Emotional Drama in Fiction Set in Other Cultures

[dubsartur]

I'm nervous about posting this topic because what I see as a hard problem jubal often sees as no problem at all.  But Jubal's post about characters in The Witcher who are obsessed with another character's lack of sexual experience and a short fantasy story with some 20th-century family tensions got me thinking.  Some kinds of fiction focus on interpersonal tensions and characters' desires and feelings.  When these stories are set in other cultures, authors often have trouble: should they project things from their experience or the stories their culture produces (which usually feels wrong), or try to understand the things characters in societies like the setting quarreled about and were hung up on (which is hard, because before the 19th century few people left detailed records of their emotional and interpersonal lives)?  How can they communicate what is at stake to their readers?  And for authors who are not historians or anthropologists, how can they find those models from outside their culture in the first place?

In a society inspired by medieval and early modern Latin Christendom, a young woman might be torn about whether to spend some private time with a guy who is hot and rich but also totally likely to blab and ruin her reputation, or about whether to marry and accept the clear place in society but legal disabilities which come with that, or about whether to marry for the pleasures of the world or please God by remaining a virgin (very many women in late medieval and early modern England never married, demographers and creepy people get excited about this).  I can think of examples of those scenarios from those cultures, but I'm not sure it would be common for a young person in those cultures to feel that finding someone to have sex with was a fundamental part of becoming a functioning adult like an American teenager in the 1990s/2000s might feel.  (Although there are a lot of hints that many people's ideas and practices diverged pretty far from the ones laid down by learned theologians).  Marriage was important in those societies in ways it has not been in Canada for decades.

Anthropologists tell me that parent-child tensions are strongly correlated with neolocal marriage practices (ie. teenagers tend to get rebellious in cultures where adults are expected to found their own household independent from those of their parents and their spouse's parents).  People who volunteer with crisis lines in the USA find people who suffer because of all kinds of strange beliefs which I would not have thought were part of North Atlantic culture any more.

It gets harder if the setting is one which did not leave writing such as northern and western Europe before and outside Roman rule.  People in the Arras culture must have suffered because of false beliefs and expectations and quarreled over things less concrete than "whose goats got in to my garden?" or "who galloped through my standing crops chasing a boar?" but with no written records how can storytellers imagine a plausible set and sell them to readers who may be pretty provincial?  This century, a scary number of people never read or watch stories written before they were born unless those stories are from their sacred text, so they don't even have experience with earlier versions of their own culture.

I don't think I am expressing this very well but its all the time and emotional energy I have.

[Pentagathus]

yes

[dubsartur]

Did you mean to reply to this thread with one word?

Reading part 2 of the short story, it moves on to have more 21st century trappings, but it still inspired me to think "why are there so many stories with swords and castles where characters have the emotional lives of postwar Americans?"  Human experience is frighteningly diverse: there are people going to bars and dance clubs like COVID never happened!

[Jubal]

I agree with you in this case that the problem is complex (I think I actually probably agree with you more often than it may seem on that, I probably come across as thinking things are simple if what I actually mean is that I've thought about them long enough that I have a position or solution I'm keen to argue for!)

I think communicating what is at stake always takes time, though there are possible strategies to do it: you need to have a foot in multiple worlds, though - that is, the readers probably need to be on board with "I want the best/worst for this character" before you can get into "and in this society, the best/worst for this character may require X, here's why". That makes it hard to simulate every aspect of a past culture at the same time, because if people don't have the mental hook (or prior experience of the setting) then you don't give them a way in. This is one of the reasons it takes time, because you probably need to get particular ideas into a reader's head more or less one at a time, and some of them interlock so you need to ease them in next to one another or sitting awkwardly or something.

And even historians and anthropologists often aren't good at having the full sweep you need for a book or a game: I think I could write pretty convincingly about elite Caucasus nobles in a court context, but I might struggle to capture the same people's attitudes to faith in nearly the same depth because I don't have the same depth of knowledge of the hagiographies and sermons of the period, or indeed of medieval Orthodox religious practice and experience more widely, as I do in the chronicles and secular texts that are my primary specialism. So if I wrote a fictional text about a young nobleman and his romances in the Georgian court, I might be able to get across to readers certain ideas about the relationship between women and power, and the ways in which a dchabuki should act, but I'd plausibly end up understating the religious aspects and experiences of his life and how those affected his view of interpersonal relationships. I worry about this which is one of the reasons I haven't tried writing specifically historical fiction about my period of study.

Also such a character can often only show what the mores of the culture are by testing and pushing against them, though I think that's generally a difference between fiction and reality: characters even in fictions in the premodern period do a lot of telling us what society thinks you should do by doing exactly the opposite and facing obstacles or punishment for it.

[Pentagathus]

Did you mean to reply to this thread with one word?

yes



It was mostly so I remembered to read this thread again and reply properly. I think i agree, but my brain is still too dumb and tired to read

[dubsartur]

It was mostly so I remembered to read this thread again and reply properly. I think i agree, but my brain is still too dumb and tired to read

Not to worry, I think a lot of people are feeling slow and tired right now. 

[Jubal]

It was mostly so I remembered to read this thread again and reply properly. I think i agree, but my brain is still too dumb and tired to read

Not to worry, I think a lot of people are feeling slow and tired right now. 

Seconded! Or thirded, or something. The northern hemisphere in January can be a very grey place invoking very grey feelings.