Story Matrices

By Gillian Polack

The culture we live in shapes us. We also shape the culture we live in. Stories we tell play critical roles in this shaping.

The heart of cultural transmission is how stories and the way we shape knowledge come together and make a novel work. How do they combine within the novel? Genre writing plays a critical role in demonstra

• Language: English
• Publisher: Luna Press Publishing
• Release date: Apr 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781913387921

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ACADEMIA LUNARE

Story Matrices

Cultural Encoding and Cultural Baggage

in Science Fiction and Fantasy

Gillian Polack

Cover Image © Francesca Barbini 2022.

Text © Gillian Polack 2022

First published by Luna Press Publishing, Edinburgh, 2022

The right of Gillian Polack to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Story Matrices © 2022. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright owners. Nor can it be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on a subsequent purchaser.

www.lunapresspublishing.com

ISBN-13: 978-1-913387-92-1

This book is dedicated

to Sonya Oberman

Acknowledgement

A grant from ArtsACT enabled the writing up of my research. Many writers have asked me to document my research, and have talked openly with me about their research and writing processes, both of which have helped me a great deal. Science fiction conventions around the world and historical fiction conferences in Australia have included my talks in their programmes and audiences have helped me tease out some of the more interesting constructs. Continuum in Melbourne was where I first talked about cultural brickwork, for instance. This support meant that I did not drop this project, despite university cutbacks including my job, bushfires kilometres from my door, and illness.

The list of individuals to thank for this is too long to include here but thank you all. I’m sure you’ll be very relieved that this book is finished.

Preface

Many, many years ago, I examined the Medieval historiography written during World War II. I never wrote down the outcome of this piece of random research, but the results of my reading have haunted me for forty years.

The writers’ introductions discussed the relationship between their previous years of research on the subject and how their recent lives meant that they were writing the research up under very limiting circumstances. They were unable to check sources, obtain extra books, or add to their research. They wrote knowing that the world was changing around them and had no idea what the new one would be like. At the time I wondered how it would feel to experience something that big.

My time has come.

The first oversized event that interfered with this book was the Australian bushfires. Apart from some research I did in Ireland in August 2019 and apart from an evacuation in January 2020, I was confined to my apartment for the duration. From July 2019 until late February 2020, I finished the research and began the writing, often wondering if there was actually a world beyond the smoke.

In March 2020, COVID-19 hit my part of the world and from that point until now I have been in iso or near-iso. I talk about being disabled, but this was the year that my particular (invisible) disabilities changed my everyday. I’m not alone in this. 2019 and 2020 gave me a very strange type of isolation. I had the internet and five years of research, I had an ArtsACT grant and income from patrons (via the Patreon system) that covered groceries and heating during my COVID winter. I had no access to paper books that I did not own, which was not atypical of researchers these last two years. In fact, due to many conferences moving online, audiences have shared aspects of this book much more than they would have in earlier years through virtual conferences and meetings. The segment introducing cultural building blocks or bricks (imagine toy bricks, such as Lego bricks, with a significant amount of variation in shape and size of decoration), in particular, owes a debt of gratitude to the attendees at the 2020 European Science Fiction Convention.

Because of all the restrictions, I focused on creating an introduction to what cultural matrices are, how they operate in story and how they can be explained using science fiction and fantasy novels. No more than that, and no less.

Introduction

Novels are cultural artefacts of great complexity. This work discusses what speculative fiction authors carry into novels, both knowingly and unknowingly. It helps answer crucial questions such as how writers see culture, and how they map it, shape it or question it so that they can write fiction. It also helps us understand some of the techniques writers use to bring culture into world-building for fiction and within the story space they write from.

When writers draw upon the culture and history of others, what are they actually doing? How do they handle issues such as cultural understanding and cultural appropriation? How can we identify the silences writers leave and what these silences imply in terms of cultural presence and understanding?

Writers develop worlds in which to set stories. In both those worlds and those stories, writers transmit culture. This study will help interpret how the culture writers carry—whether it is at the level of the individual or shared culture—affects the way they write about those worlds. Some of this culture is specific to how a novel is built, some is specific to the world within the novel, and some of it creeps into the novel from the outside world.

The first chapters of Story Matrices present tools that will help us understand both the constructs that enable writers to bring aspects of culture into fiction and writer/reader relationships with those constructs. Cultural brickwork is the foundation tool. That foundation will be explored, extended and explained using cultural mapping. Idioculture and diaculture are concepts that will help express and explain the relationship between personal culture and shared culture.

From there, the book will explore how story helps shape writers’ choices, and the role a writer’s cultural background can play in creating the world of the novel. Methods of discovering what culture is being transmitted in novels include mapping the culture presented in fiction, identifying silences and resonance, and examining specific subjects including gender and diasporic voices. Of particular interest is which elements of a novel a writer uses ‘own voices’ for, and what elements they take from other backgrounds to their own. Throughout, this study will assess how problematic cultural constructs can enter fiction.

Introducing Cultural Brickwork and Bricks

Our fictional worlds are partly prefabricated by our cultural and personal views. That prefabrication helps readers navigate them, to choose a favourite genre or sub-genre or avoid themes they dislike. It also carries baggage, much of it unintended. The term ‘cultural Lego’ is one I’ve seen used in teaching about gender and ethnicity; its best-known use is by Ulrich Beck (Beck and Cronin, 2006: 5) and it’s an exceptionally useful term to describe how a world is created for fiction and what impact that creation has on genre novels.

We build worlds for fiction using cultural brickwork. The concept of cultural Lego has been used in narrative studies and occasionally in education: cultural brickwork is a translation of that concept to assist in interpreting how novels are written.

We are not talking of literal prefabricated houses. Cultural bricks and brickwork create a metaphor for how a writer takes a framework and builds a house from it. That framework includes the genre, character choice, plot, and other key aspects of a novel. The writer brings the novel to life for a reader choosing decorative pieces as telling detail (details of the setting that bring the setting to life for readers) or aspects of structure as plot devices. One aspect of the house is formal and shared: it is made of prefabricated bricks of varying kinds. However, the fact that it is a house that announces its genre: ‘I am a science fiction novel—look at my spaceship pieces!’ indicates that writers also select bricks that make their work distinctive.

One of my favourite examples of this is the opening to Ian McDonald’s The Dervish House (2011: 9-10) The initial flight of the bird into the city and what follows perfectly shows us the type of novel McDonald wrote (near-future science fiction with a great deal of action) and immerses us in his invented world. His world becomes our world for the duration and we react to it with direct emotions—and the usual stuff one brings to reading a novel one feels the wish to be a part of. The skill a writer displays with cultural brickwork sets up the novel, and sets readers up for identification with aspects of the novel; that is, what brings readers into a particular story.

Cultural bricks used effectively means the reader does not need to know a great deal about the world of the novel before opening the book. Peadar Ó Guilín’s The Call (2016) ought to be very alien to a non-Irish reader in many ways. The mythology called on for the novel, the one that underpins the narrative throughout, is strongly Irish and does not cede to international retellings for the mythology. If we were describing the novel in terms of type of crafted brickwork structure, it would be a rebuilding of the mounds at Tara and the monument at Newgrange, with a few modern buildings scattered in their midst. It would not appear to be a place to rest and to read a book.

Within this Newgrange framework, Ó Guilín uses specific cultural bricks and related pieces to bring readers into the unfamiliar, with sufficient comfort to want to continue reading. The bricks include children growing up, eating food, playing pranks, and telling jokes.

Cultural brickwork is also used to depict a school system that is fighting to save the lives of children when those lives are under gross abuse and threat. From the very beginning, our emotions are caught up by the lives of these children. Ó Guilín uses familiar pieces of cultural brickwork (genre pieces, school pieces, folklore and mythology pieces, young adult protagonists, even food pieces) and then subverts how those pieces are usually understood.

This is the opposite of an English writer who uses a lot of similar cultural bricks for English fiction. J.K. Rowling (from the first Harry Potter novel in 1997) creates a theoretically similar world that creates a very different brickwork-built structure in her Harry Potter books. Schools, abused children, food, magic, and young adult protagonists fit into the cultural building that is Hogwarts. Compare the cultural bricks in the two novels and we see a castle instead of an ancient mound, and many similar pieces, ranging from food to child abuse.

Both Ó Guilín and Rowling used similar pieces for some of their work, but the results are not that close in genre terms. On a bookshelf, both writers’ work fits into the general classification of Young Adult fantasy. Despite this, they’re not a matching pair. Whole structures can be imported into narratives without the author of the narrative knowing they’ve done it or being aware of the implications of the import.

The difference between Ireland in The Call (2016) and the UK in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997) is that Rowling and Ó Guilín applied their bricks quite differently. The difference is so great that Rowling presents fairly standard school stories that follow a regular hero journey, while Ó Guilín presents a tale of apocalyptic horror.

From this, we see that the implications for writing of similar choices of cultural brickwork is very broad ranging. This is because writing is not solely about whether or not the underlying theme is children growing up in a Young Adult fantasy novel. In other words, it’s not what overarching genre choices are made, but how the pieces are used.

Writers choose bricks and connected pieces, then build them into a form that fits the genre (My world needs a castle! My world needs dragons and elves! My world needs evil!) and then writers tell stories. Not every writer knows why they choose the stories they tell, but all writers draw on their cultural bricks to create the fantastical worlds their story inhabits.

It is especially important as a tool for understanding the genre choices made by writers. It can help us understand what elements writers use in their structuring and what links those elements have with other novels. Vladimir Propp’s morphology of folk tales (Propp et al., 2000) demonstrated how such a structure could work for one type of story. Cultural brickwork operates, however, at a broader level than Propp’s dissection of folk tales.

Cultural brickwork is the first and most fundamental of the critical factors that make our stories function; they tell us about the way our cultures shape the world we see. Understanding how the world of the novel operates helps determine both the questions we’re going to ask and the stories we’re going to tell. Understanding fiction is about how our culture shapes us as much as how we shape our culture—and how narrative plays a critical role in this shaping.

Cultural brickwork and building a novel that uses it to shape story enables us to find out what cultural constructs a writer brings into their fiction and to discover where these constructs come from.

Additional aspects of cultural brickwork will be brought forward in other chapters, unpicking some of the interesting cultural paths that writers take in order to make this choice; using their bricks to build the world for their novel and to write that novel. Cultural brickwork then, is the tool that will link this study.

In Order to Tell Stories, We Need Worlds

This study is about narrative. Narrative is what holds humanity together and what tears humanity apart. Shared narrative is an impossibly strong force.

That cultural point where we share all aspects of a narrative is both amazing and terrifying. We all know of politicians who try to change countries by establishing shared narratives of a very dangerous kind regarding trust, truth and knowledge. We tell stories and those stories have meaning: and we act on that meaning.

In order to tell stories, we need worlds. This is where genre fiction is of particular importance, especially science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction. These genres use effectively built worlds and facilitate cultural sharing; we will focus on them and, just a little, on other kinds of fiction.

How and where the worlds are carried into fiction are the locations where creators and consumers of all kinds have roles to play.

The focus of this study will be mostly on the writer representing the creation side but, where necessary, the study will also examine the reader (representing the consumer side), as well as placing a writer’s work in the context of the broader publishing industry. The publishing industry is seldom neutral in relation to how a writer’s work reaches the public, so it cannot be left out of this study entirely.

Most explanations of writing fiction tend to describe the world writers creates for their story as consisting primarily of conscious narrative decisions made by a writer, who then creates a story from them. This world that the writer creates for the story, however, isn’t merely the result of a set of decisions. The cultural knowledge that precedes these decisions is critical.

Thus, these decisions are themselves secondary to something else, as the acts of making conscious decisions about the world in which the story is set and the filling-in-the-gaps between these decisions take a writer into story space. Story space is where the world of the novel is built: a structure that exists mainly in an author’s mind (although, with science fiction and fantasy, computer and physical supplementation are not unknown). Some writers create databases for their worlds and other create models and maps. This work creates a place from which further decisions are made, and this place, for many writers, is immersive and even prescriptive. This, is story space.

Readers read from story space—writers enter it to write. This element of narrative will be explored shortly.

It is critical to consider the material a writer brings into the world they are building. What creates the bricks and other pieces used to build and create. What underpins the choices of brickwork. What is carried into story space knowingly or unwittingly.

For some writers the story space intentionally draws upon their knowledge of the world they live in. For others, it is invented from scratch. I’ve examined this in History and Fiction (Polack, 2016a: 77) in relation to how history contributes to writer’s story space. In this study I shall extend that analysis with an examination of story space itself, and the role cultural transmission plays in translating constructs established in story space into story.

It is critical that story space uses the writer’s research and thought for the world of the novel, but that it draws on a writer’s prior knowledge and education to do so. It is also critical that, for the reader, it connects what the writer has successfully communicated of that research and the world of the novel with the reader’s prior knowledge. It is one of the pivotal places for cultural transmission through narratives.

Each writer writes from a unique space, but they create their story space in overlapping ways, combining their assumptions of race, gender and of the shape of the world itself with the kind of things one finds on a world building website. A popular world building website for fantasy writers, for example, is Patricia Wrede’s page on the Science Fiction Writers of America site, which she titles Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions (Wrede, 2009). Once a writer has developed a story space, they can use it to draw on what they have invented as well as what they already know.

More about Cultural Brickwork

Cultural brickwork is the first tool a writer uses to transform the setting of a novel into the appropriate form for a novel. It is the foundation on which a novel rests. Each brick is a cultural choice and when the bricks are added to each other, the writer has built the house in which story happens. The actual story may involve sitting down in a room in the house and drinking tea, or it may involve burning the house down entirely, but the structure in which the events in the novel occur is built from cultural bricks.

At its heart, are genre choices: the brickwork foundation is the form of the novel itself and the walls and windows and roof help the reader see that the novel is science fiction, or urban fantasy, or a coming-of-age quest. The world of the novel is part of the fabric of this house.

What pieces do writers choose and how do they integrate them into tales in order to tell stories? How do the number of metaphorical walls—or their height, their colour and other choices relating to the building of this house—influence the stories themselves? These are important questions that will be examined directly and indirectly here, but I will also discuss how we can examine novels to gain an understanding of the range of material writers can place into their fiction using these methods and how we can interpret this material. That is the core of this book: how we can understand cultural transmission and the choices writers make.

The choices between depicting the stories we share as