There's a tendancy in a particular kind of mainstream fantasy, (by which I mean sci-fi, sword and sorcery, superheroes, whatever) to write metatexts, to have stories that talk about the fact that they're stories, and it's linked to the fan-writer.
See, the fan-turned-write grows up with a particular narrative, Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica, or Batman, or whatever. As she gets older, she realises that what she found engrossing and convincing as a child isn't as much so as an adult. Anybody who watched the 60s Batman show as a kid and then later as an adult knows what I'm talking about. Basically, kids are far more willing to suspend their disbelief.
So, as an adult, the fan-writer looks back at the story elements and says, 'Dang, we gots to fix this!' and alters the story so that it's more believable to an adult. You can see this in Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica. He justifies the remarkably low-technology of a space-faring society by saying that the antagonists are able to manipulate high-technology, specifically networked computers.
There's another easy path to suspension of disbeleif, though. Basically, when an audience member says, 'Hey! That doesn't make any sense,' a writer can just throw up her hands and say, 'Well, it is just a story.' Sometimes that's a childish gesture that basically says, 'stories aren't important, so don't worry about it,' or even worse 'fantasty stories aren't important.'
However, there are also times when that is a gesture of honesty and complexity. Gaiman and Moore do this all the time, revealing the constructed nature of their stories as a way to add layers of meaning and metaphor. 'Don't just read this for internal consistency or 'realism'' they say, 'read them for symbol and metaphor and reference!'
A particularly interesting example of this is in Batman Begins written by David S. Goyer, a comics writer. Much of that movie is devoted to explaining/justifying Bruce Wayne's decision to put on a bat costume and leap from roof-top to roof-top in Gotham. At night. One of the major elements of the justification is theatricality. Wayne acknowledges that he's playing a character (though how much he's playing the character and how much the character's playing him is another question!).
When Wayne says, "As a man I'm vulnerable, but as a symbol, I could be incorruptable" he's basically describing how Batman works as a fictional character. He's analysing the Batman story. Goyer justifies this character's decisions by obliquely alluding to how the narrative itself functions. Batman is a symbol, not to be treated as 'real,' in a sense. Not only is the audience not supposed to read these kinds of stories in realistic terms, but the characters don't either.
Posted by orion at October 16, 2005 12:52 AM