My Knee-Jerk Reaction to Knee-Jerk Reactions

I’m a bit the ornery cuss lately, mainly because twice a week I have to roll through 2+ hours of traffic to get to a class whose value becomes more questionable by the day, and immediately after the class turn around and drive and hour and a half back home. Tuuesdays and Thursdays are pretty much nothing but kid, driving and this bullshit class.

My main issue with the class is sloppiness. I hate decontextualized academic conversations, because they lead nowhere and mainly exist to air presuppositions. Challenges to ideas are unacceptable in such venues, unless you are spouting the party line with your objection.

Last night, we were discussing the Joyce Carol Oates story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” The story is about Connie, a precocious and pretty teenager that sneaks out to the drive-in restaurant to meet and make out with boys. She notices a random boy one day, and on a Sunday whn she skips out on a family function to stay home by herself, the “boy” and his friend show up in the driveway. By degree, the “boy,” Arnold Friend, cajoles then coerces and menaces her out of the house, into his car to be raped and likely killed.

Not much direction, just discussing, so already I’m annoyed. And, the prevailing current of “I just don’t believe that she would just get in the car – why didn’t she run or yell for help or something” became just too much for me.

So, I point out that this one great power of literature is its ability to allow readers to get outside of their own subject position and see the world from other people’s eyes. I go on to say how much Arnold’s coercion reminds me of the method for turning out a girl that real pimps described in American Pimp, and the fact that if you are trying to prosecute a rape case, the last thing you want on your jury is women because historically they have a much higher tendency to think “I wouldn’t have gotten myself in that situation” or “In that situation, I would have acted differently,” and place a higher degree of blame on the victim than men tend to.

The discussion was about to move on when on of the grrrls that had been most vocal in questioning Connie’s actions says “This whole rape trial thing is bothering me. I just want to say that I would never have that reaction if this were an actual person. I just question the writer’s intent in writing this character.”

It is a testament to my famous restraint that I let this pass with just an internal flush of rage (that and the fact it was within five minutes of the end of class and I didn’t think it wise for me to go there as it would’ve taken WAY more than five minutes).

But, fuck me, are you kidding? An author writes a character whose motivations you wouldn’t question in a real-life context, which has to imply that you don’t find the motivations completely unrealistic, and you “question the intent of the author”? Huh? Was she worried that Oates was spinning a morality tale that says “Don’t be a slut” or that she is casting women generally as powerless in the face of male oppressions?

There seems a tendency among the theoryheads and the grrrls to make this kind of interpretive jump, that an author who writes a character who feels real is indicating that the character is a model for how people “should” act, or that all similar people necessarily do act this way. And this contrived belief that honest reflection of life within fiction can be looked at in such a way because the people aren’t real.

I see a belief hidden in there that writers should always be writing the world as it should be, with empowered women and unoppressive men and children well on the way to self-actualization.

Heaven forbid that fiction try and get you to break out of the big pile of should you’ve hidden yourself away in, and attempt to negotiate your shoulds with the is in a more mature way, that fiction’s power over theory is its placement in a specific possibility.

It is simplistic to say Oates wrote a character that is weak and therefore damning to all women. And it is short-sighted to fail to see that this story, by focusing on the moment, allows the possibility to find sympathy for such a character, and to perhaps understand that bad judgment is not a rape-able offense (‘nother words, she wasn’t asking for it).

This knee-jerk reaction to passive-aggressively “question the intent” of any author who writes characters and situations outside your land of should galls the shit out of me. It is easy, the refuge of the over(post-modernly)educated and underanalytical.

And, shit, if we can’t react to well-drawn characters the same way we react to actual people, if we can’t see that other individuals are as much pieces of construction and illusion as a fictive individual, the fiction loses its power.