Digital Music

Browsing the Lit. Crit. section Bookspycojpkbtz any library, you probably won't gain the impression that the critics are making any great effort to plumb the central mystery of story-telling. To isolate the X factor, unidentified so far, which separates good story-tellers from bad, would be quite a coup, but nobody expects, after all these thousands of years, to be able to do it.

I would strongly suggest that in order to home in on the X factor, we must assume that if it Avengersllerbj ever to be discovered, it will be Silver Bells analysis of a relatively "bad" writer, that is to say, a writer who does not obey the commonly accepted commandments of good writing. For when a "good" or "brilliant" writer achieves great effects, it can be ascribed to his/her literary skills, which mask the X factor. The pure substance of story-telling can only be isolated when other substances have been boiled off in the test-tube of our analysis. We need a bad great writer.

Now let's consider: is ERB a promising candidate for this treatment? I consider him a great writer; but is he bad enough?

To decide this question it is probably unnecessary to look further than his cast of characters. Most of them are extremely stereotyped. In particular his minor villains tend to be gross, coarse-featured men; time and again we are given this type of description. And his plots contain hundreds of examples of beautiful women being kidnapped and threatened with the fate worse than death. There are exceptions. Ras Thavas, the great surgeon of Mars, is a mixture of good and bad. Orthis, the great villain in the Lunar series, is a convincing paranoid. Tavia, the heroine of A Fighting Man of Mars, is genuinely adorable. But mostly the reader has to do the work him/herself, filling in the colour and personality which the author has not provided.

But this is precisely the point, the reader does do this! The characters exist in their setting, and the setting lends life to the characters, life they would not otherwise have. Some authors can get away with doing it this way, others can't. Burroughs can; his imitators, to my knowledge, can't. The X-factor again!

It's not just a matter of his virtues trumping his faults. Sure, he does have virtues. The standard of invention, particularly in his Mars tales, is high. And most people might say that his tales succeed because of the frequent action and excitement they provide. However, I would argue that all this gets nowhere near explaining the mystery. His imitators, for instance Lin Carter, provide plenty of action.

Besides, Burroughs - much more often that he is given credit for - relies on the converse of action, namely, suspense. Perhaps the most remarkable example of this is the 9 pages of A Fighting Man of Mars in which the hero narrates his predicament as he is trapped in a deserted tower by one of the great white apes of Barsoom. Nothing much happens during Superboy 9 pages, but they are an unforgettable read.

My suggestion is that the X-factor, the secret of story-telling, is something to do with sentence-structure and rhythm. The great story-tellers weave a spell by the rhythm of their prose, and this, allied with their gift for colour and setting, brews the concoction of success. I have noticed that Burroughs often uses a distinctive "hump-backed" or "L-shaped" sentence - a long sentence beginning with a rising note, a change of direction in the middle and then a falling cadence.

"...The only redeeming Webcomicgjeftrcdhj of the descent was the darkness, and a hundred times I blessed my first ancestors that I could not see the dizzy depths below me; but on the other hand it was so dark that I could not tell how far I had descended; nor did I dare to look up where the summit of the tower must have been silhouetted against the starlit sky for fear that in doing so I should lose my balance and be precipitated to the courtyard or the roof below..."

So my argument has led me to realizing that the X-factor is to do with good writing after all. But only in one specific sense. If you have it, you can get away with an awful lot. Stereotypical characters come to life, brought to vividness by the worlds they inhabit.

Robert Gibson is caretaker of the Ooranye Project, creating a fictional giant planet which can be explored on TARGET="_NEW" www.ooranye.com">www.ooranye.com

The project's aim is to meld the subgenres of Future History and Planetary Romance, resulting in over a million years of civilization with its own societies, customs, conflicts, triumphs and disasters, politics, philosophies, flora and fauna, empires both human and non-human, and adventures that range over an area ten times that of the surface of the Earth. Lovers of planetary adventure are invited to view the history, comment on the progress of the project, access the tales and keep in touch with the developing destiny of Ooranye.

posted by blogginguaaikl  # 8:16 AM 0 comments