(no subject)

[cahn]

Please rec me books with dads who are major characters (important secondary character is fine) and for whom parenting is an important component of their character, with kids who are older at the time of canon (teenager or above). They don't need to be good parents, necessarily, and they can make horrible mistakes, but they should be (relatively?) non-abusive and clearly love their kid(s).

So far I've got

-Aral Vorkosigan (...I guess he's not super a main character any more, but he casts a pretty long shadow)
-Atticus Finch
-Andrew Wiggin
-Jean Valjean
-Reb Saunders and David Malter
-Van Hohenheim (taking the prize for not being a good parent and making horrible mistakes...)

...this is a much lower percentage of the books we own than I had thought it would be!

Comments

[mildred_of_midgard]

When reading the Uhura-Lia exchange, I immediately wondered if it might be a deliberate allusion, so I went looking in the rest of the book for a foreword, afterword, author's note, something, that might actually credit the source, and I didn't find anything. Given that the source isn't public domain, a dialogue reproduced verbatim like that is the sort of thing you *have* to cite. Not so the Surak/Gandalf echoes, but you can't ethically (or legally afaik) just copy someone's dialogue word for word and make it appear to be your own words without giving credit.

It's the sort of thing that if I ran into it in a student's work when teaching at university, I'd be obliged to report it. And sprinkling verbatim, unattributed passages of copyrighted works throughout her work and making them appear to be her own words was the exact thing that got Cassandra Claire banned from FFN. That's why I'm trying to give the author the benefit of the doubt by saying it was probably unconscious.

I'd also argue that from a Watsonian perspective, the passage doesn't make sense as a conscious allusion on Uhura's part. It's not a quote, it's a dialogue between two people. Making it conscious would mean that Uhura said, "The whole thing would have broken your heart," expecting Lia to recognize it as a quote, and that Lia then responded by quoting the next line in the passage. "The whole thing would have broken your heart," on its own, is so generic that I'm skeptical that anyone would recognize it as a quote, especially since the passage in the source isn't--stop me if I'm wrong--*that* famous or widely quoted (unlike the Aeneid, which learned people have been quoting extensively for millennia). The only way I would expect one person to say, "The whole thing would have broken your heart," and their listener to say, "Why? Was it so sad?" and the first person to reply, "Sad? No," is if they both had the source text as a common reference and were in the habit of reciting dialogue from it.

Not impossible, given the characters in question, BUT, in context, making the Wounded Sky passage a recitation of a passage from an old book would undercut the intensity of the mood. Lewis's dialogue is a *good* way of concisely expressing the ineffable, which is exactly what's going on in Wounded Sky:

McCoy: "The common factors among all the reported experiences are initial discomfort—discomfort— secondary, I think, to everyone’s perception of loss of duration— and extreme vividness of experience, to the point where physical reality seems insufficient, or temporarily ephemeral, on recovery. Oh, and one other. A perception of the experience as desirable— even if it wasn’t exactly pleasant at the time— and a desire to return to it. A few people made the distinction that it wasn’t the experience specifically they desired to reenter, but the background— the context— and the emotions it inspired in them.” He touched a spot on the desk, and a recorded voice spoke: Uhura’s. “The whole thing,” she said, her voice quiet and pensive, “would have broken your heart.”

“Why?” said Lia Burke’s voice, equally quiet. “Was it so sad?” “Sad? No!” said Uhura— and the joy and longing in her voice were astonishing to hear.

“Evaluation,” Jim said. “Are these ‘experiences’ going to impair the crew’s ability to function?”

McCoy shook his head. “I have no idea, Jim. I see no such impairment at present. But some of them might be covering."

The moment you assume that dialogue is a quoted passage, and not an authentic, spontaneous attempt on Uhura's part to express her depth of feeling to someone who doesn't already understand what she experienced, the whole mood changes. The dialogue ceases to be the reaction of someone in the grip of strong emotion--"pensive", "joy", "longing"--and becomes an artificial, scripted performance. Putting myself in Lia's shoes, I can't imagine hearing a description like that from a friend, and replying with "Why? Was it so sad?", which sounds like a genuine question, while I was really quoting C.S. Lewis with the understanding that it wasn't sad. It doesn't make *sense* to me as how people behave.

What *does* make sense to me is that Duane was writing a passage about a ship's encounter with the extraordinary and reaching for the words to relate an experience similar to what C.S. Lewis had already related so well--and came up with the same words without realizing it.

The right way to do this, from both a literary perspective and an ethical one, would be to have had Uhura explicitly reference Lewis as a way to call attention to her own inability to put her feelings into words, while at the same time expressing that she was experiencing something much like what Lucy experienced. This is exactly what I did when describing what it felt like to have saved someone's life:

I don't really have emotion words for something of this scope. Except to quote Tolkien: "To say that Bilbo’s breath was taken away is no description at all. There are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful."

I.e., if the whole passage had come from Uhura's lips instead of including an artificial-yet-genuine-sounding question from Lia, it would have worked for me, and it wouldn't have been plagiarism if it was obvious she was quoting someone else.

[ricardienne]

apologies for continuing to jump in -- I find this discussion so fascinating as a literary scholar who works on Roman literature: my frame of reference assumes that literary works are full of 'allusion and intertext' both as conscious literary strategies on the part of the author and unconscious moments of recall.

I wouldn't think that an allusion put into the mouth of a character has to be understood as being made by that character. For example, when Aeneas says "Unwilling O Queen, did I depart from your...shore", he repeats word for word nearly an entire line of Catullus' translation of Callimachus' "Lock of Berenice" ("Unwilling, O Queen, did I depart from your head!"). Clearly Aeneas the character has not read Catullus, and cannot be aware of an event (the catasterism of the lock of hair of a Hellenistic queen) that is going to take place about 700 years in the future in for him. Whatever we make of that allusion (and it's a perplexing one!), it's present for the reader, who can see and make something out of the way that the author of this poem is connected to that other author and that other poem. I don't think allusions operate -- generally speaking -- on a Watsonian level. And it works so well for me -- at exactly the point where the characters are struggling to describe the ineffable, the author in a sense concedes that she can't do it justice either and resorts to a famous description from a work in the same genre, with roughly the same plot and themes.

Ovid apparently talked about this kind of allusion as "stealing, yes, but with the intent of being caught" [theft is the standard classical Latin metaphor used for plagiarism]. And that seems right, whether we take such intertexts as subconscious events that happened when an author landed on an apposite phrase from her reading without precisely knowing where it came from, or as deliberate "easter eggs" that she put there for the knowledgable reader to enjoy. With the Dawn Treader allusion, I'd think the latter, but, to be honest, I'm not terribly upset if it's the former, nor do I particularly want an author to add footnotes or an afterward listing all of the allusions in their text -- don't spoil the game for the readers and reviewers and critics! Fiction isn't the same as scholarly writing, in large part because the interpretative possibilities are left more open.

I have much the same feeling about much of the Cassandra Claire scandal, to be quite honest, although the extended passages, where page-long exchanges of dialogue and description were produced practically verbatim are perhaps in a different category. And there's definitely something to say about what happens when a deliberately allusive work moves beyond its intended readership of the people its quoted bits are directed at to a wider audience who takes the whole thing to be the "original" work of the author (and CC definitely cherished the reputation for witty dialogue). I don't know. The lines aren't entirely clear, but there definitely is a line somewhere. I'm not inclined to think that the Duane examples cross it, however, and I'm usually more excited than disconcerted when I find this kind of stealth quotation.

[mildred_of_midgard]

No apologies needed! This has been a very interesting conversation. I have more thoughts, but until I have time to lay them out, we'll just have to agree to disagree. :)

[cahn]

This is actually soooo interesting, please always feel free to jump in with examples from classical lit :)

For me, I guess the dividing line comes down to whether the reader would reasonably be familiar with the quotation/allusion or not. (Which depends on the author, too. John M. Ford, since he came up earlier, basically expects familiarity with a much wider swath of literature, including e.g., Charles Williams, who isn't normally on the Western-canon list -- he is the reason I have read a whole bunch of Charles Williams now. Though he flags it by also having additional attributed quotes from Williams as epigraphs.) I feel like Duane can reasonably expect her audience to know Narnia and LOTR (in fact, earlier in Wounded Sky Harb is walking around in a simulation of the world "Lorien," with elanor in the grass, which isn't explicated any further).

I seem to remember the Cassie Clare thing being around two issues, one of which I think is serious and the other of which I don't. One was a bunch of unattributed Buffy (and other TV) quotations -- and I don't think that is at all a big deal because it's reasonable to expect her target audience would be able to spot those. Obviously not everyone, I read some of her stuff at the time and I hadn't watched any Buffy, but I was aware that it was sort of "geek cultural literacy." The other problem, and much more serious in my opinion, was that she had big unattributed parts from Pamela Dean's Secret Country novels, which in my opinion are not reasonable to expect a reader to be familiar with (unless she'd previously made a big deal out of those books and/or used them repeatedly with attributed quotations, as Ford does with Williams, which I don't think she did). (Even then I don't think that very small bits, like a phrase or two, would have bothered me, not in fanfic. you should see my teenage MacGyver fanfic, omg But this was much larger swathes of text.)

That all being said, in Duane's case I think it is also very possible it was carelessness, because I've certainly had issues with Duane being careless before. I went to reread and I agree that it's definitely the case Watsonially that Uhura and Burke, themselves, weren't consciously referring to Narnia, whatever one might say Doylistically, and Duane seems not to do that elsewhere in the book (unless you count the Others saying "We are who are," which in any case was picked up on by McCoy and Spock even though the Others obviously didn't realize that their words were allusive). But I guess because Duane does do so many particularly-geek allusions, and because it's Narnia, and in particular a bit of Narnia that I would never be able to read as not Narnia (it's a pretty memorable bit, at least for me), it doesn't bother me because I would never have read it as Duane's words rather than Lewis's.