Category Archives: – BOOKISH THOUGHTS

May 17, 2013 · 11:11 am

Peck Out Her Eyes, She Deserves It!

Vindictiveness in Fiction

'Just Desserts,' by Paulina Smit. Creative Commons.

‘Just Desserts,’ by Paulina Smit. Creative Commons.

Some versions of Cinderella end with her ordering her bird-friends to peck out her stepsisters’ eyes. Yes, the sweet, lovely Cinderella whom we all heard about as a kid – though clearly not the Disney version. Apparently she decided to take revenge and punish her sisters by blinding them in the most gruesome way she could think of. Or, in other versions of the story, exiling them to the wilderness, or forcing them to be slaves.

 I always preferred the endings where she invites her stepsisters and stepmother to live in the castle instead, and teaches them how to be gracious. After all, Cinderella is supposed to be better than them, and if she resorts to petty vindictiveness to punish them, how is she better than her stepsisters, who mistreated her because she was prettier than them?

 I always wanted to think if anyone could be outstandingly forgiving, it was Cinderella. And I always wanted to think the stepsisters learned to be better people after what happened. Maybe I’m just an optimist about humanity.

 But, strangely enough, vindictiveness is a strong theme in many works of fiction. I mean, take The Count of Monte Cristo. This is a book completely centred around a man taking revenge, it is regarded as a true classic, and its plot keeps getting used by many other works (the movie, The Mask of Zorro, for instance, and Charade, an actual Christian inspirational fiction book that uses the same plot).

 In the book, the Count of Monte Cristo takes great pleasure in revenge. He manipulates a man’s wife to commit suicide and take her son with her as well, driving the man insane. Then he destitutes another man, and causes a third to commit suicide. Of course, the point of the book is that they all deserved it, but still…

 Clearly, punishing people who were mean to you is attractive to most readers, and I’m not really surprised this natural human reaction is so popular. Everyone likes to see someone get their comeuppance. I am surprised that I don’t enjoy it. Like I said before, I like the versions of Cinderella where she doesn’t punish her stepsisters, and the parts of The Count of Monte Cristo where he relents instead of taking revenge. But this quirk of mine ends up interfering with my enjoyment of other classics as well.

 Take Roald Dahl. Everyone loves Roald Dahl! Everyone’s read at least a dozen of his books in their childhood – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, etc. So I read them too, and they confused me like crazy. As a kid, I couldn’t figure out if I was supposed to laugh or feel bad (I actually felt bad) when James’ aunts get flattened by the giant peach, or Veruca Salt gets carried away by squirrels.

 So while I knew these books were wonderfully creative and inventive – no one’s written about being inside a chocolate factory before! And definitely not a chocolate factory that was so fun – I couldn’t get past feeling uncomfortable with them. In this case, I never particularly felt that the characters in the book were the vindictive ones – Charlie, or James, for example. It was just this undercurrent of vindictiveness that ran through most of the books – as if the author himself was exorcizing his demons.

 So here’s the thing – bad characters should learn something, or be punished, or whatever makes a satisfactory ending to a story. But what I find uncomfortable is when other characters take this into their own hands. Because I don’t believe we ever see things quite clearly when we’ve been hurt. And I’m always afraid that taking this kind of revenge just tangles things up and makes them worse.

But that’s just me. What do you think about vindictiveness in fiction?

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April 12, 2013 · 10:45 am

Ranking Jane Austen – Is It Possible?

Emma
Mansfield Park
Pride and Prejudice
Sense and Sensibility
Northanger Abbey
Persuasion

 Is this a sensible way to rank Jane Austen’s books? As far as I can discern, this is how Adelle Waldman ranks them, in “I Read Everything Jane Austen Wrote, Several Times: Here Are Some of the Many Things I Learned.” Fans of Jane Austen, of course, can argue for hours about which of her novels are best, and non-fans are probably just surprised she wrote more than Pride and Prejudice. But this particular ranking is unique enough that I feel compelled to comment on it.

 In general, most of these choices are justifiable, and while I would rank Pride and Prejudice just a little higher than Emma, they are both of such good quality that they could both be at the top of any list. I did not think Emma was well-plotted the first time I read it, because it was so long and it felt like the action dragged out forever. But it is well-plotted, if you know many of the little details will add up to something in the end, and reveal how blind Emma was at certain point, or how blind you as the reader were about what was really going on.

 Uniquely, Waldman looks down on Persuasion. I have often been confused as to why so many critics think it is one of Austen’s best works, though I would not be as hard on the novel as Waldman is. It is not as funny and sparkling, true, but there is something sweet about it. I have the most amount of sympathy for Anne Elliot, because I know what it’s like to be overlooked.  Depending upon which novel I am reading, I would probably rate Persuasion, Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey all pretty close to each other, and so I’m not going to quibble about which one should be rated higher than the others. I just have to stick up for Persuasion when it is stuck dead last.

 But she puts Mansfield Park far too high up the list. While the complexity of the characters do make the novel a more mature work, I cannot forgive the deficiencies of its plot. It does not leave the reader with any feeling or satisfaction, or ending in the right spot, even though it ends with the expected happy ending. (I ranted more about Mansfield Park here).

 However, I can’t help but thank Waldman for the observation that Austen is not merely about romance and marriage, but primarily about people and how they should behave. Romance and marriage tends to act as a reward for the right sort of behaviour, which is why Austen’s work often comes off as intensely moralistic. But it is also why Austen’s works have endured so well. We all know vain and pompous fools (Sir Walter Elliot), scoundrels who lead women on (Wickham), jealous and competitive women (Caroline Bingley), and foolish and vindicative women (Mrs. Elton). We want to see people like that learn a lesson – though Austen realistically never forces a vile character to change as a result of the lessons a reader can glean from the action. As Waldman states, “She gives us a cast of characters and then zeroes in, showing us who and what is admirable, who is flawed but forgivable, who is risible and who is truly vile… Austen wrote stories that show us how we think.”

Yes to that.

As a postscript, my personal ranking goes like this:

 Pride and Prejudice (as the best paced and best plotted one of the bunch, with highly entertaining characters who go through believable character development)

Emma (almost as good as Pride and Prejudice, upon second reading, but a little too long to be thoroughly enjoyed on first reading – as I discovered here)

Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion (both entirely serviceable and charming novels, and I’m not sure which one rates above the other)

Northanger Abbey (which is enjoyable but somewhat flawed – understandable considering it was one of the first she wrote, as well as one she later revised, though it was published posthumously and therefore it’s hard to say it she would’ve been satisfied with its finish published form)

If you include Lady Susan as one of Austen’s novels, though it is more of a novella, I would stick it last on the list. If it had been longer, I would’ve liked it more (more of my thoughts on Lady Susan here).

And then… I can’t decide where Mansfield Park fits in. I think that novel will annoy me for the rest of my life. Is that a mark of great literature?

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November 23, 2012 · 10:41 am

The Crime of Re-Using Plots – Is It A Crime?

Oh no, a romantic comedy! (Sabrina trailer – {PD})

Oh no, it’s another mad dash to the airport, where the girl swears she will leave the country forever and the guy insists he’s in love with her, you sigh to yourself. Everyone knows romantic comedies all have the same plot. Why do they even bother making more of them?

Well, how many plots do you think there are in the world, anyway?

Don’t get me wrong, I get as annoyed by a formulaic “plot twist” as anyone else. I never want to see another break-up where the girl found out the guy was really a newspaper reporter and writing about her the whole time, ever again. I’ll be perfectly content if think-he’s-cheating-but-actually-it’s-all-a-wacky-misunderstanding scenes are banned from movies and books altogether. But that doesn’t mean expecting every element of the plot to be completely original every single time is at all realistic.

Like I said in previous posts, ancient writers all let each other play in their sandboxes. There was nothing surprising that the bard who wandered into your village told the exact same story as the bard who was there three months before. Another story about the Fall of Troy? Hey, why not, it’s not like anyone owns it. And so people only got famous if they did something really, really interesting with the well-worn story.

Romeo and Juliet was originally The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, and end with the nurse being hung and the apothecary banished. Shakespeare was merciful to the nurse and the apothecary, and a classic was born. The Metamorphoses was just Ovid retelling every single Greek myth he could think of, and making sure everyone changed into an animal at some point in the story, but everyone agreed he told the stories better than anyone else. And shoot, everyone knows Star Wars is based on The Hero’s Journey. Just because we’d told stories about heroes before, didn’t stop Star Wars from becoming insanely popular.

The key is – it’s got to be done better. We don’t live in a time where plagiarism is allowed, so an original take on the plot of the latest best-seller won’t get you anywhere, but no one’s copyright The Hero’s Journey. Or the romantic comedy formula. Use them to your heart’s content, but do it better.

Because that’s the real source of frustration with the formulaic plots, isn’t it? It feels like the writers or whoever thought the audience must be feeling the emotions they want them to feel because they hit all the right plot points. Who cares if the characters are cardboard and have no motivation – they’re racing for their love in taxicabs through New York, so you have to cheer for them. On the other hand, if the writers succeed is presenting a hackneyed plot in a fresh and interesting way, you almost forget you’ve heard some of the plot points a thousand times before. For example, in Sabrina with Audrey Hepburn, Audrey is chased by two brothers who are in love with her. Not the most original set-up in the world, but I still love the movie because Audrey makes me care which guy she ends up with. Or you can take the millions of re-tellings of Pride and Prejudice that exist, and I will watch as many of them as I can get my hands on, because the dynamic at the center of the book is so intriguing I want to see what other creators do with it.

Re-telling the story is not the problem. Re-telling it well is.

Cinderella is another story that’s been re-told a hundred thousand times. Can it handle one more? Call me deluded, but I thought so and wrote Prince Charming because of it. And since it’s free today and tomorrow, you can go here and decide if I succeeded.

What do you think, is re-using plots a crime against writing and the source of all formulaic books and movies? Or can writers dispense with being completely original once in a while to play around with well-worn tropes?

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November 16, 2012 · 12:10 pm

The Message on Manhood in Young Adult Novels – Or, What Should We Teach Boys?

Think he’s a good little boy? {PD}

“But as we debate ad nauseam whether, for example, Bella Swan is a dangerous role model for young women, we’ve neglected to ask the corresponding question: what does it tell young men when Edward Cullen and Jacob Black are the role models available to them? Are these barely-contained monsters really the best we can imagine?”

- YA Fiction and the End of Boys, by Sarah Mesle

When I read the above quote, I realized it was a huge question than I’ve never considered. To be upfront and honest here, I’ll admit I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of all books with male protagonists, or even know what the best-sellers in the YA genre are (other than the really major ones like Twilight and The Hunger Games). But I’ve always hated how Twilight teaches young girls that romance will be magical and perfect, and how The Hunger Games allows Katniss to string along two guys forever without ever caring how that makes the guys feel. I’ve always considered what the impact will be on girls, likely because I am a girl. But yes, what do books teach young boys?

Well, my first instinct is to say boys don’t read Twilight because they want to be like Edward. Will boys actually want to become a moody, sparkly boyfriend who tries to keep his girlfriend safe by disabling her truck and not allowing her to go anywhere, all as a result of reading Twilight? Maybe not, but that doesn’t erase the fact that there really is no message for boys about how they should be, just like the only message you can take from it for girls is a really bad one. And stereotypes aside, boys do read, and some even read Twilight. We worry so much about teaching girls to be strong, independent and intelligent, that sometimes we forget to wonder what we are teaching boys.

Part of the problem is, as Sarah Mesle says in the article I quoted above, that it’s difficult to figure out how our society actually thinks men should behave. We have lots of stereotypes, of course: the overgrown child who lives in his parents’ basement, the slacker who plays videogames all day…or the womanizer, the muscle-bound dimwit, the emotionless action-hero. The great thing about literature is that it can examine stereotypes such as these, and subvert them. But replace them with what? Good values for men appear to be not abusing any power advantage their might possess as a result of society structures, and probably not getting too absorbed with their masculinity. Because we are not sure, in contrast to many cultures before us, that masculinity is really a very good value.

So we skirt around the issue, neglect to think about it, and forget to talk about it. But maybe literature is a good place to explore the place of boys and men in our modern world. After all, “how can a boy become a good man, if he doesn’t know what that would mean?”

Like I said above, I am by no means an expert on the YA genre, but let’s take a quick look at a few I have read. I mentioned Twilight already, and I really hope both boys and girls aren’t taking lessons on how to behave from those characters. Masculinity appears to consist of being a tightly controlled monster who is tightly controlling of female characters. Another big hit was The Hunger Games, with two nicely contrasting male characters. In this book, I got the feeling that Suzanne Collins was actually attempting to include a message to boys – that’s it’s okay not to be the big, manly hunter, and that boys who like baking can be useful in tight situations too. For some readers, it seemed to work, considering Peeta is a pretty popular character. I got annoyed at how being a decent guy meant letting a girl walk all over you, but maybe Collins was attempting to show passivity as not being bad either. (I still can’t buy that). And last up is the Harry Potter series, whose popularity seems like eons ago now that all these other book series have cropped up – but hey, it was a major series, and it had a boy as the hero. Harry Potter does have something to say about a boy growing up, and takes an oddly old-fashioned approach to it. He learns to take on responsibility, self-sacrifice and concern for others, not too different from the 19th century heroes Sarah Mesle talks about. But then, the wizarding world is a bit of a throw-back itself. How this journey would play out in the bland world of Privet Drive isn’t really explored.

(All the same, would you count Harry Potter as a good role model for boys? Have you read any YA books lately with an interesting take on “manhood”?)

Sarah Mesle’s argument is, in the end, that the rise of feminism should not mean the end of conversation on what “manhood” is for boys. Because one of the points of feminism was to gain new perspectives on both genders. Now, I have a funny relationship with feminism in general, because I do not agree with everything feminists talk about, but I can agree with this. Both masculinity and femininity can be taken to an extreme, both can be abused. We shouldn’t be afraid of pointing out stereotypes, or criticizing what traditional views of males and females get wrong. But we can’t focus on one side of the conversation only, and instill what we decide are good values in our girls, without setting up some sort of target for the boys to shoot at. And this includes the way writers write for them.

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November 9, 2012 · 11:02 am

Happy Birthday, Dracula!

The Count, by Thecount63 {PD}

I’ve been sick as a dog all week, with some kind of cold which plugs up my head and leaves me unable to think very clearly. However, I can’t leave Stories and Stuff without some kind of post on Friday, can I? So I’ll just note that yesterday was Bram Stoker’s 165th birthday, and Bram Stoker is, of course, the author of Dracula. Google celebrated this appropriately with a Google Doodle. And Slate even wrote an article about him.

It’s thanks to Bram Stoker that we have Twi-hards running around, and the whole recent vampire craze (which thankfully seems to be dying away somewhat). However, I’d like to point out some commonly believed facts about Dracula which never actually occur in the book Dracula at all. Since I picked Dracula as one of my summer reading books, I can actually weigh in on this subject. :) For instance, Slate describes Dracula as “a very sexy novel.” Many people have described it that way, but it’s only possible if you read a LOT of subtext into it. Because Dracula is emphatically described as unappealing and unattractive, and old on top of all that. According to Wikipedia, several other vampire novels written at the time read a lot more into the vampire method of sucking blood than Dracula did, and that may’ve been where the idea of “sexy novel” came from, but in my opinion it seems like this reputation was retroactively applied to Dracula rather than it being obvious in Dracula itself. Because you really have to stretch to read any of Dracula’s scenes in a sexy way.

Another thing which surprised me and many other readers of Dracula is how much of the accepted vampire legend is not actually present in the book – not being able to walk around in the sunshine, having to be killed with a silver stake, etc. While the book may’ve started the whole vampire literature craze (which has continued to the present day, apparently), it can’t really be read as a definitive description of vampire lore. You can’t really go back to it to see what the ‘original’ says. Or you can, but you’ll get people telling you it’s lame that a vampire can just be killed with a regular knife, like anything else.

Lastly – well, this doesn’t really have anything to do with commonly believed myths about Dracula, but I really love the theory about Lucy Westenra’s death that says Dracula didn’t kill her and Van Helsing did. As a former nursing student, I was highly interested to read about blood transfusions in a novel written before blood transfusions were done often. For the characters, it’s a simple matter of seizing the nearest willing volunteer and pumping his blood into Lucy to replace the blood Dracula stole. While reading this, I keep having flashbacks to my hospital days where I had to double-check over and over that the blood I was pumping into the patient matched their blood type, that the patient was not reacting to the blood, that nothing had been mixed up… and here Van Helsing is blithely ignoring all of these safe-guards. To me, it just makes sense that maybe Lucy died from having four blood transfusions from four different people! I mean, not all of them could’ve had Type O-negative blood, right?

Anyway, in conclusion, I’d say Dracula was an entertaining enough novel that was important to literature because of its widely-copied approach to vampire stories (not to mention kicking off a whole series of vampire movies). However, if you’re looking for a novel that will make you think deeply, Dracula probably isn’t it. As a Protestant Christian, I found it highly interesting how the Protestant characters cheerfully mixed Catholic and Protestant beliefs to wield off ‘the undead’ – I’d personally like to see a book that wrestles with this sort of issue (if you don’t believe in ‘holy water,’ how can holy water ward off a vampire?), in addition to whether the concept of vampires can actually exist along with Christian theology at all – but that might be asking a little much. In the end, Dracula is exactly what Bram Stoker wrote it to be – a diverting pot-boiler.

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On an unrelated note… isn’t Google Doodles one of Google’s smartest ideas? It actually gives you a reason to visit Google’s homepage, even if you don’t have to search something. Some of them are amazing. And then news outlets get to report on them, driving even more traffic Google’s way.

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November 2, 2012 · 11:20 am

The Debate: Literary vs. Genre Fiction, and Is There a Chasm Between the Two?

SERIOUS fiction, you guys.
(Book covers, by Lars Aronsson. Licensed under Creative Commons ShareAlike 1.0 License.)

When I began submitting stories to fiction magazines, I was amazed to find there was a large gulf between “genre” fiction and “literary” fiction, and that literary fiction was usually considered to be the superior kind. As a person who enjoys reading all types of books, I’d always thought a good story was a good story, whether it was a mystery story, contained dragons, or examined the inner life of American housewives circa 1950. In my inner hierarchy, Lord of the Rings, Pride and Prejudice, and The Secret Adversary could all comfortably sit on the top tier of “greatness” together, despite belonging to the Fantasy, Classic Lit, and Mystery categories respectively. This clearly exposed my ignorance of the conventions of the literary world. “Genre” fiction panders to the market, and the clamouring hordes’ lack of taste. “Literary” fiction deals with real issues. Therefore, certain literary magazines refuse to even consider “genre” fiction.

Therefore, if your work can conceivably be slotted into a category such as Romance, Fantasy, or Western, it is not literary. I still find that weird. I think you can still explore serious issues, even if unicorns are a main feature of your prose. But I can see it’s an easier way for editors, who are flooded with thousands of submissions from basement dwellers who think being a writer is easy, to weed out the stories that merely hit every cliché of a specific genre. They want something that makes the reader think. The regurgitated pap can be published by some more commercial magazine.

However, in the last year or so there’s been several articles about the resurgence of genre fiction. The claim that some genre writers are now, finally, being taken more seriously. The typical sort of internet argument between those who believe there is a wide divide between literary and genre fiction and that this divide should always be maintained, and those who think the walls should be broken down.

To illustrate, here is one article which argues that though the difference between genre and literary fiction is hard to describe, it is not a difference between an “artistic” work and a more pedestrian one. Lev Grossman claims the skill of plotting is much more required in a typical genre novel, whereas standards for style and characterization might be higher in literary novels – and this might be the dividing factor. He also argues there is a great blurry space between literary and genre fiction, inhabited by authors whose work doesn’t fit into either. And I agree. Trying to slot every work of literature into some prefabricated category is always a dumb idea. And Grossman ends by suggesting genre fiction may yet overturn the world of literary fiction.

Arthur Krystal, in The New Yorker, takes up the other side – insisting that there’s always been hybridization in literature, and just because there’s a middle ground between genre and literary fiction, doesn’t mean the differences between the two will be erased. He claims, “Writers who want to understand why the heart has reasons that reason cannot know are not going to write horror tales or police procedurals.” (And I say – why not? But I am not a highly acclaimed author, so what do I know?) Literary fiction, he insists, tackles the difficult side of reality in a way genre fiction can never dream to. And there will forever be a difference between the two.
So the question remains – should I shoot for the literary or the genre side of the target, or wager on the fact the lines between the two will become increasingly blurred?

Or maybe I should just concentrate on writing great stories. Let the chips fall where they may.

 

Do you think there’s an impassable chasm between literary and genre fiction?

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October 19, 2012 · 1:39 pm

There Will Be Superheroes

A call to abolish them is completely misguided

Superhero

Superhero, by Vegas Bleeds Neon. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0.

The other day I came across this article, which reviews the claim of film critic David Denby that our society needs rescuing from our obsession with superheroes, and that the movie business never will be mature and realistic until it stops focusing on fantasies like these. As if a future where people only told realistic stories was somehow desirable. This is an utterly ridiculous call, because human society has created superheroes for thousands and thousands of years. Why on earth would we collectively ignore the way our mind works? Stories of fantastic powers and superhuman doings are not necessarily dumbed down stories for the lowest common denominator.

Of course I don’t mean humanity has been inventing guys in spandex flying through the air for thousands of years. But we’ve never been able to resist giving characters in our stories super-human abilities. Even in stories where Achilles was not dipped into the river Styx (ie: The Iliad), he has super-human fighting ability – not just because good fights make a good story (see, humans haven’t changed much), but also because we’d like to see what such a super-good fighter would be like. Beowulf was the only man courageous enough to fight a rampaging dragon, showing what could happen if we could overcome our natural-enough inclination to run away. King Arthur gets to show off what a ‘perfect king’ might be like. Paul Bunyan gets to be gigantic. All in all, people throughout history weren’t shy about inserting unbelievable characteristics into otherwise somewhat-realistic stories. And I don’t think things have changed much. People with special abilities – Superman, Spiderman, Harry Potter – still fill our stories. And I don’t think that needs to change. Just because a story is a fantastic story, doesn’t necessarily indicate our society’s literature or film culture is does not realistically “reflect the soul” of North America.

Because superheroes give us a picture of what rising above our circumstances could look like. They can get past all our frustrating limitations in a way no one else has the power too. And because they can do that, they can also examine if what we think we want would turn out to be a good thing after all. Let’s take Achilles, the supreme realization of someone who hit all the targets for a perfect hero in ancient, ancient Greece. (To us, he comes off as a self-centered jerk, but trust me, to them that was apparently what their heroic ethos required). Does that make him happy? No, throughout The Iliad, he is continually placed in situations that make him furiously angry, as a result of living up to this ideal. And our modern superheroes fill the same function. Want the ability to make all those criminals who get away with evil crimes to pay? Well, there’s responsibility that comes with that. And would it actually make the world a better place?

So we get the hope that comes with watching someone rise above petty human circumstances, and do what we can only dream of. But we can also see that consequences of what this would be like, without have to bear the responsibility for that ourselves.

And this is unrealistic? I suppose what Denby means in the article I linked above is that we can use this type of thing as an escape from reality, to avoid facing what’s actually wrong with our society right now. Presumably he thinks we should have more movies (movies are the focus of his piece, actually) that deal with human limitations, our inability to reach perfection. Facing our problems is the only way to deal with them, and so on. But isn’t there room for both? Humans need to look up to something, and need to have some kind of hope. Otherwise superhero stories would never have been written. Depression can easily lead to apathy, after all.

And, like I said before, these stories force us to examine our ideals. Are men with inhuman fighting ability really what we want to see in our world? How about men with infinite power? Or men with an unswerving drive to see justice done? I think the answers stories about humans with fantastic powers can give us astounding intelligent answers to this – though it certainly produces immature answers as well. Because it’s easy to let our assumptions about what our society thinks is worth pursuing go unexamined. And even super-human abilities will run up against unexpected limits. (After all, the world itself is still imperfect).

So yes, more superhero movies, please. But also more stories on a mythic scale, of the type humans used to sit in circles around a bard to listen to.

 

What do you think about superheroes – completely unrealistic, or worth making stories about?

 

And a heads up to all who’ve been enjoying my blog – tomorrow I am doing a free giveaway of my latest ebook, Prince Charming, over at Amazon. Is Prince Charming actually charming, or merely an entitled brat? This is your chance to get your hands on the story, so go check it out!

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September 28, 2012 · 1:33 pm

Unicorns in the Streets: What is Genre, Anyway?

by Erin Stevenson O’Connor, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

J.K. Rowling just released her latest book yesterday, and surprise, surprise, it is not about wizards. Or magic. Or unicorns. She has firmly departed her old stomping grounds of children’s fantasy, and forayed into what might be called contemporary adult fiction. Which got me thinking – why do we draw such hard and fast lines between different types of writing, anyway?

No Fantasy in Realism

“I had a lot of real-world material in me, believe you me,” Rowling is quoted as saying. “The thing about fantasy—there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy.” She makes it sound like the gulf between realism and fantasy is wide and impassable. But looking back over a history of literature, it doesn’t appear that there was always such a hard line between fantasy and realistic stories. The Iliad depicts a drawn-out conflict between two war-like groups, a situation that would’ve been somewhat familiar to people at the time. Yet fantastic elements such as the interference of gods and Achilles battling with a river are added without a second thought. In medieval literature, knights go off to fight dragons and mythical creatures, as well as more mundane enemies. Beowulf slays a dragon. King Arthur pulls a sword out of a stone. MacBeth consults with witches. The line between the realistic and the fantastic seems to be very blurry – perhaps to the point of not existing at all.

(To be fair, what we know as a ‘novel’ was not invented till about the 17th century either. The Iliad, for example, was an epic poem and certainly not a novel. The same for Beowulf.)

Of course, part of the reason for this was that for historical peoples, the world was a mysterious place and mostly unknown. There really might’ve been dragons beyond the next hill, but you didn’t really know because you’d never gone there. In our modern times, we’ve lost that sense of wonder when we gained the ability to circumnavigate the world in hours, and map DNA down to the very last detail. Fantastic creatures such as unicorns and dragons just don’t belong in our everyday life, or even our typical imaginations. They are only acceptable sectioned off behind a little label called ‘Fantasy,’ with the understanding that ‘Fantasy’ and ‘Realism’ are very different things.

But Really, Why Genre?

I think it’s because we, as humans, like to know what to expect in stories. Not to know every detail, of course, but to be able to predict general outlines. If it’s a fantasy novel, it’s going to have magic, some kind of Dark Lord, and yes, maybe unicorns. If it’s a mystery novel, it’s going to have a murder – and probably someone who’s wrongfully accused, a detective of some sort, and a second murder that raises the stakes of the case. The readers know a bit of what to expect beforehand, so while hopefully the plot will keep them at the edge of their seats, they are still entering a comfortable world where events happen according to unspoken rules. A nice contrast to the randomness of reality.

And genre conventions do go back a long way. The ancient Greeks didn’t have novels like we do, but they did divide their plays into two types: comedy and tragedy. The audience knew to expect different things in each one. Shakespeare also had comedies, tragedies and histories (slightly different from what the Greek meanings of those words were). Of course, not all Shakespeare plays fit into the categories assigned to them, proving that while genre is a useful concept, it does not solve all problems across the board. Creators want freedom to subvert conventions, including the conventions of genres.

So there you have it. When J.K. Rowling announced her latest book was ‘adult realism,’ she (and her publishers) were signalling exactly what kind of audience they expected to buy the book. Genre is a useful tool for letting the reader know what to expect, but the categories are not the hard and fast categories we like to think of them as. Writers like to break rules, and more than that, categories and styles of literature have changed over the years.

But does this mean a unicorn could never walk down the main streets of New York, and still be called ‘realistic’? Maybe not nowadays, but who can say about the future?

 

 

Note: I missed my Quotables post this Monday – it just completely got lost in the shuffle. Unfortunately I have a bit of a busy semester ahead of me, so once in a while I may resort to only posting once a week. If a post doesn’t go up, rest assured I have not forgotten about my blog! I just have not managed to juggle my priorities well enough. I hope this will not happen often. :)  

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September 7, 2012 · 10:16 am

Real-life Romance: The Scholarly Professor and Edith

The young J.R.R. Tolkien. Doesn’t he just ooze romance?

Real life is better than fiction sometimes. More unbelievable than fiction too, but that’s another topic. This post is the second of four to mesh two of my favourite blog topics: romance and history. ‘Cuz I realized, when I thought about it, that I knew at least four stories from history that were eventful enough to be a romance novel on their own. May I present the second Person Whose Life Could’ve Been the Plot of a Romance Novel… J.R.R. Tolkien!

(The first post, “Elizabeth Barrett Browning: From Recluse to Romance,” can be found here)

You might not be surprised to see Tolkien on this list, because I wrote about his thoughts on true love before. Clearly, the man had thought about love at least once in his life – a departure from his usual ruminations on rune-making and language inventing, I’m sure – if he wrote about it to his son. And his does mention love once or twice in his epic Lord of the Rings, even if he does banish Arwen and Aragorn’s romance to the appendix. But the actual story of his falling in love with Edith – well, it might be more like a romance novel than you’d expect from a scholarly-looking professor who smoked pipes.

Tolkien starts off telling his love story to his son by saying, “My own history is so exceptional, so wrong and imprudent in nearly every point that it makes it difficult to counsel prudence.” Clearly, the reason he wrote it down for Christopher was to teach him something, but feels, like many parents, that his own life was not a particularly good example for his children to follow. He’s talking about how to have a good marriage, and be happy in love, but he’s afraid his way is not really the best way to go about that, even if it did turn out very well in the end.

First of all, Tolkien falls in love at eighteen with a Protestant. Tolkien was a Catholic. Now, some people might be confused at what the problem is here, but at the time everyone knew there was an ocean of difference between Protestants and Catholics, even if they both called themselves Christians (the Reformation, and some of the wars and violence that came out of that, might have something to do with that). Even today, Catholics and Protestants might hesitate to get involved with each other. But anyway, Tolkien and Edith Mary Bratt fell in love over their shared interest of visiting teashops with balconies, and using the sugar lumps on the tables to toss into the hats of people walking below. Picture the serious college professor doing that! And, once in love, ran straight into the disapproval of Tolkien’s mentor, who viewed Edith as not only a dreadful Protestant, but also a distraction to Tolkien’s studies. Straight off, this mentor forbade Tolkien to see her. (See? Romantic plot elements 1 & 2.) Except Tolkien, instead of doing the Romeo and Juliet thing, listened to his mentor and stayed away from Edith.

So there is Tolkien, miserably working his way through school and whiling away the time till he is twenty-one and able to talk to Edith again (you know, once he’s graduated school and everything). And Edith – well, she meets someone else and gets engaged. (Romantic plot element 3).  Tolkien doesn’t blame her, as he says, “She was perfectly free and under no vow to me, and I should have had no just complaint (except according to the unreal romantic code) if she had got married to someone else.” But the minute he turns twenty-one he wastes no time writing her and telling her how he feels, to her absolute astonishment. She thought, since she hadn’t heard a peep from him for years, that he had forgotten all about her.

The two of them had a romantic reunion under a railway viaduct, apparently, and Edith returned her engagement ring to the other guy. Tolkien clearly feels inadequate upon his marriage, telling his son, Christopher, “Think of your mother! … I was a young fellow, with a moderate degree, and apt to write verse, a few dwindling pounds, and no prospects, a Second Lieut. on 7/6 a day in the infantry where the chances of survival were against you heavily (as a subaltern).” I don’t know what the other guy’s qualifications were, but Edith obviously preferred Tolkien despite all of this. And, according to biographer Humphrey Carpenter, it was a happy marriage despite the rocky start: “Those friends who knew Ronald and Edith Tolkien over the years never doubted that there was deep affection between them. It was visible in the small things, the almost absurd degree in which each worried about the other’s health, and the care in which they chose and wrapped each other’s birthday presents’; and in the large matters, the way in which Ronald willingly abandoned such a large part of his life in retirement to give Edith the last years in Bournemouth that he felt she deserved, and the degree in which she showed pride in his fame as an author.” (p. 158)

As Tolkien tells his son, “the greatest of these [romantic] tales do not tell of the happy marriage of such great lovers, but of their tragic separation.” Fortunately for him, that part of the romantic story did not come true. He and Edith were married for fifty-five years, and died within twenty-one months of each other. And as I mentioned before, Edith was Tolkien’s inspiration for the beautiful Lúthien Tinúviel in The Silmarillion.

And that’s the story. The whole story, in Tolkien’s words, can be found in Letter #43 of The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Other sources are Wikipedia and Humphrey Carpenter’s autobiography.

Does this story change your opinion of Tolkien? Any other real-life characters you know of, whose life was absurdly similar to romantic novel clichés?

 

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July 13, 2012 · 6:30 pm

I Read the Appendices

OR, Geeking Out Over Author’s Supplements

Book covers, by Lars Aronsson. Licensed under Creative Commons ShareAlike 1.0 License.

If I read something and like it, I tend to read absolutely everything related to it. I never realized how pronounced this tendency has been throughout my whole life, until this week I looked up Little House on the Prairie on Wikipedia. I read the series as a kid, and haven’t thought much about it since, but looking at the Wikipedia entry I realized I read not only the whole series, but the series about her daughter, the book of published letters Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote her family, her biography, and the Little House on the Prairie cookbook (not to mention actually making some of the recipes). If I like a series, you can really tell.

Why do I do this? What drives me to find out absolutely everything detail about a fictional world? Thank goodness many authors indulge tendencies like mine – or maybe, like me, they have trouble tearing themselves away from the fictional world they created too.

I did this with Lord of the Rings too. Not only did I read the appendices, which many people skip (and wonder where Arwen appears in the book), I also read The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and Unfinished Tales. AND I read most of the The History of Middle-earth, which is a slightly-dry-at-times publication of almost every stitch of writing Tolkien ever wrote about Middle-earth. (I gave up when the library didn’t have any more of the volumes, and I was a bit sick of reading the twenty-seventh version of The Silmarillion by that time, anyway). Anyway, The History of Middle-earth has some really great stuff in it if you can slog through it, including the original story of the Fall of Gondolin, which blew me away.

I know I’m not the only one to geek out like this over supplementary materials – and by supplementary materials, I mean all short stories/cookbooks/appendices/dictionaries etc., written either by the author or someone else, about a particular fictional work. Authors and publishers clearly capitalize on these types of fans. Why else would they publish appendices, if no one read them? Sometimes you can tell the author is clearly into writing it, but sometimes it’s clearly a money-grab by a publisher, or cash-strapped author. For example, the venerable Mark Twain even fell prey to this – he was strapped for cash and he knew Tom Sawyer was one of his most popular characters. So he wrote two novellas about Tom, each imitating other popular novels of the time: Tom Sawyer Abroad (imitating Jules Verne adventure stories), and Tom Sawyer, Detective (imitating detective fiction). I’ve read them and I enjoyed them, but somehow it’s not quite the same as Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. But really, if you don’t read them, how else are you supposed to know Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn spent time knocking around Egypt after they leave the plantation?

So I tend to read this stuff, even if it’s just an attempt to fill the holes in some author’s budget. It must just be my obsessive need to fill in all the details. I can’t even imagine trying to write an appendix or dictionary for any of the novels I’ve written, so the effort can certainly be appreciated. And it’s one way to squeeze every last bit of enjoyment out of a series. So no, I’m not ashamed to say:

“I read the appendices.”

Have you ever found yourself doing this?

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