Our faith in this narrative: "Natural Disasters" by Alexis Schaitkin

One of the themes I keep coming back to on this blog is to ask the question of whether literature is good for us. It's not just an important question for those who study literature; because humans so naturally turn everything into a story, the same questions about whether literature is good for us can apply to a number of human cognitive processes that involve us telling ourselves stories in order to understand what is happening to us. 

For literature specifically, at least some of the trade-offs are fairly clear. We sacrifice verisimilitude in order to create stories where most events serve a general purpose, be it a purpose of plot, character development, or theme. There are advantages to this; we can deeply examine a particular problem of the human condition by focusing a story entirely on that one problem. But it can also lead to a faulty belief in those who read a lot of stories that the events in their actual lives are, as in a well written story, all are there for a reason. It can lead us to read our lives like they are stories with an externally determined meaning rather than an open narrative we must fill based on our own sense of values. We can, in other words, misread our lives as being one type of narrative when the brute facts of the case imply something else.

Maybe there are some instances where not insisting too much on the truths of our lives helps contribute to survival, such as the person living under unavoidable trauma who finds a way to believe they are living a different life than the one they are. I'm not an orphan being shuffled from one foster home to the next; I'm a prince whose real parents are coming to get him. I'm not in a concentration camp; I'm in an extreme weight loss camp, and once I hit my goal weight, I can go home.

But these few marginal cases are probably dwarfed by the frequency of the counter-example: the person who is destructively misreading her own life because she continually applies an external story she has imagined over top of it. This makes her misinterpret her life over and over. This was the case with just the last story in BASS 2019, "Audition" by Said Sayrafiezadeh, where the main character kept thinking he was an actor just pretending to be a construction laborer, when in fact he really was a construction laborer. And it's the case with the 16th story as well, "Natural Disasters" by Alexis Schaitkin.

How the narrator misreads her life

Jen, the first-person narrator, is looking back later in life to the time when she and her former husband moved from New York to Oklahoma. Jen's husband, Steven, has just been sent there by the oil company he works for. As soon as Jen hears of the promotion and the move, she begins to create a narrative into which this new event fits. Jen recalls how this was something she did about everything back then. "You see, I lived then guided by the unconscious notion that the story of my life as I was meant to live it was already written in a secret, locked away text. At the end, I would finally be able to open it and read the story that had been written there all along--its arc, its twists and turns, it motifs and themes, it most evocative lines."

This ability to put her life into a secret story has helped both her and Steven to get through the lean years in New York, when they lived off meager means, accompanied by a variety of "manageably unpleasant odors," like mice decomposing in the walls. Their "faith in this narrative" allowed them to "delight even in (their) frequent arguments," and to "enjoy things that were not, in themselves, enjoyable." So reading her life as part of a secret story has had advantages, but it will also cause her to misread the next part of her life, the part in Oklahoma, because she is still trying to see every event as part of this secret narrative.

There's a little bit of this idea going on in the story, but that's not the only idea being developed.

She recalls that both she and Steven were living in Oklahoma "ironically." This partly means that they were living there like stuck-up New York elitists, having a laugh at the unsophisticated locals. She and Steven get a chuckle out of the fact that their neighborhood is called "Amber Ridge," although there is no ridge. But "living ironically" also means, for Jen, that she will think often while she is in Oklahoma as though she isn't really there, or at the very least, like she is just passing through, doing nothing more in Oklahoma than picking up anecdotes to fill the book of her life's story. She tended this collection of anecdotes "with the vigor of an avid hobbyist, savoring the delicious irony of a place that conformed exactly to my hackneyed expectations."

There are two reasons she is collecting these little pieces of Oklahoma life. One is that she thinks thereby she can get some sense of the essence of the Oklahoma part of her life: "I believed that I could nail this place by triangulating among its details, that these typifying images converged upon a deeper truth." That is, she thinks the place is nothing more than the sum of its parts. But there's a deeper reason, and this is where the real critique of fiction as a cognitive process comes in.

God help us, she's a writer

The second reason she collects stories is that she's by nature a writer. This isn't a story about a writer, exactly, although the woman is, by her own admission, good at writing. She takes a job writing those little real estate blurbs--you know the ones, "this two-story craftsman is country living at its finest, a real stunner!" She partly takes this job because she's having difficulty adjusting to life in Oklahoma. It's this difficulty that makes her realize, much later, that there's no such thing as living ironically. You might think it's hilarious that you, with your college education and your gift for bons mots, are living in Oklahoma, but you're still there, the same as everyone else who is there. You don't get to escape feeling depressed. When the giant, open spaces fill you with terror, those open spaces don't realize you don't belong there, that you're not like everybody else.

Jen finds working writing these blurbs for a real estate agent helps calm her symptoms of depression. Maybe because they allow her to not focus so much on the wide, open spaces, but on the limited spaces of the houses. It also helps that Bethany, the real estate agent, seems to teach Jen a thing or two about how to be "apart without seeming to keep herself apart." That is, how to live cognizant of the incongruity of being somewhere, but nonetheless with sincerity and without irony.

When Bethany asks if Jen is a good writer, Jen does not hesitate to say "yes." However, she later qualifies this within her recollection: "I could give the impression of meaning and insight, of grand convergence, and if you weren't paying careful attention you might not notice that beneath the rhythms of thought the argument was facile, even specious."

Isn't that the problem with any good writer? That they can tell us a story so compelling-sounding, we don't realize we've been completely bamboozled by how pleasant the words and images are and so miss how much we've been lied to?

The "part of the story I've been working up to this whole time"

Indeed, although Jen gets better at interpreting the data in her life--learning to respect the women around her for their strange, inner strength that comes to them from God-knows-where, she continues misreading events up to the end. The climax comes when Jen goes out to see the fanciest house she ever visits in order to write her blurb about it. It's right on the edge of the endless prairie, and, unlike all the homes she's been to, there's a man inside instead of a woman. And a good looking one, too. She immediately compares him in her head to every good looking cowboy in every movie she's ever seen. His name, Mac, seems to fit the cowboy image.

Mac is awkward in the home, which Jen attributes to "a certain male cluelessness--he didn't have the instinct to monitor and steer things the way a woman did, I thought." When he seems embarrassed by how nice his home is, she assumes that "he was one of those rich people whose good fortune embarrassed him." She starts inventing theories for why he is living out there all alone.

But she's wrong about all of it, which she doesn't discover until a tornado threatens to break right on top of them, forcing her and Mac to run to the shelter together.

While in the shelter with Mac, Jen can't resist resorting to the "secret book" of her life again. The storm is raging outside. He's close to her, and he's so good looking. He could just reach out, brush back her wet hair, and she'd be his. "I had the exhilarating sense that for the first time I was living a page from the secret text of my life."

No sooner does she imagine this than the storm abates and she learns who he really is and why the house is for sale. It turns out that the place belonged to his brother, who was killed recently in a car accident after safely returning from serving in the military in Desert Storm.  She's misread real life again, because she keeps trying to superimpose the kind of logic that works in fiction on real life.

Does Jen get the moral to her own story?

Jen offers to interpret the meaning of her story for us at the end. It's a tentative but convincing attempt to read the events of her life. She's since gotten divorced from Steven, a divorce that should have been obvious all along, if only she'd be cognizant of the signs. She's moved several times since then. She offers this as part one of what she's learned: "a place and its disasters--its fathomless, inscrutable unknows--are not separable. Oklahoma is its tornadoes, just as Maine, even on the mildest of spring days, is its snows, is a caved roof and a woman asleep in her bed, and then gone. The disaster is always there, because it takes up residence inside of you."

She notes when she reads about Mac's brother's life in an old newspaper that it "sounds like something from a story, almost too...on-the-nose, to be real." She can't even recognize reality, because reality to her now seems like fiction. That's why I'm not sure we ought to trust Jen a few pages later when she returns to her "disasters" understanding of her life. In the penultimate sentence, she theorizes that "Life is not a story at all. It is the disasters we carry within us."

That sounds profound. But is it? By Jen's own admission, she's capable of slipping us crap and making us think, if we're not careful, that it is some kind of deep knowledge. Jen thinks that Oklahoma is somehow not itself now, because by pouring water into the Earth for fracking, it is not suffering earthquakes, meaning its organic disasters have shifted. But does this hold up? Isn't this just another example of Jen trying to force one story onto reality when reality is trying to offer us something else? Earthquakes are very much part of Oklahoma's nature, at least now, because Oklahoma is having earthquakes. So don't come in with your writer's notions of the right and wrong kinds of disasters. These aren't ironic earthquakes.

I'd guess most readers will take Jen at her word by the end. Life is the disasters we carry inside us. She's really overcome her early-life tendency to read a story into everything. She's dropping wisdom on us. But what the hell does "we are the disasters we carry inside us" mean? That sounds like faux wisdom to me, the kind of thing an ersatz guru would drop on his credulous followers. It's Jen now being ironic, or trying to be, about herself as a natural-born writer who relates to the world the way writers do. But she hasn't really transcended this tendency. She's just denied it. Rather than learn to interpret better, she's learned to interpret much worse by falling into even deeper "facile, even specious" thinking.

As if to throw us off the trail that this "we are the disasters" nugget is specious, Jen offers up a strawman interpretation right before her own: "Maybe you think all of this is easy to interpret. A girl left the city and learned a thing or two. A silly young woman hoped to be ravished by a man who was not her husband. A marriage fell apart, and afterward a wife was wiser, though in some ways no better, than she had been before." And right after the "life is the disasters inside us line," she harkens back to her writing as a real-estate blurbist: "(Life) is amazing, it is exquisite, it is a stunning charmer, and it is noted in water and jotted in dust and the wind lifts it away." I think Jen really wants us to side with this reading. 

But I think Jen has missed another reading. Life can be a story. It's just isn't a secret story. It's the story life shows us. It's what we experience, not what we wish we were experiencing. When life is showing us something, we shouldn't ignore that data, preferring the story we've created in our heads.