The Moss-Troll Problem
Apr. 27th, 2006 08:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyJune 2, 2011: Comments have been turned off because of spam.
Brace yourselves, my lovelies. I'm not sure I can articulate the thing I'm about to try to say.
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mrissa was talking yesterday about the thing that I have dubbed, in consequence of her post, the Moss-Troll Problem, which is that moment in your writing when you reach for a description, only to have the horrible realization that you can't use it. You can't say the sea-serpent's eyes are the color of NyQuil in a world that doesn't have NyQuil in it. You have to come up with something that's in your narrative's frame of reference, and that often involves, yes, inventing moss-trolls. With all that that leads to.
I had this problem t'other day, because you can't call it the missionary position in a world without missionaries.
Oops.
But what occurred to me last night--and what I fear I am going to fail to articulate--is the way in which the Moss-Troll Problem is possibly the strangest semiotic knot human beings have ever tied themselves into.
Okay, look. Literature is all about metaphors--analogies. One thing is like another. I've said before that one reason fantasy and science fiction continue to get dissed by the critical establishment is that they come pre-analyzed. SF explicates its own metaphors, generally by making them literal. The Ring isn't just a symbol of Evil. It IS Evil. (Of course, it's also a symbol of Evil, so it's figural and literal both at once, which Mellor says somewhere is characteristic of the Gothic and of women's writing. fwiw.) But a lot of literature works by saying, "This thing is like this other thing." And really great literature works by saying, "This thing is like this other thing, WHICH YOU WOULD NEVER HAVE THOUGHT OF COMPARING IT TO." These comparisons can be overt ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.") or covert, subtextual, subliminal. But it's there. You take a thing--a thing in your imagination--and you compare it to another thing--a thing in the frame of reference you (hopefully) share with your reader. And thus you generate meaning and imagery and all those other things that are what makes literature tick.
Now consider the Moss-Troll Problem and what it says about secondary-world fiction. We've declared one of the fundamental gestures of literature out of bounds. We make this same gesture--this thing is like this other thing--but we have denied ourselves the frame of reference in common with the reader. So when we do this, when we say the sea serpent's eyes are the color of moss-troll ichor, we have to somehow convey both sides of the analogy, rather than relying on one half to explain the other.
I said I wasn't going to be able to articulate this.
So there's a way in which secondary-world fiction (I'm not saying "fantasy" because science fiction set far enough in the future has the same issue, though the terms of the equation are a little different) has taken self-referentiality and made it into a koan, a pondering point. A hallmark of its art. And it's the only genre I can think of that does this, that denies a frame of reference between reader and narrrative.
And this is the place where world-building is trying to get you, where you have a secondary world that's rich enough and deep enough that it can generate its own frame of reference, that you can reinvent the wheel using unobtanium and dragons' bones.
I'm still not saying it right, but the idea is so cool (at least to me) that I'm going to post this anyway and hope that at least some of my meaning manages to claw its way through.
Brace yourselves, my lovelies. I'm not sure I can articulate the thing I'm about to try to say.
mrissa was talking yesterday about the thing that I have dubbed, in consequence of her post, the Moss-Troll Problem, which is that moment in your writing when you reach for a description, only to have the horrible realization that you can't use it. You can't say the sea-serpent's eyes are the color of NyQuil in a world that doesn't have NyQuil in it. You have to come up with something that's in your narrative's frame of reference, and that often involves, yes, inventing moss-trolls. With all that that leads to.I had this problem t'other day, because you can't call it the missionary position in a world without missionaries.
Oops.
But what occurred to me last night--and what I fear I am going to fail to articulate--is the way in which the Moss-Troll Problem is possibly the strangest semiotic knot human beings have ever tied themselves into.
Okay, look. Literature is all about metaphors--analogies. One thing is like another. I've said before that one reason fantasy and science fiction continue to get dissed by the critical establishment is that they come pre-analyzed. SF explicates its own metaphors, generally by making them literal. The Ring isn't just a symbol of Evil. It IS Evil. (Of course, it's also a symbol of Evil, so it's figural and literal both at once, which Mellor says somewhere is characteristic of the Gothic and of women's writing. fwiw.) But a lot of literature works by saying, "This thing is like this other thing." And really great literature works by saying, "This thing is like this other thing, WHICH YOU WOULD NEVER HAVE THOUGHT OF COMPARING IT TO." These comparisons can be overt ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.") or covert, subtextual, subliminal. But it's there. You take a thing--a thing in your imagination--and you compare it to another thing--a thing in the frame of reference you (hopefully) share with your reader. And thus you generate meaning and imagery and all those other things that are what makes literature tick.
Now consider the Moss-Troll Problem and what it says about secondary-world fiction. We've declared one of the fundamental gestures of literature out of bounds. We make this same gesture--this thing is like this other thing--but we have denied ourselves the frame of reference in common with the reader. So when we do this, when we say the sea serpent's eyes are the color of moss-troll ichor, we have to somehow convey both sides of the analogy, rather than relying on one half to explain the other.
I said I wasn't going to be able to articulate this.
So there's a way in which secondary-world fiction (I'm not saying "fantasy" because science fiction set far enough in the future has the same issue, though the terms of the equation are a little different) has taken self-referentiality and made it into a koan, a pondering point. A hallmark of its art. And it's the only genre I can think of that does this, that denies a frame of reference between reader and narrrative.
And this is the place where world-building is trying to get you, where you have a secondary world that's rich enough and deep enough that it can generate its own frame of reference, that you can reinvent the wheel using unobtanium and dragons' bones.
I'm still not saying it right, but the idea is so cool (at least to me) that I'm going to post this anyway and hope that at least some of my meaning manages to claw its way through.
