yonmei

09:36 am: "My job as an artist is to make you squirm"
Via dragovianknight, E. Bear writes:

My job as an artist is to tell you what I see, not what I wish I saw. My job is to tell as much of the truth about the world as my tiny flawed inadequate little brain and art can encompass. And the truth--even the tiny, fragmentary, self-contradictory truths that are all I have to offer--the truth will make you squirm.

From Elizabeth Bear, Chapter 3, Blood and Iron:

From the point of view of a werewolf named Keith returning home:

A house--a romantic old heap, more properly--dominated the valley below, straddling the narrow zone of safety between the hillside and where the marshy burn might flood when it rose. Neither precisely a manor house nor a castle, its outline described an irregular rectangle of mortared stone with chimneys and additions and gables protruding at odd angles like the spines of a hedgehog. It was the same color in moonlight or sunlight or overcast--dappled silver and charcoal, a few of the boulders nearest the foundation glinting with mica when the light slanted against it.

So far, so good: though I find it hard to believe that anyone would refer to their family home as a "romantic old heap". Still. This is presumably a 14th-century-or-later house, and such are massive tourist attractions: quite possibly the werewolf in question read - or wrote! - the tourist leaflet.

The sea tossed against a rocky beach; the village was a little way off. The house had the look of a gentleman farmer's abode, and the lawns were indeed cropped close by sheep and shaggy Highland cattle--coos, in Eoghan MacNeill's parlance--but there were those that knew the deeper truth. That there were no more wolves in Scotland, except the wolves who dwelled here.

That - right there - is where I started to squirm. Yes, there are still folds of Highland cattle in the west of Scotland - they even have a website. Yes, sheep are pretty good at keeping a lawn grazed down, though obviously you can't keep sheep on a lawn - they need a lot more space than that. I have never heard of anyone using cattle to keep their lawn grazed, because sheepshit is perfectly tolerable, cowshit isn't. But this all sounds terribly romantic, doesn't it? And that's the main thing. Plus, you get to reference how a Scot might pronounce "cow" as "coo", and refer to this as "parlance", and oh my god, "Eoghan MacNeill"? Eoghan is an Irish name. MacNeill is a Scottish surname - via Ireland, sure, from when the Scots came over about 15 centuries ago. Eógan/Eoghan is a name found in Irish annals only as early as the tenth century - it makes sense as a name for a Scottish werewolf only if you suppose that this family came over from Ireland say in the 15th century or later, and retained an Irish given name in the family: or if I suppose that these are much more modern incomers harking back to a supposed Irish past.

Actually, in all honesty, while the references to "shaggy Highland cattle" and "Eoghan MacNeill" and "coos, in ... parlance" made me squirm right there, I didn't know for sure that Eoghan is a thoroughly Irish name until I'd done some research on it: all I knew was that it really doesn't sound Scottish. But, there's a village: and if a village, that means tourists: and a gentleman farmer who wanted to add an air of picturesque glamour to his dwelling for the tourist trade might well have both cows and sheep on display in front of his house.

[Keith] passed through late summer herbs--the mint gone to flower, the dill setting seed--and scratched and whined at the kitchen door rather than the big main entrance that faced the road and the sea. Stout gray-haired Morag was there to let him in, the dressing gown in her hands draped over his shoulders deftly even as he began to change. His paws became hands as he fumbled with the belt; Morag stepped back to stir the soup pot on the stove.

"Welcome home, young Master," she said. "You were missed a bit. The bread's in the oven. Your father is in his study, and I imagine he'd be glad of ye."

No. No no no no.

Either "stout grey-haired Morag" has been brainwashed by her employers (always a possibility when the employers are magical creatures) or she's terrified of offending them and therefore always obsequiously polite (always a possibility when the employers are werewolves) or the conversation when Keith changed would have gone "Get some clothes on!" or "Cover yourself up, I've seen it all before, the gown's behind the door where it always is." Afterwards: "What time of night do you call this to walk in?" A woman her age who's been working for the one family that long, addressing a man whom she's likely helped bring up and certainly remembers from a child - that she would submissively and silently turn away from stirring the soup to dress him, and address him as "young Master" - suggests something dreadfully, awfully wrong. What has been done to her?

Alternatively, Morag is imported from a Brigadoon film set. She knows she's supposed to behave the way Americans think British servants behave towards "their betters", and will do so while the camera - aka Elizabeth Bear's narrative - is on her.

"I'd have thought he wouldna be at home," Keith answered, bending down to kiss her on the part of her hair. "Isn't it his Glasgow week?"

She hesitated, the thick stock curling around her wooden spoon. "Och. He's not well, Keith my love--"

"Ah." Keith stepped back, thrusting his fists into the pocket of the dressing gown.

Morag dropped her spoon on the ceramic spoonrest--shaped like a chicken--and turned to face Keith. She craned her neck back, hands on her hips, her frown twisting the tip of her nose to one side. "You sound like a damned American, laddie."

This dialogue, matched with the last, is all wrong. If Morag is so brainwashed or so cowed as she appears in the first part - what is she doing telling the young Master what he sounds like? And given that Keith's spoken two sentences and a phatic grunt, why is Morag reacting to the phatic grunt with "you sound American"?

She tch'd, cocking her head to one side like a bird, eyes glittering bright enough to make him laugh. "Go, see your father, young Master. It would be a kindness of you--"

"He's that poorly?"

"Aye."

"I've nowhere else I need to be," he answered. "Of course I'll stay. And I'll go up and see him as soon as I get some clothes on. Will that suit?"

"It will," she said, and stood on tiptoe to kiss the air beside his cheek.

Again, it just doesn't come across right. It's the "young Master", and the air-kissing - she's known him how long and she can't call him "Keith" even at a moment when she's telling him his father's very ill and he should stay home? She can drape a dressing-gown round his shoulders but she can't kiss him or pat him on the arm? What has been done to Morag to make her like this?

Elizabeth Bear doesn't seem to care all that much about Morag, and how her magical employers have terrified or brainwashed her, because we never see her again - at least, not in this chapter (and I'm not buying the book):

Keith joined his father fifteen minutes later, having taken the time to clean the mud from under his nails and change his dressing gown for blue jeans and a cable-knit sweater. The study was only loosely so termed; Eoghan MacNeill had lavished more attention on this room than any other in his slow restoration of the old manor house, and its rugged tapestry-hung walls framed a view of the moonlit ocean through broad modern windows. The massive table that served as Eoghan's desk was butted up against the outside wall. As Keith entered the room, he saw his father's head framed by the window, silver hairs picked out by the green-blue glow of twinned monitors and the remaining ginger strands sidelit by the amber warmth of the fireplace.

The "slow restoration" (and the "rugged tapestry-hung walls") do sound quite like an incoming family who bought the house relatively recently and have been turning it into an authentic tourist trap, providing much employment for the locals. Still, I don't see a woman Morag's age getting into that kind of role-playing - certainly not when there's no tourists about to see. Keith and his father have a conversation about the "princedom of the pack" and the narrative moves on to the fake-Kelpie.

Joking apart, I somehow doubt that Bear regarded Morag as an important character in her story, or cared why she was reacting like this: Morag actually bears all the signs of walking in from Stock Character Casting Call, with instructions to be servile and provide the important characters - the men who will later be exchanging narrative information about princedoms and kingship - with some background information. But still: I wonder what happened to Morag.

This is enough to make me squirm, but not because it's "the truth": it makes me squirm because it's embarrassingly untrue. If it's what Elizabeth Bear "sees", she was at the movies or watching TV when she "saw" it - the romantic depiction of "the young Master returning home to be greeted by the middle-aged female servant". (It also makes me sure, and sad, that Bear has never been a P. G. Wodehouse fan: even Bertie Wooster understood that the phrase "young Master" can be employed only for comic or teasing effect.)

Later in this essay asserting what kind of Artist she is, Bear says:

If you want somebody to tell you what you want to hear, to hew to a party line, or to spread some kind of gospel, you probably want some other kind of artist. If you want somebody to proselytize an ideology, you definitely want some other kind of artist.

I am not here to comfort you.

Well, Blood and Iron is certainly not comforting - it's irritating and discomfiting to realise that there are still people in the world who think that it's appropriate to pull out "Stout grey-haired McCliche" when they think need arises, complete with obsequious dialogue. (Unless, later in the novel, we discover part of being a werewolf is keeping the local village in terrified submission, and the reason for Morag's obsequiousness was that she knew if she failed to address Keith as "young Master" or if he complained about her service, villagers would die. That doesn't quite make sense either with the way she behaves, but maybe she's suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.)

But Bear's notion that in promoting this kind of character, depicting this kind of relationship, she is not "hewing to a party line", just tells me: she's never tried to think politically about what she writes. About how, for example, a pack of incoming werewolves who buy and restore a Scottish 16th-century manor house near a village, and set about raising cattle and sheep, would fit in with the community. (Are they Catholic werewolves or Protestant werewolves? If Protestants, are they Presbyterian or Episcopalian? If Presbyterian, which branch of the church have they followed?) How would the locals react to the new family at the big house? (And they could be "the new family" for fifty years or more...) If Bear thinks that they could simply move in and be princes of the fiefdom without any backtalk from the locals, she is proselytising an ideology - a very conservative, very comforting kind of ideology to a certain kind of person - the sort of person who believes absolutely in the rightness of the class system, in everyone "knowing their place", and the lower orders showing proper respect to the landowner.

That isn't the kind of artist I want. But it is the kind of artist who would write Morag that way and never notice that she had her own thoughts about Eoghan and Keith MacNeill.

(See also: What is a writer's job? at feministsf.)



Tags: books are what i read, evil american politics, racefail 09, scottish politics, venting