I was halfway through my master's degree in English at University of Illinois at Chicago in 2003 and had been accepted by the school to the Ph.D. program. Halfway through getting a master's, though, was enough for me to see that academia in the humanities was an insane asylum. Nothing I've heard from friends who continued on that route and are now working as professors has ever made me regret my decision. As much as my current work might be a bureaucratic mess, and as many head-scratching moments of "is this really what I want to do for a living?" it induces, it's a drop in the ocean to what my friends seem to face.
That's also the vibe I get from Jessica Burstein's "All Politics," included in the 2019 Pushcart Anthology. The title is misleading, because politics hardly figure directly in the story at all, but in another sense, it's right on the nose, because the entire point of the story is the political uselessness of humanities departments. As much as folks complain that the humanities have gotten "too political" or are "all about politics," in reality, they're so deep in their own dysfunctional cultures, they're hardly political at all. Or, to put it another way, if everything is political, then nothing is.
The first-person narrator, who only tells us her nickname of "Red DeMur," a name she is a little too proud to have picked up from black people at the gym-- "not the black guys who work at the university; the other black guys"--has gotten a fellowship to Oxford. She glibly reveals that the subject of her lectures that won the fellowship--"installation art, mostly earthworks"--is something she is only dabbling in, but dirt is somehow trendy, and she gets the gig. She's happy to escape the increasing budget cuts of American universities: "taking out the phone lines, restricting our access to the copy machines (professors still love to copy things), shutting down the library, merging the humanities with the new Diversity in Diversity Zion Protocols Center..." In Oxford, however, she finds that the humanities are equally impotent. The only difference is, as she puts it by way of how Brits and Americans work out at the gym, that "Americans grunt; the Brits just endure, quietly." Americans humanities departments might make more fuss about their growing irrelevance, loss of status and budgets, but it's happening to them just the same. (Of course, even Americans don't make that much fuss. As Red tells us: "...in these days of budgetary brouhaha, the university was getting it in the neck. And taking it, since basically, American professors are spineless. By basically I mean unequivocally. American professors are the worst. Or as we like to term it, the best.")
Along the way to discovering the differences across the pond, "Red" gives us the usual list of accusations against the humanities, although in such crisp and witty detail they feel fresh. She name-drops intellectuals, pop culture icons, and artists, both putting them into the mouths of her characters and also putting the actual famous people into her story to interact with Red. Red considers feeling empathy for a moment for humanities students, but then realizes they are "willfully oppressed," and therefore not in "actual need of empathy." This frees her as a professor to enjoy "being pandered to." Meanwhile, much of her narrative, far from being the insightful and revealing narrative we'd think it should be from someone who is allegedly an expert in culture, is full of banalities. These are the funniest part of the story. Burstein is really good at nailing these. For example: "So off I went to Oxford. It's in England. Long flight. Oxford was neat. They put me up in an apartment, or, as they say there, a 'flat.'" At least one-third of the story is Red talking about how she works out at the gym.
Much of the name-dropping is full of red herrings, an example of how in the humanities, it can be as important to make sure you signal that you are aware of the influential figures as it is to actually have original and intelligent thoughts about them. When Red wears a shirt where a woman is blowing her brains out with a gun, but the blood comes out as butterflies, the best she can come up with is to say that it's somehow "very symbolic." This was, by the way, the same thing one of her students had to say about the "Out of the Woods" video she saw while taking Red's Taylor Swift symposium.
Enough. Burstein did a good enough job beating the hell out of humanities departments that I don't need to keep explaining how she did it. It's a good reminder that I'm glad I didn't go down that route, and I'm happy to move on to the next story knowing I avoided at least one land mine in my life.
Wednesday, January 30, 2019
Saturday, January 26, 2019
Elegy without a ceremony: "Secrets Deep in Tiger Forests" by Poe Ballantine
Fiction often deals with tragedies and traumas, but there are a number of performative functions a story can play in framing a trauma. It can memorialize, lament, celebrate, heal, criticize, exhort, blame, excuse, or simply bear witness. None of these approaches is better than the others. For major traumas in human history, such as the Holocaust, it's important that culture produce art that plays all of these roles.
A culture can, perhaps, end up with an imbalance in the actions the stories of a particular generation perform. It can produce too many patriotic stories in response to trauma, for example. For 20 years after Eritrea gained independence from Ethiopia, its literature produced little else than stories lionizing the martyrs of the revolution and pointing to their suffering as a reason why Eritrea needed to go it alone.
I wonder if American literature hasn't produced too much literature of the lament or elegy form in response to the non-stop American wars of the last 17 years. The veteran with PTSD story is so ubiquitous nowadays, I wonder if it's partly responsible for the stereotype that all veterans suffer from it. If this is true, then the very act of creating stories meant to help veterans may be inadvertently hurting some of them.
Stories don't have to be about Iraq or Afghanistan to really be about Iraq or Afghanistan. Much like M*A*S*H used the Korean War to comment on the war in Vietnam, some writers are using Vietnam as a stand-in for talking about the Unending Wars. (I talked about a story like this in 2017.)
"Secrets Deep in Tiger Forests" by Poe Ballantine is also such a story. It's set in what appears to be a working-class neighborhood during the Vietnam War, at a time when young men are coming home in body bags or as shadows of their former selves. The unnamed first-person narrator is a teenager only a few years shy of the same age as the young men who went off to war from his neighborhood. He observes the effect of the war on those around him, especially Raja, the older son of the Carrs next door.
The Carrs have had a lot of bad luck, it seems. Mrs. Carr died a year before the story takes place, and her oldest son Raja "went off to war a serious boy in a uniform, but when he came back, he was no longer Raja." Raja can't even talk. He just laughs and smiles. Raja's younger brother Whitey is acting out, beating up on the narrator once a week, and then being nice sometimes in between beatings. Mavis, the older of two daughters, is pregnant, and gossip says her father is also the father of her baby, although the father has since also died of leukemia. The youngest daughter, Queenie, is starting to show signs of a budding sexuality herself, a sexuality the narrator notices, and it probably won't be long before she gets pregnant herself.
The narrator comes home one day to find Raja has been carted off to a mental health facility. He'd have gone to the facility sooner, but the wait to get in was too long. The family couldn't keep taking care of him. The story ends with a grief that can't find a voice: "...old peasant women with mangled teeth who yacked and yelled at me without a sound."
It's a very short story, and maybe best viewed as a sad bildungsroman in which the narrator learns about the world he's about to inherit and doesn't find much to look forward to. The kids in the neighborhood who've just gone the path he's about to go down came back mean or broken or dead. America is a place where young men are very often fed to whatever issue politicians believe cannot possibly be resolved without sending them to die. It still is. As much as America wanted to keep the Unending Wars from becoming Vietnam when they started, they became much more Vietnam than even Vietnam was. Even President Trump cannot find a way to end our never-ending commitments there, although he's certainly tried, above the complaints of his generals.
In addition to a bildungsroman, the story could also be seen as an elegy. It's meant to honor and remember Raja and those like him who came back a shadow of what they were when they left. As Lincoln said of another group of war dead, it is "altogether fitting and proper" that we should honor our casualties of war like this.
But the story doesn't really offer any kind of way out for young men touched by war. For those dealing with the after-effects of war, the narrative in this story and in our culture seems to be that you will be forever broken, and it's okay. Society can only commiserate with you in your brokenness, not try to find a way to make you whole.
Contrast this with another story of a war veteran who came back changed, the unforgettable Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko. It's about a WW-II vet, the mixed-race Tayo, who comes back from hell in the Pacific. He is at risk of following the route many native Americans who came back from the war did, losing himself in alcohol. But medicine men help Tayo to find his own ceremony in a world that is losing all sense of the sacred, his own way to repair the broken web of the world.
The reality of Ceremony is every bit as awful as that of "Secrets Deep." Silko wasn't ducking reality by having Tayo find a way back after hell. I'm not suggesting that stories should never end without redemption. Nor do I object to occasionally dwelling or even fetishizing our sadness. I am an artist, after all. But I wonder if our generation has too great a fondness for merely diagnosing our ills. If we can post on social media about our solidarity with troops struggling to overcome trauma, we feel we've done our job.
James Mattis has spoken before about how emphasizing the PTSD aspect of military service may not be helping military members to get better. Of course we should recognize and treat illness. But as folks used to say in church, that doesn't mean we need to spend so much time talking about the devil we end up praising him. It's okay to encourage people to put themselves back together. It doesn't all have to be appreciating how broken they are.
Maybe it's because when it comes to repairing spiritual wounds, our culture doesn't have much to offer. We have no ceremonies to cleanse ourselves, because we don't believe in anything sacred. Our view of psychological healing is a consumer one: we go to a professional who gives us drugs. We continue going forever, which means we consume forever.
I'm not saying nobody should see a psychiatrist, although I wish we were as skeptical about diagnoses of depression as we are about diagnosing too many kids with attention deficit disorder. But we need more than just a consumer doctor-patient model to make us well again. We need a spiritual life as a society. One of the sources of that healing spirituality is our mythology, our stories.
There's nothing wrong with Ballantine's story. Ballantine isn't to blame for the predilections of society. But the fact this story made it into a year's best anthology says something, I think, about how our culture views trauma and recovery. For us, a coming-of-age story about war and trauma is complete when we realize how psyche-rending the trauma is. The boy is a man when he is unmoored, confused, sexually frustrated, and unable to find a voice to express all that he now knows.
A culture can, perhaps, end up with an imbalance in the actions the stories of a particular generation perform. It can produce too many patriotic stories in response to trauma, for example. For 20 years after Eritrea gained independence from Ethiopia, its literature produced little else than stories lionizing the martyrs of the revolution and pointing to their suffering as a reason why Eritrea needed to go it alone.
I wonder if American literature hasn't produced too much literature of the lament or elegy form in response to the non-stop American wars of the last 17 years. The veteran with PTSD story is so ubiquitous nowadays, I wonder if it's partly responsible for the stereotype that all veterans suffer from it. If this is true, then the very act of creating stories meant to help veterans may be inadvertently hurting some of them.
Stories don't have to be about Iraq or Afghanistan to really be about Iraq or Afghanistan. Much like M*A*S*H used the Korean War to comment on the war in Vietnam, some writers are using Vietnam as a stand-in for talking about the Unending Wars. (I talked about a story like this in 2017.)
"Secrets Deep in Tiger Forests" by Poe Ballantine is also such a story. It's set in what appears to be a working-class neighborhood during the Vietnam War, at a time when young men are coming home in body bags or as shadows of their former selves. The unnamed first-person narrator is a teenager only a few years shy of the same age as the young men who went off to war from his neighborhood. He observes the effect of the war on those around him, especially Raja, the older son of the Carrs next door.
The Carrs have had a lot of bad luck, it seems. Mrs. Carr died a year before the story takes place, and her oldest son Raja "went off to war a serious boy in a uniform, but when he came back, he was no longer Raja." Raja can't even talk. He just laughs and smiles. Raja's younger brother Whitey is acting out, beating up on the narrator once a week, and then being nice sometimes in between beatings. Mavis, the older of two daughters, is pregnant, and gossip says her father is also the father of her baby, although the father has since also died of leukemia. The youngest daughter, Queenie, is starting to show signs of a budding sexuality herself, a sexuality the narrator notices, and it probably won't be long before she gets pregnant herself.
The narrator comes home one day to find Raja has been carted off to a mental health facility. He'd have gone to the facility sooner, but the wait to get in was too long. The family couldn't keep taking care of him. The story ends with a grief that can't find a voice: "...old peasant women with mangled teeth who yacked and yelled at me without a sound."
It's a very short story, and maybe best viewed as a sad bildungsroman in which the narrator learns about the world he's about to inherit and doesn't find much to look forward to. The kids in the neighborhood who've just gone the path he's about to go down came back mean or broken or dead. America is a place where young men are very often fed to whatever issue politicians believe cannot possibly be resolved without sending them to die. It still is. As much as America wanted to keep the Unending Wars from becoming Vietnam when they started, they became much more Vietnam than even Vietnam was. Even President Trump cannot find a way to end our never-ending commitments there, although he's certainly tried, above the complaints of his generals.
 |
| Yes, Colonel Potter, that sums up my thoughts on 18 years of war with no end in sight. |
In addition to a bildungsroman, the story could also be seen as an elegy. It's meant to honor and remember Raja and those like him who came back a shadow of what they were when they left. As Lincoln said of another group of war dead, it is "altogether fitting and proper" that we should honor our casualties of war like this.
But the story doesn't really offer any kind of way out for young men touched by war. For those dealing with the after-effects of war, the narrative in this story and in our culture seems to be that you will be forever broken, and it's okay. Society can only commiserate with you in your brokenness, not try to find a way to make you whole.
Contrast this with another story of a war veteran who came back changed, the unforgettable Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko. It's about a WW-II vet, the mixed-race Tayo, who comes back from hell in the Pacific. He is at risk of following the route many native Americans who came back from the war did, losing himself in alcohol. But medicine men help Tayo to find his own ceremony in a world that is losing all sense of the sacred, his own way to repair the broken web of the world.
The reality of Ceremony is every bit as awful as that of "Secrets Deep." Silko wasn't ducking reality by having Tayo find a way back after hell. I'm not suggesting that stories should never end without redemption. Nor do I object to occasionally dwelling or even fetishizing our sadness. I am an artist, after all. But I wonder if our generation has too great a fondness for merely diagnosing our ills. If we can post on social media about our solidarity with troops struggling to overcome trauma, we feel we've done our job.
James Mattis has spoken before about how emphasizing the PTSD aspect of military service may not be helping military members to get better. Of course we should recognize and treat illness. But as folks used to say in church, that doesn't mean we need to spend so much time talking about the devil we end up praising him. It's okay to encourage people to put themselves back together. It doesn't all have to be appreciating how broken they are.
Maybe it's because when it comes to repairing spiritual wounds, our culture doesn't have much to offer. We have no ceremonies to cleanse ourselves, because we don't believe in anything sacred. Our view of psychological healing is a consumer one: we go to a professional who gives us drugs. We continue going forever, which means we consume forever.
I'm not saying nobody should see a psychiatrist, although I wish we were as skeptical about diagnoses of depression as we are about diagnosing too many kids with attention deficit disorder. But we need more than just a consumer doctor-patient model to make us well again. We need a spiritual life as a society. One of the sources of that healing spirituality is our mythology, our stories.
There's nothing wrong with Ballantine's story. Ballantine isn't to blame for the predilections of society. But the fact this story made it into a year's best anthology says something, I think, about how our culture views trauma and recovery. For us, a coming-of-age story about war and trauma is complete when we realize how psyche-rending the trauma is. The boy is a man when he is unmoored, confused, sexually frustrated, and unable to find a voice to express all that he now knows.
Friday, January 25, 2019
New story up: "Haulers" is now on Crack the Spine
Just a short post here to announce my latest story to get published. It's called "Haulers," and it's here on Crack the Spine. Basic premise: guy who hauls trash for a living is having a hard time getting over his 15 minutes of infamy that happened when he ended up in a viral video he'd rather forget.
More to say later about this story and how it came to be, but for now, I'll just let the story do the talking. Have a great weekend.
More to say later about this story and how it came to be, but for now, I'll just let the story do the talking. Have a great weekend.
Wednesday, January 23, 2019
When failing better isn't good enough anymore
If you've ever tried to beat a video game, unless you're a really good player, you'll likely hit a number of cruxes. These are moments where you have a really hard time beating the level you're on, and at some point, you have to decide if it's worth the time you'll have to put into it to get past the part you're stuck on. Sure, if you keep at it forever, you're bound to beat it sometime, but do you really want to invest that much time in a video game? Don't you have other things you could be doing? Didn't the game stop being fun a while ago?
As you try and try to beat the game, you'll likely have a moment where you almost get it. Either you change your approach, or you get a little better at what you were trying, and you very nearly beat the level. Close, but not quite, and that's usually when you throw the controller down and spend some time asking yourself how much you really want to beat this game.
You've gotten closer than you ever got, but to get even better, you're going to need to change somehow. You're going to need a genuine gaming catharsis. You might also need just a little bit of luck, as some levels of the game require you to get the right random combination of things at the same time as you are playing at your best.
I've had a lot of those kinds of moments lately with writing. No writer goes right from zero to success right away. It's a tough road for everyone, and even the extremely talented have to do some heavy lifting to get where they want to be. Earlier in my life, I decided writing seemed too hard for me, and I abandoned it for a decade or so. When I decided to really try it again five years ago, a big part of that decision was me agreeing with myself to keep pushing through a lot of failure. I didn't always keep that promise. I threw the controller down many times, but I always kept picking it back up after a break.
That led to "failing better," to paraphrase Samuel Beckett, and even to what you might call beating a few levels--publications in some smaller journals, the book, etc. For the last two years, I've been trying for a much harder level--cracking into one of the top 50 literary journals. At first, I didn't get very far, just form rejections. Last fall, I took a whole new approach to writing and cranked out five new stories. The results have been coming in for the last few months. In that time, I've gotten rejections but with encouraging notes from five of those journals: Glimmer Train (who put me on their honorable mention in a contest), Iowa Review ("we gave serious consideration to your submission and found it very promising"), The Common ("we were impressed by your writing and would like to see more work in the future"), Shenandoah ("we found much to admire in this story"), and One Story.
This is "failing better." Any writer will tell you a rejection with a note is far, far better than a form rejection. You got noticed off the slush pile, out of hundreds of manuscripts. You were probably in the last round of selections, you just didn't quite make it. I ought to be encouraged, but I'm kind of at a point where failing better isn't cutting it anymore.
This is where, to keep the video game analogy, I might just need a little luck to go with doing it better. An editor somewhere who has a personal connection to my subject matter, maybe, or just having someone read it on the right day to be in the mood for what I'm laying down.
I just don't know if I can stick with it that long. I'm not saying I quit, and I'm not saying I'm going to keep going. I'm saying I threw my controller down with one of those encouraging-but-not-quite messages, and I haven't gotten to where I can pick it back up yet. I might wake up one day and feel like I've got a way to get past the next boss, and I might decide I ought to do other things with my time.
One thing that's very different about writing from trying to beat a video game: the lag time between trying something and finding out if it works can take between a month and a year, and you don't always know what it was that killed you.
I'm sharing this in case other writers ever feel the same. I mistrust advice that tells you to keep going and believe in your dreams no matter what. I also mistrust advice that tells you the opposite. What I trust is when someone tries to tell me the truth, so that's what I'm trying to share with you. There will be moments as a writer when you don't know if you really ought or want to keep going. The only way to know if you should is to put down the controller for a bit and see how drawn you feel to pick it back up.
As you try and try to beat the game, you'll likely have a moment where you almost get it. Either you change your approach, or you get a little better at what you were trying, and you very nearly beat the level. Close, but not quite, and that's usually when you throw the controller down and spend some time asking yourself how much you really want to beat this game.
You've gotten closer than you ever got, but to get even better, you're going to need to change somehow. You're going to need a genuine gaming catharsis. You might also need just a little bit of luck, as some levels of the game require you to get the right random combination of things at the same time as you are playing at your best.
I've had a lot of those kinds of moments lately with writing. No writer goes right from zero to success right away. It's a tough road for everyone, and even the extremely talented have to do some heavy lifting to get where they want to be. Earlier in my life, I decided writing seemed too hard for me, and I abandoned it for a decade or so. When I decided to really try it again five years ago, a big part of that decision was me agreeing with myself to keep pushing through a lot of failure. I didn't always keep that promise. I threw the controller down many times, but I always kept picking it back up after a break.
 |
A really good rage quit is almost as satisfying as actually succeeding |
That led to "failing better," to paraphrase Samuel Beckett, and even to what you might call beating a few levels--publications in some smaller journals, the book, etc. For the last two years, I've been trying for a much harder level--cracking into one of the top 50 literary journals. At first, I didn't get very far, just form rejections. Last fall, I took a whole new approach to writing and cranked out five new stories. The results have been coming in for the last few months. In that time, I've gotten rejections but with encouraging notes from five of those journals: Glimmer Train (who put me on their honorable mention in a contest), Iowa Review ("we gave serious consideration to your submission and found it very promising"), The Common ("we were impressed by your writing and would like to see more work in the future"), Shenandoah ("we found much to admire in this story"), and One Story.
This is "failing better." Any writer will tell you a rejection with a note is far, far better than a form rejection. You got noticed off the slush pile, out of hundreds of manuscripts. You were probably in the last round of selections, you just didn't quite make it. I ought to be encouraged, but I'm kind of at a point where failing better isn't cutting it anymore.
This is where, to keep the video game analogy, I might just need a little luck to go with doing it better. An editor somewhere who has a personal connection to my subject matter, maybe, or just having someone read it on the right day to be in the mood for what I'm laying down.
I just don't know if I can stick with it that long. I'm not saying I quit, and I'm not saying I'm going to keep going. I'm saying I threw my controller down with one of those encouraging-but-not-quite messages, and I haven't gotten to where I can pick it back up yet. I might wake up one day and feel like I've got a way to get past the next boss, and I might decide I ought to do other things with my time.
One thing that's very different about writing from trying to beat a video game: the lag time between trying something and finding out if it works can take between a month and a year, and you don't always know what it was that killed you.
I'm sharing this in case other writers ever feel the same. I mistrust advice that tells you to keep going and believe in your dreams no matter what. I also mistrust advice that tells you the opposite. What I trust is when someone tries to tell me the truth, so that's what I'm trying to share with you. There will be moments as a writer when you don't know if you really ought or want to keep going. The only way to know if you should is to put down the controller for a bit and see how drawn you feel to pick it back up.
Monday, January 21, 2019
How not to argue with evangelicals: Clay Cane's editorial on Mike Pence
Nothing reinforces the stereotype evangelicals have of liberals as Bible illiterates as much as when some liberal acts surprised to learn what the Bible actually says.
Evangelical: I believe the Bible.
Liberal: Cool, bro.
Evangelical: No, like, I actually believe it's the words of God and stuff, and that you should take it in a literal sense in most parts.
Liberal. Whatever.
Evangelical: So, like, where Romans 1 says that homosexuality is "unnatural" and "shameful," I think that's like, true.
Liberal: Whuuut? How could you possibly believe such a thing? Don't you know it's 2019?
This is essentially how much of Clay Cane's editorial that showed up on CNN's website this week reads. There is, I admit, a decent argument buried in his scatter-brained broadside somewhere. The hidden, good argument goes something like this: Mike Pence says he believes in sexual morality the way the Bible describes it, but while he opposes LGBTQ rights on the one hand, he's more than willing to work with a guy who is a known serial philanderer when it suits his political purposes. So Pence is a hypocrite.
That's not a bad argument, but Cane spends more than half the article running around trying to make a quite different point. What he wants is not to achieve some sort of political point of agreement with Pence and other evangelicals, but to demand they repent and change their beliefs. This is where Cane starts his editorial, unimaginatively comparing a Christian school where Karen Pence works to the dystopian world of The Handmaid's Tale. What is it about this school that makes him compare it to Margaret Atwood's world where women have lost all political agency? That the school requires its students to sign a document pledging to "live a life or moral purity." If there is a Christian going back to Peter and Paul who didn't believe in living a life or moral purity, I'd be very surprised to hear about it. If this school is to be condemned for advocating "moral purity," then Augustine, Aquinas, Francis of Assisi, Saint John of the Cross, Sor Juana Ines, and millions of others in history should be condemned along with them. There is nothing unique or novel about this belief. It was also something Quakers who fought to get rid of slavery believed in.
Cane continues to attack the school's pledge document by pointing out that it defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman, and also defines homosexual acts as the type of immoral behavior that would disqualify someone from working at the school. Three paragraphs in, Cane is nowhere near starting his argument that Pence's easy cohabitation with Trump equates to hypocrisy. Instead, he is attacking what Pence and millions of other evangelicals believe about homosexuality. He claims their belief, as expressed in the pledge's language, is "disgusting and insults millions of taxpaying American citizens, many who have served their country. That it is acceptable to the wife of the man who is a heartbeat away from the presidency should horrify and alarm all Americans."
I don't know if the language from the school's pledge document is "disgusting." I know I believe it's wrong. I don't believe the Bible is the word of God. Absent that, it's hard for me to find a moral reason to object to sex between two consenting adults of the same sex. It would be like objecting to someone liking Thai food.
But let's accept that there are people who are obligated to believe homosexuality is wrong, because they believe the Bible is the word of God. You can't shame them into changing their beliefs by saying those beliefs are "un-American" or out of date. For evangelicals, the fact that their beliefs are no longer in fashion means nothing. Jesus is "the same yesterday, today, and forever" to them, so if their beliefs are now anachronistic according to the weather of the world, that troubles them not at all. You cannot shame an evangelical by calling his beliefs "homophobic," because an evangelical does not recognize the thing you are calling a sin as sin. It's like a Jehovah's Witness trying to shame me for accepting a blood transfusion. When it comes to what "sin" is, we're speaking two different languages. When Cane says Pence is morally wrong because he does not recognize LGBTQ people's identity, it will come across to Pence as circular reasoning: It is wrong to deny who LGBTQ people are because that's who they are. Pence's belief, though, is that this isn't who they are, and you'd have to undermine his entire belief in his Bible to convince him otherwise.
Cane and other liberals aren't going to be able to change the minds of evangelicals, at least not overnight. To convince an evangelical he's wrong about homosexuality, you'd almost have to convince him his whole faith is wrong. That's a long, multi-faceted conversation, and the most important parts of it probably will happen off the public stage. There are much more fundamental issues to deal with than whether homosexuality is right or wrong that have to be confronted before an evangelical is going to budge. I'm not saying it's impossible to change an evangelical's mind. I was an evangelical once, and now I'm not. I'm saying that when we're talking about politics and the effects of politics, we should limit our discussions with evangelicals to right political choices, not morally correct ones.
In the 90s, when arguments in favor of same-sex marriages were first picking up some steam in the public arena, those arguing for the change used to emphasize that accepting same-sex marriages didn't mean evangelicals had to agree with those unions. They simply had to accept that whatever marriage means in a legal and secular sense could apply to same-sex couples. They could draw a division in their minds between what was legal and what was moral. They could accept that while sharing a life with someone of the same sex seemed wrong to them, it was a greater wrong to not give someone the legal means to pursue his own happiness in whatever way seemed right to him. This is similar to how sodomy laws against gays were overturned. The argument wasn't, "Gay sex is moral, too," but "Gay sex is not such a threat to the state that the state can make a compelling case to outlaw the actions of free adults in this case." This led some states to change their anti-sodomy laws. Those that didn't were finally forced to change when the Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas that such laws were unconstitutional. Gay rights moved forward by setting realistic political goals, not unreachable cultural ones.
But now, liberals seems unsatisfied with just arguing for political equality. Cane's editorial is a good example. It ignores its own best point for half the article, because it just can't miss a change to shame Pence for believing something Cane doesn't believe.
This is a bad argument, partly because it's just ineffective. People who believed homosexuality was wrong before the article still will, and those who think homosexual acts are as moral as heterosexual ones will still believe that. Nobody will be convinced by this kind of argument.
But it's more than just ineffectiveness. Liberals ought to be people who believe in sound reasoning. We ought to believe in it like evangelicals believe the Bible. Part of sound reasoning is knowing how much of an argument you actually have to win. If a cop is about to give you a speeding ticket, it's enough to say that the sign you just passed said 50, not 40. You don't have to convince the officer that writing speeding tickets is a bad use of police time and taxpayer dollars.
Cane seems to understand the difference between private and political beliefs. He admits that the Pences "have every right" to believe what they believe about God and sexuality, and that the school has a legal right to believe what it believes. But he no sooner allows for this than he frets over the meaning of these beliefs for a man in his position of power. "The school where Karen Pence will work — and indeed she has taught there in the past, for 12 years -- does have a legal right to its brand of hate. But it is deplorable for the wife of the vice president to work in this space. (One wonders, for example, how the sexuality of the kids there will be investigated?)" .
This is absurd. It smacks of frustration. "We liberals won this war years ago. What right do the Pences have to go on believing something we've decided people shouldn't believe any more?" There have been private Christian schools teaching this idea for as long as there have been schools in America. But because they have refused to change when others did, this means that America should not elect someone who continues to teach those ideas?
This lacks any kind of pragmatism, which ought to be a liberal hallmark. We ought to be able to distinguish disagreeing with someone over private matters--even deep disagreement, like we have (and ought to have) over homosexuality--and the ability to find political common ground. If you argue that while Christians have a right to teach sexuality how they want in their schools, funding for it shouldn't come from the government, you'll find some evangelicals willing to accept that argument. But to accept Cane's views would mean that no evangelical could be president, even a president willing to separate private views on morality from public policy views of personal liberty. What evangelical will go along with that?
It's true that not every evangelical makes these distinctions. Some really do want their moral precepts enshrined in laws for everyone. But demanding that nobody who holds the views on homosexuality nearly every evangelical holds ever be able to hold public office is exactly what makes evangelicals feel threatened and want to elect more evangelicals.
Evangelicals think homosexuals are sinners. They also think everyone who doesn't believe in the fundamentals of their beliefs is headed for an eternity of torment and suffering in Hell. They believe this punishment will be handed out by a God they call just and loving, one whom they worship. I think the second belief is so much more troubling than the first, the first is almost not even worth thinking about. It's definitely something liberals have to stop acting shocked about and demanding evangelicals change before we can have some kind of political common ground with them. Giving evangelicals no space to cooperate politically gives them no place to go but exactly where they've gone. And where does that get any of us?
Evangelical: I believe the Bible.
Liberal: Cool, bro.
Evangelical: No, like, I actually believe it's the words of God and stuff, and that you should take it in a literal sense in most parts.
Liberal. Whatever.
Evangelical: So, like, where Romans 1 says that homosexuality is "unnatural" and "shameful," I think that's like, true.
Liberal: Whuuut? How could you possibly believe such a thing? Don't you know it's 2019?
This is essentially how much of Clay Cane's editorial that showed up on CNN's website this week reads. There is, I admit, a decent argument buried in his scatter-brained broadside somewhere. The hidden, good argument goes something like this: Mike Pence says he believes in sexual morality the way the Bible describes it, but while he opposes LGBTQ rights on the one hand, he's more than willing to work with a guy who is a known serial philanderer when it suits his political purposes. So Pence is a hypocrite.
That's not a bad argument, but Cane spends more than half the article running around trying to make a quite different point. What he wants is not to achieve some sort of political point of agreement with Pence and other evangelicals, but to demand they repent and change their beliefs. This is where Cane starts his editorial, unimaginatively comparing a Christian school where Karen Pence works to the dystopian world of The Handmaid's Tale. What is it about this school that makes him compare it to Margaret Atwood's world where women have lost all political agency? That the school requires its students to sign a document pledging to "live a life or moral purity." If there is a Christian going back to Peter and Paul who didn't believe in living a life or moral purity, I'd be very surprised to hear about it. If this school is to be condemned for advocating "moral purity," then Augustine, Aquinas, Francis of Assisi, Saint John of the Cross, Sor Juana Ines, and millions of others in history should be condemned along with them. There is nothing unique or novel about this belief. It was also something Quakers who fought to get rid of slavery believed in.
Cane continues to attack the school's pledge document by pointing out that it defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman, and also defines homosexual acts as the type of immoral behavior that would disqualify someone from working at the school. Three paragraphs in, Cane is nowhere near starting his argument that Pence's easy cohabitation with Trump equates to hypocrisy. Instead, he is attacking what Pence and millions of other evangelicals believe about homosexuality. He claims their belief, as expressed in the pledge's language, is "disgusting and insults millions of taxpaying American citizens, many who have served their country. That it is acceptable to the wife of the man who is a heartbeat away from the presidency should horrify and alarm all Americans."
I don't know if the language from the school's pledge document is "disgusting." I know I believe it's wrong. I don't believe the Bible is the word of God. Absent that, it's hard for me to find a moral reason to object to sex between two consenting adults of the same sex. It would be like objecting to someone liking Thai food.
But let's accept that there are people who are obligated to believe homosexuality is wrong, because they believe the Bible is the word of God. You can't shame them into changing their beliefs by saying those beliefs are "un-American" or out of date. For evangelicals, the fact that their beliefs are no longer in fashion means nothing. Jesus is "the same yesterday, today, and forever" to them, so if their beliefs are now anachronistic according to the weather of the world, that troubles them not at all. You cannot shame an evangelical by calling his beliefs "homophobic," because an evangelical does not recognize the thing you are calling a sin as sin. It's like a Jehovah's Witness trying to shame me for accepting a blood transfusion. When it comes to what "sin" is, we're speaking two different languages. When Cane says Pence is morally wrong because he does not recognize LGBTQ people's identity, it will come across to Pence as circular reasoning: It is wrong to deny who LGBTQ people are because that's who they are. Pence's belief, though, is that this isn't who they are, and you'd have to undermine his entire belief in his Bible to convince him otherwise.
Cane and other liberals aren't going to be able to change the minds of evangelicals, at least not overnight. To convince an evangelical he's wrong about homosexuality, you'd almost have to convince him his whole faith is wrong. That's a long, multi-faceted conversation, and the most important parts of it probably will happen off the public stage. There are much more fundamental issues to deal with than whether homosexuality is right or wrong that have to be confronted before an evangelical is going to budge. I'm not saying it's impossible to change an evangelical's mind. I was an evangelical once, and now I'm not. I'm saying that when we're talking about politics and the effects of politics, we should limit our discussions with evangelicals to right political choices, not morally correct ones.
In the 90s, when arguments in favor of same-sex marriages were first picking up some steam in the public arena, those arguing for the change used to emphasize that accepting same-sex marriages didn't mean evangelicals had to agree with those unions. They simply had to accept that whatever marriage means in a legal and secular sense could apply to same-sex couples. They could draw a division in their minds between what was legal and what was moral. They could accept that while sharing a life with someone of the same sex seemed wrong to them, it was a greater wrong to not give someone the legal means to pursue his own happiness in whatever way seemed right to him. This is similar to how sodomy laws against gays were overturned. The argument wasn't, "Gay sex is moral, too," but "Gay sex is not such a threat to the state that the state can make a compelling case to outlaw the actions of free adults in this case." This led some states to change their anti-sodomy laws. Those that didn't were finally forced to change when the Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas that such laws were unconstitutional. Gay rights moved forward by setting realistic political goals, not unreachable cultural ones.
 |
| It might be a minute before you can get some people to even make it to political equality. Let's start there before we go demanding they change their minds about the bigger stuff. |
But now, liberals seems unsatisfied with just arguing for political equality. Cane's editorial is a good example. It ignores its own best point for half the article, because it just can't miss a change to shame Pence for believing something Cane doesn't believe.
This is a bad argument, partly because it's just ineffective. People who believed homosexuality was wrong before the article still will, and those who think homosexual acts are as moral as heterosexual ones will still believe that. Nobody will be convinced by this kind of argument.
But it's more than just ineffectiveness. Liberals ought to be people who believe in sound reasoning. We ought to believe in it like evangelicals believe the Bible. Part of sound reasoning is knowing how much of an argument you actually have to win. If a cop is about to give you a speeding ticket, it's enough to say that the sign you just passed said 50, not 40. You don't have to convince the officer that writing speeding tickets is a bad use of police time and taxpayer dollars.
Cane seems to understand the difference between private and political beliefs. He admits that the Pences "have every right" to believe what they believe about God and sexuality, and that the school has a legal right to believe what it believes. But he no sooner allows for this than he frets over the meaning of these beliefs for a man in his position of power. "The school where Karen Pence will work — and indeed she has taught there in the past, for 12 years -- does have a legal right to its brand of hate. But it is deplorable for the wife of the vice president to work in this space. (One wonders, for example, how the sexuality of the kids there will be investigated?)" .
This is absurd. It smacks of frustration. "We liberals won this war years ago. What right do the Pences have to go on believing something we've decided people shouldn't believe any more?" There have been private Christian schools teaching this idea for as long as there have been schools in America. But because they have refused to change when others did, this means that America should not elect someone who continues to teach those ideas?
This lacks any kind of pragmatism, which ought to be a liberal hallmark. We ought to be able to distinguish disagreeing with someone over private matters--even deep disagreement, like we have (and ought to have) over homosexuality--and the ability to find political common ground. If you argue that while Christians have a right to teach sexuality how they want in their schools, funding for it shouldn't come from the government, you'll find some evangelicals willing to accept that argument. But to accept Cane's views would mean that no evangelical could be president, even a president willing to separate private views on morality from public policy views of personal liberty. What evangelical will go along with that?
It's true that not every evangelical makes these distinctions. Some really do want their moral precepts enshrined in laws for everyone. But demanding that nobody who holds the views on homosexuality nearly every evangelical holds ever be able to hold public office is exactly what makes evangelicals feel threatened and want to elect more evangelicals.
Evangelicals think homosexuals are sinners. They also think everyone who doesn't believe in the fundamentals of their beliefs is headed for an eternity of torment and suffering in Hell. They believe this punishment will be handed out by a God they call just and loving, one whom they worship. I think the second belief is so much more troubling than the first, the first is almost not even worth thinking about. It's definitely something liberals have to stop acting shocked about and demanding evangelicals change before we can have some kind of political common ground with them. Giving evangelicals no space to cooperate politically gives them no place to go but exactly where they've gone. And where does that get any of us?
Wednesday, January 16, 2019
Critique, review, or something else?
I've been following Karen Carlson's blog for six years now, since I first started reading the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart anthologies every year. Even though I've stolen her idea and started blogging through these two series, I still follow what she has to say on these stories, because she provides an unfailingly personal reading. There's zero artifice and no pretense in anything she writes.
Yesterday, she commented that she writes more "reactions" than "reviews." It might be helpful to differentiate between a review and other terms that are close to it, like reaction or critique.
---
A review is meant for others who might be considering reading the book. The chief focus of a review is whether the book/story is good and why.
A critique or "literary criticism" focuses on what the work means, both within the work itself and within the bigger context of the world in which the work was produced and also within the narrower confines of the world of literature. Criticism is nearly synonymous with analysis.
A reaction is not so much what the work means as what the work means to the person reviewing it. It's about the process of internalizing it and how it changes the reader's perspective on life.
---
All three are part of reading well. The three also bleed into one another somewhat. You can't talk about what a work means to you without at least talking a little bit about what it means, period. You can't explain what the work's significance is without at least giving people a guess whether you think it's good. And you can't explain why it's good without talking a little bit about what it means. I tend to combine all three of these elements into my discussions of literature, which is why I tag them as both review and criticism.
It occurred to me the other day that there is another genre out there that influences how I approach writing about literature. It's the sermon. My first introduction to reading a text seriously wasn't in school, it was in church. Pastor Russ would spend 45 minutes talking about a relatively small number of verses from John or First Peter, first trying to explain issues from the Greek, then giving the context, both within the larger work and within the history in which the work was written, and then we'd move into what the work meant for us, how we should all change our lives based on the work's message.
I don't think I've ever gotten away from thinking of reading as something that should impact how I live, however far I've gotten from believing the other things Faith Bible Church taught me. I think anyone who attempts to be a critic about American literature ought to have at least some familiarity with how some of the better sermons sound, because it's a form that's likely to resonate with a lot of Americans.
A sermon isn't as scholarly as an article in a journal on Biblical studies, and neither are most of the things I write attempting to harness the full might of available literary erudition. I write the way it occurs to me to write, the way my actual thoughts usually play out when I read literature, and I hope that it registers with enough people that it's worth the effort.
I'd like it if there were more people doing criticism out there. No pastor can write a sermon without consulting at least a few serious scholars, and I'd be grateful if more actual literary professionals spent time blogging from a more learned perspective about these stories. But absent that--and it looks like we are absent that--I'm going to keep offering what I've got the only way I can offer it. But I'd like to warn readers (many of whom I suspect are students looking for help with stories they've been assigned) that although I will sometimes channel real literary analysis into my reviews, they're usually somewhat south of what you'd want to include in a paper on the story. They might point you in the right direction of what a work means, but you're going to need to follow those directions to some place where you can look at the meaning a little closer.
Yesterday, she commented that she writes more "reactions" than "reviews." It might be helpful to differentiate between a review and other terms that are close to it, like reaction or critique.
---
A review is meant for others who might be considering reading the book. The chief focus of a review is whether the book/story is good and why.
A critique or "literary criticism" focuses on what the work means, both within the work itself and within the bigger context of the world in which the work was produced and also within the narrower confines of the world of literature. Criticism is nearly synonymous with analysis.
A reaction is not so much what the work means as what the work means to the person reviewing it. It's about the process of internalizing it and how it changes the reader's perspective on life.
---
All three are part of reading well. The three also bleed into one another somewhat. You can't talk about what a work means to you without at least talking a little bit about what it means, period. You can't explain what the work's significance is without at least giving people a guess whether you think it's good. And you can't explain why it's good without talking a little bit about what it means. I tend to combine all three of these elements into my discussions of literature, which is why I tag them as both review and criticism.
It occurred to me the other day that there is another genre out there that influences how I approach writing about literature. It's the sermon. My first introduction to reading a text seriously wasn't in school, it was in church. Pastor Russ would spend 45 minutes talking about a relatively small number of verses from John or First Peter, first trying to explain issues from the Greek, then giving the context, both within the larger work and within the history in which the work was written, and then we'd move into what the work meant for us, how we should all change our lives based on the work's message.
I don't think I've ever gotten away from thinking of reading as something that should impact how I live, however far I've gotten from believing the other things Faith Bible Church taught me. I think anyone who attempts to be a critic about American literature ought to have at least some familiarity with how some of the better sermons sound, because it's a form that's likely to resonate with a lot of Americans.
 |
| His repertoire was a bit limited, but this guy was a decent literary critic |
A sermon isn't as scholarly as an article in a journal on Biblical studies, and neither are most of the things I write attempting to harness the full might of available literary erudition. I write the way it occurs to me to write, the way my actual thoughts usually play out when I read literature, and I hope that it registers with enough people that it's worth the effort.
I'd like it if there were more people doing criticism out there. No pastor can write a sermon without consulting at least a few serious scholars, and I'd be grateful if more actual literary professionals spent time blogging from a more learned perspective about these stories. But absent that--and it looks like we are absent that--I'm going to keep offering what I've got the only way I can offer it. But I'd like to warn readers (many of whom I suspect are students looking for help with stories they've been assigned) that although I will sometimes channel real literary analysis into my reviews, they're usually somewhat south of what you'd want to include in a paper on the story. They might point you in the right direction of what a work means, but you're going to need to follow those directions to some place where you can look at the meaning a little closer.
Monday, January 14, 2019
All in all, who isn't a brick in the wall?: "Kylie Wears Balmain" by Sarah Resnick
The Pushcart Anthology has a funny quirk I've noticed over the years. As the editors lay out the contents, which alter between fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction, only the fiction entries are specifically called out as fiction at the beginning. For example, the story I'm reviewing now has the title of the story on the first line, then "fiction by Sarah Resnick" on the second line, and finally the journal in which the story first appeared (n+1 in this case) on the third line. I can see why they don't specifically say that poetry is poetry. Poetry is set off typographically (so much that one college professor of mine said that the best way to tell if something is a poem is that "the lines don't go all the way to to end"), so it's easy to know when you're reading a poem. But nowadays, creative non-fiction tends to sound a lot like first-person fiction. So it's easy to get confused sometimes about what you're reading. Pushcart ONLY calls out the fiction as fiction. It's as if the non-fiction were the default, the assumed form, and fiction were the oddball that needs labelled. I doubt this would have been true fifty years ago in a literary anthology.
I bring this up because Resnick's "Kylie Wears Balmain" sounded a lot like to me like creative non-fiction, like a memoir. I had to keep going back to the beginning to be sure that what I was reading was actually a short story.
My difficulty being able to tell fiction (something that didn't happen) from non-fiction (something that really happened) turned out to be totally appropriate to the themes of Resnick's excellent story. In "Kylie," a woman (called "the woman" throughout) takes a job writing for a celebrity tabloid. She's tired of being poor and living in a crappy place, and she is already working two jobs. The magazine (called "The Magazine" throughout) offers good pay and a lot of nice perks, including great catered dinners for staff.
Immediately after taking the job, she has doubts about what she is doing. She went to school to do serious writing, but The Magazine is everything that's wrong with America: "fashion knock-offs, 'diets that work,' stratified wealth, divorce, couture latex, infidelity, single moms, countouring, God, fame, infamy."
She assuages the guilt in two ways. (Well, three, I guess. Guilt also goes down easy with a fancy catered dinner.) First, she tells herself she is just there to "check the facts." Although her friends chide her that a magazine like The Magazine doesn't contain any facts, there are actually a dizzying number of facts for The Woman to check up on. And unlike every serious journalism enterprise in America, The Magazine actually still employs enough fact-checkers to get its stories right. Reason being, The Magazine can lose the good will of its sources if it does something like misprint the age of a celebrity. So there are stakes for the magazine, and those stakes mean it's important to get the facts right. The facts might be about the most insipid things, but they're still technically facts.
The second way The Woman comes to terms with her job is that everyone else working as a fact-checker at The Magazine is a lot like her. They're all artists of various sorts: poets, novelists, the editors of a literary magazine who get no money printing literature, so they do this job to pay for the other one. There's even a Democratic candidate for city office working there. The Magazine is, without meaning to be, "a benevolent sponsor of the city's high-minded literary and arts communities."
The Woman has come face-to-face with a reality almost everyone in the arts faces eventually: art doesn't pay. So she has to take a job in the world, and in her case, there's an extra perversity to it. As an artist, she's beholden to critique everything that The Magazine tries to push on people. But as a fact checker, she's forced to help protect The Magazine's ability to uphold the culture she should be deconstructing.
To add insult to injury, every day she checks facts about "artists" of a sort who are making money--scads of money--by being artists, which has to make The Woman question what is wrong with her and whether something was very wrong with her calculations of value in the first place.
Ultimately, The Woman is spared from having to go through an enlightenment that would allow her to walk out of the job, because the job walks out on her. Like all American consumer culture, it eventually consumes itself. The Magazine ends up broke, partly through bad business practices, and partly because the market has changed: celebrities no longer need to work with tabloids to stay relevant, because they can simply build their own brand through social media.
The Magazine's staff dinners get progressively more and more parsimonious, until finally, they consist of nothing more than a nutrition bar The Magazine is hawking on behalf of a celebrity publicist. When The Woman learns she's been fired, she takes one last nutrition bar and continues reading The Magazine on the way out. Far from finding a way to live without the worst of American capitalism, she has become content to drain every last drop she can from it.
I never intended to end up in the job I'm in. If you'd told me in 1997 as I was getting out of the Marine Corps and headed off to college that I'd be where I am, I'd have laughed at you. But having no money when everyone else you know does has a way of changing your mind about things. I didn't want to be a burden on other people, and I hoped that maybe I'd even be able to help others if I got a job. So I gave in to the system, as the system expresses itself through market forces in the labor market.
That job has enabled me to support a family and also to help several people outside my family. It is enabling me to pursue writing as a passion. Like "The Woman" from "Kylie," I work with a lot of people who didn't dream of being where they are now, people who use their day jobs to try to follow what they really want to be doing on the side.
I don't think there's a solution to getting out of this situation. Any job you get is going to at least be supported by the worst of American capitalism, even if it doesn't directly feed into it. You might be a massage therapist (the job I dream of doing when I try to think of a job with no social downside), but all of your clients are going to be people who make money off the worst of American capitalism, unless you intend to specify "no robber barons" in your marketing. If the American economy went south, your job as a massage therapist would take a hit, too. If your ability to do your job depends on the health of another industry, then you are a part of that industry, no matter what you may think.
Anyone with a bank account can't really claim they don't support American capitalism, including its military adventuring side.
You could, I suppose, try to take extreme measures: move to the woods in Alaska, somewhere where you are allowed to just claim a piece of land and not pay for it. Use only what your hands can make, eat only what you can grow, gather, or catch. But what good is this? For one thing, if everyone did that, the wilds would soon disappear, making it impossible for anyone else to live that life. Secondly, I'd die in about twelve hours of that kind of life. I know no survival skills that don't pertain to civilized life. Finally, the biggest benefit from this kind of life would be a reduction in your consumption and footprint on the environment. But if that's your goal, the hard truth is that nothing you do to reduce your consumption will be as effective as suicide.
Is there any hope, then, for someone who wants to live a life that isn't co-opted? I think there is, and it lies in refusing to give in to the lies around us even while we are forced to give some level of support to those lies. The Woman, having helped fact-check a story on the short-lived romance between Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston, wonders whether they were ever really in love or if it was a con cooked up by their respective PR teams. She decides that it is "of little consequence as far as fact-checking is concerned."
The Woman is lost at this point. And here we return to the difficult distinction between fiction and non-fiction with which we began, a distinction becoming all the more difficult every day as journalism struggles to keep up with the age in which we now live.
The job of people is to know better and hope for better even while we work in a world in which better does not yet exist. It is to be "in but not of the world," as my Christian friends would have it. The Woman convinces herself that the lies she supports aren't lies because they contain so many facts. It's easier to believe this than to accept what the job really is. I propose that the superior route is to remember you are supporting a lie, even if you don't see much choice and this realization makes you unhappy.
The person who knows she is working for something other than the ideal can still push back, can still have small ways of influencing society. She joins an organization of people with no name, an international conspiracy fighting an ongoing guerrilla war for truth and a better way to live.
We will often fail to resist when we should. We will acquiesce when we shouldn't. But we mustn't content ourselves forever with living off the scraps the world throws us. I conclude with another Christian reference, this time, the words of C.S. Lewis:
I bring this up because Resnick's "Kylie Wears Balmain" sounded a lot like to me like creative non-fiction, like a memoir. I had to keep going back to the beginning to be sure that what I was reading was actually a short story.
My difficulty being able to tell fiction (something that didn't happen) from non-fiction (something that really happened) turned out to be totally appropriate to the themes of Resnick's excellent story. In "Kylie," a woman (called "the woman" throughout) takes a job writing for a celebrity tabloid. She's tired of being poor and living in a crappy place, and she is already working two jobs. The magazine (called "The Magazine" throughout) offers good pay and a lot of nice perks, including great catered dinners for staff.
Immediately after taking the job, she has doubts about what she is doing. She went to school to do serious writing, but The Magazine is everything that's wrong with America: "fashion knock-offs, 'diets that work,' stratified wealth, divorce, couture latex, infidelity, single moms, countouring, God, fame, infamy."
She assuages the guilt in two ways. (Well, three, I guess. Guilt also goes down easy with a fancy catered dinner.) First, she tells herself she is just there to "check the facts." Although her friends chide her that a magazine like The Magazine doesn't contain any facts, there are actually a dizzying number of facts for The Woman to check up on. And unlike every serious journalism enterprise in America, The Magazine actually still employs enough fact-checkers to get its stories right. Reason being, The Magazine can lose the good will of its sources if it does something like misprint the age of a celebrity. So there are stakes for the magazine, and those stakes mean it's important to get the facts right. The facts might be about the most insipid things, but they're still technically facts.
The second way The Woman comes to terms with her job is that everyone else working as a fact-checker at The Magazine is a lot like her. They're all artists of various sorts: poets, novelists, the editors of a literary magazine who get no money printing literature, so they do this job to pay for the other one. There's even a Democratic candidate for city office working there. The Magazine is, without meaning to be, "a benevolent sponsor of the city's high-minded literary and arts communities."
 |
| It's easy to scoff, but what if this were how the next great American novel came to be? |
The Woman has come face-to-face with a reality almost everyone in the arts faces eventually: art doesn't pay. So she has to take a job in the world, and in her case, there's an extra perversity to it. As an artist, she's beholden to critique everything that The Magazine tries to push on people. But as a fact checker, she's forced to help protect The Magazine's ability to uphold the culture she should be deconstructing.
To add insult to injury, every day she checks facts about "artists" of a sort who are making money--scads of money--by being artists, which has to make The Woman question what is wrong with her and whether something was very wrong with her calculations of value in the first place.
Ultimately, The Woman is spared from having to go through an enlightenment that would allow her to walk out of the job, because the job walks out on her. Like all American consumer culture, it eventually consumes itself. The Magazine ends up broke, partly through bad business practices, and partly because the market has changed: celebrities no longer need to work with tabloids to stay relevant, because they can simply build their own brand through social media.
The Magazine's staff dinners get progressively more and more parsimonious, until finally, they consist of nothing more than a nutrition bar The Magazine is hawking on behalf of a celebrity publicist. When The Woman learns she's been fired, she takes one last nutrition bar and continues reading The Magazine on the way out. Far from finding a way to live without the worst of American capitalism, she has become content to drain every last drop she can from it.
I find this story "relatable," as they say
I never intended to end up in the job I'm in. If you'd told me in 1997 as I was getting out of the Marine Corps and headed off to college that I'd be where I am, I'd have laughed at you. But having no money when everyone else you know does has a way of changing your mind about things. I didn't want to be a burden on other people, and I hoped that maybe I'd even be able to help others if I got a job. So I gave in to the system, as the system expresses itself through market forces in the labor market.
That job has enabled me to support a family and also to help several people outside my family. It is enabling me to pursue writing as a passion. Like "The Woman" from "Kylie," I work with a lot of people who didn't dream of being where they are now, people who use their day jobs to try to follow what they really want to be doing on the side.
I don't think there's a solution to getting out of this situation. Any job you get is going to at least be supported by the worst of American capitalism, even if it doesn't directly feed into it. You might be a massage therapist (the job I dream of doing when I try to think of a job with no social downside), but all of your clients are going to be people who make money off the worst of American capitalism, unless you intend to specify "no robber barons" in your marketing. If the American economy went south, your job as a massage therapist would take a hit, too. If your ability to do your job depends on the health of another industry, then you are a part of that industry, no matter what you may think.
Anyone with a bank account can't really claim they don't support American capitalism, including its military adventuring side.
You could, I suppose, try to take extreme measures: move to the woods in Alaska, somewhere where you are allowed to just claim a piece of land and not pay for it. Use only what your hands can make, eat only what you can grow, gather, or catch. But what good is this? For one thing, if everyone did that, the wilds would soon disappear, making it impossible for anyone else to live that life. Secondly, I'd die in about twelve hours of that kind of life. I know no survival skills that don't pertain to civilized life. Finally, the biggest benefit from this kind of life would be a reduction in your consumption and footprint on the environment. But if that's your goal, the hard truth is that nothing you do to reduce your consumption will be as effective as suicide.
Is there any hope, then, for someone who wants to live a life that isn't co-opted? I think there is, and it lies in refusing to give in to the lies around us even while we are forced to give some level of support to those lies. The Woman, having helped fact-check a story on the short-lived romance between Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston, wonders whether they were ever really in love or if it was a con cooked up by their respective PR teams. She decides that it is "of little consequence as far as fact-checking is concerned."
"What matters, for her purposes, is that even if Taylor and Tom were not truly in love, they had still performed love for the cameras. Love or no love, there remains the fact of the performance. And in the fact of the performance, there is something one can call "truth," i.e., the performance happened.
If there is a fiction in the story, it does not originate in The Magazine."
The Woman is lost at this point. And here we return to the difficult distinction between fiction and non-fiction with which we began, a distinction becoming all the more difficult every day as journalism struggles to keep up with the age in which we now live.
The job of people is to know better and hope for better even while we work in a world in which better does not yet exist. It is to be "in but not of the world," as my Christian friends would have it. The Woman convinces herself that the lies she supports aren't lies because they contain so many facts. It's easier to believe this than to accept what the job really is. I propose that the superior route is to remember you are supporting a lie, even if you don't see much choice and this realization makes you unhappy.
The person who knows she is working for something other than the ideal can still push back, can still have small ways of influencing society. She joins an organization of people with no name, an international conspiracy fighting an ongoing guerrilla war for truth and a better way to live.
We will often fail to resist when we should. We will acquiesce when we shouldn't. But we mustn't content ourselves forever with living off the scraps the world throws us. I conclude with another Christian reference, this time, the words of C.S. Lewis:
Failures will be forgiven; it is acquiescence that is fatal, the permitted, regularised presence of an area in ourselves which we still claim for our own. We may never this side of death, drive the invader out of our territory, but we must be in the Resistance, not in the Vichy government.
Friday, January 11, 2019
The book isn't good, but come on, be nice: "The Absolved" by Matthew Binder
In November, I offered up some thoughts on a developing writer who wrote an opinion piece I mostly disagreed with. I can't call what I wrote a defense of his opinions expressed in Quillette, but maybe it was something of a defense of Matthew Binder, the person who wrote them, and his right not to be attacked personally for expressing an opinion.
To briefly review, Binder had a dream to write a novel, so he interrupted his life to travel and write one. He then moved to New York to try and break into the literary world, where he faced rejection for about two years before finding a publisher. His book The Absolved dropped on December 4th.
In Quillette, he attempted to offer "a glimpse inside the ideological monoculture of literary New York." He did not quite outright say that a monocultural literary establishment kept him out because it was unwilling to accept political views divergent from liberal ones, and he didn't quite outright say that being a white man was a big obstacle to getting published, but he strongly implied both. He offered one anecdote to back up the second claim: He thought, based on conversations with an acquisitions agent, that he had landed a deal. But the agent got an email from his boss that the company wasn't "taking on unknown white guys this year." Binder claimed that he saw this email and those were the words in it.
Quite a few outlets caught wind of the story and unleashed a fury of scorn at Binder. None was tougher on Binder's article than this scorching attack from Robyn Pennacchia at Wonkette. I call it an attack on Binder's piece, but it was really an attack on Binder himself. The title called Binder a "terrible novelist," and then the opening paragraph goes like this:
It got worse from there, and it never stopped being personal. There were a few moments when Pennacchia eased off how much she found Binder personally repugnant to refute points in what he wrote. She pointed out that it has always been difficult to get published, not just lately. She quoted from the novel, a passage which, I fully agreed, did not portend a great work. But she also just made a lot of ad hominem attacks, many of which were based on assumptions. She assumed, for example, that when he was asked to leave a party for expressing a differing opinion, that he was being obnoxious and grating, although it's equally possible the other party took offense without good reason. Pennacchia wasn't there, so she ought to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Soon after this happened, I wrote the post that argued that while he didn't make as strong an argument as he thought, and the novel didn't seem as promising as he thought, the way he was being attacked was unreasonable. Instead of calmly pointing out the weaknesses in his post, people made it about him. He's a terrible person. He's an entitled, pompous white man with more self-confidence than talent. They also assumed his novel was terrible, and this was why he had such a hard time getting published.
The sample passage from Binder's book didn't give me a lot of hope it would be great, but I decided, mostly to get a little more perspective on an incident I found interesting, to read the novel and see. I was sort of hoping that somehow, the novel might be really good, and then my argument would look a lot stronger.
The novel is not good. I could just leave it at that, and I'm tempted to. I don't really want to spend time pointing out flaws in someone else's book. There's really only a point to that exercise when the book in question has sold well, and I'm offering an opinion on why the book's popularity isn't deserved. It's no fun to pick at another author who's struggling to get somewhere just like I am. It's also a real chore to go into why something is bad, because it makes you linger a long time in a work you don't enjoy. But I can't pretend to be honest as an observer of literary culture or as a critic without putting a period on this whole Quillette hubbub by reviewing the book.
66 years ago, Kurt Vonnegut's first novel Player Piano was already looking ahead to a world in which automation and technology had robbed most people of the dignity that comes from meaningful employment. In Vonnegut's world, the majority of Americans without real employment were put into a TVA-like jobs program in which thirty men would sweep a single street for a day. Everyone was guaranteed a basic living, but only the elite technicians who could fix the machines really had a meaningful and abundant life. The restless masses, dubbed the "Reeks and Wrecks," eventually plotted a Luddite revolution. Dr. Paul Proteus, the novel's protagonist, starts off happy with society as it is, but gradually sympathizes with the Reeks and Wrecks and eventually joins the "Ghost Shirt Society" to fight the machines. But the revolution goes horribly wrong, and eventually everyone decides to go back to living meekly with the machines.
Binder offered what could have been an updating of Vonnegut's story. In 2036, most Americans have been put out of work by machines, and only a technical elite still have jobs. Instead of being on a jobs program, though, many Americans become "absolved," hence the title of the book, and no longer have to work. They have a guaranteed universal income and universal health care. They can do whatever they want with their time (except, for some reason, travel abroad). But naturally, the absolved aren't happy. They're listless and untethered. There is an undercurrent of Luddites who'd like to smash the machines and take us back to 1960 or 1860 or 60 B.C. Into this backdrop comes a presidential candidate who is, shall we say, a lot like a politician we're all familiar with today. He's stirring up the Luddite degenerates and railing against the current president, who wants to keep the status quo of socialized everything.
The Absolved's protagonist, Dr. Henri (does he have a last name?), is sort of like Vonnegut's Proteus: he starts off mostly happy with the status quo and then gradually becomes less so.
So it's an interesting premise. Every since The Atlantic ran "A World Without Work" a few years ago, I've worried about this very future. There's a lot of rich ore to mine there.
We never get anywhere near mining all that the story could offer. There are six weaknesses I can point to that kill any chance of this story having any kind of impact:
1) Voice: Henri's voice is relentlessly pompous. He comes off exactly like a mediocre intellect trying to sound smart. His narrative and even his dialogue are both weighed down with far more long adjective and adverbs than are necessary, and the sentence structure is convoluted. The nouns sometimes feel like they were the first choice that came up in a synonym search. Dozens of sentences labor under the weight of excess prepositional phrases when there was a more direct way to get the thought across. Examples:
There's strict logic, and there's the logic that happens to you when you're trying to do something you desperately want to do. Writers all over the world get upset and start looking for answers when they can't publish the work they put so much of themselves into. Against everything we were taught as kids, sometimes there can be some wisdom to making excuses rather than saying your failures are because you're bad. If you admit it's because you're bad, you might give up. If you make excuses, you might keep going. Binder did that. I've done it, too. And look what it did for him-- at the end of a long road, he got his novel published. It's selling okay. It's got a few good reviews--just not from me.
Eventually, Binder won't have to make excuses. But he's going to remember how he was treated during this, and that's going to make him a lot less receptive to what the people who attacked him have to say.
Those who saw the flaws in his argument could have just calmly pointed out those flaws. When you're right, you can afford to be calm, almost bored. They could have, like I did, read the story and shown how maybe the flaws of the book itself had something to do with the difficulty of getting it published. They could have restrained themselves to the facts at hand, instead of making it all about Binder's aggrieved white maleness. But they didn't. They made it a snark free-for-all against Binder. For all I know, Binder spends his free time building solar panels for orphans in Angola. So I'm going to keep my thoughts about his writing and his work separate.
I like snark. It has a place, but that place isn't against people who are just frustrated like we've all been or we all are now. Snark is for the powerful. They are supposed to be the butt of our jokes, not some poor dude with such a tender heart he gave up his day job to write a novel because of Anthony Bourdain.
The novel is pretty bad. It reminded me a lot of the film The Room by Tommy Wiseau. It has the same strange misogyny and the same buoyant belief in its own value, in spite of obvious flaws. I like how James Franco's The Disaster Artist chose to treat Wiseau. They saw his self-confidence and desire to tell his story against all common sense as something to celebrate. They noted how remarkable it is that we were still talking about his move years after he made it. And here I am, now, at the end of a very long post talking about Binder's book. To quote Binder's Henri, making art requires ego. I don't understand why we are surprised Binder had enough ego to think the fault wasn't his own. I very much doubt any criticism I or anyone else could raise against the book will change his mind about the merits of his work. And I wouldn't want it any other way.
To briefly review, Binder had a dream to write a novel, so he interrupted his life to travel and write one. He then moved to New York to try and break into the literary world, where he faced rejection for about two years before finding a publisher. His book The Absolved dropped on December 4th.
In Quillette, he attempted to offer "a glimpse inside the ideological monoculture of literary New York." He did not quite outright say that a monocultural literary establishment kept him out because it was unwilling to accept political views divergent from liberal ones, and he didn't quite outright say that being a white man was a big obstacle to getting published, but he strongly implied both. He offered one anecdote to back up the second claim: He thought, based on conversations with an acquisitions agent, that he had landed a deal. But the agent got an email from his boss that the company wasn't "taking on unknown white guys this year." Binder claimed that he saw this email and those were the words in it.
Quite a few outlets caught wind of the story and unleashed a fury of scorn at Binder. None was tougher on Binder's article than this scorching attack from Robyn Pennacchia at Wonkette. I call it an attack on Binder's piece, but it was really an attack on Binder himself. The title called Binder a "terrible novelist," and then the opening paragraph goes like this:
Every so often on this here internet, we get a hate read that is so perfect, that so aptly encapsulates a particular form of douchebaggery that we all must collectively gasp at it's (sic) awfulness and revel in the general repulsiveness of the arrogant human being so lacking in self-awareness that they actually thought it would be a good idea to write such a thing. Today, I bring you such a hate read -- Matthew Binder's A Glimpse Into the Ideological Monoculture of Literary New York.
It got worse from there, and it never stopped being personal. There were a few moments when Pennacchia eased off how much she found Binder personally repugnant to refute points in what he wrote. She pointed out that it has always been difficult to get published, not just lately. She quoted from the novel, a passage which, I fully agreed, did not portend a great work. But she also just made a lot of ad hominem attacks, many of which were based on assumptions. She assumed, for example, that when he was asked to leave a party for expressing a differing opinion, that he was being obnoxious and grating, although it's equally possible the other party took offense without good reason. Pennacchia wasn't there, so she ought to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Soon after this happened, I wrote the post that argued that while he didn't make as strong an argument as he thought, and the novel didn't seem as promising as he thought, the way he was being attacked was unreasonable. Instead of calmly pointing out the weaknesses in his post, people made it about him. He's a terrible person. He's an entitled, pompous white man with more self-confidence than talent. They also assumed his novel was terrible, and this was why he had such a hard time getting published.
The sample passage from Binder's book didn't give me a lot of hope it would be great, but I decided, mostly to get a little more perspective on an incident I found interesting, to read the novel and see. I was sort of hoping that somehow, the novel might be really good, and then my argument would look a lot stronger.
I regret to report my findings
The novel is not good. I could just leave it at that, and I'm tempted to. I don't really want to spend time pointing out flaws in someone else's book. There's really only a point to that exercise when the book in question has sold well, and I'm offering an opinion on why the book's popularity isn't deserved. It's no fun to pick at another author who's struggling to get somewhere just like I am. It's also a real chore to go into why something is bad, because it makes you linger a long time in a work you don't enjoy. But I can't pretend to be honest as an observer of literary culture or as a critic without putting a period on this whole Quillette hubbub by reviewing the book.
What is right about it
There's a good premise to the whole thing.
66 years ago, Kurt Vonnegut's first novel Player Piano was already looking ahead to a world in which automation and technology had robbed most people of the dignity that comes from meaningful employment. In Vonnegut's world, the majority of Americans without real employment were put into a TVA-like jobs program in which thirty men would sweep a single street for a day. Everyone was guaranteed a basic living, but only the elite technicians who could fix the machines really had a meaningful and abundant life. The restless masses, dubbed the "Reeks and Wrecks," eventually plotted a Luddite revolution. Dr. Paul Proteus, the novel's protagonist, starts off happy with society as it is, but gradually sympathizes with the Reeks and Wrecks and eventually joins the "Ghost Shirt Society" to fight the machines. But the revolution goes horribly wrong, and eventually everyone decides to go back to living meekly with the machines.
Binder offered what could have been an updating of Vonnegut's story. In 2036, most Americans have been put out of work by machines, and only a technical elite still have jobs. Instead of being on a jobs program, though, many Americans become "absolved," hence the title of the book, and no longer have to work. They have a guaranteed universal income and universal health care. They can do whatever they want with their time (except, for some reason, travel abroad). But naturally, the absolved aren't happy. They're listless and untethered. There is an undercurrent of Luddites who'd like to smash the machines and take us back to 1960 or 1860 or 60 B.C. Into this backdrop comes a presidential candidate who is, shall we say, a lot like a politician we're all familiar with today. He's stirring up the Luddite degenerates and railing against the current president, who wants to keep the status quo of socialized everything.
The Absolved's protagonist, Dr. Henri (does he have a last name?), is sort of like Vonnegut's Proteus: he starts off mostly happy with the status quo and then gradually becomes less so.
So it's an interesting premise. Every since The Atlantic ran "A World Without Work" a few years ago, I've worried about this very future. There's a lot of rich ore to mine there.
But inept writing means the promise of the premise is never realized
We never get anywhere near mining all that the story could offer. There are six weaknesses I can point to that kill any chance of this story having any kind of impact:
1) Voice: Henri's voice is relentlessly pompous. He comes off exactly like a mediocre intellect trying to sound smart. His narrative and even his dialogue are both weighed down with far more long adjective and adverbs than are necessary, and the sentence structure is convoluted. The nouns sometimes feel like they were the first choice that came up in a synonym search. Dozens of sentences labor under the weight of excess prepositional phrases when there was a more direct way to get the thought across. Examples:
- "While confident I will never fall in love with Taylor--for she is merely a dalliance, a charming and exquisite distraction from the everydayness of my regular life, an embodiment of amorous passion...
- "I've always found that a post-dinner amble never fails to help me work through and resolve the thousand small vexations that plague me."
- "Not unlike Davie Bowie of Paul McCartney, I had an almost mystifying gift for melody."
- "All around the mother are men and women in swimwear who witness this spectacle with shocked and grievous expressions. The rendering is so disproportionate and overly simplistic that I am made disturbed." (I am made disturbed?)
- "After further coaxing, she tells a long and harrowing tale of misfortune and grief straight from Charles Dickens."
There are many, many more like this. It's an outdated way of speaking and even writing now. No man has conversed like this since the 50s. You could make the argument that Henri, as an "anti-hero," should actually sound pompous and long-winded. That might make some sense (although it would still be painful to read), except that EVERY OTHER CHARACTER IN THE NOVEL SPEAKS WITH THE SAME VOICE. Examples:
- "You're the one who's inspired millions of people to cast off all they know in favor of our glorious past!" (The guard at the jail who guards Henri)
- "...told her yes, and she said that some people develop a nihilist philosophy because they dislike the world around them but don't know how to go about transforming it." (Henri's SIX-YEAR OLD SON, who apparently is not thought unusual at all for talking like this)
- "...these generals and kings that you so highly esteem carried on in the most monstrous of ways!" (Henri's father)
- "Perhaps you would prefer the world to stand still? To make its inhabitants immutable?" (Henri's friend)
- "You never can tell the time or place when love will make itself known." (Henri's boss)
- "Henri's abject failure to summon even one convincing dramatic depiction of hay-fever left his audience cold. Not even with the aid of snorting black pepper did he conjure up anything more than a couple of trifling sniffles and a runny nose..." (Henri's wife)
- "Karl, it's okay, I'm dying for my country. It's a good death. Remember, America is a bastion of goodness in a world gone mad." (The fucking immigrant who dies in a story told by a guy Henri knows at the bar, meaning that's Henri's inane manner of speech maintained through the filter of two other people.)
The end result is that I'm left thinking everyone in the novel speaks like a annoying grad student because that's the only register the author has, not because it's an artistic choice.
2) Cliches:
- "The room gets so quiet that I swear I can hear my own heartbeat."
- "Looking not like a woman but a vision of Aphrodite herself."
- "Hair as black as a raven's wing..."
- "...bloom like a desert rose..."
- "...as dry as the Sahara Desert..."
3) Show don't tell:
Granted, any rule can be broken, but you need a good reason to break it. In The Absolved, we get a lot of descriptions where you just have to take the author's word for it, because you're not going to see it for yourself.
- "I'm not sure how, but I won Taylor's affections, evinced by her allowing me to rush her off to bed that very night." (It would have been much more convincing and told us a lot more about their relationship to see what it was he had that won her over.)
- "In today's society where many people feel more intimately connected to their VR-life than to their real life, VR sex is a far more flagrant offense..." (Could we not be given a chance to see a scene rendered in which people are really preferring their VR lives? Could we not get a much better chance to see the world of the future from that than simply being told about it?)
- "Our increasingly technological advances have driven greater and greater inequality." (A lot of the details of the world of The Absolved aren't shown us ever. So we never really get to consider the themes of the book, because we really don't know the world we've visited. We're just told, "It's like this.")
- "When compelled by a powerful emotion, there's not another person alive capable of such a demonstration of charisma and persuasion." (Much better to show us that person being charismatic and persuasive, no?)
4) A lack of focus on what matters:
This novel's promise depends on being able to paint realistically a future without meaningful work for most people. But it digresses for most of the novel into Henri's very uninteresting marital troubles and his not terribly profound thoughts on women. ("It's true--once a woman depends on a man for her sexual pleasure, she gives herself to him entirely.") He can't decide if he's a family man or if family life bores him so much he just wants to run off with the young woman he got to sleep with him without knowing why. It's fine to have a novel be about more than one thing, but Binder is clearly outmatched and not up for the challenge of writing convincingly about love. Every woman in the novel is a bitch. Henri's wife is a neurotic, relentless nagging bitch, his boss is a selfish bitch, his mistress turns out to be a bitch after first seeming like a cool chick who was DTF, the bartender is a bitch who first seemed like a righteous broad.
After first cramming so many facts (but not showing! Never showing!) about the year 2036 into the beginning that even the narrator has to apologize for digressing, we lose track of what's special about 2036 for a long, long time.
Most of what ends up being there shows little thought and doesn't tell us more than what any wag at any bar could tell us: lack of physical labor makes you less of a man and unhappy; people need work to feel happy; nothing is free, and healthcare and basic income for all will eventually become untenable; socialism is bad and will make it so we aren't allowed to smoke and we have to kill anyone who is too expensive to keep alive; Christianity is treated like a backwards religion but Islam gets a pass; political correctness has run amok.
It's a thin story papering over hack political philosophy coupled with amateur economics. ("Rich people can only buy so many consumer goods, and when they run out of things to buy, they simply save their wealth, essentially removing that money from circulation.") Everything in the story feels like the writer knew, based on his political beliefs, what needed to happen, and then just moved some characters around and had stuff happen until he got that ending. We don't learn anything from the novel, because the author didn't learn anything from it, either.
5) Errata:
I had errors in my own book (and every blog post I ever put out), so it's a little hypocritical of me to complain about typographical or syntax errors. I get that with a smaller press, you may not be able to hire a pro editor. But there were a lot of errors I found, and I wasn't even looking that hard. From mixing up "affected" and "effected" to sentences that obviously don't read right if you read them out loud to comma splices to misuse of reflexive pronouns, there were a lot of things that weakened the ethos of the book even more than just the amateurish composition. Most of the main story is told in the present tense, with earlier information in past or past perfect, but there are occasions where there are slip-ups, and the past tense makes it into the main narrative. The president's nickname is "bien hecho," said to be Spanish for "do-gooder," but I believe that means "well done," and the word he was looking for was one word, "bienhechor."
6) No moral center and no identifiable theme
I think the author is something of a libertarian, but didn't want to be seen as one. The only mention of Rand in the novel is to make fun of her. I think Binder didn't want to push his political views down our throats too much, which is a good instinct. But it ended up that it's not really clear what the theme of the book is. If Henri doesn't have the right ideas, and his wife doesn't, and Serena doesn't, and the president doesn't, and the socialists don't, and the rebellion doesn't, then who does? The closest we get to someone with an answer is the old lady who believes in God and it comforts her after her husband dies. That's not really a theme worth writing about. By the end, Henri has thrown out a lot of ideas, some of which I think the reader is meant to take seriously and some of which I think we're meant to see as bunk from an unreliable narrator. But nothing emerges as the real winner.
I thought in chapter 39 that we were getting close to a theme, when Henri tells us that, "Once a man has acquired the taste for tackling difficult things, he no longer has the inclination for matters of ease." That seemed like it might be Henri's awakening. But then two chapters later, he is expounding some long-winded and incredibly stupid theory on how men and women love differently, and in chapter 47, Henri has gone full-reversal on what he said in chapter 39. He now advises: "If it's the truth you want to stand before you, you must never be for or against anything. The struggle between for and against is our fatal flaw!" It's an outburst coming from nowhere and not really meaning anything, although maybe it does foreshadow what Henri will ultimately do (thirty minutes after deciding he will do the opposite thing).
Ok, so the book was bad, but that's still not a reason to be mean
I feel pretty bad about this review, because I think Binder's been through enough. He wrote about what he experienced when trying to get his book published. His facts were not all correct. One anecdote about a guy saying he didn't want new white guys that year doesn't show that all of New York's writing establishment is anti-male or anti-white or anti-white male. But telling your story isn't always just about the hard facts. It can be about what your experience felt like to you. And just because he isn't mostly right doesn't mean he's all wrong. Publishing (and art in general) is fairly liberal. Pennacchia acknowledged this even while beating Binder with a club made of snark. The literary world can be closed off to ideas that aren't in its wheelhouse. I have never been anywhere at any writing gathering where anyone admitted to being a conservative.There's strict logic, and there's the logic that happens to you when you're trying to do something you desperately want to do. Writers all over the world get upset and start looking for answers when they can't publish the work they put so much of themselves into. Against everything we were taught as kids, sometimes there can be some wisdom to making excuses rather than saying your failures are because you're bad. If you admit it's because you're bad, you might give up. If you make excuses, you might keep going. Binder did that. I've done it, too. And look what it did for him-- at the end of a long road, he got his novel published. It's selling okay. It's got a few good reviews--just not from me.
Eventually, Binder won't have to make excuses. But he's going to remember how he was treated during this, and that's going to make him a lot less receptive to what the people who attacked him have to say.
Those who saw the flaws in his argument could have just calmly pointed out those flaws. When you're right, you can afford to be calm, almost bored. They could have, like I did, read the story and shown how maybe the flaws of the book itself had something to do with the difficulty of getting it published. They could have restrained themselves to the facts at hand, instead of making it all about Binder's aggrieved white maleness. But they didn't. They made it a snark free-for-all against Binder. For all I know, Binder spends his free time building solar panels for orphans in Angola. So I'm going to keep my thoughts about his writing and his work separate.
I like snark. It has a place, but that place isn't against people who are just frustrated like we've all been or we all are now. Snark is for the powerful. They are supposed to be the butt of our jokes, not some poor dude with such a tender heart he gave up his day job to write a novel because of Anthony Bourdain.
The novel is pretty bad. It reminded me a lot of the film The Room by Tommy Wiseau. It has the same strange misogyny and the same buoyant belief in its own value, in spite of obvious flaws. I like how James Franco's The Disaster Artist chose to treat Wiseau. They saw his self-confidence and desire to tell his story against all common sense as something to celebrate. They noted how remarkable it is that we were still talking about his move years after he made it. And here I am, now, at the end of a very long post talking about Binder's book. To quote Binder's Henri, making art requires ego. I don't understand why we are surprised Binder had enough ego to think the fault wasn't his own. I very much doubt any criticism I or anyone else could raise against the book will change his mind about the merits of his work. And I wouldn't want it any other way.
Thursday, January 10, 2019
The good story that I'll call great but for all the wrong reasons: "Lupinski" by Myron Taube
Normally, I try to ignore personal details about authors when reviewing their work. This is typically easy for me, since I'm so terrible at remembering names, I often really don't know anything about even an established writer. Once I'm done writing my review, I'll sometimes Google and take a peek at what's out there on the author, mostly out of curiosity. I also like to check just to be sure I didn't say something about a work that someone else already wrote.
For some reason, while reading "Lupinski" by Myron Taube, I decided to check up on the author before writing my review. I liked the story okay. Its use of significant detail, such as a well-timed meatloaf recipe, was particularly effective. I could teach a class on use of detail from this story. It's not technically innovative or anything, and the subject matter--an old man saying good-bye to his wife dying in the hospital--is the opposite of innovative. (I've seen stories get rejected just because they were about this very subject. It's been done. A lot.) But the story's craft--a word I normally hate, but will use here, because it struck me reading it that craft is really what held the story together--got me through it thinking it was alright. My guess--and this is what led me to look up the author--was that it had been written by some bright young MFA student making good use of the writing advice he'd been learning, but still struggling to find unique subject matter.
Instead, I found out that Myron Taube was a retired English professor who died in 2017, not long after writing this story. Moreover, his wife of many years died not long before him. This story wasn't a talented young writer searching for something to write about and landing on the well-worn subject of parting at the end of life; he was a guy who'd just been through the ordeal of saying goodbye to his wife and made it the last thing he left to the world.
Should that matter? Should I think more (or less) of a story because I know some small piece of the human background of the author who wrote it? In serious literary study, the answer is generally no. We are usually supposed to make our judgments based on the text. Extra-textual matters are interesting, but they're supposed to be left outside the discussion of the story itself.
But that's not always how it actually plays out. If I didn't know what made Eric Clapton write "Tears in Heaven," I'd think it was a fairly syrupy, sentimental song. But knowing it's what he himself wrote to try to cope with a terrible tragedy makes me think of the song differently. It really is a different matter when you are witnessing someone "perform" art in this manner, when they are using art publicly to survive some trauma, and we get to watch the performance.
"Lupinksi" starts out like one thing, changes to another, then shifts back to the original thing again, only worse. Life is running out for two people who lived full lives, who checked a lot of the boxes most of us would think you'd need to check to say you spent your time on Earth well. One is just fading away while the other is lost in a fog. There isn't much grace to snatch there, but what there is, the dying pair ineluctably find. It's true and raw and still not totally without hope. And it's far, far more powerful knowing it came from a guy who needed to share this rather than a guy who was just trying to find a touching subject for a story.
For some reason, while reading "Lupinski" by Myron Taube, I decided to check up on the author before writing my review. I liked the story okay. Its use of significant detail, such as a well-timed meatloaf recipe, was particularly effective. I could teach a class on use of detail from this story. It's not technically innovative or anything, and the subject matter--an old man saying good-bye to his wife dying in the hospital--is the opposite of innovative. (I've seen stories get rejected just because they were about this very subject. It's been done. A lot.) But the story's craft--a word I normally hate, but will use here, because it struck me reading it that craft is really what held the story together--got me through it thinking it was alright. My guess--and this is what led me to look up the author--was that it had been written by some bright young MFA student making good use of the writing advice he'd been learning, but still struggling to find unique subject matter.
Instead, I found out that Myron Taube was a retired English professor who died in 2017, not long after writing this story. Moreover, his wife of many years died not long before him. This story wasn't a talented young writer searching for something to write about and landing on the well-worn subject of parting at the end of life; he was a guy who'd just been through the ordeal of saying goodbye to his wife and made it the last thing he left to the world.
Should that matter? Should I think more (or less) of a story because I know some small piece of the human background of the author who wrote it? In serious literary study, the answer is generally no. We are usually supposed to make our judgments based on the text. Extra-textual matters are interesting, but they're supposed to be left outside the discussion of the story itself.
But that's not always how it actually plays out. If I didn't know what made Eric Clapton write "Tears in Heaven," I'd think it was a fairly syrupy, sentimental song. But knowing it's what he himself wrote to try to cope with a terrible tragedy makes me think of the song differently. It really is a different matter when you are witnessing someone "perform" art in this manner, when they are using art publicly to survive some trauma, and we get to watch the performance.
"Lupinksi" starts out like one thing, changes to another, then shifts back to the original thing again, only worse. Life is running out for two people who lived full lives, who checked a lot of the boxes most of us would think you'd need to check to say you spent your time on Earth well. One is just fading away while the other is lost in a fog. There isn't much grace to snatch there, but what there is, the dying pair ineluctably find. It's true and raw and still not totally without hope. And it's far, far more powerful knowing it came from a guy who needed to share this rather than a guy who was just trying to find a touching subject for a story.
Sunday, January 6, 2019
The flat arc, Lord of the Rings, and going the distance
We're almost a week into the new year, meaning, according to all research, that a fair number of people have already abandoned their New Year's resolutions. People can be forgiven for thinking there is some magic to keeping a resolution; we're often fed the notion that change only comes as a result of some great epiphany at the end of unusual events. The character arc of most fiction, be it in books, movies, drama, or TV, follows this formula. A character is stuck in some place, then events come along that crescendo until they finally reach a point where the character realizes something that prompts a change. The change allows the character to overcome the thing that has been preventing him or her from finding happiness.
(Caveat: I'm definitely plagiarizing someone in this section. I'd be happy to cite the proper source, but this is now so widely circulated, I don't really know where the following classification of character arcs began. I'll have to just be content with saying this isn't me.)
Generally, the trajectory or arc a character follows in a narrative can be classified as one of three types of arc:
The positive arc: Most of us are pretty familiar with this one. It's what I just described above. We meet a character and learn about that character's traits, which are a blend of positive and negative. The negative traits are causing some kind of problem in the character's life. (This is sometimes called "the lie the character believes.") The character faces a series of challenges that force her to face up to the weakness (or to see through "the lie") and change. The moment of change is the climax, and it is followed by the denouement, which shows us how the climax allows the character to resolve the issue.
The negative arc: This is an artsier example, at least for main characters. Stories in which the main character gets worse instead of better tend not to satisfy, so we usually relegate the negative character arc to a secondary character. In a negative character arc, the person has a chance to change for the better, but fails to. Sometimes, this just means retreating into the negative traits that cause the problem (continuing to believe "the lie"), but it can also mean the character actually goes from good to bad or bad to worse. Charles Foster Kane from Citizen Kane is one familiar example of a main character with a negative arc.
The flat arc: In a flat arc, the character doesn't essentially change. We might see the character dealing with challenges better in some sections than others, but the character's view of how one ought to face challenges doesn't really change. Often, it is a secondary character with a flat arc. This character is not changed by events nearly as much as the character causes change in others. This character comes into the story knowing something, and this knowledge unlocks the mysteries another character (usually the main character) needs to unlock, or helps the main character see through "the lie." Once in a while, a story will be about this "impact character," and the story becomes about how the main character changes others, rather than is changed. Chauncey Gardner in Being There or Amelie from the movie of the same name come to mind.
There can be mixed arcs. Frodo Baggins has basically a flat arc: he is able to endure from beginning to end because he is basically humble and true and good from beginning to end. However, he is wiser at the end. So are all of the hobbits, and while their basic character remains the same at the end as it was at the beginning, they have also changed enough that they are able to defeat Saruman and his lackeys in the Scouring of the Shire.
Lord of the Rings and the flat arc
Nearly all the main characters in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings have flat arcs. There are a few exceptions, like Saruman, Boromir, and Gollum (all negative arcs), but most of the characters are very much the same at the end as they were at the beginning. The movies changed this for a couple of characters, because the movies needed to make money and people really love positive character arcs. I understand why everyone loves positive arcs. It's important for us all to believe we can change. That's a good thing to believe. If you didn't it'd be hard to get out of bed in the morning.
But I'm a big fan of the flat arc. The fact is that most of us don't really need an epiphany to get past the hurdles in our lives. We just need to do the damn work. Most people who resolved to lose weight or run a 10K this year or whatever know what they need to do to accomplish their goals. Lack of knowledge isn't keeping them from losing the weight. It's lack of tenacity. One of the great secrets to life that isn't really a secret at all is how important it is to put your head down and keep on going.
Aragorn, the movie
There's one character arc in LOTR in particular I'd like to look at a little closer. Owing to the influence of the movies, Aragorn has come to be seen as an example of a classic positive character arc. Kristen Kiefer on her writing blog makes this very mistake while discussing--go figure--the subject of character arcs.
Aragorn is sort of a fantasy George Washington in the movies. He's happy fighting wars, but reluctant to assume the responsibility of ruling. Afraid he might not be worthy to be king because of mistakes made by his forefathers, Aragorn spends much of the trilogy denying the mantle of hope for mankind that others are trying to put on him. This "lie that he believes" is chipped away at bit-by-bit, until finally he decides to become the king he was born to be when the father of the woman he loves tells him it is the only way to save Aragorn's love.
It's a nice story. The trilogy itself came out right after 9/11, and America immediately read its current political situation into the challenges faced by the Fellowship. We saw Frodo's reluctant resolve to do what needed to be done to stop evil as our own story of facing up to extremism. So making Aragorn over into a Washington resonated with us, as well.
Tolkien's Aragorn
But that's not Tolkien's Aragorn. Tolkien's Aragorn was two when his father Arathorn was killed fighting orcs. Aragorn was taken to Rivendell by his mother, where Elrond took on the role of father to him. While in Rivendell, he was given the name "Estel," Elvish for "hope." No one spoke of his true name or lineage in order to protect him from the enemy. When he became full-grown, though, Elrond told Aragorn who he really was and "delivered to him the heirlooms of his house."
This included the shards of the sword Narsil, the one that cut the ring from Sauron's hand. Aragorn is, in fact, carrying this broken sword with him when he meets the hobbits in the books, because it is part of his destiny to carry it as the heir of Elendil.
The only heirloom Elrond does not give to Aragorn is the sceptre of Annuminas, which he says Aragorn needs to earn by way of a hard and long test. This test becomes Aragorn's whole life, which he spends in wandering and fighting the enemies of the free people of Middle Earth. His wandering is not something he does to avoid being king; it's what he has to do to earn the right to be king.
The day after Elrond told Aragorn who he was, Aragorn met Arwen, Elrond's daughter, and immediately fell in love. (Arwen had been away for many years at Lorien, which is why Aragorn had never met her before.) Elrond, sensing Aragorn's true feelings, tells him this:
The next day, Aragorn begins his long test. He wanders for thirty years, learning about the world as he does, becoming friends with Gandalf, and "uncovering the plots and devices of the servants of Sauron." He then sees Arwen again in Lothlorien, and she falls in love with him. She believes he will achieve great things. He does not know if he will be able to live up to her hope, but he says he will "hope with her hope."
When Elrond learns of Arwen's choice, he is grieved. He tells Aragorn that he will agree to lose his precious daughter to him, but only if by doing so, he can help to restore mankind. He will not allow Arwen, therefore, to marry him unless he becomes the king of a reunited Gondor and Arnor.
This is critical to understanding Aragorn. He wants to become king more than anything, because only by becoming king can he have what his heart desires, which is to marry Arwen. At no point in his story does he ever waver from his determination to become king. What we see in him is not reluctance to be king, only an uncertainty about whether he will be able to pass his test. He does, it is true, remain long hidden, and he keeps many false identities. But this is a strategic decision on his part to delay coming forth until the time is right, not born out of a concern that he might somehow have the same moral failings his forefather Isildur did when Isildur failed to destroy the ring. Aragorn refers over and over again to his wish to return to Gondor as heir to the throne, beginning as far back in the trilogy to the Council of Elrond, when he explains Boromir's dream thus:
And, in fact, the ring having been found, it is Aragorn who has the sword remade--not Elrond--and Aragorn does this before the Fellowship leaves Rivendell on the quest. He sees the quest as the end of his long trial. It's the denouement to a catharsis he had decades ago, not a moment of new revelation.
Most of our lives are flat arcs
One of the questions about literature I most often ask myself is whether it's ultimately good for people who spend a lot of time reading it. Certainly, I think that believing we can make our lives into positive-arc stories, ones in which we change and overcome our challenges, is a healthy belief. But we might also end up in long and futile cycles of waiting for some kind of enlightenment to strike us before change can happen. In reality, most of us are in a story that's more like the Aragorn of the books than the Aragorn of the movies. We don't have some great moment of revelation where we suddenly see we've been doing it all wrong. We've known for a long time what we were trying to do with our lives, and we know what we need to do to accomplish it. It's not a mystery, it's just hard, and we might fail at it.
Aragorn doubts himself. Four times, after the Fellowship breaks, he criticizes his own decision-making and puts the blame on himself for the group's difficulties. But he doesn't doubt his ultimate goal, just his ability to accomplish it. There is no catharsis in Lord of the Rings for Aragorn, no moment when he stops "believing the lie." He's got a game plan from very early on, and the story for him is just that game plan developing over a long time.
As we try to accomplish our dreams in our own lives, this arc is more likely what we need to succeed. We don't need a great unmasking of some truth. We don't need to learn some secret we don't already know. We don't need a new plan; we just need to do better at the plan we've had all along.
Three kinds of arcs
(Caveat: I'm definitely plagiarizing someone in this section. I'd be happy to cite the proper source, but this is now so widely circulated, I don't really know where the following classification of character arcs began. I'll have to just be content with saying this isn't me.)
Generally, the trajectory or arc a character follows in a narrative can be classified as one of three types of arc:
The positive arc: Most of us are pretty familiar with this one. It's what I just described above. We meet a character and learn about that character's traits, which are a blend of positive and negative. The negative traits are causing some kind of problem in the character's life. (This is sometimes called "the lie the character believes.") The character faces a series of challenges that force her to face up to the weakness (or to see through "the lie") and change. The moment of change is the climax, and it is followed by the denouement, which shows us how the climax allows the character to resolve the issue.
 |
| One reason I really like Finding Nemo is that you can teach a lot of narrative concepts easily from it. It follows a perfect narrative cycle of rising action-climax-denouement. It also has three characters who clearly have positive character arcs. |
The negative arc: This is an artsier example, at least for main characters. Stories in which the main character gets worse instead of better tend not to satisfy, so we usually relegate the negative character arc to a secondary character. In a negative character arc, the person has a chance to change for the better, but fails to. Sometimes, this just means retreating into the negative traits that cause the problem (continuing to believe "the lie"), but it can also mean the character actually goes from good to bad or bad to worse. Charles Foster Kane from Citizen Kane is one familiar example of a main character with a negative arc.
The flat arc: In a flat arc, the character doesn't essentially change. We might see the character dealing with challenges better in some sections than others, but the character's view of how one ought to face challenges doesn't really change. Often, it is a secondary character with a flat arc. This character is not changed by events nearly as much as the character causes change in others. This character comes into the story knowing something, and this knowledge unlocks the mysteries another character (usually the main character) needs to unlock, or helps the main character see through "the lie." Once in a while, a story will be about this "impact character," and the story becomes about how the main character changes others, rather than is changed. Chauncey Gardner in Being There or Amelie from the movie of the same name come to mind.
There can be mixed arcs. Frodo Baggins has basically a flat arc: he is able to endure from beginning to end because he is basically humble and true and good from beginning to end. However, he is wiser at the end. So are all of the hobbits, and while their basic character remains the same at the end as it was at the beginning, they have also changed enough that they are able to defeat Saruman and his lackeys in the Scouring of the Shire.
Lord of the Rings and the flat arc
Nearly all the main characters in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings have flat arcs. There are a few exceptions, like Saruman, Boromir, and Gollum (all negative arcs), but most of the characters are very much the same at the end as they were at the beginning. The movies changed this for a couple of characters, because the movies needed to make money and people really love positive character arcs. I understand why everyone loves positive arcs. It's important for us all to believe we can change. That's a good thing to believe. If you didn't it'd be hard to get out of bed in the morning.
But I'm a big fan of the flat arc. The fact is that most of us don't really need an epiphany to get past the hurdles in our lives. We just need to do the damn work. Most people who resolved to lose weight or run a 10K this year or whatever know what they need to do to accomplish their goals. Lack of knowledge isn't keeping them from losing the weight. It's lack of tenacity. One of the great secrets to life that isn't really a secret at all is how important it is to put your head down and keep on going.
Aragorn, the movie
There's one character arc in LOTR in particular I'd like to look at a little closer. Owing to the influence of the movies, Aragorn has come to be seen as an example of a classic positive character arc. Kristen Kiefer on her writing blog makes this very mistake while discussing--go figure--the subject of character arcs.
Aragorn is sort of a fantasy George Washington in the movies. He's happy fighting wars, but reluctant to assume the responsibility of ruling. Afraid he might not be worthy to be king because of mistakes made by his forefathers, Aragorn spends much of the trilogy denying the mantle of hope for mankind that others are trying to put on him. This "lie that he believes" is chipped away at bit-by-bit, until finally he decides to become the king he was born to be when the father of the woman he loves tells him it is the only way to save Aragorn's love.
It's a nice story. The trilogy itself came out right after 9/11, and America immediately read its current political situation into the challenges faced by the Fellowship. We saw Frodo's reluctant resolve to do what needed to be done to stop evil as our own story of facing up to extremism. So making Aragorn over into a Washington resonated with us, as well.
Tolkien's Aragorn
But that's not Tolkien's Aragorn. Tolkien's Aragorn was two when his father Arathorn was killed fighting orcs. Aragorn was taken to Rivendell by his mother, where Elrond took on the role of father to him. While in Rivendell, he was given the name "Estel," Elvish for "hope." No one spoke of his true name or lineage in order to protect him from the enemy. When he became full-grown, though, Elrond told Aragorn who he really was and "delivered to him the heirlooms of his house."
This included the shards of the sword Narsil, the one that cut the ring from Sauron's hand. Aragorn is, in fact, carrying this broken sword with him when he meets the hobbits in the books, because it is part of his destiny to carry it as the heir of Elendil.
The only heirloom Elrond does not give to Aragorn is the sceptre of Annuminas, which he says Aragorn needs to earn by way of a hard and long test. This test becomes Aragorn's whole life, which he spends in wandering and fighting the enemies of the free people of Middle Earth. His wandering is not something he does to avoid being king; it's what he has to do to earn the right to be king.
The day after Elrond told Aragorn who he was, Aragorn met Arwen, Elrond's daughter, and immediately fell in love. (Arwen had been away for many years at Lorien, which is why Aragorn had never met her before.) Elrond, sensing Aragorn's true feelings, tells him this:
"Aragorn, Arathorn's son, Lord of the Dunedain, listen to me! A great doom awaits you, either to rise above the height of all your fathers since the days of Elendil, or to fall into darkness with all that is left of your kin. Many years of trial lie before you. You shall neither have wife, nor bind any woman to you in any troth, until your time comes and you are found worthy of it."
The next day, Aragorn begins his long test. He wanders for thirty years, learning about the world as he does, becoming friends with Gandalf, and "uncovering the plots and devices of the servants of Sauron." He then sees Arwen again in Lothlorien, and she falls in love with him. She believes he will achieve great things. He does not know if he will be able to live up to her hope, but he says he will "hope with her hope."
When Elrond learns of Arwen's choice, he is grieved. He tells Aragorn that he will agree to lose his precious daughter to him, but only if by doing so, he can help to restore mankind. He will not allow Arwen, therefore, to marry him unless he becomes the king of a reunited Gondor and Arnor.
This is critical to understanding Aragorn. He wants to become king more than anything, because only by becoming king can he have what his heart desires, which is to marry Arwen. At no point in his story does he ever waver from his determination to become king. What we see in him is not reluctance to be king, only an uncertainty about whether he will be able to pass his test. He does, it is true, remain long hidden, and he keeps many false identities. But this is a strategic decision on his part to delay coming forth until the time is right, not born out of a concern that he might somehow have the same moral failings his forefather Isildur did when Isildur failed to destroy the ring. Aragorn refers over and over again to his wish to return to Gondor as heir to the throne, beginning as far back in the trilogy to the Council of Elrond, when he explains Boromir's dream thus:
For the sword that was broken is the Sword of Elendil that broke beneath him when he fell. It has been treasured by his heirs when all other heirlooms were lost; for it was spoken of old among us that it should be made again when the Ring, Isilur's Bane, was found. Now you have seen the sword that you have sought, what would you ask? Do you wish for the House of Elendil to return to the Land of Gondor?
And, in fact, the ring having been found, it is Aragorn who has the sword remade--not Elrond--and Aragorn does this before the Fellowship leaves Rivendell on the quest. He sees the quest as the end of his long trial. It's the denouement to a catharsis he had decades ago, not a moment of new revelation.
Most of our lives are flat arcs
One of the questions about literature I most often ask myself is whether it's ultimately good for people who spend a lot of time reading it. Certainly, I think that believing we can make our lives into positive-arc stories, ones in which we change and overcome our challenges, is a healthy belief. But we might also end up in long and futile cycles of waiting for some kind of enlightenment to strike us before change can happen. In reality, most of us are in a story that's more like the Aragorn of the books than the Aragorn of the movies. We don't have some great moment of revelation where we suddenly see we've been doing it all wrong. We've known for a long time what we were trying to do with our lives, and we know what we need to do to accomplish it. It's not a mystery, it's just hard, and we might fail at it.
Aragorn doubts himself. Four times, after the Fellowship breaks, he criticizes his own decision-making and puts the blame on himself for the group's difficulties. But he doesn't doubt his ultimate goal, just his ability to accomplish it. There is no catharsis in Lord of the Rings for Aragorn, no moment when he stops "believing the lie." He's got a game plan from very early on, and the story for him is just that game plan developing over a long time.
As we try to accomplish our dreams in our own lives, this arc is more likely what we need to succeed. We don't need a great unmasking of some truth. We don't need to learn some secret we don't already know. We don't need a new plan; we just need to do better at the plan we've had all along.
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