- A human heart
- Oct 10, 2012
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I don't think anyone should pay attention to what the author of a book called "Lord Foul's Bane" says about literature.
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Jul 5, 2016 23:10
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Dec 6, 2024 08:13
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- A human heart
- Oct 10, 2012
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Minor point because I think that book sucks but technically it's a deliberate satire of the genre and the corniness of that name is intentional.
that's stupid
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Jul 6, 2016 05:59
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- A human heart
- Oct 10, 2012
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That article and mindset is cool in a lot of ways but especially because it puts forward the viewpoint that genre fiction readers are a persecuted minority and not the majority of people reading books in the world today
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Jul 8, 2016 11:16
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- A human heart
- Oct 10, 2012
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On top of the fact that the "literature" genre, as Bakker says, in order to keep its own garden clean from contamination, in order to maintain a sense of identity and distinction from what outside and still claim a certain superiority, ends up endlessly repeating itself, and so just becoming trite redundancy. That's why within genre is even more likely to find something innovative. There are less rules, less requirements to respect, less boundaries. Less prejudices overall that censor the range of what you can write about and how. Genre fiction itself is made of endless contamination, and that's a good thing that will keep it relevant.
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Jul 9, 2016 11:35
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- A human heart
- Oct 10, 2012
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On top of the fact that the "literature" genre, as Bakker says, in order to keep its own garden clean from contamination, in order to maintain a sense of identity and distinction from what outside and still claim a certain superiority, ends up endlessly repeating itself, and so just becoming trite redundancy. That's why within genre is even more likely to find something innovative. There are less rules, less requirements to respect, less boundaries. Less prejudices overall that censor the range of what you can write about and how. Genre fiction itself is made of endless contamination, and that's a good thing that will keep it relevant.
Hello can you give some examples of this stuff happening in real life, thanks.
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Jul 10, 2016 00:38
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- A human heart
- Oct 10, 2012
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Hello fellow haters! I've developed one more arguments to discuss The Vegetarian from a different angle, joining it up with the scorn thrown at Donaldson and his Thomas Covenant.
It is quite typical to see Thomas Covenant dismissed because the protagonist rapes a woman in the first book, and this is also conflated with a trope of fantasy as a genre. Some readers just reject that part, but I'm not sure they realize its deeper implications and the moral subtlety that derives.
As in The Vegetarian, Thomas Covenant is trapped inside a dreamworld. This dreamworld is not a separate dimension, as if walking directly into another world. It's instead an internal landscape, a metaphor, that turns outside. Exactly as it happens to everyone of us when we dream: what is inside is projected outside. At that point in the story Thomas Covenant his angry at himself and his life. When he rapes this woman, he does it fully aware that this woman is "fictional", that she's a projection of his mind, and the violence of the act is not an act of violence to some other person, but to himself.
The struggle that comes out of that scene is a "symbol" of the protagonist own internal struggle, and coming to terms with that act is a symbol of the conflict he lives. So this woman isn't a "woman", but she's a representation of an idea. A metaphor. One of Thomas Covenant own voices, taking shape as a person. Mirroring in fiction what happens in reality: a writer that puts on the pages these voices he find within himself, as if those voices are real, whispering to him. Thomas Covenant is himself the metaphor of the writer and writing. Exactly as in The Vegetarian the characters animate ideas.
In The Vegetarian the frame of the story is not unlike Thomas Covenant. The woman is blocked into her dreamworld, a violent dreamworld that represents her own internal conflict. The same pattern is reproduced: the sublimation of an internal landscape made into a statement (to the reader).
The premises are all the same, what changes is how the respective protagonist deals with that internal conflict. For the woman in the Vegetarian it's just going downward a spiral. There's no way to come to terms with her dreamworld. She never questions what she sees, she never enters in dialogue with it. She's just a passive observer of what happens to herself. The dreamworld dictates who she is and who she becomes. And her voice becomes the voice of the Dreamworld, she's lost to it. Whereas in Thomas Covenant that dreamworld is the place of a continuous struggle, of continuous self-observation, judgement and self-hatred that is pushed to its limit. It's, in the standard context of fantasy, a journey. A journey through a landscape that symbolizes a journey of the soul and its qualities.
And it integrates a deep and complex epistemological discourse, because it implies that the persons you recognize beside yourself are just aspects you find already in yourself. Like Husserl's phenomenology, the world is built through an act of observation, all its moving parts are always internal. Same as in Von Foerster's constructivism. Which make Thomas Covenant "dream" as valid of moral implications as the real life.
Which is why I find The Vegetarian "weak". The theme of the impossibility to escape the cycles of consumption, that the review brands as "the protest against existence itself", is a theme that is only hinted at. Many reviews don't even acknowledge it. So, for me, the moment the book becomes interesting and shows some actual complexity, it stops. It doesn't dare go further to explore what it is actually saying. It ends up described by many as "haunting" and "evocative", but meaning that it stays vague. It walks up to the edge, then turns. Leaving itself to readers' interpretations, that in this case end up so conflicting to be more like "misunderstandings".
Instead, stepping slightly outside topic but back into that genre versus literature argument, I propose a quick challenge if there's someone who wants to take it. Read just one page of Malazan, and tell me what you think about it:
http://www.tor.com/2016/04/04/excerpts-steven-erikson-malazan-fall-of-light-chapter-one/
Just that first section that ends *before* the first chapter. It's a single page, it doesn't require any previous knowledge of Malazan or Erikson, or fantasy as a genre. It's just a statement. Having read lots of reactions of various readers to the book, I'm not sure it is understood. That's for me something unprecedented in literature, and in fantasy as well. As a rarity within a rarity. And that, in just a page, contains a lot of what makes Malazan something part of the genre, while defying its boundaries.
If you do, I'll then offer my interpretation, since I'm more used to Erikson, and will explain why it is that it does something unprecedented, that few readers seem to have understood.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_6CZ2JaEuc
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Jul 12, 2016 00:23
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Dec 6, 2024 08:13
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- A human heart
- Oct 10, 2012
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Just that first section that ends *before* the first chapter. It's a single page, it doesn't require any previous knowledge of Malazan or Erikson, or fantasy as a genre. It's just a statement. Having read lots of reactions of various readers to the book, I'm not sure it is understood. That's for me something unprecedented in literature, and in fantasy as well. As a rarity within a rarity. And that, in just a page, contains a lot of what makes Malazan something part of the genre, while defying its boundaries.
Oh btw I read this and it was clumsily worded and said nothing interesting.
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Jul 12, 2016 00:24
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Jul 5, 2016 23:10
