#litcrit

[necarion]

I really like Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere books. But there are two parts to the ending of Rhythm of War that I hate. There are parts of his books I am not thrilled with (including a lot of Rhythm) and even one (Dawnshard) that I think was generally lousy. But there's only one bit that's provoked such a strong negative emotion at a character's choice and subsequent consequences, from a Watsonian perspective. That, combined with Rhythm being generally plodding, has put me off a fandom I was obsessed with for a while.

[saintmachina]

I am endeavoring to get off Twitter for good and read actual articles and longform pieces, like, you know, literary criticism and cultural commentary and provocative personal essays and deep-dive reflections, but I am embarrassed to admit I don't actually know where to find them.

In magazines and websites, yes, sure, but every time I find an article from Vulture ("Against Women's Writing") or the NYT ("New York's Hottest Club Is The Catholic Church" and the critical articles that cropped up around it) I'm interested reading, it's behind a paywall, which is fine, I can subscribe to a few that I like, but not all of them obviously.

So the question is: where are you people getting your articles from? Where magazines do you subscribe to? And even better if they are smaller lesser known niche journals, I'm desperate to broaden my horizons and re-train my brain to go deep.

[jadagul]

So there's this idea I've seen circulating periodically of "don't tag your hate", that fandom tags are for being positive about the fandom and if you're going to say negative things about a work you shouldn't tag it and harsh the vibe of the fans.

And this is, like, utterly baffling to me. If I'm a fan of something I want to see critical analysis! And some of that will say good things and some will say bad things. Unmitigated positivity mostly just pisses me off for being shallow.

Like, the first thing I ever really did with the internet was join a Wheel of Time fan community. But I also spent time looking for negative comments about the books. (I just didn't find any that made sense! The two critiques were "it's too long", which like fair enough but I was a bored speedreader in high school; and "all the female characters are indistinguishable", which may be one of the most incorrect claims about a work of literature that I've read.)

If I post meta about a work of literature, I'd kinda like people to argue with me! That's fun and engaging. (As long as the things they're saying aren't stupid, obviously, but stupid responses are annoying regardless of whether they're positive or negative.) And when I search for commentary, I'd like both positive and negative commentary.

I kind of suspect that I just don't do "fandom" in the sense that people who are part of fandom think and talk about it.

Of course, the weirdest one is that in the early days of this blog, I did a lot of criticism of effective altruism, and I got asked not to tag it "effective altruism" because that tag was for positive stuff about EA. Which is why my tag for effective altruism discussion is still "ea cw".

[violsva]

So I just rewatched the end of Daughters of the Crown (episode 14 of Neverafter, this one) because I was thinking it was a bit rushed (at least compared to how long the very femslashy part of my brain wanted it to be), and what's going on is that Brennan was clearly planning on ending the episode during the hug. But Siobhan stopped him. And if he had ended on the hug then the entire mood of that ending would have been different (and it definitely would have seemed longer and more meaningful).

And I think Siobhan was absolutely right to keep things going and end it where she did, if that's where Rosamund is at that point, because it wouldn't work well to begin the next episode with that conversation - it would very much step on the mood. And this way she didn't let that mood build up to the point where it would be misleading.

I haven't actually watched the next episode yet, so all I know is the preview, but it very much looks like that's what's going on, anyway. So it's interesting seeing the two narrative options there so clearly, and the choice between them. Because with Brennan's ending the perceived sympathies going into the next episode would be very different, either for the party/narrative as a whole or for just Rosamund. And with this ending we know exactly which side they're on, and that there's not going to be any intra-party conflict over this.

[sneezypeasy]

Watsonian vs Doylist Analyses - A Couple Points of Clarification

I just want to clear up a couple of misunderstandings I may have unintentionally contributed to in my previous references on the subject:

1. There can be multiple explanations (multiple Watsonian explanations, multiple Doylist explanations, multiple of each etc) of a given scene or character portrayal or plot point, and people can accept more than one explanation at the same time. It's just uncommon for people to accept or present multiple explanations at once because that's kind of how people people.

2. Doylist takes aren't inherently "better" than Watsonian takes, and vice versa. People use both to engage with the text in different ways and for different purposes. Watsonian logic is fun for roleplay or immersing yourself into the story, and I imagine a lot of fanfic writers often start from a prompt like "I wonder what would happen next if I took x character and then put them in y scenario". Doylist logic is fun if you like examining the text from a more "meta" standpoint, trying to see what purpose various narrative choices serve (or undermine). Neither angle is intrinsically a more valid way to engage with fiction, and you might enjoy doing one thing one day and another thing the next - with different texts or even with the same text.

In litcrit, because I like to pick my brain on the subject of "what would have made for the best story here", I tend to be more interested in analyzing theme, character arcs, setup and payoff etc, which are Doylist interpretations. Some people focus a lot on authorial intent, which is also a Doylist perspective (just a different one). Some people like to try to get into the heads of the characters they're analyzing and discuss ideas like "what choice would make the most sense for x character given who they are as a person". That's a Watsonian take. There are contextual and individual reasons why some explanations may resonate with you more than others some of the time or even most of the time, but they're really apples and oranges. Which one you prefer will likely vary depending on the type of question being posed and what scope seems to be the most appropriate for it - and people are always going to have different opinions about that too... because that's how people people.

Of course, the opinions I personally care enough about to splash all over the internet are going to be opinions I hold with very strong convictions, which is why I can come off quite aggressive about them, but they're still just opinions and there's no such thing as "one true explanation", whether that's Watsonian or Doylist. If I make a Doylist argument and I dismiss someone else's rebuttal on the basis of it being Watsonian, that's not because Watsonian takes are intrinsically weaker, it's just because you generally can't use a Watsonian take to rebut a Doylist one or vice versa. You need to engage with someone's point in order to counter it, and you can't generally do that when you completely change the scope of the question, which is what tends to happen when a Watsonian perspective and a Doylist perspective comes into conflict.

(Of course, you can argue that a Doylist scope is situationally stronger than a Watsonian one or vice versa, but that's a different argument and usually context-dependent lol - point is just because a Doylist answer might fit one particular prompt much better this time, doesn't mean all Doylist answers will always trump all Watsonian answers in every single context all of the time, and that's not even accounting for the fact that you're never going to reach unanimous agreement about these sorts of things anyway.)

I hope that clears things up 😊

[bitternanami]

[fervent, harried, gripping your shoulders] characters

[metamatar]

Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013) and Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others (2014), that embody this tendency: a universalization that, in fact, neither comprehends nor sympathizes with the social and political contradictions in contemporary South Asia.

Both novels place at the center of their narrative what is commonly referred to as the Naxalite movement, which began in 1967 with a peasant uprising in Naxalbari, a village in northern Bengal near the Nepal border. Initially led by armed members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the movement later broke away to form the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) and has largely followed Mao’s doctrine of “people’s war.” Begun in the countryside, it spread to the cities during the 1970s, attracting significant numbers of educated, unemployed youth energized by the peasants’ struggle for rights and recognition. A brutal counteroffensive, empowered by draconian anti-terrorist laws, brought the first phase of the movement to an end. In both novels, the central figures are Naxalite militants. Their immersion in the movement, together with the fallout of their decisions on the lives of those around them, largely propels the narrative in both.

By placing an emancipatory movement at the core of their novels, Lahiri and Mukherjee also place the politics of resistance front and center. And yet, even though both novels are structured by the political actions of key characters, neither author is able to muster an empathetic understanding of their characters’ actions. Moreover, the very idea of a life of struggle is made to appear at best quaint, at worst objectionable. In both novels, politics remains something imposed on the characters, an external, impinging force—but never a source of self-actualization. Instead it serves as a source of dislocation, self-doubt, broken relationships and disrupted lives. Each novel exposes its author’s inability to perceive the political as an intrinsic aspect of the individual being.

Hence, while each of the authors locates a politics of resistance at their novel’s center and views that politics through a universalizing prism, neither can fathom its attraction. Such an approach to emancipatory politics reinforces the neoliberal view that all resistance is doomed because there are no possible alternatives to the current order. And although both authors seem to want to escape an ethos where resistance is viewed as futile, neither is able to do so. As a result, neither is able to engage, much less express, the internal lives of their own central characters. Because of this, they remain limited, not just as post-colonial novels but simply as novels.

The World In a Grain of Sand, Nivedita Majumdar (emphasis mine)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

But what I had either missed or forgotten about those books was the bitterness of the noir hero. I remembered their affect as being wry, smart-assed, even dry. But the bitterness surprised me.

What surprised me more was the source of that bitterness. The median noir detective is a veteran of either World War I (if the action is set in the interwar years) or World War II (for midcentury settings) and the thing they are just smouldering with rage at is the way that the America they fought for has changed.

They left an America where the right people were running the show — affluent white guys who evinced a priggish moral code. They come back to an America where women, Black and brown people and queers are visible and unashamed of it. They come back to an America where the rich have revealed themselves to be deviants and perverts.

The affect of the noir hero is bitterness over progress.

Much like Edward Neumeier discovering to his dismay that the beloved cracking space-battle novel of his boyhood was actually a reactionary, book-length antidemocratic screed, revisiting those noir novels made me realized that those hard-boiled tough-guys I loved were reactionary creeps.

-Silicon Valley Noir: Red Team Blues and the Role of Bitterness in Technothrillers

[robtopus]

Still one of the best and most lucid works of Shakespeare criticism.

@transsexualcoriolanus it even has one on Coriolanus!

[oliviawaite]

“The upfront fun of a con artist is the way they manipulate the social fabric. Prohibitive rules and unspoken undercurrents become navigational channels into locked spaces: Martin Bishop holding a cake and balloons so the guard has to open the security gate for him, Sophie Devereaux playing both a wealthy duchess and a nerdy art restorer to gain access to a locked gallery. It’s a game, a puzzle, a magic trick, and like all those things we automatically root for it to work.

But we also root for the con artist to get caught — not by the law, but by the social threads they so clearly understand. We want them to come to trust the partner they’re forced to work with, we want them to fall for the mark, to leave half the cash on the steps of the orphanage and get the real villain, the heartless villain, hauled away in cuffs. We’re always looking for the moment they start to see the con as a means of making people happy, rather than extracting wealth.”

[jadagul]

I'm torn between citing Practical Guide to Evil, which loves this one:

“You could at least pretend you’re not spying on me,” I reproached. “We came by that information coincidentally, I assure you,” Cordelia politely lied.

and the greatest dialogue tag ever, from Wheel of Time:

"I won't shout at you," Nynaeve shouted.

I know everyone says it’s best to just stick to “said” as a dialogue tag bc it disappears and that’s true and I mostly do but I want to take a moment for my all-time favorite dialogue tag, “lied.” Absolutely nothing hits like “‘I’m here to help,’ he lied.” NOTHING.

[necarion]

Book review: Twelfth Knight (2024) is a modern day retelling of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, featuring characters playing MMOs and going to conventions.

It also seeks to answer the question: "What if Twelfth Night, but less gay?"

I was optimistic about this story, but I think I'm done with it about halfway in. I jest about the gayness (although there is thus far only guilt and anxiety about the deception, nothing actually funny from it), but the core problem is that the protagonist is just mean. The story tries to justify it by "she's a girl in geek fandom and everyone is mean and belittling to her, can you blame her for being angry?" But then she's just as mean to guys who aren't meeting her standards for proper geekdom.

Part of her (and the author's, I think) anger issues are that the world tells women to be more agreeable, to smile more, to go with the flow more. And that everyone telling her that she's an asshole.

But she is. Somehow, the protagonist of an adaptation of a Shakespearean comedy is more offputting than Kvothe.

[jadagul]

I've been reading an old copy of The Phantom Tollbooth to my girlfriend, and tonight we finished it. And just for fun I read some of the ads for other books at the end, and I found what may be the greatest book blurb in history.

A Dark Horn Blowing Dahlov Ipcar Far out across the sands stretching silver-white into the darkening bay, the cow was calling. That mourning, that sadness; it filled my whole soul with its sorrow. But there were words crying in the sound, and it was not the cow that spoke those words, but a small man with a horn standing by a long, black boat there at the edge of the tide. The cow's lowing became the dark horn blowing, and then it was too late ­— if ever I could have turned back I could no longer. 'Here is a remarkable piece of fantasy; haunting title, magical opening chapter — I can promise you the rest won't disappoint.' Naomi Lewis

Everything about that is amazing. The author's name is spectacular. And whoever wrote that blurb has literary pretensions far in excess of their wordsmithing capabilities.

I tried to read it out loud, broke twice, gave it to my girlfriend, who then broke at how hard I was laughing. There were words crying in the sound, and it was not the cow that spoke those words.

[violsva]

God, how much I love meaningful violence in media. Consequences to violence in media. I love a 16 year old girl calmly walking into a room, killing the two people in there with no second thoughts (because she's done it before), and then feeling a part of herself literally rot away as a result. And then, still calmly (because she's done it before), cutting that piece of herself out of her own flesh with the same knife, and burning it as an offering to her patron.

You can say that a world made of food where everyone is food is inherently silly, but there's nothing you can do to make that silly. It doesn't matter that the girl is a chili pepper. That's still just horrible. As it should be.

This is what fantasy is for: realizing metaphors. You can go on deep journeys into characters' psyches as much as you want in realistic fiction, but you will never get that pure and impossible-to-misinterpret horror of violence having an immediate and physical corrosive effect on the perpetrator.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Going back to old favorites is a weird exercise. I remember reading an interview with Edward Neumeier about his script for Starship Troopers, describing how he remembered the original Heinlein novel as a kind of fast-paced action-adventure thriller about massive set-piece battles with alien monsters. But when he actually went back and re-read the novel, he discovered while that those battles make up the beginning and end of the novel, the meat of the book is a bunch of boring lectures about whether only soldiers should be allowed to vote.

I remembered those hard-boiled novels as plot-forward, pacey books about two-fisted heroes beating all the odds to defeat deliciously evil villains. I thought of them as Ur-pulps, as William Gibson told The Paris Review:

The only kind of ghetto arrogance I can summon up from being a science fiction writer is, I can do fucking plot. I can feel my links to Dashiell Hammett. If I meet some guy who subsists on teaching writing in colleges, and if there’s any kind of hostility, I think, I can do plot. I’ve still got wheels on my tractor. The great thing is when you’re doing the other stuff and you whip the plot into gear, then you know you’re driving something really weird.

Gibson’s not wrong here. These books have got wheels on their tractors. They can do fucking plot.

-Silicon Valley Noir: Red Team Blues and the Role of Bitterness in Technothrillers

[necarion]

In A Practical Guide to Evil, one of the most lore-significant revelations is saved for the penultimate chapter and final chapters. It's the answer to something fans had been speculating on for years. And it's saved to the end for a point where it no longer actually matters, not really.

And that's perfect. Because this character has been doing things for a very long time, things that are harmful and evil, and this character needs to be stopped. Why they are doing these things? It's nice to know, but really, fundamentally not important to the story. Meaningful? Yes. It helps us contextualize everything from before. But not important.

Throughout, ErraticErrata remains extremely focused on delivering impact through the characters and their needs and goals. Plot and revelations happen for the characters, first and foremost. Because that is ultimately who we fare about.