Cultural Relativism and Stuff

Point 1: Hey, I’m back!  In the four months since I’ve posted, my life and conception of self have been turned completely inside out, but as things are beginning to fall back into place in this new, wonky, and wonderful world of grad school, and as I’m more full of thoughts than ever, and as I think best in writing, and as I need a creative outlet at least somewhat separate from school, I’ve decided to make blogging a priority again. 

Point 2: I’m very fond of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.  I also maintain a very firm (one might say granite-esque) belief in the value of free literary engagement with serious topics like religion.  This is a point that seems obvious to me–if we don’t allow for creative dissent, we are never going to get any closer to the truth (or the understanding that there’s no such thing as truth, as the case may be).  So when the matter of the fatwa came up in class, I took a confident, flying leap and defended the book on the basis of freedom of speech, the press, open debate, creativity, whatever–and smashed headlong into the shiny glass windowpane of cultural relativism.  As my brain lay gasping and fluttering, metaphorical feathers swirling down around it, I struggled with two apparently mutually exclusive beliefs, both of which I hold.  (1) That (thoughtful, considered, non-hateful) free discourse is good, not just for some people in some times or places, but for all people everywhere, and (2) that just because a belief happens to be mine and my culture’s doesn’t mean that it is somehow more valid than an opposing belief belonging to a different culture or individual.  It’s perplexing.  I’m not just entertaining two sides of an idea here, I’m strongly embracing two beliefs that seem inherently incompatible.  I’m saying that I support a certain statement as universally true, and at the same time that I don’t believe in the concept of universal truth. 

So, my question is, does the fact that I support mutually exclusive ideas mean that I haven’t thought out my beliefs well enough?  Does one require an internally consistent set of convictions in order to be a clear-thinking, educated, intelligent person?  If, for instance, I met an individual who claimed to be both a strict Biblical literalist and a believer in Darwinian evolution, I would at the very least want an explanation of how she made those two belief systems work together.  If she couldn’t provide a rational account, I would probably assume (whether fairly or not) that she was not particularly thoughtful and hadn’t given her own beliefs much critical attention.  Not wanting to be an uncritical thinker, and not being able to explain how to make my espousal and disavowal of universal truths compatible with one another, and still adhering to both original propositions, I find the whole thing kind of upsetting.

Linked

I finished Byatt’s Babel Tower this evening, and started Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.  These books are linked, in that a major character in Babel Tower, Jude Mason, named himself after the hero of Jude the Obscure, who is in fact a mason by profession.  Babel Tower also involves a book on trial for obscenity in the 1960s, and so Jude the Obscure was censured in the late 1800s.  Books are tied to one another, and to life.  History and story and world and word are all bound up together, and it is a pleasure to have the freedom to direct my reading by the natural ties between books.

Capering Word Puppets

I was reading A.S. Byatt’s Babel Tower this afternoon, when my eyes got tangled in a description of a class studying Howards End and Women in Love:

These grown up human beings speak wisely and foolishly of other human beings: Margaret and Ursula, Forster and Lawrence, Birkin and Mr. Wilcox, as though they were (as they are) people they know (and don’t know).  They know perfectly well, if reminded, that four of these six beings are actually made of words, are capering word puppets, not flesh and blood.

This passage made me realize, abruptly, that to the individual there is no difference between a character in a work of literature and a real human being whom he has never met.  There are numerous people–friends of friends, great-grandparents dead before my birth, authors and artists and intellectuals whose works are their only public presence, famous historical figures, etc.–whom I know only by description.  In my understanding they, too, are nothing but linguistic constructions, “capering word puppets” less developed, probably, than the meticulously woven characters of my favorite authors.

Our willingness and effortless ability to treat these language-sketches as real people whether we may someday encounter them as such (a friend’s boyfriend or J.K. Rowling) or not (George Eliot or Julius Caesar) suggests that literature is as valid a forum for the study of human nature as history or current events.  This is, of course, a position that I tend not to dispute, although there are certainly people who set up fiction in opposition to “real life.”  They may scorn the study of “nonsense,” but fiction, I think, is often as real to the individual as “real life” itself, sometimes more-so.

I need to think more about this–the fusion or distinction of the real and the fictional–and whether it is at all important, where the boundaries lie, and what lies inside those boundaries (King Arthur, Robin Hood, Jesus–man? myth? inseparable fusion of the two? (manth?)).  Anyway, it interests me, and it is a pleasure to think once in awhile.

Nonapology

I’m not sorry I haven’t written.  Frankly, I’d rather have my life be full of life than of loose pockets of spare time that I attempt to fill with reflection.  I have approximately thirty days left to complete the tasks of my undergraduate career, and despite the fact that I rarely get more than five or six hours of sleep and still can barely keep my head above water, I’m thoroughly enjoying myself.

In a month, we’ll see, but for the moment you’ll have to excuse me…I have a life to live.

Thanks World, you rock!

It’s hard to find a word for how I’m feeling these days.  If I were religious, I would say blessed.  I could say lucky, but that doesn’t convey an adequate amount of gratitude.  Whatever the word, the fact is that life is very good to me and I feel obliged to try to deserve my good fortune.  Of the eight graduate schools I applied to, three accepted me.  Of those three, one offered a generous funding package.  That one was my first-choice school all along; funny how things work out.

When something has consumed your life the way applying to grad school has consumed mine over the past half-year, it is extraordinary and strange to find your worries and obsessions suddenly resolved all at once, in the course of  a few words on official letterhead, a few emails, and a few phone calls.  It is strange to go from not knowing where you will be in six months to knowing (as much as any of us can know the future) where you will be in six years.  Strange and wonderful.

And so, even though I have ten thousand things to do every day and a mountain of stressful situations to surmount before graduation in May, I am singing-out-loud-smiling-for-no-reason happy.  And since I know it all could have turned out otherwise, I am grateful.  I suppose I could say that I am blessed by luck.

Digesting Derrida

Urban Dictionary defines “mental constipation” as the “inability to articulate one’s thoughts or ideas.”  As the result of an evening in the company of Jacques Derrida, I would like to introduce the concept of “reverse mental constipation.”  This occurs when one is attempting to absorb knowledge from a very dense text.  One pushes and strains and makes grotesque faces, and yet after long periods of intense and exhausting effort only a few pathetic nuggets of knowledge have passed in to the mind.  (This in, of course, is what makes it reverse constipation.  Conventional constipation is naturally engaged in the effort to pass said pathetic nuggets out…as it were.  The direction of this passage is irrelevant, however, in light of the striking similarity between the frustration and discomfort of such fruitless effort.)

What is needed here is some form of reverse mental prune juice–a quick fix to ease and expedite the process of knowledge intrusion (a word here defined not as “a hostile entrance” but rather by its difference–or differance?– from extrusion).  Or, to shift the metaphor from excretion to digestion, Derrida and Co. ought to have imbued their texts with ample quantities of easily digestible mind-fiber to make the processing of their ideas a little easier on the mind.  As it is, digesting Derrida is like digesting a super-sized bucket of deep-fried spicy chicken wings with a side of curly fries: tough on the innards.

In this case, it seems that gastrointestinal processing and knowledge processing are similar but opposite proceedings: food goes in easy and comes out hard, knowledge goes in hard and comes out shockingly easy, and both wreak havoc in between.  And that, folks, is your crass scatological/academic metaphor of the day.