more thoughts about The Unraveling
Major spoilers for the entire book!
I want to think a bit about the implications of the frame story for the main narrative and what Rosenbaum might be trying to do with that. I've been looking for reviews that talk about this aspect of the novel but I have yet to find anything.
So, the first 21 chapters form a fairly conventional narrative with occasional "interludes" of documents from the world - conventional in the sense of being in Fift's third-person limited POV, complicated slightly by his triple-camera nature. After chapter 21 we get a new interlude in the form of a personal essay written as a school assignment, in which the young essay-writer Ruich explains the practice of "storytelling" and "mancing", or as we would say, real person fiction and shipping. And then we get Book Two, four chapters set thirty years later, and then a letter from Thavé explaining that the entire previous document is a story they're sending their distant friend. And then the appendices, as "document attachments".
When I first read it, I found it kind of hilarious that Rosenbaum gave us this careful explanation of the very-familiar-to-me practice of RPF - this is a way more detailed explanation than we ever got of the economy, or technology, or infrastructure, at least not until the appendices - at this point in the book I still hadn't figured out that they were dug down into the planet and was still sort of vaguely thinking all this was happening in near orbit or something. (Although going back, that may have been my failure to pick up on the indications in Rosenbaum's careful wording.) But, okay, Rosenbaum clearly wants to make sure we get this, so - why? The book is too tight for this to be a random authorial-insert commentary on real-world RPF. I think the obvious conclusion is that Rosenbaum is suggesting that at least one of the two narrative arcs is storytelling, is fictional within the book's universe, and that seems like an interesting choice to make in an already complicated book, and so I want to think about why!
The most straightforward read to me is that Book One is true and Book Two is fiction. Ruich tells us that the "tricky topics you can't show directly" are fighting, sex, and Staid matters, and Book One shows all three of those things directly - those are pretty much the key scenes that drive and determine the plot! On the other hand, Book Two "implies them and skirts the edges", but does not show them directly, exactly like Ruich tells us is permitted. Ruich also concludes ver essay by saying "I wanted to imagine a happy ending. I just wish it could come true in real life, too." - and then we immediately cut to Fift and Shria getting a happy ending. But thirty years later, when they are juuuuust aged up enough to not offend sensibilities! Ruich makes it very clear that underage is just as controversial a topic in the mancing world as it is in real-life fanfiction communities. I mean, Ruich's argument about the purity of their friendship and "maybe there is something there but shippers make it harder for them" could more or less come verbatim out of more than one round of RPF shipping discourse.
In this read, why is Rosenbaum doing this? It's a little bit of an authorial have-your-cake-and-eat-it, in that he gets to write the happy ending he maybe wishes the characters could have even if it's not what he thinks "really happens" in some sense. But in-story, I think it's explained as part of Thavé's message. Thavé tells their friend (I'm using they because they predate the whole Vail/Staid gendering) that the story reminds them of them, long ago when they were young, specifically comparing themself to Fift and their friend to Shria, and so Book 2 echoes the wish that Thavé expresses explicitly in their letter: let me lure you here, come find me, can we still understand each other. Book 2 is Thavé's story where Shria *does* come find Fift and they can still understand each other - maybe found by Thavé after picking Book One, which "someone turned into a narrative", or maybe even storytold by Thavé themself. (Which is so much a part of how fanfiction, including RPF fiction, functions in fan communities, as a kind of elaborate message, sometimes! Here, I love you, I wrote about these boys kissing for you! Here, I think you're awesome, I wrote about these girls kissing, please notice me! Are you on AO3, Benjamin Rosenbaum?)
I think you can also read Thavé's letter to mean that Book One and Book Two are *both* at least somewhat fictional - they say "I'm sure there are some embellishments and errors" in how "the local parasentiences wove a biography out of the analysis of electronic excreta". There are parts in Book One that the local parasentiences shouldn't know about - Fift and Shria's sexual encounter in the body-shop lab, the conversation with Dobroc once Fift's agents have been scrambled, Fift and Shria's final conversation and kiss - so maybe whoever "turned it into a linear textual narrative" was one of those objectionable Fift-Shria underage Vail/Staid slash mancers, and Thavé deliberately picked that version of the story so that the pining and yearning would be a better lure for wanting the shippy (excuse me, mancey) resolution. Dobroc's fanvid (excuse me, clip opera) reprises the first half of the novel, which confused me at the time - why were we spending all this time on this recap - but if you imagine that Dobroc's vid was a real document, the first half of Book One could even be read as a back-construction from it, building a narrative to connect, organize, and explain the famous clips in public footage. And then Dobroc ends up as part of the story zirself, in Book Two, the BNF actually getting to settle down with their fan object...
This is getting very meta for a book that already has pretty complicated worldbuilding! If this book was just about all of the ideas crammed into Book One, the genders and the bodies and the arcs of civilizations and the reputational economy and the cohort parenting, wouldn't that be enough? Maybe Rosenbaum made a bet at the bar that he could sell a novel with a 500000-year-old RPF shipper as an important character, who knows. In the book, though, I think this question of truthfulness is supposed to reflect back on the concept of the universal-surveillance no-privacy world, and the idea of an economy built on personal narratives. Rosenbaum clarifies in an appendix that "strictly speaking the planet has an agent-mediated emotional-transaction pride economy rather than a classical reputation economy". And "banker-historian" - "a professional responsible for emotional accounting, formalizing the story of a person or institution's emotional states so as to optimally influence their ratings" seems to be a somewhat prestigious job (an honor for Fift to be apprenticed to Pip, who has clients like Pom Politigus, who caters to really big celebrities like "virtuoso logistics coordinators" and "celebrity statistician-poets").
Rosenbaum is acting as the banker-historian of Fift - he has formalized a story of Fift's emotional states so as to optimally influence zir rating with us, the audience, who are thus drawn into Rosenbaum's world's economy, experiencing the operation of emotional accounting. If we don't have Book Two, how does that change how we feel about Fift's choice at the end of Book One? What does this story look like in Shria's emotional accounting, who gets rejected there, and is Rosenbaum successfully showing "another kind of balance" between Shria and Fift, in which neither has to be Supplanted, but both come off as sympathetic? What about in Pip's accounting, who is most decidedly rejected of any of the adults, but comes around at the end with a "guarded smile", "exactly the expression ze had when ze supervised the unfolding of a satisfyingly nonlinear sequence of banking-historical transactions". If Fift's rejection of Pip's scripting of their conversations with the attackers is in some ways a rejection of the whole system as laid out in the epigraph, that someone has to lose and someone has to win every encounter, that this is the heartbeat of the world - if part of the point of the Shelterings in Book Two is to create spaces outside of the economy, where there are no ratings and privacy makes a different kind of interaction possible - and for the first time in Book Two we get to see an interaction of siblings, which has ostensibly been so central to the world but we haven't gotten to see, and it doesn't look so much like struggle and supplanting but like growth - if even Pip agrees that Fift's story "works" - then I think Rosenbaum is drawing attention to the constructed, fictional nature of Fift's story specifically to make sure we're thinking about "emotional accounting", and what kind of stories it is possible to tell - specifically to undermine the epigraph, and say that the heartbeat of the world can be something other than displacement and struggle, something more like openness, solidarity, and hope.
This entry was originally posted at https://psocoptera.dreamwidth.org/557159.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
I want to think a bit about the implications of the frame story for the main narrative and what Rosenbaum might be trying to do with that. I've been looking for reviews that talk about this aspect of the novel but I have yet to find anything.
So, the first 21 chapters form a fairly conventional narrative with occasional "interludes" of documents from the world - conventional in the sense of being in Fift's third-person limited POV, complicated slightly by his triple-camera nature. After chapter 21 we get a new interlude in the form of a personal essay written as a school assignment, in which the young essay-writer Ruich explains the practice of "storytelling" and "mancing", or as we would say, real person fiction and shipping. And then we get Book Two, four chapters set thirty years later, and then a letter from Thavé explaining that the entire previous document is a story they're sending their distant friend. And then the appendices, as "document attachments".
When I first read it, I found it kind of hilarious that Rosenbaum gave us this careful explanation of the very-familiar-to-me practice of RPF - this is a way more detailed explanation than we ever got of the economy, or technology, or infrastructure, at least not until the appendices - at this point in the book I still hadn't figured out that they were dug down into the planet and was still sort of vaguely thinking all this was happening in near orbit or something. (Although going back, that may have been my failure to pick up on the indications in Rosenbaum's careful wording.) But, okay, Rosenbaum clearly wants to make sure we get this, so - why? The book is too tight for this to be a random authorial-insert commentary on real-world RPF. I think the obvious conclusion is that Rosenbaum is suggesting that at least one of the two narrative arcs is storytelling, is fictional within the book's universe, and that seems like an interesting choice to make in an already complicated book, and so I want to think about why!
The most straightforward read to me is that Book One is true and Book Two is fiction. Ruich tells us that the "tricky topics you can't show directly" are fighting, sex, and Staid matters, and Book One shows all three of those things directly - those are pretty much the key scenes that drive and determine the plot! On the other hand, Book Two "implies them and skirts the edges", but does not show them directly, exactly like Ruich tells us is permitted. Ruich also concludes ver essay by saying "I wanted to imagine a happy ending. I just wish it could come true in real life, too." - and then we immediately cut to Fift and Shria getting a happy ending. But thirty years later, when they are juuuuust aged up enough to not offend sensibilities! Ruich makes it very clear that underage is just as controversial a topic in the mancing world as it is in real-life fanfiction communities. I mean, Ruich's argument about the purity of their friendship and "maybe there is something there but shippers make it harder for them" could more or less come verbatim out of more than one round of RPF shipping discourse.
In this read, why is Rosenbaum doing this? It's a little bit of an authorial have-your-cake-and-eat-it, in that he gets to write the happy ending he maybe wishes the characters could have even if it's not what he thinks "really happens" in some sense. But in-story, I think it's explained as part of Thavé's message. Thavé tells their friend (I'm using they because they predate the whole Vail/Staid gendering) that the story reminds them of them, long ago when they were young, specifically comparing themself to Fift and their friend to Shria, and so Book 2 echoes the wish that Thavé expresses explicitly in their letter: let me lure you here, come find me, can we still understand each other. Book 2 is Thavé's story where Shria *does* come find Fift and they can still understand each other - maybe found by Thavé after picking Book One, which "someone turned into a narrative", or maybe even storytold by Thavé themself. (Which is so much a part of how fanfiction, including RPF fiction, functions in fan communities, as a kind of elaborate message, sometimes! Here, I love you, I wrote about these boys kissing for you! Here, I think you're awesome, I wrote about these girls kissing, please notice me! Are you on AO3, Benjamin Rosenbaum?)
I think you can also read Thavé's letter to mean that Book One and Book Two are *both* at least somewhat fictional - they say "I'm sure there are some embellishments and errors" in how "the local parasentiences wove a biography out of the analysis of electronic excreta". There are parts in Book One that the local parasentiences shouldn't know about - Fift and Shria's sexual encounter in the body-shop lab, the conversation with Dobroc once Fift's agents have been scrambled, Fift and Shria's final conversation and kiss - so maybe whoever "turned it into a linear textual narrative" was one of those objectionable Fift-Shria underage Vail/Staid slash mancers, and Thavé deliberately picked that version of the story so that the pining and yearning would be a better lure for wanting the shippy (excuse me, mancey) resolution. Dobroc's fanvid (excuse me, clip opera) reprises the first half of the novel, which confused me at the time - why were we spending all this time on this recap - but if you imagine that Dobroc's vid was a real document, the first half of Book One could even be read as a back-construction from it, building a narrative to connect, organize, and explain the famous clips in public footage. And then Dobroc ends up as part of the story zirself, in Book Two, the BNF actually getting to settle down with their fan object...
This is getting very meta for a book that already has pretty complicated worldbuilding! If this book was just about all of the ideas crammed into Book One, the genders and the bodies and the arcs of civilizations and the reputational economy and the cohort parenting, wouldn't that be enough? Maybe Rosenbaum made a bet at the bar that he could sell a novel with a 500000-year-old RPF shipper as an important character, who knows. In the book, though, I think this question of truthfulness is supposed to reflect back on the concept of the universal-surveillance no-privacy world, and the idea of an economy built on personal narratives. Rosenbaum clarifies in an appendix that "strictly speaking the planet has an agent-mediated emotional-transaction pride economy rather than a classical reputation economy". And "banker-historian" - "a professional responsible for emotional accounting, formalizing the story of a person or institution's emotional states so as to optimally influence their ratings" seems to be a somewhat prestigious job (an honor for Fift to be apprenticed to Pip, who has clients like Pom Politigus, who caters to really big celebrities like "virtuoso logistics coordinators" and "celebrity statistician-poets").
Rosenbaum is acting as the banker-historian of Fift - he has formalized a story of Fift's emotional states so as to optimally influence zir rating with us, the audience, who are thus drawn into Rosenbaum's world's economy, experiencing the operation of emotional accounting. If we don't have Book Two, how does that change how we feel about Fift's choice at the end of Book One? What does this story look like in Shria's emotional accounting, who gets rejected there, and is Rosenbaum successfully showing "another kind of balance" between Shria and Fift, in which neither has to be Supplanted, but both come off as sympathetic? What about in Pip's accounting, who is most decidedly rejected of any of the adults, but comes around at the end with a "guarded smile", "exactly the expression ze had when ze supervised the unfolding of a satisfyingly nonlinear sequence of banking-historical transactions". If Fift's rejection of Pip's scripting of their conversations with the attackers is in some ways a rejection of the whole system as laid out in the epigraph, that someone has to lose and someone has to win every encounter, that this is the heartbeat of the world - if part of the point of the Shelterings in Book Two is to create spaces outside of the economy, where there are no ratings and privacy makes a different kind of interaction possible - and for the first time in Book Two we get to see an interaction of siblings, which has ostensibly been so central to the world but we haven't gotten to see, and it doesn't look so much like struggle and supplanting but like growth - if even Pip agrees that Fift's story "works" - then I think Rosenbaum is drawing attention to the constructed, fictional nature of Fift's story specifically to make sure we're thinking about "emotional accounting", and what kind of stories it is possible to tell - specifically to undermine the epigraph, and say that the heartbeat of the world can be something other than displacement and struggle, something more like openness, solidarity, and hope.
This entry was originally posted at https://psocoptera.dreamwidth.org/557159.html. Please comment there using OpenID.