"Nothing happened"

[nancylebov]

A lot of avant-garde art challenges the audience's ability to pay attention in spite of disgust and/or boredom due to repetition.

There's another frontier I haven't heard of anyone taking a crack at--an extended narrative about pleasantness. Usually, the complaint if there's no pain for the characters is "nothing happened", which gives an interesting angle on what people think of as a something.

Does anyone know of literature that's tried this?

Afaik, there's pornography where everything that happens pleases the characters, but that tends to be unambitious about prose and not considered literature. If there's anyone reading this who knows somewhat about pornography, could you tell me whether literary pornography tends to be less fun for the characters?



Imho, Heinlein challenged that limit of keeping things pleasant (unsuccessfully, I suppose, since he wanted to please his readers--on the other hand he also wanted their money, and I have no idea whether late Heinlein sold well on momentum or because it actually had a large audience) with his characters from Tertius. What I find more interesting is the extent to which he challenged a real taboo, and I'm not talking about incest. At least Freud put that one on the radar screen. No, I'm talking about endearments. In the real world, people use endearments, and people talk about endearments on line, but Heinlein is the only one I know of who put them into fiction. I don't mind them especially, but they seem to aggravate a lot of readers.

People will say that the particular endearments are awful, but they never have examples of acceptable endearments from fiction, so I think it's a taboo. Maybe it's a taboo with a reason--maybe there's a cross-cultural tendency to keep endearments out of fiction because nobody can stand it.

Oh--I just thought of a counterexample--fiction can include endearments from ridiculous women to small pets. That doesn't count, except to the extent that sometimes you can sneak in a little truth as humor. What I'd be interested in, though, is endearments portrayed as a normal human activity.

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

MZB has endearments from women to women -- "Breda" in the Darkover books and "Little sister" in MoA. I noticed because as you say, it's noticeable. I liked the "breda" but didn't like "little sister".

Patrick O'Brian has Stephen called Jack "My dear". I love this.

As for writing about nothing happening, I tried it, and it's really really hard. I was intending to write a story in a very high magic world in which a man from a lower magic part of it and a woman from a poly family in a higher magic part of it got together for a while and then broke up. Story being what it was, this turned into a story about having your grandmother come back from Elfland with the gods mad at her, because that's the part of the story I thought was incidental background but which has the event nature. Le Guin is actually right about this. I underestimated the problem because it's easy for poetry.

I have about 50% of this novel done, and will finish it sometime.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Where did LeGuin write about the event nature?

This reminds me of _Spock's World_--iirc, the primary story is about peace negotiations, but there are long setpieces (iirc, historical chapters rather than flashbacks) with more exciting things happening.

I like the idea of the grandmother coming back from Elfland with the gods mad at her.

If the relationship breaks up, that might be a little more something than I had in mind.

I was thinking about at least a long short storysworth of good food and drink, affection, genial conversation....

[papersky.livejournal.com]

She wrote about it in essays in Dancing at the Edge of the World and then she proved how hard it is in Tehanu.

The closest I can think of anything achieving this is Phyllis Karr's At Amberleaf Fair, which I think you'd like. Eleanor Arnason also comes close.

The problem with the "good food and drink" thing is that it isn't a story. You can only have that in the intervals of a story, good food and drink and convivial company, how different from when I was alone on the moor and the wolves were starting to howl.

Actually I've just thought of a way of doing it, as a short story, but you won't like it.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Why won't I like it? Is it from the point of view of a government agent in charge of making sure everyone has good food and drink and convivial company, and it all works?

I wonder if there's a way of doing it as a practical joke by the author--there are all sorts of little clues impying impending disaster, but nothing happens and the reader is left saying "what?".

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I have emailed it to you.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks very much.

And you're right that I didn't like it, since I'm somewhat fond of the Earth. Still, it's a good short-short, and I hope it gets published.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

The thing is, there is no story unless there is something untoward somewhere. In books for very small children, the untoward thing can be very very small: it can be anticipation of a good event, or the consolidation of a good event. When we get older, we become habituated to small events, and it's harder to get a rise, or a story, out of them. So if you want the payoff event to be a small thing, a pleasant small thing, you pretty much have to build it up by having the untoward event loom large -- or rather, delve deep, I guess, since we tend to sort of visualize the trail of the story as moving upwards to a climax/summit thing. Which is why, I guess, when people want to write about small pleasant triumphs they tend to start out with a deeply neurotic or deeply wounded or deeply contemplative point of view: so there's somewhere to move.

You could, and I bet that people do and I've read some and can't think of them at the moment, write a story in which the surface events are moving from pleasant to pleasant without misery,fear, or grotesquery, while there is a background movement that is substantial. That seems like a worthy challenge, actually. To do it in a way that the reader knows the movement but can't put their finger on any one sentence in which the deeper, more miserable stuff is happening.

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

I'll have to go check when I get home, but I feel confident in my recall that Charles DeLint also has some of his characters use endearments, occasionally. (Though I may be remembering parental or other elder-relation endearments, I would swear there are one or two between lovers.)

Given time, I am sure I can dig out other examples (I'm reading Peter Dickenson now, and I bet I can find a few in his work, too). But the fog is on the brain; it's almost time to go home and sleep.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Endearments between parents and children or between siblings or whatever are ok--it doesn't have to be lovers and it doesn't have to be reciprocal. It just has to be protrayed as normal rather than ridiculous, with extra points for silly endearment.

[redbird]

Elizabeth Lynn's characters use endearments. In The Dancers of Arun, at one point Kel calls Kerris "chelito", and the third-person narrative says "the endearment warmed him".

I wonder if it's easier in fantasy, where the author can use made-up endearments and avoid readers thinking that a particular term is silly, or being annoyed by it because it's what their ex, or their least-favorite great aunt, called them.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

You may be right about it being easier in fantasy, though I'm not convinced that past annoyance is the reason native-language endearments get avoided.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks, everyone. I should have set the bar as high as the one Heinlein tried to jump over: silly endearments. I'm not just talking about calling someone "darling"--it's got to go at least as far as "Hamadarling" for someone named Hamadryad.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I think in the mainstream fiction I've read endearments are pretty freely used.

One of the things I do is I use endearments to reflect on the people in the SF world. So that my people who are from a literally colorful, affectionate, sensual, but highly conformist culture call each other all sorts of endearments (mainly "peach") which my people who are from a culture which is more individualist, more achievement-oriented but just as conformist on different issues save their endearments for much more specialized situations and are shocked when they hear the way the people from the first group speak to each other ("calls a man old enough to be his grandpa "Peach!").

But I use a lot of light, color, and pleasant sensations to set a scene too. Even when the people in them are miserable. Because, you know, we don't have a bunch of tiny invisible stage managers running around switching down the saturation level on the scenery when bad things happen, and taking away our music and replacing it with dirges, or turning all the birds into creaking floorboards.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

I don't believe there is any taboo against using endearments in fiction. I've been seeing them since I learned to read. (Lady's people call each other "Jim Dear" and "Darling," and it seemed a deeply human thing to do, not silly at all.) In fantasy, MZB and Mercedes Lackey characters use endearments more than most of the people I know. They use them among friends, not just between lovers, which is jarring...but oddly world-defining. Endearments between lovers, or within a family, don't feel at all noteworthy.

A term like "Hamadarling" doesn't look like an endearment, to me. It looks like a glaring indicator of tone-deafness in the realm of endearments. (Like George W. calling Laura "Bushie." If she really loves him, she might have warm fuzzy associations with it. But an outsider can still shudder.) I might see it as character development if Heinlein didn't do it so consistently.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Hokay, which authors would you say do silly endearments well?

For what it's worth, I think "Hamadarling" is ok as a one-shot endearment, but wrong (probably too long) as a habitual endearment.

[sgsguru.livejournal.com]

Late- period Arthur C. Clarke is about as conflict- free as you can get. The Songs of Distant Earth (novel, not short story) is the best example I can think of.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the reminder. I quit reading Clarke long about _The Fountains of Paradise_ because nothing happened. IIRC, he also wrote a kids-on-space-station novel where every time something threatened to happen, it didn't. In particular, there was a giant zero-g hydra which looked scary but wasn't dangerous at all.

I'm not sure whether it's related, but _Childhood's End_ is remarkable for being a quite readable novel in which no one makes any decisions that make any difference.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I seriously doubt that a purely pleasant narrative is feasible in anything that resembles popular fiction--that's why I brought up the avante garde fiction that tests the reader's mental flexibility and/or endurance.

It's interesting that uninterrupted pleasantness is apparently harder to write than something like _Waiting for Godot_.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

Came to this discussion by way of sartorias. Whee!

L.E. Modesitt, Jr. uses "best-beloved" in Towers of the Sunset (perhaps elsewhere in Recluce), and I seem to remember "sweet" being used (sometimes rather, uh, ironically) frequently in Cherryh's Cyteen. Neither of these grated on me. On the other hand, "darling" immediately makes me want to spork something...YMMV.