The Novel as a Museum Exhibit

Ishmael Reed's Ragtime has an unusual variety of footnotes, images, definitions, citations, newspaper clippings, and other such non-narrative bits thrown in with the somewhat jumbled story. This certainly throws some readers off, and some may find this format to be objectionable, but I actually like the way Reed tells the story. It seems almost like an exhibit at a history museum, where artifacts are displayed next to descriptions of the world they were part of and there is an occasional helpful little placard explaining what the heck some of these things are.

I can think of a few other novels that could be construed as having this layout. One is 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson, which takes advantage of its miscellaneous extra documents to explain some of the technologies and cultural norms present in its science-fiction setting (such as a section from a do-it-yourself book on how to colonize an asteroid).

The other novel, which many more of you have likely heard of, is The Hithchiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. This one is somewhat more structured in its use of extra documentation than 2312, but still: every once in awhile, we get a break from the usual adventures so we can read a section of the eponymous encyclopedia that tells us the wonders of towels, dolphins, mice, the Infinite Improbability Drive, species that are mostly harmless, and Pan-Galactic Gargleblasters.

I happen to like the story + supporting documents approach enough that I've considered using it for one of my own long-term writing projects.

And when I say long-term, I mean long-term.

In sixth grade or so I created a set of characters who I just kept on thinking up stories for (Note "thinking up," not "writing." There are very few finished stories). Thing is, as I got older, my writing style and writing tastes changed, and I kept reimagining not only plotlines but also the themes and setting these characters existed in. If you placed the original characters in a room with their more recent incarnations, they wouldn't recognize each other. Or be able to breathe the same atmosphere, for that matter.

Here's the short explanation of the premise: The current rendition (unfinished, as always) features two sentient alien species living in a major political mess on a large moon orbiting a gas giant in a distant solar system. Then one day, a human spaceship discovers their civilization, and the political mess just gets worse. Some characters are trying to use humanity's new diplomatic influence to bring peace to the moon. Others are trying to use humanity's superior technology to bring peace in an entirely different way. And of course, humanity is busy with its own war against a fourth sentient species, and would greatly appreciate any help from its new acquaintances.

Anyway, since I prefer to write in the first person, the problem is: who do I use as a narrator?

The original alien character who's stuck with the story for six years?
The human journalist?
Or one of the other characters involved?

The answer is Yes.

It's potentially confusing (Mumbo Jumbo certainly is), but ideally I'd throw in a couple of historical documents and narrator's notes into the story. The original alien character would be primary narrator; after all, he's sort of the center of attention. The journalist can be passed off as the document's translator, adding her own notes to explain certain aspects of alien society and even filling in accounts of events she was present at but the alien character wasn't. And to give human readers the full story, she'll include a number of historical documents from the time.

Gimmicky? Sort of. But does it accomplish what I'm looking for? Yes.

That's probably similar to what went through Ishmael Reed's head when he was deciding what "extras" to add into Mumbo Jumbo.*


*which, I must point out, I have found to be far less confusing than Mr. Mitchell's warnings suggested it would be.

Doctorow, Mieville, Oblivion, and the art of Homagiarism

Homagiarism (ɒmɨdʒərɪzɨm) - n. The act of ripping off someone else for your own creative purposes.

In Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow took the name and basic story arc for Coalhouse Walker, Jr. from a novel written a century and a half earlier by German author Heinrich von Kleist. Is that even legal?

Well, yes.

But is it okay? Is there something wrong with Ragtime because it uses someone else's plot? I understand that there are those of you who say that there are no original ideas in fiction, and postmodernists can probably barf up some stuff along the lines of "does it really matter that someone else wrote it first?", but still: Doctorow used someone else's material. This is something that can be great in some circumstances, and terrible in others. Let's view this dichotomy through two examples.

RAILSEA

This young-adult novel by China Mieville takes cues from a very recognizable source: Moby-Dick. The most obvious reference is that there's a captain who lost an appendage and gained a vendetta in a harpoon battle with a large white animal. At first, the book seems to be a rewrite of Herman Melville's (note Melville, not Mieville; I'll call them CM and HM so you don't get confused) novel set in a thoroughly weird universe of endless expanses of railroads and overgrown subterranean mammals. This is not exactly a striking new concept in the world of fiction; anything that was ever famous spawned remakes (or at least sales pitches) as "xyz IN SPACE!" or "xyz AT A MODERN HIGH SCHOOL!" or "xyz UNDER THE SEA!" or "xyz ON AN AIRPLANE!" (or in the case of Airport '77, on an airplane under the sea).
Some people evidently like to reread the same plot over and over again. Some people evidently think that transpositions are the best way to get kids to read/watch fuddy-duddy old works of fiction like Shakespeare. I am not one of those people.
However, CM gets away with his use of HM's premise because 1) he throws in plenty of his own stuff on top of it, and 2) he puts a clever twist on the end of the Ahab vs Moby plotline (I can't explain it without spoiling a great part of the book... but it's clever). In fact, with pirates, monsters, weird technology, and a search for the edge of the earth, good old Moby-Dick gets so deeply buried that you don't notice it's there.
CM homagiarized correctly by taking a premise and plot as things to modify and build off of. Now we look at an example of how homagiarism can go very, very badly.

OBLIVION

I watched this movie without knowing that it was meant to homage just about everything, so my initial reaction was that it had no original content whatsoever. Even now that I know that all of the ripped-off scenes were entirely intentional, it seems like a dumb idea. Here's a list of all the works I noticed were referenced (all were caught on my first time viewing the film; they aren't buried too deeply.)
The Phantom Menace, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, Dune, Planet of the Apes, Tron, 2012, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Portal, Gattaca, Independence Day, Wall-E, Top Gun, The Matrix, Logan's Run.
I HAVEN'T EVEN SEEN ALL OF THOSE FILMS (or played that video game), AND I STILL CAUGHT THE REFERENCES! Oblivion takes the most iconic scenes/ideas/props/sets/voices from these works and jams them together into one big, sad excuse for science fiction. The problem is that there is very little (if any) original content to pad the references, and all of the homagarized bits are taken almost exactly in their original forms--no clever twists here.
Granted, there was one reference that I actually thought was clever: the slanted Statue of Liberty from Planet of the Apes. This was okay for two reasons: 1) it is probably the most recognizable post-apocalyptic image of all, and 2) it shows up for just a moment--they fly past it during a chase scene.

RAGTIME

So does Doctorow get away with it? Does he have a good example of homagiarism? His transposition of von Kleists' story is pretty straightforward, but it's intertwined with other stories in the novel. In the end, the thing that makes Doctorow's homagiarism acceptable is that the source he takes "influence" from is not widely known. For one thing, it doesn't automatically trigger something in our brain that says, "Hey, wait a minute! They already did that in (insert fiction here)!". But it also makes it clear that Doctorow is not just using the homagiarized story to try and jump on a bandwagon; it's not, "This was popular, so let's remake it" (ahem*Michael Bay*ahem), it's "Hm. This is an interesting story. I bet I could use it somehow...". It seems like a more genuine form of reuse... though maybe Doctorow could have at least mentioned in a preface or end note that he used von Kleist's story?

Didn't his highschool librarian tell him to always cite his sources?

PS: Interestingly enough, both Railsea and Oblivion are metafiction! The narrator of Railsea occasionally interjects to comment on the progress of the story, and Oblivion's innumerous references ensure that the viewer is constantly reminded: "Hey, I saw that in a sci-fi film once--OH WAIT: THIS IS A SCI-FI* FILM! OMG LOL." (or something like that). Additionally, the inclusion of Tom Cruise's sunglasses from Top Gun remind the viewer that the character onscreen is really just Tom Cruise putting on a persona.

*I do not endorse the labeling of Oblivion as science fiction.