by Nisi Shawl
1) “I have a cat. My neighbors on either side and across the street all have cats. Therefore, everyone has at least one cat.”
2) “My neighbor has a cat, and she’s an idiot. My brother has three cats, and he’s an idiot. Therefore, cat owners are idiots.”
Delany’s Trouble on Triton offers a great example of a character committing factual categorical thinking and a character committing fallacious categorical thinking:
“Lawrence, he was right.”
“Who?” Lawrence looked up.
“That Christian—the one we saw out in front of Audri’s co-op. Mad Mike.”
“Right about what?”
“About women.” Bron suddenly crumpled the letter between cupped hands. “They don’t understand.”
“You mean they don’t understand you? Some of us, my dear, get along smashingly with women. Even me, from time to time. No misunderstandings at all: just pure sympathy and sympatico right down the line. Of course with me it doesn’t last. But does it ever, all the time, with anyone?”
“They don’t understand about men— Not you, Lawrence. I mean ordinary, heterosexual men. They can’t. It’s just a logical impossibility. I’m a logician and I know.”
Lawrence laughed. “My dear boy! I have observed you intimately now for six months, and you are a sweet and familiar creature—alas, far more familiar than six months should make you. Let me tell you a secret. There is a difference between men and women, a little, tiny one that, I’m afraid, has probably made most of your adult life miserable and will probably continue to make it so till you die. The difference is simply that women have only really been treated, by that bizarre, Durkheimian abstraction, ‘society,’ as human beings for the last—oh, say sixty-five years; and then, really, only on the moons; whereas men have had the luxury of such treatment for the last four thousand. The result of this historical anomaly is simply that, on a statistical basis, women are just a little less willing to put up with certain kinds of shit than men—simply because the concept of a certain kind of shit-free Universe is, in that equally bizarre Jungian abstraction, the female ‘collective unconscious,’ too new and too precious.” Lawrence’s brows knitted; he frowned at Bron’s knotted fists. “Why, I bet that’s a letter from a lady—I confess, when I was checking for corpses, I had a peek in here and saw the name and the return address. Your problem, you see, is that essentially you are a logical pervert, looking for a woman with a mutually compatible logical perversion. The fact is, the mutual perversion you are looking for is very, very rare—if not nonexistent. You’re looking for someone who can enjoy a certain sort of logical masochism. If it were just sexual, you’d have no trouble finding a partner at all—as your worldly experience no doubt has already informed you. Hang them from the ceiling, burn their nipples with matches, stick pins in their buttocks and cane them bloody! There’re gaggles of women, just as there are gaggles of men, who would be delighted to have a six foot, blond iceberg like you around to play such games with. You can get a list of the places they frequent just by dialing Information. But, though she is a religious fanatic like Mad Mike, who believes that the children of her body are one with the objects of her hand, or a sociopath like poor Alfred, who doesn’t quite have a model for anyone, correct or incorrect; be she nun or nymphomaniac, a loud political pamphleteer running around in the u-l sector, or a pillar of society living elegantly on the Ring, or anywhere in between, or any combination, the one thing she is not going to do is put up with your hurry-up-and-wait, your do-a-little-tap-dance-while-you-stand-on-your-head, your run-around-in-circles-while-you-walk-a-straight-line, especially when it’s out of bed and simply has no hope of pleasurable feedback. Fortunately, your particular perversion today is extremely rare. Oh, I would say maybe one man out of fifty has it—quite amazing, considering that it once was about as common as the ability to grow a beard. Just compare it to some of the other major sexual types: homosexuality, one out of five; bisexuality, three out of five; sadism and masochism, one out of nine; the varieties of fetishism, one out of eight. So you see, at one out of fifty, you really are in a difficult situation. And what makes it more difficult—even tragic—is that the corresponding perversion you’re searching for in women, thanks to that little historical anomaly, is more like one out of five thousand. Yes, I have a—believe me—platonic curiosity about both male and female victims of this deviation. Yes, I exploit the attendant loneliness of the unfulfilled by offering friendship. Psychic vampirism? Believe me, there’s as much of the blood donor about me as there is of Vlad Tepes. I don’t know anything about the woman responsible for that—” He nodded toward the crumpled letter—”other than her public reputation. But I’ve lived a long time. I can make a few speculations about her. Bron, in your terms, she simply doesn’t exist. I mean, how can she? You’re a logical sadist looking for a logical masochist. But you are a logician. If you redefine the relation between P and Not-P beyond a certain point—well, then you just aren’t talking about logic any more. All you’ve done, really, is change the subject.”
“I’m a metalogician,” Bron said. “I define and redefine the relation between P and Not-P five hours a day, four days a week. Women don’t understand. Faggots don’t understand either.” (212–214)
As this excerpt demonstrates, a writer may intentionally make her characters commit categorical thinking—bad, good, or a mix—in order to reveal character.
A Final Term for Generalization
The most common term for the generalization fallacy when applied to human beings is “stereotyping.”
Exercise 3
Describe yourself with one (and only one) major ROAARS change. In other words, if you describe yourself as being of a different race than you really are, keep this new you at your same age; your physical ability, religion, gender, and sexual orientation should also remain the same. Take four minutes for this exercise.
Afterwards, as you review what you’ve written, be alert for these things: stereotypes, other changes in your ROAARS traits that seem to stem inevitably from the original change, lack of any noticeable difference beyond the original change, unexpected consequences of the change. Did you find yourself thinking in new ways about the category you theoretically and temporarily “joined”? About the category you theoretically and temporarily “deserted”?
6
Congruence
Using what we call congruence is one good way of establishing ties between a reader (or an author) and a character of one or more different ROAARS characteristics.
The heroine of Nisi’s short story “The Tawny Bitch” differs from her creator in a number of ways. “Belle” is a lesbian, whereas Nisi identifies as bisexual. Belle is a minor, and Nisi’s a mature woman. Belle is a quadroon; she quantifies precisely the proportions of her African and European ancestry. Nisi’s lineage is also largely African and European, but she doesn’t know the exact proportions and has no very deep interest in figuring them out. There are other non-ROAARS traits that distance Nisi from her character: Belle is an heiress, while Nisi works for her living, an important class distinction. Belle also identifies strongly as a colonial, a lesser subject of a strong, centralized empire.
These points of dissimilarity regarding its heroine apply to most readers of “The Tawny Bitch,” too. The majority will not be lesbians, heiresses, minors, etc.
To help herself as an author connect emotionally to her own heroine and to increase her readers’ ability to empathize with her Nisi focused on some specific non-ROAARS characteristics she and her audience might have in common with Belle. She made her a picky eater. She described her as deeply in love—a condition not everyone is in all the time, but one potent enough to remain a vital memory long after the actual experience. But the main congruency Nisi established between Belle and her creator/consumers was the character’s intoxication with words. The story is told primarily via entries in a journal Belle keeps while imprisoned, so her extravagancies of language come through quite clearly in the text, e
xciting a sympathetic response in those with the same literary inclinations.
In Sarah Canary, Karen Joy Fowler uses congruence to show similarities between characters of widely differing ROAARS characteristics. To take one example, though Chin dislikes and fears Indians, he notes that Tom, the Indian he is forced by whites to execute, has very little facial hair, “…no more than Chin himself.” (47) To take another example, compare the following passages, the first from the viewpoint of a white suffragette, the second, again, from that of Chin:
“Downstairs, the men were shouting—boisterous, happy sounds. Women were rarely safe when men got drunk and happy together.” (166)
“Chinese men were rarely safe when white men got drunk and happy together.” (188)
By examining these two passages you can see how Fowler’s book simultaneously uses both parallax and congruence. The suffragette and Chin face danger from the same sources, and the phrasing underlines this. But unlike Chin, the suffragette disregards racial markers; to her, they’re irrelevant to the situation.
Categories All Around Us
Every person belongs to a large number of categories. We doubt there are many individuals who are genuinely sui generis. All people have traits and abilities that put them into all sorts of categories or groups—groups that overlap at least some, and potentially most—other groups.
You can be a neurotic white lesbian Zen Buddhist with gorgeous eyes, bad teeth, anorexia, a designer wardrobe that’s the envy of Hollywood, a full dog-sled racing team, a condominium in the French Quarter of New Orleans, a summer home on the coast of Maine.… Some of these are ROAARS traits, and some are not. Some are consistent with one another or with stereotypes attributed to identification with a particular group. Others are diametrically opposed to those stereotypes or completely unrelated to the rest of these traits. One trait may imply membership in a different economic class than another does—a non-ROAARS distinction of important though often unconscious consideration.
The same multi-group/cross-group traits should be true of your characters. Even your secondary characters.
Generally, a secondary character has one main character trait. However, a secondary character shouldn’t be that one trait exclusively. Neither should all the secondary character’s few illustrated traits point to the same ROAARS category. That makes a stereotype of even the most minor of “bit players.”
For example, don’t make a secondary character’s main trait be his gayness and then portray him as a bitchy, effeminate San Francisco florist with a great collection of disco-diva CDs. There’s nothing wrong with a character’s being gay, or effeminate, or a florist, or a disco fan, or a San Francisco resident. But when every trait you ascribe to a character points to the same group, you’re just promoting a widely-held stereotype.
How about a secondary character who’s a bitchy, straight florist who has a pet house rabbit and thinks rap music has gone way downhill since Public Enemy’s third CD? Or who’s an African-American computer programmer and classical oboist?
It’s not often we run across these characters in fiction—but they’re believable. Even if they’re unusual, they’re believable. And don’t you find such characters more interesting than common stereotypes?
Do You Remember When?
Congruence and Change
Do you remember when it used to be remarkable for a male writer to write believable, complex woman characters? Did you, perhaps, tell all the female readers you knew, and perhaps even all the male readers, about this stereotype-shattering male writer?
That has changed. Nowadays, we are more likely to remark on instances in which a male writer creates unbelievable, one-dimensional female characters.
For another example of progress in this area, we recommend reading Chan Davis’s 1949 essay “Critique and Proposals” discussing stereotypes in science fiction. Davis’s concerns were more limited in their scope than ours, yet knowledgeable genre readers will be able to see how many of his suggestions had an impact on the field.
We change. Our culture changes. Someday, we hope, we will not see differences like skin color as barriers to believable characterization—or as barriers to writing about people of other races. Someday, perhaps, we may only see our virtual reality representations
as differences.
Exercise 4
Create a list of non-ROAARS traits for the ROAARS character from Exercise 2. Alternatively, create the list for an other-ROAARS character from your own fiction, or for one you were thinking of writing. Take one minute to do this.
When you have the list, look it over. Do all the non-ROAARS traits point to identification with one particular ROAARS category? Do they contradict or reinforce each other? Do they include hobbies, physical characteristics, geographical origins, hopes, education, employment? Try this again, with other characters, as many times as you like.
Exercise 5
Once more, here’s an exercise you’ll find a lot more valuable when you do it with a partner or when you at least get an interested bystander to help you out. You’ll also need at least two magazines.
You and your partner should select two pictures from the magazines. Each picture should be primarily of one person. When both of you have your selections ready, hand them over to each other. (If you’re doing this alone, ask a friend who’s not participating to pick the pictures for you—it’s important that you don’t select the material for yourself or even see it before you begin writing about it. If you and your exercise partner are doing this via email, try to send each other jpgs or URLs for photos available over the internet.)
Next, write a description of the people in the two pictures in terms of how they differ from one another. Take three minutes for this description.
Now describe the pictures in terms of how the people they portray are alike. Take three minutes for this description, too.
As always, it’s worth taking time after completing the exercise to consider what you’ve been through. Was one description harder to write than the other? If so, which? Did the people in the pictures remind you of anyone in real life or in the fiction you’ve read or created? Did you identify more strongly with one of them than with the other?
7
Unintended and Intended Associations
and Resonances
Unintended associations and resonances are the bane of a writer’s existence; they’re particularly pernicious when it comes to writing the other.
An association is the simple one-to-one connection of two ideas. You may deliberately make associations, or your readers may bring them to your work, creating an unanticipated relationship between your chosen setting (or some other story element) and an idea you believed entirely foreign to it.
Resonance involves a complex of ideas that reinforce and highlight one another through the multiplicity of their connections.
Intended or not, associations and resonances greatly influence the ideas or feelings imparted by a piece of fiction: the mood, the underlying meaning, the unstated burden of the story. Because they are inexplicit, they’re difficult to control. They can partake of the author’s conscious and unconscious input but draw their primary power from the input of your audience. When we deal with resonances and associations arising from social issues such as ROAARS traits, much of what we’re working with derives from the social surround in which a text is read.
Controlling resonances and associations involving ROAARS requires authors to combine difficulty of technique with challenging—disturbing—even explosive content.
Both Nisi and Cynthia attended the 1992 session of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. As mentioned earlier, a classmate’s comment spurred Nisi to write the essay that eventually grew into the Writing the Other class and then this guide. That session of Clarion West also provided an unforgettable example of unfortunate, unintended resonance with ROAARS implications.
The format of the Clarion workshops focuses on critiquing short stories written in situ. One such story depicted
a man with a German surname who imprisoned children in his basement and tortured them. Nearly every one of the author’s twenty classmates saw this character’s name as an intentional evocation of Nazism and the Holocaust and interpreted the story on the basis of that assumption. Faced with several similar misinterpretations of his work during his classmates’ verbal presentation of their critiques, the chagrined author was forced to admit that he’d picked the German surname at random.
How could the author have avoided giving his readers the erroneous impression that they were reading a modern Nazi fable? How can you avoid and disarm similar unintended resonances or associations in your own work?
Actually, Nisi and Cindy’s classmate was on the right path. Remember, his readers at this point were colleagues, not the general public. Writing is considered speech; it helps to have more than one person considering what you’ve said—before publication.
Bearing in mind that thoughtful pre-publication critique is your best defense against unintended resonances and associations, there are some steps you can take to ensure receiving helpful critiques—and some steps you can skip. To begin with, it’s worth noting that not all those who felt the story’s resonance with the Nazi Holocaust were Jews or descendants of other groups victimized by the Holocaust. That’s good, because it means you don’t have to have a preconceived idea about who you may be unintentionally offending. And you don’t have to run your manuscript by people with exactly the same ROAARS traits as your characters. What you need is a pool of reasonably intelligent, well-informed, and articulate readers.
