4th Street Fantasy Notes - Grinding Buttons and Pushing Axes

[marydell]

Grinding Buttons and Pushing Axes for Fun and Profit
(Messages in Literature)

• This is a partial, I had to leave the panel about 30 minutes into it.
• I'm not using any reasonable standard for last/first/abbreviated names, just going with what works for me. Apologies if anyone doesn't like being called whatever I'm using.
• "Audience" means someone in the audience whose name I don't know.
• Text not in quotes is me paraphrasing; text in quotes is exactly as I heard it.
• Text in brackets is me.

Panelists:
Elizabeth Bear - mod matociquala

Marissa Lingen mrissa

Alec Austin alecaustin

Sarah Monette truepenny

Emma Bull coffeeem

Favorite Quotes:
"The Last Battle, where Jesus ate his brain" - Marissa Lingen
"Great Expectations is Black Beauty with a pony" - Elizabeth Bear

Works & Authors Referenced:
Ayn Rand
1984
The Pilgrim's Progress
Narnia books, particularly The Last Battle
Black Beauty
Great Expectations

 

---------------------------------------ve--------------

Someone (Marissa, I think) makes the point that merely having a gay character, for example, doesn’t make it a message story.

Monette promises to repress supress her academic self “like a guinea pig.” [Possibly said something about squishing it] [ed: see comments for explanation. I believe "repress" was a hear-o; corrected.]

Monette:  Sometimes the writer has a message and the reader misses it completely.  That was my experience of reading Narnia.  The problem comes in when there is a message you cant miss. 

Alec asks about the gap between Ayn Rand and Narnia.

Bull:  All stories have messages.  You can’t help but have a message because “every story is informed by what the writer believes.” There is always a message underlying it.

Marissa:  Trying to scrub messages out of my stories made it so all my characters were women.  That way I could avoid making it seem to be about gender.

Bear: – “You man hater!”

Marissa:  You have to distinguish between Narnia books.  You've got The Last Battle, “which is where Jesus ate his brain” as compared to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader which didn't have the full-on Jesusyness. 

Monette and Bear both missed the allegory in The Last Battle, because one was raised by atheists and one by pagans.

Monette:  One of my professors once said that “the basic message of all literature is 'don’t be a jerk.'” 

Brust: “That’s clearly not the message of anything by Ayn Rand.”

Marissa: If you can say, "this book is about, fill in the blank" with only one message, that's a problem.

Bear: "Black Beauty is Great Expectations with a pony."

Brust: If you can summarize the point of the book in a single declarative sentence.

Audience: How do you distinguish between a message and a theme. 

Monette: “The theme is the thing it’s about and the message is the thing it wants you to learn.”

[Here commences a bit of an argument about terms but I lose the thread.]

Bear:  [apropos of something I didn't hear] 1984 provides an answer to the book's question, but it’s one you instinctively reject.

Audience:  “What better place for a message?” 

Brust:  “The better place for that is discursive prose, that’s what it’s for. An essay.”

Audience:  The problem with having a "message book" -- is it really a question of craft?  Ayn Rand doesn’t write well, that’s the problem.

Marissa:  If it’s got a single message then it’s not well-written.

Monette:  Didactic literature by its nature--you can see the gears and the clockwork is very loud. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, it’s just really loud. Pilgrim’s Progress & 1984, for example. That’s not the same thing as poor craft.

Bull:  An essay is stepping up and saying you have an argument. SF and fantasy gets past that reaction that people have by saying “trust me, you’re just going for a ride, there’s not going to be anything scary in here at all.”

[Someone else]: "Trust me, I'm a writer!"

Bull:  “If you take away the defensiveness and add good craft, you darn well better be using this as a force for good.”

Alec:  Good craft isn’t equally important to all readers.

Alec: You bring cultural expectations to a book.  If yours don’t match up with the author you may read it as a message.  Pilgrim’s Progress--everyone knows it’s trying to instruct. If you expect escapist entertainment and you pick up Starship Troopers and read Heinlein's essay on social responsibility you might be surprised.

Marissa:  We don’t have agreement on what Science Fiction is supposed to be and what the message is.  Some people think it’s supposed to teach children to value space exploration.

Monette:  “There is a school of thought that says literature is only valuable inasmuch as it is didactic."

Audience: “The literature of social engineering.”

[Panel continued but I had to bail at this point, alas]

 

Comments

[geekosaur]

Monette promises to repress her academic self “like a guinea pig.” [Possibly said something about squishing it]

Academic whack-a-mole?

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I think it's an Alice in Wonderland allusion: guinea-pigs in the courtroom scene being suppressed by putting into a bag and sat on (or something like that - don't have my copy to hand, but it sounds like Carroll to me).

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I googled it and here's the quote:

Here one of the guinea-pigs cheered, and was immediately suppressed by the officers of the court. (As that is rather a hard word, I will just explain to you how it was done. They had a large canvas bag, which tied up at the mouth with strings: into this they slipped the guinea-pig, head first, and then sat upon it.)

God, Carroll is brilliant.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

‘I’m glad I’ve seen that done,’ thought Alice. ‘I’ve so often read in the newspapers, at the end of trials, “There was some attempts at applause, which was immediately suppressed by the officers of the court,” and I never understood what it meant till now.’

Hee

[eposia.livejournal.com]

Ooh, having you post these now is calling up good 4th Street memories and motivation. Thank you!