The poetics of patriarchy: "Ambivalence" by Victoria Lancelotta

In the past, I've enjoyed blogging through the short stories in the annual Pushcart anthology, probably more than I've enjoyed blogging through Best American Short Stories. The stories in Pushcart have a different feel. They're less likely to be products of the elite of literary fiction. Sometimes, they're by complete newbs, and that gives the volume a rawer, more outlaw feel to it.  

I also approach a Pushcart blog-through differently from BASS. With BASS, I force myself to at least write something about every story. Even if I'm basically passing, I have to at least say why I'm passing. With Pushcart, though, I only do the stories that move me. If that's only three in the whole volume, then I only write about three. There's no pressure. Also, since many of the writers in Pushcart are complete unknowns, unlike the majority of writers in BASS, I tend to avoid writing about a story I didn't like. There aren't a ton of critics out there putting fingers to keyboard about these authors, so why make the one critical piece on their work something negative? There's no point to it. Since I don't like writing negative pieces, the decision to skip those makes the project a lot less arduous. 

So it's unusual that I'm writing about a story from Pushcart I didn't like. I don't actually mean that the story isn't written well. It fulfills very precisely the expectations of our time for what a short story in a literary journal should do. The writer did what she needed to do to get published by a hard-to-get-into literary journal (The Idaho Review). It's precisely because the story is a success at what it is that I felt while reading it like something clicked about why I don't like a certain type of story, one that's extremely popular now and possibly even the default aesthetic for developing writers. What follows is a critique not of this particular story, but of that aesthetic. If this work is such a good example of a particular literary style that I wanted to use it as a springboard for a deeper examination, then it can only be seen as a success.

No ideas but in things

I don't know if William Carlos Williams' dictum of "no ideas but in things" really was a watershed in cultural history, but it feels that way to me. Hardly a writing advice book fails to cite this credo. It fits the aesthetic approach of Ray Carver, who was probably held up as the ideal writer in many graduate writing programs when I was in school. 

Fiction has always featured use of significant details that appeal to the five senses in order to establish setting, tone, mood, and theme. Don Quixote, nearly the first true novel, did it. Homer gave us the wine-dark sea. There's nothing new about stimulating the brain's sensory apparatus through evocative words, but in no-ideas-but-in-thingsism, the things are no longer just setting. They start to take over. We don't have a woods laid out so we can imagine people doing things in it, but rather a woods that contends with the people for our attention. Setting isn't just there to provide a place for characters to do make decisions in. The props are the show. Mood isn't supporting the action, it is the action.

It's appropriate a poet like Williams was the one who bequeathed this idea to us, because it's fundamentally a poetic logic. More precisely, it's the logic of lyrical poetry, rather than narrative poetry. The guiding force isn't the plot, but rather the emotions and feelings of the narrator. We aren't concerned with hunting a deer in the woods, but with a stream-of-consciousness series of sensory impressions that accompany hunting a deer in the woods. The end result for a short story that employs this aesthetic is that you get a story where it can be challenging to summarize the plot. Sometimes, there isn't much of a plot. There's people and the things around them and the feelings those things evoke.

Does this picture get you horny? It does for the main character.

Lists!

That's the effect of the approach in "Ambivalence" by Victoria Lancelotta. It's such a poetry-as-story approach, in fact, that its opening lines break into poetry-like line breaks: 

On Wednesday mornings the father hoists someone else’s
       daughter onto his naked lap
       bends someone else’s daughter over the press board motel desk
       flips someone else’s daughter onto her skinny back
       does not think about his own
       will not think about his own.
       His own is younger than this one
       But not by much
       not by enough.

I read a lot of stories in litmags and anthologies that seem ruled more by the logic of poetry, the dictates of language over logic that poetry brings, and the associative and connotative connections of imagery over movement from one plot point to the next. One of the characteristics of these stories is that they're just chock full of stuff, of "things." In an early description of Samantha, the too-young girl the father is having sex with on Wednesdays, we get things that appeal to nearly all the senses: "This one has lavender-pointed toenails and skin that tastes like watermelon candy. She has sticky lips and straight white teeth and when he looks at them he can think of nothing but what they feel like on his nipples." 

One of the frequent characteristics of a lyrical-poem-as-short-story is the list. Lists are a frequent device in poetry. Even more traditionally narrative stories often will resort to mini-lists, often in the form of triplets that the narrator is noticing. In "Ambivalence," though, the narrator is so frequently listing things, the lists begin to take over. "Herewith, a partial accounting of things the father doesn't know," begins one list. In another place, we get a list of things the father doesn't think of when he's banging the young tweaker: "No daughter, no five-bedroom house, no three-car garage...no tennis club membership, no Saturday tee time...No airport lounge priority pas and no NFL season tickets." 

These lists are sometimes of the more common variety, the one of listing things the POV character is noticing. For example, the father is aware of many of the peculiar props present in Amish country in Pennsylvania, where he goes on Wednesdays to have sex with Samantha. He thinks of taking her to a restaurant with "plastic tablecloths, plastic flowers. A small wooden triangle pegged with brightly colored golf tees meant to keep children busy." Soon after, he lists off things he remembers his daughter having put in her mouth when she was young. The story goes way beyond these lists of items in the immediate scene, though. Anything in the story can help build a list. 

Nihilistic realism

Some people really love this poetic device, but at some point, I found it oppressive. By constantly putting the human characters in a world of unending things that can be listed and then including their own behavior among those lists, the story puts human behavior into a category of "things," things that just are. Human behavior is no different a thing from a road. Both include things to be listed. Human behavior cannot transcend, then. It's part of the environment it's playing out in and will only ever get dragged into it.

Because of this, the story ultimately feels more like it is admiring self-destructive sexual behavior in young women and the predatory men who take advantage of them than it is critiquing it. Or, if not admiring it, it is impotently bemoaning it. The tone is almost one of  joy that such things exist, because they give the narrator such exquisite lists to make. There is no thought of building a critique of either men who take advantage of such women or of the women who make youthful bad decisions (as Emma Cline did in one of my favorite short stories), because a critique is an idea, and ideas should only exist in things. Long, relentless, and eventually disheartening (even if perceptive) lists of things. If this is realism, it's realism with a series of nihilistic assumptions lurking behind it. 

Maybe someone will say that if I felt oppressed by the poetic of the narrative, then it succeeded, because women feel oppressed by the sexually predatory men who take advantage of women like these. I'm not so sure. Part of this story reminded me of the HBO series Euphoria, which I watched about ten minutes of and then turned off. (Only to have my daughter watch it on my account, so HBO kept sending me updates about the show.) I don't care if the actors are over 18. They're playing kids--wildly oversexed kids. Don't tell me that if I feel uncomfortable, then the show is succeeding. That show gratifies the very men who prey on young women's immaturity and poor decisions. It gratifies sex offenders. It normalizes behavior that hurts the people who perform it. It's exploitative and so is this story. While Euphoria is exploitative in that it takes teen angst and turns it into a titillating HBO show with lots of T&A, "Ambivalence" is exploitative in that it takes advantage of the poetic possibilities in suffering to luxuriate in those possibilities without offering a roadmap out. Roadmaps out are preachy, didactic. Things listed in sharp and clever detail are smart, modern, objective. 

The revenge of poetry students

This has ended up sounding like a criticism of this story, but it isn't. The story was written under certain aesthetic expectations, and it succeeded in meeting those expectations. It's certainly not the only story to have done this. It was just a clear enough example that the outline of what those aesthetic expectations were became clear to me. Plenty of other stories do what this story did. They find some injustice, some imbalance in the world, some tragedy, and they explore the poetics of its awfulness with a sharp eye and a complete unwillingness to impose any kind of corrective force to it. 

I often think that a decent working definition of literary fiction in the 21st century might be "fiction in which plot is not a primary consideration." Obviously, this definition doesn't work for every story you might find in The New Yorker or The Georgia Review or The Missouri Review. There are still a lot of great stories with plots you could summarize. These are usually my favorites stories. This definition does work, though, for a surprisingly high number of stories. Robert Olen Butler's From Where You Dream pushes this kind of writing, one in which a story feels like a dream, and his book has been extremely influential. I think a lot of writing programs think they've succeeded when their students begin to write like this.

When I was in graduate school, my advisor, Cris Mazza, once remarked in class that because fiction sometimes sells books and poetry hardly ever does, it's somewhat easier to have an objective discussion about what works in fiction than in poetry. If nobody expects that a poem will ever be read by more than a small handful of award panelists or graduate advisors, then it's hard to know if the poem "works." With a story, though, there's at least some hope that if the story "works," then people will like it. I thought this was a good argument, and it had something to do with my decision to change from a poetry focus to one in fiction. I felt kind of bad for poets, actually. 

But perhaps poets have gotten their revenge by exporting some of their aesthetic preferences into literary fiction. Maybe many of the people writing literary fiction, or the editors of literary fiction, are others who once wanted to be poets. In any event, while I don't necessarily hate every story that conforms to the aesthetics of lyric poetry, I do more readily connect with stories that have at least some plot to them. This story was more of an evocative description of the status quo into which a disruptive force would naturally come in a more traditional narrative structure than it was a tale of people and their trail of decisions.  

Other views: My friend Karen Carlson is actually ahead of me in reading Pushcart. When we do BASS, she's usually behind, meaning I've already stolen all the easy stuff to say about a story. Now I have to follow her, which is going to make it a lot harder for me to have anything original to write. Here's her take on this story.