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March 3, 2008

Advice for Novelists--I

Reading through the most recent Stephen King Opus, which right now promises to be something very different from his usual (did he learn something from his son?), it seemed that it might be advisable to give some suggestions to authors who had become too big for editors to any longer control their tantrums and whims.

As this is the first of several such possibilities, it would be better to confine such recommendations to a single point. If you want to write nonfiction, do so. If you feel the urgent need to editorialize, write to your newspaper. But whatever you do please, please, please do not interrupt the flow of your story, do not intrude so much on your characters, that we are left with the author's political opinions popping out here and there throughout the book.

In Mr. King's case, I have no desire to know that he is a frothing at the mouth Bush hater--and yet, he seems bound and determined to let me know before the end of his book that Bush is responsible for everything from the extrinction of the Dinosaurs to the war in Iraq. While I might have some sympathies with the latter view, I find the need to express any opinion whatsoever in a work of fiction deplorable. This is not versimilitude--it is in fact merely dating the work in the worst possible way.

If you want to write a political novel, disguise it--make it science fiction--set it in an equivalent era or in a place that addresses the particular issue you want to vent on--or better yet, abandon the novel part and write yourself a nice juicy piece of political diatribe--get it out of your system entirely. Everyone will benefit from that--most particularly the characters on whom you are imposing views that may or may not be germane, but views that are certainly quite distracting from your main point.

Posted by Steven Riddle at 7:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Hidden Humor

Where else, but in Faulkner. Light in August is an interesting study in neurosis and psychosis and how one feeds the other until disaster. It is also a repudiation of Calvinist fatalism, even though there seems to be that about it which suggests inevitability. But regardless of the dire and drear events, we have in the midst of them this:

from Light in August
William Faulkner

Presently the fire truck came up gallantly, with noise, with whistles and bells. It was new, painted red, with gilt trim and a handpower siren and a bell gold in color and in tone serene, arrogant, and proud. About it hatless men and youths clung with the astonishing disregard of physical laws that flies possess. It had mechanical ladders that sprang to prodigious heights at the touch of a hand, like opera hats; only there was now nothing for them to spring to. It had neat and virgin coils of hose evocative of telephone trust advertistements in the popular magazines; but there was nothing to hook them to and nothing to flow through them. So the hatless men, who had desert edcounters and desks swung down, even including the one who gound the siren. They came too and were shown several places where the sheet had lain, and some of them with pistols already in their pockets began to canvass about for someone to crucify.

But there wasn't anybody. She had lived such a quiet life, attended so to her own affairs, that she bequeathed to the town in which she had been born and lived and died a foreigner, an outlander, a kind of heritage of astonishment and outrage, for which, even though she had supplied them at last with an emotional barecue, a Roman holiday almost, the would never forgive her and let her be dead in peace and quiet.

In and among the solemn events, these flies in their brand new and utterly useless fire engine provide the kind of comic relief that Shakespeare (and probably a good many playwright of lesser compass before him) employed so effectively with the drunken porter in Macbeth.

Posted by Steven Riddle at 8:04 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 4, 2008

The Divine Comedy Act III

As often as I have read the Divine Comedy, I have found profound difficulty with the third part--the part that should be so compelling. It seems that all forward motion stops and Dante enters into a realm of airy speculation (mostly wrong) and cosmology that is both weird and vaguely uninteresting. The people in paradise maunder on and on about abstruse theological theories and oddities of the medieval sort. In short, it is the "most dated" and least "useful" of the three acts. And yet, I am sure that I am missing something in the reading. I am sure that as often as I have been through it, I have been left out of paradise through my own fault.

So I try again. And once again I am treated so some odd explanation of the spheres of the cosmos and to Beatrice (who if you ask me isn't some Divine avatar but a relentless and self-righteous harridan--see the end of Purgatorio. One is left to ponder what in the world Dante saw in this woman.

Not that the rest of the comedy isn't riddled with similar lectures, cosmologies, and oddities, but somehow amid the grotesques and the "poetic justice" they seem to fit in. If the realm of perfection is nothing other than an endless lecture series on the Divine glories, unless I become a completely different person (by which I do not mean simply abandoning sin and growing closer to God, but having something approaching a spiritual lobotomy) I think that the suffering there would be akin to the suffering of some of the souls in Dante's Inferno.

But then, why might Dante think that this endless lecture circuit is Divine? Perhaps because knowledge was so highly valued a commodity in a time when its dissemination was so difficult? Perhaps it was just that particular poet's mind? I don't know, but perhaps that is a focus to pay attention to as I try to ignore the lectures that get in the way of a tourists view of paradise.

Posted by Steven Riddle at 7:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Beatrice--Snide and Smug

Here's an example of what I spoke of before. Beatrice speaks to Dante:

from Paradiso
Dante (tr. John Ciardi)

"Are you surprised that I smile at this childish act
of reasoning?" she said, "since even now
you dare not trust your sense of the true fact,

but turn, as usual back to vacancy?

Charming. Simply charming. There's nothing to inspire love and admiration like some smug, self-righteous, overly informed combatant smiling at your stupidity and then telling you so. I'm supposd to be enchanted/enthralled by this? Color me appalled.

Fortunately Dante's goal was not entirely to make me love Beatrice as he did. If so, his cause is utterly lost. Unfortunately, I perceive that this guide to the celestial realms will not be nearly so convivial as our guide through the other two. We can expect to be laughed at, lectured sternly, and variously assaulted and accosted as we try to enjoy the scenery.

Posted by Steven Riddle at 7:46 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

The Realm of the Inconstant

The first person we have speak to us from the realm of the Inconstant (the lowest and slowest sphere of heaven) is a woman named Piccarda. She is consigned to this realm because of her "inconstancy" to her holy vows of a religious. However:

from Paradiso
notes by John Ciardi

Piccarda was already a nun and living in her convent when her brother Corso, needing to establish a political alliance, forced her to marry Rossellino della Tossa of Florence. Various commentators report that Piccarda sickened and soon died as aconsequence of having been so forced against her will and vows.

It is this kind of reasoning that throughout time has bred atheists. Circumstances that we do not will nor do we consent to force us to actions that we would not take for which God, who created and allowed these very circumstances, then punishes or demotes us.

Piccarda had no choice in this matter. For much of medieval time in many places women were just a step (and a very small step) above chattel. A few extraordinary women did rise above these circumstances--but for the most part your lot in life as a woman was to do what the men around you told you to.

But in Dante's mind, a woman who against her will is forced to marry and is basically raped, is inconstant to her vow. I'm surprised she isn't in The Inferno for being false to her vow. Instead God in his infinite love and mercy says--"you were trapped by circumstance and by the situations my will allows, and couldn't puzzle your way out of it--so off to the lowest circle of beatitude and be glad I don't kick you downstairs."

Yuck! This is what I constantly run up against in Paradise. A strange sort of paradise it makes it.

Posted by Steven Riddle at 7:54 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack