There's No Homelike Place

[marycatelli]

The blurb goes like this:  "Many portal quest fantasies function by exploiting anxieties surrounding the location of home: either home is to be found beyond the portal, where the nerd/outcast finds their true tribe, or home is to be returned to, enriched by the fantasy land left behind in its favor. However, given that our world is increasingly mobile and rootless, why do we seem to produce so few sympathetic narratives of adventurers who never find home—for whom home is less a destination than a journey?"

And I pull out my ten-foot pole to poke it.

Because after all there are plenty of adventurers who never settle down, or who take a good long while to do it.  Conan the Barbarian only did as king, which constituted two of his numerous adventures.  Fahred and the Gray Mouser.  Many another sword and sorcery hero -- I consider it one mark of archetypally pure sword and sorcery, that the hero loves to adventure and goes on and on having them.  As opposed to epic fantasy where the hero settles down after.

It's needed in a lot of series, but it's also used in stand-alone works.  How poignant it is for the character to ride off along the road, alone. . . or sailing away from the Gray Havens.

Which is one reason why it's not more common.  Rootlessness is a hard condition to make an aspiration.  Especially if the character is already rootless.  Like knocking off the parents so the hero can act without wondering whether it was right to shove them into a nursing home, rootlessness allows the hero to move the plot like nobody's business.

So why doesn't he stick to it more often? 

Well, roots and homes are indeed a common human desire.  And making them the hero's desire allows him to achieve his aim.  Character change!  Especially if he had wanted to adventure.  Furthermore, unlike an endless desire for new and different, it allows the story to end.  I believe it was E. M. Forster who said that weddings and funerals are very convenient for endings -- which is true, they give shape, and finding a home can serve the same purpose.  Endless wandering means endless adventuring, which makes the ending always open.

Part of bittercon

Comments

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Also, leaving home can serve as a metaphor for adulthood, but so can settling down, which often means house, spouse and children. At leas in YA fantasy.

[marycatelli]

Well, I would say that leaving home is a metaphor for starting your bildungsroman; settling down is the metaphor for successfully completing it.

It's not just YA. In some fairy tales, the child returns to the parent's house; in still fewer, the adult embarks on the adventure and marries at the end; but overwhelming, the child leaves the parent's house, adventures, wins the prince or princess, marries and settles down.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I think it's interesting that the home at the end is sometimes the same as the home at the beginning, but usually it isn't. It's a new home.

Your argument is a good one. Most of us expect to leave our parents' home, but only to build a new one.

[marycatelli]

And being in transit in the meantime is a sign of our liminal status.

Liminality in stories tends to resolve.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

exactly

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

And there are plenty of stories where you know suspect that settling down is only a temporary state.

[marycatelli]

In my experience, those tend to be weak endings. The ones where the heroes set out for further adventures are open but not undermined. There is nothing quite like a series where some kind of settling down is fudged up at the end every time, and you're saying Yeah, sure.

[mswyrr]

given that our world is increasingly mobile and rootless

I don't quite get this? Because even if you're moving frequently, home is people and your connections to them. And as long as we have a concept of home a literal place will speak to us, even if our personal experience is of moving from one literal place to another pretty frequently. The literal home represents the emotion of being with the people who are our home. We're not rootless; our roots are just nourished in increasingly diverse ways that include physical mobility. But technology means that "home" doesn't have to disappear or diminish because you move away from one physical place -- as long as we can Skype, we can have the people who are our home with us anywhere in a way that was never possible before. Home might be less required to be a specific place you intend to stay forever, but a place remains a good fictional way to speak of home.

[izuko.livejournal.com]

This is one way of defining home. But many of us have as much attachment to place as to people. For us, were we lay our heads is not necessarily home.

[marycatelli]

Living out of the suitcase is just not the same as living in your own home.

[marycatelli]

Place helps, regardless. Face-to-face meetings and on the web do not give the same kinds of relationships.

[mswyrr]

Place does help. But I remember being at school and knowing I could talk with my family easily made it feel like I had a connection to home, even though we couldn't eat together, touch, etc. It was a different experience, I think, than if I'd moved away in a time when people could only reach out in letters and not see and hear each other.

[marycatelli]

It's not rootlessness -- it's longer, electronic roots.

[mswyrr]

I like that, yeah. Roots that can span the globe.

[lilyayl.livejournal.com]

This. Speaking as one who has spent the past six-seven years of her life living in places with deadlines and spending copious amounts of time in hotels (for work), I agree that home is more than just a place. However, I would extend your definition. Home is where I am. I have made a sanctuary of hotel rooms. Books, whether they are in a language I can read or not, anchor me wherever I am. An internet connection keeps me from feeling trapped. As long as I can make some space *mine,* no matter for how little a space of time, I feel at ease and at home. The last time I couldn't do this I was staying with family in my hometown. Everyday I felt an itch beneath my skin as I wanted to escape and I felt my hopes dim as job interviews failed to materialize. Now I have a stable job in a city, but I'm still waiting for the deadline. Still wondering when my next move will be.

I think you could build an arc that would allow for the character to continue traveling. The character could start with the expectation of a traditional plot-- the grand adventure followed by settling down with maybe the occasional smaller adventure after. Then have the character come to realize that home does not have to be a place.

I think the real key is letting the character come to peace with themselves and lives. Many adventurers are leaving a small town and/or settled life, thinking that they are meant for adventure and the road. Then, while they may accomplish great things, they realize that 'home' isn't a bad thing. They come to peace with how they grew up and who they are, and then create a new home or return to an old one.

Others may need to come to peace with the fact that they'll never be comfortable in one place, and that while they'll have a few safe harbors, home itself will never be a location for them.

[marycatelli]

Of course, to do that, you have convince the readers that it's not sour grapes.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

"Adventure" tends to happen to people in a state of insecurity. Most people in a state of insecurity are in the transition between childhood and mature adulthood. Hence, the time of "adventure" is essentially a time of young adulthood. Tales of adventure which recognize this tend to either have their main characters eventually retire from adventure (to begin their lives of true and secure adulthood) or be cast into adventure by disaster (in which case they wish to regain their secure adulthood).

This is also why stories about characters who simply go from adventure to adventure, seeking adventure for their own sake, tend to be stories about immature main characters.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Maybe 'looking for adventure' - if you define it as thrill + danter - is immature, but 'going on voyages of discovery' is something that mature people do: they go on pilgrimages, they seek to live in another culture, they seek to map the unknown in more than one sense or simply to widen their own horizons.

Dismissing all these people as immature strikes me as rather judgemental.

Also, it is possible to be settled, with a steady income and a family, and still be immature. I'm sure we've all met people like that.

[marycatelli]

They don't habitually do it all the time.

And living in another culture is, in fact, settling there.

[marycatelli]

The love of danger is a little more complicated than that. A good mediation on it here, even if it does raise questions about adrenaline junkie.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

roots and homes are indeed a common human desire

I would argue that fixed property is one expression of having a home; and it is indeed a desire that many people have - but that's just one type of narrative, and one type of people.

Thre are plenty of people who have a desire for a base - a place where they are always welcome - and who to into the world from it, sometimes for months and years at a time. There are people who have a summer and winter home, or a week and weekend home, or a home they see only at certain times of the year/month/week, or who take their home, snail-like, around with them... and all of these are people who *choose* that lifestyle and who don't want to be tied to one place eternally.

My last move didn't feel like a move. I had my mobile phone, I had my e-mail address, I had my livejournal and computer access to it. I had a job and a regular income while being of no fixed abode, and my employer never noticed. In the past, I've moved less than a mile with greater upset to my life.

So the answer is I have no idea why we see so many people who are desperate to put down roots, why the travellers are always the Other, but I very much would like to see a greater variety of narratives, just as not everybody has the desire to live in a one man-one-woman relationship.

[marycatelli]

The question does arise of statistics and how much of each is involved.

[lilyayl.livejournal.com]

Part of me wonders if home ownership was a dream that got sold. But with the increasingly smaller, more interconnected world, and with less emphasis being placed on owning a home, will the dream and stories also change?

[marycatelli]

People have been moving around for a long time. When trying to persuade his mother to adopt a proper Stoic indifference to his exile, he tells of a place where the native-born are outnumbered by foreigners -- that there is no place on earth where people do not live because they have chosen to move there-- and therefore there is no place where to be exiled is bad. . . .

It has not been a popular view.