Challenge 770 Response
Say What of Whom?
with Lance Dean
and Michael E. Lloyd
“Brain Dead Peep Star Dreams” appears in issues 769-770.
[Lance Dean] Really enjoying finding my way around your web site. Ran across the 770 Challenge. What terrific questions!
[Don W.] Glad you like BwS, Lance. It is at least among the oldest and is certainly the largest literary webzine on the Internet. There’s a lot to like in it.
[Lance D.] Here's a question to throw a monkey wrench in some of the other questions: How might the author write the story, in other than first person, without making it obvious that the author never addresses the narrator's gender?
[Don W.] Even in first person, “Brain Dead Peep Star Dreams” already makes it abundantly clear that the narrator has multiple genders. Therefore, in a third-person narration, the narrator cannot be referred to by “he” or “she”; those pronouns are out of the question.
Could the main character be referred to as “they”? The pronoun is genderless, but the plural number is absurd: the narrator is a single individual, not a group, nor is the narrator subject to dissociative personality disorder.
In third-person narration, the story’s main character would most likely be referred to as “it.” The pronoun cannot refer to a human being. Since the main character’s thoughts are its only human characteristic, and human beings would find its home world uninhabitable, the narrator qualifies as a space alien. The fact that the narrator represents a mutated form of humanity is irrelevant; it couldn’t live on Earth any more than human beings could live on its planet.
What about second-person narration, where the main character is referred to as “you”? The pronoun is genderless and can be either singular or plural in English. That strategy is also logical, but it is self-defeating. Readers will either take personal offense or mentally reanalyze “you” as “I,” “he,” “she” or “it” automatically.
How, then, could the story be transposed to a third-person point of view?
The easiest way: avoid personal pronouns entirely. As a workaround, the character’s name might be useful. Of course, the character must have a name. If the character has none, the author hasn’t a leg to stand on. If the character has more than one name, the author is tied in rhetorical knots.
Can we borrow a genderless third-person singular pronoun from somewhere? Turkish has one: ö. It means “the same subject as before” and says nothing about gender or status. And English borrowed “they,” “their” and “them” from Old Norse. But times have changed, and it’s always been easier to borrow meaning words than function words. Which is easier: to add new furnishings to a house or to add new rooms to it?
The same applies to inventing pronouns. What if you wrote something like, “When [name] woke up, xy got up and put on xy’s clothes.” Readers may think, “Who or what is ‘xy’? A Chinese emperor? The name should be capitalized. And how do I pronounce it?” Confusion reigns. But there’s worse:
Inventing function words to replace “he” or “she” is like inventing a new traffic light, one that flashes any number of different colors. Drivers — i.e. the readers — won’t know what to do. And who or what gives anyone the authority to change traffic signals, simply on one person’s say-so? A pronoun can be invented for use when talking about a person, but I can’t be forced to adopt it; I’ll simply avoid it.
It isn’t the same as in direct address, where two people are talking directly to each other. For example, in 18th-century Germany, a professor had to reprimand a doltish student who happened to be the son of a nobleman. He couldn’t address the student as du (too informal) or as Sie (too formal). The professor settled for: Wir sind ein Esel! (‘We are an ass!’). To which the student replied, “I take exception...”
Speaking of which, English is an exception in the Indo-European language family by having no grammatical gender. In fact, English gives only a passing nod to natural gender and none to any other.
How could a story with a multiple-gender protagonist be translated into, say, French, which is more like other languages in the family? French has only the masculine and feminine; the neuter gender in Latin was subsumed into the masculine.
In Michel Butor’s La Modification, the main character is vous (‘you’ formal or plural). However, the adjectives default to the masculine singular, which is the simplest form. Of course, vous could have been feminine and/or plural, if necessary.
English-speaking readers may see Michel Butor’s choices as being very limited. But French grammar cannot abide the ambiguities with which English is so rife. “Ah, these Anglo-Saxons, how do you say? Always talking out of both sides of their mouth.”
In short, then, English has it easy. Just avoid gender-specific pronouns, if you have to.
[Michael E. Lloyd] You will doubtless recall that, for almost the full length of Observation One: Singing of Promises, I had to be very careful with my treatment of the Domans in general and the senior crewmembers of the Mater in particular, the latter always needing to be referred to as “the Captain,” “the Chief Surveyor” or “Chief,” and “the First Officer” or “Quo.”
It was only after the Radimote’s somewhat reluctant revelations in London that I was able to deploy third person pronouns and adjectives in the usual way. But Carla’s punch line made it all worthwhile! And things were then a lot easier for me, of course, not only in the completion of that text but in both succeeding volumes of the Observation trilogy!
Copyright © 2018 by Lance Dean,
Michael E. Lloyd
and Bewildering Stories
