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Sunday, May 15, 2005
Continuity
Tim Burke is back! Easily Distracted has a new address here. Tim is nervous about Revenge of the Sith.
I’ll take this opportunity to set Levywatch bells ringing by passing on a discussion of continuity issues courtesy of Jacob. (Continuity issues in comics are an issue dear to my heart, he knows.) Jonathan raised the issue via this link in this thread just the other day.
Another quote courtesy of my steady passage through Theory’s Empire. From Roland Barthes, whose word for ‘fanboy’ is, apparently, ‘reader’:
The readerly is controlled by the principle of non-contradiction, but by multiplying solidarities, by stressing at every opportunity the compatible nature of circumstances, by attaching narrative events together with a kind of logical ‘paste,’ the discourse carries this principle to the point of obsession; it assumes the careful and suspicious mien of an individual afraid of being caught in some flagrant contradiction; it is always on the lookout and always, just in case, preparing its defense against the enemy that may force it to acknowledge the scandal of some illogicality, some disturbance of ‘common sense.’ (S/Z, p. 156)
I don’t really know Barthes, so correct me if I’m wrong. For Barthes, ‘readerliness’ is basically what Burke is talking about when he says: “The pull of narrative is very strong. Once I’ve started a story, I need to know what happens next.” An incredibly common attitude, then, although compulsion to read all of Robert “if it’s Tuesday I must have written another one” Jordan is, happily, less common. Conflating this common stance with hypertrophic continuity fetishism - a comparatively rare condition - is wrong. Yes, the two are related, since narrative pulls via logical threads. And sometimes strange things happen, y’know. Belle’s sister was going to join some online gaming wossname set in the Jordan universe. You had to pass an MCQ test on the novels to join. No kidding. (I won’t tell you whether sister passed. Would it be more shameful to pass or fail?) If you are forcing people to memorize Jordan trivia to inhabit an online world, is that riptide pull of narrative, or fanboy logicism unleashed? Bit from column A, bit from column B? Who can say?
As I was saying, wanting to know what’s going to happen and being continuity-mad are not the same, so Barthes is wrong. But maybe he doesn’t mean to run them together. ‘The discourse carries this principle to the point of obsession’ may say only that when a bunch of people who want to know what happens next start chatting, they easily turn into raving doctrinairians about midi-chlorwossnames. [Yes, I know when Barthes says ‘discourse’ he doesn’t mean ‘chat’. But I’m not sure whether ‘the discourse of readerliness’ means anything besides ‘readerliness’. Everything being a discourse, y’know.] At any rate, regarding continuity freaks: why? I assume such exercises are typically undertaken in a spirit of high-precision whimsy. Surely fanboys are seldom wholly lacking in irony and it is often the dominant mood. Still, the absurdity of repairing these castles in the air is not sufficient explanation, in some cases, for the fact that people go to the trouble. I suppose for some there is a genuine, deep-seated compulsion to engage in this sort of debugging. Is it just a logical sense running in overdrive? Submissive behavior? (Like picking fleas off the back of the alpha male monkey - in this case Lucas. By grooming him, you are signalling your subdominant lack of rebelliousness to his Empire.) Is it an excess of love, only misplaced? Like the aging quiz kid character in “Magnolia” I quoted a few weeks back: “I’ve got a lot of love to give. I just don’t know where to put it.” Other theories? This is the week when the sith hits the fan.
Does anyone have an opinion of these books
Extra bonus point question: compare and contrast the situation of classicists, with all these new Oxyrhynchus texts come to light, with the Episode 3 situation. In both cases the situation is technology and effects driven. The classicists use “multi-spectral imaging”, the Star Wars people rely on special image effects, too. Who is happier, fans or scholars? (Don’t you think it’s sort of heartwarming that the Scotsman is still insisting on that 9,000 year span even after a month. You’d think they’d be able to do corrections on a webpage. Isn’t there some way to change webpages?)
Comments
I’ve not actually read any of the Sutherland books, but I have taken a number of classs from him, and read excerpts. The overall feeling was of an attempt to wring as much information out of a novel as possible by really digging into odd-seeming details. E.g., Woolf writes that Mrs. Dalloway makes it from one part of London to another in ten minutes, which is far too quick if she’d been walking. So she must have taken a cab, though Woolf doesn’t mention this fact in the text: it’s just “Mrs. Dalloway arrived in East End ten minutes later”, or what-not. Does this indicate a certain upper-class privilege, that the hiring of another person and the spending of money isn’t worthy of mention? Or a class-based repugnance to discuss the merely (commercial and) logistical?
Morphologically similar to the continuity-plugging fanboy project, I suppose, although I think the motivation is slightly different—I don’t think the idea is so much to create an infallible, authoritative text as it is to use “errors” as a tool for teasing out subtlety (with a more or less constant knowledge of the likelihood that really, the explanation is almost certainly that the author was writing to deadline and screwed up). Very detail-oriented and probing, and they certainly do take the novels seriously, but the general idea is to have some fun.
I can’t answer your basic question about continuity-zealots, JH, but I want to point out that the Richard Miller translation of <i>S/Z</i> is awful in some important respects. He creates the terms “readerly” and “writerly” for Barthes’ lisible and scriptible</i> when the former in fact means something more like “writer-generated” and the latter “reader-generated.” “The pull of narrative” is the proairetic, which is emphasized in the <i>texte lisible but is not all that it’s about. The texte lisible, as I understand it, expects passive submission in the face of its authority. It claims transparency, consistency, and documentary realism, assumes that we all subscribe to conventional wisdoms, and limits the range of creative work a reader may bring to it --it encourages consumption, not production. Barthes, IIRC, got in some trouble for denying that a critic’s sole duty was to articulate the universal and unambiguous truth contained in a literary text.
Now, what you call “hypertrophic continuity fetishism” reminds me of Biblical exegetes, spending centuries trying to make sense of seeming contradictions and what are, on the surface, incredible claims/demands. But since lisible is initially used by Barthes to characterize a type of written work, not an attitude or practice of a reader, the only Biblical passages that do what Barthes describes would, I think, be the typological bits in Matthew.
But that’s probably not relevant to my attempt to unpack the Barthes passage, because with respect to the properties of “the readerly and ‘the discourse,” Barthes clearly “does not mean to run them together,” but, lacking the context that precedes the quoted passage, I don’t know what “the discourse” refers to --it sure sounds as though it’s something he’s making a contrast, claiming that this “discourse” out-readerlies the readerly. Anyone here have Miller’s translation on hand to confirm or refute that?
Thanks Josh. That’s helpful.
A thought experiment:
When novelists imagine worlds, they do it along the lines of “believable enough.”
Sci-fi and fantasy writers, especially, only construe a few (or a few dozen) defining attributes of the alternate and future realities they imagine. Beyond that, the concepts they devise refer back to “reality,” as do the plots of the stories they write. “Fiction” here is a relatively thin</strong device, and for most readers (in the “lisible” spirit), it is diverting enough.
But what “fanboys,” fan-fiction writers, and massive multiplayer simulationists demand is something much more systematic: the explanation of every aspect of the fantasy world. They want want textbooks on midi-chlorian biology. They want case-law from the Federation. And perhaps most importantly, they want live, dynamic simulations they can participate in. The interesting thing about this total fiction for me is that it almost ceases to be referential at all.
In that sense it can’t be thought of as “lisible.”