I have more student loan debt now than when I graduated in 2003, and I'm not sure canceling student loan debt is good policy

I grew up a stone's throw from the Pro Football Hall of Fame, so it was kind of foreordained I would at least try to play high school football. It went okay my freshman year; I started both ways on the 9th grade team, and it seemed reasonable that I'd progress over the next few years to play junior varsity and then get playing time on the big stage as a senior. But my sophomore year threw a wrench into all of that. 

Sophomores rarely logged playing time on the varsity team, but they did practice with the varsity squad. We were the "scout team," mainly there to help the varsity team practice by getting beat on. There were also hazing rituals for sophomores. One involved running at a wall of upper classmen who would then flip you over when you got to them. While you were in the air, other players, who had been perched on top of a blocking chute, would jump off the chute and hit you in mid-air. We didn't dare question it, but some upper classmen offered a justification of it anyway. "We had to do it when we were sophomores" was what they usually said.  

As apologias go, that's not a great one. Would an ex-slave oppose the abolition of slavery because he'd had to go through slavery? The previous existence of a pernicious practice is never a reason to continue the practice. I made it through that sophomore year, mostly because I didn't want anyone to think I had quit because I just couldn't take it, but I refused to play as an upper classman. There was no way I was going to keep playing for a team like that after I knew what they did. 

The comparison many people are making to student loan debt is not good 

I doubt I have to argue long to convince most people that the kind of logic the upper classmen produced is faulty. "I had to, so you do, too" is not just a logical fallacy, it envy incarnate. It's evil.  

I'm not sure, though, that the ubiquitous argument in favor of cancelling student loan debt, one that compares a common argument against cancelling the debt to an "I had to, so you do, too" fallacy, is sound. 

I've seen this argument cropping up all over. Here's a Tweet I saw this week that captures the basic point people are trying to make:

Hahahaha. Yes, I get jokes. 

In any sort of metaphorical juxtaposition of two things, there is the original image, the new image, and something those two images have in common the metaphor wants to highlight. In technical terms, these are the vehicle (original thing), tenor (new thing being compared to original thing), and the ground (thing they have in common). In the sentence "Achilles is a Lion," the lion is the vehicle, Achilles is the tenor, and bravery or strength is the ground. 

What are the vehicle, tenor, and ground in a Tweet like the one above? Something like this:

Vehicle: A terrible person who resents people who haven't had to suffer the same things he has.

Tenor: A person who paid all their student loans and is now angry that others might get their loans forgiven.

Ground: Both of these people are uncharitable and jealous. They resent any good thing that happens to someone else if it didn't happen to them, and want any bad thing that happened to them to happen to everyone. They're haters.  

Does this metaphor hold? I'm not sure it does. Cancer is an unmitigated evil. There is no upside to cancer, ever, unless maybe if Hitler gets it. But taking out a loan for a desired good or service, then paying off that loan in a timely manner, might be good or bad. Yes, you can make an argument that society should provide all the education citizens need to become productive for free. I'm open to that argument. But our society has never done this. We've left it up to people to decide for themselves if the cost of a higher education was worth it. That might be a bad way to run a society, but at least we've all been living under the same rules. Given those rules, the existence of student loans was either a qualified evil or a qualified good, not an unmitigated evil like cancer. 

Moreover, paying off one's loans isn't like beating cancer. While there are certain things one can do to help beat cancer, one certainly has more control over paying off loans than whether your particular cancer is going to be one that treatment can beat. Yes, people have things beyond their control that keep them in debt and yes, capitalism can be cruel. But overall, there are more things you can do to take control of your debt than there are things you can do to beat cancer. That means there's more personal responsibility involved. It's not your fault if you succumb to cancer. It might partly be your fault if you get in over your head in debt. 

A bigger reason the comparison doesn't wash

For better or worse, capitalism does, in some sense, pit all of us in competition with one another. We frequently use the metaphor of a race for capitalism. Arguments for economic justice especially like to use this image, because they argue that it's neither fair nor good for competition the way some people have to start the race behind. 

If student loans represent a handicap in a race, then you can certainly make an argument for removing that handicap. The next time the race starts, we should try taking that handicap away and see what it does. But canceling student debt suddenly is like removing the handicap in the middle of a race, and only for some people. 

An example from my own life

I got through undergraduate school without any debt, thanks to help from my parents. (This is the original unfair handicap all capitalism strains under. Nobody can pick their parents, but you can get a huge head start or a huge disadvantage in life based on something you can't control.) My parents didn't pay for grad school, though, so I picked up debt then. So did Mrs. Heretic. We picked up quite a lot of debt, actually. When we both finished our M.A. degrees in 2003, we had about 90K in debt. We didn't sweat it, though, because we figured we had a few years to work and get it taken care of before we'd have kids. I don't know why we were so optimistic, when we both had gotten degrees in liberal arts that weren't good for much, but that's what we were like then. 

Long story short, Mrs. Heretic got pregnant almost the second she finished grad school, and we spent years trying to figure out how to either live off my one salary or juggle childcare so it paid for her to go to work. We didn't do well at it. We were having a hard time paying our bills without student loans figuring into it, and we had to put expenses on credit cards. I think my credit rating was in the low 600s at one point, even though I was paying everything on time. The great thing about capitalism is that when your credit rating is low, you pay more for everything, making it harder to improve your score and trapping you in that rut forever. 

We both put our loans into "forbearance," which meant we didn't have to pay on them, but they were accruing interest. I did that for my loan for as long as they would let me. When I finally started paying, I'd gone from 25K in debt to 33K. I picked a graduated plan that would start paying interest only, then increase over time. Before COVID-19 put everyone's loans on hold in 2020, I had been paying a little over ten years, and had only gotten the balance down to about 30K. Mrs. Heretic had a higher balance, so we focused more on getting hers down. Between us, we now owe about 85K. We've probably made somewhere in the neighborhood of 50K of payments, and we now owe 5K less than we did in 2003. 

A lot of people present these stories as evidence of the inhumanity of student loan debt, but I'm not so sure. I got a degree in the liberal arts knowing it wouldn't lead to a job that paid much. So did Mrs. Heretic. We could have opted for cheaper places to live than we did, but we were afraid of what the effects of living in some of those neighborhoods would be on our son. (There's a great example of the cruelty of capitalism--the place you can afford has a direct impact on your personal safety.) We took vacations. Not extravagant ones, but we took them. We ordered food out sometimes, instead of always eating hyper-economical meals from bargain grocery stores. We bought new cars. Not fancy ones--I've been driving the same Toyota Corolla for twelve years--but we did buy new cars. We could have taken public transportation. It would have sucked, but we could have.

Some people did make the sacrifices we didn't, because they were playing the game by the rules as they were. They paid off their loans, and now they're in a better position than us. I don't begrudge them this. I'm not good at capitalism. I don't really like it, and I don't put as much effort into it as I would if I thought the rewards were worth the cost. That's why I do things like get degrees in English. I know that I'm never going to win at capitalism. I might prefer a different system, but we don't have that system now. Others didn't spend time moping about the world like I did. They worked to thrive in it. Do I now deserve a governmentus ex machina bailing me out?

A funny thing happened last year. Capitalism actually kind of worked for us. After losing a lot of money we couldn't really afford to lose on a house back during the crash of 2007/2008, we sold a house in early 2021 and made a lot of money out of it. I didn't sell it to make money; I was moving to a new job. But man, did it work out. We'd bought the house in 2015 with a VA loan. Qualified buyers were so few back then, I asked for the seller to pay all my closing costs, and he said okay. Without that, I couldn't have bought. I had very little actual cash. I financed 100% of the cost of the house plus the VA financing fee. I wondered what the hell I was doing. We made essentially no improvements in six years of home ownership. Then COVID-19 made it so nobody wanted to sell a house, driving down supply and making my house worth way more than it should have been. 

We now have enough money that we could pay off our student loans. We even have a little bit beyond that, not enough to make us rich, but certainly a bigger savings account than I had in 2015 when I had to finance 103% of the cost of a house. We aren't paying off our loans, though, because it's possible we might not have to. Or that we might not have to pay off all of them. 

The real irony here is that I had worked a government job for a long time prior to last year. If I were still working that job now, I'd qualify to have nearly all my student loans cancelled. Oops. Did I mention I'm not good at capitalism? I hardly ever make the right choices.

If the government cancelled all or most of Mrs. Heretic's and my loans, we'd suddenly have actual money in our account, instead of money we ignore because we know we have to use it to pay something off. We might actually have enough to be competitive for one of these incredibly inflated houses, instead of paying ridiculously inflated rent. 

But--and here's where the cruelty of capitalism shines again--I'd be bidding on those houses against other people who are struggling as hard as I am. Some paid off their loans. Some never went to college, because they didn't want the student loan debt. We were all running a race against each other, and suddenly I got an advantage over them. Now I get the house in the nice neighborhood, while the guy who paid off his loans gets stabbed by a meth head. 

Capitalism is brutal and shabby (even if it might be the least terrible option available). A policy like sudden student loan cancelation would make it less so, but only for some people, and rather randomly. Why not a sudden massive payment to anyone making less than 50K a year instead? Why not paying off medical debt? Because this is the issue the politics of the moment have seized on, not necessarily because it's the best way to mitigate the brutality and shabbiness of our system. 

Policy isn't the same as private morality

When I got hazed as a sophomore, the right thing to do was to end hazing. If my grandparents got polio as kids, it's a good thing I have a vaccine now so I don't get it. Nobody should hate the inheritors of the future because we've made it better for them. That's what we're supposed to do for our progeny. 

But public policy doesn't always work the same as individual morality does. It isn't flexible enough to provide for what is right in every circumstance. Instead, the best it can strive for is to be fair. Sometimes, fairness is a very blunt tool, and it means enforcing the same crappy rules equally across all of society. 

We don't allow for punishment of crimes ex post facto. If someone saw a loophole in a system and exploited it, we close the loophole, but we don't punish the person who took advantage of it, even if that person was a jerk for having exploited it. Private morality would dictate we hate the guy, because he should have known better, law or no law. But the law has limits. 

Maybe I should have been able to get my grad degree for free. Maybe I should have been able to pay it off interest free on my own schedule. If we change the rules now going forward to make it easier for future students, I won't hold it against them that they got something I didn't. That's the correct application of rejecting the "I had to, so you should, too" fallacy. 

For me, I'll take the help if it's offered. Like I said, I suck at capitalism, so I need all the help I can get, even if I don't really deserve it. But I understand why Biden is reluctant to enact some massive forgiveness. 

If forgiving loans will bring a good to society so powerful, it's worth the unfairness to some people, then it's worth considering. I'm not sure, with inflation at an all-time high, though, that we'd get the benefit we want from freeing up a bunch of cash for Americans. It's likely to mean that people like me will just keep paying ridiculous prices for things like houses and gas, instead of making demand slacken and bring prices down. 

It's not an easy choice. Biden has political considerations to consider with a mid-term coming. There are pros and cons to any choice he makes, including a middle ground of forgiving smaller amounts. But the debate is not advanced by applying false moral metaphors where they don't belong.  

Saved: "Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain" by Jamil Jan Kochai, Best American Short Stories 2021

I try to analyze stories (talk about what they mean) rather than review them (talk about whether I like them), but I really loved this story. It's about a second-generation immigrant in an Afghan family who is a slacker/video game fanatic. Typically, video-game-nut-slacker stories are about white middle-class kids, but that's part of what makes the protagonist's struggle so compelling: his family expects more of him, expects him to take things besides video games seriously: "prayer, the Quran, Pashto, Farsi, a new job, new classes, exercise, basketball, jogging, talking, guests, chores, family time, time," but the main character is an overweight young person going nowhere and weighed down by "the unrelenting nature of corporeal existence." The main character has assimilated into American culture, and the result, to his family, is a disaster. 

He's not a total non-achiever, although he sees himself that way. He uses his Taco Bell paychecks to help out a father who can't work anymore, because he was injured when the Soviets tortured him in the 1980s during their military adventure in Afghanistan. He has some sense of family duty, and he clearly wants to connect with his father and with his family's past, as becomes clear when he's playing the game.

The entire story is about this young person playing the game "Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain" on the day it is released in 2015. He had to scrimp and save to even afford the game, after what he gives his family from his paychecks, and he also kind of needs to hide its existence, because his father thinks paying for video games is an extravagance when there are "kids in Kabul...destroying their bodies to build compounds for white businessmen and warlords." 

A kid playing a video game doesn't sound like much of a story, but this is--as our main character makes clear and manages to convince us, the readers--no ordinary video game. It's Metal Gear Solid V. What makes it worthy of a story is that it's the first game this Afghan kid in America has ever played where he can play as an Afghan, from the point-of-view of the Mujahedeen fighting the Soviets, instead of as an American shooting at Afghans. That means he can play without the guilt of shooting people who look like his father.

Magical realism or sci-fi?

Video games are incredibly realistic now. Accurate satellite mapping means you can play in city landscapes that are eerily like the real thing. Games can also be mind-bogglingly big. "Open world" games--and Phantom Pain was the first game in this series to be open world--are so large, they might as well be infinite, at least from the player's perspective. In open world games, there are still set missions to finish, but you can more or less get to them on your own schedule while you go off and play around, discovering what the world has to offer.

But the game our main character is playing is a little more realistic than video game technology currently can really achieve. It's so realistic, it's either an intrusion of fantasy into a realistic story or it's sci-fi presenting us a future game so true-to-life it's essentially a mirror of the real world. Because of the combination of an open world with hyper-realistic NPCs (non-playable characters), the protagonist is able to find his father and uncle just before the Soviets killed his real-life uncle and maimed his real-life father. 

This is the quest that sets the story in motion. It's a virtual quest, but it feels very real. This feeling of reality is heightened by the main character's family banging on his door throughout his game play, then kicking on the door until he feels the need to barricade it with a dresser. He's under siege in both the real and the virtual worlds, but we, the readers, empathize with him when he feels that his real quest is in the virtual one. In the virtual one, he may be able to right wrongs that have continued to hurt his family for generations. 

It's possible to read this story as a tragedy, because the main character is seeking to connect with his father, to catch him in his arms as he is falling, to "set him down gently on the clay so that the sky does not swallow him," but only in the video game, while outside his room his very real father is seeking to connect with him. The father told his son that he had something important he wanted to talk to him about, but the son hasn't taken him up on it. Instead, he continues to ignore even the father's gentle calling from his bedroom door. 

I don't read it like that, though. Better philosophers of science than I am have written reams on how the dichotomy between virtual and real world might be false, or on how our "real" world might itself be virtual, might in fact be a video game of incredible complexity. I'll just say that the the main character's quest to right wrongs in the virtual world might not be as pointless as it would seem. I think the main character somehow really needs this. I think the video game is offering him a chance at redemption for his family, at a virtual catharsis that has to happen before he can overcome all the things troubling him in the real world. At the end, we see the main character carrying his father and uncle into a dark cave--symbol, no doubt, of the deep recesses of the psyche--as he attempts, perhaps in vain, to rescue them from assaults. It's clear that this retreat into the cave is a move into the protagonist's own mind and toward self-refection: "you feel compelled to keep moving into a darkness so complete that your reflection becomes visible on the screen of the television in front of you, and it is as if the figures in the image were journeying inside you, delving into your flesh. To be saved." 

There is a play on words, of course, in "saved." He is trying to save his family virtually, from death and pain. His family, meanwhile, is trying to "save" him by carping at him to get his life together. And then there's the video game meaning of "saved," which is to backup game progress so you can leave it for a while, return to the "real" world, and come back to the game later in the same place. I believe the main character's descent into the cave of his own psyche is, in fact, going to save him. 

The importance of representation

Video games have been criticized for decades for not being representative. The main character has played tons of games where Afghans are the "other," the ones being killed by American heroes. The emergence of a game in which Afghans are the subject is itself healing for the protagonist. Video games really are trying to get better at this. It used to be that nearly all women in games had giant breasts, small waists, and wore clothes that made it impossible for them to be doing the athletic things they appeared to be doing in the games. This has changed, and now women can play at least some games from the point-of-view of a woman who actually sort of looks like them. 

I sometimes joke a little bit about the clumsy nature of picking stories for a Best American Short Stories collection, because it's pretty clear that there's a bit of artificial "we need at least some from each group" to it. But it's worth using this process even if it is a little bit of a blunt tool. It's better to force different voices into a collection than it is to try to pick stories without considering representation and ending up with none. Of all the attempts to improve the way culture views race, I think adding more diverse voices in narratives might have been the one that's been most effective. We can try to legislate right thinking, or we can try to inculcate it in our education, but it's far more effective to create compelling stories told form the points-of-view of different people and allow wide audiences to live virtually through their perspectives. 

Did the story end too soon?

Like with the other Jamil Jan Kochai story I've read, I felt like there might have been a bit of incompleteness to this. I felt like maybe we needed a denouement where we can see that the son has been changed through his virtual interaction with his family history, see him now reaching out to the real father. Maybe he invites the father to come play the game with him. Maybe he saves his game and goes out to talk to the dad, asks questions he hasn't ever asked before. The final sentence isn't just "saved," a past participle meaning some type of salvation or preservation has taken place, but "to be saved," meaning the salvation is still hoped for. "To be saved" is almost the same in this sense as "to be continued." Maybe wanting a symbol of connection is too neat. The narrator might still need time in the cave before anyone can be saved. Maybe salvation is too much to hope for, and the moment of introspection is as close to victory as the narrator can get in this game. I'm still not satisfied at the end, but I love the way that I'm not satisfied, the way I have to keep asking myself if I should be. 

My personal context to this story

I have a son who is a slacker, and it concerns me deeply. He doesn't show any interest in taking his future seriously, although he's at an age where he needs to. He loves video games. If he could sit in his room, eat what we give him, and play games until he dies, I think he would. I'm as concerned about him as the father in this story is concerned about his son. And I feel as unwelcomed when I knock on his door. At this point, if I knew that in a few years he'd be working at Taco Bell and kicking in a few bucks to help out, I might even be happy to know he'll be that productive. He's an incredibly smart, perceptive person. He has a lot to offer the world, but he's also full of ennui and ambivalence, and he's not sure it's worth the effort in a world that's going to hell anyway. This wasn't a parental issue I was prepared for, and I know I'm failing at it. 

While I don't think playing video games is enough for a human being to do to justify the resources necessary to sustain life, I do see a lot of redeeming qualities to games. I hope that eventually, my son will find in one of those games a cave into his own psyche, one from which he can emerge in a better relationship with those around him and ready to do his small part to save the world. 

Karen Carlson's take on this story is here. 

Is it religion, or is it culture? "Escape from the Dysphesiac People" by Brandon Hobson, Best American Short Stories 2021

Bart Ehrman's The Triumph of Christianity asserts that it is difficult to talk about Christianity taking the place of native Roman religions, because Romans never thought of their beliefs relative to the gods as what we would call "religion." It was a set of commonly received, commonly accepted, commonly practiced customs. What we would call religion and what we would call secular life were all rolled up together so you couldn't tell which was which. I wonder, if were we to find some long-lost tribe of people somewhere on the hills around Rome who somehow never got the message that the empire had come to an end, and I had the chance to speak with these people, how easy I would find it to celebrate their Roman "culture." Especially if it involved killing chickens to tell the will of the gods or some other superstition. 

I have a hard time with some Native American literature, because often, the culture that is being celebrated, kept alive, and revived in it seems to me to have the same undivided blend of religion and culture. It's all jumbled together. "Harmony"--a frequent subject in American Indian* lit-- means not just erasing the lines between the self and nature, but between the sacred and the secular. I haven't read a ton of Indian lit. I took a class as an undergrad, something like "Intro to Native American Literature," that included plenty of Sherman Alexie and Leslie Marmon Silko and Joy Harjo. I enjoyed it. Alexie's an ass sometimes, but he's funny. Silko's novel Ceremony especially stuck with me for a while after reading it. Of course, as an agnostic, I found it hard to accept some of the spiritual aspects of it, but in a figurative sense, the notion of the world as a giant, interconnected spider web in which damage to one part damages the whole resonated with me. 

In Brandon Hobson's "Escape from the Dysphesiac People," I felt a similar simultaneous attraction and repulsion at once. It's a fairly simple story, although because the language of the white people in it is intentionally bizarre (they are all dysphesiac, i.e. they suffer from dysphasia, or a brain malfunction that impedes the language center of the brain), it may not seem simple. The dysphasia is symbolic. To a Cherokee boy taken from his home and thrown into an Indian school/work reformatory, their language must have seemed nonsensical, and so dysphasia becomes an exaggerated means to express how disorienting their talk was for the boy. It's also an effective image for how the talk of white people trying to "civilize" Indians was so hypocritical as to be meaningless. The very notion of killing the Indian to save the child is itself oxymoronic; you can't save something by killing it. So the image of a civilization that speaks only babble works well. Karen Carlson does a great job in her post on this story of explaining how the talk of politicians can be dysphesiac. That's the meaning of the word in this story: talk so empty it fails to be coherent.

The boy is taken at age fifteen. It is probably in the 1950s, although it might have been earlier. We are hearing the story from the boy now as an old man telling it to his grandchildren. A "Dr. Estep"--about whom we are told nothing, but who seems to likely be a counselor of some sort--has recommended he tell the story. (One irony of the name "Estep" here is that both of the two possible origins of the name refer to someone who dwells in the East, while the boy saves himself by following a magical trail west.) The old man stresses that his story is not really as much about the trauma he endured as it is about how he escaped. He says it is not "a mélange of distorted events," which is helpful exposition, actually, because in my first read-through, that's what it seemed like. 

While in captivity, he is contacted by the ghosts of his elders. He sees visions of them, mostly suffering. Many visions seem to be of the "Trail of Tears," on which his ancestors were forced to move from their native homes in the southeast of the United States to Oklahoma. They were sent there by President Andrew Jackson, who makes his presence still felt in the narrative through characters named Jackson and also Carl, who is Andrew Jack's son. (We never see Andrew Jack.) 

His ancestors teach him the way to escape, to follow a spirt trail of cherry blossoms out of the dead lands to find the Pleiades, their home. He learns about the importance of harmony, which is what the Tsalagi (a word with several meanings, the most simple of which is the name the Cherokee give their own language) is all about. He sees ancestors spirit travel and change into animals. And eventually, he runs. His real escape isn't just getting away. It's meeting Tsala (a form of the word Tsalagi). His reconnection to the language is the real cure for the babble-talk of his captors. 

Of course, I don't have to take any of the spiritual events literally. And it's actually possible to separate the story's focus on true and harmonious language as distinct from empty and incoherent language without reference to any of the spiritual elements.

I'm sure many indigenous people today don't believe the "religion" handed down to them is literally true, just as many Jews and Christians believe their traditions in a more metaphorical sense. But, well, some sure do seem to take it pretty literally. Some really do seem to believe they can literally commune with their ancestors, or that spirits are traveling through nature. I can, of course, choose to personally read these things metaphorically and leave others to read them how they will, but there's something about reading this kind of literature that leaves me struggling to know how I should take it. What's the message for me, assuming I'm never going to try to commune with my ancestors, because I don't believe they're still around? How do I look at Native American beliefs in general, or the specific Cherokee beliefs as they are presented here, when I know I don't think any of them are right in more than a very watered-down sense?

Am I wrong to feel like this story is pushing religion on me? Or if not on me, then on the "grandchildren" listening to it. Am I misunderstanding the beliefs presented here and insisting on thinking of them in a Western sense? Maybe, but then that seems to be to be treating Cherokee beliefs as something too precious and coddled to be treated how I would treat a story with religious overtones from a different belief system. How would I take a Jewish novel if it seemed to be telling me that the future of Judaism lay in following the Torah? Even if it seemed like there was some wiggle room for not believing everything in the Torah was a literal fact? What would I think of a short story about a kid who was taken from her parents and put in a foster home but survived because she trusted Jesus? That's kind of how I feel when I encounter a story like this. I feel conflicted, because a story like this that tries to restore and maintain a link to ancestral tradition is both asking to keep alive a culture (which seems noble and worthwhile to me) and also a host of "religious" ideas that do not. Again, it seems there's no way to avoid this, because the culture in question didn't separate the religious and secular into distinct realms.

Of course, religious ideas can be helpful to people and give them strength to endure hardships even if the beliefs are not true. Some contemporary Indians doubtlessly think of the old ways as true "up to a point," that while their ancestors aren't literally alive, they still survive through us, their descendants, and so in a sense, they're still here to guide us. There must be "reformed" Indian spiritual beliefs (to use an analogy to Judaism, although "reformed" is an unfortunate word to use in relation to a story of a child who was sent to a brutal "reformatory.") 

A short story like "Escape" uses what might be called "magical realism," which blends elements of fantasy with elements of realism. One need not literally believe in magic to write magical realism. It could all be meant symbolically or as a colorful exaggeration of the natural. Nobody believes that incest will really cause a child to be born with the tail of a pig, but it still works in a novel about a twisted family history. And that's how "Escape" might work.

But it just doesn't feel like that. The boy's experience is intense, like the experience mystics have of God. His passing it on to his grandchildren feels evangelical. It's hard to reinterpret that in an intellectualized way, like, "Even though we don't believe that humans actually inhabit the bodies of eagles, the moral is that we should treat all nature as if it had cognition." Or such. It feels like a belief so intense that to make it abstract would be to make it nothing.

Ultimately, the story is from the grandfather to his grandchildren. It's for them, not for me. I'm listening in on a story meant for others, and maybe it doesn't need to resonate for me. 

I still liked--or perhaps admired--the story, but you can like a story without thinking it's going to become something you treasure and store up for moments when you need it. 

----

This wasn't a literary analysis. I wanted to do one, to point out how I noticed that there were pictures of tanks and planes in Jackson's home for boys but that in home of the old spirit the boy comes across, the pictures had been taken down. I wanted to trace the emerging symbols of home that broke through. I wanted to investigate the mystery of bathrooms and what sinister happened in them. (I'm sure everyone who's been to a school like this probably learned to fear bathrooms, where human cruelty and deviance seem for some reason to shine forth the brightest.) But ultimately, I think the most honest way for me to write about this story is to admit that I have a hard time allowing its magic to come alive for me. And that's okay. There are plenty of stories written for literary muggles like me. 

*One of the things I discovered in my Native American lit class was that many Native Americans are fine calling themselves Indians. In fact, many prefer it. An important indigenous news source is called "Indian Country Today." In what seems to be an extremely healthy relationship with history, a lot of Indians feel that although the name represents the mistake of early colonizers who thought they'd arrived in India, that flawed name is the name that came, and it's important to remember this error. I've used Indian/American Indian/Native American/Native/indigenous interchangeably here. 

The critic is evicted: "The Rest of Us" by Jenzo Duque, Best American Short Stories 2021

For a blogger trying to come up with 20 interesting takes on 20 stories, the best fodder is a Goldilocks kind of story: not too hard and not too easy to understand. The perfect story would stretch me to my exact limits of comprehension, synthesis, analysis, and explanatory powers, and no further.

Stories like "The Rest of Us" by Jenzo Duque don't leave a whole lot of room for a critic to work. Nearly all readers will find it easy to understand and relatively easy to know what you're supposed to "get out of it," to use the phrase plain-speaking folks who don't do literature for a living often use. 

In a lot of ways, there's nothing really to "get" about the story. Unlike "Boyz N the Hood," which it celebrates, it doesn't attempt to dissect the origins of urban blight. The story is meant more as raw data than as a grand attempt to make sense of raw data. It exists to say "we were here," to tell the story of people quickly being forgotten as the neighborhood they once lived in is gentrifying. It does this well, with plenty of humorous or palpable details that made me believe the story's authenticity, but once I'd read it, I had a hard time earthing up layers beneath the story to dig up. It's like a basketball analyst trying to come up with something interesting to say after a good team beat a bad team by fifty points. 

I still quote this line sometimes when I'm trying to get amorous with Mrs. Heretic. 

One notable characteristic of this story is that feels a lot more like a creative essay than a short story. It has the logic, chronology, and vocabulary of creative non-fiction more than fiction. That isn't a negative criticism; it's just how the story feels, and that feeling has a lot to do with the reader's emotional engagement. I found myself more nodding my head as I read to say, "I have heard you" than I felt like crying or wanting to race back through the story to pull on interesting threads. 

What this story does, it does well, but what it does well doesn't leave much room for me to try to do more with. 

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As an complete aside, I would note that BASS has an interesting trend going on. Most BASS anthologies for as long as I've been reading them have sought--consciously, I would guess, whatever the judges may say about their methodologies--to bring about "diversity," understood in the way our current culture understands it. There will be stories by both men and women, and, if possible, trans/non-binary writers as well. There will be white, black, Latino, Asian, and indigenous writers, and stories about white, black, Latino, Asian, and indigenous characters. There will be gay and straight characters and writers. Which is fine. The collections usually come out fairly interesting with this approach, partly for the way they allow of compare and contrast exercises within single anthologies. But for some reason, the "Latino" entry in BASS seems to be on a roll of giving us stories full of the "Dickensian aspect" of the American experience. A brief history:

2021: "The Rest of Us" by Jenzo Duque, about a group of Latino boys in Chicago who grow up to become drug dealers. Some are killed, some go to prison.

2020: "The Hands of Dirty Children" by Alejandro Puyana, about a group of kids living on the streets in a Caracas slum. 

2019: "Anyone Can Do It" by Manuel Munoz, about illegal immigrant workers (and some who might possibly be legal) and their travails

2018: "Everything is Far from Here" by Cristina Henriquez, about the border and immigrants being held in prisons.

That's not really enough to consider it a tradition. (And to be fair, the 2018 anthology that had "Everything is Far from Here" also had Jacob Guajardo's beautiful coming-of-age story "What Got into Us," so it wasn't all Latino trauma in that edition.) But I will be paying attention to next year's anthology to see what comes out of it. (And yes, I wrote basically the same thing last year when talking about "The Hands of Dirty Children.) 

Karen Carlson found more to say about this story than I did here. 

What's my motivation here? "Our Children" by Vanessa Cuti, Best American Short Stories 2021

Non-writers might think all writers agree that it's important to reveal a fictional character's motivations for what they do and say. We're all familiar with that line put into the mouth of flustered actors and actresses: What's my character's motivation here? Actors supposedly find it impossible to embody a character without having enough of a backstory to understand why they are doing the things called for in the script. Many (most, probably) literary stories seem to want to give the reader something similar to what these theoretical actors are asking their directors to give them--an understanding of what is going on in the character's head and why.

But there are some who argue for something quite different. Aatif Rashid explains this contrarian view of motivation here: 

In Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt argues that Shakespeare’s characters are compelling because he makes their motivations purposefully unclear in order to create greater psychological complexity: “Shakespeare found that he could immeasurably deepen the effect of his plays, that he could provoke in the audience and in himself a peculiarly passionate intensity of response, if he took out a key explanatory element, thereby occluding the rationale, motivation, or ethical principle that accounted for the action that was to unfold. The principle was not the making of a riddle to be solved, but the creation of a strategic opacity. This opacity, Shakespeare found, released an enormous energy that had been at least partially blocked or contained by familiar, reassuring explanations.”

This idea clearly challenges one of the traditional notes almost every writer receives in a writing workshop, that readers didn’t fully understand what a character wanted and so the writer should clarify those motivations. Add a backstory that explains why this character decided to leave their husband. Tell us about their mother and father so we can understand why they’re so withdrawn. Give them some past trauma to explain their present depression. Alongside such notes, we’re also taught that a character’s want should drive the story’s plot. And so, writers end up clarifying their characters’ desires with such precision that their narratives becomes perfect structures of cause and effect—this character left her husband because her mother never left her abusive father. This character is withdrawn because his mother never told him she loved him. This character is depressed because her brother drowned when she was young. It’s Freud reduced to teleology, and it cheapens the complex reality of human experience.

It would be wrong to think that providing motivation is an either/or choice. It's more like a spectrum. You can provide zero clues as to motivation ("John shot Bob"). You can provide small clues as to motivation ("John shot Bob because he hated him,") leaving it up to the reader to try to find clues in the text that would explain the hatred. You can give a simple backstory ("John shot Bob because he hated him for having rejected his script for a Game of Thrones spin-off with Tormond Giantsbane working in a modern-day cubicle job.) Or you could go one more step--probably too far--and give the backstory and then also explain what the backstory did to the psyche of the character. ("John shot Bob because he hated him for rejecting his script; for you see, John always had an inferiority complex that came out when he was rejected...")

There's probably not one right answer for all stories. Different stories likely feel more or less satisfying with different levels of revelation of motivation. It's important to pick the right one for each story, not have a grand aesthetic to cover all fiction.

"Our Children" leans toward not explaining motivation

In "Our Children, a woman first divorces a man with whom she had two children, then marries the man she left him for, who also has two children. They endure all the turmoil of upending two families and starting a new life together. There are four major life choices the main character makes, which are given differing levels of explanation as to motivation. However, the tendency for all is to lean toward less explanation, rather than more.

Choice One: Deciding to marry husband #1 (Peter) in the first place. From the first line, we see a character who doesn't put too much stress on the "why" of her life choices. She begins to explain her life by saying, "I was once married to a man." This matter-of-factness, the way she was married to "a man," as if any man would have fit the bill, tells us a lot about her lack of introspection when making major decisions. Perhaps it's normal for young people. Nearly everyone, whether they got divorced or not, can relate to her saying she "didn't know what marriage was supposed to be. I had no idea what I was expecting." This is close to "John shot Bob." 

Choice Two: Leaving Peter for husband #2 (Dan). The main character shows more agency about this choice, more conscious thought behind her decision. She calls him "Dan" in the first line about him, rather than a generic "man." She provides an attempt to explain why she fell for him: he was feeling sweet potatoes in the grocery store, something the narrator also does but most people don't. This would be in the "John shot Bob because he hated him" realm of exposition: yeah, it's an explanation, but it invites further questions. In spite of being somewhat more in charge of her own destiny with this choice, the main character is still somewhat passive when meeting Dan. She talks of "something that happens to me," and the reader begins to suspect that her life is all "something that happens to her" and few actions she is willing to own. The main character seems to believe fate dictates life in ways she cannot control: "Everything that was to happen had already begun to happen." 

The main character does sometimes show flashes of a more active side to her, usually in the form of outbursts of anger. This anger tends to be focused at the combined children she and Dan share. She flips a bowl and swears in front of them to show she is capable of being formidable. She enjoys the quieter, more adult-like feeling of the house when the children are not around. She describes it as "cooler." Preferring cool things to hot makes sense for a character who prefers to avoid taking responsibility for her own life. Hot is the temperature of active things. 

When thinking about how she would explain being a homewrecker to Dan's ex-wife, she still uses the language of someone who feels more like a victim of fate than a captain of it. "I wouldn't have chosen it this way." "Two people fell in love...I did not intend for this to happen." "There was a glitch." And so on. 

Choice three: Leaving the children at a cabin. This is probably the most consequential decision she makes. It is also the one that has, paradoxically, both the most and the least attempt at an explanation. It's got plenty of attempts at an explanation--it was that black tail of smoke from the fire, it was the rot in the walls, it was the sound of a raccoon eating a chipmunk--but they all seem to be non-sensical. If she had ever been hauled into court and forced to explain her actions, it probably would have come down to this: "I wasn't in my right mind." Again, she uses the language of one being passively controlled, "a puppet waking, someone's hand in my back." There is no motivation to give because there almost is no motivation. A puppet has no motivation of its own.

Choice four: Going back for the kids. While most people have never left their children in the wilderness, anyone can understand the sense of panic the main character felt, the question she puts to Dan, "Do you know what our lives will be like" if they don't leave the children.

The decision to go back is obviously a turning point in the main character's life. She has done it on her own, without even Dan coming with her. (Karen Carlson read it as the couple going back together, but I didn't see Dan in there. I guessed he was still passed out back home.) She has obviously made a choice to be mother to "our children" by the end. The concluding scene shows her at her most motherly, calling to the children. A transformation has happened. But why? Surely a character's cathartic moment of transformation should have some kind of account of how it happened, right? 

When she panics in the cabin, leaves the kids, and convinces Dan to run with her, they go back home, get drunk and high, and have sex all over the place. She then has a possibly drug-induced vision of an imaginary future for the four children. It's something of a Swiss Family Robinson/Robinson Crusoe dream. The four children would immediately adapt to living in the wild, learn to live off the land, and thrive.

I tend to think leaving a bunch of kids alone in the wild would end up like this more than what the narrator imagines.

Why would this make her go back at top speed to be with the kids before they woke up? Wouldn't it have the opposite effect? A catharsis has clearly taken place in which the main character has changed and is now actively choosing to be a mother, but unlike most turning points, we have nothing to tell us why. She was picturing them happy without her, picturing herself happy without them, and then in the next scene, she is barreling down the highway to return to their "hot, sweet" bodies. (Okay, that sounds bad to say "hot, sweet bodies" about kids, but it's not pervy.)   

One possible reading is that she never really ran out of the cabin. At the end of her vision of the children's future, she imagines her daughter one day marrying Dan's son. "They mate like bobcats on a flat rock in the sun. Or like humans in a room of the cabin, its door locked." Maybe her sudden return in her vision to the cabin where she ran out from is her mind returning to the cabin she never actually physically left. Soon after imagining the children marrying, she thinks of names they might give their child, and the last one she thinks of is "something familial" like Dan. And then the scene changes and she's eastbound and down back to the cabin. Was this small thought of "something familial" among all the other parts of her vision enough to make her choose the life she has apparently chosen by the end?

Or was it the episode with the deer in her vision? The kids kill a deer, meaning to eat it, then realize they have no idea how to safely butcher a deer carcass. Not wanting to die of food poisoning, they leave the animal, but not before one boy takes its tooth as a trophy, thinking "things die for no reason all the time." Was this a terrifying enough intrusion on her fantasy that she decided to go rescue the kids?  

We don't know. This isn't the kind of story that's going to beat us over the head with explanations of motivation. But maybe we can think of what makes choices three and four different from choices one and two. The main character seems to have made choices in life somewhat without much forethought, guided only by instinct. She has regretted some choices, and wonders why she couldn't have made the best choices all along. Still, she has freedom to undo the decisions she regrets, which allows her to remain somewhat passively pulled along by the river of fate. Until kids come along. Kids are the end of a significant portion of liberty. They are the end of the ability to passively let life come to you. You have to be actively in it with kids. 

Of course, she had kids before leaving her first husband for Dan, but they didn't have the same "hot" feeling to them. Her own kids, she could probably think of as something that "happened" to her, but a big blended family of kids is something she chose. Or needs to choose. 

This realization causes a moment of panic in her (whether real or imagined), but the panic eventually resolves itself. We're not going to go deep into the why. We're not going to get a backstory from her childhood about why she was a commitment-phobe. She was scared and then she wasn't. Since every reader can relate to the panic that comes with having children (even if they've never had them), every reader can easily imagine that there is a good reason without being given one. Iago hates Othello. Why? Who knows, but people hate others for lots of reasons, so maybe sometimes it's enough to just know someone hates someone else, just as anyone can understand the angst surrounding kids (even if we know our own damn decisions gave us those kids) and the final decision to stay with them. 

Karen Carlson noted something similar about the lack of motivation in her take here. Rhiannon Morgan-Jones expresses her sympathy for the mother and the her difficulty managing the expectations put on mothers here. 

To hold, as 'twere: "The Miracle Girl" by Rita Chang-Eppig (Best American Short Stories)

C.S. Lewis once wrote that no miracle could possibly take place that skeptics wouldn't see as explainable by natural forces, and no natural phenomenon could take place that a believer wouldn't see as miraculous if determined to do so. To Lewis, this meant that what people saw in a claimed miraculous event told you more about what those people believed going in than it did about the event itself. I'm not sure this is always a solid heuristic; I believe there is an objective reality and that it is what it is independent of what humans bring to it. However, there are a number of cases where the observer really does play a role in determining what is really going on, and literature often sets up these kinds of cases.

In Rita Chang-Eppig's "The Miracle Girl," the reader comes across a number of open questions, which are voiced or merely implied to varying degrees. The point-of-view character is Xiao Xue, overlooked and underloved second sister to Xiao Chun, who miraculously experiences the stigmata while attending a Catholic school run by missionaries in Taiwan soon after Mao's revolution has swept Chiang Kai-shek off the mainland. Xiao Xue finds her older sister's miraculous signs and wonders to be more of a nuisance than a blessing. It reminds Xiao Xue how much more everyone loves and adores her older sister than her. Xiao Xue's feeling of being second-best in a race between two people (i.e. last place) is mirrored by the feelings of racial inferiority inculcated into her by the missionary school, where she is taught to believe that "Mongoloids" are a second-class race of people. 

The answers to the following open questions will be answered differently by every reader, such that the text is holding up a mirror to the reader as much as it is opening a window into its characters. Here are some of the half-spoken questions going on in the story:

Open questions

1. Is Xiao Chun really experiencing miraculous signs? One need not be a Christian to accept that within the context of this fictional story, a character could "really" be replicating Jesus's wounds in her own body. The narrator begins the story by off-handedly treating it as a miracle: "On the first day of her stigmata...." However, in the second paragraph, the village doctor Wong Daifu asks her whether she "didn't hurt herself accidentally," a doubt that never quite goes away. The wounds are described as "thin ovals with fringes of red, protruding skin." Would that be a miraculously repeated crucifixion wound, or is that more like what you'd see if someone had dug into her own skin in order to fake a stigmata? 

Xiao Chun generally evinces a truly devout and generous soul, giving away her lunches to others, showing generosity to her sister when others are upset by her, and generally being "the inside of a nautilus shell, bright and pure." But there are hints that Xiao Chun isn't all she seems. As much as Xiao Chun talks about God's love, Xiao Xue certainly never felt that love when she was being punished by Sister Eunice at the missionary school. "Xiao Chun never once defended her or begged Sister Eunice to stop. Instead she watched Sister Eunice mete out the punishment, "the impulse of a smile at the corner of her lips." Xiao Chun does seem genuinely pious, and as such would be the sort of person blessed with the stigmata. But is she a little too pious, such that we might suspect she is stigmata-ing herself because she wishes to have that level of approval from God? In the most cynical reading, might she be faking miracles just to show up her sister? 

2. A second question is the obverse of question number one: Is Xiao Xue guilty of the sin of envy, such that she is at odds with her sainted sister for no reason, or is she a victim of being made to feel second-class by everyone such that her rebellion is justified? Is Xiao Xue like the unnamed narrator of Robert Browning's Poem "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," in which one monk spews hatred and jealousy of another one for imagined hypocrisy? 

Certainly, there are people in Xiao Xue's world who think she's guilty of envy. Xiao Chun for one, who forgives Xiao Xue when she hacks up Xiao Chun's hair while she is asleep. When Xiao Xue shows herself ungrateful for being forgiven, Xiao Chun warns her that "envy is a dangerous sin." We could write off Xiao Chun's interpretation of her sister as Xiao Chun's own self-interested interpretation, but in at least one point in the story, it does seem that Xiao Chun is genuinely not a phony. It comes when Xiao Xue tries to steal attention back from Xiao Chun by eating berries she knows will make her sick. The plan fails and everyone ends up thinking Xiao Chun has miraculously healed her sister, making Xiao Xue even more jealous. On the way home from school, Xiao Chun delivers what seems like true and good advice:

"'Have you ever thought,' she said, 'that maybe I get more attention because I'm not constantly making trouble just to get it? Because I actually think about other people? All those times Mom had trouble standing after scrubbing the floor, did you once offer to help? Maybe you don't get attention because you don't deserve it.'" 

She walks off, leaving Xiao Xue to stew over her words for a beat that feels significant, like Xiao Xue should be reflecting on these words a bit just as we we as readers can't help but do. If this were a movie, that beat would strongly suggest sincerity on Xiao Chun's part (although we'd also want to read a lot into the tone of how the line was delivered, something we don't get in the text of the story). 

Of course, Xiao Chun could be right in a sense but also wrong in another. Perhaps Xiao Xue is petty and jealous. But can we blame her? She's an unwanted second daughter, told that she "always shows up at the wrong time," that Mongoloids are second-class, that she has ugly and untamable hair, that she should accept her ming (fate, more or less). Shouldn't we celebrate her rebellion, if that's what she's rebelling against? 

When Xiao Xue eventually begins an escalating series of self-harm actions to get attention, it's fairly understandable. If the stigmata are fake, then Xiao Xue is right to be upset, because her sister is faking it to get attention. But if they're real, then Xiao Xue also has reasons to feel bad. She already thinks that possibly her "sister was beautiful because God favored her." If God has also shown his approval of Xiao Chun through miraculous signs, how worthless does that make Xiao Xue by comparison? 

Have you read the good news of Heidi Pitlor? I was going to try to photoshop a Best American Short Stories anthology into their hands, but I lack the skills. 

3. Are the missionaries forces for good or evil? Nowadays, most people who aren't Christians (and many who are) are likely to think of the missionaries of yesteryear as an evil force, one that destroyed cultures and sought to beat the savage out of non-European people. This is especially true after more recent discoveries of massive graves of children at Indian schools in North America. The residents of Xiao Xue's village are a little more ambivalent about the missionaries, though. The missionaries make sure everyone is fed (at least everyone who shows up to church). They provide a school that's nearby so that students don't have to walk uphill both ways six miles in the snow. They speak the language, both the lingua franca of Mandarin and the local language of Hokkien. They're willing to sacrifice. Sister Eunice turned down a rich suitor in order to become a nun. All the missionaries faced danger when the Communists won the revolution. They aren't total hypocrites, and they're willing to back up the commitment in their words with actions. 

On the other hand, what the missionaries are preaching is clearly (to us) full of harm. They taught (often, apparently) a story of God giving baths to the various races. He gave white people a bath first, so they came out sparkling clean. Then he gave a bath to "mongoloids," who only got partly clean because the water was a little dirty from the first bathers. Then he gave a bath to people from Africa who got the least clean. Although Xiao Chun claims her sister is missing the point when she sees the lesson of the myth as "Asians are dirty" and "Asians are second-class," we readers in 2021 (2022 for me) can see that Xiao Xue is right. The missionaries, seeking to bring blessings to the poor savages, have caused permanent damage to their self-image, especially among the young people, who lack "immunity" from what they teach.

The missionaries and Xiao Chun

I think we can somewhat pull questions one and three together, because their answers are related. Xiao Chun almost certainly has some hypocrisy lurking behind her rapturous piety, some phoniness. The missionaries also, as countless movies, documentaries, novels, and breaking news items have told us, are hiding hypocrisy on their end as well. But none of that means that there isn't also some sincere goodness about them, nor that people should ignore all of the things they have to say. Xiao Xie is right to object to the world telling her she isn't good enough, but she should also listen when her sister tells her she ought to be more aware of others. We as readers can certainly pick out the hypocrisy of moralizers around us, but that doesn't necessarily free us from the obligation to sometimes do as the moralizers say, if not as they do. 

For the missionaries and Xiao Chun, although the story does portray them fairly, including both good and bad characteristics about both, at the end, they are not blameless. They have helped create such an inferiority complex in Xiao Xie that she has gone on a self-harm spree. The stigmata of approval in others has led to Xiao Xie's stigmata of desperation. 

Perhaps God/ming/the universe does smile on some people, for reasons that don't make any sense and aren't at all fair. Some are born beautiful, which studies have shown leads to all kinds of social advantages. Some are born in rich countries and have advantages the rest of the world does not, a fact which some of those in rich countries make take as a sign of God's approval. There are all kinds of privilege one can be given. (Privilege itself now being something which moralists of a different stripe are as happy to hit others over the head with as missionaries once were about Jesus.) This story shows the importance of employing that privilege with a light hand. To those without privilege, every exercise of that privilege (or social media post of the #blessed variety) can feel like an accusation or a reminder of how fate has blessed us all unequally, something that always makes those blessed less wonder what that means for them. 

Should Xiao Xie envy her sister for being beautiful and (possibly because she is beautiful and others are kind to her) kind? No. Should Xiao Chun be less smug about her own virtue, a virtue that might be a result of good fortune more than hard work? Definitely. There's a lot of blame here that sort of reminds me of the 2003 movie Monster, based on the life of serial killer Diane Wuornos. In that movie, instead of blame lying principally with either society or the criminal, we get blame all around. Society is completely guilty of having let Wuornos down. At the same time, Wuornos is also to blame for her inability to control her rage. It rejects the "personal responsibility/societal responsibility" false dichotomy that liberals and conservatives have been clashing over for two hundred years. 

As cleverly ambiguous as "The Miracle Girl" is, I think it's still a story with a moral lesson (as much as that is often seen as a criticism nowadays). It's not a pat lesson, like "envy is bad." It's as complicated as morality in real life is often complicated, with overlapping lanes of blame, responsibility, and the chaos of fate all interweaving. It's a morality built out of the reciprocity of social interaction, how all relationships involve a complex web of responsibilities to one another. 

I started by saying that people tend to read into stories what they bring into them. What you as a reader bring out of this will very much depend on where you were in life when you read it. Whether the mirror of this story reflects your status as Xiao Xie or Xiao Chun in the roulette wheel of life, it's a story relevant far beyond its specific historical moment, one that speaks volumes to a status- and social-media-obsessed world that wants to demonstrate God's favor through by self-marketing evidence of their own favor. It's a story that reminds us of the consequences of a world without kindness. 

 

Other readings of this story: 

Karen Carlson's at a Just Recompense

Rhiannon at Notes from this pretty sight (which Karen made me aware of)  

A shallow interpretation: "To Buffalo Eastward" by Gabriel Bump, Best American Short Stories 2021

I'm putting a disclaimer up front: I've only read The Great Gatsby once, in high school. I've also only read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man once, in college. I've never read Joyce's Ulysses, and from all I know of it, I never intend to. The Cliff's notes seem enough. 

That rather shabby background might seem to put me in a poor position to produce a credible reading of Gabriel Bump's short story "To Buffalo Eastward," since allusions to those three novels play such a central role in the narrative. However, I'm going to suggest that my half-assed familiarity with these three novels makes me, in fact, the perfect reader of this story.

That's because the narrative is full of characters who perform half-assed readings: of songs, of books, but mostly of people. The unnamed central character (Karen! The drinking game begins with the first story!) known only as "Invisible Man," is on their* way from northern Michigan to somewhere east of Buffalo. They're headed there after a disappointment in love. Not really a breakup, more a hoped-for, impossible dream that never fully materialized. Invisible Man was into a girl who turned out to be more interested in marrying a guy she'd been seeing. 

A journey to a destination is often the stuff of epics (like the original Ulysses), but in this case, it's something of an anti-epic. The great American travel adventure has always been about an adventure west, into the wild. Invisible Man, though, is headed back east, back past that great symbol of wild American adventure, the buffalo. IM's journey is much like their narrative--full of digressions and meanderings. They confess about their indirect story telling: "I have problems telling stories. I get on one track and backflip to another, running in the opposite direction." 

As the story slowly unfolds, IM stops at bookstores on the road and runs into a few people. The most notable of these people are the three IM meets near Cleveland, who all give names made up on the spot taken from novels. There's Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker, two women who name themselves for Great Gatsby characters, and then there's a carpenter/bookstore owner/landlord who calls himself Sancho Panza, Don Quixote's esquire. (Okay, I have read Quixote with a fair amount of care, and more than once, and in Spanish, but I don't think you really need to know more than most people know about it for this story.) 

Sancho and Invisible Man are having a drink in a bar while watching a baseball game. IM narrates some of the details of the game, but manages to get the name of one of the teams wrong, calling the Twins "Minneapolis" instead of "Minnesota." When the girls enter the bar, they ask what Sancho is reading, and are told it's Joyce. "Dubliners!" one of them shouts. "Finnegan's Wake!" shouts the other. They obviously have about an English 101 knowledge of Joyce. They probably have only read the books that were assigned to them in school, which is why they give themselves names from The Great Gatsby. They have a similar reaction to Invisible Man's name. "The lights!" one of the Great Gatsby girls yells, which is about all I can remember of that novel I read more than twenty years ago. 

The Great Gatsby girls are only capable of the most cursory understandings of the texts that lurk at the back of the story. Daisy Buchanan calls herself "alone and boring," meaning the character in the book she is named for is alone and boring. Her companion complains that this is "a shallow interpretation," but all the characters are interpreting shallowly. They listen to songs on the radio, but without trying to understand what they mean: "We tried to guess the words to songs we hadn't heard before, wouldn't hear again." They go through long periods of silence because "there was nothing to know." When they pile into Invisible Man's car, they can see IM's "life laid bare for them to inspect and handle" in all the books, clothes, and trash in the car, but instead of trying to learn from what's there, they throw it into the trunk with the rest of the mess. 

Everyone ends up going to an office building Sancho allegedly owns, where they pass several more people they catch only glimpses of. The entire world continually presents them with texts they are only reading the covers of. They get high off pills Sancho gives them. They spend hours talking about relationships that have gone bad, partly through the inability to truly understand the people in their lives. This talking, though, does not lead to real connection: "We spent hours like that: talking and not understanding one another's eyes."  

It's not that the characters do not desire something deeper. They are briefly attracted to "charts and graphs and memos" they find in the office building, because through them they "felt connected to important happenings." While high, Jordan Baker dreams of going to the deepest parts of the ocean, archetypal symbol of the unconscious. She imagines a submarine, but Invisible Man thinks that "there wasn't a submarine." Even if there is really a submarine, a passageway to deep understanding, it would be beyond Jordan's ability to comprehend: "It's all scientific, these things I don't understand." 

In the end, although Daisy Buchanan has called for "an adventure," Invisible Man is the only one able to keep moving on with their journey. Why? What makes IM different? Perhaps it's IM's ability to read others a little more deeply. When Invisible Man first meets Daisy and Jordan, Invisible Man struggles "to find a difference between" the girls, but soon finds it possible to distinguish "unique lines and blemishes" between the two. 

Maybe even the mistake with the baseball team was meaningful. The team is the Minnesota Twins. It's an unusual name; most teams are named for cities, rather than states, with relatively few exceptions. And "twins," of course, are the one thing most people can't tell apart without getting to know both people really well. Perhaps the "mistake" of putting the Twins in a more specific location than just Minnesota is Invisible Man's meandering mind finding meaning, putting it in the more specific spot with more concrete meaning. IM has taken something indistinguishable and generic to most people and interpreted it on a deeper level, giving it identity it didn't have. Perhaps this tendency will eventually allow IM to give themselves identity others find it difficult to see. Not all minds that wander are lost, in this case. Invisible Man calls them "Minneapolis" because she is paying attention and wants to see the team's "unique lines." 

IM claims to have vague features that leave others confused about their ethnicity, and of course there is the issue of whether IM is male, female, or something else. IM needs a close reading to be understood. IM shows throughout the text that they have this capacity for close reading, which means that even if nobody else understands them, they will eventually succeed at understanding themselves.  

IM pays attention to details, which helps to orient her in the vastness of space. One advantage IM seems to have compared to Jordan and Daisy is that IM doesn't get swallowed up in the ocean, the thing too deep to comprehend. Instead, IM has many memories of lakes. IM's happiest memory of their recent unrequited love happened on a lake. Their first time getting high was on an island in a lake. When that happened, IM and their friends "all linked arms and looked out a broken window onto our lakes. The late-night stillness heightened our experience, as if the water was one big mirror that could swallow our souls, the ghosts inside us." . 

Daisy's ocean is an abyss that confounds her. Invisible Man's lake is a mirror that helps them see themselves. It would be easy to write off the drug hallucinations as lazy writing, as I saw someone do in one amateur review online, but it's hard to deny that these kinds of drug trips are journeys into the sub-conscious and can be disorienting in a troubling way. That journey into the mind parallels the physical journey Invisible Man is making. Drug trips are risky writing, but I believe this particular trip is consistent with the theme of the story. 

The concluding scene shows that one of the girls has scrawled "Invisible Man, make it where you're going" on IM's car window, and I believe they are going to make it. They're going to make it because their ability to distinguish, to read deeply enough to understand others and their surroundings, will keep them oriented. Even the wandering storytelling is a means of self-preservation for Invisible Man, something that keeps them moving on a journey instead of stopping, that keeps them swimming instead of sinking. 

At least, that's how it seems to me without doing any real research, which I think is how the story is asking to be read. 

*I originally read the protagonist as a woman, but Karen Carlson and Rhiannon Morgan-Jones made a good argument for the central character maybe not being a woman. I read Invisible Man as a woman because of the "take this wrench so those boys don't take advantage" passage, but Karen and Rhainnon are probably right that there are other facts in the story that suggest otherwise and that the ambiguity is probably a feature, rather than a bug. I've gone with "they/their" in this post, although I have to confess it made it difficult to write in places, because I ended up with overlapping "they/their" pairs--one for Invisible Man and one for the whole group. For Karen Carlson's take on this story, have a look here. For Rhainnon's, see here. 

The critic America deserves, if not the one it needs

I'm going to blog about this year's Best American Short Stories, although I said I wouldn't. That I couldn't. That I needed to move on from literature and do something more practical with my life. After a year or so of sticking to that resolution, though, I think that all things considered, blogging about literature in the way I do might be one of the less futile things I could do with my time. 

A lot of that has to do with what I chose to blog about, how I approach it, and how few others are doing something similar. I analyze stories based mostly on nothing more than a close reading, a passing familiarity with theoretical approaches, and a heavy influence from having listened to thousands of sermons that were built around textual analysis. My goal is to create readings of stories that intelligent laypeople can understand, enough that they feel their experience of a story was deepened by what I had to say about it. If possible, I try to find some practical application of the reading, just like a Protestant pastor would with a Bible text. If there were thousands of people doing this for collections like Best American Short Stories or the Pushcart anthology, I likely wouldn't be compelling enough to rank high among them. But that's not the case. The numbers on my blog clearly tell me that there are still people in the world reading short stories, wanting to understand them better, and finding the resources out there slim enough they're willing to spend a few minutes with me. 

Literature may not be the most important thing in the world, but if becoming better at reading fiction that tries to capture the essence of life in its exasperating emotional and psychological agony makes people a little less prone to celebrating the maudlin, the mawkish, and the banal, then it's a useful way for me to spend my time. 

So I'm going to get back at it. It's not easy for me to write critically about the stories regarded as the best produced today. On a personal level, as a writer myself, I have two reactions, which are contradictory and come to me in alternating waves. Either I feel that I'm writing stories on par with those being hailed as the best, and my exclusion from them is an injustice, or I feel that I have been left out because I'm an inferior writer and that nobody should care what I have to say about stories I'm not good enough to have written myself. 

To analyze short stories, I have to ignore both of those voices, because whether I'm a good writer of fiction has nothing to do with whether the analysis I create is worthwhile. It's no exaggeration to say that at the very least, in relative terms, my literary analysis of these stories is worthwhile, because very often it's almost the only thing out there. (Although I'm not completely alone as long as my buddy Karen Carlson is still at it.) 

People have been complaining about the death of criticism forever, as one Times Literary Supplement article pointed out recently, but if you'd like proof that I'm not exaggerating, try finding good, professional criticism of the stories I'll be blogging about for the next few weeks or months, the ones from Best American Short Stories 2021. You'll see I'm not making this up.

I can guess at a couple of reasons for this. One is that most readers of short stories are writers themselves, as everyone knows, but since writers now are told that building social networks is nearly as important as writing itself, penning anything remotely critical about another writer is a risk not worth taking. 

It's also just plain hard work. Karen introduced me two years ago to a blogger who planned to try to blog through BASS with us, but he gave up after a few stories. That was just for one volume of BASS. Reading thoughtful, challenging stories in a way that does any justice to them is not easy. Doing it over and over is grueling, and it's not like anyone's paying me for it. If there's any result of it that I hear about, it's just as likely to be negative as positive. 

Nonetheless, this is a niche fate seems to have ordained I somehow fill, though I often feel slow of speech and slow of tongue and like fate should send anyone but me to do it. The more it seems like the world may not have as long a history in front of it as I once thought, though, the more it seems to me like I ought to tend the garden I have and think less about whether it's the one I think I ought to have.