before, but themselves depending on other people who might themselves fall in either Category). And so on.

I am hopelessly lost now, in a hall of mirrors that I have unfortunately stumbled too far into. So the authenticity of the description of one author can possibly be traced through an infinite number of possibilities, which really can all be resolved an explanation from the author him/herself, but your garden-variety reader usually does not go asking every author about the source of the author's sources, is the problem. And almost all authors would not list their sources, either. (Who wants his/her readers to know that he/she is really bluffing?)

So let us all just believe that everything we read is true to some extent, but also take them with a slight bit of salt (after all, fiction is as fictional as you believe it to be). Until we get hit in the head with a baseball bat or drown or have near-death experiences or be afflicted with Asperger's syndrome or whatever.

P.S. This is why I have always been reading fantasy. Because so much in fantasy novels are made up anyway you hardly get your knickers in a twist puzzling over the accuracy of descriptions about characters being teleported or stunned by magic, if you understand what I mean.

(One day I'm going to get stoned for always saying I have nothing much to say and ending up writing a whole pile of rubbish)

Avaris / 6/23/2004 03:01:00 PM

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