(a question without an answer)
Mar. 7th, 2007 05:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
reenkaSo um, sometimes I'm bored and I read Salon.com (har har), and there's an interesting article right now about Milan Kundera's lit-crit book, here. Apparently, Kundera says something to the effect of all 'true' literature needing to offer some insight into the nature of existence, and it needs to do this through formalism or meta-commentary of some sort rather than a mimetic representation of life. I sort of laugh and at the same time feel bad, 'cause I know where he's coming from, emotionally speaking; it's not so long ago that I thought Harry/Draco fics should answer or at least pose deep questions about the pairing or they're worthless :P
And I agree with the author of the review in that these 'theories' in a writer really say more about -them- and what inspires them than the literature they're supposedly critiquing. I mean, criticism is inherently about the work itself rather than the critic's issues, isn't it? You shouldn't bring too many expectations/outside influences to your analysis, or it'll automatically be skewed and most likely didactic (so annoying). Which is a lot of the problem I have with some HP meta I've seen... but yeah. -.-;;;
The reason I mention all this is that there's a quote by Roland Barthes included in the article (whose 'Lover's Discourse' is awesome): "Literature is a question without an answer."
I was just thinking that this applies to romance stories in an interesting way, doesn't it; especially 'genre' romance relies so much on answering questions.
And umm, this is partly why I enjoy slash so much (I think it can ask more questions by nature than your average boy-meets-girl stuff, like 'why did they wake up gay?' for instance), and partly why I enjoyed the idea of H/D. Yeah, I was gonna bring all this back to H/D, how sad is -that-? But that's what the quote made me think of; how I used to believe H/D had this unique potential to ask hard questions about the characters and even love itself and leave us with no easy answers. (Of course... umm... one's ambitions outgrow one's britches....) In that sense, my ideal of H/D kind of 'justified' my obsession with romance tropes and redeemed my own love to myself; in theory, it brought the two ends that drive writing together: the fulfillment of desire and the unfulfilled-by-definition dream.
Speaking of Kundera's aesthetic, the writer of the article (Gary Kamiya) writes:
It is the unpleasant truths of history that made him a connoisseur of antinomies, incompatible truths, jarring tones, harsh and inappropriate modulations.
And yeah. YEAH. That's exactly what I'd been looking for with H/D; that almost post-modern reveling in the jarring, harsh and near-painful, seemingly 'incompatible truths' that the pairing can conjure. I felt ecstatic just thinking about the sheer mental dissonance I could see produced by having them together; it is both ironic and inevitable that almost anyone that ever wrote H/D wrote it in a sort of automatic visceral rejection of this dissonance, pushing the pairing much much farther towards the ultimate romance cliche than more 'realistic' pairing (like S/R) writers had done. I think people felt the jarring tones and saw them as something not even to overcome-- rather, as something to smother in their sleep with extreme prejudice. But. I imagine most people don't read fic for their OTP to be made uncomfortable about existence itself. Do they. :P
To borrow another term from Mr Kamiya, instead of wanting to 'interrogate' history like Kundera, I wanted to 'interrogate' rather than just read or write H/D; I wanted not so much to deconstruct (too meta) but to purely question without answering, to rip their guts open and see what spilled out. No mercy. I wanted both of them to be transformed and redeemed and eventually grown up, but especially Draco (...and then HBP came along and I was like '....snap, she got there first' :/ hahaha). This is basically a reaction against my own tendency to seek comfort in what I read and my love of happy endings; I've always been fighting mostly myself.
And yeah, I speak in the past sense because I'm pretty much over that idealism :P I still think romance is both the worst and the best genre to use to achieve that purity of open-ended questioning united with the ancient satisfaction of desire fulfilled (eucatastrophe). I just think that, uh... it's silly to be so uptight about fanfic. Or original fic, for that matter (...except when it really really sucks... which it often does, granted). Le sigh. Ah, youthful dreams.
But actually, it's Barthes' quote that also encapsulates why I became so drawn to mimetic 'realism' in fanfic especially lately; coming from initial attraction to fantasy/metaphor-heavy stories, I realized that the closer to 'unfiltered truth' you portray people's behavior, the more naturally open-ended and deeply relevant it can become. Conversely, the more you saturate it with meta, the more you run the risk of answering questions before you ask them. So yeah, that's why I became a canon-whore of sorts. ^^;; I'm not sure if that's somehow 'better' than being a stylistic demanding elitist in Mr Kundera's tradition, BUT WHATCHA GONNA DO, right :P
~~
In other, more Zodiac-related news: Robert Downey Jr still super hot even as a drunk bum. Well, he was my teenage crush, what do you want. :/ Jake Gyllenhaal surprisingly much MUCH hotter as a dork. SO MUCH HOTTER. *_____* Like 0 to 60. D:
And I agree with the author of the review in that these 'theories' in a writer really say more about -them- and what inspires them than the literature they're supposedly critiquing. I mean, criticism is inherently about the work itself rather than the critic's issues, isn't it? You shouldn't bring too many expectations/outside influences to your analysis, or it'll automatically be skewed and most likely didactic (so annoying). Which is a lot of the problem I have with some HP meta I've seen... but yeah. -.-;;;
The reason I mention all this is that there's a quote by Roland Barthes included in the article (whose 'Lover's Discourse' is awesome): "Literature is a question without an answer."
I was just thinking that this applies to romance stories in an interesting way, doesn't it; especially 'genre' romance relies so much on answering questions.
And umm, this is partly why I enjoy slash so much (I think it can ask more questions by nature than your average boy-meets-girl stuff, like 'why did they wake up gay?' for instance), and partly why I enjoyed the idea of H/D. Yeah, I was gonna bring all this back to H/D, how sad is -that-? But that's what the quote made me think of; how I used to believe H/D had this unique potential to ask hard questions about the characters and even love itself and leave us with no easy answers. (Of course... umm... one's ambitions outgrow one's britches....) In that sense, my ideal of H/D kind of 'justified' my obsession with romance tropes and redeemed my own love to myself; in theory, it brought the two ends that drive writing together: the fulfillment of desire and the unfulfilled-by-definition dream.
Speaking of Kundera's aesthetic, the writer of the article (Gary Kamiya) writes:
It is the unpleasant truths of history that made him a connoisseur of antinomies, incompatible truths, jarring tones, harsh and inappropriate modulations.
And yeah. YEAH. That's exactly what I'd been looking for with H/D; that almost post-modern reveling in the jarring, harsh and near-painful, seemingly 'incompatible truths' that the pairing can conjure. I felt ecstatic just thinking about the sheer mental dissonance I could see produced by having them together; it is both ironic and inevitable that almost anyone that ever wrote H/D wrote it in a sort of automatic visceral rejection of this dissonance, pushing the pairing much much farther towards the ultimate romance cliche than more 'realistic' pairing (like S/R) writers had done. I think people felt the jarring tones and saw them as something not even to overcome-- rather, as something to smother in their sleep with extreme prejudice. But. I imagine most people don't read fic for their OTP to be made uncomfortable about existence itself. Do they. :P
To borrow another term from Mr Kamiya, instead of wanting to 'interrogate' history like Kundera, I wanted to 'interrogate' rather than just read or write H/D; I wanted not so much to deconstruct (too meta) but to purely question without answering, to rip their guts open and see what spilled out. No mercy. I wanted both of them to be transformed and redeemed and eventually grown up, but especially Draco (...and then HBP came along and I was like '....snap, she got there first' :/ hahaha). This is basically a reaction against my own tendency to seek comfort in what I read and my love of happy endings; I've always been fighting mostly myself.
And yeah, I speak in the past sense because I'm pretty much over that idealism :P I still think romance is both the worst and the best genre to use to achieve that purity of open-ended questioning united with the ancient satisfaction of desire fulfilled (eucatastrophe). I just think that, uh... it's silly to be so uptight about fanfic. Or original fic, for that matter (...except when it really really sucks... which it often does, granted). Le sigh. Ah, youthful dreams.
But actually, it's Barthes' quote that also encapsulates why I became so drawn to mimetic 'realism' in fanfic especially lately; coming from initial attraction to fantasy/metaphor-heavy stories, I realized that the closer to 'unfiltered truth' you portray people's behavior, the more naturally open-ended and deeply relevant it can become. Conversely, the more you saturate it with meta, the more you run the risk of answering questions before you ask them. So yeah, that's why I became a canon-whore of sorts. ^^;; I'm not sure if that's somehow 'better' than being a stylistic demanding elitist in Mr Kundera's tradition, BUT WHATCHA GONNA DO, right :P
~~
In other, more Zodiac-related news: Robert Downey Jr still super hot even as a drunk bum. Well, he was my teenage crush, what do you want. :/ Jake Gyllenhaal surprisingly much MUCH hotter as a dork. SO MUCH HOTTER. *_____* Like 0 to 60. D:
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no subject
Date: 2007-03-08 01:58 pm (UTC)... I am in love. *_*
no subject
Date: 2007-03-08 01:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-09 12:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-09 07:53 pm (UTC)To borrow another term from Mr Kamiya, instead of wanting to 'interrogate' history like Kundera, I wanted to 'interrogate' rather than just read or write H/D; I wanted not so much to deconstruct (too meta) but to purely question without answering, to rip their guts open and see what spilled out. No mercy.
see how you too area skeptic. common ground at last!
no subject
Date: 2007-03-10 12:51 am (UTC)