oh, look, more nit-picking

[truepenny]

papersky is pandering to my megalomania with an extremely lovely post.

In case anybody was wondering, 764 ms pages translates to approximately nine pounds of paper.

I notice that I haven't posted anything with actual coherency since Wednesday. Should rectify this and write about books or something, but am afraid all that would happen is I would nit-pick Those Who Hunt the Night to death. I'm on that n+1 reading where suddenly all the flaws come swarming up at me (kind of like those monster cockroaches in "Grave"), and it's just going to get ugly.


In particular, it's striking me especially this time what very heavily loaded language she uses to describe Ysidro; everything is about his eyes and the beauty of his face and hands and hair. Now, if this were Traveling with the Dead, I wouldn't be worried about it, because (a.) that book's all about romance cliches and (b.) the PoV from which we see Ysidro is that of a heterosexual female. TwtD takes that romantic language and disassembles it, piece by piece. (It also does a much better job of capturing what a Catholic Spanish aristocrat who was made a vampire in 1555 would really be like to talk to and work with.) But TWHtN is NOT about the romance cliche bit; moreover, our viewpoint character is a heterosexual man who as far as I can tell genuinely isn't feeling any homoerotic passion for Ysidro at all. Part of TWHtN is whether or not Asher can/should/will feel friendship for Ysidro, but it's just friendship. Except that the language of the narrative is loaded with eroticism, and that eroticism is not undercut. It's even heightened; for example, here's the moment near the end when Asher finds Ysidro in that prison/coffin:

The lid was heavy and fitted close. It was an effort to raise it with one hand. As Asher lifted it clear, Ysidro turned and flinched, trying to shield his face with his shirt-sleeved arms, his long, ghostly hair tangling over the coffin's dark lining beneath his head. "No ..."

...

"Close it." The long fingers that covered the vampire's eyes were shaking; beneath them Asher could see the white-lashed eyes shut in pain. The light voice was sunk to a whisper, shivering, like his hands, under the strain of exhaustion and despair. "Please, close it. There is nothing we can do."

Knowing he was right, Asher obeyed.
(Hambly 203)

I don't think you have to be particularly sensitive to subtext to feel the charge here. And it's weird. Not so much for the Romantic Vampire shtick--that's all over the place these days, and it's quite feasible to read TwtD as a reaction to some of the questions TWHtN fails to ask--but for this tremendous erotic charge that seems to exist, not between the two characters, but solely in the narrative language. Asher is married and passionately in love with his wife; when this scenario is reversed in TwtD, when Asher is imprisoned and Ysidro and Lydia are searching for him, Hambly is very explicit about the way in which the vampire glamour both creates and horribly mutilates romantic love: Lydia loves Asher as passionately as he loves her, but she is also drawn to Ysidro, partly because, as Ysidro tells Asher at the end of the book, that's how vampires hunt, partly because Ysidro has got charisma and magnetism coming out his ears, and partly because Ysidro himself is falling in love with Lydia. And when we hack our way out of that appalling sentence to my point, it is that if she intended there to be romantic tension between Asher and Ysidro, she would have stuck it in openly enough to be recognized. Of course, since Hambly's major characters are always heterosexual (unless that isn't true in Sisters of the Raven which I frankly just couldn't be bothered to read, after the third unimpressed review I read), there's probably not any homoerotic tension intended whatsoever. It's just sitting there in the language, like a toad. And it's weird, because I genuinely can't figure out what it's doing there or what its purpose is supposed to be.

---
WORKS CITED
Hambly, Barbara. Those Who Hunt the Night. New York: Del Rey-Ballantine, 1988.

Comments

[leadensky.livejournal.com]

Very interesting. I like/agree with your thoughts on Traveling (which is one of my favs of Hamblys) and it's actually been quite a while since I've read Hunt in it's entirety.

The use of language that you describe got me thinking about BH's various characters, and about how to use 'beautiful language' one must (should?) have a character who thinks beatiful thoughts - sexy, erotic language requires a character who thinks/feels things in a sexual tone, and so forth. Many of her characters seem to share a strong aesthetic sense, despite a thin cover of rationality/practicality. (IMO. Your thoughts?)

Have some thoughts on this re: books in series and 'setting up the universe' but they refuse to gel at the moment. Perhaps later.

- hossgal

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Traveling with the Dead (as I said somewhere else) is both my favorite of her books and my vote for her best book. I love everything about it and I think it's brilliant.

To move on to the language thing ... I think Hambly always writes with extreme attention to aesthetics. It's one of things I like about her, because it also means she pays attention to detail. (This is something I particularly adore in Dog Wizard.) Since she never writes in first-person, I'm not sure how much of that can be ascribed to the characters themselves, and how much of it is a characteristic of her powerful and uniform narrative voice. Her characters are all very different--there's no danger of confusing Sun Wolf with Antryg or Jenny with Gil--but the narrative voice itself is extremely consistent from book to book and universe to universe. So I don't know.

If you can figure out how to articulate that other strand of thought, I'd be interested to see it.

[lcohen]

Of course, since Hambly's major characters are always heterosexual....

it is nagging at the edge of my memory that there is a major character in The Ladies of Mandrigyn who is not heterosexual because i think that that is what first caused me to notice Hambly above and away from the many SF/F authors i was sampling at that time (i was still fairly newly out and desperate to find books that were both well written and had glb characters--not that easy to find circa 1984).

i feel that i did see a positive review of Sisters of the Raven...maybe in Locus?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Two of the secondary characters in The Ladies of Mandrigyn, Amber Eyes and her gladiator girlfriend, are lesbians. And there are gay and lesbian characters around the edges in other books (I'm especially fond of Charles Sandringham in Bride of the Rat God, and god I love Augustus Mayerling in the Benjamin January books). But the MAJOR characters--her viewpoint characters--are always straight, partly because her books always have a romance plot front and center and she seems to stick with het romance. Which isn't a complaint or a value judgment, just a fact.

I didn't mean my comment in the original post about heterosexual leads as a slam (although reading it again, it kind of looks like one), just as a piece of evidence: it's safe to assume Asher isn't lusting after Ysidro because Hambly's major characters are heterosexuals secure in their sexual identity. In fact, I agree with you; Hambly is very good at conveying that the world is not made up solely of straight people.

Those Who Hunt the Night

[netninny.livejournal.com]

My response to TWHtN and TwtD appears to be the opposite of yours: the first is one of my favourite books, while the second disappointed me.

if she intended there to be romantic tension between Asher and Ysidro, she would have stuck it in openly enoug h to be recognized. Of course, since Hambly's major characters are always heterosexual [snip] there's probably not any homoerotic tension intended whatsoever. It's just sitting there in the language, like a toad.

First off, I should probably say that I'm a big fan of eroticism that resides in the language and landscape of a story. But I don't think it's unwarranted in TWHtN: I think the relationship between Asher and Ysidro is *situationally* erotic, whatever the actual feelings of the two characters.

The best way I can think of to describe that situational eroticism is with a quote from Kenneth Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives: "mystery arises at the point where different kinds of beings are in communication." Because Asher's life depen ds on his being able to understand this very different (and highly inscrutable) kind of being, his already exceptional observational skills *have* to be focussed on Ysidro's eyes, face, voice, and body language--to the point that one would usually associa te with romantic obsession. In addition to this, Ysidro is a walking, talking embodiment of the past for which Asher has such a passion. There is also a pronounced class distinction between the two, bringing to mind the master-minion model of homoerotic r elationship: the haughty Ysidro adopts a protective "You are in my service" stance towards Asher, which Asher eventually accepts and reciprocates, doing his best to protect Ysidro in turn. All this is on top of the sexual connotations of the standard vamp ire predator/prey relationship to humans (which Ysidro demonstrates to Asher early on in the story by effortlessly overpowering him and placing "a mocking kiss" on his neck).

So, despite Asher's unshakable attachment to Lydia in TWHtN, I think the erotic ism of his relationship to Ysidro is fully intended by Hambly. In fact, I would go so far as to say that part of the reason I prefer TWHtN to TwtD is that the world of the books seems more erotic to me when viewed through Asher's eyes than when viewed thr ough Lydia's. From Asher's perspective, Ysidro is powerful and mysterious, while Lydia is strong, beautiful, and confident; from Lydia's perspective, by contrast, Ysidro is a chauvinistic manipulator, while she herself is an insecure ugly duckling. I'm aw are that I'm oversimplifying here, but as a romantic, I prefer the non-deconstructed version of the characters.

YMMV, obviously. Just offering an alternative perspective. :-)

*

Re: Those Who Hunt the Night

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Now, see, I always prefer the deconstructed version.

But I like your theory for why that erotic obsessivenesss is in the language of TWHtN. It makes sense. There's still a disjunct for me between all these metaphorical, symbolic, psychological overlays and the actual literal relationship between Asher and Ysidro, but that may be on my end instead of Hambly's end.