How Do Texts Define Us?

My discussion board post about how the different “texts” help define the various characters in The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao got me thinking about the texts in my life.  If someone were to analyze the texts I most identify with, how would they categorize me?  

Additionally, I got to thinking about micro stories.  If micro stories are “stories that might make sense for only a single person or a very small group of people” (Biederman), then would my texts only make sense to a small group of people?   Maybe the different categories of texts would each make sense to a different small group, meaning that each group could understand part of me, but no group would be able to understand the whole me.  

If so, this is a very interesting paradox.  In a world where we are more “out there” than ever - email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. - it would seem that more people than ever before have access to who we are.  They see our random thoughts, our interests, the food we eat, the places we go for fun, the people we interact with.  Our entire lives are lived online, so even people we’ve never met face to face know everything about us.  But could it be that even with all of this access, people actually understand us less than ever before due to the sheer number of texts we each associate with?  There are so many ways to combine and look at our texts; thus there are thousands of ways those texts could be interpreted.  What if the image I think I project is nothing like the perception of me that someone else sees?  How many different perceptions of me actually exist in the world?  And then, what makes me “me”?  Is it who I am, or who others think I am?  

To that end, I shall list some of the texts that I associate with.  They are listed in no particular order, just the order in which I thought of them - which, I suppose, probably does say something about me.

Harry Potter

Converse

Doc Martens

To Kill A Mockingbird

dogs

Star Wars

Princess Bride

In The Time Of The Butterflies

The Time Traveller’s Wife

Crime and Punishment

power tools

chocolate

The House On Mango Street

Anne of Green Gables

Hamilton: An American Musicals

musicals in general

Facebook 

Twitter

printed out pictures

my family

trees and treehouses

my hammock

my gardens

Psych

Chuck

Big Bang Theory

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

Dungeons and Dragons

Dragonlance

Ready Player One
Back To The Future

Playing with Time in 10:04

One of the parts of the book that really stuck out to me was when Alex and Ben go to see the film The Clock.  I think part of what stuck out was that the concept of the film really intrigues me.   It is a very interesting concept, one that I’m not positive I totally understand.

On page 52, Ben tells us that  he “had wanted to arrive by 10:04 to see lightning strike the courthouse tower in Back To The Future, allowing Marty to return to 1985.”  Considering that the title of the book is 10:04, this feels like important information.  So, what is it that Lerner is trying to tell us?  What is he trying to get back in time to?

This idea of playing with time is furthered by the fact that Part Two is simply a retelling of Part One.  Ostensibly, in this section, we are reading the New Yorker article that Ben had told us he was working on in Part One.  But, given the idea of going back in time, maybe this retelling of time is more significant than the magazine article?  

This idea of moving fluidly through different points of time comes up in several places throughout the book. On page 63, Liza and the author discuss the benefits of being sedated for oral surgery.  The author ruminates, “I can’t figure out if abolishing the memory of pain is the same thing as abolishing the pain.”  Later, he goes on to say, “If I take the drugs, it’s like dividing myself into two people. . . the person who experienced the procedure and the person who didn’t.  It’s like leaving a version of myself alone with the pain, abandoning him” (64).  Interestingly, this rumination takes place in the article Lerner wrote about himself, which is also kind of like splitting himself into two  - the fictional author and the real one. It gets more complicated when you realize that Part One might be a fictionalized account of Lerner’s actual life, so then Part Two would be a fictionalized account of a fictionalized account, thus splitting himself into three parts.  This is reminiscent of the Back To the Future movies, where Marty accidentally affects the timeline, thus causing three possible futures.  This concept of the author dividing himself into two people is repeated again on page 78, as well as several other places in the book.  

The idea of divided self, or two different realities comes up again with the story of Ashley, the girl who lied about having cancer.  It also is echoed in the story of Noor, who grew up believing that she was of Lebanese descent, but sees herself growing paler when she finds out that she wasn’t actually Lebanese.  Throughout the book, Lerner plays with this idea of divided reality, of dual possibilities.  

It feels like Lerner is not confident in the path that he is choosing, and so he is trying to create an “out” for himself if he discovers he doesn’t like the future he is in.  By creating a divided world, there is always another option.  Thus, we get the idea of 10:04, that moment in time when everything resets itself so the main character can start afresh.  

Of course, outside of books and movies, time doesn’t work this way.  There is no bolt of lightening that will reset everything, and we can’t divide ourselves into different realities in order to explore the possibilities.  Lerner seems to address this on page 223 when he tells Roberto, “The future doesn’t belong to the faint-hearted; it belongs to the brave.”  Although he is saying this out loud to Roberto, it feels like he might really be saying it to himself, an admonition to start living in the real world and be brave enough to deal with the future as he’s made it. 

Metanarratives As Shown By Ferris Bueller

“Incredulity toward metanarratives” (that is a a quotation from Lyotard, a key postmodernist). This means that the big, important, defining, confidence-inspiring myths we tell ourselves as individuals and as a culture/society/nation/world no longer hold water in the age of postmodernism. A metanarrative can be anything from a Disney movie to the U.S. constitution: a story that’s supposed to make us feel safe. Postmodernism loves ripping those stories apart.

Dr. Lucy’s weekly class email

What if the idea of a novel that offers us wisdom is a metanarrative? 

Dr. Lucy on a discussion board post

Metanarrative: any story told to justify another story, esp. involving artifice; a story about oneself that provides a view of one's experiences

dictionary.com

If a metanarrative is a story that is told to justify a lie, or a story told to influence how other people view you, then it makes sense that metanarratives cause us to reexamine the things we think are true.  After all, if we stop trusting the storyteller, why should we believe anything they tell us?

We all know that person on Facebook who posts pictures of their “perfect” life - perfect house, perfect kids, perfect spouse.   Every picture is curated to perfection.  Realistically, we know that no one’s life can be that perfect.   But, over time, we begin to accommodate this perfection into our worldview.   “Everyone else’s life is so good.  Why can’t my house look like that?  Why can’t my kids stay clean for longer than 10 seconds?”    Even though realistically we know that it’s not a true representation of life, we begin to expect that our own lives should look that way, too. 

Interestingly, this idea of metanarrative seems to work in different ways for different generations.  My mom’s solution is to not let people into the messy parts of her house.  Her sister has not been permitted to venture past the living room in years.   My generation posts pictures of “good” moments to social media, while only sharing the bad ones with close friends who we deem as understanding.  But teenagers?   Their approach worries me a little.

Perhaps it’s because this concept of crafting the perfect image is all they’ve ever known, teenagers at once seem to both embrace it while treating everything with a certain cynicism.  They know that no one’s life could possibly be that perfect, so they automatically reject anything that feels too unreal.   Photographic evidence is not to be trusted. People’s words are not to be taken at face value.  Even happy, fun movies are rejected as too saccharine, too unrealistic.  

Last year in my Creative Writing class, I showed the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,”  a classic staple of the ’80’s canon.   Everyone loves Ferris, right?  

Wrong. 

My students hated him.  They hated everything about him because everything about him was too “fake.”  They hated Cameron for hanging out with him.  They hated his girlfriend, Sloane, because if she dated someone like Ferris, it obviously wasn’t because she loved him.  It had to be all about perception.   No, the only person in the whole movie they actually liked was Ferris’s sister, Jeanie.  They liked her because bad things actually happened to her, no matter how hard she tried.  When I pointed out that it was just a movie and the characters were supposed to be ideals, not real, they scoffed and said that the problem was that Ferris, Cameron and Sloane did feel real.  That’s the way people act today, and they don’t want to see it in their entertainment. 

I really didn’t know how to respond to that. 

That experience caused me to re-examine my own thinking.  Why did they see such a different message in a movie that seemed so straightforward to me and my friends?  Was it possible that they view other things through such a vastly different lens as well?   Is this why they had such a hard time understanding the books I assign them to read?   If so, how do I fix this?  Can I fix it?  Should I fix it?  

What is the purpose of a book?  I would argue that it is to understand the message that the author is trying to relay through their characters, plot, setting, and themes.  After all, this is what we teach in high school English.  But what if my students’ inability to understand the message that I understand has less to do with their reading comprehension than it does with their worldview?  What if, as Dr. Lucy said, “What if the idea of a novel that offers us wisdom is a metanarrative?” As an avid reader, this idea shakes me to the core, but what if it’s true? 

There have been books with timeless messages for generations, but we have never had a generation that has been steeped in such artificiality from the very beginning.  What if their world of curated perception and living on social media has changed something that cannot be undone? 

Perfection in the novel "White Teeth"

The search for perfection seems both so important and yet so futile.   This search for perfection is evident in Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth, especially in the character of Samad.

Samad is trying to create the best life for himself and his family that he can.   He does pretty well at chasing perfection for awhile: he has a younger, attractive wife, twin sons, a steady job, and devout faith.  Yet, the perfection is just a facade.  Underneath, it is all imperfect and slipping from Samad’s grasp.   This comes to a head when Samad succumbs to temptation and begins an affair with his sons’ music teacher.  

Smith foreshadows the fact that things that seem perfect are, in fact, flawed on page 144.   The children, Magid, Millat, and Irie, are trying to fulfill their school’s service obligation by delivering food to an old man. The old man, Mr. Hamilton, returns their favor by talking about how teeth rot - while also offering them more sugar for their tea, which I thought was an incongruous touch.  Mr. Hamilton does point out that everything has two sides.  After all, the only way he was able to see the enemy in the Congo was by their beautiful white teeth.  In addition to going along with the overarching metaphor of the book, Mr. Hamilton’s statement also shows that perfection can be deadly.

On the next page, page 148, we again see Samad in the throes of his affair. Full of anger at himself for not staying true to his faith, he decides that the best course of action would be to send his sons away from this sinful place in order to preserve their faith.  That’s right - instead of taking responsibility for his own actions and recognizing his own weaknesses, he instead blames his indiscretions on England and the sinful lifestyle there. 

Over the next chapter, Samad devises a plan to send his son back home to Bangladesh.  The chapter follows Samad on a crazy mental course as Samad tries to justify to himself why packing off one of his sons - he’s not really sure which one it should be, but it doesn’t really matter anyway - without discussing it with either son or his wife.   Even though Bangladesh is full of violence and rioting at the precise moments that Samad is carrying out his plan, he is positive that it is for the best because it will return his son to the “old” ways and traditions and save him from the temptations and trends of England.

Naturally, the plan doesn’t work.   He is able to send his son away, and disturbingly, no one seems to be too upset about it.  His wife Alsana certainly isn’t too happy about it, but after a week of trying to get Magid back, she seems fairly accepting of the situation.   No, the plan doesn’t work in the sense that when Magid does come back 8 years later, he acts more “English” than the brother who stayed in England.  Thus, the search for perfection once again leads Samad astray.