Roz Kaveney CRSF Keynote
Roz Kaveney is a poet and novelist living in London. She is perhaps best known for books on popular culture like READING THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, her verse translation of the poems of Catullus and her Lambda-winning trans novel TINY PIECES OF SKULL.
Already well-known in the SFF community as a critic, reviewer and anthologist, the RHAPSODY OF BLOOD sequence is her return to the promise of her earlier short stories after a long hiatus.
Roz Kaveney CRSF Keynote: Against Intention – Random and aleatoric elements in the creation of Rhapsody of Blood
I’ve been asked here because I recently completed a five volume work of the fantastic that some people think is important. Rhapsody of Blood is a novel of around two thirds of a million words which appeared in five volumes between 2012 and 2023. It is set in the mythic and historic past of the ‘real’ world as well as its present and future, and deals episodically with two heroines, one an immortal, Mara the Huntress, the other Emma Jones, a young woman in the 80s, as they resist a shadowy antagonist who has corrupted human history by teaching magical procedures whereby men raise themselves to power and godhood through bloodshed. It includes myths of foundation and creation, various apocalypses and some sardonic comments on the Heroine’s Journey; it includes among many many other things the Fall of Tenochitlan, the Secret of the Templars, elves, Britart and the Twilight of the Aesir.
My work on these books coincided with a return to poetry after a gap of over thirty years and my reinvention as some sort of neo-classical formalist, my almost accidental production of a highly praised translation of the Latin poet Catullus and the belated publication of my first and very different autobiographical novel. It also overlapped with the last couple of collections of critical essays by me and others on genre in television and film and a fair amount of political work on committees and social media. I was also busy as an editorial reader – primarily of literary fiction – for various London publishers.
I thought it would be worthwhile to document my creative process, as far as I can from the vantage point of two decades, and in the course of doing so, discuss some theoretical matters that arise. This is perhaps particularly worthwhile because for most of my working life I have been a critic and reviewer rather than a novelist and poet. This might have led me to produce work obsessed with its own critique – in the event, overarching concern about that possibility has made me an intuitive writer who plans as little as possible and relies in both my fiction and my poetry on the material to create its own structure and interior logic.
There is a school of aesthetic philosophy – intentionalism – which tries to mandate readings that are consistent with the author’s intentions. As you can perhaps guess from my title, I am profoundly sceptical about this view, not least because of the analogies with Originalism, the school of right-wing American jurisprudence which tries to bind interpretation of the US Constitution to what we know, or can allegedly think we know , of the framers’ intentions. Thus – in some Originalists’ thinking – no social attitude formulated much after 1790 can possibly be constitutional: recent Supreme Court judgements against abortion have said as much and indicated preparedness on these grounds to overturn legalization of gay sex and interracial marriage. This is not only vile but nonsense – both because the ability of Congress to amend the Constitution indicates that it was intended as a living document and because Originalists choose to ignore that the framers clearly regarded some things as so axiomatic in Common Law that they need not be spelled out, notably privacy.
I make this detour because it seems to me that Intentionalism likewise has an agenda, to bind readings to a notion of the Author as Authority that may be gratifying to some writers who like to see themselves as exercising total – one might almost say imperial – control but which is both a petty minded and parochial attack on post-modernism, but rules out readings which deal in, say, the constraints of genre and the freedoms those constraints permit, the time-bound implicit prejudices embedded in texts, the workings of influence and its anxieties, the presence in texts of loud echoes of other texts the author forgot they read a decade earlier. I’m talking less about The Death of the Author than about Reading Everything as what I call A Thick Text, not just what’s on the page in front of you but everything that is, or might reasonably be supposed to be relevant to the process of its production.
Strict intentionalist readings have the empirical problem that documented facts change. Contrary to a century of rather prurient gossip masquerading as scholarship, Wiliam Morris both knew of and accepted his wife’s relationship with Rosetti – he wrote an incomplete verse drama in 1871 advocating free love two decades before News From Nowhere. His daughter hid it: I found it and wrote about it – and also told Antonia Byatt in the pub, a fact possibly relevant to her novel Possession. It has recently emerged that the children’s author Nicholas Stuart Gray was a trans man, which affects how we read, say, THE SEVENTH SWAN. And then, of course, there’s the question of thoughts an author could not let themselves consciously think but which are implicit in the notebooks…
What I’m advocating is a post-modern way of looking at texts that is not sloppy as detractors claim but actually far more rigorous and multidisciplinary…And as keen as Ranke on setting out what actually happened…
Which leads to my establishing some of the relevant biographical facts in the background of Rhapsody of Blood, just to make the lives of future scholars a little easier. In my twenties, I messed up several brilliantly promising careers through a mixture of principle, bloody-minded arrogance and bad luck; by the end of that decade I had transitioned and found a career that actually suited me, as a reviewer and as an advisory reader for various publishers. There followed a period of ill-health followed by a period of desperate survivor hedonism. As I have mentioned, In my twenties I had abandoned my original ambition to be a poet: in my late 30s, I turned my Chicago adventures in the early days of my transition into a comic novel that I was unable to sell: in my early 40s I wrote a few sf and fantasy short stories and started and abandoned two ambitious projects. On of the reasons I abandoned them was that for several years in the mid 90s I was heavily involved in civil liberties and civil rights politic. I managed to offend the incoming Blair government and set aside any political ambitions I might have had – and then had a midlife health crisis and a number of bereavements that reminded me that time had passed and I had achieved very little. I am fairly certain that all the above is of relevance to the themes and plot of the Rhapsody novels.
As a side result of my critical work on film and television , I got sucked into various media fandoms, notably into the category of Buffy and Angel fanfic referred to as femslash, mildly erotic reinvention of Whedon’s characters as overtly in lesbian relationships, and rediscovered the joy of writing for its own sake but also for a small enthusiastic audience. When writer friends who had liked my earlier work suggested that it was time I got back to creating my own stuff, I listened, but was also aware that writing fanfic had loosened me up a little.
I should add that in the early 90s I worked closely with John Clute on his Encyclopaedia of Fantasy and in particular – at an early stage – on helping him name and taxonomise the various common tropes of genre fantasy. It would not be truthful to say that in the Rhapsody books I consciously ticked off one of the tropes we named after another including several that didn’t make it into the final text: equally the books are informed by that work.
Elsewhere in my critical writings I’ve written about the three standard matters of modern genre fantasy, which have largely replaced old national myths like The Matter of Britain, and which I have termed The Reconciliation Of Faerie and the mundane, the search for the Cure for The World’s Pain and the Education of the Prince. The problem I hit once I started work on my own huge epic is that a lot of the books I was describing when I produced that taxonomy are not only set in a pseudo-mediaeval world but, with a few notable exceptions, rather tend to mediaeval ales and solutions, and to the restoration of an assumed natural order – the rich man in his castle, the poor man at the gate. God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate…well, screw that, frankly.
I wanted to write something that reflected my values – but that also had all the visceral excitements of the books and other media I love – swashbuckling historical romance, noir thrillers, books full of intricate puzzles, intrigues and surprises, a reasonable number of very obscure scholarly and literary jokes that only I would get, a lot of historical settings that I’d already done a lot of the reading for so I didn’t have to do too much research…
It wasn’t going to be much like anything else, even like the other fantasy novels I like. For one thing bits of the narration were going to be vast non-linear panoramas and other scenes would be delicate and intimate and quite minor characters would have great lines, and there would be a lot of comedy and some moments of chilling horror and sexiness and blasphemy. I did realise that it was going to be fairly non-commercial and in my late 50s I did not especially care.
And each book would have one epigraph from a famous philosopher and one from a famous female rock or soul vocalist…
To start with, I needed heroines.
One was going to be an immortal and she was going to fight gods, not all gods but some gods. So I thought of the Rituals of Blood – becoming gods through mass murder – pretty much straight away, which gave me titles for the series and the individual volumes straight away. And it was a bit close to fighting vampires but on a bigger scale. I spent several seasons of Buffy assuming that the Slayer power drew on the vampires killed. When Whedon made it clear instead that Slayers drew on a demon – stupid idea if you ask me – I thought my idea was too good to waste. Which made Mara both the protector of the weak against the strong but also the top predator in the food chain. Which gave me a heroine with a sense of herself as morally in a grey area and therefore not allowed privileges. So inevitably she became a bit like a ronin in a Japanese samurai film, a master-less wanderer, and also inclined somewhat to despise most gods who might not have done anything that would bring her down on them, but also give themselves airs. And her relationship with them would be prickly because she’s police…And she will be aware that however hard she tries, she cannot save everybody because she will always be too late for malefactors’ first victims: and is aware of that irony too.
But also she has to exercise restraint, because she refuses to take on issues outside her mission, or indeed to plan much beyond spotting people who might become a problem later and giving them fair warning. And the obvious bad magus was Aleistair Crowley, and warning him off became part of the frame narrative for the first four books. Except of course the real frame narrative was her telling someone else how she talked to Crowley. Who was she talking to? I didn’t know and, I realised, I didn’t need to know…I assumed I would find out in due course.
And I decided Crowley would be one of the characters who my other heroine would come across and would be a nuisance.
So, I thought, how did Mara – and I have no idea why I called her that except that I liked the sound – become the Huntress. Revenge? Well partly but that’s a cliché so maybe she took the mission first and became vengeful second…Which gave me the wish to become the protector, but wishes go in threes…so she had sisters, clan sisters and also lovers , who got one wish each…from a wandering god…which gave me a proto society of way stations and trade in commodities between isolated communities and two sisters whose wishes would also be fulfilled ironically.
Sof was easy because she wishes for understanding and therefore, like knowledge, endlessly dies and is reborn…which means that Mara has perpetually to search for her. And among her lives would be Mary of Egypt, who would also be Mary Magdalen, and Hypatia. And I remembered a very bad dream I had never found a way of using.
And when I had the third sister whom I called Lillit ask to evade the workings of time and chance, I vaguely knew that this would be a very bad thing indeed, but it took me several years to work out why and how…People often ask why I made my immortal demigoddess a first person viewpoint character and the answer is partly so that she could find out things I didn’t know yet…Oh, and later on I discovered that in some Jewish legends Lilith who was Adam’s first wife had a sister, called Mara, but honestly I didn’t know that.
So Mara was one type of heroine. And the other was Emma, who was going to be English, socially insecure, romantically attached to a posh mean girl, Caroline, and suddenly finds herself thrust into nightmare and taking to it rather well. Some people who read early drafts of the first Emma pages complained that it was all a bit YA lesbian romcom, which, frankly, was pretty much what I was aiming for so that when a guest at a drinks party turns into an ogre and bites Caroline’s head off, it would be genuinely shocking, as, I’m glad to say, many readers have found it. Look kids, Mara has already talked to Crowley about human sacrifice- did you think this was a novel in which these two nice dyke kids were going to be safe? Mara turns up, executes the ogre and is gone without explanation. And suddenly Emma’s tutor is keen to tell her Caroline never existed and seems to be right – thereby revealing himself to the reader, and indeed to me – as one of the faces worn by my villain.
But I already liked Caroline’s voice and suddenly she came back as the ghostly emissary of a mysterious employer – mysterious to most of the characters for the next two books and for parts of them even to me. And Emma and Caroline start having adventures.
I made a few plans but decided that for the most part I’d wing it. I made the decision to trust my own material. Originally I envisioned a trilogy but it gradually grew – not least when my excellent editors at Plus One, Deborah Grabien and Jacqueline Smay asked me to open out plot points – notably Mara’s pursuit of Jack The Ripper – that I had mentioned in passing. Writing about Jack involved me in making one of his victims an active character elsewhere in the sequence. Thinking about why Mara didn’t catch him earlier meant she had to be busy with the 1888 Sudanese invasion of Ethiopia. Giving him a non sexual motive gave me the primordial fungus he is trying to cultivate. Having Mara try to understand how a Victorian man of science might understand magic rituals gave me the young H.G. Wells as her sidekick – which in turn made me give them adventures which prefigure his later writings. Inventing the fungus and deciding it was a person gave me important plot elements for later. It’s really a wonder that I was able to keep it down to five volumes…
I wanted to write a fantasy set in the real consensual world – partly because I’d been playing Civilization a lot and couldn’t face making up a fantasy map. I wanted to write about power and its abuses, and about religion. I wanted to write two sorts of fantasy heroine, one ruthless and effective and also compassionate – and because she is an immortal gets to drop names on a scale I can only dream of -, one empathic and quietly competent but rather too in love with her own cleverness. I’d read Pullman’s His Dark Materials and thought it a cheap shot to have the god behind the curtain be a drooling idiot, and so I wanted to write a version of the God of the Abrahamic faiths who’d be both ally and secondary antagonist to my heroines, and a charming dangerous old fraud. I wanted a shadowy mostly offstage villain who would be genuinely terrifying when we finally meet him and a gallery of historical and contemporary villains who would be horrible in different ways. Because like everyone British my age I grew up on Dr. Who, I liked the idea of a heroine who is always saying I am the Huntress and I hunt alone, yet somehow regularly acquires sidekicks, famous sidekicks…
And all of this came to pass, more or less, but I only planned it at the level of ‘wouldn’t it be cool if’ because I know there were a lot of ideas I didn’t use, like making far more of a thing of Mara and Emma never having any trouble with languages. I thought about that and realised that developing that idea would involve a lot of research into things I’m not very interested in, so I just decided that once you get involved with the magic world, that goes away. I wasn’t very interested in having my characters spend a lot of time walking around like they do in Tolkien and Martin – I did that a bit in the Atlantis section of RITUALS -and so I created Shadow originally as a sort of magic hyperspace and only gradually as a larger realm over and under the mundane.
Then I needed Mara to have a companion in the French Revolution section vulnerable because Mara can’t simply hoist her out of the mundane and into Shadow. I’d already decided that Polly – I’ll explain Polly in a moment – had become an immortal through using Newton’s Elixir. Which made me decide that somehow there was something wrong with Newton’s elixir. Which made me decide that at some point in the past a crucial detail of what once made alchemy work was forgotten. Which sent me off to read up on alchemy in First Century Alexandria which gave me large parts of the plot of RESURRECTIONS and the later volumes. Because I planned so little in advance, I kept running up against problems of plot logic, and each time I solved a problem, I found myself with new fertile ideas as a bonus. Writing about Alexandria gave me the opportunity to write about the Jewish philosopher and translator Philo and his neo-Platonism gave me insight into the creation and purpose of Heaven. And made me think about the mystery of what happened to Alexander the Great’s body, and having an interesting idea about that made me invent a villain that might have a use for it.
All I knew about Atlantis was that Mara was going to go there and it was going to sink. There’s a Heinlein story with unpleasant cultists who worship the Bird and when I read that in my teens I thought he didn’t do enough with that, and I got the idea of a city that wasn’t a city yet became the archetype of human cities. And as Mara tries to understand the place and the creature I built them round her and tried to understand what I was writing. One of the reasons I increasingly trusted myself to improvise and let my subconscious do so much of the work was that at the early point in the books when I wrote the Atlantis section, what was in fact ramshackle improvisation felt like a tightly planned construction.
And I knew that the Bird and its chicks were not done with me yet…
I also set myself a few constraints – for the most part I avoided using characters from other people’s fiction and the historical sections adhere to real world chronology punctiliously and that created its own problems and solutions. I knew I wanted to have Mara encounter a fairly young Voltaire, which gave me the chance to write London in the early Eighteenth century of squalor and coffee houses and I was originally minded to include Jonathan Wild, the police chief who was also controller of London’s crime. But unfortunately for my purposes he had been hanged some short while before Voltaire arrived in England…And then it occurred to me that the fictional versions of Wild, in The Beggar’s Opera and the Brecht-Weill Threepenny Opera, both had a daughter, Polly. And I found myself writing a brash young woman who talked in a mixture of thieves’ cant and slightly idiosyncratic pedantic grammar that I probably got from Dickens’ Magwitch.
And the moment I wrote a few lines of her dialogue I knew that she was going to become another immortal and bounce off both my heroines with a snarky pragmatic view of life.
The sort of vaguely random research I found myself doing sometimes gave me solutions to problems even before I recognised them as such. I decided it would be tasteless to make a y of the great C20 massacres into magical operations and so my obvious choice was the Jacobin Terror. And I needed someone credible who could convince Mara that Robespierre and Saint Just were up to the sort of no good in which she would take an interest. And it turned out that the priest, diplomat and serial traitor Talleyrand was both at Voltaire’s deathbed and in exile in London just when I needed him there.
Some plot elements come from completely random conversations and being a good listener. I was at a party and sat overhearing three musicians working with various kinds of electronica talking shop. I asked a new friend what her PhD was on and let her tell me at great length about Eighteenth Century mechanisms, about counterweights and elaborate systems of chains and pulleys, and suddenly I knew how a heroine who can literally walk through walls, or at least walk around to where they aren’t, can be trapped in a cell, if trying to leave it will kill people. I talked to a friend who had been stationed outside Basra about the boring dangerous bits of war and suddenly the car park of a base in Iraq became a real place for me.
And I used technology. Google Earth let me plot an incredibly fast journey from Gibbon’s home in Lausanne to the site of the Assassins’ base in Alamut and helped me describe a battle in Ethiopia for which I could find little information except where it happened, by showing me the exact layout of the site so I could work out from terrain which road Sudanese cavalry would ride down into a killing ground. And YouTube gave me people’s voices – people talk of HG Wells’ slightly odd voice but you need to hear it to write him. And other people have put research online that I did not have to do myself – I could just look up the time it would take by ship from Caesarea to Alexandria in the spring of 16 C.E or where the Museion stood in relation to the Prefect’s house or the Riman barracks
There are I am sure holes in the plot logic and moral structures of what I ended up with but from the beginning readers and reviewers seem to have felt that this heap of narrative fragments amounts to something bigger and more ambitious than its parts. In spite of all the randomness and improvisation each volume ends on a decisive note for both heroines – Mara for three volumes progressively alienated from friends and loves with each temporary victory having downsides and Emma progressively triumphant and yet further and further from the girl she once was and who Caroline loved. And at the end of Book 4 REALITIES both have been tricked and outwitted and trapped outside the mundane world in Shadow, giving their enemy a free hand to mould the twenty-first century…
Well, I finally ended it and in my novel at least theodicy is snatched from disaster.
Because, of course, this is a fantasy….
Roz Kaveney will be in conversation with Louie Stowell this evening, Wednesday 11th October 7pm in London to launch Revelations
For more information and to purchase tickets, CLICK HERE
Thanks Roz for this series which I thoroughly adored. So intelligent and compassionate.