While I was thinking about this post by Aliette de Bodard, on the prevalence of US tropes in storytelling, I wondered — as I do from time to time — how the fact that I’m Australian (living in Thailand, though that doesn’t really come into this post) writing for a predominantly US audience, affects my writing, consciously or unconsciously. Do I alter things according to my perception what I think Americans will understand and appreciate?
I’ve come to the consclusion that mostly I don’t — at least, not consciously. I know that America is a big, diverse country, and that while perhaps I know more about America than the average American knows about Australia, due to the nature of the flow of cultural product from centre to periphery, I certainly don’t know everything. I can’t second-guess America. I do know, though, that any Australian tropes I use may be interpreted as, or in light of, their nearest American equivalent, or American values in general.
As one example, I’m under the impression that America likes stories about winners. Australia rather likes stories about losers, people who go down fighting, or who just sort of battle on without triumphing. I think it has to do with the hostile, infertile landscape — you can’t triumph over this country, you’re always battling it, you can never achieve security here, it’s all too easy to try hard and still fail (as it surely is everywhere — but the land itself discourages the idea that effort leads naturally to success). It’s hard to be a great optimist when Death Stalks the Land, even when you live in Melbourne. But when I write about losers and people who just get by, maybe American readers find the characters puzzling or unappealing because (as well as any other reasons that there may be) there isn’t enough winning and general progress going on? Maybe I’m dead wrong, but the point is that I have the thought at all — I think I’m writing for a kind of foreign audience, and I expect some misunderstanding, but I don’t know if they think they’re foreign or expect to misunderstand. Am I making any sense?
And do (some? many?) fantasy writers use fantasy as a lingua franca, always assuming that we’re speaking the same magical language when in fact we might not be?
Anyway — I think certain Australian themes and figures connect very well with American counterparts — the cowboy, the brave outlaw, immigrant stories, colonial brutality. And America of course has its own great share of melancholy and pessimistic stories, and the landscape and legends of the American Old West segue pretty smoothly into Australia. But our different history, politics and demographics, our isolation from the rest of the West (except New Zealand), give us — I think — different views and dreams about ourselves that –I think — even well-informed Americans aren’t likely to be aware of, and there is no particular reason why they should be.
I’ve tried just once to write specifically for an American audience. I made an effort with The Heart of a Mouse to use American language and what could have been an American environment, according to my impression of both those things, as I didn’t want American readers to feel that the story was in a foreign place (although it isn’t necessarily in America, either, since a “search and replace” has been done on the whole world — in fact, I was trying to present homogenisation and franchise-ation as part of the apocalyptic scenario) . I was very surprised when some people took the story to be some kind of response to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. (I haven’t read it.) The lesson I took away from that reaction was that people are going to interpret your work in light of what they know, not in light of what they imagine you might know. It’s hard to imagine the latter in any case. Or maybe they just assume that you know what they know. And when you try to write a story in the colours of another culture, it’s probably even more likely that people will see it in light of familiar material from that culture. Australians and Americans probably both make the understandable error of thinking we know each other better than we do. I remember getting quite a culture shock in the U.S. when I went there.
There’s also the fact that America has been influencing Australia for quite a long time now. Apart from direct lifting of American tropes, I don’t know to what extent “Australian” tropes are now influenced by American ones. How much has our own cultural product for the last few decades, even the last century, been influenced by American cinema, literature, and general cultural presence? I have no idea, really. Sometimes it’s obvious, but when it isn’t — well, you don’t know, do you? And it goes without saying that my understanding of American cultural product is coloured by my own background anyway.
But I think the interest in the loser and the battler persists. Maybe also a sense that nothing matters hugely, there’s no grand scheme, no great starting point and no great end. Shit happens, then you die. Your only glory, which is probably too strong a word, is in how you struggle along the way. I don’t know. Maybe I’m falsely imagining that my own cynicism and apathy have a cultural basis.
But back to readers — when a Westerner reads, say, a Japanese novel, I think there’s an expectation of difference, of cultural stuff that we won’t get or that we will at least have to put in some effort to understand. I just wonder if as English-reading people we also have that expectation of difference from other places in the Anglosphere, or if we forget sometimes?
I feel a bit nervous posting this. I’m trying to talk about stuff I don’t know about (this is the internet, what else should I be doing?). I just get…inchoate feelings? I don’t know what questions to ask, and I’m afraid of embarrassing myself. (I am embarrassed that I can’t be wonderfully eloquent and erudite and say trenchant and incisive things. I feel like a bear of very little brain at times. A lot of the time, actually!) Anyway, I suppose it’s only natural for a writer to have woolgathering thoughts about writing, so… post.
(ETA: Seconds after posting, I’ve realised that some people mightn’t like my use of the word “periphery” to talk about an English-speaking country. Just to be clear, I’m talking about the Anglopshere, and I think of Australia as a country on the periphery of the Anglosphere. At least, I’ve always felt peripheral.)
