Solar Porn: "A Ravishing Sun" by Leslie Blanco

There are two kinds of unreliable narrator, and one is a lot more unreliable than the other. The first is the kind that's willfully withholding information because of ulterior motives, even while ostensibly going through the act of confession that a story is. This kind has a plan and is deliberatively deceitful. You have to question everything this kind of narrator says. The other kind, the more reliable, is the one who will give you all the information you need but misinterpret it while giving it to you. In this case, you can trust the facts but not the commentary. It's like a doting parent telling you the results of the game their kid played in when their team lost by a narrow margin. Throw away all the interjections about those rotten, biased refs and how the coach should have put little Timmy in at goalkeeper in the critical moments and just listen to how it all ended. 

The narrator Lucy in Leslie Blanco's "A Ravishing Sun" is the second kind. She's trying to give you everything you need to know, and she does, but she's also throwing red herrings at you by misinterpreting the information at the same time. Her misinterpretations are a result of her own biases, and they're sometimes hard to spot, because they're mixed in with a lot of genuine wisdom that can make you think everything she's saying is trustworthy. ("The world should be dressed in black. We should all of us be building a city underground.") It's not. The strategy is the same here as with the soccer parents. Ignore the editorializing and scrutinize the actual events. 

Lucy misreads Xavier in two ways

Lucy's misinterpretations begin before the BIG TRAUMA (TM) that upends her life completely. There are actually a series of stressful events that happen one after the other, and her new boyfriend Xavier is there for all of them. It begins when Lucy meets Xavier and realizes how unhappy she is in her seemingly perfect, highly productive, immigrant life. She was a Cuban-American doctor married to another Cuban-American doctor. (I'm assuming they were both Cuban. They're both "Carribbean," and I assume that perhaps the father's approval of this first marriage may have had something to do with the husband, Philip, being of Cuban origin.) Ten days after she meets Xavier, she leaves both Philip and her profession. She decides to go back to what she wanted to do to begin with, which is study Cuban history. 

She'd been unhappy a long time, but it took Xavier to give her a push. He left his fiancée as well, but impulsiveness is more in his nature than it is for Lucy. Or at least, Lucy would have us believe it is. Her words to describe Xavier include: "impulsive," "exuberant, recklessly optimistic," "uncontained" and harboring an "infinity of passions." Her father was an escapee from Cuba in "Operation Pedro Pan," but that's not the only Peter Pan in Lucy's life. She can't believe Xavier is actually a grown man, because his boundless belief things will work out is so child-like. 

To hear Lucy tell it, this is what Xavier is like. But it's not.

But is her interpretation of Xavier correct? Before she uses any of these words in the impulsive/impetuous family to describe him, the first things she says is that he's "all practicality." This happens when he's packing them up to move in together days after they are involved in a car accident. This is the BIG TRAUMA (TM) that sets Lucy up for a long slide into near-madness, but Xavier is the one holding things together. He's worried about money while she's unable to cope with her multiple stresses: divorce, new job, being shunned by her family, and finally the car accident in which a motorcycle driver slammed into them and then died gruesomely in front of them. She can't even be bothered to think about money. Who's the adult in that scenario? 

She can't stop from thinking of "Xavier" as "savior," because the two words are similar, but Xavier--along with equivalent name Javier--  means "new house" or "bright." That's almost what Xavier was to Lucy. He was something new. He was the first real rebellion against what she calls her "conformist, immigrant life." He was a breath of fresh air to her. 

Lucy is misled by multiple types of bullshit

Lucy undeniably faced something stressful, perhaps something that could even be justifiably called "traumatic." The accident is, for her, the last straw after several consecutive stresses, all of which came as a coda to a long and unhappy life as doctor and perfect immigrant daughter. Xavier, however, also faced similar stresses. He called off a wedding to be with Lucy. He also moved in with her. He didn't get a new job, but he was the one driving when the motorcycle slammed into them. They were completely not at fault, and Lucy wasn't even driving, but she's the one who ends up "pinned to the asphalt, to that story. For years." Why?

She spends a long time trying to figure out why. Various types of bullshit prevent her from getting to the answer.

Psychiatric bullshit

She goes to therapists and neurologists. There, she is confronted with "psychiatric buzz words" and "theories--circular, endlessly spinning theories--that help not at all." They are condescending and treat her like it's all in her head. 

One of those buzzwords is "adrenal time," which refers to how the brain perceives highly stressful events, when the adrenal glands are pumping full throttle. Time feels different, and it can be hard, afterwards, to experience time the same way again. 

Lucy already know how pointless therapy can be, though, because she made her husband Philip endure it back when she already knew she wanted out of the marriage. She knows therapy can be a lot of bullshit, a lot of highly paid people trying to solve nearly impossible-to-solve problems and basically throwing spaghetti at the wall. It still affects her, though.

Blame game bullshit

She is mad at Xavier for not being more traumatized. She blames him for this, and she also blames him for making her leave her perfect immigrant life, which led to the motorcycle accident. She blamed herself for having failed to "tether the spirit" of the dying man to this world when she imagined she saw his spirit leaving in an "S" shape. She thinks he might have Santeria-style cursed her on the way out. She also toys with the idea that it might have happened because she's Cuban. "It's an immigrant thing. A refugee thing." 

Cultural theory bullshit

Look, there's some truth behind all the cultural theory of the past 100 years as it relates to imperialism and colonialism and racism and so on, but is a personal, romantic relationship the most logical place to try to apply the ideas of Edward Said? Lucy, now at the university, is obviously being influenced by the patois of the academy, and it's affecting the way she sees her "new house" Xavier. She has a long list of incriminations against Xavier as a white man. She interprets his "undimmable radiance" as "reek(ing) of privilege," as well as "exploitation" and "imperialistic entitlement." She's picking up these ideas, and they need to land somewhere. Xavier is the closest spot for them to land. 

Not that her ideas aren't without some truth

Maybe Xavier is more likely to face trauma with resilience because of his relative privilege. Then again, it's not like all white people are super resilient. I wouldn't be surprised to find there are more white people in therapy and drugged up than any other race. Resilience isn't a particularly white people thing. It's a Xavier thing, though. 

Lucy is probably also correct that her parents' various traumas, living under the early terrors of the Castro regime, have been passed on to her in some way. She isn't wrong that some of her problems were given to her, not necessarily created by her, as her father, mother, and therapists seem to think. 

Right answers for the wrong reasons

Lucy ultimately "comes through it," by which we might mean something like, "rejoins society in a way that will at least allow her to answer the question, 'What do you do?'" She's performing better in graduate school, no longer behind on assignments and staring blanking at books. She starts by saying there is no reason why she got better. She just got out of bed one day and was better. She later backtracks, though, and explains that at least part of what got her up was revenge. Revenge against her former husband, against her father, who, even though he'd faced his own trauma, had no right to show her such cruelty, and against Xavier. Why against kind Xavier? Again, she returns to academic theorists' terms. "Why should Xavier--and his class, his type, his ethnicity--have the only permanent lease on possibility?" 

She believes that an optimistic view of the future is the birthright of white people, the inheritors of colonial authority. I would like for Lucy to meet me and see if her theory of white people's monopoly on hope holds up. In any event, even if Lucy has the wrong axioms, she still solves the problem correctly. Rage and revenge, in my experience, are very strong motivators. Along with fear of failure, those emotions are probably responsible for nearly all of my ability to handle a grown-up job and pay bills the last two decades. She's probably wrong to focus her revenge against Xavier. Indeed, she hardly seems to think him bad. She counts him among the Good Samaritans helping her through. He tethers her, the way she tried to tether the dying man. 

Lucy constructs a somewhat cockamamie theory of history 

Lucy builds toward this ejaculation near the end:

And finally, revenge aside, what is history, really, but collective adrenal time? Memories that exist collectively with an altered time signature. Memories collectively stored in isolation from reality. Memories rehearsed as if for a guarantee against the future which never, no matter what historians say, repeat, not really, not for the same people, not the same way.

"Collective adrenal time"

 This sounds like it's a bit of an epiphany. I think the author may have meant for us to read it in a straightforward way as an epiphany. As epiphanies go, though, it's a little bit of a first-year-grad-student-in-a-coffee-shop sort of epiphany. Which is to say, there's not much to it. Lucy's own story should show her that "collective adrenal time" is hard to come by. Two people can experience the exact same trauma, and one will get through it, "unimpeded but not unaffected," while another ends up "pinned down" by the same experience for years. The two went through the same event but did not have the same experience. Furthermore, there is a reference here to the old saw about history repeating itself. Lucy assures us that history (well, "memories," but it's a similar thought in context) doesn't repeat, no matter what historians say. But real historians don't say that history repeats itself. That's a quasi-mystical idea that hardly any professional historians push. It's popular wisdom, but not expert wisdom. 

What Lucy would wear if she were in Roblox

Ultimately, Lucy has built a faulty solution, but because she believes in the solution, it works. She eventually gets past revenge as a motivation and seems to have achieved something approaching enlightenment. She has taken her anxiety and used it to make her more alert to the world. Instead of it making her sense-dead, it makes her feel "electricity." She ends with the feeling of pain turning into a "ravishing sun." "Ravishing" has a sexual connotation to it, of course. She is giving herself up to the world the way one gives oneself up during orgasm. Which I guess might be what enlightenment should feel like.

The style

I stopped counting the number of sentence fragments at 75, but there were more. They usually come in waves of three to five. They start with the second sentence. "Joy. Honeysuckle vines wild against fences, dresses with tiny, inlaid pearls, a vineyard, Xavier and I new as baby's skin. A Long Island wedding." It continues to nearly the end. "Sharper. Closer." 

Lucy compares herself at one point to a "little girl unduly influenced by a personage named Xavier." This style of frequent staccato sentences is the style of a precocious teenager. It can be effective in places in order to keep a story from becoming constipated, but repeated as often as it is throughout the story, it seems to be tied to Lucy's inability to fully speak the traumas that affect her. Another way of looking at it is that these bursts of short sentences are the sexual peaks of the narrative, and the story as a whole is multi-orgasmic. She's the sun's lover now, and the touch of the sun continues throughout her recollection.  

I hereby accuse Blanco of blatant plagiarism

Does the story transcend its immediate context?

Maybe because this is the first story in BASS, I'm going to examine it from the perspective I warned about in my prologue to this year's blog-through. This might be unfair to the story to subject it to this kind of criticism just because it came first, but it's also a pretty good choice to look at from this perspective. 

I've been struck over the years reading BASS by a growing sense that the anthology--and the literary culture that spawns it--has a penchant for creating good-but-not-quite-great stories. I think this is partly because of the diversity-forward nature of the business, which is informing the selection of stories. To be clear, I'm not anti-diversity, even if diversity's inquisitors will say denying you're against it is the surest sign you are. Expanding the canon has been good. Pushing the idea that whiteness isn't "normal" and everything else is fringe is good. Added exposure for people who might never have gotten read before is good, good, good. 

But like all most things, they're made less good when business interests get involved. Business interests like to not only provide more diversity, but also break the diverse groups into clearly definable special interests, who can then be marketed to. This leads writers to have to identify primarily as members of these groups. Their characters are speaking their humble truths as members of these groups, and the identities of those characters generally coincide with the identities of the authors. 

What this atmosphere tends to produce are stories where the reader's takeaway is something like: "Huh. That was a somewhat eye-opening peak into another world." But it doesn't necessarily speak to the world of readers who aren't in that group or aren't constantly obsessing about the need to be an "ally" to those groups. Unlike a show like The Wire, which manages to be universal in spite--maybe even because of--its extraordinary specificity to a particular time and place, these stories don't seem to transcend their specific, realism-inspired bonds. They're a good way to learn about the issues of that group. But so is a Netflix show about young women in India or an autistic young man. If I'm looking for a pleasant 101 into one of the identities the corporate structure recognizes (a list that is always expanding, because business has to grow) and doesn't make me think much afterwards, there are easier ways to do it.

I think this state of affairs is bad for writers, bad for readers, and bad for the culture. It's bad for writers in two ways. First, if an identity already has as many representative authors as the market for that identity can support, then no future writers of that identity can break through until one of the big names leaves. Oh, you're an Ethiopian-American writer? Sorry, we already have one of those. You can get published in the Zimber Ditch Review, but not one of the big journals. You definitely can't make it into a big anthology, because we already had a story about an Ethiopian-American last year. 

It's also bad for writers because expectations build for the writer to always and exclusively produce work that fits their community. A Navajo writer who writes magical realism about her ancestors guiding her through modern life can't suddenly write a story about a white hat hacker in Ukraine. A Mexican writer known for gritty border stories can't write about a naturalist in Ontario. A transwoman with a short story collection of trans tales can't follow it up with a philosophical novel. They have to stick with their brand. That leads to stagnation for both writers and the industry.

How is this bad for readers? The same way music genres are bad for music lovers. You can only listen to the albums that get made, and albums tend to only get made if producers know how to sell them. So truly "novel" work, in spite of the name given to longer books, happens a lot less than it ought to. 

How is it bad for society? Well, basically, people read less. For the last few years, if you Googled all 20 Best American Short Stories winners a few months after the collection, two of the top five results would nearly always be my blog and Karen Carlson's blog. Why? Because nobody else gives enough of a shit to do this. This is BASS. It's as good as it gets for American short fiction, and there's hardly anyone on the Internet taking it seriously enough to engage in rigorous or even semi-rigorous criticism about it. I'm a translator. I have a day job. Someone more qualified than me should be doing this. But nobody wants to, because ultimately, while the stories are good, they're aren't the best option people have out there of how to spend their time. 

Anis Shivani, probably intentionally being a little more provocative than he needs to be, asks if it's even permissible in the marketplace for a writer from one of the identified groups to branch out:

Neoliberal inequality functions by dividing workers according to various identity categories, which prevent those workers as a whole from demanding universal rights and privileges, as used to be the case before the rise of identity politics. The parallel manifestation in the literary realm would be the demand for each aggrieved group to claim the greatest disadvantage for itself, because such recognition leads to academic and literary legitimacy, the flow of funds and the establishment of academic departments, and the chance to take the group’s case public, an option that brings with it its own form of lucrative rewards. Of course, in such a race for most-aggrieved status, there is no winner, and the competition never ends; the struggle only breeds infinite loops of self-involvement, providing the weave and texture of writing.

Note that the communal experience, the basis for such writing, requires bounded identity: were a Bengali writer, for instance, to start writing about Jewish lesbians or undocumented Mexicans, she might well be accused of robbing those oppressed classes of their own claims to prestige. (I use the term “prestige” advisedly, and in full cognizance of the convulsions that identitarians face when a plain white woman like Rachel Dolezal decides that appropriating black identity, and fighting on behalf of social justice for black Americans, no less, is her only route to privilege.

Or, as he says both more succinctly and more provocatively in the essay "Authorship in Contemporary American Literature": "Thus the consistent need to construct a stable/knowable/marketable/niche identity for each reputable author, a singular self that is artificially limited in scope, a perfectly devourable subject for the consumer society, a hypocritical project eliciting the passive collaboration of authors." 

Back to Blanco

Does Blanco's story fit Shivani's critique? On the surface, perhaps it would seem so. Blanco is a Cuban-American woman writing a story about a Cuban American woman. She is divorced and remarried and so is her character Lucy. She has mentioned before that she has a passion for the "unwritten" history of the Cuban Revolution of 1959, and Lucy has the same passion. Does this story, then, present us with a nicely crafted, not unmoving portrait of a woman from a particular background, a story which the rest of us can merely read, nod our heads, feel we've grown a small bit, and then move on to the next?

I don't think so. This story does transcend the identity of its main character and its author a bit. At one point, Lucy is remembering the moment right before the accident, when she was wondering if she and Xavier should pull off the road for a quickie. She knew they'd have to be in separate rooms at her parents' house. She interprets this moral conservatism as a hallmark of "Cubans," but Xavier sees it as endemic to "Catholics." Early in the story, there is tension from the existence of overlapping identities. Rather than tear the story apart, a lot of its vigor comes from this tension. If people can be more than one thing, then the rigid categories of the industry don't have an iron hold on the possibilities of fiction. This isn't "intersectionality." It's the messiness of real life. 

Unlike nearly every story featuring a character with a strong likelihood of being able to speak Spanish in BASS the last few years, this one isn't a story of characters getting the shit kicked out of them by life. Lucy's ability to lay in bed for months after her trauma is evidence that she is privileged. Maybe not privileged in the same way Xavier is, but privileged. This privilege is all over the story, from her willingness to give up a financially remunerative job in order to attend a long period of education in the liberal arts, to her father growling about how much he'd paid for her medical school, to her inability to pick an eggplant from the grocery store. This isn't the formula Shivani complains about, of oppressed coteries writing about their oppression. Lucy does chafe against perceived male dominance, some of it real and some of it unfairly leveled at men. But this isn't a poor-little-girl-from-Havana Cuban story. 

Because of that, it has a natural solidarity to it that emerges almost in spite of Lucy. Shivani sees the modern academica-bound literary fiction world as essentially antithetical to solidarity: "Neoliberal inequality functions by dividing workers according to various identity categories, which prevent those workers as a whole from demanding universal rights and privileges, as used to be the case before the rise of identity politics. The parallel manifestation in the literary realm would be the demand for each aggrieved group to claim the greatest disadvantage for itself, because such recognition leads to academic and literary legitimacy, the flow of funds and the establishment of academic departments, and the chance to take the group’s case public, an option that brings with it its own form of lucrative rewards." That isn't what's going on in this story. Lucy takes plenty of shots at the privileges of men and of white people, and all her shots aren't errant or undeserved, although some are. In the end, though, she's enlightened and thinking about sacred trees, stone Buddhas, silent rivers, and the "unfair advantage the living have over the dead." She's literally picturing herself getting shagged by the sun that shines down on all of us, and she's good with it. She's moving toward seeing herself as having common cause with the living, although not without limits or boundaries. 

This story is at least a partial success, and maybe even a bit more than that, because it isn't just another "immigrant story," as Lucy would put it. It's not something for a reader to experience politely, golf clap for, call "mesmerizing" on the jacket blurb, then move on from to the next story. It has the ring of real experience lived by a real person who is both part of an identifiable community but also much more than the marketing label assigned to her. 

Other assessments: Karen Carlson looks at the Tarot imagery, which I neglected to do, here.