Pulling at the fringes of the universe's tallis: "The Master Mourner" by Ben Ehrlich

It's pretty obvious that "The Master Mourner" belongs to a class of stories that could be grouped under the category of "stories with ambiguous endings." The way you're asking yourself "What did he say to her" at the end of Lost in Translation, or the way you're wondering what was real and what was an implanted memory at the end of Total Recall, or the way you're asking yourself "What the hell did I just watch?" after 2001: A Space Odyssey or Inception, so at the end of "The Master Mourner," I think it's pretty easy to find yourself asking what has gone on. The story itself encourages the reader to look for secret conspiracies and hidden shenanigans, beginning as it does with the Hebrew school teacher who once helped the Irgun to carry out a terrorist plot against British occupiers of Israel by distracting them with her piano playing. The reader at the end of "Master Mourner" is justified in wondering if he, too, has been distracted throughout in order to be surprised by a bomb at the end. 

There are hints throughout the story that a secret plot--in both the literary and espionage meanings of the word--is going on beneath the surface plot, which resembles a familiar Jewish coming-of-age story. Jacob, son of Henry Singer, fails to emotionally connect to his mother's death when he is young. Jacob only experiences mourning as series of social obligations he must fulfill: "...to open the door with my face prepared with a mourner's mixture of pale sorrow, stiff resilience, and a hint of eye-smiling gratitude for the offering of yet another fruit basket." He looks upon his duties as a mourner much like he looks upon singing and praying at church--as something to be endured until it's over. Meanwhile, Jacob's father seems to check out emotionally after the death of his wife. He retreats to a "different realm," one in which nothing reaches him, where even if Jacob tries to yell to him or to buy the wrong eggs to "get him out of reverse," the sound is "inaudible to him." As opposed to the Hebrew teacher with her three hearts allowing her to be resilient even through trauma, Henry stops running, a hobby he seemingly enjoyed, because, he claims, he has a bad heart. Bad heart, indeed. 

That's the surface story, at least, but there's another story straining to be heard throughout. Even inanimate objects seem to be trying to let Jacob know something is afoot. The pews in synagogue squeak "No!" and "Please" to him. The floors of his house say "No! Stay!" when he goes to answer the door in the middle of the night. 

Then there's Jacob's understanding that the universe is full of mysteries to be solved and resolved. When he attends temple as a boy, impatiently waiting for the end of service, he spends "most of the time playing with the fringes that dangled from my father's tallis. I tugged at them, pretending they were levers that opened the ark or did some other unexpected trick." Jacob hopes to open the ark, the replica in the temple of THE ark, the ancient religious relic that supposedly housed the glory of the Lord God himself. Jacob hopes, that is, to unlock the mysteries of the universe. 

However, he is doomed to disappointment. Moses-like, he hears the voice of God as a young man when he is coming out of the drug store where he picked up medicine for his ill mother. Jacob is wondering if he will end up like his father, and God Almighty answers: "Of course." Near the end of the story, Jacob, having tried to embarrass synagogue icon Bernie Bernstein, is ashamed when he realizes Bernie lost a brother in the Holocaust. At this point, Jacob realizes "that everything I thought I was I was not and everything I would be I would never be and everything I assumed I would never be I would most certainly be." Jacob's not going to live up to his big dreams of penetrating the big mystery of it all. Can the reader hope to escape the same fate?

God's presence everywhere can be viewed as either a balm or a menace. 

Who is Bernie?

After opening with the former-terrorist-turned-Hebrew-school-teacher telling Jacob's class that God is everywhere, the story then encourages us to equate the suggestively named Bernie Bernstein with God Almighty. The idea of God's omnipresence could be viewed as either reassuring or a threat, but in context, it feels more like a threat, given that it's coming from the woman who once played piano until her listeners ended up in chunks all over the keys. It's more "God can get you anywhere, any time" than "God is always there to help in time of need." This affects how the reader feels when Bernie replaces God in Jacob's mind: "This was after my mother passed, during the time when I realized that God is not everywhere; Bernie Bernstein is everywhere." So Bernie feels like a vague threat throughout. But is he?  

The first thing you'd have to say about a name like Bernie Bernstein is that it's an obviously Jewish name. Sure, "Bernie" doesn't have to be a Jew, nor, technically, does "Bernstein," although most people with that name are Ashkenazi Jews. But I doubt anyone would hear that name and not assume the person answering to it was Jewish. It literally "doubles down" on its Jewishness. You couldn't have that name and pretend not to be Jewish if you were ever in a position where you thought it was dangerous to be Jewish. Henry Singer isn't the same. The surname Singer has been pared down from the one used by "longer-surnamed shetl dwellers from the morasses of Eastern Europe" who are Jacob's ancestors. Henry (a name more German than Jewish) might have wanted to distance himself from his Jewishness, a feeling Jacob shares, as he doesn't like to think about the people from whom he is descended. Bernie has taken the opposite approach from blending in. He's not just Jewish; he's Jewish, damnit. 

A second unmistakable thing about Bernie is that he's an important member of the congregation. Henry's the one who first identifies him as such. He receives congratulations at the end of every Shabbat service for nothing more, Jacob thinks, than having survived another week. 

Henry actually seems to like Bernie, in spite of how one seems to value his Jewish identity and the other seems to downplay it. Before long, Bernie is Henry's only friend. They're both in the same business together, and they meet once a week to talk about the old times. 

Punishment or sympathy? 

So what the hell happens with that ending? One possible way of reading it is that Bernie has killed or attacked Henry. We've just learned that Henry is the only member of the congregation who violates the laws of the Sabbath by driving to temple rather than walking to it. In this sense, one could read it that Bernie, the image of the traditional Jewish community, is taking the place of the omnipresent God who can punish us when we do wrong. If this is what happened, then Henry's saying "I'm sorry, Jacob," is him apologizing for doing "what had to be done," the same way Morah Lev did what had to be done when fighting for Jewish independence. 

I don't think that's what happened, though. When Jacob sees Bernie at the door, it's with a torn shirt, which could suggest that there was an altercation between Bernie and Henry. But it's much more likely that this torn shirt is the traditional torn shirt of shivas, the mourning ceremony. The story is called "The Master Mourner." Jacob believes that he's mastered the art of mourning, by which he means looking grave and telling people thank you for bringing over a whitefish salad, but it's Bernie who is the real master mourner. The torn shirt isn't a sign that Bernie has attacked Henry; it's a sign that Bernie has joined Henry in genuine mourning, at least partly in order to help Henry with his own loss. In this sense, the "I'm sorry" isn't "I'm sorry I did something terrible," it's a genuine expression of sympathy. 

Bernie has already had a lifetime of practice in mourning, having lost his brother in a concentration camp years ago. If we extend Bernie from an individual to being a larger symbol of the Jewish community and its ability to endure suffering over the ages, he's had much more than one lifetime. This symbolic reading is suggested by Jacob's inability to guess Bernie's age: "He could have been anywhere between thirty and three thousand." If Bernie isn't just one person, but a symbol of Jewish endurance over the ages, then this explains why his continued survival from week to week is such a cause for celebration. 

With all this practice mourning loss, Bernie is the perfect person to help Henry. He's not God's terrifying presence seeking vengeance for sins to the ends of the Earth; he's the comforting presence of Jewish tradition there to help Henry. Bernie isn't interested in punishing Henry for driving himself to temple. Henry has said he's too "heavy" to walk; Bernie merely wants to help lighten Henry a bit by mourning along with him in his loss. Bernie has already had one opportunity to get angry about another driver, that being Jacob when Jacob almost ran into him with a shopping cart. Bernie didn't get angry, though. He merely advised Jacob to "drive the cart" rather than "let the cart drive him." Bernie doesn't object to traditions changing. The important thing is that as they change, they should serve the people who carry them out, rather than the other way around. 

What's up with Morah Lev?

Reading Bernie as a symbol of Jewish tradition and its ability to provide comfort makes sense to me, but what, then, to make of Morah Lev, the Hebrew teacher who once duped a room full of British administrators carrying out the Palestinian Mandate to their deaths? Some people today will argue that Irgun wasn't a terrorist organization. They will point out that Irgun at least occasionally attempted to minimize deaths. I hardly qualify to pass judgment on this. I will only say that Morah Lev might signify a counterweight to Bernie. If Bernie represents the ability of a people to endure through resilience and tradition, Morah Lev is the voice that insists that a people can only endure if they fight for it. Bernie is a people enduring through culture; Morah Lev is a people enduring through defending themselves by any means necessary. 

To strengthen herself for her role as defender of the people through violence, Morah Lev carries out a series of rituals of her own. She uses three colors of lipstick at once and braids her hair (using three strands, I presume--is there another way to braid hair?), rituals meant to reinforce the three levels of heart she has to maintain. 

Henry doesn't have much to say about Morah Lev except to call her "colorful." Morah Lev operates on her own logic. That logic might serve to prevent some tragedies for the Jewish people, but it has nothing to say once loss has already occurred. She is unable to unsee the blood and flesh on the white keys of the piano she used to distract her victims to their death. Mourning isn't for her. Her three hearts keep her strong, but they are too strong an armor to pierce through mourning in order to heal.

It's the cultural symbol of endurance in Bernie, rather than the military one in Morah Lev, that ultimately stands as the hope in the story. At the end, having shared in real mourning with Henry, Bernie hands Jacob literal keys, which are hard not to also read figuratively as unlocking some kind of code for life. Having received the keys, Jacob then runs upstairs to see his father. That is, Jacob is ascending a stairway to Heaven. In the original, Biblical account of Jacob seeing the stairway to Heaven, God reaffirms his covenant with the Jewish people, in which he promises to make of them a great people and to give them a land to dwell in. Jacob isn't running to find his father dead. He's running to join with his father in continuing life.  

The story doesn't deny that situations may call for Morah Lev's ways, but they do seem to suggest that the key to a continued future for the Jewish people has more to do with the comfort and encouragement of tradition and culture than through the might of arms and the cunning of plots. 

Timing

This story was published in Gettysburg Review (RIP--the loss of which may require its own mourning) months ago, but it comes out now as part of Best American Short Stories at an interesting time. Yet another terrible chapter in the long history of irrational hatred for Jews has taken place, leading to yet more mourning, to more torn shirts and paltry-feeling signs of sympathy from the community. Israel's government, led by a ruling party which is in some ways a direct political descendant of the Irgun, has launched a counter-strike, which some say is too much, but which Israel justifies, given the extremes of inhuman hatred its people face. 

I've been debating continuing with BASS blogging for some time, or even with literature and writing as an earnest pursuit. One of the reasons I always feel this way is that blogging about a short story seems so irrelevant, given the number of people suffering in the world. This story, though, seems to be arguing that without an identity beyond survival, survival will ultimately be pointless and short-lived.  

Every story, everywhere, all the time: "Treasure Island Alley" by Da-Lin

I should love "Treasure Island Alley" by Da-Lin, right? It's got time travel of sorts and a TV cartoon version of one of the four Chinese classics and science and it's about confronting death. It's a slightly less frenetic version of "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once," a comparison I'm going to bet I'm not along in making. So why didn't I like it?

While trying to answer that question for this post, I've realized how frustrating it is to do literary criticism as a part-time affair with a day job that's totally unrelated to literature. I spent some time in between my last blog-through of Best American Short Stories and now trying to shore up some of the gaps I have as a lay person, but that has only served to make me more cognizant of all I don't know. Even to do this as a hobby, I don't feel skilled enough or learned enough. 

I feel that lack the most with stories I don't like, and I really disliked "Treasure Island Alley." I will try below to explain why, because I think it's owed, but I am admitting that this attempt at a critique is poor. I just don't have the skills to do more than weakly point to what I want to say. 

What's wrong with it

"Treasure Island Alley" is what people mean when they say that all the stories in lit journals sound alike. They don't, but there are certain types of stories that give that impression. 

There's a formula to this brand of story. We like to think of literary fiction as the kind of fiction that doesn't have follow conventions, but it's got plenty of its own. They might be conventions they teach at Iowa, but they're still conventions. The formula for this type of story goes something as follows:

1) Find some fact about the universe, quirky cultural icon, or profession not many people do. Make sure it's one your audience isn't likely to know much about, so they're sufficiently awed when your character waxes rhapsodic about it for the rest of the story. Science is a good choice, because most literary journal editors don't know much about science, nor do their audiences. If a whole generation of writers could get away with trying to convince non-scientists that physics teaches us the truth of Buddhism or Taoism, you can certainly get away with having a main character who thinks the mitosis he studies in the lab teaches valuable human truths that help him cope with the loss of his daughters in a boating accident. If you're familiar with the history, culture, or language of any part of the world outside the two coasts of the United States, you can also use literally anything you want that's just lying around. Extra points if it will seem exotic to editors, as nearly everything will. 

2) Got your object or icon or unusual profession? Good. Now add some kind of tragedy, and have the main character go on and on for about twenty pages trying to make use of the thing you've picked to help him or her figure out the tragedy and other mysteries of life. No amount of improbable clinging to the thing is too much. It's not overkill; it's narrative unity.  

3) Add a bunch of really specific and esoteric-seeming details. If you can (you always can), render them in staccato sentences. "The metal and oil scent of the armory." "Pungent amines seeping into the wood chairs in the lab." Everyone will call this "lyrical" and they'll say you're making whatever thing you chose to shoehorn into every part of your story beautiful, even though you'll probably be thinking to yourself the whole time that your character's determination to read every phenomena in life through the same lens isn't beautiful; it's Quixotic. Our culture decided long ago to admire Quixote, against the express wishes of text. So go with it.

4) Finally, go on TwitterX and sell it as a funny, whacky blend. When you get interviewed about it and they ask a "fun" question, like how would you describe your story in six words, say, "Vampires, Formula One, and stinky cheese," and then laugh and try to mean it. Literary fiction is so fun! Why don't more people read it? 

Other stories that do this? This is where I know I'm weak as a critic. There was this story several years ago, but one writer who leaps more immediately to mind is Andrea Barrett. Like Da-Lin, Barrett went fairly far down a graduate school path in the sciences before turning to writing, and she's used that background to turn out a series of these kinds of stories. Barret and Da-Lin both know enough science to know more than their audience, which is all they have to know. Da-Lin can add her past in Taiwan to her pool of knowledge most people don't have. A typical Barrett story features a famous scientist making their discoveries and then turning their discoveries in the lab into meditations on life. It will develop a mantra-like summary of a scientific truth and re-use it throughout the narrative. 

That's the formula used in this story. The story takes the Monkey King, Chinese funeral practices among wealthy people in Taiwan circa 1980(?), and some random science-y facts, throws them all in a blender, and comes up with something that is, I guess, supposed to be "a deep search for nothing less than the meaning of death," according to the New England Review, which originally published it. But it's not that. It only appears to examine the meaning of death; in the end, it doesn't take death on. It disappears into its cultural tokens and kind-of-science-y stuff, and it lets those icons try to make the story seem to say something that it doesn't actually say. Since most readers don't really know what the hell the Monkey King is or anything about the science of immortality, it's guaranteed that they'll think  it's deep. 

If I were a better critic, there'd be a section here tying in Karen Russell, who I think does something similar. 

The end result is a story that mimics a real spiritual and emotional journey, but doesn't ultimately lead anywhere. It's Western yoga. 

I very nearly quit over this one

Something came undone in me reading this story. I don't know what I'm doing with these blog-throughs any more. I have too much education in literature to do fun reviews, but not enough to do the serious analysis I want to do. We'll see how the next one goes. I might not do this again. 

The ghosts are us but not literally like in that one Nicole Kidman movie: "Camp Emeline" by Taryn Bowe

Some stories don't require much critical or theoretical intervention to interpret. That's just the way it is. They speak for themselves quite nicely and most readers are able to "get it" without needing much intermediary exposition. Sometimes, as in "His Finest Moment" by Tom Bissell, the story just before this one in the 2023 Best American Short Stories collection, that's because there's not much of a story there worth giving much thought to. There isn't any deeper layer to it, and the lack of things to say to expand upon the story is a good indication that the story isn't the kind of story you're going to treasure for a long time. Then there's a story like Taryn Bowe's "Camp Emeline," where the lack of things to say after the story is over isn't an indication that the story isn't worth thinking about long after the last words, but only that it managed to make most of what it had to say overt. Like its main character Libby clearing garbage out of the lake, you don't have to dive very deep to find what you're looking for.

I've only got a hodge-podge gallimaufry of thoughts on this story. Mostly, what occurred to me were a few minor observations about technical or formal considerations that made the story work.

The right moment to begin

Any beginning fiction-writing primer will stress the importance of starting the story at the right moment. Two key considerations for picking this moment are first to ask the question "why now?" and secondly to try to move as close to the moment of crisis for the main character(s) as possible.

"Camp Emeline" doesn't start back when Emeline is born with spinal bifida, nor when she gets sick, nor when she dies, nor when the parents are struggling to win a malpractice lawsuit against the hospital after she dies. It starts with the family trying to use the money they've won in the lawsuit to honor their daughter after they've already won. This is an interesting choice, and maybe, with this one choice came the entire success of the whole project. There's a whole different, Erin Brockovich-kind of story that could have been told. This could have been about the plucky family that took on the big charity hospital with all the celebrity endorsements and how they won and how they didn't do it for greed but instead are trying to give back with the money they won by opening a camp for other kids with disabilities. The beginning of "Camp Eveline" could have been the happy ending of another kind of story. But this story isn't so much about what happened as it is about how people cope psychologically with what happened. So it starts with happily ever after and points out that sometimes, happily ever after is the saddest moment, because it's the moment when a family that's been deferring its feelings, pending the outcome of their settlement, finally has to deal with them. 

Terror misdirected

In the 2001 movie The Others, we spend the whole movie afraid that supernatural beings are trying to kill Nicole Kidman and her two spectrally pale children, only to find out at the end that they were the dead ones the whole time. I kind of thought it was a movie that asked the question, "Has it been long enough since The Sixth Sense that we can pull this off again?" but also partly a nice misdirection. One of the scariest ideas is not that there's something to fear, but that the thing to fear is something completely different from what you should be afraid of. 

The word "ghost" appears three times in the story. The first time, it's to describe the camp the family has bought, before they've fixed it up, as a ghost town. That last time reflects the first, calling it a "ghost camp." But the second time, Libby, the first-person narrator teenage girl struggling to cope, calls her and her family "ghosts." She's gone to the wilderness to look for a sign from the dead, but they're the ghosts. This is a perfect way of describing the feeling of losing someone close to you. It is a ghost town, but not because of all the undead from yesteryear haunting the place. It's a ghost town because they've themselves are only pale shadows of their former fully living selves. 

There's another misdirected terror in the story. Libby has been directing all of her feelings about her lost sister and the wreck her parents became because of her death by engaging in sexually stupid behavior. She's been giving out hand jobs to losers at school for twenty-five bucks, and occasionally having sex with people as long as they are okay with her occasional outbursts of violence during sex. Her mother found out about the hand jobs, and now the two barely speak to each other. Perhaps partly because of this awkwardness, the parents do absolutely zero checking in on their children throughout the story as Libby and her brother Eli hang out with a twenty-four-year-old drifter who says he comes with the camp her parents bought. Libby is begging someone to take her up on her attempts to act out sexually, and she's come across precisely the profile of person you'd be worried about her coming across. So the reader does a bit of white-knuckling the book (or device, for those on Kindles), worried that she's about to find exactly the trouble she's looking for, like this is Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" 

It turns out, though, that there was nothing to fear. The drifter, who has his own people he's lost and is hurting in much the same way, turns out to be just what Libby needs. I'm not sure this is how it's likely to work out most of the time in life. I think most of the time, teenage girls probably ought to stay out of the shacks of twenty-four-year-old drifters with pasts. But the guy's got a good heart, and the two manage to help each other face their issues by a series of conversations that up their pain in very minimalist ways.  

Unlike "The Others," "Camp Emeline" doesn't make every shot a carefully contrived chiaroscuro. It throws light and dark around loosely, and uses both large and small tableaux. 

An interesting stylistic quirk

The opening lines paint a scene, in this case the natural scene of the camp around the lake. After two sentences, though, while still in the same paragraph, it changes to a quick summary of the past leading up to the beginning of the plot that begins "When the settlement money came in..." This "When the settlement money" could have been the opening lines on their own. I'd have probably written it that way, because I kind of have a thing about not liking to open with scene descriptions, but scene description is a tried-and-true story opening. That opening paragraph feels like it has two starts jammed into one rather long paragraph. And while much of the story mostly moves along quickly, some of the individual paragraphs break the typical logic of the paragraph, jamming more than one main idea in before providing an indentation to indicate a change. The third paragraph does this much like the first, beginning with the father going in to Meredith to buy flashlights and batteries, then digressing into how the parents have been off their game since Emeline died, then talking about Libby's risky behavior and the rift it's caused with her mom, then moving back to another description of the camp again, ending with the first reference to it as a ghost town. These aren't on every page, but they do show up now and again. The logic of these paragraphs is more associative than linear, which mirrors the way the story is more about feelings about what happened than what happened.  

So does Emeline give them a sign or not?

The quest for a sign from the dead sister/daughter Emeline continues throughout the story. Libby sees her mother swimming in the lake and wonders if she's also looking for a sign. 

There are three mentions of ghosts in the story, and also three mentions of loons. The three times loons are mentioned are actually not far off from the three mentions of ghosts.

I probably only said this line to myself 8,000 times while reading this story. 

Ghost/loon combo one: "Without campers, the camp was a ghost town. I could hear loons wailing. 'I'm here,' they seemed to say. 'But where are you?'" 

Ghost/loon combo two: Libby and the drifter are out on the water in a canoe at night, and when Libby could "hear the loons wailing, (she) knew (she and the drifter) were moving toward the center where they'd built a nest." Not long after this, the drifter asks Libby if everything is okay with her parents. "Probably not," she answers. "It's like we're all ghosts." 

Ghost/loon combo three: On her last night with the drifter just before the camp opens, they are in the shack listening to the rain. "One of the loons wailed. I waited for another to call back. That's why they cried like that, I'd read, to find a mate, or sometimes, if their calls were short and clipped, to locate family, to check if they were out there still, alive. Before the end of their night together, Libby thinks that she feels "stronger than before (she'd) come here, to this ghost camp, to his little shed." 

Loons, if you've ever heard them, sound a little ghost-like. It's tempting to think that Emeline is speaking through them. But the loons are actually symbols of the survivors, who are the real ghosts, still looking for their lost loved ones. There is no sign from the dead. The only sign that they were ever there is the mournful wailing of those still alive, which marks both the dead's former presence as well as their current absence. 

At the end, Emeline's former presence and current absence is replaced by Libby mourning over the newer absence of the drifter. Meanwhile, there is a new presence, that of the just-arrived campers, that feels to her like a menace. Maybe it's because the new campers, which were like a new puppy to get over the lost dog to her parents, have arrived to her before she's ready.

If this were a typical Hollywood movie, the presence of the wise, older-but-still-somehow-not-a-sexual-predator drifter would have healed Libby enough to allow her to honor her sister by passing on her love for Emeline to the campers. The final scene would be Libby doling out the love in the parking lot to the new children, perhaps looking wistfully off as she sees the drifter walking down the road in the distance. Instead, our final scene is Libby cowering in the Drifter's shack, praying for any kind of illness that will give her an excuse to not meet these kids. She isn't yet done looking for her lost loved ones, and she's not willing to replace them. 

When the drifter first brought up his lost ones to Libby in the canoe, he was sick for a few days after. It's possible this sickness was the poison of losing his loved ones leaving him at last. So while we don't see Libby totally healed, I don't think we should completely ignore her self-evaluation that the drifter's presence has made her stronger than she'd been. Her sickness--or wish for it--is a sign she's ready for the next stage in healing.  

I mean, if you say so: "His Finest Moment" by Tom Bissell

My first and most enduring reaction to "His Finest Moment" by Tom Bissell, the third story in the 2023 Best American Short Stories collection, is to recall "Post" by Alice McDermott from last year's BASS, and for all the worst reasons. Like "Post," "His Finest Moment" seems to me to be inspired by a type of story that dominated the news for a few years, one that probably every short story writer during that time took on in some way. (Here's my effort.) "Post" was a failure to me because it did nothing to distinguish itself from the thousands of other COVID-19 stories that went out, and Bissell's story, at least on the surface, seem an awful lot like just one of many "Me Too" stories. It doesn't do anything that would make the reader think differently the next time some famous and beloved man is taken down by accusations of sexual assault. It's sort of a formulaic, ripped-from-the-headlines morality tale, full of cliches: the upset and betrayed spouse, the girl about to lose all respect for her father, the plucky and intrepid reporter getting to the heart of the story.

Unlike "Post," it's at least mercifully short and written at a pace where the momentum never slows. It's clearly a paint-by-the-numbers done by a master, but it's still paint-by-the-numbers. I tried very hard to look at this story in some way that would make me understand what Zyzzyva saw in it to publish it to begin with or what BASS saw in it to second that motion by putting it among the year's best, but I have failed. 

The story is about a writer who likes to include morally complicated characters in his novels, although the stories themselves aren't formally complex. The writer ends up mirroring his own characters' moral ambiguity in his own life, becoming a rake. Among his many escapades is one particularly shameful, alcohol-fueled incident involving non-consensual touching and kissing. He knows it's not excusable and he knows there's no way to explain it to his wife or his daughter, although he's trying to in the last hours before the story comes out. Other than a few flashbacks to tell us what he's done and to review how the reporter kept after him until her story was complete, it stays in the moment of the night the story breaks, as he bumbles his way through telling his family what's coming. 

I kept trying to figure out if the story "His Finest Moment" was an attempt to do what its own main character does, to write a morally complex person. But it's not. The night of his assault, which was the "not his finest moment" that completes the thought of the title, he'd just attended the launch of his very successful latest book. "It just wasn't a night he wanted to hear no, in the end." This isn't the Lolita of Me Too. 

"His Finest Moment" doesn't do what the author in its narrative does. It doesn't grant its characters complexity. The author is pretty much a bog-standard cliché of a libertine rake. The author congratulates himself for being complicated, but the text of the story he's in does not. And that's likely the point. The story seems to want to deromanticize the solitary author, depraved in the name of his art. It's the anti-Lolita. The man is a sexual predator and not worthy of ennobling by crediting him with complexity. He might seem complex, but "formally," he's not. 

This treatment of sexual predators kind of mirrors a shift in moderate leftist thinking on this in the last ten years. It used to be that conservatives were the ones to say that if someone rapes a woman, he should be castrated or murdered. Liberals were sometimes wont to say that you had to look at how predators themselves had often been abused or how they had mental illnesses or generally, how it was more complicated than conservatives thought. But liberals have simplified their thinking on sex crimes. They're not calling for castration and the death sentence, maybe, but they are unwilling to let powerful men off the hook when it comes to maintaining their careers in the public spotlight. We've come to accept that there is no excuse for sexual assault. It's not complicated. 

Which--okay. I agree with that change. And I can see that the form of the story follows the function. It's a simple story that tells a simple truth. If this had appeared in the Maryland Literary Review, I'd have thought it was more than good enough to be there and that the writer had a gift for keeping the momentum of a story moving. I'd have hoped the writer had tried other, more ambitious things. But I don't really see this as a great story, one worthy of coming back to over and over. The effect, I think, is supposed to be something like that of all morality tales: by watching the main character go through the painful process of knowing he's destroyed his family and his fortunate career, men should contemplate the wages of sin and not repeat those sins themselves. That's useful, I suppose, but I didn't need a story by a talented author to make me consider this. If I'd ever dreamed of putting unwanted hands on a woman, the last ten years of news headlines would already have scared me straight. (I haven't, by the way. I'm chicken about even approaching women. I've had sex with two women in my life, both of whom I married.) 

This won't go down as one of those BASS stories I really actively dislike, like "Post" or "The Apartment" by T.C. Boyle. It's an okay story, and if BASS editors say they love it, well, if you say so. Maybe the real reason I'm not in love with it is because it violates what Peter Rabinowitz called a "convention of notice." That is, in a BASS story, you kind of expect stories to be packed full of things you only notice after coming around to them again on a second or third reading. Certainly, "Do You Belong to Anyone," the story before this in the collection, met that convention. A few years ago, Mary Gaitskill's "This is Pleasure" met that convention in spades with her MeToo-ish short story. Maybe my whole objection here is nothing more than me being a guy who tries to read BASS in a way where I notice things and then write cleverly about them. A story like this doesn't give me the chance. 

Complicated by ambivalence: "Do You Belong to Anybody" by Maya Binyam

I think it's fair to say that "Do You Belong to Anybody" by Maya Binyam puts a lot of demands on a regular reader, one who isn't heavily invested in literary fiction. It's not that it's terribly hard to follow what's going on, but the tone of the story--which is actually the opening to her novel, Hangman-- isn't one that's designed to make turning the page easy. The story announces early on that it's full of ambiguity, ambivalence, and uncertainty, and the style lends itself to that. That's artistically honest, but it means a retired engineer in Sacramento reading the story for an adult enrichment class might struggle with it. I'm going to argue, though, that although its feeling is kind of similar in places to the infamously self-indulgent and pretentious movie The Brown Bunny, with a traumatized character unable to feel who travels bleary-eyed and emotionless through a landscape, "Do You Belong to Anybody" is a satisfying story. 

Let's start, as I sometimes do when a story hides its own plot a bit, with a very prosaic and artless retelling of the "what" of it. While this might be taking what was done very skillfully and artfully and turn it into something bland, I think that a reader, armed with the simpler history, can go back in and more fully enjoy the verbally richer version.

We've been through worse, people. Hang in there.

The plot reworked for non-English majors

Two brothers, sons of a wealthy landowner, are living in Ethiopia at what I believe is the end of the reign of Haile Selassie, around 1974. Sometime after the takeover of the Derg, the quasi-Marxist organization that replaced Haile Selassie, confiscated their land, one of the brothers, the unnamed narrator of the story, goes to fight them by joining one of the armed groups opposing them, perhaps the Tigray People's Liberation Front or one of the other regional liberation fronts. This brother is captured by the Derg and put in prison to await execution. While in prison, many of his comrades are put to death, and his son is born. His wife brings the son to see the father in prison. The son is named "Revolution." 

Somehow, the fighter brother does not die, but when he leaves prison some time in the early 1980s, he also leaves the country. Perhaps he is too traumatized to remain, perhaps his life is still in peril (the Derg won't be overthrown for another ten years or so)--we aren't told. But he never comes back. For twenty-six years, he remains in the United States, where he drives a taxi cab like so many other members of the Ethiopian diaspora. He also gets remarried. Meanwhile, the brother who stayed out of the fighting takes care of the abandoned son and wife, but he develops health conditions that are hard to treat. The non-rebel brother called the exile brother for years asking for money to help with his condition. Exile brother did not seem to help much. Eventually, the brother who stayed dies, and the exile brother returns to Ethiopia for the funeral. His wife has helped him pack and made all his travel arrangements for him. While on his way to the funereal, he happens to overhear his brother's son retelling his whole story. The narrator's nephew doesn't appreciate the narrator's sacrifices in joining the revolution; instead, he hates the narrator for abandoning his family.

There is a possibility I have it wrong. There have been many cab drivers' strikes in Addis Ababa, so that's an unreliable way to date the story, but I'm pretty sure about this being generally correct. If so, he's back in Ethiopia somewhere between 2006 and maybe 2010. That would make sense with the "America having some economic issues now" thoughts of the taxi driver the narrator encounters. It's the only thing that fits, timewise. 

Of course, the story doesn't actually ever say it's Ethiopia. It doesn't make any of this simplified version overt, and you'd have to know something about Ethiopian history, as by wild fate I sort of do, to pick all this out. Otherwise, it's just a story about "some place in Africa," which is, unfortunately, the way some critics have read it. One review of Hangman even suggests that reading Ethiopia into it might be counter to the novel's purpose. Which on one level, I sort of understand--the story doesn't name anyone or any place, and seems to invite as much ambiguity about place as the narrator feels about everything. Still, all of the details fit a history of Ethiopia.

Why no names? 

The story's style is aggressively blank. In the first few lines, the narrator violates that time-honored rule of unimaginative editors everywhere and uses passive voice several times: "I...was told"..."arrangements had been made"... "my clothes had been packed"..."jacket...was handed to me" and so on. 

In real life, passive voice is used when we want to hide the subject. For example, if I broke something my mom cared about, and she asked what happened, I might say, "It got broken" rather than "I broke it." There's something similar going on here. It so happens that it's the narrator's wife who's being elided here, because, as we later find, she's the one who packed his clothes and made his arrangements. We might think that the narrator had something against his wife that made him want to keep her out, but we soon find that no names are used anywhere in the narrative. We don't get the name of the country he's going to, the names of any of his relatives, the names of any of the people he meets, not even the name of the former president who founded a charity that operates in Ethiopia (Clinton, I presume). Even the radio does not "care to identify" the occupation of a woman in an accident. 

There is one exception, perhaps. The narrator recalls a story of two women who were his passengers in his cab once. They did not pay the full fare, and when he asked for the rest of the money, one called him the N word. It wasn't his name, of course, and even hearing it confused him, but it was an attempt at a name. In retaliation, he locked one of the passengers in the car and drove her back to where he had picked them up. Almost the only thing that can stir our emotionless narrator to action is to be called by a name, even a name that is not his. 

The narrator prefers a nameless state because a name indicates a specific something, and the narrator prefers vagueness. A name also indicates belonging, and the narrator resists "belonging to anyone," in the term of the title. 

He is, above all, ambivalent. He shows no preferences for one food over another, and is sometimes unaware of his own physical inhabiting of his own body. When the passenger next to the narrator on the plane complains that his own life has been "complicated by ambivalence," he thinks this makes him different from the narrator and, really, from anyone who has to work for a living. The passenger thinks he suffers from ennui because he has nothing he really needs while most people might struggle for a living but at least know why they're struggling. In reality, the narrator is suffering from something similar. 

From ambivalence to preference

There is a break in the ambivalence, however. Once on the plane, the language changes from English to "our destination's national language," most likely Amharic. When a flight attendant asks the narrator what he wants to drink, he can't answer because he doesn't have any preference. She then changes languages and he suddenly realized he wants coffee. 

In Ethiopia there are over forty languages spoken. Most people have at least two languages, one that they speak at home and then the national language of Amharic. I think what has happened is that the attendant first asks him in Amharic, and then when she switches to his home language, maybe Oromo or Tigrinya or something else, he suddenly remembers what he likes. Perhaps the use of the language he grew up with brought back memories from before his trauma, memories that allowed him to find a human inside himself with wants. Soon after, she asks again if he wants sugar, and not only does he say he does, but he finds it "delicious." Later on, when he goes to an Internet cafe, he doesn't even have to wait to be asked to know he wants a macchiato. They don't have it, but at least he knows what he wants. The possibility of overcoming ambivalence is dangled before the reader.  

The four dialogues

Most of the structure of the story is built around four dialogues, three of which the narrator participates in and one that he overhears. In two of the three dialogues he participates in, there is an interrupting narrative. In the first case, it's a movie that the narrator watches on his seat mate's device. In the second, it's the narrator himself recalling a story from when he drove a cab in the U.S. 

Dialogue 1

The first dialogue is with the man on the plane who thinks he's unfortunate to have everything he wants, so much so that he can't even muster lust for his mistress. This conversation is interrupted a few times by the attendant asking about coffee and sugar, and then, after the narrator struggles to sympathize with the man, the man begins to watch a movie on his device. The narrator watches alongside.

It's some type of artsy film about a man who wanders a cityscape asking people if they belong to anybody. He starts by asking people on a street corner, and then he begins to wander the city in search of people to ask. When he runs into obstacles, he just keeps going, finally climbing a building and falling off. At this point, the DVD player goes blank, and the narrator realizes the man next to him is dead. 

There are two things about this movie that stand out to me. First, it's a doubly and even triply indirect or vicarious experience for the narrator. It's a movie, so that's one level of indirectness, as watching or reading any story involves an audience experiencing somebody's else's lived reality. But it's technically the movie of the guy next to him, which he's just watching out of the corner of his eye. Since it wasn't the narrator's choice to put the movie on, he could claim that he's not really "watching a movie" in the way we normally mean it. So if the movie is good or bad or objectionable, it's not the narrator's fault that he chose it. Third, at one point in the movie, the character in it is himself watching a movie, in fact a pornographic one. I suppose this counts as a type of mise-en-abyme, a sort of picture-within-a-picture or art-within-art effect, as when Hamlet watches a play within the play Hamlet. 

The effect of it is that the narrator, who is unable to feel anything, is permitted to feel indirectly through this triple filter. The man who, as his nephew will put it, "pretended...that like an angel he had no relation to anyone," is able to face the question "Do you belong to anyone?" This is a question he's been running from for twenty-six years, and now he has begun, at least indirectly, to confront it. 

When the plane disembarks, people start to offer their condolences to the narrator for the dead person next to him. Maybe they assume that they are related because the flight crew covered up the man's head, so they can't see that these are just two people who happened to sit together. They don't "belong" to each other. In any event, the narrator finally receives the condolences he's had coming to him for a long time, but when they finally come, they are misplaced. 

Dialogue 2

The narrator takes a cab to the bus station and ends up talking with the driver. The driver reminds the narrator of a younger, better-looking version of himself. The driver, like the hero of the movie he has just partly watched, has to navigate a cityscape. Unlike the hero, though, he can't just go through obstacles. Instead, he has to continually go around them in new ways, as the obstacles themselves seem to keep moving. During his conversation with the driver, the driver does not believe the narrator is a cab driver in America, because the driver believes everyone in America gets rich. 

This scene with the taxi driver could maybe be seen as another form of mise-en-abyme, because the narrator is seeing himself reflected in the driver. But it's not an infinite repetition, because the narrator has a difficult time getting the driver to see the himself in the narrator. This all has a bearing on the dialogue that nearly closes the story, the one the narrator overhears between two people in which one person, his nephew, argues that history is cyclical. We've already seen a few examples of cyclicality and repetition in the mise-en-abyme of first two dialogues, but perhaps there are limits to the repetition. It's ambiguous, like the narrator is himself when he cannot decide which man he agrees with in the argument.

I've already commented on the significance of the flashback story the narrator tells the driver of is own adventures in taxi driving. It's the only time in the whole story in which the narrator overcomes his ambivalence and takes decisive action. Except, maybe, for re-discovering that he likes coffee and sugar. 

The narrator discovers he has lost his luggage. Does this mean he has been forced to let go of the past he was carrying with him? Will he overcome his trauma and its attendant ambivalence? 

Dialogue 3

The narrator meets an aid worker from the <Clinton?> Foundation on the bus to his destination, which is somewhere many hours' ride from the capital in Addis Ababa. Here, we start to get details of the narrator's life, but even those come grudgingly. He doesn't want to answer the aid worker's questions about his family, but he does mostly because he can't think up a lie. To the reader, his answers might even seem more evasive then they are revealing, but in the final dialogue, the whole story, more or less, will come together, and we will learn that everything he told the aid worker was true.

In the context of the final debate between someone who argues that history is doomed to repeat itself because of human greed and weakness and another man who argues that progress is possible, although difficult and never final, this third dialogue might itself be seen as an argument for the possibility of progress. At the end of it, for one thing, they have actually made it to his destination. For another, he's started to face his past, albeit involuntarily. It's possible at this point that the narrator will be able to achieve some sort of catharsis. Maybe he will meet the family he abandoned at the funeral and make amends? 

The overheard dialogue

But no, it's not to be. Instead, the narrator happens to overhear two men at a cafe arguing about world history, and is forced to listen as his own story is told. It's the second time the narrator has indirectly been told a story, and this one's retelling his own. Cyclical history seems to be reasserting itself, and with it, the narrator also returns to his ambivalence, his avoidance of conflict. He flees the scene just as he is being invited to join the two speakers.

As he leaves, he complains that even if you've already suffered greatly, there's no guarantee you won't suffer more. It's the second time he's worried about guarantees, the first being when he noted that "even a guarantee was unreliable, as anything could happen between the present and the future, including death." 

There are, at the end, nothing but cycles in the story, and even the apparent progress is undone, just as the man scaling the buildings in the overseen movie only ends up falling to the ground. Does the narrator belong to anyone at the end? He's steadfastly refused to name anyone, including his son, his brother, and the wife who arranged his whole trip for him and without whom he can't find his blood pressure medicine. Although he's shown occasional capacity for action, it is eventually swallowed up by ambivalence, or at least "complicated" by it. 

This is, perhaps, the inevitable fate of the person who refuses the "comforts of complicity," as the nephew puts it, who faces "being tortured, or imprisoned, or separated from one's family." The narrator is viewed as a bad man by his family at the end, although he, unlike his brother, did the noble thing in putting the needs of his family above the needs of society. The nephew, rather cynically, holds that sacrifices only matter if they achieve success. 

The funny thing is that if I'm right about the political situation being referred to in the story, the man did have a role in success. The TPLF and its allies did overthrow the Derg. He is visiting Ethiopia more than fifteen years after the fall of the Derg, when the TPLF that overthrew it is already beginning to annoy Ethiopians itself. 

Given that the TPLF (technically, the EPRDF, but the TPLF always dominated the coalition in these days) that played such a key role in liberating the country was beginning to wear out its welcome, it's no wonder sacrifice seems pointless. Given how it seems that human malice always comes back, and how sacrifice never seems to achieve the hoped-for end, how could one not be ambivalent?

Three after-the-fact digressions

I've treated this like a short story, because that's how it appeared in "The Paris Review" and in BASS. I'm sure it takes on a different meaning as the start of a novel, but since I'm reviewing BASS and not the novel, I've treated it the way it appeared. 

Secondly, I comment every year on how many stories in BASS aren't set in America, how they require the reader to have a rather deep understanding of political and geographical settings elsewhere that, frankly, I doubt most readers have. Maybe it's possible to appreciate this story without knowing the exact historical setting, but reading it the way I did made me feel like some of my readings last year, such as the one I did for "Mr. Ashok's Monument" by Sanjina Sathian, may have missed the mark. I really doubt that most American commentators do a good job reviewing work set in foreign countries. They'll treat a story that is obviously--to anyone who knows Ethiopia--set in Ethiopia as sort of a generic tale of sub-Saharan African. But that's really because Americans can't tell one African country from another. So I'm very skeptical of professional critics commenting on stories like this. That includes me on many stories.  

Finally, I'd like to note something about coffee. Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee. If you're a coffee lover and you've never had coffee out of a jebena, you need to correct that right now. I have often been told by coffee snobs that I am not a real coffee drinker because I don't drink it black. But let me tell you, the majority of Ethiopians don't drink it black, either. For the most part, they love to put as much milk and sugar in it as they can. So if any uppity coffee drinker gives you a hard time for seasoning up your gross bean juice, let them know that the real coffee drinkers don't drink it black, either. 

 

Balancing the social ledger: "Tender" by Cherline Bazile

There are at least three meanings of the word "tender" I can think of, and all of them play a role in the short story "Tender" by Cherline Bazile, the first entry in the 2023 "Best American Short Stories" collection. The most-used meaning is more or less synonymous with "sensitive," as in "I twisted my ankle and now it's kind of tender." That's the meaning that gets overtly mentioned in the story, when Eden protests to her best friend Fatima that Fatima is braiding her hair too tight. "You know I'm tender-headed," she says. If Eden--an ironic name if ever there was one, because he life is no paradise--is tender, she's entitled. She's poor-ish, she's an immigrant child in a place where that hurts her social standing, and, most importantly, she suffers physical abuse at the hands of her mother. So that's one meaning. 

The second meaning is related, but in a more positive and active sense. It's the meaning that shows up in words like "tenderness," where it means something like "kindness." Eden is craving this kind of tenderness, and she envies Fatima for her supply of it from a boy they both like and, more importantly, from Fatima's mother. One tenderness the story itself shows Eden is that it does not render a scene of violence for the reader to witness, but in Eden's life, she's lacking it badly. 

The third meaning is one we don't use much in everyday English, but it leaped out to me about halfway through. It's the one that means "to offer," as in "tender a contract offer" or "tender a resignation." After Eden's hair braiding at Fatima's house--which Fatima's mother helps with--is interrupted by the arrival of Fatima's father, leading to an argument, Fatima takes Eden home. Fatima tries to seek sympathy from Eden--to seek tenderness, that is--but Eden doesn't want to give it. Eden refuses to grant Fatima the right to be unhappy with her home life, because, Eden insists, arguments aren't as bad as getting hit. Later, reflecting on this, Eden recalls how Fatima had "gone frigid in the car, how she wanted my sympathy without ever offering hers."

Relationship ledgers

Eden seems to think sympathy should be reciprocal. It's almost transactional, to use a word now much abused, but which I nonetheless think fits here. Eden thinks not only that she shouldn't have to give sympathy (or tenderness, perhaps) without receiving some in return, but that the level of sympathy one receives should be equal to the level of hardship one faces. Since Eden thinks her life is much worse than Fatima's, she thinks she should receive more sympathy.

Once I realized this, I started to see a lot of other transactional philosophies at play in the story. 

1) Eden's mother believes she could get the best of transactions, that when she calculated what she got for what she gave, she should come out ahead. When her mother sees the scarf on Eden's head that Fatima's mother loaned to her, she says, disapprovingly, that she bets "she bought it for one hundred dollars. I could have found it at a yard sale for five." 

2) The white people in the story show two different philosophies. On the one hand, they believe the world is set up in such a way that needs will be met. That's why they push Fatima and Eden into a friendship (the only two black kids in school are surely meant to be together) and why they also think the mutual blackness of Eden and Chris, the only black boy in school, is "sufficient cause for a wedding." Because life has taught them that most of their needs will be met, they believe the universe works like that for everyone. They have a lot of "of course it's that way" assumptions, and when they calculate the plusses and minuses of social interactions, they do not doubt that they are right. Transactions are not do-or-die for them, because they assume there's enough of everything to go around.

But there is also a sense in which the white kids also believe in retribution for bad transactional behavior. When one white girl confesses to stealing earrings from Walmart, she apes the language of social justice to justify it. "I don't even feel bad about it," she says, because "they treat their workers poorly." 

To some extent, both Fatima and Eden are being influenced by these kids. Whether that influence is good or bad isn't clear, but at the end, I think that at least the results of the first kind of thinking might be healthy for Fatima at least. 

3) Fatima, who has recently taken to courting friendships with the white kids in school, occasionally mirrors their belief in reciprocity: "If someone doesn't give a fuck about you, don't give a fuck about them. Easy." However, her more frequent attitude seems to be that she should give more than she takes. Eden imagines that this is so Fatima can stay ahead in some competition they have going between them. Putting words in Fatima's mouth, Eden assumes that Fatima thinks the reasons she doesn't like having Fatima do her hair is that she "thinks I'm embarrassed because I can't pay her." And we as readers are tempted to believe Eden when Fatima sets up an ice skating party for kids at school and insists on Eden coming, even though it means Fatima will have to pay for it. We assume, with Eden, that Fatima is using her relatively better financial situation to demonstrate power over Eden. 

This assumption is stronger when we realize that Fatima is a good skater, that she is effortlessly gliding around the rink with the boy she and Eden both like while Eden keeps falling down with Chris. We think Fatima has orchestrated the whole thing in order to make Eden feel bad for being poor and to look foolish in front of others. But the ending undoes this whole assumption, both for Eden and for the reader.

What kind of transactional ledgers does Eden keep? Well, she's kind of like her mother, believing she should get more than she gives, but with tenderness, not money. 

Symbiosis

There is a whole other type of transactional model mentioned in the story, one that has a completely different way of calculating gains and losses. It's symbiosis, a relationship in which both parties gain something. It may not be an equal gain for both sides, but both sides get enough to think that they have profited from the deal. Although when it's mentioned, Eden is announcing that she's abrogated the  symbiosis ("I've unhinged myself from our symbiotic relationship"), it's clear that this is what Eden longs for. Moreover, she kind of can't avoid it. When Eden falls on the ice at one point, she looks back to realize Fatima has fallen, too. "What happens to one happens to the other," she muses. "As if our bodies were bound together." Symbiosis here goes beyond simply a mutually beneficial relationship to a more literal meaning of the roots of the word. They are "living together" in the sense that they are almost drawing air with the same lungs. 

If Eden thinks that this symbiosis, this inextricable link, is forced, it's also something she very clearly longs for. The final words of the story reflect this longing, as she imagines having a mother like Fatima's, one who would "have time to do my hair, wrap me in her greasy legs, so that when she moved, I did too." 

The twist (the story kind, not the hair kind) 

Eden doesn't quite achieve this kind of intimacy, this tenderness, but her friend Fatima is at least the key to helping her to realize more fully that she wants it. As Fatima is taking Eden home from the ice skating outing, they stop at Subway. Eden has never eaten there before, and Fatima walks her through how to order in a surprisingly sweet moment. As they eat together, Fatima finally tells Eden what it is that's been bothering her about Eden the whole time. The story opened with Eden announcing that her best friend "doesn't like me much." We are led throughout the story to think the problem is Fatima, but at the end, we realize that Fatima had a good reason not to embrace Eden more fully.

Fatima has just told the boy they both like that her father has another family. Eden thinks she should feel sympathy, but she only feels stupid she didn't already know. When she apologizes at Subway for not having been a good friend, Fatima complains that Eden acts "like me having a bad day is a personal affront to (Eden)." Suddenly, looking back at the story, we can see that Fatima is right. Not everything is about winning a game to Fatima. She simply had her own shit, and with Eden, whose longing for tenderness is so acute she cannot countenance it going to others, she couldn't get any sympathy. It was always a victim Olympics. 

Will Eden be okay?

Eden can be forgiven for not understanding symbiotic relationships, or the way in which tenderness isn't a thing you get more of by failing to give it away. She's learned this from her mother, who is as stingy about affection as she is about paying for head scarves. Eden thinks at one point that it's "easy to feel like it's not a competition when you're winning." Since she's been losing both financially and emotionally her whole life, it feels like a competition to her. But I think there's hope for her. She claims that she's learning from Fatima. In fact, she claims that Fatima is teaching her "everything." The final moments of the story, in which Eden most openly expresses to herself her longing for tenderness and intimacy, are perhaps hopeful. Just as the scene in Subway revealed to the reader that Fatima wasn't really calculating and cold the whole time, it seems to have also opened up other possibilities for Eden in human interactions besides the need to come out ahead. Eden has hopefully gotten the point of her own story. 

Revisiting literary theory twenty years after grad school

Twenty years ago at this time, I was limping to the end of my Master's in English. Although I'd been accepted into the Ph.D. program, by the final semester of getting my M.A., I had already turned them down and wanted only to collect a piece of paper to document the poor life choice going to graduate school had been before heading off in search of the elusive "real job."  

I'd probably gotten into literature in the first place for the same reasons many people do. Literature had offered to me, in the words of Harold Bloom, a chance to "enlarge a solitary existence." Far from enlarging it, though, graduate school seemed to make the solitariness more solitary. At the heart of this was something called literary theory.  

For most people who never get further into literary studies than an introductory survey class in college or maybe even the survey courses of high school, they might think that what literature students do is what your Eighth grade teacher taught you to do when you were reading Of Mice and Men. You read a bit about the author's life, then you read the story, then you list the main characters, the conflict, the setting, and maybe write a few paragraphs about theme. If there's any difference between what English majors do and what high school English students do, most people would probably guess it's a matter of degree. Say, you read a whole biography about the author instead of a few paragraphs, and then you follow up Of Mice and Men by reading more Steinbeck, until you're something of an expert on his work. Then you move on to the next canonical author. 

When I picked English as my major as an undergraduate (my fourth major in my first four semesters of college), I think that's also what I assumed it was. I guessed that you took survey courses up to the 300/400 level, when you started zeroing in on the authors you liked the most and got to take whole courses in them. But that whole time, I assumed that reading seriously meant mainly reading for things like setting, character, narrative arc, theme, and maybe, if you wanted to get a little crazy, trying to demonstrate how the work reflected social beliefs of the time of its creation. 

Theory ruins Eden

Imagine my shock, then, when I took a 300-level course in Baroque literature that spent far more time talking about Saussure, Derrida, de Man, and Foucault--theorists who wrote from the late 19th century to the late twentieth--than it did talking about, say, Pedro Calderon or other writers from the actual Baroque period. We got passages from these theorists that had been extracted from larger works, and I often could only vaguely guess what they were talking about. Maybe it was because I needed to read the whole work instead of just an extract, maybe it was because it was in translation, but it seemed like they were either making up words on every page or using words in ways I didn't recognize. 

They seemed to be saying that language was so slippery that nobody could ever really understand each other, but also that language was so iron-clad it could be used as a tool of the oppressor. To the extent I could understand them, it seemed like the things they said were either intentionally provocative and false--early versions of internet trolls--or so obvious, I didn't understand why they went through all those mental gymnastics to arrive at such commonplace conclusions. My professor, in any event, seemed to think this stuff was the most fascinating thing she'd ever encountered, and she looked at literature not for plot, structure, and theme, but for all the circumlocutions of language these theorists claimed made up all human discourse. 

It seemed to me like reading literature for everything except the reasons that made it worth doing in the first place, but once I became aware of theory's existence, I realized it was all over the study of literature. In fact, anyone who was considered a serious scholar was only talking about theory. Emotionally and cognitively engaging a text on a human level was the height of squareness. 

Because everyone seemed to treat it with so much seriousness, I tried to learn about it. My undergraduate school didn't have an "Introduction to Lit Theory" course, so I tried reading books about it. One I remember actually finishing was Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: an Introduction. Someone had recommended it to me, and really, there weren't a whole lot of other choices. Eagleton was a Marxist, and he gave the entirety of the history of literary theory from a Marxist perspective, which meant it wasn't always a very unbiased way of learning about what some schools of theory believed, but I at least found Marxist approaches refreshingly grounded. They were about something in the real world I could understand. To this day, I'm still much more sympathetic to Marxist theory and other social-minded theories, such as gender theory or queer theory or Afro-American theory, than I am to the linguistically-oriented Continental theorists. (Of course, to the extent that some socio-centric theorists rely on the language centric ones, I hate them, too.) 

What I privately imagine every deconstructionist theorist looks like

I understood enough about literary theory by the end of undergrad that I did okay on my English literature specific GRE, which was about half theory and half actual literature, but I never felt comfortable with it. In grad school, I often felt unprepared for what we were doing. What annoyed me most was that I didn't really believe most students who were aping the language of theory understood it any more than I did. I thought they were using buzz words the way people in my job now do, to cover over their own inadequacies and as a substitute for real thinking. But I also knew I wasn't a master of the subject enough to call them out. Grad school was a mix between workshops where I wrote stories (which I could no longer write in a natural way, because theory had made me question what a story even was) and literature classes where we mixed theory nobody understood with literature nobody had time to read because we were too busy trying to learn theory. 

I had to decide to either keep diving deeper into something I suspected didn't really have anything to it at the bottom, or I had to start all over in life. I chose to start over. I think I made the right choice. From what I know of what happened to literary theory after I left the academy and the "theory is dead" cries that went up a few years after I'd gone away, I might have been just a few years ahead of my time.

Return to theory

In the last few years, though, I've sometimes wished I had a little more grounding in theory. I've now written over 100 entries in this blog analyzing short stories, along with a few on novels, movies, or TV shows. Anytime you're trying to examine what a text is doing and how it's doing it, you're kind of delving into theory. Yes, I can get by with my kind of cobbled-together half understanding (and I even sometimes tell myself this is an advantage as I try to be a bridge between an academic reviewer and an everyman reviewer), but I still think I'd benefit from having a better grounding in theory, even if I mostly reject it. 

Ten years after leaving grad school (which is now ten years ago almost to the day), I decided to start writing fiction again. When I did, I tried something I'd never actually done the whole time I'd been a literature/creative writing student: I read a few introductory books on writing. It certainly helped. So I'm doing the same thing now with theory. Since I never had an "Introduction to Theory" class, I'm slowly putting myself through one now. I'm piecing together my own introductory course, one that might take me up to a year to complete, since I'm doing it on my own time and with huge, competing intellectual priorities interrupting. I've been at it about a month or so, and I've already made a couple of discoveries that I think are useful:

• I've learned that my own, private way of thinking of literature as a replacement for religion isn't really original. Matthew Arnold saw "the great works" as a way of replacing religion, too. Arnold, however, didn't think of this replacement as a private matter, like I do, but a public one. He was concerned that as religion was losing its ability to keep society together, British society would fracture. He proposed inculcating the newly emergent middle classes into the same sort of literary exposure the upper classes had already been doing. By directing their tastes and moral sensibilities, Arnold hoped, the upper classes could maintain their influence. It kind of worked. This is also the birth of what we now know as English literature. There's a reason all that study of plot, character, and theme appeals to me so much and scratches such a similar itch to the one religion used to: because it was designed to do that. It's always good to understand that the ideas one comes up with have probably been thought by someone else, and it's also good to be able to place one's own beliefs in history. I realize my preferred approach was originally meant to be used as a tool of political conservatism, and I therefore am a little bit more circumspect about it.
• Speaking of realizing other people think the same things you thought you came up with on your own, I was already, by the end of grad school, trying to sketch out my own response to language-centric theories that emphasized the futility of communication. I now realize that there was a school of thought all along that was building a philosophy similar to what I was coming up with on my own, except much better. It's called neo-pragmatism. It's favored by a lot of scientists who bother to think about these things, and it particularly appeals to me. One of my books for my self-made theory class is by Richard Rorty, high priest of the school of neo-pragmatism. 
• I've also reconsidered my ideas on the intent of the author in relation to the intent of the text and the intent of the reader. Peter Rabinowitz, in particular, has given me some useful vocabulary to think of these things, such as the "authorial audience" and his focus on the importance of conventions in reading and writing. These things will probably subtly change my approach to stories.

Best American Short Stories comes on in a week. I'm going to try for another year of tackling all twenty stories in it. Looking into my medium-term future, I'm eligible to retire in a little over five years. With the way prices of everything are going up, I doubt I'll be able to retire, but it'll be there as an option. In retirement, I might want to make criticism my main outlet (along with my own writing, of course). If so, I kind of need to fill in some gaps in my education in the meantime. The end of the canon as the basis of literary education was very freeing, but it meant that I kind of spent a lot of my time in school doing whatever I found interesting at the time and not getting enough exposure to influential writers I really should know. 

I'm also looking into moving the blog to another platform, maybe Substack. I picked Blogger years ago because I'm lazy and it was easy, but I've often regretted that choice since then. I'm no less lazy now, so I might still never move it, but I'm going to force myself to at least do some half-assed looking around.