Alice Thomsen

on the wrong side of sunrise

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Dissonance, Part III: order in disorder

June 3, 2012 / / 3 Comments

[part i]
[part ii]

Lately I have had Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night on the brain. I’ve talked about Festinger and Carlsmith’s tedium, Milgram’s volts … but not much about the book itself. So let’s move on to Das Reich der Zwei: the nation of two.

Some background, and my apologies if I mess up any details—I’m away from home at the moment, without my copy of the book, but I wanted to write this now:

Howard W. Campbell Jr. is born in the United States but spends most of his early life in Germany. He marries a German woman, Helga Noth, daughter of a police chief. He is a playwright; she, the lead actress in many productions. Together, they make up what he calls das Reich der Zwei. Together, they occupy a space uniquely theirs, sovereign and autonomous and separate from the rest of the world. Together, even as Germany descends into war and Howard becomes involved in the transmission of coded messages to US forces, they exist in a solitary, untouchable peace.

Observe a special sort of couple for any amount of time, and das Reich der Zwei becomes apparent. Between them, a culture will have developed. In a chaotic, dissonant world, they will have their own resonance. Their own lexicon and idioms and speech patterns, their own legends and mythologies, their own traditions and celebrations and solemn observances of tragedy. Try to make a home in their Reich der Zwei, and you will never move beyond resident alien status, will never be able to fully assimilate.

Such is the nature of the nation of two.

Helga meets an untimely end. Das Reich der Zwei crumbles. Howard is left at the mercy of other nations—Germany, the United States, Israel—snapping like hungry wolves for meat fresh from his bones.

Trying to emigrate from the nation of two, though, is as successful as trying to immigrate to it. That culture becomes part of you, and although you may adopt different customs, come to appreciate foreign cuisine and find the new language coming more and more easily, your heart will always belong to your nation of two.

Somehow, knowing that ein Reich like yours could exist makes it all the more difficult to survive in the bigger, noisier, messier world.

This is why, before the novel’s outset, Vonnegut says, “And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It’s good for you.”

Dissonance, Part II: shocking revelations

May 31, 2012 / / 0 Comments

As previously mentioned, I recently read Kurt Vonnegut’s early novel, Mother Night. Protagonist Howard W. Campbell Jr. writes his memoirs for the Haifa Institute, awaiting his trial for war crimes committed while serving as an American spy, producing Nazi propaganda.

The Nazi story is an unsettling one. Howard confesses, when pressed, that if Germany had won the war, he would likely have gone along with it, American spy or no, and this is an unfortunate truth many of us would rather not face. We like to think we are secure in our values and moralities, that we are unaffected by situational factors.

A defense used over and over again was this: “I was just following orders.” How could so many people “just follow orders” to commit such atrocities? One theory, particularly popular with Americans, was the Culture and Personality Theory: essentially, traits inherent to the German culture fostered in the German people an “authoritarian personality,” meaning they were naturally predisposed to “just follow orders.” The appeal of this explanation is, of course, that Americans would never do that, because our culture fosters independence and free thought. A competing theory, Situational Theory, posited that situational factors (e.g., Germany’s humiliating defeat in World War I and the ensuing depression combined with Hitler’s charisma, nationalism, and success) positioned people for that sort of obedience. The implications of this are much less comforting: what happened in Germany could happen anywhere, to anyone, given the right conditions.

In 1961, when the trials of Nazi war criminals were just beginning, Stanley Milgram devised a now-infamous experiment. He recruited subjects for what he called a study on learning. Subjects were taken into a room and told that they were to be the “teacher,” and on the other side of the wall was another subject, the “student”; the teacher would ask the student a question, and when the student answered incorrectly, the teacher was instructed to deliver a shock of increasing severity.

The settings on the device used for shocks were marked, ranging from mild to extremely dangerous, 450V. Inevitably, the students got questions wrong, and the teachers delivered the prescribed shocks. As the voltage got higher, though, students became distraught, eventually begging the teachers to stop, crying, and finally going silent. Whenever the teachers showed signs of hesitation, though, the researcher instructed them to continue. Sixty-five percent of participants administered the maximum shock.

The students were actually actors, and no real shocks were given. Milgram’s results, though, support the Situational Theory over the Culture and Personality Theory. His subjects were normal members of American society, but they “just followed orders” and did things most of us would consider unacceptable.

(There are many criticisms of Milgram’s study, and he is largely responsible for the heightened standards of the Human Subjects Review Committee for ethics, including the addition of an informed consent making subjects explicitly aware that they can stop participating at any time. The results may be imperfect, but they are still troubling.)

So what does this mean for Howard W. Campbell Jr., Nazi propagandist and American agent, known for fraternizing with Eichmann and openly condemning the United States and its Jewish overlords? What does it mean for the other war criminals awaiting trial? What does it mean for me, as a reader, on the opposite side of those pages?

We are not so different as we would like to think.

[to be continued]

Dissonance, Part I: it’s good for you.

May 19, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Dissonance does funny things to people.

In 1959, Festinger and Carlsmith set people at a tedious, seemingly pointless task for an hour. After the task was finished, some of the participants were sent on their way; the others were asked to do a favor: go to the waiting room and tell the next “participants” (actors) that the task was interesting. Half these people were offered $20 (~$150 today), and the other half were offered $1 (~$7.50). When asked to rate their own response to the task, participants given $1 tended to call it more interesting than those given $20.

Here’s the explanation posed by Festinger and Carlsmith.

The task was boring. One would be hard-pressed to see it otherwise. But the participants told others that it wasn’t. The ones given $20 could use that money as solid justification, could tell themselves, “I said that because hey—$20!” The others, though, had only a dollar’s excuse. So, they reasoned, since the incentive wasn’t that great, there must’ve been more than that behind their claim that the task was interesting—for instance, maybe the task actually was interesting. If it hadn’t been, after all, why would they have said so for just a dollar?

We want to align things in our minds. When a few dissonant notes are struck, we want them to resolve into a major chord. Sometimes that means changing our circumstances—e.g., if I start reading a book and dislike it, I can stop. Other times, though, that means changing our perspectives.

I recently read Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. The introduction begins …

This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don’t think it’s a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

… and concludes …

There’s another clear moral to this tale, now that I think about it: When you’re dead you’re dead.

And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It’s good for you.

Vonnegut is known for his irreverence and the ubiquitous so it goes, but also—maybe most—for his dark humor. Jessica Hagy expresses it well:

by Jessica Hagy

Vonnegut, I would suggest, thrives on dissonance.

[to be continued]

Relationship Status: writing on Sternberg’s triangle

April 12, 2012 / / 0 Comments

In the fall I took a psychology of human sexuality course with Dr. Pamela Landau. Thus far, it’s the best class I’ve had here, and I came out with a very different perspective on people, relationships, and myself—and an inability to see the Simplex-brand exercise equipment in my neighborhood fitness center without thinking of herpes. Part way through the term, we discussed Robert Sternberg’s triarchic theory of love. It’s based on a triangle:

Each point represents an aspect of love—intimacy, passion, and commitment—as well as the form of love associated with only that aspect; each leg represents a combination of the forms at its ends, and in the center is the blend of all three.

I say I’m between projects right now, but that’s not quite right. I’m between projects with which I’m in consummate love. Here’s a sampling of what I do have:

1. A fully-drafted novel. I completed the first draft in December of 2010 and got about two-thirds of the way through a first heavy revision before becoming distracted by life (a poor excuse, I know). I would say this project and I have a romantic relationship: I feel close to it, and I care about it … but I haven’t committed, and I don’t know if I can.

2. A partially-drafted novel. I started this one more recently and got maybe a third of the way through. It’s hard to say, though, because I never developed a good sense of the thing as a whole—which I suspect is why I drifted away from it. This I think would fall under infatuation, because it’s a project I was excited about and, if I returned to it, could see myself being excited about again. But I don’t have that level of intimacy yet, and I haven’t even committed a full draft to (digital) paper.

3. A partial short story. I don’t know where it’s going, and although I started strong, now every time I open the document, I plod along through a few half-hearted paragraphs before becoming bored. Still, it’s what I’ve been working on, so I keep working on it. This is clearly empty love—lacking intimacy and passion, at this point little more than a way to be writing something.

4. A concept for a story about an android with an autocorrect function. This seems to me like fatuous love, because I’ve held onto the idea for a while and I find it enjoyable … but I haven’t gone any deeper than that conceptual surface level.

5. A draft of a short story. It’s drawn very heavily from my own life, so there’s a great deal of intimacy, but I think all there is to our writer-writing relationship is liking. I look at it and consider revising it but feel no particular drive to, and I don’t picture myself going anywhere with it.

In life, a relationship drifts around in the triangle as the dynamic changes. The writer Edith Wharton speaks to the writer-writing relationship drift when she says, “What is writing a novel like? 1. The beginning: A ride through a spring wood. 2. The middle: The Gobi Desert. 3. The end: A night with a lover.” (She goes on to add, “I am now in the Gobi Desert.”) I see the same thing in my own writing, and I worry about being dissuaded by Gobi fatigue.

Perhaps what I need to do right now is to take some time to examine myself as a writer. Writing without having more deliberate intentions seems sort of like wandering into the Gobi Desert, blindfolded and wearing impractical heels. If writing is building a relationship, I ought to treat it with the same care I would any other relationship.

Or, perhaps, even more.

Young Adults: what we talk about when we talk about genre

April 10, 2012 / / 0 Comments

A writer friend and I were discussing a series of books I am in the process of reading, one with which he is largely unfamiliar. He suggested I consider contacting the author, because we’re working in a similar young adult genre.

I don’t consider myself a young adult writer, outside the fact that I am an adult who is still on the young side who, on occasion, acts in the manner of a writer, and I certainly don’t think of those books as young adult books. I told him the latter.

“Too much sex and drugs and violence.”

“Young adults love those things,” he countered, which I suppose is often true.

When I was in the “young adult” demographic, which I’m going to call roughly 12–16, I was reading some thinner books about characters my age, going to school and experiencing adolescence … but I was also reading chunky Stephen King books about bondage play gone wrong and a modern forensic scientist’s examination of classic cold cases. (I recall a revision of the Lizzie Borden rhyme: “An unknown subject took a hatchet and gave Lizzie Borden’s stepmother nineteen whacks. Ninety minutes after that deed was done, he or she gave Borden’s father ten plus one.”) I may not have been the average reader, but I don’t think I was outside the normal range.

And yet not long ago, when I saw a girl who looked to be in her early teens reading It, I gawked and wondered, condescendingly, what she was doing with a book like that.

Expressly young adult fiction has come under criticism recently for its sometimes edgy content. Last summer, Meghan Cox Gurdon wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal, remarking that

Pathologies that went undescribed in print 40 years ago, that were still only sparingly outlined a generation ago, are now spelled out in stomach-clenching detail. Profanity that would get a song or movie branded with a parental warning is, in young-adult novels, so commonplace that most reviewers do not even remark upon it.

Some people (according to the WSJ opinion poll, a little over 10%) agreed with her condemnation of such books, or at least sympathized with her concerns, but many others took issue with the assertions. The author of several young adult works with heavy material, Sherman Alexie responded a few days later, saying:

And now I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don’t write to protect them. It’s far too late for that. I write to give them weapons—in the form of words and ideas—that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.

If there’s one thing to take from the success of the Twilight books across age groups, it’s that the young adult genre and the young adult reader are not a monogamous pairing. Somewhere, there’s a twelve-year-old girl with Thomas Harris on her nightstand and a budding fascination with the charming sociopath, and in another room, her mother is following one of Laurie Halse Anderson’s high school heroines. Books, and readers, can be promiscuous.

It’s interesting what we’re really talking about when we talk about genre labels. When we argue about whether or not The Handmaid’s Tale is science-fiction, we’re often also, below the surface, debating the literary legitimacy of science-fiction as a genre. When we comment on the hypersexual heroines of much urban fantasy, we’re also discussing what it means to be a sexual being today. And I don’t think we can separate worry about the darkness in young adult fiction from worry about the darkness that exists in the world young adults are on the cusp of joining.

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