Reading and Telling

Even as long as I’ve been working to make this blog a presentable platform for myself as a writer and lover of history and archaeology, it is still hard for me to discuss reading publicly (even as little comment as this blog gets; I still know you’re out there *reading*).  I can air out my draft writing without a second thought (I need to get BACK to that project) and I do remember to bring up topics, process, and interesting little inroads of research or storytelling from time to time – but discussing that thing so deeply intimate to me still comes only reluctantly (I’ve even eliminated using the “here’s what I’m reading/watching/etc.” widget in the sidebar; does anyone read those things anyway?).

At the moment, though, I’m reading one of those pieces of popular lit which is itself so ostentatiously intimate in tone it distances me enough to be reading as a mechanical exercise more than an immersive, never mind emotional, one.  It’s “The Red Tent” – in which the Telling is so much more of the work than any Showing that, though it’s clearly intended as a whispering, urgent, immediate confessional, I’m set apart from it completely.  It’s not bad writing (though I know some who argue with its presentation of actual behavior in its period), but for me such intentional intimacy invariably produces the opposite of its desired effect.  Storytelling can’t be done without some Telling, of course.  But when it’s all Telling, it must be impeccably well done for it to envelop me.  As easily as I'm willing to give it, my WSD, it still doesn’t come stock just because I picked up a book.

Similarly ancient, similarly feminine in POV, similarly speculative and researched – “Lavinia” trumps “Tent”, for me, in its ability to take me in.  Ursula LeGuin, in writing it, wasn’t working to be literary, nor to write The Latest Bestseller – but urgently telling a story she felt from deep within.  Of course, Diamant must have done the same, must have borne “Tent” from the same motivation – but the result works a different spell.  LeGuin was so inspired she spent years teaching herself Greek and read The Aeneid in its original language before she could or would write her own work.  Lavinia came from a practical drive as much as it did from fanciful or emotional needs, and its discipline produces a work all the more ineffable.  Where “Tent” tells us of memories, relationships, emotions, and points of view … “Lavinia” is a poem.

I’m not much a reader nor a writer of verse, and epics turn me off sight unseen if I am honest.  So it is perhaps necessary to note that I mean poem as a rhapsodic descriptor.  “Lavinia” tells, yes – but, in telling, it creates, and there is no questioning it.  “Tent” leaves me room for “but, but, but” while I am reading.  “Lavinia” held me so beyond my own will it’s one of the few books I own with barely any marginalia scribbled in its edges.  For those who know what an inveterate commentator I am with my books (some of my novels have layered years of copy editing, cooing, snarking, or questioning laid down over different readings and bearing different reactions) – “silence” from me, in my reading, is perhaps the clearest signal of a novel’s success.

If I am so enthralled I’m rendered speechless - reactionless - by a novel as I read it, it must be of immensely potent power.


One of the things I found distancing about "Tent" was its insistence upon changing the very basis of the story.  Instead of laboring seven years for Rachel, only to be given Leah - then laboring seven more to finally win her, Jacob marries both sisters within months, the basis of the deception and Leah's role are utterly changed, and no powerfully compelling reason for this seems to explain these liberties.  I have said myself that historical fiction depends as much upon its fiction as its history (or accepted mythology), but alterations to fundamental plot points accepted for literally millennia now beg some fairly hefty storytelling questions it does not do to leave unanswered.  The result is that this fundamental story becomes nothing but a prelude to whatever enflames Diamant's imagination "more" than ... you know, the story she takes as her own text.  It feels like Short Attention Span Theater - and there is no reason for it.

Since Dinah is, like Lavinia, scarcely on the stage of the traditional tellings, why turn toward the text if only to ransack it pointlessly?  If you want to tell the story of Dinah, why waste the time on telling the biblical tale and changing it so?  Yes, it's important to the character at hand.  But few would have needed instruction, and providing revision is somewhat irksome.  I don't nitpick out of religiosity, but the *literary* presence of this story is so indelible changing it is inexplicable.  Dogma be damned, if you are inspired by a source, respect it - you're not the only one.

Basically - if the idea is to bring into the light a familiar detail of a time-honored piece of the culture and history of so many societies even today, why point your light onto distortions before pointing it on her?

Also somewhat irritating is the character of Laban.  No joy of a fellow, to be sure, the character who deceives his nephew and son-in-law to chisel fourteen years of labor out of him, his shabby greed *still* comes across as shallow in characterization and so repellant as to distract me, at least.  When I read "women's fiction" (which itself I find such a reductive genre), incest comes off always as a tool to vilify a character not given enough room to grow, not as the traumatizing violation of (usually the main) character it would be if treated more organically.  Laban's diddling of his daughters seems little more than shorthand for "he's a bad guy" - as cheap a piece of characterization as the verb diddling is for such a profoundly dysfunctional, selfish, evil behavior.

In fact, a number of the characters are hateful in “The Red Tent.”  This again seems to be characteristic of “women’s”/feminist fiction, and even as a feminist I find it a turnoff.  Perhaps particularly because I am one, and don’t feel the need to “shore up” my convictions by demonizing anyone.  It's easy to depend on villains, but characters are compelling.  When the first thing you know about a novel is the good guys and the bad guys, you're cheated out of learning something which can be one of the most interesting things about reading.

I'm not a great one for axioms - "write what you know" is outright foolish - "show, don't tell" is good, but can limit innovative storytelling.  Some things have to be told.

Some authors know how to tell.  Diamant is good.  LeGuin is peerless.