Arwen Spicer's Blog: Diary of a Readerly Writer (and Writerly Reader), page 5

Totally Personal Response to "23 Things Every Woman Should Stop Doing"

Here is this woman's quirky, personal response to Emma Gray's trending article, "23 Things Every Woman Should Stop Doing": how I measure up, plus some general thoughts...

1. Stop apologizing all the time.

Well, pretty much stop doing anything "all the time," but yeah, I agree women generally do this more than men and it hurts us.

But how much one should apologize is a matter of culture rather than abstract truth (ex. Japanese culture uses apology more than American culture), so the problem is not really that women apologize too much but that our society considers the more masculine apology style to be more empowered. One could as easily say men should apologize more; it might be a more sensitive society.

2. Saying "yes" to everyone else.

I'm working on this. It's a hard balance, and not just for women: partly because our society is always telling us (all of us) to take on more and be more productive.

3. Saying "no" to yourself.

Again, for myself, I agree: I have succumbed in my life to artificial limits placed on myself. I'm working on believing I can do it, even though "it" involves becoming a female filmmaker in a male-dominated field.

4. Viewing food as the enemy.

I view food as the friend! Mm, pumpkin whoopie pie.

5. Body-snarking.

I agree with this! I don't do it much yet probably still too much.

6. Feeling like an impostor when you accomplish something professionally.

Yep. I have this tendency, and I agree we need to challenge it. However, it is partly a spillover of modesty and uninflated self-perspective, which are GOOD things. Our society rewards people (differentially men) who are overly self-confident and self-inflated, which not only distorts who, by merit, should have power (in business, in politics, etc.) but also creates a vicious cycle in which selfishness and lack of accurate self-perspective are allowed to perpetuate social ills. So while, yes, women should feel comfortable owning our own accomplishments, all of us (women and men) should show greater respect to those who keep themselves and their contributions in perspective with credit due to others and realistic self-analysis.

7. Obsessively untagging every "unflattering" photo of you that ever existed online.

I have succeeded in stopping doing this in the sense that it has never crossed my mind to do it.

8. Comparing your real life to someone else's virtual one.

Good advice for men, women, and children, and cats.



9. Holding on to regrets and guilt.

I dislike this kind of pop psychology. There's a truth here. Yes, women are too often encouraged to have low self-esteem and take on more guilt and regret than is healthy. But our guilts and regrets are as personal and varied as we are. They exist for an infinity of different reasons and in different ways. No soundbite can tell us how we should address some of the most complicated aspects of our individuals lives. When I hear this sort of line, I feel like I'm being preached at by Sybok.

10. Wearing heels every day.

There are people who wear heels every day?? I gave up on heels midway through high school. Some people still wear them. I don't get it.

11. Judging other women's sex lives.

My immediate response to this is: ??? Why would I possibly care about another woman's sex life?

12. Judging your own sex life.

Ah now, this I agree with. In fact, I agree with no. 11 too. Our society is far too concerned with labeling a very tiny range of human sexuality as "normal." I really hope we all get over it soon.

13. Trying to be "chill."

I think I tried to be chill once. It was in the first couple of days of seventh grade. It was exhausting and a complete failure. I gave up on it after that.

14. Fearing the label "crazy."

I kind of love the label "crazy." Seriously, though, that's because I'm a misfit geek and we tend to own things like that. I have never really had it deployed against me as in "you're just a crazy woman," and I would hate that very much. But it would be the speaker's problem, not mine.

15. WebMDing everything.

Hm, have I ever WebMD-ed anything?

16. Worrying that your life doesn't look like Pinterest.

I barely know what Pinterest is. And I kind of wish it didn't exist just because I'm already quite overwhelmed enough by Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, Twitter, etc.

17. Fearing being alone.

Okay, I'm really tired of this one. Being alone -- feeling alone -- is one of the worst things that can happen to any human being. No, not the worst, but it's pretty high up on the list. Think about being emotionally alone. Frankenstein's monster is alone. The Phantom of the Opera is alone. No sane person would want to be them, even in a less exacting, metaphorical way.

There's a tiny percentage of the human race who are natural hermits, who feel okay being by themselves in a monastery or a cabin the woods, etc. The more power to them, but humans are a social species. We always have been.

Women raised in the feminist age (roughly 1960s on) are constantly being told not to fear being alone (while simultaneously being told that we're only valid as people if we have a man). Telling us not to fear being alone is telling us not to be human. Of all of the ridiculously unrealistic expectations placed on women this is very likely the most ridiculous and unrealistic. Please stop telling me to be inhuman and have an impossible psyche. As a woman, I get enough of that from Victorian literature. I don't need it in the 21st century too.

Now, to say that we can be un-alone in ways that don't involve finding a traditional, monogamous, romantic partner is a different kettle of fish. To invite us to find love and community with friends, with family, with non-sexual relationships, with intentional communities, with polyamorous relationships, etc. is all very well and good, and our society desperately needs more reinforcement of that message, especially in our narratives.

But by making the only alternative to the classic romantic partner "being alone," Gray plays right into the old disempowering stereotype.

18. Being in relationships for the sake of having a relationship.

Yes, we should not do this. But when the only alternative we're told we have is "being alone," because having friends and family apparently doesn't count, we are more likely to.

19. Not taking advantage of vacation days.

Every American, take advantage of your vacation days! You have few enough.

20. Holding on to toxic friendships.

Yep, don't do this.

21. Spending time with people out of obligation.

I agree with Gray's description of this: it's a call for balance really. I'll only add that we do have social obligations (men, women, children, all of us). And we do need to meet them sometimes, even if we don't want to. But, yes, we need to meet them with balance and not try to be all things to all people.

22. Being embarrassed about your interests.

I recently re-blogged my essay on the pregnancy motif in Mirage of Blaze -- and I've apparently just admitted to it again. I think I'm over this one.

23. Setting deadlines for major life events.

I'm happy to say that the older I get, the less I do this. It's not easy to stop doing when life is so brief. But she's right that little good comes from it.

Anime Review: The Unlimited: Hyoubu Kyousuke

The Unlimited: Hyoubu Kyousuke (2013), produced by Manglobe as a 12-part anime sequel to Zettai Karen Children, follows the adventures of the original anime’s antagonist, Hyoubu Kyousuke, as he fights–violently–for the rights of “espers” (people with superpowers) in a world dominated by norms. The Unlimited has all the elements of a truly great anime but misses a lot of chances to deploy them to the best effect. Overall, it is well above average without being spectacular. I have not seen Zettai Karen Children and so can confidently say that you don’t need to in order to enjoy The Unlimited.



The story is fairly simple, though the plot has some convoluted twists. Hyoubu Kyousuke is a very powerful esper (he can fly around, use telekinesis, shoot energy waves, etc.). He was born in the 1930s, but thanks to his powers has an extended lifespan and still looks like a teen, albeit white-haired. A child hero within a special esper unit in World War II, he became disillusioned with “normals” after experiencing cruel persecution and devoted his adult life to forming a criminal esper organization, P.A.N.D.R.A., to resist and possibly exterminate norms. Opposing him is nigh everyone, including B.A.B.E.L., a norm-esper organization founded by one of Kyousuke’s esper companions from World War II, Fujiko. Unbeknownst to Kyousuke, he is also being opposed by a young esper he has recently recruited, Andy Hinomiya, a Japanese-American who is, in fact, a US undercover agent. But things are more complicated than even Andy knows, and he may find cause to switch his loyalties. The three titular “children” from Zettai Karen Children, now middle schoolers, also make brief appearances as B.A.B.E.L. agents but are not central characters.

Read the rest at The Geek Girl Project.

Authorial Distance and Authorial Light Years Away

We all know there's such a thing as being too close to your fiction writing, losing "authorial distance" and getting lost in the mazes of your own issues. But right now, I'm in the midst of the opposite -- I feel way too far away.

I'm at a point in my novel, The Forwarder, where the plot takes a very angsty turn. This is a novel I plotted out in broad strokes around 2006, which was a lifetime ago for me psychologically. If I were inventing a story fresh today, it wouldn't be nearly this dark. But it is what it is, and it's a story I need to tell.

The trouble is I'm not in a dark place right now. That's a very nice kind of trouble to have, mind you. And, in fact, it's a powerful motivation for not wanting to dig into the deep, dark spaces to find my characters' inner agony. I've had enough of that, thank you very much. But the result is a sense of extreme distance from the drama. I'm having to call on memories of difficult times in my life without wanting to sound the depths of those memories. It feels fake. I don't know if it reads that way -- this is first draft stuff I haven't workshopped yet -- but it feels that way.

I don't know what the upshot will be. Revision, I suppose, as always. Of all the problems I could have as a person, not being miserable is probably the one I'd choose first. But it makes grief hard to write from the gut. Hopefully, I can piece it together in a way that works.

Mary Shelley: Geek Girl Extraordinaire

If any 19th-century woman can claim a place as quintessential geek girl, it is surely Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Not only is she the progenitor of one of the icons of geek culture and a founder of modern science fiction, she is also, I will argue, firmly situated in the grand tradition of women fan fiction writers. Born August 30, 1797, she would be 216 years old today.



Brief Biography
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley seemed marked for literary accomplishment. The daughter radical philosopher, William Godwin, and prototypic feminist and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley was a natural heir to literary talent. Despite this advantage, however, her life was fraught with sorrows. Her mother having died in childbirth, she grew up close to her father. This relationship, however, was shattered when at sixteen she eloped with scandalous Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley (of the “Satanic School”).

Though the Shelleys loved each other and were surrounded by a stimulating social circle of Romantic intelligentsia, their lives were troubled, not least by the loss of several children: Percy Florence was the only child to survive his parents. After Shelley’s untimely death in a boating accident, Mary found herself a widow at twenty-four with a son to support. Though Shelley’s father was a baronet, his disapproval of his son’s elopement meant that he provided little financial support. She ended up significantly augmenting her income by writing and editing.

She was a prolific writer. In addition to Frankenstein and her futuristic science fiction novel, The Last Man, she wrote lesser-known novels, short stories, children’s stories, travel literature, and essays (and, of course, voluminous letters).

Today, aside from some slight attention to The Last Man and her novella, “Mathilda, ” about an incestuous father-daughter relationship, she is only remembered for Frankenstein. But, really, isn’t that enough?

Read the rest at The Geek Girl Project.

Yay for Donated Helmets for Indie Sci-Fi!

Heartfelt thanks to my BFF, Melanie Powers, for her donation of football helmets to my sci-fi film, The Eater. Package received! Moreover, she's paying postage as a donation to the film. Melanie, you're awesome!

This is one of the things I love about microbudget filmmaking. People pull together to accomplish an immensely complex project out of resources something like 0.1% of what Hollywood would say you need to raise to make a movie. Now, do microbudgets look like Hollywood movies? No. Even those produced by professionals with exquisitely honed talent and rigorous production standards (I do not count myself in this group, by the way) will show the signs of extreme cheapness: fewer/poor effects, lower-grade sound, less diversity in camera angles, cheap costumes, more continuity glitches the crew couldn't afford to correct, etc.

But it's possible to make exceptional art on a shoestring. Consider Shakespeare at the Globe: actors on an empty stage. Yes, movies are a different medium, but the same basic rule applies: great actors and a great script can generate great art. With a little help from your friends, there's nothing stopping you.

What this doesn't generate is a sustainable economic model. Shakespeare's contemporaries had theater goers to buy tickets. Most microbudgets, even well received at festivals, will not get regular distribution or make much money in theaters; DVD sales are a thing of the past; and streaming or online sales brings in a pittance per view or copy sold.

And so we have a cycle of poverty, often with the poor supporting the poor. My friend, Melanie, isn't rolling in cash, which makes her contribution all the more noteworthy. I'm not rolling in cash either, which hamstrings my desire to increase the budget I contribute from my savings to pay people respectably for their work. And so people end up donating a lot of time and resources. I love them for it, but they're not making a living this way anymore than I am.

It's never been easy to be a working artist, but I generally agree with Jaron Lanier in You Are Not a Gadget that our current model of internet culture has made things harder. Or to be more fair, it's made production easier; it's made making money harder. Consumers--myself included--just aren't willing to pay much for digital copies, and with so many projects being produced, even most good ones get lost in the noise.

I don't have a ready solution. But I know this: people won't stop making art. Indie, low-budget filmmaking won't stop. Most of it will be bad quality, but some of it will be as brilliant as anything from professional studios. And this will continue to be the work of people coming together out of love of art and in friendship with each other to do it because it's worth doing.

Anime Review: Aku no Hana

Aku no Hana (Flowers of Evil) (2013) is a truly different anime. This 13-episode Zexcs production, based on the manga by Shuzo Oshimi, is a dark slice-of-life teen drama. I generally detest slice-of-life teen drama, so I’m not just idly gushing when I say this series is (mostly) fantastic. It owes much of its originality–and controversy–to its use of rotoscoping in place of traditional animation. This technique, in which live-action footage is traced over, puts Aku no Hana artistically in a bit of an uncanny valley between cartoon and live action drama. The effect unsettled me at first, but the whole story is meant to be unsettling, and in the end, I found it the perfect mix of realism with a creepy, otherworldly overlay.



Aku no Hana starts out as an adventure in Schadenfreude. Shy middle-school boy, Takao Kasuga, has a crush on the beautiful and accomplished Nanako Saeki, and in a moment of bad judgment, he steals her PE uniform. Unfortunately for Kasuga, this momentary lapse is witnessed by Sawa Nakamura, a borderline psycho from his class who is desperate to find another authentic “sicko” like herself to relieve the tedium and hypocrisy she sees in middle-school life. She blackmails Kasuga into performing more and more bizarre acts in exchange for her silence about the uniform. And Kasuga, like the clueless, emotionally sensitive boy he is, lets himself get buried in increasingly unconscionable webs of deceit. All this is just the jumping-off point for an in-depth psychological investigation of Kasuga, Nakamura, and Saeki, none of whom is quite what they initially seem.

Read the rest at The Geek Girl Project

What is the value of art?

What is the value of art? Comment to your heart's content.

The Depiction of Women in The Wolverine

The latest X-Men film, The Wolverine, has recently opened in theaters. As you might guess, it’s about Wolverine–but I need to talk about the women. As gender fail goes, The Wolverine is by no means an egregious offender. In some ways, it handles its female characters well, but this is all the more reason to critique it: its gender fail not a fluke. It’s not a movie that just happened to be penned by a sexist writer. If anything, its handling of women is better than the norm for a Hollywood superhero flick. Yet it’s still offensive, and we have to do better. Now.



Spoiler-lite summary: the film is set after X-Men: The Last Stand, in which Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) killed an insane Jean-Grey-as-the-Phoenix (Famke Janssen) to stop her wreaking destruction. We catch up with him haunted by dreams of her and trying to put his identity as “Wolverine” behind him. But his past finds him in the form of an old Japanese acquaintance (Haruhiko Yamanouchi) he saved from the bombing of Nagasaki.* This old man wants to see Wolverine before he dies. Thus, Wolverine is whisked off to Japan where adventure ensues, including romance with his old friend’s granddaughter, Mariko (Tao Okamoto). The story is based on one of Wolverine’s more famous comic book plotlines, but I’m going to address the movieverse as a standalone.

The film does some redeeming gender work. One enjoyable character is Yukio (Rila Fukushima), a multitalented mutant sidekick with amazing fighting skills, wit, charm, courage, and culturally plausible Japanese cuteness. (But note the word “sidekick.”) Mariko is also updated from the traditional damsel in distress. Though not a mutant, she has some decent fighting skills of her own and is courageous, proactive, and intelligent.

Read the rest at The Geek Girl Project.

Grateful for a Great High School Reunion

There's a myth about high school reunions in much the way there's a myth about mothers-in-law. Mothers-in-law, we're told, are shrewish and awful, a stereotype belied by the life experience of countless individuals. High school reunions, we're told, are about one-upmanship and showing off. As of last Saturday, I've been to three high school reunions (5th, 10th, and 20th) with the wonderful people from Justin-Siena High School's class of 1993, and either I got very lucky or this stereotype is just plain false. (I'm betting both.)

Every time I see these people, I feel blessed by their kindness, all the more so because I am not close personal friends with most of them and wasn't in high school. In high school, I had three close friends from my own year, and they're not great reunion goers. I saw one at my 10th reunion and one (all too briefly) at this 20th. The vast majority of my reunion time, I've spent talking to people I scarcely talked to in high school. We were on good terms, but we weren't close. Yet at every reunion, they greet me like an old friend and with unmistakable sincerity. I've even made new friends over the years among old high school classmates as well as their spouses.

With these folks, there are none of the shenanigans reunions are infamous for. People discuss their lives, of course: their families, jobs, and projects. But there's no hint of competition, no jockeying to prove who's accomplished the most. Indeed, I see a great show of honesty in sharing things that have gone well and things that have been difficult. Our diverse class includes people who are married, single, with kids, without kids, high-earning professionals, not-so-high-earning, people with advanced degrees, people without, people who look just like they did in high school, people who look middle-aged now. Everyone is embraced. Everyone is celebrated for their unique life accomplishments. The show of good will, from all I've seen, is universal.

And when I think back to high school, I can see the seeds of this kindness. Certainly, we were all teenagers then and had all the usual types of teen drama. People misbehaved; people hurt each other. But even then, the dominant feel of the school was safe, supportive, and inclusive. As a shy, nerdy girl with giant, thick glasses, I could have been a prime target for ridicule, but I wasn't. I can count on my fingers the number of times in four years that any of my classmates was less than kind to me. Even at the time, I remember being grateful to be at Justin-Siena and not some of the other high schools I heard friends complain about.

Seeing these people again, twenty years after we spent high school together, I can feel the closeness that only comes with the passing years. Though I may not see my former classmates often, as the years go by the uniqueness of the context we share becomes more and more evident.

Class of 1993, you are my family. I was privileged to go to high school with you. I am still privileged to have gone to high school with you. I look forward eagerly to staying in touch with you, whether it be as closer friends or once a decade. You are all amazing!

Review: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

I do not think War and Peace is a novel. If War and Peace is, in fact, a history text on the Russian perspective of the Napoleonic Wars, using fictional characters to portray a range of daily realities that formed part of the fabric of this time period, then it does its work, and it may be the most interesting history text on the Napoleonic Wars ever written. But if I am meant to see War and Peace as a novel--as a work of fiction whose task is to tell a story about its characters--I found it failure.

Its failure is more frustrating because it is plainly the work of a literary genius. Tolstoy may be the best writer I have ever read for comprehending and capturing the way human beings function psychologically. He creates a wide range of characters--young and old, extroverted, introverted, merry, severe, emotional, rational, capricious, conscientious, etc.--all of whom think and behave in ways exactly plausible for who they are and yet surprising and complex and evolving. And he depicts many of these experiences, external and internal, with a phenomenal eye for detail, nuance, strangeness, idiosyncrasy, and the stream of consciousness of human thought and feeling. So what's the problem?

1) It doesn't add up to anything.

A couple of caveats: if War and Peace is a history text, then yes it does add up: it adds up to a portrait of the Napoleonic Wars as they pertained to Russia. Even if War and Peace is to be seen as a novel, it adds up on occasion, mostly for Pierre and Natasha as a couple (more on this shortly).

But too often--the vast majority of the time--I feel left with a set of exquisite vignettes robbed of the connecting structure to make a meaningful story out of them. A few examples--most involving Prince Andrei because he's my favorite character:

• We are told that Pierre and Andrei are best friends. And we're given about three or four vignettes that could sell this: Andrei lights up when Pierre enters a boring party; they give each other a sense of spiritual transcendence when they meet a few years later; even the misfire of their not being able to communicate meaningfully on the eve of battle feels poignant and human. But that's it. For two central characters in 1000+ page book, this is very close to all the development their relationship gets. When Andrei dies, we're told that Pierre is moved by it in some sort of way, but this is never shown: we see him devote almost no thought to it. They go through the vast majority of their respective stories thinking about just about everything except each other, and if this makes them best friends, it seems not far from the level on which titular Secret Agent John Drake claims a guest star in one episode as his best friend; i.e. "To every man he meets, he stays a stranger."

• Another Andrei example: there's a consistent theme that Andrei has no relationship to speak of with his son. This is more notable given that initially, it seems they will be close: he is close to his own prickly father, so there's a precedent; he is present at his son's birth; he is desperate with fear that his son might die during an illness as a baby. And then, nothing: several years later, he briefly holds his son on his lap but can't even finish telling him a story. And then, when Andrei is dying, he blesses him, only because his sister and Natasha want him to: he's already passed beyond caring about the mundane world. The intentionality of this absence is driven home through young Nikolai's perspective as an adolescent years later: he doesn't remember his father at all, though his father died when he was about seven; he really should remember him--but then, he almost never saw him.

So far so good: that's good character development. But again, what does it amount to? We get no commentary of any kind (authorial, internal, other character) on what this failure in parenting means. How did it affect Andrei's view of himself, his life? How did it affect his sister, Princess Maria's view? His father's? Natasha's? We do get a bit of young Nikolai's view, insofar as he comes to view his father as a shadowy figure of reverence. And there's some good irony there: worship arising from negligence. But even here, what's the upshot? We leave Nikolai as a youth in this worshipful stage with no sense of where it will take him or how it's supposed to matter.

• Vera, the unloved daughter of the Rostovs. In the beginning of the book, we are hit over the head with Vera's unsociability. She seems set up for some sort of grand psychological fall or, well, something. After a few chapters she marries herself off to Berg, and they seem to form an okay if not brilliant couple, and we never hear from her again. What was the point of that? Why was she there? Why meticulously set up a character as a social misfit headed for trouble just to have her trail off?

• Pierre's first marriage. The marriage of Pierre and Hélène is very unhappy. We get a brief descent into their being horrible to each other, and then they essentially never have anything to do with each other again. When they're in the same room in social settings, they pass like ships in the night. This is not only a cataclysmic waste of character potential: Hélène is not a character at all and may win the prize for worst-served creation in the book. It is also not realistic. I don't care how alienated Pierre is from her or how much he tries to put her out of his mind. She is his wife, and he's stuck with her, and she would come up in his thoughts in interesting and particular ways sometimes.

If there's an exception to this lack of follow-through, it is the two final marriages between Pierre and Natasha, and Maria and Natasha's brother, Nikolai, respectively. They build relatively well, particularly the former. In fact, I don't feel qualified to comment on the trajectory of Pierre and Natasha for the purely personal reason that I don't identify with either character much and, thus, have trouble identifying with their love story. But as far as I can see, their story may well be plotted out in a way compelling to those more attached to the characters. (Natasha is very close to my antithesis in personality, and while I consider her very well crafted, this makes it hard to hold on to particular empathy for her. This is not a flaw in Tolstoy's writing; it's just a fact of my response.)

2) The book sacrifices humanity to analysis.

For somebody with such an incisive grasp of the human condition, Tolstoy has a singular unwillingness to get inside his characters. In these vignettes he gives us, he illustrates profound truths, but the vignettes are short, often not clearly connected to each other, and interspersed with vague glosses of very important life transformations.

For example, Andrei and Natasha fall in love, but aside from the fact that they see a lot of each other and have a conversation about Natasha getting lost in a forest (which, in itself, is a fantastic vignette), it's not clear why they fall in love; it's never really gone into.

Another example: Natasha's and Maria's respective grieving processes over Andrei's death are described as identical, except for the purely external difference that life's responsibilities pull Maria back into life first. This is not possible. It is not possible that a very young, vivacious woman who has been romantically in love with a man she doesn't really know well for some a couple of years on-and-off would experience the same grief at his death as an almost middle-aged, introverted and self-reflective woman who has known this man as her brother for her entire life. Yes, there is a universality to grief. And, no, nothing Tolstoy specifically says about their grief rings untrue. But it is skimmed over at such a vast authorial remove that the fundamental differences between the women and their relationships with Andrei don't even merit a mention.

And here is where--forgive me--I will compare Tolstoy invidiously to Dostoevsky. My views are supremely biased, but I can best illustrate my point by the comparison.

Dostoevsky lives inside his characters. His characters are him, not in the sense that you can point to a character and say, "That's FMD" in the way you can point at Jane Eyre and say, "Ah, Charlotte Brontë," but simply in the sense that he puts himself in their place. He speaks out of a character's center as though it were his own. When he writes Ivan Karamazov, one is inside Ivan Karamazov. When he writes Alyosha Karamazov, one is inside Alyosha. This is the essence of Bakhtin's (and my) esteem for Dostoevsky as a supreme dialogist. His characters feel real because a real consciousness lives through their eyes.

On a concrete level, he achieves much of this through voicing people. He is dialogue heavy and sometimes ponderously lengthy, but it gives his characters a voice with which to tell us who they are in their own time, in their own depth.

Tolstoy maintains a hygienic distance from his characters. He looks down upon their lives like a world-class entomologist on his favorite species of ant. This entomologist may know more about these ants than anyone in the world. He may be 100% correct in all his conjectures about them. He may be scrupulous, meticulous, and insightful in his study of the salient details of ant life. But he never ceases to be an entomologist dissecting the habits of ants. He will never be an ant and walk among them. Thus, Tolstoy’s characters, on some level, never move beyond being objects under a microscope.

The fragmentation of the narrative; its dearth of overarching, recognizable narrative structures; the brevity of its dialogue and characters' internal thought processes; and the glossing of major internal transformations in a handful of expository paragraphs are all concrete manifestations of this dissection.

I have said that Andrei is my favorite character. He is. I love him. Tolstoy succeeded in making me love him. In that, he's a very fine writer. But all the greater is my frustration that in being given characters like Andrei, like the entire Bolkonsky family, like Pierre, and so on, characters of such potential, so very real and fascinating in their composition, Tolstoy chose not to do much with them. He leaves so many beautiful thoughts, ideas, relationships, tendencies, tragedies, comedies sitting in a drawer, filed under "Miscellaneous observations about how ants go to war and make peace."