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Something here will eventually have to explode
Wherein I do rant.
It's not that I hate all humorous fantasy per se. I am a devotee of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books—though I consider those sort of a species of free-for-all satire, albeit one that makes me laugh out loud in public places—and I am greatly amused by Mary Anne Mohanraj's "Fleeing Gods." (I have not yet read Leslie What's Olympic Games. It's on my to-read-before-some-impatient-friend-clobbers-me-with-it list.) Mostly it's a literary stripe that I just don't read particularly often. This week, I read Esther Friesner's "Last Man Standing" in the January 2005 Fantasy & Science Fiction, and have found myself unexpectedly annoyed.
The story has been favorably reviewed in The Agony Column and I'm sure elsewhere as well. It deals with a sarcastic slave named Namtar who escapes drinking hemlock at the funeral of Gilgameš only to find himself pulled down into the underworld alive by the romantic intrigues of the goddess Inanna; along the way, he runs into everyone from an irate female bartender to the divine Ereškigal to the less than impressed shade of Gilgameš himself, with a side order of scheming priests and vengeful ghosts to boot. In and of itself, it's a very funny story. Namtar follows in a long tradition of wisecracking protagonists who consistently get themselves into hot water and must rely on the same capacity for quick talking to get themselves back out again: he's sort of a servus calidus transplanted from Roman comedy to the ancient Near East; Pseudolus among the mud bricks. The narrative displays about as much reverence as Namtar himself, with lines like "Though the death of gods is sometimes unavoidable—whether to fulfill a prophecy, to respect some hidden rule of the cosmos, to get mortals to sit up and pay attention during temple services, or simply to make for a better story—it can also be a mere temporary inconvenience, like cat-sitting." I didn't find the tone laugh-out-loud hilarious, but the snerk level is evenly high. And who could fail to be amused by the ancient Sumerian pop hit, Love Me, Baby, Like A Sacred Temple Whore?
. . . cut for righteous pedantry.
Herein lies much of my major trouble with the story. Sacred temple whores? Royal funerals in which luckless slaves accompany their betters into the afterlife to satisfy not the strictures of the underworld, but the earthly pomposity of corrupt priests who run everything? When celebrating his newfound freedom, Namtar goes on a binge in the tavern run by his old acquaintance Puabi: "There had even been a time or two (or seventeen) when the pair of them had shared a satisfying measure of beer-fueled fleshly comfort during the Feast of Inanna, all quite amicable as far as casual orgiastic sex goes." Pardon me, what? I am willing to refrain from a fisticuffs about the issue of human sacrifice, as the Sumerian literary text The Death of Gilgameš and the "death pits" of the royal tombs at Ur have been academically linked since the 1920's, but I am much less convinced of the existence of temple orgies. (Sacred prostitution, fine by me: only keep in mind that not every priestess in Mesopotamia is a prostitute. Especially the ones who have taken vows of celibacy.) Then there are the names Friesner chooses for her characters. A slave named Namtar: after the minister of Ištar in the Akkadian version of the goddess' descent? A bartender named Puabi: like the queen buried in the royal tombs of Ur? Don't let me even start on Namtar's former superior, another potter named Ibi-Sin: like Ibbi-Sîn, the last king of the (Akkadian: 2112-2004 BCE) Third Dynasty of Ur? I cannot speak to the accuracy of the name Sabit, but it suggests a Semitic—Akkadian—origin to me. (If anyone knows otherwise, however, please correct me!) Lastly, and perhaps this is the greatest sin my book: Esther Friesner gets Inanna's Descent wrong.
"When Inanna's favorite mortal lover died, the goddess of love and war determined to bring him back from the dead, a land ruled over by her sister Ereshkigal. Dressed in her finest robes, decked with her most precious ornaments, Inanna descended into the land of darkness, her dainty gold-sandaled feet itching to kick her sister's butt and reclaim her own."
No. I like retellings. I have trouble with blatant misrepresentations of mythology. In the Sumerian version, Inanna claims to have come down to the underworld for the funeral of her sister's husband Gudgalana. (There are certain problems with this explanation, given that Ereškigal's consort is traditionally Nergal, the god of plague and chaos; but assume for the moment that Inanna is telling the truth.) In the Akkadian version, the goddess gives no reason at all: the text implies that she has it in mind to take over the underworld from Ereškigal, but nothing Ištar says to her sister to the gatekeeper explicitly makes this point. Whether by the name Dumuzi or Tammuz, the goddess' lover—who is not a mortal; his name contains the determinative DINGIR, unambiguously indicating his divine status—does not enter into the story until Inanna-Ištar has already returned to earth and needs a substitute to take her place in the underworld. In the Sumerian story, she passes over her minister, her manicurist and hairdresser, and her faithful servant, all of whom have observed the proper mourning rites: but Dumuzi, magnificently dressed and playing his flute as blithely as though his lover had never been dead, Inanna happily sics her demon escorts on. The Akkadian version offers a more fragmentary narrative, but even if Dumuzi has mourned his lover and actually been set up as a fall guy by the powers of the underworld (as Ainsley Dicks has suggested), still he is alive and well and living aboveground when Ištar comes back up. A goddess descending into death to rescue her mortal lover, even unsuccessfully, is a sweet story: but it is not this myth.
To a certain degree, I realize that I cannot take too much academic offense—especially on behalf of a field technically not my own. And there is a simple answer to all of my dissatisfactions with "Last Man Standing": Hey. It's a humorous story. It's not mean to be historically accurate. Keep your shirt on. Fine; the shirt stays on. But because you're writing a funny story rather than a note for NABU, does that mean it's not worth the research? About the story, the author says, "This time I would like to blame the British Museum, specifically their section on ancient Sumeria, as well as Larry Gonick, creator of The Cartoon History of the Universe, for his obvious-yet-overlooked observation that in any large gathering of people, there's always some guy who has to be last in line." Frankly, the story reads as though all of Friesner's information about ancient Sumer—because I believe "Sumeria" is a font—derives from pages 105—111 of the graphic novel, especially 110 and 111. I think this bothers me on the grounds of both academia and storytelling. Most people wouldn't know the ziggurat of Marduk at Babylon from a hole in the ground.* Don't make their ignorance worse. You may not care much about the culture from which you take your material, but at least pay a little respect to its traditions. (I have some of the same difficulty with Tom Doyle's "The Floating Otherworld," though I am nowhere near as qualified to rant on the misuse of Japanese mythology as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
yuki_onna.) You can twist a story in all sorts of ways and still not warp it beyond its contextual resonance. Same for history: I'd have been enthused to read a historically-detailed, anachronically-sardonic story set in ancient Uruk. Beer straws and lapis lazuli do not make up for what looks like a basic lack of interest in any real exploration of the culture in which Esther Friesner chose to set her story. As it is, I think I might have been happier if she'd made up an fantasy country that bears a close resemblance to Sumer and set "Last Man Standing" there.
So, I suppose that's all my rant comes down to: Care about what you write about. Take the time to get to know the historical period, or the mythical background, on which you're basing your story. (By the same token, although I loved John G. McDaid's "Keyboard Practice: Consisting of an Aria with Diverse Variations for the Harpsichord with Two Manuals," the phrase Dingi' Pazuzu qatu Dingir Ishtar—which he uses as an example of ancient Sumerian, a potter's tuneless chant as she throws clay on her wheel—is not Sumerian. Inanna is Sumerian. Ištar is not. The word qatu, moreover, looks suspiciously like the Akkadian word for "hand." I appreciate that he took the time to find out the Sumerian word for "school," e-dubba, and use it; so why not the same attention to a quoted phrase? All right, so most of his readership will neither know nor care. But Assyriologists read science fiction too!) At least make a brief foray in its direction: it can't hurt. If nothing else, fewer writer-scholars will get annoyed.
Rant over. I return to my regularly scheduled Greek epigrams. Feel free to bash me now.
*Which is pretty much what it looks like, these days. Memo to self: don't make national monuments out of mud brick.
It's not that I hate all humorous fantasy per se. I am a devotee of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books—though I consider those sort of a species of free-for-all satire, albeit one that makes me laugh out loud in public places—and I am greatly amused by Mary Anne Mohanraj's "Fleeing Gods." (I have not yet read Leslie What's Olympic Games. It's on my to-read-before-some-impatient-friend-clobbers-me-with-it list.) Mostly it's a literary stripe that I just don't read particularly often. This week, I read Esther Friesner's "Last Man Standing" in the January 2005 Fantasy & Science Fiction, and have found myself unexpectedly annoyed.
The story has been favorably reviewed in The Agony Column and I'm sure elsewhere as well. It deals with a sarcastic slave named Namtar who escapes drinking hemlock at the funeral of Gilgameš only to find himself pulled down into the underworld alive by the romantic intrigues of the goddess Inanna; along the way, he runs into everyone from an irate female bartender to the divine Ereškigal to the less than impressed shade of Gilgameš himself, with a side order of scheming priests and vengeful ghosts to boot. In and of itself, it's a very funny story. Namtar follows in a long tradition of wisecracking protagonists who consistently get themselves into hot water and must rely on the same capacity for quick talking to get themselves back out again: he's sort of a servus calidus transplanted from Roman comedy to the ancient Near East; Pseudolus among the mud bricks. The narrative displays about as much reverence as Namtar himself, with lines like "Though the death of gods is sometimes unavoidable—whether to fulfill a prophecy, to respect some hidden rule of the cosmos, to get mortals to sit up and pay attention during temple services, or simply to make for a better story—it can also be a mere temporary inconvenience, like cat-sitting." I didn't find the tone laugh-out-loud hilarious, but the snerk level is evenly high. And who could fail to be amused by the ancient Sumerian pop hit, Love Me, Baby, Like A Sacred Temple Whore?
. . . cut for righteous pedantry.
Herein lies much of my major trouble with the story. Sacred temple whores? Royal funerals in which luckless slaves accompany their betters into the afterlife to satisfy not the strictures of the underworld, but the earthly pomposity of corrupt priests who run everything? When celebrating his newfound freedom, Namtar goes on a binge in the tavern run by his old acquaintance Puabi: "There had even been a time or two (or seventeen) when the pair of them had shared a satisfying measure of beer-fueled fleshly comfort during the Feast of Inanna, all quite amicable as far as casual orgiastic sex goes." Pardon me, what? I am willing to refrain from a fisticuffs about the issue of human sacrifice, as the Sumerian literary text The Death of Gilgameš and the "death pits" of the royal tombs at Ur have been academically linked since the 1920's, but I am much less convinced of the existence of temple orgies. (Sacred prostitution, fine by me: only keep in mind that not every priestess in Mesopotamia is a prostitute. Especially the ones who have taken vows of celibacy.) Then there are the names Friesner chooses for her characters. A slave named Namtar: after the minister of Ištar in the Akkadian version of the goddess' descent? A bartender named Puabi: like the queen buried in the royal tombs of Ur? Don't let me even start on Namtar's former superior, another potter named Ibi-Sin: like Ibbi-Sîn, the last king of the (Akkadian: 2112-2004 BCE) Third Dynasty of Ur? I cannot speak to the accuracy of the name Sabit, but it suggests a Semitic—Akkadian—origin to me. (If anyone knows otherwise, however, please correct me!) Lastly, and perhaps this is the greatest sin my book: Esther Friesner gets Inanna's Descent wrong.
"When Inanna's favorite mortal lover died, the goddess of love and war determined to bring him back from the dead, a land ruled over by her sister Ereshkigal. Dressed in her finest robes, decked with her most precious ornaments, Inanna descended into the land of darkness, her dainty gold-sandaled feet itching to kick her sister's butt and reclaim her own."
No. I like retellings. I have trouble with blatant misrepresentations of mythology. In the Sumerian version, Inanna claims to have come down to the underworld for the funeral of her sister's husband Gudgalana. (There are certain problems with this explanation, given that Ereškigal's consort is traditionally Nergal, the god of plague and chaos; but assume for the moment that Inanna is telling the truth.) In the Akkadian version, the goddess gives no reason at all: the text implies that she has it in mind to take over the underworld from Ereškigal, but nothing Ištar says to her sister to the gatekeeper explicitly makes this point. Whether by the name Dumuzi or Tammuz, the goddess' lover—who is not a mortal; his name contains the determinative DINGIR, unambiguously indicating his divine status—does not enter into the story until Inanna-Ištar has already returned to earth and needs a substitute to take her place in the underworld. In the Sumerian story, she passes over her minister, her manicurist and hairdresser, and her faithful servant, all of whom have observed the proper mourning rites: but Dumuzi, magnificently dressed and playing his flute as blithely as though his lover had never been dead, Inanna happily sics her demon escorts on. The Akkadian version offers a more fragmentary narrative, but even if Dumuzi has mourned his lover and actually been set up as a fall guy by the powers of the underworld (as Ainsley Dicks has suggested), still he is alive and well and living aboveground when Ištar comes back up. A goddess descending into death to rescue her mortal lover, even unsuccessfully, is a sweet story: but it is not this myth.
To a certain degree, I realize that I cannot take too much academic offense—especially on behalf of a field technically not my own. And there is a simple answer to all of my dissatisfactions with "Last Man Standing": Hey. It's a humorous story. It's not mean to be historically accurate. Keep your shirt on. Fine; the shirt stays on. But because you're writing a funny story rather than a note for NABU, does that mean it's not worth the research? About the story, the author says, "This time I would like to blame the British Museum, specifically their section on ancient Sumeria, as well as Larry Gonick, creator of The Cartoon History of the Universe, for his obvious-yet-overlooked observation that in any large gathering of people, there's always some guy who has to be last in line." Frankly, the story reads as though all of Friesner's information about ancient Sumer—because I believe "Sumeria" is a font—derives from pages 105—111 of the graphic novel, especially 110 and 111. I think this bothers me on the grounds of both academia and storytelling. Most people wouldn't know the ziggurat of Marduk at Babylon from a hole in the ground.* Don't make their ignorance worse. You may not care much about the culture from which you take your material, but at least pay a little respect to its traditions. (I have some of the same difficulty with Tom Doyle's "The Floating Otherworld," though I am nowhere near as qualified to rant on the misuse of Japanese mythology as
yuki_onna.) You can twist a story in all sorts of ways and still not warp it beyond its contextual resonance. Same for history: I'd have been enthused to read a historically-detailed, anachronically-sardonic story set in ancient Uruk. Beer straws and lapis lazuli do not make up for what looks like a basic lack of interest in any real exploration of the culture in which Esther Friesner chose to set her story. As it is, I think I might have been happier if she'd made up an fantasy country that bears a close resemblance to Sumer and set "Last Man Standing" there.So, I suppose that's all my rant comes down to: Care about what you write about. Take the time to get to know the historical period, or the mythical background, on which you're basing your story. (By the same token, although I loved John G. McDaid's "Keyboard Practice: Consisting of an Aria with Diverse Variations for the Harpsichord with Two Manuals," the phrase Dingi' Pazuzu qatu Dingir Ishtar—which he uses as an example of ancient Sumerian, a potter's tuneless chant as she throws clay on her wheel—is not Sumerian. Inanna is Sumerian. Ištar is not. The word qatu, moreover, looks suspiciously like the Akkadian word for "hand." I appreciate that he took the time to find out the Sumerian word for "school," e-dubba, and use it; so why not the same attention to a quoted phrase? All right, so most of his readership will neither know nor care. But Assyriologists read science fiction too!) At least make a brief foray in its direction: it can't hurt. If nothing else, fewer writer-scholars will get annoyed.
Rant over. I return to my regularly scheduled Greek epigrams. Feel free to bash me now.
*Which is pretty much what it looks like, these days. Memo to self: don't make national monuments out of mud brick.
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