Alpennia Blog: Polysemy in Titling
Apr. 5th, 2016 11:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjThe pattern of titles for the Alpennia books just sort of evolved on its own, but in that way where you can tell that your subconscious knew what it was doing. I've loved that every title in the main series addresses multiple aspects of the story from multiple angles. And that pattern has ended up helping brainstorm themes for future books.
Daughter of Mystery, as a title, was rather carefully designed to be interpretable as applying either to Margerit (due to her work with thaumaturgical mysteries) or to Barbara (due to the deliberate concealing of her parentage and origins). The Mystic Marriage was rather similarly obvious, referring to the alchemical process whereby different basic elements are "married" in a transformative process (symbolized in the literature by the union of the sun and moon, or by other figures representing opposites) to create the elixir or philosopher's stone. So the title has an overt reference to Antuniet's alchemical work, but also very directly to the way in which the very opposite personalities of Antuniet and Jeanne transform each other and achieve a new synthesis. Perhaps somewhat oddly, I didn't bring in the most common motif to which the label "mystic marriage" is applied, which is the symbolic relationship between certain female saints and Christ where their devotion is depicted as a marriage.
In Mother of Souls the interpretations of the title are a bit less direct. The most obvious, perhaps, is Margerit's quest to start a women's college, riffing off the idea of an institution of learning being one's "alma mater" (of which "mother of the soul" is a loose translation). But there's also the theme of the medieval philosopher Tanfrit being, in some way, the mother of "modern" Alpennian academic thaumaturgy. And then there's a less overt sense of the Rotein river begin something of a symbolic maternal figure to the city and the land. (This is symbolized more clearly in the very briefly mentioned figure of Saint Rota, colloquially known as "Mama Rota", who began as a Roman-era river deity, later converted into a saint, but largely forgotten except among certain segments of the population. But you'll hear more about Mama Rota in Floodtide.)
The original idea for the title Mistress of Shadows (the book that follows chronologically after both Mother of Souls and Floodtide) came from the idea of Barbara taking up a new career in Alpennia's secret service, riffing off the slang term used in Daughter of Mystery using "shadows" to refer to employees used for quasi-legal activities. But I know I'd solidly hooked another of the themes for that book when I realized it would also apply to a new viewpoint character whose mystical talents include an ability to create connections between mystically powerful, but unskilled persons and mysteries designed by other parties. Well...it will all make sense when it comes up. In any case, the potentially sinister aspects of her talents, and the spin placed on them by other people, make her another natural candidate for the label "mistress of shadows".
I've been brainstorming for some time trying to come up with a title centering around "sister", and at the moment I have some vague ideas of possibly using Sisters in Spirit for the next book after that. It's a bit far out to have more than a few tendrils of plot worked out, but one of the themes will be women from very different spheres, who would be expected to be rivals and even enemies, finding kinship and common cause. Now if I were brainstorming for alternate interpretations of the title in order to try out some potential secondary plots, "spirit" automatically suggests something supernatural to do with ghosts or the like. It's a bit of a shame that the major period of spiritualism (in our own timeline) is just a smidge too late to tie in well. It would be a natural as a medium (see what I did there?) for Alpennian-style mysticism. Who knows, by the time I get to writing it, I'll have decided that advancing things by a decade or so is ok for plot purposes.
Given the events and concepts I've been noodling around with for the hypothetical Sisters in Spirit, I think the concluding book with the revolution would come after that one. And being a story that will focus on transformations and looking forward, some sort of title-word in the semantic field of children or heirs or descendants will probably be what I aim for.
But all of this started out because I was poking around into the relationship of the word "mystery" between the "religious secret" sense and the "trade mystery" sense, when I was coming up with the idea of the "mystery guilds" being both social groups devoted to religious activities (mysterium) and being the modern (Alpennian-world) evolution of social and trade organizations focused around a professional activity (misterium, from ministerium). This evolved into a sense of the essence of Fortunatus's De Mysteriis et Misteriis as understanding the development and shaping of thaumaturgical ceremonies as both an act of worship and the practice of a craft. So that sense of overlapping (and unrelated) meanings combining in synergy to produce a new, creative understanding is at the heart of my plot-development process for the entire Alpennian saga.
Plus, of course, my love of wordplay and polysemous ambiguity.
Daughter of Mystery, as a title, was rather carefully designed to be interpretable as applying either to Margerit (due to her work with thaumaturgical mysteries) or to Barbara (due to the deliberate concealing of her parentage and origins). The Mystic Marriage was rather similarly obvious, referring to the alchemical process whereby different basic elements are "married" in a transformative process (symbolized in the literature by the union of the sun and moon, or by other figures representing opposites) to create the elixir or philosopher's stone. So the title has an overt reference to Antuniet's alchemical work, but also very directly to the way in which the very opposite personalities of Antuniet and Jeanne transform each other and achieve a new synthesis. Perhaps somewhat oddly, I didn't bring in the most common motif to which the label "mystic marriage" is applied, which is the symbolic relationship between certain female saints and Christ where their devotion is depicted as a marriage.
In Mother of Souls the interpretations of the title are a bit less direct. The most obvious, perhaps, is Margerit's quest to start a women's college, riffing off the idea of an institution of learning being one's "alma mater" (of which "mother of the soul" is a loose translation). But there's also the theme of the medieval philosopher Tanfrit being, in some way, the mother of "modern" Alpennian academic thaumaturgy. And then there's a less overt sense of the Rotein river begin something of a symbolic maternal figure to the city and the land. (This is symbolized more clearly in the very briefly mentioned figure of Saint Rota, colloquially known as "Mama Rota", who began as a Roman-era river deity, later converted into a saint, but largely forgotten except among certain segments of the population. But you'll hear more about Mama Rota in Floodtide.)
The original idea for the title Mistress of Shadows (the book that follows chronologically after both Mother of Souls and Floodtide) came from the idea of Barbara taking up a new career in Alpennia's secret service, riffing off the slang term used in Daughter of Mystery using "shadows" to refer to employees used for quasi-legal activities. But I know I'd solidly hooked another of the themes for that book when I realized it would also apply to a new viewpoint character whose mystical talents include an ability to create connections between mystically powerful, but unskilled persons and mysteries designed by other parties. Well...it will all make sense when it comes up. In any case, the potentially sinister aspects of her talents, and the spin placed on them by other people, make her another natural candidate for the label "mistress of shadows".
I've been brainstorming for some time trying to come up with a title centering around "sister", and at the moment I have some vague ideas of possibly using Sisters in Spirit for the next book after that. It's a bit far out to have more than a few tendrils of plot worked out, but one of the themes will be women from very different spheres, who would be expected to be rivals and even enemies, finding kinship and common cause. Now if I were brainstorming for alternate interpretations of the title in order to try out some potential secondary plots, "spirit" automatically suggests something supernatural to do with ghosts or the like. It's a bit of a shame that the major period of spiritualism (in our own timeline) is just a smidge too late to tie in well. It would be a natural as a medium (see what I did there?) for Alpennian-style mysticism. Who knows, by the time I get to writing it, I'll have decided that advancing things by a decade or so is ok for plot purposes.
Given the events and concepts I've been noodling around with for the hypothetical Sisters in Spirit, I think the concluding book with the revolution would come after that one. And being a story that will focus on transformations and looking forward, some sort of title-word in the semantic field of children or heirs or descendants will probably be what I aim for.
But all of this started out because I was poking around into the relationship of the word "mystery" between the "religious secret" sense and the "trade mystery" sense, when I was coming up with the idea of the "mystery guilds" being both social groups devoted to religious activities (mysterium) and being the modern (Alpennian-world) evolution of social and trade organizations focused around a professional activity (misterium, from ministerium). This evolved into a sense of the essence of Fortunatus's De Mysteriis et Misteriis as understanding the development and shaping of thaumaturgical ceremonies as both an act of worship and the practice of a craft. So that sense of overlapping (and unrelated) meanings combining in synergy to produce a new, creative understanding is at the heart of my plot-development process for the entire Alpennian saga.
Plus, of course, my love of wordplay and polysemous ambiguity.
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no subject
Date: 2016-04-05 07:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-04-05 08:25 pm (UTC)Since the novel that is roughly congruent with the Sisters in Spirit concept will involve a significant non-Alpennian woman coming to Rotenek and struggling to make a place for herself there, it would be interesting to have her be someone who saw/communicated with ghosts (but perhaps had some very odd notions of what that meant).
I've realized that at some point the idea that new viewpoint characters will always be involved in a f/f/romance is going to go out the window. But perhaps by then I'll have trained my readership to be open-minded about such things.
no subject
Date: 2016-04-06 09:42 am (UTC)Namely, the titles you've got all emphasise what women can be in relationship to others: Daughter, Mother, Sister, (and indirectly Wife via Mystic Marriage). Now, in this case, the others are all (with the exception of 'daughter') women themselves, but...I dunno, when I realized this, it sort of sat a bit uncomfortably with me.
no subject
Date: 2016-04-06 04:53 pm (UTC)So much of literature -- and especially SFF -- spends a lot of time exploring the relationships between men. Too often, women exist in the narrative only in terms of their relationship to one of those men. Not in terms of their own personal identity, but especially not in terms of how their life interacts with the lives of other women. And that's simply counter to history and reality.
That's the heart of the "Bechdel Test", in some ways. It's the question of whether a movie (or other property) includes at least two named women who interact with each other in a context that has nothing to do with their connections to men. Any property that fails that test is a story about something other than the world we all live in.
Choosing to turn that trope inside-out wasn't an artificial socio-political statement. It's a recognition of reality. Even more than in our modern world, the gender-segregated world of early 19th century Europe meant that women's relationships to other women were of immense importance to their lives (even when those relationships were nominally derived from their respective connections with men).
Of course, all the Alpennian women have lives that have been significantly shaped by their relationships with specific men. That's inescapable. But it would be an authorial choice to make that what the stories are *about*, and it's not the choice I made.
Not all of the central female characters in these stories have a romantic or sexual attraction to women (although all the viewpoint characters to date have had that). But it's a guiding principle for me that the way in which I tell their stories will be through the lens of those female relationships. I expect that this will mess with people's minds on occasion -- both the readers who default to expecting male-female relationships to be the focus of a story, and the readers who (based on my publishing context) expect that all the important female-female relationships in the books will be romantic/sexual.
no subject
Date: 2016-04-07 10:54 am (UTC)I think I see -- I would've arranged things:
1. women defined in relationship to men.
2. women defined in relationship to women.
3. women defined in terms of their own personal identity,
finding (1) the most objectionable and (3) the least, but your order has (2) and (3) swapped. On that view, then the issue I raise is certainly not problematic.
no subject
Date: 2016-04-07 01:50 pm (UTC)So my emphasis on relationships isn't meant to say, "Women primarily exist in terms of their relationships with other women" but rather "An area that is noticeably lacking in fiction is the exploration of stories through the medium of women's relationships with other women."
For example, one could tell Antuniet's story as the story of a woman who alone and through her own valiant efforts achieves her life goals. And it would be an inspiring story and one that didn't focus primarily on her relationships with men (except in that her brother's treason precipitated the need for it). But it wasn't the story I wanted to tell.