@thesublemon I was thinking about your post on narrative vs. speculative vs. metaphorical fiction after watching Never Let Me Go the other day.

I had been surprised by how much I loved the metaphorical aspect of Never Let Me Go, given that I usually can’t stand metaphorical spec-fic.  And indeed, parts of it had the quality I usually dislike – actions that make no sense in literal terms, only metaphorical ones, which jars the viewer away from the characters and makes the story itself seem like mere disposal packaging for a nonfictional payload.

(I’m thinking of the way that the characters jumped back and forth between discounting certain rumors as idle talk and believing in them fervently – although I told myself “maybe this makes more sense in the book, which I haven’t read,” and that may be how I tolerated it as well as I did.)

But what’s great about Never Let Me Go (at least the movie, again, haven’t read the book) is that it uses a particular type of metaphor that is unusually supple and non-strained.

In an ordinary metaphorical work, we have a fictional situation and its real analogue, and the two are very distinct things – not “near” one another in conceptual space.  You can’t “continuously deform” one into the other; instead there is this discontinuous leap of thought that maps one onto the other, and often this leaves individual details lacking clear analogues, or with awkward unintentional analogues, etc.  If you do a good science-fiction-writer’s job of depicting aliens (so that they aren’t just humans with funny ears), and then say “the way the humans treat the aliens is like the way colonists treat colonized peoples” (or whatever), you’ll have the problem that the aliens simply aren’t people and so certain details will transfer over badly.

But (trying to avoid spoilers) there is another sort of metaphor, the sort used in Never Let Me Go, which just exaggerates certain features of the real situation to create a situation that is superficially very different, and then argues that the exaggeration didn’t really change anything fundamental and the two situations are somehow deeply the same.  This is much more graceful for a number of reasons.

Unlike the other sort of metaphor, which just postulates a mapping between two things and asks you to accept it, this kind of metaphor makes an argument: this particular mapping has been chosen for a reason, because the two things are close enough in conceptual space that you can imagine “deforming” or “dilating” one into the other, and ask yourself, “if things fundamentally change during that deformation process, where exactly does the change happen?  if I can’t say where things ‘flip’ along the way, perhaps they don’t flip at all?”  And the metaphor feels truly illuminating about the real situation in a way the other kind does not, because the “deformed” version has a real claim to being a new perspective on the same thing, rather than another thing that happens to look like it if you squint the right way (and which, if you squint another way, doesn’t look like it at all).

napoleonchingon:

The other thing in relation to how the artist deals with becoming a celebrity and whether celebrity-dom is from then on the only legitimate topic for that celebrity, and whether hedonism is the only authentic choice is that this has been a long dialectic conversation in rap music since forever. Some, like Jay-Z present hedonism as the only culturally authentic choice and as a culmination of the struggle:

Got critics saying “he’s money cash hoes”
I’m from the hood, stupid, what type of facts are those?
If you grew up with holes in your zapatos
You’d celebrate the minute you was having dough

Or, as Biggie said put it even more succinctly in the greatest rap song of all time

Damn right I like the life I live
‘Cause I went from negative to positive

But while it may be the authentic choice for the artist, the only way it could be interesting to the audience is out of envy and that’s not a lot to build on. Gift of Gab satirized a rapper who suddenly finds success:

He’s a Big Willie now, rappin’ bout cars
Thousand dollar shopping sprees, hanging out with stars

And what’s the result? At the end of the song, Gift of Gab sums up:

Now the moral of the story is that some go
“Why would money make the inner vision crumble?”
So if you’re blessed with the talent, utilize it to the fullest
Stay true to yourself and stay humble

Of course in the dialectic, where we have a thesis and antithesis, we have a synthesis, the “self-aware” celebrity. The ones that take the trappings of celebrity, but hate themselves for it. This DFW in the rap world is of course Kanye:

First nigga with a Benz and a backpack
Ice chains Cartier lens and a knapsack
Always said if I rap, I’d say something significant
But now I’m talking ‘bout money hoes and rings again

And, given the two ways it could go from there, I kind of prefer Kanye’s gradual slide into full-on embrace of hedonism

I get it custom
You a customer
You ain’t accustomed to going through customs you ain’t been nowhere

Even if it leads to shit like”I AM A GOD” with its

In a French-ass restaurant
Hurry up with my damn croissants

to letting the self-hatred eat at you from within and then killing yourself. But like neither is the best choice.

napoleonchingon:

I’ve written about this several times before, but one point of “Common People” is that if you’re a rich wanker, the honest thing to do is to max up the rich wankerdom. It’s more authentic that way.

But authenticity isn’t actually admirable in itself. I’m fucking happy that Leonard Cohen transmuted his celebrity-hedonist experience into Chelsea Hotel №2 and not whatever is the folk equivalent of It’s All About the Benjamins.

napoleonchingon:

Thinking of @nostalgebraist‘s essay on Bret Easton Ellis and the attitudes towards trappings of celebrity among the literary elite, is that, while there’s a lot going on in that essay, my instinctive reply on BEE himself is that, yes, maybe Bret Easton Ellis is necessary in that ecosystem and if you’re a rich wanker admitting that you’re a rich wanker and just playing it for all it’s worth is in some sense more honest, but that doesn’t mean we have to like him or read his books. 

The thing about the hedonistic celebrity life is that it’s a lot easier to like its avatars after the fact. Witness the redemption of Noel Gallagher, or this (wonderful) Tom Breihan essay on Puff Daddy. Retro-hedonism seems kind of cute and you start thinking, “Hey, they had their moment, and can you really blame them for taking advantage of it to revel in stupid celebrity-ism?” And that’s true. But that forgiveness somehow extends to the product, and that is only there because the actual product has got the film of nostalgia on it. Puff Daddy’s music was inescapable and crappy, and it’s 100% on him. Celebrity being the theme of celebrities may be more honest, but it’s not relevant to me, so its honesty is no virtue if it sucks. My opinion on Bret Easton Ellis is exactly the same.

Jan van Mill has described βN as a ‘three headed monster’ — the three heads being a smiling and friendly head (the behaviour under the assumption of the continuum hypothesis), the ugly head of independence which constantly tries to confuse you (determining what behaviour is possible in different models of set theory), and the third head is the smallest of all (what you can prove about it in ZFC).