a few notes on adopting orientalistic fiction

[kaigou]

Probably more than just a few, but you know me.

Back in the midst of the LLF debacle, Kirsten Saell observed that the M/M genre is a "phenomenon...where a fairly large group of authors from Group X write *solely* about the lives of members of Group Y..."

I've turned that over in my head more than a few times since then, and incidentally it's part of what spurred some of my comments about fanfiction, in the last few posts. Not enough to get mentioned, but it was an ingredient in the stew. When I'd tossed that question at CP, he mentioned orientalism, which is most definitely a century-old (or more) fixation for the West, but I don't think that really applies, not as a literary genre. I mean, if I walked into a bookstore and said, "where do I find all your books about the Far East?" I'd either get shown to the travel section, or given a blank stare.

But if I went looking for domestic/US-based orientalism, that's easy: we can start with Last of the Mohicans, detour to grab Hanta Yo, and of course top it off with Dances with Wolves (book or movie, your pick). Or less overtly, we can just swing through the Western-historical genre and find similar in any of a number of books. That's a sub-class of a genre in which a whole host of writers (like Cooper, and then O'Reilly doing the fakelore with Pecos Bill) have fetishized, bowlderized, homogenized, and generally bastardized Native American cultures into one big horse-riding, feather-headdress-wearing, BIG-tatonka-signing, Stoic Injuns. The sub-sub-genre of Western Romance (which is equally a sub-genre of Romance as well) likes its trope of ultra-masculine noble savage steals away white woman who either learns to love her savage or domesticates him or civilizes him, take your pick, blah blah blah.

Most definitely not a genre that's writing by Native Americans for Native Americans, hell, it's not even written by non-Natives for Natives. And I wouldn't say that Native Americans have necessarily bought into the stereotypes wholesale, but I have met those who do -- ended up interviewing some for my thesis, and wasn't sure quite how to respond when I got lectured mid-interview on what was really a re-packaged re-sale of the Noble Savage myth and how Natives were one with Mother Earth etc etc. I say I wasn't quite sure how to respond because, well, been there. I've fallen for a repackaging, myself (of my own culture).

That brings me to a genre that most definitely did get bought wholesale by the culture the genre is about: Southern fiction. Bear with me on this one, because while I'm not going to try and shove the bulk of my thoughts into this post, I think it's good to address an example of fetishization and how it can manipulate a culture -- and what's going on, in part, when it does.

You've probably seen stills of Gone with the Wind, or any GWTW knock-offs: big plantation, pretty girls in absolutely most unpractical summery gowns ever, big floppy hats, men drinking mint julep, and throw a handful of happy slaves into the background where they can sing gospels while picking cotton... and that, in a nutshell, is what folks think of when you say, 'antebellum' or Old South. It's the mythos of an entire geographical region.

You get one guess on where this mythos originated. Give up?

Yankees.

In practical terms, outside port cities like Savannah or Charleston, if in the 1850s you headed inland, you hit rural area pretty fast -- and not exactly wealthy. It's not that there are only a few big plantations still standing after all this time; it's that there really were that few, even then. Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, western stretches (especially as you get into the foothills and the mountains proper) of the Carolinas and Virginia, and we're talking people who were eking out a living that was wilderness only a few years before, barely even a few decades before. Plantations are like any other massive corporation; they cost time and money to build, maintain, and expand, and they're far less efficient than most raw-materials producing companies we can name today.

That rim of the socio-economic population was in the neighborhood of 1%, maybe 1.5% if we're lucky (though they employed-cum-owned the overwhelming majority of slaves); I'm not saying the rest of the population didn't own slaves, but the stats I recall from contemporary reports had it looking like your average Southern homestead -- in what was still swaths of frontier, no less -- had one to six slaves. My point isn't to dismiss the human cost, only to point out that in the mythos, it's big plantations + whole lotta slaves picking cotton + impressive house with women lazing about while being courted by the boys from the plantation next door -- and that this is about as far from reality as, say, the old 90210 with its beemer-driving teenagers is from the real average American kid's life.

So, we've got this mythos that has a basis in reality for 1% of the population, while the rest of the folks were dirt-poor, raising pigs, eating collards, and learning about the novelties of insulation. It's a mythos based in reality... sort-of. For a very very tiny part of the population -- but it became the mythos of the Old South.

Here's what happened, in a loose conglomeration of details.

Shortly after the South surrendered, large parts of it remained under martial law (and did so for nearly 20 years, until the Posse Comitatus Act was finally signed into law). The South had been, in many ways and in a word, razed. Try to think of what it might be like to be a Northerner during the Civil War, and then afterwards; it's a strange and complex mix of emotions, especially when the "cousin against cousin and brother against brother" is not an exaggeration by any stretch. It doesn't help, either, that port cities in the North were also major intake points for slaves; people stood to lose economically and financially from the halted slave trade in the North, just as much as others stood to lose if they couldn't get the South's raw materials -- since that was really our economic setup: the South had the resources, and the North had the factories to process those resources into finished products (which it then sold back to the South... well, until the South surrendered and no longer had the money to buy back finished goods made from its own resources).

There's also the elements of guilt, of bringing low an entire region of your own country, even if you feel it was for that region's "own good" (a position much grayer in historical fact than Hollywood and the passing of time might have you believe; contemporary reaction was far more ambivalent about the wisdom of an army firing on its own people, even if their state reps did sign a statement of secession). Even if you feel the cause is righteous, it's still hard to see entire sections of your own country beaten down so badly; I think that's part of it, too.

Those of you familiar with publishing now are probably already aware that publishing has always been pretty high-risk, and thus adverse to starting new trends without some assurance that it'll be popular. The first stories with Old-South-style themes show up in the New York Saturday Press (same magazine that later published Twain's first story), that's right, a magazine with NY-only circulation. I recall studying the 'local color' genre, and being stunned that the first onslaught of Old South stories were a) mostly by women, b) all the women were Northerners who c) were not residents nor natives of the South, and most surprising to me at the time, d) were writing for an almost-exclusively Northern audience.

The first isn't so remarkable if you take into consideration that women writing about domestic and/or rural affairs was considered acceptable, low-scale stuff for women to write about (especially if it came with uplifting or romantic overtones). But the other points... I was utterly taken aback. I mean, this was the mythos I grew up with! I mean, even including the saying that if you're Southern and have money, you must be New Money, because anyone with Old Money lost it in the War. Except, of course, that much like our society today, the majority of the Southern population prior to the War could just about make ends meet and not much more than that -- certainly not enough to spare for a hundred acres of happy darkys and a bundle of pretty dresses. So where the hell did this myth come from?

Part of it, I think, is the romanticism that Americans like to lay over anything it's conquered, from Natives to the Old South and even entire ways of life, like free-range thousand-heads-of-cattle long-distance herding. And part of it, similar to the trends in fiction about Native Americans, may be for romantic or literary purposes but really amounts to a sort of 'there, there' pap: okay, so you're pretty much beaten down now, but hey, once upon a time you were really something! So even though you get no agency now -- we break our treaties, or we put you under what's effectively martial law for twenty-something years -- we'll still honor what you used to be... and just ignore the handwavium required to turn 'what you used to be' into some kind of noble savage, or noble confederate.

I have read some of those first-flush pieces of Yankee-produced Old South 'local color' pieces, and they're pretty forgettable. Hell, that's even a compliment, seeing how I was forgetting them even as I was reading them. They were tripe, plain and simple, but each of those one-hit wonders contained a nucleus of concepts that whetted readers' appetites for more. Soon enough, Southern writers were publishing 'local color' as well -- Page, Cable, Twain, Chopin, Harris, Murfree. But the biggest market for these stories wasn't in the South; it was in the North, again for such a variety of reasons that it's an entire dissertation in and of itself: guilt, romanticism, ambivalence, affection, and on. These genre of stories didn't really start making headway within the South, as a popular genre, until Reconstruction was nearly at its end, at which point the mythos started not only to take off within the South, but to take hold.

Previous to the war, there isn't a huge amount of Southern fiction, and almost no local-color fiction -- Uncle Tom's Cabin wasn't written nor is read as local-color. It's really an anti-slavery polemic, with a scope and content entirely different from the strongly-domestic, usually-agrarian emphasis of 'local color'. But skim through the Reconstruction years, and keep going until you get to Mitchell writing Gone with the Wind, and the next generation's round of Southern/local-color (now getting into Depression-era works like Addie Pray), and eventually you end up with Southern children being given a copy of GWTW* as though this is some kind of cultural touchstone. More than that, it's almost a cultural bible. I still find it intriguing that GWTW's longest-running showing was something like a weekly showing for thirty years -- in St Louis, I think it was. Not Atlanta like you might expect, but hey, what need does Atlanta have of that when it's living the mythos, now?

Anyway, the upshot is this: in the wake of conquest, the victors created and furthered a fanciful, loosely-based-on-reality, highly-romanticized fiction of the conquered culture. Eventually, those within the culture started writing to those new tropes, until the genre's tropes were not only introduced back into the objectified culture, but those tropes were wholesale embraced by the objectified culture. It's like the snake eating its own tail, or a dog eating its young, or something equally disturbing and yet so very human, I suppose.

In a literary sense, I'm not entirely convinced a parallel happened with Native American fiction, as that genre seems to have skipped the self-romanticism (except where it can benefit from using it a commercial commodity, much like tourist-driven parts of the South do) and gone right into tackling and debunking the outsider-romanticism. Not sure much headway's been made, but regardless, the South bought the ready-made fictionalized presentation, and now firmly owns the mythos.

However, I'm not saying there's a damn thing wrong with commercializing how outsiders view you, and turning that into a commodity. One of CP's comments in our usual dinner debate was that Japan did a similar thing, taking Western pre-conceptions of Japan, running it through its own filter, and then selling those pre-conceptions back to Westerners in the form of an self-orientalized oriental experience, as it were. Basically, that's what the folks with the cash are hungry for, so what the hell, that's what we'll give them -- which, I recall from studies, is at least one part of the thrust of the fiction coming out of the South that capitalized on this romanticized, externally-produced fiction.

That's fetishization of another culture purely for the enjoyment and manipulation of authors and readers who are not necessarily (if at all) part of the objectified culture -- at least until the objectified culture decides to start cashing in, at which point there's one of two inevitable outcomes. Either the genre drops off in popularity and is forgotten, or it becomes a cash cow to the point that now people/businesses need to further the adopted fiction because money's riding on the game.

All that said, I don't think this is what's going on in M/M fiction at all, and I think the parameters of the original question -- "where a fairly large group of authors from Group X write *solely* about the lives of members of Group Y" -- aren't really an accurate description of this peculiar genre. In fact, I'd say M/M fiction isn't really about men at all.

But that's for another post.

---

* My first major relationship was with someone raised with family in Mississippi. When we split up, we expected it to be difficult to also split the book collection. That was actually pretty easy, with the exception of trying to figure out which copy of Gone with the Wind was his (given by his grandmother) and which was mine (also given by a grandmother). It was a series of ink stains in the back pages that eventually identified his copy. Part of the reason I was determined to get MY copy is because mine's a 2nd edition, while his was a 4th edition. Unh-hunh.

Also, I just realized I have a second edition of Page's Two Little Confederates sitting on my shelf, which had been one of my father's childhood books. Never read it, but there it is: a childhood book for a man born just a bit less than a hundred years after the book's setting. This stuff just never freaking goes away, and it won't until people stop making money off the mythos, really. At least, IM-rather-cynical-O.

Comments

[habibti.livejournal.com]

I think the important thing about the mythologizing that you are talking about is that it tells you so much more about the side doing the mythologizing than the mythologized. When you look at British and French Orientalists (who were dominant prior to WW2), you can see their creation of the 'Other' in the peoples of the Levant, India and China. They could more easily define themselves vis-a-vis the Orient and it resulted in the empowerment of the Occident - the Orient was not, and still is not, 'subject'. I think a similar thing applies in America in the minds of the conquerers over the conquered, whether they be indiginous nations, southerners or Mexican. It says much about the Occidental identity and need to project and create an Other.

Makes you wish that the process of psychological growth of groups would happen more quickly. Hey, but what am I saying - most people never really grow up anyway!

[kaigou]

Bertrand Russell was right: most people would sooner die than think.

It says much about the Occidental identity and need to project and create an Other.

But the second half of the equation is the so-called Other's economic needs for the benefits gained by playing along, cf Japan's incorporation of westernized-bowlderized concepts like wabi-sabi, or its export-emphasis on Suzuki's theosophically-tinted version of Zen Buddhism. Similar movement as what prompts "pictures with the Indian chief" as a tourist attraction on some Native reservations, or even the Southern habit of wrapping up the whole dress-and-julep thing and shoving it down tourist throats. If it weren't for the fact that the North had the money and the South had, well, not much of anything, there would've been little gain from attracting carpet-baggers yankees down to the South to spend their money -- or from getting anglos to visit the rez, or for getting western money to flow into the badly-bankrupt Meiji-era Japan.

But maybe that's just a strange kind of equal exchange: the dominant culture gets to Other, and the objectified culture figures out a way to turn that into a commodity. The main pivot point remains that the culture doing the Othering is a dominant culture, be that militarily or economically or technologically, although even that may just be a fancy way of rephrasing that the victors write the histories.

[reileen]

This reminds me of something I read a while back (or maybe my friend told me it) that the costumes and moves of what most Westerners think of as "traditional" bellydancing are actually not traditional in the same way that some other costumes/moves are traditional, but are instead created specifically to cater to Westerners.

Thanks for this post of thinky-thoughts. I've been thinking about instituting a somewhat similar yet opposite(?) dynamic in a novelverse of mine that I'm currently working on, in which the conquered people mythologize and romanticize the conquerors to the extent of worshipping them, because if they didn't it was likely that the conquered would only get, erm, conquered more, I suppose. (Meanwhile, most of the actual conquerors don't think all that fondly of their conquered subjects...)

[kaigou]

in which the conquered people mythologize and romanticize the conquerors to the extent of worshipping them

See also: Cults, Cargo.

(I had a beagle that was a devout cargo cultist. Fascinating human behavioral trait, but hysterical when you see it in a dog.)

Meanwhile, most of the actual conquerors don't think all that fondly of their conquered subjects...

I wouldn't really say that in any of the instances that the conquering culture really has any fondness for the objectified culture. I mean, the West thought Japan and China were full of soulless heathens who didn't even have the sense God gave a turtle to know it's "just not right" for men and women to bathe together at the onsen, or to make women put on a shirt when working in the fields. The North-created Southern Myth may seem benevolent on the surface, but if you look at the lines being drawn, it's anything but: yankees talk fast and think fast and are ingenious builders and craftsmen and businessmen, while southerners talk slow and think slow and are more obsessed with genteel manners than in actually, y'know, getting anything DONE, because agrarian life just "moves slower down there" and everyone's into wearing big floppy hats and raising tomatoes.

We've got 'southern hospitality' and 'new yankee workshop', and when you look at who gets what qualities, really, the North did pretty much take a lot of the good ones for themselves -- ingenuity, inventiveness, multi-culturalism, expansiveness, future-oriented near-liberalism -- and left only those traits for the South that might seem okay individually but together are both limiting and condescending.

It's the 'condescending' part that really underlies the colonialism, be this domestically or internationally. And the culture condescended to has to swallow any resentment of this and either pander to that attitude or lose the potential income gained from willfully Othering itself to the dominant culture -- of which the bellydancing moves are just one instance. (And yes, I've been told the same -- that also goes for several other styles of 'folk' dance, too, as they're performed in the US, though in those instances this is because the styles were imported by non-dominant sub-cultures in the US, who then adapted to the pressures of the Othering forces going on intra-culturally.)

[reileen]

See also: Cults, Cargo.

Huh! That's interesting. I've never heard of this before.

I wouldn't really say that in any of the instances that the conquering culture really has any fondness for the objectified culture. ...

True. If they have any sort of "fondness", it's for their romanticized notions of the objectified culture, and even then it's still got that tone of condescension - sort of this "oh, how quaint" feel to it. And - going back to something that I think you were saying - it goes all back to issues of power more so than the actual thing itself.

[kaigou]

Yeah, cargo cults are a fascinating insight into human concepts of cause and effect. I mean, if you didn't really grasp the technology of what makes something happen, then it makes sense that you'd find some other "cause" -- I can hardly mock someone who doesn't have a full grasp of the cause/effect and thus makes wild guesses. I mean, that's 90% of how I've learned the vast majority of engineering I do know: making wild guesses and then revising when the theorized cause doesn't actually do the trick.

As for the dynamic in romanticizing the Other: it's absolutely about power.

Thank you!

[okaasan59]

It might be ridiculous in this day and age, but I feel a bit of resentment that the Northern urge to crush the life out of the defeated South still echoes in our poverty. I wish it could have been a Mouse That Roared scenario but I think that since the South was, in fact, a part of the fractured whole, the more severe consequences were both a knee-jerk reaction and a calculated effort to forestall any future dissidence. The term "Reconstruction" is a joke in the South. Around here Reconstruction = Northern Outsiders Taking Over And Leaving Us Nothing. And this doesn't even take into account the thousands of suddenly freed and abandoned slaves and impoverished soldiers that were thrust back into the economy with no support at all. (And this is from someone who can't stand the modern, casual use of the Confederate flag and "the South shall rise again" mentality. I just think things could have been handled better.) But enough of that soapbox...

It was a rite of passage, when I was growing up, for girls to read and fall in love with Gone with The Wind by the age of twelve. I reread it years later and wondered what my fascination had been based upon. I supposed it was just that the genre was new--I had no idea it started with northern based periodicals but that makes sense. Since then I've read Chopin and Faulkner and Ernest Gaines and even a few of those Southern historical romances which end up generating a kind of fascinated horror within me. But even when reading the works of the established, accoladed authors, as much as I've loved some of their works, I'm usually left with an unsettled feeling that somehow, I'm not truly Southern because I don't always feel the deep-seated sense of hopelessness and lethargy that seems to be an underlying theme in much of Southern literature. So now I'm wondering if some of that sense of hopelessness or despair is a projection that was assumed by outside writers to be the mental state of the conquered and was then adopted by Southerners themselves?

Being from New Orleans, the mythos is something we're drowning in (post-Katrina pun intended) and never, not once, does any form of media presented to the rest of the world get it right. And it's only made worse by locals like Anne Rice, though I suppose the folks who give Vampire tours in the French Quarter are happy enough.

[kaigou]

But even when reading the works of the established, accoladed authors, as much as I've loved some of their works, I'm usually left with an unsettled feeling that somehow, I'm not truly Southern because I don't always feel the deep-seated sense of hopelessness and lethargy that seems to be an underlying theme in much of Southern literature.

Yeah, that's exactly the sense. Flannery O'Connor always leaves me with a sense of restlessness, like even the vaguely happy endings aren't truly happy, so much as, "well, there it is." The majority of Southern/regional writers have that sense, for that matter. A sort of longing, a bit of melancholy like somehow the best days are already past. I think a lot of that has to do with the mythos of a region being built on what-we-don't-got-now, which is really rather... sad, in itself, and self-defeating, as well.

One thing I did realize when studying this stuff was that the romanicization really freaking backfired, in one respect: if we didn't have the dominant culture going on and on about how 'wonderful' and 'idyllic' such slave-powered agrarian-based life was, some aspects of the South wouldn't be so hellbent, even now, on rising. They'd be aware that there's nothing to rise to, nothing all that great to go back to. What the South had was a massive stratification of wealth, with huge division between very rich and very poor, and the very rich weren't all that many anyway, and the rest of us were basically missing teeth and raising pigs and not all that much to write home about. Who the hell wants to rise again and reclaim that? But no, we've got a mythos that insists we were genteel, wealthy, happy, content, a freaking garden of goddamn eden or something, so it's no surprise to me that 150+ years later people are still muttering here and there about it -- and that, IMO, is the Northern writers' and readers' own goddamned fault for creating, encouraging, and perpetuating a mythos to the point that the South swallowed it as well -- and you'd think the Southerners reading these works (who were easily old enough to remember exactly what it'd been like, for realz) would've known better!

Then again, in the midst of Reconstruction, I guess even a pipedream of the past was better than the reality of the present, especially with the total lack of real significant economic assistance or rebuilding that might've given people hope about the future. Makes me just the tiniest bit bitter about how the US helped rebuild both Germany and Japan after WWII: the US freely and generously gave of time, energy, and expertise to build those countries into major economic powers, but it couldn't bloody well be bothered to do it for half its own population.

And they wonder why the South still rankles, sometimes, even these generations later. Katrina was just the exclamation mark at the end of a very bad, very unfunny joke.

I'm not even touching Anne Rice -- that woman is a an entire series of posts all to herself!

[owl]

However, I'm not saying there's a damn thing wrong with commercializing how outsiders view you, and turning that into a commodity.

Hmm. I think this is not so far off what happened with Ireland and especially Scotland.

Also, huh. The width of the userpic dropdown is changing width with what is selected. I've never seen it do that before.

[kaigou]

I think both Ireland and Scotland have been doing that for years, honestly. Like, decades -- because I recall getting handed all sorts of pre-packaged notions about Scotland when I was there [censored] years ago, and I was still a kid but well-read enough to know that what I was being handed was the simplified, ready-for-tourists version and not the more complicated reality. But then again, even at the time it didn't miss me that the majority of fellow American tourists were perfectly happy with what they got handed, because it matched their expectations.

The userpic dropdown -- you mean the drop-down selection bar itself? That's peculiar, though maybe I missed it because I only see this screen in Safari. What browser are you using, so I can check?

[owl]

Yeah, the select box. It could be because the selected item is uppercased? I'm using Fx 3.5.

[starlady]

But then again, even at the time it didn't miss me that the majority of fellow American tourists were perfectly happy with what they got handed, because it matched their expectations.

I had similar impressions in Ireland several years ago, though I met multiple Irish people who found non-Irish views of Ireland not only stifling but infuriating, quite understandably.

I'd agree with you about M/M fiction, too. I've been thinking about the natures of yaoi and of slash recently, due to rereading Legal Drug.

I should reread your whole post, though, and then try to formulate actual comments. One question, though, that I wondered: to what extent was antebellum Southern society oriented toward the kernel of upper-crust society that became the basis for the postwar myth of the Old South? To what extent, if any, were postwar Northern writers seeing what they had been conditioned to see? It's my (possibly completely mistaken) impression that a lot of the famous Southerners and pro-slavery advocates of the immediate prewar were at least well-to-do, and I wonder to what extent their acting as mouthpieces for the region shaped perceptions of the region outside the South.