Monthly Archives: May 2016

Fact v Fiction: The Zahir by Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges’ The Zahir plays with fact and fiction in very interesting ways. First of all, the story is written from the first person, and the narrator identifies himself as Borges. Herein lies the first question of fact and fiction in the story. Is the story supposed to be read as the narrator actually being Borges, or is the narrator merely a fictionalization of him? The narrator provides an enigmatic answer with “I am still, albeit only partially, Borges.” This could be read as Borges acknowledging the fictionalization of himself but asserting that this fictionalization in the piece still adequately refers to actual aspects of himself.

 

The next question that this story might raise then, is how fictional exactly is the story supposed to be? Borges already implied that fiction and nonfiction lie on a spectrum with his own insertion into the piece. The answer to this question might be found in a transition the piece makes. The piece begins with describing Teodolina Villar and her recent death. She is placed in the story with allusions to reality such as the occupation of Paris by Germany, among others. The narrator goes as far as to say, “I was in love with her, and that her death actually brought tears to my eyes? Perhaps the reader has already suspected that”. This address to the reader implies a factual element to this character and her impact on Borges, however, shortly afterwards the story picks up a far more mystical tone.

 

The titular “zahir” is described in the text as “beings or things which have the terrible power to be unforgettable, and whose image eventually drives people mad”. This description, along with many references in Borges’ work is questionable in its authenticity. Borges lists many actual works but among them also references ones that do not exist, and despite Zahir’s description being based in truth about it being one of 99 names of God, it is most likely this is a fictional creation of Borges. For the narrator of the story, his zahir is a coin which he finds almost immediately after the funeral, and from then on the story becomes clearly fictional (with the inclusion of magical elements).
However, it is most likely the case that the narrator’s obsession is supposed to be connected to his love of Teodolina. A meta reading of “Until the end of June I distracted myself by composing a tale of fantasy. The tale contains two or three enigmatic circumlocutions: “water of the sword”, it says, instead of blood, and “bed of the serpent”, for gold, and is written in the first person. “ lends some credence to this view since his obsession with the coin is paralleled with the gold in the story. This suggests that the coin being the object of the narrator’s obsession is merely sublimation of his obsession of the late Teodolina. However, if Teodolina’s existence is put into question, the narrator also asserts that the zahir is interchangeable with anything and everything in the world. In this way The Zahir sugests that there is fact in all fiction, since it is always connected to our reality in some way, even if not entirely sublimation.

Fact v Fiction: A Girl by Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound’s “In A Station Of The Metro” was my introduction to imagist poetry, and it really captured my imagination, so I sought out more of his work and found “A Girl”. The poem’s title is not directly referred to in any way in the piece. However, its use of the word “you” could be interpreted as a call to the titular girl. The image that most easily invokes this connection is found in “You are violets with wind above them.” This is an incredibly minimalist sentence, but it manages to paint a vivid picture of flowers caressed by the wind, and relate it to a you. This relation creates a romantic sentiment not overtly seen anywhere before in the piece, and it is this sentiment that implies a connection between the girl and the “you”.

 

This sentiment is subverted almost immediately by the next line, “A child – so high –  you are,” when the romantic connotation is implied towards a child, which fits the title of “A Girl”. The two readings of “girl” are being very skillfully used by Pound, in that they take advantage of the connotation of a child and a possible romantic interest, and this perhaps is referred to in the closing line “And all this is folly to the world.”, which implies some sort of taboo or improper line being crossed. In my reading I saw two strong possibilities for what this folly is, it is either the folly of romantic intentions toward a child, or the folly of having a childlike nature as a sexual and romanticized woman in the world.

 

So far however, I have focused entirely on the second stanza of the poem. I have omitted the first because without the reading of the second it reads purely as images. However, with romantic and sexual connotations present, lines such as “The branches grow out of me, like arms.” and “The sap has ascended my arms,” become highly sexual images. This sexuality is communicated in minimalist and vivid images, and finally I am ready to think about them in terms of the theme of fact and fiction.
The sexual reading of this piece wherein the girl is a child is disturbing and it calls into question the aspect of “fact”, in that it beckons the reader to ask if there is some reality to it. However, the only absolute facts in this poem are its images. Every image that Pound conjures is a fact of the poem, outside of its relevance to reality, each image exists in itself. These images are the backbone of any reading of the poem, and compose its fiction status, whatever it may be.

Fact and Fiction in Edwidge Danticat’s “Children of the Sea”

“Children of the Sea” by Edwidge Danticat is a short story that I read last semester in Maria Lima’s 203, Reading Transnationally. It is a fictional piece about the experience of two teenage lovers who are separated during the violence of “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s despotic dictatorship in 1950s-70s Haiti—one has fled from Port-au-Prince to a small town, and the other is on a small boat headed to Florida. In this braided narrative based on exchanged letters, the balance between elements of fiction and nonfiction are what make this piece so striking. Danticat is Haitian, and she herself was not around during the regime, but her fiction is based on true historical events of this horrific time in Haitian history, making this piece a real blend of “fact” and fiction.

It’s quite apparent that this piece does a lot of work with “fact”, being that it is a historical piece based on the experiences of Haitians during this time. Having learned about the regime in a history class, with my limited knowledge I can confirm that state terror and rape as a means of control were tactics widely utilized in the twentieth-century military regimes of the Caribbean and Latin America. The story goes into the tactics of the “Tonton Macoutes”, or the police force that would terrorize citizens in order to maintain control, often by forcing family to rape each other as others watch. Although horrific, these are the realities of state violence. These jarring and vivid scenes are illustrated throughout the piece, such as when female narrator describes why her uncle sometimes sleeps at her house:

“they have this thing now that they do. if they come into a house and there is a son and mother there, they hold a gun to their heads. they make the son sleep with his mother. if it is a daughter and a father, they do the same thing. Some night papa sleeps at his brother’s, uncle pressoir’s house. uncle pressoir sleeps at our house, just in case they come. that way papa will never be forced to lay down in bed with me, uncle pressoir would be forced to, but that would not be so bad.”

Fictionally, I found that the braided narrative was one of the most striking aspects of this piece. The use of the braiding brings a very personal aspect to the fiction, showing characters in their true raw thoughts. The narratives of the two lovers are artfully executed in the way that they are each characterized so carefully, even when it comes to the style of the prose—the girl’s narrative lacks punctuation and capitalization, giving a sense that she is rushed and nervous. This makes sense because she is the one that has fled to a small town, still in Haiti and reeling from the recent rapes and murders of her neighbors. The boy’s narrative differs starkly—his is meditative and paced, which relates to the fact that he is writing these letters on a boat with no sense of time or direction, and he is eager to do anything to pass the time in limbo. As the male speaker comes closer and closer to the realization that the boat will sink and that everyone on it probably will die, his writing only increases in its concentration and somber pace, starkly contrasting the nervous writing of his lover who is so eager to know if he still alive.

Fact and Fiction in Nate Pritts’ Poetry

This analysis is based on the second poem from “Pattern Exhaustion” (on page 12 of Post Human, if you have the book handy.)

After attending the Nate Pritts reading and buying his book, I began to notice in his writing the mixed elements of reality and dream, something that Pritts interweaves together wonderfully in his honest and post-modern poetry. I know from his reading that his poems are based on his own thoughts and experiences, making them largely nonfiction—but of course in poetry, elements of fiction and the unreal seep in to make the real more poignant.

In this poem, I see four spaces—looking at photographs online, envisioning a camera flashing, and the street outside. The action of looking at the photos hints of nonfiction because it is a mundane, daily activity that one would do everyday. And since so much of Pritts’ poetry is about the intersection of humans with technology, and he often relies on scenes of him being on his phone or computer, I get the feeling of “fact.” I was struck by the usage of “high resolution American hush” to describe this action, and could feel, hear, and see the din of the LED screen—packed into this line are images of high advanced technology, the notion of a nation (a nation, like an image being on the screen, something that is intangible and living in the imaginary), stopped with the action of a hush, creating a sense of hiding and secrets.

Then the most fictional element comes in—the moment when the photograph from computer screen is taken; an action that took place in the past. Of course, this is a fictional creation because I doubt Nate was there to witness whoever was taking this photograph and knows the exact time and method in which it was taken. The action of taking the photo is described as so:

 

“seeing the dynamic

moments stopped                 the camera

 

singling out only one thing

that happened to keep forever”

 

What’s captivating about these four lines interspersed in two stanzas is how well the form is able to manifest the action. Of course, one is immediately drawn to the spacing between “stopped” and “the camera”, a pause that reminds me of the moment in which a camera shutter makes that satisfactory, half-second click before the photograph is recorded. In the second stanza, the juxtaposition between “singling” and “forever” is an immense one—the taking of the photo is at the same time single and local while also being a cosmic event, a small but extremely important blip in the universe when something was being created and recorded for all time.

 

The last line of this poem is one I’ll never forget:

 

“I forget how to be solid.”

 

This statement itself is a real emotion that I think will resonate with anyone who can relate to Pritts’ poems—the feeling of emptiness, of floating, of confusion in the modern internet-driven world. Yet it is also a statement of fiction in that it implies that the state of being solid is something that human thought can control; it relies on extraordinary metaphor and the contemplation of the metaphysical. Being most literal, it must be fictional since our bodies are made of mostly liquid, and so implying that you could be solid would be especially presumptuous. But besides all that—I think we all forget to be solid sometimes, and it’s nice to be reminded that that’s okay.

Response to “Every Season Starts at Dicks”

“Every Season Starts at Dicks” is a nonfiction piece that I found in the Gandy Dancer archives. It details the experience of working a retail job at Dick’s Sporting Goods during holiday season, something I can personally relate to having spent much of my own time working retail jobs. In this short story, a customer is attempting to return a pair of pants the day after Christmas. With all the hectic-ness that is going on around her, the cashier/narrator misplaces the pair of pants and has to deal with the rude customer as she deals with his return. At the end of the piece, she visits Target on her break to do a return of her own and sympathizes with the other retail worker who is completing her transaction.

The humor is definitely a strength of this piece. Especially for those who have worked retail before, every description of the customers and things those customers say are extremely accurate. Even if the events of the story didn’t play out exactly as they are told in the piece, it can still be considered nonfiction because any small alterations that were made did not drastically alter what the piece was trying to accomplish.

Beyond that, the writer is very good at evoking the feelings of frustration that the narrator is feeling within the reader as well. Perhaps it is just because I can relate on a personal level, but I found myself wanting to yell at the rude customer myself. If writing is realistic enough to actually make the reader want to scream through a computer screen, I think that demonstrates real effectiveness, especially in nonfiction pieces.

The language and voice and descriptions in this piece transported me right to a Dick’s Sporting Goods during the holiday season. I could feel the chaos and hear the beeping of the security tag scanner. Although the piece definitely does take place in a Dick’s, I don’t think the piece is limited to that particular store, so it is therefore not limited to people who have only worked with sporting goods. This story could be broadly understood by anyone who has ever worked a retail job, and even those who have not. This is achieved through the voice of the narrator and the descriptions of the chaos ensuing in the store itself. This story made me understand how effective actually invoking real feelings in the reader can be. Perhaps everyone should strive to write pieces that have the reader screaming into their computer screen.

Response to Ethan Keeley’s “Straight Lines”

I looked on Gandy Dancer for both of my nonfiction/fiction pieces. I came across Ethan Keeley’s piece entitled “Straight Lines” and was immediately engaged by the sense of voice in the piece. It felt very natural and there was no point where I felt the story was forced or untrue. I must not have been paying very close attention to what I was doing, because I read the whole story before I realized that it was definitely not a nonfiction piece, however, it did make me reconsider a lot of my feelings and ideas about what separates fiction and nonfiction and fact.

I know that this is a fiction piece, because I found it in the fiction section of the archives, and because it takes place in Mississippi. It seems highly unlikely that someone from Mississippi would come to SUNY Geneseo for college. However, without these details, I’m not sure I would be able to so clearly pinpoint this piece as fiction. It does read as a fiction piece, as opposed to an essay. It is plot based with sections of dialogue, it is told in first person point-of-view, and includes a lot of inner monologue from the narrator. Normally, these traits would automatically make me lean towards a fiction piece. In this circumstance, though, I think it actually almost makes me rethink how automatically we may classify pieces as nonfiction or fiction based on these. Yes, generally, these are good guidelines. But who is to say that they must be so?

I tend to enjoy pieces that have a strong voice and focalized narration through the speaker. I am more engaged by these stories, and I think I understand them better. To me, that is the greatest strength within this piece. It is so short, but despite its length, I can understand each character with a decent amount of depth. When each character speaks, their pieces of dialogue vary in language in a way that doesn’t make me confused about who is speaking. Their quotes act as a method of characterization just as much as the narrator’s (a thirteen year old boy) insights about those people.

There doesn’t seem to be anything within this piece that isn’t serving a purpose. Each word and thought is carefully chosen and is doing the work it should be doing. I am also impressed by the balance of this piece. It doesn’t rely too heavily on any one technique, and it isn’t missing too much of anything either. There is just enough imagery and description of setting to transport the reader to that place and time without become overbearing. There is just enough dialogue to enhance the characters and plot, without becoming reliant. All of these techniques working together create an extremely realistic world and a very realistic tale, that it’s almost difficult to believe that it isn’t real. These are things that I think any writer of realistic fiction should consider when writing a piece. Fiction may be fiction, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be real.

Response to “Discomfort Food” by Maggie Downs

On the website, littlefiction.com, I decided to look into a collection they had called, “Nonfiction: a nonfiction anthology about food and life,” as in my last exercise, I want to create a theme of emotionally connecting to music, but I don’t think I was particularly successful. Food like music, elicits of variety of response, and come to a person randomly or by choice. I was hoping to find something that figured out how to do this in a better way than I did. I choose the story “Discomfort Food,” by Maggie Downs, for its intriguing title playing on a common expression. In this story, the narrator’s mother, who is terrible, but well-meaning cook, dies, and his house is stuffed to the brim with delicious food, that lasts for weeks, from relatives and neighbors showing condolence. The strange irony in this is never addressed. As a result of his mother’s death, the narrator finds himself in situation of which was always deprived of before. I don’t know how significant it would’ve been for the author to say something like, “I’d rather eat dry chicken the rest of my life than have lost my mother,” but it’s weirder to set up it up in the exposition, where he complains about his mother’s cooking and then not coming back to it.
An incredible list of food items is given, replete with details about how each was carefully made. The narrator doesn’t describe eating any of these pieces. They sound very good, but no character in the story is there to enjoy it and I found that disappointing.

The piece was mostly about losing his mother the parts about food were very extraneous. I felt like the piece was written to be submitted for this category. The title and was only address were he talks about not feeling hungry, feeling that the food won’t be comforting. It would have been much more poignant to talk about trying to eat and not being able to. The piece takes place over several weeks, so we know he didn’t completely not eat. In the end this piece was more eulogy than anything else, though I wanted to see more details about his relationship to his mom, but rather we are given a lot of detach biographical information. It’s a sad and touching piece, but more needs to be developed, and maybe the food could be taken out completely. I didn’t get what I was looking for and felt mislead. This is a problem for creating a category and asking for submissions. People might distort their writing unnaturally. It’s harder to fit a specific category like this and have it be non-fiction. I feel like it’s not unrealistic to ask someone to talk about their love and connection to food, or to ask someone to tell a story that involves food on the ways, but to ask one to tell a story that is heavily based around food, and reveals a truth about another facet of life, is a little too ambitious. This category might have done well to open up to fiction as well as non-fiction.

(http://littlefiction.com/beta/Nomfiction_MaggieDowns.html)

Response to “Care” by Craig Santos Perez

After reading the poem “Care” by Craig Santos Perez on poets.org, I was struck by its sharp and concise language and word choice. This poem has roots in non-fiction, mainly because it deals with real life human emotions, and incorporates struggles that could easily be attributed to a real life scenario. The poem also names actual places in the world to establish a contrast between two vastly different settings. Both the island of O’ahu in Hawaii and the country of Syria are mentioned, in contrast with one another, while at the same time connecting them through the introspection of the speaker in the poem. The speaker of the poem poses the all-encompassing “what if” scenario of the safety of his surroundings becoming similar to the current day conditions in Syria. The tension in the poem comes from the presumed commentary of the turmoil in the entire Middle East region, specifically Syria, of which the media and the world has shifted the focal point to over the past year or two, because of the instability in the country.

The effectiveness of the poem comes from the fact that Perez focuses on concrete and not abstract diction. The narrative is clear, and it does not rely on “lofty” ideals that are sometimes presented in hypothetical scenarios. However, this is not to say that the poem does not touch on the issue of human existence and other philosophical ideas. Although the “drought” in the piece is grounded through the reference to Halaby pepper fields, this is used as standing point to comment on “the drought of humanity.” Through the “drought of humanity” line, we are able to recognize the shift in theme of the poem, from the speaker and his daughter, to the human race as a whole. The poem is in a sense an optimistic pleading for compassion among all humans, most especially those who are the most violent, a call to world peace, without sounding cliché. At the same time the main theme of the poem shifts, so too does the tone of it. The violent depictions of soldiers and terrorists are replaced by words like hope and refuge, which changes the dark tone, to light.

There is some interesting word play in the poem, where “Flames, nails, and shrapnel” are proposed to be “barreling” towards the speaker, regardless of the fact that it’s hypothetical. The use of the verb barreling, draws a connection to the noun barrel, which could be an allusion to oil barrels, and the unrest that has been caused over the control of oil in the Middle East. This speaks to the clever nature of the poem, and is something that makes you really. I think the purpose of this poem is to make us think, to engage the reader to consider the less fortunate, and sympathize with people who have to survive in very harsh living conditions. These are things that as an American I have the privilege of not having to worry about, too often in this country we too easily ignore the plight of others around the world.

 

Fact vs Fiction 1Q84

Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 is a novel that at first glance seems to not concern itself with whether its events are fact or fiction; and to be fair, the novel is written with magical fantasy elements included. But to lump 1Q84 into “fiction” or “nonfiction” would do it a disservice. It stands wholly on it’s own, and in my mind, a uniquely defies genre in its fantasy. Spoilers ahead!

Murakami saves the magic of the novel for a surprise twist that occurs at exactly the halfway point through this 800+ page novel. The first half of the book succeeds massively in realistic descriptions of the characters, their backgrounds, and their physical surroundings. For the first 400 pages, for the most part Murakami has written realistic fiction. It’s this dedication to real world Tokyo that lets the magic feel magical. In 1Q84 it is the fact that makes the fiction.

Maybe this is obvious, and the case for all types of magical realist literature. But personally, the introduction of magic into 1Q84 blew my fucking mind. Murakami does so well in writing his realistic fiction that when the magical realism kicks in, it doesn’t really feel like magic. You join the characters in feeling like reality itself has taken a total shift. In the novel the main characters find out that the world they live in, and the world everyone lives in, is actually being written by a select few powerful storytellers, who determine the thoughts motivations and actions of all the people around them. The most shocking part lies in the fact the characters we follow, that is, the characters the novel is focalized around, are not the storytellers. They are side characters, taking action based on the wills of these powerful other people, and feeling their motivations change as the story goes on. These characters are aware of their own transformations, and for the reader to watch a character they have grown close to over hundreds of pages suddenly start to lose their individuality to some other character in the story is pretty disconcerting. More than disconcerting- we’ve followed a thought pattern for chapters on chapters that all of a sudden is aware it’s changing due to the influence of another character in the story.

The relationship between fact and fiction in 1Q84 is symbiotic. The facts enhance the fiction, and the fiction enhances the facts. By grounding us in a very very real world, listing specific subway stations in Tokyo, giving the characters very real internal monologues with hopes and dreams and anxieties, and by avoiding tropes of all sorts, Murakami successfully convinces us this reality exists. Of course it does- it looks just like our own, doesn’t it? In this way 1Q84’s form reflects its content. The characters also believe their world to be real and free of magic, until they are proven wrong. The magic also makes the characters feel more factual, in that they react to the world changing around them in realistic and believable ways. By all measures, this is a real world that has suddenly been flipped upside down, on the reader and the main characters.

Fact v. Nonfiction: Redeployment

I think that people who have never been to war have certain preconceptions and attitudes about it. For example, I think that if we read stories about a veteran having PTSD, we are automatically inclined to believe it as nonfiction because in our heads, all veterans have PTSD and it’s not really something to accuse as being false. When we read that poem about a PTSD episode at Home Depot or Lowes, I don’t think many people argued that it was fiction. I did because it seemed a little cliche and contrived, but that just might be because of my experience reading books that go more in depth on these issues, one of which was Redeployment by Phil Klay

Redeployment by Phil Klay was a collection of short stories that felt so much like non-fiction. The main reason this felt so real to me is because of the various conflicts that we don’t realize happen, but we don’t see because Hollywood doesn’t think these entertaining enough for the screen. For example, there was a story where one of the soldiers got shot in the head with a sniper round. His helmet prevented it from piercing, but the force of the projectile was enough to cause serious cranial damage, knocking him out cold. He awakens safe after an ensuing firefight, and is told by other members of the platoon that the Sergeant had spent his own life saving the main character’s. What his platoon members leave out, however, is that when he got knocked out, he fell behind cover that kept him safe from the shooting. The Sergeant had lost his life saving a life that didn’t need saving. This made me believe that the stories were real because this is something that would so feasibly happen, but we don’t hear about it because we idolize the soldiers overseas, so downplaying their deaths to make it seem like an awkward situation would seem disrespectful to their service. Still, the story may have been fiction, but based on real-life events that weren’t released.

What also made it seem nonfiction is that the collection of stories didn’t seem to have a consistent theme. It seems that war movies now have the same themes of love or family or camaraderie or how hellish war is. These stories, however, seemed to only want to tell a story, as I feel most nonfiction pieces do. Nonfiction pieces I feel exist to get someone’s story out in the open, while fiction has some sort of agenda. This agenda for war movies is usually to inspire young adults to enlist. These stories, however, followed men in the war, men at home after the war, and one boring one where the main character never saw any action, but finds a girlfriend who assumed he did while he’s in law school. The stories like this one are more about people than about soldiers. Nonfiction tends to humanize people (see: Mein Kampf), while fiction tends to create cliche humanoids, and the people in these stories were humanized from the rushes of adrenaline to the monotony of rating girls at a bar.