devonmeyer

Soooooo I forgot about this post. But I was definitely at the conference. I promise.

Unfortunately, the only panel for which I was available to be present was my own, which means that I only got to hear four other presentations. But all of them were quite intriguing, if I must say. It was kind of awesome, too, due to the fact that three of my four fellow presenters were in my same CORE-102/111 class. We kick ass.

Anywho, I really liked the presentation about Never Let Me Go-- probably because it was the only work from the panel that I had actually previously read. But it was all very interesting. I liked the fact that everyone seemed to have the same theme: humans shouldn't treat every outsider like they're sub-human. It's all about the dehumanization of non-humans that we all seemed to find so atrocious.

However, interestingly enough, one questions whether it is immoral to dehumanize that which is not human. Obviously reading Never Let Me Go, one is swayed to the side of the humane argument, but I always like to question the popular readings. Dehumanizing is only a bad thing when it applies to humans, it seems. We treat our horses and cattle quite nicely, but we still use them as tools and if there were one who resisted doing its job, we'd consider it a bad horse/cow and probably just off the blasted thing.

But because it looks, smells, and sounds like a human, it's a human? I dunno... It just raises the question: How human-like does something need to be in order to be considered human? Is it a gradient, as in: the more human something is, the less mean we can be towards it. Or is it black and white: human or non-human, nothing between.

And can anything other than a natural, biologically-conceived human being be considered human? I don't know! I guess that's probably about the point of this class haha.

Oh life.

So I'll admit I'm not completely done with the novel yet, as I have had a ridiculous amount of extra work to complete this week, but I have read enough of the second half to be able to ask this question:

Why are humans so afraid of anything alien to us? I mean, in the case of Dawn, the alien things are actually aliens, but the fact is that human beings are always afraid of the unknown.

Dawn shows us that fear in a most brilliant high noon, but it's not the only novel. In fact, I believe this to be a very major theme of the novel- substituting 'something alien' for actual aliens. Human beings fear what they do not know, and this novel uses a metaphorical replacement to prove this.

But we are afraid of all sorts of things that we don't know. Death is obvious-- we have no idea what comes thereafter. Public speaking-- ranked higher than death on a national fear list-- I'd assume because there's no way out and therefore the unknown circumstances such as whether or not you'll forget what you're talking about halfway through your speech can rustle through your brain and paralyze you. Also things like spiders: I mean they're creepy, yeah, but I think the genesis of that fear is that they are so ridiculously different from humans. About the only thing we share is the idea of legs, but other than that they are basically aliens to us.

One can explain fear in an evolutionary sense-- we have developed the capability to fear as it is necessary to avoid extinction. Fearing death seems a pretty good thing if a species doesn't want to, you know, die and stuff. But why aliens? Why public speaking? Why spiders? Why is the genesis the unknown as opposed, simply, to death? It seems that we should fear things that might cause death, but instead death is one of the symptoms of an even deeper fear. This seems counter-intuitive.

Dawn shows that fear pretty creatively, and I think the answer is this: We humans don't crave survival anymore-- maybe we've moved beyond that-- now we crave comfort, and far too often we have found the unknown to result in discomfort, and therefore we have recently developed an inherent fear of the unknown. That's my thesis, and I think Dawn supports said theory.

So I just realized that this was going to be late. I typed it up yesterday but decided to wait until today to post it. Why, I will never know, but either way... Here it is... Late but still in.

I just finished reading this passage by Spillers, and I think the best way to summarize my feelings about it are: this stuff is messed up (with maybe a few synonymous words thrown in here and there). This passage reminds me of a direct conflict with what I observe as the object of sexuality, as well as its advantages and disadvantages.

For instance, between two completely free individuals, as long as sexual relations are consensual, nothing should be morally outrageous, from my vantage point, about the two gettin' it on. Not that it's always going to end well, but if both consent freely and knowingly, and neither is subject to trickery, there's nothing wrong with it.

As this passage points out, however, there are many a case, especially in our own country's history, where one party was not completely free. I'd even go so far as to say that if a slave and slave-owner loved each-other, and their relations were both completely romantic and everything... Hell, even if the two got hitched beforehand, the conditions under which the feelings for one-another had their genesis were anything but free. I'd venture to say that this is just an extraordinarily skewed, yet still quite definite branch of rape.

And this brings me to the thought that I had just after finishing the paper: is there any society where no enslavement exists? Well the obvious answer to this is NO. We are, I'd argue to some degree for our own benefit, enslaved by customs, laws, jobs, the physical and sociological nature of being humans; does this mean that all sex is essentially rape?

I mean look at it this way (this is going to be a terribly cliche example, but it highlights my point). Take the example of a woman having sex with a very rich and powerful man, given that she would not have done so if he were anything but a rich and powerful man. Or even if the fact that he is a rich and powerful man causes her to fall in-love with him-- you could argue that she was initially 'in it for the money,' but discovered feelings for him along the way. Isn't this, essentially, the same example as above, with the slave and the slaveholder? Of course, my example has some chauvinistic underpinnings simply due to the extreme cliche-ness of the anecdote, but I think you catch my drift.

The fact is that slavery itself needs to be evaluated if this essay is going to have any merit to speak of.

And that's my take.

(once again, sorry this was late)

So this blog post is going to be about 45 minutes late due to that long, ineffective, and tediously disappointing awards ceremony last night that I know at least two others from this class attended. Can I say how embarrassing it is to realize that an organization comprised exclusively of top scholastic performers at a top U.S. University is unable to organize something as simple as an alphabetical filing of no more than 350 of its new members? GAH! I wanted to run for E-Board just so that I could make next year’s ceremony worthwhile. Not to offend anyone but it was just very frustrating and this is a great place to vent 

Anyways, I read the first few chapters of Never Let Me Go the other night and a few today. I have a couple more to finish after this entry, so I’m not quite finished with the assignment yet. I want to spend the first half of my post thinking out loud about the chapters that I have read. It’s interesting to see the development of inter-personal relationships between the children in Kathy’s flashback. I really like how even in a society that seems slightly distant from our own, many of the same problems persist. This is very much the same in BNW as well as WotEoT—in Huxley, people still struggle with prejudice against individuality, and even despite their intense conditioning, they still have slight occasional difficulties conforming to the norm. The same thing appears in the Ishiguro, as can be obviously pointed out through the trials and tribulations of Tommy.

I also find it interesting how the idea of sports never seems to be far away from the act of ostracizing. I have personal experience of being an outsider in a culture driven by sports—Tommy, on the other hand, seems to be the outsider in a culture driven by creativity and artistry. But in both cases—mine and Tommy’s—sports play a pivotal role: Tommy is superior to the others in sports, but is not allowed to play with the other children because they do not like him. I just think it is interesting that even in a world that seems alien to ours, similar themes persist.

For a little bit of my blog I’d also like to discuss Battlestar Galactica. I must admit, I have been obsessively watching Season 1 since having seen the miniseries, because it is so fracking awesome. Anyways, as I watch the title credits, I notice how much I am reminded in the picture of the fleet of spaceships moving slowly through some interstellar cloud of the old pictures of the Trail of Tears. There is an obvious parallel here: one technologically dominant group forcing an entire inferior group out of their home and causing a great deal of them to die along the way—but it is interesting to think that the inferior race in this case, in essence, caused their own destruction. This isn’t quite parallel to the Trail of Tears historical example, but it is interesting nonetheless.

Anyways, yeah.

This post has two parts. The first part is how I didn't really care for this novel.

I mean, it was certainly interesting. It was a pleasurable read, and I was enticed to the end. But I didn't really take to it very well. Everyone in-class gave me this sense that BNW is this fantastic work of literary art unparalleled by any other, but I didn’t really find it to be all that exciting.

My largest complaint, by far, is the story. There was very little story to it. I mean who is the protagonist here—Bernard or the Savage? I severely dislike both of them, so I hope I’m wrong and I’m forgetting the real main guy here but I can’t, for the life of me, determine who it could be.

The story was lacking in a set protagonist as well as a substantial plot. Seriously, what happened? Nothing. A couple went to a savage reservation, picked up some guy who happens to have every work by Shakespeare memorized, and then the guy complains a lot and ends up killing himself. I mean it’s cool and all (I like Shakespeare as much as the next drama enthusiast), but that doesn’t make for a really substantial plot. Something’s got to happen, in my opinion. Something has got to try to oppress the Savage, and he must overcome.

That’s my final complaint: the Savage doesn’t overcome jack shit, he just instills in himself a sense of deprivation. In none of the stories that the Savage recounts does the person who suffers trials rejoice in the suffering of trials. The trials come because they have to come, and the person goes through it. It’s not like Romeo and Juliet wouldn’t choose to be able to grow up and marry each-other and live out their lives happily if they could; what makes the story riveting and their suffering beautiful is that they had to suffer, and willingly did. That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have it any other way.

And this brings me to the second part of my post: what I’m thinking about for my essay.

I really want to write about the aforementioned wrongness of the Savage. He’s ridiculous. The beauty in self-sacrifice doesn’t come simply in self-sacrifice, it comes in attaching oneself to an ideal or a person despite the self-sacrifice that one will have to go through. I mean, I think the future of Huxley’s novel is a dystopia without question, but the solution isn’t in this engorged sense of the necessity of the deprivation of happiness that the Savage presumes.

I guess I’ll have to think a little bit more about the novel and about Freud and all that jazz because I still have no idea how to logically tie all of this together, but now that I have had the book shelved for a few days and am revisiting it, I must say that overall, I just didn’t love it. Yep.

I finished the novel on Saturday night... Although a more accurate time would be very early Sunday morning. It was quite a reading sprint, and I cannot say I enjoyed every single minute, but overall the novel was a good read. I would like to take this particular opportunity to rant... I mean to reflect upon the ending.

First of all, when did novelists decide that ambiguous endings were the way to go? I mean, I’m not talking like Harry Potter ambiguous where the rest of the kid’s life isn’t spelled out, but why is it that a writer assumes that we’re on board without some closure just for closure’s sake? I get it: they found out that she did it, and she got sent to a mental institution where she lived for the rest of her life, and died. But would it really have been difficult to insert this little sentence:
“The day after the investigation, Connie was taken to Rockover, where she lived out her days in peace”?

Now that I’ve gotten my frustration out, I’d like to point to one aspect that I brought up in my tutorial today: why did Dr. Morgan and Miss Moynihan live, while the others died? Obviously there is some significance in that six people were intended to be killed, but only four were killed. And I’m betting it has something to do with the manner in which they escaped their death. Dr. Morgan was cutting down on his coffee, and Miss Moynihan was sick in the bathroom. What kind of epic, deep significance does this have? I’ll be damned if I know, but it’d be an interesting topic for an essay.

As far as the overall message of the ending is concerned—i.e. Connie sacrificed herself to do what she could in the war against mind control and all of that—I think it was actually quite well-done. I wouldn’t say that it was the best ending, because Connie is left alive and then the question remains as to whether or not she can still visit Luciente, and if so, then she’s still, in some sense, an active participant in the war. Not to mention that Rockover is likely no more inescapable than her previous two places of incarceration, and thus there’s no reason why she couldn’t hatch a plan to escape there. But I think overall it’s alright, and who am I to tell a storyteller how their story should end?