the bone dances alone

[jazzfish]

I am rereading Emma Bull's Bone Dance, "a fantasy for technophiles." If you've not read it I make no promises that what follows will be at all coherent.

I can't remember the last time I read it but I know the first time was in high school (sophomore year, I think), and I know I read it enough times to be familiar with it.

My recollection of certain plot events is roughly: Mad Tom whups Sparrow and Frances but good, Sparrow gets Frances to safety by selling zir body, friends cart Sparrow to a place of recuperation, Sparrow recuperates, they try again.

It's only now, on this read-through, that I notice how Sparrow's been mentally hurt by what zie went through. Seriously. This is literally the first time that I noticed exactly how badly off zie is at the farm, how... damaged. To me it was always "okay, zie's in a new place with lots of strange people and wants to stay on the outskirts, not risk getting involved." That made sense to me.

But not getting involved even with your friends? Yeah, that made sense to me too. Partly because it's consistent with how Sparrow's been portrayed up 'til now, just brought out to the surface and magnified tenfold. And partly because Sparrow as a character always resonated with me anyway. Nothing's for free, not even (especially not) friendship; people getting close to and learning about me are dangerous. So no longer having anything to say to Theo, that made sense. I didn't understand why Sherrea got so upset at Sparrow's detachment.

Sparrow's a perpetual, pathological, outsider. It's probably good that I can recognise that now as a defence, as a broken place. Really, though, all I can see is horror and a deep sadness at who I was, that that seemed perfectly normal to me.

The end of the book has always confused me before, it felt like it kind of trailed off. I suspect that's because that's where Sparrow stops being the perpetual outsider, and I never knew how to handle having the character I could identify with changed into one of them. Not that Sparrow does either, as I recall.

Comments

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

Question regarding your use of gender-neutral pronouns:
1a) Were they used in the book, or just by you here?
1b) Were the characters in the book androgynous, or are you androgynizing them by your descriptive usage here?

[jazzfish]

1a) They're not used in the book.
1b) Neither; at least, if I'm androgynizing Sparrow it's unintentional and a result of an imprecision of language.

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

1b) It seems to me that use of gender-neutral pronouns to describe a known-gender[-preference] character is androgynizing and inducing language imprecision, though--which you accomplished (it seems) by using zie and zir in reference to Sparrow, here.

[jazzfish]

Using them introduces less language imprecision than using others, in this particular case, and I didn't want to figure out how to write the 'by selling zir body' sentence elegantly without using a pronoun. (That is not an invitation for you to be "helpful" and write it for me.)

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

Not trying to be "helpful" or antagonistic, I just don't understand why, if Sparrow's gender is known and constant, a sentence about Sparrow would not be written with specificity in the gender pronouns. I see the value of use of gender-neutral pronouns, but only in cases where the gender in question is unknown/flexible/non-constant.

[jazzfish]

The book is told in first-person without reference to Sparrow's gender.

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

Ah! That clarifies it, thank you.