Bibliophilia

[steepholm]

An exchange between sartorias and jade_sabre_301 in the comments to sartorias’s latest post has got me thinking about love. Book love, that is. Could it be, they were wondering, that fan ficcers are more attracted to books with flaws than to “perfect” books (Queen of Attolia was mentioned as an example of the latter), where you can do nothing but stand back and admire their awesomeness?

Sounds plausible to me. Moss grows in the fissures, where the perfectly smooth surface is sterile. But it’s got me wondering about the different kinds of love we can have for a book, and how these may relate to the different kinds of love we may have for a human being.

Let’s look at three types of human love (and I'm sticking to the romantic kind, to keep things "simple"):

a) You love someone because you think they're the bee's knees, and just about perfect. It's a kind of hero worship.

b) You love someone because you see the kind of person they could be, if only they'd believe in themselves, or take a bit more care about their appearance, or not drink so much, or learn to relax, etc. You see the best expression of your love as helping them to become the person they have the potential to be. (Yes, this is the fan fic equivalent, and yes, I’m aware there’s more to fan fic than this.)

c) You love someone, and while you see they have faults, you're prepared to accept them - and maybe even love them too, because after all we're all human, the faults are relatively minor, and you're more interested in loving a human being than a plaster saint.

Now, it’s quite possible to feel all three ways about the same human being, if not at the exact same moment then at least in rapid succession, and I think that good relationships may well be built on this triple foundation (with a rather more of b) and c) than of a), to be sure, though I’d hate to give up a) entirely, and with lady_schrapnell I've lucked out in that respect). Is that the case with books, too, or in the rather more one-sided relationship we have with them do we tend to opt for just the one kind of loving – where we love at all?

Comments

[lamentables.livejournal.com]

Your point about flawed books and loving things that have the potential to be something closer to what you want, reminds me of Aidan Chambers arguments about children enjoying reading formulaic, sketchily written books and about remembering incidents from books that turn out to exist only in the memory and not in the text.
I can't right now remember which Aidan Chambers book I mean, and my children's lit books are buried behind all the displaced furniture from abrinsky's study.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

As to the first point, I'm not sure if this is what you mean but it's certainly been suggested (not sure if Chambers was the suggester) that some children read formulaic books in a way that allows them to project themselves into the heroic role of the formulaic protagonist, who then becomes like one of those end-of-pier cut-out figures where you stick your own face into the gap. (Wolfgang Iser would love this!) Arguably this is easier with formulaic books, and especially with books that offer a chocolate-box selection of formulaic protagonists - the brave one, the pretty one, the clever one, etc - than it is with books where the characters are three-dimensional, individual, and opaque. I'm not sure about this idea, myself. Either way (to drag it back to the love metaphor), I guess it's more the equivalent of fantasizing about a person than actually having a relationship with them: but I'll have to think about that when I've more time!

[shark-hat.livejournal.com]

I read something quite recently on LJ, but can't remember who it was, to the effect that the person had read a book by author X as a child and had a very vivid memory of a wonderful scene at night, on a hilltop, the stars and the scent of smoke and the dark hump of a wood on the horizon and the tension waiting for the attack... and then reread it and all it said was "the night was dark."

I think b) is possibly more like the love one might have for an author, or all the books by an author, rather than for a single book? I'd love so-and-so more if her heroines weren't feisty, or whatever?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I read something quite recently on LJ, but can't remember who it was, to the effect that the person had read a book by author X as a child and had a very vivid memory of a wonderful scene at night, on a hilltop, the stars and the scent of smoke and the dark hump of a wood on the horizon and the tension waiting for the attack... and then reread it and all it said was "the night was dark."

That's a lovely example! And it certainly shows the reader keeping their part in the creative bargain - although I'm enough of a member of the writers' union to feel that the author probably did a lot of spadework before "the night was dark" to make such a rich reading possible. (C.f. "I remember King Lear saying something profound and moving about the human condition and the finality of death, but when I went back all I found was 'Never, never, never, never, never!'")

I think b) is possibly more like the love one might have for an author, or all the books by an author, rather than for a single book? I'd love so-and-so more if her heroines weren't feisty, or whatever?

This made me realise that there must be at least two different types of fanficcer. The kind who loves the books so much (pretty much in mode a)) that they can't bear to let them go, and just want to take up residence there; and the kind whose love is laced with frustration at the things the author got wrong, the opportunities missed, etc, and wants to show how it should have been done: mode b).

[gair.livejournal.com]

sheenaghpugh has a distinction between 'more of' fanfic (your mode a) and 'more from' fanfic (your mode b) which works well here. (Oh! Also I love this post, but I think my basic assumptions about love might be different from yours, so I might respond to it belatedly and in a post rather than now in a comment.)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Can't wait to read it!

[danceswithwaves.livejournal.com]

That has happened to me three times that I can count offhand, and probably a few more, but more with ideas presented in books than with a picture of a scene. For instance, I read a book titled The Far Side of Evil when I was younger, and I remember the main character saying at one point that humans need adventure, and cannot live in a stagnant society. When I looked it up for a commonplace book project in high school, I couldn’t find where it was said. I ended up using a paragraph from Jane Eyre instead, as it said essentially the same thing – it just hadn’t given me the epiphany the first one had. After finding that two other ideas in other books that had given epiphanies as well were merely a few words, or a couple lines, I figured that I couldn’t find the first quote because it was smaller than I thought.

It’s interesting because the quotes that give me epiphanies seem to be tiny phrases, and not whole paragraphs – though if I come across a paragraph that illustrates the same point, I’ll often use it instead, because other people will understand the idea better that way.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

I think you'd have done a different job (not to say 'better', only because of that corrective note in b) which looks fairly unpleasant) if you weren't trying to analogize to fanfic... Looking at a) (and I think you're the bee's knees too, sweetie!) - there's a huge gulf between thinking someone is made of awesome and just about perfect in that mode and hero worship. And b) is just put that little bit slant-wise to make it all wrong, rather than all right. Loving someone for who they really are - oh what the hell, let's use the Cromwell cliché, right? - warts and all, means loving them as they are AND wanting them to be that self in its fullness too, surely? And c), though you've put it a bit roughly, is fine for people, but can you think of a book you've actually loved more for its flaws? I can't off-hand. Back to a) for books - hero worship of a book can exist with familiarity, and a kind of - oh, communal proprietorial feeling, maybe, which it wouldn't at all for a person. I think. (Actually, I think I shouldn't comment on interesting things when my head is about to fall off.)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Books I love more for their flaws? I suppose the limit case is The Collected Poems of William McGonagall , but I feel sure I could come up with others. Oh yes - I like Shakespeare more for his habit of making bad puns, probably because it's a frailty I share. But there, admittedly, it's hard to know whether I'm liking the text, or the idea of the man I concoct from the text.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Ah now, who says they're bad puns? And what's wrong with puns in the kinds of texts in which they appear, anyway? Mind you, I could see, the 'crap plays' (to quote the RSC!) might easily make you like the idea of Shakespeare more, as someone who could write them along with the amazing ones, but -- Cymbeline?

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

But... but... but.... I LIKE Cymbeline!! Beautiful language, and the broadest farce of a Jacobian revenge tragedy play imaginable! I think people take it much too seriously. If you treat it as a broad farce, it's FUNNY!


(Yes, and I love Shakespeare. ;-) )

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I'm in two minds about Cymbeline. It has beautiful bits, of course ("Fear no more," etc) - and personally I'm rather fond of Cloten: "We will nothing pay for wearing our own noses" is just the kind of thing I can see becoming a Revolutionary slogan in 1776. And it gives a fascinating glimpse of life in Milford Haven before the oil tankers. But all the same, it's hard to read without the phrase "Load of old tosh" flitting unbidden through one's head at least once. (From that point of view the only way to make it look good is to come at it right after Pericles.) And Posthumus must vie with Claudio and Bertram as one of the least sympathetic romantic heroes ever to get the girl.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Well, I was forced to take it seriously, as part of a rather disastrous section of a Shakespeare course - no fun, believe me! I bitched about all this to steepholm at the time and the exclusions for the nice poetry bits were understood. Still think it's one of the 'crap plays', but *somebody* has to like them. ;)

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

Actually, you do have my sympathy for it, because at the time I took the required Shakespeare course for my B.A., I too found it a drag. It seemed incredibly ponderous for a Shakespeare play, to me, at least.

Then, a couple of things happened. (1) I had to read The Changeling for a Doctoral qualifying exam, and the book it was in had an introduction about the Jacobean Revenge Tragedy formula. Murder, chastity tests, ghosts, poisons, hidden identities (I forget what else, would have to look it up). And I realized that what Shakespeare had done was see this genre come up (rather like slasher movies these days) with the formula, and he decided to do the Uber-revenge play (that is, Hamlet). And then he decided to turn the genre on its head, and spoof it (that being Cymbeline).

From the opening scene Cymbeline is a farce. My favorite signal for this is when Cornelius is dealing with the Queen, stepmother to the lovely princess, who has asked him to buy her some poison - so she can experiment on animals. He knows she means to poison the princess, so he gives her a sleeping potion. Later, the Queen gives the depressed Imogen the potion, telling the princess that it is a sleeping potion, thinking it will kill the girl. Imogen, not trusting the Queen, thinks it's a poison, but takes it anyway, because she is so depressed. With the result that her body is taken out to the forest, and she eventually finds Tweedledee and Tweedl--- I mean, Blockhead and Duff--- I mean, her long lost brothers. Heh. Nobody dies in the play EXCEPT the Queen and her son - the only two we WANT to die.

When you have a scene where a man sneaks his way into a woman's locked bedroom, finds her asleep - and this a woman he longs for -- and all he does is stand there and rhapsodize about her beauty, including mentioning the Rape of Lucrece, yet takes ONLY the ring her husband gave her -- you can't take it seriously. Because the whole point of his gaining the ring at all was to prove to Posthumus that Imogen was not faithful. Except that she is faithful.

Anyway, the second thing that happened (2) was seeing the production of the play for the complete BBC cycle. I realized what the problem was: because the language/poetry is so good, and because it's SHAKESPEARE, it gets treated with reverence even if the company can't understand why: solemn and stately. But it needs to be played with absolutely NO reverence. It needs to be way over the top broad and silly. Poshumus should be the stiffest stuff shirt ever (because why would anyone kick out such a "worthy" son-in-law just because he's of humble origins?).

It's become a passion of mine (obviously, sorry! heh) -- I desperately want to be involved in staging a production that does indeed go way over the top. I think it would be a rollicking, smashing success.

Back on topic -- love of books (or in this case, a play) -- for me, obviously, it's a case of me (at least) looking at the grubby match girl sitting in soot and garbage and realizing she's actually quite lovely.

[tetkamorovja.livejournal.com]

Wow - I have now got to read this play!

Your description of it, and how it should be staged, reminded me of when I read Thomas Mann's Holy Sinner. I had always been led to believe that Mann had no sense of humour, until I read that - it had me laughing outloud.

Can't help but feel that our response to a book, and what we say about it, says more about us than about the text ...

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

And b) is just put that little bit slant-wise to make it all wrong, rather than all right. Loving someone for who they really are - oh what the hell, let's use the Cromwell cliché, right? - warts and all, means loving them as they are AND wanting them to be that self in its fullness too, surely?

Well, basically I agree, as you know! I was trying to get at that idea by saying that one might combine b) and c). But if you love their warts AND you want them to be that same self in its fullness, does that mean you want to them to have even bigger, wartier warts? If your sweetie drinks too much, should you not rest until s/he's a full-blown alcoholic? I think not. So, there is a corrective element, and although it's hard to put that in a way that doesn't make the lover sound like some sort of nag, in practice it needn't be so, as I know from experience. But you know me - can't see a rod without kissing it!

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Oops - have I been on the wrong track all along with your warts? ;) I'm clearly not up to this discussion atm, but you know as well as I do that there are all kinds of gaps in the argument above! If one was to postulate a loved one with a lack of self-confidence, for example, clearly they'll be likely more fully themselves if they manage to get a bit more self-confidence (not less!). But the one who loves them doesn't see it as loving them for who they could be, if they'd just shake that stupid lack of self-confidence. I suppose there could be a corrective element in refusing to accept crap the loved one talks about him/herself (or has been told and accepts, for another completely fictional example), but it's the 'loving the potential' idea that makes it sound all wrong to me.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

All good points, Lady S. Since I'm pretty sure we actually agree, I'm just concentrating on the ways that language trips us up when we try to do so - and I've come to the conclusion that the real culprit is logocentrism. We tend to say we love someone using the present tense, for example, which is fine except when we understand it restrictively - as if one were declaring love for a person caught in a freeze-frame, at a particular present moment. If we understand it that way, then to say we "love the potential" sounds as if we're saying, actually what we love isn't the person in front of us but some possible future state of that person. And I can totally see how you'd have a problem with that - as would I.

But suppose we think of love as always future orientated or even trans-temporal, as teleological, as concerning (in the immortal words of my LJ's subtitle) "not being, but passage"? Then to say "I love you" is to include the whole shebang, the whole field of possibility radiating from the other person like a star.

I hope that clears everything up, because my brain is overheating!

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

What a pair we make! I say 'Unhhhh, yeahbut' and the like to your original statements, and then you come up with lovely prose in response.

But, though that does clear up a lot, and I agree that we're agreeing fundamentally anyway, I think it's definitely trans-temporal rather than 'always future orientated', and is being AND passage. (Less immortal wordy, but you can fix that.) I think you were brilliant to identify the tense problem, as one can (present tense) love the person right now (also loved one's present tense), the many possible future persons (loved one's future tenses) and the person - no, people! - that person was even before one met him/her (er, past tense but not excluding past continuous?). All at the one time. At least, I could, or I could, before my brain exploded.

[gair.livejournal.com]

there could be a corrective element in refusing to accept crap the loved one talks about him/herself

Apologies for interposing my body (as it were) but this is really interesting, thanks - am going to take this away and think about it in light of my upcoming/draft post on intergenerational romance...

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

I can't see why you'd apologize for commenting! Will be very interested to read your post, as I can't quite see the interest value in what's there myself. But cool.

[shark-hat.livejournal.com]

"hero worship of a book can exist with familiarity, and a kind of - oh, communal proprietorial feeling, maybe, which it wouldn't at all for a person."

I think celebrity-worship can be a bit this way. (There's also RPS, of course- Real People Slash, treating the public persona of an actor or band member like a character in a book and writing about them, to the extent that fanon and shipwars develop, which is what I originally thought of when I saw the "communal proprietorial feeling" point in your post, and then I thought, ah, maybe this applies to people reading Heat, not just to relatively-small corners of the net.)

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Oh, I suppose it can with celebrity worship ("My life will be complete if you just give me plastic surgery to make me look like Posh, because I feel like we're kindred spirits" kind of thing?), but I was trying to keep to the romantic relationships version of people. Heat a Hello kind of thing or am I even spacier than I realized?

[shark-hat.livejournal.com]

Oh, Heat's sub-Hello - red carpet shots of stars with captions saying they look fat, exciting paparazzi pictures like Jade Goody going into a newsagent...

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Aw, now I'm feeling all deprived not to have read it. (I spent some time at first thinking it might be best-selling novel only I was unaware of...

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I wish I didn't have to go out today! I will be thinking about this.

Example

[tetkamorovja.livejournal.com]

I love Diana Wynne Jones. Sorry, I love her writing. I fell in love way back in the 70's and I haven't fallen out yet. I get goosebumps thinking about getting hold of 'House of Many Ways' soon soon soon.

One of the things I love relates to what 'shark hat' and others commented on - how some scenes blossom in the mind's eye, apparently far beyond the little section of prose used. With DWJ I can go back and point how she zooms in on the little details, from the right angle, that just work. It's just one side of how her prose works for me.

I do find flaws - she doesn't let her characters indulge in anger, even when they have right, and the reader has a need, as after reading Merlin Conspiracy. The pacing isn't quite right in Pinhoe Egg, and she should have indulged the farce more in Conrad's Fate.

If I imagine how these things might otherwise play out, then I think of myself as problem solving - what would make this work better. For me, its an analysis, craft thing - and I tend to do that with everything - bit of an OCD itch than any talent.

But yes, of course I respond to books as I do to people. Isn't this one of the main joys of reading?

Re: Example

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I love DWJ's work too. Which is the most perfect? Maybe Archer's Goon, for me - but the one I love most is Fire and Hemlock. Of course, there is the ending of F&H, which passeth most people's understanding, including mine, and I guess that's a kind of fault. On the other hand, I do find myself looking at it from different angles and wondering whether a) the fault is in myself and I'm just too thick to appreciate it, or b) the fault is real, but actually a virtue in disguise. After all, there are moments - when I read the ending myself, or when I read someone else's exposition of it - when I seem to catch, just for a moment, a fleeting rainbow of understanding. "That's it!", I cry. "How could I not have seen it before?" And then I look again, and the gold I've excavated so excitedly is only a pile of potatoes.

Then, of course, I go into meta- mode, and think how apt it is that a book about the difficulty of recording fairy horns on tape should itself prove so elusive, and I start jabbering about how it performs its own meaning, until someone comes and calms me down.

Re: Example

[tetkamorovja.livejournal.com]

"I love DWJ's work too. Which is the most perfect?"

This sounds like one of those questions which have dire consequences - either revealing my true personality, or that I might fail to make it across the quagmire of unfathomable knowledge. However, being plucky, and argumentative, I would have to say that, IMO, there are two - Charmed Life, and Howl's Moving Castle - both of which persistingly shine for me.

That said, I will have to admit that I would be one of those unfortunate people who did not survive the burning building, sinking ship scenario, because I do not have a favourite DWJ - I would attempt to escape with my entire collection ... At least I would burn or drown surrounded by the best of companions ...

"Then, of course, I go into meta- mode, ... and I start jabbering about how it performs its own meaning"

There has got to be a Greek word for this, surely, but what? and yes, doesn't it just give a double high ... once, thinking about how someone has written a text that can do that, twice, because you've recognised it happening.