walking on knives
Jan. 29th, 2010 04:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyWhat with the whiny princess feet, I've been thinking a lot about the Little Mermaid recently.
I should say clearly, btw, that I hate Hans Christian Andersen. Terry Pratchett is on record as hating Lewis Carroll, and the way he feels about Carroll, although completely antithetical to my experience of Carroll, is pretty much word for word the way I feel about Andersen: "I didn't like the Alice books because I found them creepy and horribly unfunny in a nasty, plonking, Victorian way. Oh, here's Mr Christmas Pudding On Legs, hohohoho, here's a Caterpillar Smoking A Pipe, hohohoho. When I was a kid the books created in me about the same revulsion as you get when, aged seven, you're invited to kiss your great-grandmother."
Except, of course, that Andersen has no particular sense of humor.
As alert readers of the Doctrine of Labyrinths will probably have noticed, there is one Andersen story I like: "The Tinder Box." But "The Steadfast Tin Soldier"? No. "The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf" Hell, no. "The Little Mermaid"? No no no.
I should also say that, while (having a weakness both for musicals and for animated films) I enjoyed Disney's Little Mermaid, I was aware from the beginning that it was a cheat--quite literally the Disneyfied version. In many ways, it's a more satisfying story than Andersen's, but Andersen seems to have been quite deliberate in his choice to tell UNsatisfying stories. (N.b., I am not and do not pretend to be an Andersen scholar; I'm only going on my memories of the stories of his I've read.) And, you know, I do genuinely respect that as a choice, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.
But anyway (this is the John M. Ford segue back from a tangent and should really be heard in his voice if you can do it), thinking about the Little Mermaid tends to lead me into thinking about my favorite Peter Straub character, Rose from Shadowland. Rose is a reworking of the Little Mermaid who decides at the end that the hero's love isn't worth the constant agony of walking on knives and goes back to being amermaid fish. I didn't like that choice the first time I read Shadowland, as a teenager, but as an adult I appreciate it greatly.
Straub is very good (once he gets past the Vengeful! Supernatural! Female! which drives Julia, If You Could See Me Now, and Ghost Story) at writing female characters who have subject positions which the narrative is not privy to. (I find him less compelling when he gives his female characters point-of-view, although I should also say that I haven't read any Straub since The Hellfire Club, due to (a.) my ongoing fiction reading problem, (b.) my deep disappointment in Black House (haven't read any King since then, either), and (c.) ENOUGH WITH THE SERIAL KILLERS ALREADY.) The most brilliant example is April Ransom in The Throat, who spends the entire novel either comatose or dead, but whose subject position comes shining through, both in the evidence of her life that Tim Underhill finds and in the mirror of her father's grief. And one of the things I like about Straub is that Tim, the narrator/protagonist, and behind him the author, is just as incensed as I am at the male entitlement issues that lead her husband to murder her; although the novel is built around several complicated things, one of them is John Ransom's descent into the banal evil of egotism, of seeing April only as a threat to his own masculinity instead of as a person--and a remarkable person--in her own right.
We never get Rose's point of view in Shadowland, but it's very clear she has one, and that she makes decisions for her own reasons. And she says no to the reader's narrative expectations. (So, in his own way, does Tom, who abdicates the metaphorical throne of Shadowland to become a stage magician.) Tom is a very nice boy, and a hero sure enough, but he isn't worth the sacrifice of her own life symbolized by the pain of walking on knives. The prince in Andersen isn't worth it, either--that being Andersen's dour and horrible point--but what I love about Rose is that she says, "Fuck this story, I'm going home."
And although that's just as deliberately unsatisfying as Andersen, it's unsatisfying in a way that gives me something back.
I should say clearly, btw, that I hate Hans Christian Andersen. Terry Pratchett is on record as hating Lewis Carroll, and the way he feels about Carroll, although completely antithetical to my experience of Carroll, is pretty much word for word the way I feel about Andersen: "I didn't like the Alice books because I found them creepy and horribly unfunny in a nasty, plonking, Victorian way. Oh, here's Mr Christmas Pudding On Legs, hohohoho, here's a Caterpillar Smoking A Pipe, hohohoho. When I was a kid the books created in me about the same revulsion as you get when, aged seven, you're invited to kiss your great-grandmother."
Except, of course, that Andersen has no particular sense of humor.
As alert readers of the Doctrine of Labyrinths will probably have noticed, there is one Andersen story I like: "The Tinder Box." But "The Steadfast Tin Soldier"? No. "The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf" Hell, no. "The Little Mermaid"? No no no.
I should also say that, while (having a weakness both for musicals and for animated films) I enjoyed Disney's Little Mermaid, I was aware from the beginning that it was a cheat--quite literally the Disneyfied version. In many ways, it's a more satisfying story than Andersen's, but Andersen seems to have been quite deliberate in his choice to tell UNsatisfying stories. (N.b., I am not and do not pretend to be an Andersen scholar; I'm only going on my memories of the stories of his I've read.) And, you know, I do genuinely respect that as a choice, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.
But anyway (this is the John M. Ford segue back from a tangent and should really be heard in his voice if you can do it), thinking about the Little Mermaid tends to lead me into thinking about my favorite Peter Straub character, Rose from Shadowland. Rose is a reworking of the Little Mermaid who decides at the end that the hero's love isn't worth the constant agony of walking on knives and goes back to being a
Straub is very good (once he gets past the Vengeful! Supernatural! Female! which drives Julia, If You Could See Me Now, and Ghost Story) at writing female characters who have subject positions which the narrative is not privy to. (I find him less compelling when he gives his female characters point-of-view, although I should also say that I haven't read any Straub since The Hellfire Club, due to (a.) my ongoing fiction reading problem, (b.) my deep disappointment in Black House (haven't read any King since then, either), and (c.) ENOUGH WITH THE SERIAL KILLERS ALREADY.) The most brilliant example is April Ransom in The Throat, who spends the entire novel either comatose or dead, but whose subject position comes shining through, both in the evidence of her life that Tim Underhill finds and in the mirror of her father's grief. And one of the things I like about Straub is that Tim, the narrator/protagonist, and behind him the author, is just as incensed as I am at the male entitlement issues that lead her husband to murder her; although the novel is built around several complicated things, one of them is John Ransom's descent into the banal evil of egotism, of seeing April only as a threat to his own masculinity instead of as a person--and a remarkable person--in her own right.
We never get Rose's point of view in Shadowland, but it's very clear she has one, and that she makes decisions for her own reasons. And she says no to the reader's narrative expectations. (So, in his own way, does Tom, who abdicates the metaphorical throne of Shadowland to become a stage magician.) Tom is a very nice boy, and a hero sure enough, but he isn't worth the sacrifice of her own life symbolized by the pain of walking on knives. The prince in Andersen isn't worth it, either--that being Andersen's dour and horrible point--but what I love about Rose is that she says, "Fuck this story, I'm going home."
And although that's just as deliberately unsatisfying as Andersen, it's unsatisfying in a way that gives me something back.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-01-29 11:04 pm (UTC)Also, I think Andersen operated on the principle of shared unhappiness: "I am perfectly miserable in all aspects of my life, and I am going to write this story poetically explaining my miserableness to you all, because everyone should be as miserably unhappy as I am."
no subject
Date: 2010-01-30 05:56 am (UTC)I've never liked his stories either--I have a lingering fondness for The Swan Maiden, but that's probably because I can't remember how his version ends . . .
no subject
Date: 2010-01-29 11:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-29 11:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-29 11:27 pm (UTC)Also as a kid was read Hans Christian Anderson stories and again found them horrifying and scary and sad. They aren't meant for children in the way we mean stories for children to be now, stories of children being heroes to emulate, instead of examples to watch out for with tragic endings.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-30 12:01 am (UTC)I was more or less raised on both Andersen and Carroll and lots of other Victorian children's classics. Right, they were not 'for children.' Children couldn't afford those books. They were for the adults who bought the books, and who read the books aloud to children (and knew when to skip).
For success, PETER PAN had to entertain both audiences: the children and the adults who had bought the tickets. By the time of Narnia, children could get access without too much pleasing of adults, but the tradition lingered: lots of injokes over the child readers' heads (eg Parliament of Owls).
no subject
Date: 2010-01-30 12:06 am (UTC)Andersen gave me one big cognitive leap before I could even read. My mother had a big edition with beautiful illustrations and kept wanting to read out of it. I went along with that a few times, then said: "Everything in that big pretty book turns out sad and nasty."
That was the concept that stories had authors and different authors chose different kinds of stories and you could sort of predict the kind of story if you knew who the author was.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-30 02:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-30 10:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-31 05:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-31 05:49 am (UTC)