In the myriadic year of this week
Hi Word Suitcase readers,
I hope this newsletter finds you well, and boy do I mean that. As well as possible, anyway. I didn’t expect to experience a world-changing pandemic in my lifetime, but turns out we don’t get a choice.
Signing an email two weeks ago: Best, Emily
Signing an email now: Wishing that Providence may spare you and yours, and keep you in good health and good cheer, I remain, &c &c, Emily
March 20th 2020 1,780 Retweets 12,134 Likes
Anyway, here are some words and books I’ve been thinking about. This newsletter is really long, but maybe you’re looking for something to read.
FRANK, adj. Before this word was an adjective that meant “free” and then came to mean “outspoken,” it was a noun that meant a member of a Germanic tribe called the Franks. They lived on the edge of the Roman Empire in the Rhine river valley. Some parts of where the Franks lived are now called France.
Here’s what the Online Etymology Dictionary has to say about the adjective “frank”:
A generalization of the tribal name; the connection is that Franks, as the conquering class, alone had the status of freemen in a world that knew only free, captive, or slave.
Shit. Human history is a huge bummer almost all the time. The names we call each other have to do with whether we conquer or are conquered, or sometimes what kind of weapons we prefer to kill our fellow humans with. It’s possible that other Germanic tribes called the Franks by that name because they used spears or javelins, and frankon would have been the Old Germanic word for that. But there’s not much attestation there.
Whether or not it was with spears, the Franks did a lot of conquering, so much so that eventually “Franks” became less of a tribal identifier and more of a catch-all term for Western Europeans. When the Franks got tired of conquering Europe and decided to raid the Middle East in the Crusades, Arabic speakers, for whom “fr” is a foreign consonant cluster, named them “farangi.” This word made it into Persian (farang) and from there into other South and Southeast Asian languages, including Thai, where “farang” is now an insulting word for white people. Hindi फ़िरंगी firangi (another insulting word for white people, especially Brits) came into 17th-century English as “feringhee,” and nobody on the internet will confirm for me that this is where Star Trek got the name of its alien species the Ferengi, but I simply cannot be convinced otherwise.
Anyway, we white people can strive not to be farang/firangi by not being rude, or outspoken, or frank.
I didn’t finish any small-r romance this week, and nobody is more surprised than me. I thought for sure I would turn to that guaranteed Happily Ever After in this moment of grim chaos, but instead I read three things that all have their fair share of grim chaos, but they all had in common the wonderful quality of not being the firehose of bad news that is my twitter feed.
This week in Capital-R Romance, I read Baudelaire’s translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Masque of the Red Death” (Le Masque de la Mort Rouge). I also read Poe’s original for comparison. Poe is beloved in France, maybe even more so than here in the United States, and some of that is thanks to Baudelaire. They were a good match, Baudelaire and Poe, both obsessed with the filthy underbelly of human nature.
It makes sense to me that Baudelaire’s translation feels a little more modern, since Baudelaire’s own writing is more interested in modern life. Poe sets “The Masque of the Red Death” in an unnamed country, and his linguistic choices reflect that: the language is elevated, evoking an almost fairytale past. The one very deliberate nod to modernity and the passage of time is the chiming of a clock, which all the characters find chilling. (As previously discussed, the subject of all poems is the clock.)
Baudelaire hews to Poe’s English pretty closely, sometimes in ways that change the feeling. For example, he translates Poe’s use of “visage” as visage. Those two words have all the same letters in the same order, and they both mean “face,” but they’re not the same word. “Visage” in English is highfalutin and unusual. Visage in French is just regular old “face.”
Anyway, if you can’t stand to read one more thing about a plague, I don’t recommend reading “The Masque of the Red Death” right now. But if, like me, you’ve been warming your cold heart with the thought that at the very least, maybe some of the evil assholes who made this catastrophe worse for all of us are about to get dead, then Poe has got you covered.
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, this week I revisited a childhood favorite—after discovering that all the Animorphs books are available for free online, I downloaded and read The Invasion (Animorphs #1) by KA Applegate. In case you were not eleven years old in 1998, Animorphs is a 54-book series that came out in the 90s, one shiny paperback a month that cost $3.99 and took an hour to read, about a group of five young teens given the ability to transform into animals so they can fight a secret alien invasion of the earth. You might recognize them by their covers, which manage to be both cheesy and horrifying:
By all rights, these books should have been as forgettable as their production schedule and price tag suggested, but they left a mark on me and almost everyone else who read them. I read so many books in my childhood that simply passed through my brain and into the ether. I think I liked Anne of Green Gables, but can I tell you a single thing that happens in it? Definitely not.
Animorphs, on the other hand, still has a grip on my memory. I remember plot points. I remember sentences. And I don’t mean the repeated sentences, the “My name is Jake/Rachel/Tobias/Cassie/Marco” explainer in every first chapter. I mean it’s still on my mind twenty years later that at one point, the main characters ally themselves with someone who has perfect recall. Then the plot takes its usual course and a bunch of violent and horrifying stuff happens, and as the narrator drags himself home in the aftermath, he reflects that his trauma will be easier to cope with because “already, my mind was forgetting.”
Jesus.
On a lighter note, if any Millennial ever tells you about how red-tailed hawks ride columns of warm rising air called “thermals,” it is a surefire sign that they read Animorphs. (Don’t tell me there are other ways people might have learned this fact. I don’t want to hear it.) But there aren’t many lighter notes. Over and over again, these kids find out that the adults in their lives can’t be trusted, that war and violence will grind you down, and that none of them will ever be the same. It was brutal and heartbreaking and I loved it.
I knew even then that these books were not cool, that if I read them in public, their covers would earn the scorn of my peers. It didn’t stop me. I read them in private and didn’t talk to anyone about them—except one of the first things I ever did on the internet was type “Animorphs” into a search engine (Yahoo, maybe, or Ask Jeeves—not Google). That’s how I discovered fanfiction, which is how I became a writer. And now I’m here writing this newsletter that is usually about romance novels, notorious for their embarrassing covers. I have not changed at all, and neither have these books, which are still deeply uncool on reread. A lot of goofy 90s references to that novelty, the internet, and those now-abandoned monuments, shopping malls. (These did not strike my tween self as goofy, but my adult self loves them.) But they’re still riveting, too.
Anyway, if you were an Animorphs reader: (1) hello and (2) it will tickle you to learn that these books have been discussed in The Paris Review. [Content warnings for The Invasion: death of a parent (mentioned), abuse/neglect (mentioned), kids unable to trust their families, violence.]
I also finished the spectacular sci-fi/fantasy novel Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir—perhaps better known by its succinct and accurate tagline, “lesbian necromancers in space.” I am late to this book, having waited months in a hundred-person digital queue to get my library copy because of Macmillan’s wrongheaded, punitive library embargo, which is now thankfully ended, but I am so glad this weird, hilarious, suspenseful, punch-to-the-gut book entered my life this week, when no other book could have absorbed my attention so fully and for so many hours. I have finished it now, my library copy, but I contacted the shuttered indie bookstore in town, which is wisely respecting our new socially distant norms, to arrange a James-Bond-style handoff.
Since I finished it—in the middle of the night, blinking back tears and flipping pages furiously—I’ve wanted to go back to the beginning. To reread it. To see what I missed. But I only just read it the first time, so it’s still fresh in my memory. I know exactly what this return will involve: the lines that made me laugh the first time through will make me cry now.
That reversal suits this book perfectly, since it executes an astoundingly acrobatic version of the enemies-to-friends-to-not-quite-lovers trope. Gideon is an indentured servant of the Ninth House, a desolate, lightless planet of dried-up old bone nuns and skeletons guarding a fantastically creepy tomb. She hates it there, and she especially hates the Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus, the young necromancer who rules the Ninth. Gideon’s only concerns in life are titty mags, her sword, and getting the hell away from the Ninth.
The book has an exciting, twisty plot—a magic puzzle quest mashed up with a country-estate murder mystery, except everyone’s trapped in an abandoned Gothic palace in space—but the story is about Gideon and Harrow. Naturally, as a romance reader, when I see two fictional characters who hate each other, I assume they’re gonna fall in love. As always, the trick to writing something we’ve all seen a thousand times before is not to make readers ask what will happen, but how it will happen. The more impossible it seems for these two people to stop hating each other, the more satisfying it is when they finally do. This book conjures love from hate just like its characters conjure life from death: esoterically, miraculously, in such a way that you can witness every step and still not replicate the results. And, like an unholy construct of bones charging right at you, it will make you scream.
Do you know what the first thing I highlighted in this book was? In retrospect, it’s a massive spoiler, so I am printing it here ciphered in ROT13, which can be decoded by anyone who’s read the book already or who doesn’t care about spoilers, and passed over by anyone else.
"...fur yrnarq vagb Uneebj; Uneebj, jub jnf qnoovat ure rlrf jvgu rabezbhf tenivgl. Gur arpebznapre syvapurq bhgevtug.
'Qb lbh jnag," Tvqrba juvfcrerq uhfxvyl, "zl unaxl."
'V jnag gb jngpu lbh qvr.'
'Znlor, Abantrfvzhf,' fur fnvq jvgu qrrc fngvfsnpgvba, 'znlor. Ohg lbh fher nf uryy jba'g qb vg urer.'"
BU ZL TBQ. V ynhturq ng guvf gur svefg gvzr guebhtu. V ynhturq! Naq shpx vg nyy, ohg vg'f fgvyy shaal. Cnegyl vg'f pbagrkg, fvapr ol guvf cbvag va gur obbx, jr haqrefgnaq Tvqrba naq Uneebj'f eryngvbafuvc. Ohg vg'f nyfb gur cebfr. V guvax vg'f "juvfcrerq uhfxvyl" gung qvq zr va, ohg bs pbhefr vg'f nyfb gur pbagenfg bs "qb lbh jnag zl unaxl" trggvat nafjrerq jvgu "V jnag gb jngpu lbh qvr."
Naq bs pbhefr, Uneebj trgf jung fur jnagf. Jung n shpxvat xavsr gb gur urneg.
I can’t believe I’ve been talking about Gideon for this many paragraphs without discussing the prose, which is weird and wonderful and bounces between “abstruse” and “mega dead.” I describe a lot of books in this newsletter as “funny,” but very few actually make me laugh out loud. This one did. There’s so much joy in this use of language. (I’m not gonna quote any of the funniest passages because they have to be in context.)
It’s rare to find sci-fi and fantasy books that so fearlessly incorporate contemporary slang, as SFF writers (myself included) rightfully fearing jarring readers out of the imagined world of the book. This is true for Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” and its unspecified country, too.
When I was writing secondary world fantasy, I told myself that the work was a translation: my characters did not speak English, so it didn’t matter if I had used the word “inch” in a context where British imperial units (and Britain) had never existed. The other option is to invent your own system of measures—but that gets you nowhere if you want to say one character “inched” closer to another. Sure, you can say she took a small step forward or she scooted or she shuffled or whatever other synonym works, but every word we use comes from somewhere. (hey thats the premise of the newsletter) Nothing is free of context.
Even knowing that, and repeatedly reminding myself that my work was a translation, I still mainly stuck to language that would feel timeless. Not too tied to 2016, when I was writing my first fantasy novel. Not too American. But of course you can’t really achieve that. I’m American. I wrote in 2016. These things mark my writing whether I want them to or not. I made choices to minimize those qualities, but they cannot be eliminated. Nobody in my fantasy novels says “Yo, step off”—something Gideon says (absolutely perfectly) because Tamsyn Muir’s attitude toward translation was more expansive than mine. Whereas I was soothing myself with “it’s a translation, I have to make some compromises,” she was shrugging and saying “fuck it, it’s a translation, I can do what I want.” It works because she commits so fully. It works because it’s the right attitude for this book and for hot, sword-wielding, sunglasses-wearing lesbian slacker Gideon. One instance of “Yo, step off” would feel jarring, but this book delights in stirring in just the right amount of contemporary slang. Not so much that you can’t taste that seasoning anymore, but not so little that it feels like “Yo, step off” was accidentally dropped in.
This variety goes hand in hand with the book’s narration. The vast majority of fiction that I read, regardless of genre, is narrated in third-person limited point of view, which is writing/publishing industry shorthand for a complex mechanism of fiction that readers take for granted: who tells the story? For a work of fiction written in first person, this question has a short answer: the “I” we see in the text, reporting whatever that “I” is doing, saying, hearing, seeing. (Obviously, first person point of view is also complicated. I ain’t got time for that now.)
For a work of fiction without this “I,” the question is murkier. When we say “third-person limited point of view,” what we mean is a disembodied voice tells the story, but that disembodied voice only knows the thoughts and feelings of one character. When we say third-person omniscient, we mean the disembodied storytelling voice knows everybody’s business.
Literary critics have all kinds of academic jargon about this, and there’s a whole field of study called “narratology.” Personally, I feel like I should have to put a quarter in a swear jar any time I say a word I learned in graduate school, so I will try to keep this newsletter free of them. Apologies for “narratology.” One of the best moments of grad school was a sort of pulling back of this theory-and-jargon curtain when one of my professors sighed and said, “The narrator of a Balzac novel is Balzac. We’re not supposed to say it’s Balzac, but it is.” What a huge relief that was.
But things change. Writers start messing around with this idea of who the narrator is, of how present, how knowledgeable, how preachy that narrator should be. In English literature, it probably starts a little earlier—I think you can find moments in Jane Austen where the characters’ thoughts surface without intervention from the narrator—but I don’t know shit about English literature. I’m only licensed to drive French literature, so we’re gonna talk about Flaubert.
Writing about Madame Bovary, Flaubert once said in his personal correspondence:
L’illusion (s’il y en a une) vient au contraire de l’impersonnalité de l’œuvre. C’est un de mes principes, qu’il ne faut pas s’écrire. L’artiste doit être dans son œuvre comme Dieu dans la création, invisible et tout-puissant ; qu’on le sente partout, mais qu’on ne le voie pas.
The illusion (if there is one) comes, on the contrary, from the impersonal nature of the work. It’s one of my principles that one must not write oneself. The artist should be in their work like God in creation, invisible and all-powerful; we should feel them everywhere, but not see them. [Translation is mine.]
Scenes in Madame Bovary are told in a sort of blend of the voice of the invisible, all-powerful narrator—and the thoughts of the characters. (I have written about this before, specifically the ennui spiders.) This technique probably sounds unremarkable to you because this blend is so common in contemporary fiction. As readers, we are accustomed to this perspective that puts us both inside and outside of a character’s head. We don’t expect interruption from the narrator. We don’t expect the narrator to have a personality at all. The impersonal nature of the work makes the illusion. In the 173 years since Flaubert described his innovative style, it’s become familiar and comfortable for all of us. The subdivision into “third-person limited” and “third-person omniscient” comes later, but “limited” is made possible by the narrator’s retreat into the impersonal and the invisible.
(Allegedly neutral third-person narration was, I think, probably bolstered in the twentieth century by the rise of film and television, since sometimes we like to pretend that the lens of the camera is neutral and impersonal. But this ain’t no film class.)
Flaubert was reacting to the dominant style of his own time, a narrator who didn’t mind saying “I” or interjecting an opinion or a moralizing judgment here and there. This style is now comparatively rare—which is why I was delighted to find it in Gideon.
(I know. We’ve wandered far from our lesbian necromancers. I made it through all those paragraphs about narration without saying “extradiegetic,” but if I had a Flaubswear jar, it would be full.)
Take, for example, this sentence, describing a rapier duel:
Gideon Nav knew in the first half second that Magnus was going to lose: after that she stopped thinking with her brain and started thinking with her arms, which were frankly where the best of her cerebral matter lay.
Who says this? Who thinks it? Certainly not Gideon, though we are privy to her thoughts (“Magnus [is] going to lose”). We have just been told that she “stopped thinking,” so the second half of the sentence can’t be her thoughts. You can find this sort of “she stopped thinking” moment in impersonal narration, and it usually doesn’t trip my “uh oh, narrative fuckery” alarm.
But “frankly” rings the narrative fuckery alarm hard.
(hey thats the word of the week)
“Frankly” is a word for introducing an opinion. It’s a little flag we wave to say here comes some honesty, you might not like it. “Frankly” is utterly personal. This is not a camera lens. This is not an invisible, neutral disembodied voice. This disembodied voice has notes for you, and you might not like them.
The sentence makes more sense this way. Gideon, who says things like “Yo, step off,” is pretty unlikely to say something like “cerebral matter”—or to call herself stupid.
The narrator in Gideon never goes full-on “I.” They remain a disembodied voice. (Feels pretty appropriate for a book with so many ghosts.) But they do express opinions. And more than that, the variety of vocabulary that is the joy of this book requires this kind of narrator, one who’s not bound to express things only in the way that Gideon would. This contrast shows up in the very first sentence:
In the myriadic year of our Lord—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!—Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.
“In the myriadic year of our Lord” already alerts us that our narrator is not limited solely to Gideon’s perspective, in addition to evoking the opening lines of other historic or legendary tales (while simultaneously demonstrating that this tale doesn’t take place in any history we know). The scale of this book is big. Something grand is happening here. And we maybe get a little personality in that interjection—an exclamation point!—but who knows, could be that this whole culture is just really excited to praise the King Undying.
Still, that language, which is the language of religion, of royalty, of history, of epics, doesn’t go with the simpler style and smaller scale of the second half of the sentence, and it really doesn’t go with “dirty magazines.” We were just talking about the King Undying and his ten-thousand year reign, and now we’re talking about porn. This reinforces what we already suspected: “In the myriadic year of our Lord” is not how a character tells their own story, and it’s definitely not how Gideon Nav of the dirty magazines would tell her story.
The whiplash in this first sentence, the way it jerks (heh) us from formality to informality and back, shows us what this narrator can do. See the big ten-thousand year picture; get up close and very personal with Gideon. These contrasts make the book—and they are, frankly, fun as fuck.
[Content warnings: death mostly by violent murder, suicide, violence, blood, gore.]
Whew. Okay. Thanks for reading all that, or not reading it, that’s also fine. (An attention span? In THIS economy?)
Also this week, which was ten thousand years long, I started a hashtag for #LivingRoomReadings on twitter, and there’s been some really good stuff so far.
Felicia "Ray" Davin @FeliciaDavin
ooh what if we do tiny (10 minute max) readings on twitter live? I would love to hear authors read their own work or readers share their favorite passages, we could tag them all #LivingRoomReadings or something
sarah maclean @sarahmaclean
I'd love to see book events move online--livestream from your house with the help of a local indie. Give readers all over the world a chance to see you in action, authors! https://t.co/dm6bm3tDnv
March 16th 2020 40 Retweets 164 Likes
Participate if you want to! You don’t have to be a writer, or on twitter. You can read someone else’s work and post it wherever you want. And then tell me about it if you’re comfortable with that! (I did a couple of readings of my own work and will probably read more over the next few weeks.)
Okay. Deep breath. See you next week!
