Facts and Sympathy

In celebration of the month, another visit to the library the other day. I’m always looking for pleasing fiction guided solely by visible indicators, thus by the book’s cover and title. Now it happens that ma bibliothèque pauvre, despite being located dans un quartier riche is guided in purchasing new novels pretty much from bestseller lists—or maybe those two situations go hand in hand? Anyway, I thought, Why not? Try to read one. I picked one—but cautiously. I chose an historical novel set in mediaeval times and published a while back, not brand new. I won’t name either the author or the title because, in a way, I think the author innocent.

It’s interesting to discover that historical novels require both facts and sympathy. One of these alone just won’t suffice. This novel, set in the twelfth century, was very well researched in every detail—obviously so but I also later took time to check multiple facts in specialized histories of daily life. Yet the story’s feel was entirely wrong through and through…because the story-telling voice contained within it an interpretation of that society entirely reflecting twentieth century secular values. The story’s very language and narrative style also clashed with the setting. The whole was almost consciously written for the movies and in three-, four-line paragraphs to cater to the restless and the greedy. But the lady author is highly gifted. Really. She actually held me through about thirty pages. She’s skillful, vivid, entertaining, fast paced—and, yes, very popular. But the twelfth century, gazing into this mirror, would not recognize itself. Facts galore, sympathy none—and a plot deliberately…crafted, I think, is the now word, to highlight the author’s and her presumed audience’s revulsion for a time beyond the comprehension of either.

Ellis Peters’ Cadfael novels, set in the same period, have a quite different aura—but oddly enough also sound much more real and “today” than the current author, and this despite the latter’s rich embroidery in fact. The human is unchanging.

Third-First Narrative Style: Addendum

Herewith an e-mail exchange concerning an earlier post on this subject (which is here):

I am wondering if the story I read last night is, as I suspect, in what you call the Third-First narrative style? The story is called America First by Louis Auchincloss and appears in the newest edition of the American Conservative. I can not recommend the story, but just read the first paragraphs. Tell me, is this an example of that third-first style? —Monique

Third-First Narrative Style

This style was pervasive in the last century and continues still to deform most fiction in the twenty-first. Narrative is artifice. I bow to that. But my enjoyment diminishes when I become aware of it. I become aware of it immediately when the story-teller is the character, yet the character’s voice is in the third person.

Gal dang it, she’d done it again, but he could never help himself. No. Couldn’t. Got him in trouble, all the time, even back in Tennessee, long before he learned to play the guitar. He always had to stick around—even though he’d been called “Slick” as long back as he could remember, long before that good-for-nothing drunk of a father of his left for California, and good riddance too.

The conventional name of this style is “third person limited.” “Third-first” is my name for it. It’s first person narrative without using “I”—and lacking the temporal distance from the events related that good narrative ought to have. A variant is to use several characters to tell the story, each using the third-first voice; the artifice then, of course, is compounded. So what’s wrong with it? Ordinary stream of consciousness does not produce a monologue. And natural thought will not yield exposition. To make it do so produces odd overtones. The convention is based on the premise that the reader must be grabbed by force, by sensory participation—lest he or she swoon into boredom. Identification with the character must be built in. We dare not let it happen spontaneously. As readers we’re supposed to feel that we’re the person, right here, right now.

The big downside here is that the essence of real narrative—events, actions, feelings, and thoughts recollected in tranquility—has been banished. The fiction becomes, instead, an attempt to make the reader experience something directly. But if an unexamined life is not worth living, a tale without a teller isn’t worth reading.

But storytelling is a familiar and natural phenomenon. Its components emerge spontaneously. Young writers are told: Show, don’t tell. Like any rule related to the high, this one too must be “more honor’d in the breach than the observance.” A good story teller knows exactly when to tell and when to show, and these two elements in fiction are akin to light and shade, the artful use of both is what makes stories live. We need detail, we need panorama—in the right spots, to the right intensity. We need to feel, sometimes to see the red thread that gives meaning to the whole. In modern fiction, half the time, especially where the third-first is heavily used, there isn’t any theme at all. No sovereign eye watches the scene. The fictional universe is thus as godless as the big one that the author thinks he mirrors. (Women know better—they tend to use the first person by preference: personal, intimate.)

Third-person omniscient—meaning that a story teller is always present, however muted the voice—is the right use of “the third.”

All this came to mind because, in the library, I chanced across Royal Highness by Thomas Mann, a book I’d never read. I opened it and started reading the first paragraph. Ah, delight! The voice of a true story teller. I went and checked it out…

Jane Austen, Detective

I must have read the novels of Stephanie Barron not long before I began this blog. Had Ghulf Genes been running at that time, I’m sure I would have noted her name and her delightful novels already. Stephanie Barron is the pseudonym of Francine Matthews, a woman with a fascinating career. She is a scholar (history), a one-time CIA analyst—but above all a very fine novelist. Her Jane Austen books generally follow Jane Austen’s life chronologically; the mysteries take place in the places where Austen lived or vacationed, and its characters include members of her family, people she knew, and, of course, characters invented by Stephanie.

I came across her work in my on-and-off life’s hobby of discovering mystery writers I really like. I approached this series with a great deal of apprehension. I discovered these detective novels while looking deeper into Jane Austen’s life after another period (which also repeats at roughly nine-year intervals) of rereading Austen. “Well,” I thought, “it’s probably a waste, but what the hell. Read one.” I was immediately captured, charmed, indeed surprised—and never regretted setting off on the venture. The list of Stephanie Barron's mysteries, a serious body of work, follows:

1. Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor (1996)
2. Jane and the Man of the Cloth (1997)
3. Jane and the Wandering Eye (1998)
4. Jane and the Genius of the Place (1999)
5. Jane and the Stillroom Maid (2000)
6. Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House (2001)
7. Jane and the Ghosts of Netley (2003)
8. Jane and His Lordship's Legacy (2005)
9. Jane and the Barque of Frailty (2006)
10. Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron (2010)

Why now? I’ve become weary of reading so-called serious books, needed a change of atmospherics, and therefore began another search for yet another mystery author. I think I’ve also succeeded, but I'll write about the new author I stumbled across at some other time. The current search reminded me of the last one.

Francine Matthews, under that, her real, name also writes modern thrillers. I’ve looked at these as well but had the same curious response I’d had to reading Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. That novel is the strangest amalgam of magic and brutality I’ve ever encountered. Two thirds of it takes place in the past and is illuminated by a mysterious spirit. In the last third we are suddenly in modern times, and everything changes with such a gritty brutality that I found it difficult to finish the book. Now, of course, this may have been intended… Years later I chanced across Allende’s The Sum of Our Days: A Memoir. This book has essentially the same content as The House of the Spirits, but, written as a memoir, it is understated and oddly much better structured than the fictional version. A round-about way of saying that the spiritual element is much stronger in Matthews’—as in Allende’s—work when reality is seen at a greater distance and the raw texture of the everyday has been transformed by distance and reflection into meaning.

A Novella Online

The first story I ever published was entitled The Splendid Freedom. It ran in one of the 1974 issues of Galaxy magazine. Some time later (1980) it lent its name to a story collection of mine (shown to the left), which, in addition to that tale, also had two of my then most popular shorter pieces, The Eastcoast Confinement and Plutonium.

I have put up the text of Splendid Freedom on what I call my literary (or more humbly, my writing) site (Ghulf Records) accessible here. It is in PDF format. Some readers of this blog, suddenly seeing me revealed as an author of fiction, can now read one of my pieces and see for themselves what I sound like in another of my personae. In a way it pleases me that this novella, although now three decades old and counting, has not lost its meaning or relevance; nor am I tempted to make excuses for it. If you don’t have an Adobe Reader, send me e-mail and I’ll give it to you as an MS Word document. The e-mail address is accessible through my profile.

One additional comment. While the illustration of the story collection (shown) is actually drawn from the story, my own approach to science fiction—however artfully I deal with science and technology in these accounts—is never about whizz-bang. But then regular visitors here will already know that. Meanwhile I always insist that the science part of my sci-fi apes reality much better than many others’ efforts manage the job.

Mma Ramotswe

If that name makes you smile instantly in anticipation of something pleasant, indeed tempted perhaps to fetch a cup of something to enjoy it more, don’t. This is short. (Well, as usually, it got long instead. So go ahead.) But if, instead, you find yourself puzzled, be prepared to get instructions on how to enjoy your leisure just a little more.

Years ago now I’ve abandoned the habit of urging so-called high literature on people, having discovered that, to some extent, we understand high literature to be that which we enjoyed in youth, a part of what was then The Canon. What we did not personally absorb, we neither canonize nor recommend. Meanwhile, I’ve discovered that many of my friends of old have quietly slipped out the backdoor of the Canon as the modern party heated up; they’re now relaxing in Walhalla or, more likely, still creating great things in some distant reaches of eternity.

But, instead of praising, say, Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers, Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, Herman Hesse’s Magister Ludi, Tsao Hsueh-Chin’s Dream of the Red Chamber, Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of the Genji, the collected works of Jane Austen, and the bulb is out in the attic so I couldn’t immediately see other treasures of mine… So, instead, these days I recommend literature that is, perhaps, not of the highest rank but, in some ways, of the highest value: wonderful storytellers whose inner vision resonates with mine. And one of those is Alexander McCall Smith, creator of Mma Ramotswe, the sole and therefore No. 1 Lady Detective of Botswana (in fiction, of course). And, yes, one of the series is coming to a Moving Picture Theater near you SOON!

There are at least ten novels in this series. The most recent appeared days ago in hardback—and I saw it COSTCO therefore it must be good too. New readers should begin at the beginning with The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. In some ways it is the most painful of them in that it brings views of the darker side of Africa, especially its diamond mining enterprise. They serve to place Mma Precious Ramotswe, a comfortable sort of lady described as “traditionally-built,” into the context of Botswana, with her own family history. Botswana? You will learn to appreciate the country the more you hear about it. Most people reading this blog in any detail will, I guarantee, be at least mildly pleased and well instructed by the experience.

This much for the general reader. The rest is for those of you who already know Mma but have wondered, as have I, what that title means. Mma is used to address women, Rra is used to address men. These titles are nowhere explained. And as I discovered today, the Internet is literally awash in blogs, discussion groups, and speculation—not least unhelpful words from Alexander McCall Smith not quite explaining the words. Ghulf Genes to the rescue.

First we deal with the pronunciation. Mma is voiced as “Ma,” Rra is voiced as “Ra” but with a rolled R. Please apply to native Spanish speakers on how to roll that R. Some swear that the roll of the R should follow the Ra, thus “Rar”; others dogmatically assert that there is only one R to roll, the first one. Make your own choice. As for how to roll the R silently as you read, on that subject I’m still searching for counsel.

The words are not abbreviations of longer words—but they do have plurals. Many Mmas, if I may put it that way, are called Bomma in the native language most Botswanans speak, Setswana (sometimes rendered Tswana). Many Rras are called Borra. The author of the series says that these are honorifics. The less informed say that they mean Madam and Sir respectively. I’ve searched high and low and finally managed to discover a book, entitled Culture and Customs of Botswana, by James Raymond Denbow and Phenyo C. Thebe, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006. This book has 244 pages whereas the average wisdom available from the web is under 45 words. In this books, on page 167, which you can look at here, the authors finally draw the veil from the mystery and reveal that Mma derives from “Mother” and “Rra” from “Father.” The Lord be praised. What a surprise!

Brigitte and I got to talking, she remembering a German and I a Hungarian childhood. And we both remember that it was customary in our youth for people to address all ladies who were older as “aunt” or “auntie” and all males as “uncle”—and this with perfect strangers. We think there is a parallel here. Monique may chime in with parallels from Bolivia in Spanish. So there’s the final word on the matter. Get busy, Google, and bring this good message to the entire Internet. SOON.

Titles. Publishers, Please Listen!

Back When I wrote a novella entitled The Chained Karma of the Plutonium Priest—and if that doesn’t draw you, you’re not a science fiction fan. The story was published in Galaxy magazine, but the editor there titled it Plutonium. Yes. Unfortunately Galaxy had serialized one of my novels under the title of Helium, so this was, as it were, in the ballpark. Sort of. Helium, by the way, first saw the light as A Hostage for the Hinterland, my own title for it. No room for a long title? Column-inch-challenged? I shake my head. Plutonium did its magic anyway despite being a nickname. I was nominated science fiction writer of the year; I didn’t get the coveted prize, but I was up there on the stage with two other contenders. Later yet this same novella, genuinely expanded into a novel, not merely bulked up—in effect I wrote a brand new novel with the same plot—saw hardback publication by St. Martin’s Press. But they called it The Karma Affair, hoping to position it as a “cross-over” novel; they put a so-so but mysterious-looking dust jacket on the thing. Now, to be sure, I never wrote anything in science fiction which wasn’t a cross-over book. I’m just not the kind who cleanly fits a genre! Anyway, that book did rather well despite its undistinguished title, enough so that it got translated into a number of languages, including Italian. The Italians, finally, gave it a good title: La Fisica del Karma. This was close to being descriptive of one aspect of the book, as neither Plutonium nor Karma Affair really were. My own title, the best of them all, went to waste. But publishers have this right, you see. They buy the property but reserve the right to butcher the title.

Several incarnations later, now working in reference publishing, I originated a title called Manufacturing U.S.A. Here I got lucky. The deciding personality was Deidra Bryfonski at Gale Research. She over-ruled more junior editors who wished to change the name. No. She went with mine, and MUSA, as it came to be known, went out into the world with the handle that I gave it. MUSA promptly won Best Reference Book of the Year in its category and became the foundation of our company, Editorial Code and Data, Inc. The book is still appearing at two-year intervals, albeit its title now is Manufacturing and Distribution U.S.A., the scope having expanded and also its size; three volumes now. It’s current editor is Joyce P. Simpkin, a young woman but a veteran editor of ECDI. That company name, incidentally, I formed in respectful imitation of what I’d always thought was a great name; I was respectfully using only its rhythm and its honest and direct statement of what the company did: Industrial Light and Magic. ECDI subsequently won several other Best Reference awards as well, and, generally, under Gale, we were and are edited by pros.

Title-inflation is very often a problem nowadays as Chiefs of This and That (Toxic Asset Disposal perhaps) proliferate—but occasionally, if the creator has a knack, title-deflation is something to be avoided. Are you listening out there?

Shades of Mordor

We were talking long-distance with Michelle in Paris. These conversations go on for an hour or so. Along the way we talked about her problems in commenting on blogs. Brigitte then let slip the fact that I operate three blogs, not just one, and that one of those has a French name, La Marotte. Michelle’s reaction to that name deserves a special posting by itself, but today I’ll stick with another. In the course of this conversation I felt obliged to explain the reasons for these blogs, and I did so, pointing to the main thematics of the other two. But Ghulf Genes, I said, is kind of different because it was the first and no restrictions of subject matter apply. Michelle said: “Oh, I see. One blog to rule them all.” This produced a good deal laughter, and I thought I’d share her spontaneous reaction. Her mind works like mine. Pictures flash up...

And, of course, there is the fact that, still in her teens, Michelle persuaded me to read Lord of the Rings, which I resisted for the longest time—only to become a devoted follower of Tolkien’s myths. Our daughters have been active in introducing us to the new and splendid in music and in literature. Monique introduced me to Gabriel Garcia Márquez (A Hundred Years of Solitude) and to Richard Neuhaus (The Naked Public Square). Michelle is now working on me (a decade and counting?) to read the Harry Potter series, or at least to accept J.K. Rowling. I understand that The Tales of Beedle the Bard will be making it across the Atlantic for me to read, and I agreed to do so. Is that the sound of someone undermining the massive stone walls of my castle?

In the meantime I’ve been enriched by the thought that three blogs are like three magic rings. And there is one that rules them all. How many more blogs must I start to reach fullness of measure. Let me grab a slip of paper and calculate this out. Let’s see, 9 - 3 = 6. Well. Miles to go before I sleep.

The Name of the Rose

Within my own family the name of this blog is instantly recognizable as the title of a futuristic novel I wrote ten years ago. I began to market it just a month before 9/11 changed the cultural landscape, although my failure to find a publisher, I hasten to add, had perhaps little to do with that event. The book is rather long and, while technically a work of science fiction, it crosses the boundaries of the genre. This isn’t the case of a would-be author who’d always longed to publish a novel. In the late 1970s and early ‘80s I’d published a number of novels, a collection of stories, and a series of novellas that all appeared in science fiction magazines. I have what is called a “name” in the field—not a big name, but there it is. A search on my name on Google will show that my books are still out there, used copies still available from Amazon.com. Nor did I lack access to publishers in 2001. Several saw the book but chose to decline. Too bad. Ghulf Genes is probably the best work I’ve ever done. Not only that. It is the first in a three-volume work that I’d tentatively named Symphony in Ghulf Major. What I had to say in that series included views that did not resonate with the times, including a favorable take on Muslim culture and a very dark view of the future American empire in the twenty-fourth century and beyond.

The subject of the novel is a fictitious clan, the Ghulfs, whose involvement in space travel is complex and long-lasting—but that’s the outer wrapper. The real essence of the book is the family saga itself, traced across several generations in three separate novels. One of the requirements laid on every Ghulf who wished to participate in the family in a substantial way was that he or she file with Ghulf Records an annual report—by computerized means, of course. When members of my family began to blog in earnest, this suggested Ghulf Records to me, and, consequently, led to my own choice of naming this record after the book in which the clan is introduced to the world at large.

As for the content of this blog, enough of it exists now so that neither introduction nor comment is really required. The perspectives offered here are philosophical, by and large, appropriate for a person of my age and experience. Beyond writing science fiction off and on, I’ve had careers in the military, in big business, and in big government (I was once the nation’s Garbage Man at the Environmental Protection Agency). I’ve been an independent consultant, a self-taught computer wizard, and ran my own small publishing business, Editorial Code and Data, Inc.—which continues on without me. My education, such as it was, centered on literature and history, but most of my work focused on economics, markets, and technological development.

My real interests have always been cosmic, however—and that occasionally bleeds through here although I do try to keep things accessible.

____________

Picture credits: Karen's Whimsy, reachable here.

A Story

If you want to hear one of my science fiction stories read aloud—and rather well at that—I suggest you go to this link, click on the title at the head of the page (A Bite of Stars, a Slug of Time, and Thou – Episode 12). A little radio control then becomes active, and clicking on it you can hear my tale, Such is Fate. After the story is finished, some British commentators, headed by host Elisha Sessions, discuss the tale for quite a while—most intelligently. Amazing what you can find on the Internet! Concerning the story, it’s one I dashed off once on several legs of several flights of a business trip back in Anno Long Ago, starting in Atlanta and eventually ending in Kansas City a couple of days later…