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I only have a couple problems with The Castle of Otranto, really. First of all, it's hokey. People must be tougher now than they used to be, because in old books everybody swoons all the time--the women, at least. Besides, being the first Gothic novel, I think it suffers from a kind of Casablanca syndrome--it's innovative and all, but so much time has passed, so many other works have been derived from it, that everything in it seems stupid and clichéd to those who only know the derivatives.
Second, and more important, nothing seems to happen ... or if it does, it's absurd. The plot of this novel (so far) (if you could call it a plot) is ridiculous. The cahracters are one-dimensional, predictable, and I don't care about them. These things aren't bad--I'm used to them; as an English major I'm immune to dry fiction--but that doesn't mean I enjoy them.
(Interlude: I find it curious that, on the first day of class when we had to introduce ourselves and say why we took the class, at least one person said he was excited about it because he was sick of dry fiction and thought this would be more fun. Now, I've read Jane Eyre and Dracula and Frankenstein (twice!), and with the exception of Dracula--which I read for fun and not for class anyway--they weren't noticably better than other things I've had to read. I suppose that specific kid might just be more interested in such things, but it led me to wonder ... Why would we perceive ghosts and monsters as being better than, I don't know, Dickens? (Yes, I know there are people who will extol the virtues of Dickens, but I'm not one of them, and even those who are cannot deny that he doesn't have the pop culture appeal that horror movies do.) Almost all my English classes have been mere hoops to jump through, for me--but maybe that just signifies my displeasure with the major. But still, I thought of Gothic lit just as another thing to do, not "oh goody, I can read about haunted castles!")
Most importantly, what drives me crazy about this book is the format. Either our modern conventions for writing dialogue had not been invented yet, or Mr. Walpole is flippantly ignoring them, because entire conversations are contained in huge paragraphs, with no quotation marks or punctuation of any kind--except dashes, sometimes--to distinguish between people's words, other people's words, and straight narration. Of course, there's usually a "he said" or "she said" kind of thing tagged onto each sentnce, but even then it's not as simple as "he said," it's more like, "and upon hearing this Manfred flew into a rage and he commanded ..." or "the noble princess, fearing her father's wrath but ever cognizant of her familial duty to devotion ..." Gah! Makes me want to toss the book across the room.
Yet despite all this I want to enjoy my time at the fair and with Matthew, so I read a bunch this morning anyway (I'm up to the part where two princes who I think are fighting over the same crown, and at least one of whom I know is nasty, are planning to marry each other's teenaged daughters). Still, I can only take so much, so when I noticed I had only 15 or 20 pages left to read, I put the book down in favor of Snow Crash, the book![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cepcion sent me for no reason other than that he's cool. I've finished that now, and I really liked it. And not just because it had cool weapons and virtual reality and some interesting things to say about religion and some Sumerian mythology and there was a new paragraph, and quotation marks, every time somebody talked.
Second, and more important, nothing seems to happen ... or if it does, it's absurd. The plot of this novel (so far) (if you could call it a plot) is ridiculous. The cahracters are one-dimensional, predictable, and I don't care about them. These things aren't bad--I'm used to them; as an English major I'm immune to dry fiction--but that doesn't mean I enjoy them.
(Interlude: I find it curious that, on the first day of class when we had to introduce ourselves and say why we took the class, at least one person said he was excited about it because he was sick of dry fiction and thought this would be more fun. Now, I've read Jane Eyre and Dracula and Frankenstein (twice!), and with the exception of Dracula--which I read for fun and not for class anyway--they weren't noticably better than other things I've had to read. I suppose that specific kid might just be more interested in such things, but it led me to wonder ... Why would we perceive ghosts and monsters as being better than, I don't know, Dickens? (Yes, I know there are people who will extol the virtues of Dickens, but I'm not one of them, and even those who are cannot deny that he doesn't have the pop culture appeal that horror movies do.) Almost all my English classes have been mere hoops to jump through, for me--but maybe that just signifies my displeasure with the major. But still, I thought of Gothic lit just as another thing to do, not "oh goody, I can read about haunted castles!")
Most importantly, what drives me crazy about this book is the format. Either our modern conventions for writing dialogue had not been invented yet, or Mr. Walpole is flippantly ignoring them, because entire conversations are contained in huge paragraphs, with no quotation marks or punctuation of any kind--except dashes, sometimes--to distinguish between people's words, other people's words, and straight narration. Of course, there's usually a "he said" or "she said" kind of thing tagged onto each sentnce, but even then it's not as simple as "he said," it's more like, "and upon hearing this Manfred flew into a rage and he commanded ..." or "the noble princess, fearing her father's wrath but ever cognizant of her familial duty to devotion ..." Gah! Makes me want to toss the book across the room.
Yet despite all this I want to enjoy my time at the fair and with Matthew, so I read a bunch this morning anyway (I'm up to the part where two princes who I think are fighting over the same crown, and at least one of whom I know is nasty, are planning to marry each other's teenaged daughters). Still, I can only take so much, so when I noticed I had only 15 or 20 pages left to read, I put the book down in favor of Snow Crash, the book
cepcion sent me for no reason other than that he's cool. I've finished that now, and I really liked it. And not just because it had cool weapons and virtual reality and some interesting things to say about religion and some Sumerian mythology and there was a new paragraph, and quotation marks, every time somebody talked.