Oh, that's weird - I answered Amelia's comment first, because I was proceeding through my story count in order, and I ended up talking about T.H. White to her, as well! It's odd, in a way, that I don't talk about White more often - because he's the deepest down of all my literary, imaginative, and political influences. My activist father read i>The Once and Future King out loud to me when I was a very little girl, and it was the first time a book ever really made me think about the hard problems of ethical morality, beyond simple surface moralism. It's my core fandom; but I don't often talk about it.
-One of the things White doesn't do with Mordred, but that would be very characteristic of his work, is to humanize him (instead, White ends up making him a metonym for all of fascism, essentially blanked of characterization). But I've always thought it was odd that people ascribed such weird and supernatural motives and capacities to Mordred, when he seems to me a very familiar human type: the abused child who grows up nasty, who engenders both pity and harsh judgment or moral revulsion. The bullied child who becomes a bully. There's nothing supernatural about Mordred's nastiness; it's cold and calculating, but also human and so essentially born out of need and pain. So that's what I wanted to do here: to let Mordred be a nasty little boy who's maybe almost in love, but doesn't have a lot of knowledge about what love is or how it works. But I also really wanted to give Gaheris some power, because I think we tend to undervalue steady caretaking types; it was important to me that Mordred's belief in his absolute control over his older, stronger brother read somewhat hollow.
-this story kind of caught the thing that's always haunted me about White's Orkney clan, and that's very cool. The title comes from White's epigraph to the second book; on the opposite page my favorite chapter of the whole book starts, the one where the Orkney brothers recount the family story of their ancient wrongs, and their mother boils a cat for an invisibility spell downstairs. The Orkneys are simultaneously very lovely in their family loyalty, in the depths of their response to the story of their grandmother's abuse, in their clannish connectedness to one another - but simultaneously horrifying because of how far they'll go in order to advance their cause, and how well they hold their grudges, and how their personal loyalties allow them to excuse cruelty and abusive behavior in one another.
-it's weird, but I often feel like the stories I write in half an hour, like this one, handle and display my prose style much better than the ones I labor over for months. I tend to be elaborate and imagery-packed, sometimes overly so, but here I think the balance holds; it's all pretty, but clear and solid too, and that's why it manages some impact.
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Date: 2013-05-25 01:34 am (UTC)Three things I like right now about Put to Sleep My Mother's Curse:
-One of the things White doesn't do with Mordred, but that would be very characteristic of his work, is to humanize him (instead, White ends up making him a metonym for all of fascism, essentially blanked of characterization). But I've always thought it was odd that people ascribed such weird and supernatural motives and capacities to Mordred, when he seems to me a very familiar human type: the abused child who grows up nasty, who engenders both pity and harsh judgment or moral revulsion. The bullied child who becomes a bully. There's nothing supernatural about Mordred's nastiness; it's cold and calculating, but also human and so essentially born out of need and pain. So that's what I wanted to do here: to let Mordred be a nasty little boy who's maybe almost in love, but doesn't have a lot of knowledge about what love is or how it works. But I also really wanted to give Gaheris some power, because I think we tend to undervalue steady caretaking types; it was important to me that Mordred's belief in his absolute control over his older, stronger brother read somewhat hollow.
-this story kind of caught the thing that's always haunted me about White's Orkney clan, and that's very cool. The title comes from White's epigraph to the second book; on the opposite page my favorite chapter of the whole book starts, the one where the Orkney brothers recount the family story of their ancient wrongs, and their mother boils a cat for an invisibility spell downstairs. The Orkneys are simultaneously very lovely in their family loyalty, in the depths of their response to the story of their grandmother's abuse, in their clannish connectedness to one another - but simultaneously horrifying because of how far they'll go in order to advance their cause, and how well they hold their grudges, and how their personal loyalties allow them to excuse cruelty and abusive behavior in one another.
-it's weird, but I often feel like the stories I write in half an hour, like this one, handle and display my prose style much better than the ones I labor over for months. I tend to be elaborate and imagery-packed, sometimes overly so, but here I think the balance holds; it's all pretty, but clear and solid too, and that's why it manages some impact.