An Encyclopedia of Literary Fallacies

<p style=”clear: both”>By which I mean not so much a set of mistakes in literature itself, literature being exactly what it is and not needing me to beat up on it at all, but the sort of pitfalls in thinking and perception to which one is liable when one reads too much. And I am convinced there is a more elegant way of describing it, which, being a girl who has frequently been accused of reading too much, I ought to be able to bring about, but the unfortunate fact is that I labelled this category — I remember precisely the moment, sitting on the bus on my way home from the accelerated French class, head propped against the cool glass, staring out the window, so it was my sophomore year of high school — at the moment when it occurred to me that somebody was behaving exactly like a stock character and that I particularly hated this thought because I knew of course to somebody else I was a stock character and not in fact the multi-faceted and fascinating protagonist I have always been in my own life. And perhaps that is the sort of thing one ought to be thinking and be wary of thinking in high school only the loneliness of high school, and particularly pre-internet high school, is that when toxic self-consciousness overtakes you you think that you are the only person to whom it has ever happened.

Over-preface much?

It seems like the list should be more exhaustive. And I don’t buy the sort of Madame Bovary notion that one’s head is filled with dangerous romantic expectations. But the shaping of one’s sensibilities by literature seems to lead to the following:

• A sense of inevitability that leaves one’s sense of free will a little shaky. Again and again things do just sort of work out in books that it still surprises me a little when it doesn’t happen in real life.
• It’s not that my literary predilections leave me all optimistic, by an means, however. I find I have a fear of wanting anything after constant exposure to the literary irony of characters wanting the wrong thing, getting what they want, not being happy. One could begin to believe that happiness is a mirage, an oasis that shimmers only from a distance
• Apophenia. That is, literary economy means that the details that get included are meaningful and have something to do with what the writer is telling us. Someone coughs and it’s never merely throat-clearing, no, it’s the onset of consumption that will leave the character dead in twenty pages. So what to do with all the messy details one notices in real life that lead nowhere? After a morning with my head between pages, I walk and suspect that the universe is trying to tell me something with those two birds flying out of the bush just as I walk past it…
• That thing with primary and secondary and stock characters. Maybe this is just my life-long battle against solipsism, but I’m scared of reducing people I encounter to mere gestures and catchphrases.