Fiction, Reality, and Nihilism – Part II

by Jasper Gilley

Since writing the last post, I have realized that music videos are perhaps the best example of just absurdly blatant emotional non-ambiguity. Watch, for example, the music video for Taylor Swift’s You Belong With Me: it’s a fantastic video, in my opinion, but it’s incredibly emotionally non-ambiguous.

Anyway, since the last post, Fiction, Reality, and Nihilism (which can now be retroactively labeled as Fiction, Reality, and Nihilism – Part I), I’ve had some more thoughts on the same subject. To start with, a few loose ends.

I realized that dreams, especially of the deep REM sleep sort, are almost without exception emotionally non-ambiguous. Even if it’s not a dream about anything that in your waking life you’d consider emotionally non-ambiguous, your experience during the dream is reliably anything but nihilistic. I honestly have no idea why this would be the case – is it just a recharging mechanism, or a hint at the broader neurochemical structure and meaning of dreams? Considering the fact that we have almost no idea why dreams occur or how they work, (or what they were doing, to paraphrase Stonehenge from Spinal Tap), I don’t know if anyone is really qualified to speak to this.

Secondly, I think that the emotional non-ambiguity of novels in particular, and of fiction more generally, is related to what I consider to be a fallacy regarding the rationale for consumption of fiction. I was in a class about a week ago, when the professor, a reasonably famous literary critic, suggested that the reason one should read realist novels such as Anna Karenina is to gain experience looking at the world through different human lenses, thus becoming a wiser human. I agree with this idea, but is it really justifiable to claim that this is the only, or even the pre-eminent reason, one should read novels? I think not: for this argument really only applies well to  realist works like those by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and not as well to absurdist or surrealist works such as Waiting for Godot, Don Quixote, or The Phantom Tollbooth (which happens to be one of my favorite books.) Does reading The Lord of the Rings really give you life experience? I’d argue that a large part of the value of a book derives not from its practical applications, but from its intrinsic emotional non-ambiguity. To humanities scholars, who represent a discipline currently in a bit of an existential crisis, this might seem a less compelling argument, but I think modifying the rationale for the humanities to fit a more essentially utility-maximizing STEM-y framework destroys some of the humanities’ value. We established in the last post that telling emotionally non-ambiguous stories through book, music, or art appears to be one of the most basic human needs. I think the humanities exist simply to fulfill that need, not to necessarily help us in real life.

To illustrate this point, I will point to the TV show The Office. Of TV shows that have aired in recent memory, I think it’s probably the closest in artistic approach to the realist novels. For it is a show about essentially lifelike characters in a humdrum office in a humdrum town doing a humdrum job. All of the episodes center around essentially mundane scenarios that would be very likely to occur in real life. I think one of the big giveaways is that the show has no background music, so that when something mundane happens, you’re not told how to feel about it – just like in real life. The very lifelike nature of the show is, I think, why some people (such as my mom) “just don’t get it.” If you only watch a bit, it can seem entirely emotionally ambiguous, and who would consume emotionally ambiguous fiction?

I think the brilliance of the show, though, resides in its ability to generate emotional non-ambiguity out of realistic scenarios. This allows for greater subtlety than the show would be allowed if the viewer’s disbelief had to be more strongly suspended. Also, The Office’s lack of an obvious intended emotional state heightens its subjectivity, another essential ingredient in subtle art. For these reasons, I argue that anthropologists of the year 3000 will watch The Office both as a tool for learning what life was like in the year 2010 and as a tool for gaining entrance to the psyche of people in 2010.

This also gets into the difference between abstract and representational art. Both are (or should be) emotionally non-ambiguous, with their only difference being the amount left up to the interpretation of the observer. It’s not remotely obvious, for example, how a Jackson Pollock piece is supposed to make you feel, whereas one can discern instantly what reaction cheap art like Thomas Kinkade’s is supposed to elicit from you. To be fair, it’s not at all obvious how the Mona Lisa is supposed to make you feel, even if it’s not technically abstract art. So perhaps the distinction between abstract and representational is almost synonymous with the distinction between good and bad art – and perhaps it would be more accurate to consider the Mona Lisa a form of abstract art.

Finally, on the post Fiction, Reality, and Nihilism [Part I], an astute commenter commented:

Isn’t nihilism when you think life has no meaning? Just because something is emotionally ambiguous doesn’t mean it does not have meaning. One could say that it is existentialist in that you can make your own meaning from the ambiguity. Isn’t it even more meaningful when you choose what the meaning is rather than have it on a silver platter?

It seems that an important question is whether or not the terms “meaning” and “emotional ambiguity” (or lack thereof) are synonymous. As a thought experiment, consider what one might mean when one says one’s life has meaning. For a very blanket example, consider the stereotypical millennial who decides that their meaning in life is to follow their passion (whatever their passion might be.) Then this millennial’s meaning is their passion. But “passion” is a very emotionally charged word, to the extent that one might as well define it as “that which one perceives as emotionally non-ambiguous.” A musician’s passion, for instance, is the music, the whole point of which is to be emotionally non-ambiguous. So for all intents and purposes, “meaning” is the same thing as “emotional non-ambiguity.”

So a definition of nihilism as “the belief that life has no meaning” is essentially the same thing as “the belief that life is emotionally ambiguous.” Analogously, existentialism might be alternately defined as the belief that humans must choose their own means of viewing the world in an emotionally non-ambiguous fashion. Of course, if the world is fundamentally emotionally ambiguous*, this makes no sense. But since perception is the intermediary between humans and the world, if one chooses to view the world in an emotionally non-ambiguous fashion, can it really be said to be emotionally ambiguous?

Maybe so. It depends on how completely one can enforce the dogma of emotional non-ambiguity. Perhaps the important thing is not that one actually believes the world to be emotionally non-ambiguous, but that one strives to believe as much.

This is a very Nietzschean conclusion, but I’m not sure I agree with it. Honestly, I have no idea where this post went. It didn’t really answer any questions, but maybe the point of thinking about these kinds of things isn’t to generate answers but to raise questions.

*Emotion is a very anthropogenic construct. Why would the universe have any non-anthropogenic emotional bias?