Is this Good Advice?
Madeleine Robins October 3rd, 2006
Over in LiveJournal-land, Anna Genoese (my current editor at Tor) is answering random questions. I adore Anna, but I think she missed the boat here; the question, regarding historical fiction, was:
And how accurate do the facts have to be in such works (I’m not talking dates — more like making up motives for people’s actions.
and her answer was:
People are people are people. If their motivations don’t make sense, no one is going to want to read your book. If the characters are stupid, silly, one-dimensional, and boring, and they seem to do things for no reason at all other than to move the story forward, you will get a form rejection really quickly because it means your book is bad, whatever the genre.
I generally think it’s a mistake to over-research, or at least to leave too much of your research on the page. Whether it’s SF, fantasy, or straight historical, wading through pages of the author’s attempts to demonstrate how much more she knows about the setting than her readers will ever know is a distinct turn off (unless it’s John Fowles, who could sit there and lecture me for hours, and I would lap it up happily–but Fowles manages that with tone and voice, not endless exposition). On the other hand…
I am equally irritated by a story in which the motivations of the characters are out of tune with the setting. You cannot write (for example) a novel set in 16th century Italy in which the behavior of the characters is not influenced, in one way or another, by the presence of the Catholic Church, by the lack of reliable birth control, by the laws regarding women and property. That’s not to say you can’t write a novel in which a character goes against the grain of her society, but you have to build in convincing reasons for her to do so–and you have to remember that (when your heroine becomes Pope and decides to establish ecumentical ties to Islam and Judaism in 1450) that not everyone around her is going to be thrilled. In many historical periods and places, women were rarely given political or temporal power; women who had casual sex would face consequences, anywhere from shunning to stoning (not to mention pregnancy); romantic love was a literary construct, and marriage was often a matter of economic expedience. To elide over these facts and consequences is not only cheating, it’s boring.
So, it’s not that I disagree with what Anna said; I just don’t think she was complete enough. Some would-be writer is going to read her comment as “Hey, as long as the motivations make sense, you don’t need to do any research.” Motivations are motivations, and people are people. But if you don’t inform those motivations with the mores and laws of the setting, you’re cheating the reader and you’re cheating your story.
It sounds like she was addressing a question of form rather than content, and as far as she went it’s good advice, but…
Some truly excellent writers can step “outside” the contemporary social milieu of their historical fictions and make it work regardless. I’m thinking of Eco’s Brother William in “The Name of The Rose” who was more an Enlightenment thinker than a 13th Century monk, but it didn’t matter, at least not to me. Others…
I had problems with Caleb Carr’s “The Alienist” because his protagonist was very much a Freudian at a time when it was highly unlikely for such an approach to be entertained. It kept throwing me out.
On the third hand, a friend of mine did a couple of novels set in ancient Maya and did a marvelous job of recreating the social context and being true to that in the depiction of her characters–but that context and mindset are so alien to us that the texts are virtually anthropology rather than compelling fiction. Very little entree was given for a contemporary reader to find sympathy.
It’s a had dance to do. But the rule I go by is, if you’re going to change something, know what it is you’re changing. Which means doing the necessary homework to understand how different your historical characters really are from the present. Otherwise, you run the risk of horrible anachronisms, both coming and going.
Believing motivation can vary from reader to reader, too. Anna has published a couple of books that I thought were dreadful for the very reason she states–and yet she thought the characters and their motives fine enough to publish. Sometimes it’s apples and oranges.
I agree that an ‘alien mindset’ can create a problem for readers trying to identify with characters. While the opposite problem - contemporary mindsets in fancy dress clothing - bothers me and some other readers, I suspect although I can’t prove that it creates less of a problem for many readers than the alien mindset.
Still, to a great extent, people are people emotionally. in love, greed, hate, jealousy, joy, caring, and cruelty. Theoretically it should be possible to latch onto the emotional similarities even when intellectual or social differences are stark.
However, for myself, I find the hardest element of writing into a non contemporary culture are the points where I am not myself quite conscious of the assumptions I’m bringing to the work.
I totally agree!
Maybe it’s question not of the basic motivation but of how the character goes about achieving the goal of that motivation?
Let’s postulate two Christian women, neither beautiful but both nice-looking, who want a good marriage. One lives now, the other during the Renaissance. Both go to church regularly. The first, our contemporary, at age 22 begins to pay attention to how she dresses by trying to look sexy but under control; she hopes to meet men by immersing herself in church clubs for singles and charity works like Habitat for Humanity. The second, the Renaissance girl, at age 12 begins buttering up her father — she needs him to give her a good dowry, so her mother and aunts can make her a good match when she turns 14.
Motivation, in short, is not everything. Both women are women are women (and yes, in earlier times 12-14 years old meant woman), but their stories are going to differ. Our contemporary woman will probably meet a nice guy who wants a big family, and together they’ll work out the terms of their marriage.
If the Renaissance girl tried to take matters into her own hands, she’d end up like Juliet did in a certain play from that era that you all have probably heard of.
Editors are not always right, and books are often published that are not as good as they should be.
Anna’s a smart cookie; while I don’t always admire her choices of books, they hit their markets. My problem, really, was that I am afraid the woman who asked the question was going to take Anna’s comment as a rubber stamp for her own reluctance to do the heavy lifting. (Okay, it’s not like some kid seeing The Matrix and feeling encouraged to go out and do some spree killing, but it did feel like an encouragement to what I consider auctorial bad behavior.)
Absolutely. But what I find most interesting in historical fiction is when these basic emotions are at war with the demands of the social milieu. Once upon a time I read a Regency with a really, really interesting setup: young unmarried woman has an affair with a man from the same town she grew up with. He dies, and leaves her a house (in that town) and a small income–so long as she lives in the house and does not try to sell it. In other words, this guy (who she believed loved her) has set things up so that she has to live in the one place where every single person knows her shame; where her family has utterly cut her off for her crime; where no respectable middle-class woman will talk to her; where men will assume that if she’s fallen once, she’s easy game. So (since this was clearly marked as a romance) she has to be rehabilitated or, at least, find some desirable man who is willing to offer her an honorable “happily-ever-after” despite her sadder-but-wiser past.
I was so excited to see how the author managed it. But she didn’t. Rather than having the heroine find some way to be happy in the society she lives in, the author dropped any semblance of social reality in the setting. By five chapters in, the people who are holding the heroine’s past against her are old fuddy duddies; only the mean men think she’s easy; and by everyone else the heroine is treated as if she had transgressed minorly: been seen wearing white after Labor Day or something. Either the author didn’t understand the economic and social realities of middle- and upper-class women in 1810, or she chose to ignore them, and I felt totally cheated. Particularly because we never got a sense of what she, as a woman of her time and place, felt about her transgression or about the man she’d been involved with.
This rehabilitation may not have been the author’s focus, but having set things up to raise these questions, it’s a cheat not to deal with them. And to do that, the author needs to know something about the world in which she’s set her story.
Mad, I agree. In fact, I think that example just proves my point. The emotional situation is so rich, and yet the author fails it by not doing exactly what you suggest: set up the contrast that we as readers could not help but appreciate.
On the other hand, if a reader had no knowledge of and no ability to get their head around social differences in the past, I guess it wouldn’t work.
There is a funny modern American mainsteam cultural emphasis on - and here I’m not even sure how to put it - essentialist virtue winning out. Hmm, not sure that means what I think it means. Anyway, I find this notion of essentialist virtue (or evil) to be tiresome on many levels, as I think effort, competence, struggle, repentence, or what have you make for a more interesting tale.
Kate, could you elaborate on what you mean by “essentialist virtue” (or evil)?
My own perception is that in America what is assumed as individualism wins out. Which is fine for stories now, but Mad’s story proves that imposing our culture’s choices on the past just sets up a costume story about modern people in period dress. (And there are many who want to read just that.) In American individualism what is of paramount importance is that having sex with the guy was her choice, therefore she’s the heroine and everyone who disagrees is of course a narrow-minded meanie.
The type of costume story I find the least attractive is the one in which the heroes are all enlightened modernists and the villains have the mindset of the period. What an easy cheat.
I find it hard to understand why people want to set a story in some other time/place and then pretend it isn’t.
Bad to the bone. He was evil. She was good. I sense - and I may be wrong - that there is a somewhat manicheistic worldview hidden in the heart of American modern culture, in which some are good down through their essence and others are evil down through their essence, while the rest joggle in between. Therefore, evil people of this stripe - the essentialist evil - are just evil, no chance for redemption, they just are, while essentialist good people are the heroes and they will win out with their essentialist virtue (it’s like genetic or something) and even if they have to do a few bad things along the way those don’t matter in the end to the triumph of their virtue.
I see this strain in certain kinds of conventional plots in movies and books, but it’s perfectly possible that I’m reading into it something that isn’t there.
Still - take the torture question. When evil guys torture it’s evil. When good guys are forced to torture it’s because they have to, and the inherent evil of the act cannot touch them because of their essential virtue.
The opposite side of this is the notion of “noble blood” - the sort of innate superiority that reveals itself despite any adversity or setting. The foundling prince. Oliver Twist. This is a very common trope in fantasy.
The Scarlet Pimpernel; Lord Peter Wimsey (much as I love him); Cedric Lord Fauntleroy. Blood will tell.
I actually like the occasional character who is sui generis, just evil; the biggest mistake Thomas Harris made in Hannibal, in my humble, is giving Lecter a backstory that would somehow make his evil comprehensible. I think readers get monster. However, with a non-monster bad guy, if the palate doesn’t have a range of colors, I lose interest pretty fast.
Lois, is the ‘noble blood’ trope the opposite side of essentialist good & evil or only a variation thereon?
Mad, I agree that a “monster” can work now and again in a narrative, done in the right way; I think that’s a bit different than essentialist evil.
The essentialist good as the opposite side of the essentialist evil.
Kate Elliott said “some are good down through their essence and others are evil down through their essence, while the rest joggle in between.”
LOL . . .the great thing about reading a blog written by writers is that I quite often run across words and sentences that just STICK in my head.
I will be thinking about people “joggling” between good and evil for days.
Is “joggling” a combination of jiggling, jogging, and bobbling? I rather like the mental picture of my soul half-running shakily betwixt good and evil with its head bobbing like one of those weirdly cheerful bobblehead figurines.
Heh. That’s it EXACTLY!
Historical-fiction that stays within its contemporary worldview on every point can show us what it was like to live in the past, and with the values of the time. However, there is a place for historical-fiction in which certain characters hold values more prevalent in today’s society. Including these characters is a great way for different values to interact directly.
I think that a lot of people are pretty interested in trying to figure out what is right, and what works, etc. And many of the values from past centuries are still relevant today: should a mom stay at home; should someone marry for love, attraction, stability, or wealth; does nature exist just for our use? So having values from today and the past side by side in the same story can be a good setup.
I have no problem with a character who–in some way, at least–is more modern in outlook than the people around him. But that means that the people around him have to react, not beam approvingly, when he acts in a way that is out of sync with his milieu. I’m really interested in a character who starts out in sync with the worldview of his time, but for some reason begins to change, and the costs that change has.
I’d agree that for a lot of setups a character changing his/her values need to be believable—and having a whole village change their values in a short time span is pretty unlikely. Although, I’m not going to rule out the possibility that it could be done; the author would have to really love a challange. Of course, the author could have a setup which requires less justification for the change—maybe a comedy of some sort. I guess I’m saying that I like to take it book by book, since whether or not something works is tied in with the rest of the story.
On the topic of values changing and the costs—I read a bio of George Eliot a few months ago (by somebody Hughes, I think) and the costs were pretty high for her. When she was in her early twenties her ideas on religion changed and resulted in a break with her father and brother. Apparently, she felt had about how she handled things, and that regret stayed with her. She was one brave woman, since she knew personally what it would mean when years later she chose to break her society’s values again by setting up house with a married man.
Eliot’s a wonderful example. She had the strength of character to follow the dictates of her heart and her conscience, but there were costs and she bore them. (One of the reasons that Jane Eyre was considered so scandalous was precisely because Jane insists on being taken as a full woman, despite the fact that she has none of the protective insulation of birth, beauty, or fortune.)
I don’t care for the exact opposite sort of creative laziness, either, of course. The sort of “no one would ever talk to a woman who had sex outside of marriage” bloc thinking; there are some who would, some who wouldn’t, depending on their religion, their social class, their financial situation, their own experience, their character and a host of other influences. That’s where building characters comes in.
I wonder if that “some people are always good, some always evil” belief comes from the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. That sounds abstract, perhaps, but it had a huge influence on American intellectual life from the first colonies onward, the so-called “Puritan ethic”. Consider the current mythology that America is somehow “God’s own Country” and can do no wrong.
Predestination lies at the root of the current condemnation of the poor and exaltation of the rich, for instance — the idea that if God’s chosen you to be one of the Elect, you will prosper, and so, if you prosper, you must be one of the Elect. The Gospels show Jesus saying the opposite of course, but to our current crop of Good vs. Evil True Believers, what Jesus said seems to matter very little.
For a very good send-up of the whole idea of Predestination, one can’t beat James Hogg’s CONFESSIONS OF A JUSTIFIED SINNER, just by the way.
But is it always a matter of creative laziness? Couldn’t the author have a creative reason for everyone in the village cheering on our adulterous heroine? Although, I’m hard pressed to come up with an example of why to do this, short of a strange parable or farce or something. Maybe I’m having an attack of “No rule should be followed off a cliff” as C.J. Cherryh puts it over on her site. (Isn’t that a great way to say it) For a lot of stories, I think it is great advice for the character’s motivations to be grounded in their culture/time.
But what exactly is the root/starting point of this “general rule”? Knowing what the root is helps to figure out when to apply it and when not to. I don’t think that there is anything inherently wrong with choosing what parts of a historical culture to include or not include (other than the fact that it will turn off some of the readers—but fantasy also turns off some people because it isn’t “accurate” to reality). So, if it’s not a matter of historical accuracy, what is it? That’s what I’m trying to work out. Or maybe there is a reason that historical accuracy is inherently needed that I haven’t seen.
C.J. Cherryh has a great list of “Pre- and Post- 1900’s Language” at her site, here.
Kit, yeah, I should think that Calvinism and however it fits in with Puritanism are the biggest influence on this odd American essential good/evil thing. That makes the most sense, and it fits in all ways with the idea of the elect prospering, or the Good being able to do things that are bad but them somehow not being bad because the Good did them.
re: historical accuracy. Aren’t we always looking at the past through a filter of the present anyway? How accurate can we be?
Not saying that as an excuse not to try to depict other times and places in ways that show ways in which society works differently from ours, just that I tend to think there is a limit to what point we can know we are being accurate.
Agreed on Mary Ann Evans. I admire her a lot.
Kit — I think it’s the confluence between predestination and the Heratio Algers mytho’s — not only is there predestination towards good/evil, but if you don’t become one of the good/wealthy (because this is America afterall and the land of anyone can become wealthy) you are somehow even more evil.
I’m not sure I’m articulating this well, but I’ve always felt that the downside to the Heratio Algers mythos is that if you fail at rising up above your station in life, you’ve somehow morally failed in life as well.
Just had great thought. I wonder if any genres were ever created because someone said “Hmm, maybe I can break rules X, Y and Z if I call my book something different.
Madeleine, You make Jane Eyre sound really good. I’ll have to make reading it a priority.
About historical-fiction, and it being written by people not of that culture/time: I don’t know why, but I find it bizarre to think that people from the period being written about will never be able to read these historical-fictions. Maybe it’s because the historical worlds become so real in the books themselves, that it seems natural that people from the past should know about the book.
Something to think about: Christopher Stasheff said that he wrote the Wizard in Rhyme series as a reaction to all the medieval fantasy novels that completely disregarded religion. (Like, not just “all the characters are atheists or agnostic, isn’t that strange” but “religion? what’s that?”) It can be irritating to read medieval fantasies that simply don’t address religion at all, especially considering that religious conflicts (within and without) can be, if handled right, more than just an element of worldbuilding but a, a plot, a character, almost, that all the other characters react to, in its own right. (I’m thinking in particular of a certain series by Deep Genre’s very own Kate Elliot. Who’da thunk that heresy could be so interesting?)
I think it comes back to making it, not necessarily realistic, but plausible. I can tolerate a lot in the books I read, but I can see why others feel cheated when they pick up something set in, say, the 1300s and yet all the characters seem like they just stepped off a modern-day New York City subway. It’s like picking up a science fiction book with a really interesting conceit (some variation on the psychic powers theme, or contact with aliens, or a totally different physiology, or whatever) that has absolutely no effect on the characters, or the setting, or anything, except that it’s there…no xenophobia, perfect tolerance of those with special powers, no social repercussions of new technologies, nothing.
To some extent, people are still people, with the same basic motivations: biological needs, spiritual and intellectual growth, acceptance, belonging, “their own way”, comfort in tradition, with different amounts of each for different people. But that’s clearly going to be filtered through the society they live in. Otherwise, like someone said above, what’s the point of setting the story in a different society anyway?
Sara Douglas also does this really well in The Nameless Day. I was more fascinated by the worldview she presented than the actual plot of the book.
Plausible is a good word for this. I like it. It has also helped me figure out that there are two different “plausibles” being discussed. One is whether a character’s motivations are plausible in regards to the setting of his/her world. The other is whether a setting that borrows from history is a plausible reproduction of a historical period. For the most part, I think it’s the second one that I’ve been unsure about. How are the story-telling aspects of a book worse off with a contemporary-ish society that wears fancy clothes, drives carriages, and fights duels?
My second thought on this has to do with the focus of a story. Most of the ways the setting of a book influences the characters won’t be included in the main focus of the story. So even if an author has an accurate historical setting, there is a lot of stuff that is probably best left out of the story or downplayed. The more unfamiliar a setting is, (such as in historical-fiction, science-fiction and fantasy) the more stuff that an author is going to have to consider whether or not to include. Unfamiliar stuff needs more explanation, and explaining too much can lead to the problem Madeleine Robins mentions in the the beginning of the post. So leaving out secondary repercussions—those that don’t have to do with the main focus—might make the story better.
What this comes down to, I think, is, why people want to read stories set in “exotic” locations: in the past, on other worlds, in neverwheres of various sorts. Is it just because you like the costumes? Do the manners intrigue you? Are the rules of society something that makes you think about the rules of your own world? Does the way the world works set up situations that we could not experience in our own world?
In writing my Sarah Tolerance books, I set myself some specific hurdles. In order to understand the heroine’s situation, the reader had to understand the rules of society regarding women and sex (she’s a woman of good family who ran away with her brother’s fencing master, and now, a dozen years later, is back in London; the circumstances under which she might be recieved into society are very limited–if she’d married someone of considerable rank, maybe. And even then there would be people who refused to speak to her). And it was important to me that Sarah herself not only understand how the people of her own class regarded her moral lapse, but that she herself feel that she is “good for none of the commonplace uses of young ladies.” I dealt with this, in part, with a two page info-dump at the beginning of the book, specifically addressing the place of prostitutes in Regency London, and the social assumption that a woman of good family who had sex before marriage would, eventually, wind up as a prostitute.
What was interesting to me, in writing the book, was taking those social expectations and seeing how I could use them to twist the heroine’s life up. Yes, I like the costumes, and yes, it’s a wonderful era to write about. But without the social expectations, the important part of the book would be meaningless.
So: why do you read stories set elsewhere and elsewhen?
You know, one of my biggest loves is when the natural world becomes one of the main “characters” as Gwen nicely puts it. Even if, as Dani says, the plot itself doesn’t work well. How does the natural world push the characters into creating new methods of problem-solving? What kinds of mental/emotional states occur while interacting with the natural world? What are the causes and effects that create our intricate, vibrant ecology? How do our human society and our natural world shape each other? I love Arthur Upfield, Kim Stanley Robinson, Terri Windling’s The Wood Wife, William Steig’s Abel’s Island—Any recommendations would be great.
In most books, nature plays the role of a minor character—amplifying the main story in someway, moving the plot along. Probably similar to the role historical society plays in a “costume” historical-fiction story.
I see a couple of places where things can get harry:
First, deciding when the cause and effects (inc. setting and character motivation) are plausible.
Second, trying to balance focus, clarity, plausablity, vision, etc. Take a story about an army of men and women in medieval-fantasy world. The author might want to include the effects of no birth control/having 10+ kids has on individuals and society. The author might be able to find a way for the complications of this issue to deepen the story. Or the author might conclude that it detracts from the main focus of the story and add a herbal birth control.
Figuring out how to BALANCE everything to make a strong, coherent whole seems to be the toughest part of writing.
One of the many fascinating elements of George Eliot the author was her massive auctorial intuition, which failed her infrequently.
One of the most significant areas in which her intuition / knowledge served her so well was to know when not to write what she knew. Many contemporary critics and readers fault Eliot for refusing her characters the same solutions to their lives that she created for herself. Eliot was an exception to the place and role of women of her culture and era, and deeply aware of it. The longer she lived, the more keenly she felt her exceptionalism, and the price it had extracted from her as a woman, whereas the same transgressions by men of her time and culture, who had the same intellectual and creative gifts she possessed, paid no price at all. Therefore she rightly did not hand out her choices to her characters, making her books immortal and universal, rather than local and of period interest — which more and more, for instance, is the case of the novels of her contemporary, George Sand.
Love, C.
I’ve been thinking about this for the past couple of days. About eight years ago, I wrote a comic-book tie-in novel based on the Marvel superhero Daredevil. Daredevil, for reasons too exhausting to go into right now, is blind, but all his other senses are exquisitely heightened. Throughout the book, every time Our Hero came on stage, I had to turn off the visual and evaluate every scene according to what he would have sensed. It was a wonderful challenge, and I think I managed it pretty well. Now, particularly when I am writing period stuff, I try to remember that lesson–to use scent and taste and feel as well as look to create a scene.
The exercise has a broader applicability, though. In the book I’m working on, set in Italy in the 13th century, I’m trying to remember to approach every scene through the lens of religion. Having been raised in a household with No Visible Means of Spiritual Support, this is no mean feat for me, but I’m trying to get a sense of how religion suffused daily life, without necessarily referring to it (in the same way that I can refer to the prevalence of internet life in a contemporary story without getting into infodumps about the web). To return to the original point of this topic, that’s why research is essential–so that I understand it myself, before I try to create a world based upon that foundation.
Definitely. I can’t imagine writing a story based on the natural world without research. Actually, I’ve got one story forming in my head about science in the 1800s, and can’t imagine doing that without research on the Victorians.
“Approaching every scene through a lens….” In a roundabout way this reminded me of a manga a saw recently by
Fumiko Takano, about a grandmother becoming senile, and F.T. draws her as a young child. I only saw a few panels, and it was in Japanese, but it was intense. One page had the “young girl” going down the apartment stairs, then turning back to look as a family member yelled at her. F.T. suffuses the story with the grandmother’s POV in a great way.
About George Eliot—I think she believed change in society had to occur slowly, which makes a lot of sense. But I hope it’s not always the case, since global warming is something we need to address now.
Well, George Eliot was an evolutionist; she witnessed the speed with which railroads transformed regions and communities. She was … complex. (Such a profound statement that. Not!)
Mad — I’ve been thinking about these things as well. As, for instance, how few people knew how they looked throughout history. How does this affect self-consciousness and self-awareness? Only the very wealthy in most periods of history had mirrors. Did the wide access to mirrors change to a faster or slower degree one’s sense, one’s awareness, of self? One’s sense of one as ‘one?’ And people didn’t much have window glass either for so much of time.
Were mirrors among the objects that Savaronola wanted purged from Florentine life?
Love, C.
Constance, from the context, I’m guessing you meant “evolutionist” in a wider societial way. But I thought it was funny, since I had just read this from G. Eliot’s journal regarding Origin of Species:
Always thinking about the writing.
I also meant it in the terms of Origins of Species too. Darwin didn’t come out of a vacuum.
Eliot’s life partner, George Henry Lewes wrote original and articles upon ‘life sciences and natural philosophy’ subjects, wrote critical articles about others’ works, and performed many researches himself; among them are Seaside Studies (1858), Physiology of Common Life (1859), Studies in Animal Life (1862). One of their preferred forms of relaxation was to go poking around in tide pools and finding specimans and dissecting and drawing them and looking for connections among them.
Eliot was as deeply informed as any free thinker of the day as to the ideas in this realm. By the time she became George Eliot she was not personally a Christian in any sense that her father would have recognized, other than she shared the conviction of so many others in her position that religion was a good and necessary thing for the morals of the uneducated classes.
In Middlemarch, in particular, there are many images clustered about her characters that describe them in terms of the ‘forced changes’ of the animal kingdoms of the natural world.
Love, C.
It’s really interesting that she included the natural world in that way. I’m always looking for fiction with nature/science. After reading her biography, I meant to try one of her books and havn’t done it yet. I did love the Masterpiece Theatre version of Danial Deronda.
Evolution in science went back well before Darwin. What differentiated Darwin, I believe, was the huge amount of research he had done. He was able to base his deductions on the detailed information he gained from paying close attention to the natural world. Research first! : )
Daniel Deronda is very different from Middlemarch, which is the novel that carries the most of those images and metaphor. For one thing, one of the principal characters, Dr. Lydgate, also has ambitions toward establishing himself as a scientist. Another of the principal characters, Mr. Farebrother is an atheist clergyman and amateur naturalist; he and Lydgate are simpático, and have discussions on various subjects.
Daniel Deronda is very different. It’s about Art, with a capital A. The image clusters are deeply oriented around various schools of painting, past and contemporary to the time period, music and so on. There’s also a great deal of religious imagery of both Christian and “Hebrew” source — and George Eliot knew this material as very few people did, including translating the famous Life of Christ from German as the real start of her career as an intellectual and writer.
There’s a lot about religion and art imagery in Middlemarch too, of course, including several painters, or hopeful painters, as characters. We go to Rome ….
I love Daniel Deronda. It’s a ’sophisticated’ book in the way none of Eliot’s others are because in this novel she’s dealing with that class of society, which she entered and observed in Europe (though she didn’t go out in England, due to her adulterous status), and was given entry to due to her fame and the money she made from her writing.
It is a deeply flawed novel though, because she sentimentalized, through not really knowing, Jewish lives and people. She had been hoping to repeat Harriet Beecher Stowe’s success with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by dealing with England and the “Jewish” question, with Daniel Deronda.
But it is still a wonderful novel.
Love, C.
Hmm, so would you recommend reading a particular one first?
I’d recommend reading Middlemarch first, followed by Daniel Deronda.
I love Silas Marner tremendously as one of the most perfect novels ever written in every way, and admire Adam Bede very much, but a lot of people don’t share these attitudes, having been tortured when far too young with these novels in h.s.
The Mill on the Floss, is wonderful, of course, in terms of characters and landscape and a historical era, but its melodramatic ending quite ruins it for me as an entire experience.
Love, C.
Adam Bede is interesting to me in large part because of the portrait of Dinah (did I get that right?) as a methodist preacher - a woman speaking in public before mixed audiences. I found Deronda problematic; I might like it better now - or not - hard to say; I liked Adam Bede better.
Naturally, Middlemarch I consider one of the great novels ever written.
I love that Eliot quote about Darwin!
The out-pouring of valentines for George Eliot has quite convinced me I need to bump her up to the top of my reading list. In fact, my next stop on the web is going to be the library to put in a reserve. (I have to wonder what the library staff thinks of me, since I perpetually have 5-15 books waiting to be picked up—I make them earn their money.)
Okay, I just went and reserved one Middlemarch, which I noticed could be searched for in the genre bildungsromans. I wish they had a genre-category for la picaresca too.
There is Eliot’s novel located in the Savanarola era of Florence, Romola, which in my view is unreadable. I have done my best to read everything available by Eliot, and read the works more than once, and that includes her non-fiction. Have even re-read more than once, Felix Holt, but never once gotten through Romola! I’ve re-read several times Scenes From a Clerical Life, but never once actually read Romola. I have often tried, especially by the time I’d re-read Middlemarch probably about 100 times. Not possible, just not possible. Even though Eliot played a big role in my thesis on American and English Victorianism.
Love, C.
That reminds me of something the biographer (Kathryn Hughes) suggested regarding Eliot’s middle books. She wondered if those books would have been more engaging if Lewes hadn’t kept all the comments/reviews about the books from her. Although she also wondered if Eliot would have stopped writing all together after reading the bad reviews.
I would add another couple possibilities. First, as an instructor of mine once commented, your worst paintings are often the ones you learn the most from. Eliot might have learned what she needed to write her later masterpieces while writing the ones that came before. Second, if she had seen the reviews and was concerned about them, might she have listened to them instead of her own vision? All just conjecture of course.
With Romola, from this perspective, it just was a place, a period, a culture that could not provoke the richness that was in Eliot’s gift for what she owned. She did not own Catholic, Renaissance Florence. She did not resonate sympathetically with it. No matter how much research a writer does in these circumstances can change the situation and the delivery is dead in the water.
Her struggle to write the book is another indicator. Never in the bogged down process was she able to feel that joyous flight when parts really take off for the writer.
It was a mistake as a project. We make them.
Love, C.
Writers will suggest pushing through to solve writer’s block, but I guess there is a point where stopping and re-evaluating is best. Research can immensely enrich and spark imagination and vision, but it can’t replace them. There is something magic about imagination, which is at the heart of what I love about stories, and about drawings. Wish I could understand it better, but at the same time wonder if it’s best left a mystery.
I think there’s an interesting question here about learning from mistakes, and from the mistakes created by ambition. Do we, as artists, need to push ourselves into unfamiliar territory, where we will likely make major mistakes, in order to grow? If we only stay in the tried and true, will we write smoother works with fewer mistakes but less opportunity to struggle onto a higher level?
It seems that in several ways each time Eliot tried to do something different, even when working within her ‘tried and true,” as with Silas Marner, Adam Bede, the much slighter Scenes From a Clerical Life, Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch.
It seems that in several ways each time Eliot tried to do something different, even when working within her ‘tried and true,” as with Silas Marner, Adam Bede, Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch. and the much slighter Scenes From a Clerical Life.
Daniel Deronda, which was a great departure from those tried and true is a brilliant success in terms of character. One example: the actress (who I shall not name for the sake of new readers of the novel) invariably brings up recollections of Lucy Snow’s description of the great “Vashti’s” theatrical performance as a parallel character that Lucy Snow rejects as unwomanly in Charlotte Bronte’s Villette — a novel I truly love. But in Eliot’s novel this character provides a powerful, burning indictment of what it is to have that power of the great artist flaming within you and be denied the expression of it due to what is expected of a woman — and how motherhood will destroy it. That is contrasted with the meek little songbird ‘artist,’ who has a true gift, though much slighter than the actress’s, that was abused by her father far too soon and cannot really bear the large public stage — very, very different, btw, than portrayed in the BBC production of Daniel Deronda. She is not only willing, but wishes to give it all up in order to be a man’s helpmeet and a mother, and in so many ways is also a failure as a character exactly for being that sentimental perfect angel in the house right down to being so very very tiny. Again, the opposite of Eliot herself — who did deny herself motherhood, though raising another woman’s children fairly well it seems, and possessed of all homemaking skills — and who did step upon the world stage when it was available to her. Both of these principal female characters are again contrasted with the neurotic, frightened, mediocre beautiful society figure of Gwendolyn, who thinks that a professon as a performing artist is available to anyone with talent for charades, and who is told quite otherwise. There are many other characters who are billiant executions along with much othe wonderful material — yet the book fails where Eliot cannot step. She makes the same errors there that she made with Romola, researching rather than owning.
Yet, much of that same research glows like Renaissance Cathedral art in Eliot’s sections of Middlemarch set in Rome. You see much of that research used to marvelous effect in the best parts of Daniel Deronda as well.
So — I don’t know how to answer that. Each artist needs to ask that question of herself with each project. Inability to take risks doesn’t get you anywhere either, one would think.
Erica Jong is a writer who never really succeeds when she moves out of her own life — she is the autobiographical novelist of her time and place. But her historicals are far less successful, for instance.
Often, however, publishers and readers do not want you to change. Which may well play a larger role in the ‘literary’ writers referred to in that piece linked to the Guardian, than the idea that they are slumming, coz I, for one, don’t think the writers feel that way for a second.Â
Love, C.
I wonder if there are ways to ameliorate the business consequences of discovering a book a mistake after spending months on it, having a contract, etc. Of the top of my head, all I can think of is having a book in the bank—a different but already finished book to offer the publisher, even if it isn’t the book contracted for. I have no idea publishers would actually be able to make a switch like that, or be willing to. But the relief of knowing I had a back-up plan would make taking chances easier.
Roger Sutton, editor of Horn Book, recently asked this on his blog:
Rather than rephrasing the comment I made in response, I’m going to copy it here, except a typo.
“Several times I’ve read comments by visual artists in which they talk about how important limits are in their work. Limitations make the artist come up with new solutions. One type of limit is to create a work pretty different from the previous one, but another type is to create variations within a given set of conditions.
Generally speaking, the second type seems to be appreciated less in literature than in the visual arts. However, writing the second type of book is in many ways harder. Imagining interesting variations on a theme can be tougher than coming up with a new theme. Also, the writing itself has to be really good, since the readers are already familiar with the aspects that are repeated.
Maybe this is related to the difference between people who like to travel far and wide, and people who spend their lives discovering the secrets of one place.”
But as Constance pointed out, publishers and readers may very well want similar books from authors.
There are legal problems with substituting another book for the one that is contracted for, just for starters.
Your contract includes a brief, but hopefully telling, description of the book that the contract is for. Additionally, there is the proposal, the description, etc. in the New Book’s file that specify what the book is.
As an example, recall the trouble Spinrad got into with his now ex-publisher here in the States when he turned in a mystery instead of the sf book he contracted for? Not only did the publisher refuse to go along with it, it demanded the return of the advance for the book not provided, and dumped him as an author, and did it through legal action, the costs of which they had the right (though I don’t know if they did) ask him to pay.
Repetition, the known quantity, is what so many want. It makes that dud something that can be amoritized across to maybe the next book, that may well be better, with this time around the author less distracted by illness, divorce, birth, death, poverty, prison sentence, etc. So the continuing character that the public loves is the key. The problem is being provided the time it takes for the public to learn to love that / those character(s). The Patrick O’Brian books were not the spectacular success out of the box that they eventually became. Neither was James Burke’s Dave Robichaux. It takes time, and time is what authors’ creations are seldom allowed these days.
And then what happens when the buying public gets tired of those characters? Because it does / can happen. The public outgrows / changes, etc. Tastes and trends and fashions change with each generation and within the generations too.
So you’re still better off writing what you need to write, want to write, love to write. That’s still the bottom line, it seems.
Love, C.
Thanks, Constance, that’s really helpful information. Tough, from an author’s POV, but understandable since publishers have specific types of books they publish, and have probably already done work on the cover, etc for the book on contract. So, it seems what I could do as an author, would be to leave wiggle room in my schedule for unexpected persona; delays, and to not send a book out until I’m pretty confident the characters/place are alive for me.