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October 21st, 2008
![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) twistedchick | 11:53 am
Finally, someone who says what I've been thinking for a long, long time. Rolanni said it about the encroachment of academia upon science fiction; if you remove the SF references and put in media fandom ones, you start to have a sense of my views.
I think the situation is actually worse for non-academics in fandom than it is in science fiction. I have yet to hear of anyone who reads or writes science fiction being told they're not smart enough to understand the discussion of their own work -- but it has happened to me, and to several other people I know, more than once, with the stories we wrote in media fandom. Fandom is supposed to be large enough to make room for everyone, but as time goes on I see people who don't have lit docs and don't give a damn about postmodern crit being edged out and shoved around by those who do. In some fandoms there's very little room for anyone who is interested in writing, as opposed to self-serving critique -- it's not the sort of feedback that helps an author, but an elitist head game played by people who often don't give a damn about either the person or the writing, just about the game. IMO, but that's what I've seen and experienced, in pretty much every major fandom I've encountered in more than a decade. The one place where this hasn't happened yet (so far as I know) is Yuletide, where there are a myriad of small fandoms and (so far, thank God) nobody has started ritually deconstructing the stories and staking them out on postmodernist anthills.
I say that I'm not a postmodernist, I'm a modernist, but that's not quite true; what I'm not is a deconstructionist. I have never liked dissections and vivisections. Hand me an old wind-up clock and I'll take it apart and fix it, but not anything that's alive or has ever been alive -- and any story that's worth its salt is alive. I almost said 'worth its metaphors and mythology', and that's true also. When something's alive, I look at how all its parts are connected -- which foot goes down in what order when it's running -- but I don't pull the feet or wings off and see how they'd do as stomachs or ears. I try hard not to take things out of context because the context matters. The author matters. The story matters in its context, the characters at this particular time and this situation, informed by the events of the world in which they take place and sometimes by the events of this world, large and small. And it matters that this person wrote this story at this time and place in the turning world. Ignoring the context isn't just inaccurate, it's dishonest.
I'm a synthesist*; I put things together; I spent most of my working life putting facts together, piecing the puzzle together to see what it shows in a larger sense. I spent years going to town and village board meetings, school board meetings, zoning board meetings, listening to people talk about what concerned them, finding out the background that created that concern, the reasons for it, the situation around it, and what would happen because of it and what results would be created. Nonfiction or not, it was storytelling. I would be willing to dare anyone to cover a four-hour sewer adminsitration board meeting, sit through the whole thing, just to see what stories they'd come out with. I inevitably found half a dozen or so, though I usually got to write up one or two and hint at the others because that was the same night as City Council, and smaller stuff got bumped for the next day (smaller in comparison to City Council, not necessarily smaller in any other way.) Every one of those stories was part of a longer, continuing saga of construction, renovation, maintenance, even of international affairs -- such as when the valves and precision instruments for a pump station have to be reordered from Israel because the Egyptian military shot down the plane carrying the last ones. People would go to the sewer board to ask that the digging be put on this side or that side of the property, to preserve specific trees that they didn't want harmed -- because those trees mattered to them, trees their families planted to honor someone's birth or death or marriage.
And then there was the school board that was considering banning 743 books from the school library, in a town that didn't have a public library, because one woman on the board didn't like the questions her daughter asked her about sexuality after she was reading a few of them. Her embarrassment about having to talk about homosexuality or pregnancy or sex at all made her go through a huge stack of books with a magic marker and black out the words she disliked, without regard to context. She ranted at me about Catcher in the Rye, and how there were four-letter words in it -- and I mentioned that Holden Caulfield, the book's narrator, had seen the words and was trying to erase them or paint them over so his little sister wouldn't see them -- and she just blinked at me. Reading stories wasn't part of her context; she was only concerned with censoring 'bad words'. You don't want to know what Slaughterhouse Five looked like when she was done with it, or Catch-22, or M*A*S*H, or Native Son, or Another Country -- all books that I read in high school, in my own high school library that was blessedly free of ideologues of that sort. (There were, and are, other sorts of ideologues there, but that's for another time.)
Like those trees, stories are rooted in context. They make no sense without it. I am still putting things together, patchwork bits of national and world events in newsblogs, piecing one view with another and looking for the larger picture behind them, not just the problem with vote counts but the rigged machines and the political machinery that's pulling the strings on all of it.
Sounds like small town stuff? Yeah. So's most of fanfic, regardless of fandom -- stories that concern a handful of characters dealing with things that involve them intimately, not a remote city of characters. (Yes, I know, there are whole archives of stories out there with characters whose cardboard is so thin it wouldn't make a recipe card. I wrote a few of them, more than a decade ago. That's not the point.) It's all small town. I like my small towns in one piece, healthy and happy, not looking like Hobbiton in the time of the Sheriffs. I like my stories -- in whatever format, however they are written -- to continue to live, like those trees, without being dissected for someone's public amusement. I'm not interested in playing self-serving head games with the work that someone put hours and weeks into writing. I'm interested in reading stories about characters who are alive, whether they're realistic or fantastic or just plain absurd (girl scout cookies? penguins? talking whales? shamans and ghosts? cloned and recloned and rejuvenated and reanimated and resurrected and still kicking ass because, hey, not dead yet? And still the prettiest?)
See, when you take all the living bits of a story apart, out of context, skin them and stake them out and dance around them while they're drying, what you've got is something that you've killed, and it's dead. It might make stew, but it's not a story any more. You haven't 'controlled the narrative', you've slaughtered it, and it's attracting flies and smelling pretty bad. You can say you've got Einstein's brain, in a jar on the shelf, and you can measure it and figure out what shade of pinkish-gray it is this week, but it's not a living mind any more, is it?
It's even worse when this no-context-allowed approach is carried over to discussions of other issues -- that's when you end up with assumption on assumption, sand on sand and not a rock in sight. That's the kind of inadequate worldbuilding that results in stuff like the Wall Street meltdown of this last month. (No, I'm not being extreme; I studied economics in grad school, and as far as I'm concerned the 'economic assumptions' underlying the way economists have been making decisions are far more science fiction than anything Heinlein or Clarke ever wrote. Both Heinlein and Clarke were masters of context; the economists ignored anything that didn't fit their particular ideology. And look where those assumptions have gotten us in the last month.)
I wouldn't mind so much, I think, if anyone had ever offered to *add* to the context of a story by talking about the mythology that it fits into, the archetypes, the way that Daniel Jackson's continual return from the dead relates to the death and rebirth of the Corn King or the emperor's dream of the butterfly, or how Jim Ellison's life as a Sentinel may relate to the stories of Heracles. But I'd rather read stories in which the author had thought about these things and had let that richness brew in the dark side of the brain while writing, so that reading becomes a deeper experience of the character's personality and actions in that world. I'm seeing more stories like this online now, in a very few places, and they are wonderful.
Every once in a while, someone asks me why I'm not writing fiction any more. There are a lot of reasons for that, some of them online and some offline, but what I've written above is one of the larger ones. Except for small snippets here and there in small-but-lively fandoms, I don't feel the urge to put stories out there any more. If it's not fun, why do it?
*I had always seen it spelled the way it was, synthetist, but there is apparently another spelling: synthesist. I'm not sure if the difference is one of those US/CA/UK changes or if the back of my mind hears it differently than the front. Whatever. Same idea. Puts things together instead of taking them apart.
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