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truepennySo (I start a lot of entries that way--![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
elisem, is this your fault?), working on "Spider's Rose," I've reached the scene where the two strands of my plot meet each other. It's a scene of negotiation: two people sitting across a table from each other in a dark room.
And I realized this morning that I know where that scene comes from. It's the opening scene of Bone Dance.
Now, in almost all other possible respects, this scene is not like Bone Dance. Setting, character, what's being negotiated and why, the interplay of power between the characters, even the reasons for the darkness of the room and what it says about whose negotiating power--not a bit alike. But all the same, as I contemplate writing this scene, I've got Sparrow and A. A. Albrecht in the back of my head, skirmishing politely over Singin' in the Rain.
And, you know, I doubt that anyone but me would ever know that--except now that I've told y'all, you know it, too--but it makes me happy in an odd way. Because ... well, because I think literary tradition is important, and I think having a literary tradition is important.
[An imaginary interlocutor looks at me blankly: What do you mean 'having a literary tradition is important'? You HAVE a literary tradition. What do you think the canon is, for the love of Pete?]
But this is where, even more so than most times, I'm not talking about the canon. The canon is a literary tradition; it's a literary tradition of white empowered men who have certain opinions about what literature does and what it's for. The fact that the canon has been forcibly widened over the past few decades to include people who are not white, not male, and/or not empowered means that the canon qua canon is actually ceasing to exist, slowly and in patches (like the Peter Carey story where bits of the landscape start vanishing), and in its place is arising a kind of compendium of literary history. Now, that's an enormously unwieldy thing, and it is always going to have a predilection for sliding back into the Members Only worldview of the capital-C Canon (the one that I hold responsible for the fact that I had to study James Fenimore Cooper as a high school junior). But it's a different enterprise, and when your "canon" is that large, it becomes slightly nonsensical to talk about your "literary tradition."
The program under whose auspices I got my M.A. in English is a generalist program; the Master's Exam covered material from Beowulf to Toni Morrison. (I believe it forges even more boldly into the brave new world of the twentieth century these days, but let's stick to what I know, which is what it was doing mumble-cough years ago when I got my M.A.) The women and minorities were sad and lonely outposts amongst the dead white men: Jane Austen, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, H.D., Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison (doing double Token duty--triple, actually, since she and Beckett were the only authors representing for the second half of the twentieth century). And I think, honestly, that part of the reason there were so few of them--aside from sexism and oppression and the whole history of Western culture, I mean--is because they don't fit. The Canon, leaping from peak to peak--Beowulf to Chaucer to Shakespeare to Fielding to Dickens to Faulkner, to pick one path, although there are certainly others--is a literary tradition, and by definition that means that there are works it will find non-traditional. And, by and large, those works are going to be written by people for whom the tradition doesn't work, in one way or another. (These people can perfectly well be white men, of course. Laurence Sterne is in the Canon, but that's because of sheer perverse brilliance. It's not like anyone knows what to do with him.)
Where was I?
Oh yes. For a variety of reasons, then, the Canon is not my literary tradition. Because I'm a woman, yes, but also because I'm a fantasist, and fantasy is frowned on by the Canon and regarded with suspicion even by the people currently involved in hacking the Canon to bits. (And even that's not quite true. Beowulf is fantasy, after all. So is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (also on my M.A. list) More's Utopia, The Tempest, The Faerie Queene, Gulliver's Travels, Edgar Allan Poe--it's not until we hit the twentieth century (when, probably not coincidentally, non-realistic fiction establishes itself as a separate and popular genre) that fantasy becomes unclean and is given little bells (or luridly colored covers) to ring to warn people of its approach.) It's a little hard to feel invested in a canon that isn't interested in what you write.
Now, I would resist, tooth and nail, forming a Canon of speculative fiction along the lines of the Canon of Western Literature. Not that it isn't already happening, mind you, and not that, if you asked, I wouldn't admit that there are some sf/f/h books I think people ought to be reading. Because this is the problem. Canon-formation springs from the laudable and necessary desire to have common ground. It's hard to talk about books if everyone involved in the discussion hasn't read a certain quorum of the same books. It's hard to talk about why X's The Y of Z is a brilliant send-up of the conventions of fantasy if you don't have a foundation to build on. And that foundation, perforce, is the books you've read and that other people have read, so that when you talk about the temptation of evil in The Lord of the Rings, everyone nods and says, Right, we follow, instead of poking their neighbor and whispering, The what of which? It's just that the canon becomes a totalitarian tool of oppression so damn quickly, and then we're right back in the mud looking up at the bright and shining literary gods as they stride by.
No thanks. Not my scene.
But the fact that canon-formation happens, the fact that at any given time, you can throw a rock and hit five different people pontificating about what science fiction is or what fantasy isn't (and the value-judgments come tagging along behind, yes they do), means that being aware of your own literary tradition is a way of keeping yourself grounded, of knowing who you are and what you write, and knowing that--in a strange atemporal (which isn't the word I want, but be damned if I can think of the one I do) way--you aren't alone. (It's even more exciting when your tradition is a very young one, as the traditions of science fiction and fantasy are, and you can actually meet the people who influenced you and embarrass yourself dreadfully by regressing to your fourteen-year-old fangirl self, not that I would have done this myself, of course. ::carefully does not look atellen_kushner::)
What I'm saying, ultimately, is that literary tradition can be a kind of solidarity. And that it expresses itself in strange ways. The word here is "intertext," which is what you call it when one book is talking to another book. Sometimes the intertexts are obvious; sometimes they're subtle. Sometimes, as with my little revelation that started this post, they're not even visible to the naked eye.
But I know it's there. And to me, it matters.
elisem, is this your fault?), working on "Spider's Rose," I've reached the scene where the two strands of my plot meet each other. It's a scene of negotiation: two people sitting across a table from each other in a dark room.And I realized this morning that I know where that scene comes from. It's the opening scene of Bone Dance.
Now, in almost all other possible respects, this scene is not like Bone Dance. Setting, character, what's being negotiated and why, the interplay of power between the characters, even the reasons for the darkness of the room and what it says about whose negotiating power--not a bit alike. But all the same, as I contemplate writing this scene, I've got Sparrow and A. A. Albrecht in the back of my head, skirmishing politely over Singin' in the Rain.
And, you know, I doubt that anyone but me would ever know that--except now that I've told y'all, you know it, too--but it makes me happy in an odd way. Because ... well, because I think literary tradition is important, and I think having a literary tradition is important.
[An imaginary interlocutor looks at me blankly: What do you mean 'having a literary tradition is important'? You HAVE a literary tradition. What do you think the canon is, for the love of Pete?]
But this is where, even more so than most times, I'm not talking about the canon. The canon is a literary tradition; it's a literary tradition of white empowered men who have certain opinions about what literature does and what it's for. The fact that the canon has been forcibly widened over the past few decades to include people who are not white, not male, and/or not empowered means that the canon qua canon is actually ceasing to exist, slowly and in patches (like the Peter Carey story where bits of the landscape start vanishing), and in its place is arising a kind of compendium of literary history. Now, that's an enormously unwieldy thing, and it is always going to have a predilection for sliding back into the Members Only worldview of the capital-C Canon (the one that I hold responsible for the fact that I had to study James Fenimore Cooper as a high school junior). But it's a different enterprise, and when your "canon" is that large, it becomes slightly nonsensical to talk about your "literary tradition."
The program under whose auspices I got my M.A. in English is a generalist program; the Master's Exam covered material from Beowulf to Toni Morrison. (I believe it forges even more boldly into the brave new world of the twentieth century these days, but let's stick to what I know, which is what it was doing mumble-cough years ago when I got my M.A.) The women and minorities were sad and lonely outposts amongst the dead white men: Jane Austen, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, H.D., Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison (doing double Token duty--triple, actually, since she and Beckett were the only authors representing for the second half of the twentieth century). And I think, honestly, that part of the reason there were so few of them--aside from sexism and oppression and the whole history of Western culture, I mean--is because they don't fit. The Canon, leaping from peak to peak--Beowulf to Chaucer to Shakespeare to Fielding to Dickens to Faulkner, to pick one path, although there are certainly others--is a literary tradition, and by definition that means that there are works it will find non-traditional. And, by and large, those works are going to be written by people for whom the tradition doesn't work, in one way or another. (These people can perfectly well be white men, of course. Laurence Sterne is in the Canon, but that's because of sheer perverse brilliance. It's not like anyone knows what to do with him.)
Where was I?
Oh yes. For a variety of reasons, then, the Canon is not my literary tradition. Because I'm a woman, yes, but also because I'm a fantasist, and fantasy is frowned on by the Canon and regarded with suspicion even by the people currently involved in hacking the Canon to bits. (And even that's not quite true. Beowulf is fantasy, after all. So is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (also on my M.A. list) More's Utopia, The Tempest, The Faerie Queene, Gulliver's Travels, Edgar Allan Poe--it's not until we hit the twentieth century (when, probably not coincidentally, non-realistic fiction establishes itself as a separate and popular genre) that fantasy becomes unclean and is given little bells (or luridly colored covers) to ring to warn people of its approach.) It's a little hard to feel invested in a canon that isn't interested in what you write.
Now, I would resist, tooth and nail, forming a Canon of speculative fiction along the lines of the Canon of Western Literature. Not that it isn't already happening, mind you, and not that, if you asked, I wouldn't admit that there are some sf/f/h books I think people ought to be reading. Because this is the problem. Canon-formation springs from the laudable and necessary desire to have common ground. It's hard to talk about books if everyone involved in the discussion hasn't read a certain quorum of the same books. It's hard to talk about why X's The Y of Z is a brilliant send-up of the conventions of fantasy if you don't have a foundation to build on. And that foundation, perforce, is the books you've read and that other people have read, so that when you talk about the temptation of evil in The Lord of the Rings, everyone nods and says, Right, we follow, instead of poking their neighbor and whispering, The what of which? It's just that the canon becomes a totalitarian tool of oppression so damn quickly, and then we're right back in the mud looking up at the bright and shining literary gods as they stride by.
No thanks. Not my scene.
But the fact that canon-formation happens, the fact that at any given time, you can throw a rock and hit five different people pontificating about what science fiction is or what fantasy isn't (and the value-judgments come tagging along behind, yes they do), means that being aware of your own literary tradition is a way of keeping yourself grounded, of knowing who you are and what you write, and knowing that--in a strange atemporal (which isn't the word I want, but be damned if I can think of the one I do) way--you aren't alone. (It's even more exciting when your tradition is a very young one, as the traditions of science fiction and fantasy are, and you can actually meet the people who influenced you and embarrass yourself dreadfully by regressing to your fourteen-year-old fangirl self, not that I would have done this myself, of course. ::carefully does not look at
ellen_kushner::)What I'm saying, ultimately, is that literary tradition can be a kind of solidarity. And that it expresses itself in strange ways. The word here is "intertext," which is what you call it when one book is talking to another book. Sometimes the intertexts are obvious; sometimes they're subtle. Sometimes, as with my little revelation that started this post, they're not even visible to the naked eye.
But I know it's there. And to me, it matters.
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no subject
Date: 2006-01-05 05:33 pm (UTC)While I'm sure a lot of holes have been poked in Ellen Moers' Literary Women since it appeared in 1970-something, I thought it did make extremely interesting points about women being in dialogue with works by other women (either contemporary or predecessors) - e.g. Emily Dickinson riffing off E Barrett Browning, and everybody making obeisance to George Sand - and the invisible intertextual tradition involved.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-05 05:46 pm (UTC)And yeah, what you said--that underpinning is vital and wonderful and how can you write without it?
Standing on the shoulders of giants, indeed.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-05 06:22 pm (UTC)Comp lit situates everything in all sorts of different ways. Z lived in a particular cultural/historical context. Z listened to these musicians and looked at the work of these artists and had coffee with a bunch of writers that she violently disagreed with. Z got force-fed certain stuff in school. Z had an epiphany at the age of 37 that changed her writing forever.
So the idea that one Canon -- worse, an exclusively ink-on-paper Canon -- can cover everything of interest about the predecessors to Z's writing is, quite frankly, ludicrous. A comp lit seminar would laugh that out of the room. Of course everybody has a unique set of influences from varying traditions. How could it possibly be otherwise? And why would we expect (or even want) the list to be stable?
And that solidarity is not the only effect we should expect when we study these things. There is also reaction-against, subversion, alienation, adoption in whole or in part...
To borrow a line from
Eh, well. I am not expressing myself well here. Reason #8923 that I am not a literary critic or a writer.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-05 06:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-05 06:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-05 07:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-05 09:23 pm (UTC)(sorry)
no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 12:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-05 07:11 pm (UTC)My Speech Arts and Drama teacher (who is also responsible for most of my education in literature) says I'm a human library of intertext, so I appreciate this. :)
*memories*