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kate_nepveu) wrote2007-05-25 09:37 pm
Bittercon: Risky Narrative Strategies
Bittercon panel number two. Yes, my personal biases are showing; what of it?
Risky Narrative Strategies
Sarah Monette's Mélusine sends one of its two first-person narrators into a tailspin on his third page and drives him crazy before the chapter's over. It certainly doesn't play safe, but it's also risky because it gives the reader very little baseline for the character—particularly since the POV is so tight and he doesn't cross paths with the other narrator for a while. What other narrative strategies are risky, and how? Is information flow the principal kind of risk? In what books do risky strategies work, and in what don't they—but in interesting ways?
Presume that there will be spoilers for Mélusine and The Virtu within; for any other works, ROT13 spoilers or put them between <span style="color: #999999; background-color: #999999"> </span>.
Re: More risks:
Sarah Caudwell and Ashinano Hitoshi are the only writers I can think of right off who have introduced a character who is definitely either male or female, then never bothered to mention which. Most writers want to hammer it out at some point, even if they just say "both" or "neither." Whatever the answer is, when it does come, it's going to temporarily jar the reader out of the story to recalibrate. Particularly if the setting's one in which gender roles matter seriously, and the character's been around for a long time, the reader automatically starts reanalyzing things.
Sometimes this is what the author wants the reader to do, and the story's set up in a way to make the reanalysis productive in some way (Shadow Man by Melissa Scott; Fruits Basket in a completely different way; presumably a certain sequence in Glory Season by David Brin). But sometimes the author just put the ambiguity in there "for fun" (not that there's anything wrong with that!), and if the reader doesn't share the author's culture/politics, it can ruin the whole experience for him/her. (See lots and lots of manga, but Mikiyo Tsuda's Day of Revolution and Princess Princess suffer from this particularly badly - I feel that the humiliation/self-loathing of girls-and-people-who-look-like-girls thing she does is mostly intended to be erotic (her yuri is pretty telling that way), but the way she presents it seems to make it too offensive to most Westerners to be readable as such.)
Re: More risks:
It's actually done reasonably subtly, as the storyline for this particular character doesn't depend on the character's gender.
Re: More risks:
Re: More risks:
Ambiguity I think is less risky when it doesn't matter, in which category I would put Caudwell's series. Or when it _does_ matter and that's the point, your reanalysis--alas I have to spoiler-protect a book title here, which is really not optimal, but there's no other way of doing it: rzzn ohyy'f obar qnapr.
The only time I can think of that gender disguise would be a narrative strategy is when the POV character is passing as one gender but the reader doesn't know that--like a murder mystery in which the POV character is also the murderer. That's a very tricky thing to do--which isn't to say it couldn't work, but would be tough, just from a "playing fair" perspective.
Gender disguise as a plot element does have a lot of stereotypes to navigate; I think you should make it another Bittercon panel, done well and poorly, and then leave a link back here! =>
Re: More risks:
Re: More risks: