Shells for Ships, Dead Horses, La Mer

[greygirlbeast]

Since I mentioned it this morning, here's the clip Spooky shot yesterday of me experimenting with the buoyancy of clam shells, filmed near Moonstone, on the stream connecting Trustom and Card ponds.

Clamshell Boat, Riding the Current from Kathryn Pollnac on Vimeo.

It's starting to look as though my shadow is destined to get a lot more screen time than I ever will. Which is probably for the best. If you listen, you can hear the foghorn at Pt. Judith, almost five miles southeast of Moonstone Beach.

I'm still mulling over the whole silly "Mary Sue" thing. And yes, I still find it a painfully silly and generally useless concept. Though, I think there's something more insidious here. The idea that characters must be mundane to be believable, and a sort of elevation of the ordinary, that I find undeniably repugnant. Great literature is most often about extraordinary people, even when it purports to concern itself primarily with the "common man" (consider Tom Joad in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, for example). The whole idea of this sort of character police, it makes my skin crawl. We are good writers, or we are not, whether we are professional or amateur, whether we write fantasy or sf or genre mysteries or what so many mistakenly refer to as "literary" fiction (a grand redundancy). There is no place for dismissive categories like "Mary Sue." I see why it's happened. I even see why it's being applied beyond fanfic. Sure, I can understand the appeal of dismissing Stephanie Meyer or Laurell K. Hailton's distasteful and absurd heroines by simply labeling them "Mary Sues." They are undoubtedly idealized avatars in the service of the authors. But if we do that, given the inherent subjectivity of the concept, we must, wholesale, also dismiss thousands of other characters who have the same relationship to their authors. People are trying to invent a very simple solution for a problem that has no simple solution. And it's just dumb. I keep coming back to that, and I can't fathom why I'm wasting so much energy on such a completely reprobate idea. That which irks me gets my attention, more than it usually deserves. And, for the record, I do not, necessarily, have any problem with fanfic. But I've said that lots of times before.

Anyway...

I'm currently obsessed with NIN's "La Mer," from The Fragile (1999). Here are the original French Creole lyrics, which are spoken on the album by Denise Milfort:

Et il est un jour arrivé
Marteler le ciel
Et marteler la mer

Et la mer avait embrassé moi
Et la délivré moi de ma cellule

Rien ne peut m'arrêter maintenant

Which may be translated into English as:

And when the day arrives
I'll become the sky
And I'll become the sea

And the sea will come to kiss me
For I am going
Home

Nothing can stop me now

Or, somewhat more literally:

And the day has arrived
To thresh the sky
And to thresh the sea

And the sea has embraced me
And it has dispensed me from my cage

Nothing can stop me now

Comments

[greygirlbeast.livejournal.com]

But to what extent does a writer go against idealization to the point where it becomes almost inverted idealization, i.e., this character is the worst, stupidest, most flawed character ever to appear in print? Like, how far can we go with this fucked-up character and still get you to care about what happens to her? Or, how far can we idealize her and still get you to identify? Is identification necessary to begin with? And so on.

Honestly, when I'm writing, these are not even questions I pause to consider. I do not believe the are valid, from the POV of the author.

I suspect that you're rejecting Mary Sue as a valid criticism on some level because you don't want to be thinking about it the next time you sit down to create a character; you don't want it, unbidden, anywhere on your radar, and you certainly don't want any possibility of some potential fanboy/fangirl snark to influence you one way or the other.

See above.

he funny thing is, none of your characters have ever struck me as being remotely Mary Sue-ish, so why dignify it at all? It's not something that has anything to do with what you do.

I don't know. Echo aside, I can see this fallacious "criticism" being leveled at a lot of my earlier characters, especially in Silk and Tales of Pain and Wonder. And it is true, they were all parts of me, and here and there, there's wish fulfillment (when did that get to be a bad thing?). These things irk me. Just knowing that there are people in the world who buy into this crap irks me.

What would Harlan say? Probably 'What the fuck is a Mary Sue and why are you even thinking about it?' Interspersed with 'kiddo' and various uses of 'fuck.'

Yeah, and "toots." He likes to call me toots.

[sovay]

And it is true, they were all parts of me

And why is that a strike against the author, anyway? Does anyone call up John le Carré and tell him George Smiley and Alec Leamas are invalid characters because he wrote them out of his experiences of working for MI5 and MI6? I know this is not worth ranting about, but people have some very weird ideas about art.

[greygirlbeast.livejournal.com]

I know this is not worth ranting about, but people have some very weird ideas about art.

Weird and horrendously wrongheaded.

[timesygn.livejournal.com]

Does anyone call up John le Carré and tell him George Smiley and Alec Leamas are invalid characters because he wrote them out of his experiences of working for MI5 and MI6?

LeCarre's characters from his "Circus" novels are some of the most thoughtful and well-developed I think I've ever encountered. Have you read Our Game? Highly recommended.

... people have some very weird ideas about art.

Most people have no ideas whatsoever about art but like to pretend they do.

[robyn-ma.livejournal.com]

Honestly, when I'm writing, these are not even questions I pause to consider. I do not believe the are valid, from the POV of the author.

It's obvious that — like any author who's actually been published — you haven't spent much time looking at dumb 'How to Create Characters We Care About' articles in Writer's Digest. I have to wonder if that rag has actually helped any aspiring writer.

Yeah, and "toots." He likes to call me toots.

*snerk* And yet you let him live.

[greygirlbeast.livejournal.com]

*snerk* And yet you let him live.

Well, he's Harlan. And it's oddly sweet.

[robyn-ma.livejournal.com]

I can cite an example of a meta-Mary Sue that you wouldn't necessarily consider a Mary Sue: Tyler Durden (book and film). He even comments on how much of a Mary Sue he is ('I look the way you want to look, I fuck the way you want to fuck,' said to the first-person narrator), which is what makes him meta, and the twist makes him a surprise Mary Sue. While I doubt Chuck Palahniuk sat down and said 'I think I'll satirize Mary Sues,' that's kind of what he ended up doing.