ext_22913 (
smellingbottle.livejournal.com) wrote in
trennels2007-03-28 03:07 pm
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the Brontes and Peter's Room
I cast an eye over Peter's Room (which I don't own, and know far less well than other AFs) lately, and found myself wondering about the sections that deal with the Brontes, before the Marlow/Merrick Gondal kicks off - the conversation in the Shippen where Ginty tells the others about the Brontes, and Gondal and Angria, and the slightly later one where Karen (all hot water bottle and Thucydides) nudges Nick and Ginty through a sort of Socratic dialogue about art vs life and the general wrongheadedness of adult addiction to fantasy games. (I suppose there weren't role-playing societies at Oxford in her day, and one can imagine her opinion of on-line RPGs...)
It's completely fascinating and the usual intellectually-sophisticated AF stuff, but I found myself wondering whether the novel actually required so much Bronte material? It's probably my own favourite part of the novel, but, after all, all the characters in PR have independent capacities for starring in their own fantasies, as shown in the novels as a whole, and the collective fantasy isn't so much of a stretch from Nick's Scott or Lawrie being a resistance fighter when her conduct mark is read out etc etc. So - in some ways the Bronte stuff reads like a compulsively readable red herring. I'd forgotten simply how much of the early part of the novel those two conversations actually take up, effectively postponing the start of the 'action'. Also, I have no memory of when I first read the novel, but I read the Brontes young, and so probably knew what AF was talking about from other sources, but there may well have been readers completely befogged by the very elliptical way in which the Brontes' story is told by various AF characters. I was talking about it to a children's book agent friend the other night and she didn't think that kind of digression would get past an editor these days.
So - how effective/necessary is the Bronte stuff to Peter's Room? If you read PR young and without any knowledge of the Brontes, were you at sea or not? Did anyone read the Brontes because of PR? And, because this occurred to me as I was reading, how does anyone imagine the Marlow/Merrick Gondal to have been carried out, exactly? We know they don't act it out by actually moving around and doing the actions, apart from the very end, because Patrick says so, but are we to imagine them taking it in turns to narrate a kind of recitative, something like the italicised narrative the reader gets? Or just speaking their own parts?
It's completely fascinating and the usual intellectually-sophisticated AF stuff, but I found myself wondering whether the novel actually required so much Bronte material? It's probably my own favourite part of the novel, but, after all, all the characters in PR have independent capacities for starring in their own fantasies, as shown in the novels as a whole, and the collective fantasy isn't so much of a stretch from Nick's Scott or Lawrie being a resistance fighter when her conduct mark is read out etc etc. So - in some ways the Bronte stuff reads like a compulsively readable red herring. I'd forgotten simply how much of the early part of the novel those two conversations actually take up, effectively postponing the start of the 'action'. Also, I have no memory of when I first read the novel, but I read the Brontes young, and so probably knew what AF was talking about from other sources, but there may well have been readers completely befogged by the very elliptical way in which the Brontes' story is told by various AF characters. I was talking about it to a children's book agent friend the other night and she didn't think that kind of digression would get past an editor these days.
So - how effective/necessary is the Bronte stuff to Peter's Room? If you read PR young and without any knowledge of the Brontes, were you at sea or not? Did anyone read the Brontes because of PR? And, because this occurred to me as I was reading, how does anyone imagine the Marlow/Merrick Gondal to have been carried out, exactly? We know they don't act it out by actually moving around and doing the actions, apart from the very end, because Patrick says so, but are we to imagine them taking it in turns to narrate a kind of recitative, something like the italicised narrative the reader gets? Or just speaking their own parts?
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>>>What evidence do you base this on?
Merely that I don't think that anyone in the 1950s/1960ssaw role playing as dangerous - it was just something that some children did, either on paper or through puppets.
I might be mistaken, in that the first intimation (apart from the hints in PR) was, for me, reading a novel about a Dungeons and Dragons game in the 1980s - but I might have got the dates wrong.
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As far as 'the potential dangers' of roleplaying games go, perhaps this link may be of interest: Myths About Roleplaying (http://members.aol.com/waltonwj/faq_myths.htm). It is very unfortunate that so many people are so ill-informed about what is basically a healthy, social hobby, if a somewhat geeky one - and that they don't go to the trouble of seeing whether their prejudices are justified.
Myself, I think that constructing alternative personas online, creating elaborate family relationships between them, and faking their deaths, is considerably more unhealthy.
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This may well be the case - but we are talking about AF, who makes it clear that there can be dangers if boundaries are not established.
My own experience of role playing in pastoral care, and in three decades of historical recreations, has also demonstrated to me that there can be dangers in role playing, if boundaries are not clear.
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I was under the impression that you were speaking more generally, since you were talking about your own experiences, and continued to do so in this comment. However, since this community is for discussion of AF, and frankly I find her very much more interesting than tangents about puppet theatres, by all means let's return to the text.
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I think the stuff about the Brontes is partly there so as to suggest the pitfalls AF sees in roleplaying, but it works because it is interesting anyway, and as a plausible reason for Ginty to propose the Gondal. Maybe now a group of teenagers might think of this anyway, but perhaps it was less obvious in 1961.
And I can't help believing that AF herself must have been able to be swept away by her own fantasies, to be able to write about it as she does.
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I can quite see Ginty claiming to have chestnut hair and brown eyes and to be afraid of nothing to, for example, a mailing list full of fellow fans of The Constant Nymph, and then getting into a horrendous mess when she has to meet members of the list IRL...
And, of course, there are a few people out there who really shouldn't be allowed to go round pretending they are someone else because they might do themselves a mischief, just as there are paedophiles like Uncle Gerry. Fortunately, just as one can visit Oxford in the reasonable hope of not running into a fake uncle in a brown suit, one can hang about with roleplayers for years and not get shot. ;)
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Well that would be because, in her mind, Ginty is afraid of nothing. Poor, self-deluded fool.
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Patrick I do suspect may be someone who shouldn't be allowed to do much pretending he's someone else, though one has to remember he's only about 16. I wonder if his only-childness comes into it a bit (obviously I don't mean all only children are like Patrick); in a way there's an element of the online anonymity because he's getting an audience who don't know him anything like as well as they know each other, so he can develop his fantasies without much fear of anyone analysing them too personally.
Not using real guns as props would help in the not-getting-shot part, I feel! That's a case of Peter trying to be adult and competent and not in fact knowing enough to do it properly. He wants to blame it on Gondal and the devil on the roof tree, but (contrary to what I used to think), it is partly his fault in a very non-spooky way.
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But after all, if any of the AF books could be treated as an Awful Warning (and I think she's far too sophisticated to be that didactic) it's TRMF:
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Oh, heavens, yes. Or the people who put down genre because it's genre, and whilst they don't actually read that, being far more interested in higher-minded things, they know by cultural osmosis that it's all square-jawed heroes who might as well be Cecil Rhodes In Space, or, alternatively, soppy-bad Jungianly dubious stuff that would be porn if it only had the courage of its convictions.
That particular pose always reminds me strongly of Charlotte Bronte and M. Heger agreeing together that Emily would only ever come into her own as an essayist. Particularly when her essays themselves are so very much like something a sixth-form Karen might have written.
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Also, a propos of something either you or one of your commenters said, I do think Patrick's attitude to fantasy torture is to do with the Elizabethan Anthony Merrick, but also with a rather gruesome Catholic interest in the sufferings of the martyrs and saints which I remember from the nuns and various forms of religious rhetoric when I was little. Presumably Patrick would have been subjected to something similar, with his recusant heritage.
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ROFLMAO! Ankaret, you are a star!