Happy New Year!
Dec. 31st, 2009 02:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyAs a New Year's present, here is the foreword I wrote for the forthcoming Chinese edition of Mélusine:
This Chinese edition of Mélusine is the first translation of any of my books to be published. I am delighted simply by the fact of translation--and translation into a language of which I cannot recognize a single character. It is, in all seriousness, a kind of magic for my words to be able to reach you. And I have further been invited to write a foreword to introduce you, the reader, to the book and its world. I am honored and pleased by the opportunity.
I started writing Mélusine when I was nineteen years old. I worked on it and its sequels (The Virtu, The Mirador, and Corambis) for the next fifteen years. The last book was published in April, and I've been weirdly at loose ends since then, not quite sure what to do with myself now that I don't have these enchanting, demanding, infuriating books to work on. Thus this foreword is also an opportunity, perhaps, to put it into perspective for myself, as well as for you who are reading it for the first time.
I taught myself to read, my parents tell me, shortly before I turned three. I don't know; I don't remember a time before reading, before stories. And for me, stories and fantasy were inextricably intertwined: Oz, Narnia, Middle-Earth--I knew their geography and history long before I was taught the geography and history of the United States. Thus, when I started writing stories, at the age of eleven, I think it would have been more surprising if I hadn't immediately turned to fantasy. It was what I knew, and loved, best.
And that hasn't changed.
All fiction, no matter how realistic, no matter how meticulously researched, is telling stories about imaginary people in imaginary places. All fiction is the art of illusion. Some fiction chooses to work its illusions to make the closest possible facsimile of real people and real places; fantasy and her sisters, science fiction and horror, choose instead to flaunt their imaginary colors. They work their illusions to emphasize the unreality of their people and places, to describe buildings that have never been built, battles that have never been fought, people whose births and deaths alike never took place. What I find particularly beautiful about fantasy is its ability to make readers care in spite of--or, perhaps more precisely, because of--its blatantly imaginary material. We love dragons because they don't exist.
At the same time, it would be nonsensical to deny that fantasy has a relationship with the real world. Authors, after all, are real people; their imaginations are fed by their real lives. The book you are holding in your hands is a good example, as it is the obverse face of my life during its writing.
I said that it took fifteen years to write the Doctrine of Labyrinths. In good part, that's because, during those same fifteen years, I was earning first a bachelor's degree, then a master's, and finally a doctorate. And it's fair to say that the world of Meduse is made up out of my experiences in academia.
Most obviously, the names and languages I made up drew on my knowledge of the languages I was studying: French, Ancient Greek, Latin, Old English. The folklore of Meduse is frequently warped reflections of the literature and history of Western civilization: the blood-wizard Porphyria Levant, for example is named partly for the blood disease porphyria, but mostly and most cogently for Robert Browning's poem, "Porphyria's Lover." Brinvillier Strych is named first for the French poisoner Madame de Brinvilliers whose trial is recorded in the letters of Madame de Sevigny, and second for the poison strychnine. There is a district in Mélusine called Gilgamesh, from the mythical Babylonian hero, and another called Britomart, from the female knight in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. Mélusine itself is named for a monster in French folklore, half woman, half snake. Everything I studied was fair game, and I enjoyed making incongruities, like naming a brothel madam after the cyclops in The Odyssey.
The other way in which the world of Meduse is drawn from my experience is that the magic systems are somewhere between affectionate parody and pastiche of the different schools of literary criticism. (This becomes increasingly apparent in later books, as we learn that the practice of magic is all about the metaphors you choose for it.) The wizards of the Mirador, with their factions, in-fighting, and endless committee meetings, reflect years of observation of departmental politics.
But that's hardly the only thing going on in Mélusine and its sequels; if one protagonist, Felix Harrowgate, is a vehicle for exploring my experience of and ideas about academic culture and the life of the mind, then the other, Mildmay the Fox, turned out to have a great deal to say about class and economic issues. Mildmay also shares my own passionate love of and interest in stories and story telling and allowed me to introduce a metatextual level wherein the characters within the fiction are able to comment on fiction itself.
And both Felix and Mildmay are my commentary on certain tropes of Anglophone fantasy, learned from an adolescence spent reading all the fantasy I could get my hands on: the Wizard and the Assassin, the wizard, in this case, being as utterly unlike Gandalf as possible--neither old, nor wise, nor serenely above human concerns--and the assassin being not at all Byronic, but, in fact, a professional murderer, someone who's good at what he does because there's something wrong with him. Neither of them is a traditional fantasy hero; a friend commented once that, in anyone else's book, Felix would be the villain, to which I would add that, looked at out of the romanticizing context of fantasy, Mildmay's past is most emphatically villainous. And yet, they are doing the best they can; in some moods, I find that the most heroic thing any human being can do.
Welcome to Mélusine. Go carefully in its dark places.
Sarah Monette
Madison, Wisconsin
September 15, 2009
This Chinese edition of Mélusine is the first translation of any of my books to be published. I am delighted simply by the fact of translation--and translation into a language of which I cannot recognize a single character. It is, in all seriousness, a kind of magic for my words to be able to reach you. And I have further been invited to write a foreword to introduce you, the reader, to the book and its world. I am honored and pleased by the opportunity.
I started writing Mélusine when I was nineteen years old. I worked on it and its sequels (The Virtu, The Mirador, and Corambis) for the next fifteen years. The last book was published in April, and I've been weirdly at loose ends since then, not quite sure what to do with myself now that I don't have these enchanting, demanding, infuriating books to work on. Thus this foreword is also an opportunity, perhaps, to put it into perspective for myself, as well as for you who are reading it for the first time.
I taught myself to read, my parents tell me, shortly before I turned three. I don't know; I don't remember a time before reading, before stories. And for me, stories and fantasy were inextricably intertwined: Oz, Narnia, Middle-Earth--I knew their geography and history long before I was taught the geography and history of the United States. Thus, when I started writing stories, at the age of eleven, I think it would have been more surprising if I hadn't immediately turned to fantasy. It was what I knew, and loved, best.
And that hasn't changed.
All fiction, no matter how realistic, no matter how meticulously researched, is telling stories about imaginary people in imaginary places. All fiction is the art of illusion. Some fiction chooses to work its illusions to make the closest possible facsimile of real people and real places; fantasy and her sisters, science fiction and horror, choose instead to flaunt their imaginary colors. They work their illusions to emphasize the unreality of their people and places, to describe buildings that have never been built, battles that have never been fought, people whose births and deaths alike never took place. What I find particularly beautiful about fantasy is its ability to make readers care in spite of--or, perhaps more precisely, because of--its blatantly imaginary material. We love dragons because they don't exist.
At the same time, it would be nonsensical to deny that fantasy has a relationship with the real world. Authors, after all, are real people; their imaginations are fed by their real lives. The book you are holding in your hands is a good example, as it is the obverse face of my life during its writing.
I said that it took fifteen years to write the Doctrine of Labyrinths. In good part, that's because, during those same fifteen years, I was earning first a bachelor's degree, then a master's, and finally a doctorate. And it's fair to say that the world of Meduse is made up out of my experiences in academia.
Most obviously, the names and languages I made up drew on my knowledge of the languages I was studying: French, Ancient Greek, Latin, Old English. The folklore of Meduse is frequently warped reflections of the literature and history of Western civilization: the blood-wizard Porphyria Levant, for example is named partly for the blood disease porphyria, but mostly and most cogently for Robert Browning's poem, "Porphyria's Lover." Brinvillier Strych is named first for the French poisoner Madame de Brinvilliers whose trial is recorded in the letters of Madame de Sevigny, and second for the poison strychnine. There is a district in Mélusine called Gilgamesh, from the mythical Babylonian hero, and another called Britomart, from the female knight in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. Mélusine itself is named for a monster in French folklore, half woman, half snake. Everything I studied was fair game, and I enjoyed making incongruities, like naming a brothel madam after the cyclops in The Odyssey.
The other way in which the world of Meduse is drawn from my experience is that the magic systems are somewhere between affectionate parody and pastiche of the different schools of literary criticism. (This becomes increasingly apparent in later books, as we learn that the practice of magic is all about the metaphors you choose for it.) The wizards of the Mirador, with their factions, in-fighting, and endless committee meetings, reflect years of observation of departmental politics.
But that's hardly the only thing going on in Mélusine and its sequels; if one protagonist, Felix Harrowgate, is a vehicle for exploring my experience of and ideas about academic culture and the life of the mind, then the other, Mildmay the Fox, turned out to have a great deal to say about class and economic issues. Mildmay also shares my own passionate love of and interest in stories and story telling and allowed me to introduce a metatextual level wherein the characters within the fiction are able to comment on fiction itself.
And both Felix and Mildmay are my commentary on certain tropes of Anglophone fantasy, learned from an adolescence spent reading all the fantasy I could get my hands on: the Wizard and the Assassin, the wizard, in this case, being as utterly unlike Gandalf as possible--neither old, nor wise, nor serenely above human concerns--and the assassin being not at all Byronic, but, in fact, a professional murderer, someone who's good at what he does because there's something wrong with him. Neither of them is a traditional fantasy hero; a friend commented once that, in anyone else's book, Felix would be the villain, to which I would add that, looked at out of the romanticizing context of fantasy, Mildmay's past is most emphatically villainous. And yet, they are doing the best they can; in some moods, I find that the most heroic thing any human being can do.
Welcome to Mélusine. Go carefully in its dark places.
Sarah Monette
Madison, Wisconsin
September 15, 2009
