Satire, Sex and Sentiment · 8:51pm Jun 1st, 2016
Bad Horse has been a little scarce around here lately. Turns out he’s gone back to school.
He’s trying to become a more mature and serious writer by immersing himself in current literary theory, which makes it sound like he’s been sitting around in great vats of the stuff.
Thank God none of it seems to have stuck…
Fanfic writers are like modern-day Goliards: they write about what literary writers, the court poets of our day, can’t or won’t. In the Middle Ages the court poets couldn’t write satire, or about sex, so the Goliards did and they had a field day doing it. In our age the literati can’t write satire, other than cack-handed political diatribe, or about sex other than as cack-handed political diatribe, and to these two I’d add a third forbidden topic: sentiment, the celebration of sincere and conventional emotion.
So it’s delectable to see the ever-serious Bad Horse, after a semester spent seriously attending upon the literati who despise him and us and everything we do, blow a fat wet teacher-let-the-monkeys-out raspberry to current literary theory and write three short stories touching on just what it says we shouldn’t touch: satire, sex and sentiment. And have a field day doing it.
“Do That Again” is the first, a deceptively silly story that displays a sound grasp of craft. It’s a satire in that it subverts the themes and values of the original, albeit for laughter and not social criticism. In this case that subversion involves an inappropriate juxtaposition: think of Monty Python’s Eric the Viking, in which a bunch of burly Norsemen argue like schoolkids over who has to sit next to whom in the longship. This sort of thing can be criticized as cheap laughs, but in Eric's case a little history will teach you that Norsemen were exactly like this, so the humor in fact derives naturally from a careful reading of the sagas and eddas. With “Do That Again” the juxtaposition involves sex—specifically BDSM, which is about as inappropriate for a kids’ show as it is possible to be without involving tobacco. But Bad Horse has justified it with his own careful reading of the original (in this case the episode “A Hearth’s-Warming Tail”), so the humor derives from it quite naturally--surprisingly so in fact.
Of course, all the structural virtue in the world won’t save you if your execution is weak, as it sometimes was in Eric the Viking. Here, fortunately, Bad Horse is going strong. His sense of timing and his instinct for a punchline are operating full-bore in a way I haven’t seen since Bad Horse’s Bedtime Stories for Impressionable Young Colts and Fillies. It’s a pleasure to see him hit one out of the park again, and a double pleasure to see him do it with the grace of a natural.
“The Gathering” and “The Gift of Lethe” are neither of them satires, and neither of them deal with sex (except very peripherally). What they do deal in is sentiment, gobs and gobs of it. But each of them also has a central conceit that works on many levels. Both of them deal with the problems of immortality, a theme that’s surprisingly courant: a new Broadway musical called Tuck Everlasting is being advertised with the slogan If you could live forever—would you? It’s worth noting that it’s based on a children’s book, a book that poses twinned questions: what do immortals lose by loving those who must die, and what do mortals lose by loving those who never can?* These two stories deal with those two questions.
“The Gathering” deals with the first: what must immortals give up to love mortals? On first reading the answer is: a whole lot of fun. Bad Horse has already made it explicit that at one level it’s a metaphor for the choices parents make when they have children. It’s a sound and affecting metaphor, but I can’t believe that’s all there is to it, not with all those echoes of Dunsany and Zelazny in the prose.. Bad Horse is dealing with gods here, not evangelically but literarily, as characters in the human drama, just as Dunsany and Zelazny did.
I may tread on dangerous ground—fortunately I just had my hobnailed boots sharpened—but I think it’s not unfair to say that in this story Celestia is Christ-like. Yes, I know many religions tell stories of gods becoming mortal, and even of gods suffering agonies for the benefit of mortals**. But Christianity went all-in on this one particular god who went all-in on mortality: birth and growth, family and friends, labor and love, and then death. It’s been a defining story of Western culture for two millennia and I doubt anyone who grows up speaking or reading a Western language can avoid being influenced by it.
So here is Celestia, being tormented in a way that is ostensibly unique to immortals, but metaphorically common to all flesh. Did Jesus ever think Damn, I could be shaping whole galaxies into titanic works of art but instead I’m stuck on this cross trying to teach these rotten kids how to share and not hit. And when they’re grown will they even write?
Of course, Celestia’s not being crucified…
“Now, my favorite: the recommendation committee’s annual report on the advisory committee’s annual report on the prior year’s activities of the recommendation committee.” He dropped a bound folio onto the desk before them, which landed with a bang. It was thicker than the Canterlot address directory.
…well, not as such.
It’s a sweet story and a sad story, and it makes you feel sweetly sad—a conventional and comfortable feeling, a sentiment. And as the story does not demand much effort of you to feel those things, it could be called sentimental. But having made you feel them, it then makes you think, and think about serious things. That’s not normally an effect of sentimentality.
So does the story avoid being sentimental? I don’t think it could accomplish what it does if it tried to avoid sentimentality. It embraces a dichotomy between comfortable feelings and uncomfortable thoughts. This is called aesthetic tension, and it’s a virtue.
Then “The Gift of Lethe” takes this think-feel dichotomy and dials it up to 11. This is a story of how a mortal addresses the problem of being yet another mayfly in the life of a demigod, and Bad Horse tries to present the solution as a lady-or-the-tiger ending: did she do right, or did she do wrong? But the “she” in this case is Rarity, so you get both the lady and the tiger.
This is Rarity giving a master-class lesson in ars moriendi, which is to say it’s a Dying Rarity story. As such it may make you weep, or roll your eyes, or both—none of which reactions, I suspect, would entirely displease Rarity. But that aside, her coupe de grace manages to be both over-the-top and very, very subtle. It immediately put me in mind of the concluding lines of Alexander Pope’s “Solitude:”
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.
In other words, it’s Alexander Pope writing about how he’d like to be forgotten after his death, in a poem destined to make his name live forever—which, of course, was his whole intention in writing it.
I’ve heard it said that in haiku, what’s left unsaid may be more important than what is said—may, in fact, be the whole point of the poem. That’s Rarity’s approach. Not content to just be another portrait in a long, long gallery, she burns a Rarity-shaped hole in the wall: Forget that, if you can. It’s brilliant and unexpected and completely in-character—so much so that it’s difficult to keep in mind that it wasn’t Rarity who thought of it: Bad Horse did.
Here again, you couldn’t get this effect if the story didn’t unironically and enthusiastically embrace its sentimentality.
That’s a problem with modern literature, and in fact the literati of all eras: you can’t pour le bon vin du Beaune from a bottle of Vichy-water. Literature offers readers intriguing metaphors and concepts but it often fails to engage readers emotionally with these things because it is afraid, like all Establishments, to take chances; afraid, like all creatures of the court, of making an error and being torn to pieces by the other courtiers.
So it is left to us, the Goliards, to take these chances, because we have nothing to lose. We who studied so diligently for an academic or artistic or commercial benefice yet found no preferment would come, we gather in this little Court of Miracles, a low and reckless crew, and bawl our brawling lines out upon the darkness.
The court poets do not hear. They’re too busy dirking and toadying in order to keep their places in court. But preferment ends with the reign, and all reigns end. In which event Golias and all his ilk will merely hiccup, pour another cup—and go back to composing disreputable tales of satire, sex and sentiment.
Which may yet outlast a hundred courts, and all the poets in them
Aw, c'mon--are we really that important?
Probably not. But not improbably so.
* Vampires are not involved
** In Norway, is Canterlot called Bridle-blik? Is Celestia’s chariot Hring-horn?
Wow, did I ever misread The Gift of Lethe. I was so focused on how Rarity's act might be circumvented, I never considered the true intent beneath its surface.
Thank you for exposing my foolishness to me.
:c Aww...
Man I did not read that deeply into the gathering.
It's been a real joy seeing Bad Horse publish again.
You ought to follow suit, Ed.
I find this really interesting.
I've come to define sentimentality as obvious effort to evoke (usually hefty) emotion, but failing. I really think this is what readers (court poets or Goliards) actually mean when they say sentimental. Or rather, a failure to evoke is the real source of the rub, but readers misdiagnose it.
I often see sentimental stories (as I define them) accused of telling instead of showing. I find this very interesting, particularly because failure to evoke feeling does not stem from telly prose. It stems from bad plotting.
What I've never seen is a reader accuse a story of telling which is actually very evocative, even when it has lots of telly prose. And while a literary critic may level the charge of sentimentality (not as I define it) at any number of stories, I would bet you she waxes rapturously at how her favorite novel stirs her heart. And even the most boring writer probably cries with their own work, right?
So when the Goliard says "too telly" or the court poet "it's sentimental"--to mean "it evokes emotion"--I think in both cases they are misdiagnosing the problem. Because we all look for emotion, and we love no story which does not stir our heart.
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Anyway, great blog.