The rant raised to high art: "Acceptance Speech" by David Naimon

David Naimon sets himself up with a tough challenge in "Acceptance Speech," originally published in Boulevard and now in the Pushcart Anthology. The entire story is told as an acceptance speech for an award. There is no set-up to the speech. We start with word one of the speech, and the story ends when the speech does. It's the sort of premise for a story that feels like it came out of one of those "writing prompt a day"calendars writers sometimes get as gifts. Whether it will work depends on the writer's ability to dazzle with one speech. The story stakes everything on the power of one soliloquy, told without breaks of any kind--not even paragraph breaks.

Fortunately, Naimon is up to the challenge. The narrator of "Acceptance Speech" mesmerizes her audience--us--right away, and the spell doesn't let up until the last word. She's winning some sort of award for gardening, of all things. Along the way to accepting her award, we learn about her philosophy and her relationship with her husband.

She doesn't think of gardening in the sentimental way one associates with gentle grandmothers and their funny gardening hats. Her speech is a "confession," which she likens to the gardener's tendency to go about "unearthing secrets, the subterranean love affair between taproots and earthworms, the unconquerable underground of morning glory networks, the white softness of larvae in the fetal position." Gardening isn't just about growing things to make the world beautiful to her. She sees through this lie into the heart of what gardening really is, just as she rejects the outward cuteness of otters by noting the truth that otters rape baby seals. (By the way, if you Google "otters rape baby seals," Google will shame you by reminding you that child pornography is illegal. Yes, Google. I agree. Please take me off your watch list.)

Assholes. 

Gardening isn't about making the world beautiful. It's "an enterprise full of cruelty, a task best suited for sociopaths and tyrants...If not them, what mentality best suits a pastime where we alone choose what deserves to live and what deserves to die, that demands we constantly kill things to groom and nourish the others we prefer?"

Herein, shining through the philosophical rant, is the seed of actual human conflict in the story, the conflict between narrator and husband that seeps out through the speech. The husband is the cheery, optimistic sort. He recycles because he believes it might really save the planet, whereas the narrator, his wife, sees recycling as a "terrible lie," because it is nothing but a "Band-Aid on the open sore that is consumer capitalism." The narrator claims--and insists she means it--that the best solution would be to let humans be fully human and end their lives on Earth sooner rather than later, since it's inevitable we will wipe ourselves out eventually anyway.

The narrator looks to the bacteria that fill the soil she works in for an example, the bacteria she reminds her audience outnumber humans ten cells to one within our own bodies: "I say, let's look to our ancestors and to their ancestral wisdom for the answer. When we place bacteria in a petri dish with an abundant food supply, what happens? They reproduce rapidly, exponentially. They are unstoppable. That is, until they choke themselves to death on their own waste..."

So the narrator thinks humanity is doomed and refuses to be sentimental about it. The husband willfully refuses to see the truth the wife sees, which is why he wants kids and she doesn't. This leads us to the moment of crisis, when the husband confronts the wife by asking her: if you really think humanity is better off dying sooner rather than later, shouldn't you have kids? Shouldn't you have a ton of them? "That would be the ultimate act of filling the petri dish, wouldn't it?" he asks.

In anger, she tears out every beautiful plant in her garden and fills it with the most aesthetically challenged plants she can find. The Sambucus Black Tower. The Snakeroot.

A Sambucus Black Tower. All I can see is the singing bush from Three Amigos. 

When she has finally ripped out every plant in the garden, including the fig tree the couple had planted together as a symbol of "good luck and fertility," she realizes that this ugly reaction to her husband's insistent and childlike faith was "a terrible lie...a moral sleight of hand."

Her catharsis, her realization, is this: "That nothing did fulfill my philosophy more fully than hominid propagation, even if somehow it also, disturbingly, satisfied my husband's hackneyed hope for humanity's future as well."

She is content to "fill the petri dish." She is accepting the award for her strange garden, we learn, while pregnant. She adopts some of her husband's naivete during the goosebump-inducing peroration:

"I..watch a fat tiger-striped slug slide in the moonlight. I decide not to scissor it. Not yet. I decide to leave it whole, as my husband would prefer, leave it unsplit, undivided for yet another moment. But the hum, it is unmistakable. I like to think it is both that I hear, the bacteria and me, the hum of our division, as together we feed the fever and add to the dish. The garden and I, we are so full, so full of life. Thank you for this great honor." 

It's rare that short stories deal in such an honest way with what is really the central questions in life. There is a lot of modern fiction on questions of identity and social justice. These are important questions, of course, but they're not the central question. Nobody will care about social justice if she feels the world is doomed soon, anyway, or that humanity can never really rise about the essential red-in-tooth-and-clawness of nature. What was it that allowed the narrator of this story to embrace, however tentatively and with qualification, optimism for humanity's future?

The best I can tell, it was simply fully embracing the alternative. This is how some commentators read the Book of Ecclesiastes, too: after nihilistic thought piled on top of nihilistic thought, the "preacher"--who is, just like Naimon's narrator, telling a story through a speech--finally collapses into a tried-and-true chestnut of a conclusion. "Here is the conclusion of the matter: fear God and keep His commandments." It's not a very convincing conclusion after so much despair, perhaps, unless you accept that the preacher has earned his soft landing after so much unblinking honesty.

Some people, like the narrator's husband, naturally lean toward optimism. They do so by ignoring many inconvenient facts, but by the end the narrator doesn't see this as something to despise the optimistic for. She also arrives at a well-worn conclusion: go forth and multiply. For her, it isn't so much a surrender after having been though the dark night of the soul as it is a realization that nihilism and optimism, on some level, come out to the same thing.

She has repeated a process our ancestors no doubt had to find for themselves long ago. Some poor soul in the neolithic period, scratching out a tough life from the ground, decided to grow something because it was beautiful. This first gardener was not unaware of how brutal nature really was, how ready to kill. This understanding of what nature really was wasn't a challenge to optimism; it was the source of it. The narrator in "Acceptance Speech" is just repeating an ancient discovery by means of the act of accepting something being given to her.