In response to Joe Average Writer, original blog post found here.
Truth is a funny thing, and truth in the terms that you're discussing is so funny as to be hilarious, given certain considerations. My current favorite quote regarding truth goes something like "there are three sides to every story: yours, theirs and the truth." Your story touches on some of the themes that bolster this platitude's street cred in current discussions of the topic, but I'd like to dissect what you're talking about just a little bit further before I start Frankensteining it back together again.
First, we have to establish that truth exists. Not an easy task, but for the sake of the current discussion, let's make some assumptions. I believe that there are such things as facts in the universe, and that these facts are knowable and often quantifiable. That's making a lot of philosophical leaps, but I think those assumptions, those beliefs, form the basis for a lot of the things we believe we 'know' in our lives. I know I'm hungry because I have observed the sensation from my stomach that I've come to know means I need to put food in it. I know my eyes are hazel because I've observed the culturally constructed condition known as hazel eyes, and observed that my own fit that profile. I know that the currently-accepted English plural of goose is geese because every time I've said 'gooses,' I'm understood to be exerting some kind of sense of humor people give me credit for having. I know that I wore khaki pants to work today. Etc.
So relevant to your story, there are some things that we can know. You were present in a certain place at a certain time for the purpose of watching a fireworks show. At some point in the proceedings, a rocket flew overhead and fell out of the sky. Several members of your family were present there with you. These facts appear to be uncontested. Those things under contestation are 1) whether or not a truck blew up, 2) the level of spectacle caused by said truck potentially blowing up, and 3) whether or not you were there to actually witness said spectacle, if it occurred at all.
I don't know the truth of any of these points, nor do I have a direct means of learning such a truth. I was not involved in any way with the events that you describe. What I know for certain is that you have said such and such a thing to describe the situation. All I know factually is that you gave an account that reads in a certain way. This by itself is obviously not irrefutable proof. If I were a regular listener to your stories, and had built up some trust in you as a reliable source, I might be more inclined to believe that you did in fact see what you said you saw. If I knew you for a habitual exaggerator and bender of the truth, I would be less inclined to do so, but having neither range of experience to color my opinion of your reliability, all I can say for certain is that I know you said that something happened.
Which brings me finally to your question: Does it matter which version of the truth you guard in your memories?
Yes, but possibly not in the way you might think, at least in my opinion.
Whether something matters or not means that you are asking me to place value on a certain thing. That value will be, by definition, a purely subjective concept. What matters to me could not possibly matter less to a snail crawling up the side of a building in Hong Kong. We have entirely different value sets in life. Herein, I believe, lies the fundamental disconnect with questions of the type you are posing. You are asking if the truth (objective construct) matters (subjective construct). The answer will always be "it depends."
My personal perspective is that the degree of value which I place on the truth of a story varies broadly depending on what I expect that story to accomplish. If my child goes out one night and comes back two hours late, I place a great deal of importance on the factitive nature of the story he gives me by way of explanation for such behavior. If I read a fantasy novel about a dark wizard and a chosen little boy who's supposed to defeat him, the facts of the story take on their own internal relevance, which it is important to me be maintained, entirely apart from the context of the rest of reality to which I've become accustomed. When I read a story about a fireworks display that happened years ago in a place I've never even visited, describing events that had an impact stretching no further than the city in which said events took place, I have no stock in whether the story is factually accurate or not. I am, in all likelihood, reading to be entertained. Therefore, what matters to me is that I find the story entertaining, not that I believe it to be accurate.
Over and above these things, though, I believe that truth matters. Period. It's important whether a truck blew up that day because that means somebody probably lost a job. Or funds had to be cut buying a new vehicle. Maybe someone was injured. Or maybe it never happened and nobody who could have been hurt was actually harmed in any way. That would be important too. The show's not-happening had an effect on all those who showed up to see it, and that effect is important because of the impact it had, however minor. Every tiny piece of creation, from the snail inching its way up a Hong Kong building to the truck that may or may not have blown up that day in Vegas, is important. They all form building blocks that, cumulatively, make up the relevant facts of the reality in which we live. They all have their place, however great or small.
In this way, I believe the truth of the stories we hold onto is important because it is our way of shaping the methods by which we remember who we are. It is incredible to imagine the lengths to which the human mind will go in order to avoid dealing with certain kinds of pain and trauma, or simply inconvenient truths about our existence. Once observed by the person in question, the truth under consideration can be accepted by the mind, forming a piece, however small, of the person's identity (yes, I'm the kind of guy who eats a #8 from Jimmy John's on February 11th, 2015, at roughly six thirty in the evening, central time). They can also be denied, on a sliding scale from casual dismissal as irrelevant and unimportant all the way to vehement, psychotic denial to the point of repression and altered perceptions. On the other hand, memories can be fabricated, either in the most mild example like your potential exaggeration above, slipping in snippets of fiction to enhance or otherwise flavor the narration of events we actually observed, or in the more extreme examples of psychoses like schizophrenia, in which it becomes impossible to distinguish the constructed reality of the mind's creation and the observable reality of the person's surroundings. Where your brain falls on this spectrum is absolutely vital to the quality and character of your life, and is a consideration that should never be taken lightly.
All of this, all of these considerations should be factored in when considering the importance of what truths we pass on. How do we tell others about the world? Do we do it in facts? Do we do it in opinions based on hearsay? Do we deny parts of the reality of which we are aware because we consider them inconvenient? Do we pass off the inventions of our own mind as reality? The means by which we attempt to convince other people of the veracity of our communications says a great deal about who we are as people. You may be the kind of person who relates a story without being 100% certain of its truth. That's all well and good when the stakes are low. Would you, as the context of your entry references, tell the same story the same way on a witness stand? No, I don't believe you would. You would understand that the stakes are higher in that context, and that the importance of verifiable, observable, objective truth is much higher than the entertainment value of the story in question.
In summary, the presence and acceptance of truth in our own minds, together with the presence and acceptance of truth in our communications with others, will define us as people as we live our lives.
So yeah. It's pretty important.
Thursday, February 12, 2015
Sunday, January 25, 2015
The Eye of the World
TL;DR – I’m reading Wheel of Time this year, just finished the first one, pretty good but also very annoying in many ways. Here’s hoping the rest are better.
One of the great advantages of having many friends on the same relative level of nerd at which I live my life is the frequency of recommendations I receive regarding various fandoms in which it is thought I would enjoy participating. Grateful as I am for the ever-growing list of sci-fi and fantasy literature/movies/television on my to-do list, it has become quite cumbersome. Like so many pins on pinterest have stated, I have a reading (and I would add viewing) list that is longer than my expected lifespan. Be that as it may, I occasionally do pull an item from the backlog of recommendations and decide to add it to my ever-growing list of familiar fandoms. Late last year was Lost, which I binge-watched from around September through November, with overall satisfying, if infuriating, results. I’m sure any of you who watched the show, especially while it was airing, can relate.
This year’s project, I feel, is quite a bit more daunting, but I also feel like I’m off to a pretty good start. It’s my goal to read the entire Wheel of Time series from start to finish during 2015, having never done so before. I’ve recently finished the first book in the series, The Eye of the World, and will be posting reviews after each one.
I will say first and foremost that my motivations for reading the WoT series are primarily obligation and secondarily morbid curiosity. As a fan of the genre and with Jordan’s opus being so ubiquitous in the fictional landscape of fantasy, I feel like it’s a prerequisite for anyone who calls themselves a fan, which I certainly do. So it is not that I walked past a bookshelf, saw the books and was instantly intrigued. Nor is it that I read a review or read a synopsis and felt a deep desire to dive into the story. I’m just aware of how pervasive it is in the general consciousness, and wanted to check it off my list.
It’s only fair, at the outset of this review process, to state my other experience reading in this genre. So far, I would place the WoT squarely in High Fantasy. I’m not comfortable calling it Epic, because that genre conforms to certain norms that I feel are lacking in WoT, but that’s more of an academic division than anything else. Other series I’ve read which I would place in the genre of High Fantasy are 1) Lord of the Rings - Tolkien (of course, it being arguably the modern foundation for the genre), 2) A Song of Ice and Fire – George Martin, 3) Several Dragonlance cycles – Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, 4) The Death Gate Cycle – Weis and Hickman, 5) The Sword of Truth – Terry Goodkind, 6) The Riftwar Saga – Raymond Feist, 7) The Belgariad – David Eddings. In compiling this list, there were several other series that I considered including, but they didn’t have quite the over-arching punch of the above-named, even if they otherwise had the feel of the genre, which led me to try and examine some of the constraints of what makes a novel High Fantasy. (Disclaimer: I’m not sure if that’s an actual genre that’s officially designated in any way, but that’s the classification they’ve always had in my mind, to distinguish them from smaller-scope fantasy works) The elements I include are 1) pre-modern setting, essentially any cultural context pre-industrial-revolution, 2) the existence and use of magic, 3) war, of some kind, 4) some form of quest, though I will argue later on that this is no longer an essential part of the genre, 5) a constructed world, rather than our own, 6) events that have a significant impact on the world in question for change.
In this context, The Eye of the World conformed to all of the above tenets of the genre by itself, promising lots of the same for other characters and other pieces of the world to be explored later on in the series. So it certainly met all the criteria.
My problem is that meeting criteria is not a reason for me to enjoy a book. My reasons for thinking that The Eye of the World is a good book have very little to do with actually enjoying it as a work of fiction. It did a great job at building a world, expanding it with detail upon detail upon detail until it acted on my brain more like a work of poetry is supposed to than a work of fiction, but without the consistently high tone that poetic construction requires. The aggregate of images created a vivid world that I truly enjoyed inhabiting for the space of reading the book. There are intricate mysteries and histories and realms to explore in further adventures, and the story did leave me looking forward to those adventures.
If all of that sounded like there was a huge BUT coming afterward, well, good, because here's the BUT.
My enjoyment of a book, a movie, any kind of story, is in the characters portrayed. And the characters, at least in this first book, were so flat I could have made crepes out of them. The bulk of the book was told from Rand's perspective, and that should have made him the deepest and most empathetic character, by rights. But the construction of the story was such that the reader almost always knew exactly what was going to happen twenty pages before Rand got it through his own thick skull, and that became very tedious to me very quickly. The book only became mildly interesting to me when the companions were separated after the events of Shadar Logoth, and all were forced to interact in ways that brought out individuals more strongly. Even then, though, the narrative force-fed the facts of each situation to you so often that the characters were left as nothing more than pieces of the set dressing. The wheel weaves as the wheel wills, and the attitude of Moiraine Sedai came through strongly as the will of the author. The message of the text is that you, as the reader, are not meant to experience this world through the characters, you are meant to be fed a list of names and facts about the world for your own knowledge by the use of every shoehorned narrative device available. That is not a style of storytelling that I enjoy. Most of the time, it read more like a lecture than it did a story about people.
On the whole, I will say that I do not want however many hours of my life I just spent reading the book back, and I still intend to go forward in reading the rest of the series. Partly this perseverence is based on the recommendations of some of my friends, who insist that the books get better as they go on, and partly because as OCD as I am, once I start something, I always feel a great obligation to finish it.
One down, thirteen and a half to go. Bring it on.
One of the great advantages of having many friends on the same relative level of nerd at which I live my life is the frequency of recommendations I receive regarding various fandoms in which it is thought I would enjoy participating. Grateful as I am for the ever-growing list of sci-fi and fantasy literature/movies/television on my to-do list, it has become quite cumbersome. Like so many pins on pinterest have stated, I have a reading (and I would add viewing) list that is longer than my expected lifespan. Be that as it may, I occasionally do pull an item from the backlog of recommendations and decide to add it to my ever-growing list of familiar fandoms. Late last year was Lost, which I binge-watched from around September through November, with overall satisfying, if infuriating, results. I’m sure any of you who watched the show, especially while it was airing, can relate.
This year’s project, I feel, is quite a bit more daunting, but I also feel like I’m off to a pretty good start. It’s my goal to read the entire Wheel of Time series from start to finish during 2015, having never done so before. I’ve recently finished the first book in the series, The Eye of the World, and will be posting reviews after each one.
I will say first and foremost that my motivations for reading the WoT series are primarily obligation and secondarily morbid curiosity. As a fan of the genre and with Jordan’s opus being so ubiquitous in the fictional landscape of fantasy, I feel like it’s a prerequisite for anyone who calls themselves a fan, which I certainly do. So it is not that I walked past a bookshelf, saw the books and was instantly intrigued. Nor is it that I read a review or read a synopsis and felt a deep desire to dive into the story. I’m just aware of how pervasive it is in the general consciousness, and wanted to check it off my list.
It’s only fair, at the outset of this review process, to state my other experience reading in this genre. So far, I would place the WoT squarely in High Fantasy. I’m not comfortable calling it Epic, because that genre conforms to certain norms that I feel are lacking in WoT, but that’s more of an academic division than anything else. Other series I’ve read which I would place in the genre of High Fantasy are 1) Lord of the Rings - Tolkien (of course, it being arguably the modern foundation for the genre), 2) A Song of Ice and Fire – George Martin, 3) Several Dragonlance cycles – Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, 4) The Death Gate Cycle – Weis and Hickman, 5) The Sword of Truth – Terry Goodkind, 6) The Riftwar Saga – Raymond Feist, 7) The Belgariad – David Eddings. In compiling this list, there were several other series that I considered including, but they didn’t have quite the over-arching punch of the above-named, even if they otherwise had the feel of the genre, which led me to try and examine some of the constraints of what makes a novel High Fantasy. (Disclaimer: I’m not sure if that’s an actual genre that’s officially designated in any way, but that’s the classification they’ve always had in my mind, to distinguish them from smaller-scope fantasy works) The elements I include are 1) pre-modern setting, essentially any cultural context pre-industrial-revolution, 2) the existence and use of magic, 3) war, of some kind, 4) some form of quest, though I will argue later on that this is no longer an essential part of the genre, 5) a constructed world, rather than our own, 6) events that have a significant impact on the world in question for change.
In this context, The Eye of the World conformed to all of the above tenets of the genre by itself, promising lots of the same for other characters and other pieces of the world to be explored later on in the series. So it certainly met all the criteria.
My problem is that meeting criteria is not a reason for me to enjoy a book. My reasons for thinking that The Eye of the World is a good book have very little to do with actually enjoying it as a work of fiction. It did a great job at building a world, expanding it with detail upon detail upon detail until it acted on my brain more like a work of poetry is supposed to than a work of fiction, but without the consistently high tone that poetic construction requires. The aggregate of images created a vivid world that I truly enjoyed inhabiting for the space of reading the book. There are intricate mysteries and histories and realms to explore in further adventures, and the story did leave me looking forward to those adventures.
If all of that sounded like there was a huge BUT coming afterward, well, good, because here's the BUT.
My enjoyment of a book, a movie, any kind of story, is in the characters portrayed. And the characters, at least in this first book, were so flat I could have made crepes out of them. The bulk of the book was told from Rand's perspective, and that should have made him the deepest and most empathetic character, by rights. But the construction of the story was such that the reader almost always knew exactly what was going to happen twenty pages before Rand got it through his own thick skull, and that became very tedious to me very quickly. The book only became mildly interesting to me when the companions were separated after the events of Shadar Logoth, and all were forced to interact in ways that brought out individuals more strongly. Even then, though, the narrative force-fed the facts of each situation to you so often that the characters were left as nothing more than pieces of the set dressing. The wheel weaves as the wheel wills, and the attitude of Moiraine Sedai came through strongly as the will of the author. The message of the text is that you, as the reader, are not meant to experience this world through the characters, you are meant to be fed a list of names and facts about the world for your own knowledge by the use of every shoehorned narrative device available. That is not a style of storytelling that I enjoy. Most of the time, it read more like a lecture than it did a story about people.
On the whole, I will say that I do not want however many hours of my life I just spent reading the book back, and I still intend to go forward in reading the rest of the series. Partly this perseverence is based on the recommendations of some of my friends, who insist that the books get better as they go on, and partly because as OCD as I am, once I start something, I always feel a great obligation to finish it.
One down, thirteen and a half to go. Bring it on.
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