Hec, do you have an issue with identification? How much is too much? And I include woobie-fication in this question too. I've seen you be snappish in Jossverse when it felt like posters were getting close to a fictional character.

I do think it's a kind of distortion, and it bugs me when it hits me as "The Reader As Mary Sue." "I was reading Catcher in the Rye and I realized, I am Holden Caulfield."

In the Jossverse examples (Spikefen, Kittens) other forces were at play. I think the Kittens identified with what Tara represented - which meant that her character (to them) could never be treated just as a character in a narrative. Spikefens (I'm carefully using this word to denote the crazy-ass end of the Spike fan spectrum) didn't identify with Spike so much as projected their wants/needs on the character. Again, he represented something like a romantic ideal/woobie (or something, I'm not sure exactly) so that any deviation from that ideal set off seismic tantrums. These are both incredibly static, reactionary ways to view a character. It puts them in amber (so to speak) and doesn't allow them to change past the point where the fans latched on to them. I think that's a problematic way to view any show/book/movie.

Do you think it's a in/less valid way to approach fiction?

Nabokov (in his Cornell lectures) ripped into identification as one of the lowest modes of reading. He was very disparaging. I'm not nearly that dogmatic about it, but I do think it's a very narrow lens to view any book.

Do you think it precludes your way?

No way! I'm right. There's no precluding.

please note dogmatic intransigence intended for comic effect

Ginger, that was a great post. Thank you.

P-C, I love Wordsworth, but I didn't discover him until my late teens.

I don't think I knew much of him until my British Romantic Poetry class...sophomore year, spring semester. I like that poem quite a bit (though I don't totally agree with it), and some of his other (shorter) stuff, but he's not really a favorite. I love Keats, Browning, Eliot, Blake, and probably specific poems of others, but those are the ones that come to mind as pleasing me greatly with multiple poems.

Aimeee, I hope you take this as the compliment that is intended - I wouldn't soft-sell things with you because I think you respect being forthright. So I was with you. (And besides, you started it.) t /petulence

So, I wouldn't have said "bullshit" to just anybody. Besides, I have some notion that there's no point in trying to...not make you angry. Sometimes you're just going to get mad and that's okay. At least, I feel okay about it. Which is not to say that I go out of my way to piss you off, nor did I intend to shit on you.

But there's identification, and there's identification, Hec. There's not an experiential POV that can't be fucked with by an idiot.

I adore Vlad Taltos. Sometimes I identify with him, or identify him with others, sometimes I don't. I don't think it breaks my ability to kick back and look structurally at the books, however.

The key is, I'd think, investment, not identification. If you're pretending to be analytical or objective (for what that can possibly be worth in fiction) I think it behooves you to not be having your point of view's babies. Whether it's that you totally are Modesty Blaise, or that you like the genre or the narrative style or .. whatever.

And if you can't be "objective", recuse yourself, or qualify up the yin yang.

Nabokov can kiss my ass. Because sometimes, to stand inside a created world and look around, you need to be inside a character. I cannot imagine a diet that precludes that mode of experience.

Are people thinking about two separate threads?

I was thinking of a seperate thread, yes. I'm not wedded to the idea. I just thought it was worthy of discussion. I have rarely had or seen book discussions in here I'm interested in, and I was thinking that a book club thread might change that for me.

Other people might feel it doesn't, not want another thread, hate the idea of book clubs or whatever
shrug
But without going as far as Hec or hayden would, I don't find a lot of the discussion in here useful to me.

Do you think it's a in/less valid way to approach fiction?

Nabokov (in his Cornell lectures) ripped into identification as one of the lowest modes of reading.

Can there be a difference between Mary Sue-ing Holden Caufield and just plain old identification? Identification without idealization, maybe?

Because it seems to me that one of the functions of any art form is to provide that spark of recognition, that connection with something other than the Self. And this time I mean "connection" differently than my Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? example -- that was connecting 2 works of art. This is the reader/viewer/listener connecting with what's being portrayed in the art.

But there's identification, and there's identification, Hec. There's not an experiential POV that can't be fucked with by an idiot.

Idiots are always skewing the curve.

The key is, I'd think, investment, not identification. If you're pretending

Telling word choice!

to be analytical or objective (for what that can possibly be worth in fiction) I think it behooves you to not be having your point of view's babies. Whether it's that you totally are Modesty Blaise, or that you like the genre or the narrative style or .. whatever.

Upthread I argued that one of the great virtues of a novel is that you get to be inside somebody else's head. Sometimes that's the writer's head, sometimes that's going to be inside a character's head - and sometimes that distinction is slippery.

I guess my gripe is when it becomes hermetic and closed. The book or character as totem object instead of cultural currency. And my motive in that may be selfish, because I'd rather read Ple explicate what she's getting out of her Batfamily reading, then simply know she's clutching Nightwing #93 to her chest and rocking back and forth in a rapture of joy.

Because sometimes, to stand inside a created world and look around, you need to be inside a character.

But I think that's different than wanting to be the character. Embarassing example from my own life: the first time I read McCaffrey's Pern novels, I wanted to be Lessa--tiny and beautiful and delicate and ferocious and proud and a heroine; all qualities I felt I lacked as a pre-teen. It wasn't just that I enjoyed the stories, although I did. Lessa was a character into whom I could pour all my angsty identity-creation issues and spend some time imagining I might turn out to be like her.

My identification with her doesn't make her a great character, nor does it make the books in which she appears great books. If we're talking about formal criticism (which I thought was where the question of identification came up), it means diddly-squat.

I don't think that hec and Hayden are wrong that there is a real hatred of critical analysis in this thread. But I also think they may underestimate how provoked that hatred is. Ideally a canon would be what was described a common language. But I think it is more a shibboleth; if I remember correctly the term comes from a story in the old testament where after a battle a victorious army is trying to prevent the defeated foe from escaping. So they test their pronunciation of some local town or feature - "Shibboleth". Anyone who does not pronounce it correctly (i.e. the same way the winners do) is slain by the sword. I think one reaction against the Canon comes from it's being used in this way - as a method of seperating the truly educated from all the poor doomed damned souls who don't like or have not read the approved books every "educated" person should have read - and yes most of them by dead white males.

OK, another thing is that looking at the innards of something too closely can indeed spoil your joy in it. Deborah apparently had "wind in the willows" ruined by close textual analysis. My love for Gulliver's travels was lost in the same way. But I do see the value in a common cultural language, a list say of books and movies and songs which everyone should be familiar with - maybe have read or at least know a cliff notes version. Gore Vidal once complained that no one understood a reference he made to the Cataline Geese (saved Rome by making noise and warning of a barbarian invasion - from what I've seen of Geese, don't know how that differed from then noise they made every other day). Gore Vidal in addition to being a genius and a wit, is also sometimes a pompous windbag. I mean the Cataline Geese is neither that great a story, nor that full of wisdom. I honestly don't think it's not being widely known is one of the great tragedies of our time. But at the same time, I think it is good, maybe essential for a culture to have SOME common fund of stories; that is the best argument I know for a canon. And if a canon is needed, then some sort of critical tradition is needed too; because all canons will reflect cultural, class, gender, racial and other power hiearchies and agendas; and you will need the ability to turn the stories upside down and inside out , so that if "patient Griselda" gets included in a canon, you can find a way to turn her from a victim encouraging victimhood as a virture into an argument for being the kickass type who would never take the shit Griselda did, or maybe tell about the subtle revenge Griselda took, after she received her "reward" of being taken back by her shit of a husband - which come to think of it would be storytelling, not criticism. (Nah it would be both.)

And I really feel nervous talking on this subject. When it comes to poltics I can hold my own with anyone on this board. When it comes to literature, not so much. Still, you can learn a lot by occasionally fighting out of your weight.

Can there be a difference between Mary Sue-ing Holden Caufield and just plain old identification? Identification without idealization, maybe?

Sure. Again, it's the kind of identification that freezes the character at the moment of apprehension. I think a parallel might be falling in love with somebody with a big romantic connection - and then being constantly disappointed if they change or grow. My personal relationship with Capt. Ahab has changed quite a bit over the years.

Because it seems to me that one of the functions of any art form is to provide that spark of recognition, that connection with something other than the Self.

Of course. As Joss Hisself often says, (to paraphrase) "Of course I love it that my fans obsess about Buffy. It was designed to provoke that reaction. That's why we do this." Nobody (excepting possibly the French here, and maybe a few 12-tone serialsts) writes a novel (or composes a symphony) with the intent that it be coldly dissected by a critic.