There's a fine line between intimacy and invasion.
Closeness is desirable and yet terrifying. I'm sure you can think of an example from your own life where just when you were starting to get close to someone they panicked and backed off. If the wrong person tries to get close to you, don't you feel that panic and revulsion?
To me, this is one of the richest sources of story conflict imaginable. In "Cold Words" (Analog Oct. 2009), my character Rulii said about his friend Parker,
"I do not know to love or cringe, that a foreign creature can nudge me so close."
Another classic example of the same thing is the relationship between Genly Ai and Therem Harth rem ir Estraven in Ursula K. LeGuin's book The Left Hand of Darkness. Two individuals who are fundamentally incompatible for intimacy find themselves thrust into an intimate situation. The conflict - the tension - it's incredible! And it even demonstrates what I was saying about intimacy, invasion and retreat, because when the two attempt to speak through telepathy, Estraven discovers that Genly's mental voice sounds like the voice of his dead brother, and asks him not to try to speak to him that way again.
You could argue that the way that the "Ewu children" are treated in Nnedi Okorafor's new book Who Fears Death (DAW 2010) is related to this intimacy/invasion borderline. These children are born of unions - either willing or unwilling - between two races, one of which is trying to eliminate the other through genocide. The Ewu children, as evidence of intimacy between people who are "supposed" to be separate, engender extreme reactions of revulsion, disgust, contempt, and even violence.
If you've ever wondered about the draw of romance novels, I think it has a lot to do with the fascination of intimacy. Intimacy is the goal - revulsion and the fear of invasion are the risks. It's a conflict that speaks deeply to all of us, even though it's not necessarily always about love or sex. Rulii has lost the support of his family because of personal choices, and is desperately lonely, but afraid to pursue the brotherly intimacy he has begun to feel with the human linguist, Parker. There are opportunities too to play with intimacy/invasion conflict in the mentoring relationship that is so common in stories. Obi-wan acts like Luke's father, but who is his real father? And who does Luke get angry with when he finds out? Harry longs for his lost parents and wants to get closer to Dumbledore, but struggles when Dumbledore pushes him away for his own protection... Look also at all the buddy movies out there, and how the guys try to prove their worthiness to each other without getting too close. I'm sure there are many many more examples.
If you're writing a story, look around for possible intimacy/invasion conflicts. One might be at the center of your story, as with my novel in progress For Love, For Power. Or there might be a minor character in your story, perhaps a confidant or guide to the protagonist, who could take on additional dimension if you can explore the relationship and find where the intimacy/invasion borderline lies between them. It could be as simple as styles of politeness, where one group of people expresses alignment by honoring the autonomy of others, and another group expresses alignment by using expressions of intimacy with them (oh, the possibilities for offense!).
The borderline between intimacy and invasion is a powerful ally to any writer who wants to intensify conflict in a story and increase the engagement of readers.
It's something to think about.
Showing posts with label borderlines. Show all posts
Showing posts with label borderlines. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Perceived Boundaries
I started thinking about how we perceive boundaries this weekend, while I was in Yosemite. What brought it on initially was our walk on the nature trail that surrounded Evergreen Lodge where we stayed. This trail was marked by the occasional numbered post, where we were to read things about local flora and fauna and their history, and by different sorts of boundary markers in different locations. At one point we walked along a barbed-wire fence. At other points there were long dead sticks of varying size laid along the borders of the path. In some places where we climbed over rocks, the boundaries of the path weren't marked at all. Somehow we managed to find our way all the way around the loop and have a good time without getting lost.
There was another form of boundary-marking in play on the paths within the Lodge cabin areas. The paths were paved, which made their boundaries very obvious, but I found when it was dark that the lights they put on both sides of the path weren't quite close enough for me to perceive the boundaries of the path when I looked from afar. What with the number of different paths, and their proximity to one another, looking at them at night was a lot like gazing at a bunch of random lights.
At the Lodge this weekend, someone was getting married, and given that the weather was very cold, they had the reception in a giant tent. This tent had transparent plastic walls, a very clear boundary. But once when I circumnavigated it, I found myself wondering if I should "count" the ropes that tied down the tent as part of the border, and skirt them, or not.
All of these struck me as questions of how we perceive boundaries. I've read that human minds like to perceive boundaries - we look for them. Our brains even exaggerate them, as when we perceive a larger difference in color between two adjacent blocks of color than actually exists (for an example, go here and look for "the shade of the center dot is the same in all the squares").
My children just noticed for the first time the other day that in the movie "The Jungle Book," the character of Mowgli has black lines surrounding him, while the jungle backgrounds do not. I remember noticing the same thing about the movie Totoro - the characters were outlined and clearly animated, while the backgrounds looked more real. Here's a little illustration of the difference between outlined and non-outlined colors.
Perceived boundaries can vary across cultures. I'm thinking in this regard particularly about perceptions of personal space (I've blogged about this before in Are You Being Invaded?). The boundary of personal space in the US differs significantly from that in Japan. In the US people typically stand and talk at handshake-distance. In Japan they do so at bow-and-don't-conk-heads distance, which is farther. However, the sense of personal distance in Japan alters radically when you change contexts from the social to the commuter train. In a commuter situation the boundary of personal space seems to me to move straight to the skin - people in a train station in Tokyo will walk right into you and pass by without appearing to notice that they just slammed into your shoulder. I remember coming back from Japan and encountering an entirely different type of perceived boundary: a woman in the grocery store had extrapolated the future path of her shopping cart, and mine, and having determined that they would intersect, apologized to me. I was floored by this after spending eighteen months using the Japanese system (to the best of my ability - I've never been able to handle jostling crowds well). I think there are some contexts in the US where that crowd impersonality takes hold and people jostle one another without perceiving an invasion of boundaries - a packed rock concert, for example - but I've never encountered it here to the same degree as in Japan.
Here's another example of children and how they perceive boundaries - or how they learn to change their behavior as a result of a perceived boundary. I have some neighbor kids who occasionally play with mine, and one day I was working in my garden weeding when they came over. I had one of them help me a little with my weeding, but her younger brother started pulling out plants I liked, so I asked him to stay out of the garden. This was very difficult for him. I don't imagine that he couldn't perceive the border of the garden, just that he hadn't learned to perceive that border as one that should stop his forward motion. So after that day I went out and bought a very short wire fence, to exaggerate the sense of the edge of my garden as a barrier. So far it appears to have worked.
This kind of boundary perception is something that may be worth considering in the process of worldbuilding. It's easy to assume that another group of people will perceive physical boundaries in the same way we do, but it might be more interesting to ask how they might not. Personal boundaries. Physical boundaries. The edges of objects. City, state, or national boundaries. All of these can potentially be called into question - either in their sensory perception, as with some kind of alien species, or in their interpretation. In a science fictional or fantasy world, or any other situation where culture is at stake, I think it's fascinating to play with misunderstandings (like the one about my garden!) surrounding the perception and interpretation of boundaries. What are we taught about what boundaries mean? Why might good fences make good neighbors (or not)? Why do nations need to draw lines between them, and how far can these disputes go (very far - witness Kashmir!)? Do the disputes of nations directly parallel the way that we treat our personal boundaries? And what about our psychological ones?
There are lots of implications there worth exploring.
There was another form of boundary-marking in play on the paths within the Lodge cabin areas. The paths were paved, which made their boundaries very obvious, but I found when it was dark that the lights they put on both sides of the path weren't quite close enough for me to perceive the boundaries of the path when I looked from afar. What with the number of different paths, and their proximity to one another, looking at them at night was a lot like gazing at a bunch of random lights.
At the Lodge this weekend, someone was getting married, and given that the weather was very cold, they had the reception in a giant tent. This tent had transparent plastic walls, a very clear boundary. But once when I circumnavigated it, I found myself wondering if I should "count" the ropes that tied down the tent as part of the border, and skirt them, or not.
All of these struck me as questions of how we perceive boundaries. I've read that human minds like to perceive boundaries - we look for them. Our brains even exaggerate them, as when we perceive a larger difference in color between two adjacent blocks of color than actually exists (for an example, go here and look for "the shade of the center dot is the same in all the squares").
My children just noticed for the first time the other day that in the movie "The Jungle Book," the character of Mowgli has black lines surrounding him, while the jungle backgrounds do not. I remember noticing the same thing about the movie Totoro - the characters were outlined and clearly animated, while the backgrounds looked more real. Here's a little illustration of the difference between outlined and non-outlined colors.
Perceived boundaries can vary across cultures. I'm thinking in this regard particularly about perceptions of personal space (I've blogged about this before in Are You Being Invaded?). The boundary of personal space in the US differs significantly from that in Japan. In the US people typically stand and talk at handshake-distance. In Japan they do so at bow-and-don't-conk-heads distance, which is farther. However, the sense of personal distance in Japan alters radically when you change contexts from the social to the commuter train. In a commuter situation the boundary of personal space seems to me to move straight to the skin - people in a train station in Tokyo will walk right into you and pass by without appearing to notice that they just slammed into your shoulder. I remember coming back from Japan and encountering an entirely different type of perceived boundary: a woman in the grocery store had extrapolated the future path of her shopping cart, and mine, and having determined that they would intersect, apologized to me. I was floored by this after spending eighteen months using the Japanese system (to the best of my ability - I've never been able to handle jostling crowds well). I think there are some contexts in the US where that crowd impersonality takes hold and people jostle one another without perceiving an invasion of boundaries - a packed rock concert, for example - but I've never encountered it here to the same degree as in Japan.
Here's another example of children and how they perceive boundaries - or how they learn to change their behavior as a result of a perceived boundary. I have some neighbor kids who occasionally play with mine, and one day I was working in my garden weeding when they came over. I had one of them help me a little with my weeding, but her younger brother started pulling out plants I liked, so I asked him to stay out of the garden. This was very difficult for him. I don't imagine that he couldn't perceive the border of the garden, just that he hadn't learned to perceive that border as one that should stop his forward motion. So after that day I went out and bought a very short wire fence, to exaggerate the sense of the edge of my garden as a barrier. So far it appears to have worked.
This kind of boundary perception is something that may be worth considering in the process of worldbuilding. It's easy to assume that another group of people will perceive physical boundaries in the same way we do, but it might be more interesting to ask how they might not. Personal boundaries. Physical boundaries. The edges of objects. City, state, or national boundaries. All of these can potentially be called into question - either in their sensory perception, as with some kind of alien species, or in their interpretation. In a science fictional or fantasy world, or any other situation where culture is at stake, I think it's fascinating to play with misunderstandings (like the one about my garden!) surrounding the perception and interpretation of boundaries. What are we taught about what boundaries mean? Why might good fences make good neighbors (or not)? Why do nations need to draw lines between them, and how far can these disputes go (very far - witness Kashmir!)? Do the disputes of nations directly parallel the way that we treat our personal boundaries? And what about our psychological ones?
There are lots of implications there worth exploring.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Are you being invaded?
Have you ever had one of those conversations where you're being chased? The other person takes one step too close to you, and you step back, and they step forward, and before you know it, the race is on?
This is one of the difficulties that can arise from different concepts of personal space.
It's not a visible, but an invisible line between people, and when someone crosses it, you know. Not everyone's invisible borderline lies in the same place - and not every borderline stays in the same place all the time.
In Japan, typically people maintain a borderline that is further from them than ours here in the US. It's very practical. If you're both going to be bowing, and potentially bowing all the way to the horizontal, you have to take that into account when deciding where to stand, or you could sustain a head injury! So I guess it's okay to stand closer to someone when you're of about the same status and you won't have to bow low, but standing further away might be best with someone much older or of higher social status.
The one that always surprised and amazed me in Japan was the way the personal space borderline moves. If you're in a work or home situation, in a place where established social relationships exist around you and must be maintained, then the borderline falls at a distance. But if you're walking the Tokyo streets or traveling the subways with strangers, the borderline moves inward - to the skin. I was always amazed at how people in Tokyo would walk straight through me, constantly jostle and bump and never seem to notice they had done it.
To sensitive little American me it felt like a constant assault, and somehow I could never entirely turn it off, even after I got used to it. When I had just gotten back to California a woman in the supermarket apologized to me and at first I couldn't figure out why. Then I realized she was apologizing because the invisible path in front of her cart had accidentally entered the invisible path in front of mine.
I was tempted to give this woman a hug for being so considerate - but I wouldn't have wanted to invade her personal space. :-)
This is one of the difficulties that can arise from different concepts of personal space.
It's not a visible, but an invisible line between people, and when someone crosses it, you know. Not everyone's invisible borderline lies in the same place - and not every borderline stays in the same place all the time.
In Japan, typically people maintain a borderline that is further from them than ours here in the US. It's very practical. If you're both going to be bowing, and potentially bowing all the way to the horizontal, you have to take that into account when deciding where to stand, or you could sustain a head injury! So I guess it's okay to stand closer to someone when you're of about the same status and you won't have to bow low, but standing further away might be best with someone much older or of higher social status.
The one that always surprised and amazed me in Japan was the way the personal space borderline moves. If you're in a work or home situation, in a place where established social relationships exist around you and must be maintained, then the borderline falls at a distance. But if you're walking the Tokyo streets or traveling the subways with strangers, the borderline moves inward - to the skin. I was always amazed at how people in Tokyo would walk straight through me, constantly jostle and bump and never seem to notice they had done it.
To sensitive little American me it felt like a constant assault, and somehow I could never entirely turn it off, even after I got used to it. When I had just gotten back to California a woman in the supermarket apologized to me and at first I couldn't figure out why. Then I realized she was apologizing because the invisible path in front of her cart had accidentally entered the invisible path in front of mine.
I was tempted to give this woman a hug for being so considerate - but I wouldn't have wanted to invade her personal space. :-)
Saturday, August 23, 2008
A taste of taboo
I think of taboos generally as zones of discomfort. There are lots of them, and they vary depending on the culture. I mentioned them in my earlier post on humor, because a lot of humor centers around taboo borderlines of various kinds, including (but certainly not restricted to) body parts, bodily functions, illness and death, race, religion - the list goes on and on. I think the movie that was the most bipolar ever for me was Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, exactly because it took aim at so many body taboo borderlines. Thus, when I liked the jokes, I loved them - and when I didn't love them, I was appalled by them (stomach upset has never been something funny for me!).
Monty Python's parrot sketch played with death, but managed to avoid any of the gross-out aspects of the topic and instead played with euphemisms. I love euphemisms, so I guess it's no surprise that the line "If he hadn't been nailed to the perch he would be pushing up the daisies!" had me incapacitated with giggles. People think of lots of ways to talk around taboo subjects, and as time passes, they continue to have to find more, because the association of any given euphemism with a taboo topic effectively contaminates it over time. Think of the number of different names that have been given to toilets and the rooms in which they reside. Or think of the number of different names that have been given to former slave and immigrant peoples of the USA, which have then been tossed out and replaced with others as they were judged too derogatory.
When I was living in Japan with my husband a movie came out that portrayed the final days of someone with a terminal condition. The odd thing about this movie for us was that it was a comedy, and one of the main jokes was the fact that the guy was dying and his family couldn't tell him. I'll admit I was a little shocked by this. However, when we asked our friends we learned that in Japan, doctors will not tell patients that they are dying because it would be too upsetting; instead they tell the family so that they will be able to prepare. This is something that makes my gut go "no!" but from an anthropological point of view I can see how it would make sense culturally.
Taboos can result in a lot of cultural self-restriction. The area of technology leaps to mind, where the ethics of cloning and stem cell research play such a large role in determining where money goes, and thus where the technology goes next. Religious restrictions can have a deep influence in many areas of a culture - in Islamic art, for example, where the depiction of living beings (particularly humans) has been historically discouraged as blasphemous.
Taboo is rich territory for world and culture building. The planet of Garini in my story "Let the Word Take Me" had a religious taboo on the use of language. Many religions restrict the utterance of particular phrases or names, but in the Garini case the taboo applied to any free use of the language. Check out the July/August 2008 Analog magazine if you want to see how it worked; I don't want to give too many spoilers here. Frank Herbert (Dune) does a brilliant job of culture building with Arrakis and the treatment of water there, building in taboos on wastage that are treated with respect or disrespect by different power groups. Ursula LeGuin does some fascinating work with taboo in The Left Hand of Darkness when she creates a race of ambi-gendered humans (no time here to explain the exact details; go read it if you haven't) and builds folktales for them which elaborate on the kinds of taboos they might have, including for example incest and childbearing.
I encourage writers to think about the taboos of the cultures they create, because this can be a great way to give a culture extra dimension, to link its social groups in principled ways and to make it feel grounded in a physical environment.
Monty Python's parrot sketch played with death, but managed to avoid any of the gross-out aspects of the topic and instead played with euphemisms. I love euphemisms, so I guess it's no surprise that the line "If he hadn't been nailed to the perch he would be pushing up the daisies!" had me incapacitated with giggles. People think of lots of ways to talk around taboo subjects, and as time passes, they continue to have to find more, because the association of any given euphemism with a taboo topic effectively contaminates it over time. Think of the number of different names that have been given to toilets and the rooms in which they reside. Or think of the number of different names that have been given to former slave and immigrant peoples of the USA, which have then been tossed out and replaced with others as they were judged too derogatory.
When I was living in Japan with my husband a movie came out that portrayed the final days of someone with a terminal condition. The odd thing about this movie for us was that it was a comedy, and one of the main jokes was the fact that the guy was dying and his family couldn't tell him. I'll admit I was a little shocked by this. However, when we asked our friends we learned that in Japan, doctors will not tell patients that they are dying because it would be too upsetting; instead they tell the family so that they will be able to prepare. This is something that makes my gut go "no!" but from an anthropological point of view I can see how it would make sense culturally.
Taboos can result in a lot of cultural self-restriction. The area of technology leaps to mind, where the ethics of cloning and stem cell research play such a large role in determining where money goes, and thus where the technology goes next. Religious restrictions can have a deep influence in many areas of a culture - in Islamic art, for example, where the depiction of living beings (particularly humans) has been historically discouraged as blasphemous.
Taboo is rich territory for world and culture building. The planet of Garini in my story "Let the Word Take Me" had a religious taboo on the use of language. Many religions restrict the utterance of particular phrases or names, but in the Garini case the taboo applied to any free use of the language. Check out the July/August 2008 Analog magazine if you want to see how it worked; I don't want to give too many spoilers here. Frank Herbert (Dune) does a brilliant job of culture building with Arrakis and the treatment of water there, building in taboos on wastage that are treated with respect or disrespect by different power groups. Ursula LeGuin does some fascinating work with taboo in The Left Hand of Darkness when she creates a race of ambi-gendered humans (no time here to explain the exact details; go read it if you haven't) and builds folktales for them which elaborate on the kinds of taboos they might have, including for example incest and childbearing.
I encourage writers to think about the taboos of the cultures they create, because this can be a great way to give a culture extra dimension, to link its social groups in principled ways and to make it feel grounded in a physical environment.
Friday, August 15, 2008
The Pitfalls of Humor
I couldn't blog last night because I was out - watching the taping of the NPR radio quiz show called "Wait, wait... Don't tell me." My husband loves this show, so we often hear it on Saturday mornings. It's full of political humor and quirky stories from the week's news. I laughed so hard my face hurt - but I wonder if someone from a different culture or country might have enjoyed it quite as much.
Humor doesn't translate well.
I admit I laugh at "Wait, wait... Don't tell me." And Jon Stewart gives me quite the chuckles. The hardest I've ever laughed was at The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Monty Python - English humor. Some of the jokes, of course, went right by me. They didn't make me groan, but instead made me go, "Wha...?" The ones that got me, on the other hand - whoa! Monty Python's parrot sketch brought tears to my eyes.
I think a lot of humor is like that, because if humor didn't tread borderlines, it wouldn't be funny. My preference is for humor along the random/weird borderline, because if I don't get it, it just leaves me behind. I laugh at some types of uncomfortable/taboo borderline humor, but when I don't get it, I can hardly stand it. With Mr. Bean, for example, I have to leave the room after about five minutes - same with Mike Myers at his worst. Profanity generally leaves me cold, but it "fits" well with certain types of humorous content. Seinfeld was always firmly on the borderline of inanity/pet peeves, and I couldn't stand it.
But in English generally, even if I don't "get" the humor, at least I understand what it's trying to do. Humor in a foreign language is much tougher.
French humor was always a rewarding effort for me. I thought Asterix and Tintin comic books were hilarious - Tintin went more for the physical slapstick humor that was relatively familiar, while Asterix added a dimension of puns that is difficult to describe. I think puns in English are often considered to be low humor, though they are used constantly in the area of sports, and often in news headlines. The puns in Asterix were so thoroughgoing that you just had to love them. And the cultural borderlines they played with were somewhat familiar.
Japanese is harder. I've studied a heck of a lot of Japanese, lived there three years, watched a lot of Japanese television shows, and I have yet to get it completely. Some stuff I've figured out. The physical humor - I can understand the ridiculing/embarrassing/fooling/injuring people borderline to some extent. It was a little like America's most sadistic home videos. The humor satirizing extreme elements of Japanese culture, I could also get - like a sitcom-style show that depicted a number of families going to extreme measures as their children passed through rigorous testing to enter kindergarten. Or like Juzo Itami's The Funeral - a great movie - which satirized the societal expectations of behavior surrounding a funeral for a man whom everyone in the film disliked. But some of it, especially comedy-dialogue, left me totally bewildered.
So what about in writing stories?
Well, as I've told all my critique friends, I can't write humor. Not jokes, at least. So I don't try to go for ridiculous situations or funny twists or wild over-the-top comedy. On the other hand, I love to have my characters be funny just because of who they are. Like the gecko Allayo in Let The Word Take Me (Analog, July/August 2008), who because of her cultural background drew the utterly serious and sensible conclusion that the young Human man David Linden was possessed, simply because he talked so much.
When I started writing this post it made me wonder what an alien or fantasy society would look like if it were designed with its own particular brand of humor. I'm not sure if I've ever seen anyone do something like that - not having the entire story be a comedy, so much as having the people in it make humor an important and integral part of their lives. If any of you have encountered such a thing, do tell me where, because I'd love to see how it was done!
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