The cover to Anis Shivani's Against the Workshop tells you a lot about the book:
Shivani writes persuasively that American literature is currently producing a nearly endless stream of well-written stories, stories that follow all the best practices of storytelling. Nonetheless, most of those stories are dreadful to read. They're dreadful because they really have nothing to say, but they say that nothing so well, it's difficult to realize how little they are actually saying.
That's about my take on Thomas Paine's "Bloody Mary! Bloody Mary! Bloody Mary!" It does everything an MFA workshop would want you to do with a story, but I felt no underlying urgency, no burning passion beneath it. I didn't feel like I was reading a story a writer had to write, a story he ripped from his own heart to tell. Instead, it just seemed like a story that a competent fiction writer thought he could write.
It starts off with promise. We're at a 12-year-old's birthday party where only two of the twenty-some kids invited came. We've got a dad bungling his way through the party. I'm certainly not immune to stories that play on a parent's concern for the happiness of his children, or on the fear of children growing up friendless and alone. But all that tension and fear starts to unravel the moment the dead mother cliche enters the story. It wasn't necessary; there was enough to play with using only the material of a loner child with a good heart nobody else can see. We didn't need the artificial push for pathos that comes with a dead mother.
To make it worse, we've got a mother next door to the widower father who has also lost a husband. Hers, however, ran off with a guy he met online. It's like a romantic comedy you can't quite decide if you want to sit through: They're MFEO in this wacky, screwball comedy, if only they can see it! It's even got the precocious kids seeming to do their sly part to get them together.
The story thinks it's being clever when it ends up not really being a rom-com that gets the parents together. It craftily makes the reader suspect that's what's coming when the mother next door says she had something to tell the father, but can't remember what it was. He tells her she'll think of it eventually. But she never does, and we're left at the end with the precocious girl next door reading the father's palm while everyone is trying to calm her down after the father's ill-advised decision to have the kids try to summon Bloody Mary in the mirror at the party.
I believe the journey, such as it is, is toward a realization that the kids will probably be fine if he lets them be. He thinks this is a story about his son, but it's really a story about him, and he needs to worry more about himself. But he's the wrong hero of the book. Frankly, the kid's possible alienation from his peers is a much more compelling story line than the father dealing with familiar grief is. But that story line disappears the moment we realize that the kid's not really that bothered by his failed party. Which means there's just not much conflict, except that the girl next door will have nightmares for a few nights. There's just not that much to worry about for anyone in this story.
Ultimately, "Bloody Mary" gives in to a dull optimism far too easily, without having earned that optimism by passing through any real hardships. It's pieces of familiar American life mirrored back to readers and stitched together with the surface features of good fiction we've come to expect. It's a simulacrum of a moving story, but it has no real pathos, no real earned sentiment, and it's largely a waste of space in a year's best anthology like Pushcart.
I've been submitting to Glimmer Train longer than any other journal. I even submitted to them a few times before I got serious about giving writing a go in late 2013. They're one of the few journals I've ever subscribed to. I love that they're just a thing two sisters dreamed up and then made happen. I haven't loved every story they've put out over the years, but I've liked many of them, and I really love that they pay writers and that they always publish a list of not just the winners but also the top 25 for every contest. It's nice to get that little clue that even if you didn't make it, you're on the right track. To make the top 25 is to make the top 2-3% of about 1,000 people, which is about what they usually get, give or take some depending on the contest.
I submitted maybe ten times without ever cracking either top list. Then a few months ago, I made top 25. Just last week, I got a notice that I'd somehow managed to make the top 25 a second time. The editors told me they got over 1,000 for that one, so I was in the top 2% of a ton of people.
I ought to be happy. Maybe I sort of am. But also not. Mostly not. I had a project I really wanted to dive into a week ago. I wrote for a day and then just stopped, not because I was stuck but because I just couldn't see the point. I feel like I took my best shot with this last round of stories, and I'm coming up just short all over the place. This last near-miss with Glimmer Train feels like it has some finality to it.
Maybe that's because Glimmer Train is shutting down after 20 years. This was my last chance to get into it. I realize there are hundreds of other journals out there, but for some reason, I feel like missing out on my last chance to make it in Glimmer Train is somehow my last chance to make it, period.
That same story that just placed me in the top 25 got a form rejection after a week from a much lower-prestige journal. You might think that if a really strong journal was close to taking it, a lower-prestige one would snap it up. But it doesn't work like that. Sometimes, it takes the stronger editors at a bigger journal to even realize what they have. I can personally testify that at lower-prestige journals, the editors are so overworked, they really can miss good stuff. I did.
The other story that made Glimmer Train's top 25 has also had a couple of other "we almost published this" notes, but plenty of total ignores as well. So there's being good, and there's luck. Luck submitting a story at the right time relative to the other stories a journal gets, and luck just finding an editor who gets you.
Some people get lucky early in their careers, and some never get lucky. I'm feeling right now like I'm nearer to latter end of the spectrum.
There are some stories that just have to be either a comedy or a tragedy. They don't work in both modes. As much as some people loved Roberto Benigni's "Life is Beautiful," I found it ridiculous, and not in any way a convincing exploration of the notion that we can make life conform to our attitudes about it. Telling your kid it was all a big, extravagant game of hide-and-seek and that he wasn't really in a concentration camp would have worked for about two days, max. It's actually a little troubling to me to make the claim that one can overcome systemic genocide with a happy outlook.
Then there's the "I went to Las Vegas with my girlfriend and a rich guy tried to take her away" story. It worked as a comedy, but not as a drama, when two different movies tried that formula in the 90s (Honeymoom in Vegas and Indecent Proposal).
David Long's very short story "Skull" is about that moment in life when young people realize they are mortal and will die, too, so they try to cope with drugs until that's no longer fun. On my first read-through, I felt like this story just didn't work in the sad and somber tone it was told in. It felt like a story that could work as a comedy, but not as a drama with an unresolved ending. After reading it a second time, though, sticking the chocolate of this story into the hummus of its vehicle somehow didn't taste all that bad.
The story's told in second person, so the main character is just "You." You are at a point in your life when you're living a pretty sketchy existence, busking and living in a run-down sublet in the city. A girl named Keiko--who is often referred to as a "China doll" or having China-doll like characteristics (putting her sneakers aside like "ceremonial slippers") comes into your life and crashes at your place a bit. You do drugs together. One day, Keiko seems to have a bad trip. She pulls out a photo of an underground room built out of thousands of human skulls. She starts moaning about how she doesn't want her own skull to have nothing in it.
The key to the story is in "Your" subtle transition. The story takes place at a time when "your life could still go many ways." It's not clear exactly what way it did go, but putting together clues from the story offers some picture. You are a busker. You play the violin. The first time you offer Keiko to hold your violin, she is afraid to touch it.
It turns out you have a better violin sitting in storage in Maine, where you're from. Later on, the story compares the skulls in the photo that freaked Keiko out to a musical instrument: "Not white like bleached bone, but filthy yellow like very old, mal-treated piano keys..." Is this why Keiko flinched when offered the violin? She fears to touch precious things, because they remind her that those precious things will fade away. Her first question on touching the violin was if the violin was old.
There's some suggestion that "You" have already been through something similar to Keiko and are kind of starting to get over it. You used to still be "zingy from whatever kept you up all night" at dawn, but now you wake up early in the morning, and the day seems quiet and full of some beauty to enjoy. You're doing drugs, but maybe drugs that aren't quite as hard, and you're starting to sleep again.
When Keiko freaks out, holding her skull and worrying that it will be empty one day, You choose to try to comfort her. You look for something to feed her, something that will make it hurt less. You hold her head while she is crying about how much she doesn't want that head to be empty one day. You offer her what solace you can.
My guess is that "You" eventually stop busking, go back and get your good violin, and study music for real before going on to a professional career in it. You use your violin to continue to offer solace to people trying to cope with the realization that their skulls will one day be empty, their instruments destroyed.
Gabriel Brownstein's short story "No Time Like the Present" is one of those narratives that give enough ammunition to various ways of reading it that you could make a plausible case for interpretations that are directly contradictory to other possible readings. It's like the Bible: if you want to show that God is anti-capitalism, you can find it in there. If you want to show that God is pro-capitalism, you've got passages you can pull out of there, too. I can think of at least four ways to read this story, four "what it's really about" statements. First, a summary:
Summary of plot
Sebastian has anxiety, and the night before his wife goes in for a lumpectomy, his anxiety plays such havoc on him, it leads to a series of events that will likely completely wreck his apparently mostly happy life. After his wife takes a pill and goes to sleep the night before her procedure, he is unable to stop worrying about the broken front door handle. He imagines people will break into the house, or there will be a fire they can't escape. So he goes out into the middle of the night to get a new handle from the hardware store, forgetting his wallet on the stand by the door where he put it when he was trying to fix the door.
He's drunk, because he'd been trying to use whiskey to deal with the anxiety of the surgery. Presumably, when he started drinking, he never intended to go out driving, but once the anxiety took hold of him, he was helpless to tell it to wait until he was sober. When he realizes at the store he doesn't have his wallet, he steals the new handle. Security chases him to his car, and he tears off out of the parking lot. On the way home, he hits a bicyclist. He gets out to help, but the bicyclist attacks Sebastian before the severity of his injuries overtake him and he passes out on the road. Sebastian panics and flees the scene. He comes back home and frets over the night's actions until his wife wakes up for her surgery.
Relax. Let me guide you through this four-way intersection.
Reading #1: It's a story that encourages the reader to sympathize with those who have mental illness
Sebastian most likely has a pathological level of anxiety requiring treatment, not just enough anxiety to be an occasional nuisance to his wife. We learn that Sebastian's father "never sleeps," suggesting there is a family history of anxiety. When the idea forms in his head to fix the door, he is unable to resist its insistent suggestions: ""What if there were a fire? Would they be able to open the door and escape? If there were a fire, would they all be trapped?"
Sebastian doesn't seem to get treatment for his anxiety. Perhaps he's a fairly high-functioning anxiety sufferer. He owns his own business. And his wife, Katya, is a yoga teacher who seems to be the right amount of chill to offset his anxiety. Maybe it's worked for him.
The night before the surgery, just before it all went wrong, Sebastian and Katya fought about his anxiety. She was trying to get him to read a book called "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" by Jonathan Garment, M.D. She also accidentally insulted him by substituting the word "panic" for "anxiety." This led to angry words in return from Sebastian, which is part of the reason he can't stop obsessing. Katya is his main prop keeping him sane, and when things aren't right with her, it's hard for him to keep himself together.
Ultimately, although we can't really excuse Sebastian's actions, we are meant to understand them. They do have a cause that's understandable, and that cause, by and large, is his mental illness. At the end of the story, his wife announces that it's "time to go to the hospital," and the reader is meant to see this as having a dual meaning. She has her lumpectomy, yes, but Sebastian's own anxiety has now gotten so bad, he also needs to deal with it. We see anxiety like we see cancer, "metastasizing," and as real a medical issue as a tumor.
Reading #2: Don't hide behind your illness, fucker. This is all your fault
So Sebastian has anxiety. Lots of people have anxiety, and they manage to get through the day without drunk driving, stealing, and killing (maybe--we don't know that the bicyclist is dead) innocent people. Sebastian manages his anxiety well enough to own and operate a business, to take care of a child, to live in a comfortable home. His string of mistakes on this night are partly because of anxiety, sure, but they're also from a string of moral failings beyond anxiety. He's vain. He's selfish. He fights his wife when she tries to offer help, and he internally argues with the book when it offers ways out.
This reading leads us, inevitably, to the never-ending question we face in a culture that really likes to come up with new diagnoses of mental illnesses. Can everything people do that's bad be explained by mental illness? More to the point, can it be explained away by mental illness--that is, is what we normally call evil or at least vice really just the manifestation of some kind of underlying mental pathology the asshole in question has no control over? When are people responsible for their own actions?
We can sympathize with Sebastian when we see anxiety taking over his mind, but there were many spots in the narrative where Sebastian really had the ability to do better and didn't. A truly anxious person should have worried about the possible results of driving drunk. A truly anxious person would have checked his pants for his wallet six times before leaving the house. A truly anxious person--whose anxiety was rooted in concern for his family--should have thought that stealing from a big-box store with cameras everywhere might have impacted his ability to take care of that family. Anxiety might cloud our minds with worries we don't really need to worry about, but I'm not aware that it makes us stop worrying about obvious threats. Sebastian's night of bad decisions was nothing more than the bubbling up of narcissism he normally managed to keep just below the surface. When the police find him, they should throw him in jail for a long time, and Katya, if she lives, should find someone better.
Reading #3: This is a critique of shallow Western interpretations of Eastern mysticism
Katya is a yoga instructor, and the book she tries to get Sebastian to read is chock-full of the kind of Western interpretations of Eastern thought we're all used to hearing. From the story's opening paragraph, we can see that Katya and Sebastian are upper-middle class. They're the kind of people who probably pay too much for organic everything, who get suckered by every new hippie fad that comes along. Sebastian is more skeptical than Katya, but lacking his own philosophy to replace hers, he's susceptible to falling in for the snake oil of Dr. Jonathan Garment. (And doesn't the name "Garmet" suggest the author of the book is hiding something?)
What Garment's book offers is just pure hogwash. Repeating a phrase, like "present moment" or "beautiful moment" will force the brain to switch off its overactive neurons. This will help stop anxiety, which is, Garment says, "the thought that thinks less than in thinks." With this slender rod, Sebastian is supposed to beat back the demons of his anxiety.
Katya offering this book to Sebastian is like trying to fix her possibly malignant tumor with crystals and essential oils. He's got a real problem, and this bullshit is just offering false hope when what Sebastian needs is real science. He ends up killing someone by refusing to treat his disease for real, just like parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids sometimes end up killing others with their stubbornness and stupidity.
Reading #4: The mysticism is fine, but you've got to be careful how you introduce it
While there's probably a good deal of bullshit in what Katya believes, it also seems to be working for her. She is never calmer than when she's under stress, Sebastian observes. We all survive off telling ourselves some things that aren't true, so maybe it's not really necessary to fault Katya for believing in lies that are useful for her.
The problem in the story is that Sebastian tries to suddenly change his own set of lies--or, if you prefer, his set of coping mechanisms. He has pointed out to Katya that as much as anxiety sometimes made his life difficult, it also provided advantages: "He'd just been trying to make a simple point about anxiety: that sometimes anxiety prevented one from seeing things, but sometimes it helped one work things through."
There are a lot of people with mental illness who claim something similar. Some bi-polar people claim that they are so creative and productive in the manic phase, they can't imagine the benefits of controlling it would outweigh the positives. And they're right--until they're not right anymore.
Sebastian is getting to a point where he is possibly ready to do something new with his anxiety, the point where his old coping strategies aren't working anymore. This is necessary to him getting more control over his illness, but it's also a dangerous time for him. In the past, he probably would have had enough worry over the consequences of his actions to stop his chain of bad decisions long before it ended in hitting a bicyclist. But he's trying something new this night. He's trying to be "present." He's trying to be less anxious, rather than embrace the good and the bad of anxiety, and that's where the danger lies.
As a novice in being "present," he interprets what presence means all wrong. He repeats the mantra about "present moment" just before accelerating off into the night and hitting the bicyclist. Where anxiety would have formerly told him to quit doing stupid things, tonight, he is trying to not listen to his anxiety, and that, paradoxically, is what makes it all go wrong.
If he was going to live with anxiety, he needed to live with it entirely, both the good and the bad. If he was going to try to overcome anxiety with meditation and mantras, then he needed to be all-in on that. It's when he's in the place of transforming from one to the other that he's vulnerable.
In this reading, we might reflect that one of the most dangerous times in a person's life is the time when he's actually trying to improve.
A nitpick I should have enough sense to leave well enough alone
Blame the presence of this little nitpick on my own obsessive-compulsiveness. Sebastian is at Home Depot at 1 AM. But there are no Home Depots in New York City open past midnight. I checked, because I've never seen a 24-hour Home Depot. Therefore, I choose to believe that Sebastian really dreamed the whole thing.
Hello. Thanks for reading this. A lot of people in America think evangelicals are so closed-minded, it's useless to try to reason with them. To reason with you, that is, the evangelicals I hope are reading this. I don't believe that's true. My own history with evangelicals is complicated. I was raised as something of a half-committed Catholic. A friend invited me to his evangelical church when I was sixteen and just beginning to wonder about the big questions in life in a serious way. Because that church had a lot of answers to the questions I was asking, I took to it pretty readily. I hit all the Christian milestones evangelicals look for: genuinely asking Christ to be my lord and savior, then baptism, then regular church attendance and "witnessing" to others. I carried a Bible around high school my junior and senior years. I married a girl from my high school group at a young age, like a lot of evangelicals, because it was "better to marry than to burn."
After seven years, I had more questions about how parts of what I'd believed could be true than I could answer, and I walked away from it. It's not important for this discussion why. I'm always happy to talk about that and explain it as best I can, but for now, I just want to make the point that I've been inside evangelical communities and inside an evangelical psychology myself. That's why I don't accept what a lot of people would have me believe about you--that you are filled with hate, that you are uneducated, that you ignore Christ's commands to care about the poor and sick and argue for restrictions to abortion and freedom to own guns. Believing something fundamentally different from the majority need not mean you are monstrous. For example, I now disagree with you when you say that homosexuality is a sin, but I don't accept that just because you believe it to be sinful, that means you hate homosexuals. I hope you'll afford me the same latitude as you read this, because I'm going to be arguing that something you fundamentally find to be monstrous should be legal.
I'm not out to change your mind about the big stuff, and I think we can coexist in society without agreeing on those fundamental questions much more readily than some would have us believe. The point of this post isn't to get you to believe that abortion is morally right. You don't need to believe that--even in cases of medical threat to life or rape or incest. It's not important that you change your mind about whether it's right. I only submit to you that there might be good reasons to grudgingly accept it as legal. At the very least, I hope to explain why someone might believe in abortion being legal without being a moral monster. Lately, I've seen some of you asking questions about how anyone could support abortion and not be evil. This has been especially prevalent since New York passed its abortion law allowing for late-term abortions when "there is an absence of fetal viability, or the abortion is necessary to protect the patient’s life or health." I'd like to try to explain where I'm coming from enough that you can at least consider the possibility that being okay with abortion might not make me psychotic.
I believe most evangelicals are actually quite literate and reasonable. In a world where reading and reasoning skills are becoming weaker, it's possible evangelicals on the whole reason better than than the average American. So come, let us reason together about this one issue.
Precedent for accepting what is immoral as legal
Accepting the legality of what you view as sin might seem to violate the evangelical principle of not "compromising" to sin. But I think the notion of "no compromise" is really meant more for Christians in their own lives than what Christians are supposed to expect of the secular governments they are living under. The Christians who wrote the New Testament and the first three centuries of Christians who followed them couldn't have dreamed of being a politically relevant force in government one day. The attitude of Christians to government in the New Testament isn't always negative--Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2 both call on Christians to be "subject" to human rulers--but there is an "otherness" when Christians of the first century talked about government. Government was one thing and Christian faith was another. So Christians really had no choice but to accept that the government would put rules in place it did not approve of. If Christianity was to change cultural practices, it would have to use a different form of influence. In fact, this is exactly what Christianity did up until the point when a Christian became emperor, and the nature of Christianity's relationship to the state changed forever in the West.
Even now, after Christianity has been politically significant for centuries, Christians have gradually come to accept that certain precepts important to Christians should not be enforced in laws for everyone. One example are laws prohibiting certain kinds of activities on Sundays. These used to be commonplace, but one hardly sees them now except in echoes, like liquor stores not being able to open until noon one day a week. A more telling example is the legal de-criminalization of homosexual acts. Until very recently, it was illegal for two grown people of the same sex to engage in consensual sex in the privacy of their own homes. We have changed this, and although a majority of evangelicals still believe homosexuality is a sin, a much smaller number believe there is cause to outlaw it. That's because Western evangelicals understand the difference between what God wants and what is needed to live in an imperfect world alongside non-believers. It's something ardent believers in other parts of the world are still struggling to learn.
I can already hear evangelicals objecting to comparing what the law should be on liquor on Sundays or homosexual sex to abortion. Since abortion means murder to most evangelicals, they would see a reason to make a law for abortion where one isn't needed for other acts. There are some actions that Christians believe are sinful that they nevertheless think it alright to leave up to individual freedom to chose to do or not do. Abortion isn't one of them. That's fine at this point. If we leave this part of the discussion with just accepting the notion that some acts Christianity views as immoral ought to still be legal, then we can at least have a discussion.
So why should we accept abortion under the law?
If there's one thing those seven years as an evangelical instilled in me, it's an appreciation for the three-point sermon. So I'll follow suit and give three reasons why I think abortion should be legal. There is no hymn at the end to summarize the points, though, so feel free to leave immediately after and go get coffee or barbeque, depending on which kind of evangelical you are.
1. The Bible doesn't overtly outlaw abortion, but you see it there. The Constitution doesn't overtly guarantee the right to privacy, but it's there, too.
I'm not going to make the argument that the Bible isn't really anti-abortion. You've all read the Bible. You can make your own minds up about what it says and doesn't say. But one thing that would be pretty hard to argue it does say is that abortion is a sin. At least, it doesn't say that overtly. There's some stuff in Psalms where a poet speaks in the voice of God and says He knew the listener in the womb. There are punishments for harming a pregnant woman. From these and other passages, most evangelicals argue that even if the Bible doesn't say "Thou shalt not commit abortion," it's a pretty obvious implication of what is there.
Some have argued the opposite and said that the Bible doesn't prohibit abortion. The argument comes down to three things: 1) The Bible never mentions abortion, even though it existed, at least in rough fashion, when the Bible was being written; 2) A passage in Numbers 5:11-31 forces wives suspected by their husbands of having become pregnant with another man to submit to a "purity test"; if they failed the test, God would kill the baby, suggesting God did not believe infants had an unalienable right to life; 3) The general way in which Old Testament law treats children as property for which the parents should be compensated rather than as having their own self-worth. (See Exodus 21:22-25).
You don't have to side with those who think the Bible isn't anti-abortion. The early Christian church was condemning abortion fairly early in its history, so I'm fine with the assertion that it's a traditional Christian stance, whether it's overt in the Bible or no. But then, in accepting that something could be more implied than stated in the Bible but still be mandatory to follow for Christians, you are accepting the principle that some things can be an obvious implication of a text without being explicitly stated in the text.
This matters, because a big argument against the right to abortion is that the Constitution does not guarantee a right to an abortion, nor the right to privacy upon which earlier decisions established that right (update: this was what the majority argued in its decision today, June 24th 2022). But if you're the sort of reader who feels that even if something isn't explicitly stated, it ought to be treated the same as an explicit statement if you can't follow the explicit statements without the follow-on implication, then you have to take the right to privacy more seriously that that. Many of the guaranteed rights in the Constitution don't make sense without a corollary right to privacy. That means that the government has to have an overwhelming and compelling reason to interfere with your right to do whatever the hell you want to do.
Many of the societies that were either mentioned in the Bible or that came into contact with those societies practiced infanticide. I'm not talking about the ritual sacrifice of children to appease gods, although that also happened; I'm talking about communities deciding not to put resources into a child they thought to be too weak to thrive. The first society Christianity lived in, that of the Roman Empire, practiced infanticide of the weak. Scholars differ on how widespread the practice was, but it's clear it wasn't unknown. The very myth the Romans told themselves about how Rome came about involved a pair of children who were abandoned at birth.
Why has no one ever thought of a wolf dairy farm?
Christians--to their everlasting credit--helped to outlaw the practice when they came to power in Rome. There are also many examples of Christians rescuing babies. But still, although the practice was probably well-known, there is no clear condemnation of it in Christian literature until the Didache in the 2nd Century.
Does that mean, then, that the Bible doesn't condemn infanticide, just because it isn't in the New Testament? (There is one famous mention of it in Psalms, one that approves of infanticide of one's enemies, but let's lay that to the side for now.) Of course it doesn't mean that. Christians opposed infanticide from very early on because they couldn't make sense of what was explicit in their faith unless infanticide was also an explicit sin.
So when people argue now for things like a separation of church and state or a right to privacy, you can't just say those things aren't actually in the Constitution and so we don't have to consider them. Not unless you want to also get rid of many of the things you consider to be critical to your faith as well.
2. A right to an abortion helps protect your right to reproductive freedom as well
There's a guy I know--I won't say I know him well, but I worked with him once, and for some reason, he's kept me on as a Facebook friend in spite of my frequent posts about Korean pop music. He's had four children. When he and his wife had their first, they realized they both had a recessive gene for spinal muscular atrophy. It was just bad luck. They both needed to pass on that recessive gene for their kids to get it--meaning there was a one-in-four chance each child would get the disease, but their first child had it.
I want to say that from what I know, I think they're both amazing parents. They put all they had into their first child until she died. After their first child, they had a choice to make. Should they have more kids and risk passing on the disease to someone else?
They had three more kids, one of whom also got the disease. Again, they've put an amazing amount of effort into caring for her. I've seen people question his choices when he's posted about his life before; they feel that because he knew the risks with subsequent children, he should be blamed for bringing the second affected child into the world. They also feel that he bears some blame for knowingly causing high costs to society (presumably passed on to his insurance company and from there to everyone who subscribes to that insurance).
I don't agree. I think this person has a right to have as many kids as he wants. He certainly has proved that whatever happens, he'll do right by the kids he has. (He recently ran fifty miles as a fund-raiser to buy her a trail-capable wheelchair).
I feel nothing but admiration for them. I also never would have made that choice. This is one of those weird places in ethics where one cannot prescribe an action that is right for everyone. For me, I could not have knowingly had a child with the risks that high. I had a cousin with Klippel-Feil syndrome. Her life seemed miserable to me, in spite of the saintly efforts of dozens of people in her life. Over the course of her life, I'm sure society spent millions of dollars to keep her alive. In order, in other words, to keep the agony of her life going. I don't think I could knowingly create a life if I thought the odds were high I might cause that kind of pain for another human being. More than cause it--that I would create it ex nihilo.
I think it is wrong to have a child when there is a high risk of severe birth defects. That's why Mrs. Heretic and I aren't trying anymore, although we both wanted more. We're too old, and the odds of all kinds of things are elevated beyond what seems responsible.
But I also don't think it's wrong for my friend. That's because having those kids is an essential part of who my friend is. He proves this by how much love he shows all of his kids. To tell him he couldn't have kids because of the risks would be to keep him from being himself. It would be a crushing blow to his unalienable right to pursue his own happiness.
In a society like ours that has resource abundance, there doesn't seem to be any compelling social interest that would prohibit his right to have kids. But what if we were struggling to feed ourselves? In some ancient societies that practiced infanticide, concerns about being able to feed the society played a big part in the practice. In one case, the laws required fathers to bring newborns before the elders (not mothers, who would beg for the lives of their children and make the elders feel awkward). The elders had to rule whether the child was worthy of taking resources from the community based on the health of the child.
What if our society were to face resource scarcity again? Would there be a push to institute laws that restricted reproductive freedom? I'm not talking about forced abortions here. It could be much less overt than that. What if my friend and his wife had been required to have medical screenings for spinal muscular atrophy and other diseases and, when their link was discovered, had been legally prohibited from having children?
Society could, in fact, make a compelling case that it has an interest, enough of an interest to restrict reproductive autonomy. This is especially true when society all shares the costs of medical care.
The only way to protect against this kind of an argument is to say that the Constitution guarantees an inordinate amount of reproductive freedom. A right to abortions would invoke a fairly "inordinate" amount of freedom, which means it would also protect your right to have children society might deem unwise or unwanted. The more society grants reproductive autonomy, including broad protections for abortion, the more your rights to make different decisions are protected.
3. Taken to its logical conclusion, the notion that the state can compel women to carry children to term has some alarming side-effects
Let's say you agree with point number two. People should be in charge of their reproductive health you say, and in 2019, they've got all kinds of choices about what kinds of contraceptives to use. But once they're pregnant, then the state has a right to compel them to have a baby. Freedom ends at conception, because nobody can really argue they didn't know the risks that came with sex. (I mean, you'd be surprised. A lot of people get surprised by their pregnancies. But let's accept the premise anyway.)
Okay, let's grant your wish. Reproductive freedom now ends at conception, because life begins at conception, and that fetus has an absolute right to life that is more important than the wishes of the mother.
Let us assume that the mother will not be terribly happy about having this child she doesn't want. Unhappiness has an effect on pregnancy. Can the state, out of concern for the health of the child, try to force happiness upon the mother? Can it force the mother to go to classes on how great it is to have a baby?
Can society force the mother to avoid cigarettes? How about alcohol? There have been a lot of cases discussed in the news recently about drug-addicted mothers with stillborn babies being charged with murder, but we need not go that far to see what implications might come from making abortion illegal.
What about coffee? Can society tell a mother not to drink coffee? What about making her take pre-natal vitamins and eat healthy? Can society, like most parents in the world I grew up in, make her eat all her vegetables before she has dessert? Can society make her go to a pre-natal yoga class?
How about this...say abortion is now illegal in the United States. A bustling abortion tourism to Europe begins. Does the U.S. start giving women mandatory pregnancy tests as they leave the country, and only allow them to go to countries where abortion is also illegal?
It gets a little scary once you decide that the life inside the womb has claims that are stronger than the life that possesses the womb. One can always make too much of a slippery slope argument, but in this case, I do think that once the state asserts control over a woman's body and what she can do to the things that reside within her own body, it can be very, very tricky to figure out where the state should stop. The state should be very slow indeed to interfere with the principle that people have a right to autonomy over their own bodies.
The uncomfortable compromise should continue
I think what maybe perplexes Christians the most about people like me who favor the legality of abortion is this: How I can support killing a living human being? Isn't it obvious that a fetus is alive?
My answer is that yes, a fetus is alive, following any biological definition of what life means. But it's a unique form of life, one that cannot live except through an exceptionally parasitic relationship with its host. It's a life whose right to live is necessarily in conflict with the right of another life to her own autonomy. This is one of those cases in society where we have two rights in conflict with one another.
For several decades now, our society has tried to find a compromise between those two principles that are in conflict with one another. We've said that women can have abortions, but for the most part, they need to be carried out by a certain point in the pregnancy. At six weeks, a fetus is not recognizably human. At twelve weeks, you might be able to tell it was human if you knew what you were looking for. At 24 weeks, anyone can tell it's a little human. More importantly, at 24 weeks, structures in the neocortex have formed, the ones that give us functions we tend to think of as uniquely human. I don't really accept that at six weeks, just because a fetus has human DNA, it's really "human" with all the rights a human possesses. But I accept that at 24 weeks, a baby is human.
Where in between should the cut-off be? And what about this new law in New York, the one that several people in my Facebook feed insist means being allowed to kill a baby moments before delivery?
I will admit that the New York law gives me pause. Like a lot of people who support abortion, I don't support abortion without limits. Christians are right that we have to cherish human life. I believe that includes mothers, and that cherishing the mother's life means not asserting control over her body without overwhelming necessity. But just as I don't think a fetus' right to life is absolute, I also don't think a woman's right to her own body is absolute. The New York law might not really say that a woman can kill the baby right before it's born, but figuring out what it really allows and doesn't allow will be tough work for judges.
But returning to the question of parents who know their children will be born with extraordinary health issues, I think parents do deserve the right to make extraordinary decisions. I often hear the objection that parents should not play God, but parents already play God when they decide to create life. They have god-like power over their children for years. There is a reason Graham Greene called childhood "life under a dictatorship." With god-like power should come god-like ability to make decisions.
I know people who have had late-term abortions. The decision was devastating. They wanted kids badly. But the prognosis was grim. To them, they loved their children enough to make a painful decision. They loved the kids enough to take that responsibility on themselves. They made a hard choice in order to prevent almost certain and profound suffering. The only way I can even imagine making that decision is to try to multiply the experience of putting a dog down by...I don't know, some number I can't calculate. In one case, the couple was financially ruined by the surgery, which was not covered. They'd have been financially much better off having a baby that would have needed to live in an institute for most of its life. They had the spine to make another decision. I respect that as much as I respect my friend's decision to have his kids and live with the consequences.
Christians, I respect your choices. I respect your beliefs. But there are more people to respect in the world than Christians. I have seen too many posts about how anyone who favors a late-term abortion is a murderer. This represents an inability to put yourself in the position of someone else. There is more than one way to respect life. As a Christian, you probably believe that God intended every human life to exist, and even the most painful and medically challenging existence can glorify God. You have to accept that absent a belief in God, it's hard to accept that view of life. So those of us who don't believe in God but still want to cling to some belief in the sanctity of life have hard work to do figuring out what that means. We might come to different answers than you. But a difficult choice made with reflection is not the same as an amoral choice.
In political reality, we may see some swings in what is legal and not legal in America as far as abortion goes. We have a conservative court now, partly because many of you looked past your other misgivings about President Trump and decided picking the justices who decide on abortion cases was the most important issue in America. These justices might change the law. But it will eventually change back. While the law swings back and forth, we the people have to figure out some way of living with each other in spite of serious disagreements over this stuff.
To me, the tenuous compromise of the last few decades is about as good as we're going to get. Women should be able to get abortions in the first 16 weeks without question. Abortion opponents should be allowed to stand a safe distance away from a clinic and say that "all babies want to get borned." It is not too traumatic for women to hear opposing views as long as they are not physically threatened if they do not listen to the alternate views.
After 16 or 18 or 20 weeks or whatever, I'm okay with states limiting it, as long as they leave it open to the exceptions Roe v. Wade provided for. What those restrictions mean will be something we won't agree about. But I think the benefit of the doubt should always go to the principle of autonomy over one's own body, and the right of parents to make decisions for their kids, even if those decisions involve a late-term abortion. If our society is going to be tolerant of parents who refuse vaccinations, a decision that has life-and-death implications for the already-born, I think we can also give a benefit of doubt to parents making decisions that only affect their own unborn children.
Whenever I point out that it's hard for me to accept the notion of a loving God who is also all-powerful but allows unspeakable evil to exist on the Earth, Christians often propose to me the notion that God had to allow evil in order to grant people free will. Christians will sometimes say that it was more beautiful for God to allow evil to exist, because that meant those who worship him and obey him did it freely. God didn't want robots, so he created people who can either love one another or commit genocide against each other. If you accept that, then I wonder whether you can't also accept that parents ought to have the free will to make choices you think are wrong. What makes the choice of my friend to have kids in spite of the risks and costs beautiful is that he chose it. What makes the decision of my aunt--whose wonderful life we just celebrated on Friday when she passed away just a few years after the daughter she spent her life taking care of went first--so beautiful is that she chose it. But their choice could not be beautiful in a world where there wasn't also a choice to have a late-term abortion for a child with severe birth defects. If there was no choice to do the wrong thing, as you would see it.
I don't expect I've changed all your minds about everything, and maybe not about much at all. But I also hope I made it clear that I respect you and that I value having you in our society. America doesn't always value human life as it should, or at least we don't value all life equally. I'm happy to have a voice that seeks to right that, even if I don't agree with all the reasons you have for valuing it.
There are many areas in which we have a common interest. We have a ton of problems in America, and we won't fix any of them if we're constantly in conflict. I think the compromise that's been in place is the best we can do to manage conflict. It preserves protections for your own practices should they become unpopular, it makes the life of a fetus gradually more protected the further along in a pregnancy it goes, and it also preserves a reasonable level of autonomy over one's own body for women while also acknowledging other rights. I won't say it's as good as we can get, but it is about as not-bad as we can get.
I try on this blog to break down stories in contemporary literature and make them accessible to others by revealing meaning. There is, however, a philosophical question, one I usually try to usually avoid on this site, of how meaning is communicated in a story. If you're not a professional literary critic, professor, or theorist, you might be surprised by how contentious questions about how to find meaning in a story are among the pros. In fact, a good number of professionals make a living questioning whether stories really "mean" anything in the way lay people think of something having a meaning.
One tension in trying to find meaning is whose meaning we are talking about. It used to be we all assumed the author had a meaning, that he knew what he meant and put elements into the story for us to find what he meant, and the reader's job was to dig through the clues to find the author's meaning. But there are two other kinds of meaning we have to consider with a story. One is the meaning of the text. An author might try to create a story with one meaning, but unintentionally put elements into the text that make the text say things the author never intended. Then, there is the intent of the reader. All of us bring our own strengths and weaknesses to the text of a story, and we can each find meaning in it that nobody has ever found before.
When I was in grad school, the intent of the text was considered the proper concern for most serious-minded literary folks, with intent of the reader a sort of interesting and cutting-edge field of study but not one that was totally trusted. Nobody really was interested in the intent of the author, which was thought to be a busted way of looking at a story.
I think, however, that it's better to consider all three intents: the intent of the writer, the intent of the text, and the intent of the reader, and to keep them in a dynamic tension while reading a story.
There is a similar three-way war of meaning in Barrett's story
Eli Barrett's "The Imagination Resettlement Program" presents us with a plot that's not totally unfamiliar. It's kin to stories like "Six Characters in Search of an Author," or "The Truman Show," stories where there is blurring between the imaginary, fictional world and the "real" world. In "Imagination," imaginary characters have suddenly started sprouting up in the real world. For example, a fire-breathing tiger shows up on the narrator's lawn and scorches his Bermuda grass. A government spokesperson explains that the world of imagination has become overpopulated from years of humans creating characters, causing a crisis of overpopulation. Characters are coming from imaginary-land to the real world like refugees go from one country to another in our own world.
The government decides to try to help the imaginary characters by resettling them. They offer subsidies to people in the real world willing to take an imaginary character into their homes. Our narrator Carl volunteers, hoping to subsidize his disability checks.
At first, I expected the characters from fantasy land would be characters from well-known fictional stories. But "Imagination" plays off of a characteristic of literary theory of the last 100 years: many literary theorists have claimed that interpretive strategies for high art can also be applied to a range of narratives outside high art, including pop culture or advertisements. So it's not surprising, maybe, that instead of getting Tom Sawyer, Carl gets "Mary the Bridal Detective," an marketing prop who, according to her magazine ads, "searches for the best deals in bridal fashions."
Carl had to do some detective work of his own to find this out, because Mary was part of a very minor advertising campaign some time ago, so Carl didn't even know who she was. She is a prim and proper woman, concerned with making the house look nice and serving the kind of finger foods that would go well at a stylish bridal party. She's a bit of an anachronism, coming from a world when following the correct social codes for events was more important.
It's unclear if she is interested in marrying Carl, and Carl isn't entirely sure what he feels about her. It's illegal to marry an imaginary person, and even sex--which Carl think might "satisfy at least some of what (he) feels," would get him kicked out of the program. He toys with the notion of daring to do it anyway, but he can't get a clear answer from Mary if this is even what she wants. His own feelings toward her seem to be a mix of lust and a desire to protect her.
In other words, Carl is having a hard time interpreting Mary. He doesn't know who she is or what she means to him. Carl is a fictional character is a story called "The Imaginary Resettlement Program" who is portrayed as a real character in a universe that has fictional characters just like the "real" world we readers are in has fictional characters like Carl.
The fictional "real" characters of the story keep trying to change what the "fictional" characters in their world signify, and we, the readers in our "real" world, struggle to interpret the same thing as the "real" people in the story keep changing how they interpret their "fictional" characters. The imaginary characters started out being a seeming commentary on how imaginary worlds interact with the real world, but the characters within the "real" world of the story have their own way of looking at them. The characters quickly become to them what refugees or other outsiders are to immigration hardliners in our world. Carl hears on the news where soon after the resettlement programs has begun, citizens are already complaining about what "dirty freeloaders" the imaginary characters are, how they should be "forced to work for their benefits."
Later on, the imaginary characters start to go beyond being like a refugee population in our world, and become more like marginalized groups that become targeted for persecution, like Jews in 1930s Germany. There is enormous prejudice among the real toward the imaginary. The government is talking of rounding them up into work camps. One "man on the street" tells the interviewer he hopes all that free labor will get the economy going again.
Enter Little Joe
In order to pay for all the ways he likes to spoil Mary, Carl has to take on another border. He ends up with Tommy Lee, a character from a Western TV show. Tommy Lee idolizes his father, who has learned much wisdom through suffering. Tommy Lee has an obsessive-compulsive need to be given a life lesson at the end of every day, and Carl has to take on the responsibility of giving it to him. Mostly, Carl just teaches Little Joe that he should stay away from Mary, because Carl is jealous of how Tommy Lee shows affection for her.
Most literary analysis used to be as straightforward as Pa passing wisdom to Little Joe in a Bonanza episode. Not so anymore.
Tommy Lee interprets the world like a fictional character from a show like Bonanza would. He sees the world in black-and-white. He thinks suffering in life has value, because it gives wisdom, and wisdom can be passed on in the form of life lessons. Carl, however, rejects this interpretation. He tells Tommy Lee that, "Not every day in the world will bring you a lesson...Most days you're just here and that's that." Tommy Lee has tried to import the logic of his world into the real world in order to understand it, but Carl has resisted Tommy Lee's attempt to interpret the world according to his rules. Meanwhile, Carl cannot understand Tommy Lee, because he cannot accept a world in which suffering has meaning or life lessons can be learned.
So we have readers in our real world reading a real fictional story with imaginary characters who are real within the context of the fictional universe we are reading about, and those "real" characters are interacting with characters who are fictional or imaginary within the context of their world. And the imaginary characters are trying to interpret the fictional "real" world according to the laws of their imaginary worlds, which are real to them. Meanwhile, the fictionally "real" citizens are trying to both force their meaning onto fictional characters and also to force those characters to have utility according to the rules of their world. And we, the readers in our real world, are trying to understand both sets of characters in the story "The Imagination Resettlement Program" according to our own rules. That's a lot of interpretations working against each other.
A story that doesn't resolve itself
Rather than let one of the interpretative sides "win," the story ends with uncertainty. The government has learned that if people merely start to imagine the fictional characters again, the characters will go back to where they came from. There are campaigns to get people to do just this thing in order to solve the crisis. Carl finds himself watching Hamlet and trying to pay enough attention to get Hamlet back "to a world where people can understand the way he talks."
It's telling that Carl is watching Hamlet, of all things. A hundred years ago, when the old way of reading literature began to change, Hamlet was often used as a way of framing a debate. Some asked if it was appropriate to think of the character of Hamlet continuing on after the play ended. Could we attempt to draw meaning by trying to fill in details about Hamlet's life that the play did not openly share with us? One school of thought said no, that it was a moot question to try to imagine Hamlet off the pages of the script. Hamlet only existed in the words of the script. He was not a real person, and once the words stopped, so did his independent existence. But Carl is working off the opposite notion. Hamlet does exist in some universe somewhere, and until Carl can help get Hamlet back there, both our universe and the alternate universe will be marred.
The characters from the world of imagination, then, both exist independently in another plane but also are dependent on people from our world to imagine that existence for it to happen. But if they are subject to the cruel fate of relying on people to imagine them, they also are able to exact a bit of revenge by resisting interpretation. Hamlet needs us to imagine him in order to exist, but we do not control him. We cannot summon him into our world and make him mean whatever we want. Hamlet will still continue being Hamlet, operating off Hamlet's own logic, no matter how much we try to make him mean what we want him to mean. We may try to fit characters from fiction of the past into the political landscape of whatever moment we are living in, but the imaginary characters themselves do not have to cooperate. Tommy Lee will continue to be an anachronism, believing in the efficacy of suffering to build wisdom, trusting in his father to teach him important life lessons. The world can put him back where he came from, but we cannot change him by bringing him here. We have to submit ourselves to doing the detective work to understand their existence in order to understand them; we cannot force them to understand us.
In the end, Carl tries to change Mary, to make her fit to be his wife, but he finds that she resists his attempts to change her nature to the last. "She was never meant to be a bride, just a bridal detective." Having been dreamed up by some advertiser "two minutes before a deadline," her nature is now immutable.
Carl realizes Mary would never make it being put into a work camp in which she'd be forced to serve the economic needs of the moment. The best anyone can do for her is to get her back where she came from. Carl ends up bribing someone in a third-world country to imagine Mary exactly as she once was, enabling her to continue to exist as she once did.
It's a weird, wonderful story. Not all of it makes sense, and it's not really supposed to. Generally, I don't like stories that are too referential to literature itself or where the themes have more to do with what it even means to have a theme than just developing a theme. I think a lot of editors have a similar bias, which means Barrett had to overcome a lot of prejudice to get this story published. He did it by acting like one of the fantasy characters in his own story: he made the story unapologetically exactly what it was, not what he thought we'd want it to be.
While I've been blogging through the short stories from Pushcart, I've also been taking time to do a side project I've wanted to do for a while. Sixteen years ago, when I was getting ready to start my job as a translator, I was looking for something to work on to improve my Korean with. Rather randomly, I picked up the Korean version of the year's best short story collection for 2003. One of the stories in it, "A Wildflower Seed" (들꽃 씨앗 하나) by Yi Chong-jun (이청준), has stayed with me ever since. Over the years, I lost the book that story was in, and I was having a hard time remembering what the series was called so I could get a replacement, but I finally figured it out and have spent the last week re-reading the story. When I started, I was thinking I'd like to translate it in the hopes of sharing it with the world. But there are a lot of reasons that might not work out. Yi died in 2008, and I really have no idea how to get a hold of his family to ask for permission to publish his work in translation. I've never done a literary translation before, so I have no idea how that world works. I intend to try, because it's my favorite story ever and it deserves a wider audience, but since it's unlikely to work out, I here present a synopsis and a brief analysis of why it's my favorite story.
It's a pretty simple story, although rather long, sort of in that no-man's land between a long short story and a short novella. Jin-yong comes from a poor country town. And when I say poor, I mean really poor. This story takes place in South Korea in the years right after the Korean War, when Korea was poorer than India and devastated by three years of conflict. Jin-yong's father was a casualty of that war, and Jin-yong lives with his mother and younger sister. In order to lift his family from poverty, Jin-yong heads off to the big city ("K City, which I assume is Kwangju") as soon as he graduates from elementary school. He does odd jobs and studies at a private academy to pass middle school. The plan was that he would do this for three years and then take a job in his hometown as either a school teacher or a civil servant. But as he gets near the end of middle school, the rules change. The job he wants now requires a high school diploma.
Jin-yong takes the entrance exam and passes with flying colors, but he has no money to attend high school. (Since high school is not mandatory at this time, it seems the only school available charges tuition.) A teacher at the middle school offers to help Jin-yong out. He knows the administrator of the high school. He thinks he can either get Jin-yong a scholarship or a payment plan. But Jin-yong needs to go back to his little village and pick up a tax form showing that his family is poor and return with it by Saturday at 3 P.M. Jin-yong learns of this on Thursday. Without the form, there is no high school and no eventual job that will get his family out of poverty.
South Jeolla Province, 1950s.
He takes the earliest bus on Friday morning. There should be time to get down to his hometown, get the document, and return to Kwangju that same day, leaving plenty of time to have everything set up for high school. He desperately wants to see his family while he is back home, but he doesn't think it will be the responsible thing to do, given his time crunch, and he intends to go down and back without stopping at home.
Fate has it in for Jin-yong. The bus breaks down, causing a delay of hours. The delay is longer when a woman on the bus realizes her money has been stolen, and she forces everyone to help her try to find the thief. Ji-yong arrives at City Hall too late to get the document that day. He tries to see the bright side, figuring at least he'll be able to see his family, and maybe he can still get the document in the morning and make it back to Kwangju on time. But his mother and sister are both away. He learns from an uncle that they have gone to find work. The uncle helps Jin-yong by making him a new stamp, which Jin-yong will need to obtain his paperwork. At the crack of dawn, Jin-yong rises, gets his document, and gets on the bus back.
But now there is snow. The authorities have shut down the road leading through Wolchu Mountain. It looks like Jin-yong is not going to make it. The bus driver hears his story, and within an hour, the bus is suddenly allowed to pass, because they are carrying an important military officer to a meeting in Kwangju that he must attend. It's not clear if the bus driver and this officer have come up with this plan to help Jin-yong or if the officer really had a meeting, but I suspect the former. The bus makes it, with great difficulty, through the mountain, but Jin-yong gets back to Kwangju too late. His teacher, who promised to wait until two before going to the high school, isn't at the middle school anymore. Jin-yong runs to the high school, but everyone has gone, and a guard tells Jin-yong he missed the deadline to apply. So all of Jin-yong's desperate efforts, as well as the efforts of everyone who tried to help him, come to naught.
One of the most uplifting things I've ever read. No, really.
What I've just described sounds like a really depressing art house film. But it's not. In his short analysis of "A Wildflower Seed" within that 2003 anthology, Lee Dong Hwa called it a "failure story," which, one would assume, is the opposite of a "success story." As Lee put it, the hero had an objective--get the document back by three on Saturday, meet the next step in your plan to lift your family out of poverty--and he failed. In the hands of another writer, this would have been a critique of capitalism or society. The message would have been: Look! This person did everything to try to lift himself up by his boot straps, and it didn't work out! The dreams of capitalism are all lies! But that's not what this story is about.
Lee Dong Hwa listed three reasons why this story is actually more hopeful than depressing, calling his essay on the story "Hope Stronger than Fate." I also have three reasons why I love this story, and while the Venn Diagram between my reasons and Lee's overlap a bit, I'll present mine without referring to his.
1. Jin-yong might not succeed, but by God you want him to.
In creating Jin-yong, Yi gave us something rare: a flat-arc character who is good from beginning to end but also totally believable. Just to have written a character the reader can feel so unashamed to root for and so terrible to see fail is a noteworthy accomplishment.
2. Jin-yong owns his own destiny
The funny thing about Jin-yong is that at the story's end, he isn't blaming others or blaming fate. He blames himself. This is, on one level, ridiculous. He is taking on responsibilities nobody would expect someone his age to have to take on. He did everything he could to get the document back on time. He just had rotten luck. But that's not how he sees it:
But when he thought about it, this wasn't something anyone else should feel bitter or sad about. Others had done nothing but help him out. In the end, what had made things not work out was that he, of his own fault, did not meet the timetable. He felt only shame and sorrow. He felt guilt about his teacher, his uncle, the workers at city hall, the bus driver, even this guard at the school. He felt shame in front of all of them. But more than anything, he felt shame and sorrow about his mother and sister, waiting with their hearts in their stomachs for him to return home in glory.
Sounds harsh, yes? I was crushed when I read that. I thought, what a terrible story. But I kept ruminating on it for days afterwards. There's something noble about that way of looking at things. By reserving blame for himself and feeling only gratitude toward the many people who tried in vain to help him, Jin-yong maximizes his own agency. He refuses to give in to fate, to say he got bested by circumstances beyond his control. If it's his fault, that means he can do better next time and turn failure into success.
There's always a dangerous balancing act with this kind of story. Blame the individual too much, and society gets off the hook for creating conditions nobody should have to overcome. Blame society too much, and the individual escapes responsibility for his own actions. Jin-yong decides it's better to err on the side of blaming himself, because this is the only way he can feel control of a life where fate seems at war with him. He may have lost the battle, but a reader can leave the story with a sense that he might still somehow, however improbably, win the war. He certainly won't win the war if he allows himself to dwell on how fate cheated him. Even if he does not manage to win the war, his failure is one of the noblest things I can imagine.
I've thought about this story virtually every time I've faced any kind of adversity since I first read it. Not that I would dare compare myself to the many real people who have faced lives like Jin-yong's, but I do think that I, as a first-worlder, have a lot to learn from people like Jin-yong. We focus a lot on the impact of society on the individual in the first world, which sometimes makes us lose our drive to overcome that impact. I love this story for the way it restores my drive.
3. As much as it focuses on individual responsibility, it is very much about how we are all bound together.
People help Jin-yong along the way. His teacher, the old men at city hall who arrange to get him on the road quickly, the bus driver, his uncle. And the great thing about Jin-yong is that he notices these things. On the first morning of his trip, when the bus first starts to have problems, the driver and his on-board young mechanic work together to nurse the bus onward. Jin-yong thinks that, "Compared to himself, sitting with nothing useful to do but wait, he felt sorry for the driver and his helper who kept working hard in the cold. And he felt nothing but gratitude for their hard work, which would enable him to take care of his work that day."
Jin-yong repeats this gratitude over and over. It's one of the reasons he's so easy to root for. He comes from a culture that understands the bonds that tie people to one another. He find it easy to empathize with others. Even when the woman delays him further by crying over her stolen money, he feels sorry for her and her family who will have to live without the money. Jin-yong's entire motivation for pulling himself up by his bootstraps is to take care of his family, not to be rich himself.
There are some incredibly touching moments of kindness Jin-yong receives, much of it from grumbling old men who pretend to be much put out by Jin-yong's impertinence and impatience.
Much as Jin-yong's self-blame allows him to maintain a feeling of control over his destiny, the care others show to Jin-yong allows the story to both reflect the real troubles in society but also to demonstrate that love and kindness are at work as well, and can do much to help overcome those troubles.
Reviews of stories abuse the word "beautiful." This is one of the few stories I've ever read I would call beautiful. The wildflower never actually makes an appearance in the story, but if I had to guess what the meaning of the title is, I'd say it has to do with how the beauty of something can lay hidden in the ground for a long time before it is evident. South Korea's strong social ties and the belief of Korean individuals that they controlled their own fate allowed the country to turn from a devastated country to the powerhouse it is today almost overnight.
I've thought about this story more than any short story I've ever read. I'd love a chance to translate it for real so I can spend more time thinking about it.
When I started a concerted effort last fall to blog more reviews of contemporary literature, I was worried I wouldn't be able to be honest when I thought something fell short. I'm a writer myself, and in a literary market that seems based on a lot of Twitter-based mutual admiration between writers, I worried I'd be blacklisting myself if I didn't radiate enthusiasm about every story. I was spared having to find out for the most part when I blogged through Best American Short Stories, because I honestly liked 18 of the 20 stories in the collection.
Now, I've come to a story in the Pushcart Anthology I don't think was up to snuff, and if I'm going to have any integrity about this, I need to call it like I see it. I don't get any kind of snarky thrill out of picking apart a story, but I really think there were some fatal flaws in "The Bar Beach Show" by Olabajo Dada.
It's a promising plot: a man makes coffins for the Nigerian military, who puts on a show every other Sunday (the titular Bar Beach Show) where the military publicly executes prisoners by tying them to barrels on the beach and mowing them down with machine guns. Akanji, the coffin maker, isn't really into this job, but he's got a sick wife and he needs to pay for her medical care. There's a lot of potential here for heavy-hitting social commentary. So why doesn't the story work?
An actual photo of a Nigerian prison. Found on grandmarketsquare.com, which did not credit the photographer
1. The prose is sloppy. This story badly needed editing. The first paragraph has this sentence: "On the day of the show, while children played soccer and flew kites around lovers moseying along the shoreline, who patronized hawkers peddling snacks, and swimmers rose and fell with the waves, soldiers set up barrels right next to a bamboo stage where invited musical guests entertained the crowd just before the show's most popular attraction." I don't even think that sentence is grammatically correct. The clause "who patronized hawkers..." is unclearly linked to what came before; I first thought the children were patronizing hawkers, but then I realized it was the lovers moseying along the shoreline. But that's all within the "around lovers..." clause, which means we've got one hell of an interrupting clause. The clause is so long, in fact, that it interrupts the parallelism of "children played soccer and swimmers rose and fell" such that by the time I got to the swimmers, I was all turned around in the sentence and had to go back and read it again and again. There are a lot of these kinds of constructions in the story, where sentences are so impatient to get information to the reader they can't finish one sentence before starting in with something new. A lot of the story needed to take a breath and slow down.
In fact, there's another guilty sentence in the first paragraph: "Then, with much ceremony and to deafening cheers and jeers, the soldiers paraded newly condemned criminals and tied them up to the barrels. And while they wailed and pleaded and ceaselessly pleaded their innocence, the soldiers yanked out their assault rifles and mowed down the convicts like inanimate paper targets. Their bodies..." There are two subject pronouns here that don't refer to the subject nouns that came immediately before them. Soldiers are the subject of the first sentence, but then the "they" that follows in the next sentence refers to the object of the soldier's action, the prisoners, not the soldiers. Once we've made this shift to prisoners as the subject, we then move back to soldiers doing the action of "yanking," but then we immediately get back to a "their" that refers to the bodies of prisoners, not soldiers. This would have been easy to edit down. I'd have rejected the story after that first paragraph. Yes, I can understand what it means, but why make the opening lines disrespect me enough to make me work that hard?
2. There are a lot of weak adjectives doing all the work. I never really saw the scenes here, because there isn't much in the way of imagery. We get a lot of adjectives. Page one: flashy, deafening, succulent (in a way I'm not sure made sense), inanimate, sombre, ear-splitting (also in a way I don't think makes sense--is a hammer ear-splitting?). The attempts at imagery don't really work, like soldiers shooting people like paper targets. That's just comparing one thing soldiers shoot to another thing they shoot. Not much imagination at work there. Later on, we get, "Two hefty soldiers off loaded the truck while a stocky officer stood by supervising, arms akimbo." That's a sentence that could have been written by any beginning fiction student.
3. The organization seems off. There are eight sections to the story. All but two are from Akanji's point-of-view. Only two and seven differ, and the characters from two aren't the same as seven. Those sections are really just there to get information to the reader we couldn't get another way, not to establish new characters or a new reality to the world of the story. These characters really don't get to be anything more than automatons necessary to move the plot. These two sections don't have enough power on their own to justify their break from the rest of the story.
4. The plot is a cheat, entirely meant to give us a surprise. Akanji sold his soul to help his wife, but guess what? His wife is dying anyway, and he's going to get double-crossed by the major he works for! For some reason, Major Okoro is worried enough about whether his coffin maker's heart is in the work that he tells another character (in section seven, when Akanji is absent), that he's going to find a new carpenter and kill Akanji. Why the hell would he do that? Couldn't he just fire Akanji? Is he worried that Akanji will somehow blow the lid off the big scandal that Okoro made money off selling the coffins to wives of victims? Of all the scamming things he's got going on, he's really worried about this one? More than he's worried about a trail of murders he'll create to cover up what seems a small crime in the world of the story?
The promise of the plot is in its social commentary, its satirical take on a Nigeria wanting to put on a show to discourage lawlessness while corruptly preying off the weak. It's fine to end a story about the evil state with "I fought the law and the law won," but Akanji doesn't even fight. He has no arc at all, not even a negative one. No character does. In fact, every character in the story other than Akanji is a cutout, just there to serve the interests of the plot. There is no change in anything from beginning to end. There is no hint at what is special about Nigerian corruption compared to corruption anywhere else in the world. I don't feel I learned anything, even knowing as little as I do about Nigeria, from beginning to end. There is nothing in this story that offers hope or an explanation for why there is no hope. It's just an anecdote, told in mediocre language, with a bit of a twist.
When a story is only one page long, like "Midwinter" by D. Nurkse, you'd think the author wouldn't have time to start off with what seems like a digression: a Sunday School teacher asks her children a religious trick question. But "Midwinter" is, in fact, entirely about God, and the opening is no digression, but leading us right into the main point. It's nice to have a story that's about the big stuff. I think most people, even if we don't like to admit it, even if we're pretty determined agnostics or atheists and unlikely to change, still think about God fairly often. It doesn't make sense to never write stories that clearly tackle subjects including God.
In "Midwinter," we start with a question from a religious teacher, "Could you love God in a world without death?" This question belongs to a school of reasoning in Christianity called theodicy, or the attempt to explain how evil can exist in a world governed by a God who is both all-loving and all-powerful. This question from the teacher is kind of a weak offering in this school. It's akin to the "if there were no evil, we wouldn't appreciate good" line of argument. A better argument for those who try to reconcile God and suffering is to appeal to free will, stating that God did not want moral slaves, because He wanted creatures capable of loving Him and obeying Him freely. Such freedom HAS to allow evil to exist, Christians argue, but the ability to love freely also means the ability to choose not to love. If nobody can hurt other people, then love is meaningless. There are downsides, like ALL THE SUFFERING EVER IN HUMAN HISTORY, but freely given love from an agent with free will is enough of a good that it outweighs all the bad that exists. (I'm intentionally kind of mangling the argument there, but even expressed well, it's not much more convincing, at least to me.)
I've always thought this made God seem like kind of a negligent parent. As human parents, we also want to allow our kids to grow up to make their own decisions, but we also understand we can't let them knock the bloody hell out of other kids "or else they will never really be free." I don't understand why free will has to be an absolute, such that God really could not occasionally stop talking and having wine with the other deities long enough to come back to the playground and break up a fight or two. Why can't God have the same sense a human parent does? Why do we have to allow for the fullness of human depravity in order for love to mean anything?
As Shakespeare put it, "There was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently." No matter how strong your philosophical argument for why suffering is possible with a loving God who has the ability to end it, it will never satisfy the existential feeling of suffering. Even those who don't directly experience suffering on this scale ought to have enough empathy to realize the universe doesn't make sense.
"Midwinter" works as a fictional short argument against theodicy. The children are unable to answer the question their teacher poses to them. They are thinking of their uncles, away in Korea in "the winter after Inchon." That is to say, in the winter of 1950, the winter that would make David Halberstam call his brilliant history of the Korean war The Coldest Winter. Their uncles are carrying things: "a bazooka, canned peas, pictures of us." (And here, the callback to "The Things They Carried" was almost so hammy it broke the spell, but not quite.) Those "pictures of us" bring us an ironic parallelism. The uncles are away in a war that makes no sense, a war that challenges theodicy. But they attempt to hold onto their beliefs by thinking of their loved ones back home. Meanwhile, those loved ones back home are having the very beliefs the uncles need to hold onto challenged by thinking of what the uncles are enduring.
In spite of attempts to skirt around the question, such as the response of one class clown, "probably for half an hour," there is no getting around the fact that there just isn't a good answer to it. The students can feel this more than they can reason it out. That's the real problem with theodicy arguments, I think--they might have some power in an abstract sense, but they really do nothing to assuage the sense one gets while enduring suffering that this just isn't right. The story ends with the students wondering why nobody has fixed the squeaking heating system, which reminds them all of hamsters going around on endless wheels. We end with a mini-allegory of man and God:
Oil it! We said under our breath. Who knows why it never happened--who skipped a day on the task chart, who was distracted, why that small trapped creature is still advancing, there in the darkest month, in the cage of a circular journey.
God is the negligent maintenance man, and all humanity is the hamster stuck on the wheel, uselessly going around in the middle of bleakest winter.
Remember that old Richard Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino movie where about halfway through, it stops being a movie about bank robbers and becomes a vampire movie? That's what Victor Lavalle's "Spectral Evidence" reminded me of, except that unlike that movie, all the parts of Lavalle's story work, both in part and as a whole.
It starts off like an unsuspecting, regular-old literary fiction story. We've got a woman who runs a psychic business. She knows she's a fraud. She prepares for each customer by telling herself they all know she's a fraud, too. That's her life as it's introduced to us, but then we get the plot-moving complication: a girl comes in and wants to know if her mother, now a few years dead, is still alive somewhere. The girl, Abby, wants to know a little more than that, actually. The form her question takes is the question we'd all like to know: "Is there something...after all this?" The psychic is especially affected by this, because the girl makes her think of her own daughter, Sonia, and what it would have been like for her daughter if the psychic had died when Sonia was a girl.
That's a good start, but then it gets weird and better. The psychic goes home, flashes back to thoughts of her daughter, during which we learn that Sonia killed herself not too long ago. The psychic had been estranged from Sonia for four years prior to Sonia jumping off a building. That's an interesting story development, and one that helps explain why the psychic connected with Abby so much. But there's a much bigger twist coming. Turns out the psychic actually does hear from her dead daughter Sonia. The woman who knows she is a fraud when she talks to customers about communications from beyond death actually hears from dead people.
But the funny thing about it is that her daughter only says one thing to her psychic mother. It's the same thing, over and over: It's too dark in here.
In the third act, Abby's father comes to the psychic's business. He is distraught, and there is a hint of violence brewing. It turns out Abby killed herself not long after leaving the psychic's business. When the psychic answered Abby's question about "is there something after this" with a simple yes, that seems to have maybe been the impetus for Abby committing suicide. Having been reassured that she wouldn't end with killing herself, Abby decided to go ahead with something she'd been considering a long time. Maybe Abby hoped to be reunited with her mother.
It's not long after this that the psychic starts to hear from Abby, too. The message is no different from the one from Sonia: It's too dark in here. As with Sonia, the psychic can hear the message, but she doesn't know what it means.
The psychic resolves to quit lying to people, but this doesn't mean what we'd expect it to mean. For the psychic, it doesn't mean she's going to stop telling people about the messages from the dead. Rather, she's going to tell people exactly what those messages say. The story thus becomes the first step in her resolution to tell the truth, no matter how disturbing that truth may be.
We, the reader, can try to puzzle out along with the narrator what "it's too dark in here" means, but I think the point is that if there is a message for the living from the dead, the living either are too daft to understand it or it's too frightening to be fit for our ears. So it's best to ignore it. It's a rather life-affirming message, in the "there's nothing but this life, so you'd better pay attention" kind of way. In this sense, this quick-hitting little story with two suicides and messages from the dead turns out to be all about how important life is.
