![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
reenkawah. at the very end of reading `his dark materials', and i'm rather tired. tiiiiired. and it's funny because the more tired i get from the continuous reading, so that sparkles aren't shooting out of my eyes all the time, the more i read cautiously, not entirely so, but enough to notice the dents. there aren't enough to disturb me, of course, but there's almost enough to give me pause. mostly it's a sort of rueful amusement because sometimes i can just tell when the author's being more transparent and hurrying things along and things click into place because they -have- to. there's very much a sense of control about this sort of storytelling, and you just have to ride it, look past the mechanics and through to the spirit of the greater story.
i'm not used to things being so intricately plotted-- or maybe i've grown unused to it... but mostly, it's this sense that connections are made between people because they -have- to be made, because otherwise things won't move forward. not always, but sometimes that's particularly clear. that was my problem with hp, too. things were this way or that way because they -had- to be, in order for all these other things to happen. do human relationships actually work like that? can you look back on the "plot" of your life and see how of -course- you liked or disliked that person, and is there ever this sense of inevitability about it all?
i mean, yes, sometimes things just -are-, instinctual and immediate, but there isn't really a -reason-, no way to actually -explain- it, is there? that's what bothers me, the intricate linkage of explanations all clinking together. not clumsily like in fanfic, where one rails against telling-not-showing, not clumsily at all. less like a writing defect and more like a way of understanding the world as a series of chain-linked connections. it's like in those old anthropology books, i imagine, where they outlined the way to behave among "those people" in order to get "those results", as if people are in some sense predictable and you could kind of play them like a game of chess.
of course, the whole series is a game of chess in more ways than one-- and this doesn't make a bad story at all, in fact plenty of stories (lewis carroll being most obvious) depend on a rigid architecture, all the components in their exact place, playing their exact role. maybe this is what "plotting" is all about, i don't know. but it's been a long few days, and my head hurts, and i could use some chaos right now, i guess. not all stories are like this, but a lot are, i know that-- a lot of the best, even. everything in its place, a ballet of movements all building towards a cascading sets of results that eventually combine to inevitably come together in some sort of finale. without ophelia there would be no hamlet, that sort of thing. funny because in this case, this is a struggle against destiny, in a way, and it's brought about by this intricate set of necessary coindidences. i mean, the very concept hurts my mind, kind of. necessary coincidences.
and by the end, i am holding all this in my head, and the weight of all these inevitable coincidences is mighty indeed. there was some conversation at the beginning of the book about destiny-- and someone questioned the idea of it. it's hard to separate the reality of how everything happens from the eventual goal. you can't really escape destiny if your destiny is to escape it, can you. and if you -have- to make certain connections, and everything kind of depends of this connection being made at this exact time, and you can't make it at any other time, and you -have- to do this-or-that now and not later in order for a 100 other things to be able to happen and link together-- that's just kind of disturbing, isn't it?
in my own stories, things kind of amble along and maybe they happen and maybe they don't. obviously, my plotting is never very rigid, and there's room for error and doubling back and restructuring at virtually any point. if i wanted, i could rewrite any story with a different ending, though truthfully i usually feel the one i write makes the most sense, all things considered. but it's an organic sort of thing. the result grows out of the conditions i create as i write, in a continuous process of what might be thought of as evolution, rather than the conditions being necessary for the result. the result, in other words, is an emergent property, not a destiny that has to be fulfilled.
naturally, this is hard to make happen regardless, if you're talking about a book about a prophecy. i wrote a story like that once-- i was rewriting genesis using the given of adam being a fallen angel in love lucifer (the serpent). the same result had to occur-- the story had to end with adam being with eve, lucifer leaving heaven for good, humanity fallen, etc. my story was a small one, with only two players, basically, so it was easy to kind of let it tell itself. i mean, there was the basic given of "adam loves lucifer", and yes, i kind of explained it, but the character of adam kind of grew -out- of him loving lucifer, so it was all tangled together. so yes, their actions and responses defined their character and there was a definite emergent inevitability there (besides the inevitability of the Fall hanging over me). they were doomed, but meanwhile, they could feel and do whatever they felt like. i mean, in my mind there are a 100 different ways to get adam to fall, and as long as that happens, he could take his sweet time, basically.
and it's funny that in a story so dependent on the quantum many-worlds theory, there is this sense of minute necessity that spreads beyond event and to emotion itself. sure, any event can have any number of near-infinite results, but there is a definite sense that the story only follows the right result in order for the final movement to occur. and i haven't finished yet so i don't know the whole structure, but in some basic way, my mind rebels.
it gets mentioned more than once that lyra has a vital function, and the the fate of all the worlds hangs in the equation. and almost all the variants in this equation besides lyra are aware of their own function, and ready to go to any lengths to fulfill it. they even say it: well, if my function is fulfilled (and lyra is thus alive-- or conversely, dead), what else is there? what else is important? and yet, there's this dual message that life itself, everything to do with the 5 senses, breathing and feeling and -being-, that's the most important and true function one can fulfill. and it's like, everyone's accepting these chains of prophecy (or plot) in order for humanity itself to no longer have a story.
because in a way, as long as there is a predictable structure, a goal, there is a story, right. but if everyone is just existing and being happy fulfilling the function of existing kind of organically-- like the mulefa-- they would have no story. the mulefa remember everything, they say, up till the very beginning, and yet they can't -change-, they can't resist, really, they're not really people you could make story heroes out of.
heroism is one thing-- bravery, all that-- but being a hero or heroine in a story is something else. for that you need a purpose-- a destiny. something about you has to be predictable and trackable and dependable even in the changing, because the changing follows an arc, a function. this or that about you has to change, in fact, for the story to continue. this makes me think of metatron, and his inability to understand mrs. coulter even though he could see right through her. well, the problem is that he wasn't a writer, i guess. because he was only slicing her, seeing her atemporally in a sort of unchanging static state of being, as if there's some 'truth' about us that we arrive to. but there is no such truth. or rather, the truth of human beings is in the arc of movement, the angles and curves of it as much as any point on the line. because he couldn't see her as a wave and only as a particle, he couldn't see her.
anyway, now i'm completely off my initial irritable point and i'm sure i've lost the attention of everyone but myself (and that too is debatable). i can't be sure if the irritating inevitability of everything is intentional or not-- that is the nature of inevitability, almost. one -wants- to doubt it, because if one does there is hope, somehow. one hopes that even stories about destiny can escape it if they wanted to. maybe. and yet in a way, maybe no story escapes its destiny, and only deceives the reader into thinking that because it uses curves too complex to follow, i don't know. because after all, otherwise one supposes a story would become incomprehensible. obviously, things have to make sense and one thing tends to follow another in some sort of sensible pattern, if people are to understand it.
maybe that's why people have so many theories about the hp books, and yet i'm sure that in the end, what happens will be painfully inevitable and obvious. jkr writes with the same extreme inevitability woven into everything. sometimes (often) it drives me batty, but sometimes it makes me smile because there's just no freaking way anything else but X will happen, and to some extent we're all deceiving ourselves, trying to make the story more malleable than it is, in our imaginations. that was exactly the sense i got, reading the fifth book. i felt pleasure because i could see how inevitably it's moving forward-- though in `his dark materials', the pleasure of this is muted by the fact that it's not a rebellion against the mutability of fanfic, and there's only the sense of everything being a function of everything else, the inevitability of life and death and even a glance of understanding between two people. kind of depressing. but true in stories, at least.
i guess in this story about the end of god and destiny and all that, there's a sense that only authorial intent really matters. there -is- a god here, and he can be felt in every word, every step of the way, every emotion flying like an arrow to some target. mind you, i love this story to pieces (because it means to make snse, and it succeeds admirably), and i grew to love the hp books too (strange as -that- is, believe me). sometimes, in spite of everything, i wish things made a little bit less rigid sense, and then maybe... maybe... i don't know, see. but maybe, then. maybe draco could live again, or something.
i'm not used to things being so intricately plotted-- or maybe i've grown unused to it... but mostly, it's this sense that connections are made between people because they -have- to be made, because otherwise things won't move forward. not always, but sometimes that's particularly clear. that was my problem with hp, too. things were this way or that way because they -had- to be, in order for all these other things to happen. do human relationships actually work like that? can you look back on the "plot" of your life and see how of -course- you liked or disliked that person, and is there ever this sense of inevitability about it all?
i mean, yes, sometimes things just -are-, instinctual and immediate, but there isn't really a -reason-, no way to actually -explain- it, is there? that's what bothers me, the intricate linkage of explanations all clinking together. not clumsily like in fanfic, where one rails against telling-not-showing, not clumsily at all. less like a writing defect and more like a way of understanding the world as a series of chain-linked connections. it's like in those old anthropology books, i imagine, where they outlined the way to behave among "those people" in order to get "those results", as if people are in some sense predictable and you could kind of play them like a game of chess.
of course, the whole series is a game of chess in more ways than one-- and this doesn't make a bad story at all, in fact plenty of stories (lewis carroll being most obvious) depend on a rigid architecture, all the components in their exact place, playing their exact role. maybe this is what "plotting" is all about, i don't know. but it's been a long few days, and my head hurts, and i could use some chaos right now, i guess. not all stories are like this, but a lot are, i know that-- a lot of the best, even. everything in its place, a ballet of movements all building towards a cascading sets of results that eventually combine to inevitably come together in some sort of finale. without ophelia there would be no hamlet, that sort of thing. funny because in this case, this is a struggle against destiny, in a way, and it's brought about by this intricate set of necessary coindidences. i mean, the very concept hurts my mind, kind of. necessary coincidences.
and by the end, i am holding all this in my head, and the weight of all these inevitable coincidences is mighty indeed. there was some conversation at the beginning of the book about destiny-- and someone questioned the idea of it. it's hard to separate the reality of how everything happens from the eventual goal. you can't really escape destiny if your destiny is to escape it, can you. and if you -have- to make certain connections, and everything kind of depends of this connection being made at this exact time, and you can't make it at any other time, and you -have- to do this-or-that now and not later in order for a 100 other things to be able to happen and link together-- that's just kind of disturbing, isn't it?
in my own stories, things kind of amble along and maybe they happen and maybe they don't. obviously, my plotting is never very rigid, and there's room for error and doubling back and restructuring at virtually any point. if i wanted, i could rewrite any story with a different ending, though truthfully i usually feel the one i write makes the most sense, all things considered. but it's an organic sort of thing. the result grows out of the conditions i create as i write, in a continuous process of what might be thought of as evolution, rather than the conditions being necessary for the result. the result, in other words, is an emergent property, not a destiny that has to be fulfilled.
naturally, this is hard to make happen regardless, if you're talking about a book about a prophecy. i wrote a story like that once-- i was rewriting genesis using the given of adam being a fallen angel in love lucifer (the serpent). the same result had to occur-- the story had to end with adam being with eve, lucifer leaving heaven for good, humanity fallen, etc. my story was a small one, with only two players, basically, so it was easy to kind of let it tell itself. i mean, there was the basic given of "adam loves lucifer", and yes, i kind of explained it, but the character of adam kind of grew -out- of him loving lucifer, so it was all tangled together. so yes, their actions and responses defined their character and there was a definite emergent inevitability there (besides the inevitability of the Fall hanging over me). they were doomed, but meanwhile, they could feel and do whatever they felt like. i mean, in my mind there are a 100 different ways to get adam to fall, and as long as that happens, he could take his sweet time, basically.
and it's funny that in a story so dependent on the quantum many-worlds theory, there is this sense of minute necessity that spreads beyond event and to emotion itself. sure, any event can have any number of near-infinite results, but there is a definite sense that the story only follows the right result in order for the final movement to occur. and i haven't finished yet so i don't know the whole structure, but in some basic way, my mind rebels.
it gets mentioned more than once that lyra has a vital function, and the the fate of all the worlds hangs in the equation. and almost all the variants in this equation besides lyra are aware of their own function, and ready to go to any lengths to fulfill it. they even say it: well, if my function is fulfilled (and lyra is thus alive-- or conversely, dead), what else is there? what else is important? and yet, there's this dual message that life itself, everything to do with the 5 senses, breathing and feeling and -being-, that's the most important and true function one can fulfill. and it's like, everyone's accepting these chains of prophecy (or plot) in order for humanity itself to no longer have a story.
because in a way, as long as there is a predictable structure, a goal, there is a story, right. but if everyone is just existing and being happy fulfilling the function of existing kind of organically-- like the mulefa-- they would have no story. the mulefa remember everything, they say, up till the very beginning, and yet they can't -change-, they can't resist, really, they're not really people you could make story heroes out of.
heroism is one thing-- bravery, all that-- but being a hero or heroine in a story is something else. for that you need a purpose-- a destiny. something about you has to be predictable and trackable and dependable even in the changing, because the changing follows an arc, a function. this or that about you has to change, in fact, for the story to continue. this makes me think of metatron, and his inability to understand mrs. coulter even though he could see right through her. well, the problem is that he wasn't a writer, i guess. because he was only slicing her, seeing her atemporally in a sort of unchanging static state of being, as if there's some 'truth' about us that we arrive to. but there is no such truth. or rather, the truth of human beings is in the arc of movement, the angles and curves of it as much as any point on the line. because he couldn't see her as a wave and only as a particle, he couldn't see her.
anyway, now i'm completely off my initial irritable point and i'm sure i've lost the attention of everyone but myself (and that too is debatable). i can't be sure if the irritating inevitability of everything is intentional or not-- that is the nature of inevitability, almost. one -wants- to doubt it, because if one does there is hope, somehow. one hopes that even stories about destiny can escape it if they wanted to. maybe. and yet in a way, maybe no story escapes its destiny, and only deceives the reader into thinking that because it uses curves too complex to follow, i don't know. because after all, otherwise one supposes a story would become incomprehensible. obviously, things have to make sense and one thing tends to follow another in some sort of sensible pattern, if people are to understand it.
maybe that's why people have so many theories about the hp books, and yet i'm sure that in the end, what happens will be painfully inevitable and obvious. jkr writes with the same extreme inevitability woven into everything. sometimes (often) it drives me batty, but sometimes it makes me smile because there's just no freaking way anything else but X will happen, and to some extent we're all deceiving ourselves, trying to make the story more malleable than it is, in our imaginations. that was exactly the sense i got, reading the fifth book. i felt pleasure because i could see how inevitably it's moving forward-- though in `his dark materials', the pleasure of this is muted by the fact that it's not a rebellion against the mutability of fanfic, and there's only the sense of everything being a function of everything else, the inevitability of life and death and even a glance of understanding between two people. kind of depressing. but true in stories, at least.
i guess in this story about the end of god and destiny and all that, there's a sense that only authorial intent really matters. there -is- a god here, and he can be felt in every word, every step of the way, every emotion flying like an arrow to some target. mind you, i love this story to pieces (because it means to make snse, and it succeeds admirably), and i grew to love the hp books too (strange as -that- is, believe me). sometimes, in spite of everything, i wish things made a little bit less rigid sense, and then maybe... maybe... i don't know, see. but maybe, then. maybe draco could live again, or something.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-07-15 02:06 pm (UTC)And I think just the opposite: No, there's no need for any plan. If Bilbo hadn't found the ring a different story would have happened. It only seems inevitable and planned in retrospect because of course in order for us to get where we are now, X must have happened then. If somebody else had had the ring THAT would have been the Divine Plan. We can't imagine anything else. Really, though, life is absurd! I'm a big fan of chaos, myself, but it's a surprisingly unpopular thing.
But other stories, as you said, are obviously plotted that way so that it's obvious something had to be so. Like in Star Wars when Vader tells Luke he's his father you have to say, "Ah, of COURSE he is. Has to be." But there it doesn't feel like a contrivance or fate so much as reflecting some basic truth about life. Like, the father figure must go from a mysterious, benevolent figure to the hated enemy. It's inevitable but also natural to me. That, to me, didn't feel like a plot point but a character one.
I've been thinking about making a post about a sort of related topic, in fact. One on comparing the "ordinary" (non-fated) hero and the "extraordinary" one. I had been thinking about how we need both, but if I have to lean one way or the other I lean towards the "ordinary" one, one who wasn't born to any particular task. But then...part of becoming a hero means recognizing what needs to be done and doing it and once you do that you have your task. Frodo, imo, was not born under any special star, but who he was made him the hobbit Bilbo would leave his ring to, and also the only hobbit who could get it to Mount Doom. So in that sense the task falls to him and, as people keep telling him, he's fated to do it, but for me there's never one second that he's not driving himself on without any feeling of destiny being laid on him. All he knows about fate is that it's unknown. He's decided he needs to do this thing without feeling, imo, that he was destined to do it.
I wonder if this is maybe another reason I lean toward Draco in HP. Part of what seems so ironic about him is that in many ways he could be fated for some kind of greatness (fanon often makes him so) but he obviously isn't. He's the son of the man who appears to be the main bad guy under Voldemort. He's the first kid Harry meets. He's blonde where Harry is brunette. He's the opposing Seeker. He's the head of Slytherin. He's been brought up to believe in V's ideas. Yet over and over his universe tells him he's nobody, totally unimportant, an also-ran. He's not the Heir of Slytherin. He's not in the inner DE circle. He's not a Parseltongue. He hasn't a clue how to avenge his father against Harry. He doesn't appear to have any great talent for the Dark Arts as Harry has for DADA. Everything he is in the series is due to sheer force of will, a refusal to be ignored. While other characters are drawn into the story apparently by fate (Hermione the best witch who also luckily fought a troll with Harry and Ron and is muggleborn; Ron the perfect sidekick with a family in the Order; Neville born the exact same day as Harry etc.) Draco must keep hurling himself against the plot to make trouble. He's yet to find the thing that makes him special in himself, but then isn't that what a lot of adolescence is really about? He's the ordinary kid here and that makes him...extraordinary!
no subject
Date: 2003-07-15 05:57 pm (UTC)erm.
i was particularly excited by that duality you brought up, of the fated and non-fated hero. i haven't thought of it that way, and it quite invigorates me to. in `his dark materials', i swear, every single character(!!) is a fated character. no, really. it's mind-boggling. you should read it >:D<
but anyway. yah. well, i mean, draco is fated to be what he is, too, because he's needed to be that way, you know? like the muggles are needed to be non-special so that the wizards can be special, or something. i mean, you need constrast, in hp. at least, everything's built on it. in hdm, not so much with the contrast-- he seems to contrast different things anyway (passion and curiosity vs. control and blind faith). maybe this different contrast makes for different sorts of characters. but see, draco's leeched of the best characteristics that make the heroes special-- in this case, honesty and nerve and generosity and a moral center. in hdm, a moral center isn't important, and both the heroes and the villains have nerve (or daring or what have you), and it's all about how you use it. but jkr refuses to give her villains the same advantages she gives her heroes, so even though both series go on about the importance of choice over being, i think jkr kind of makes full choice almost impossible under the weight of this inherent lack of character.
i think also that this is related to shades of gray in the bad guys-- which hdm has-- in fact, it has a major character who switches sides completely and grows within the course of the books, remaining dark but with a source of light (or love) that kind of redeems her. i feel semi-sure that this shady character is snape-- she allows him darkness and light without the sense that one has to -triumph- over the other in the end, like you get with harry. in hdm, it's not that mrs. coulter's "light" triumphs, it's more that the force of light within her is enough to make her act in a certain way. i mean, she is who she is but she does what she does. which is probably what jkr means with snape, but without giving snape an obvious source for the light ( like mrs. coulter and her love of the main character, her daughter), he's a weaker example of his type, imo. with draco, of course, there's nothing to triumph-- he's just kind of... not really there. i mean, if he -was- there, there'd be something to say about him, but... if you remain within authorial intent (which i may do too much, i don't know), you get this sense that draco's part of the scenery more than an independent being.
of course, even in a deeper work like hdm, there's not really a sense of the characters being independent-- if anything, because they always make the Right Choice, the choice that will bring the ultimate reward, etc. i mean, someone says that they should let the main character, lyra, make mistakes, but she doesn't make any mistakes, really, and neither does the hero. and the reason i too like non-fated heroes slightly more is because they -can- make mistakes, they're independent, not a -function- of anything but their own character.
and i like what you said about anakin's being luke's father being a function of character rather than fate (though i think it's both, i guess, on different levels). in real life, i think the closest thing we have to fate is dually a function of character & events and coincidences conspiring, but character moreso. a "natural" feeling story would feel like it grew out of the nature of its characters, and would feel non-fated, subtle. i think there's a quote that says, "character is destiny", but i can live with that. retelling `paradise lost' is a more artificial destiny, and it puts one's characters into too tight of boxes, i feel, in order to make a theoretical point, an allegory.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-15 05:58 pm (UTC)so it's not that he's ordinary, it's that he's not really -alive-. sigh. and being -alive- is closer to being ordinary than extraordinary, so of course we want characters we love to be alive, to have choices that aren't bound by some inevitable clause, even if that close makes a good story. we want them to grow up and be happy and discover themselves, and who cares about voldemort and what must be done to save the world, really, you know? i dunno. *grins* but i do so love how it all comes back to draco, in the end >:D<
no subject
Date: 2003-07-16 07:02 pm (UTC)It's so interesting about Snape not having an obvious source for light because really he's the character who should have the firmest moral standing of all because he learned he was wrong. He had to reject what he previously thought was true and accept responsibility for causing evil in the world. None of the good guys have gone through this and it should give Snape more understanding into the Dark Side than they have. In fact he does seem to have that understanding, we just never see him using it to good advantage (like by turning the Slytherins away from Voldemort).
Yet we don't know why he did what he did. We don't know what keeps him so firmly committed to the good side (so far) despite getting very little reward for it. I guess that's why Snape seems like such an independent character to me. He clearly seems to know why he does what he does in ways that other characters don't because they were just born into their role. He's got his reasons, whatever they are. I truly truly hope we never find out something is controlling him or that there's anything keeping where he is but his own desire and plans.
I guess that's also why I can't help but give Draco a character when the author doesn't. You're absolutely right about him being more scenery than a character--I always think of him as "sleeping in the prop closet."
The other day I mentioned something about HP to my roommate and she knows I love Draco and she (who knows me very well) said, "I know what you're doing. I can see it. You see so clearly what this character SHOULD BE. It's so clear to you you can't help but talk about it. But then you have to keep stopping and reminding yourself that how he should be isn't how he is."
She's seen me get myself into many a tizzy over things like this (she's never forgot the "Grease 2" incident) and she was so trying to do an intervention before I ended up really upset. I'm just so sad.:-) The problem isn't that I wish he was written another way--for instance, I don't want him to become a different character, just, like you said, to be alive. To be a real boy who has a life beyond Potter. And really, there's plenty in canon to suggest it. This kid had 11 years before he met Potter. He interacts with a whole cast of characters in the school we barely know who have nothing to do with Harry. Nobody's bad all the time, yet as far as we know Draco never does anything even vaguely pleasant (the closest we get is his respectful addressing of Snape in his office, I guess). Even his bad decisions don't seem to come out of anything consistent or any desire of his own. He wants to stop Harry, but doesn't yet seem to want anything for himself. This is rather hard to understand in a kid who puts such effort into just those secondary goals. It's like he's screaming to be a character and some readers are hearing him and trying to rescue him, but his author is determined to keep driving stakes into his heart!