Writing in a World of Technology

It didn’t really hit me how much technology has affected our society until I began looking at it through a literary perspective.  As a writer myself, I have become so dependent on technology to write.  In the “Technoculture” article it states, “’Technoculture’ in literature can also describe a new proximity between the author and technology.”  I know they were describing it more in the sense of how technology appears in literature, but technology has taken over the way authors write.  The most obvious example is the writer’s main writing tool.  Yes, there’s still pen and paper, but most writers use a computer, even if it’s only for the final draft of their work (which must be typed to be even read by an agent).  The Internet has also taken the place of a library as a writer’s main source of information for research.  It’s certainly more accessible and contains more readily-available information than your local library. 

E-books are also slowly taking over.  Basically they are electronic versions of books that can be read on personal computers or hand-held devices.  A big question in the publishing industry is: will e-books take over in the future?  It’s certainly a possibility.  Every year new technology comes out and personal electronic devices are extremely popular.  E-books have their positive side—they’re eco-friendly and much easier to distribute and manufacture.  Already schools are replacing textbooks with laptops (my high school did this the year after I left).  Perhaps some day in the future we’ll no longer need books; we’ll simply hook ourselves up to programs like in The Matrix and learn that way. 

The point is that technology is slowly taking over and it’s affecting people more than they think.  It’s not just doctors and engineers who are becoming dependent on new technology, but we writers too are letting it run our lives.  Now that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s definitely something to be aware of.

It's History, Yes, but at Least a Little More Accurate

Last year I was fortunate enough to enroll in an extremely fascinating and in depth class that studied the Civil War and Reconstruction.  Although our class only briefly focused on the details of slavery (we had to get through almost one hundred years worth of information in a semester) I started reading Kindred with some knowledge already of what life on a plantation was like.  What was really interesting to me was that Dana had some of the same initial reactions as I did.  In one scene, the first time Dana walks into the cookhouse, she mentions that “I was glad to see [children] there.  I’d read about kids their age being rounded up and fed from troughs like pigs” (72).  Like Dana, I was relieved that the children in this book weren't fed like animals (which would have given me another reason to despise the Weylins).  But this statement struck me because I remembered reading a slave’s account in my Civil War class, and this was the exact situation the slave described.  (There were some other accounts that related to food, but none so awful as this.  Perhaps, that’s why I remembered this one.) 

I have to admit that like Dana, I noted how much better the slaves on Weylin’s plantation were treated.  Granted, they were still slaves, and the whole idea of slavery is appalling.  Tom Weylin wasn’t a kind slave owner, but he could have been a million times worse.  But it really shouldn’t be that surprising to me.  Many of the slave narratives I read varied.  Some detailed horrible conditions, cruel owners, bad supplies, and the like.  Others described controlling, but kind masters and had generally good living conditions.  One account even mentioned that the mistress of the house would let the slave children eat at the dinner table and she taught them to read.

The thing is, it’s the horror stories that stick in our minds.  It happens even nowadays.  When we think of slavery we think of slaves being whipped every five minutes, doing backbreaking work for twenty hours a day, and having sadistic and cruel masters.  In reality (according to my Civil War professor), most masters were neither excessively cruel nor overwhelmingly nice.  The majority fell somewhere in between.  (The Weylins are a good example of this.)  And it makes sense.  Slave and plantation owners are businessmen in the simplest sense.  You don’t want to destroy your “merchandise” (it sounds awful using that word, but I’m sure that’s how slave owners saw it), but you certainly don’t want it to destroy you. 

So in reality I see much of my own preconceptions in Dana.  History is history and we can only really know what we’re told.  Kindred, in that sense, was interesting.  Yes, it’s based off our ideas of history, but it transcends them.  It presents a more factual picture of life on a plantation (at least in my opinion) compared to other works based on that time period.  But perhaps I’m wrong.  How can I know?  I haven’t been to the past. 

(And now reading over this, I’m wondering if perhaps I should have saved some of this for my term paper.  Hm.  Maybe you’ll forget I wrote this by the time you have to read my paper.)

Redefining...Well, a Lot of Stuff

We discussed the Harriet Jacobs article somewhat in class, but I think there was more to be said about her narrative and its connection to Kindred.  One of the main points made in the article we read about Jacobs’ experience as a slave said “’true womanhood’ meant chastity and virtue,” and that “slavery makes it impossible for a black woman to live a virtuous, chaste life.”  This is certainly true of some of the characters in Butler’s novel.  In fact, one of the central issues of Kindred is Rufus’ sexual exploitation of Alice.  But within this novel Butler revises genre, especially with her character, Dana.  Dana is living in the 1970’s, right at the peak of one of the biggest feminist movements.  At this time women were transcending the idea Jacobs’ presented of women who were defined by “chastity and virtue.”  By placing Dana in the 1800’s, she is redefining Jacob’s slave narrative by presenting a black female slave who manages to maintain her virtue and chastity.  Although during the 1800’s, virtue was usually defined by a “sexual pureness,” Dana sustains other virtues (self-awareness, honesty, tolerance, and determination are just a few) that at the time weren’t usually upheld.  Combined with her education, political awareness, and sense of history, Dana is nearly the opposite of a traditional antebellum slave, the kind seen in slave narratives. 

These aspects also add up to make Dana out to be a heroic figure, albeit not necessarily the kind usually seen in science fiction and fantasy works.  Dana is your average modern woman.  In an everyday setting, the qualities Dana possesses would not necessarily be seen as anything “heroic.” However, the circumstances into which she is forced make her out to be the heroine.  In this way Butler is rewriting the classic sci-fi/fantasy novel.  (There are other aspects of this work that revise the sci-fi/fantasy genre, but that’s another story.)

There are so many ways in which Kindred redefines both the slave narrative and the science fiction and fantasy genre.  One of the effective ways, however, is through the main character, Dana.  The reader feels a certain attachment to her as the narrator of the novel, and because she is a modern woman, it makes the reader see history in a new light, one that’s perhaps easier to understand and relate to.

Blog Paper

Ever since childhood, reading has been a huge part of my life.  In school our teachers most often taught “classic” literature, that is to say, literature written at least half a century before I was born.  In grade school we were force fed The Joy Luck Club and The Pearl when all we really wanted to do was go to recess.  In high school our teachers also felt the need to expose us to all the classic literature that, as one teacher told us, “You will definitely read in college.”  (So far I have yet to read a novel in college that I read in high school.)  We sped through the usual reads—Catcher in the Rye, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Heart of Darkness—and discussed the usual topics. In grade school we were all about the “I feel,” “I think” writing, but once I hit high school we were violently dragged away from that.  Freshman year was the first time I learned about the “no I” rule in papers because (and here I quote a few of my teachers), “the reader does not care about your opinion.”  Needless to say, we quickly went away from the text-self stage. 

For my four years of high school we focused mostly on the text-text stage and a little bit on the text-world stage.  One of my classes, American literature, was especially text-text because it was a combined class with American history.  We studied texts from different historical periods and how they related to each other and movements at the time.  In another class we studied Heart of Darkness and its movie adaptation Apocalypse Now.  My senior year our teacher tried to enhance our learning by teaching us about critical lenses and interpreting texts through Marxist, feminist, and sociocultural lenses.  College has offered me more of the “classic” literature that I was used to, but I felt I was getting more out of it than I was as an eighth grader struggling through A Tale of Two Cities.  Through some of my non-literature classes I started to read more non-fiction works.  In my sociology class we took on a text-world view.  Most, if not all, of the essays and articles we read could easily be related to the society we live in today.  We often discussed the psychological, political, economic, and even religious discourses that connected to the works we read.

            Another thing that I think helped me become a stronger reader was my exposure to a wide variety of films and music.  Thanks to friends and family I’ve seen many different films that vary in language, genre, and year.  I’ve also been fortunate enough to work with a variety of Milwaukee actors, writers, and directors.  It was one of these writers that suggested I watch the old 50s Batman TV show, and this is when I first learned what camp was.  Music has also had a big impact on my life (especially in writing) and on my understanding of reading and storytelling.  Even if I was not forced to write an analysis paper on every movie I watched or song I listened to, I was adding to my internal arsenal of literary works.

I never really had a problem with studying only “classic” literature, but because that was all we read in school, I was more likely to read “contemporary” literature in my free time. Despite reading more contemporary literature on my own, I have to admit I probably did not show any advanced reading development.  Most of my personal reading rarely gets past a text-self stage because I’m reading solely for entertainment. 

When we first got this assignment I was sure that my present reading stage was somewhere between text-text and text-world.  Upon looking at my blog entries for this class, I realize that I am more text-self to text-text.  My first entries were mostly text-text due to the fact that I am still a bit conditioned to follow the “no I” rule my high school teachers instilled in me.  My second blog post was on City of Glass and how “despite not being your average detective story, Paul Auster’s City of Glass features many ‘clichés’ of detective stories.”  I went on to compare different aspects of the story, including character traits and plot details, to stereotypes and conventions from mystery novels: “Although Quinn has a passive and slightly nervous personality, as Auster, he becomes the traditional smooth-talking, self-assured detective. He is confident and levelheaded. He tracks his mark, keeps detailed notes, and even assumes different ‘disguises’ with ease, just as any other typical detective would.”  However broad the genre I compared the story to, the blog is your basic text-text analysis.

After we read Jonathan Lethem’s You Don’t Love Me Yet and wrote our mini screenplays, I started to fall back into the text-self stage.  My September 18^th blog was a reflection on the screenplay writing process.  I included a lot of personal opinions on our completed work—“I’m happy with how the final draft turned out…”—and some notes on how our group worked together—“…the hardest part of writing was just coming to an agreement within our group.”  In other parts of the blog I discussed the adaptation process, comparing the original text to our version, but it was mostly in terms of what we liked and decided to keep so I think that still fits into the text-self stage.  For example, I wrote, “We also expanded on the argument between Matthew and Denise to give them each more lines.  We felt the original dialogue was missing just a bit more explanatory detail so that’s what we added.”  While a comparison to the original text, it does not have the depth that I think a text-text stage would require.  In my second and last Lethem-based blog I completely fell back into the text-self stage with comments like, “So many times I’ve read amazing books only to see them slaughtered in movie format. And this makes me think, how is that book’s author handing this? If it were me, I would be horrified.”  The rest of the blog features much of the same subjectivity.

My most recent blog on October 2^nd does not fall easily into any specific stage, but probably could have if I had expanded on certain topics.  The text-self aspects are most obvious: “I must admit that Maus was one of the most interesting pieces of literature I’ve read all year.”  The first paragraph continues along those lines, detailing my interest in the book and my questions about the author’s choices.  I then go on to list four reasons I came up with for the author choosing to use animal characters instead of human characters.  The speculations are mostly at the text-text stage.  I make direct reference to other texts—“…another one that came to mind when I read it was Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien.  The story features the good and struggling mice and the dangerous and deadly cat…” I also reference events from history—“Mice are also often used in experiments which could touch on the Nazi experiments performed on Jews.”—and bring up norms of the present day: “Nowadays people have become incredibly desensitized to human death.  But what about animal deaths?  Ever notice how people can watch a whole movie of people brutally murdering other people and not even blink?  And yet the dog dies and everyone is appalled…Perhaps the reason for making the characters animals was to play into that sympathy most people have.”  Both the historical and present day references fall into the text-text category.  Perhaps if I put more detail into the ideas, for example, expanding on society’s numbness to violence in the media, then the blog could have moved into text-world territory.  I did not, however, so this blog, like most of my work so far this semester, floats in the text-self/text-text range.

Upon realization that I am not as far into the reading stages as I thought, I really want to start working at a text-world stage.  I think that something that will really help me achieve this goal is to start narrowing down my topics.  Instead of discussing many points under one topic, I can choose one point in particular and explore it on a deeper level.  My Pulp Fiction blog is a good example.  I make very brief references to the board games Life and Operation and how they relate to the overdose scene in which they are placed.  But I really don’t go the extra mile in the blog.  I could easily have gone into more detail about how this juxtaposition makes comment about our present day society, or how drugs have become “games” in modern life.  I think the reason I haven’t reached the text-world stage is because in my mind working at such a level requires more resources and analysis than I feel I can put into a one or two paragraph blog.  But perhaps this assumption is just in my mind and I need to learn how to not over-analyze my work.  Or meta-analyze.  (Are those different things?)  Regardless, it all comes down to motivation.  I know I’m capable of reading and writing at a text-world stage, I just have to push myself to work harder. 

The Mice in Maus (and the Cats and the Pigs...)

I must admit that Maus was one of the most interesting pieces of literature I’ve read all year.  The funny thing is that I actually checked this book out from the library only a couple days before I went to the Stritch bookstore and realized we would be reading it for class.  One of the things that fascinated me about this graphic novel was how the author combined the story of the Holocaust with cartoon animals.  I had heard years ago about this graphic novel and had wanted to read it for a long time.  I couldn’t imagine how the author would go about presenting this story.  Now that I’ve finished reading it (well, Part I), I’m still interested in why the author chose to use animals instead of human characters.  I have some theories:

1. The first and perhaps the most obvious reason for having animals instead of people is just for the simplicity factor.  There are a lot of characters in the story, most of which have confusing names that the average reader (or at least American) would have a hard time keeping straight.  Trying to keep track of who’s a Nazi, who’s a Jew, who’s Pole, etc. can be plain confusing.  The easiest way to fix this?  Make all the Nazi’s cats, the Jews mice, and the Poles pigs.  Easy enough.  You see a pig and you automatically know that person’s a Pole, but not a Jew.  This also eliminates the confusion when some of the characters are pretending to be Poles—just put a pig mask on them.
2. Same as the above, except for the author.  It’s got to be hard drawing countless human characters, all of which have to look somewhat different.  But if the characters are all animals, well, that eliminates that hassle. 
3. The pity factor.  Nowadays people have become incredibly desensitized to human death.  But what about animal deaths?  Ever notice how people can watch a whole movie of people brutally murdering other people and not even blink?  And yet the dog dies and everyone is appalled.  I’ll admit that sometimes I’m that person.  Perhaps the reason for making the characters animals was to play into that sympathy most people have. 
4. A fourth reason for using animals—perhaps the author wanted to include an extra layer of symbolism or make reference to our culture.  I’m not going to go into insane detail listing possible symbolism, etc. (this blog is getting long enough), but there are definitely symbols based on the animals chosen.  The most obvious is that mice are the prey of cats.  Mice are also often used in experiments which could touch on the Nazi experiments performed on Jews.  As for making references to our culture, well, there are plenty.  We mentioned Animal Farm in class, but another one that came to mind when I read it was Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien.  It was a favorite of mine as a child.  The story features the good and struggling mice and the dangerous and deadly cat (strangely enough it also features experimentation on mice).  I’m sure with further thought one could think of countless more references.

So why did Art Spiegelman make all his characters animals?  Who knows?  I’d like to think that at least one of my ideas is close, but we’ll never know.  Regardless, it certainly makes an impact and makes this story an even more fascinating one.