Wm Henry Morris's Blog

A passage from Blanchot’s Literature and the Right to Death

Blanchot’s work, especially the literary criticism, is difficult to understand and not wise to excerpt because each piece of the argument (often developed in long paragraphs) builds on the other, but even so, I found this particular passage interesting and worth sharing:

The reader makes the work; as he reads it, he creates it; he is its real author, he is the consciousness and the living substance of the written thing; and so the author now has only one goal, to write for that reader and to merge with him. A hopeless endeavor. Because the reader has no use for a work written for him, what he wants is precisely an alien work in which he can discover something unknown, a different reality, a separate mind capable of transforming him and which he can transform into himself. An author who is writing specifically for a public is not really writing: it is the public that is writing, and for this reason the public can no longer be a reader; reading only appears to exist, actually it is nothing. This is why works created to be read are meaningless: no one reads them. This is why it is dangerous to write for other people, in order to evoke the speech of others and reveal them to themselves: the fact is that other people do not want to hear their own voices; they want to hear someone else’s voice, a voice that is real, profound, troubling like the truth. (364-365, Literature and the Right to Death, Maurice Blanchot from The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, trans. by Lydia Davis)

What Orhan Pamuk doesn’t understand about genre fiction

[image error]Orhan Pamuk’s The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist* is similar to Stephen King’s On Writing in that it presents itself as a distillation of a famous author’s thoughts on fiction (although Pamuk talks as much or even more about the reading of fiction as the writing of it) but what is presented as universally obvious and true ends up actually being about the particular experiences, biases and preoccupations of the famous author. Whether or not one finds value from the book depends largely on how much one’s own experiences, biases and preoccupations match up with the famous author.

For all that he uses as primary examples a lot of 19th and early 20th century novels that I really like, Pamuk and I were not a great match. But this post is not about that personal argument, rather it’s a look at how in trying to privilege the novels that have spoken to him, Pamuk shows that he doesn’t actually understand genre fiction, especially science fiction.

Things start well enough. Early on he writes:

Historical novels, fantastic novels, science fiction novels, philosophical novels, romances, and many other books that blend these various types are actually, just like so-called realist novels, based on everyday observations of life in the period in which they were written. (47-48)

This is good. This acknowledges that authors of genre fiction use one of the same key tactics as those of works of literary realism (and he even uses “so-called”!): observation. Details get taken from life and then worked into the fiction that the author is written. Those details are often transmuted. But not necessarily as radically or as often in literary realism as in genre fiction, especially science fiction (he doesn’t say what the difference between “fantastic novels” and “science fiction novels” is).

Later in the book, though, things go off the rails, especially in the last chapter where Pamuk introduces his concept of “the center”, which he says every great novel has — that, in fact, determines whether a novel is literary or not. I can’t really explain what Pamuk means by the center because he doesn’t really explain it himself — doesn’t seem to really even know what it is. It’s more of a “I know it when I see it” kind of thing. The most succinct explanation he provides is:

The center of a novel is a profound opinion or insight about life, a deeply embedded point of mystery, whether real or imagined. Novelist write in order to investigate this locus, to discover its implications, and we are aware that novels are read in the same spirit. When we first imagine a novel, we may consciously think of this secret center and know that we are writing for its sake—but sometimes we may be unaware of it. (153)

I have no problem if Pamuk wants to describe novels in this way. My issue is that he then uses this construct — one which is entirely idiosyncratic to him and isn’t well-defined — as a bludgeon against genre fiction.

For example:

Let us try to describe the insufficiency we feel when we read a novel, when we think via the medium of a novel. As we get further and further into story, as we joyfully lose our way in the forest of details and incidents, its world seem far more substantial than real life. One reason for this is the relationship between the secret center of the novel and the most basic aspects of life—a relationship that empowers novels to provide a greater feeling of authenticity than life itself. Another reason is that novels are built with everyday, universal, human sensations. Yet another reason is that in novels—and this is generally also true of genre novels, such as crime fiction, romances, science fiction, and erotic novels—we find the sensations and experiences that are missing in our own life. (123-124)

Pamuk ties this “secret center” to authenticity — in fact, an authenticity that is so authentic it’s more authentic than real life — and then claims that genre fiction lacks this type of center. That they are about the inauthentic experience of heightened sensation and exceptional experience. Or to put it in the way it more often is in these tired literary vs. genre debates: genre fiction’s only use is escapism from everyday life.

But wait—there’s more! Pamuk double down on his claim that works of genre fiction have no center, although he does do the inevitable carving out of exceptions for the (Lem and Dick for SF; plus a bonus of Patricia Highsmith and John Le Carre; although, what? No Le Guin?):

Both writing and reading a novel require us to integrate all the material that comes from life and from our imagination—the subject, the story, the protagonists, and the details of our personal world-with this light and this center. The ambiguity of their location is never a bad thing; on the contrary, it is a quality we readers demand, for if the center is too obvious and the light too strong, the meaning of the novel is immediately revealed and the act of reading feel repetitive. Reading genre novels—science fiction, crime novels, period fantasies, romance novels—we never ask ourselves the questions Borges asked while reading Moby-Dick: What is the real subject? Where is the center? The center of these novels is precisely where we found it before, while reading novels of the same type. Only the adventures, the scenery, the main characters, and the murderers are different. In the genre novel, the profound theme that the narrative must structurally imply remains the same from one book to the next. Apart from the works of a few creative writers like Stanislaw Lem and Philip K. Dick in science fiction, Patricia Highsmith in thrillers and murder mysteries, and John Le Carre in espionage fiction, genre novels do not inspire us with any urge to seek the center at all. It is for this reason that writers of such novels add a new element of suspense and intrigue to their story every few pages. On the other hand, because we are not drained by the constant effort of asking basic question about the meaning of life, we feel comfortable and safe when reading genre novels.

In fact, the reason we read such novels is to feel the peace and security of being at home, where everything is familiar and in its accustomed place. The reason we turn to literary novels, great novels, where we search for guidance and wisdom that might confer meaning on life, is that we fail to feel at home in the world. (159-160)

Notice the equivalent of literary with great and “such novels” with familiar. Notice the assigning of genre novels to the tidy domestic sphere and of literary novels to travel—to the seeker, the wanderer—to the wisdom that creates meaning out of failing to feel at home in the world. Notice how the achievements of entire fields are boiled down to one or two supposed outliers. Most of all, notice how the work of reading and the byproduct of such reading—the conversations, arguments, fan fictions, fan art, original fictional works written in dialogue with—are brushed aside because Pamuk claims we feel “comfortable and safe when reading genre novels.” I suppose here is where I should insert all sorts of caveats: “well, yes, let us acknowledge there are, indeed, works that are derivative” or “it’s true that many genre readers only seek the familiar”. But even if that’s true, turning the number of exceptions from one or two into ten or twenty or five hundred is to accept Pamuk’s terms of definition.

No, what Pamuk gets wrong—what many critics of genre fiction get wrong—is to mistake what they learned to read for in literary novels (where they find “the center”) for all there is to be found in fiction. “What is the real subject?” asks Pamuk. Well, in genre fiction it may or may not be found in theme or characterization or prose. It instead may be found in world building and setting. Or reconfiguration of standard tropes. Or character relationships. Or across novels in a series. Or on a level of variation of plot, character, setting, etc. that is unique or fresh or particularly effective but only to readers who know the standard tropes well enough. It’s not just that reading tastes differ—there’s also the fact that both the pleasures and the thing that challenges and the journey that’s dangerous sometimes (maybe even often) happens on a level that only the connoisseur can appreciate. This is not a defect on their part (although it could be in some instances). Rather it’s a mode of reading. I suppose one could argue that it shouldn’t take a connoisseur to find the pleasures, virtues, meanings, wisdom in a work. But all the works that Pamuk points to in his book also require learning how to read them. Just because a certain type of reading work has been codified by education and the family practices of the middle class, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Reading literary fiction for light and center requires become an active reader, a connoisseur. It’s just that such connoisseurship is respectable (because the 19th-21st literary novel is [was?] respectable to the bourgeoisie).

Now, it may seem hypocritical for me to champion genre fiction when what I tend to most write and talk about is non-core genre fiction. But what makes novels that combine literary elements with genre elements great is not that they achieve more than solidly genre novels (although some might do just that). What makes such novels great is that they activate tropes and wrestle with concerns and deploy prose and characterization in ways that feel more abundant and complete to those of us who grew up reading both literary and genre fiction. But those heady delights shouldn’t lead us (me) to proclaim that as the superior way just as the way Pamuk being steeped in late 19th century/early 19th century novels shouldn’t lead him to mistake their particular delights and strengths for the entirety of the value to be gained from fiction. What’s more: the reader we currently are doesn’t have to be the reader we always are. The best way to experience the delights of other modes of reading is to sample from wide array of fiction that is available. And the best way to identify the flavors you might be missing is to talk to other connoisseurs about what the like and why the like it. There’s a vast array of delights on offer. Wisdom is great, but can be found in so many types of fiction. Who needs the center?

*Quotes are from Orhan Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, trans. by Nazim Dikbas. Harvard University Press, 2010.

Three translations of Kafka’s Aphorism 20

Mosaic of Leopard Chasing a Gazelle; Roman, Homs, Syria, 450-462 AD; material = polychrome marble tesserae; on display in the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison; photography by wikimedia user Daderot

20. Leoparden brechen in den Tempel ein und saufen die Opferkrüge leer; das wiederholt sich immer wieder; schließlich kann man es vorausberechnen, und es wird ein Teil der Zeremonie. (From Aphorismen – Betrachtungen über Sünde, Leid, Hoffnung und den wahren Weg*; source = Project Gutenberg)

Translation 1:

Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial vessels empty; that repeats again and again; finally, it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes part of the ceremony.

Translation 2:

Leopards break into the temple and lap up the contents of the gold chalices. It happens again and again until, finally, it become predictable and is incorporated into the ceremony.

Translation 3:

Leopards invade the temple and empty the ewers. This event recurs over and over until at last it can be anticipated and thus become part of the ceremony.

* Aphorisms — Reflections on Sin, Hope, Suffering, and the True Way

“Literary” SF&F and self-publishing: qualitative results

In a previous post, I presented the qualitative results of my survey of self-publishing and literary SF&F. Quite a few respondents also provided comments. Because some were okay with me quoting them and others preferred that I not share, I’m going to do a bit of a mishmash here. If anyone who commented wants to clarify or add additional comments, feel free to do so below.

ON LITERARY SF&F:

Will Ellwood (@fragmad) said: “I want SF&F to advance an argument. This holds true for novels published via ‘traditional’ routes as well as self-published material. A good example of ‘literary’ SF which has been self-published is Ian Sales Apollo Not-Quite-Quartet, which advances an aesthetic argument and is identifiable as the work of an individual author rather than a work which has been massaged for mass consumption.”

Other respondents said that they like literary SF but feel that is a sub-genre that is often likely to be highly politicized (which is a turn-off) or that they don’t trust the majority of titles presented in that category to also be entertaining because it so often isn’t (and that it being self-pubbed means that it already has two strikes against it). On the other hand, a respondent said that “for me, one of the big promises of self-publishing was that it would make quirky, offbeat and niche works available that the big publishers wouldn’t normally pick up.”

One respondent made the point that if an author is going to claim to be literary SF&F, they better be able to prove it: “The sample chapter’s quality will be very important in deciding to buy. Have enough bad experiences with indie writers cover copy touting literary qualities that aren’t there.”

ON SELF-PUBLISHING:

Several of the commenters reinforced the quantitative results that suggested that what matters most is a perception of quality by the reader (especially via recommendations).

Mike said: “if I’m interested in a book, whether it’s self-published or not has essentially no relevance to whether I would buy it or the amount of money I’d be willing to pay for it. I don’t generally feel that whether a book was traditionally published or self-published provides much useful information about the book’s quality, and by the time I’m willing to spend any amount of money on a book, I’ve usually already been convinced of its quality.”

Another respondent said: “I don’t trust self-pubbed books generally, so to buy one I would really need to have a strong recommendation from someone I trust a lot.”

And another said: “More likely to be interested if the book has had an editor work on it.”

A respondent who preferred to not be quoted directly but was okay with me summarizing their comments said that the motivation of the author to self-publish and their previous experiences in/with the publishing industry are an important factor in if they’d be willing to give a book chance. For example, if an author is self-publishing because their work is considered by mainstream publishers to be too experimental or difficult then that’s a different thing than if they’re just doing it because the work wasn’t good enough.

Some respondents have strong feelings on format:

One respondent said: “My answers to the third and fourth questions are invalid because I would not by an ebook, ever. I will not read an ebook.”

Dave added: “Rather than print-on-demand I would first look for an audiobook version narrated by a good reader. I find I satisfy 75% of my fiction habit through audiobooks. I love printed versions the most, but audiobooks come in a close second. I usually start with the audiobook and then buy a print version as well, when it becomes a favorite. An ebook is also a gateway to a print book but I use it much less often.”

I would note that some genre-oriented self-publishers have had a lot of success with audiobook editions (although I’m not aware of debut authors launching with an audiobook). Audiobooks require either a partner or a large up-front investment. Some literary SF&F might also not translate well to audio form. On the other hand, if the novel has particularly beautiful and flowing prose and a strong voice, it might do very well in the form.

ON THE MARKETPLACE:

A few respondents made some observations on the marketplace for literary SF&F:

One respondent said: “For me, one of the big promises of self-publishing was that it would make quirky, offbeat and niche works available that the big publishers wouldn’t normally pick up. Hence, I feel it’s a pity that self-published SFF has become a wasteland of werebear romance and military SF straight from Baen’s slushpile, because it had the potential of becoming so much more.”

I’m sure there are oases to be found in the wasteland, but I agree with overarching point of the comment: there’s so much stuff that it’s hard to find the stuff that would be interesting to me.

Another said: “I think part of the issue with self pubbed literary spec fic may be the competition vs firmly genre stuff on Amazon — that is, the difficulties of category differentiation of a relatively small vertical. On a completely different note, while I’m sure extra $ from POD are nice bonus not to be ignored, I don’t think it offers much more than marginal benefit for most, vs the multiplicative possibilities of other strategies (serialization with strategic sales, bundles, collaborations).”

And finally, a comment on who among literary SF&F writers are more likely to have success self-publishing: “I would only recommend it for VERY well established short fiction writers or those with TONS of community connections. Selling outside of your circle will be super hard so your circle needs to be big.”

Thanks for all the comments, folks. To be honest, neither the qualitative nor quantitative results made things much clearer for my personal situation. Of course, I wasn’t really looking for that anyway. My biggest take-away is that there might be more of a market for self-published literary SF&F than currently exists, but that it will likely be a difficult thing to crack/nurture.

NOTE: first time commenters are put in moderation; once moderated, any future comments are published right away.

“Literary” SF&F and self-publishing: quantitative results

Many thanks to all of you who took my survey on “Literary” SF&F and self-publishing novel length fiction. As of earlier today when I turned the survey off there were 32 total respondents. That’s not a huge sample size (although it’s larger than I thought it would be). Nor was the survey itself built to produce anything approaching scientific validity so even though there are numbers below they shouldn’t be taken as anything but an interesting snapshot of a limited SF&F readership where that limit is “is connected to me in some way or is connected to someone who is connected to me” and “was willing to fill out the survey”.

MOTIVATIONS & METHODOLOGY

As I wrote on the introduction to the survey: “This survey is motivated partly out of self-interest — there’s a chance I might self-publish genre fiction in the future. But it’s also reflective of my general curiosity about how novel-length SF&F w/literary elements is perceived by those who regularly purchase that kind fiction as well as my overall interest in the publication and reception of genre fiction, which you’ll sometimes see me musing (or ranting) about on Twitter or my author/critic website.”

In particular, what I’m interested in is a debut novel-length work of “literary” SF&F in ebook form. It seems to me that self-publishing short work is generally acceptable across most of the SF&F readership. However, novel-length work is less acceptable (or perhaps simply less of interest). It’s especially less acceptable if the author does not have some sort of editorial imprimatur. If your publisher cancelled your series, then maybe self-publishing is an okay route to finish the series. But if you have no track record in novel length fiction then  And it’s even less acceptable or perhaps more skeptically viewed if the author is presenting themselves as more toward the literary side of the SF&F ecosystem.

In terms of methodology:

I did not ask for any sort of demographic data. I didn’t know how many respondents I would get and the fewer you get the less useful that becomes. I also wanted the survey to be as quick as possible to fill out. Note that this is a major blind spot in the survey and anyone who is purporting to truly provide a portrait of the field should collect some form of demographic data.
I did not ask respondents to identify themselves, although a few chose to do so in their additional comments.
I linked to the survey via my Twitter account, personal Facebook account, and on a web forum I participate on where most of the participants have an interest in SF&F. It’s not a wide sphere of distribution. However, based upon my knowledge of those groups, I think it’s safe to say that I drew upon a fairly wide spectrum of SF&F fans. If someone were to do this type of survey in a more robust way, they would have asked some questions about literary preferences and genre consumptions patterns so that they could identify some groups to compare data against. I didn’t do that.
I ask about price because it seems to me that self-publishing is seen as down market and traditional publishing as up market (or just: the real market) and that debut authors are an especial risk so if those assumptions are correct then the pricing should reflect the calculations that go into a consumer deciding how much of a risk the novel is.

QUANTITATIVE RESULTS

[image error] (click to embiggen)
[image error] (click to embiggen)

Because the answers to this question were really long, they don’t show up in the image so here’s the key to the graph above. Note that respondents could select 1-3 of the options that they thought applied most to the situation:

Debut novelist has established record of short stories I like (43.8%)
The novel gets a good review from a reviewer I respect (56.3%)
The novel gets recommended to me by a friend or acquaintance whose tastes I trust (81.3%)
The cover, marketing copy and excerpt from the novel interest me (25%)
I’m friends or acquaintances with the author and I like what they have written on Twitter, Facebook, their personal blog, etc. (34.4%)
The novel has good Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Library Thing and/or Goodreads ratings and reviews (25%)
The author does a podcast or online/print publication interview that intrigues me (25%)
Other (no responses for this option).

[image error] (click to embiggen)
[image error] (click to embiggen)
[image error] (click to embiggen)

ANALYSIS

Here’s what jumped out to me:

I’d say that based on the results of question one, there’s cautious optimism for a self-published “literary” SF&F novel — if, of course, it meets all the standards it would need to in order to present itself professionally
No surprises, I think, in the most important factors that would lead folks to buy such a novel. Word of mouth is still king. Reviewers matter (and probably matter more in this particular situation). The track record of short stories is a bit higher than I would have expected, but I suppose it makes a lot of sense — that track record would matter to fans buying a self-published novel for the same reason that editors at traditional publishers would see it as a factor: it’s a way of assessing if the writer can write well, and if you like their sensibility.
On the pricing, I was a bit surprised that respondents were willing to go as high as some of them did, but, then again, I think it shows that if someone perceives the novel as interesting and good quality, that they’re willing to pay for that. On the other hand, it wasn’t surprising that the $0.99-2.99 is the sweet spot for no-brainer buying of a novel. That’s long been the conventional wisdom among self-publishers and traditional publishers have also started to use the same pricing tactic.
When it comes to offering a paperback: I find it interesting that the main reason that the self-publishing conventional wisdom provides for doing so wasn’t much of a factor.

For the qualitative results (the comments that people submitted) I need to spend some time summarizing and excerpting them so those results will come in a future post. Thanks again to everyone who participated!

Also see: qualitative results from the survey

NOTE: first time commenters are put in moderation; once moderated, any future comments are published right away.

Twitter bots I will never get around to making

Henry Rick James
Preposition of the Day
Jane Austen in Austin [Jane Austen is (-ing verb) at (Austin location)]
TheNewspapersWereRight [(X) was general all over (X)]
Lovecraft Sells Amway
Maltify [(verb) (amount) of malt into (noun)]
AyiyiAI [Uh-oh, the AI just (past tense verb) (the noun) in the (noun)]
Pudding [pudding]
Facial Hair Wars ([historical figure]’s (type of facial hair) vs. [historical figure]’s [type of facial hair)]
AdverbialBrooks [(line from David Brooks corpus), thought David Brooks (adverb)]
Paisley [paisley (X)]
YoMamaPoliceState [your mother is so police state, she (dystopian phrase corpus)]

Two brief excerpts from Quentin Anderson’s The Imperial Self

[image error]Detail from the front cover of Quentin Anderson’s The Imperial Self

Quentin Anderson’s The Imperial Self is the kind of idiosyncratic literary criticism by white men trying to say something about America that flourished in the post-WWII period. I had never heard of it until I read Jonathan Sturgeon’s Baffler salvo Divine Indigestion: the endlessly fabulized American self. The overview Sturgeon provides in that piece interested me enough to seek out the book. I’m not sure it’s worth seeking out even if I found it thought-provoking.

It did have the salutary effect of curing me of whatever vestiges of intellectual goodwill I had left for Emerson (and the vestiges were already small).

I also have to admit that I have been sitting on these quotes since I finished the book back in late summer. Now seems like an even less good time to post them than back then was. Or maybe it’s an even better time. I don’t know. On the one hand, these seem like an indictment of the entire fictional enterprise of modern western SF&F. On the other hand: look who is doing the indicting. And: when I think of the works that have spoken to me most over the past few years, they’re works which circumvent or, more often, short-circuit what Anderson describes below. Which grasp the cultural tools at hand but use them in strange, beautiful, angry, hope-generating ways.    

Please note that Anderson was an idiosyncratic curmudgeon who took many of his cues from Lionel Trilling, which means his political stance is, for lack of a better term, complicated. Moderate but cranky? Classically liberal? Neoconservative? Maybe somewhere in between those three. It’s hard to say and that’s just as much a function of the platforms and tactics of the two U.S. political parties over the past half century as it is slipperiness on the part of Trilling (and Anderson–but Trilling was the larger figure so there have been more attempts by others to claim him/pin him down). I mean, Anderson was a Columbia professor during the 1960s, which led to this wonderfully euphemistic sentence from his official CU obit: “He chaired the Joint Committee of Disciplinary Affairs, following campus disturbances in the spring of 1968.” 

It’s also not fair to present these quotes without the context of the book, especially Anderson’s argument about Emerson’s effect on the American imagination, and specifically the way communities and their social ties were redefined and weakened by the elevation of the individual self and the self constituting the world itself aka the imperializing the world (the extreme logical extension of which can be found in modern techno-libertarian fantasies where the self extends it ability to be an imperial self through technological augmentation).

Also: the world has changed a lot since these words were written.

So with all those caveats:    

Excerpt 1

A part of the rather grim comedy of the period of the 1940’s and 1950’s is that we were in the habit of asking ourselves anxiously why we no longer had political imaginations, political concerns. If we had seen the meaning of our subscription to an iconography of imagination, we need not have asked these questions. In such art the world has been moved into the self, as in Blake, and the plurality, the inconsequence, the muddiness of existence have been replaced by internalized antinomies. These playlands of the imagination were great fun to explore, but they altogether lacked what a form such as tragedy provides, a recognition that life is actually open-ended. When we came to understand how this cultural shift came about, we will have to admit that while our theory of art ruled out art as a cause, or art as having cognitive value, the theory served simply to protect us from a knowledge of what was happening to our imaginations. As usual in historical matters, we can’t tell whether our responsiveness to certain kinds of art was a primary cause, but it is plain that our art and our cultural disposition were after all bound up with one another.

The notion of the impersonality of art became the refuge of the infantile demand to rule the whole world. And with reason. Here after all was a human power one could actually exercise, actually experience. Is there a greater imaginable human power than the power to control the way others apprehend the world? (202-203)

Excerpt 2

Without pretending to explore the significance of the most recent impulses of youthful disaffiliation, we may find in the groundswell of enthusiasms over the last ten years a number of particular instances. The need for the young to feel for a total translation of experience, a fresh ground for experience or a new umwelt for their sensations, has led to the immersion in Tolkien, science fiction, or the substitute world of Blake’s prophetic books. (204)

Both excerpts are from The Imperial Self by Quentin Anderson, 1971, Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

P.S. Perhaps the best recommendation for the book is Harold Bloom’s condescending misreading of it in a July 1971 review for Commentary Magazine.

Zangwill’s The Master on Art

[image error]The front cover of Hennepin County Library’s first edition copy of Zangwill’s The Master

Published in 1895, Israel Zangwill’s The Master is a Künstlerroman about a teenage boy in Nova Scotia who overcomes a difficult childhood and extreme poverty to become a great painter. The Master also features illustrations by George Wylie Hutchinson, a frequent Zangwill collaborator whose life story informed the writing of the novel.

I haven’t gotten that far into it yet so I don’t know if it’s any good (it was a bestseller when it first came out). But what I do know is that this passage from the proem (preface) is an overwrought but fabulous and cutting meditation on art and artists that ends with an image that is SF&F adjacent and thus worth noting here:

“And amid these homely emotions of yeomen, amid the crude pieties or impieties of homespun souls, amid this sane hearty intercourse with realities or this torpor of sluggish spirits, was born ever and anon a gleam of fantasy, of imagination: bizarre, transfiguring, touching things with the glamour of dream. Blind instincts—blinder still in their loneliness—yearned towards light; beautiful emotions stirred in dumb souls, emotions that mayhap turned to morbid passion in the silence and solitude of the woods, where character may grow crabbed and gnarled, as well as sound and straight. For whereas to most of these human creatures, begirt by the glory of sea and forest, the miracles of sunrise and sunset were only the familiar indications of a celestial timepiece, and the starry heaven was but a leaky ceiling in their earthly habitation, there was here and there an eye keen to note the play of light and shade and color, the glint of wave and the sparkle of hoar-frost and the spume of tossing seas; the gracious fairness of cloud and bird and blossom, the magic of sunlit sails in the offing, the witchery of white winters, and all the changing wonder of the woods; a soul with scanty self-consciousness at best, yet haply absorbing Nature, to give it back one day as Art.

“Ah, but to see the world with other eyes than one’s fellows, yet express the vision of one’s race, its subconscious sense of beauty, is not all a covetable dower.

“The islands of Acadia are riddled with pits, where men have burrowed for Captain Kidd’s Treasure and found nothing but holes. The deeper they delved the deeper holes they found. Whoso with blood and tears would dig Art out of his soul may lavish his golden prime in pursuit of emptiness, or, striking treasure, find only fairy gold, so that when his eye is purged of the spell of morning, he sees his hand is full of withered leaves.” (3-4)

preserve

[image error]Photo by Angela Morris

return to preserve that perfect moment

return with a crust of salt, a cloud of smoke, a cube of ice, a cruet

of vinegar, a crock of butter

of duck fat

of varnish

of piss

return again with

a clear glass bottle in which to carefully rebuild it in miniature (but not out of matchsticks–of sensory details and flickering images and elusive feelings and

you don’t know what

because it always

collapses

just as

it’s

almost

complete)

return again with

a dictionary in which to press it (the one you used in college bound tight with

your grandmother’s belt–the one with the extra hole punched in it

because

her waist

was tiny

and it was a man’s belt but she wore it anyway because it was sturdy and made of good leather

which she oiled religiously, and your mother didn’t know what she oiled it with when you asked her so you used leather conditioner which you

bought at a saddle shop

even though you knew that your grandmother would have scoffed at

such extravagance

or at least that’s the story you always told whenever you wore it)

return again with

a jar of sugar in which to nestle it in the hopes that it will speckle the granules with its essence as it fades (which it always does which is why it must be

constantly renewed

even though

the expenditure of energy required to do so is immense,

your reserves are burned to fumes,

and it’ll take years to build them back up again)

return again with

a bottle of gin in which to soak it (the acrid, desert smell of juniper replacing the fresh sharpness

of birch trees–a swap of sensory detail that corrupts the memory only a bit and in the right direction, which you know now

or

you think you know now

you can’t remember–even though you have returned

again and again)

return again with

a bucket of formaldehyde in which to plunge it

as if extreme measures were all that were left to you

as if the puckered slick thing you come back with is meaningful

as if the fumes rising from it didn’t clog your nose and prickle your skin and blind your eyes with tears (and you are aware that surely by now the controls must need re-calibration, but you can’t change the process–too much depends on keeping everything the same even if that same is veering off course

because

what if you over-correct your re-calibrations

what if veer so far off course you can never return again)

and it’s not that it never works—it’s that it never works quite right (and never for long enough)

the mind is peat, permafrost, silica, calcite

a bog for drowning

a tundra for burying

a desert for sinking

the mind is a ruined book, a yellowed ruff of pages

the mind is a minor playwright’s half-completed masterpiece filled with country bumpkins and withered vicars and lost sea captains and way too many cousins

the mind is an epic poem all fragments and heroes–all fire, ill winds and mistaken identities

and each return is a second too late, a minute too long–

you fill the kitchen counter until it’s slimy with

blemished fruit

fit only to jam

not a single one that optimal ripeness that bursts sweet and tart

and so fresh with life

you could savor it, devour it forever

it’s never that forever

the one with salt stinging your skin; smoke perfuming your hair, fat

glossing your lips

it’s the one

where you return again and again and come away with

hardtack and jerky

pickles and preserves

and they only last so long

before you have to go back again

COMMENTARY

Artists probably shouldn’t comment on their own work. But I want to interrogate my reaction to this poem because it was a strange thing for me to write. See, I posted a line to Twitter that I found evocative. Not an unusual practice for me. The line was: a crust of salt, a cruet of vinegar, a cloud of smoke, a cube of ice. I thought about that succession of images and thought, hey, there’s something there, and dutifully copied the line over to my big list of story ideas. My thinking was that perhaps I could build a short story around it where each line was a section of the story. Or perhaps four variations on a story. But then the thing kept gnawing at me, and the first stanza came to me, and I couldn’t let go from there. I had to play the whole thing out. What makes this strange to me is that I really do have a distrust of poetry. And I dislike time travel as a narrative device. I don’t write either and don’t read much of either. It’s not so much that I refuse to as that I avoid both genres as much as possible. Which is a stupid thing to do. But I have my reasons. Which are:

Distrust of Poetry

I think I like poetry. But it’s hard for me to know how much I like most poetry because I distrust it. When I read poetry, I do not dive into the text with an open heart and mind. This is not because I was traumatized by grade school or high school teachers who over-mystified or over-analyzed poetry. Nor was it because college lit classes burned me out on it. In fact, my distrust of poetry grew after I started writing fiction. I think it’s because as I became aware of the rhetorical tricks of fiction, I became even more attuned to how poetry’s concentrated, intense efforts are intended to capture the reader (however meagre my own powers in this area may be). Poetry is spell working. Or to put it another way — I distrust poetry for the same reason I distrust film: because it uses atmospheric, powerful sound (and soundtrack) and striking images to manipulate my emotions. I mean, all art is trying to do the same. It’s just that poetry is so in your face about it. And that makes me distrust it. Which is a stupid attitude, I know, but even though I’m aware of it, when I approach poetry, it’s very hard for me to do so in an unguarded way. The distrust interferes with my experience of reading poetry, which means it’s a self-reinforcing barrier. Which means I don’t read much of it. And I certainly don’t write it*.

Dislike of Time Travel Narratives

Time travel messes with the causality endemic to narrative. I suspect this is why some people like it. I suspect this is part of why I don’t. Although I don’t think that’s the entire reason because I like work that messes with narrative conventions. Meta-fiction, flipped narratives, strange points of view, ambiguity — I’m cool with all that. So I suppose that part of it may be simple snobbery: time travel is too often reached for as a trope and too often it is deployed clumsily. But I think there’s something else: time travel stories inevitably become about time travel itself. Because time travel is impossible (or functionally impossible) according to our understanding and experience of physics, when used as a plot trope, it’s always having to justify itself (or awkwardly, blatantly ignore the need for such justification). It’s so inelegant a device (in most writers hands).

What Happened as a Result of Writing preserve

Writing this poem has reminded me that I’m definitely not a poet. Poetry—real poetry—-is difficult. Because I’m not a poet, I rely too much on repetition (of sounds and images). Those techniques are fine if used sparingly in poetic prose. They’re not the most sophisticated techniques when used in poetry. I lack that ability to find a perfect image or line and so overcompensate with a profusion of them. More importantly, I’m not good at laying those images out or twisting them up in a way that adds extra meaning to them. Oh, and: really good poets are remarkable with their transitions. Good transitions are difficult in prose — they’re incredibly difficult in poetry. I also suspect that a good poet would have been able to avoid the use of second person or used it in a more interesting way and would have been more thoughtful about line breaks. But I’m not a good poet, and I doubt that poetry will be a regular part of what I write in the near future.

Nor do I think I’ll be using time travel narratives in my fiction anytime soon. I do think I better understand the appeal to the writer. Narrative is history. Fiction is memory. Time travel messes with history and memory. Writers live to mess with stuff. And yet I still think that time travel stories tend to be about time travel itself and that’s not something I want to engage with at the moment. Memory and history are important to me — but I’m more interested in how they work in, how they haunt the present of the narrative.

And yet: while the poem showed me my limitations as a writer and gently reinforced some of my literary prejudices, what I can’t escape is that once I committed to the concept, the puzzle of working through the final form the initial idea should take was interesting and fun. This is a mundane observation, but I’m going to make it anyway: strong preferences (likes and dislikes) are important for artists. There are good reasons and strong forces that cause artists to specialize. But I wonder if sometimes we (especially when we = newer writers) limit ourselves unnecessarily. I’m not a poet. It’s not something I want to be. But that doesn’t mean I should avoid poetry. Two years ago I wasn’t a novelist and claimed that I was agnostic on the matter of ever writing a novel. I’ve since written one. If you asked me today, I’d tell you that I am not fond of memoir/personal essay and can’t see myself ever engaging in that literary form (and, honestly, that’s a form I’m going to continue to resist). I also have no desire to write horror, westerns or about the singularity. That’s not a bad thing. Most writers must specialize in order to be successful. But sometimes it feels good to be a dilettante. To try on other forms and genres and see how they fit. To discover that maybe you aren’t as fully formed as you thought you were.

Of course, if I was really committed, I’d start reading more poetry. Any suggestions of where to start with poetry from the past 5-35 years**?

*The exception is that I have written poetry that appears within the text of prose fiction, but it’s different when it’s in that context. And it doesn’t happen often.

**I’ve read the 18th to early 20th Anglo/American poets rather broadly and a few of them deeply (Rilke, Blake, Donne, Dickinson)        

How Sofia Samatar complicates the Bildungsroman in A Stranger in Olondria

[image error]Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria overflows with storytelling, textual and oral. Jevick is always remembering a bit of text or playing audience for another character’s urge to share with him a story. The plot is simple: Jevick leaves his island home, travels to and across Olondria and returns home. And yet because it’s so full of stories and because of how those stories interact with the main narrative arc, it feels like something very different. The narrative shape of A Strange in Olondria haunts and befuddles me. I want to understand it. No. Understand is not the right word: I want to appreciate it more fully.     

A Stranger in Olondria as Bildungsroman

Most of the reviews of the novel, swept up perhaps, in all that it has to say about literacy, reading, identity, travel and storytelling (and it has a lot to say about those things), didn’t invoke the term. Out of the reviews I’ve tracked down so far only Craig L. Gidney brings it up by noting that: “The form the novel takes is the bildungsroman: a novel about the initiation of a youth into the wider world.”

I agree with him (although, of course, Samatar beautifully and harrowingly complicates those words initiation and wider). I don’t know if it’s because I experienced it that way as I read it or if it’s actually important to understanding the novel, but I want to explore the notion further.

The classic Bildungsroman has many elements, and I’m sure there’s a whole line of academic argument over which are crucial and which are not, but for me specifically—and I have in mind two examples that I’m most familiar with here, Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly and Stendahl’s The Red and the Black—a Bildungsroman often features:

A semi-educated young adult main character
Who is not content with his boring, often lower-middle class lot in life
Breaks with his (it’s almost always his) father and/or family
Travels to an exotic location or locations (either urban or rural — but in either case one that is foreign and more dangerous than that of the main character’s upbringing)
Quickly develops an awareness of his naiveté
Meets other young people (and, more often than not, also an older, more experienced woman) who educate him in the ways of the world
Through those friends and acquaintances gets caught up in a wider political, social and/or cultural conflict
Survives and escapes the political, social and/or cultural entanglements and
Returns home a wiser, sobered, more complete individual.

I may be cherry picking these attributes so that they obviously fit A Stranger in Olondria. But they also fit Waverly and The Red and the Black.

Because the point of the Bildungsroman is the education of the main character and because it involves leaving from and returning to the same place, the plot (to be sure like other plot models) is a circle. Like so:

[image error]

That’s laughably simple, right? But two things:

1. While the leaving home and traveling abroad is an element of many types of novels, in the Bildungsroman the home and abroad are more fraught, more to the point, than, say, in the quest structure. Abroad exists to complete the character’s education—not because it needs the main character to accomplish a certain task (like defeat the evil wizard or restore the monarchy or whatever—in fact, the main character in a Bildungsroman typically in the end avoids that plot). This is why a Bildungsroman is often more wandering in its plot—more of a travelogue. So it’s actually not a crisp circle. More a meandering, ovalish one.

2. That simplistic model is what was in my head as I read the novel and how the novel breaks that structure turned out to be one of the keys to how I experienced it.

The gap and the ghost

There’s a lot going on structurally in A Strange of Olondria in regards to textuality and storytelling—Jevick is always quoting texts or being told stories—that I haven’t yet been able to figure out in relation to the overall structure of the novel (see the “more reading” section below for some excellent reviews that talk more about those aspects). But going back to my simplistic plot model above, there are two ways in which Samatar breaks the model in a profound, jarring way which complicates the novel as a Bildungsroman: the gap and the ghost.

The gap occurs during the festival of the. After the death of his father, Jevick travels to Bain, the capital city of Olondria, on a trading trip. Up to this point, all the elements of bildungsroman are there: the book education, the journey to a more cosmopolitan place, the initial overwhelmingness of that place, the struggle to find friends and a place. But then something happens to Jevick during the Feast of Birds that throws the pattern of the bildungsroman off: after falling in with some of the young celebrants of the feast, Jevick takes something (not specified in the text) from a young women in what appears to be a brothel. “Cousin, this is what the gods eat” (69) she tells him. He awakens later, in pain and missing his waistcoat, his purse, and even the pearl button from this shirt collar. The city alight with the fever of a festival now echoes back to him his hangover. A gap has opened up. He has lost time. The city has disenchanted itself.

But what happens after that gap—or perhaps because because of that gap—is even more important. On the sea voyage to Olondria, Jevick meets Jissavet, a young woman with a wasting disease who is traveling with her mother in the hopes of finding a miracle cure. Jissavet has not found the miracle she was hoping for. She is now a ghost. And she steps into the gap that has opened up and haunts Jevick. This fact, once it becomes known to the Olondrians, makes Jevick interesting to them. He becomes a pawn in a fight between religious cults that is spilling over into the political sphere. Much of the subsequent plot movement of the book is similar to a bildungsroman, more people who try to influence him, more travel, more witnessing of scenes that strip away his illusions. But as all of this is happening (and all this is happening because of this) Jissavet continues to haunt Jevick. She does so until, in desperate straits, Jevick agrees to write her story in return for the ghost’s help. He gives his story (and the novel) over to her:

I sat at the desk in my jacket, dipped the pen in the ink, and steeled myself against the coming light. “I’m ready,” I said. (212)

He stops fighting the haunting and the ghost—Jissavet—is able to tell her story through his pen. And so, the circle gets disrupted. There’s no longer this miasdventurish but ultimately tidy, male protagonist-centered movement from home to abroad and back. In addition to those things, there’s a gap and a ghost and, finally, the ghost taking over the narrative. Like so:

[image error]

More reading on A Strange of Olondria

Craig L. Gidney review  (Quoted above.)

Amal El-Mohtar, review for Tor.com (Has a lot to say about literacy and identity.)

Sessily Watt, review for Bookslut (Makes some great points about books and power.)

Abigail Nussbaum, review at Asking the Wrong Questions (Nussbaum does an excellent job of showing how Samatar’s world building is different from a standard fantasy novel; she also explains much better and in more detail than I have above how Jissavet’s role in the novel complicates Jevick’s bibliophilia and privilege. It’s my favorite of the group.)

Gary K. Wolfe, review for Locus (Wolfe has high praise for Samatar’s prose; I agree.)

Nic Clarke, Strange Horizons review  (Among other things situates the novel as epic fantasy.)

Keguro Macharia, “Reading Sofia Samatar: Indwelling” for The New Inquiry (Really interesting: Macharia links the main character’s dead brother to the rest of the novel and in so doing provides a reading that is unique and thought-provoking.)