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fatalism-and-villainy · 4 years

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Reparative Reading

I would love, and indeed have been meaning for a long time, to talk about a piece of academic writing from one of my favourite theorists that I think has an ongoing relevance. This is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” first published in the mid-to-late 1990’s and compiled in her 2003 monograph, Touching Feeling. There’s a some free PDFs of it floating around (such as here) for those who want to read it in full – and I would recommend doing so, despite its density in places, because Sedgwick has a marvelous critical voice.

Sedgwick’s topic of contention in this essay is the overwhelming tendency in queer criticism to employ what she thinks of as a paranoid methodology – that is, criticism based around the revelation of oppressive attitudes, and that sees that revelation not only as always and inherently a radical project, but the only possible anti-oppressive project. This methodology is closely related to what Paul Ricoeur termed the “hermeneutics of suspicion” and identified as central to the works of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, which were all progenitors of queer criticism. Sedgwick objects to the fact that the hermeneutics of suspicion had, at her time of writing, become “synonymous with criticism itself,” rather than merely one possible critical approach. She questions the universal utility of the dramatic unveiling of the presence of oppressive forces, pointing to the function of visibility itself in perpetuating systemic violence, and identifying the work of anti-oppression as one based in a competition for a certain type of visibility. She also rejects the knowledge of the presence of oppression alone as conferring a particular critical imperative, instead posing the question, “what does knowledge do?”

As an example, Sedgwick critiques Judith Butler’s commentary on drag in Gender Trouble, one of the works that she uses as an example of a reading based in a paranoid approach. She identifies Butler’s argument that drag foregrounds the constructed aspect of gender as a paranoid approach, due to its focus on revelation of structures of power and oppression, and she finds Butler’s argument lacking in its neglect in acknowledging the role that joy and community formation play in the phenomenon of drag. Near the end of the essay, she also does an example of a reparative reading of the ending of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, claiming that the narrator’s remove from the traditional familial structure and its temporality is precisely what confers his particular moment joy and insight upon discovering that his friends have aged. Broadly, Sedgwick rejects the implication that readings based in joy, hope, or optimism are naïve, uncritical, or functionally a denial of the reality of oppression.

Now, it’s important to note that the message of this essay is not that paranoid readings are bad, and reparative readings are good. Sedgwick is drawing on a body of affect theories (most prominently Melanie Klein’s) that posit the reparative impulse as dependent on and resulting from the paranoid impulse – reparation by definition is something that can only occur after some kind of shattering, and Kleinian trauma theories generally posit that process as something that produces a new object or perspective than pre-trauma. (Something I love about Sedgwick is that she often sets up these binaries that seem at odds with each other, but end up being mutually dependent.) Furthermore, the critical tradition in queer studies that Sedgwick is critiquing in this essay is one that was itself, in many ways, a manifestation of communal trauma, particularly with the impact of the AIDS crisis. Sedgwick herself acknowledged this last point in a later essay, “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes,” claiming that she didn’t feel she did a good enough job of identifying the AIDS crisis as a driving force behind this trend. So Sedgwick is not discounting the utility of paranoid readings, but rather rejecting the notion that they ought to encompass all of criticism. (In fact, a running theme in Touching Feeling is her representation of various perspectives and methods as sitting beside one another, rather than hierarchically.) And reparative reading, as Sedgwick portrays it, is not the denial of trauma or violence, but a possibility for moving forward in its wake.

Why am I taking the time to outline all of this? Because, while the original essay was written almost 25 years ago, with the academic community in mind, it reflects a similar pattern that I see now in online fandom.

Queer fandom (as that’s what I feel the most qualified to talk about) has a considerable paranoia problem. Queer fandom is brimming with traumatized people who carry varying degrees of personal baggage and are afflicted by the general neuroses that come from existing in a heterosexist, cissexist society. And many people in fandom have been repeatedly burned by the treatment of queer people in media – Bury Your Gays, queerbaiting, queercoded villains, etc. And in such a media landscape, and within such a communal sphere, much of fandom has developed the kind of “anticipatory and reactive” method of media criticism that Sedgwick identifies in this essay.

Fandom gets very excited for new media, certainly, and is prone to adulation of media that seems to fit its ideological beliefs. But it is also very quick to hone in on any potential representative flaw, and use that as a vehicle for condemnation. (This cycling between idealization and extreme, bitter jadedness has been widely commented on). Not only is there a widespread moralistic approach in fan criticism that is very invested in deeming whether or not a piece of media is harmful or not, “problematic” or not, within a simplistic binary framing, but that conclusion is so frequently the end of the conversation. “This is problematic,” “this is bad representation,” “this falls into this tired and harmful trope,” etc, is treated as the endpoint of criticism, rather than a starting point. This is the spectacle of exposure that Sedgwick critiques as central to the paranoid approach – simply identifying the presence of oppressive attitudes in a text is not only treated as an analytic in and of itself, but as the only valid analytic. So often I have seen people jump to take the most pessimistic possible approach to a piece of media, and then proceed to treat any disagreement with that reading as in and of itself a denial of structural homophobia, as naïve, and as not being a critical enough reader/viewer. “Being critical” itself has been taken on as a shorthand for this particular process, which many others have commented on as well.

Now, again, I want to stress that taking issue with this totalizing impulse is not discounting the legitimate uses of identification and exposure, or even of reactivity and condemnation. There are particular contexts in which these responses have their uses – in Sedgwick’s words, “paranoia knows some things well and others poorly.” But that approach has a finite scope. And rejecting the universal application of this particular analytic does not itself constitute a denial of the existence of oppression, or its manifestation in media and narratives. Nor is it about letting particular works “off the hook” for whatever aspects they may have that are worthy of critique. Rather, it’s a call to acknowledge that other critical approaches exist, and that the employment of a more optimistic approach is not necessarily a result of ignorance or apathy about the existence of oppression. It is one that invites us not to lay aside paranoia as an approach, but recognize that it has limited applicability, and question when and how our motives might be better served by another approach.

I think that “is this homophobic, yes or no?” or “is this good representation, yes or no?” are reductive critical approaches in and of themselves. But I think there’s also room for acknowledgment that not everything needs to be read through a revelatory lens regarding societal oppression at all. Rather than “what societal attitudes does this reflect back?” being the approach, I think there could be a good bit more “What does this do for us? What avenues of possibility does this have?” I think there’s already been leanings in this direction with, for example, the reclaiming of queercoded villains, with dialogues that treat those characters not as reflections of societal anxiety and prejudice, but rather as representative of joy and freedom and possibility in their rejection of norms and constraints. I’d like to see that approach applied more broadly and more often.

Let’s try to read more reparatively.

#alpha speaks #alpha's literary opinions #eve sedgwick #literary criticism #queer studies #help me sedgwick #also apparently 'reparatively' isn't actually a word but sedgwick invented words in a similar way all the time so #lord i hope this is all coherent...#these concepts are always more complicated and harder to convey than they seem #my meta #big sigh.#queue #for pillowfort #(when it comes back online)

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emcandon · 3 years

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I just finished Ronin and it's now my favourite ever Star Wars book. Your writing is so beautiful and the plot!! It's so layered, like when you think understand it there's another level to it! The characers and story are the most original I've ever seen. I can't praise this enough, I'd rate your book 100 out of 10 if I could. (1/2)

Ahhhh <333 thank you, it is always a boon to hear when the book gives people a good time. I didn't intentionally write it with reread value in mind, but it seems to have a good deal! Which I suppose makes sense given my tendency to saturate stories with SECRETS. I am glad it paid off for you <3

Also...thank you for loving the Traveler in specifically the way you do. I wanted someone like them to be in Star Wars because I wanted to have had someone like them to imprint on as a kid, you know? Somewhat adjacently, I think of this book as being pretty firmly rooted in both my mixed and diasporic experience because, well, that's the only perspective I can write from. I'd be powerfully interested in reading a Japanese iteration on Star Wars from someone with closer temporal ties to Japan -- though the Visions project as a whole is this in a lot of ways. (Which is to say: I recognize this anxiety. I encourage embracing it. We are who we are. We have the relationships with our history that we have. There's a beauty in that as well.)

FINALLY: I have not yet read Gearbreakers, though the second I saw the pitch I was like "aha, a book FOR ME." But then I am also writing in the queer mech genre and was fated to be a giant nerd about it :P (The Archive Undying's ABMs have gone out into the world and i am low-key dying about this all the time. "read my book! BUT DON'T LOOK AT ME, SO HELP ME GOD." etc.)

#star wars ronin #ask reply

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emurgency-festival-digital--blog · 5 years

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(Em)Urgency Performance Symposium Program for Day 2

(EM)URGENCY - DAY 2

BA Performance Arts – A First year showcase

1pm-5:30pm

On Listening

All the works presented today are a response to Text as Performance, a first-year unit that this term explored the theme of On Listening. Performance Arts is a course which brings together a range disciplines – and all the artists have responded in their own way to what has been presented during the term. No piece is the same, no artist is the same, and we present to you an eclectic mix of short and early work that may influence our later practice – this is our first public sharing as a cohort, so please speak to the artists and enjoy.

With thanks to: Third Year students on BA Performance Arts, Platform Southwark and Diana Damian Martin.

Durational works – in the studio

Untitled Billy Buttars

An exhibition of paintings, sketches, and other works that are reinterpretations of texts into visual forms. Exploring text in the language of art objects, and concepts of inspiration and influence.

Billy’s work surrounds concepts of personal influence and representation, as well as what radical really means in a temporal context and the impermanence of it all.

Gaze Joy Kincaid

Whose body is this

As she looks at her

With your eyes at her

As she sees herself

She sees what you see

And then doesn’t see

So, she looks at herself

And doesn’t look at herself

This is not meant for you to watch?

If watching was the only way

Then I ask you not to watch

I ask you to engage more then

Your eyes and your hands

And your mind  

I ask you to see more then

Her. I ask you to see yourself

And in her yourself is buried

And in myself your eyes are burned

So, I ask you not to watch

But be born

As she is born

Joy Kincaid is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is centred on deconstructing monolithic narratives on black and queer bodies within the interrelations of white spaces through radical acts of embodied contradictions, witnessing and shape shifting.

Family Jukebox Tom Dodd

In the foyer and someone will wait, pick a mixtape? Choose your favourite song? that I will then play for them. Songs chosen by the performer’s family members – take your pick and hear the soundtrack of someone’s life?

Tom is a performer who hopes to work with sound and how sound affects people. The company Darkfield are one of his biggest inspirations and he looks forward to creating similar work. For tonight’s performance Tom will be looking at how sounds in the forms of songs affect different members of his family.

Performances – on the stage

What is the C word? Alicia Bridges

‘What is the C word?’ explores ideas of Consent in an abrupt, disassociated, inhumane way. From my own experience, I feel I have always been trying to connect the pieces together.

Content warning: references to sexual assault.

Alicia enjoys and is interested by multimedia performance, verbatim and immersive theatre. Throughout her degree she expects this will change and develop. She is excited by the prospect the next three years will give her to challenge her own artistic practice. She has previously worked with physical theatre and directing. 

Instagram: @alixiabridge

Voicemail Jody Davies and Chloe Knowles

‘Voicemail’ is a physical theatre piece that reflects upon real-life experiences both artists have endured. These two different stories surround listening and lack there-of, where both artists reflect on unsent voicemails they wish they had sent.

Content warning: references to sexual and domestic abuse, emotional manipulation, explicit language.

Jody Davies is a Welsh performance artist with a background across musical theatre, physical theatre and experience in vocal coaching. Her interests include live art and photography but her works mainly consists and explores physical theatre and immersive projects.

Chloe Knowles is a performance artist from England.

She has experience in acting, writing as well as directing theatre for younger children between the ages 7-16 at Sonnets Theatre Club Newbury, John Rankin Junior School, and Cheam Private School.

Her Interests mostly include writing and directing.

When I was 5? Jaydon Merrick

An exploration of celebrity idolisation, jealousy and discarded dreams through a casual, reflective and participatory dance experience. Suitable for all skill levels, the less talented the better.

Jaydon is an Australian actor, writer and director. He has been living in the UK for 2.5 years now; in Australia, Jaydon’s work was heavily musical, and stage based, since moving to the UK his practice has become more film and screen orientated.

Nostalgia for a Time Gone Nowhere Evie Stopforth

I feel like I am constantly leaving a home behind. I know you inside out and they have no idea who you are. I’m three different people, and a stranger.

Evie Stopforth is a young performance artist investigating the relationship between audio and visual entertainment. She focuses in this piece on loneliness, homesickness and the feeling of being stuck in limbo.

It’s Your Birthday! Miel Celeste Nadam

‘It’s Your Birthday!’ is derived from a personal hatred of my own birthday. I regress into a somewhat younger and pinker version of myself, as the cracks of the present seep through.

Miel is interested in the idea of nostalgia and objects behaving badly. For her, art is the most potent when humour is sprinkled into pain. Laughing can slip into crying.

Candidate 14 Grace Oskiera-Vooght

An examination for a job role that requires you to not react, talk or feel. You must detach yourself from human instincts: feelings. Will you pass or fail?

Content warnings: references to death and suicide.

Grace has a background in straight acting and is interested in the arts sector. She is interested in writing, creating, directing and performing. She has a cross-arts practice taking inspiration from across many art forms, particularly performance. She is currently interested in exploring intimacy and relationships and the way it is performed as part of her arts practice.

The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek (Cancelled) Reena Black

This adaptation of 'The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek' explores the underlying, darker themes of the play. This piece will delve into the character's mind and bring the audience with her on her journey of confession.

Content warnings: references to death and mental illness.

Reena Black is a British actress, dancer and writer; she has been trained in classical and contemporary acting techniques for many years. Experimenting with different techniques has always been a passion of hers and she is continuing to do this through her degree in Performance Arts.

Dès l’aube Irène Pawin

Look around. What can you hear? Smile. This experience is only for you. Put on the headphones. Only you will hear this story. You are truly special. Enjoy.

Content Warnings: mentions of death, suicide, and explicit content in some pieces.

Irène is exploring her potentiality as an artist, and has been exploring writing her own work. Irène is particularly interested in oddness and queerness, the feeling of being out of place, of being foreign. Irène is an impulsive creator that never knows what her next obsession will be.

Dinner Time Cerys Salkeld Green

A piece focussing on the idea of intrusive thoughts and dealing with grief in opposition to modern life.

Content warning: references to sex and sexual content

Cerys is interested in the boundaries between fact and fantasy.

Alexa Owen Whiteside-Ward

Alexa: With technology always advancing, what happens when technology makes certain advances?

Owen is a writer, director and performer from Norwich. He has a long history of musical theatre work as a performer and in the last few years has written directed and produced his own musical: this is something he is currently still doing, working on numerous other musicals. In addition to this Owen has taken a strong interest in writing plays and films and likes to create pieces that often leave the audience questioning. This is Owen’s first work outside of Norwich, which he is looking forward to.

Email: [email protected]

Can you hear it? Esme Mai Davies

Can you hear it? Is an immersive piece that combines film, sound and live elements. What happens when you lose safety in your spaces?

Content warnings: mental health and panic

Esme as an artist is primarily interested in performance; her background is in traditional theatre. She is now exploring a mixture of performance, visual art and drag as well as working to incorporate technology and new mediums into her work.

A train running on a jointed track Ben Church

When we listen schematically, do we listen for the relation between sounds? Or is it something more? This piece aims to answer none of these questions.

Ben Church is a performance artist with a multitude of different interests and fields of study. These range from more traditional acting at Stratford upon Avon’s RSC, to writing and co directing pieces of immersive theatre and teaching drama. More recently he has been looking into composition and how sounds gain meaning.

Why Are You Wearing That Stupid Man Suit? Anja Hendrichova

Dates first dates no dates first sex holding hands broken hearts brave knights crushed buses Czech girl singing jumping in the rhythm of love or no love the end.

Rather than viewing this piece as a criticism of any kind, feel free to laugh at me and / or with me. Anja has the superpower to watch the same film or series 50 times. The more people to embarrass in front of, the less shy.

Find your Bite Jack Gallagher

Find your bite tonight. I know you have it in you. Please.

Content warnings: references to sexual violence.

Breathe Tsen Day-Beaver

During this piece I focus heavily on the subject of panic within the body, documenting its reactions and tendencies, situating this subject in the event of a panic attack.

Tsen is an artist/performer from Scotland interested in performance within film and text-based work. She is currently focusing on composition of the body within performance and its relation to the mind.

displacement Jasmine Wright

Ripped away. It’s not homesickness, it’s yearning for a place that doesn’t exist anymore. Is home a place or a feeling, and how can I find it again?

Jasmine is currently exploring ideas of unfamiliarity, strangeness, the body, and Asian heritage. She is really enjoying writing as/for performance. She is also interested in creating multimedia experiences and experimenting with artificial, anthropogenic, and naturogenic sounds and visuals. 

See with Sound Juan Salazar

A quick informational guide on maternity, nuclear fallout and social conventions. The piece explores themes of listening through imagination, primal instinct and tribalism in a post-war, ever-growing technological society.

Juan is an audio-visual artist. He is interested in space, time, dreams, memory, metaphysics, meta-metaphysics, regular physics, and irregular physics.

Can you hear my silence? Molly Denbigh

When silence becomes too loud.

Feelings of anxiety and fear are felt by many but speaking up honestly about them is done by few. It’s difficult. Emotional. I ask myself the questions that we need to answer for ourselves. Do I truly belong? Am I me?

Molly Denbigh is a performance artist with interests in immersive and physical theatre. She is also interested in fine art and musical theatre and would love to combine these different styles in future work.

The School Pen Mia Lulham

A short immersive/interactive piece commenting on the learning difficulties neurodiverse children face when first entering the education system. The piece shows the struggles involved with “basic” tasks such as learning to read and write.

Mia is heavily interested in and influenced by dance, choreography and physical theatre as well immersive theatre, and aims to continue to use these influences in her developing practice.

The Voice James Brewer

A man must overcome his anxiety about how he sounds and goes through many different types of voices in order to pick the right voice that suits him most.

James is an actor and performance artist from East London who has worked with London Bubble Theatre and National Youth Theatre.

Can I be loud? Beth Timson

Can I be loud? Who Can be loud in spaces and why? Where can we be loud? An exploration of loudness in institutional, normative space and where queer and non-normative identities fit in to this.

Beth’s work centres on community, feminism and queerness. Beth is a writer, theatre maker, spoken word artist and facilitator from East London, and an early career artist who has presented solo work at Shoreditch Town Hall and Battersea Arts Centre. Alongside studying for her degree at RCSSD, Beth is working, freelance in various capacities, ushering at The Yard Theatre, and as a Young Creative for All Change Arts. Beth started out in community arts and her work centres on using performance to bring people together and spark conversations. Her work is deeply political and seeks to challenge normativity.

www.bethtpeform.wordpress.com

twitter: @BethBRT

(Em)Urgency Festival Digital Feed Noa Taylor in collaboration with the EFDF Collective

The (Em)Urgency festival digital feed considers the performativity of multimedia performance documentation performatively. We document the work of the (Em)Urgency Performance Symposium and publish the material on social media platforms during the event.

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queerasfact · 6 years

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Sources - Moche Sex Pots

Here is a list of sources that I used for our episode on the erotic ceramics of the Moche people of 2nd to 8th century Peru, as well as links to images of the pots we discussed. You can listen to the episode here.

It’s worth noting that if you speak Spanish, you’ll no doubt be able to find a lot more sources - I did quote from many more sources than these in the episode, but those quotes were limited to the translations which can be found in these texts. This list should at least provide a start for English speakers, and the bibliographies of these articles will include further Spanish and other language sources

Janusz Z. Wołoszyn and Katarzyna Piwowar’s “Sodomites, Siamese Twins, and Scholars: Same‐Sex Relationships in Moche Art“, in American Anthropologist, Vol. 117, No. 2 (2015), p.285-301

This is a good introduction to scholarship on the Moche sex pots over the past 100 or so years. It also has better and clearer images of the pots we discussed than I was able to find anywhere else. You can also find these on our blog under the Moche tag.

Somebody did comment on one of our posts that they were offended by the word “sodomite” in the title, so I’ll just note that Wołoszyn and Piwowar are using this word as a reference to how these pots have been interpreted by homophobic scholars, and not because they consider it appropriate in a modern context.

Michael J. Horswell’s "Toward an Andean Theory of Ritual Same‐Sex Sexuality and Third‐Gender Subjectivity” in Infamous Desire: Male Homosexuality in Colonial Latin America (2003), p.25–69.

This includes a very useful summary of Manuel Arboleda’s work on queer Moche pots, for those of us who don’t speak Spanish. Horswell also explores the possibilities of what the role of third-gender people in their pottery may have symbolised to the Moche people.

Mary Weismantel's “Moche Sex Pots: Reproduction and Temporality in Ancient South America” in American Anthropologist, Vol. 106, No. 3 (2004), p.495–505.

This article talks about the Moche erotic pots generally. Weismantel doesn’t focus in particular on queer themes, but does provide some interesting thoughts on why the Moche chose to depict the types of sex that they did.

Edit (2022): since we posted this, Weismantel has now written a whole book on the sex pots: Playing with this: Engaging the Moche Sex Pots. Well worth a read - check out our review if you want to know more.

Richard C. Trexler’s Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas (1995).

Richard Trexler is probably my least favourite scholar when it comes to discussions of Indigenous American gender, but I include him here for the sake of completeness - for a full explanation of why I disagree with so many of Trexler’s ideas, you’ll have to listen to our podcast. If you do want to read his own words, most of his writing about the Moche can be found in his chapter “The Religious Berdache”.

Peter Mason's "Sex and Conquest: A Redundant Copula?” in Anthropos Vol. 92, No.4–6 (1997), p.577–582.

This review of Trexler’s work started a feud of several years between the two scholars. I didn’t get much new information from it, but if you want to read Trexler get dragged then here is a good place to do it.

Ramón A. Gutiérrez’s “Warfare, Homosexuality, and Gender Status among American Indian Men in the Southwest” in Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same‐Sex Sexuality in Early America (2007), p.19–31.

Gutiérrez doesn’t write specifically about the Moche in any detail, and where he does his opinions are obviously very informed by the work of Trexler. I’m including this source only for the sake of completeness.

#moche #queer history #lgbt history #lgbtq #trans history #gender #gay history

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green-violin-bow · 7 years

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Hawksmoor, BBC Sherlock and historiographic metafiction

First:

This piece is not of academic quality or rigour. I left university eight years ago; I studied literature in two languages and did well at it. Nevertheless I am no longer in academia and have not written an essay since then. My sources are partial, dependent on what I can get access to through my local library, through academic friends, or what I choose to pay for on JSTOR. I work full-time and have put no time into e.g. referencing (always my least favourite part of essays).

Although I personally hold out hope for unambiguous Johnlock still, I would not class this as a ‘meta’ arguing that it will certainly happen. This is a reading, undertaken for my own satisfaction and interest, jumping off from the inclusion of ‘Hawksmoor’ as a password in one scene of The Six Thatchers. I do not particularly mean to suggest that Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat are deliberately playing with/off literary criticism. They may well be holding two (or more) time periods in tension, however, in a way that I choose to explore through the lens of the literary tools described here. I do not seek to challenge or disprove other fan theories.

I am no television/film studies scholar. There are probably layers and layers of nuance and meaning that I’m missing because I simply have no frame of theoretical reference in that field (and one of the primary ‘texts’ we are talking about here is, after all, a television show). The abundance of television and film references discovered by Sherlock fans have made it clear that the show’s creators deliberately allude to other visual media within modern Sherlock all the time. I believe my approach here is valid because Hawksmoor, a literary text, is pointed to in the show, and because ACD canon itself was a literary text. But I want to flag up this important way in which my analysis is deficient.

I tagged a few people in this but I’m aware this is more of a musing/essay than a traditional ‘meta’ so don’t worry about reading/responding if it’s not your thing!

The Six Thatchers

In The Six Thatchers, Sherlock visits Craig the hacker, to borrow his dog Toby. On the left of our screen (taking up an entire wall of Craig’s house, realistically enough…) are lines of code, in the centre of which is written ‘Hawksmoor17’.

I was interested in finding out more about this. I decided my first port of call would be the ‘detective novel’ Hawksmoor, by Peter Ackroyd.

Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd is a historian and author, who has written a huge array of fiction and non-fiction, including:

London: The Biography (non-fiction)

Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day (non-fiction)

The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (an imagining of the diary Oscar Wilde might have written in exile in Paris)

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (novel, presenting the diary of a murderer)

Hawksmoor (novel)

In his work London is present, constantly, a character in itself, woven into the very fabric of the story as irrevocably as it is into the mythos of Sherlock Holmes.

Hawksmoor

In brief, Hawksmoor is a postmodern detective story, running in two timelines. Each timeline focuses on a main character: in 1711, the London architect Nicholas Dyer; two hundred and fifty years later, in the 1980s, Nicholas Hawksmoor, a detective, responsible for investigating a series of murders carried out near the churches built by Dyer.

Ackroyd plays with the ‘real history’ of London throughout, muddling and confusing the past with fictional events, with conspiracy and rumour.

There was a real London architect named Nicholas Hawksmoor who worked alongside Christopher Wren in eighteenth-century London to design some of its most famous buildings. He also designed six churches. Ackroyd chooses to change the eighteenth-century architect’s name to Nicholas Dyer, and to make Nicholas Hawksmoor the twentieth-century fictional detective instead – a deliberate muddling together of timelines and of ‘facts’.

Ackroyd had drawn inspiration for Hawksmoor from Iain Sinclair’s poem, ‘Nicholas Hawksmoor: His Churches’ (Lud Heat, 1975). This poem suggests that the architectural design of Hawksmoor’s churches is consistent with him having been a Satanist.

As well as changing the historical figure Hawksmoor’s last name to Dyer, Ackroyd adds a church, ‘Little St Hugh’. Seven, in total.

The architect Dyer writes his own story, in the first person and in eighteenth-century style.

Only in Part Two of the novel does Nicholas Hawksmoor – a fictional detective with a real man’s name – appear, to investigate the three murders that have so far happened in 1980s London. Written in the third person, the reader is nonetheless invited into Hawksmoor’s thoughts, his point of view.

As the novel proceeds, Ackroyd employs literary devices so that the stories – separated, apparently, by so much time – begin to blur. In particular, the architect Dyer and the detective Hawksmoor are linked. For instance, both men experience a kind of loss of self, a “dislocation of identity”, upon staring into a convex mirror (Ahearn, 2000, DOI: 10.1215/0041462X-2000-1001).

The cumulative effect of all the parallels is that the reader starts to lose any sense of temporal separation between the time periods; starts to see Dyer and Hawksmoor as almost the same person; to suspect each of them of being the murderer and the detective at the same time. The parallels between the time periods “escape any effort at organization and create a mental fusion between past and present” so that “fiction and history fuse so thoroughly that an abolition of time, space, and person is […] inflicted on the reader” (Ahearn, 2000).

Importantly, I believe, Hawksmoor again and again “tries to reconstruct the timing of the crimes, but this is from the start impossible” (Ahearn, 2000). This is a rather familiar feeling to Sherlock Holmes fans.

At the end of the book, Dyer and Hawksmoor come together in the church, take hands across time, or perhaps out of time. They become aware of one another. Their perspectives dissolve and seem to merge into one person, into a new style of narration not like either of them: “when he put out his hand and touched him he shuddered. But do not say that he touched him, say that they touched him. And when they looked at the space between them, they wept” (Ackroyd, 1985).

Historiographic metafiction

Hawksmoor is a postmodern detective story. It has been classified by critics as a work of ‘historiographic metafiction’. As a detective story, it lacks the most familiar feature – a detective who is able to sort and order the events and facts, before finally drawing together all the threads to present a coherent, satisfying and plot-hole-free conclusion. In other words, a solution to the mystery.

So what is ‘metafiction’? Waugh defines it as “a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (1984).

In Hawksmoor, Ackroyd uses a popular literary form (the detective story) to unsettle our understanding of fiction, reality and history. An Agatha Christie detective novel (for example) relies on an accepted, understood structure, where the reader has definite expectations of what the outcome will be; as such, Christie’s novels “provide collective pleasure and release of tension through the comforting total affirmation of accepted stereotypes” (Waugh, 1984). In metafiction, however, there is often no traditionally predictable, neat, satisfying ending: accepted stereotypes are disturbed rather than affirmed. The application of rationality and logic to the clues gets the detective no closer to solving the crime. Readerly expectation (“the triumph of justice and the restoration of order” [Waugh, 1984]) is thwarted.

Hutcheon coined the term ‘historiographic metafiction’, fiction where “narrative representation – fictive and historical – comes under […] subversive scrutiny […] by having its historical and socio-political grounding sit uneasily alongside its self-reflexivity” (Hutcheon, 2002). It is a kind of fiction that explicitly points out the text-dependent nature of what we know as ‘history’: “How do we know the past today? Through its discourses, through its texts – that is, through the traces of its historical events: the archival materials, the documents, the narratives of witnesses…and historians” (Hutcheon, 2002).

Whereas a ‘historical novel’ will present an account of the past which purports to be true, a ‘historiographic metafiction’ has a combination of:

deliberate, self-reflexive foregrounding of the difficulty of telling ‘the whole story’ or ‘the whole truth’ especially due to the limitations of the narrative voice;

internal metadiscourse about language revealing the fictional nature of the text;

an attempt to explain the present by way of the past, simultaneously giving a (partial) account of both;

disturbed chronology in the narrative structure, representing the determining presence of the past in the present;

‘connection’ of the historical period structurally to the novel’s present;

a self-consciously incomplete and provisional account of ‘what really happened’ e.g. via ‘holes’ in the [hi]story which cannot be resolved by either narrator or reader (Widdowson, 2006, DOI: 10.1080/09502360600828984).

The above points are certainly true of Hawksmoor. The reader of Sherlock Holmes will find some of them very familiar – for example, Watson’s self-conscious in-world changing of dates, names and places; and the impossible-to-resolve timeline. The audience of BBC Sherlock will also find these features very recognisable, especially from Series 4 of the programme.

I’d like to examine BBC Sherlock itself as a ‘historiographic metafiction’: a ‘text’ which self-consciously holds the past and present fictional events of Sherlock Holmes’ life in tension, not merely as another adaptation of the source text, but as a way of destabilising the accepted ‘[hi]story’ and mythos of Sherlock Holmes.

The Great Game

The Sherlockian fandom is well-known for its practice of ‘The Great Game’:

“Holmesian Speculation (also known as The Sherlockian game, the Holmesian game, the Great Game or simply the Game) is the practice of expanding upon the original Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by imagining a backstory, history, family or other information for Holmes and Watson, often attempting to resolve anomalies and clarify implied details about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. It treats Holmes and Watson as real people and uses aspects of the canonical stories combined with the history of the era of the tales' composition to construct fanciful biographies of the pair.” [x]

There are a number of interesting features about the Great Game. It:

pretends that Sherlock Holmes and John Watson were real people;

ignores or explains away the real author Arthur Conan Doyle’s existence;

attempts to use ‘real’ historical facts (texts…) to resolve gaps in a fictional text;

in turn, produces additional (meta)fictional texts, often presented as ‘fact’ in journals set up for the purpose;

in so doing, adds constantly to the (meta)fictional destabilisation of chronology and holes in the story, as different, competing ‘versions’ are added by a multitude of authors.

The Sherlock Holmes fandom, as it attempts to elucidate ‘what really happened’, only destabilises the original (hi)story further – drawing attention, over and over again, to the gaps and inconsistencies in the original canon tales.

I would argue that the Sherlock fandom has been engaged, for over a century, in an act of collective historiographic metafiction.

The writers of BBC Sherlock are aware of themselves as fans, and of the wider Sherlockian fandom. They paid tribute to Holmesian Speculation in the episode title of Series 1 Episode 3. The title – ‘The Great Game’ – is a signal, an early marker of postmodernity in BBC Sherlock, a sign that the Sherlockian fandom will not be absent from this metafiction.

Implicating the reader/audience

There is an interesting moment in Hawksmoor where Detective Chief Superintendent Nicholas Hawksmoor goes to investigate the murder of a young boy near the church of St-George’s-in-the-East. The body is beside “a partly ruined building which had the words M SE M OF still visible above its entrance” (Ackroyd, 1985).

As Lee says, the “missing letter is "U," ("you") the reader” (1990).

Elsewhere in the book, Hawksmoor receives a note instructing him “DON’T FORGET … THE UNIVERSAL ARCHITECT” alongside a “sketch of a man kneeling with a white disc placed against his right eye” (Ackroyd, 1985).

Lee suggests that this drawing refers to “detective fiction’s transcendental signifier” Sherlock Holmes, and that the “Universal Architect, here, can only be the reader, since it is he or she who is in possession of all the histories: the historically verifiable past, the eighteenth-century text and the text accumulated through reading”. Thus, the reader is “doubly implicated not only as a repository of the past, but also as a co-creator of artifact and artifice” (Lee, 1990). In the Sherlock Holmes fandom, this is more true than in almost any other; co-creators indeed.

The missing ‘U’ in Hawksmoor can be clearly linked to the daubed ‘YOU’ in ‘The Abominable Bride’, a sign that, from that point on, BBC Sherlock will be clearly and mercilessly implicating its audience; putting the Sherlockian fandom back in the story, where it has always belonged. This includes the writers and creators of BBC Sherlock.

I also think there is reason to link the ‘YOU’ daubed on the wall to another piece of graffiti in BBC Sherlock – the yellow smiley face in 221b. An all-seeing, ever-present audience within Sherlock and John’s very home.

It is often repeated that Arthur Conan Doyle only continued to write Sherlock Holmes stories out of financial necessity and due to public demand; that he was bored and exasperated by his creation. The Sherlock Holmes fandom is (possibly apocryphally) known as having worn black armbands in the street in mourning for the fictional detective when Conan Doyle attempted to kill him off in The Final Problem.

The Sherlock Holmes fandom has long been considered importunate and unruly. As Stephen Fry puts it in his foreword to The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes: “Holmes has been bent and twisted into every genre imaginable and unimaginable: graphic novels, manga, science fiction, time travel, erotica, literary novels, animation, horror stories, comic books, gaming and more. Junior Sherlocks, animal Sherlocks, spoofs called Sheer Luck and Schlock; you think it up, and you’ll find it’s been done before. There is no indignity that has not been heaped upon the sage and super-sleuth of Baker Street” (2017).

And yet, with every new adaptation, there is a tendency to regard it as a blank slate, in direct conversation with the canon of Arthur Conan Doyle. There is a tendency to forget the changes that fandom itself has wrought on the figure of Sherlock Holmes – a weight of stereotype and expectation which warps the character to a pre-fit mould in every incarnation. As Fry says, Holmes:

“rises up, higher and higher with each passing decade, untarnished and unequalled. Because, I suppose, we need him, more and more, a figure of authority that is benign, rational, soothing, omniscient, capable and insightful. In a world, and in daily lives, so patently devoid of almost all those marvellous qualities, how welcome that is, and how grateful we are, for its presence in our lives. So grateful, that we won’t really accept that Sherlock Holmes could ever be classed as ‘make believe’. Between fact and fiction is a space where legend dwells. It is where Holmes and Watson will always live” (2017).

This is the traditional understanding of Sherlock Holmes and its fandom, and is highly reminiscent of the voiceover by Mary Morstan in Series 4 Episode 3, ‘The Final Problem’: “I know who you really are. A junkie who solves crimes to get high, and the doctor who never came home from the war. Well, you listen to me: who you really are, it doesn’t matter. It’s all about the legend, the stories, the adventures. There is a last refuge for the desperate, the unloved, the persecuted. There is a final court of appeal for everyone. When life gets too strange, too impossible, too frightening, there is always one last hope. When all else fails, there are two men sitting arguing in a scruffy flat like they’ve always been there, and they always will. The best and wisest men I have ever known – Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson.” [transcript by Ariane Devere]

The conception of Sherlock Holmes as “a figure of authority that is benign, rational, soothing, omniscient, capable and insightful” shows what we, the reader, want: a traditional detective story, with an all-knowing detective, who uses rationality and logic to assess the clues and brings us smoothly, at last, to a solution which reasserts the order of things; where justice is done and society is made safe once again.

BBC Sherlock, however, resists these comforting fictions. The detective unravels, becoming more emotional, more human as the story progresses. Mysteries go unsolved. The narrator gets more unreliable with every episode. Characters inhabit strange states, seemingly alive or dead as the story demands. The ‘rules’ of traditional detective fiction are flouted left, right and centre.

Viewed as a historiographic metafiction, BBC Sherlock aims to hold up the historical text (ACD canon) against the modern one (BBC Sherlock) in such a way as to slough away a century of extra-canonical fan speculation and addition, and give a new reading to canon.

‘Writing back’: re-visionary fiction

I would now like to look at Peter Widdowson’s journal article, ‘Writing back’: Contemporary re-visionary fiction’ (DOI: 10.1080/09502360600828984). He argues that there is a “radically subversive sub-set of contemporary ‘historiographic metafiction’” which, while being “acutely self-conscious about their metafictional intertextuality and dialectical connection with the past”, ‘write back’ to “formative narratives that have been central to the textual construction of dominant historical worldviews”.

Widdowson explains that his term ‘re-visionary’: “deploys a tactical slippage between the verb to revise (from the Latin ‘revisere’: ‘to look at again’) – ‘to examine and correct; to make a new, improved version of; to study anew’; and the verb to re-vision – to see in another light; to re-envision or perceive differently; and thus potentially to recast and re-evaluate (‘the original’)” (2006). He points out that this is closest to Rich’s approach to feminist criticism: “We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us” (Rich, 1975).

This act of ‘knowing it differently’ can also be achieved by “the creative act of ‘re-writing’ past fictional texts in order to defamiliarize them and the ways in which they have been conventionally read within the cultural structures of patriarchal and imperial/colonial dominance” (Widdowson, 2006).

Widdowson lays out what he regards as the defining characteristics of re-visionary fiction, first negatively by what it is not:

Re-visionary fiction does not simply take an earlier work as its source for writing;

It is not simply modern adaptation – instead it challenges the source text;

It is not parody – whereas parody takes a pre-existing work and reveals its particular stylistic traits and ideological premises by exaggerating them in order to render it absurd or to satirise the ‘follies of its time’, a re-visionary work seeks to bring into view “those discourses in [the source text] suppressed or obscured by historically naturalising readings. The contemporary version attempts, as it were, to replace the pre-text with itself, at once to negate the pre-text’s cultural power and to ‘correct’ the way we read it in the present” (Widdowson, 2006).

As to what re-visionary fiction is:

First, it challenges the accepted authority of the original. “[S]uch novels invariably ‘write back’ to canonic texts of the English tradition – those classics that retain a high profile of admiration and popularity in our literary heritage – and re-write them ‘against the grain’ (that is, in defamiliarising, and hence unsettling, ways)”. This means that “a hitherto one-way form of written exchange, where the reader could only passively receive the message handed down by a classic text, has now become a two-way correspondence in which the recipient answers or replies to – even answers back to – the version of things as originally delineated. In other words, it represents a challenge to any writing that purports to be ‘telling things as they really are’, and which has been believed and admired over time for doing exactly that.”

Second, it keeps a constant tension between the source and the new text. A re-visionary fiction will “keep the pre-text in clear view, so that the original is not just the invisible ‘source’ of a new modern version but is a constantly invoked intertext for it and is constantly in dialogue with it: the reader, in other words, is forced at all points to recall how the pre-text had it and how the re-vision reinflects this.”

Third, it enables us to read the source text with new eyes, free of established preconceptions. Re-visionary fictions “not only produce a different, autonomous new work by rewriting the original, but also denaturalise that original by exposing the discourses in it which we no longer see because we have perhaps learnt to read it in restricted and conventional ways. That is, they recast the pre-text as itself a ‘new’ text to be read newly – enabling us to ‘see’ a different one to the one we thought we knew as [Sherlock Holmes] – thus arguably releasing them from one type of reading and repossessing them in another.” The new text ‘speaks’ “the unspeakable of the pre-text by very exactly invoking the original and hinting at its silences or fabrications.”

Fourth, it forces the reader to consider the two texts together at all times: “our very consciousness of reading a contemporary version of a past work ensures that such an oscillation takes place, with the reader, as it were, holding the two texts simultaneously in mind. This may cause us to see parallels and contrasts, continuities and discontinuities, between the period of the original text’s production and that of the modern work.”

Fifth, they “alert the reader to the ways past fiction writes its view of things into history, and how unstable such apparently truthful accounts from the past may be”, making clear that the original text, though canon, was also just a text and should not necessarily govern our perceptions and understanding forever.

Sixth, “re-visionary novels almost invariably have a clear cultural-political thrust. That is why the majority of them align themselves with feminist and/or postcolonialist criticism in demanding that past texts’ complicity in oppression – either as subliminally inscribed within them or as an effect of their place and function as canonic icons in cultural politics – be revised and re-visioned as part of the process of restoring a voice, a history and an identity to those hitherto exploited, marginalized and silenced by dominant interests and ideologies.”

That last point, I think, should also apply to queer re-visionings of source texts (and indeed, Widdowson uses the example of Will Self’s Dorian: An Imitation re-visioning Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in his article).

We can view BBC Sherlock as a re-visionary fiction which aims to ‘speak’ “the unspeakable of the pre-text by […] hinting at its silences or fabrications.”

BBC Sherlock as re-visionary fiction

Not only does BBC Sherlock have to hold itself up against the original canon of Arthur Conan Doyle; there is also a century of accumulated speculation and creation by an extremely active and resourceful fandom to contend with.

I think that BBC Sherlock asks us to re-vision ACD canon, but has a few sly jabs at the Sherlock Holmes fandom (including the writers themselves) along the way. Let’s look at some concrete examples:

John Watson’s wife:

In BBC Sherlock, the woman we know as Mary Morstan has no fixed identity. Her name is taken from a dead baby; she is not originally British; she is an ex-mercenary and killer; she is variously motherly, friendly and threatening; she shoots Sherlock in the heart – or does she save his life? In Series 4, her characterisation is more unstable than ever. She is a romantic heroine, a ruthless killer, a selfless mother, a consummate actress, a wronged woman, a martyr, an ever-present ghost, and the embodiment of John’s conscience. She is also the manifestation of the Sherlock Holmes fandom’s speculation about John Watson’s wife: did he have one wife, or six? Was she an orphan, or was she at her mother’s? When did she die? How did she die?

Ultimately, however, if you hold BBC Sherlock up against ACD canon, it highlights the fact that so many Sherlockians have tried to compensate for: in order to reconcile the irregularities in Mrs Watson’s story as narrated by Watson, she would need to be a secret agent actively hiding her identity. Examining BBC Sherlock against ACD canon makes us apply Occam’s Razor – the idea that the simplest explanation will always be best. John Watson’s wife was only written into the story because homophobia was so pervasive at the time that ACD was writing that his characters – and by extension he himself – would have been suspected of ‘deviance’ if there had not been a layer of plausible deniability in the shape of a wife.

And there you have it: the central problem of Mary Morstan/Watson, in both ACD canon and BBC Sherlock – she shoots Sherlock in the heart – or does she save his life? Look at ACD canon again. Does Mary Morstan’s engagement to John Watson hurt Sherlock Holmes, to the point that he replies, at the end of SIGN, “For me, …there still remains the cocaine-bottle”? Or does Mary Watson save his life? In the nineteenth century, suspicion of a romance between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson could have meant imprisonment or even hanging; many men suspected or accused of same-sex relationships chose suicide rather than total disgrace. Mary Watson’s presence provides Holmes and Watson with a lifesaving alibi.

Let’s have a look at this against the criteria for a ‘re-visionary fiction’:

Challenges the idea that Watson ‘told things as they really were’ – instead, it introduces the idea that Watson deliberately obscured the facts of his and Holmes’ partnership

Keeps the pre-text Mary Morstan constantly in view – a startling contrast, which rather effectively comments on the position of both women and queer people in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries

Enables us to abandon our “restricted and conventional ways” of reading the original – if it makes no sense for Mrs Watson to have existed in ACD canon, then the reader must radically reconsider Holmes and Watson’s relationship; no longer ‘just’ a friendship, but a lifetime’s commitment, as close and loving as a marriage. BBC Sherlock encourages this re-visioning by setting Mary up as a rival to Sherlock; by having her attempt to get rid of him; by highlighting that she both kills and saves him. It re-casts Sherlock Holmes as the dominant romance of John Watson’s life, in every version.

It causes us to see parallels and contrasts between the two time periods: the societal homophobia that made Mrs Watson a necessity in ACD canon has largely gone in modern Britain. But BBC Sherlock hints at a profoundly closeted bisexual John Watson who strives after a ‘normal’ wife who “wasn’t meant to be like that”. The continued presence of a Mrs Watson very effectively shows us that societal attitudes are not as profoundly different as we may think.

BBC Sherlock shows us how the existence of a Mrs Watson has been written not only into the [hi]story of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, but into the fabric of society: Sherlock Holmes is a great man, but God forbid he should also be a happy, human man, in a loving relationship with another man. The cultural script has been written: the great figures are either straight, or they are nothing. There is always a wife.

As discussed above, the presence of Mrs Watson is also important politically and culturally. It draws attention to the total lack of agency for nineteenth-century women, and to the restrictive narratives imposed on female characters in today’s culture. It makes terribly clear the extent and dangerousness of the homophobia in nineteenth-century Britain. It highlights the fact that there are still countries today where people are forced to hide their sexualities for fear of being imprisoned or killed.

The Watson baby:

In BBC Sherlock, the woman we know as Mary Morstan is revealed to be pregnant on the Watsons’ wedding day. In ACD canon, Watson never mentions a child from his marriage. In Holmesian speculation, plenty of children have been suggested for Watson, especially since it is often posited that he must have had more than one marriage (that Watson might be infertile is not something the proponents of the ‘Three Continents Watson’ school of thought often like to suggest).

As a re-visionary fiction, then, BBC Sherlock forces us to examine the source text: in a time when reliable contraceptive methods were virtually non-existent, why did John Watson and his wife never have a child?

The options, broadly, are:

Mrs Watson was infertile (if Watson only had one wife)

Watson was infertile (if he had more than one wife)

They didn’t have sex, either due to ignorance (but Watson was a doctor…) or reluctance

Mrs Watson only ‘existed’ because societal homophobia made her a necessity (see above).

John Watson:

In Series 4 of BBC Sherlock, John behaves in an unrecognisable manner: he beats Sherlock bloody, so that his eye is still bloodshot some little time later. This is said to be due to the pain of losing his wife, and the fact that her death is Sherlock’s ‘fault’.

Viewed as re-visionary fiction, as metafiction, BBC Sherlock here satirises the idea of the ‘deutero-Watson’ which has existed since Ronald Knox wrote his Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes. It also, however, critically examines the fact that, in ACD canon, there are (at least) ‘two Watsons’: one, the narrator, seemingly the most reliable and loyal of fellows, straight (in all senses) and true, good in a fight; and a second, the ‘true’ John Watson behind the narration, the man we discern when we look beyond the surface of the tales. A man who is devoted, above all, to Holmes; prepared to adopt Holmes’ habit of ‘compounding a felony’ to follow the idea of justice as opposed to law; prepared, in fact, to break the law if Holmes thinks it right; prepared to abandon his wife at a moment’s notice, when Holmes calls; prepared to alter all kinds of details in his stories to protect their participants. (Also, presumably, a bit of a joke about the accidental ‘dual personality’ that ACD gave his Watson by naming him James and John on different occasions.)

Looking at ACD canon through the lens of BBC Sherlock, the entirely unreliable nature of Watson as a narrator comes to light, but the enduring feature of his stories – his love for, and loyalty to Holmes – provides the obvious answer to why he should be so unreliable. Watson may be ‘two people’, but he lies, he breaks the law, he abandons his wife and his patients for only one person: Holmes.

Ultimately, the reader understands that they have been lied to, because the truth would have been impossible to tell at the time ACD was writing. Famously, the final story in the Sherlock Holmes canon, The Adventure of the Retired Colourman, ends with the words, “some day the true story may be told.”

If BBC Sherlock is seen as re-visionary fiction, Series 4 of the programme becomes a representation of the artificiality of the construct that we think of as BBC Sherlock and – viewed through its lens – ACD canon becomes visible as an equally artificial construct, filtered through the writings of an unreliable narrator and governed by the societal and cultural imperatives and prejudices of its time.

Every trick has been employed in Series 4 to highlight its artificiality: lack of coherent structure, temporal uncertainty, incoherent character arcs, introduction of a deus ex machina character, fluctuations of genre, and members of the crew actually appearing on screen. Just as in Hawksmoor, the ‘case’ of Series 4 defies solution. BBC Sherlock and Hawksmoor are both postmodern detective fictions. We have been told that this is ‘a show about a detective, not a detective show’. The form of the show, like the form of the traditional detective novel, leads us to expect a neat, tidy ending, explained carefully by an all-knowing figure of authority. The makers of BBC Sherlock, however, have done everything they can to pantomime a lack of care for, or understanding of, their own show. They have simultaneously inserted themselves into the story (Mark/Mycroft; giving varying accounts of when/how Series 4 was written; lying and saying that they lie) and withdrawn the ‘grand narrative’, the fiction of the omniscient narrator.

Why?

For over a century, ACD canon has been read in the same way: as the most archetypally logical detective story available to us. The fact that the canon is a huge mess of inconsistencies, requiring the collective effort of thousands of people to pick away at, is typically explained by the idea of an omniscient but uncaring storyteller: Arthur Conan Doyle.

This is particularly ironic for a fandom which supposedly wishes to disavow the existence of an author at all.

And yet, the problem is, if you don’t slip into extra-universe speculations on ACD’s attitude to Sherlock Holmes, you have to face head-on the conclusion that Watson is a very, very unreliable narrator indeed.

And you have to face why.

@devoursjohnlock @garkgatiss @221bloodnun @tjlcisthenewsexy @may-shepard

#sherlock meta #hawksmoor #bbc sherlock #acd canon #historiographic metafiction #postmodern detective fiction #hawksmoor17

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collaborationandresearchproposal · 3 years

Text

Research Proposal Final Draft

Title

Evil Kweens: A Queer Look at the History of Villains and Monsters in Animation and Film.

Report Type

Extended essay.

Proposed Table of Contents

Historical context and background

the Hays Code and its influence on the content of almost every American film made between 1930 and 1966

How were things back then?

Queer-coding and Queer-baiting with Focus on Modern Media

both are issues for the LGBTQIA+ community as they seek to capitalize on these marginalized groups.

Queer-baiting: portraying an obviously queer relationships with the use of cues and subtext without acknowledging it or perhaps even gas lighting it.

Queer-coding: writing a character with queer stereotypes as a form of representation without explicitly acknowledging that the character is queer.

Intent matters but a piece of queer media made with bad intentions could actullay end up having a good effect or be good for the community whilst the reverse could also happen.

Disney villains

Lycanthropy and Other Monstrous Subtext/ Parallels. Allegory or Myth?

talk about werewolves (Teen Wolf, Harry Potter, Buffy)

Frankenstein (Mary Shelly, Rocky Horror Picture Show)

Question

Is representation of LGBT individuals in animation and other forms of entertaining media good for the community or just a way for corporate big wigs to swindle money from hopeful queer people who would pay to see at least one shred of a character who is like them?

Limitations

it may be hard for me to stay objective given that I’m in the LGBT community myself.

Risk of outdated sources and temporal context problems. A project of its time will certainly play a part but more importantly the LGBT community is quite fickle it changes a lot as new identities and constructs get introduced so it may be hard to find a viable source.

I could possibly run the risk of getting distracted or going off on tangents which lack focus but I think this is partly because there is a lot about this subject so there is a lot to go on.

Background

The Hays code was published in 1930 and was based on three general principles:

No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.

Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama entertainment, shall be presented.

Law, natural or human, shall not be included, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.

These were developed in a series of rules grouped under the self-explanatory headings Crimes Against The Law, Sex, Vulgarity, Obscenity, Profanity, Costume Dances (I.e. suggestive movements), Religion, Locations (I.e. the bedroom) National Feelings, Titles and Repellent Subjects'' (extremely graphic violence).

Typical Features of Queer- Coded Characters

high cheekbones

thin bodies

feminine beauty

dramatic of voice and actions

male characters may talk or sing in falsetto or have a camp voice and a female character will most likely have a deeper voice (Maleficent, Evil Queen, Ursula- who is actually based on the drag queen Divine)

these characters may also drag out their words and walk about as though slinking (Scar, the Lion King)

Examples or queer-baiting

Myka Bering and H.G. Wells (Warehouse13, SYFY)

Sherlock and John Watson ( Sherlock, BBC)

Captain America and Bucky Barnes (MCU)

Spock and Kirk ( Star Trek, NBC)

Stiles and Derek ‘Sterek’ (Teen Wolf, MTV)

Merlin and Arthur ‘Merthur’ (Merlin, BBC)

Dean and Castiel (Supernatural, ABC)

Lycanthropy

seems to be synonymous with the homosexuality- parallels between teen Wolf and Buffy the vampire slayer’s respective coming out scenes

The Queer-ness of Professor Lupin from the Harry Potter Franchise- J.K Rowling has admitted that Lupins Lycanthropy is a metaphor for AIDS/ HIV but has further dismissed fans’ theories that Lupin is Queer.

Homophobia and HIV- homophobia acts as a major barrier to ending the AIDS crisis and at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, gay men were so my led out to receive abuse as many believed they were responsible for transmitting the disease.

Overall aims

explore the impact of queer-baiting on queer communities

investigate true intentions behind the Hays Code

Make people aware of what good representation is and what bad representation is.

- Stereotypes, coding, characters that are gay and it’s not their whole character

Research methods

Relevant books and articles. I will also be looking at films from the Disney renaissance era and looking into monster stories such as the Wolf man and Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein's Monster, paying close attention to subtext and possible parallels as well as comparing them with more modern sources such as Harry Potter and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

I’ll be looking at a couple of other peoples extended essays who have talked about and around this subject as well.

These are appropriate methods of research because they will allow me to get others’ perspectives on the topic and allow me to analyze the villains and monsters in detail and give me visual material to talk about deeply. It wil also give me the opportunity to find sources that I may have missed in my primary research.

Potential Outcomes

The research will be helpful for me because it will allow me to increase my awareness on a subject that I am already passionate about and interested in.

In a wider context this may help more people to understand the meaning and history behind the characteristics of their favourite villain and any possible subtext that may be lurking beneath them.

Educate those that are unaware or the issues queer-baiting and queer-coding pose.

Timetable

Bibliography

Brooke, M. The Hays Code the moral code that governed mid-20th century American filmmaking. Available at http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/592022/ (Accessed: 16 March 2021)

Cheng, Z. (2020) Queer-Baiting: What Is It and Why Is It Harmful to The LGBT Community?

Available at:https://hypebae.com/2020/6/queer-baiting-what-is-it-why-harmful-lgbtq-community-tv-shows (Accessed: 16 March 2021)

Elliott, J. (2016) Becoming the Monster: Queer Monstrosity and the Reclemation of the Warewolf in Slash Fandom. Dissertation. University of Florida. Available at: file:///C:/Users/me202/Downloads/Becoming_The_Monster_Queer_Monstrosity_a.pdf (Accessed 16 March 2021)

Ennis, T. (2020) The Strange, Difficult History of Queer Coding.Available at: https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/the-strange-difficult-history-of-queer-coding (Accessed: 16 March 2021)

Hays, H, W. (1931) Online. United States: Production Code Administration, Appendix 1

Hutton, Z. (2018) Queering The Clown Prince of Crime: A Look at Queer Stereyotypes as Signifiers In DC Comics’ “The Joker” FIU Electonic Theses and Dissertations. 3702. Availale at https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/3702/ (Accessed: 16 March 2021)

McLeod, Dion, S. (2016) Unmaksing the Quillan: Queerness and Villiany in Animated Disney Films. Doctor of Philosophy thesis, School of the Arts, English and Media, University of Wollongong. Available at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/4802/ (Accessed 16 March 2021)

Smith, M. (2015) Making Things Perfectly Queer: Art’s Use Of Craft To Signify LGBT Identities.The University of Brighton. Available at: https://cris.brighton.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/4754843/Complete+E+Dissertation+Jan+2016.pdf (Accessed: 16 March 2021)

Birgitta Hosea researcher uca

#researchproposal

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palmviolet · 21 days

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Thank you so much for your incredible response to my ask, seriously above and beyond what i could've asked for, the extra references too! So grateful :')

Ordered a copy of outriders yay! That being said though, and obviously you don't have to answer after your generous fist answer, but I've been meaning to get into critical theory and have no idea how. You mentioned “E Unibus Pluram” by David Foster Wallace, (never apologize for a DFW rec btw) so I will definitely be starting with that, but do you have any other helpful reads for getting into critical theory? Some favourites? Anything would be useful, its such a big overwhelming subject lol.

Again thank you for your answer, and no pressure to answer this one! Excited to read your new fics whenever they come also :) I'm in love with your style and intellect! Cheers.

absolutely no worries — honoured you're coming to me for recs!

honestly 'theory' is such a broad topic it can get overwhelming, as you've noticed lol. i started in all this very much from a narrowed literary perspective, so looking at the basics of the different schools of thought — new historicism, structuralism etc — and then tossing it all out of the window to develop my own views (i was taught in the loose 'teach yourself' tradition of prestigious education lmao). which means my knowledge of the basics is fairly scattergun, but i can tell you what i started with, which was beginning theory: an introduction to literary and cultural theory by peter barry. as i recall, it was a good basis. i'm copying from my undergraduate reading list now but David Lodge, ed.: Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader and Twentieth Century Literary Criticism: A Reader were also pretty good.

i can also absolutely recommend the a very short introduction series. they are indeed very short but they're great if you're just getting into a subject and really don't take very long to read.

from there it's really a matter of finding a) what subjects interest you and b) which voices/perspectives you accord with best. and it's best to draw from a mix. ie. my general approach is a blend of marxist/queer/postmodern criticism but i'm not going to brand myself that way because theory is really much more mutable than all the names suggest and in my experience it's kind of vibes-based anyway. so don't be intimidated, is the upshot. i've read a lot of criticism but not a massive amount of raw theory because i was always more text-focused, literary rather than philosophical, which has definitely contributed to my 'making it up as i go along' approach but also means i can confront texts on their own terms without necessarily the burden of theoretical preconceptions. that being said, i couldn't do what i do without a grounding in the central ideas of postmodern semiotics and queer theory. it's more useful context than anything else sometimes, if that makes sense?

i'm not sure exactly what i read to get a grasp of postmodern theory — it just sort of happened. going through my old downloads on my laptop i've got From Modernism to Postmodernism: Concepts and Strategies of Postmodern American Fiction by Gerhard Hoffman, which was pretty good i think. also in the vein of the DFW essay, New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age by Adam Kelly is solid. and while we're on the subject of recentish fiction, i'll toss you Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison by John McClure and The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing by Mark McGurl.

re: queer theory texts:

No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive — Lee Edelman

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity — José Esteban Muñoz

Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories — Elizabeth Freeman

The Celluloid Closet — Vito Russo

Between Men — Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

the former two are definitely the most influential in my practice. also have to mention jack halberstam and judith butler, but then of course you're getting into some pretty intense abstract gender theory that might be beyond the scope of what you're looking to begin with. anyway. sorry for the intensely rambling answer i have had a glass of wine and a long day. i probably have more in the tank so feel free to shoot me another ask and we'll see what i come up with next time lol

#asks #literary theory

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hayaomiyazaki · 7 years

Text

i saw call me by your name and then i came out to my parents

last night at nyff, i saw call me by your name (and enjoyed a brief post-screening q&a with the director and leads). i have studied film theory for six years at nyu, and i’ve seen so many films…so many queer films…so many feminist films…just so much, and i’ve been so grateful to have been exposed to so much immersive, reflective, creative cinema over the years. there are no “best films of all time” — only films that have helped develop mainstream form and style, and films that we each love personally. the latter is all that matters, to you, to filmmakers, to cinematic history. please trust me. here’s some notes on things people seem rather curious about (with minor spoilers for those who haven’t read the novel, though i genuinely believe knowing what happens in the film takes away nothing from the experience whatsoever, because it’s not a plot-based narrative, but an exercise in pacing):

the peach scene is not grotesque as the media is leading you to believe; it is brief, and it is essential. it represents the exploration, awakening, and ennui of elio’s life, and affords a huge amount of vulnerability to the following interaction between the two men. it’s not scandalous or explicit or silly or gratuitous. it’s not “a big deal.”

they kiss. no, they kiss. i’ve found that it is a default for straight or straight-leaning actors to kiss a very particular way: closed-mouth, hard, foreheads pressing together as their faces gravitate towards the floor. it’s rough and inexperienced, and, sure, this can be passionate. but in this film, they kiss. they kiss with their mouths open, and slowly, and they touch each other’s hair and faces, and their chins press together because they’re looking up, up at the stars or the hot air above them; “gasping for air” is what we often read in fiction, when two characters are kissing. those gasps — that air — it isn’t between them from below; it’s above. they look up and into each other’s eyes and it feels like gentle want, not like they’re rushing to make use of stolen time.

armie hammer has mentioned many times in talks that the film is simply about love, that there’s no harshness about coming out, that there’s no phobic sources forcing them apart, etc. understand that this is not necessarily true. yes, the film is wholly about love, but the root of their “lost love” narrative is a subtle religious-based shame, almost exclusively on the part of oliver, a proud jewish man. he is sure, as much as he loves elio and will never forget their time together, that it simply isn’t realistic for them to be together (specifically mentioning his father would have him “carted off to a correctional facility”), and does default to a heterosexual marriage at the film’s end. at the same time, they function completely in secret (or, attempt to do so) during their weeks together. this is important to recognise, even within the spacio-temporal context of the film.

timothée chalamet’s voice is a lot deeper than you’d imagine it would be.

you will hate your life after seeing this film. i’m sure you have it wonderfully, loving friends and family, sure, sure, but do you have a villa in northern italy, a cook that makes apricot juice good enough for the gods, two pools, parents who read you fairytales in german as you lay across their laps on a wet summer’s evening, a rustic turquoise bike that maintains its perfect state no matter how many times you carelessly throw it against the dirt road, a closet of endless cable knit and cotton button-downs, fresh peaches for days, fluency in three languages, and armie hammer in short-shorts? call me by your name is not set in italy — it is set in utter queer paradise, and it will make you sick.

michael. fucking. stuhlbarg.

the film is 90% symbolism. fountains. statues. bikes. hankies. mattresses. paper. shirts. bare feet. water. juice. peaches. so many peaches. the score replaces the first-person narrative of the novel, and you’ll never forgive sufjan for how it all makes you feel.

i called my mother this morning and said, “i want to talk,” and she was worried, “oh no, what’s happened? oh, you’re calling to tell me you won’t graduate, is that it?” and i laughed, because what a silly assumption, but also so spot-on, and i sighed because we’re not very close and this is feels like the interaction close family should have, and i said, “i just want you to know that i didn’t lie to you because i’m scared of what you’ll think, because i’m not,” which is true, because my parents are wonderfully accepting, and i would know, as my sister is in a committed lesbian relationship, and she said, “oh my goodness, what’s happened? are you okay?” and i said, “mom, i’m fine. last month when you visited, you shocked me by asking me a question at dinner so nonchalantly, i wasn’t prepared, but i should say i’m glad it was so nonchalant because it means we really are making some progress in society…” and she cut me off, saying, “sarah, what is the matter?” and i said, “nothing. i just wanted to tell you that last month, you asked me ‘if i was dating girls’ and i lied and said no, but i had a girlfriend over the summer, and she just moved to london, and it’s over, but it’s true, and you would have liked her, mom, she was very sweet, and she was much prettier than me, you would have been proud, but, anyways, that’s happened and now you know,” and my mom laughed and started, "she's not the first...no, of course she isn't..." and then got very stern and said, “you mean she was in town at the same time as me and you didn’t introduce me?” and i laughed and then she asked me about the lgbtq acronym and told me labels don’t matter, and i told her not to be surprised when there’s another lucky lady in the future, and she said, “yes, any lady would be lucky to have you,” and i agreed, because she would want me to, and i said, “i saw this film last night,” and she said, “you’re sick and off from work but you felt fine to see a movie?” and i said, “no, that’s just it. i saw this film and it made me so ill…i didn’t go to work, and then i called you and told you all this,” and she said, “well, i’ll have to see it, then, and i’ll have to tell your sister about it if it’s gay,” and i laughed, because she assumes all gay people like all gay films, and then she went on to tell me that she wanted to watch the danish girl because she wants to know more about the trans experience, and i tried to interrupt and say, “well, perhaps don’t start there,” but she said, “no, i didn’t, because i got it confused with this movie carol,” and then she told me how she watched carol waiting for one of them to be trans — “probably cate blanchett because she can play anything!” she said — but then fell asleep because it was kind of boring, and then she said, “but i’ll try again,” and then there was some gentle jesting about grandkids and who knows what else, and that was it. it was the easiest thing in the world. and i don’t feel relieved…i just feel some equilibrium in the universe has finally been achieved.

anyways, what was the point of this post again? ah, call me by your name. yes… yes. it’s one of my favourite films i’ve ever seen. it’s made me supremely poorly: my head aches and my chest hurts and my feet are heavy and my eyes are welling up during every downbeat, and i can’t focus on anything, which is probably why this whole post is such gobbledygook. that is to say: i’m very grateful.

#i don't usually post real personal stuff. sry bout this #also sry bout the length #call me by your name #guadagnino #p

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