narrative expectations
Jan. 19th, 2003 02:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyI'm trying to edit Ch. 4, but I keep spacing out. I've tried the shower-to-wake-up and I've tried the nap, and neither one has quite worked. So I'm going to try posting and see if that can get the gears turning.
This is going to be about books again, and there are going to be spoilers for Meredith Ann Pierce's Darkangel Trilogy, A Civil Campaign and A College of Magics (and Louise Cooper's Indigo books), so, if you choose to click here, you know what you're getting into.
My Bujold and Sayers post has become a conversation about gender and genre and narrative expectations, and the comments on this post of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
melymbrosia's have brought up the abysmal disappointment that is Meredith Ann Pierce's The Pearl of the Soul of the World, and I've been thinking about why that book, which does defy the narrative expectations coded into it by genre, can be so disappointing when I've been bitching about A Civil Campaign for conforming to genre conventions.
Possibly the answer is that I'm a persnickety bitch and can't be satisfied, but I don't think so. At least, I hope there's something more going on than that.
So I want to look at three books that have come up in recent conversations about endings: Caroline Stevermer's A College of Magics, Meredith Ann Pierce's The Pearl of the Soul of the World, and Lois McMaster Bujold's A Civil Campaign, and try to talk about why Stevermer's book succeeds for me, and Pierce and Bujold don't. I'll also be looking at Louise Cooper's Indigo books (and for the life of me I cannot remember the title of the last one; the first one is Indigo, and the rest are all one-word titles, some of which are obviously relevant to the plot and some of which are not; if someone out there can remember, could you post the title, please?).
Before I begin, I should acknowledge the justice of Melymbrosia's point about ACoM, namely that the end seems to be punishing sexual desire. As I said in a comment on her blog, that's not how I read it, and although I think she has a point about the antagonist, what I see happening between Feris and Tyrian is something quite different. (This is, of course, my reading, which is not the same thing as saying it is the only reading.) If Feris's love for Tyrian could be destroyed by the fact that he is now stuck in an old, physically unattractive body, then their relationship is based on nothing more than lust and is not a relationship that would warrant the tremendous sacrifices both Tyrian and Feris have made. He is still in there, even if the outer form is less than pleasant, and for me that means she's still coming out ahead. (There's a whole parallel thingy here with responding to a lover who has been crippled or disfigured, but I'm not going to go into it in this post.)
So ACoM denies narrative expectations produced by its genre, but it doesn't simply smash the conventions against the floor and stand tragically amidst the wreckage (as TPotSotW rather does). It asks the question, if these conventions won't work for us, can we still go on? Can we put together a story, a relationship, that works without the framework of genre to hold it up? That, to my mind, is where A Civil Campaign goes wrong: it depends on genre conventions to support a relationship that otherwise would not work--or would have to work in a radically different way.
The trouble with Louise Cooper is that she pulls a bait-and-switch. I don't mind Fenran not being the noble, chivalrous Hero-with-a-capital-H that Indigo thinks he is, but I strenuously object to him being subjected to character-blackening retconning in the last book that explicitly contradicts what we see in the first book. It's the negative image of Bujold's solution; where Bujold uses genre conventions to hand-wave past the huge spiky porcupine of Miles and Ekaterin's relationship, Cooper more or less says, Genre convention says she gets the guy and lives happily ever after, but I'm writing a feminist anti-patriarchal story, and therefore her Hero must really be her Villain, and her relationship with him is nothing but weakness and stupidity. She doesn't want to think about what that relationship might really look like, between a woman who is a hero, and a man who was not strong enough to save her, and in fact has to be rescued himself.
(Damn. Now I want to write that story. Maybe someday I will. Ooh, yes, it fits in with the thing I was saying onpapersky's journal about writing a fantasy where nothing in particular happens. It might end up looking weirdly like Busman's Honeymoon in an off-kilter and completely different way. Ahem. Sorry. Tangent.)
So, I think where I was heading with all this was that letting genre conventions do the work for you is not the answer. But turning the conventions into kindling doesn't satisfy, either, as Pierce and Cooper show in their different ways. And that, I think, is why ACoM works for me. It says, No, we can't have the conventional smooch-against-the-sunset ending, because the characters' problems are bigger and messier than the genre conventions can handle. But that doesn't mean we can't go on, can't struggle to find ways to recuperate from the destruction. I think watching characters picking up the pieces is one of the strongest and most beautiful ways a book can end.
This is going to be about books again, and there are going to be spoilers for Meredith Ann Pierce's Darkangel Trilogy, A Civil Campaign and A College of Magics (and Louise Cooper's Indigo books), so, if you choose to click here, you know what you're getting into.
My Bujold and Sayers post has become a conversation about gender and genre and narrative expectations, and the comments on this post of
melymbrosia's have brought up the abysmal disappointment that is Meredith Ann Pierce's The Pearl of the Soul of the World, and I've been thinking about why that book, which does defy the narrative expectations coded into it by genre, can be so disappointing when I've been bitching about A Civil Campaign for conforming to genre conventions.Possibly the answer is that I'm a persnickety bitch and can't be satisfied, but I don't think so. At least, I hope there's something more going on than that.
So I want to look at three books that have come up in recent conversations about endings: Caroline Stevermer's A College of Magics, Meredith Ann Pierce's The Pearl of the Soul of the World, and Lois McMaster Bujold's A Civil Campaign, and try to talk about why Stevermer's book succeeds for me, and Pierce and Bujold don't. I'll also be looking at Louise Cooper's Indigo books (and for the life of me I cannot remember the title of the last one; the first one is Indigo, and the rest are all one-word titles, some of which are obviously relevant to the plot and some of which are not; if someone out there can remember, could you post the title, please?).
Before I begin, I should acknowledge the justice of Melymbrosia's point about ACoM, namely that the end seems to be punishing sexual desire. As I said in a comment on her blog, that's not how I read it, and although I think she has a point about the antagonist, what I see happening between Feris and Tyrian is something quite different. (This is, of course, my reading, which is not the same thing as saying it is the only reading.) If Feris's love for Tyrian could be destroyed by the fact that he is now stuck in an old, physically unattractive body, then their relationship is based on nothing more than lust and is not a relationship that would warrant the tremendous sacrifices both Tyrian and Feris have made. He is still in there, even if the outer form is less than pleasant, and for me that means she's still coming out ahead. (There's a whole parallel thingy here with responding to a lover who has been crippled or disfigured, but I'm not going to go into it in this post.)
So ACoM denies narrative expectations produced by its genre, but it doesn't simply smash the conventions against the floor and stand tragically amidst the wreckage (as TPotSotW rather does). It asks the question, if these conventions won't work for us, can we still go on? Can we put together a story, a relationship, that works without the framework of genre to hold it up? That, to my mind, is where A Civil Campaign goes wrong: it depends on genre conventions to support a relationship that otherwise would not work--or would have to work in a radically different way.
The trouble with Louise Cooper is that she pulls a bait-and-switch. I don't mind Fenran not being the noble, chivalrous Hero-with-a-capital-H that Indigo thinks he is, but I strenuously object to him being subjected to character-blackening retconning in the last book that explicitly contradicts what we see in the first book. It's the negative image of Bujold's solution; where Bujold uses genre conventions to hand-wave past the huge spiky porcupine of Miles and Ekaterin's relationship, Cooper more or less says, Genre convention says she gets the guy and lives happily ever after, but I'm writing a feminist anti-patriarchal story, and therefore her Hero must really be her Villain, and her relationship with him is nothing but weakness and stupidity. She doesn't want to think about what that relationship might really look like, between a woman who is a hero, and a man who was not strong enough to save her, and in fact has to be rescued himself.
(Damn. Now I want to write that story. Maybe someday I will. Ooh, yes, it fits in with the thing I was saying on
papersky's journal about writing a fantasy where nothing in particular happens. It might end up looking weirdly like Busman's Honeymoon in an off-kilter and completely different way. Ahem. Sorry. Tangent.)So, I think where I was heading with all this was that letting genre conventions do the work for you is not the answer. But turning the conventions into kindling doesn't satisfy, either, as Pierce and Cooper show in their different ways. And that, I think, is why ACoM works for me. It says, No, we can't have the conventional smooch-against-the-sunset ending, because the characters' problems are bigger and messier than the genre conventions can handle. But that doesn't mean we can't go on, can't struggle to find ways to recuperate from the destruction. I think watching characters picking up the pieces is one of the strongest and most beautiful ways a book can end.
