“Poor Things” by Alasdair Gray is a masterwork of literary fiction. This book is dense, in a good way, and there are many layers to pull back after reading it. Whether it be discussions of gender roles/norms, empire, or narrative fictions, this novel by Gray has a ton to discuss. In class, I asked why fiction was a viable way to disseminate historical facts. Why not talk about the history of Scotland through a non-fictional lens, where the information isn’t as coded? Maybe not as coded for us literary detectives, but rather for people who read “for fun”. Is “Poor Things” a book that you can read for fun? Sure, I think that Gray’s 1992 novel is, at times, hilarious and witty. For the horror story buff, there are plenty of nods to the grotesque to chill your bones. Ultimately though, will a casual reader pick up on these ideas of gender and false narratives as urgently as a grad student who could end up writing a seminar paper based on the book? By the way, as the grad student who could end up writing a seminar paper based on this book, I don’t consider myself to be a great literary detective. I have read scholarship that describes Bella Baxter/Victoria McCandless as an allegory of Scotland, and I’ve heard that idea from Dr. Jennings as well; however, I have struggled to conclude towards that idea in my own reading of Bella. This allegory that Gray creates seems central to the narrative considering how prevalent Bella’s character is. Add on the fact that this story is told with four varying perspectives/narratives, both false yet told convincingly, I found myself working hard to understand everything that Gray was trying to say (cheap rhyme). That’s something to expect when it comes to metafiction, and based on the one metafictional short story that I wrote in undergrad it’s just as hard to write as it is to read. The whole point of the technique is to disorient the reader by breaking the fiction and reminding them that they are reading something that was constructed by someone else… This has never happened before in any of my previous blog posts; I just had an aha moment midway through writing. Gray constructed a narrative that he wanted readers to take as factual despite its absurdity. There are so many connections that can be made to that point (I realize too that that point was likely very obvious to everyone else who read “Poor Things”). Then again was it that absurd considering that I believed it at first? We are told many narratives in our time. Some are true, some are lies, some are a subtle mix of both, and rarely, some are neither truthful nor false but rather complete and utter garbage that amounts simply to said words and said utterances, wastes of space and time. See what I did there? In all seriousness, I still wonder about the messages in Gray’s novel being lost in translation. The muddy waters of fiction get even murkier when the fiction begins to multiply within the same cover. After class discussion though I do see that in Gray’s position, one of his main priorities was to express the ideas, and bring them to the table. As a reader and literary-detective-in-training, I wonder if that is enough anymore (to be fair to Gray “Poor Things” was written in 1992). Still, I wonder if it’s enough to solely bring ideas to the discussion board, especially if that board is only being accessed by certain (types) of people. We may see what Gray is doing with allegories and pastiches and parody and metafiction, but does the person who is reading “Poor Things” just because it’s a book to read see those same complexities that literary scholars do? Maybe I expect too much from fiction. I used to write fiction solely from the lens of entertaining an audience. Writing African-American lead characters would be my not-so-subtle twist on the norm. After four years of undergrad and a semester and a half of grad school, I now view most fiction as political, and borderline propogandical (yup, I made it up). As a writer, I have struggled with this. There’s almost a pressure to write something that feels fresh and relevant to the issues at hand today, and then I think about what comes next. Yes, I could write a “Get Out” style thriller (not as good as Jordan Peele did but in the same galaxy of success) and then feel empty about it afterward because I would question its significance against the issues at hand. Relevant themes in a novel or film still pale in comparison to real-life realities. “Duh, Trey, no one is saying that they don’t. I think you just expect too much from fiction.” This post has strayed away from “Poor Things” specifically at this point, which means that it’s time to wrap-up, and wrap-up abruptly because I have run out of words to type and I am ready to sleep. “Poor Things” did make me think about fiction in this way though, which may be saying something or nothing at all.
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