"When I respond to fiction drafts of any length, I try to think in the simplest of terms: what is the story doing well, what is it about, and what could it do better? I'm fairly convinced that authorial intent, while important, is often overrated--especially by the writer her or himself."
He then lists the elements of fiction he concerns himself with: what's it about, beginning, ending, details, plot/organization, character, setting, and voice. I think this is a typical way to approach writing nowadays. The primary concerns are with whether the story "works," not with its meaning.
He never mentions theme, but theme is, I think, why a lot of people serious enough about writing to go to graduate school or spend a lot of their personal time trying to hone their skills fell in love with writing in the first place. Unfortunately, the business of literary fiction now, especially short fiction, seems to be in the hands of writers, meaning there is a disconnect between what those writers pick to publish and what most readers actually want. Most people want stories that have a deep meaning, while most writers think in terms of the instructor in that email I received. I'd argue this disconnect accounts in part for the public's general indifference to serious short fiction.
In defense of theme
What is theme? A lot of people talk about it as though it were the same as subject matter. They say things like, "The theme of this story is friendship." That's not really right. Friendship is a subject. How the story feels about friendship is a theme. "Friendship is both a blessing and a curse" is a possible statement one could make about the theme of a story. It's not a terribly deep or interesting statement, but it serves the purpose of demonstrating the difference between theme and subject matter.
I think modernity tends to shy away from theme because it comes too close for us to the "moral" of a story. It's didactic, and that summons up images of condescending schoolmarms smacking the hands of distracted students with rulers while tsking their way through some recitation of Aesop's fables. It implies certainty on the part of the writer, when the business of post-modernity is learning to live with uncertainty. But theme doesn't have to be as dry as "haste makes waste" or "love conquers all."
Just this week, I was talking with my son about Whitman's poem "Cavalry Crossing a Ford." I pointed out that you can intuit a lot about how the narrator feels about the soldiers without him saying anything at all. From the tone and language, you can see that he admires the soldiers, that he thinks they are perhaps engaged in something noble. This is entirely achieved through the pleasure of beautiful images and powerful language, but the themes are still there.
Typically in modern fiction, theme is hinted at and felt more than overtly stated. That's great for readers who want to feel like the story is real and organic, but it's not so great when we, as readers, start to feel the natural urge after the story is over to think about what it means in some larger sense. It's great when a writer masters all those elements of fiction mentioned above, and it's a keen pleasure to read fiction in which those elements are mastered, but at some point, we want to know how we ought to feel about all that wonderful manipulation of what is often called "craft." When that happens and the task is beyond us, we might need professionals to help.
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| A theme can be a moral, but it doesn't have to be that obvious. |
An intelligent person who is not a professional in literature might walk away from a story like Jacob Guajardo's "What Got Into Us" or "Nights in Logar" by Jamil Jan Kochai feeling like we have some sense of what to take with us as we go, but we might have a difficult time expressing that when we discuss the story with others. And we might not have a clue what we're supposed to feel after a story like "The Houses That Are Left Behind" by Brenda Walker or Carolyn Ferrell's "A History of China."
That's when it can be useful to have a critic, someone skilled at scouring the elements of fiction for the unique ways in which fictional logic creates meaning and then communicating that meaning to readers--preferably to readers who are not literary professionals. But such critics hardly exist. For every movie out there, you can find a dozen quality YouTubers doing God's work trying to mine the movie for meaning, but darned if you can find that for the best literary fiction. That's true even if you're talking about short fiction, which is probably easier to critique in the manner I'm talking about than long fiction. There's a reason students of Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Prize Stories are finding my blog. It's not that I'm the most skilled person on Earth at this. It's that hardly anyone else is even trying critique on this level.
Instead, we get a review. Literary Review, critique, and theory are related disciplines but differ in important ways. A good review will let you know if you should read a book. A good critique will help you to analyze the work critically. Theory is more for professionals, and interrogates the work on a deeper level in which literature itself is often being investigated as much as the particular work under discussion. The three disciplines overlap to some degree: critique can include opinions on quality, and theory will include close reading of how the elements of fictions build meaning. Critique is the middle ground between heavily academic thinking about literature and a more personal reaction to it. But nearly all writing about serious literature one can find tends to lean toward the review end of the spectrum, because it's mostly other writers running the show.
This is even true of the anthologies themselves. Having just finished my critiques of the most recent big three American short fiction anthologies (Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and the O. Henry Prize Stories), I found a lot of great fiction. (I was actually worried, when I started, if I would be able to go through with a full critique of all the work, since I'm trying to get published myself by many of the same venues that published the work I'm analyzing, and I didn't want to make enemies. But I was surprised how often I could blog positively with a clear conscience.) But I didn't find much in any of the three anthologies to help orient a lay reader about meaning.
BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2018
This is the best selling of the three, and for the six years I've been reading it, has followed the same format. Heidi Pitlor, who has narrowed the possible candidates down to a little over a hundred, has a guest editor pick the twenty stories that appear in the volume. Both Pitlor and the guest editor offer thoughts on the volume, Pitlor in a foreword and the editor in an introduction. Often, these include some musings on how the stories reflect the historical year covered by the anthology.
In 2018, both Pitlor and guest editor Roxane Gay focused on the chaos and uncertainty in American democracy and how the stories they picked may or may not address that chaos and uncertainty (and for Gay, why they should be excused if they do not seem to address it pointedly enough). Pitlor's foreword begins with a list of all the unbelievable news that had happened in just the month before she finished work on the anthology. Her concern with fiction in this political context is more existential than semiotic, more about whether fiction can survive than what it might mean: "Fiction writers are now faced with the significant challenge of producing work that will sustain a reader's attention amid this larger narrative."
Pitlor relates her personal history with the BASS anthology, which she first discovered in college. Her first contact with the series included her realization that there was a section of writer notes in the back, a feature that still exists in BASS today. "After reading a stellar story, I turned to the mini-essay that provided access to what seemed like secrets: confessions about the difficulties of writing, self-deprecating comments about the author's obsessions; profound assessments of the themes of the stories." (emphasis mine)
Pitlor seems to care about the same things I've just said most readers really care about in reading literature. The raison d'etre of the anthology is to provide insight into the big questions. She writes that "The stories in this book offer readers passageway inside contemporary and age-old questions of what it means to live together in a society, as well as what it takes to define ans sustain oneself in difficult times."
She then moves on to a brief and now-familiar discussion of how literary fiction makes readers more empathetic, more open to diversity. But it's clear she sees one important purpose of fiction is to deliver meaning, not just great craft.
Gay, in her introduction, is even more concerned with existential questions than Pitlor. She writes about the realities of writing, how it takes time and space, and how we can't expect the perfect story responding to the present age to just emerge because we'd like it to. With all the political and social background to picking the year's best stories, all of which Gay is deeply concerned about, she says what she's looking for begins with writerly questions:
"First and foremost, I am looking for a good story. I am looking for beautifully crafted sentences. I am looking for a refreshing voice or perspective. I am looking for interesting, complex characters that I find myself thinking about even when I am done with the story. I am looking for the artful way any given story is conveyed, but I also love when a story has a powerful message, when a story teaches me something about the world, when a story shows me just how much I don't know and need to know about the lives of others." (emphasis mine)
So both Gay and Pitlor are looking for some kind of meaning, some thematic epiphanies from what they read in fiction, although these questions are of varying relative weight to each. But the notes from the writers in the back tend, for the most part, to rather pointedly avoid this kind of pontification. There are a few exceptions. Interestingly to me, the same writers who wrote what I considered the best stories in the volume (Brinkley, Cline, Evans) did try to address what their stories were about at their heart in some way. I wonder if one of the reasons I, a reader who reads for theme, connected with their stories is because the writers themselves also show a similar concern.
Most of the writers stuck to the background of how the story was written. Many wrote about aesthetic or "craft" considerations. For a story like Jacob Guajardo's "What Got Into Us," his biographical notes are quite helpful for thinking about theme, since Guajardo's life is similar to his main character. When he writes that, "Young, queer people of color become adept at hiding, but it's hard to hide that you are in love," he is writing auto-biographically, but he's also written a pretty good thematic statement about his own story. In fact, most of the better thematic statements in the author's notes section start with a statement something like, "I wanted to write a story about..." They are still writing from their own experience of writing the story, but by talking about what they wanted to say, we end up with a helpful guide to the story for the confused lay reader.
Ferrell, however, whose story "History of China" may be the most daunting to write about thematically, offers almost no help, choosing to write only about craft and the history of how she came to write the story. Ron Rash's writer notes are as fatuous and conceited as the story that appeared in the volume. Matthew Lyons wrote that male violence was at the heart of his story, and while that's a helpful hint at theme, I don't think it's entirely accurate. Maybe that's because I thought the story didn't quite work on the level of craft, dabbling a little too exploitively in exotic religious customs. But at least it was a thematic statement. Kristen Iskandrian, Rivers Solomon, and Esme Weijun Wang also offered an analysis of their stories that I partly disagreed with, but at least they gave some sort of analysis.
In short, the author comments usually didn't really offer much of the "profound assessments of the themes of the stories" that we were promised. Maybe that's too much to ask of the authors, who are, after all, only responsible for producing the themes themselves, not the analysis of those themes. But this analysis needs to exist somewhere. I'd like it if BASS itself too charge of leading the production of some of that criticism, either in the volume itself or somewhere with an official presence online.
All too often, I think the statements about these stories tend to dodge the thematic questions, because those are hard. You can be wrong about what you say. It's hard to be wrong when you say so-and-so wrote beautiful sentences, but saying a story's meaning is such-and-such can be contested. You can end up looking stupid. I'm sure I've failed at some of what I've blogged. I do it because critique is so rare and so important, I'm willing to provide something imperfect to at least have a starting point for readers. But I think BASS could call upon literary professionals to do better.
PUSHCART
The Pushcart Anthology doesn't offer much of anything to help a reader out. Its focus is on getting air time for writers from smaller presses. It's an absolutely admirable job, and it gives a huge shot in the arm to the trajectories of the writers who make it into the volume. But it's an paperback-only book, which means size matters. They try to get as much content into it as they can, and that means they don't have a lot of room for introductions or writer notes. The introduction this year was only a few pages, focused on personal notes from the editors, and passed on any responsibility to contextualize the stories thus: "I won't even attempt to describe the immense variety in theme and style of what follows."
If there isn't any real criticism of the big anthologies, there's damned sure not going to be any real criticism of Pushcart. This is a shame, because writing without good reading is the answer to the old Buddhist koan of what one hand clapping is like. It's nothing. Pushcart provides a great opportunity for writers desperately deserving of it, but without an active readership, it's difficult for the writers to develop an active base of followers. Writers typically gain a following when readers are attracted to thematic elements in what they read. But there has to be some discussion of what those thematic elements are before the readership can, in a sense, discover itself. So Pushcart itself is only half of the puzzle.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018
Overall, the O. Henry anthology shows a little more attention to theme than the other volumes. It groups stories by similarities rather than by the randomness of alphabetical order of the writers, which in itself means they are taking editorial responsibility for how the reader experiences meaning. In Laura Furman's introduction to the series, she takes several stabs at thematic statements about the stories. She doesn't do this for every story, but she does it for many of them. I found some of her thoughts helpful in writing about the anthology. This section of the book provides something BASS was lacking. It gave at least a few paragraphs of thoughts from an actual literary professional about two questions: What is the subject matter?" and "What is the heart of the story?" I take this second question to be largely one of theme.
Like the foreword to BASS, O. Henry's introduction promised further answers to these questions in the notes from the writers at the back of the book. "After you have completed a story in the O.Henry Prize Stories 2018, you might find you have two different answers to the questions 'What is the subject matter?' and 'What is the heart of the story?' And if you turn to 'Writing The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018,' you can see what answers the authors themselves have to offer."
However, like BASS, the authors are not always as interested in thematic elements as the readers likely are. There are exceptions. One wonderful exception was Brenda Walker, who provided a succinct statement of what she thought was at the heart of her story. This was helpful, because her story was one of the more challenging to find a thematic core of. But most of the writers stuck to origin stories of their stories. Again, I don't really fault the writers for this, but it is disappointing to the reader who wants to engage with the work on a deeper level to find a dead end.
O. Henry also includes a short essay from each of three guest editors. In each essay, the editors talk about their favorite story and why they liked it. This is more help O. Henry provides to readers that BASS and Pushcart do not give. However, since the editors are writers and not critics, their comments tend to focus on elements of craft rather than theme.
Overall, O. Henry is the most satisfying to read if you are hoping to get some kind of foothold on climbing up the mountain of understanding meaning. But it still leaves a lot to be desired. There are many places where the introduction uses discretion as the better part of valor where a thematic statement would be difficult. It evades statements about the "heart of the story" for "subject matter" or aesthetic statements. It chooses review over critique, when readers would probably enjoy a bit of the latter and feel they are relatively more capable of drawing their own conclusions about the former. For example, Furman concludes her talk of Dave King's "The Stamp Collector" by saying, "In a short story, the writer has to do it all right away--establish the tone, ensnare the reader, and make us want more. Dave King does all three just right in 'The Stamp Collector.'"
This was my first year reading O. Henry, and I really was grateful for the way it was put together. But I'd like other anthologies to follow its lead, and for O. Henry to go much further than it does. I'd love it if the anthologies also included criticism about the stories. Preferably, it would be independent criticism. The critics wouldn't be required in any way to like the stories they analyzed.
Short fiction in America needs a boost. The anthologies provide that. Getting picked for one of these collections is an immense lift to a writer's career. But criticism is in an even more pitiful state than fiction. The anemic state of criticism is intricately tied to the weak state of short fiction. It's a truism that only writers read short fiction. But what do we expect? Most serious literary fiction is difficult for a non-professional in literature, even a smart one, to dissect. Without a leg up, what engineer or math teacher or fire fighter is going to invest the time, when that time is likely to end getting nowhere?
In short, I'd love to see the big three anthologies combine their yearly output with a coordinated and linked critical output. I'd love to see my blog become obsolete.
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