books books books
Apr. 27th, 2010 10:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ricardienneMy last load of library books included some really terrible ones. I'm not going to write about the sequel to this historical murder mystery because I have only gotten three chapters in, and I cannot read it rationally. At all. All I can think is: "WHAT GOOD DOES IT DO TO MAKE TACITUS A WILD-EYED EMPEROR-HATING IRRATIONAL INDIVIDUAL? ALSO: HAVE YOU READ ANY OF THE WORKS OF THESE PEOPLE AT ALL RECENTLY? YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG!" (also: Tacitus unable to read critically? Tacitus?)
But I digress, because what I wanted to post was that I just finished Sarah McLean's The Season (ya, romance, regency), and it was terrible in an entirely different way. Or maybe in not such an entirely different way. I am not particularly a reader of romance, so I probably have an inherent bias against this kind of novel. Nevertheless. The characters were boring, the romance was contrived (by which I mean that it was contrived that they didn't just get together on page 1), and the "mystery" was not mysterious at all. So much not so that I don't feel any spoilery compunctions about complaining about the cliché of the Evil Uncle Who is Jealous That His Older Brother Got the Dukedom. Wouldn't it be nice if the younger brother were bitter and jealous and cranky but, in a twist, not evil and murderous? Or, if he were evil and murderous, but not because he was (*wah*) not loved as much as his brother?
And yet, that isn't even what I wanted to write about, because I ended up reading with my OED in hand, so to speak.
My first foray into worrying about words was while reading a series of mysteries set during the Wars of the Roses. One character described another as a "Puritan," and I thought, "Wait a minute. Does that even work?"(It doesn't.)
The line is hard to draw. In most historical fiction set more than a few hundred years back in an English-speaking place, there is an assumption that the characters are not really speaking the words that I am reading (or at least I read with that implicit understanding, and I hope the authors wrote with it!). In most fantasy, you assume that the characters are *actually* speaking some entirely different language; much futuristic sci-fi dialogue has to be *really* in, at the very least, some futuristic dialect of my language (and, obviously, they aren't really speaking English in Star Wars.)
So in one way, picking at anachronisms is crazy -- there may be an occasional historical novelist who can pull off "authentic" speech, but would a novel in the various dialects of 13th century England be readable by most people? A Lindsay Davis mystery in the painstakingly-reconstructed Hellenic-inflected vulgar Latin of the 1st century? So I try not to worry about it, just as I try not to get too antsy when one character in a heroic fantasy describes another as "Stoic" (really? Can you have Stoics without Seneca? Without Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus?)
But on the other hand, words do matter and do provide context. To a certain extent -- no, to a large extent what we read in dialogue is what we imagine the characters are saying. And so the intersection between our sense of words and their histories and their usage in a supposedly "historical" or "fantasy" novel does matter. I did an OH NO YOU DIDN'T double take and then giggled a lot when Tamora Pierce introduced "spintry" as lower-class slang for a male prostitute in her Provost's Dog novels. Because this is an exceedingly erudite word in the history of English: it has a few 17th and 18th century attestations, where it was clearly pulled straight from Tacitus and Suetonius (there might be a ref. in Juvenal and/or a later grammarian, too) as a highfalutin' literary term (it's not that relevant that we now think that the Latin word (spintria) probably referred not to a male prostitute or brothel but to (a female) one who specialized in exhibitionist group sex, but that's an interesting bit of information, so I'm including it anyway). Now obviously, none of this makes the word inappropriate for appropriation into Pierce's fantasy world. It's still funny, though.
The anachronism usually works the other direction, however. There were two really egregious slang usages in Sarah McLean's novel: "impact" as a conjugated transitive verb in a metaphorical sense. The OED doesn't give the verb "to impact" with any other examples than as a passive participle. We know that it is used differently now, but there are enough complaints from prescriptivists about it that surely someone would have flagged it! The other was "obscenely" in the hyperbolic meaning of "very." Obscene doesn't seem to have been used to mean anything other than, well, "obscene," until after the last print edition of the OED (obviously, print sources lag spoken usage, but I still really question a young noblewoman c. 1815 using it like this and it not sticking out).
Eponyms are obviously problematic, as are words taken from movements or particular historical events. (How would you describe Raglan sleeves in fantasyland? Could you describe some as a "Martinet" before Martinet?) But what about vaguer things? I got quite hung up when the main character of McLean's novel joked to her girlfriend that "they say women are more evolved than men." This seems to me like a very post-Darwininan kind of statement. On the other hand, evolution as a scientific term (having to do with developing and unfolding) was around from the 17th century, and there was probably some drift into metaphorical usage. I can see a conceivable meaning of "women are more cultivated than men," but I think that I'm bending over backwards for a sloppy author in doing so.
But I digress, because what I wanted to post was that I just finished Sarah McLean's The Season (ya, romance, regency), and it was terrible in an entirely different way. Or maybe in not such an entirely different way. I am not particularly a reader of romance, so I probably have an inherent bias against this kind of novel. Nevertheless. The characters were boring, the romance was contrived (by which I mean that it was contrived that they didn't just get together on page 1), and the "mystery" was not mysterious at all. So much not so that I don't feel any spoilery compunctions about complaining about the cliché of the Evil Uncle Who is Jealous That His Older Brother Got the Dukedom. Wouldn't it be nice if the younger brother were bitter and jealous and cranky but, in a twist, not evil and murderous? Or, if he were evil and murderous, but not because he was (*wah*) not loved as much as his brother?
And yet, that isn't even what I wanted to write about, because I ended up reading with my OED in hand, so to speak.
My first foray into worrying about words was while reading a series of mysteries set during the Wars of the Roses. One character described another as a "Puritan," and I thought, "Wait a minute. Does that even work?"(It doesn't.)
The line is hard to draw. In most historical fiction set more than a few hundred years back in an English-speaking place, there is an assumption that the characters are not really speaking the words that I am reading (or at least I read with that implicit understanding, and I hope the authors wrote with it!). In most fantasy, you assume that the characters are *actually* speaking some entirely different language; much futuristic sci-fi dialogue has to be *really* in, at the very least, some futuristic dialect of my language (and, obviously, they aren't really speaking English in Star Wars.)
So in one way, picking at anachronisms is crazy -- there may be an occasional historical novelist who can pull off "authentic" speech, but would a novel in the various dialects of 13th century England be readable by most people? A Lindsay Davis mystery in the painstakingly-reconstructed Hellenic-inflected vulgar Latin of the 1st century? So I try not to worry about it, just as I try not to get too antsy when one character in a heroic fantasy describes another as "Stoic" (really? Can you have Stoics without Seneca? Without Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus?)
But on the other hand, words do matter and do provide context. To a certain extent -- no, to a large extent what we read in dialogue is what we imagine the characters are saying. And so the intersection between our sense of words and their histories and their usage in a supposedly "historical" or "fantasy" novel does matter. I did an OH NO YOU DIDN'T double take and then giggled a lot when Tamora Pierce introduced "spintry" as lower-class slang for a male prostitute in her Provost's Dog novels. Because this is an exceedingly erudite word in the history of English: it has a few 17th and 18th century attestations, where it was clearly pulled straight from Tacitus and Suetonius (there might be a ref. in Juvenal and/or a later grammarian, too) as a highfalutin' literary term (it's not that relevant that we now think that the Latin word (spintria) probably referred not to a male prostitute or brothel but to (a female) one who specialized in exhibitionist group sex, but that's an interesting bit of information, so I'm including it anyway). Now obviously, none of this makes the word inappropriate for appropriation into Pierce's fantasy world. It's still funny, though.
The anachronism usually works the other direction, however. There were two really egregious slang usages in Sarah McLean's novel: "impact" as a conjugated transitive verb in a metaphorical sense. The OED doesn't give the verb "to impact" with any other examples than as a passive participle. We know that it is used differently now, but there are enough complaints from prescriptivists about it that surely someone would have flagged it! The other was "obscenely" in the hyperbolic meaning of "very." Obscene doesn't seem to have been used to mean anything other than, well, "obscene," until after the last print edition of the OED (obviously, print sources lag spoken usage, but I still really question a young noblewoman c. 1815 using it like this and it not sticking out).
Eponyms are obviously problematic, as are words taken from movements or particular historical events. (How would you describe Raglan sleeves in fantasyland? Could you describe some as a "Martinet" before Martinet?) But what about vaguer things? I got quite hung up when the main character of McLean's novel joked to her girlfriend that "they say women are more evolved than men." This seems to me like a very post-Darwininan kind of statement. On the other hand, evolution as a scientific term (having to do with developing and unfolding) was around from the 17th century, and there was probably some drift into metaphorical usage. I can see a conceivable meaning of "women are more cultivated than men," but I think that I'm bending over backwards for a sloppy author in doing so.
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no subject
Date: 2010-04-28 01:57 pm (UTC)I definitely notice the Overly Modern Word when I write faux-historical things. The one I'm always the saddest about is 'freaky.' It's so descriptive, and yet it sounds so 20th century to me that I can't bring myself to use it. (Now you'll probably tell me that it's been around since the spring of 1574, and I'll be totally relieved. A girl can hope, can't she?)
Mostly I really enjoy this post. :)
no subject
Date: 2010-04-28 03:42 pm (UTC)You could probably get away with "freakish," which predates "freaky" by a lot. If you used it as a direct synonym (= unnatural, really really weird) you might not be using it quite correctly (until the advent of the "freak show" freak- had more to do with odd colors or quirks of behavior and sudden changes in those things, but close enough), but (to me, at least) "freakish" sounds just odd enough and a little archaic that it would probably pass for period appropriate.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-28 05:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-28 09:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 01:07 am (UTC)Of course, they say that if you remember the sixties you weren't there. But I didn't do acid.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-28 04:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-28 07:07 pm (UTC)It's like when characters movies set in the Middle Ages or Renaissance or what have you, have these highbrow English accents regardless of what country they're in. Or in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, where characters like Will Turner and Jack Sparrow speak absolutely correct English when, by that time, linguistic creolisation, especially among the lower classes, was developing. (Then again after that horrid East India Company sideplot in the movies, it became abundantly clear to me that nobody who made that movie had any idea about what went on in the Caribbean other than rum and pirates...) I don't know why I can't forgive the PoTC people for their lack of interest in historical truth, while I freely admit that A Knight's Tale is by far one of my favourite movies. Neither movie pretends to be historically accurate in any way, and both revel in this, but there is something wildly enjoyable about the way that A Knight's Tale does that I feel was missing in PoTC.
There's a series of detective novels set in ancient Rome where the protagonist detective talks like he's straight out of a noir film. I don't know if you've come across it, but I read one of the books and it threw me for a loop! I don't remember the title, though :(
/ramble
no subject
Date: 2010-04-28 07:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-28 08:58 pm (UTC)I think I have come across that series (or one like it, because I've read various books from an awful lot of detective series' set in Rome. I'm not sure how I feel about those kinds of things because there is again this problem of how to mediate between versimilitude and comprehensibility (and in Roman detective stories, there's the additional problem of ancient science/medicine/scientific method not being the same as modern ones at all...). How do you linguistically convey "hard-bitten lower class detective" in ancient Rome? (See also: all Romans had British accents (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ptitlebb330lv9nf12)).
But I do think that there is less of an excuse the closer in time you get. PotC could have made an effort to represent at least a little of the dialectal variation and real speaking habits of the period: we know something about what was going on (I think), and it would be somewhat understandable.
Also, I think one of the main difference between A Knight's Tale and PotC is that the former is a funny story *about* the middle ages -- it's making almost as much fun of the period and our conceptions of the periodit is an "period-piece" adventure (or at least that was my impression). Whereas PotC is just an adventure story set in a certain period of history, it doesn't ask us to engage with how we're thinking about that history, but just to accept it as the setting. Which makes the movie more obligated to make an effort to present it reasonable accurately, I think!
RE: film(s) noir(s)
Wikipedia goes to merriam-webster online, which gives both (although prefers film noirs). I think that "film noirs" would be the English-language plural -- you pronounce the "s". Whereas "films noir(s)" would be the French plural, homophonic to the singular. Maybe the former became more popular in English because it is more recognizable as a plural.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 01:11 am (UTC)I take the noir style to be Davis's having fun with what she's doing. And I believe I've read that she's said somewhere that she deliberately introduces an anachronism into each book.