Explaining the odd?
Jun 24th, 2009 | By Stephanie Campisi | Category: JournalThe other day I received a response from a reader about my story A Pox on all your Houses where the reader told me that although they’d enjoyed the story, they wanted an explanation for the existence of the giant pimple in Priyanka Singh’s house.
My response, really, was along the lines of that of a foot-stamping three year old trying to explain why a ballerina outfit is appropriate camping gear: ‘Just because.’ In my mind, the point of the story isn’t really the the why or the what of the pimple, but the reactions of Priyanka Singh and her father to the house’s sudden acne outbreak.
I write absurd, silly fiction about all sorts of absurd silly things (although, more often than not, about fish or teapots, except for my novels, which are so far entirely free of such things, but contain more baked goods). The point of introduction of the absurd or fantastic element is to me a marker to the reader that notes, ‘okay, I know this is silly, but let’s run with this and see what happens’.
This might be more of a problem if I wrote hard science fiction (mostly because my dad would be calling me up to explain why my chemistry is. entirely. wrong.), but in my mind, the point of the absurd is that it’s absurd–suspension of disbelief kicks in, and we’re all having fun.
Should silliness/the fantastic just be allowed to be? Or should there be a purpose?
I’m a firm fan of the surreal/fantastic that has no logical explanation. In the case of your story, it provides the basis for an interesting question — would do people do if their house gets acne? Silly, yes. But fun. Art has many purposes; entertainment, for me, is one of the core ones.
I may be biased. In /The Bone Queen/, there are monsters made of squares. No doubt some people will complain that this is physically impossible or utterly illogical (if the book is published), but for me the surrealist element of it makes the story more fun than if the monster was just another oversized lizard.
You’d love this youtube clip, then: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1rHS3R0llU
Yay for evolving block-creatures!
Actually, the explicable is one of the things I’m struggling with a bit in my current YA, which is full of weird, crazy stuff. But I’m trying to figure out to what extent weird crazy stuff is normal to my characters so they don’t have to go ‘oh my god, a poltergeist!’ or ‘oh my god, streets that rearrange themselves!’ on every page. But that’s a very similar thing to the Pox on all your Houses thing, where the pimple is fairly calmly dealt with.
In terms of reader response, I suppose it depends on your pool of readers and where they’re coming from. I’d expect most spec fic readers to be all nonchalant about my pimply house, but readers from other genres might have different negotiated literary norms.
I like fantasy where the bizarre is not explained. I think it’s an interesting technique, and a contrast to the old-school genre tropes where everything has to be explained.
I guess my very unscientific feeling regarding bizarre or absurd stories is that you either get them or you don’t.
I think it’s also true on a case by case basis–I love the surreal and weird and quirky, but sometimes I am left with a sense of ‘huh?’ (often, but not always, in a good way). I guess there’s a spectrum of weird, as well, and our tastes (and my comprehension skills) sit at various points along it.
The unjustified weird is one of the things that keeps me coming back to spec fic, I think, even though in a lot of ways I have mainstream/literary leanings (although let’s not get into that debate!). Spec fic, after all, a genre of ‘what if’, so I think it’s the perfect spot in which to situate weirdness and lit experiments.
Thinking more about this; in the absurd I guess the fantastic is often a kind of signal of a dislocation with reality…. a sense of forces working outside our control, beyond our understanding. There are two ways you can react; the first is to exclaim and point at the fantastic. But that is a kind of a rationalistic view; whereby the universe at its base state makes perfect sense, and the odd is an abherration (sp?). But in the mindset of the absurd, I guess, the bizarre, the inexplicable, the chaotic, the cruel, are all mundane. The universe isn’t rational, it’s moody and petulant and unpredictable. But amidst that we live out our semblances of routine.
That’s a really good point, and I think is what I’ve been trying to tease out with my characters in my YA (only, er, not in nearly as articulate a manner!). So it’s sort of a collapsing of the weird into accepted norms of reality that allows absurd fiction to function, then.
Makes me think of an interview I read with China Mieville where he was disinclined to write about certain aspects of Bas Lag for fear of de-weirding the weird with explanations/rationalisations.