Fiction and A Description of a Condition

It has been a long time since I've written a post. I feel that with the last two posts I've written (the earlier, "Theory of Mind and the Big House", about my life, and the second, "The Problem-Solution Model of Fictions", about fiction)  I have said all I needed to say about both. I could just stop writing this blog now, having arrived at the inevitable final statement on each of these two subjects, and announce my life work completed. However, it is possible I have readers who would be disappointed if I just hung up my hat and allowed myself to slide into oblivion. In tonight's post I want to say something more about my theory of fictions and talk a little more about a particular type of 'mental illness'. The reason for continuing to write about these topics is that, when one has worked for years to solve a problem, to state the solution once is anticlimactic. You need to say it again and again for people to realise it is serious.

However, I wish to start this post with a brief discussion of Sam Harris, Bret Weinstein, and Jordan Peterson. I am interested in all three. I decided to subscribe to Sam Harris's podcast some time ago and it was a good decision to make. Harris seems no longer to be obsessed with attacking religion, especially Islam – he seems somehow more mature than he used to be. In a recent conversation with someone he even confessed to being agnostic about the survival of the soul after death. In a recent podcast, he discusses how people and society can continue to function without entertaining the illusion of free will. I do not believe Harris has successfully defended the ethical system he proposed and outlined in his book The Moral Landscape but his thinking about free will, his contention that the very concept of free will is incoherent, seems to me spot on. Harris employs an argument I have considered myself but never written about in this blog. Suppose we have a friend who we know to be outstandingly virtuous, of great integrity. Suppose we hear that this person has committed a crime, embezzled money or assaulted his wife. We might say that this is "out of character" and either choose not to believe the rumour or attempt to uncover attenuating circumstances. If, however, we believe that every person possesses free will, we cannot defend our friend by saying that his alleged crime was "out of character". If every person possesses free will, every person's action is, in principle, unpredictable. The alternative, the better option, is to suppose that no one has free will, that all persons possess characters, and that the particular character of a person determines his or her actions. I shall return to this argument I think in a later post.

Bret Weinstein is another member of the Intellectual Dark Web that I follow. Sometimes it is difficult to watch every Youtube clip he uploads because Weinstein, often together with his wife Heather Heying, produces so many. It seems a new one comes out every couple of days. I wonder if he risks overexposure? I do not agree with everything Bret says but always find him thought provoking. I wish now to single out a specific claim that Bret and Heather discuss in a recent clip because it is symptomatic of a deeper problem. Apparently, flora in the vicinity of a home is negatively correlated with diagnosed major depression or, to be more precise, with antidepressant prescriptions. In their discussion, Bret and Heather make a simple error. The mistake that Bret and Heather make is the same mistake most people make when thinking about mental illness statistics – the mistake of assuming that the diagnosis maps onto the prevalence of a condition exactly. This is untrue. Consider major depressive disorder. For all we know, more people suffered from this condition in the 1950s than do so currently because back then it went unrecognised and untreated. The term 'major depressive disorder' wasn't coined until the 1970s and wasn't included in the official psychiatric handbook until 1980. To take another example, the term autistic spectrum disorder is of relatively recent coinage and had the effect of moving a whole swath of people who might once have been described simply as eccentric into the ranks of the mentally ill. In their discussion, Bret and Heather seem to accept without demur the official statistic that women are more likely than men to suffer depression (Bret even suggests that higher rates of diagnosed depression among women is the result of male sexism), but it is possible that, in fact, more men suffer depression than women but aren't recorded in the official stats because they are less likely to ask for help, to seek treatment. In New Zealand more men than women kill themselves, and in fact mental health campaigners here in New Zealand have sought for years to destigmatise mental illness among men and to encourage men to confide their feelings in their mates. Bret and Heather do not even consider the possibility that men might be underrepresented because they are less likely to seek help. They do not consider the possibility that the stats don't tell the whole story.

Sometimes I like to think that Bret and Heather read this blog and so I would like to proffer some advice to them moving forward. They both claim to be left-wingers but spend most of their time critiquing the far-left, the woke fringe. It makes me wonder – in what way can they be said to be left wingers? I wonder if the success of the DarkHorse podcast depends on its appeal to conservatives as well as progressives, and this is why, apart from Bret occasionally referring darkly to 'rent seeking elites', neither Bret nor Heather lays his or her liberal beliefs on the table. What are their opinions on the specific issues that polarise people politically? For instance – do they think the minimum wage should be raised to fifteen dollars per hour? If Bret and Heather are indeed true progressives, they should stake out positions on the issues that differentiate the right from the left, demonstrate their progressive ideals by taking a left leaning stand. They should articulate their beliefs on the specific matters that earmark idealogical affiliation. I feel that they don't because they are afraid of alienating a chunk of their audience. While I am offering advice to Bret and Heather, I might make another suggestion – perhaps they could consider presenting an argument for the evolutionary adaptiveness of near-death experiences in their podcast? An argument occurs to me myself but I lack space in this post to lay it out. The margins aren't wide enough.

The final intellectual I wish to discuss is Jordan Peterson. I recently watched an interview between Weinstein and Peterson that I found fascinating and highly recommend. In the past I have been critical of Peterson but I wonder if the trauma he has experienced over the last several years has ameliorated his conservatism. I understand, from what I've read about it, that his latest book, Beyond Order, 12 More Rules for Life, is more liberal than its predecessor. I feel, and this is an inchoate intuition, that there is a connection between the Intellectual Dark Web and Donald Trump, in the sense that the Intellectual Dark Web was a kind of reaction not only to the Woke Left but also to Trump. The Woke Left came first and the Intellectual Dark Web sprang up in response, but I feel that the often acrimonious conflict within the Left during the last four years was a result of having Trump as president. Since Biden has been elected, I feel that the intensity has dialled back. Harris seems more relaxed, as do Bret and Heather. The debate began before Trump was elected but was amplified by having a narcissistic reactionary incompetent in charge. With a Democrat in the Oval Office, I hope that some civility can return to conversations among leftists. And I strongly suspect furthermore that Peterson is, deep down, more a Democrat than a Republican.

As promised in the introduction, I shall now turn to narrative theory, although, considering the typical concerns that occupy narrative theorists today, topics such as 'focalisation' and 'mimesis vs. diagesis', it might be better to say that I am interested in 'story theory' rather than 'narrative theory'. What makes a good story? The conclusion I came to, and discussed most recently in the posts "Interpretations of This is the End and The Night Circus" and "The Problem-Solution Model of Fictions", is that, at its heart, a story presents a hypothetical scenario and a resulting question which it then answers. "If A, how B?" I'll provide some examples, ones I've used before. The premise and question at the heart of This is The End is, "If the fundamentalist Christians are right and the Rapture is just around the corner, how can liberal Hollywood actors, with their tolerant attitudes towards homosexuality and drug use, go to heaven?" The story answers this question by saying "The route to heaven is platonic love (i.e. friendship) between men". The novel The Night Circus is founded on the following premise and question: "If real magic exists, what is its place in the world?" The Night Circus answers this question by saying that the place for real magic is some kind of ideal circus. The film Star Wars is based on the following premise and question: "If an interstellar war is being fought between Good and Evil, and Evil is vastly more powerful than Good, how can Good triumph?" The answer is, "Good can triumph over Evil because it has the Force on its side." These examples alone show that my theory has legs.

Other examples abound. Consider the film Snakes on a Plane, a film that puts its pitch in the title. Reportedly, Samuel L. Jackson leapt at the opportunity to star in this film simply because he liked its name. The hypothetical scenario is, "What would happen if a huge number of snakes are released in a jet while it is in the air? How will the passengers survive?" I haven't seen this film but, possibly, the answer to this question is "The passengers can survive because of the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the FBI". A scenario can be fanciful but the answer to the question it poses tends be conservative, conventional. Not long ago I saw the film Nomadland, a film that demonstrates the way in which many stories tend to have orthodox, conventional (and often right-wing) messages or morals. Nomadland begins by presenting a woman who lives in her van and has a truly awful job working in an Amazon warehouse. The problem the film is presenting is simply the problem of poverty. When watching this film, I thought, early on, that the film would be an exposé of the failings of modern capitalism, a little like the films of Ken Loach. However, at Plot Point 1, a solution to the problem is proposed that is far from progressive: at a gathering of fellow nomads, the protagonist's compatriots tell stories about how they chose the life they are now living. The solution to the problem of poverty, the film is saying, is that people choose to be poor, choose to live in their vans and work at menial jobs, because they enjoy the freedom of the lifestyle and the community of other nomads, and so no collective action is required. The question, "Is the life of the protagonist, Fern, something she has chosen or something forced on her?" is kept alive throughout much of the film and then answered definitively at Plot Point 2 when Fern is given the opportunity to settle down permanently with a reasonably affluent family and chooses instead to sleep in her van and then immediately get back on the road. For me, the last part of the film dragged because the problem the film presents has been solved, the question answered, and it was this question, the question of whether Fern has chosen her situation or been forced into it, that had sustained my interest in the movie. Paradoxically I think that Nomadland, insofar as it represents the worst type of poverty in America, has often been misconstrued by commentators as a left-wing film even though its message, in reality, is decidedly right-wing.

It seems to me that stories do two things. First, they present scenarios that might possibly lie within the gamut of potential human experience and invite readers and audiences to identify with the main characters in order to vicariously resolve the problems the stories pose. How would I react in that situation? After all, even the most atheistic people have wondered, if only occasionally and semi-consciously, what would happen if they were wrong and the fundamentalist Christians were right. What would happen if the Rapture actually occurred? What would happen if I was flying in an airplane and a whole lot of snakes fell from the overhead lockers? How would I cope if I was forced to live in a van and travel around the country looking for menial work? We are drawn to these stories because we or people we know might end up having to deal with similar situations. Second, however, the answers successful stories give tend to be soothing, reassuring, anodyne. Nomadland relieves us of our responsibility to address the problem of poverty by strongly suggesting that the poor are poor because they choose to be poor. Star Wars reassures us that Good will always triumph over Evil because Good has a supernatural Force on its side. Ghostbusters reassures us that malevolent supernatural beings can be vanquished by New York city know-how, by tradesmen who seem like a cross between exterminators, plumbers, and fire-fighters, people paid to perform a service. Cesar A. Cruz said, "Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable" but most successful stories tend to be much more about comforting than disturbing.

There is much more to be said about all this, particularly the idea that there are many fictions we gravitate towards because they make life more bearable. We want to believe that all killers are apprehended and, when apprehended, confess their crimes – this is why we like police procedurals. We want to believe that everyone is destined to meet and be together forever with his or her soulmate – this is why we like rom coms. We want to believe that mental illness can be fixed by a drug – this is why we like the film A Beautiful Mind. But none of these fictions, fictions we voraciously consume, are true. This is something I may talk about more in later posts.

At this point, I wish to pivot towards my second subject. I want to talk about a particular type of mental illness, a type of psychosis. I discussed this condition a long time ago in a post called "An Anecdote; and a Description of a Condition" – I must have some readers who pay attention to this blog because I noticed recently that some readers had returned to it. I shall discuss this condition again now. This condition has three basic features:

1. A paranoid fear that other people around the sufferer are secretly homosexual.

2. A paranoid fear that others think the sufferer homosexual.

3. An inability to say the words 'gay' or 'straight'.

I have observed this condition a number of times in other patients and had it myself, so I know what I'm talking about. It is a condition that can be greatly ameliorated by two simple forms of treatment. The heterosexuality of the patient should be explicitly acknowledged by those treating him or her. And homosexuality should be openly and honestly discussed. If I had been treated this way when I first became a patient of the Mental Health Service in 2007, I would have recovered in less than a year.

When writing this post, I suffered serious writer's block when it came to discussing this condition, and had to wait a week before returning to writing it. The reason is that, in my case, the paranoid belief that others thought me gay when I'm not, although perhaps often a delusion among other sufferers, was true in my case. The people treating me did think I was gay. The delusion that the world was full of closet homosexuals featured strongly during my first psychotic episode in 2007, returned intermittently in 2009 and went away for good at the beginning of 2010. The belief, a true belief, that others thought I was gay when I'm not only went away some three or four months ago. When I first became a patient of the Mental Health Service in around March or April of 2007, the first thing I said was, "My father's gay, he divorced my mother when I was seven because he didn't want me to be gay, and I want to come out as straight!" I was wrong about my father. And I know now that what I said when I first presented at the Taylor Centre was open to misinterpretation. But what I meant was, "I have always been heterosexual and I want people to know!" I have been trying for much of the last fourteen years, apart from the period from early 2010 until early 2013 when I simply ignored what others thought, to 'come out as straight'. And I have at last succeeded. People may want to say to me, "Why should you care if other people think you're gay?" I would reply to such people that others thinking a person gay when he or she isn't is really quite a big deal, that people who think it doesn't matter don't fully understand what homosexuality is. Homosexuals want to have sex with people of the same gender. And to think a heterosexual wants to screw people of the same sex is to do him or her a profound psychological injury, is tantamount to a kind of torture.

It is possible that I may never need to talk about this again.

As I said at the beginning of this post that it has been a long time since I've written a post. I hope that people find this one as interesting as others I have written. Should I keep writing? If I receive a message from the universe saying "Yes", maybe I will.

The Problem-Solution Model of Fictions

One of my chief concerns in this blog has been to work out a theory of fictions, a project I have been pursuing ever since the very first post in early 2015. It is possible I have readers who have travelled with me on this journey from those early days, from posts like "Applying Predicate Calculus to Literature" and posts about Ghostbusters and Star Wars to recent posts such as "Evolutionary Psychology and Fictive Worlds" and "Politics in Literature". I feel I am on the verge of a breakthrough, to cracking the puzzle. In tonight's post, I wish to discuss literary and filmic works as presenting a problem and a solution, an interpretive method that is very fruitful and a method I have discussed before. This particular approach to interpreting stories is incomplete however without an understanding of human psychology – in particular, we need to work out why many of us prefer fiction to nonfiction. Why do we consume stories that we know are not true? I want to attempt to speak back to this conundrum. Like some of the other posts I have written, in this post I am, as it were, thinking aloud.

I wish to start with a seemingly plausible sketch of why we read and watch stories, a picture that nevertheless proves wrong, specious. The theory which I will posit provisionally is that when we read a novel or short story, or watch a film, we are driven forward by curiosity. We want to know what will happen next. For instance, the film Pulp Fiction opens with Vince Vega and Jules Winnfield in a car; they are dressed in suits but Vince's long hair and Jules's afro, together with the subject matter of the conversation (they are discussing McDonalds restaurants in Amsterdam) kindle our curiosity. Who are these two and where are they going? We learn soon that they are gangsters on their way to kill a couple of interlopers on their turf. A movie like Pulp Fiction is continuously piquing and satisfying our curiosity. Early in the film, we learn Vince has been tasked with chaperoning the wife of his boss Marsellus Wallace, and that a previous chaperone had been thrown out a window after giving Mia Wallace a foot massage. Again this arouses our curiosity. What will happen when Vince Vega goes out for an evening with Mia Wallace? Will he similarly be dallying with peril? This naive theory as to why we enjoy fiction, that fictions arouse and assuage our curiosity, also seemingly explains why people enjoy Agatha Christie. At the beginning of a detective novel a murder occurs and the reader is driven forward by his or her desire to know who did it, how, and why.

However this naive theory, although it may seem superficially promising and aligns with folk notions of why we enjoy narratives, can't be true. It can't be true because it fails to explain why we reread novels or watch movies more than once. Why reread a novel when we know its ending? And yet many of us do. When I was a child, I read and reread The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks, the Dragonlance books by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman, the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett and then, a little later, read and reread the Thomas Covenant books by Stephen Donaldson. Some books I would immediately start rereading as soon I had finished the first perusal. My mother compulsively rereads novels by Georgette Heyer and Jane Austin. I have reread Ulysses by James Joyce several times (although this is a special case because every time I reread it I find something new in it). The naive theory about why we enjoy stories fails because we can't be curious about the ending of a story if we already know it. It is not just the fact that we reread novels and rewatch films that evinces the failure of the naive theory. Even before we start reading a novel for the first time, we already have some sense of its plot – we learn it from the blurb. When we see a film, we already know much of its story from its trailers. For instance, recently I saw the film Rams starring Sam Neil. The preview of the film had already given away its most important twist, that as the result of an outbreak of an infectious sheep disease, a complete ovine cull is ordered which the film's protagonist attempts to evade by hiding some of his prize sheep in his house. Before we read a novel or see a film for the first time, we are likely to have read reviews of it that give away much of what happens in it. It seems we like to know a good deal of the plot line and themes of a novel or film before we engage with it. Admittedly blurbs, trailers, and reviews try not to give away the end of a story but usually we can guess it. If we watch a Spider Man movie or Iron Man movie, for instance, we know that we are going to see the superhero's origin story, that a villain will be introduced, that they will fight several times, and that, at their climactic brawl, the superhero will emerge victorious. Even on the first reading or viewing of a story, we know or can guess a rough outline of a story before we start it or early on.

In screenwriting parlance, stories are built around 'set-ups' and 'pay-offs'. A 'set-up' can be considered an action or incident in the story which raises a question in the mind of the reader or viewer; a 'pay-off' is when the question is answered. If we were to subscribe to the naive theory of fiction, we might suppose that the question arouses our curiosity, but in fact what it really does is create a sense of expectation. When a 'set-up' occurs, we hypothesise as to how it will be answered and the story proceeds by either confirming or disconfirming the provisional hypotheses we form. To return to the example from Pulp Fiction, when Jules tells Vince about the fate that had befallen a previous chaperone of Mia Wallace's, this creates a certain expectation in the mind of the viewer – that in going out for the evening with Mia, Vince is entering into a sort of peril. The viewer does not know if the evening will end well or badly for Vince, but nevertheless there is an expectation that something will happen. At the beginning of Rams, we find that Colin and his brother Les are estranged, although they live on neighbouring farms; when I was watching it, knowing something about story structure but little about this particular film, I immediately formed the expectation that the movie would present their reconciliation, a hypothesis that was later confirmed. (My mother, who saw the film with me, told me afterwards that she did not immediately form this expectation but I suspect she in fact did so subconsciously.) Some stories, such as Fight Club and The Sixth Sense, are built around twists, deliberately seek to make the reader or viewer reappraise everything that has happened in the story prior to the twist. However, such stories do not invalidate the general thesis I wish to advance – I shall return to Fight Club shortly in this post. There is a long tradition of stories that set up the conclusion right at the beginning. In The Odyssey, we are informed right at the start that the Gods wish Odysseus to return home and resume his position as king of Ithaca and husband of Penelope. The opening preamble of Romeo and Juliet explicitly states that the deaths of its two protagonists by suicide ends the feud between their warring families. In Elizabethan times, if we went to a tragedy we would expect the protagonist to die at the end; if we saw a comedy, we would expect the major characters to marry at the end. Usually, we know where a story is going before we engage with it, or very early on.

So, if the naive theory of fiction enjoyment fails, what then can we replace it with? I would like to suggest that a story presents a problem and a solution. I have argued in favour of this theory in previous posts. For instance, I have argued that the film Star Wars is built around the question, "How can Good triumph over Evil when Evil is vastly more powerful than good?" The film answers this question by showing that Good can triumph over Evil because it has the Force on its side. The problem a story presents is not, to be clear, a problem faced by the protagonists which they themselves must solve – rather it is a problem in the mind or world of the reader or viewer (although sometimes the problem is indeed tackled by the main characters). For instance, the films Trainspotting, Pulp Fiction and Fight Club all deal thematically with teenage rebellion and peer pressure; this is why they appeal to teenage boys (and appealed to me when I was a teenager). Consider Fight Club. In this movie, the unnamed narrator played by Edward Norton falls under the influence of Tyler Durden, an iconoclastic, charismatic, and contumacious figure played by Brad Pitt. Much of the film portrays their friendship. (A very long time ago I wrote an essay about Fight Club in which I argued that their relationship is homoerotic but I wish now to repudiate this claim; arguably the protagonist loves Durden but there is nothing sexual in his feelings towards Durden.) The problem at the heart of Fight Club, the theme that resonates with teenage boys, is "How can one be cool?" The provisional answer it gives is, "You can be cool by association." As the film progresses, we see the narrator's special relationship with Durden come under threat because of the sexual relationship Durden forms with Maria Singer (played by Helena Bonham Carter) and because the narrator seems almost superfluous to the organisation Durden sets up that grows out of the Fight Club. The viewer sees and identifies with the narrator's jealousy. At Plot Point 2 or shortly after, the narrator and audience realise quite suddenly that Tyler Durden doesn't exist – the narrator and Durden have been the same person all along. Durden is at once an imaginary friend and an alter-ego of the narrator. At this moment in the film, the viewer feels a sudden thrill – I certainly did when I first watched it. The problem has been resolved. The shy, impressionable, and unhappy narrator with whom the viewer identifies has been revealed to have been the cool one right from the beginning. This post is not the place to provide a rigorous interpretation of Fight Club but it is significant that it is just before the narrator realises that Durden and he are the same person that Durden pivots away from being an ally to being the adversary. 

The idea that a story presents a problem and a solution can be illustrated with respect to the film I mentioned earlier, Rams. The Wikipedia page about the film provides the following synopsis: "In remote Western Australia, two estranged brothers, Colin (Sam Neill) and Les (Michael Caton), are at war. Raising separate flocks of sheep descended from their family’s prized bloodline, the two men work side by side yet are worlds apart. When Les’ prize ram is diagnosed with a rare and lethal illness, authorities order a purge of every sheep in the valley. While Colin attempts to stealthily outwit the powers that be, Les opts for angry defiance. But can the warring brothers set aside their differences and have a chance to reunite their family, save their herd, and bring their community back together?" This quotation has the flavour of promotional material released by the production company. It is significant to my argument for several reasons. It is significant because it gives away much of the story beforehand as a way of enticing audiences into the cinema– although the release ends with a question, we can guess that the answer is "Yes". Even before cinephiles make the decision to buy a ticket, they know not only much of the story but also the main problem the story is addressing, namely disharmony or outright hostility between members of a family. The synopsis does not describe the circumstances through which Colin and Les reconcile with each other but the viewer knows, even before he or she sees the film, that they will.

The problem-solution model explains why we return to certain stories again and again in childhood and adulthood. If there is some pressing problem in a person's life, a story that addresses this problem provides some temporary relief, mitigates an internal tension or cognitive dissonance. We vicariously resolve the problem in our own life by acting it out in disguised form in imagination – although this resolution is only provisional and does not hold fast. Consider the Thomas Covenant books by Stephen Donaldson, books I first read when I was eleven. This hero of this series is a self-hating leper who has been plucked from the ordinary world by a deity and transported to a magical world to save it from the plottings of the malevolent Lord Foul; in the story, Covenant decides that he is dreaming and rejects the heroic designation imposed upon him by the inhabitants of this world. The problem in the story is the tension between how the protagonist views himself and the way he is viewed by the other characters, characters who see him as a saviour figure; the problem in my own life was that I hated myself but wanted to believe that I had some special role to play in the world, that I was the hero of my own story. By identifying with Thomas Covenant, I was able to alleviate temporarily my feelings of low self-esteem and self hatred, to believe for a moment that these feelings were illusory or unjustified. The type of thematic dynamic explored in the Thomas Covenant trilogies is common in Fantasy literature. The protagonist of the Belgariad by David Eddings, for example, is a kid who is gradually revealed throughout the series to be a king and a sorcerer fated to defeat the evil god Torak. The series also gradually reveals that Garion's companions are all themselves kings, immortal sorcerers, or heroes in their own right. The Belgariad differs significantly from the Thomas Covenant books (it is not nearly so good) but is playing with similar ideas. The difference is that Garion is an ordinary youth plucked from obscurity and swept along volitionlessly by fate (the first book in the series is called Pawn of Prophecy) whereas Covenant is an adult who is continually fighting against the role of hero he feels has been assigned to him by the dream he feels he is in. The Fantasy books I read when I was young made me believe that I was important, special. Likewise, it is likely that the Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer books my mother compulsively rereads also provide temporary salves to problems in her own life.

The type of analysis I am advocating for here is related to, although not coincident with, a kind of interpretive methodology known as thematic analysis. In arguing, as I have, that Rams, for instance, deals with friction between members of the same family, a theme that has near universal resonance, I am performing just such a thematic analysis. Thematic interpretations are the default form of literary criticism – at high school, we are taught that the theme of Romeo and Juliet is love, that the theme of Macbeth is ambition, and that the theme of Othello is jealousy. Stories, according to this interpretive paradigm, deal with universal themes, with abstract ideas that anyone can relate to because of their ubiquity. However, many literary scholars reject thematic interpretations altogether. Over the summer of 2017 and 2018, I undertook some independent research into narrative theory under professor Brian Boyd at the University of Auckland. Brian doesn't like thematic analyses and, in one of the most important books he has written, The Origin of Stories, calls for a new form of criticism to replace it and other popular forms of interpretation, a new form he terms 'evolutionary criticism'. Ironically, although Brian doesn't like thematic analyses (perhaps he has read one too many undergraduate essay claiming to have discovered the true meaning of Hamlet), he believes that great stories, such as The Odyssey and Horton Hears a Who by Doctor Seuss, the plays of Shakespeare and the novels of Nabokov, shed light on human nature – furthermore, he believes that this human nature is the product of natural selection during prehistory. He applies evolutionary psychology to literature. I myself am unconvinced that there is such a thing as human nature; rather, I believe that the problems literature deals with are contingent rather than necessary, arising out of our culture, and that not only do stories arise out of our culture, they also speak back to it, can even change it. When I was studying under Brian, after he had formed an imprecise sense of my particular approach to fictions, he recommended the book New Readings vs. Old Plays by Richard L. Levin, a work that strongly critiques the thematic analysis school. Brian had sensed that the interpretive method I favour is somewhat adjacent to thematic analysis and had suggested this book because he wanted to shake up my conviction that a kind of thematic analysis of literary works can help us make sense of story structure. I recommend New Readings vs. Old Plays to anyone who, like me, embraces a thematic approach but has never seriously reflected on the assumptions underlying it. To be clear, the problem-solution model of fiction is not however the same as thematic analysis. A problem-solution model involves the supposition that a story asks a question and then answers it, whereas thematic analysis is often based on the supposition that a story is an exploration of or rumination on an abstract idea.

Let us assume for the moment that the theory that fictions present problems and solutions has legs. The issue which I wish to discuss now is: what types of problems do fictions present? The reader may have noted something which seems to give the lie to my theory. If we read fictions in order to vicariously solve problems in our own lives, why are the typical problems presented by fictions so far removed from the problems we actually face in reality? I have difficulty finding a job – why then do I not read stories about people who successfully find, apply for and obtain employment? I don't know how to use Paypal to buy goods over the internet – why then do I not read stories about people learning how to download Netflix films and buy cars on Trademe? If I wish to improve my understanding of other minds, why read novels and not biographies, memoirs, and psychology textbooks? It seems that the problems stories present often arise from hypothetical scenarios that have no bearing on the real world, that the audience and creators of stories alike recognise that the premise or conceit at the foundation of a particular story read or written is fanciful, unrealistic. In the post, "Interpretations of This is the End and The Night Circus", I discussed two stories, a film and a novel, that both seem to make supernatural claims about the world. This is the End asks the question, "If the Evangelical Christians are right and the Rapture is just around the corner, how can liberal Hollywood actors, with their tolerant attitudes towards drug use and homosexuality, go to Heaven rather the Hell?" This is the End answers this question by asserting that the route to salvation is platonic friendship between men. The Night Circus asks the question, "If real magic exists, what is its place in the world?" It answers this question by proposing that the place for real magic is some kind of ideal circus. Both stories are playing with conceits that are generally known to be untrue. Seth Rogen, who cowrote This is the End, I can say quite confidently is an atheist (a later Rogen film Sausage Party has an explicitly anti-religious message); likewise, I think it unlikely that the writer of The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern, believes literally in magic. In this blog, I have several times argued that the question at the heart of Star Wars is, "How can Good triumph over Evil, when Evil is vastly more powerful than Good?" This question is also at the heart of The Lord of the Rings. What I have failed to do so far in talking about Star Wars is address the fact that, in the real world, in any conflict, it can often be difficult to determine which side of a conflict is in the right and which side is in the wrong. Yet in both Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings, it is patently obvious who is good and who is bad. The question at the heart of Star Wars can also be reframed as a hypothetical conditional: "If Good and Evil exist and Evil is vastly more powerful than Good, how can Good triumph over Evil?" This reformulation captures the way these stories present worlds in which the complexities, nuances, and sheer confusion of the real world are repackaged in a form that is more digestible for people who want to believe that all worldly conflicts can be regarded as battles between sides that can be simply labelled Good and Bad.

We can approach nearer an understanding of fictions by noting that people invest themselves in issues remote from their own lives. Consider sports. Whether or not the Auckland Blues defeat the Canterbury Crusaders in a rugby match has little objective impact on an ordinary Aucklander's own quality of life – and yet sports teams such as as the Blues can inspire fanatical devotion. Everyday I read the newspaper and pay attention to American politics, to for instance Donald Trump's latest tweet, even though his most recent broadside has almost no effect on my own life as a New Zealander. John Donne said, "No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main [...] any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind". Human beings do not focus narrowly on their own self-interest and individual concerns; rather, they participate imaginatively in the struggles of others, in their successes and defeats. On public issues, we take sides. Both Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker and The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis deal with abortion, a subject people hold strong opinions about – even if they themselves have never been put in the position of considering an abortion, and don't know anyone who has. It may be that we take an interest in stories that present problems we do not currently face because the possibility always exists that we may face such problems in the future. Although Seth Rogen and a fair share of his audience do not believe in an afterlife, it is always possible that he and we are wrong and that the Christian Evangelicals are right. We can't be absolutely sure. Yes, most of us believe death is the end, that morality is relative, that real magic is impossible. But we can't be absolutely confident that we are right.

This line of thought leads us to the supposition that people do not possess what Bertrand Russell, in the context of discussing Meinongianism, called "a robust sense of reality". Although people pay lip service to rational materialism, the stories we consume betray the fact that there are myths we deeply want to believe even if we know rationally that they are not true. One such myth, for instance, is the idea that everyone is destined to meet his or her soulmate, that True Love exists. This is the theme of many Hollywood movies, such as Sleepless in Seattle, and the generic Romance novels published by Harlequin. In the real world, though, the romantic relationships we form usually result from luck, opportunity, and compromise – in the words of Eddie Vedder, often the woman "can't find a better man". The idea that one is fated to find and be together for all eternity with one's soulmate is a comforting story people tell themselves that is usually not true. The genre of detective fiction is committed to another myth, the myth that, when a murder occurs, the culprit will be reasonably quickly identified and brought to justice. Although my mother often returns to Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer, she also reads PD James and the Scandinavian crime writers, and watches TV shows like Midsomer Murders, Vera, and Lewis. In these shows, not only is the culprit soon apprehended but always confesses when arrested. In the real world, most homicides go unsolved and most killers never admit their guilt. For instance, here in New Zealand, Scott Watson and Mark Lundy, both convicted of murder, the first in 1998 and the second in 2002, have consistently maintained their innocence from before their convictions right up until the present. The problem-solution model applies to romance fiction and to detective fiction as much as to the stories I have already discussed. Romance fiction deals with the problem, "If True Love exists, how can one find one's soul mate?" Detective fiction deals with the problem, "If murders occur, will the perpetrator be caught?". Both genres present reassuring bromides, that true lovers always find each other and that justice always quickly prevails.

However, the supposition that people do not possess a robust sense of reality also can't be right. In an earlier post, I discussed the fact that children, from when they are quite young, can tell the difference between real stories and made up ones. I am not cognisant of any psychological studies that have determined the age at which children first start distinguishing fictional stories from true stories but I imagine this capability develops contemporaneously with their first exposures to narratives. (Oddly, although Brian Boyd discusses the ontogeny of story-knowledge as possessed by children in The Origin of Stories, he does not discuss this rather crucial question.) It seems possible that children's ability to distinguish fancy from reality first manifests at the same age that they start to distinguish between dreams and waking life. There is a connection between dreams and fiction that has perhaps not been explored sufficiently (although Freud made some gestures in this direction). It may be that, although we know fictions to be unreal, perhaps a part of our brain accepts the underlying thematic propositions advanced by fiction as true. If we were to indulge in some cod neurology, we might posit that the left hemisphere of the brain recognises fictions as imaginary, while the right hemisphere processes and integrates the messages of fiction into its understanding of the world. It seems that we enjoy fictions not only knowing that they are unreal but because we know they are unreal. It may even be that we need fictions in order to distinguish the real world from imagination. A writer who knows something about both dreams and stories is Neil Gaiman. In The Sandman, the titular hero is the anthropomorphic personification of Dreams; as the series progresses, we learn that he is also the lord of stories. In the storyline Brief Lives, Dream and his sister Delirium embark on a quest to find their prodigal brother Destruction; during the story, the reader learns that Destruction, despite his name, is a clumsy dabbler in painting, poetry, and cooking. When they find him, Destruction delivers a monologue from which I shall quote. "A two-sided coin: destruction is needed. Nothing new can exist without destroying the old. Things are created. They last for some little while, and then they are gone. Empires, cities, poems and people. Atoms and worlds. One cannot begin a new dream without abandoning the last, eh, brother?" Destruction, this passage implies, defines creation by being its opposite. He goes on to say, "Our sister [Death] defines life, just as Despair defines hope, or Desire defines hatred, or as Destiny defines freedom." Morpheus asks him, "And what do I define, by this theory of yours." Destruction replies, "Reality, perhaps?"

It seems that I am equivocating. Does our love of fiction indicate that we lack a robust sense of reality? Or, alternatively, do we hunger after fictions precisely because they help us better distinguish between the real and the unreal? Yes, stories bring solace because through them we can vicariously solve the problems that preoccupy us. But why are these problems, to restate something I said earlier, so often so far removed from the problems we actually are likely to face in the real world? Is it pure escapism? I am unsure of the answer. But I feel certain that we cannot make sense of fictions without also understanding reality, what it means for something to be real.

I'll finish this post by saying something about it. It is, like other posts I have written, an 'essay', a form of literary writing pioneered by Montaigne. To quote Wikipedia: "The name itself comes from the French word essais, meaning "attempts" or "tests", which shows how this new form of writing did not aim to educate or prove. Rather, his essays were exploratory journeys in which he works through logical steps to bring skepticism to what is being discussed." This post took me an awful long to write but nevertheless there may be orthographic, grammatical, and stylistic faults, solecisms, that I have overlooked when rereading it. The reason the paragraphs are so long is because the type of literature I most enjoy employs long sentences and long paragraphs. I am keenly aware that an argument of the sort that I am making succeeds, persuades, only if the style is compelling. People will often reject a good argument if they feel it is badly expressed, especially if the argument goes against their preconceived notions. Still, even if I am the only one to read this post though to the end, that's something. At least I myself know something new.

Theory of Mind and The Big House

As I've said before, I sometimes receive small signs from the universe that point me towards topics to discuss in this blog. The other day I watched a Darkhorse livestream, the Youtube program hosted by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, in which Bret posited that paranoid schizophrenics lack theory of mind. Now, I am diagnosed schizophrenic; so, consequently, a reader might justifiably wonder if this is true of me. Does the writer of the Silverfish blog lack an understanding that other people might have different beliefs, cognitive processes, knowledge, and emotional dispositions than he does? Readers of my blog, people who have for instance read the short stories I have published in it, will know the answer already. My problem, as this post will indirectly show, is not that I lack theory of mind but that I have too much theory of mind. This may seem an extraordinary claim to make but I can justify it. An important point, before I move on to discussing theory of mind in the context of my own life, is that, although I am diagnosed schizophrenic, I no longer believe that I ever had schizophrenia. By definition, schizophrenia is a condition from which it is impossible to recover (this is the psychiatrists' own definition). But I recovered many years ago – in fact, I don't believe I have experienced delusions since 2013 and even then, they weren't serious delusions. Therefore, by definition, I don't have schizophrenia at all and never had it.

In the livestream, Bret Weinstein makes two mistakes with respect to schizophrenia. First, he implies that the film A Beautiful Mind is an accurate picture of schizophrenia, or at least an accurate portrayal of the mathematician John Nash. It isn't. As I've discussed before, A Beautiful Mind is a compendium of untruths. When Ron Howard made it, he might as well have gone round and fellated the psychiatric profession. The  second mistake Weinstein makes is that he implies that schizophrenics always lack theory of mind, that it is a fixed immutable feature of the natural kind of person denoted by the term. What I would like to suggest is that a psychotic episode can be caused by a breakdown in theory of mind, that it can be a temporary aberration in an otherwise normal mental continuum. What I want to do in this post is to describe some moments in my life when my theory of mind failed me, focussing particularly on my time living at the Big House, moments when I simply couldn't understand the things people said, thought, or what they were trying to communicate to me. Before I engage in this task, I need to make clear my situation. I have been under the Mental Health Act and receiving Compulsory Treatment for nearly seven years now. I see my psychiatrist less than once every three months, for an hour. I have a key worker,  a social worker, who I also see extremely infrequently, usually only when I see the psychiatrist. Every fortnight I go to the Taylor Centre for an injection of 300mgs of Olanzapine and have the opportunity to talk to other patients and other mental health workers. This at least is something but not much. When I do see the psychiatrist, he asks me few questions: in fact, I would have consultations with my previous psychiatrist, Jennifer Murphy, at which she would ask me no questions and in fact said nothing at all. I had to guess what to talk about. The people who work in the system take extensive notes about the patients but I don't think that they even read their own notes. I have a sense, crucially, that, although I have been saying that I'm heterosexual often enough to make my point ever since just before Easter 2013, they don't record the fact that I'm heterosexual in the official record, perhaps because it goes against some obscure policy. As someone under the Mental Health Act, I have the right to request my notes, and did, in 2015. I was given a stack of papers about the size of the bible, and read only the very beginning.

I will start with something that happened relatively recently. My previous key worker was a woman called Debbie Smith. We would go out for coffee to talk sometimes in late 2017 and early 2018, before I got rid of her and my dosage was doubled from 300mg every month to 300mgs every fortnight. I only saw her a handful of times. One time, I remember, when we went to a cafe, she was wearing dark glasses – I think she was wearing dark glasses because she was subconsciously trying to distance herself from me, was looking at me from a clinical vantage. Even though I was completely sane, she had decided, presumably based on my notes, that I was crazy. I mentioned in passing that I had lived at the Big House. When I said this, she whipped off her sunglasses and said, in some surprise, "You lived at the Big House?" I said, "Yes" and she said, seemingly astonished, "I know the Big House! They're good people!" It turns out she had lived on the same street as the flat I had lived at. What I suspect, and suspected even then, is that in my notes there must have been some misrepresentation of the place I was living in when I first became 'sick' in 2007 and that this was why she was so surprised. Perhaps the psychiatrists and other mental health workers thought I'd lived in a flat full of gay men. In fact, in the fourteen months I lived at the Big House, a house with twenty flatmates, we only ever had one gay flatmate. (His boyfriend was a frequent visitor and I can remember another flatmate, a straight man, saying, "I hate to imagine what's going on in the room next door!") Alternatively, she may have thought that my abode in 2006 and early 2007 was full of homophobes, an inference equally false. Everyone living at the Big House was very liberal politically. I admit that I didn't understand then and still can't understand now what she meant when she said that the people living at the Big House were 'good'. It all rather depends on what Debbie Smith means by the word 'good'.

In this post, I intend to talk a little more about about my first psychotic episode. This post follows on from the previous posts about my first psychotic episode, "My First Psychotic Episode" and "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM." I intend to focus on the Big House in this post but I wish to begin with a scene that I only pointed towards in the first of the two posts just mentioned and described in more detail in the second, a scene that occurred at bFM. I wish to describe the moment that I first became delusional. As I said in those previous posts, on that morning I was working at bFM in a side-room writing news stories while Mikey Havoc manned the studio desk in the room next door. There were two of us writing news items, the advertising boys were sitting nearby, and other important functionaries were about in the premises. I had known for a long time, if only subconsciously, that the other people working at bFM thought I was gay when I'm not, even though a fortnight previously I'd brought in a girl I was wanting to get with to sit in during Havoc's breakfast show. I no longer remember this morning perfectly but I had a sense that Havoc was acting up in the studio during his morning slot. Picking up on the frantic, agitated vibe in the station, I found an item in Russell Brown's Hard News site that contained the line, "If you let in a flamboyant homosexual, you may as well let in a Catholic" and wanted to run with this story because I thought it would tell the other bFM staff, and the public generally, that I'm straight. The station manager, who was floating around near me at the time, wouldn't let me run with it. When the breakfast show finished, I went into the studio proper to talk to Mikey and Jose and found them looking at themselves via webcams on their laptops. I remember turning towards Jason Rockpig and him saying, "I only play guitar." The station manager, who was there as well, sarcastically quoted the item he didn't let me run with, "If you let in a flamboyant homosexual, you may as well let in a Catholic!" I asked Jose if I could have a word with him and he said, "When I've finished messing around with these dicks!"

What I realise now, but didn't realise at the time, was that the people who worked at the station, particularly I think Jose, thought I was there because I was sexually or romantically interested in them (wrongly, of course, because I'm heterosexual) and were trying to rebuff me. But right at that moment my theory of mind failed me. I decided instead that both Mikey and Jose were coming out as gay to me. In fact, I decided that they were having an affair. On the walk home to the Big House back from bFM, I felt a sense of elation, as though I'd been admitted into a privileged club. A casual acquaintance that I'd known a little several years before, Wiremu, a chap I strongly suspected was gay, approached me on the street and asked me for my phone number. I politely rebuffed him, saying that I didn't have my phone on me. I said that I was working at bFM and he reacted in astonishment.

The sense of elation soon faded. I told my best friend at the Big House, a chap called Simeon, that Mikey Havoc and Jose Barbosa were gay and having an affair. I told him this in confidence, in his room. I visited my mother. Now, I'd had an uncle, who had died in 1997 when I was seventeen, a man considerably older than my mother who had worked as a radio DJ back in the 'fifties and then later as a English teacher, called Tom Newman. I had long suspected that Tom was gay. I asked my mother, for the first time in my life, "Was Tom gay?" She confirmed it. I said, "So's Mikey Havoc." 

It is difficult to get this post in the right order. I am talking about moments in my life when my theory of mind failed me, but, to put these moments into context, I need to talk about my first psychotic episode in more detail. I think it necessary also, now, to try to describe the Big House to people unfamiliar with it in more detail. Essentially the Big House was a kind of hippie paradise, something a little like a commune comprised of Green supporters. The people who lived in it came from all backgrounds, although they were often professionals or students. We had several Maori, a couple of Germans, a French girl, a Dutch girl, and a Chinese girl. About half of the crew smoked pot every day and the other half almost never smoked pot at all. In a flat with twenty flatmates, it is impossible for a person to get on with everyone else who lives there but I had some friends, particularly Simeon and a chap called Harry. Although I have some memories from my time living there that cause me to wince with shame retrospectively, largely related to the facts that I was incapable of keeping my room clean and took inordinately long showers, I believe most of the others in the flat liked me, because I was clever and had a quirky sense of humour. (My 'illness' killed my talent for being funny.) All House decisions, such as who did the grocery shopping and when we would have another one of the enormous parties we sometimes held, were made at House meetings and required unanimous support, which meant that some meetings could drag on almost interminably. The story "Starlight", which I have included in this blog, was inspired by my time living at the Big House. The Big House was fairly famous around Auckland and a person was quite fortunate to become a flatmate, although the turnover rate was high. We would select a new flatmate every couple of months. The flatmate who had lived there the longest was a man called Logan, a Greenpeace and environmental activist quite far up the ranks of the organisations he belonged to; Logan was often not around because he was up north attending to his orchard that produced feijoa wine, his main source of income. I believe that he had lived there for over twenty years when I lived there, and that he is still living there now. Logan was the unofficial captain of the ship. A final important detail: my sort-of girlfriend Maya had lived in the Big House for several years prior to when I moved in at the beginning of 2006. In fact, it was Maya, who had by that time moved to Katikati, who told me that a vacancy had opened up at the flat.

As I said in the previous two posts about my first psychotic episode, I left bFM quite abruptly, explosively. Over the next several weeks, I dealt with some depression and then, after the Red Hot Chilli Peppers concert I attended, I started to become psychotic. It began small. I started to believe that the media was full of closet homosexuals. At my most recent Independent Review, my psychiatrist said about me that, during this period, I told my flatmates that many celebrities were gay. This is untrue. I was incapable of saying either the word "gay" or "straight" at the time. I may have implied on one occasion that the famous New Zealand broadcaster, Paul Holmes, was gay, but partly as a joke, to make people laugh. I also started to believe that I was under surveillance, a paranoid delusion that gradually metastasised into the idea that there were listening devices in the fire alarms and that everything I said was being broadcast to a vast gay fanbase. I believe this all happened over the course of about a month. The delusion that I was under surveillance was the most salient feature of this first psychotic episode but, inexplicably, my psychiatrist didn't mention this at all at the Review. I also started to divide up the flat into angels and devils, heterosexuals and closet homosexuals, inexpertly however because I couldn't be sure which was which. I recall one time during this period I went downstairs into the dining room of the Big House, feeling that I was in a fog of pervasive, oppressive, and threatening unreality, and found the bFM advertising boys there. They seemed to be deliberately adopting gay mannerisms. Previously, the people at bFM had had no contact with the Big House at all except occasionally, perhaps, at parties. I speculate, now, that the two advertising boys had decided to foster some kind of relationship with the Big House to protect the bFM brand and to deal with the scandal that I suspect I had created. But at the time it just seemed to me more evidence of some kind of malign, inexplicable conspiracy. I avoided them. Right before things reached crisis point and I considered drowning myself, I decided that all the men living at the Big House were gay except me.

Obviously, a feedback cycle was at work. The stranger I became (and I was a little manic over this month long period), the stranger my flatmates became around me. They had no idea I was having a psychotic episode. Their strangeness worsened my paranoia and made me stranger still.

In the post "My First Psychotic Episode", I mentioned how a Frenchman had moved into the Big House after I left bFM. I am no longer sure if he moved in before or after the Chilli Peppers concert. I wish to talk a little more about him now. I remember when he first appeared on the scene: I was on the front verandah with Logan when he appeared and started making conversation. He expressed his wish to move into the Big House; I remember feeling flattered because he seemed to be addressing himself to me. He was quite good looking (even though I'm straight I am capable of noticing when another man is handsome; at the time I thought he was 'cool'). Logan seemed less pleased with him. At the House Meeting when it was decided that the Frenchman should be admitted into the House, Logan strenuously argued against making him a flatmate but was overruled. I missed this House meeting because I was in bed, but heard about it later. Perhaps Logan had an intuition that there was something fishy about the Frenchman. On several occasions after he had become a flatmate, the Frenchman and I would sit outside and, as far as I can recall, discuss philosophy. I never discussed sexuality or bFM or any of the other things that preoccupied me with him at all. As I described in the post, "My First Psychotic Episode", when things reached crisis point, just after I considered drowning myself, I returned to the Big House and told my flatmates, those who were awake that early in the morning (a girl called Kirsty was there I remember), "My father's gay but I'm straight!" The Frenchman was around at the time. He said, "Don't you know you have to be a member of a group to make fun of it?" I suddenly realised two things. The first was that the Frenchman was gay. The second was that the Frenchman must have had knowledge of me prior to his moving into the Big House. I suddenly surmised that he had thought I was making fun of gays when I was working at bFM even though, in fact, I hadn't been. I conjecture, now, that perhaps the Frenchman even had knowledge of the gay spy film I wrote when I was twenty-one, six years prior to meeting him.

At this point in the post I wish to indulge in a little conspiracy theory. New Zealand has two spy agencies, the SIS and GCSB. I sometimes hear recruitment advertisements on the radio for these two intelligence organisations. I found out a couple of years ago that there is a connection between the spy agencies and the Mental Health System – my key worker at the time, Daniel Moodley, told me that the Taylor Centre had received information from the Prime Minister's office about one of the patients. The SIS and GCSB fall under the Prime Minister's purview. What I would like to suggest, now, is that the Frenchman might have been an intelligence operative who had been assigned to the Big House because, as a result of my time working at bFM, I had been flagged as a person of interest. There is a second possibility. Perhaps there were indeed rumours about me circulating in the gay community and the Frenchman had heard these rumours, and decided to get into the Big House perhaps to find out for sure. I don't know which possibility is correct but I feel certain that there was definitely something fishy about this man.

I left the Big House quite suddenly the next day after I had considered drowning myself, and moved back home to my mother's, my brother having come round to collect me from the Big House. The day after that, I first made contact with the Taylor Centre, the Mental Health provider I have been with for most of the last thirteen years. Soon after, one of my former flatmates, Sam, phoned up to say that they had decided to keep my room at the Big House vacant in the expectation that I would soon move back in. I remember speaking to my psychiatrist, Antony Fernando, at one of the first appointments I had with him and saying that I wanted to move back into the Big House. He said, "So soon?" Of course, Fernando didn't have the foggiest idea about the nature and cause of my 'illness' but I guess he indulged in speculation, easy assumptions. In those early days, I was manic and was living with the delusion, quite false, that my father was gay, but the feeling that I was under surveillance had gone away as had the delusion that the Big House was full of homosexuals. As a result of my treatment by Fernando and I believe the drug I was prescribed, Risperidone, my paranoia and delusions came back after a week or two. The delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals which I had formed at the Big House and which had temporarily gone into abeyance returned; I decided that there were more homosexuals in the world than heterosexuals, that homosexuals were having children and that heterosexuals weren't. These delusions lasted about eight or nine months and didn't go away entirely until December 2007 or January 2008. In reality, I was too unwell to go back to the Big House, and too ashamed. Very occasionally I see former flatmates on the street but I have had almost no contact with the Big House in all the years since.

A couple of weeks after I left the Big House, when I still felt capable of doing so, I returned for a visit. I remember sitting outside with several of my former flatmates at night smoking. Everyone was agitated. One flatmate, Peter, a German (and a straight man) said something like, "If you have something you need to confide, Andrew, use me." This is not an exact quote but it gives the gist. The Frenchman, who was also there, burst into laughter and made fun of Peter for his choice of words, "use me". I suspect, now, and in fact suspected at the time, that although my flatmates knew I had confided something to Simeon, they didn't know precisely what. They may have thought I had come out as gay to Simeon or had perhaps disclosed a report of a homosexual experience to him. Why Peter felt he was a better choice of confidant than Simeon is something I still don't understand. I also strongly suspect that the Frenchman, even though he knew I was straight, felt it served his purposes somehow to allow the false impression that I was gay or sexually confused to get around my former flatmates. Probably, as well, he was keeping his homosexuality secret from the rest of the flat. That same night I went upstairs to the attic of the Big House, where Simeon had moved to, to talk to him. Simeon had been my best friend in the house, the one I had the most to do with. At my first few appointments with Antony Fernando, I had received the strong impression that he had decided to diagnose me as a latent homosexual, presumably because I had said that my father was gay. I told Simeon, "My father's gay. And it's genetic!" I thought that maybe the gay gene was carried on the Y chromosome. Simeon said, "Andrew, do you want to hear about my homosexual experiences?" At the time, my theory of mind failed me again. I could sense that this was Simeon's way of saying he was straight but I couldn't understand why he felt the need to tell me that he was straight when I hadn't questioned his sexuality at all. At the time I felt that his willingness to disclose stories of homosexual experiences without coming out publicly as gay made him another one of Them, yet another closet homosexual. It felt then as though a curtain of darkness had descended all around me, something that often occurred to me during that first terrible year and again at the beginning of 2009.

This post is a little sloppily written, a little digressive, but I hope I have made my point. Yes, I formed the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals but the root cause of my 'illness' was people around me thinking I'm gay when I'm not, something I was subconsciously aware of. Consider: if a rumour goes around that a person is gay, that person can either ignore it or find some way to say and prove he or she is straight. And in the real world straight people are never put into the position of having to say that they are straight.

In this post, I have focussed on the time when I became psychotic at the Big House, but I also wish to tell a story about another moment my theory of mind failed me. It is a story I have told before, several times, but it is so indicative of the sadism and corruption of the psychiatric profession that it is worth repeating. Antony Fernando never asked me if I was gay or straight or brought up sexuality directly at all but, on one occasion, in 2009 before I went off the Risperidone, he asked me, in a deliberately offhand manner, with my parents in the room, "Do you stand up for yourself or are you a people pleaser?" I had no idea what he was talking about but opted for "people pleaser" because I was afraid of him. The sociopath smirked. I now realise that he was asking me if I preferred to be blown by men or to blow men, a truly disgusting and evil question to ask a heterosexual male especially by someone in a position of power.

I'll close this post with a general point about the New Zealand political scene, at least as it was back in 2006 and 2007 when I volunteered at bFM. Back then, the Prime Minister was Helen Clark, leader of the Labour Party, and the opposing contender for the top job was John Key, leader of the National Party. Both had weekly interviews on bFM. One time, when writing a news item that summarised an interview with Key, I chose a soundbite from the interview that made it seem that Key was a dunce. I felt that bFM was a lefty station and that I could get away with it, that I could wear my colours on my sleeve; what I didn't realise at the time was that bFM was trying to be a fair and balanced medium for the daily news, that there is such a thing as journalistic integrity. Now, in those days, the Labour Party was seen as being closely aligned with the gay lobby, a perception exacerbated by the fact that Clark had a deep voice and, although married to a man, had no children. The National Party exploited this perception, used homophobia to attract voters. The homophobic vote was part of the reason Key was elected in 2008. Fortunately for everyone, New Zealand is a different country now than it was twelve years ago. Our finance minister, Grant Robertson, for instance, is openly gay and the general public seems to think that this is fine. A change in cultural attitudes didn't stop the National Party from trying to exploit homophobia for political advantage in the last election. The National Party radio advertisements usually tended to begin with Judith Collins saying, "New Zealand, let me be straight with you." The National Party lost resoundingly. I leave it to the reader to conjecture if the political culture that existed back in the period when I first got 'sick' was a part of the reason a nightmare descended around me. All I can say is that it is possible.

[Note: Rereading this post, I feel very keenly aware that an unsympathetic reader might perceive signs of thought disorder in it. I have reflected on it overnight, and wish to amend one of my conclusions. Maybe, at that moment in bFM when I decided that Mikey and Jose were gay, it wasn't that they thought I was gay and were trying to rebuff me, but were rather prepared to admit that I was straight. An explanation for my illness hinges on Jose Barbossa's sexuality. Was he gay or straight? And, if he was gay, did Mikey Havoc know? I don't know how to answer this question. But everything depends on it.]

Evolutionary Psychology and Fictive Worlds

In tonight's post, I am going to talk about two issues – an erroneous hypothesis promulgated by evolutionary psychologists and a mystery in narrative theory. These two issues are quite distinct but I wish to discuss them both. There were other issues I considered talking about in this post but for the sake of brevity I shall focus just on this pair of unrelated topics. Bear with me: the essay gets more interesting and better written as it goes along.

In this blog, I have often inveighed against evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology can be characterised as the theory that many psychological traits are adaptions that evolved during prehistory as the result of evolution, of the interaction between chance mutations and natural selection. This theory is quite popular today and has infiltrated many of the social sciences, including English departments, but I believe it to be quite mistaken. I have discussed evolutionary psychology in posts such as "Why Richard Dawkins is Wrong: Group Selection vs. Inclusive Fitness" and "Some More Thoughts about Group Selection." In the post "Nature vs. Nurture" I offered an argument which I think very forcefully demonstrates the weaknesses of the claims of evolutionary psychology, and I will offer it again in a more elaborate form, now, because I think it such a good argument. It runs as follows. The vast majority of people in New Zealand and in many other countries can drive cars. Suppose an alien descends to Earth in Auckland and begins secretly observing the daily habits of ordinary people. Suppose furthermore that this alien is a devotee of evolutionary psychology. The alien might conjecture that the ability to drive cars is an evolved trait, that humans must have been driving cars for hundreds of thousands of years and that natural selection had acted on natural variation in driving capability, favouring the better drivers and weeding out the worse drivers. She might posit a car-driving module in the human brain that developed as a result of evolutionary pressure to produce ever more adroit car handlers. But the alien would be quite wrong. Humans have only been driving cars for just over a hundred years, and although there may be some evolutionary pressure acting in favour of good drivers (bad drivers are more likely to killed in traffic accidents), one hundred years is not long enough for an entire species to evolve a new trait. The ability to drive cars is a learned ability, even though it might appear to an alien to be natural. If driving cars is a learned ability, it stands to reason that many other apparently natural traits are also learned rather than genetic.

In this particular post, however, I do not want to discuss evolutionary psychology generally but focus on one particular hypothesis. In A Natural History of Rape, Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer propose that men are evolutionarily hardwired to want to rape women. A Natural History of Rape was a controversial but successful book on its publication in 2000 and has made an enormous impression on public intellectuals since, particularly people like Steven Pinker, Sam Harris, and Bret Weinstein, those who already subscribe to the tenets of evolutionary psychology. In one of his podcasts, Harris refers to the hypothesis in relation to the 'naturalistic fallacy', a term that, in this context, means "the fallacious belief that everything that is natural is good" – Harris points out that even if rape is natural that doesn't mean it should be socially desirable, that such a conclusion would be fallacious. In a recent livestream, his forty-ninth, Bret Weinstein answers a question about the 'rape-is-an-evolutionary-adaption hypothesis', expressing the view that that the authors' conclusions were obvious to everyone, saying (I quote) "When this book came out, every evolutionary biologist working at the time had the same sense that like, well, this isn't exactly news, obviously it's an evolutionary strategy." I have a love-hate with Bret and his wife Heather Heying. They often say interesting things but have a faintly fanatical devotion to the core principles of evolutionary biology. These principles have certain consequences. If you do accept the fundamental assumptions of evo-psych, that the purpose of life is to have as many offspring as possible, then it is indeed obvious that rape might prove a successful evolutionary strategy, so long as the rapist can get away with it. But is there any reason to accept the core assumptions of evolutionary psychology?

In writing about A Natural History of Rape, I should say that I haven't actually read it (I have often put myself into this embarrassing position in this blog). Because I haven't read it, I am unsure if Thornhill and Palmer are arguing that there are two sorts of men in the world, rapists and non-rapists, or if they are arguing that all men are potentially rapists. My impression is that they are proposing the second possibility. All men would rape if they could and the only reason that civilisation does not fall apart is because men fear the punitive social and legal consequences of violent crime. For high status men, the costs of rape outweigh the benefits and so they tend to prefer monogamous relationships; it is low status men, men who have difficulty soliciting consensual sex, who have the strongest incentive to rape. When A Natural History of Rape was released many commentators pointed out its flaws. If the 'ultimate cause' of rape is the motivation to father offspring, men should only want to rape women of reproductive age (this is in fact what the authors argue); many critics have pointed out that this fails to explain rape of children, the elderly, and other men. As the Wikipedia article on the book indicates, this particular criticism has been levelled at the book by many people multiple times. A second objection to the thesis is that sometimes high-status men rape, as evinced by Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby. There is a logical error in the argument. If all men are potentially rapists but are deterred by punitive social and legal consequences, then it would be men who feel somehow above the law, rather than low status men, who would be the ones most likely to rape. (Think Genghis Khan or the English nobles who indulged in prima Nocta.) A related and important point, incidentally, is that I don't think Harvey Weinstein ever regarded his actions as immoral, as rape.

I have been thinking about this issue over the last week and have come up with another objection to the hypothesis proposed by Thornhill and Palmer. A couple of years ago, I wrote a post, "my soul is an irritant", in which I pointed out that both men and women fantasise when they masturbate. Obviously, a person's fantasies are private and so a person is not liable for legal or social censure for indulging in fantasies which would be illegal if enacted in reality. Therefore, if all men are potentially rapists, we would expect a large number of men to entertain fantasies of rape when they masturbate. My hunch is that they don't. Thornhill and Palmer define rape as "copulation resisted to the best of the victim's ability unless such resistance would probably result in death or serious injury to the victim or in death or injury to individuals the victim commonly protects". Do many men fantasise about such scenarios when they jerk off? This is a potentially answerable question. We could survey a random, representative sample of men and ask them if they fantasise about rape and, if so, how often. The survey would have to be anonymous to ensure, as much as possible, that the men surveyed answer the question honestly. Such a survey would be an excellent way to test Thornhill and Palmer's hypothesis, but, so far as I know, no such survey has ever been carried out. My hunch, however, to reiterate, is that such a survey would return a negative result.

I do not have access to other men's fantasies but I do have access to my own. I am a low status male who hasn't had a girlfriend in a very long time, and so am a prime candidate to be one of those who might adopt a coercive reproductive strategy such as the one outlined by Thornhill and Palmer, at least in fantasy, in my private moments alone. But I never fantasise about non-consensual sex. Although I may sometimes fantasise about casual sex, an integral component of my fantasy life is the feature that the woman I am fantasising about should want to have sex with me and should enjoy sex with me. I fantasise about the female orgasm. There is a romantic aspect to my sexual fantasies, a belief that sex should be tied to love, that would be otiose or downright counterproductive if Thornhill and Palmer were right in supposing that the only purpose of male sexual activity is procreation; if a person believes that sex should ideally only take place within the context of a loving relationships, this reduces the number of possible sexual partners a man can have. There can be, in fact, a significant disconnect between a person's fantasy life and the sorts of sexual practice that can actually pass genetic material down to successive generations. In August of this year, it was revealed that Jerry Falwell Jr's wife had had a years long affair with their pool boy and that not only did Falwell know about the relationship, he liked to sit in the corner of room and watch. Just as evolutionary psychologists cannot explain homosexuality, they cannot explain scoptophilia, or most of the other peculiar fetishes that some people indulge in.

The topic of rape is somewhat unsavoury, but unavoidable in modern discussions of evolutionary biology. Perhaps I am wrong in projecting my own libidinal preferences onto other people, in assuming that others are as innocent as I am, but the question of what people actually fantasise about can be posed and can perhaps be answered by others. And this would be a way of testing the hypothesis. Simply put, if evolutionary psychology is right, then Thornhill and Palmer are right; if Thornhill and Palmer are wrong, then evolutionary psychology is wrong. It was this type of logic that led to the solution of Fermat's Last Theorem.

At this point in the post, I wish to switch topics and discuss something I regard as a great mystery. Solving this mystery falls within the scope of narrative theory. This is the mystery of fictive worlds. When we read a book, we form some impression of the characters, of their actions and relationships, and of the setting of the story. But the author does not spell everything out. Some narrative theorists have proposed that the author of a work has in mind a complete fictive world from which he or she selects only some details to report. The assumption behind this in my view quite silly idea of fictionality is that an author has in mind a total world, in all its plenitude, and chooses which details to report, and that readers, when reading, imagine that world in all its details, going beyond what the author tells them. But this is specious. Yes, it is true that when we read a typical book, we tend to assume that the characters have two arms and two legs each, unless the author specifies otherwise, as Robert Louis Stevenson does with Long John Silver in Treasure Island when he describes him as having a peg leg. If we read a story by a white author, we do tend to assume that the characters are white unless the author tells us something to the contrary. But we do not, I contend, imagine for instance the eye colour of a novel's protagonist or whether a female character is wearing jeans or a skirt in a particular scene, unless the author tells us so explicitly. Not only do readers not go far beyond what the author tells them directly, I contend that it is quite possible that the author herself does not have in mind these details. The author only imagines and reports on those elements that are relevant to the story being told and the reader only bears in mind those elements that are relevant to the story being told. The proposal that has been made by some narrative theorists that an author imagines a complete fictional world and then, through the agency of a narrator, selects which details to report, is quite wrong.

I can give an example from my own writing that illustrates this point. One of the best short stories I have written and published in this blog is A Refusal to Mourn. Early on in this story, its protagonist, Xanthe, walks around Raglan. In these early scenes, is she wearing jeans or a skirt? I don't know. And I wrote it. Of course, the reader is free to imagine her attire precisely if he or she wishes, but I myself didn't have in mind any particular dress. The only details I included in the story that have any bearing on her appearance is that she is nineteen, attractive, and has blond dreadlocks. The relevance of her youth to the story being told is, obviously, that the story is a kind of coming-of-age tale. Her attractiveness is important to the story because it helps make her sympathetic and explains why the male characters is the story are interested in her. Why, though, does she have blond dreadlocks? In my view, Xanthe is unconventional, adventurous, rebellious, a free spirit – after all, she has made the decision to live in a van by herself near a West Coast beach for three months. Her blond dreadlocks, along with the detail that she has studied at Elam, are signifiers of these personality traits, traits that are relevant to the story. But beyond these details, I do not myself have a clear idea of what she looks like.

A story is set in a world. Much modern literature is set in the real world, our world, but describes and relates the adventures and misadventures of people who are totally fictional. For instance, the novel Normal People by Sally Rooney is set in County Sligo and Dublin in the several years immediately after the 2008 Irish economic downturn: the novel's protagonists Connell and Marianne, along with the other characters, are totally fictional but the setting is real. I don't believe the story mentions Brian Cowen, the Taoiseach of Ireland during this period, but it wouldn't be a revolution in literary technique if it did. We could easily imagine a novel set in New Zealand in 2011 which mentions John Key in passing. The film that I wrote in 2012 was also set in this world, in this country, and featured the 2011 Christchurch earthquake quite prominently – Jess, however, was at least partly fictional. The general rule for much modern literature is that the fictional characters and real world people do not impinge upon each other, or interact only in one direction, from the real to the unreal. We are supposed to imagine that the characters in much modern fiction could live in the same city as us, perhaps just a few streets over, might be affected by the same kind of events that affect us, but do not have any effect on the larger world they are encompassed by.

However, there is much fiction that breaks this general rule. Famously, the novel Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow mixes fictional characters with fictionalised real people. (It is a long time since I read Ragtime so I cannot speak about it with authority.) The Gabriel Allon series of spy novels by Daniel Silva deliberately smudges the line between the real and unreal in that the fictional characters have the power to influence world events. Allon himself is presented as the Director of Mossad, a real position occupied by a real person in the real world; in The New Girl, a major character is modelled closely after Muḥammad bin Salmān bin 'Abd al-'Azīz Āl Sa'ūd, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump are referred to, although not by name. Silva writes fiction that could approximate reality, the reality we see sometimes reported about in newspaper articles. By contrast, Franz Kafka took reality and warped it fantastically. The world in which The Trial is set is Prague in the very early twentieth century but Kafka adds to this world the strange, arcane, and inscrutable court system that has Joseph K. arrested and charged and which seems to operate in parallel with the real court system. Where Silva seeks to present a world that is a plausible approximation of reality, the types of diplomatic and political incidents reported on in the news, Kafka sought to take reality and make it unheimlich. 

Whether we are reading Normal People, The New Girl or The Trial, we are bringing to bear on all these stories our knowledge of the milieus in which they are set, whether the setting be Ireland, Israel and the Middle East, or the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1914. It seems that, when we seek to understand the environment the characters inhabit, we fill in the gaps based on our knowledge of the particular geographical and temporal locales in which the stories take place. However, there are many books, particularly fantasy books and science fiction books, which are not set in anything like the real world, and consequently cannot rely on our shared common knowledge of Earthly history and of Earthly cultures. Recently I read The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany, a novel first published in 1924. This novel has two principal settings, the Vale of Erl and Elfland. The Vale of Erl is modelled somewhat after the kind of feudal society found in England during the Middle Ages, rendered timeless in Dunsany's treatment. Elfland is entirely fantastical. The novel features a number of stock tropes from fantasy literature – elves, trolls, unicorns, and will o' the wisps. It seems that when we read fantasy fiction the world we imagine is based on all our previous reading of fantasy fiction. (Of course, when we first start to read fantasy fiction, we need to begin somewhere – the ability to 'fill in the gaps', form a sense of a story's setting, is perhaps stronger in children than in adults.) Modern fantasy fiction is indebted to Tolkien, to the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, and to more modern computer games like World of Warcraft. Commonly, modern fantasy is filled with elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, and dragons. But the world of each fantasy novel or fantasy series differs in subtle ways from all the others – Middle Earth differs from Krynn (the setting for the many Dragonlance novels) and both differ utterly from Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea.

Similarly, science fiction introduces the readers to worlds of which they have no prior knowledge. One of my favourite books as a kid was Use of Weapons by Ian M. Banks. This novel centres on a kind of mercenary known as Zakalwe who employs his highly sophisticated military skills to intervene in planetary conflicts on behalf of his employer, an extraordinarily technologically advanced and utopian galaxy wide civilisation known as the Culture. In the novel, Zakelwe visits many planets. However, the societies that he engages with are always composed of humans, and tend to be intelligible as past or potential future stages in Terran social and political development. We can make sense of the worlds he visits because, except in ways that the author specifies, they can be grasped as possible variants of human societies. Other science fiction novels use a different technique. Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card deals with a planet, Lusitania, that has its own peculiar ecosystem and biome entirely unlike Earth's. However, the story is told from the point of view of human scientists who are stationed in Lusitania to study it; the culture of the humans is close enough to our own culture and to the way future human society is organised in other science fiction novels that the reader has no difficulty comprehending the wider human setting. We learn about Lusitania through characters who are also strangers to it. This technique, presenting a foreign world through the eyes of a person or people who come from a world similar to our own, is common in science fiction and can sometimes be found in fantasy. In the Thomas Covenant books by Stephen Donaldson, for instance, the Land (a world which shares with Middle Earth the existence of a Suaron-like archenemy, Lord Foul, but is otherwise very different from the fantasy template originating with Middle Earth) is seen through the eyes of a human from our world who has been magically transported there.

We now arrive at the mystery. Whether we are reading Normal People, The Trial, A Wizard of Earthsea, or Use of Weapons, we are dealing with incomplete information. This is inevitable. A book that explicated every detail associated with its characters' appearances, lives, and social, political and cultural settings would be infinitely long. And yet, when we are reading, we are never troubled by our incomplete understanding the world in which a particular story is set. We form a vague sense of the milieu in which the tale takes place but generally just race through a novel without wondering too much about what we don't know. There are sometimes exceptions. In the previous post, I discussed the novel The Night Circus. When I was reading this novel, a niggling question that bothered me was that I couldn't understand how Marco could influence the Circus when we he was stationed in London while the Circus travelled internationally. Eventually, the novel's author Erin Morgenstern answers this question – Marco controls some of the exhibitions through the intermediating agency of the bonfire at the centre of the circus, a bonfire that acts as a conduit for his magic. The reason that the precise method Marco influences the Circus is a question that requires an answer while Marco's precise living address in London is a question that doesn't is that the first question is relevant to the story being told while the second question is superfluous. We arrive back at the idea I proposed earlier in the post. An author seeks to tell a story and reports on only those details that are relevant to the story being told. A reader, in complementary fashion, makes the assumption that the everything the author tells him or her has been told for a reason. Chekhov, in a letter, made the same point. "Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."

So it seems that we can read, comprehend, and enjoy a novel without a complete understanding of the world in which it is set, and that the author herself may not know herself all the details of the world she is representing. This raises a number of issues in narrative theory related to 'suspension of disbelief' and notions of truth and falsity in fiction. It raises, furthermore, the most fundamental question of all: what is a story? I wish to conclude this discussion with two points. The first is that this mystery doesn't just bedevil fiction but ordinary discourse. When we read a newspaper article about, for instance, the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, we can understand the import, the purpose, of the article even if we are hazy about what Rohingya Muslims are. Some may be inspired to carry out independent research about Rohingya Muslims but most people, I suggest, read the article, incorporate it into what they already know about the world, and move on. Likewise, if a friend gossips about a person she knows, we can understand the point she is making even if we know nothing else about the subject of the gossip. Our understanding of even the real world is compromised by incomplete information. The second point is that the ability to distinguish between the real world and fictive worlds, between reality and fiction generally, is present almost from infancy, as I have discussed in this blog before. Children who read the Harry Potter books, or have the Harry Potter books read to them, understand from the very beginning that the wizardly world is unreal and, I suggest, enjoy these books precisely because they realise that the wizardly world is unreal. This seems to me another great mystery.

In this post, I have discussed two issues, the hypothesis that rape is a natural evolutionary behavioural adaption and the mystery of how we are capable of making sense of fictive worlds despite a lack of information about these worlds. Readers of this blog will realise that these two issues are related to other subjects I have tackled in the past. Perhaps I will discuss them again in the future. 

Interpretations of "This is the End" and "The Night Circus"

When I began writing this blog, it was originally concerned with narrative theory, and this is a topic I have returned to occasionally over the years. In today's post, I am going to discuss narrative theory again and apply my model of interpretation to the Seth Rogen film This is the End and to the novel The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. I may also discuss my life again towards the end of the post. I have thought about narrative theory, or something perhaps more aptly called 'story theory', for many, many years now. I don't know if my approach is original, or if it is a kind of distillation of the types of critical analyses I read when I was twenty-two and a student of English Literature. Perhaps my readers can decide if my approach is original or not.

The key word in my theory (and yes I know I know the term 'theory' is controversial, as is the claim that it is 'mine', that others have not thought of it before) is rhetoric. Stories are a form of rhetoric.  'Rhetoric' can be defined as 'the art of persuasive speech'. The term 'rhetoric' has a long history in literature studies – in 1961, Wayne Booth published a famous book The Rhetoric of Fiction which laid the groundwork for much narrative theory formulated since. More recently, in 2007,  Richard Walsh published The Rhetoric of Fictionality, riffing on the title of Booth's book. I read both books in early 2018 when undertaking a research paper under the supervision of University of Auckland professor and resident narrative theory expert Brian Boyd, and what struck me about both books is that neither writer engages with the idea that, if fiction is rhetoric, it must be trying to persuade the reader or viewer of something, by definition. This failure, the use of the word 'rhetoric' as betokening a key idea without any use at all of the associated word 'persuasion', has seemed to me then and afterwards a profoundly stupid error made by people who are reputedly clever. In my view, stories are rhetorical in the sense that they seek to persuade the reader or viewer of a proposition about the real world, or some set of propositions about the real world. Usually these propositions are ones the story's audience already wants to believe. Stories are poultices or bromides used to sooth the internal contradictions that vex the collective psyche.

I can make this clearer with a couple of examples, examples I have used before. The 1977 film Star Wars is devoted to the proposition or thesis "Good always triumphs over evil". In order to make the case that good always triumphs over evil, the storytellers have to present evil as vastly more powerful than good, and good as the victor despite this. In the Western tradition, stories depend on conflict, and in my theory this conflict manifests as a tension between two contradictory propositions about the world. In Star Wars, the thesis is "Good always triumphs over evil" and the antithesis is "Sometimes evil triumphs over good". In Pulp Fiction, the antithesis is "It's cool to be a gangster" and the thesis is "Being a gangster gets you killed". In both Star Wars and Pulp Fiction, the thesis triumphs at the end. I need to make a few points about this theory. At its heart, any story worth being called a story is concerned with abstract ideas (Othello is concerned with jealousy and Don Quixote is concerned with chivalric ideals vs. reality) but a story very infrequently makes the abstract ideas on which it is founded explicit. Interpretation is required to bring the abstract ideas to the surface and different people interpret stories in different ways. It is difficult to prove one interpretation correct over all others. Nevertheless I believe that any good story has a correct interpretation, although it can take a lot of thought to arrive at the right destination. (For instance, I believe, now, that the interpretation of Rambo I proposed in the post Politics in Fiction was not quite right but this does not invalidate the claim that a correct interpretation is always possible). A related point is that some stories do not resolve the conflict that is at the heart of the story, but, in my view, such stories are inconclusive and leave the reader or viewer dissatisfied.

I would like to offer a more complex model for story structure. At the beginning of a film or other type of story, a problem is presented. This problem is a problem within the culture or ideology of society at large, and can be construed as a question. In Star Wars, the question is "How can good triumph over evil when evil is vastly more powerful than good?" In West Side Story, the question is "How can the different social groups that make up America come together to form a harmonious whole?". At Plot Point 1, a possible solution to the problem is presented. In Star Wars, the solution that is mooted is the Force – Obiwan Kinobe suggests, not long after we first meet him, that good can triumph over evil because it has the Force on its side. In West Side Story, the possible solution is love – the different groups that make up America can be brought together by romantic relationships. At Plot Point 2, this solution receives its strongest test. In Star Wars, the light sabre duel between Darth Vader and Obiwan Kinobe on board the Death Star marks Plot Point 2. Vader says, "Your powers are weak, old man. I shall strike you down." Obiwan replies, "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine." Obwan is indeed "struck down". The third act involves the effort by the forces of good, the rebels, to destroy the Death Star, without Obiwan's assistance. Just before Luke fires the missile that brings about the destruction of the Death Star, he hears Obiwan in his head, saying "Use the Force, Luke!" (It is also significant that Luke has just been saved from Darth Vader by Han Solo piloting the Millennium Falcon – Solo's full allegiance to the side of good having been in doubt up until then.) In West Side Story, Plot Point 2 occurs when Tony kills Bernardo, and the final act moves almost inexorably towards its tragic conclusion, the death of Tony. In Star Wars, the potential solution, the Force, proves effective; in West Side Story, the potential solution, love, proves ineffective, and this is why West Side Story is a tragedy and Star Wars isn't. West Side Story acts as a clarion call for action to address conflict between different ethnic groups, whereas Star Wars leaves the audience with a somewhat complacent sense that good will inevitably prevail. 

The model for story structure I have just presented is deeply indebted to Syd Field's theory of screenwriting outlined in his book Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting. The difference between my theory and his is that I am putting the emphasis on the abstract, rhetorical dimension of stories, rather than on the motivations of characters. Before moving on, I would like to draw attention to two important details related to the examples I have given. I have yet to work out a satisfactory explanation for what happens at Plot Point 2 – although Plot Point 2 occurs in most stories, is generally the lowest point for the protagonists and results in a simplification of the story, it is difficult to form a generalisation about Plot Point 2 that is true for all stories. The second detail is cautionary. Don't rely on Wikipedia for synopses of films and other stories. The Wikipedia page on West Side Story, for instance, is completely wrong – better synopses can be found elsewhere on the Net.

As promised, I will now turn my attention to the film This is the End. I first saw this film in the cinema in 2013 and caught the last part of it again on TV about a week or two ago. In writing about it, I will be relying upon my memory of it. I will assume that my readers have also seen this film and will not provide a summary of it. I want to say one thing about it before we embark on its interpretation. The title is very probably an allusion to The Doors song "The End". (This was pointed out to me by my friend Jess not long after I first saw the film, in 2013. At the time I didn't believe her.) If the title is an allusion to The Doors song, as I think it is, this is not accidental, as I shall elaborate on later.

This is the End is a story about a group of Hollywood celebrities, playing themselves, struggling to survive after the Apocalypse has occurred A good story is a rhetorical argument in favour of some abstract theme or idea which can be expressed in the form of a proposition; a satisfactory story ends with the triumph of the thesis over the antithesis; therefore, when we are seeking to determine the message or moral of a story, we should start with the finish. The climax of This is the End occurs when, having fled James Franco's house into the post-Apocalyptic wilderness of Los Angeles, the film's two main characters, Seth Rogen and Jay Baruche, are confronted by an enormous devil bearing down on them; having established that the route to heaven is selfless acts, the two try to apologise to each other for all the things they have done wrong to each other. A beam of light appears around Jay and he begins to ascend to heaven, but no similar beam appears around Seth. Seth takes Jay's hand but his weight means that Jay's ascension stalls. Seth sacrifices himself by letting go; as he falls, a beam of light appears around him as well and he and Jay both rise into the sky. The film ends with both Jay and Seth arriving in heaven. It might seem from this that the thesis of the film is "Selfless acts will get you into Heaven" but I think we can go further. The relationship between Jay and Seth is the backbone of the story – the film begins with Jay arriving to visit Seth and Seth spelling out Jay's name in marijuana joints. There is a very brief scene at the beginning of Seth and Jay pressing the soles of their feet together, a reference perhaps to the Kurt Vonnegut novel Cat's Cradle. The film thus begins by depicting the platonic love between Seth and Jay. As the film progresses, we find that the relationship between Seth and Jay has in fact deteriorated, that they have grown apart. The film climaxes with them restoring their relationship by confessing to each other all the mistakes they have made with respect to the other. From all this, I think it would be more credible to say that the thesis of the film is "Platonic love between men is the route to heaven".

If the thesis of the film is "Platonic love between men is the route to salvation", what is the antithesis? Platonic love between men is threatened on both sides – on the one hand, it is threatened by antagonism or hostility between men and the other hand it is threatened by homosexuality. There is quite a lot of coded references to homosexuality in This is the End. To give just one example, in the last act we find out that Danny McBride has adopted Channing Tatum as his gimp. It is not just homosexuality that threatens the relationships between men, it is sexuality in general. Early in the first act, Seth and Jay attend a housewarming party hosted by James Franco. The party is decadent, Bacchanalian, depraved. Michael Cera, who is present at the party, plays himself as a crazed sex-addict and is one of the first to die when the Apocalypse occurs. Much of the film concerns the group of men trying to weather out the storm in Franco's house. At one point, Franco and McBride get into a heated, verbal altercation about masturbation – McBride had secretly appropriated a porn magazine belonging to Franco and had ejaculated on it, much to Franco's annoyance. A little later, Emma Watson breaks into the house. Jay gets the boys together to discuss how to deal with her because he is worried that they might give off a "rapey vibe". McBride says to Jay (this is not an exact quote but it gives the gist), "When push comes to shove, you'll be the first to become the house bitch". Emma Watson overhears the conversation, gets the wrong idea and, taking their water, exits the house. At the climax of the film, it is not accidental that the enormous devil bearing down on Seth and Jay is naked and has an enormous penis – when Seth is raptured up to heaven, the beam of light around him cuts the devil in half, severing the penis. The party in heaven is at once the mirror image of the party hosted by Franco and its opposite – its opposite because it is effectively neuter.

The theme of the movie concerning the dangers of homosexuality is perhaps most explicitly expressed through the Jonah Hill character. Jonah has an earring in his left ear and is referred to as "Earring motherfucker" at one point by James Franco. There is some confusion on the internet about which ear means what but I think we can say that a pierced left ear is a sign of heterosexuality while a pierced right ear is a sign of homosexuality. The fact that Jonah needs to advertise his heterosexuality to the world through an ear piercing in his left ear not only indicates a tolerance for homosexuality but also suggests an uncertainty about how he presents himself and perhaps an uncertainty about his own sexuality. There is a brief scene in which Jonah is looking at James Franco, experiences an 'attraction' and reflexively grabs hold of his earring I think to reassure himself that he is straight. A storyline that runs through the first half of the film concerns Jonah's attitude towards Jay – he appears to like Jay but Jay suspects that Jonah's apparently friendly posturings are false, hypocritical. At the midpoint of the film, Jonah, while lying in bed, prays to God, saying that he hates Jay and asking God to kill Jay. A devil appears and molests Jonah. (This is not shown explicitly. Rather we see the shadow of the demon on the wall with a huge erect penis.) The next day Jonah is seemingly uncertain whether the homosexual experience was real or a dream. As a consequence of this molestation, Jonah comes to be possessed by an evil spirit, is subject to an attempted exorcism, and, after he catches fire, burns down James Franco's house.

The encounter between Jonah and the demon highlights a peculiar feature of the story. The film equates antagonism between men with homosexuality; both threaten the ideal of platonic love and result in death and damnation. Homosexuality is presented as a kind of violence. Partly this peculiar aspect of the story is because the film is playing with Fundamentalist Christian ideas. What happens to decadent Hollywood stars if the Fundamentalist evangelicals are right and the Apocalypse is just around the corner? How can liberal Hollywood justify its tolerance of homosexuality if homosexuality is a sin that sends a person to hell? This is the End is, of course, a comedy. Of the six men who shelter in James Franco's house, half are raptured up to heaven and half die and presumably go to hell. And the six are all actors playing often unsympathetic caricatures of themselves. It is worth noting, in passing, that Michael Cera's characterisation as a sex-obsessed heterosexual and Jonah Hill's as sexually confused is the reverse of the characters they played in another Seth Rogen film Superbad.

This is the End, like all well structured movies, has the question-solution structure I described earlier. The question, first posed at Franco's house warming party, is "How can decadent Hollywood, with its permissive attitudes towards drug use and sex, be saved in the Christian sense?" It is significant to the story that Jay, who is the conscience of the film, feels uncomfortable at Franco's party. When the Apocalypse occurs, only Jay guesses correctly that they are living through Armageddon; the other survivors think the rift that has opened up in the front yard and the rest of the chaos in the world around them is the result of a natural disaster such as an earthquake. It takes the whole of the second act for the other characters to realise that Jay is right. Plot Point 1 occurs after the initial devastation when the main characters take refuge in Franco's house. The question that has been posed is given the provisional answer, "Hollywood can be saved by cooperation and mutual amity among its members". This solution is shown, throughout the second act, to be seemingly unsustainable. Danny McBride, who is introduced early in the second act (he had gatecrashed the party and slept through the earthquake and rapture in the upstairs bathtub) proves a disruptive influence on the group. During the second act, McBride is evicted from the house and Jonah Hill is possessed by a malignant spirit. When the house catches fire, the remaining four survivors are driven from Franco's house. This marks Plot Point 2: it is at once the nadir of the film and the moment where the story has become simpler – all the characters now understand that they living in the End Times. Early in the third act, Craig Robinson sacrifices himself for the others. Seeking to distract a demon, he runs towards it (yelling his war-cry "Take off your panties!") – and is raptured up to heaven. The answer that had been offered tentatively at Plot Point 1, that the route to salvation is through friendship between men, has now been confirmed. And the film ends, as I described earlier, with the friendship between Seth and Jay enabling their ascension to heaven.

At this point in the post, I wish to turn to another story, a novel I read recently rather than a film, The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. I really enjoyed This is the End and I wish I could say the same about The Night Circus. But I can't. It seemed to me (and I admit that this judgement is somewhat un-PC) a novel for precocious thirteen year old girls. Perhaps my capacity to appreciate this work of magic and fantasy had been somewhat compromised in advance because the novel I read immediately prior to it, The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany, is a true Fantasy masterpiece. I bought The Night Circus hoping  to recapture the thrill I had reading Dunsany's book but found myself disappointed. However many others have loved The Night Circus. It was a bestseller, has legions of devoted fans, and was nominated for The Guardian First Book Award, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Galaxy Book Awards. The copy I own comes complete with glowing tributes from many well respected newspapers and magazines and I wish to single out a couple of quotes because they have some bearing on the interpretation of of the novel I wish to propose. The Guardian critic says about it: "It is – a surprisingly rare thing in fiction – a strikingly beautiful world, in spite of its darkness." The Scotsman says "For all her humorous touches, Morgenstern has produced something darker than night." Red magazine says "An extraordinary blend of dream and nightmare will take you on a magical journey." These quotes suggest that many reviewers have found something dark or nightmarish about the novel – but I myself didn't find anything particularly dark about it at all. However, the fact that others did points to a possible interpretation.

Before I explore this idea further, I want to make some general points about the book. It is very readable. The chapters are short, paragraphs very short, and sentences brief. It has what my authoress godmother calls "narrative drive", in her view the supreme virtue of a well written work of fiction. Morgenstern employs a particular technique that one finds common in much fiction – she presents several protagonists separately and the reader is impelled forward by the conviction that at some point the different characters will meet and curiosity about what will happen when they do. James Joyce employs this technique in Ulysses (Stephen Daedalus is presented at the beginning and Leopold Bloom in the fourth chapter but they do not have a real conversation until more than three quarters of the way through the book) and David Foster Wallace satirised the same narrative device in Infinite Jest (the two main characters, Hal Incandenza and Don Gately, never meet although we constantly expect they will and for the story proper to start; it is perhaps unsurprising that Wallace's working title for the book was A Failed Entertainment). In The Night Circus, the three main characters are Celia Bowen, Marco Alisdair, and Bailey Clarke. Celia and Marco are rival magicians who have been bound from childhood to participate in a magical competition that eventually takes place at a kind of perfect circus; Bailey is an avid circus goer. The story is not told chronologically. Rather the storylines involving Celia and Marco start in 1873 and the storyline involving Bailey begins in 1893. Celia and Marco first meet and recognise each other as their fated rivals in 1894, about two fifths of the way through the novel, and Bailey does not meet Celia and Marco until almost the end in 1902. The story builds tension and answers the questions it asks gradually. Celia and Marco are first magically bound to the competition in the second chapter; we witness the inception and establishment of the Night Circus a little later but are only little by little made aware that the circus is the venue for the competition as the novel develops. As the novel progresses, we learn that all the displays and performances in the circus depend on the magic of either Celia or Marco. About four fifths of the way through the story, Celia learns (and the reader learns along with her) that the competition is "a test of stamina and control, not skill", that "the victor is the one left standing after the other can no longer endure" (p.381). In other words, either Celia or Marco must die. By this point in the novel, Celia and Marco are passionately in love. The novel reaches its climax when Marco, who has been manipulating the circus from outside its borders, is drawn to the circus by another magician, Tsukiko (the victor of a previous magical competition), who wants to kill him and in this way end the competition because she fears that it is endangering the circus and its members. Celia saves Marco and they both become disembodied spirits, haunting the circus. Bailey, who has found himself at this apposite moment in the circus, is offered and accepts a new role as proprietor of the circus, ensuring its survival. The competition is declared a stalemate, and both Celia and Marco persist as ghosts. (This summary of the plot is perhaps a little hamfisted– to get a better understanding of the story, I suggest the novel itself.)

What then of the novel's supposedly dark and nightmarish qualities? One aspect of the story is that, as the story progresses, we find out that all the members of the circus and those associated with it are seemingly immune to the effects of time, but don't know why. Tara Burgess, one of those involved in the devising of the circus, says to another co-founder, Ethan Harris, "I feel...not trapped but something like it [..] I am finding it difficult to discern between asleep and awake [...] I do not like being left in the dark. I am not particularly fond of impossible things." (p. 190). Ethan suggests she talk to the man in grey, who, unbeknownst to both Tara and Ethan, is Marco's guardian, is privy to the secret that the circus is the venue for a magical competition and is in fact one of the competition's originators. When Tara meets him,  "she tries her best to explain her concerns. That there is more going on with the circus than most people are privy to. That there are elements she can find no reasonable explanations for. [...] The concern of not being able to be certain if anything is real. How disconcerting it is to look in a mirror and see the same face, unchanged for years." When pressed for an explanation, the man in grey says, "The circus is simply a circus [...] An impressive exhibition, but no more than that." (p. 223) Very shortly after, Tara, while waiting at a train platform, sees the man in grey arguing with the competition's other instigator, Celia's father Prospero the Magician, steps forward onto the tracks, and is hit by a train. Morgenstern does not make this explicit but the suggestion is that Tara has been magically killed because she has come too close to discovering the circus's secret. Tara is not the only character to feel the disturbing effects of magic. The enchantment over those involved in the circus has its most profound effect on the circus's principal founder and proprietor Chandresh Lefevre. Chandresh not only does not age, but has defects of memory and is unable to move on from the circus to other projects, as a result of sorcery by Marco. At Plot Point 2, Isobel (who is Marco's official girlfriend for much of the novel) lifts a spell she had cast to keep the two competing forces in the circus in balance. That same night, Halloween, Chandresh visits the circus, sees the man in grey talking with the circus's preeminent fan Friedrick Thiessen, and, feeling obscurely that the man in grey is responsible for the curse he is under, throws a knife at him. The man in grey dodges the blade and it kills Thiessen. There are thus two deaths in the story (prior to the end when Marco and Celia dematerialise). These two deaths do not seem to me sufficient justification to say that the story is dark and nightmarish. To explain why many reviewers found something dark and disturbing in the novel, we need to go deeper. We need to consider the deeply buried subtext of the story. In addition to the storylines involving Marco, Celia, and the other characters, there is a recurring narrative, written in the second person, that depicts what the reader might experience when visiting the circus. This narrative runs from the very beginning until the very end. The circus is presented as something exciting, enthralling, mysterious, and marvellous. But it is also potentially dangerous – dangerous because it is a place where the rules of the ordinary world do not apply. There is a tension between the allure of the circus and its peril. It is significant that, at Plot Point 2, it is the circus's most prominent fan, a man who stands as a metonym for all the patrons who love the circus and visit it obsessively, who is killed while visiting it.

I turn now to perhaps the most important two features of the story. The first is that it presents, from the beginning, a world in which magic is real but thought to be unreal by almost all normal people. The reality of magic is evident from the very beginning when Celia, then a child, at her first encounter with Prospero, telekinetically destroys a teacup (which Prospero telekinetically reassembles). In the early part of the novel, we are presented with two different ways magic can operate in the world. Marco's guardian, the unnamed man in grey, prefers to remain inconspicuous, while Prospero displays his magic to the world as a stage magician. He outperforms his stage magician rivals because he employs real magic; he is able to get away with this because his audiences assume that his magic is trickery, devices, deception, and legerdemain. Several chapters into the novel, Chandresh arranges with a number of collaborators to establish the Night Circus. From its inception, it is conceived as a place that seems as maximally magical as possible but is in fact founded on rational principles. Thiessen, for instance, is commissioned to manufacture the circus clock; the clock he constructs seems quite magical but is purely a piece of extraordinarily sophisticated engineering. When the reader is presented with the circus's opening night, he feels (or I felt, at any rate) that the marvels of the circus are theatrics, illusions. As the novel progresses, as I said earlier in the essay, the reader comes to realise gradually the extent to which real magic informs and underlies all the varied shows in the circus, until by the end he has realised that everything in the circus is to some degree magical, is implicated in the competition. The second important feature of the novel is the love story between Celia and Marco. Because most readers are familiar with the conventions of fiction, we expect, as soon as we realise that the oppositely gendered protagonists have been forced into a rivalrous competition, that they will fall in love. The love story seemed to me pure Mills and Boon, and reminded me of another critically and commercially successful but subpar novel, Normal People. (Both novels make a point of presenting their female protagonists as orgasmic.) Although this reader found the love story unconvincing, the romance in the novel obviously explains to a large degree why The Night Circus was such a critical and commercial hit. Because Marco and Celia are rivals, they are always equals, and so the novel permits a Feminist reading. There are therefore three tensions or conflicts within the story. The first is that real magic exists but is repudiated by most ordinary people. The second is that the circus presents itself as an entertainment, a spectacle, but is in reality the arena for a magical competition. The third is that Marco and Celia are rivals, forced into a competition in which one must either symbolically or literally destroy the other (something the reader has intuited long before it is confirmed) but have fallen in love. The end of the novel resolves all three conflicts.

Earlier in this essay, I said that we can work out the thesis of a story from its conclusion. The climax of The Night Circus occurs when Marco and Celia are torn from the real world to become incorporeal shades tied to the circus. This climax had been foreshadowed at the midpoint of the novel when a young circus dweller, Widget, relates to his sister Poppet the legend telling of how Merlin was trapped in a huge oak tree because he has shared his magical secrets with a young woman. The Night Circus then resolves itself when Bailey agrees to take over the job of proprietor from Chandresh. Bailey's role in the narrative makes him a kind of deus ex machina: it is precisely because of his importance to the resolution of the story that he has had a storyline of his own throughout the novel. It is significant that, when Bailey agrees to take on the role of circus caretaker, he does so of his own free will, knowing that the circus is founded on magic unlike Chandresh. Bailey is also a surrogate for the reader and for the ordinary circus visitor. In this way, the novel resolves the first of its three tensions: the truth that real magic exists has got out to the rest of the world. The second of the three tensions resolves when the competition is declared a stalemate: the circus is now truly a genuine entertainment or spectacle, rather than the venue for a magical competition pretending to be a spectacle. Finally, the love story resolves. Marco and Celia can be together for eternity. The novel ends by suggesting that the Night Circus still exists and is operating in the present, with Bailey still as its proprietor.

So, what is the thesis of The Night Circus? I would propose that its central proposition is, "Magic exists and is something marvellous to be celebrated". The antithesis is, "Magic exists and is something fearful to be repudiated". The novel equates magic with romantic love – the victory of the thesis over the antithesis is also the victory of love over fate (although perhaps there is some ambiguity about the ending). If we apply the problem-solution model advanced earlier, we can interpret the structure of The Night Circus in the following way. At the beginning it poses a question, "What place does real magic have in the world?" At Plot Point 1, when the Night Circus opens, a provisional answer is put forward, "The place for magic is some kind of perfect circus." At Plot Point 2, this solution is put to its strongest test, when Isobel lifts her spell and Thiessen is killed. It seems that magic is indeed something to be feared and rejected. It is significant that Plot Point 2 connects with the novel's love story – Isobel undoes the spell she had cast because Marco has finally broken up with her. The novel finishes, however, by reaffirming the solution it had put forward tentatively at Plot Point 1. The place for real magic is indeed the Night Circus.

Over the years, I have argued quite consistently in favour of this particular model for describing successful fictional narratives. However, thinking about This is the End and The Night Circus compels me to make an important point. A story is indeed an argument in favour of some proposition or some set of propositions – but these propositions do not have to be true, don't even have to be believed by the story's writer or writers. This is the End appears to have the moral, "Platonic love between men is the route to heaven while homosexuality or hostility between men is the route to hell" – but I think it highly unlikely that Seth Rogen or his collaborator Evan Goldberg believe in either heaven or hell. In fact, a later Seth Rogen film, Sausage Party, has a quite explicitly anti-religious message. Likewise, I doubt that Morgenstern herself believes in magic. I would go so far as to suggest that, although many people in Western countries identify as Jedi on national censuses, George Lucas himself probably doesn't believe literally in the Force. Both This is the End and The Night Circus depend on hypothetical scenarios, on conditionals. "If heaven and hell existed, how could ensure we go to the former rather than the later?" "If magic existed, what would be its place in the world?" A particular story has its own peculiar logic, is based on its own assumptions that may not apply to reality. This idea, that the the underlying conceit of a fiction may also be a fiction, is important and something I may discuss in greater depth in future posts.

Earlier in the essay, I suggested that the title of This is the End is an allusion to The Doors song "The End" and said that I would elaborate on this idea later. I would like to finish the essay by tying up this loose thread. The subtext of This is the End is, as I have said, largely concerned with sexuality, and this explains The Doors allusion. For many men, Jim Morison is an iconic exemplar of heterosexuality. In popular culture, in subterranean byways of the collective psyche almost inaccessible to analysis, the idea persists that heterosexuality involves a successful resolution of  the Oedipal complex, and the Oedipal complex is directly referenced at the climax of "The End". The persistence of the idea that sexuality is bound up with one's relations with one's parents can ultimate be blamed on Freud. I have been thinking about the connections between sexuality and the Oedipal complex, as it is evinced in "The End" and in the Star Wars trilogy, recently, but have yet to form any solid conclusions. Again, this might be a subject for later posts.