Invidia Aquitaine (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
inimarupta) wrote2013-06-03 06:16 pm
inimarupta) wrote2013-06-03 06:16 pm
Entry tags:
Ramblings: Identity and perspective in the third person
One of the interesting nuances in Codex Alera is how perspective interacts with the narrative. Unsurprisingly, Jim Butcher is a practiced hand at presenting a story through a character's eyes -- after all, he secured his career as a professional novelist with the Dresden Files, a still-running first person series that's about 13 books in and only about halfway done. I'm just saying, the man has a little practice with limited and unreliable narrators.
So when he sat down to write Codex Alera -- which he sells as the epic fantasy he always wanted to write, inspired by a challenge to combine two terrible ideas and try to make them awesome -- it's interesting to see that he chose to tell it in a third-person limited narration style. It serves a basic purpose: Butcher gets to draw on his practice at first-person presentation without tying the scope of his epic to events happening directly around his protagonist. He can have Tavi in one place learning how to defeat the Vord by sitting and studying the overrun of Canae, and have Bernard and Amara in another place discovering and addressing the threat of enslaved furycrafters. But he doesn't leave it at the fundamental purpose necessitated by the story he wants to tell; the man actually plays with it.
An easy example is how the narrative describes and refers to the non-human characters of the setting. Aleran culture tends to be extremely self-centered; this is a psuedo-Roman Empire society that has been purchasing its unity and survival by committing genocide on anything non-human for well over a thousand years. It follows that no one has ever really sat down and studied the other cultures and maybe figured out their various nuances. Alerans are terribly patriarchal, so when Tavi actually sits down and starts figuring out the Marat because Doroga wants to use Tavi to avert renewed conflict between their species, the narrative refers to Kitai as a boy because Tavi mistakenly assumes Kitai is male due to patriarchal assumptions and we are viewing the world from his perspective. It also sometimes refers to Kitai as a whelp because that is what Doroga stresses to Tavi as Kitai's identifier; Marat are treated as genderless until they come of age. Likewise, Alerans never saw a female Cane until the Canim invasion in Cursor's Fury; canonically, Alerans began to assume that the Canim weren't split into male and female but rather were all some third option that let the species procreate. As a result, Canim are all referred to both in dialogue and narration as it until Tavi sees a female for the first time -- and then it still takes Tavi correcting others a few times before Canim are entirely referred to as he or she.
It's also noteworthy that subjective topics tend to vary along with the perspective. Isana struggles with self-worth throughout the series, including some harsh judgments on her appearance compared to everyone else; when Invidia is described while the narrative is following Isana, it focuses on Invidia's privilege -- as a powerful woman of privilege, Invidia is forever young, beautiful and well-attired. When Fidelias looks at her -- a spy with a sexual relationship with her and an inherent distrust of her -- she is sexy but fickle, with signs of facades and predatory hints (his lady's "lips splitting in a cool smile" evocative of, say, a wolf's mouth opening in a moment when she's watching someone incorrectly think they've got a leg up on her).
HOW DOES THIS AFFECT INVIDIA gosh I'm glad you asked.
The interesting thing about how this narrative play is used on Invidia is her identity. The narrative always -- always -- refers to her as Lady Aquitaine in books one through four. And there's a few nuances in Aleran naming (High Lady Aquitainus Invidia is pulling rank, Aquitainar Invidia would indicate a bastard child who hasn't been legally accepted by her parents in Aquitaine) so referring to Lady Aquitaine constantly is a practical narrative way to convey who she is and how she's being perceived beyond the literal "this is who the author is referring to." A personally amusing note is that when Isana first meets Invidia in person, she doesn't recognize her; Invidia is literally "the woman in the red dress" until Serai blows Invidia's deliberate anonymity, at which point she's Lady Aquitaine again.
The narrative doesn't refer to her as Invidia until Princeps' Fury, after Amara has seen Invidia kill a High Lord for the Vord and is confronting her for the first time as a traitor to the Realm (note: some summaries credit the Vord queen with the kill because the narrative initially describes the High Lord as being easily destroyed by the Vord; however, when Amara looks more closely at the battlefield, it is specifically stated that she saw Lady Aquitaine clearing the High Lord's blood from her blade). There's so many nuances to this. Amara has known Invidia is guilty of treason from book one, but she was still Lady Aquitaine because Invidia's treasons were unprovable. She was, in all technical senses, still to be addressed as an upstanding lady of the Realm.
The narrative stops referring to her as Lady Aquitaine when Amara stops thinking of her as a lady of the Realm -- and it comes at about the same time that Amara stops addressing her as a lady of the Realm. It takes a few moments for it to hit Invidia herself that her identity has changed. Lady Aquitaine, as Amara says, is dead. What's left is Invidia; the same personality, the same background, etc. But she is stripped of her privileges as a High Lady. She doesn't command one of the Realm's twelve major regions anymore. She's been knocked from her place in the food chain.
In play, I'm simply going to refer to her as Invidia, though she will still occasionally point out that she was a High Lady, damnit. It's easier, less confusing. But I like that it has coincidental meanings: the characters around her wouldn't likely care about a title from an empire that isn't in their own world, her standing in Ariel is that of a basic citizen, and from Invidia's perspective Alera has probably been wiped out anyway. Invidia would still like to talk about herself as a High Lady -- but she is Invidia.
So when he sat down to write Codex Alera -- which he sells as the epic fantasy he always wanted to write, inspired by a challenge to combine two terrible ideas and try to make them awesome -- it's interesting to see that he chose to tell it in a third-person limited narration style. It serves a basic purpose: Butcher gets to draw on his practice at first-person presentation without tying the scope of his epic to events happening directly around his protagonist. He can have Tavi in one place learning how to defeat the Vord by sitting and studying the overrun of Canae, and have Bernard and Amara in another place discovering and addressing the threat of enslaved furycrafters. But he doesn't leave it at the fundamental purpose necessitated by the story he wants to tell; the man actually plays with it.
An easy example is how the narrative describes and refers to the non-human characters of the setting. Aleran culture tends to be extremely self-centered; this is a psuedo-Roman Empire society that has been purchasing its unity and survival by committing genocide on anything non-human for well over a thousand years. It follows that no one has ever really sat down and studied the other cultures and maybe figured out their various nuances. Alerans are terribly patriarchal, so when Tavi actually sits down and starts figuring out the Marat because Doroga wants to use Tavi to avert renewed conflict between their species, the narrative refers to Kitai as a boy because Tavi mistakenly assumes Kitai is male due to patriarchal assumptions and we are viewing the world from his perspective. It also sometimes refers to Kitai as a whelp because that is what Doroga stresses to Tavi as Kitai's identifier; Marat are treated as genderless until they come of age. Likewise, Alerans never saw a female Cane until the Canim invasion in Cursor's Fury; canonically, Alerans began to assume that the Canim weren't split into male and female but rather were all some third option that let the species procreate. As a result, Canim are all referred to both in dialogue and narration as it until Tavi sees a female for the first time -- and then it still takes Tavi correcting others a few times before Canim are entirely referred to as he or she.
It's also noteworthy that subjective topics tend to vary along with the perspective. Isana struggles with self-worth throughout the series, including some harsh judgments on her appearance compared to everyone else; when Invidia is described while the narrative is following Isana, it focuses on Invidia's privilege -- as a powerful woman of privilege, Invidia is forever young, beautiful and well-attired. When Fidelias looks at her -- a spy with a sexual relationship with her and an inherent distrust of her -- she is sexy but fickle, with signs of facades and predatory hints (his lady's "lips splitting in a cool smile" evocative of, say, a wolf's mouth opening in a moment when she's watching someone incorrectly think they've got a leg up on her).
HOW DOES THIS AFFECT INVIDIA gosh I'm glad you asked.
The interesting thing about how this narrative play is used on Invidia is her identity. The narrative always -- always -- refers to her as Lady Aquitaine in books one through four. And there's a few nuances in Aleran naming (High Lady Aquitainus Invidia is pulling rank, Aquitainar Invidia would indicate a bastard child who hasn't been legally accepted by her parents in Aquitaine) so referring to Lady Aquitaine constantly is a practical narrative way to convey who she is and how she's being perceived beyond the literal "this is who the author is referring to." A personally amusing note is that when Isana first meets Invidia in person, she doesn't recognize her; Invidia is literally "the woman in the red dress" until Serai blows Invidia's deliberate anonymity, at which point she's Lady Aquitaine again.
The narrative doesn't refer to her as Invidia until Princeps' Fury, after Amara has seen Invidia kill a High Lord for the Vord and is confronting her for the first time as a traitor to the Realm (note: some summaries credit the Vord queen with the kill because the narrative initially describes the High Lord as being easily destroyed by the Vord; however, when Amara looks more closely at the battlefield, it is specifically stated that she saw Lady Aquitaine clearing the High Lord's blood from her blade). There's so many nuances to this. Amara has known Invidia is guilty of treason from book one, but she was still Lady Aquitaine because Invidia's treasons were unprovable. She was, in all technical senses, still to be addressed as an upstanding lady of the Realm.
The narrative stops referring to her as Lady Aquitaine when Amara stops thinking of her as a lady of the Realm -- and it comes at about the same time that Amara stops addressing her as a lady of the Realm. It takes a few moments for it to hit Invidia herself that her identity has changed. Lady Aquitaine, as Amara says, is dead. What's left is Invidia; the same personality, the same background, etc. But she is stripped of her privileges as a High Lady. She doesn't command one of the Realm's twelve major regions anymore. She's been knocked from her place in the food chain.
In play, I'm simply going to refer to her as Invidia, though she will still occasionally point out that she was a High Lady, damnit. It's easier, less confusing. But I like that it has coincidental meanings: the characters around her wouldn't likely care about a title from an empire that isn't in their own world, her standing in Ariel is that of a basic citizen, and from Invidia's perspective Alera has probably been wiped out anyway. Invidia would still like to talk about herself as a High Lady -- but she is Invidia.