My Beef With The Bechtel Test

Kyle had a post up a little while back linking to a video from Feminist Frequency about how the 2011 Oscar contenders measure up on the "Bechdel Test". I forget where I ran into the test before, but I definitely remember it rubbing me the wrong way. As summarized in the video (if, like me, you hate videoblogging, you can read the transcript here):

The Bechdel Test is a very basic gauge to measure women’s relevance to a film’s plot and generally to assess female presence in Hollywood movies. It was popularized by Allison Bechdel in her comic Dykes to Watch Out For back in 1985. In order to pass the test a film just needs to fulfill these three, very simple, criteria: A movie has to have at least two women in it who have names, who talk to each other, about something besides a man. Pretty simple right? I mean this is really the absolute lowest that we could possibly set the bar for women’s meaningful presence in movies.

Now, I gotta say, this just makes me climb the walls. I have a strong dislike for simplistic litmus tests that allegedly determine the quality (or even more generally the qualities) of fiction, and I also dislike "gotcha" tests that are supposed to determine hidden bias. These seems at the confluence of these two, and as a result it takes a certain amount of effort to separate my annoyance from the topic enough to try to come up with some less gut-level reaction to it. Given this aim, I'll start with working through the things I can't accuse the test (in this particular use) of, than then work back to why I have an issue with it as a means of evaluating fiction.

First off, the way that the test is being discussed here is not necessarily that advocated by the comic strip characters who originated it -- where "the rule" was to not watch any movie that didn't fit the criteria. Feminist Frequency (and Kyle) on the other hand, admit that a movie might be quite good while not passing the test. Here's Feminist Frequency again:

Again, to be clear this test does not gauge the quality of a film, it doesn’t determine whether a film is feminist or not, and it doesn’t even determine whether a film is woman centered. Some pretty awful movies including ones that have stereotypical and/or sexist representations of women might pass the test with flying colours. Where really well made films that I would highly recommend might not.

Obviously, there's some level of tension here, because while she insists that some really good and recommendable films might not pass the test, she also seems to see it as a problem when individual films (such as 7 out of 9 Best Picture nominees) do not clearly pass. But still, at least formally the concession is clearly made that passing the test is not necessary to a movie's being good or indeed to having strong and essential female characters.

Also, I feel I should concede that passing the test will correlate fairly decently with films that have more female representation in them. Yes, you can have a woman-centered story with a female main character but structured in such a way that the film doesn't pass, or a story which is evenly balanced between one male and one female character, but in general movies in which a woman or women have a lot of screen time will pass.

This leads to the beginning of my criticisms, however, because although most stores that have a lot of screen time for women will pass, they will often do so rather incidentally. So, for instance, I'm finishing up reading Jane Eyre -- certainly generally considered a "girl book", and one that has such a strong female main character, who repeatedly stands up against the expectations of a male dominated world, that it is considered by some critics to be an example of proto-feminist fiction. Thinking of the recent movie of Jane Eyre, it does indeed pass, but even so probably 90% of the screen time involves either Jane interacting with men or Jane talking with other women about men. Even with the more spacious book, if you cut it down to only the scenes which involve Jane talking to another woman about something that does not involve any men, you get some fairly pedestrian scenes in which she talks to her female cousins (and listens to them argue), talks to Helen Burns about books and life, talks to her teachers and to the kitchen maid and her aunt's house, and talks to her pupil Adèle. You miss virtually all of what's interesting in the plot: the conflict.

Now, someone will be pointing out to me that the claim isn't that the scenes that meet the Bechtel Test are the most interesting in the story, just that if the story has a substantial part for women that it is likely to pass the test. And I get that. But it frustrates me that someone would try to analyze fiction based on a criteria that is clearly and admittedly incidental to what it is they're trying to measure. Measuring something like the percentage of the time a named woman character is on screen, or the percentage of lines spoken by a woman, would, however, but a lot less fun than the gimmicky three criteria Test. And something like "are female characters realistic and important to the plot" is hard to quantify, and thus wouldn't produce a fun site full of people rating movies according to one's criteria.

Aside from the fact that the Bechtel Test is clearly measuring something incidental to what it's actually looking to find, it seems to me that by design it isn't really set up "to measure women’s relevance to a film’s plot" as to determine the extent to which women are a separate and self sufficient group within the plot. So, for instance, despite it's female protagonist the movie True Grit fails the Bechtel Test as applied by Feminist Frequency:

Interestingly, even though True Grit is a female centered story, following the adventures of Mattie Ross struggling to get by in a man’s world, when we apply the 60 second rule the film doesn’t pass. In fact the only exchange she has with any other woman is with Mrs. Floyd the innkeeper and those incidental interactions total less than a minute. This style of film where the female lead inhabits an almost entirely male world, brings to mind the Smurfette Principle which I’ve discussed in my Tropes vs Women video series.

So clearly, what's being tested for (and what Feminist Frequency desires to see in a movie) is not simply that women in the movie be well rounded character or that they be essential to the plot, but rather that they be in a world which is at least moderately separate from men. This seemed particularly driven home to me by her complaint against a movie I haven't actually seen (and thus can't provide my own evaluation of the characterization) but the analysis itself is telling:

Tree of Life is a more experimental film about a boy and his family. It fails the test because the only brief scene where two women talk, the conversation is about the death of the family’s son. While it’s true there’s very little dialogue in the film as a whole, the father and the son do speak to each other on multiple occasions.

So, a conversation between to women isn't real if it's about how they feel about a male who has died. If it was a woman, that would be fine, since they're talking about the death of a male, it fails. (Heck, if they'd talked about designer shoes instead of about the death of a family member, it would have passed.)

Similarly, any film which is tightly focused on a relationship (between a man and a woman) is going to at least flirt with failing.

Now, given that this test originates on a comic stripe entitled "Dykes to Watch Out For" perhaps that's reasonable enough. But if one's interest really is in characters and stories well told, I don't see why one would allow oneself to get caught up in this particular analysis gimmick. I don't think that woman characters are less real when they talk to men than when they talk to women, or when they talk about male characters than when they talk about female characters. Yes, perhaps that fact that many Hollywood films don't pass it says something about the extent to which women are represented as independent characters in mainstream films, but if so only in a very incidental fashion. And given that the majority of films lack any well rounded characters of either sex, I find this hard to get particularly excited about.

Friday Fiction

I'd made a command decision that I didn't have time to try the NaNoWriMo thing well before MrsDarwin decided to make the plunge. However, particularly since all the fun we had with the Korrectiv folks at the Walker Percy conference, I'd been itching to try to start writing fiction again.

The result thus far is the draft of a short story, which you can read here: Ways Not Taken

Once upon a time I wrote a lot of fiction (basically all of it genre: science fiction and fantasy) but at this point it's been about twelve years since I've written any, and I'm still feeling my way around how non-genre writing works. If anyone feels like writing in depth feedback (in comments or via email) please feel free. I don't know if this is solid enough to be worth revising extensively, or if I'd learn more by leaving it and writing a few more, but either way a little intelligent dissection of the current product would doubtless me a learning experience.

And Now For Something Completely Different...

Once upon a time I wrote fiction (mostly science fiction and fantasy) and I had a younger sister who was flattering enough to think that was cool. Now I write a blog, and my little sister is actually the cool one, the real writer. She writes mostly fantasy, some of it tinged with Catholic elements, and unlike I ever did, she actually gets paid for it.

Some of her stories are available online, via links on her website.

Readers might find the following particularly interesting:

[Note: For some reason the Coyote Wild site is very slow to load on some browsers, due to what appears to be a problematic stat counter link. Sorry for the Google cache link.]

"City of Angels" published in Coyote Wild, March 2008

I knew something was wrong as soon as I walked into the kitchen and saw Mamá making rice pudding. A crumpled plastic bag lay on the counter; I picked it up, smoothed it. Real California Raisins! Taste The Zing Of Sunshine!

"What's happening?" I asked, nervousness prickling my arms.

"Braid your hair and wash up," said Mamá. "It's almost done."

As I went to the bathroom to get some hair elastics, the prickle slid down from my arms to my stomach. The few times that I had eaten Mamá's pudding, my hair had been unbound.

When I got back to the kitchen, Mamá was spooning the rice pudding into a bowl. Her dark hair was already pulled back in a long braid; only a few wisps escaped around her face.

"Here." She set the bowl in front of me. "Eat."

"But I can't do magic with my hair --"

"It's not for magic. The pudding . . . dampens you. Covers you. Makes you less noticeable." Mamá gripped the back of her chair, knuckles white. "We're leaving. Los Ojos killed Peter, and I think he wants you."

Terror sheared through my stomach. Los Ojos was the most powerful lord in Los Angeles; cruelest too, if half the stories were true. [read the rest]

"I Have Heard the Angels Singing, Each to Each" published in Coyote Wild, August 2008

I found the angel at the ninety-nine cent store.

I'd grabbed canned corn, dried chiles, hand lotion, and Mexican hot chocolate, and I was examining the dish towels when I felt something like a faint whisper. I glanced across the aisle--and there it was, sitting among the figurines next to the poorly scented candles: a little plastic statuette of an angel, her face tilted upwards and her hands clasped over her chest.

She was painted in delicate pastels, except for the sickly smiling mouth, which was a garish lipstick red. Her wings were naked white plastic, her long, curling hair was pale yellow, and her swirling skirts were pink. She was like a hundred other tacky statues I'd seen over the years.

I couldn't look away.

The sensation of whispering got louder without ever becoming audible. As I studied the statue, I realized that the space around it was curved, beginning to fold in on itself, as it did around the Moebius strips outside our door. I frowned, trying to see farther, deeper--

"Hey." Thuy snapped her fingers in front of my face. "Earth to Maria. You ready to go?" [read the rest]

"More Full of Weeping Than You Can Understand" published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 10/07/2010

During the later part of the war, the government issued a pamphlet on how to recognize changelings. Violet read it (a green tinge of the features; propensity to cruelty) and laughed. The real signs had been far more pervasive, far less clear. Sometimes she thought she had only realized she wasn’t human when she was fourteen. Sometimes she thought she had always known.

The external, everyday things were always easy. She liked French, hated mathematics, and complained about her governess. She sailed toy boats with Thomas, bridled when he was patronizing, and once threw her oatmeal at him. She cried when a picnic was rained out, when she fell and scraped her knee, and when her governess disciplined her.

Other things were harder. None were inexplicable.

She did well at her piano lessons, but all music was only a string of notes to her. She supposed this was what Papa meant when he talked about his old tutor who was tone-deaf.

There were nights she climbed out her window into the garden because she could not bear to be inside another moment, and she could never go back in till she had danced herself breathless. Mama shook her head and said that Aunt Maisie, too, had been a tomboy.

She didn’t cry when her kitten or Grandmama died. She poked the kitten and she stood respectfully at the funeral, but both times she was curious, then bored. Thomas had once read her a poem that said hopeless grief was passionless. [read the rest]

"And Her Eyes Sewn Shut With Unicorn Hair" published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 7/14/2011

“Look, Zéphine!” Marie called. “A unicorn!”

Even though Zéphine knew what would happen, her heart still thumped with hope. She set down her spoon, then jerked her head up to see the breakfast room window where her little sister stood. But when she looked where Marie pointed, Zéphine saw only a gazebo whose white latticework was clogged with crimson roses.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Marie whispered.

“Yes,” lied Zéphine. “Beautiful.”

Why should she hope to see a unicorn now, when she never had in all her life?

Marie untangled herself from the lace curtains. She was only twelve; baby fat still clung to the corners of her beaming face. “And on your nineteenth birthday, too! It’s a lucky sign—the unicorns will love your maiden dance tonight, I know they will.”

Zéphine sat back in her chair and looked at her little silver bowl. She didn’t want any more custard; the few mouthfuls she had already eaten hung heavy in her stomach.

Marie kept on chattering. “...and the suitors can start watching you dance for the unicorns next month. Philippe is first in line to try, right? He would make a good king.”

“Mother danced for nine men before Father.” Zéphine mashed the custard with her spoon.

“I wouldn’t like that.” Marie’s dark eyebrows drew together. “Nine men, all dead....” [read the rest]

Orphan Openings: Decision Point

It was a Monday night when Kristen decided to be unhappy in her marriage.

The day was not, in other respects, an unusual one.  People at work, unhappy to be back in the office after the three day weekend, had as usual behaved as though she were being personally unreasonable when she reminded them at 2:15 that their slides were due for the Tuesday Ops deck by 3:00 PM.  Some day, she promised herself, she would leave them un-reminded and they could explain to the Senior Vice President how a deadline that arrived at precisely the same time every single week could be, every week, forgotten. 

Then at 4:56, as she was struggling to get the last of the slides together, the inevitable text had arrived from Ron, "Can u pick up kids?  Running late and have to finish."  She gritted her teeth, knowing that if she replied, "No." the response would be, "Please...?" 

She announced her entry of the other admin's cube with a can-you-believe-this sigh.  "Ron sends his text-pologies again.  I have to go get the kids before 5:30 or they start charging by the minute."  Jennifer rolled her eyes sympathetically.  "Todd and Kathy haven't sent their slides yet.  Can you put them in when they do?"

Jennifer could.  "Couch," she advised. 

James and Emily tussled loudly in the back seat and wailed when, as always, homework was ordered before television.  There was nothing faster than frozen pizza in the freezer, and the thought of carbs for dinner reminded her of the free cookies which had proved irresistible in breakroom that afternoon, making her doubly exasperated. 

Ron did not appear until after dinner.

"Sorry, hon," he announced himself, dumping his laptop case on the kitchen floor as he swung the fridge door open and grabbed a beer from the bottom shelf.  "Meetings.  Samir was out.  Code wouldn't compile."  Because, she almost thought she could hear him say.  I have an important job.  "Oh man, I'm tired..." he was saying.  As if this was some unique achievement of his, unexperienced by her. 

Steps sounded behind her, but she didn't turn.  Pop went the beer, just behind her.  "Oh hey, pizza."  He grabbed a piece.  "Down by twelve points already," he complained, vanishing into the living room.  A moment later the TV sounded.

She paused, savoring her frustrating and imagining the sympathetic nods that it would draw from Jennifer the next day when properly related.  "He always does this.  And didn't even sit down and ask how my day was."  Always. 

She rose and went to the door of the living room.  He had one foot on the coffee table, the pizza slice folded over in one hand, the beer in the other, leaning forward tensely -- the pizza sliced paused in it's trip to his mouth -- as he awaited the result of a play. 

Always. 

She could hear in her mind the nattering advice of the pre-marriage counselor all those years ago.  "Never say, 'You always...'  That's fighting language.  Say, 'When you do that it makes me feel...'"

But after sixteen years of marriage, and in the middle of watching a game, "makes me feel" would elicit no more than an absent "Uh, huh..."  And all of a sudden the work of not being unhappy in her marriage seemed the one thing she did not have energy left for, however difficult being unhappy might later prove to be.  So thinking of how it would sound when related over coffee the next day, she started with, "You always do this.  You just don't care about my job, or dinner, or...  I don't know what you do care about."

Orphan Openings: The Unequal Marriage

Few would have disputed that Maria-Lucia was one of the most beautiful girls in the village, with fine, dark hair, delicate features, skin like new-skimmed cream, and full lips that smiled often, showing even teeth. As she neared womanhood, the legs and arms which had been merely thin assumed the subtle curves which drew men's eyes, and her waist and bosom the less subtle curves that held them. Yet she had no pretensions about her, was quiet and dutiful towards her elders and devout to just such a degree as to seem a "good girl", but without excess. And so there was surprisingly little jealousy directed towards her, until the time of her marriage.

Her offense, when it came, was not of the usual and forgivable sort. Had she married a rich old man, heads would have nodded indulgently as they observed that she was very pretty after all, and from a poor family, and so who would blame her? Many voices would have "hoped she would be happy." Similar hopes would have been expressed had she married one of the more attractive young men -- hopefully in the sort of hurried fashion which would allow people to meditate with satisfaction that beauty was not an unmixed blessing, and be thankful for their own daughters' virtue.

Opinion was, thus, outraged to see itself defied when Maria married Giuseppe. He was a quiet man, five years her senior, with no living family left. His farm was small and his looks were plain almost to the point of ugliness, with very large ears and nose, and a mouth that drooped as if sad, though when he spoke it almost always with cheer and kindness. His hair was naturally disordered, his skin burnt brown with many days under the sun, his shoulders slightly stooped, his arms long and his pace very slightly shuffling, such that when they were first seen entering the parish church together after the marriage (which had been small, with only the families and a few friends in attendance) one sharp tongue remarked afterward, "With his looks next to hers, it looked as if he were a pet ape moping along behind her."

Though the marriage had seemed sudden enough -- or at least, if they had spent much time together in the months beforehand, few had marked it -- few could imagine it was because of necessity, save for a few who darkly muttered that she must have come to grief with a man who wouldn't marry her, and only Giuseppe would take her in that condition. Time, however, proved this not to be the case. There was, of course, speculation that she must be unhappy. And that fall Giuseppe found more than the usual number of young men coming to see if he needed hired laborers for the harvest -- though if he suspected that they had actually come in hopes of finding his wife eager for other male company around the farm, he gave no definite sign of the knowledge as he turned them away.

Though Giuseppe's farm was no more remote than most, they were treated almost as if they lived on the other side of the river, in La Rocca, and if they were mentioned at all it was with the observation, "But surely the children will be ugly."

But that was not in fact to be the case.

The Horror

I've been reading H.P. Lovecraft, and I say: meh. Maybe it's a mistake to read an author in a large volume of his collected works, but one can only take so many pulpy tentacles and Unspeakable Rites and ineffable foetor and blasted New England heaths before the style grows predictable. You want real terror? Let me tell you about the other night when the baby suddenly started to gag and choke and I couldn't find the aspirator. Compared to that, Cthulhu ain't even in it for fear.

Neil Gaiman understands. In fact, he has delved into some cursed and nightmarish arcana, and has presented the public with I Cthulhu, the dead god's dictated memoirs.

We are going out, said Hastur to me. Would you like to accompany us?

We? I asked him. Who's we?

Myself, he said, Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Tsathogghua , Ia ! Shub Niggurath, young Yuggoth and a few others. You know, he said, the boys. (I am freely translating for you here, Whateley, you understand. Most of them were a-, bi-, or trisexual, and old Ia! Shub Niggurath has at least a thousand young, or so it says. That branch of the family was always given to exaggeration). We are going out, he concluded, and we were wondering if you fancied some fun.

I did not answer him at once. To tell the truth I wasn't all that fond of my cousins, and due to some particularly eldritch distortion of the planes I've always had a great deal of trouble seeing them clearly. They tend to get fuzzy around the edges, and some of them -- Sabaoth is a case in point -- have a great many edges.

But I was young, I craved excitement. "There has to be more to life than this!", I would cry, as the delightfully foetid charnel smells of the swamp miasmatised around me, and overhead the ngau-ngau and zitadors whooped and skrarked. I said yes, as you have probably guessed, and I oozed after Hastur until we reached the meeting place.

As I remember we spent the next moon discussing where we were going. Azathoth had his hearts set on distant Shaggai, and Nyarlathotep had a thing about the Unspeakable Place (I can't for the life of me think why. The last time I was there everything was shut). It was all the same to me, Whateley. Anywhere wet and somehow, subtly wrong and I feel at home. But Yog-Sothoth had the last word, as he always does, and we came to this plane.

Yep, that about sums it up.

Gaiman also reveals a fascinating bit of lost history:

Nice to see "I Cthulhu" in print at last: the only other Lovecraftian article I plan on doing at some point is annotating some correspondence that has come into my hands relatively mysteriously. Which is to say, it is not generally known that the H.P. Lovecraft letters we know and love are incomplete in one important respect.

In the late twenties and early thirties a young English writer -- who, like Lovecraft, thought little of writing twenty thousand word letters -- was in New York , working on his own books and writing the librettos to musicals.

That Lovecraft, a devoted anglophile, was a fan of the man's work is unsurprising. That P.G. Wodehouse was a fan of Weird Tales is perhaps more so. How their lengthy correspondence got into my grubby little hands I do not wish to go into at this point. Suffice it to say that I possess not only their only collaborative novel (alternatively titled The What Ho! On The Threshold and It's the Call of Cthulhu, Jeeves ) but also fragments of their musical, Necronomicon Summer , in which the heroine is called upon to sing those immortal lines:

I may be just a bird in a gilded cage

A captive like a parakeet or dove,

But when a maiden meets a giant lipophage

Her heart gets chewed and broken, like that old adage

-I'm just a fool who

Thought that Cthulhu

Could fall in love!

The similarities between the two authors -- not only in names, but also biography, both of them having been brought up by aunts for example (one of a legion of similarities) leads one to ponder why the collaborations were a failure and covered up by both men, and why they conducted their work together in such secrecy. Certainly the novel throws a fascinating light on both their obsessions (the sequence in which Aunt Agatha is revealed to be Nyarlathotep, and the Wooster-Psmith expedition to the thrice accursed plains of Leng, enlivened by their running battle over Bertie Wooster's bow-tie, spring to mind immediately).

When it is fit for publication; when copyright is cleared; and when the significant question of whether these are the Wodehouse-Lovecraft Letters, or the Lovecraft-Wodehouse Letters (or whether, as been suggested, one should compromise into, for example, the Lovehouse-Wodecraft Letters) has been fully sorted out: then I can assure you that your publication shall be the first to know about it.

Now that's a volume of collected works that I could sink my tentacles into.

Stories for All Hallows Eve

Having stood up for All Hallows Eve as a legitimate time of spookification, it seems only right and proper to suggest some appropriate short stories and novels that deal with ghosts and other such creatures.

High Spirits, by Robertson Davies is a collection of ghost stories the celebrated Canadian novelist told at Christmas gatherings at Massey College, of which he was Master. These are humorous ghost stories, and among them can be found: "The Ghost Who Vanished by Degrees" about a truly perpetual grad student; "The Kiss of Khrushchev", in which a Russian bass finds himself under the evil eye; "The Cat That Went to Trinity" about a Frankencat; and "Einstein and the Little Lord" in which the ghost Little Lord Fauntleroy appears.

Expiration Date by Tim Powers is set in the streets and suburbs of modern Los Angeles, among the sub culture who trade in vials containing ghosts. If you inhale a ghost, you can experience in a rush the memories which compose this cast of shell of a soul which long ago left the world. A typical Tim Powers novel, Expiration Date describes a world shot through with the supernatural, yet imagined a way that leaves you wondering if this is indeed how the real world works.

Hobberdy Dick by Katherine Briggs is the best window on classic English superstition and folklore that you'll ever find -- perhaps not surprising as Briggs was a serious academic folklorist. The title character, a hobgoblin, is guardian of country manor, which has just been taken over by a Puritan family after its Cavalier owners found themselves on the wrong side of the English Civil War. Anyone with an interest in the real English folklore traditions, of hobs and lobs and grims and ghosts and witches, should read it.

Face In The Frost by John Bellairs begins so lightheartedly that one little imagines how seriously terrifying it will become at times as wizards Prospero (not that one) and Roger Bacon (that one) seek to find an enemy who seems to be bringing the world to an end. Though the novel definitely shows much of Bellairs characteristic humor (and background in writing mysteries and ghost stories for young readers) Face in the Frost holds up as adult reading as well.

Feel free to post your own suggestions in the comments.

Why Read Fiction

Quite some time ago, bookmarked a posting on the First Things blog because it reflected comments I'd heard from several other quite intelligent people my age that I've run across:

A few days ago our editor, Joseph Bottum, observed with a shake of his head that none of the many Junior Fellows at First Things in recent years reads novels with any regularity.

I had to confess I was no exception, thus perfecting his despair. “The dominant Western literary form for the past two hundred years” he said “but you all say, ‘Nope, we’re done with that.’”

Why is this? I can’t speak for anyone else, but, for my part, I just don’t get drawn into fictional narratives the way I did as a child.

I turned towards the philosophical and historic in my mid-teens, which gave me Plato’s kind of impatience with lying poets. At some point I found that I had to force myself to turn the next page because I really did not care in the least what happened to imaginary persons. The only narratives I now read with easy pleasure are travelogues, histories, and biographies, packed as they are with the red meat of the real.

But I’m making a good-faith effort to regain a taste for novels. I’ve started with Jane Austen, hoping that the goodly helping of edification will help me painlessly transition from my addiction to propositional truths to a healthy appreciation of the formal properties of a well-wrought story. I’ve read Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility and am now in the middle of Persuasion. She’s quite as wise, perceptive, and delightfully ironic as everyone says, but I’m still having the hardest time staying interested in the plot.

Now, I don't share Mr. McDaniel's hang up in this regard at all, though I do find that I don't read as much fiction as I used to as a teenager. But as I say, several good friends have surprised me by expressing similar opinions. Helene Hanff who wrote 84 Charing Cross Road and Q's Legacy, two of my favorite books about books, observes at one point in 84, "I never can get interested in things that didn't happen to people who never lived."

Some of this is, I think, simply a matter of personal taste. However I wonder if some of it also has to do with a modern idea of what fiction is. There are two contradictory ideas of fiction which I hear often:

1) I am the author and I have created this story, which is mine and is precisely what I say it is, for your entertainment. Read it and be diverted.

2) The author has created a text which does not necessarily have an inherent meaning. You as the reader must encounter this text and determine what it means to you.

Both of these, if one actually internalizes them, strike me as rather boring. If a story is simply something which a particular author thought up in wholly artificial fashion and presents to you for amusement, what exactly is the point? Why should I care that that author made up that particular sequence of unreal events? If the story does not have meaning in and of itself -- if meaning is something that I apply myself -- why should I care about the story? Clearly, anything worth knowing is already in my head, and reading the story is like staring at an uncarved block of stone and imagining a sculpture.

On the question of why we read and write fiction, the works of ancient authors like Homer and Virgil have always struck me as interesting. Both to some extent, I think, believed in the myths they were recording. (Virgil less so than Homer, and neither in a literal sense, perhaps.) Yet both knew they were making up the details of these stories as they went along. And their readers in the ancient world both knew that the stories they were hearing or reading had been composed by human authors, and also believed that they in some sense reflected real stories about the gods and heroes.

The key insight here, I think, is that worthwhile fiction describes something that is at root true -- indeed it shows reality in a more distilled fashion than actual observation -- even if the details are made up. When fiction ceases to be seen as describing something true, it ceases to be worth reading.

Beach reading

We didn't take a vacation this year (except vicariously, through TS's travel posts), so I have to make my escape through reading. Yesterday I went to the beach, courtesy of Jeff Sawyer.

Outside on the small deck of the Isle de Veau, Jack squinted into the concrete gray sky as he cranked open a half-dozen blue Cinzano umbrellas, in case anyone actually showed up for lunch in this lousy weather. Three-foot waves gnawed at the beach in the distance, the wind occasionally carrying spray through angled palms all the way to his tan, tired face. It dampened the faded tee that hung loosely off his frame, and his cargo shorts, and his mood. Little electric Japanese lanterns strung around the deck arbor had twisted up tight, hanging themselves in their cords, the relentless wind shifting their vibe from island chic to bleak. The whole island felt like that to Jack these days, like paradise lost. Just a photo in a glossy brochure faded to light blue after sitting too long in the window of a travel agency in some snowy New England town.

Every morning he’d see crusty old retirees who’d responded to brochures like that, pensioned dinosaurs plodding along the beach on crunchy knees, bracing their backs with one hand to stoop and pick up shells with the other, artifacts they mailed to grandchildren back home. Under floppy cotton hats, their thin, hoary hair was whipped by the wind against cocoa wrinkles. Where did they get those ridiculous faux Hawaiian shirts, stretch pants and giant sunglasses, he wondered, what were they thinking? He devised a name for their geezer ensembles, and reminded himself to see if it’d get a laugh out of Car when she arrived at the Isle for dinner that night: Last Resort Wear.

Shipwrecked on the Isle de Veau, Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3

Gone Goth

"There," said Montoni, speaking for the first time in several hours, "is Udolpho."

Emily gazed with melancholy awe upon the castle, which she understood to be Montoni's; for, though it was now lighted up by the setting sun, the gothic greatness of its features, and its mouldering walls of dark grey stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime object. As she gazed, the light died away on its walls, leaving a melancholy purple tint, which spread deeper and deeper, as the thin vapor crept up the mountain, while the battlements above were still tipped with splendor. From those, too, the rays soon faded, and the whole edifice was invested with the solemn duskiness of evening. Silent, lonely, and sublime, it seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown defiance on all, who dared to invade its solitary reign. As the twilight deepened, its features became more awful in obscurity, and Emily continued to gaze, till its clustering towers were alone seen, rising over the tops of the woods, beneath whose thick shade the carriages soon after began to ascend.

Darwin has been savoring the satirical pleasures of Vanity Fair, but I've taken the more sensationalistic route and have been reading The Mysteries of Udolpho. Udolpho is the ur-Gothic novel: innocent heroine, vile dark villain, a castle with a secret prisoner and horrors behind black veils, dramatic scenery, and the suspense is exaggerated by the pall of murky twilight. (Nothing happens during the day except the appreciation of vast vistas of countryside.) Having been inspired by watching Masterpiece Theater's recent (and very enjoyable) Northanger Abbey, in which Austen effectively demolished the gothic genre with her ridicule, I wondered if the original could really be that terrible.

They determined on walking round Beechen Cliff, that noble hill whose beautiful verdure and hanging coppice render it so striking an object from almost every opening in Bath.

"I never look at it," said Catherine, as they walked along the side of the river, "without thinking of the south of France."

"You have been abroad then?" said Henry, a little surprised.

"Oh! No, I only mean what I have read about. It always puts me in mind of the country that Emily and her father travelled through, in The Mysteries of Udolpho. But you never read novels, I dare say?"

"Why not?"

"Because they are not clever enough for you - gentlemen read better books."

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; I remember finishing it in two days - my hair standing on end the whole time."

--Northanger Abbey

In my experience, the modern reader will find her ends splitting instead. It's hard to sympathize with the utter passivity of the young beautiful unstained afflicted Emily, with her ceaseless tears and fainting spells and delicacy so extreme that she would rather prolong the book another two hundred pages than have a candid conversation with her betrothed to clear up a misunderstanding. I couldn't help feeling a kinship with her callous aunt who is obviously driven crazy by Emily's extreme sensibility; or with the villainous Montoni, a suave force of evil who must be delighted to have such a milksop for a victim.

On the other hand, a knowledge of Udolpho makes Northanger Abbey that much more amusing; as for myself, I'll never read the word "verdure" again without a snort of derision.

In the interests of furthering my gothic education, I'm leaving Mrs. Radcliffe behind for a more Victorian tome: The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins.

Fiction for a Friday

(Fiction for a Friday (or whatever day) borrowed shamelessly from Video Meliora, who does it so well.)

They had left that morning, in a flurry of good-byes and parcels and promises of postcards, and she had the run of the place. The to-do list was hardly onerous : taking in the garbage cans; watering the plants; feeding the dog. After ticking off each item, she had slouched in front of the TV with a bowl of ice cream and spent several hours dozing through a Happy Days marathon. When she finally shook off her lethargy, the sun had set and the blue light of the television flickered on the walls and glinted off the windows.

The house, so full of life earlier, now stood somber and empty. She hesitated at the top of the stairs and considered whether she should close the door to the master bedroom. The room was shrouded in a gloomy twilight, and she felt a strange reluctance to reach in and grasp the doorknob. This is silly, she thought, shaking herself. There's nothing in there. It's just me and the house.

She strode to the door and slammed it shut. The walls shook and the crash reverberated after the silence of the day. That'll show 'em. I'm here. It's just me and the house.

Me and the house.

The Woman and the Pharisee

This Sunday's gospel was, of course, the story of Jesus having dinner with the Pharisee, when the sinful woman comes in and washes and anoints his feet.

The reading immediately struck me as one of those biblical incidents which suggests all sorts of different interpretations, explaining the relations of the characters who how they got to the point at which they see them. By the end of the sermon (which was about the Maryknoll missionaries rather than the gospel) several stories had suggested themselves. I'd originally thought to write several in a "variations on a theme" kind of way, but writing the first one took so long I think I'll just leave it at that for now.

The Pharisee's Woman

Surely it is the prerogative of any man of influence to wish the separate portions of his life kept separate, or so the Pharisee had always felt. Men were sometimes greater than the ideas which made them great. Or perhaps it was that God granted greater range of action of men of stature. Certainly, in the scriptures, God never seemed to lose his fondness for David, despite the king's many failings.

The important thing, of course, was for such great men to control the appearance they presented. Ideas and ideologies were the fuel that allowed men to propel themselves upward, and yet like any powerful steed they were as happy to destroy their rider as to bear him. For the great mass of men, it was the ideal that was important rather than the man. And so it was important that all contradictions be kept safely and politely away from sight.

The Pharisee's woman was thus a creature seldom seen. Maintained quietly and simply but without squalor, as befitted someone selected to supply the less holy pleasures of a holy man. If the small hut and infrequency of gifts were less than she sometimes intimated that she wished for, they were certainly more than most women of her character and occupation could expect. Where would she turn, to the Roman soldiers with their all too well known proclivities?

She was, at times -- or so she told him -- a lonely creature. A woman gradually approaching middle age, but remaining attractive in face and bearing, who lived in the outskirts of the city with no husband, no children and no visible means of support was a woman that most people knew all too easily how to categorize. Yet though her hands remained soft, for she was spared work other than that of her own one-person household, and her clothes in good repair -- she was of course not welcome among the respectable women who went down to the wells each day to draw water for their husbands and children.

Indeed the lack of children weighed heavily upon her, and was perhaps the purpose behind her dedicated cultivation of the small garden behind her hut, in which lay, unbeknownst to any but her own torn heart, the small fruits of her body -- too shameful to be allowed to live and one day name their father. The woman knew that, mother now to nothing but herbs and flowers, this more than all her other sins condemned her to eventual solitude and poverty when the Pharisee died, or she became too old to attract his interest and support. Towards that day all jewelry and precious trinkets, whatever small return hours of trying to please could earn, were put away: unwanted for the shame that bought them yet treasured for the bread they would buy in the long, poor twilight which seemed now to draw ever closer.

Thus, when she entered the Pharisee's house, carrying the alabaster flask of ointment which represented all of her furtive savings, and used this product of her sins to anoint the young rabbi's feet, the moment evoked similar feelings (shame of the moment and fear of the future) in both her and in her long-time master.

The Pharisee was shocked at the tastelessness of the display: the weeping, the abasement, the washing and anointing of feet. Surely the woman was not a creature of much value, but he was repulsed by her grovelling. He was angry too. Surely any could guess from this wanton display of penitence what she was, but what if any in the gathering should realize just who she was? He had been very careful all these years, he told himself. Surely no one in the assemblage could know that this thing was his. And yet what if someone did guess it? What if this pathetic creature revealed to whom she had provided her sordid pleasures all these years? In the light of the dining room (much brighter than he was accustomed to see her in) he realized too how old she was becoming. She must know that this shameful display was the end of any consideration she might expect from him. She would not see him again. Now if only she would take herself away before someone realized.

The rabbi finished his pat little tale of the debtors, supported obediently in the question and answer by his disciple. The Pharisee's eyes met the rabbi's for a moment, but he could not hold them. There was something in the young man's eyes that seemed to see right through him.

The woman's feelings might have taken the same names, but they were very different. Shame, certainly, of a sort. After all these years of walking with head upright, while others subtly moved away or stepped aside so as not to be seen too near her much less brush against this walking sin, she found herself unable to raise herself from the floor. Not from the weight of the stares of others, which she had long grown accustomed to shrugging off by thinking of their own likely hidden sins, but rather from the weight of her own knowledge of herself, which all at once came crushing down.

In her mind too, as the waters of her tears seemed to purge her of her sins even as they washed the dust from the feet of the rabbi, was a certain fear. All of the little treasures which she had put away over the years to serve the place of her lost children when she was old had been spent in her sudden impulse towards complete repentance. No look towards the Pharisee was necessary to know that she would never see him again. And so the matter of what would happen to her, an aging woman with no children and no family, newly washed of sin but not of ill reputation, was a matter that was only known to God. Yet as she wept at the rabbi's feel, she felt that perhaps this was a burden that God was willing to take upon Himself in return for her repentance.

I'm not sure if creating a relationship between the woman and the Pharisee completely obscures the point about the Pharisees as a group holding themselves so much closer to God than the rejected in society. Another variation I toyed with was that perhaps the woman was mistress to a Roman officer, and thus not merely a notorious sinner but a traitor to her race -- and thus in the eyes the Pharisees doubly unworthy of forgiveness.