This is just a quick post to say I got another story published yesterday. This is in a newer journal called Bridge Eight. I hadn't heard of them until I saw they were accepting submissions, but looking at some of the other stuff they've published, I'm proud they picked one of mine. This one's a pretty quick little story. I keep saying I don't particularly like writing shorter ones, but that seems to be what a lot of journals are looking for, and I've had more of the really short ones published than the longer ones.
The story's here. Since people seemed to like my very short story, I'll make this a very short post, as well.
Tuesday, May 26, 2020
Monday, May 25, 2020
Nonplussed: the dazed protagonist in "I Am Here To Make Friends" by Robert Long Foreman
All the books on the craft of fiction warn writers not to have passive protagonists. Your hero can't just face a world that either she doesn't understand or which doesn't understand her, spend the length of the story immersed in that lack of understanding, and then end the story still dumbstruck by how strange and unfamiliar the world is. This is a hard lesson for writers to learn, and many a promising MFA candidate never gets past it. Maybe that's because the sorts of people who seek to tell stories in the first place really do spend a lot of their lives feeling alienated, misunderstood, and generally like the world is too much for them. But most eventually learn to make their characters want something, have that want be frustrated, and then cobble together enough of a conflict out of the quest to fulfill that desire that editors will publish the story.
We're so used to the cycle of want, followed by inability to achieve the wanted thing, followed then by some kind of epiphany that allows the character to achieve what he wants--the "tyranny of the epiphany" as Jim Shepard calls it--that it's entirely arresting to read Robert Long Foreman's short story collection I Am Here To Make Friends (Sundress Publications, 2020, 215 pages). Arresting, because most of the stories involve a protagonist who breaks the rules by not being sure what they really want, mostly being passive and misunderstood, and yet every one of the stories is a joy with more than enough forward momentum to keep the reader happily flipping pages to the end. Stories without clear stakes aren't supposed to work that well, but these do, and the reader is left shaking his head as one story or another works when it doesn't seem like it should, like walking through a hall of optical illusions.
No story exemplifies this dazed protagonist as much as "The Vinyl Canal," which is mostly about the narrator's annoying acquaintance who becomes obsessed with scratching grooves in the songs he doesn't like on his records so the record player will skip over them. There is some movement in the story to take the subject matter outside the interior musings of a pompous college kid more in love with his thoughts than his thoughts merit: police brutality and American love of the easy way out enter the narrative, but they never quite form a conflict. The kid disappears, it might have been the police who did it, and then the story ends. The narrator is observing a world that doesn't give up its secrets, and ultimately, it's too much for her to keep plumbing the depths.
This cycle is repeated in: "Appraisals," about a man who accidentally is mistaken for an appraiser at a convention who decides he will just tell everyone what they want to hear; in "Turkey of the Woods," in which an addict of some sort finds a brain in the woods he mistakes for a mushroom; and "Lost Origins," in which a slacker becomes obsessed with finding a code in a strange video he bought in a bargain bin at a thrift store. These characters crack jokes other characters don't find funny, and make discoveries nobody is interested in hearing about. Being misunderstood, though, doesn't make these characters crave understanding enough to do something about it. There is no overcoming of anything to achieve a goal. Instead, there is a direct refusal to confront challenges. When the main character in "Lost Origins" finds out his girlfriend wants to break up with him, he simply says, "Fine, I thought. I saw this coming." When he then starts a new relationship, his new girlfriend says something he disagrees with, but "I wasn't about to start an argument. I was in love."
So why does all this passivity work, contrary to all the rules writers have been taught? One reason is that the jokes really are funny. The people who hear the protagonists cracking wise may not get them, but the reader does, and it creates a sort of bond. We feel that we want to reach through the story and form a secret society with the main characters.
Much more than this, though, is the way these stories remind us how appropriate it is to feel disoriented. Maybe it doesn't always make for compelling fiction to be so uncertain what the point of life is that we don't even know what to wish for, but that is a totally normal reaction to realizing we've all been dropped off on this planet with no guide book. It's appropriate to feel nonplussed, a word Foreman uses a couple of times, and which means to be so confused by a situation, one doesn't even know what course of action to take. The etymology of "nonplussed"--and many of Foreman's characters are deeply interested in the etymologies of words--is simply "no more." It means there is really nothing else left to do, because something has left you so dazed, there's no action that makes sense.
No story exemplifies this more than "Awe," the opening story. (I am putting to the side two stories in the collection, both of which have to do with guns, and both of which are sort of oddballs compared to the others.) The narrator hears his friend talk about what a life-changing experience it was watching his child be born, so the narrator goes on a wild Internet adventure to find a couple or a mother who will let him watch their child be born. He tries to explain what he needs:
Of course he needs that. We all do. We all need "awe," which is the only thing any character in any of the non-gun stories in this book wants clearly enough his quest to achieve it can be called a conflict. When he achieves his goal of feeling awe, there is nothing else he needs to feel alive and to also have some sense of communion with other living beings. To be alive is to feel disoriented, to feel awe, to be so nonplussed that there is nothing left to add to the experience. These stories, which resist everything they will tell you in MFA programs, feel like they have exactly the right amount of what's in them, and I wouldn't want to add anything more.
We're so used to the cycle of want, followed by inability to achieve the wanted thing, followed then by some kind of epiphany that allows the character to achieve what he wants--the "tyranny of the epiphany" as Jim Shepard calls it--that it's entirely arresting to read Robert Long Foreman's short story collection I Am Here To Make Friends (Sundress Publications, 2020, 215 pages). Arresting, because most of the stories involve a protagonist who breaks the rules by not being sure what they really want, mostly being passive and misunderstood, and yet every one of the stories is a joy with more than enough forward momentum to keep the reader happily flipping pages to the end. Stories without clear stakes aren't supposed to work that well, but these do, and the reader is left shaking his head as one story or another works when it doesn't seem like it should, like walking through a hall of optical illusions.
No story exemplifies this dazed protagonist as much as "The Vinyl Canal," which is mostly about the narrator's annoying acquaintance who becomes obsessed with scratching grooves in the songs he doesn't like on his records so the record player will skip over them. There is some movement in the story to take the subject matter outside the interior musings of a pompous college kid more in love with his thoughts than his thoughts merit: police brutality and American love of the easy way out enter the narrative, but they never quite form a conflict. The kid disappears, it might have been the police who did it, and then the story ends. The narrator is observing a world that doesn't give up its secrets, and ultimately, it's too much for her to keep plumbing the depths.
This cycle is repeated in: "Appraisals," about a man who accidentally is mistaken for an appraiser at a convention who decides he will just tell everyone what they want to hear; in "Turkey of the Woods," in which an addict of some sort finds a brain in the woods he mistakes for a mushroom; and "Lost Origins," in which a slacker becomes obsessed with finding a code in a strange video he bought in a bargain bin at a thrift store. These characters crack jokes other characters don't find funny, and make discoveries nobody is interested in hearing about. Being misunderstood, though, doesn't make these characters crave understanding enough to do something about it. There is no overcoming of anything to achieve a goal. Instead, there is a direct refusal to confront challenges. When the main character in "Lost Origins" finds out his girlfriend wants to break up with him, he simply says, "Fine, I thought. I saw this coming." When he then starts a new relationship, his new girlfriend says something he disagrees with, but "I wasn't about to start an argument. I was in love."
So why does all this passivity work, contrary to all the rules writers have been taught? One reason is that the jokes really are funny. The people who hear the protagonists cracking wise may not get them, but the reader does, and it creates a sort of bond. We feel that we want to reach through the story and form a secret society with the main characters.
Much more than this, though, is the way these stories remind us how appropriate it is to feel disoriented. Maybe it doesn't always make for compelling fiction to be so uncertain what the point of life is that we don't even know what to wish for, but that is a totally normal reaction to realizing we've all been dropped off on this planet with no guide book. It's appropriate to feel nonplussed, a word Foreman uses a couple of times, and which means to be so confused by a situation, one doesn't even know what course of action to take. The etymology of "nonplussed"--and many of Foreman's characters are deeply interested in the etymologies of words--is simply "no more." It means there is really nothing else left to do, because something has left you so dazed, there's no action that makes sense.
No story exemplifies this more than "Awe," the opening story. (I am putting to the side two stories in the collection, both of which have to do with guns, and both of which are sort of oddballs compared to the others.) The narrator hears his friend talk about what a life-changing experience it was watching his child be born, so the narrator goes on a wild Internet adventure to find a couple or a mother who will let him watch their child be born. He tries to explain what he needs:
"So, you want to see me give birth out of--what--curiosity?"
"I heard about it from Gary--my friend. About what a mindfuck it is." I was paraphrasing. "I mean, how much it changes you to be in the room when someone's being born. Gary's a different guy now, in a good way."
"And you need that."
"Sure."
Of course he needs that. We all do. We all need "awe," which is the only thing any character in any of the non-gun stories in this book wants clearly enough his quest to achieve it can be called a conflict. When he achieves his goal of feeling awe, there is nothing else he needs to feel alive and to also have some sense of communion with other living beings. To be alive is to feel disoriented, to feel awe, to be so nonplussed that there is nothing left to add to the experience. These stories, which resist everything they will tell you in MFA programs, feel like they have exactly the right amount of what's in them, and I wouldn't want to add anything more.
Wednesday, May 20, 2020
Writer problems: pseudoplagiaphobia
I vividly remember my first college class with a research paper as part of the requirements. A few weeks into the course, a day was set aside for us all to announce out loud what subject we had chosen and the outline of the paper we planned. It was very important to me that I be the first to present my planned paper. Why? Because I was certain that the idea I'd landed on was so good it would be obvious to everyone else, and if I didn't present it before everyone else got a chance, three other students would announce they were doing versions of the same thing.
After a few semesters, I finally realized that I was older than most of the others students, had spent time in the Marine Corps, and was therefore a lot more serious about going to college than nearly everyone. Which meant that nobody was stealing any of my ideas. In fact, they usually showed up to class on the day we were supposed to announce our topics without any idea at all what they were going to write about. In other words, my fears that just because something had occurred to me meant it would occur to others were almost always groundless. I got over pseudoplagiaphobia, the fear of falsely appearing to have stolen an idea from someone when I was merely the victim of having had the same idea as someone else. (Side note: a quick Google search tells me I might be the first to coin this word, but I'm sure a more industrious researcher might tell me I'm wrong.)
It's a whole other story writing fiction, however. In college, I only had to worry about whether someone else in my class would happen to have the same idea as me, and the odds of that were pretty long. But when I'm writing something where the potential audience includes the whole world, there's a much bigger pool of other writers to worry about having had "my" idea first. Worse, there's no possible way to investigate the collected writings of all humanity in order to know if anyone ever did something similar enough to what I've done that I might be accused of stealing it. I could check for titles, of course, but generally, I already know whether my title is sui generis without having to check, and that's not really what I was worried about, anyway. Repeating a title isn't a big deal, but repeating a story--or coming close to repeating a story--is. With the whole world to worry about, the odds I'll stumble into something someone else wrote become a lot higher.
This doesn't usually bother me, but it did bother me over the last few months when I, probably like a lot of other writers, was pushing my way through my COVID-19 novel. (I mean I wrote it during my free time I got as a result of COVID-19, not that it's about the disease.) The novel started out as one thing, but it pretty quickly morphed into something else, and when it changed, I suddenly knew where I wanted to go with it. The change was something I was really happy with, but about halfway through writing, I started thinking that surely, someone else had done something similar at some point, because if it occurred to me like that, it must have occurred to someone else.
Like the thing pseudoplagiaphobia itself worries about, there's probably nothing new about an obsession over whether your idea is really new. The best advice I can give to you if you're suffering from it is that if you've been writing long enough or if you're talented enough that people might actually read your work, then you're going to have a style unique enough that even if you do happen to stumble into the same plot points or character sketches as someone else, it's still going to feel pretty solidly your own.
The professor in one of those classes from my undergraduate years later became a friend of mine. He once was talking about how early 20th century writers were struggling with trying to find something new to say, and in an off-handed way, he threw out this line: "The Barenaked Ladies sang 'It's All Been Done,' and even that was already done a hundred years ago." The good news about the impossibility of coming up with something truly novel is that people are fairly forgiving about ideas with a lot of overlap. Hell, Moulin Rouge came out barely two years after Shakespeare in Love, and even though the second was nearly a transposition of the first to a different era and visual aesthetic, people gave both a ton of awards. (And if memory serves, that was also about the same time Hollywood found that yes, America did have room in its heart for two separate disaster flicks about an asteroid hitting Earth.)
It's true that in a very big world with a lot of talented people writing fiction just like you are, there's bound to be somebody who did something like what you did. If you're really unlucky, there might be a story out there that's a lot like yours, and you won't find out until you've published your own work. That's not really a reason to write in fear, though. You're as likely to end up with readers finding the two works to be in conversation with each other as you are to be accused of stealing an idea you didn't even know existed before you. If that happens, it's probably a good thing. Teachers love assignments that force students to compare and contrast, and if you've got something that forms a Venn diagram with another story, you might just end up being on somebody's syllabus.
You can probably rest easy that if you read a reasonable amount and write well enough to find a readership that you don't need to spend years making sure nobody already did what you are doing.
(Now, that being said, here are two things I've discovered you will have a very, very difficult time not repeating: coffee shop names and craft beer names. Seriously, I've had to put these in stories before, and I've spent hours coming up with one clever--or so I thought--idea after another only to find that yep, some guy in Des Moines already has a coffee shop by that name or there's a brewery in Michigan making that very beer. If you need to put a coffee shop or a craft beer in your story, it's best to just kiss the idea of being clever good-bye. I'd recommend having the owner of the cafe or the creator of the beer commiserating over how hard it is to come up with a new name, because it really is.)
After a few semesters, I finally realized that I was older than most of the others students, had spent time in the Marine Corps, and was therefore a lot more serious about going to college than nearly everyone. Which meant that nobody was stealing any of my ideas. In fact, they usually showed up to class on the day we were supposed to announce our topics without any idea at all what they were going to write about. In other words, my fears that just because something had occurred to me meant it would occur to others were almost always groundless. I got over pseudoplagiaphobia, the fear of falsely appearing to have stolen an idea from someone when I was merely the victim of having had the same idea as someone else. (Side note: a quick Google search tells me I might be the first to coin this word, but I'm sure a more industrious researcher might tell me I'm wrong.)
It's a whole other story writing fiction, however. In college, I only had to worry about whether someone else in my class would happen to have the same idea as me, and the odds of that were pretty long. But when I'm writing something where the potential audience includes the whole world, there's a much bigger pool of other writers to worry about having had "my" idea first. Worse, there's no possible way to investigate the collected writings of all humanity in order to know if anyone ever did something similar enough to what I've done that I might be accused of stealing it. I could check for titles, of course, but generally, I already know whether my title is sui generis without having to check, and that's not really what I was worried about, anyway. Repeating a title isn't a big deal, but repeating a story--or coming close to repeating a story--is. With the whole world to worry about, the odds I'll stumble into something someone else wrote become a lot higher.
This doesn't usually bother me, but it did bother me over the last few months when I, probably like a lot of other writers, was pushing my way through my COVID-19 novel. (I mean I wrote it during my free time I got as a result of COVID-19, not that it's about the disease.) The novel started out as one thing, but it pretty quickly morphed into something else, and when it changed, I suddenly knew where I wanted to go with it. The change was something I was really happy with, but about halfway through writing, I started thinking that surely, someone else had done something similar at some point, because if it occurred to me like that, it must have occurred to someone else.
Like the thing pseudoplagiaphobia itself worries about, there's probably nothing new about an obsession over whether your idea is really new. The best advice I can give to you if you're suffering from it is that if you've been writing long enough or if you're talented enough that people might actually read your work, then you're going to have a style unique enough that even if you do happen to stumble into the same plot points or character sketches as someone else, it's still going to feel pretty solidly your own.
The professor in one of those classes from my undergraduate years later became a friend of mine. He once was talking about how early 20th century writers were struggling with trying to find something new to say, and in an off-handed way, he threw out this line: "The Barenaked Ladies sang 'It's All Been Done,' and even that was already done a hundred years ago." The good news about the impossibility of coming up with something truly novel is that people are fairly forgiving about ideas with a lot of overlap. Hell, Moulin Rouge came out barely two years after Shakespeare in Love, and even though the second was nearly a transposition of the first to a different era and visual aesthetic, people gave both a ton of awards. (And if memory serves, that was also about the same time Hollywood found that yes, America did have room in its heart for two separate disaster flicks about an asteroid hitting Earth.)
It's true that in a very big world with a lot of talented people writing fiction just like you are, there's bound to be somebody who did something like what you did. If you're really unlucky, there might be a story out there that's a lot like yours, and you won't find out until you've published your own work. That's not really a reason to write in fear, though. You're as likely to end up with readers finding the two works to be in conversation with each other as you are to be accused of stealing an idea you didn't even know existed before you. If that happens, it's probably a good thing. Teachers love assignments that force students to compare and contrast, and if you've got something that forms a Venn diagram with another story, you might just end up being on somebody's syllabus.
You can probably rest easy that if you read a reasonable amount and write well enough to find a readership that you don't need to spend years making sure nobody already did what you are doing.
(Now, that being said, here are two things I've discovered you will have a very, very difficult time not repeating: coffee shop names and craft beer names. Seriously, I've had to put these in stories before, and I've spent hours coming up with one clever--or so I thought--idea after another only to find that yep, some guy in Des Moines already has a coffee shop by that name or there's a brewery in Michigan making that very beer. If you need to put a coffee shop or a craft beer in your story, it's best to just kiss the idea of being clever good-bye. I'd recommend having the owner of the cafe or the creator of the beer commiserating over how hard it is to come up with a new name, because it really is.)
Thursday, May 14, 2020
Wrapped up in something I don't completely understand: "Lagomorph" by Alexander MacLeod
Often when I'm looking at submitting a story to magazines, the editors will provide guidelines to writers that include a "what we're looking for" section. Unless this is very specific, like, "We are a magazine that is looking for queer stories by queer writers," these "what we're looking for" sections aren't very helpful. They all tend to come down to, "We can't explain it but we know it when we see it."
I'd criticize this, but as I was going through the 2019 O.Henry Anthology--their 100th such anthology--I decided this year I would only blog on those stories that I really connected with. This left me in the same, embarrassing boat as all those editors. Namely, what does it mean "to connect with" a story. To me, it really means nothing more than the feeling that the story landed. I mean landed like a punch lands. It left a mark on me, and I know, before I have to live the next ten years, that I'll come back to thinking about that story again at some point.
There didn't end up being that many stories in this year's anthology that landed. I only blogged about five, the one I'm about to do included. That doesn't mean there weren't good stories. In addition to the ones that "landed," there were several more I enjoyed, and I can't think of any that enraged with with their presence in a best-of collection. Maybe I'm getting cynical, or maybe I've just read so much short fiction in the last seven years, it's getting harder to land punches on me. I'm the same way with TV now. Here in the Golden Age of American Television, I'm often refusing to even start new shows, much to Mrs. Heretic's annoyance, because something about them just tells me they're not going to land. This is especially irritating to Mrs. Heretic, because I often can't really explain why I know they won't land; I can't even explain exactly what landing means.
I indulge in this digression because "Lagomorph" by Alexander MacLeod is entirely about this can't-put-my-finger-on-it sense that accompanies all of us through life. It's the story of a pretty typical man who gets married and raises three kids, with all the accompanying sense of vertigo those years of running from work to van shuttle service bring. At one point, when the kids are all between the ages of seven and thirteen, "the moment just before they made the turn into what they are now," the family makes the milestone decision to get a pet. Because the wife is allergic to cats, they get a rabbit.
The story is written from the husband's point-of-view, and he's looking back after the kids are grown and he and his wife are amicably separated but not yet divorced. He's not quite sure what happened to his marriage. In fact, bewilderment is the narrator's main characteristic. Not in a wishy-washy way, but more in an open-to-the-mystery-of-life kind of way.
The symbol of this bewilderment is the rabbit, Gunther, the "lagomorph" of the title. Gunther is something of a fuzzy, cute incarnation of the mystery of life who sits on the narrator's lap to have its ears scratched. The narrator's description of the rabbit comes packaged together with a sense of disorientation and confusion from the story's first words:
The rabbit symbolizes the ineffable enigma of existence partly because it's so hard to know what a rabbit is thinking: "Even when I imagine that I am reading him correctly, I know that he is reading me at the same time--and doing a better job of it."
It isn't just the inscrutability of the rabbit's moods, though, that make it such a symbol of why life confounds us. In Moby Dick, the white whale is a symbol for something similar to what MacLeod is getting at in "Lagomorph." But the whale is a mystery partly because it is so remote and distant. It lives in the depths of the ocean. When it does meet with humanity, it's usually in a destructive way. Gunther, though, is a common mammal. The author--somewhat Melville-like--gives us a number of rabbit facts while telling his story, one of which is the fact well-known to folk wisdom about how prolific rabbits are at reproducing. The rabbit is as different from Melville's whale as an animal can be, and yet there it is, as inscrutable to MacLeod's narrator as the whale is to Ishmael.
What makes Gunther such a remarkable and surprising element in the story is that while he embodies life's unspeakable mystery as much as Melville's whale, the rabbit is right there next to the narrator throughout. "Our rabbit--my rabbit now, I guess--he and I are wrapped up in something I don't completely understand." The ineffable isn't a powerful god with knowledge it keeps hidden out of spite, it's a fluffy ball of fur next to us that's legitimately as confused as we are. It's wrapped up in the ineffable with us, a passenger on the same ship. The narrator points out that rabbits are altricial: they are helpless when born. They're like us, then, born into a world that is too much for them from the moment they enter it. Life may be, like a rabbit, a "fickle, stubborn creature, obsessive and moody, quick to anger, utterly unpredictable and mysterious," but it's also in the same boat. Maybe God faces limitations just like we do. The mystery of life is so profound that even whatever personifies the mystery of life is also confounded by it.
This is what makes "Lagomorph" so arresting. The narrator isn't undone by some outside force. The one outside force that threatens the narrator and the rabbit in the story ends up being something the narrator dispatches easily, and in fact he ends up feeling bad about treating the outside force as a threat, wondering if he can even justify his actions he resorted to out of fear. What undoes the narrator are the small things that are with him throughout the story, the marriage the fell apart even while he treasured it, the children that have no become themselves and don't live with him anymore, the rabbit that is both common and "a nearly unique organism in the history of the world."
The real punch of this story is that something doesn't have to come from the depths of the ocean to be other and mysterious and to knock us flat with a sense of how small we are. Life isn't just ineffable, it is ineffably sweet, and that is part of what makes the experience of it such anguish. The mystery is as close as the ends of our fingers, stretched across the couch.
I'd criticize this, but as I was going through the 2019 O.Henry Anthology--their 100th such anthology--I decided this year I would only blog on those stories that I really connected with. This left me in the same, embarrassing boat as all those editors. Namely, what does it mean "to connect with" a story. To me, it really means nothing more than the feeling that the story landed. I mean landed like a punch lands. It left a mark on me, and I know, before I have to live the next ten years, that I'll come back to thinking about that story again at some point.
There didn't end up being that many stories in this year's anthology that landed. I only blogged about five, the one I'm about to do included. That doesn't mean there weren't good stories. In addition to the ones that "landed," there were several more I enjoyed, and I can't think of any that enraged with with their presence in a best-of collection. Maybe I'm getting cynical, or maybe I've just read so much short fiction in the last seven years, it's getting harder to land punches on me. I'm the same way with TV now. Here in the Golden Age of American Television, I'm often refusing to even start new shows, much to Mrs. Heretic's annoyance, because something about them just tells me they're not going to land. This is especially irritating to Mrs. Heretic, because I often can't really explain why I know they won't land; I can't even explain exactly what landing means.
Mystery as close as your nose
I indulge in this digression because "Lagomorph" by Alexander MacLeod is entirely about this can't-put-my-finger-on-it sense that accompanies all of us through life. It's the story of a pretty typical man who gets married and raises three kids, with all the accompanying sense of vertigo those years of running from work to van shuttle service bring. At one point, when the kids are all between the ages of seven and thirteen, "the moment just before they made the turn into what they are now," the family makes the milestone decision to get a pet. Because the wife is allergic to cats, they get a rabbit.
The story is written from the husband's point-of-view, and he's looking back after the kids are grown and he and his wife are amicably separated but not yet divorced. He's not quite sure what happened to his marriage. In fact, bewilderment is the narrator's main characteristic. Not in a wishy-washy way, but more in an open-to-the-mystery-of-life kind of way.
The symbol of this bewilderment is the rabbit, Gunther, the "lagomorph" of the title. Gunther is something of a fuzzy, cute incarnation of the mystery of life who sits on the narrator's lap to have its ears scratched. The narrator's description of the rabbit comes packaged together with a sense of disorientation and confusion from the story's first words:
Some nights, when the rabbit and I are both down on the floor playing tug of war with his toy carrot, he will suddenly freeze in one position and stop everything, as if a great breakthrough has finally arrived. He’ll look over at me and there will be a shift, his quick glance steadying into a hard stare. I can’t escape when he does this and I have to look back. He has these albino eyes that go from a washed-out bloody pink ring on the outside through a middle layer of slushy grey before they dump you down into this dark, dark red centre. I don’t know, but sometimes when he closes in on me like that and I’m gazing down into those circles inside of circles inside of circles, I lose my way, and I feel like I am falling through an alien solar system of lost orbits rotating around a collapsing, burning sun.
The rabbit symbolizes the ineffable enigma of existence partly because it's so hard to know what a rabbit is thinking: "Even when I imagine that I am reading him correctly, I know that he is reading me at the same time--and doing a better job of it."
 |
| Rabbits always have an ability to surprise |
It isn't just the inscrutability of the rabbit's moods, though, that make it such a symbol of why life confounds us. In Moby Dick, the white whale is a symbol for something similar to what MacLeod is getting at in "Lagomorph." But the whale is a mystery partly because it is so remote and distant. It lives in the depths of the ocean. When it does meet with humanity, it's usually in a destructive way. Gunther, though, is a common mammal. The author--somewhat Melville-like--gives us a number of rabbit facts while telling his story, one of which is the fact well-known to folk wisdom about how prolific rabbits are at reproducing. The rabbit is as different from Melville's whale as an animal can be, and yet there it is, as inscrutable to MacLeod's narrator as the whale is to Ishmael.
What makes Gunther such a remarkable and surprising element in the story is that while he embodies life's unspeakable mystery as much as Melville's whale, the rabbit is right there next to the narrator throughout. "Our rabbit--my rabbit now, I guess--he and I are wrapped up in something I don't completely understand." The ineffable isn't a powerful god with knowledge it keeps hidden out of spite, it's a fluffy ball of fur next to us that's legitimately as confused as we are. It's wrapped up in the ineffable with us, a passenger on the same ship. The narrator points out that rabbits are altricial: they are helpless when born. They're like us, then, born into a world that is too much for them from the moment they enter it. Life may be, like a rabbit, a "fickle, stubborn creature, obsessive and moody, quick to anger, utterly unpredictable and mysterious," but it's also in the same boat. Maybe God faces limitations just like we do. The mystery of life is so profound that even whatever personifies the mystery of life is also confounded by it.
This is what makes "Lagomorph" so arresting. The narrator isn't undone by some outside force. The one outside force that threatens the narrator and the rabbit in the story ends up being something the narrator dispatches easily, and in fact he ends up feeling bad about treating the outside force as a threat, wondering if he can even justify his actions he resorted to out of fear. What undoes the narrator are the small things that are with him throughout the story, the marriage the fell apart even while he treasured it, the children that have no become themselves and don't live with him anymore, the rabbit that is both common and "a nearly unique organism in the history of the world."
The real punch of this story is that something doesn't have to come from the depths of the ocean to be other and mysterious and to knock us flat with a sense of how small we are. Life isn't just ineffable, it is ineffably sweet, and that is part of what makes the experience of it such anguish. The mystery is as close as the ends of our fingers, stretched across the couch.
Sunday, May 3, 2020
A story that works at the sentence level: "Julia and Sunny" by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
I got through my now-annual blogging of all the stories in the Best American Short Stories Anthology in good time back in the fall, but even though I scaled back what I intended to do with the O. Henry anthology to just blogging about the ones I liked, I've gotten very waylaid. It's actually a good thing; I've been using some of the time lately to do my own writing. The end result has been several stories revised, three news ones written, and now, over the last five weeks, a draft of a novel. I'm going to let that draft marinate for a few days while I forget it, so I can go back to it with fresh eyes for editing. In the meantime, I'll go back to the O. Henry anthology and blog about a few of the stories I connected with.
Maybe it's the different approach I chose, but I didn't find much to like in the O. Henry anthology. There weren't a lot of stories that enraged me, the kind where I feel honestly offended the editors chose to use one of the precious, career-enhancing spots in the anthology for a story so clearly undeserving, but I also didn't find many stories I was still thinking about days later. That might be because I only read the ones I didn't really like once. Often, when I blog on BASS, where I read every story twice because I'm going to be blogging about them all, I find a story I didn't like that much after one reading suddenly seem much better after the second go-through. Maybe if I'd read this whole anthology twice, I'd have found more to like.
Be that as it may, "Julia and Sunny" by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum was a story I liked not only after the first read, but very much during it. There's a little bit of serendipity in that. The story is about a divorce, as witnessed by the married couple who are best friends with the two people getting divorced, Julia and Sunny. It so happens that a couple Mrs. Heretic and I are very close to, a couple we've known since we were dating, is getting a divorce. They've been on the ropes for a while, but they split up definitively in the last few weeks--during the COVID-19 lockdown, no less, which made it a lot more shocking. (One of our first questions was, "Where is he going to live?")
When couples get divorced, they often feel shunned by their friends who are still married. The general thinking is that the ones who are still married are looking at the divorced friends like they are carrying some sort of disease, like divorce is contagious, so you'd better stay away from the ones who caught it. Or maybe it's just that nobody likes a reminder that what happened to someone else could happen to them, too, especially when it's a couple whose friends mostly have only known them during happy times, like parties or shared vacations.
The narrator is still dealing with this shock in the first sentence of the story: "Our friends, our very good friends, are getting a divorce." On one level, this repetition of "our very good friends" may sound like simple emphasis, and it is: the two couples shared a long friendship together with a lot of happy memories. On another level, though, this sentence is protesting too much. The narrator is no longer certain of her friendship with these two, a fact that is leaving her unsure of a number of other things. She is trying to reassure herself--these guys are our very good friends, right? Because she isn't really that sure: "There are moments when we feel as if we don't know them anymore." Her concern is that if the friends can get divorced, maybe they were never really friends, and if that's true, then what else might not be true? Maybe our own marriage isn't really that solid.
These "talking yourself into something" passages are all over the book. When dissecting Julia's happiness, which the narrator and her husband had always taken for granted, they equivocate a bit too much on why she should have been happy: "True, they had landed in a city that was a bit off the beaten path, it was hard to get direct flights, the school options weren't terrific, he had persuaded her, for (their daughter's) sake, to adopt a small hypoallergenic dog that she hadn't wanted, her father was showing signs of dementia--but still, on balance, in fact by all imaginable measures, her life was good." (One of the funny, easy-to-miss details in this story is that Julia will later use the dog she didn't like as an excuse to stay home by herself instead of go on a vacation with Sunny.)
On a sentence, level, much of the language of the book registers a shock the narrator is trying to process. What makes it so hard for her is not just all the things that make it tough for every couple to watch friends getting a divorce, it's that so much of her own internal conception of her own marriage comes from Julia. The narrator and her husband were already married when Julia and Sunny started dating. They got to know Julia first, as she came over to their apartment to ask for advice on dating early in her relationship with Sunny. (Sunny is a man. I was confused in my first read-through for a while, because it wasn't "Sonny," and I thought they were a lesbian couple until the text clearly spelled him out as a man.) Julia saw the narrator and her husband in a particular way: wise in the ways of love and cute together. Seeing themselves the way Julia saw them changed their own self-image: "She made us feel romantic." Or: "We were new to this, and sometimes just the sight of our clothes hanging companionably in the closet, or our large and small shoes jumbled in a heap by the door, would send us into a sort of diabetic swoon. With Julia around, we wanted more than anything to while the day away discussing Sunny, and never to have to send ourselves to the library, or to class."
Julia looked at the narrator and her husband and saw them as in love, and this helped confirm for them that they really were in love. Without Julia and Sunny as a couple, though, this undoes all of that foundation the couple had built on for years. This is why the narrator is so in shock and half in denial throughout much of the narrative.
What finally enables the narrator to get over the loss to her self-image or her marriage is another shock. The narrator and her husband kept hoping for Sunny and Julia with a "stubborn hope," but when the narrator meets Sunny unexpectedly at an airport, she realizes that the relationship between her family and Julia's may not have been to him what it was to her. I won't give it away, but it's a more profound shock, perhaps, than the divorce itself, partly because the narrator's couple was, if anything, sort of on Sunny's side in the divorce.
This second shock ends up being a good thing, though, and it shows not only in the resolution, but in the very language of the last page. The narrator is able to finally accept that although the divorce does not make sense to her, it is reality, and she should accept her own reality, rather than continuing to rely on the self-image she has built out of her own imagination of what was. Or does it? With the story's last sentence, there is still just a hint of the redundant equivocation, suggesting she is still the same person with the same tendencies, but now slightly more under control. It's a more subdued equivocation. Her focus on the details of what is actually in front of her is what frees her from her enslavement to her own memory: "The three of us lean into each other, and it's not exactly a group hug but more like the kind of huddling that animals do in the cold, our flanks rising and falling with our breaths. We stand there sleepily for a minute or two, and once in a while, I'll think I smell something faint and intoxicating...Then, as easily as we came together, we break apart and go about our business, knowing that soon enough we'll be bumping up against the same bodies, whether on the landing or in the kitchen or somewhere else. Just knowing that, it seems to me, is plenty as it is."
Maybe it's the different approach I chose, but I didn't find much to like in the O. Henry anthology. There weren't a lot of stories that enraged me, the kind where I feel honestly offended the editors chose to use one of the precious, career-enhancing spots in the anthology for a story so clearly undeserving, but I also didn't find many stories I was still thinking about days later. That might be because I only read the ones I didn't really like once. Often, when I blog on BASS, where I read every story twice because I'm going to be blogging about them all, I find a story I didn't like that much after one reading suddenly seem much better after the second go-through. Maybe if I'd read this whole anthology twice, I'd have found more to like.
Be that as it may, "Julia and Sunny" by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum was a story I liked not only after the first read, but very much during it. There's a little bit of serendipity in that. The story is about a divorce, as witnessed by the married couple who are best friends with the two people getting divorced, Julia and Sunny. It so happens that a couple Mrs. Heretic and I are very close to, a couple we've known since we were dating, is getting a divorce. They've been on the ropes for a while, but they split up definitively in the last few weeks--during the COVID-19 lockdown, no less, which made it a lot more shocking. (One of our first questions was, "Where is he going to live?")
When couples get divorced, they often feel shunned by their friends who are still married. The general thinking is that the ones who are still married are looking at the divorced friends like they are carrying some sort of disease, like divorce is contagious, so you'd better stay away from the ones who caught it. Or maybe it's just that nobody likes a reminder that what happened to someone else could happen to them, too, especially when it's a couple whose friends mostly have only known them during happy times, like parties or shared vacations.
The narrator is still dealing with this shock in the first sentence of the story: "Our friends, our very good friends, are getting a divorce." On one level, this repetition of "our very good friends" may sound like simple emphasis, and it is: the two couples shared a long friendship together with a lot of happy memories. On another level, though, this sentence is protesting too much. The narrator is no longer certain of her friendship with these two, a fact that is leaving her unsure of a number of other things. She is trying to reassure herself--these guys are our very good friends, right? Because she isn't really that sure: "There are moments when we feel as if we don't know them anymore." Her concern is that if the friends can get divorced, maybe they were never really friends, and if that's true, then what else might not be true? Maybe our own marriage isn't really that solid.
These "talking yourself into something" passages are all over the book. When dissecting Julia's happiness, which the narrator and her husband had always taken for granted, they equivocate a bit too much on why she should have been happy: "True, they had landed in a city that was a bit off the beaten path, it was hard to get direct flights, the school options weren't terrific, he had persuaded her, for (their daughter's) sake, to adopt a small hypoallergenic dog that she hadn't wanted, her father was showing signs of dementia--but still, on balance, in fact by all imaginable measures, her life was good." (One of the funny, easy-to-miss details in this story is that Julia will later use the dog she didn't like as an excuse to stay home by herself instead of go on a vacation with Sunny.)
On a sentence, level, much of the language of the book registers a shock the narrator is trying to process. What makes it so hard for her is not just all the things that make it tough for every couple to watch friends getting a divorce, it's that so much of her own internal conception of her own marriage comes from Julia. The narrator and her husband were already married when Julia and Sunny started dating. They got to know Julia first, as she came over to their apartment to ask for advice on dating early in her relationship with Sunny. (Sunny is a man. I was confused in my first read-through for a while, because it wasn't "Sonny," and I thought they were a lesbian couple until the text clearly spelled him out as a man.) Julia saw the narrator and her husband in a particular way: wise in the ways of love and cute together. Seeing themselves the way Julia saw them changed their own self-image: "She made us feel romantic." Or: "We were new to this, and sometimes just the sight of our clothes hanging companionably in the closet, or our large and small shoes jumbled in a heap by the door, would send us into a sort of diabetic swoon. With Julia around, we wanted more than anything to while the day away discussing Sunny, and never to have to send ourselves to the library, or to class."
Julia looked at the narrator and her husband and saw them as in love, and this helped confirm for them that they really were in love. Without Julia and Sunny as a couple, though, this undoes all of that foundation the couple had built on for years. This is why the narrator is so in shock and half in denial throughout much of the narrative.
What finally enables the narrator to get over the loss to her self-image or her marriage is another shock. The narrator and her husband kept hoping for Sunny and Julia with a "stubborn hope," but when the narrator meets Sunny unexpectedly at an airport, she realizes that the relationship between her family and Julia's may not have been to him what it was to her. I won't give it away, but it's a more profound shock, perhaps, than the divorce itself, partly because the narrator's couple was, if anything, sort of on Sunny's side in the divorce.
This second shock ends up being a good thing, though, and it shows not only in the resolution, but in the very language of the last page. The narrator is able to finally accept that although the divorce does not make sense to her, it is reality, and she should accept her own reality, rather than continuing to rely on the self-image she has built out of her own imagination of what was. Or does it? With the story's last sentence, there is still just a hint of the redundant equivocation, suggesting she is still the same person with the same tendencies, but now slightly more under control. It's a more subdued equivocation. Her focus on the details of what is actually in front of her is what frees her from her enslavement to her own memory: "The three of us lean into each other, and it's not exactly a group hug but more like the kind of huddling that animals do in the cold, our flanks rising and falling with our breaths. We stand there sleepily for a minute or two, and once in a while, I'll think I smell something faint and intoxicating...Then, as easily as we came together, we break apart and go about our business, knowing that soon enough we'll be bumping up against the same bodies, whether on the landing or in the kitchen or somewhere else. Just knowing that, it seems to me, is plenty as it is."
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