Tag: Little Women

“True art is angsty & inaccessible”

Published on by Jaye1 Comment

I desperately wish I could fathom just where this idea originates.

It is a remarkably pervasive idea, and to such an extent that things that were popular and contain no angst will frequently receive interpreted doses of the latter to make literary scholars feel better about enjoying them.  And obscurity is, somehow, a hallmark of awesomeness and brilliance; though this one I think they feel no need to bother over much with — odds are even that those literary scholars have read more about Gilgamesh than of it.  They remind me of Star Wars fandom … enough I oft wonder if there’s significant overlap.

Why, though, must art be tragedy and sorrow?  Drama, angst, etc.?  Why can art not, too, be sunshine and kittens, laughter and love, romance and spiritual awakening?

Why cannot literary brilliance be measured, in part, by lasting popularity?  Why must The Hobbit and Harry Potter be “guilty pleasures”?

Why is the only fiction, supposedly, worth reading ‘literary fiction’ (a pretentious name for any genre or work, I feel)?  Why does a story need to answer any question more than ‘what happens next?!’ or ‘will they live happily ever after?’ and so on?  It’s not ‘will the hero survive?’ it’s ‘how will the hero get out of this mess?’  Why does this lack literary merit as opposed to twenty pages of someone’s thoughts who is standing in line at a post office (not making it up, don’t remember the title)?

I propose a new definition of art and brilliance.  Angst and obscurity be damned!

Any fool with crayons, a pack of construction paper, and enough spare time can write a truly depressing work read by all of twenty-five people — twenty-two of whom share a skull with the author and at least one of whom is a plush horse or a rubber plant.

I hold that art should be, first and foremost, something that you put something of yourself into — I’m not sure if this works for painting and sculpture or not, so we’ll refine that to literary art, just to be safe.  That ought to be art; so by that, our madman’s crayoned insanity is still art, but the novelist version of Sven Bianchi from Questionable Content does not make art and probably doesn’t claim to.  Second, the brilliance should be measured by if it speaks to people and degree of brilliance should be:  Does it do so over and over?  If it instils a passion once, it its brilliant — Twilight or Interview With a Vampire, are both art and, to some extent must be brilliant to have sparked such reactions and readerships from people.  The Hobbit and Little Women do it, though, through hundreds of repeat readings for uncounted readers.  People come back to Mr Baggins rushing out the door without hat nor handkerchief, and relive the (mis)adventures of Jo and her sisters.  They are masterpieces.

There is, and ever has been, too much literature to say popularity alone speaks of brilliance.  Always some really amazing work lurks, largely, undiscovered.  Game of Thrones is a fair example.  It languished in veritable obscurity for nearly a decade.  Black Trillium is, I feel, another fine example.  With a, sadly, increasing tendency, the strange dreams of young Alice is not read — but for those who take the notion, they come ever back again to Wonderland.  Still, popularity and its perpetuity is a fine test.  No one disputes that old Bill Shakespeare is a literary legend … well, not anyone who wasn’t alive when his plays were new.  The poems of Lady Sappho must have been phenomenal — they are all of them lost yet, still, she is not forgotten.

Why must we make things so blasted cerebral to feel good about them?  Fun and beautiful should not be so shameful.  Perhaps ‘the masses’ know better what is good and will stand the test of time better than the literary elitist.

Few are liable to agree with me who are ‘serious writers’, but such is life.  I’ll read my Princess of Mars, they’ll read Pride and Prejudice; I’ll read Wizard of Oz and they can read The Yellow Wallpaper … to each her own.  After all, there’s no accounting for taste.

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Sometimes it is, because it is.

Published on by Jaye1 Comment

When writing, sometimes a rose is a rose because it isn’t a geranium.

Recently I reblogged a commentary by Seanan McGuire about sometimes someone’s a character is gay because they’re gay. Honestly it’s true of so much of fiction.

In an edition of Little Women that’s put out by Barnes & Noble there’s a contemplation about the girls‘ generosity and selflessness that doesn’t once contemplate that the girls are … wait for it … simply good people! It even contemplates ‘their masochism‘ in giving up their Christmas breakfast to a starving family! They can afford to have a nicer dinner to make up for skipping breakfast, afford to spare this breakfast to one poorer even that they are and so elect, on Christmas, not to let a poor woman and her children go hungry and this is masochism?!

Besides the criticism I could make of such short sighted analysis, it makes a beautiful point – at times you need look no further than the words in front of your face to find the reasons for it. Call it masochism or call it charity the reason is before you: because that woman and her family was hungry, and the sisters were not – not in that context in any case. Why are they so pious? Is it competition with one another? Emulation of their mother? Well, perhaps somewhat the latter in the sense that she was a good Christian woman and taught the girls to be good Christian women themselves.

It’s behaviour, it’s race, sexuality, height, eye colour, hair colour, tastes in music, all of it comes down to basic characterisation. In Now & Forever, Lauren is a redhead. Simply because she has red hair. Salencia is half Italian because her father is born and bred in Naples. They story is unaffected by it, it just is. Or is there some impact on the story? A subtle one? I think so, actually. You get to know the characters a little. You now know just a bit more about them. This helps one understand them better. Identifying with the character shouldn’t have to mean that she is just like yourself, it should mean that the author has done a fair job of giving you proper insight into the characters’ motivations, thoughts, and feelings.

The biggest question, though, comes back to why? Why should there be some purpose or meaning behind these details? Why should Lauren’s eyes being green-hazel have any significance or symbolism? Why should the fact that one of Sally’s best friends in Colorado is a heavyset girl matter as more than a marker to show that she isn’t skinny? Is there some significance that Sarah is black, or that she’s a cheerleader? No. They are because they are. Lucy isn’t generic Native American to try to include any tribal groups of the United States, she’s Native American and generically so because she’s Lucy. Just as the March girls are pious and generous because they’re part of the March family.

Is there, at times, symbolism and purpose in fiction? Absolutely. Intentional and unintentional. I’m almost guaranteed to commit the latter a thousand times more often than the former, but in Pride and Predjudice you can’t go three words without hitting a deliberate symbol. Sometimes a character is something because they must be; Love or Lust and its sequels can hardly be a girl-meets-girl love story if one or both of them is a firm zero on the Kinsey Scale.

Personally I think one should avoid ‘there’s a reason …’ thinking beyond what simply must be. If you want to write a romance, you need to pick some characters who’re attracted to one another, but beyond that just let them be. If they wind up all Asian, all Agnostic goat herdsmen, or a group of magenta aliens from Ultharen, then so be it. It needn’t mean anything. This goes for readers and writers alike. See the story that’s before you, write the story that’s in your mind. We needn’t always over think the words and the works.

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