The giant literary critic of the future and the human critic of other human beings

When I wrapped up blogging about last year's Best American Short Stories, I felt like, after five years of doing this, there was something wrong with not just BASS, but the whole corporate literary ecology in which it sits. However, I also knew I wasn't up to the challenge of expressing what that something was. When everyone went nuts at Alex Perez a few weeks ago, I could see why people thought the interview was too long or why Perez indulged in too many pat clichés, but I didn't see why they thought he had no point at all. I was only disappointed he didn't do a better job of putting his finger on exactly what isn't working with literary fiction, the fiction that's supposed to do the best job of awakening readers to the exigent issues of the human condition. 

I've worked to try to make myself more prepared to discuss these things this year, but I have limitations. I'm not a professional lit critic. I have a day job that eats up most of my time and energy, and I have a family that take the lion's share of what's left. I do have an M.A. in English, and I have published a fair number of stories, so I have some idea of how literature works, but I'm not a serious scholar. In this blog, I don't try to be. I try to be the guy who knows a little bit more about literature than the average educated layperson and to try to explain stories to those readers in a way that helps them think more clearly about those stories. 

I did want to be ready to tackle the issues I tried to write about last year, so I looked to the one critic I've found over the last decade who really speaks to me: Anis Shivani. I read his essays in this book. I also read this article, which, if you've got a few hours, will pretty much tell you where my head is right now as far as BASS and the general tendency of lit fic to want to break human society into disparate, definable groups with special interests, each of which has representative authors producing work from and for those groups. I think this approach is bad for literature, bad for writers in the groups themselves, and probably bad for culture and society. 

In the book Literary Writing in the 21st Century, Shivani talks about the literary critic of the future he wants to see. He says this hypothetical critic will have to be a "giant," merging knowledge from a place of deep understanding in a variety of fields. 

I'm not capable of giant status. I know that. If I tried, I'd fail spectacularly. It's not that I don't want to or that I don't agree that literary culture is in desperate need of this kind of criticism, it's just that I chose a different path in life 19 years ago and I can't go back now and be a single, eremite scholar dedicated to the single-minded pursuit of literature. 

Still, I felt inspired. It made me want to be feistier this year when reading BASS. Then I opened the book this morning and saw the first story is from Leslie Blanco. Why did this mean something to me? Because we both had stories published in the same edition of New Letters. When I won the contest that got me published in there, I felt like I'd finally broken through. That accomplishment was followed up a few months later by placing a story in The Bellevue Literary Review. I thought I was climbing the mountain, but it turns out, that's where I peaked. I got a very favorable letter from the Missouri Review--so favorable, I thought for a second it was an acceptance. But it wasn't, and the editor called me "Jason" to boot, even though he did say some really nice things. Since then, I've written what I think are the five best stories I've ever written, and I can't get a damn one of them placed. All signs point to my "career" as a writer being dead. 

I took a peak at Blanco's story, "A Ravishing Sun." It starts with staccato sentences depicting a somewhat vague scenery, and I felt rage. Why had this story been picked? Why did Blanco get put into BASS and I didn't? Combine this with Shivani getting me all fired up to be the enfant terrible of the literary blog scene, and I was ready to tear into the work before I'd read a page.

Then I went to work, because that's what I do with my days. Now that I'm home, I don't have the energy to rage. Nor do I want to. Shivani is a bit critical of writers being nice to each other. I understand his skepticism about the whole social media-centric culture of writers behaving according to the rules so they can get a cookie one day, but I also know that the goal of producing criticism founded in humanism--Shivani's goal and mine--doesn't happen if you don't start with accepting stories as the products of other human beings. You have to start with the assumption that a human being put everything she had into a work, that she wanted to share what it most important to her about being a person with other people she shares the planet with. You have to believe a human with responsibilities and doubts about the worth of spending her time writing a story nobody may ever read still wrote that story because of some sense of love, whether love for the subject of the story, for her own ego, or for humanity who might read it. You at least have to start there. If you give the writer this benefit of the doubt and then you still, after slow deliberation, end up thinking they've abused your trust, you can lay into them. But not until then. 

So I'm starting the story again. I usually try to blog through these stories as fast as I can, because I know if I drag, I might never get done. I may allow myself to take a little more time this year. Or not. I've got a Net+ exam to study for, and BASS is delaying me, so maybe I need to get just plow through.  

And so I start this year with the same self-effacing and yet totally true self-evaluation from last year. I'm not the critic America needs, but I am the one it deserves.