26. Heav'n's unopening door
Oct. 30th, 2024 10:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
slowpartsWhat I'm Reading Wednesday
I'm definitely reading more in grad school. Who would have thought! Not me. I at least wouldn't have thought that I'd have a general, ambient desire to read beyond what I have to for homework reasons.
What I've Finished
For my speculative fiction class, I reread "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang, and also read for the first time "Bloodchild" by Octavia Butler. I get worked up when people misunderstand “Story of Your Life”—rather, I get worked up when they misunderstand it in a very particular way. To me, this is not a story about choice. Choice is not even on the table. The reader who presumes that were they in Louise’s situation, they would simply take measures to “change the timeline”—as if learning Heptapod B grants a kind of clairvoyance which would give Louise enough advance warning to simply not let her child die—is symptomatic of a reductive, control-oriented approach to the narrative’s core concepts and themes.
The novum (a term coined by Darko Suvin) of this story—a constructed alien language that changes the way a fluent speaker experiences linguistic and intellectual time—is often seen as a kind of soft time-travel, a tool with which the enterprising wielder could change the future. Most people, then, are put off by Louise’s “indifference” to being granted this magical tool that could prevent the tragedy of her child’s death if she just committed to her individualism and fought back against fate. As if any of what she knows is linear. Heptapod B enables her to experience reality not as a sequence of events but as an undifferentiated singularity, where everything has yet to happen and everything has already happened: where her child has already lived and died: she is no longer living in English time (where light must change course to pass through water) but in Heptapod time (where light is perpetually passing, unaltered, through water).
I was very very good and did not get into arguments about this in class even though I wanted to. I only got into, like, two arguments. And I waited my turn.
"Bloodchild" really blew me away. Butler's style and sense of craft is as clean and sonorous to me as a tuning fork, the note by which to meausre all others (well, she's one prong and Le Guin is the other). This was such a visceral, violent, strangely gentle story, and the craft mastery so apparent that the whole thing has the quality of a pumping organ, carrying blood to even the most peripheral details. Butler uses the fear of bodily invasion (a fear that I myself share) to explore themes of personal and bodily autonomy, loss of innocence, symbiosis and parasitism, consent, relationships… T'Gatoi and Gan's relationship is so messy and fucked-up but also strangely tender in places (though, that tenderness could itself be inextricable from their trauma bond, the power imbalance, a host of other things) and I could have spent a whole class discussion just talking about that.
What I'm Reading
I picked up Normal People by Sally Rooney because I figured it was time I read Sally Rooney. I like it really a lot actually. It's a brisk book to read. There was a passage in there after Connell tells Marianne that he loves her for the first time that made me feel so totally the way that I did when I was seventeen and my boyfriend said that to me that I got very choked up. Connell and Marianne are complete messes who can't communicate and what can I say, I appreciate that.
I'm very into the elision of quote marks for the dialogue. It's a bold choice. It seems somehow more intimate, more like something you can't take back. The things Connell and Marianne say to each other are not contained within the story in neat little echoes but rather permanent expressions occurring simultaneously with thought, fear, reaction, time, light, action. Nothing is separate and all of it is fact. I think in a novel about failures in communication this is an apt technique.
I'm currently about halfway done. Connell is back in Carricklea for the summer because he was too ashamed to ask Marianne if he could live with her after losing his job, because anything analogous to asking her for money or financial support makes him sick—which is so fucking understandable, since his mother still cleans her mother's house, and the wages she earns come back to him, and he spends those like as not on Marianne, and Marianne isn't even conscious of this, because of course she isn't, because she's affluent. Yikes. Looking forward to seeing how much worse for themselves and each other these two can make it.
I'm definitely reading more in grad school. Who would have thought! Not me. I at least wouldn't have thought that I'd have a general, ambient desire to read beyond what I have to for homework reasons.
What I've Finished
For my speculative fiction class, I reread "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang, and also read for the first time "Bloodchild" by Octavia Butler. I get worked up when people misunderstand “Story of Your Life”—rather, I get worked up when they misunderstand it in a very particular way. To me, this is not a story about choice. Choice is not even on the table. The reader who presumes that were they in Louise’s situation, they would simply take measures to “change the timeline”—as if learning Heptapod B grants a kind of clairvoyance which would give Louise enough advance warning to simply not let her child die—is symptomatic of a reductive, control-oriented approach to the narrative’s core concepts and themes.
The novum (a term coined by Darko Suvin) of this story—a constructed alien language that changes the way a fluent speaker experiences linguistic and intellectual time—is often seen as a kind of soft time-travel, a tool with which the enterprising wielder could change the future. Most people, then, are put off by Louise’s “indifference” to being granted this magical tool that could prevent the tragedy of her child’s death if she just committed to her individualism and fought back against fate. As if any of what she knows is linear. Heptapod B enables her to experience reality not as a sequence of events but as an undifferentiated singularity, where everything has yet to happen and everything has already happened: where her child has already lived and died: she is no longer living in English time (where light must change course to pass through water) but in Heptapod time (where light is perpetually passing, unaltered, through water).
I was very very good and did not get into arguments about this in class even though I wanted to. I only got into, like, two arguments. And I waited my turn.
"Bloodchild" really blew me away. Butler's style and sense of craft is as clean and sonorous to me as a tuning fork, the note by which to meausre all others (well, she's one prong and Le Guin is the other). This was such a visceral, violent, strangely gentle story, and the craft mastery so apparent that the whole thing has the quality of a pumping organ, carrying blood to even the most peripheral details. Butler uses the fear of bodily invasion (a fear that I myself share) to explore themes of personal and bodily autonomy, loss of innocence, symbiosis and parasitism, consent, relationships… T'Gatoi and Gan's relationship is so messy and fucked-up but also strangely tender in places (though, that tenderness could itself be inextricable from their trauma bond, the power imbalance, a host of other things) and I could have spent a whole class discussion just talking about that.
What I'm Reading
I picked up Normal People by Sally Rooney because I figured it was time I read Sally Rooney. I like it really a lot actually. It's a brisk book to read. There was a passage in there after Connell tells Marianne that he loves her for the first time that made me feel so totally the way that I did when I was seventeen and my boyfriend said that to me that I got very choked up. Connell and Marianne are complete messes who can't communicate and what can I say, I appreciate that.
I'm very into the elision of quote marks for the dialogue. It's a bold choice. It seems somehow more intimate, more like something you can't take back. The things Connell and Marianne say to each other are not contained within the story in neat little echoes but rather permanent expressions occurring simultaneously with thought, fear, reaction, time, light, action. Nothing is separate and all of it is fact. I think in a novel about failures in communication this is an apt technique.
I'm currently about halfway done. Connell is back in Carricklea for the summer because he was too ashamed to ask Marianne if he could live with her after losing his job, because anything analogous to asking her for money or financial support makes him sick—which is so fucking understandable, since his mother still cleans her mother's house, and the wages she earns come back to him, and he spends those like as not on Marianne, and Marianne isn't even conscious of this, because of course she isn't, because she's affluent. Yikes. Looking forward to seeing how much worse for themselves and each other these two can make it.
