Surviving
I'm halfway through blogging about BASS 2021, and this is already the fourth story that's made me want to refer to Joseph Meeker's short book on literary ecology, The Comedy of Survival. The others were "Clementine, Carmelita, Dog," "Escape from the Dysphesiac People," and "The Rest of Us." I've referred to this book on this blog several times before, enough that some readers might wonder if I've ever read another book of theory. I have, but I don't think I've read any that I found as valuable or as lucid.
Meeker argues that books are like large ecosystems "in that they present a large and complex panorama of experience in which the relationships of humans to one another are frequently represented in the context of human relationships to nature and its intricate parts." He then looks at two human mindsets ubiquitous in these literary ecosystems, which he calls the tragic and the comic mindsets. He argues that the comic mindset is closer to nature and the one that is better suited to survival. The comic mindset isn't always funny. It's about recognizing one's own limitations, seeing and feeling loss, and rejoining the flow of life. More than anything, it's about being adaptable. Tragically oriented people aren't flexible. They have ideals and "shoulds" they stick to, even if it means dying for them.
Meeker's comic survivalists include the heroes of picaresque novels like Lazarillo de Tormes. These heroes, put in a world in which they lack status, power, or wealth, have to show a certain moral flexibility. "The picaresque vision usually discovers early that exalted moral postures can quickly lead to someone's death or undoing. Morality is often dangerous to the picaro, either because it limits his flexibility, or because he runs the risk of suffering from the rigidities of others."
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| A professor of mine once summed up Meeker's book by saying "we should all live like Woody Allen," although I guess now Allen's morality has probably been shown to be a bit too flexible. |
In "Good Boys," That's exactly the position GB is placed in. His father has thrown him out on the streets after first beating him severely when he found his son engaged in sex acts with another boy. This leaves a teenage GB to navigate the streets of various cities in the state of Lagos, Nigeria. He survives because of a toughness his father didn't think he had, wielding a "good knife....the moral-less kind, the fatherlike kind," but also because of his extreme adaptability.
GB has interesting feelings about his name. He never tells us his, and he only gives us the first letter of his lover's. "What do people want to use my name for?" He asks. "It will not buy you anything." He has dropped his surname, the one that belonged to his father. He shows an adaptability to his own name that is similar to the dog in Clementine, Carmelita, Dog," from earlier in this BASS. The narrator of "Escape from the Dysphesiac People," however, resisted changing his name. One could say the narrator of "Escape" had a tragic mindset about his name, while the dog and GB had a comic one.
GB is a keen observer of human nature. He understands how men feel compelled to spend money as soon as they get it, mostly out of pride. He understands the lies people tell their romantic partners and parents. This keen eye allows him to continually find economic niches and take advantage of them. "Everywhere you look around you, there are gaps in markets. I see them and fill them." He runs an actor-for-hire service for Christian preachers who need someone to fake miracles. He runs a photography shop that will help cheating lovers or lying social media influencers fake having been somewhere they haven't. Perhaps somewhat troublingly, he collaborates with "bad guys that know real bad guys, that know some other guys" to run a prostitution ring. He leaves that because "over time it became too heavy," not because he feels guilty about the people he is pimping for, but because he doesn't like the implicit trust the Johns are showing him. "In life you have to be careful who you allow to trust you; you have to know where to stop before life stops you."
At that point in his journey, GB was still so busy adapting, he didn't want the rigidity that comes with strong social bonds. He wouldn't stay that way.
Thriving
What makes GB different from the other picaros we're seen so far in BASS--can a dog be a picaro? I'm saying yes--is that he doesn't merely survive, he thrives. He might not have thrived. To speak in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, if he had only gotten rich out of wanting to prove his father wrong, he would have stagnated and languished. GB does not apologize for his wealth he has accumulated, but he does recognize that his original singled-minded mission "to get a lot of money, so as to prove my popsy wrong" did not represent a "good mind."
GB feared the trust of others. It's why he left the pimping racket. But he eventually learned to trust and be trusted. He ends up in a community of people that is more family than most people's families are. They all have keys to his house. They have game night together every week. GB tells them he loves them, after first being unable to understand that love between friends is possible without it meaning sex.
What makes this kind of family possible is ironic: it's the very freedom the rejection or death of their fathers made possible. Had GB's father given him just a sliver of love, he realizes that he would have married a woman and had children just to make him happy. He would have been sucked into his father's entire system of "shoulds." "My father was a well-educated man, a man who had a should-be-so for everything," GB recalls. This Meekerian tragic mindset of a rigid system of right and wrong even meant that GB and his siblings missed school one semester, because his father couldn't pay their fees, and he wouldn't let his wife do it. "That's what should can do," GB wryly observes.
The very rejection GB received is what freed him from should and enabled him to become part of a rag-tag team of friends with whom he now experiences the kind of love that "changes you...remakes you as you...lets you take a deep breath." GB realizes he "didn't fully become me" until his father was gone. His fatherless friends are "all flavors of free," they are "fatherless boys now and sure there are big griefs in us, but at least we get to be us."
Rejection is incredibly painful, but it's also liberating. It means you owe nothing to anyone. GB ends up living with friends who live romantic lives he doesn't understand, but he realizes he doesn't need to.
A literary form in need of a name?
Karen Carlson, my blogging pal who also writes her way through BASS every year, told me she was disappointed I didn't have more to say about "The Rest of Us" by Jenzo Duque when I wrote about it. She felt that story was compelling because it was "like a Latino Good Fellas," meaning it had enormous scope and was about a group of humanized criminals. I felt like the story was hard for me to write about, partly because its scope was so broad, it felt more like memoir than fiction.
But maybe Duque's story and Osunde's represent some other literary form. As Karen put it when talking about "Good Boys," in this story, "the backstory is the story." Rather than focusing on one moment in time like most short stories do, these are picaresque novels crammed into smaller form. What should they be called? Lazaritos?
The voice
A picaresque story stands or falls based on whether the audience is charmed by the picaro. It mirrors the life of the picaresque character, who has to charm society in order to survive, sometimes by begging, sometimes as a con artist. In this story, the reader's chances of bonding rely completely on GB's voice. Osunde, in an interview with The Republic, said the entire story flowed out of GB's voice. I couldn't agree more. The voice is pitch-perfect. It's told in Nigerian pidgin, but the pidgin is done sparingly. (I looked up some videos on Nigerian pidgin, and if the whole thing had been done fully in pidgin, I wouldn't have understood any of it.) It's just enough for flavor, and in some places, the pidgin version is much punchier than the midlands American dialect would have been. I don't even know what "secret yato si secret, kink yato si kink" means, but I can kind of feel the meaning, and I think it's more effective even than whatever the American English equivalent would have been.
I don't know at what point in the narrative GB won me over, but as GB might have said, when you know, you know, and at some point, I knew.
I'm fascinated by the Meeker book. The question is, am I fascinated enough to pay upwards of $60 for it. Then again, after reading your reference to it in your "Why an MFA isn't worth the cost", perhaps that's a bargain.
ReplyDeleteThat's absurd that the book isn't still in print or available on Kindle. Everyone was talking about that book in college lit circles in the late 90s and early 00s. You can borrow mine if we ever happen to see each other.
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