Current mood:	thoughtful
Entry tags:	fandom: buffyverse, reading, thinky thoughts, writing, writing: theory

On symbolism vs. literalism, literary vs. genre
In which Sarah rambles a whole lot in a vague and only semi-coherent fashion.

I’ve been trawling the Internet for people with thoughts on Buffy and Angel. I found one person in particular who did fairly in-depth analysis of every ep as she watched it. It’s really interesting reading what she has to say, because we have diametrically opposite reactions to a lot of individual elements: I like Spike but can’t stand Angel, I love Buffy and tolerate Angel; she likes Angel but can’t stand Spike, she likes Buffy but adores Angel. Yet we tend to agree on which arcs and episodes were strongest - we both have a passionate (and, I suspect, idiosyncratic) love for the Buffy S2 ep "I Only Have Eyes for You" and we both rate "Blind Date" as the best ep of S1 Angel.

However, we think about the shows really differently. I tend to take a more, for lack of a better word, empathetic approach: I'm most interested in what the characters are thinking and feeling. I also spend a lot of time analyzing worldbuilding (a doomed pursuit in the Buffyverse, alas). Her approach goes a whole lot deeper and involves a whole lot of textual and visual analysis, watching for symbolism, etc. It’s fairly daunting to read her thoughts on a given episode, because my response to it all is much shallower than hers. On the other hand, I’m not convinced that everything is in the shows that she puts there. In particular, there were a few points in the Buffy S6 ep “After Life” that I flat disagreed with her on, and since this is the ep I’ve seen four or five times already, it’s one for which I feel I have decent grasp of most of what’s gone into it. So, it was comforting to think that I’m capable of not only thinking at that level, but thinking different thoughts than someone else thinking at that level.

The thing is, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to operate at that level all the time. That’s precisely the kind of thing I gratefully avoided when I changed majors from English to math. I really hate picking a work apart that way. Don’t get me wrong, I like it when insights come to me after the fact, but I’m most interested in fiction as a vicarious experience. This won’t quite make sense, but there’s something about that kind of analysis that frightens me, not intellectually but at a gut level. Maybe it’s because I live fiction vicariously - by breaking the sum up into its parts, it’s as though you’re breaking apart the reality of the experience I had. Maybe. Insert psychoanalysis here.

All this translates to the much more general fact that I take fiction literally - or at least, I take it literally first. If a story doesn’t make sense on a literal level, then I’m not much interested in what it’s saying symbolically. (In particular, I don’t like allegory, at least not as fiction - you can call it something else if you want, like "the encoding of information (opinion, debate) in narrative form.") Of course, there’s no neat dividing line between stories taken literally and stories taken symbolically, because many (most? all?) good stories work on both levels. What’s more, the emphasis placed on each level is on a continuum. And of course, a literal story that’s enhanced and enriched by its less literal elements is better than one that only works on the literal level. Once I’ve loved a story on its literal level, I’ll probably reread (or rewatch) it often enough to start looking for that deeper level of meaning. But if I don’t love it first, I probably won’t. (And, as I pointed out above, even if I do love it I often find others’ aggressive analysis threatening.)

What I guess I’m saying, though, is that I tend not to function on that level of critical analysis nearly as much, and I often have trouble appreciating it when others point it out to me. If I don’t see a connection for myself first, I never quite trust it - as I said above, I often don’t believe the original author put as much into something as the analyst is getting out of it. That’s even happened to myself, a time or two - I’ve gotten reviews and critiques from people that managed to find much deeper meaning in something I wrote than I ever meant. Which isn’t to say that some of the additional meaning might not have been subconscious. I do have a certain skepticism, though, about just how much subtlety people sometimes ascribe to the subconscious.

I think this literal vs. symbolic thing explains a lot about the genre/literary divide, and also about my personal tastes in fiction. Most genre readers, I think, want their fiction to make literal sense (although of course they may be interested in the other levels of meaning as well). We really are interested in the rocket ship, or the vampire, or the politics of the faux-medieval setting with dragons. As I keep complaining, the worldbuilding of Buffy makes no sense, is completely and repeatedly broken on just about any point you could name - but I suspect this is because, as I speculated a while back, Whedon was never really interested in vampires. He was interested in what he could use them to say.

I, on the other hand, am interested vampires - or at least, I’m pretty good at feigning interest while I’m in the middle of watching a show about them. That’s why I ask stupid questions like, “If vampires can’t breathe, how does Spike smoke?” Teasing out the mechanics is a game; it’s something I actually enjoy doing. It’s why a mathy friend and I once spent probably forty-five minutes trying to figure out why you need precisely seven coordinates to program the Stargate.

And I think this is why I tend to be skeptical of fiction with genre trappings written by non-genre writers: partly it’s that I expect them to sacrifice the literal story for the symbolic story. I don’t expect them to really be interested in the rocket ship; I expect them to use it for something else. And sometimes this works fine - I’d argue that the strength of most really good genre movies lies in the symbolic rather than the literal (Gattaca comes to mind). But often it results in a story that might make sense on some other level, but is disappointing on the literal level - and thus to genre readers like me. This is, to me, why pretty much anything Neal Stephenson writes ought to count as SF somehow - it’s because he’s so very interested in the literal elements he’s playing with, even if it has nothing to do with traditional SF tropes. I wonder if maybe this isn’t what Ellen Datlow means when she talks about fiction “with a science fiction sensibility.” (So am I now arguing that every author who’s actually interested in his/her story elements for themselves is SF? Um, not yet. But I betcha all those authors have some crossover audience with SF.)

Incidentally, another reason I find deep analysis threatening is that it makes me all kinds of self-conscious of my own fiction. I don’t even read at that level, much less write at it, so the thought that a story of mine is supposed to be making lots of sense on all those deeper levels is darned intimidating. And so, frankly, I just don’t think about it. Presumably, as I learn to read things at a deeper level and take more from them, I’ll (one hopes) naturally put some of that into what I write, either consciously or unconsciously. The inevitable conclusion is that, if I’m still writing in twenty years, I’ll look back at what I write now and be appalled at the lack of sophistication. But I can’t get there without first being here, so I just ignore the thought of my future embarrassment over early work, and I plunge ahead.

And, on another note, the taking-fiction-literally tendency is why I don't care for most slipstream. I often feel as though the author is secretly laughing at me for trying to take the premises at face value.

Whew. I'm pretty sure there are theories from literary criticism that say most of this more succinctly; feel free to chime in and tell me about them. Or that I'm nuts, or not taking x, y, and z into account. This is all very much in the pondering stage.