I am the girl anachronism (Bitterblue)

[rachelmanija]

I recently read a fantasy novel which was set in a Europe-esque landscape, with swords and bows but (unless I'm forgetting something) no firearms. They had the printing press and herbal birth control, but no antibiotics. People knew the concept of a republic, apparently based on theoretical writings, but actual governments were hereditary monarchies.

Given the ye olde setting, I was jarred to see characters use the phrase "mental health" and mean exactly what I would mean by it, and also the word "process" in the sense of "to process one's emotions." Those were the ones which jumped out at me, but there was enough in the language and concepts known and believed by the characters which was not merely modern, but distinctively modern, that between that and the thematic elements I ended up feeling that I was reading an allegory, not a fantasy. (Allegory is not a dirty word. It is a perfectly legitimate artistic form.)

The book, by the way, is Kristin Cashore's Bitterblue. I thought it was very ambitious and largely successful. But it struck me as an allegory of recovery from personal and political abuse and totalitarianism, not a fantasy on the same theme. I am not using "allegory" to mean "preachy," or anything else negative. I mean that the world of the book did not read as a fantasy world, but as a stand-in for our own. You don't need magical mind-control to be a brainwasher. It was the pervasive use of extremely modern concepts and phrases that made me feel that way.

Do any of you ever notice that sort of thing? What type and amount of modern language or concepts is invisible, what is jarring, and what tips the book into feeling like it isn't truly meant to be historical or fantastical at all?

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

This is a huge, huge thing for me. Nothing will jar me out of a fantasy faster than OKAY. I am watching Legend of the Seeker for the first time, and if I didn't already love it so much, the use of that term would really make me eyeroll. It was extremely out of place in Star Wars too, BTW.

My 12 year old extremely geeky son turned to me during the same show when one of the characters used the term "instruction manual" and said, "No one in that world would say that! Why did they write that?"

So that.

Those are the two things that leap out to me. But I know there are others.

[thistleingrey]

Yes, definitely, though I can sometimes read past it. If there's something that makes it clear that the setting isn't Earth's past, it bugs me much less, but I do not know how one gets a metal printing press without getting serious metal weaponry first; that's an economic issue (who drives development of the tech needed for movable type?) rather than a strictly historical one, for me.

I really do and really do not want to read Bitterblue, heh--other friends have really enjoyed it, and I kind of liked Graceling except for its worldbuilding.... Did you enjoy the story otherwise, out of curiosity? (Subjective enjoyment and "largely successful" aren't necessarily congruent, IMO.)

[rachelmanija]

I did like it. It's about personal and political healing after personal and political trauma - basically, "What happened to Romania after Ceausescu?" (I'm not saying it was literally based on Romania! That's just one of many possible examples.) But except for a pretty cool revelation at the end, it felt to me as if it might have made more sense set in an entirely different world, one more modern and congruent with our own.

[thistleingrey]

I see. Thanks--that's helpful!

[oyceter]

FWIW, I did like it, although I think it could have used a LOT more editing (Cashore is a little too pedantic about the cipher bits, there is a little too much plot repetition, and the romance is boring). I thought it made up for a lot of that with the very thoughtful look of what it's like to recover from a totalitarian regime and what types of policies do and don't work.

[thistleingrey]

Thanks; this too is helpful. Now I kind of want to see the cipher stuff, actually! (And bah, the romance was boring--at least for me--in Graceling, too. I still haven't read Fire....)

[dorothean]

I had an experience like that with Catherynne M. Valente's Dirge for Prester John novels. I can't find the right pages any more now because this only happened a few times, but this was set in varying times no later than (I think) 1699 and occasionally characters used idioms that I am convinced developed from post-industrial-revolution technology and business practices.

It was even more jarring because otherwise her command of language is gorgeous.

I was trying to explain it to myself with the thought that the characters' words would have had to be translated into English or at least updated into more current English, but that didn't really help.

[rachelmanija]

I generally roll with "translated into modern English," but that doesn't fly when the anachronism is in content as well as language, ie, medievaloid people should not be discussing communism, the subconscious, or memes.

On allegory

[daidoji_gisei]

I'm going to skip your questions for a moment to interject one of my own.

(Allegory is not a dirty word. It is a perfectly legitimate artistic form.)

So when, or why, did allegory become a dirty word? One of my favorite works of literature, Dante's Divine Comedy, is an allegory and I love it to pieces, but if I picked up a modern book that labeled itself as an allegory I think I'd put it back down again. Did the form get abused by the preachy, or did it just fall out of fashion?

Re: On allegory

[rachelmanija]

Good question! I'm guessing both. Possibly also that the categories of "preachy" and "allegory" do have significant overlap, and so began to be used synonymously.

Re: On allegory

[ursula]

I was actually thrown because, well, once upon a time my mother published a YA novel which was an allegory of middle school in the precise sense, where events happen which symbolize ideas familiar to the reader, and I think you meant something a bit more general?

Re: On allegory

[rachelmanija]

You are correct about what an allegory is. But the term is often incorrectly used as a synonym for "preachy."

PS. Susan Whittaker is your mom? Is she still writing?

Re: On allegory

[ursula]

Susan Whitcher, yeah, that's my mom. She is writing literary fiction for adults, now (and currently agent-hunting, since alas, her previous agent died). We are slowly talking her into putting her backlist up as ebooks, which will be a bit of an ordeal, since there are no electronic copies.

Re: On allegory

[kore]

I think people get Animal Farm dinned into their heads too often with THIS IS AN ALLEGORY!! - that or the modern taste for naturalism and realism, which means that anything even partly symbolic is automatically suspicious. Pair that with the "This is REALLY that" method of teaching, and you have generations of people who think all allegory takes place at the level of Everyman.

[cahn]

That's very interesting, because I didn't notice the mental health stuff or even the printing press at all, but the ciphers really bothered me -- not the ciphering itself, which I really liked, but the part where the whole discussion was predicated on the ciphered language being English -- at which point I started saying, wait a second, how does it happen that random fantasy kingdom is using a language that in our world developed as a mongrel of many different influences and origins, whereas in this world all the kingdoms seem to speak the same language? That was the thing that kept throwing me out of the story (which otherwise I very much liked).

[rachelmanija]

I was fine with the printing press. It was more the 21st century ideas about psychology and privilege that seemed out of time.

I hadn't even thought that about the cipher. Very true - that did go beyond the usual conceit of "the book is translated from its original tongue." I liked the concept of the ciphers, but confess to skimming big chunks of explanation about how they work.

[holyschist]

I am not sure I could give a list--it's so context-dependent for me. "Sexy" is probably on it, as is "navy blue" unless it is established that the setting has a navy which wears dark blue. (Philippa Gregory committed both of these in her Tudor novels, and I am STILL not over Henry VIII being "sexy." There are so many period terms she could have used--handsome or fair, to take two examples. And instead her heroine ended up sounding like a modern teenager.)

But it occurs to me that Terry Pratchett can break almost all rules in Discworld and not jar me at all. Because the Discworld IS here, as much as it is a fantasy world.

(late, reading through your archives after you were in metaquotes)

[algeh]

I read more SF than fantasy, so what I find jarring most frequently is a future world in which people are dealing with some social issue or other in exactly the way people contemporary to when the book was written would. This happens sometimes in fantasy too, but I find I notice it more in SF, particularly if I'm reading SF written a while ago and whatever social issue has marched on a bit since then back here in contemporary America. I've seen this happen with both various feminist issues and various GLBT issues, and probably it happens all the time with other things that I personally notice less.

It's not that I demand all SF books take place in a perfect future where there is no oppression, it's that I want whatever forms of oppression that future setting has to follow logically from the details of the setting rather than be directly copied from contemporary America as though that's how things always are, have been, and will be. I find it extra jarring if the setting uses contemporary slurs/slang while it's doing so, since that's so context-specific.

[skygiants]

I read a fantasy novel recently where the protagonist used the term 'vacuum up [thing]', which threw me right out of the text and into hilarity.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

For some reason this makes me think of the line from The Marriage of Bette and Boo, "You don't vacuum gravy!!!"

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

Very appropriate icon - The Princess Bride (the novel, not the movie) uses contemporary New York sensibilities all the way through - the movie isn't afraid to do this, either: "Life is pain, Princess. Anyone who says differently is trying to sell you something" being my favourite.

[rosefox]

I notice it all the time. Just read a Regency England romance in which they say "yarn" instead of "wool", and refer to sweet baked goods as "cookies"! Threw me right out.

[akamarykate.livejournal.com]

I read a middle grade fantasy that knocked me right out of the world (medieval/early modern, European, mountainous kingdom) a few times because characters, including the peasants, had easy access to sugar and oranges in the winter, said, "Okay," and at one point, sat down to read a newspaper with a porridge breakfast. If the use of anachronisms had been consistent, I might have bought it as allegory, but there wasn't enough depth in the rest of the story to justify that stuff.

[auriaephiala.livejournal.com]

I just finished _Bitterblue_ a few days ago, and that's a very good point you're making -- though I didn't particularly notice the sword choice myself (possibly because of only reading it late at night).

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

I don't think either of those examples would throw me out of a book (but I haven't read Bitterblue) yet, because they don't seem to me intrinsically alien to the list of concepts and features in your first paragraph. I don't see any reason why an invented fantasy world has to enact exactly the same linguistic patterns as the equivalent historical period in our world. I mean, there is a class of phrase that is rooted in specific developments, like vacuum mentioned above, and those would seem jarring, but the people in Bitterblue presumably have the concept of mental and the concept of health, so putting them together doesn't seem unnatural. Of course you know a lot more about mental health than I do, so there may well be implausibility I don't see in the specifics that makes it much more like thi vacuum example!

In general this seems to me an interesting alternate angle on the question of 'authenticity' of fantasy that gets much discussed re George RR Martin et al (the 'if you can invent a world with magic, you can invent a world with more liberal gender and sexual politics'/but that wouldn't be *authentic*‘ argument). I say mix it all up as much and as creatively as you want, but I love Steph Swainston's books.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I'm not at all saying that Bitterblue is bad. I'm saying that it did not read as if it was set in a non-modern world. With the exception of a few signposts, like the lack of antibiotics or the heroine's belief in her hereditary right to rule, the conceptual framework the characters were operating from was almost exactly the conceptual framework of the readers of LJ today. (Minus current technology.)

"Mental health" isn't just linguistic. It involves a whole set of concepts which were radically different from previous ones, and which essentially came in with Freud. Same with "process" (in a psychological context.) I forget if Cashore used the word "privilege," but she wrote about it from an extremely modern understanding. The entire book was like that.

Again, I'm not saying that's bad. I'm saying that it was noticeably different from fantasy I've read which tries to get at least a little bit into the mindset of non-modern characters, even if it doesn't strictly hew to real history. It was also noticeably different from fantasy writers like Michael Swanwick or Mary Gentle (probably Swainson? I haven't read her), who mix pre-modern and modern attitudes and objects in a deliberately jarring manner.

[wldhrsjen3.livejournal.com]

I was re-reading Mara, Daughter of the Nile the other day and noticed a reference to ballet which felt like getting poked in the eyeball. Ballet? In ancient Egypt? Um, no. :P (I still love the book, though, because the rest feels authentic.)

Modern sensibilities in historical-type fiction don't bother me too much as long as there's some context to indicate that these attitudes aren't necessarily pervasive at the time. But language... oof. I HATE reading historical fiction and finding words that don't belong.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

For me, it depends on the quality of the book. If it's well enough written, then it doesn't matter, because I take the odd jarring things as deliberate, as part of the alternate place the author is taking me. It becomes constructed -- I'm thinking, for example, of some of the games M John Harrison plays in his Viriconium sequence, or Delany's ability to recurve and reshape events and narrative order.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Michael Swanwick also does that a lot, clearly with deliberate intent. Mary Gentle, too. Gene Wolfe.

I am not sure if Cashore was doing it on purpose or not. That is, I am pretty sure she intended to reflect upon modern tyrannies, but I am not sure if the language was written to tip that off, or if she simply put everything in the terms that came naturally to her.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I guess if it works, it works!

[thecityofdis.livejournal.com]

I've not read any Cashore yet (it's on my list), but this sort of thing doesn't bother me at all - in fact, I prefer it, and it's generally how I write.

[raeraesama.livejournal.com]

The mental health part may not have bugged me too much, but then sanitary and sanity have the same root word /Latin nerd

But generally anachronisms do jump out at me, like the Prince in the Last Unicorn reading magazines(although I'm sure that was intentional)

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

I sometimes find the use of modern language slightly jarring, but not always; if a book is not a straight historical, it has elements that didn't exist in whatever period and area of our world it is similar to, so the characters need words for those. I would prefer invented words if they're done well, but I prefer modern words to bad invented words. If a book has lots of modern vocabulary (and it doesn't seem like a deliberate stylistic choice) I suppose that would be more than slightly jarring.

What bother me more are words or elements that indicate the author wasn't thinking about implications and/or wasn't trying to write a real fantasy, as in your example. I can imagine a society similar to parts of 15th-century Europe which does have the concept of "mental health," but there would have to be other societal differences, ones which would have allowed someone to come up with that concept and promulgate it.