A friend of mine is going through some serious shit right now, some of the most serious shit I've seen a person go through. It involves a mentally ill spouse, a messy divorce, and very few viable good options. He's been seeing a therapist, understandably. As most people who see therapists find, however, the supposed expert on life choices has precious little actual advice to give. It's the usual song and dance about how it's not his job to tell my friend what to do, but to help him decide for himself what to do. The rub, of course, is that his life is such a flaming wreck right now, he is utterly unable to decide for himself what to eat for breakfast, much less how to handle the real decisions he has to make in life. He needs the therapist to fucking well tell him what to do. It doesn't even matter much if it's the best possible choice. He needs some direction so he can go do something.
One often hears that the role of the fiction writer is something akin to how most therapists see themselves. One popular cliche of modern times goes something like: "It's not the role of fiction to provide the answers, but to make the questions clear." It's the same crap therapists try to sell us. I dearly hope that fiction writers are not, in the end, as utterly useless as mental health professionals are, because if that's true, I've wasted a lot of my life.
I was discussing these things tonight with a friend in conjunction with my thoughts on having finished a little more than half of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which this friend from tonight had encouraged me to read. There are lengthy passages in Jest about Alcoholics Anonymous. One recurring idea is that even though every idea AA gives its adherents is plainly a cliche and bunk and full of intellectual holes, it is also true that the people who do the steps, even if they don't believe in them, find that those steps work. In other words. AA tells them what to do, and even though it's not great advice, it somehow works.
Unlike nearly every publisher today, I occasionally like didactic fiction. It's hard to do well, but I also think I have something of a tolerance for when it's not done perfectly. The important thing when writing a story that seems, in some sense, to tell the reader what to do is to not write a story that sounds as though you knew coming into it what advice you had to give. It has to feel as though the advice came organically through the story.
I don't think a lot of the fiction I've read in the last ten years, the exemplars of America's best fiction, have given much clear advice about what to do. I'm not looking to be hit over the head with aphorisms, but it would be nice to be given some sort of clue as to what I'm supposed to get out of a story. My own writing has been influenced by these kinds of hands-off-the-reader's-personal-life stories. I think I'm going to try to resist that influence a little more going forward. If it means I don't get published, then I don't get published. That's already not happening much lately, anyway. If I'm going to fail, I'd like to fail writing the stories I like.
I don't see why you think a therapist's obligation should be to tell someone what to do: that seems rife with all sorts of ethical problems given the relationship involved. Even if couched as one man's opinion, the relationship taints that. Presumably, you've told him what you think he should do. And you are just the person from whom such opinions should come: someone who's from the circle of friends and associates.
ReplyDeleteRegarding fiction, you raise what could be an interesting topic for when you return to school to write a dissertation on creative writing: the disappearance of the author qua author. Or the conversion of the author into a camera. That strikes me as a particularly modern phenomenon. The refusal to take a stand vis-a-vis the reader because that smacks too much of an infringement on the reader's autonomy, which has, for reasons that make no sense to me, become an absolute just as personal autonomy has become an ideological absolute in other domains.
I suppose I'd like to get at least what Lucy van Pelt offered. She gave "advice" for a nickel, not just mirroring of what you'd said. I feel like the practice of mirroring your thoughts back to you in the hope that you'll see the issues more clearly just isn't helpful. Most of the time, people in a tough spot know the issues, and there is no clear answer. That's why they seek advice. I'd rather someone give me their take on what they think I should do than try to help me to see what I already know. I'm always free to ignore the advice. But isn't the counselor supposed to be some sort of expert in how to make tough decisions? If not, I guess I just don't know what you're paying them for. (Advice, of course, might come with the possibility of being sued for bad advice.)
ReplyDeleteYour thesis on the author as camera sounds interesting. It's been the point of a lot of the criticism of Anis Shivani, who is one of my favorite critics. I'm probably not the guy to write it, though. I'm thoroughly committed to writing fiction nobody will read, rather than doctoral theses nobody will read.
The author is camera is your thesis, and you are excellently equipped to explore that. I absolutely have no doubt on that point.
ReplyDeleteYou do not, regarding the therapist situation, address the power relationship, which, i'm sure, forms the basis for professional neutrality.
Ah, I see what you're saying now. Okay, I can see how the assumed authority of the therapist could be used for all kinds of nefariousness if the patient tends to give undue weight to authority figures. Still, it seems like a therapist ought to be able to tell, after talking to a patient for a while, whether it's safe to be a little more forward with the advice. Especially if the patient is flat-out saying it's okay for the therapist to overstep his bounds a little bit and just bring the advice.
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