Distortion in Literature

How the use of distortion in literature can affect it's meaning and the way it is perceived by the readers, sometimes sparking vibrant cultural trends or movements

    Literary realism can be the most drab way of analyzing or criticizing our human condition, so the wonderfully effective antidote is distortion. What makes distortion such a wonderful fix is that instead of pointing fingers and telling it like it is (which can flip the 'off' switch faster than it can make a lucid point) it is entertaining and can sometimes unconsciously have the reader empathizing with a point they might have otherwise found distasteful.

    For instance, the distortion of Victorian ideals in Alice in Wonderland had some shaking their heads (at the time it was published) with the apparent ludicrousness of the story. However, every kid (or kid-at-heart, we call them the progressives) wanted to jump down the rabbit hole with her. Why? Because the harsh reality of Victorian society was that the elders and influential people sprinkled the same old pepper on everything and told them all to eat cake. When the youngin's of the time sneezed and decided they didn't want to play croquet with the Queen anymore, change was welcomed in society.

    See, without distortion to make the truth of the matter clear, Alice (or the youths of the time) would still be spectating on irrational systems of conduct, unaware that they had a choice to even play croquet. Distortion in literature can hum the solid tune of societal change.

    In the book Fear and Trembling, distortion of consciousness and mood within the story lead the reader unwittingly down a path that in common religious practices would lead straight to hell. The reader thinks that the narrator's rather harsh female boss is just hazing her new, awkward employee out of jealousy and sick humor, but this conception doesn't quite fit the actions. The narrator is forced to cleaning bathrooms (a janitor's work, not a secretary's), re-copying hundreds of files over and over, one by one, and her boss is still just so enchanting.

    The reader sypmathizes with the narrator in her victimization, but by the end of the story the reader realizes they have just walked the path of a girl who falls in love with her sadistic lesbian boss. And you thought you could relate to her, didn't you? As the haze of distortion lifts and the reality of what has transpired throughout the plot (the hazing being a distorted form of the sexual, sadistic adventures of the two), a relationship commonly ignored and condemned in society has just been given very real and undeniable justification to the reader.

    The Stranger, by Albert Camus is another great example of the merits of distortion. They don't consider this a definitng tome of existentialism for nothing. By seeing through the narrator, Mersault's, eyes, the reader takes a walk on the existentialist side of the road. Now, this may seem a far cry from the way we live our lives, but as Mersault tells his story we walk with him through it and see through his 'distorted' (this is the existential) perspective of the world. Nevertheless, we come to understand the situation of the world as radically different from ours as it may be, and the respect gained for our existentialist guinea pig by the end of the book is more than adequate, just as our understanding of that philosophy has become. Mersault ends up dead, but we end up wondering.

    Another case of distortion in this text is the way Camus tells of the actions and at what point they occur. This is a very powerful tool, as the reader is never quite sure from at what point in the flow of events the narrator is speaking of how long this particular event actually lasts. This kind of distortion implies the irrelevancy of time, and allows the theme of the story to be applied to any time in history; in other words, it is therefore immediately applicable to the reader's point in time and point in life through the distortion of time in this novel. We don't know how long Mersault is in prison on trial, but frankly, we are led to not care. The time it happened or how long it took to pass doesn't matter, only that it happened: a major theme of existentialism.

    Distortion is, as Flannery O'Connor once said, 'the only way to make people see'. Alice would be the first to testify that our perceptions of reality are always too big or too small, but with a little distortion (or chunks of giant mushroom) everything is just right and we can finally get into the garden wherein the root of our quest resides: an understanding of our human condition.