FFXIV Write 2024 | #11: Surrogate
Fifth Umbral Moon, 17th Sun, 03 7AE
I’m frightened for Minfilia in a way I’ve never felt before.
She’s determined - moreso than she’s ever been in front of me. She displayed a spine of steel, refusing to back down no matter the bitter words Thancred—or I—muttered at her. Her resolve managed to impress Emet-Selch himself, though of course he delighted in spelling out the dilemma before us, just to rub in the tragedy of it all.
She’s a teenager - barely Alphinaud and Alisaie’s age. She never had the chance to live her own life; she has ever walked in the shadow of an unfathomable legacy. She’s always borne the weight of being a scion, and she never had a choice in the matter.
Except now she is choosing - to submit. To offer herself to the Minfilia, to let the self she’s never had the chance to express fade away in service of our mission - the mission of the Oracle of Light.
And it kills me, because I know why she’s devalued herself so much. It’s my fault. And Thancred’s, but—we look at this girl named Minfilia and can see naught but the Minfilia we lost. I know she’s not her. And…the very fact that she isn’t her makes me bitter.
That’s not fucking fair to her. It’s unfair to her, to Minfilia, to all the other girls in between that died in her name. And as much as it bothered me, my feelings can’t come into this.
And she needed to know that. I confronted her a few hours after we left the Ocular, found her on the balcony overlooking the Crystarium gates. I told her, in no uncertain terms, that she should not make her decision based on how Thancred and I feel about her.
“I’m not,” she replied firmly, never breaking eye contact. “I’m making my decision based on what’s best for everyone.”
“It’s not best for you.”
“And why would you care?” I’ll never forget how her voice cracked as she said it, how the tears began to well in her eyes. “I figured you’d be overjoyed to have your Minfilia back—”
Not if it means losing you.
She was stunned. I was stunned, and I said the words. But I meant it. Because if she goes along with this, it’s not what I think is best for someone I care about. For both of them.
Because yes, I loved Minfilia, with all my heart, with everything I was.
But I also care about Minfilia - the young one, the girl who never had the chance to be herself - because I’ve seen the little glimpses of herself peeking through the veil, occasionally. I’ve begun to pick up on what she likes, what frightens her, her sweet tooth, what she likes to read in her downtime. I’ve begun to see what kind of person she is within the shadow of Minfilia’s legacy, and…she’s delightful. And Thancred and I are fools for not appreciating her for who she is.
Not as a surrogate for the first of that name whom we loved. Not as a scion to a legacy she never wanted to inherit. Just a young girl - one of the bravest, most resolute, and strongest girls I’ve ever known.
I don’t want her to give herself up - even if it means seeing Minfilia again. And I hope, on some level, Thancred doesn’t want that either.
Because I know she wouldn’t have wanted that.
‘Can I actually convey even a shred of this sentiment to her?’ is a different question. I…think I did my best. I took her hand, looked her in the eye, and told her I wanted her to do what’s best for herself…because under it all, I do care for her.
(I can’t make the mistake of failing to ensure the ones I love know how I feel about them. Never again.)
She…took it well, all things considered. She said she would think about it…and thanked me. But that haunted look was still in her eye when she turned, pulled her hand out of my grasp, and walked away.
There’s still time, at least. I’ll banish that look from her eyes before we reach Nabaath Areng if it’s the last thing I do.
(I should talk to Thancred. Get that message through his thick skull. She’s even more concerned with his feelings than with mine, given how they’ve been together for years…)
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Tumblr isn't letting me find again @fictionadventurer's and my own posts on epistolary novels, but I have been thinking about it again, because I fell down a Goodreads review rabbit hall and I have thoughts again.
So many people dislike the style, and honestly, I don't blame them, because it's so often done... not well. It is in some aspects, a deceptively easy one, and in others, deceptively hard. And because I'm trying to write a novel with this format myself, I have been thinking about what makes or breaks an epistolary novel.
I talked yesterday about TGLPPS, because it is an interesting case to analyze. I have thought many times about it, and cannot think of a single non-merely-aesthetic reason for it to be told in an epistolary style. A lot of it depends on -British- people who have survived some terrible war conditions willingly opening up to a stranger about their experiences, and that's made... even more difficult if the medium is letters? typically writers will appeal to tropes like making the reserved character drunk, or have them share an extreme experience in isolation with the stranger to create sudden intimacy. None of this is possible in writing; if anything, one is much more self-conscious about the things one writes than the things one says; verba volant, scripta manent.
It seems to me the story would have flowed much more naturally if Juliet had been stranded on Guernsey for some reason -like the first author herself!- suddenly Dawsey commenting that he got a book from her library makes so much more sense! Yes, certainly, if you met a stranger out there, and they introduce themselves and you realize you have a book that once belonged to them, you would tell them so! And it is in this way that the epistolary format does violence to a story that would otherwise sound much less contrived.
Another problem is the large cast of characters and multiple settings. For all I complain about Dracula, Stoker manages this pretty well (of course he has the model of The Woman in White, but TWiW has fewer povs), at least on the first half, because structurally the storylines of the characters are converging, and that does a lot to guide the reader in the understanding of the character's relationships. TGLPPS's relationship structure is more of a multidirectional flow chart, and that becomes confusing really fast.
Another novel I read reviews for recently is one set in WWI, composed of back and forth letters between two lovers torn apart by war, and one common complaint was... that the climactic scenes, the times they meet, etc all happen... off-camera. It is a fair complaint, but also one I cannot really blame the author for, because that's what usually happens with real life compilations of letters of that kind. Sure, usually the editor/compiler will fill in the blanks sometimes and add an epilogue of sorts explaining what happened afterwards, and that is possible if you are writing it fictionally too, but some may think it spoils the effect of immediacy and whatnot, which, fair too.
But it makes me think of how aware Jean Webster was of these difficulties, and how deftly she managed them in both Daddy Long-Legs and Dear Enemy. Both novels have aged badly in terms of content and message, but they are very interesting stylistically.
DLL is a bildungsroman with a dash of romance; through Judy's letters to daddy long-legs we can see how she grows as a person, gaining independence intellectually and economically, and as a writer, as her grammar and vocabulary change and grow. Between making Judy an orphan who hates the orphanage where she has lived her whole life, and one where she lived past the usual age of being thrown into the world, Webster does away with the need for letters between Judy and her friends and family: all her friends and family are her college roommates and her benefactor, who is the person she writes to. The benefactor scheme also makes it so that she doesn't have to write dll's replies, which in turns makes it much more natural and acceptable for the reader when Judy writes him the ending's love letter describing the feelings and impressions of their finally meeting in person and in truth; Judy has become a writer, and she is so used to write to him as another person all the time, that it just makes sense for her to write to him one more letter at the point where her benefactor and her lover become one and the same person. She has written a novel where the core is the correspondence between lovers AND managed to include as well all the moments of their meetings that we would otherwise miss.
Dear Enemy is a similar, but longer and more ambitious story. Instead of one relationship-connection (Judy and Daddy's), we have Sallie as a nod of connections: she's Judy's friend, Jarvis' "employee", the boss of several characters, has a tense colleague-boss relationship with the visiting doctor, a boyfriend of sorts in Washington, and a family we have met before. It is, in that way, a similar setup to TGLPPS: a urban girl of means becomes a fish out of water in a different setting till she ends up assimilating to it, and settling definitely through marriage. But Webster does a few things differently to make it click.
For starters, it is clear to her that this is the story of Sallie's maturation -I have sometimes talked of Dear Enemy as a novel where a Mary Crawford-like character undergoes a transformation arc. The happenings and stories she meets and tells Judy about along the way serve this arc, besides standing on their own as case studies to illustrate the problems, ideology and solutions proposed to the secondary themes of the story (education and social reform). I feel like TGLPPS is much more interested in Guernsey's survival through the war, in which case Juliet's story is already a frame, which, again, makes the epistolary format cumbersome rather than complementary.
Dear Enemy adds more correspondents, but it is very austere/economical with them, and narrows the letters we see to only those Sallie sends. YMMV regarding if it was too much cutting or not, but the undeniable effect is structural soundness; you are never confused by what is happening or who is writing to whom. We can guess the Honorable Cyrus Wykoff probably wrote some indignant letters to Jervis, and those would be funny to read, but... would they be worth the break in the flow of the narrative? I don't think so. To this effect, just having Sallie write a line to the effect of "I expect at this point you have at hand an irate letter from the Hon. Cyrus" is enough to paint a picture for the reader. Perhaps a letter or two from Dr. MacRae would have helped develop his character more -definitely a first read of the story obscures how much misdirection there is in Sallie's narration to Judy, which in turns tends to create an impression of suddenness to the closing letter that doesn't come across well to the reader.
The choice of Sallie mainly writing to Judy is, IMO, a really good one too. It not only establishes a connection with DLL, but it also allows for the intimacy that makes disclosure believable (something TGLPPS struggles with, as I mentioned above). When you add a few letters to the doctor and Gordon and Jervis, you also get a better perspective of Sallie's personality, how she deals not only with a friend, but with acquaintances, romantic partners and coworkers.
From all this it is pretty evident that for Webster the main function of epistolarity as format is aiding in showing psychological and moral development. But that's not the only thing the format can be really good for: perspective is another, and Austen uses it to great effect in both Lady Susan and Lesley Castle.
Both stories deal with mainly static characters, but who have very strong perspectives of the same situation, and it is this singularity of setting and story that anchors the narrative to avoid confusion, while the variety of perspective brings interest. In Lady Susan, we are dealing mainly with the marrying off of Frederica and seduction of Mrs. Vernon's brother, Reginald. There where Lady Susan paints Frederica as an undisciplined, irrational and ungrateful daughter, her sister in law, Mrs. Vernon, paints her as a sweet girl and a victim of her mother's ruthlessness and lack of love. Both agree that Reginald is being seduced, but, of course, with opposite goals: Lady Susan wants him to succumb, Mrs. Vernon, to escape, and this is a delicious struggle for the reader to follow!*
Lesley Castle being an earlier effort, and unfinished, does show some of the defects I have mentioned before (mainly, the relative confusion of having several correspondents in separate storylines), but illustrates well this same perspective effect: Margaret writes to Charlotte about the new Lady Lesley, and the new Lady Lesley writes to Charlotte about about Margaret and her sister... and in these contrasts lies the main interest of the narrative.
Some conclusions to these musings, then:
Not every story is suited to the epistolary format.
The epistolary format seems to work the best when it is used for either A) showcase psychological and moral development B) to play with perspective on people and/or events.
One of the main difficulties of the format is finding a narrative element to anchor and structure the letters around.
It must have a core couple of correspondents, or at most, two. More than that will make it confusing (unless, perhaps, the story is very short and about a single event or two).
A delicate balance must be found so that the secondary correspondence doesn't cut the flow of the main one, and if possible it must feed into it.
*It is interesting how Love and Friendship, being such a delightful -and I sustain one of the best ever- Austen adaptation, is by force of the perspective switch towards a more impersonal third person, more about a love story between Frederica and Reginald than a struggle between Lady Susan and Mrs. Vernon. Which isn't dissimilar to how adaptations of DLL end up being more about the romance between the leads than Judy's coming of age in college; tropes aside, I feel like if the epistolary format is well embedded in the story, it's going to be nearly impossible to reproduce the effect in adaptation.
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