Dannyalcatraz said:
Its an argument that cuts both ways. Assume that a particular sci-fi or fantasy novel can be considered to be a fully realized representative of another genre, distinguished only by its setting. Assume also that you can find similar sci-fi or fantasy novels invading most other genres. You assert that this invalidates sci-fi and fantasy as distinct genres because they aren't doing something unique. However, by the mere existence of a novel that is both fully sci-fi and fully a romance (for example), then the genre of ROMANCE as well is no longer doing something unique. To expand the argument- any prose that successfully bridges 2 or more genres destroys each genre's uniqueness by its very existence by cross germination of features.
I assert it invalidates them because there's nothing left to talk about but scenery. Assuming SF can fully realize another genre, like tragedy, doesn't invalidate tragedy
unless you define SF as tragedy and not something distinct that can be added to it. I don't think most narratives are exclusive of one another, so I'm not arguing they can't be mixed; indeed I've said that, on the contrary, I doubt anything like a pure narrative exists. SF should be perfectly capable of incorporating other sorts of narratives, but it should also have some kind of narrative of its own. If SF is nothing but a container for
other narratives then there is no point to it because SF, as such, does not exist; it's merely a backdrop, it has no content. It's a surface, a facade. (And that also means, among other things, that people who read SF because they like SF are a little confused.)
Joshua made a
very interesting point about the usefulness of this conversation in regards to roleplaying, although I would say it isn't totally absurd, as he suggests--I'm thinking here of the discussion about core stories in Mike Mearls' LJ. Core stories are probably something we should have been hammering out here from the beginning, though I continue to believe that a genre changes over time, and that the unity of the genre is constituted historically in the reasons it emerges and is transformed, and not by a single, transhistorical definition that will last for eternity.
Dannyalcatraz said:
But we know that cannot be the case. There are innumerable works that cross genres of all kinds, yet we still feel that those genres are extant. Genres are not so neatly defined as species.
Of course this is true. But the genre crossing isn't like cross-dressing: you don't swap out a surface yet retain fundamentally the same content. When you mix tragedy and epic, you don't disguise one with the other.
Dannyalcatraz said:
You've got dragons and necromancy, what more do you want?
Heh, if I could answer that, there would be no reason to continue the thread
.
Dannyalcatraz said:
How about the fact that in at least one region of the world, the Gods of a particular nation push back the necromantic spells powered by the slaughter of innocent Kaunians (the race analogous to Jews) upon its wielders, slaying them: Direct divine intervention in the form of immediate retribution. That do anything for you? The weapon that otherwise works has the rules of the game voided on it. How about later magics that depend on "bargains with the powers below?"
Nope, none of that strikes me as unique to fantasy.
Dannyalcatraz said:
Well, I can honestly say that I too, know of a SF/F story in which an artist grows from novice to master. There are analogous plotlines, however
I don't think analogous is enough. Part of the artist's growth is the creation of art, which in turn digs back into life. There's nothing comparable in a story about magic or strategy. Those are bildungsromans, certainly. (Depending on what sort of posthumanist literature is out there, SF may even get into all this stuff, unless we distinguish between SF and posthumanism.)
Dannyalcatraz said:
Re: Flaubert's Parrot:
Blame a shoddy reviewer, then. Tell me more about it.
Oh I was aware, I've seen such reviews before. The basic idea is that the narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, is a Francophile in search of the parrot Flaubert used as a model for his story "Un coeur simple." What actually goes on is amazingly complex so I won't try to sum it up, but it's a short book that you could easily read in an evening, with hardly a wasted sentence; one of the best books of the second half of the 20th century, actually. But it's also structurally odd: one chapter is a dictionary, one is a Ph.D. qualifying exam, one is a series of timelines and so on.
Dannyalcatraz said:
Re: Kushiel:
Its definitely not as graphic as the Marquis' own work, but even though handled with a lighter touch, I'm sure he would find the divinely masochistic courtesan to be an interesting woman- possibly even his unreachable ideal.
Graphic is not necessarily what I'm looking for, though it meets the imagery requirement and seems useful in this case. I suppose my problem is that I imagine books like the Kushiel series being filtered through a standard interpretation of Sadist literature, and having no real affinity with that literature itself--being a victim of, for example, psychoanalysis, which among other things wants to blunt or pacify Sadism by making it not only meaningful but straightforward, even natural. In order for something contemporary to be Sadist, I think, it has to escape the accepted interpretations of earlier Sadism, has to become crooked again, unnatural, beyond pop-psychology and all that. This is why I emphasized earlier that I think hard definitions of SF or F won't work, because we have to take their historicality into account.
I'll skip quoting your comments on tragedy and simply use that idea to illustrate what I mean here: there is no unity, in the sense of the quote you use, to tragic narrative. Sophokles and Seneca have little in common (and Shakespeare, rather than being a writer of tragedies in ye olde Greek fashion, was a Senecan). There is hardly any unity, in fact, between the tragedies of the three original greats, or between most groups of contemporaries, like Shakesepare and Kyd and Tourneur/Middleton. For Chaucer and other medieval authors yes, de casibus tragedy was it, but before and after them theory of tragedy has been considerably more nuanced. Episode III tries very hard to be a tragedy, to the point that Aristotle's name should almost be in the credits, and strictly, I should probably say that it missed out on tragedy precisely because it ignored contemporary tragedy, like Arthur Miller or Bryony Lavery; but at the same time, Star Wars doesn't have anything to do (in any purposeful way) with what's going in the arts
today. That is, it's
supposed to be looking back to these old narratives, so for me it still works. What I like about
Dune though is that it isn't a simple repetition of archetypal garbage--in fact it nullifies the notion of the collective unconscious by giving the main characters unmediated access to
all of history. Rather than preserving history by compressing it into a set number of built-in narratives and repetitions, the way we are trying to do with genres here, history is almost unmade, almost destroyed, because, at least for these characters, it has no past--it is presently experienced. And in
Dune this absolute unlocking of (a fantasy of) human potential itself constitutes the ultimate tragedy, which is now much more than the simple archetype of Tiresias, "to know the future is to be trapped by it." Instead, with Leto II, we get something like "to create the future is to be trapped by one's own creation and to sacrifice oneself to the possibility of what one may become." And the goal, which requires Leto's sacrifice, is the possibility of living free of either past
or future.
