Comment by ceilingcorner
5 years ago
I just read the original article after reading this link.
This situation is a perfect microcosm of how the media / contemporary culture at large will take a very human situation with complex personalities and shape it to fit the ideological narrative. The actual story (this link) is nuanced and filled with insights on modern dating culture, while the semifictional New Yorker piece is pretty one-dimensional.
As far as I’m concerned, the only villain here is the author of Cat Person. She apparently got a million dollar book deal out of it, while Charles had his reputation ruined and “died suddenly” which sounds like code for suicide to me. The author of this Slate article even seems to be gaslighting herself into thinking the fictional piece was more true than her real experience.
I grew to hate literature for its inaccurate representation of reality that shapes and skews imagination of the readers and makes it aligned with one persons grim fantasy.
People internalize that children left alone will reanact Lord of the flies and people reading this will internalize that every relation with significant age difference is an abusive relation filled with negative emotions and dynamics.
Literature is not one-dimensioned like that.
I think it's more of a rule than an exception. What makes a creation attractive is mixture of percieved veracity with addition of some oddity. So the most popular works of fiction mix some pretty accurate descriptions of reality with the oddity comming from the authors imagination. As such it attracts the reader with the promise of learning the truth about the world but instead it moves them away from the reality towards specific authors fantasies that are weird or gross enough to be interesting. What's more it draws more strongly the people who already share the same skew as the author and draws them even further from accurate understanding of reality.
Cat Person is great illustration of this, where it borrows endearing details from true healthy relationship but then serves the reader the image of exploitative and abusive, repulsive older partner. Furthering prejudices some readers already had and pushing them further away from accurate description of reality which is really varied as the relationship that was basis of this story shows.
Sometimes even though there's no repulsion, exploitation or abuse and older man just gets abandoned as the young girl finds new friends and there's just mature moving on without any abuse or retibution.
2 replies →
> “died suddenly” which sounds like code for suicide to me.
That's a pretty big assumption.
You have no idea why or how Charles died. The only thing you know is it was sudden. There are plenty of non-suicide reasons that young(ish) people die suddenly such as being in some kind of accident or, as happened to an old school friend of mine when we were in our 30s, one day his heart simply stopped beating. There are many others.
The respectful thing to do here is not to speculate on how or why Charles died: we don't know because the author has chosen not to tell us. Perhaps she doesn't know either. Not all families want to share this kind of information.
It's not a pretty big assumption. "Died suddenly" is frequently used to indicate that the individual died via drug overdose or suicide.
A person who was described as being very sensitive died quite soon after his reputation was (falsely) ruined among his social circle. I think it's pretty relevant to the situation.
It’s not new for writers to be inspired by real-life events or for stories to have broader messages or purposes. Calling this contemporary seems naive, as a part of this thing lately where people act as if for thousands of years we never criticized each other or did anything political until now.
But what do you think is the ideological narrative Cat Person aims to fit?
> But what do you think is the ideological narrative Cat Person aims to fit?
As they say, if you gotta ask what jazz is, you ain't never gonna know.
This story isn't really "inspired by real life events." It's a real story of a real person, sloppily modified to fit the zeitgeist's value system.
Can you elaborate on the “zeitgeist’s value system”? You keep accusing people of doing a thing and then not really defining that thing.