In the last couple of years, I’ve added the terms squick and squee to my vocabulary collection. I’ve never been a reader of fanfic, so I came late to these valuable concepts—but they’ve now rooted deep into the critical sensibilities I bring to reading fiction. Disclaimer: my associations and working definitions for these words may well be eccentric, since I’ve only lately acquired them.
I’d seen the words, but reading Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s essay in Making Light was when I actually began to internalize the deeper ramifications of the concepts of squick and squee in a critical context. The Making Light essay references a post in Ellen Fremedon’s LiveJournal, cenelice to ganganne hwaer gegan hafde naenig man aer. (Ellen has a follow-up post, here. Both the Fremedon post and the Making Light essay are a couple of years old—the conversation, alas, finished. But I’ve invited Ellen to expound further on the matter with an essay, in some yet-to-be-determined future issue of CW. She expressed mild interest—if you’d like to read it, by all means nag her.)
Now—not everyone agrees that the specific words squick and squee are even useful, much less necessary. “I cannot fathom what was so lacking in the English language that “squick” and “squee” (I hope I’m spelling them right) needed to be created. Really, were these pseudo words/slang terms/abominations really necessary?” (That post is over a year old—practically an eon, in terms of the net. It nicely illustrates an attitude I still encounter, though.)
Why use a new word like squick, when we’ve perfectly functional words like revulsion? Two reasons: Squick cuts deeper than revulsion; it’s got that onomatopoeic quality reminiscent of handling exposed entrails, which makes it immediate and, well, visceral in a way that the more reserved and cerebral Latinate words just aren’t.
TNH sums it up this way:
The thing that most fascinated me was the part about slash fanfic writers learning techniques for holding on to good fictional values while they’re writing about massively distracting subjects, a.k.a. the Id Vortex.
What’s in the vortex? If I understand her correctly, it’s all the magic stuff: Sex, power issues, identity issues, physical or emotional violence, revelation, transformation, transcendence, violent catharsis, and whatever else is a high-tension power line for that writer.
It’s not something many writers can deal with skillfully. Jacqueline Carey pulls it off in her Kushiel trilogy, which explores BDSM in a fantasy setting. She approaches that brink of awful fascination combined with shivers of revulsion, over and over.
Incredible fiction can find the squick button and make you like it–because it’s ultimately about human truth: we’re attracted and repelled by viewing the slippery exposed guts, and then “oh my god did I just see something moving in there?” cuts straight to raising the hairs on your neck, just for a heartbeat or two.
Aristotle asserted in The Poetics, “Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated. We have evidence of this in the facts of experience. Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies.” (IV)
That’s about squick. It’s important. It’s also a complex concept. Exciting and engaging stories can find my squick button, without actually pushing my face in it–it’s related to the Blair Witch Project phenomenon, whereby that which is unseen is so much scarier and ickier than anything seen clearly–but you can’t help looking anyway.
There are ancient human aversions as powerful today as ever–fiction gives us a tool to examine those hot-buttons, safely.
–Mac