Due to circumstances beyond your control, you are master of your fate and captain of your soul.

I’ve been thinking a lot of late (somewhat facilitated by my ENGL 250H prof) about the whole concept of naturalist characters and realist characters. There seems to be this notion I keep encountering that the reality represented in literature is somehow very different from the reality we encounter on a daily basis that I have heard referred to as the “waking world”. I don’t really buy into this concept myself, as I don’t see where the author would gather the basis for the reality reflected in his literature if not from the world around him. This whole “inner struggle” that intellectuals seem to perceive the average individual going through of whether they have “agency” or not, and if so, to what extent, is mostly a complete load of BS. Hegemony being at the root of all of one’s problems is simply not feasible, because hegemony defines your problems. I am not saying that no one has the ability to make decisions outside of what society wants for them. What I am saying, is that no one has the ability to make decisions completely isolated from the expectations of society in the same way that no human can imitate true randomness. Every decision made by an individual is the result of a choice to either conform to or rebel against society. The same is true in literature. We are not capable of creating a world complete unlike the one in which we live. The way in which we interpret a link between ideas is not by a measure of similarity, but rather by a measure of dissimilarity. If one world is completely opposite the one in which we live, they must be linked, for it cannot be by random chance that this came about. It came about by direct and binary opposition to the world with which it is proclaimed to be “unlinked.” For this reason, the whole distinction between realism and naturalism is hypothetical at best. We are victims of societal pressure, yet we have the ability to rebel against society’s norms. We simply will choose not to unless it meshes with our society-driven preconceptions of what we do and do not want others to think of us.

~ by fighterjock on 19 March 2008.