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ricardienneIs there a place for unsignaled fallibility in fiction?
What I mean is: real people have incorrect beliefs about things, sometimes from personal ignorance, sometimes from widespread misconception or trendy falsehood. I don't mean about existential questions, but about trivialities. The wrong date for something. An assumption about the nationality of some historical figure. A facile narrative about some scientific or sociological or historical topic. A misstatement about language or art. So when a character in a fiction errs and goes uncorrected, does the error signify an error of the writer, or does it serve to more richly characterize the character and her millieu as one in which such an incorrect belief is held? Does it matter? (The basic distinction here is Watsonian vs. Doyleist, I know.)
An example. I've been reading a large number of Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher mysteries, murder mysteries set in 1920's Melbourne. In one, an intruder rummages through the protagonist's library, and the is analyzing which books he has pulled down:
"Phryne looked at the titles. All in Latin: Plautus, Terence, Julius Caesar, Epictetus,and the maunderings of Marcus Aurelius."
Now we all know that Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius wrote in Greek. But it's likely that a Greek edition would have a title page and title in Latin, and even be bound with a Latin name stamped on the spine, and one could argue that this is the point. But it's also likely that someone (equally, perhaps, Greenwood as her heroine) would assume that a Roman emperor would have written in Latin and would be mislead by the Latinized form of Epictetus' name to think that he also was a Latin author. So it's unclear (and maybe unimportant) whether we are getting a clever point about the publication of Greek texts (with Latin apparatus), a subtle comment on Phryne's education (somewhat desultory when it comes to ancient literature), or a revelation that Kerry Greenwood couldn't be bothered to google Epictetus and find out that he was a Greek slave of a Hellenized Roman philosopher who lived and taught in the east and whose teachings were recorded in Greek by Arrian, another Romanized Greek. I say that the distinction is possibly unimportant, because when I am immersed in the world of the novel, the first two explanations are vastly more interesting, even if they are actually less likely to be true.
My second two examples come from the realm of fanfiction (no comments from the peanut gallery, please!).
The first, from the excellent recent story "Service" (has some references to events in Cordelia's Honor and Mirror Dance, some discussion (non-explicit) of rape), by Minutia_R.
The main character is meeting his father for the first time, and the father is trying to justify his participation in war-crimes (including the rape from which the main character was born):
Now, there is no passive voice in the father's justification. There is, perhaps, avoidance of agency; there are complex (potentially obfuscating?) modal verb constructions. But there is no passive. On the other hand, As Language Log continues to document extensively, the term "passive voice" is frequently applied to language that seems to avoid admitting agency and blame in an underhand or self-serving way. So this is a not unexpected, if unfortunate, error for an author to make. But also -- and the fact that the protagonist is made to recall a teacher perhaps strengthens this reading -- a not unexpected mistaken belief about grammar that might have been inculcated into the young man who is the character. Perhaps Dr. Beaumont was excessively in love with his Vorstrunk and White. One could even go so far as to say that in the distant future of the Vorkosigan Saga the current trend of misidentifying "passive voice" has turned into an actual change in the significance of the phrase "passive voice." Maybe it has actually come to mean "obfuscating language that obscures responsibility for an action." (Sidenote: I don't know how to flag this situation/probable mistake to the author in a way that isn't condescending or obnoxious.)
The second is from the story "Research Protocol", by Tel (Allegre/Galeni with some explicit sexual stuff). The line that is getting me is this one (POV of the junior/less powerful although still adult half of the duo):
"The power dynamic in this pseudo-Hellenic tableau was completely backwards, but that was Barrayaran classical scholarship for you."
What is "pseudo-Hellenic" about the scene is that the characters have been described in a position like this or this (pederastic vase paintings: NSFW). But as far as I can tell, the "power dynamic" in the story isn't backwards at all: the senior/pursuing/erastes partner is doing the touching and the junior/pursued/eromenos partner being touched. It seems like an odd slip from the author, who has plainly gone to some amount of research to set the scene up, and -- unless I am badly misreading her story -- must be aware that the power dynamics she has set up for her characters have "hellenic" parallels without any inversion. So a character mis-reading? It's very easy to give a Watsonian explanation and say that the POV character has a tendency to pedantry and a pretty high estimation of his own erudition. Having the reader catch him out in a misconception would be a nice bit of characterization.
To conclude, I should confess what might be obvious: classical reference in particular makes me sit up and pay attention, and I like to put my pedanticism on display about it. In principle, I think that fiction would do well (and does well?) to dramatize the casual misinformation and misconceptions that float around in the world. I just started to read Plutarch's unbelievably tedious quomodo adolescens audire poetas debeat (text in Greek, Latin title by convention), but I suspect that it should give me more things to think about re: mimesis and what to do with things that intentionally or not misrepresent reality.
What I mean is: real people have incorrect beliefs about things, sometimes from personal ignorance, sometimes from widespread misconception or trendy falsehood. I don't mean about existential questions, but about trivialities. The wrong date for something. An assumption about the nationality of some historical figure. A facile narrative about some scientific or sociological or historical topic. A misstatement about language or art. So when a character in a fiction errs and goes uncorrected, does the error signify an error of the writer, or does it serve to more richly characterize the character and her millieu as one in which such an incorrect belief is held? Does it matter? (The basic distinction here is Watsonian vs. Doyleist, I know.)
An example. I've been reading a large number of Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher mysteries, murder mysteries set in 1920's Melbourne. In one, an intruder rummages through the protagonist's library, and the is analyzing which books he has pulled down:
"Phryne looked at the titles. All in Latin: Plautus, Terence, Julius Caesar, Epictetus,and the maunderings of Marcus Aurelius."
Now we all know that Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius wrote in Greek. But it's likely that a Greek edition would have a title page and title in Latin, and even be bound with a Latin name stamped on the spine, and one could argue that this is the point. But it's also likely that someone (equally, perhaps, Greenwood as her heroine) would assume that a Roman emperor would have written in Latin and would be mislead by the Latinized form of Epictetus' name to think that he also was a Latin author. So it's unclear (and maybe unimportant) whether we are getting a clever point about the publication of Greek texts (with Latin apparatus), a subtle comment on Phryne's education (somewhat desultory when it comes to ancient literature), or a revelation that Kerry Greenwood couldn't be bothered to google Epictetus and find out that he was a Greek slave of a Hellenized Roman philosopher who lived and taught in the east and whose teachings were recorded in Greek by Arrian, another Romanized Greek. I say that the distinction is possibly unimportant, because when I am immersed in the world of the novel, the first two explanations are vastly more interesting, even if they are actually less likely to be true.
My second two examples come from the realm of fanfiction (no comments from the peanut gallery, please!).
The first, from the excellent recent story "Service" (has some references to events in Cordelia's Honor and Mirror Dance, some discussion (non-explicit) of rape), by Minutia_R.
The main character is meeting his father for the first time, and the father is trying to justify his participation in war-crimes (including the rape from which the main character was born):
"It was a long time ago. But I swear, I never knew about you. I never imagined—they were Galactic women, they had to have had contraceptive implants. They must have known what might happen."
Yegor was reminded of late-night study sessions with Dr. Beaumont and the Society. Note the use of the passive voice.
Now, there is no passive voice in the father's justification. There is, perhaps, avoidance of agency; there are complex (potentially obfuscating?) modal verb constructions. But there is no passive. On the other hand, As Language Log continues to document extensively, the term "passive voice" is frequently applied to language that seems to avoid admitting agency and blame in an underhand or self-serving way. So this is a not unexpected, if unfortunate, error for an author to make. But also -- and the fact that the protagonist is made to recall a teacher perhaps strengthens this reading -- a not unexpected mistaken belief about grammar that might have been inculcated into the young man who is the character. Perhaps Dr. Beaumont was excessively in love with his Vorstrunk and White. One could even go so far as to say that in the distant future of the Vorkosigan Saga the current trend of misidentifying "passive voice" has turned into an actual change in the significance of the phrase "passive voice." Maybe it has actually come to mean "obfuscating language that obscures responsibility for an action." (Sidenote: I don't know how to flag this situation/probable mistake to the author in a way that isn't condescending or obnoxious.)
The second is from the story "Research Protocol", by Tel (Allegre/Galeni with some explicit sexual stuff). The line that is getting me is this one (POV of the junior/less powerful although still adult half of the duo):
"The power dynamic in this pseudo-Hellenic tableau was completely backwards, but that was Barrayaran classical scholarship for you."
What is "pseudo-Hellenic" about the scene is that the characters have been described in a position like this or this (pederastic vase paintings: NSFW). But as far as I can tell, the "power dynamic" in the story isn't backwards at all: the senior/pursuing/erastes partner is doing the touching and the junior/pursued/eromenos partner being touched. It seems like an odd slip from the author, who has plainly gone to some amount of research to set the scene up, and -- unless I am badly misreading her story -- must be aware that the power dynamics she has set up for her characters have "hellenic" parallels without any inversion. So a character mis-reading? It's very easy to give a Watsonian explanation and say that the POV character has a tendency to pedantry and a pretty high estimation of his own erudition. Having the reader catch him out in a misconception would be a nice bit of characterization.
To conclude, I should confess what might be obvious: classical reference in particular makes me sit up and pay attention, and I like to put my pedanticism on display about it. In principle, I think that fiction would do well (and does well?) to dramatize the casual misinformation and misconceptions that float around in the world. I just started to read Plutarch's unbelievably tedious quomodo adolescens audire poetas debeat (text in Greek, Latin title by convention), but I suspect that it should give me more things to think about re: mimesis and what to do with things that intentionally or not misrepresent reality.
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no subject
Date: 2012-05-23 06:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-23 06:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-23 06:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-23 07:33 am (UTC)After I got the idea, I did some image searches for reference and noticed that the body language on most of the vases did not match my mental image of what Allegre was doing to Duv. So I did a bit more digging via my normal approach to issues I don't know much about, which was to do a keyword trawl through Google Books (often what I get is vaguely scholarly, quite often pages/chapters/etc. are missing - it's an interesting and somewhat random way to get a lot of different opinions on a topic very fast).
The more I read about the many ways men made themselves ridiculous in the ancient sport of competitive boy-chasing, the more what Allegre was doing (which is as much an explicit "I have you by the balls" assertion of dominance as anything) really didn't... match.
I ended up throwing that line in because it was mentioned Duv wrote a paper on Barrayaran homosexual mentoring in the last fic so he's probably considered parallels - anyway it amused me.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-24 04:41 pm (UTC)What you are also making me think about is this: that the other (an other?) major influence on this kind of relationship, with its completely explicit power asymmetry but also its baseline of mutual benefit and respect, has to be 20th- /21st-century BDSM and kink culture, especially as trope-ified in fandom (hence, I think, your warning at the top "not to take this too seriously"). [My knowledge here is very limited, but it's hard for me to think of other historical, explicitly asymmetrical sexual relationships that aren't exploitative and brutal by nature. Or is it that BDSM relationships finally make explicit and upfront the asymmetry historically present below the surface in many sexual relationships?] Again, there's an obvious extra-textual explanation, but I'd love to read the section of Duv's paper about it!
no subject
Date: 2012-05-25 07:11 pm (UTC)I was thinking a fair bit about secret societies too. And hazing/fagging etc.