![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Cliff's Notes: Three Young Men
Made a very quick trip to NYC to give a reading of "Three Young Men," recently published in King David and the Spiders From Mars. Subsequently, Yao (coder, cool guy, friend of C.Blacker) commented that he was thrown out of the story by the word "ego," which one of the characters uses in dialog toward the end of the story.
"Isn't that too modern a concept for Ancient Babylon?" said Yao approximately.
Yes it is.
I'm never sure how to respond to questions about my authorial intent, because as a reader I think it's irrelevant whether I meant to put something in the text: it's in the text. Author is dead.
However, I also know that not everyone takes the same approach. Otherwise they wouldn't ask me about my authorial intent. In that context, it seems arrogant to say "refer to the text and assume I did everything on purpose."
So here is a Cliff's Notes style explanation of what's going on with my story, if you're interested in that. If I have done my job right this would reveal itself to you upon rereading, making this explanation redundant, but who knows.
Daniel, the character identified as the prophet spoken to by God both in the Bible and within the story iteslf (wherein I the author am God), always speaks like he comes from the present. Everyone in the story sounds more contemporary than the narrator(s), Daniel the most so. The narrator(s) is a backward-looking fundamentalist.
Notably, the very start of the story is also contemporary sounding, the description of burning alive. This is before "I" has emerged, and if you think about it, there's an implication that bit might not be coming from the narrator(s). (Sorry about that constant parenthetical s. The Three Young men are to themselves a single entity, a single body. Or at least one of them thinks so.)
Since the narrator(s) is not exactly reliable, I suggest listening to Daniel as the voice of God (aka the author). Similarly, the author (God) is probably responsible for that opening description, which sounds a lot more like Romie than like the Three Young Men.
So I'd say that they burn alive. Not that it's a puzzle-solving story with a solution.
I don't know. I could be wrong. Death of the author and all. But I'd say that what's horrifying is not only the events (although the events are horrifying) but the psychology of the narrator(s), an ethnically and religiously isolated group in a stressful situation that postdates a recent and undoubtedly traumatizing territorial war, whose response is to turn inward and disengage from the society around them. Their insular ideas about the will and workings of God become very strange, and include a glee over the deaths of people outside their group (the wise men) and complete rigidity of thought, culminating in the choice of a martyrdom in flames that turns them into angels.
Kind of seems like a contemporary problem to me. I wrote the story before the Boston Marathon Bombing, but notably after 9/11, and The Troubles, and the West Bank, and the Branch Davidians and who knows what else.
Don't burn people alive either, though. That's bad guy werewolf stuff for sure. Lots of wrong thinking in this story.
"Isn't that too modern a concept for Ancient Babylon?" said Yao approximately.
Yes it is.
I'm never sure how to respond to questions about my authorial intent, because as a reader I think it's irrelevant whether I meant to put something in the text: it's in the text. Author is dead.
However, I also know that not everyone takes the same approach. Otherwise they wouldn't ask me about my authorial intent. In that context, it seems arrogant to say "refer to the text and assume I did everything on purpose."
So here is a Cliff's Notes style explanation of what's going on with my story, if you're interested in that. If I have done my job right this would reveal itself to you upon rereading, making this explanation redundant, but who knows.
Daniel, the character identified as the prophet spoken to by God both in the Bible and within the story iteslf (wherein I the author am God), always speaks like he comes from the present. Everyone in the story sounds more contemporary than the narrator(s), Daniel the most so. The narrator(s) is a backward-looking fundamentalist.
Notably, the very start of the story is also contemporary sounding, the description of burning alive. This is before "I" has emerged, and if you think about it, there's an implication that bit might not be coming from the narrator(s). (Sorry about that constant parenthetical s. The Three Young men are to themselves a single entity, a single body. Or at least one of them thinks so.)
Since the narrator(s) is not exactly reliable, I suggest listening to Daniel as the voice of God (aka the author). Similarly, the author (God) is probably responsible for that opening description, which sounds a lot more like Romie than like the Three Young Men.
So I'd say that they burn alive. Not that it's a puzzle-solving story with a solution.
I don't know. I could be wrong. Death of the author and all. But I'd say that what's horrifying is not only the events (although the events are horrifying) but the psychology of the narrator(s), an ethnically and religiously isolated group in a stressful situation that postdates a recent and undoubtedly traumatizing territorial war, whose response is to turn inward and disengage from the society around them. Their insular ideas about the will and workings of God become very strange, and include a glee over the deaths of people outside their group (the wise men) and complete rigidity of thought, culminating in the choice of a martyrdom in flames that turns them into angels.
Kind of seems like a contemporary problem to me. I wrote the story before the Boston Marathon Bombing, but notably after 9/11, and The Troubles, and the West Bank, and the Branch Davidians and who knows what else.
Don't burn people alive either, though. That's bad guy werewolf stuff for sure. Lots of wrong thinking in this story.