Carlisle, erastes: Notes on Patroclus Rising

August 19th, 2013 § 1 comment § permalink

So, I’d expected to need to write a long note about how this fic could in any way be considered “canon.” But, to my delight, it seems you all were right with me, and when the chapter 4 reviews came in, people were exclaiming about how well C&Ed fit as a prequel to canon. I imagine, then, that less explanation is necessary, but I’ll provide a little background on where I went with this.

The title of the piece is Patroclus Rising. Patroclus is a character from Homer’s The Iliad, the epic poem about the Trojan war. He is the companion to the great warrior Achilles, and it is for revenge of Patroclus that Achilles finally becomes fully drawn into the war. Many interpretations of The Iliad interpret the Achilles/Patrolcus relationship as being in the Greek pederastic tradition. While I fully acknowledge that this interpretation is a) anachronistic and b) highly debatable, it is to that interpretation of the Achilles/Patroclus bond that I meant to allude with this title.

The tradition of Greek pederasty, which, given their  classical educations, would’ve been well known to both Carlisle and Edward, is one which is not about lasting homosexual relationships, but rather was seen as part of bringing a boy into manhood. A man in his mid twenties to early thirties, the erastes, would take under his wing a young man just on the cusp of manhood, his eromenos. He would bestow the eromenos with gifts, shelter him, coddle him, and provide him with sexual pleasure in the form of fondling, fellatio, and intercrural intercourse (between the thighs). Some very sharp readers have noticed that at no time in this fic did Edward perform a sexual act beyond kissing on Carlisle; this is in keeping with the roles of the eromenos—he is the recipient of the erastes’ affection and does not necessarily return it. It was also seen as demeaning for either party to be penetrated; to do so would be to lower one’s status (part of why women were seen as being of lower status).

The second thing which helps move this toward a more canon interpretation, and why I’m comfortable calling this canon-compliant even though it assumes that Edward wasn’t telling a complete truth when he told Bella he was sexually inexperienced, has to do with the attitudes toward homosexual encounters that existed in the 1910s and 1920s. In chapter 3, Carlisle refers to “drawing the curtains,” which was a common euphemism in that age that literally describes the secrecy with which such acts were conducted. A man who had sexual encounters with another man was still very likely to marry a woman, and was also very likely to consider his homosexual experiences to not be “sex” because they did not involve a woman. To some extent, this same attitude was held by women of the age; particularly if said man was faithful to them thereafter, which helped me build Esme in these last chapters as well. To her mind, Carlisle did not intend to stay in a sexual relationship with Edward; he was merely in an all-male environment and…things happened. (Maybe this idea is where the “magic vagina that heals all a man’s wildness” trope that we see so often in fic comes from.) So, reading this in light of canon, it is my thinking that were a relationship between Edward and Carlisle to play out as it does in Patroclus, Edward wouldn’t feel himself to be lying in calling himself a virgin. To everything he knows and understands, he is one. Perhaps at some point, he might be completely truthful with Bella about what had happened, perhaps it would be considered water under the bridge.

Figuring those two pieces out took me awhile, and I hope my Ancient Literature professor is pleased that I pulled out and re-read my fourteen-year-old copy of The Iliad. But nevertheless, it was a wonderfully fun prompt to work out, and given that it created not only Patroclus but also “For a Season,” I’m pretty chuffed to have ever been asked to write it.

Many, many, many thanks to Team Carlward: capricorn75, deelovely, HeBelongsToMe, lts929, mycrookedsmile, and sleepyvalentina for the amazing, thought-provoking prompt and for their limitless patience while I worked out the details. Crazy, inestimable thanks  to my critique partner, twitina, and of course, my unending gratitude to all of you who read. The desire to read, and the gift of the time to do so is a gift a reader gives a writer. Even if the writer never sees the reader reading, if the reader never writes a fanfic review or an Amazon review, if the reader never even so much as mentions to anyone else about this thing that she enjoyed reading…the enjoyment is gift enough. After over two decades of writing only for myself, the gift of having even one person, let alone many, desire to read is one by which I am humbled and for which I will forever be deeply grateful.

Thank you.

–g

Notes on Ch. 1 of Patroclus Rising

August 5th, 2013 § 3 comments § permalink

Three (gulp!) years ago, I signed myself up for The Fandom Gives Back:  Eclipse edition. I’m very, very, very particular about the fact that I feel that what I’m doing in writing fic is borrowing a character and world from the author, and that only that author deserves to benefit financially from her world. For that reason, I’m loathe even to ask people to donate to get an outtake or any sort of finished piece—for me, that walks way too close to the line of someone paying to receive a fanfic.

So instead, what I auction is the right to tell me what to write. The winning bidder gets to ask for the story of her choosing, and then I do my level best to produce something that matches that vision.

For FGB, I auctioned off the rights to two stories, one to robsjenn, and the other to a group of readers who wanted to see what would happen if I wrote a Carlisle/Edward slash: deelovely, Capricorn75, HeBelongstoMe, lts929,  mycrookedsmile,  and sleepyvalentina.

And then life intervened, which I’ve written more about here. 

But I absolutely love writing from prompts. They stretch me as a writer in a really lovely way, and in a way that forces me out of my comfort zones. Some of the pieces I feel are my personal best have been written either prompted, or for contests with a limited requirement: Da Capo is one such piece, as is “Secondhand Rose“, and “Souls in Stillness“. Many fic writers in Twidom say they stay away from canon (and even vampire fics entirely) because they dislike being restricted. For me, however, that’s exactly the attraction—the more limitations I have on what I can write, the more interesting I find the result.

The only trouble with writing to a prompt is that sometimes it takes a while to figure out exactly how to write the piece. Robsjenn asked for a canon prequel that explained how Edward and Alice became so close. It took me many false starts over the course of a year to figure out how to structure that piece. The piece which resulted, Present Perfectof which I’m very proud, is absolutely nothing like what I had in mind when I started it, and it’s all the stronger for the struggle. 

The same is true of Patroclus Rising, which spent much of its gestation time named The Last Days of Socrates. I knew what I wanted to do, but I also worried that in order to do that, Carlisle would end up being raucously unsympathetic. I even wrote a long authors’ note intended to go at the beginning, to warn people that I knew what I was doing, but that it wasn’t going to be Carlisle the way they usually knew him. I wrote one scene (the second scene of the finished version, although its initial draft was longer) and then stopped.

I couldn’t quite figure out how to pull that off.

Enter two other fics, Stregoni Benefici and One Day the Sun Will RiseAs I worked on each of those, I started exploring Carlisle’s vulnerabilities—where is he weak? Where is he stupid? What kinds of things bring him down? What is his singular goal in life, and in what ways can it create problems if he goes about that goal the wrong way? As I formed the answers to those questions, I got a better sense of exactly how Carlisle, as I needed him to behave in Patroclus could possibly still be perfectly in step with the Carlisle I’ve written everywhere else.

Along the way, this fic spawned another: in 2011, I decided to enter the CarlWard contest. Since I was already writing a fic which slashed Carlisle and Edward in the pre-Twilight years, I decided I would instead choose a post-Breaking Dawn canon-based AU scenario to bring them together again. That resulted in “For a Season,” one of my favorite pieces in my writing portfolio period, derivative and non-derivative alike.  So in a way, this one prompt created two different fics, but each of which, I feel, fit with canon as we know it…or at least, in the case of Patroclus, it does if you’re willing to peek around the edges a bit.

So at long last, I’m happy to post this piece. It’s grown to be one of my favorite explorations of Carlisle, and I hope will be for you, too.

Happy reading.

 

 

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