Derek Nikitas's Blog
October 13, 2015
EXTRA LIFE is out today!
Here’s a little piece I wrote for Booklist on switching genres from crime fiction to the crazy hybrid thing that EXTRA LIFE is: a young adult contemporary science fiction thriller.
Those familiar with my other books might be wondering where this one came from, and whether it’s up your alley. It’s still a thriller–in fact, even more of a fast-paced thriller than anything I’ve done before. I’m writing from the point of view of my protagonist for the first time, a sharp-tongued sixteen-year-old kid, but there’s an ageless obsession with the last few decades of movie culture, too.
I think it works for readers of all ages, kind of like READY PLAYER ONE did a few years back.
At its deepest level, EXTRA LIFE arises out of the same preoccupations I’m probably stuck with for good–what it means to be a self, what identity is, how time and circumstance and situation change who we are. It’s definitely a question young adults ask themselves, but I think it’s pertinent for all of us.
This time around, I’m attacking these questions directly, through the lens of science fiction. I’ve long been fascinated, for example, with the question of the “philosophical zombie.” If there were an exact replica made of you, would it share your consciousness? If not, is it “alive?” And therefore what does “alive” mean?
Or what if we were to actually invent teleportation. If your true self is evaporated and a copy is made, are you still “you” on the other end? Has your consciousness vanished? These are the questions that keep me up at night. In the end, they’re really questions about that unknown country, aren’t they?
So that’s what EXTRA LIFE is–a breakneck thriller and a twisty mind-bending foray into questions of what it means to be who we are. It’s also a love-letter to the movies and the movie-making business. Give it a try. Let me know what you think!
October 6, 2015
dereknikitas.com website launch
Welcome to the brand new website for author Derek Nikitas. The new site coincides with the release of my third novel, EXTRA LIFE (which also happens to be my first novel for young adults).
EXTRA LIFE is a mind-bending science fiction thriller in the vein of Back to the Future, with a little Donnie Darko mixed in. Its official release date is October 13th, though it’s already available in hardcover most places. The e-book version will become available on the 13th.
It’s being released by Polis Books, and here’s a taste of what it’s about:
Russ has never been your typical teen. After being expelled, Russ has started to get his life back on track. He’s a pop culture junkie, and living in a town where the popular teen soap “Cape Twilight” is filmed, how could he not be? So when Russ decides to make his own short film, he recruits the (emotionally unhinged) star of “Cape Twilight” and his own motley crew to help out. Seems like a great idea…until the plan blows up in Russ’s face.
Just when everything seems to be falling apart, Russ receives a message on his cell phone — from himself. Recorded in the future, ‘future Russ’ informs him that the day can be fixed if he’s willing to use an app to leap twelve hours into the past. Russ is happy to oblige, figuring the day can’t get any worse. But he couldn’t be more wrong. Because as soon as Russ tampers with time and space, he introduces dangerous glitches he can’t control, including alternate of himself. And suddenly Russ’s sanity and the lives of everyone he cares about are at risk if he can’t find a way to regain control of his own life— past, present and future.
For more information about this book and my previous novels, please visit the new homepage at dereknikitas.com.
October 5, 2015
Last Post
Please stop by there soon.
Oh, and my new novel, EXTRA LIFE, will be released on October 13th, 2015!
May 18, 2015
What Went Wrong with Last Night's Game of Thrones?
Spoilers, obviously.
There’s been a bit of an internet uproar about last night’s episode of Game of Thrones, “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken,” especially in regards to the last few minutes after Sansa Stark and Ramsay Bolton’s wedding (though there are also problems with the hasty treatment of the Dorne storyline and the inexplicable re-emergence of Jaime’s fighting prowess).
Some viewers lament how the showrunners have deviated from George R. R. Martin’s original novels, but now that the show has outpaced the books in several story lines, deviations are to be expected. It’s a matter of the quality of the deviations, and whether they adhere to the spirit of the books, and, by extension, previous seasons of the television show.
Other viewers lament the sexual brutality of the scene, and this concern is far more important, far more worthy of discussion. Certainly there are serious issues about agency and the treatment of women, of using rape as a plot point.
I’m going to discuss storytelling technique, but I’ll admit that what I have to say is trivial compared to these concerns. Hopefully, though, I’ll get around to saying something useful about the ethics of this episode’s storytelling, which are inextricably linked to the technique.
Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire universe is loaded with brutality and ugly turns of fate. His storytelling tests the limits of how often our hopes about his characters can be dashed before we lose all faith. Certainly, Martin has to keep a careful balance between shocking us with setbacks for heroes and maintaining a sense of hope. If we lose the latter, we’ll get the sense that there is no moral core to this universe, and the structural integrity of his fantasy world would crumble.
If the fictional world is meaningless and arbitrary, we disconnect.
Martin’s high-fantasy world is innovative because the moral rules are not simple dark/light, good/evil. His work is a brilliant exploration of moral paradoxes, of pulling the reader in several directions at once, of defamilarizing our judgment. His shocking plot points may be brutal, but they’re also deliciously ironic and paradoxical on a moral level. We hate what they do, but we love way they say.
His plot points—such as the loss of Jamie’s hand, which I discuss in a previous post—are full of resonating layers of meaning. Even when the death of the Red Viper dashes our hope, we can see that it is a morally meaningful plot point. On the simplest level, we understand that the Red Viper can’t win a decisive victory against the Mountain because Tyrion has already previously won a trial-by-combat in the Eyrie using Bronn as his champion.
He can’t do it again, if for no other reason than because the fatalism in Martin’s world won’t allow for the same moral note to be struck twice in exactly the same way. In a morally arbitrary world like our own real world, the same damn thing can happen over and over. It’s exactly that kind of arbitrariness that we resist in fiction.
So now we come to Ramsay’s rape of Sansa, with Theon in attendance. This moment was never written by Martin. Like many other Game of Thrones moments, it’s brutal, but unlike many other Game of Thrones moments, the brutality is morally meaningless. Unlike, say, the Red Wedding, when we feel a simultaneous dismay and paradoxical knowingness about Robb Starks’s hubris, we feel only dismay for Sansa and her treatment by Ramsay.
I’ve been interested in Sansa’s character arc from the start, as she’s evolved from a bright-eyed and rather snotty dreamer to a victim to a shrewd mistress of her own fate. Or, at least, she’s been headed toward that latter category. It’s been deliciously ironic that her progress as a character has been largely based on the tutelage of Littlefinger, a villain her mother deeply distrusted. Furthermore, it’s been wonderful to see (or at least suspect) that Littlefinger’s perfect political calculations may be endangered by his emotional attachment to a helpless young lady. He would be her deliverance, and she would be his undoing. There’s a wonderful elegance in that.
Sansa begins as a naïve young lady betrothed to a handsome prince. She consents, but has no understanding or agency in her consent. The irony is that the prince is a brutal monster. Once she realizes this fact, it’s too late, and we fear that she will be victimized by him. Indeed, he tries to sexually victimize her, but at least she’s spared a wedding night with him (and, furthermore, she’s allowed to have an unwilling hand in Joffrey’s death, and she’s blamed for it, too).
Her next forced betrothal, this time to Tyrion, is the perfect ironic contrast to the first. Tyrion is a “monster” on the outside, but because he is a (complicatedly) moral creature at heart, she never has to suffer nonconsensual sex with him. Her marriage to Tyrion is also the beginning of her path to political shrewdness. She’s the only Stark left inside the political arena, the only one still playing the “Game of Thrones.”
What, then, is Sansa’s marriage to Ramsay? In terms of moral resonance, the story was headed in the right direction, even as it deviated from Martin’s books. This time, Sansa is willingly undertaking this marriage, or at least she thinks she is, and the fact that she doesn’t realize she’s being manipulated by Littlefinger is a part of her character flaw. She’s only had to deal with outwardly monstrous villains.
This time, Sansa is shrewd and in control, and she’s out for vengeance with her black-dyed hair.
But then it all gets literally washed away. Sansa’s agency is stolen from her, and she is raped. This plot point grossly and clumsily reiterates her betrothal to Joffrey. Ramsey is the same kind of monster, and Sansa is the same kind of victim, and the only difference this time is that Sansa’s being put through the exact sexual torture Joffrey put her through. It is merely intensified, not changed.
Furthermore, in the beginning of the story, Sansa’s virginity was a political playing piece that other characters used. She has no choice in whether Joffrey or Tyrion took her virginity, but the fact that they did not meant something. It meant that she could develop as a character long enough that her virginity became something she had control over. It could be her choice to keep it or use for whatever emotional or political reasons she saw fit.
(I’m not suggesting it’s morally right that a girl’s virginity be a political concern; I’m merely acknowledging that it very much is in Martin’s quasi-medieval world, and in our world).
But her wedding night with Ramsay ruins all that. The redundancy of Ramsey/Joffrey, and the cynical reversal of the deliverance Sansa earned from Joffrey, effectively cancels out all of Sansa’s character progress and retracts any agency she’s earned through the seasons. It’s dismay for the sake of dismay, without any ironic resonance. We can feel nothing about it except pity.
It didn’t have to be that way. What if, for example, Sansa consensually lost her virginity to Littlefinger? The story seemed to be headed in that direction. It would be a wonderfully paradoxical plot point because Sansa would have agency and choice; she’d be deliberately abandoning the “honor” and attendant naiveté of her position as a noblewoman. She’d be spitting in the face of the false pageantry of it all.
At the same time, she’d be unwittingly giving in to the Baelish charms that her mother pointedly resisted much of her life. It would be a beautifully ironic win/lose. It would be awful and it would be subtly brutal, because we know that Sansa wouldn’t really be consenting to anything, (she’s too young, and still too innocent about monsters who seem to be charming) but it would be meaningful as a point of character progress for Sansa.
But Ramsey Bolton? He should’ve been a piece of cake for her. The Ramsey/Sansa plot point might’ve worked if Sansa had maintained her agency and carefully manipulated him without becoming a victim. Or it might have worked if Ramsey himself had surprised us in some believable way (actually trying to be respectful, now that he’s a lord, for example). I have a feeling the showrunners have Sansa’s vengeance in mind for the long game, but they blew the progress of that storyline in one terribly ill-conceived and morally bankrupt moment.
Not to mention, when Sansa’s vengeance does comes, it’ll now be too morally simplistic and inevitable.
Worst of all, they made Theon the focus of the scene, as if this were Theon’s moment to save the damsel. Nothing in the moral landscape of the story would suggest that Theon would be of any use, or any resonant meaning in this moment. The storytelling is guilty of both moral redundancy and moral bankruptcy. All we learn by focusing on Theon is that he’s still in Ramsay’s thrall. We’ve already been made to understand that several times over, and nothing changes as we pointlessly watch him watch.
Yes, it’s true that we haven’t yet seen the fall-out of this specific plot point. Undoubtedly, there will be consequences for Ramsay and Theon, but I’m skeptical that any subsequent turns will justify the backtracking and morally empty brutality of this scene.
September 26, 2013
Flaubert's Micro-Astonishments
My last post on Game of Thrones and all my recent,
unwritten musings on the masterful concluding chapters of Breaking Bad have got me thinking again about Madame Bovary, which is a pretty weird thing to say, I know.
But I’ve been teaching Bovary again and I’m struck by how the
novel continues to compel my vested interested despite its surface
near-plotlessness. Is it just that a
novel like Bovary and a novel like Game of Thrones fire entirely different
synapses in the brain, and no reconciliation between their pleasures can be
found?
I don’t know.
One thing is certain. Flaubert is not a good storyteller.
In Flaubert’s letters from during
the writing of Bovary, he admits his
disinterest in plot—in fact, he deliberately sets out to write a book “about
nothing,” focusing on something other than dynamic plot events. Certainly, Bovary is not plotless. It’s
a familiar adultery-and-repercussions narrative. But Flaubert seems to suggest that explosive plot
events would have a detrimental effect on his aim to explore the recesses of
his characters’ psyches.
If we push the metaphor a bit
further, an explosive plot event is kind of like a gun going off. It’s exciting, it makes your heart leap, but the
fraught anticipation of it is distracting, and it leaves you deaf to any
subtler sounds for several minutes thereafter.
I don’t believe that’s always the
case, but for Flaubert and Bovary, it
may be true.
So, quite intentionally, Flaubert
was not a good storyteller. Not if we mean
those classic Aristotelian virtues of compelling events, action-orientated
characters, surprise reversals and revelations, suspense, momentum. These are the elements we typically note as
"good storytelling," and what we find in abundance with an author like
George R.R. Martin. These are the age-old elements of epic and romance,
the very “cheap thrills” that Flaubert was satirizing in Bovary through Emma’s delusions.
If we look at the history of the
development of “the novel,” it’s clear that all the developments and innovations
since its inception have been movements away
from those elements we tend to cite as “good storytelling.” In a way, good storytelling was already
established before 1700, so every innovation since has been in service of something else.
Mostly, the something else was efforts to make the fictional world seem more
life-like, and in many cases, those efforts were antithetical to "good
storytelling." Just for example, surprise reversals (he’s really a
ghost! it’s his wife’s head in the box!)
are fun storytelling, but they are contrivances, or at least a rarity, because
they don't happen often in reality. It is "less realistic" to
depict them in fiction.
But good storytelling is obviously
only one factor in what can make a narrative interesting. Flaubert was
deliberately uninterested in storytelling, choosing rather to explore
microscopically the foibles of humanity, Emma’s psychological states, the
distance between two or more people's psychological experience of the same
event, details so precise and so evocative that we are shocked by their
appearance, etc.
For example, Emma Bovary has an
affair with a young man named Leon, and falls into what she thinks is “love”
with him. Flaubert writes, "She was
in love with Leon, and she wanted to be
alone as to delight more comfortably in his image. The sight of him in
person disturbed the sensual pleasure of this meditation" (the italics
are mine, and the translation is Lydia Davis’).
This is clearly an example of
interiority, an insight into Emma’s mind.
It’s not a surprise plot point, right?
Well…. there are macro-level plot
surprises. We expect Luke Skywalker to
vanquish Darth Vader and avenge his father but (twist), Vader reveals he is Luke's father and cuts off his hand! We expect Jaime to weasel his way out of a
situation like every time before but (twist),
a very Luke-like change of fortune happens to him, too! These are the explosive gunshots of
narrative.
But I’d suggest there are also these exquisite micro-level surprises,
sudden insights. We understand that Emma
loves Leon in her own way and, as a consequence, would want to spend time with
him, but (twist) she’d rather spend
time alone with her thoughts about him.
I think the macro and micro
twists have fundamentally the same effect.
Both are surprising because they give us
insight into characters’ values. Jaime’s
fate wouldn’t shock us if we didn’t see the multifaceted irony in his loss and
the circumstances surrounding it. Luke’s
fate wouldn’t shock us if we didn’t realize how drastically and ironically it
renegotiates his personal journey. And
this insight into Emma wouldn’t hit us if it didn’t drive an ironic wedge
between the appearance and reality of her character, if it didn’t poke a hole
in what we understand “love” to mean for Emma.
In both cases you’re experiencing
what Aristotle called astonishment,
which I would define as the reader’s reaction to the surprise appearance of
irony.
Another brief example arrives in
Emma’s first dalliance with her other lover, Rodolphe. They have just made love or are still making
love—it’s deliberately unclear—and we’re immersed in Emma’s orgasmic flush of
words and images (Davis translation again):
“…her blood flowing through her
flesh like a river of milk. Then, from
far away beyond the woods, on the other hills, she heard a vague, prolonged
cry, a voice that lingered, and she listened to it in silence as it lost itself
like a kind of music in the last vibrations in her tingling nerves. Rodolphe, a cigar between his teeth, was mending
with his penknife one of the bridles, which had broken.”
The first “plot twist” here is again
about ironic insight. This is the most
alive and present Emma has been in the book so far, and yet she’s divorcing herself
from her own orgasmic scream, attributing it to some animal “far away beyond
the woods.” The second plot twist is the
sudden juxtaposition between Emma’s
lyrical, ecstatic impression of this event and Rodolphe’s complete dismissal of
it.
The jump cut is amazing: she’s
still lost in reveries while he’s back to taking care of a mundane task. The ironic gulf opens up, and we see the
sharp contrast between their characters.
We’re astonished by this surprise appearance of irony (dramatic irony in this case—we’ve been
shown truths about Emma and her relationship with Rodolphe that she does not
yet realize).
Admittedly, big plot points hit
harder than these precise character insights, but in many cases big ironic plot
points hit like blunt instruments, dull and numbing. This is not always the case, as with most big
plot points in Breaking Bad, which
have the virtue of being sharp and explosive.
Or the Game of Thrones plot
point I wrote about in my last post, which is big, but has a dozen exquisite
micro-astonishing ironies swirling around it.
“Micro-astonishments” have the
virtue of affecting the reader in smaller ways—often sharper, more
precise. They also strike more deeply, I think, because we recognize our
own personal foibles of character. They
open up hidden truths in ourselves that we generally do not wish to confront
(let’s face it, most ironic recognitions in fiction are not happy ones).
They sting and they resonate.
The other virtue of
micro-astonishing twists of the type we find in Madame Bovary is that there are hundreds of them, several per page,
not just the ones at major plot junctures.
You get way more astonishments for your time with a book like Bovary, and none of them are cheap.
But, yes, for micro-astonishment
to work, you have to read more slowly, more carefully. If we read too
bluntly for "stuff happening" on a surface or situational level,
we'll skip over all Flaubert's sharp psychological insights, his dozens and
dozens of sinister juxtapositions, his evocative details that feel both frozen in
time and fully alive at once, or, as James Wood puts it in How Fiction Works, “each detail is almost frozen in its gel of
chosenness.”
It's easier to skip over the
small, precise insights precisely because they're subtle, because we've been
conditioned to read in search of the big plot points, propelling ourselves from
one to the next, never paying attention to the fact that we're being offered
one gem after another, if we allow ourselves the focused vision to see them.
But if we slow down with a novel
like Madame Bovary, we get the same
kind of pleasure of astonishment in kind
as we do from the big “page-turners.” The pleasure is only different in degree and number. More subtle, more
exacting, and far more numerous.
April 21, 2013
On the Genius of George R.R. Martin
Some thoughts about plot, via the
storytelling genius of George R.R. Martin.
Spoilers regarding last week’s episode of Game of Thrones, “Walk of Punishment” and obviously A Storm of Swords, so be warned. I will not, however, blow any plot points not
already aired.
Plot, the building block of
narration—not in opposition to character, but in concert with character. If you don’t have your characters acting, no story. Actions and never more important as when they
instigate plot “turns,” moments in a narrative when a character’s fortune is
changed, or when a game-changing piece of knowledge is revealed, or both.
A good turn affects a reader just
as much as a character. It’s the basic building blocks of effective
narration, more than anything else. This
isn’t a new idea (Aristotle), but we sometimes forget. Luckily, George R.R. Martin does not forget.
Some turns are more effective
than others, and the best kind are the ironic
ones. “Ironic” is a jumpy word, I know,
but what I mean here is this: a) a turn that the reader didn’t anticipate but
realizes he should’ve, and b) a turn that complicates
how we thought we’d feel. A is
basically embedded in B, so it’s B that’s the real kicker.
So Jamie Lannister got his hand
cut off last week. I read this scene two
years ago when I first blazed through A
Storm of Swords. Now, encountering it
again on HBO, I’m thinking about why I’m
so awestruck. Here’s why.
1. Suffering. We’re moved by Jamie’s sudden misfortune. Aristotle listed a character’s suffering as
one of the key ways that audiences are moved.
But empathy for suffering is a shallow (in fiction), too easily
elicited, too easily forgotten. Much
deeper is our moral sensibility—our sense
of judgment. In this case, Jamie has been
a pretty crap dude, so we might’ve welcomed his suffering. What’s interesting is that we don’t. Curious.
2. It’s
the worst thing that could happen to his core character. Worse than death, probably. Jamie Lannister is his bravado, his tarnished heroism, which is physically embodied
in his swordsmanship (it is with that hand that he killed the mad king). He’s a master of talk and sword. So the irony here is the great question mark
of what’s to come. We could see Jamie
dying, and we could see him living to fight another day. But Jamie living, never to be able to fight
again? We don’t know what to think.
3. It’s
a failure of his core character. Jamie’s
rhetoric has gotten him out of a lot of scrapes. He’s even, arguably, talked his way out of POW
camp. But this time, despite his best
efforts, his rhetoric could not get him off the hook.
4. Locke
is the instrument of Jamie’s amputation.
He’s no major player. He’s just a
two-bit mercenary whose allegiances are quite questionable. Our sense of justice dictates that Jamie
should be punished by a big deal character that he has grievously wronged. Now, even if Bran Stark could somehow exact
his revenge for the defenestration, it would be anticlimactic. Jamie’s core character is lost. He’s already defeated.
5. Speaking
of two-bit Lock, let’s not forget that Jamie is only in this predicament because
his rhetoric was ignored. Brianne sealed
their fate, failing to kill the traveler who eventually ratted them out. Jamie warned her. But what makes the truth so gut wrenching is
that Jamie was in the moral wrong, and Brianne in the moral right. Yet, logically, she was wrong, and he was the
one to pay the price. One might say,
unfairly.
6. Brienne. The most immediately wrenching irony is that
Jamie has just revealed himself to be
a chivalrous man. He manages to use
rhetoric to prevent Brienne from getting raped.
It’s a double-blow, then, when he is severely punished, mere moments
after saving her. There’s a poetic
injustice to it, too, since one thing that defines Brienne is her “maidenhood”
(she is the Maid of Tarth after all). He
saved what defines her, only to lose what defines him.
7. Jamie’s
rhetoric should’ve worked. It’s the same
rhetoric he used a moment before. In a way,
it’s his tactical error that dooms him.
He “wastes” his pleading on Brienne, sealing his own fate. It’s a mirror of the tactical error she made with the traveler—causing punishment
to oneself by doing the right thing.
8. On
the other hand, Jamie reverses his rhetoric, promising Locke punishment if any
harm should come to him (Jamie). With
Brienne, he promised reward (a bounty from Tarth), and that’s what convinced Locke. Another tactical error.
9. It
looked like Jamie was going to get away with it. Martin (and the show writers) surprises us by
seeming to remove the threat that Jamie is going to be killed on that chopping
block. Locke has the knife up to his
face for quite a while, and then Jamie seems to convince him. Either Jamie will be killed, or he’ll be left
alone, we think. Locke even begins to
walk away, only to turn and chop the hand off in one swoop.
10. There’s
a bigger reason that surprise works. It resonates, it calls back. This is the particular genius of Martin,
the way he “rhymes” action from chapter to chapter, even book to book. The world of Game of Thrones is not just an imaginary universe; it’s a universe
governed by a god (or gods) with an exacting and poetic sense of irony. Just before Ned Stark lost his head in the
first season, to the Lannisters, it
looked like he was going to be spared, but Joffrey’s mercilessness got in the way. Ned’s death was itself deeply resonant,
stretching back to an early scene when Ned shows his son Bran the meaning of
justice, executing a deserter with his own hands—brutal but a clear moral code. Later, Jamie attempts to kill Bran, Ned’s son
(again, in this scene, it appears that Jamie is not going to hurt Bran, and then
he does). Then, in a climactic moment
that mirrors both of those major events, Joffrey, Jamie’s son, kills Ned, corrupting
the same method that made Ned such a morally upstanding leader. In that case, Ned was forced to relinquish
his moral code and call himself a traitor, though it did him no good. Jamie’s amputation brings to bear all those moments, a veritable hall of
mirrors.
11. And
more. Let’s not forget that Caitlyn
Stark, Bran’s mother and Ned’s wife, is the reason Jamie gained his “freedom”
in the first place. When it seemed as if
every moment in captivity he might have been killed, he’s ironically in much
greater danger when he’s on the road, “free.”
It was Caitlyn’s capacity for mercy and diplomacy— exactly what Joffrey lacks—that has put Jamie in this
situation.
12. Another
resonant mirror scene is a key moment in the previous season when Jamie concocts
an escape attempt by coaxing his cousin, then killing said cousin as a means of
getting a jailor to come into the pen (not in the book, I don’t think). That scene plays out very much like the scene
with Locke, except the roles are reversed.
13. There
is ever more resonance, some I’m missing, probably. Note the losses of body parts and what they
say about characters. Ned lost his head
of course, and he was the hand of the
king (another mirror reversal). It was
with his hand that Jamie pushed Bran out the window. Bran lost the use of his legs, but has
arguably gained so much more in the bargain (the dawning of his warg ability). Davos Seaworth lost his fingers to a noble
man (Stannis), and that loss gave Davos—ironically, again—his moral superiority
over Stannis. On and on and on…
A single event that resonates
irony in at least thirteen different
ways, an absolute master-stroke of storytelling. You may think Game of Thrones and other such stories are mere pulp, but I admire
such structural genius in the same way I admire a beautifully arranged
sonnet. It takes absolute precision. I won’t say that every effect on this list
was purposeful (Martin insists he doesn’t plan ahead), but the result is the
point, not the intention. If I could
craft a moment as deeply loaded as this one, I’d consider my writing career a
success.
And, perhaps most astoundingly,
Jamie’s lost hand isn’t even the most reverberating moment you’ll experience in
this story…
UPDATE: after watching this week's episode, I see the writers are asking me to notice two other similar resonant connections:
Tyrion Lannister as the mirror of his brother. Tyrion is no warrior, yet he fought bravely defending King's Landing and nearly lost his head for it. He did not lose any body parts (in the book, he loses his nose), so he is still essentially himself--same wit and conniving. Still, like Jamie, Tyrion wants to exact revenge on those who betrayed him (Brienne makes this connection to Jamie clear in her fireside chat with him, when she tells him he must live to take revenge).
By extention, Varys' story about his castration echoes the Jamie and Tyrion theme already established. The castration may have changed who Varys' thought he was, but it made him into the character he is today.
Finally, in another mirror reversal (and connection to Tyrion/Varys/Jamie, the Unsullied army rises up, all of them castrated in order to make them fierce warriors. If we see Jamie's loss of hand as a kind of castration (and the narrative is clearly asking us to), then the unsullied represent the mirror opposite of Jamie. Yet, like him, they are "prisoners," just as he was, only to be freed by a moral female leader (Danerys/Caitlyn).
Oh, and it turns out that Jamie's ploy to save Brienne from rape was a lie (not sapphires in Tarth). In that sense, he used his immoral propensity to lie to do good by the woman who was holding him captive, another ironic turn.
That makes sixteen separate ironic turns in one event.
April 9, 2011
E-books
January 21, 2011
False Dichotomies: Plot vs. Lyricism (Part Three)
A recent reader post reminded me I never finished this series, and ought to, since I’ve only incompletely explained what I mean. You can look at the first two installments here (Part One) and here (Part Two), but the gist is this:
I’m trying (for kicks) to bridge the gap between readers who say they “read for the story” and readers who say they read for “the language.” On the one hand, I want to suggest that those “story” readers ought to read for more than just characters and events. On the other hand, I want to suggest that those “language” readers don’t really mean what they’re saying: we don’t actually read for the words on the page, per say, no matter how beautiful or lyrical they are (and despite the fact that evocative, lyrical language, if done right, makes the reading experience more fulfilling).
We’re all reading more or less for the same thing: the sensual experience that elicits an emotional response. We read to feel—strongly, subtly, deeply. Some of that comes from plot and character, but that’s what’s on the surface. A lot more of it comes from a mixed bag of tricks that some folk—erroneously, I think, call language. Evocation might be a better word. Voice is good, but limited. Sensuality—maybe, but that sounds a little dirty.
Language is a means to an end that is not, itself, language.
This issue is at the crux of John Gardner’s “vivid and continuous dream.” More recently, Robert Olen Butler argued a hard-line version in his series of lectures, From Where You Dream. Paraphrasing Butler: creative writing is the only artistic medium that posits a middle-man between the art and the audience. A movie does not make you imagine something else. You watch a movie and you imagine the movie—you imagine that it’s “real.” A sculpture is a sculpture, and a painting is a painting. They are about themselves. The Thinker doesn’t make you think about how people think; it makes you think about that particular rendition of a man thinking.
Fiction, however, is not itself. At its most concrete, it’s ink on a page. At one level of abstraction, it’s letters in an alphabet, strung together. Next, its words in a language. Then it’s the sound those words make—but the sound happens in your mind, not on the page. Then it’s syntax, etc. Finally, at the furthest level of abstraction, fiction becomes what it really intends to be: an evocation of sensual experience inside the reader’s mind. But the book—the language—is merely a middleman, the one who provides the tools the reader will use to complete the artwork.
This is Butler’s argument. A fiction isn’t a fiction until it happens in somebody’s imagination. Which is why, Butler argues, fiction should be as sensually evocative as possible—why it should show instead of tell, why the writer should remember what he’s really doing is painting a picture or making a movie, not impressing the reader with his pretty language (except insofar as said language is serving the reader’s sensory/imaginative process).
Butler’s position is not watertight. For one thing, I’m not sure he’s right that creative writing is the only art with a middleman. Music makes us think about itself, but inevitably it puts images in our mind. Admittedly, these images are much more arbitrary than the ones a piece of fiction would evoke. Then there’s sheet music. For those who can read it, sheet music functions like fiction: it evokes sound in the reader’s imagination. When Beethoven wrote his 9th Symphony, he didn’t set down any actual sounds, no more than a writer makes his fiction actually happen in the world. He transcribed musical notes that the right mind, or instruments, could turn into music. My argument here is bolstered by the fact that poor Beethoven never even heard his own 9th Symphony.
Butler’s also not quite right because he rather militantly privileges language that evokes sensory experience over all other kinds of language, when we know that sometimes a great writer can blow our minds with an abstract idea, an intellectual argument, a pithy observation about life. Take the very beginning of Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory, for instance:
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is headed for...”
Years ago, when I first read this, it struck me as one of the most profound, yet blissfully simple arguments I’ve ever heard against the fear of death. Death, for you, will be exactly the same as things were before you were born, and since you aren’t scared of what existence was like before you were born, why be scared of death? Of course it’s not that simple, especially if what you fear is the death of people you love, but Nabokov provides a momentary balm, and that’s about all we can ask for.
The point is: this is a pleasing idea, not a sensory experience. It’s an abstraction from which we’re meant to extrapolate. It doesn’t ask us to imagine anything in particular, except of course the ominous picture of the cradle rocking on the edge of a very high cliff.
And, yes, the way Nabokov says this is a large part of its effect. That’s why great poetry and fiction is un-paraphrasable, why every “modernized” version of a Shakespeare play can’t begin to capture the nuances, particularities and multiple meanings of the original. My explanation of Nabokov pales in comparison to his original, in part because I made explicit what he was only suggesting, and took away the reader’s thrill of analysis, realization and understanding (one of the main reasons we read: to feel smart that we “get” what we’re reading).
My explanation also pales because it was written in utilitarian prose, without any attempt to match sound to sense. Not so with Nabokov. Note, for instance, Nabokov’s: “common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” The sentence itself evokes three distinct stages: “Common sense tells us that our existence,” has an abundance of unstressed syllables and soft s sounds, so it “flows” (as my students love to say). “Two eternities of darkness” does quite the same: lots of s sounds, lots of flow. Parts one and three of the sentences match in their elongated, loose way. However, part two is a brief interruption full of hard sound and a rough, stress-filled cadence: “brief crack of light between.” You see, then, that Nabokov has made us feel the stages of human existence in the structure and sounds of his sentences. The easy/lucky/free openness of pre-birth and death, and the strange brevity of that thing in the middle that we call “life.”
Hey, blame Nabokov, not me!
It might seem that I’m arguing against my own conviction that no sane person reads for language alone, but I’m not. The sound is servant to the sense here, as in almost all cases. Nobody likes “common sense tells us that our existence” because it has lots of s’s and few stresses. We like it because its s’s and unstressed syllables evoke a sonic metaphor of what the sentence means. It’s not the language: it’s what the language is working for.
Why split hairs? Because when you say, "I read for language," you sound like you're privileging sound and rhythm over actual meaning, and you make us wonder why you don't just listen to music instead. Surely music is much more vividly aural than prose. But, in fact, you don't mean you read words for their aural qualities alone. Instead, you mean what everybody else means when they talk about why they love fiction: you read for the emotional experience it provides you.
In that way, you mean precisely the same thing as the guy who says “I read for story.” He doesn’t really mean he reads to see shit happen. He means he reads to see shit happen to people he’s interested in and whose feelings he feels vicariously. Same thing!
But “I read for language” sounds so damn precious, folks. If that “philistine reader” were made to see what we really mean when we say “language,” to realize how much the subtler qualities of voice and rhythm could enhance the emotional experience of reading, well, then, we might eventually broaden some palates a little.
Here: saying that you read for the language is like saying you watch movies for the soundtrack. Certainly soundtracks are essential, as is the right tone, rhythm, and diction in your fiction. Soundtracks compliment or even generate atmosphere, but they exist to serve the story, not the other way around.
I recently told a student who was struggling with the concept of voice to think of voice as the written equivalent of a movie soundtrack. You use rhythm, beat, tone and sound to evoke mood and atmosphere—to compliment the story. He seemed to understand much better.
Even the most language-y writing I can think of employs language in the service of story. Dr. Seuss’s rhythms and sounds evoke the playful, spry, child-like, off-kilter atmosphere of his fictional worlds. Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” is fun to read just to hear yourself read it—but more importantly, its pompous, nonsensical nature is there to satirize the kind of figure Humpty Dumpty represents as he recites and then explicates it: the pretentious English teacher who claims to know what it all means.
Ahem.
I must turn again to the king, Nabokov, for the most pertinent example of language-for-some–other-sake-besides-itself that I’ve ever read. The first paragraph of Lolita: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”
This passage is all about language, riffing off of Lolita’s name with loads of assonance and consonance. So much that even the regular reader (as opposed to the lit student) would see that there sure are a heck of a lot of l’s and i’s in here. And look at how Humbert Humbert, the speaker of this passage, uses the matching sounds to make a diametric opposite seem all of a piece: “lift of my life, fire of my loins.” The first half is spiritual and the second half is bawdy, but language makes it all sound like one big love-fest. Then, he inverts the spirit and the bawdy in the next sentence, carrying over the “s” sound from “loins.” Snake-like hissing (and that’s an important aspect of H.H.!).
Then, famously, H.H. pulls apart the word Lolita and describes, in sensuous, rhythmic detail, exactly how his tongue moves inside his mouth when he says it. And that, too, is a little naughty, frankly. You can’t fetishize language any more than H.H. is doing it here. This guy’s all about the language.
But that’s the point. Nabokov makes H.H. pull apart Lolita’s name like this because it’s weird to do so. On one level we go along for the ride: try not to test how your tongue moves when you say Lo-lee-ta. We’re drawn into this guy’s obsessions. But they are obsessions, ugly ones, falsely spiritual, honestly sinful. Soon we will learn Lolita is twelve and fascinating old H.H. is not at all a good man. Are we surprised? No: because that first paragraph is a case study of pathology all by itself.
So here again, the pleasures of sound are there to be had, but Nabokov is playing with us, setting us up for a stark realization regarding this speaker, whose words and worldview we’re hanging onto with vested interest. For all its qualities, the most important aspect of this paragraph is that it sets up H.H.’s sick but fascinating character, and our relationship to him. The language serves the story and our sense of it.
It’s no wonder that in just a few more lines H.H. will announce to his confessors in an ironically plain-spoken sentence: “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” Cheeky Humbert!
November 10, 2010
French Pyres
In two weeks, Brasiers hits France. That's Brasiers with one s, folks, not two and an extra e. We'll see how it goes over with the my ancient kinfolk, the land of Truffaut and Flaubert, the people who named noir...
May 15, 2010
How to Destroy Angels
Trent and I are both older now, but his deeply nihilistic worldview has always been a current conductor for the darker aspects of my creativity. You might say I learned how to do noir from Trent Reznor.
My last novel, The Long Division, in particular, references NIN lyrics on various occasions, though not for more than a word or two, owing to the fact that I can't afford copyright clearance. While I was writing Division, the NIN song "Right Where it Belongs," off the album With Teeth became the unofficial "theme song" for my character Wynn Johnston, an disturbed young man whose sense of reality is gradually cracking.
"Right Where it Belongs" is a haunting song with "Alice Through the Looking Glass" metaphysical themes regarding the "reality" of our earthy existence. It's Lewis Carroll, it's Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" or The Matrix in song form--except that the other side of Trent's looking glass isn't Wonderland or "the ideal truth," or even Neo and Orpheus and Trinity battling giant octopus robots.
It's absolute oblivion, total un-being. For me, the song derives its power from its truth value. It doesn't need to concoct a fantasy realm to scare us. It just tells us exactly what's coming, what's already there. Cheerful, huh? No--but there's a kind of melancholy satisfaction, an inner peace, that comes from pondering the unhappy truth--and this song captures it better than few I know.
As of last year, Nine Inch Nails has gone on a rather long hiatus, which is actually nothing new for Reznor, who's been known to let almost a decade pass between albums. But, actually, Reznor's output has been pretty steady in the last few years: Year Zero, Ghosts, The Slip. And even now he doesn't seem to be resting on his laurels.
Recently Rznor got married to a musician named Mariqueen Maandig, formerly of the band West India Girl. Yes, one tends to want one's mope rock heroes to avoid normal, happy things like getting married, a la Morrissey's famous musical vow: "I will live my life as I will undoubtedly die: alone." But you can't begrudge a guy a little happiness every now and then.
Especially when his marriage results in a new band and a new way to channel his creative energies. That band is How to Destroy Angels. Mariqueen sings, at least on the tracks I've heard so far. I'm a little ambivalent.
Mariqueen is a breathy, quiet singer like Charlotte Gainsbourg or that lady from Portishead. She doesn't belt it out with raw emotional energy like her husband, one of the most viscerally exciting singers of my generation, but this is more subdued music, slightly more conventional than what Trent's been doing. But it grows on me quickly.
And one certainly can't begrudge their first video. In instantly captures that noir sensibility that I've always found so captivating about Reznor. Mariqueen and Trent, both of them victims of some violent murder. It's a bit disconcerting to see the soul hero of your adolescence immolating in a pool of his own blood, but, hell, we're talking about the guy who recorded his classic album The Downward Spiral in the Tate-Polanski house. He's like that.
