Wednesday, December 9, 2020

"The Hands of Dirty Children" by Alejandro Puyana could be, might be, I think it is...

 ...going to cause my third annual "what is the social utility of literature crisis!" Hooray! Happy Question the Social Value of Literature Day! 


Three years in a row, Best American Short Stories has presented a story with Spanish speaking characters. In all three stories ("Everything is Far From Here" by Christina Henriquez in 2018, "Anyone Can Do It" by Manuel Munoz in 2019, and now "The Hands of Dirty Children" in 2020), the characters are facing poverty, extreme lack of social mobility, insecurity/danger, and general social injustice. (Complete side note: the day after I wrote this analysis, I saw this article on writer Dany Laferriere, who feels there is sometimes a burden placed on writers of color to tells stories of trauma. Perhaps worth considering in the context of three consecutive years of Latinx writers ending up in BASS with stories of trauma.) I object to none of that. All the stories describe a real experience in the world. I'm not the sort of person to complain if a story deals with grim subject matter. Lord knows I've done it myself. I wasn't a fan of "Everything is Far From Here," but for reasons other than the Dickensian aspect of its plot. I liked "Anyone Can Do It," but it gave me pause. When a story begins and ends in the hopelessness of a character's life, what is a reader supposed to come away from it with?

When Dickens wrote about poor children being crushed beneath the boot of industrialism, or when Upton Sinclair wrote in a similar vein about the cities of America in the early 20th century, they had a hope of influencing public opinion. Does a writer of literary fiction hope to do anything similar in 2020? I don't see how that's a realistic expectation. One of the results of having SO. MUCH. of everything, including high-quality literature and television and movies, is that no one single work of art can have that much influence. We're living in a culturally post-hegemonic world. There are good and bad effects of this, but one clear result is that even a very successful work of art, in terms of the public attention paid to it, is unlikely to have much influence politically. 

Both "Everything is Far From Here" and "Anyone Can Do It" dealt, more or less, with issues of the U.S. border with Mexico and the all the continental politics that feed into it. They were something the largely American readership of BASS 2018 and 2019 could have reacted to and helped to cause a change. But the border is still the border. If those stories, written for a U.S. audience about a U.S. issue, didn't cause much change, how much less can Alejandro Puyana expect his story about homeless children in Caracas will? 

Here I will note again that U.S. literature encompasses much more of "world literature" than most other national literatures. That's appropriate, because of the U.S.'s role as a world power (or as close to a world power as there is in a politically post-hegemonic world). But it also means that it's hard to get anyone's attention for long. The moment readers have paused to consider Venezuela for a moment and the impact of its many troubles on children, their attention will be distracted by a hundred other ongoing human tragedies. It's rather similar to how hard it is to get the U.S. to focus on any one foreign policy issue for any length of time.

"The Hands of Dirty Children" is a good story. It's fast-paced, doesn't indulge in Baroque description that would be inappropriate for its themes, and it establishes empathy for its characters quickly and easily. But there is no chance for the central character to go through a transformation that allows him to overcome his conflicts. In common with "Everything is Far From Here" and "Anyone Can Do It," you can fight the law, but the law will win. The narrator of "Hand of Dirty Children" does, perhaps, change enough to value the life of Ramoncito, whom none of the other Crazy 9 pitied as much as he deserved, but that's the extent of transformation possible for him. He can change enough to help his friend die well. The two sides of the conflict--man vs. society--are not equally matched. One was always going to win.

The story hinted early on of being a picaresque tale. Picaresque stories are always about someone on the outs of an unjust society trying to survive. We're always supposed to side with the "picaro," the survivor. Picaresque stories are usually comic and serve to skewer the power structures that oppress the picaro. But it doesn't stay in the picaresque vein for long, because Venezuela is so hopeless, even picaros cannot survive for long. 

If your wits can't save you, how can a story save the real-life children of Venezuela? Even if all America fell in love with this story and decided at once we wanted to help Venezuela, would we ever be able to agree on how to do it? Would any ten Venezuela experts agree on what to do, even if we wanted to do something?

I don't imagine any of these authors dreamed they would somehow change the border or American policy toward Venezuela. I didn't dream when I wrote about the plight of Eritrean migrants I would change world policies toward Eritrea or migrants. Some writing, you do just to bear witness, to say "this is the world as I see it." You do it because you feel like every day someone doesn't call it out, you're being gaslit into thinking the world is different from what you believe it is. 

Such writing can stir our emotions, touch our human empathy to make us want to be better people generally, to show kindness to those we can reach, if we can't reach children like the Crazy 9. Les Miserables has probably done that for millions. The movie Monster did it for me. Most stories that make me feel this way have less of a lasting impact, but having any kind of an impact to make someone care about others is a great function of literature. But that's about all a story like this can do for me. It certainly doesn't make for compelling literary analysis of the "find the symbolism" or "notice the subtle word puzzle" kinds. That might be possible for this story, but it feels entirely wrong to indulge in it. 

Karen Carlson and I agreed to a great extent on this story; to see her take, go here

1 comment:

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