Sunday, April 29, 2012
What's the use of stories that aren't even true?
In my final paper I talk about genre.
Before I answer the question of semester I'm going to first mention three classes that shaped my idea of genre. Professor Lansverk's 18th Century/Restoration Literature class is the first class in which we addressed the beaten-to-death question "What genre is (enter book title here)?". Then, as I briefly address in my final paper for this class, in the Studies in Shakespeare course with Dr. Sexson himself I came to the conclusion that there are only two main genres, comedy and tragedy, and every sub-genre is a derivation of the two. Why did I believe this at the time? Simply, there are stories with happy endings and there are those that end unhappily. And finally just last semester I took a Creative Non-Fiction class with Glen Chamberlain. In this course we would discuss approaches to composing true stories and the differences between various non-fiction genres such as journalism, memoir, biography, essay, etc. There's also this idea I read somewhere last semester, I believe it was for Literary Criticism class, which said--and I'll paraphrase whoever wrote it--"once oneself has commences in an act of writing the self of that oneself is no longer active nor present in what is being written." No matter the medium, even say in an autobiography, whatever is written is ultimately untrue because of, what I'll call, 'the issue of interpretation'. Non-fiction requires distinct remembering, reassembling, and thus complete recreation of something that has happened in prior times, but writing, non-fiction or fiction, is a foundational medium which cannot do justice to real life. Simply, the recreation is not the creation. With all that said I've come to what I know now concerning the title's inquiry, and since I've come to firmly believe [as I scratch my head] that all stories aren't true that only makes the stories themselves all the more enjoyable. Theoretically, in and of the use and understanding of words, writing is attempting to perfect thinking and stories become far more interesting in being recreated. Then, reversing my original belief, what if I appeal to 'suspension of disbelief'? It so happens that this is, if I may, the impossible task that us aspiring writers have much trouble understanding because we try so hard to mimic life as we know it and displace reality altogether. As writers we want to simultaneously do the art, our audience, and ourselves justice. It seems that stories must embrace fallacy and disregard logical truth for them to render an audience amazed, suspended in disbelief, and lost in the story. That's my final point which validates all untruthfulness. When people have their mind vested so much in what they're being told that they become lost, must piece together, and solve the story from its previous events and remnants which have come to pass, this fact means that they believe. If you believe in something that is untrue, even for only a certain time, then for that certain time untruth is flip-flopped and transformed into truth. Therefore, and I hope everyone's [even you Spencer-man] with my philosophizing, we have two conclusions from two perspectives both focusing in on the idea of stories. From the outside looking in, all stories are untrue. From the inside looking further in, all stories are true.
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