Myth, the Universe, and Everything

I wanted to post this on Monday, but, well, I had a deadline yesterday and had to finish reading a few series of review books at different grade levels before I could justify posting. So, just pretend this is my Valentine's Day post, ok?

You know that I read a lot of romance novels, and that I love the genre. You may also remember that we're reading the Safehold series as a family, and we're currently in the middle of By Schism Rent Asunder, the second book in the series. As I'm sure you've guessed, the Safehold books are not romance novels. However, like a lot of my favorite SF and F books, there's definitely romance inside the rest of the court intrigue and derring-do. But I think this is one of the first times I've seen compelling romance minus the angst that normally accompanies it.

I don't use angst as a pejorative here. As I posted on one of sartorias's recent Book View Cafe entries, I love me some romantic angst. My two top favorite novels of all time are both YA, and both involve the main character loving someone who she can't believe actually loves her back (which causes a heart-wrenching moment or two along the way!). In one case, the heroine doesn't actually know she's in love -- and that he might return her affections -- until she realizes she's put herself in a situation where it looks like she's betraying him utterly, and she might lose him after all. In the other, the girl knows very well that she's in love, but due to the hero's sudden absence, and his return in the company of her sister, she believes that, like in everything else in her life, her sister has proven better than she has. This opens her up to temptation by a faerie queen -- because how else will she win her heart's desire? And, of course, both have happy endings. (I'm not revealing the titles here, because these moments happen right at the end of both books, and they're complete spoilers as such. Some of you, of course, may recognize the moments. Or remember my listings of top books from earlier posts.)

Graceling by Kristin Cashore has some moments like this, also, with the exception that heroine Katsa thinks that, to have the life she wants, she has to reject all romance. Po, the hero who loves her, has to convince her that she can have romance without sacrificing herself. This may seem like a completely different moment, but the reconciling that Katsa goes through to decide what being in love would mean for her selfhood had that same kind of poignancy for me that the other stories did.

As much as I love those moments, there's no denying that they're angsty. They're full on teen torment, questioning of the self and one's relationship with the world. But that kind of angst isn't reserved for teens or YA novels. What would a good romance novel be without that same kind of questioning? If the hero and heroine knew from the very beginning that they were going to reach their happily ever after -- the way we readers do -- romance novels would be a lot shorter. The barriers that get thrown up between the hero and the heroine could be battled together, because hey, that's what teamwork is for! There are rare romance novels where this happens, but most of the fun in the romance novels I read is the will-they, won't-they push and pull, especially when it's driven by concerns that make a lot of sense -- or the world threatening to implode -- rather than miscommunication and stupid decisions.

Of course, in a SF or F epic, the romance isn't the center, and it doesn't need to take up the same amount of space. It can happen in small moments (there's a gorgeous moment in The Lord of the Rings when Aragorn notices that Eowyn is in love with him and he realizes that he has to reject her -- it's slipped in there, very quietly, and amounts to about one line of text; the love story between Eowyn and Faramir is equally quiet and lovely). It can be the hinge around which the final happy ending swings. Relationships can go through various possible incarnations or progress from fresh young love to passion to comfort (the Inda books follow a lot of relationships through various incarnations and succeed at showing love at many stages, for example).

Or romance can be a digression from the major plot that enhances the lives of the characters -- and makes readers like me squee just a little bit. This is the case with the romance currently transpiring in By Schism Rent Asunder. Two characters (unnamed for those who haven't read the series) have decided on a political marriage before meeting. There's already initial mutual respect, or the marriage would not have been the preferred form of alliance. When the characters do meet, there's instant attraction -- and, thus, relief. The marriage is the right thing to do: there's a new hope that they may actually enjoy it, as well. They each brooch the potential for romance a little tentatively -- the hesitation and uncertainty that the other may not feel the same spark -- but it's quickly acknowledged that, yes, the spark is there. And thus they can progress, without all of the will-they, won't-they push and pull, because the relationship has already been committed to. I don't think I've ever seen a romance done quite this way before, and while I'm sure that there may be quarrels and tempests in the future (they've only just begun on the relationship where I am in the story), I think the way their relationship has been presented thus far makes me as a reader fall in love with them just a little bit. And that, to me, is a great mark of success, whether or not the happily ever after is looming at the end.

Getting ready for the trip, I'm back to reading Barfield, hoping I'll be able to finish it before I meet up with the students in the airport, since they'll all be much fresher with it than I am. I've also been thinking a lot about subcreation from the perspective of Tolkien, since that's one of the topics I'm writing about soon for Journey to the Sea, and have been pondering my long WIP (the one I just started randomly and haven't yet gotten back to), in which some writers can exert their will over reality.

All of these thoughts were in my head when I picked up Lavinia, by Ursula K. Le Guin on my lunch break today, and the first few paragraphs hit home, so I wanted to share them here. I've long admired Le Guin's work (one of my favorite essays in college was a response, in Le Guin's style, to "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"), though I've not read as much of it as, perhaps, I should have. At any rate, here is the opening; I hope you'll see why it intertwined so easily with my thoughts.

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I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I write. I'm not sure of the nature of my existence, and wonder to find myself writing. I speak Latin, of course, but did I ever learn to write it? That seems unlikely. No doubt someone with my name, Lavinia, did exist, but she may have been so different from my own idea of myself, or my poet's idea of me, that it only confuses me to think about her. As far as I know, it was my poet who gave me any reality at all. Before he wrote, I was the mistiest of figures, scarcely more than a name in a genealogy. It was he who brought me to life, to myself, and so made me able to remember my life and myself, which I do, vividly, with all kinds of emotions, emotions I feel as strongly as I write, perhaps because the events I remember only come to exist as I write them, or as he wrote them.

but he did not write them. He slighted my life, in his poem. He scanted me, because he only came to know who I was when he was dying. He's not to blame. It was too late for him to make amends, rethink, complete the half lines, perfect the poem he thought imperfect. He grieved for that, I know; he grieved for me. Perhaps where he is now, down there across the dark rivers, somebody will tell him that Lavinia grieves for him.

There have been a couple of really interesting posts lately, both in livejournals I read (irysangel and sartorias) and in other blogs (Genreville) about what we carry with us as readers when we approach a work of fiction. Sometimes we as readers demand a happy ending, or "good writing" (whatever that means). Sometimes we have expectations that a work of fiction will stay true to its beginnings--in the case of John Leavitt's interesting Genreville post, that means urban fantasy that sticks close to the private investigator noir tradition, rather than fantasy roots. While a novel may not demand decisions from its readers like a role playing game does, there's a high degree of interactivity even in the printed page. Readers supply a whole lot of what goes on in a scene. My mother used to tell me she had trouble reading as a kid, because she'd imagine so many details of each scene, it would take her forever to get on with the reading instead of the imagining.

It makes me wonder a bit about the nature of sub-creation, which I've been reading and writing about a bit lately (thanks to the article randyhoyt had me ponder about earlier this month). Tolkien's description of sub-creation is quite clearly the act of an artist, or the person involved in the act of presenting a secondary creation to an audience. But I wonder, as that audience, how much sub-creation effort we expend ourselves. I've heard some writing teachers talk about students who see words simply as data. They take in the information, but don't do what my mother did as a child--they bring no imagination to it. I suspect that good writing--that a good work of sub-creation--requires not only investment from the artist, but from the audience as well. The give and take required there is a much more intricate balance than people who write off genre fiction on the whole (or really, any form of art--like the abstract visual works that I can't really claim to understand, or some forms of poetry that I don't "get") allow for.

This is about the time of year when it occurs to me that I actually need to start marking time in 2009. In part, this is because our library has Sunday hours for the school year, so we volunteer to work shifts on Sundays, usually one a month or so, right around now. To do this well, it requires actually having some idea about how the next year is going to work--or at least making sure you mark down in advance what dates it is you've volunteered for.

When I was at MythCon, I just barely missed being able to purchase a Ted Nasmith calendar for 2009. (Nasmith is known for his Tolkien art, which is, in my opinion, fantastic.) They'd sold out on the first day, which is no real surprise, and it is not yet available in stores. Strike out on that one. Yesterday, however, I discovered that Lindsay Archer (whom I've raved about numerous times) has a calendar available at her DeviantArt site. Eureka! Now I can actually plan ahead for those deadlines I hope to have in 2009.

For those of you with writing deadlines: how do you keep track of them? I started with a planner and ended up finding that a wall calendar, where I can see a month at a shot, ended up working better for me. Any ingenious organizational strategies out there I haven't contemplated?

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I have been a bad blogger this week, and for that I apologize. On the up side, not blogging has meant I did more fiction writing, and I finished "Don't Let Go" last night (clocking 6447 words yesterday for a grand total just over my total word-count limit; I'm hoping Dylan will have suggestions on cutting it down the hair it needs to be cut).

To celebrate finishing it, I gave myself the morning off and finished a book I've been reading: Standard Hero Behavior by John David Anderson. If you haven't pulled this off your library or bookstore shelf yet, don't pass go, don't collect $200, just head straight to the library or bookstore and pull it off. This is Anderson's first novel, and it's entirely satisfying--it features fifteen-year-old Mason Quayle, a struggling bard in a town where all the heroes have left, as he blunders into his first quest: a mission to bring the heroes back. One of the town's missing heroes is his own father, and the quest becomes as much about discovering who his father was as it does saving the town from impending invasion. The story is the traditional hero's quest spun on its head, and it's delightfully satisfying. You all know I've read several brilliant books in the past year: this one's pretty high on that list. It's been marketed as a children's book rather than YA (possibly because it's not very edgy), so get over to your junior fiction section and check it out. (And if anyone is on a list serv somewhere with John David Anderson and could pass on my admiration, I'd very much appreciate it! I've gotten too used to being able to compliment the authors I admire in their blog comments, I think. *g*)

And now, for a short excerpt from "On Fairy Stories" by J. R. R. Tolkien, in lieu of an original guest blog.

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There had been much debate concerning the relations of these things, of folk-tale and myth. . . . At one time it was a dominant view that all such matter was derived from "nature-myths." The Olympians were personifications of the sun, of dawn, of night, and so on, and all the stories told about them were originally myths (allegories would have been a better word) of the greater elemental changes and processes of nature. Epic, heroic legend, saga, then localized these stories in real places and humanized them by attributing them to ancestral heroes, mightier than men and yet already men. And finally these legends, dwindling down, became folk-tales, Marchen, fairy-stories--nursery tales.

That would seem to be the truth almost upside down. The nearer the so-called "nature myth," or allegory, of the large process of nature is to its supposed archetype, the less interesting it is, and indeed the less it is o a myth capable of throwing any illumination whatever on the world. Let us assume for the moment, as this theory assumes, that nothing actually exists corresponding to the "gods" of mythology: no personalities, only astronomical or meteorological objects. Then these natural objects can only be arrayed with a personal significance and glory by a gift, the gift of a person, of a man. Personality can only be derived from a person. The gods may derive their colour and beauty from the high splendours of nature, but it was Man who obtained these for them, abstracted them from sun and moon and cloud; their personality they get direct from him; the shadow or flicker of divinity that is upon them they receive through him from the invisible world, the Supernatural. There is no fundamental distinction between the higher and lower mythologies. Their people live, if they live at all, by the same life, just as in the mortal world do kings and peasants.

For us Christian folk, we're almost at the end of Lent. Today was always the biggest day of the year for me: Maundy Thursday is the part of the story where everything goes wrong for Jesus. He gets betrayed, his friends are unable to stay awake while praying, he is arrested, his friends abandon him, and some time in the middle of the night, he gets tried unjustly. Without any sleep, the next morning he faces a second trial, also unjust, and is then executed by the Empire. As much as that sacrifice (and the subsequent resurrection--metaphor though some Christian theologians say that might be) is the core of what religion is about (as Lewis says, defeating or redeeming death), to me, it has always been Thursday, lost and alone, that felt like the biggest day to me. It's the day when all hope is lost, when the hero may indeed experience despair (though that is dependent on translation).

The story of Jesus of Nazareth, whether you believe it literally, mythically, or don't believe it at all, is a heck of a story. Madeline L'Engle once wrote that she became a Christian because she liked the storybook it came with. Yann Martel said in an interview with Publishers Weekly that given the choice between a world that was made at random and a world that was made by God, he would choose God, because it made the better story. Lewis was scolded for calling myths "lies breathed through silver" by Tolkien, who called Christianity the True Myth, or myth made fact (alas, I do not have the quote in front of me). Whether there is power in belief, power beyond humanity in the form of some sort of higher power, or simply power in story (I happen to believe all three), the way that the telling moves us, allows us to empathize with those in the thick of it, is probably what draws me to both writing and mythology.

I'll confess to you all for a moment that though I consider myself a Christian, it has been a long time since I've been a regular church attendee--around four years now. Experiencing a story that is intended to be communal (the way I think religions and myths are intended to be experienced) is odd, and this Lent, I have filled that gap as best I can by typing up a collection of Lenten Devotionals I picked up maybe seven years ago, featuring the writings of C. S. Lewis--mostly from Mere Christianity--and sending it out to family and some friends who I suspected would appreciate that kind of reading during Lent. The best part of this for me is that, on some level, I found a community. While the majority were silent, I have received several e-mails over the course of Lent discussing Lewis's views, and have had phone calls with members of my family that added to my understanding of Lewis's thoughts--and larger thoughts on selected scriptures. While I will be glad not to be typing them up daily (as often I would forget and have to send two per day--particularly during the time when I was at DDXP and had no internet access), I am not looking forward to Easter this year, because I will be sad to once again experience the story--in what little time I spend on it--alone.

I have been contemplating ways to avoid this--and I will certainly be mailing that list of people to see if anyone is interested in coming along for the ride I have percolating. My thought is to try, weekly, to post a Bible verse (assuming I can find a good online concordance) alongside something from a theologian or philosopher (wisdom can be found in many places and many religions, so I am loathe to limit myself to reading only Christian writers). The question becomes whether I continue to keep it a mailing list, whether I share those thoughts here, or whether I start a separate blog to host these. I may settle on some variation thereof, because I think the community feeling would be enhanced by the conversational capabilities of a comments section. As for you, faithful readers, this blog is dominantly about myth and storytelling--is adding religious and theological writings (as barely distinct as those are from myth, according to the Dewey Decimal system) a leap that people would be willing to take with me? Or is it the entry every week that would be skipped along the friends page? (I would most likely put it behind a cut, because I am sure that not *everyone* is interested.)

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated. For those celebrating the equinox tonight, happy equinox! For Christians, may the rest of your Lent be meaningful, and your Easter the renewal it is meant to be. My calendar doesn't list any other holidays, but if you are celebrating them, I'd love to know--and I hope the celebrations accomplish what they are meant to evoke.