A musical with a second-act showstopper: "Blessed Deliverance" by Jamel Brinkley

When I read through "Blessed Deliverance" the first time, I was struck by its similarities to watching a Spike Lee joint: the nostalgic sense of loss at the gentrification of Brooklyn balanced with an understanding of the inevitability of change, the great jazz music slyly dropped in, a young person's climactic move toward introspection as a way to deal with disorienting social change...the only thing missing was the double dolly shot.

On second read, though, a different story started to appear to me, one that still has some resonance for me with Spike Lee (maybe because I don't really know that much about New York in general or Brooklyn in particular, so anything having to do with Brooklyn is going to remind me of Spike Lee movies), but which reminds me more of earlier work I've seen from Jamel Brinkley. It's a colorful, wonderfully shot nature documentary inside the interior life of an intelligent and sensitive young man navigating a young adulthood with complicated family and social surroundings. 

The story has five acts, and I think, rather than grouping elements of the story thematically like I often do, it's better here to follow the five acts chronologically, letting the themes unfold as we go.

Sun Ra, whose poster is on the narrator's wall, is one of the few jazz musicians I can say I enjoy without having to fake enjoyment to avoid being judged

Act I

An unnamed male narrator in his last year of high school gathers with his four friends one "balmy" October day. The friends are a boy named Antonio and three girls named Cherise, Walidah, and Roni. This balmy day is introduced right after a rather lyrical passage about the group of young people discovering their bodies. Some of this discovery had been within the group, and the trust build up by the members of the group knowing each other for a long time meant that when that discovery happened, it came with "ample room...an open field, like the ones in the Botanic Garden or in Prospect Park where on warm days, when things seemed simpler, we used to lavish time, each field providing a volume of space in which to flex and stretch ourselves freely, to play, to recognize that our bodies absolutely belonged there, among all the other fragrant and colorful organisms surrounding us."

The narrator explicitly puts the kids in nature and part of nature, in spite of being in the middle of New York. They are "organisms," which puts them on a level with flowers or trees or birds.

Or rabbits. As the kids are enjoying this balmy day linked in the narrator's mind with simpler times and  open fields of green space, they come across a new store in the neighborhood. It turns out it's a rabbit rescue, and much to their surprise, one of the people working there is "Headass," a homeless and mentally ill man who has been roaming their neighborhood for years. They thought they had seen the last of Headass when a vacant home he was squatting in was raided. Headass had been a victim of gentrification and "certain cruelties of the law" that were "now being strictly enforced" because of gentrification. 

Nonetheless, there Headass is, and the white man running the rescue calls him Reginald. The white man, named Cyan, has names for everything, rather Adam-like as he strives to turn Brooklyn into an upper-middle-class Eden. He gives names to all the rabbits, who are of course unaware that those are their names. 

Headass/Reginald seems to connect with the rabbits. So, too, does the narrator, although perhaps he doesn't realize it yet. The narrator continually speaks of the group as "we," but keeps "I" out of his "we." We get all the names of all the main characters in the first act except the narrator himself. The narrator also doesn't seem to be partaking in the sexual exploration of the rest of the "we," meaning he doesn't fully see himself as an "organism" in his environment the way the rest of the group does. However, the narrator does unwittingly describe himself in a very rabbit-like way early on. When worrying about what the future might hold, he notes, "Life apparently would never stop with the excitement, leaping from the gray shadows of alleyways to jump you, knocking you to the ground and seriously kicking your ass." This sounds very much like an animal wary of being attacked. 

Seeing Headass has temporarily reunited the group, who spend the balmy day in perfect harmony, like the old days. Perhaps they are also reassured by the rabbits' "serene confidence that everything they wanted would eventually and inevitably arrive." That's very much the attitude of a young child, and perhaps it is being reminded of these simpler, younger times that allows the group to be happy again like they used to be.

The group is bothered, though, that Cyan has given him the name Reginald, which they are sure is not his "government name," meaning his official, birth-certificate name. They object to white people in general giving whatever names they please to people and things that don't belong to them, including parts of the city. 

As the first act ends, though, the narrator pauses to consider whether the friends have any leg to stand on when they criticize the new people for changing names. Hadn't they, or someone close to them who was part of their self-identity, once given Headass his name? They don't like the use of "DoBro" for "Downtown Brooklyn," yet they think nothing of using "Bed-Stuy" for Bedford-Stuyvesant, where they all come from.

To put the central tension another way: from whence comes their own right to name things? Have they been using names, and language in general, based solely on social convention? If so, what happens when the society changes or disappears? Will their names and language go with it? What really belongs to them? This uncertainty seems to be behind the narrator's wish to keep his own name hidden. 

Act II

Headass's identification with rabbits gets a lot more literal. He's wearing a rabbit suit outside the rescue, in theory to drum up interest, although it's quite possible Headass just wanted to dress up like a rabbit. The suit doesn't seem right, prompting the narrator to observe: "Headass’s face peeked out of the creature’s open mouth, as though he was being swallowed or bizarrely birthed." Whether he is being born again or swallowed alive, either way, it is the end of one phase of Headass's existence. He will no longer answer to either the names Headass or Reginald. He apparently has some other name that he keeps to himself. 

Meanwhile, the kids notice all of the people riding by actually wearing their bike helmets, "assaulting us with their show of law-abiding goodness and safety." This is the second time the law has been tied to the encroachment of development, and neither time has it suited those living under the previous, less-law-abiding society. 

The kids try to remember what came before the rabbit rescue, because they are trying to remember what the intruders took from them. They can't remember, but they don't want to just ask the people running the rescue or Google it. They want the memory of what came before to be organic, something that would be theirs by right of belonging to the neighborhood. 

Without realizing it, Headass answers their question. He starts to hum, or purr, or make some kind of chanting sound. The kids join in:

"What started with the incredulous stares of the other four became, gradually, through a process of reluctant submission, our unanimous choral moaning in response to his call. He moaned and then we moaned—Antonio did it so loudly you could feel the vibrations of his chest—and for a while it went on like that, antiphonal, until finally all six of us made the sound together." 

They don't know it yet, but the rescue used to be a storefront church, the "Cathedral of Blessed Deliverance." The narrator's father will reminisce approvingly on the music that used to waft from it. Headass is reviving the neighborhood's memory of what was once there through his "antiphonal"--that is, a musical piece sung alternately by two groups in medieval Christianity--music. 

At the end of this second act, the kids' mojo is broken, and they start breaking up. There are two groups of two and then the narrator as the odd man out. They feel they'd been cast into a "net from which they were eager to escape," which is a different reality of a rabbit's existence from what they felt at the end of Act I. 

Acts III and IV

In the short act three, Reginald has been fired for not following the rules. He has been sleeping in the rescue, and the managers are concerned this might have been a code violation that would get them in trouble. The introduction of rules and law seems only to hurt the native organisms of Bed-Stuy. 

In Act IV, the narrator's father remembers what came before the rabbit rescue. He also gives his own name to Bed-Stuy: "Cathedral City." Then, the father begins to cry while the narrator hears him through his bedroom wall with the poster of Sun Ra on it. The narrator remembers when his friend Antonio was also crying similar tears after finding out how sick his mother was. He remembers how he tried to care for him, and how he let his romantic feelings for Antonio slip through, then tried to apologize, but then Antonio pretended not to understand what the narrator meant so he didn't have to deal with what it meant. 

This is the moment of the narrator's catharsis and realization. Again, the narrator takes on a mental position similar to one a rabbit would have. Realizing that with sadness, sometimes you don't even know what is hitting you, the narrator thereby makes sadness into one of the scary things "leaping up from the gray shadows" that he worried about in the first act. He method to survive these attacks is: "So, no matter how horrible the sound, it’s best to stay very quiet and avoid calling any attention to yourself." 

The narrator is surviving an assault on his language, his neighborhood, and his cultural property by switching to an extra-linguistic way of thinking. He is thinking like a rabbit, which of course doesn't care at all what its name is. 

Act V

Having come to this cathartic moment, Act V now works at the denouement. Headass has gone back to the rescue, taken a pot and a spoon, and banged on them in a sort of reverse-Pied-Piper-of-rabbits. He is setting all the rabbits free from the rescue center. The neighborhood cheers on Headass as he "delivers" the rabbits." 

The neighborhood doesn't even all agree what they're cheering about. "Everyone seemed to be smoldering in their own private fire," the narrator sees. The big, socially constructed language we all borrow from is nothing but the effect of innumerable individually built languages. These will continue to exist as long as people look out at the world in wonder. Having shared in extra-linguistic thinking, along with Headass, the narrator is now able to learn names of things for the first time, his own Adam in his own new paradise. These are the names "given out of love." These names include Headass's real name and the narrator's own, but we do not learn them. 

Questions

So whom or what is delivered in the story, and from what? In a literal sense, the rabbits are delivered from the rescue center, although to what fate, who knows? 

Perhaps the narrator has been delivered from a relationship to language that is entirely logical and rules-bound. He has been freed from the oppressive law with its logic for creating words, and instead has  acquired a more "organic" language, one that will allow him to continue to find new words for things no matter how often his environment changes. 

A question I don't have an answer to is what the kids mean early on when they look at Headass being eccentric and say to one another, "There goes your father." Am I supposed to take this literally, or are the kids clowning on each other in the manner of a "your mama" joke? If it really is the father of one of the kids, is it Antonio? It isn't the narrator, because his father is at home crying, but maybe it's Antonio, for whom the sickness of his mother is therefore all the more poignant. I doubt this reading, because it seems like there would have been more mentions of Headass really being the father of one of the kids, but I honestly don't know the answer. 

Dueling abjections: "Viola in Mid-Winter" by Marie-Helene Bertino (Best American Short Stories 2024)

“Like most things, the truth has contradictions that don’t fit neat theories,” Samarra, the vampire who turns Viola into another vampire, says, and there couldn't be a better clue to reading the entire story "Viola in Mid-Winter" than that. It's especially telling that Samarra doesn't say "don't fit neat concepts" or "neat pre-conceived notions," but theories. Many authors are indifferent to theory, and feel that if theorists want to apply this or that idea to their work, that's their business, but "Viola" seems to invite theoretical approaches. "Viola" doesn't really make it easy, however, for a reader to feel comfortable with any particular theoretical approach. All "neat theories" get complicated by the "contradictions of truth" the story presents.

"Viola" is a story about a vampire, which places it within the horror genre. It's also about a female vampire, which places it within the world of horror in which the main monster is a woman. There are few theoretical fields that are more deeply developed than the union of horror and feminist theory. Even as someone who prefers to keep his participation in theory to the sidelines, I'm aware of this. I generally try to use theory sparingly in reading for this blog, but with "Viola," there's no way out but all the way in.

"Viola" plays with many of the main concepts in the field of feminist horror theory. As readers of this blog know, I don't really care whether an author intends to put something in the story that could be read a certain way by a critic or theorist. If it's in the story, then it's fair game, whether the author intended it or not. But "Viola" seems to want its readers to know that it knows what it's doing. There is a moment when the EMT pulls out a book of short stories from her bookshelf to read. Who the hell reads a book of short stories but people with an intense interest in literature? It's more or less announcing to the reader: I know you're the kind of person who is probably aware of Barbara Creed's The Monstrous-Feminine, because you're reading a short story in a journal like The Bennington Review.  

So how does this work? You have sex and then she eats you, or she just eats you? Because it makes a difference...

There are four major ideas from feminist horror studies that "Viola" plays with, and it doesn't have a "neat" view of any of them. I'm going to briefly explain the four ideas below, before looking at how the story is interacting with them. I'm as surprised as anyone to be doing this; theory of this kind isn't something I naturally love. As a matter of fact, it's got a lot to do with why I ended my time in grad school with just an M.A. instead of going on further. One thing I really dislike about theoretical discourse is the way some theorist will take a word that has already been in use for a long time and has an established meaning, and then the theorist will create a bespoke meaning for it, and soon a whole school emerges using this special term but not telling you they're using it in their special way when they use it. As the theoretical community interacts with the term, they use it in new ways, so the bespoke meaning expands. It often expands until it can mean almost anything, which is the same as meaning nothing. 

Below, I'm going to give much narrower definitions to these terms than the theoretical communities who propagate them. I'm also going to attempt simpler definitions than are usually given to them. There's a near certain chance I'll bastardize the meaning a bit, but I think the gain in clarity is worth the loss of exactness when writing according to the spirit of this blog, which is to write not for literary professionals, but for curious and intelligent outsiders trying to understand why a story is good enough to be included in BASS. Here we go.

The four theoretical concepts

1. Abjection or the abject

If you look up what the term abject means in feminism, you'll find it comes from the theorist Julia Kristeva. You'll find a lot of explanations that will say the abject has something to do with a loss of the distinction between subject and object, or self and other. That's not wrong, but I think it's a little hard to understand what that means, partly because "subject" and "object" have their own unique meanings in both psychoanalytical and linguistic theory which aren't always obvious. 

My understanding of the abject is this: all societies have ways of promoting the notion of order and of hiding the fact that we're just one disaster away from killing each other for scraps of food. On a personal level, we also have psychological methods for forgetting that we are just animals who are part of a nature that's red in tooth and claw. We call cow meat beef, and we carefully avoid knowing anything about what goes into making it. There are customs for avoiding speaking too directly about sex or death. We lock the door while excreting waste, and we spray deodorizing aerosols to prevent others from smelling the aftereffects. We have euphemisms for all kinds of things so we don't have to think about how, even with all the trapping of civilization, we are still animals living in a very physical and savage body.

Whatever removes the barriers that keep us from remembering these unpleasant truths is the abject. 

The abject isn't just a key concept in feminism. It's a major concept in horror generally, and it's used to explain what makes horror horrifying. But feminist theory has shown both that women are often considered as abject in society in general, and also that when women are the monsters in horror, they tend to be abject in a particular way.

When Mrs. Heretic had our child, I was shocked by how savage childbirth is. Baby showers are all full of fluffy stuffed animals and soft pastel colors and kitschy games, but pregnancy is a parasite growing in a human being, altering all her bodily functions, and eventually coming out in a mess of fluids. Women's bodies bleed every month. So the female body is uniquely abject in a way that male bodies aren't. It makes us remember that we are animals. 

Creators of female monsters often capitalize on this. Think of the horror movies with women blasting out massive amounts of menstrual blood or projectile vomiting. Female monsters are monstrous in a way that is psychologically tied to how women tend to be demonized in general. 

2. Liminality or the liminal

This is an oft-used word in theory that I especially hate for the ways it gets used in extended senses. There are two basic meanings. One is to refer to a space that is mostly empty or blank, like a cave. The other is an extended meaning. Since a lot of liminal spaces, like doorways, tend to be a transitional spot between one place and another, "liminal" can also mean "transitional." 

In feminist horror theory, the liminality of the female body contributes to the particular terrifying effect it has. I don't know if you all are aware of this, but female bodies have a hole in them that male bodies don't have. Psychoanalysis since Freud has postulated various phobias of the female body, and some of them have to do with the liminal space of the vagina. Whether it's fear of castration or fear of the vagina dentata or just the fear that comes from realizing the vagina is liminal like caves or other places we fear, there are a number of ways of understanding the fear of the uniquely liminal space in women. 

The liminal space in women is also part of what contributes to what makes them uniquely abject. Part of not being reminded of our animal, gross nature is keeping our insides inside, where we never have to think about them. But vaginal sex requires being reminded of the inside of a body. No wonder so many horror movies involve a death during or right after sex. 

3. The damsel in distress

When women aren't the monsters in horror, they're often helpless and in need of saving. If the abject is the element in horror that makes it horrifying because of how it threatens the precarious hold we have on civilization and preventing carnivorous nature from going crazy on us, then the damsel in distress is what redeems horror. After all, what could be more acceptable to traditional society than protecting women from the horrors of what threatens order, so they can be free to have babies and make society grow, preferably out of sight so we don't have to grossed out by their abject and liminal bodies? Just ask Donald Trump! (I really hope that joke doesn't register with anyone in a few years.) 

A lot of horror movies do, of course, have a damsel in distress. The screaming horror movie woman is an old cliche that doesn't seem to be going away soon. When women aren't helpless, though, it's often because they're the monster. This is part of what makes the monstrous feminine uniquely feminine. Women are supposed to be helpless and protected by the males of the community, not threatening them. Somehow, a female monster feels more monstrous. 

4. The male gaze 

This is a theory term that isn't in any way tied just to horror. It applies to film studies across the board. There are lots of kinds of gazes in theory, but the one nearly everyone has heard of is the male gaze. We may think of looking as a neutral act, but according to the theory of the male gaze, nothing is innocent about "just looking." Western art has tended to depict women as sexual objects to be passively present and available to be observed by men for pleasure. Feminist film criticism often looks at how women are framed and situated within the shot, and whether this framing and situating tends to emphasize the character as a subject or object. 

I only bring this up because in "Viola," there is an interesting jockeying back and forth that goes on between two characters as they attempt to gaze at one another. 

The many ways "Viola" is impossible to pin down

When Viola is in "love jail" with the EMT, she feels herself "fixed in place by the softest pin," but the story is nearly impossible to pin down to any theoretical approach. Below are just some of the interpretations that occur to me, along with the ways in which the text undoes some of those readings.

1. It's tempting to read "Viola" as a somewhat man-hating fantasy in which women set up an alternate society without them. Viola's start as a vampire comes during World War I, when men are off slaughtering each other in one of the most gruesome real-world horrors that has ever happened. By contrast, the women Viola is around back on the home front seem to be quite content with their husbands gone. Some who were getting abused finally have bruise-free faces. 

Viola revels in how crude the women are, acting like stereotypical men who delight in scatological humor. She particularly likes Samarra, a manager at the factory. Samarra is the only one in the story who really is able to take care of Viola, although the EMT tries. Samarra provides food and clothing for Viola and her daughter Bea. It's Samarra who "occupies" Viola, turning her into a vampire. But unlike male vampires, females are polite. They have to get permission. Whereas in most vampire fiction, the act of biting a victim is a substitute for sex, with Samarra and Viola, the act of turning Viola into a vampire happens concurrently with sex, as Samarra is putting her fingers into Viola's special liminal space at the same time as she is biting her on the neck to turn her. It's an "occupation" that's bloody, but nonetheless far more civilized than the occupation going on in Europe at the same time. 

With the exception of the EMT and possibly Viola's husband who died, all the men in the story are a threat. They are mostly hunters, and they try to fix Viola in their gaze from beneath street lamps. It's clear they are hunting her as much as they are the animals in the area. So after one reading, I was more than halfway convinced this was an alt-feminist version of horror in which females are just way more sensible about being monsters than men are. 

But on the second read through, that reading fell apart completely. Viola doesn't become a strict lesbian who eschews the company of men forever. She's bisexual. Her name--especially when she names a dog after another Shakespeare character--calls to mind Viola from The Tempest, who is a woman pretending to be a man who is in love with a man but is trying to woo a woman for the man she is in love with. It's pretty gender- and sexuality-bendy, and Viola is herself quite fluid in her sexuality and in how she acts relative to gender expectations. When she loves men, it isn't predatory in any sense. She doesn't fuck them just for pleasure and she doesn't consume them when she's done. She genuinely cares for the men she is intimate with. 

Moreover, the story doesn't portray female behavior as always better than men. Samarra changes Viola but is unwilling to help teach her how to handle her immortality. Viola, thinking of what she's learned over a century of life as an immortal, bemoans "the tendency of women to wound their own." This may be a story about female monsters, and they might have somewhat different rules from men, but that doesn't make them essentially less monstrous. 

2. On many levels, it seems that Viola resists being seen as a damsel in distress, mainly because she of course isn't in distress. She's immortal. The hunters might see themselves as stalking her, but in reality, they're lucky if they don't end up on her menu. Nonetheless, Viola seems at least somewhat nostalgic about some aspects of chivalry. When she first meets the EMT, he thinks he is protecting her from obnoxious hunters in the parking lot of the Shop & Save. Viola's reaction is to spit loose tobacco onto the ground--that is, to resort to the abject, because she's not interested in being saved. Nonetheless, just before the EMT comes to her "rescue," she is pulling out a cigarette, and finds herself pausing "as if waiting for a light, an extinct ritual from a former life." Part of her finds the ancient practice of a man leaping to light a cigarette for any lady in the vicinity charming.

When the EMT comes to her house, he warns that her lack of winterization means she's "not protected." He offers to build her a house. Viola "doesn’t want him to build her a house but doesn’t mind the sentiment." Viola is actually kind of a sucker for even a chauvinistic gesture. The stereotypical angry feminist cooked up by Fox News would be so full of theory brain that she would immediately take offense to someone offering to build her a house because it was an attempt to control her through feigned protection. Viola can see that while protection is a mixed blessing, it's not entirely done with evil intent.

3. Is Viola abject? Other than the fact that she's a vampire and so feeds on blood and is a woman which, because of the female relationship to blood through their menstrual cycles, seems worse, she's only partly abject.

She is drawn to one type of abject behavior. Female shock comics who talk about sex in graphic detail or bodily functions are often considered abject, because polite ladies aren't supposed to talk about those things. But more than anything else about life among the women at the factory, it's their bawdiness that speaks to Viola. "Viola didn’t know women could speak so candidly, but she’d never been among so many, protected by war’s isolation," the narrative tells us. (Interesting that war here is thought of as "protecting her," given the complex relationship she has to being protected.)

Viola especially finds Samarra's ribaldry appealing. She remarks on how Samarra moves through a room like a "cleaver," a stock horror weapon of carnage. Samarra, whose "wide, expressive mouth made everything she said sound scandalous," seems to enjoy her vampire carnality with a gusto Viola lacks. Samarra is more than happy to eat her lovers when she's done with them, whereas Viola only engages in affairs with people she actually cares for. It's not hard to see why Viola and Samarra grew apart not long after one turned the other into an immortal. That being said, Viola never quite loses her fascination with the utterly abject Samarra, and when they meet after many years, Viola happily indulges in the "party" of a multi-day sex fest with her elder, followed by drinking down all the blood in the blood bank where the EMT works.

Viola is abject, but only sort of. She curses, and she likes that the EMT laughs when she does. But in the next breath, she is wondering if the EMT's biceps are defined, which is sort of a traditional, swooning female kind of thought. Her brain isn't quite a complete theory brain, meaning it's full of contradictions, because Viola is a real person. She's never able to fully subdue one half of her contradictory thoughts in order to bring order to her psyche.

4. Viola's liminal status is even more difficult to determine. If we include the sense of liminal that means "transitional," Viola certainly thinks she's not at all liminal. She contrasts herself to women at various "thresholds—after college, before marriage, before babies, after changing careers--" and thinks that because she will forever appear to be middle aged and no longer on the threshold of anything, she is able to pass unnoticed. "You’d be surprised how easy it is for an older woman to go unnoticed," both Viola and Samarra think.

Yet, she isn't ever completely unnoticed, because she's constantly subject to the gaze of hunters and people who regard her with suspicion. She thinks that as a middle-aged woman she's no longer liminal, no longer on any thresholds or in any transition, but she couldn't be more mistaken. When she was frozen in biological time, she was actually in the middle of a transition so big, it's often euphemistically referred to as "the change."  For Viola, "menstrual blood disappeared for months then, as if to compensate, returned with painful hemorrhaging." After she has to quit being an airline attendant because 9/11 identity regulations make it impossible for her to be anonymous, she returns "to America and moved to the Western Catskills, where she spent the rest of the century in and out of hot flashes, chased by an unleavened smell, fertile and not, fertile then not, joints swelling, trapped in a developmental doorway." (emphasis mine)

Poor Viola decided to enter immortality at a time in her life that would mean eternal menopause. That's maybe the most liminal space any woman occupies.

Her complicated liminality--both not changing and changing all the time--partly explains why she also has such a complicated relationship to various forms of male gazing, both desiring it and wanting to hide from it. She bares her shoulder to a child in the grocery store but also creates a spell to keep anyone from being able to find her house.

5. It's not even sure which feminine-monstrous archetype Viola is. Barbara Creed lists six folkloric archetypes:  the mother, the witch, the mermaid, the werewolf, the vampire and the undead bride. It might seem like Viola is obviously the vampire (which, because it quasi-sexually sucks life out of men, is similar to the succubus), but she's also kind of a witch. Witches are partly considered monstrous because they're crones/spinsters, old women no longer capable of producing life but only death. 

Before becoming a vampire, Viola's community found her threatening because she was nearing becoming a spinster: "The neighbors viewed Viola with suspicion for waiting until thirty to wed." She narrowly escapes the fate of a crone by marrying late and having a child, but mid-career as a vampire, she learns from a woman how to put a "glamour spell" on a house so it can't be found or, if she wants someone to find it, so the house will tell her whether she's compatible with that person. A glamour spell is a witch's occupation, and Viola is hard at work doing it, armed with a dog named for Shakespeare's king of fairies who also uses spells to trick people.

---

In short, no matter what kind of theoretical approach you try to apply to the story or what kind of archetype you try to find in Viola, both the story and Viola will slip the bounds you place on them. Viola is living contradictions, perhaps, as a response to the contradictory things both society and men want of women. The EMT is charmed by her curses, but cowed by her showing skin. He wants to protect her, but when he finds she can hunt as well as she can, he puts her in his own crosshairs, warning her that if you think someone is watching you, they are.

I once knew a guy in the Marine Corps who liked to say that he was looking for the type of wife who was a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen, and a whore in the bedroom. I hated that guy so much, I'd totally understand if any woman who met him became an angry, man-hating feminist. But wanting both a good wife and a wild whore is exactly what the EMT who breaks Viola's heart ends up doing:  "The EMT takes up with another local girl, homely with pretty eyes. Another progressive who insists that hunting is fair to the animal and who defers to him, unlike the bartender he keeps fucking even after he and the pretty girl marry."

Men are both fascinated by the abject and repelled by it. They want an abject woman to titillate them and also a demure woman to protect. Viola, who has to now suffer the long years of ideas "genuflecting" through time, is going to see every contradiction in both male and female desire, so it's no surprise if she becomes a series of contradictions herself to adapt.

A song that speaks to how men want impossible-to-achieve contradictions from women

What's the end for Viola?

At the end, Viola's granddaughter comes looking for her. Perhaps she wants what Viola once wanted from Samarra: instruction and guidance. Viola never gave it to her own daughter, Bea. Viola became immortal and unable to help her own daughter just as she was starting to try out abject monstrous womanhood herself ("she spit food and threw her plate"). Will Viola let down the defenses of her house and let her progeny in? Could the story itself be an undoing of the glamour spell that will allow women to learn from an ancestor? Will Viola, standing next to Oberon in mid-winter (the opposite of mid-summer, when Shakespeare's Oberon uses illusions to trick everyone), end the illusion? 

Viola finds herself wanting to kill someone deathless. Is it Samarra, who cursed her with immortality? Is it death herself, whom Viola saw on a train and wanted to befriend? Does she want to kill herself and end the long drudgery of immortality? Or is it something more abstract, like the longing she cannot kill through the endless years?

Also read: Karen Carlson emphasizes the "eternal life is a drag" nature of the story.

 

Behold as I "Say Anything" about "Jewel of the Gulf of Mexico" by Selena Gambrell Anderson (Best American Short Stories 2024)

"What I'm about to show you...might seem strange." -Uriah, from "Jewel of the Gulf of Mexico"

I never had a lot of anxiety about math in school. It's not that I was naturally great at it. I was okay. What made math low-stress for me was my secret weapon at home, which was my father. He had a B.S. in math, but it wasn't that he knew a lot about it that made it less stressful for me. It's that he had a very aw, shucks kind of calm simplicity to the way he thought about it, and he was able to communicate that approach to those who asked him questions. When you brought him a math question, he wouldn't immediately act like he knew the answer. He'd slowly talk his way through his reasoning process, not skipping steps, which allowed you to follow what he was doing. More than just following him, though, you would soon realize that math wasn't magic, and neither was he. It became apparent that he didn't just know how to do it. Even he had to think about it for a minute. It taught me that complex math was made up of simple steps, and even a good mathematician would walk through those steps. It also taught me that if you didn't panic, most problems could be broken down.  

I say all this because this story does kind of give me a lot of anxiety. I take it as a given that any good story has levels of meaning beyond the what-and-the-what-and-the-what of the plot, but with a story like this, even after a second reading, I only have glimpses of guesses as to what some of those levels might be. But maybe this is a good thing. I write these analytical posts for non-professional-literature people. If I'm having trouble with this story, I'd wager a lot of other people are, too. So rather than act like I have this all under control, I'm going to reason through this here, sharing not just my answers, but some of the process for how I get to those answers. 

1. Paraphrase

Cleanth Brooks coined the term "the heresy of paraphrase" to explain how he thought that form and content were so closely tied together, it was wrong to try to take the meaning away from the form by restating it in other words. I understand what he meant, but I also think it's a bit of a mystical approach to literature, one that treats texts like they'd too sacred to rip apart and get under the hood of. Paraphrase is helpful specifically because it removes meaning from form. Form is often a means to hide meaning, and stripping the two apart can help reveal what was hidden. Sure, once you've taken the two apart and formed some ideas about meaning, you need to put them back together to test out your theories, but it can still be enormously helpful to start with a simple summary. The dialogue and narrator commentary in "Jewel" is whip-smart and comes at you fast, but my starting point is going to be to make all of that dumb and slow.

Dumbed-down summary of "Jewel of the Gulf of Mexico"

The main character is the unnamed first-person narrator, but I get tired of writing "the narrator" in post after post. Some years, half the stories in BASS are unnamed narrators. The main character used to work at a jeweler's, so I'm calling him Jeweler Jim, or JJ. 

JJ is a young man, but no so young he doesn't already feel like he's late at figuring out his life. So far, he doesn't have much to show for anything he's done. He has negative 34 dollars in his bank account, he quit the only job with any promise to lead somewhere, and it seems like all the options out there involve selling out. He's kind of like the black Lloyd Dobler. 

He thought once that he was interested in jewelry, but more as an art form than a way to sell mass-produced pieces to clueless would-be husbands. That fell apart with a boss who was part paranoid about his employees stealing and part just didn't want to let JJ develop his skills. So JJ quit, but he hasn't found anything else to do since. To make matters worse, his extremely beautiful and spoiled rich long-term boo, Olivia, convinced him to knock her up as a way to shock his system into figuring his shit out. 

Other than the sell-out jeweler, the other example of the "success" that JJ is supposed to aspire to in the story is Uriah, Olivia's eccentric, rich, well-traveled father. Uriah got rich as a rap artist making music even he now thinks wasn't that good. By the time he was JJ's age, he had already peaked in music and was being ushered out the door of the industry. He took his seed money from music, bought hundreds of patents, and got much richer. But he still couldn't gain acceptance into rich people clubs, so he started collecting weird and useless items as a way to be let into their society. He settled on buying slave...memorabilia? artefacts? JJ wants to be somebody ("I wanted to be important,") but he feels terribly inferior, or "simple," compared to Uriah.

The entire story takes place the night of one party Uriah throws. At this party, as a way to get JJ to figure out his life, Uriah "loans" him the prized piece of his collection, a slave ship called the Berthea. Uriah takes JJ out for a spin in the ship in the Aransas Bay, off the coast of Texas and just a thin strip of barrier island away from the Gulf of Mexico. The ship is piloted by three of Uriah's lackeys, whom JJ dubs "the Bobbies." Uriah drops some pseudo-profound wisdom on JJ, then the ship begins to break apart, at which point JJ grabs it, takes it back to safety, and it breaks apart altogether. 

I feel like when Uriah was giving JJ shit for being so lost, JJ should have said, "I'm good at loving your daughter." That would've won Uriah over. 

2. Looking for patterns, images, recurring ideas

Once I've kind of got the plot down, one of the main things I look for in a story the second time through are repeated words or similar words, patterns, and the images in the story. From a writer's perspective, many stories come about through trying to see pictures in the writer's mind, but then in later drafts, writers will pick certain images, pictures, metaphors, etc. that seem to build to a theme. So I assume nothing is there by accident, and everything is a potential clue. With that in mind, here are some of the repeated words, ideas, and images:

It's later than you think

The story's opening lines are: "Springtime again. After ten o'clock." Springtime brings to mind the promise of youth, but the "again" means there's already impatience in that youth. And "after ten o'clock" means that even within the time of youth, it's getting late. JJ feels enormous pressure to have it figured out, and the baby Olivia is going to have makes it all much worse. 

At the party, he is seated "where the geraniums used to be." The flowers of spring are now gone, and JJ, like them, will soon be gone, too. Nearby is a former ballerina, already washed up at age 23. JJ is stuck trying to figure out his way in life, and it's all so, so much worse because he can feel the clock ticking and the final Jeopardy music playing. He senses that a lot of older people are full of shit, and yet they seem to be doing so well in their shit. In what may be my favorite line of a BASS story ever, he laments being forced to be a part of "someone else's stupid yet realized dreams." He resents having to watch Uriah enjoy his success: "You can only congratulate a person so many times. You can't be happy about the other person's good fortune forever. It's actually inhumane." The sense of time being nearly out before JJ's life has really begun makes all these feelings much stronger. 

JJ's body has a lot of reactions to stimuli

JJ seems to be having all kinds of psychosomatic responses to stress or to unpleasant stimuli. Here is a list of some of the ways his body reacts:

-choking 

-Glasses start to fog, the way they always do when he realizes he's about to get in trouble. (He also broke his glasses when he first met Uriah)

-body threatening to go supernova

-glasses fog up again in hallway

-the nothingness above the slave ship "poured into (his) stomach like sand"

-the talented tenth "raises his core temperature"

-his ears start to burn

JJ really wants a high level of intimacy with Olivia, but thinks it's impossible 

JJ twice mentions his desire to have a high level of closeness to Olivia, but also his feeling that it will never happen. Once, he thinks that he might have been relieved by how happy she made him, but "in reality, there's no such thing as mutual understanding. You're a chump to want it." 

Another time, in his mind, JJ imagines Olivia, and when he does, he imagines her reaching a hand back to scratch the back of her head, only "it felt like my head was the one getting scratched. That's how close I wanted to get to her." 

JJ clearly loves Olivia, even after a fairly long courtship. Nonetheless, he sees a threat in her. He describes her face using weaponry images, saying she has a "dagger nose, and chin pointed at my heart." Or again, he describes her looking at him "with lashing winds,"  something he's soon to become very familiar with when he rides the Berthea. 

There are a lot of earth elements in this story

Jewels and metals show up everywhere. They are trying to keep the story tied to Earth, but Uriah seems to think jewels represent something else, the "preternatural" and the "visionary." In other words, the transcendent, or that which goes beyond the Earth. But when he tries to take the Berthea, the "jewel of the Gulf of Mexico," out to sea, he finds it belongs to the land. He has misread what jewels mean. Dolphins, the mammals who figured out how to get off the land and take to the sea, just laugh at the attempt. 

Uriah isn't a total heel, but his experiences have led him to misread a lot of signs in life. He's slightly misread one sign after another, until he has come to believe that owning the tools of some of the most inhumane actions ever done by humanity are a sign of culture, of having "outdone himself." 

JJ has some self-made proverbs he lives by, but they're not really working out for him

JJ has tried to find some way to ground himself as he drifts through early life. He's come up with some bespoke proverbs. "Don't wait more than fifteen minutes for anyone" is one, and he claims it was given to him by God himself. Another is, "You only need directions if you're lost." He's trying to create rules to help him find his way, but he is still lost, and just like a man, he's too stubborn to stop and ask for directions. 

3. Okay, so what's the deeper point here?

I guess this is the point where I have to stop delaying and solve for X. Is there any hope for JJ and his "busted feeling"? In a world where even art seems to only be used cynically, can he hope to find some grounding? 

I think there is, and it's around Olivia's finger. Early in the story, she leans in next to him and tells him to snap out of it. She is wearing her engagement ring, which is "a pear-shaped amethyst that had survived two fire sales." This is the solid stuff of Earth, something made to last.

Most of JJ's dreams will, perhaps, come to nothing. We can't all be singers and artists. I myself am on year 22 of working a job while I wait to hit it big as a writer. But one of his dreams, it turns out, isn't all that stupid. 

Early on, JJ kind of kvetches that Olivia treats his failures like her own bad memories, but he doesn't realize that this is her giving him exactly the "scratch your head and I feel it on mine" kind of intimacy he's looking for. He figures it out at the end. When the boat crashes in the marsh and they are saved, she eases "herself under (JJ's) blanket like she'd been traumatized, too." She grabs him by the earlobes, perhaps sensing the "burning ears" he had just been feeling. She is in tune with all his crazy bodily reactions to everything. She looks at his eyes, and her own eyes turn to "sparkling confetti." JJ concludes, "That's how it is when you find what you're looking for." It's a catharsis with a one-sentence denouement, the simple "You crazy fool" from Olivia.   

JJ really does love Olivia. He might take shots at her for being one of the most spoiled black kids he's ever seen, but he loves her. And unlike a lot of the realizations characters come to in stories, the idea that this kind of earthly love is what can really ground us while we deal with the frustrations of not taking off and flying is actually a good insight about life. 

See also Karen Carlson's reading of this story, in which she does some good field work running down the origins of elements in the story, as she so often does. 

A corner where God isn't there: "The Magic Bangle" by Shastri Akella (Best American Short Stories 2024)

The first thing the narrator, Kartik, does in "The Magic Bangle" is attempt to erase his communal identity. He's from Hyderabad, India's fourth largest city, but when his father hits him after discovering a message from a man on a dating app, he decides to pretend he's from somewhere else. He goes around Hyderabad like he's a tourist, giving us, the readers, a good view of the city while he's going about. There are two reasons why it makes sense for Kartik to pretend he's an outsider. First, he feels like an outsider in his own home, where his parents are pressuring him to accept an arranged marriage. Second, since communities tend to give us our identity as much as a way to define us and control us within the communal order as a way to allow us to thrive, it's natural that Kartik would want to escape the control of the community. He imagines a gay utopia where where it's safe to love men, and he pretends to be from there.

But no sooner does Kartik seek to escape the control of community than he demonstrates what seems to be a contradictory impulse: he seeks the safety of a fortress. He wants autonomy from community, but he also wants the security that community can provide. Kartik is keenly interested in the layout of the Goldona Fort, one of the historical sites of Hyderabad, hiring a tour guide to show him "the fort's many tricks." Kartik enthusiastically notes the defensive advantages the fort provides: "Alcoves for soldiers to hide in plain sight. Unseen vantage points from which to pour hot oil on intruders. Kartik likes the clap trick best. When the watchtower soldier clapped, the sound traveled all the way to the courtroom: two claps for an approaching friend, one clap for a foe." 

The protections Kartik puts up are no less intricate.

Kartik hopes for a future in which he can hear the two claps that mean a friend is coming. These hopeful claps, however, are only available to someone who lives behind the enclosed fortress that community provides. So Kartik cannot make the choice that other non-conformists to community standards have made of living without a community. Kartik wants the self-fulfillment equivalent of having his cake and eating it, too, which is to be able to determine his own identity and yet still live safely within community. This has sometimes been called "autonomy within community," and it's sort of the perfect balance most humans long for.  

Kartik tries a few tactics to achieve this. The first is to hide. He tells everyone he's going out of town so he can get away. As a matter of fact, this isn't just hiding; it's repeating the soldiers' trick of hiding in plain sight. He's still in his hometown, but disguised as a tourist. When he meets Shahrukh, they continue hiding in plain sight together. They eat together at the Shadab Hotel in Hyderabad, "a place of communal eating" where "no one blinks an eye at them." It's a restaurant full of men eating together who have just come from Friday night prayers at the Masjid (Mosque). It's the very picture of community, and because of that, the two men are able to have their first date together without arousing the anger of the community. 

While they are seated, a qawwali--a type of Sufi music--plays, and the lyrics include these words from the 19th Century Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib: "Allow me, Imam, to drink in the mosque or show me to a corner where God isn't there." That is, allow me to sit in the symbol of community, but allow me to transgress the community's requirements while there. If not, allow me a place to remain unseen by the ultimate keeper of community standards." It's a wish to remain both true to one's desires but also not to be cast out from the community.

The bangle arrives

When Shahrukh pulls the bangle from his pocket, it feels as much out of place as Kartik is in his hometown. It's a magic item suddenly appearing halfway through a realistic modern story. It promises to answer questions, but it comes with a proviso: if it tells you what is going to happen in the future, you have to make it come to pass, because the djinn who gives the bangle its power hates to be wrong. Kartik later learns that the djinn really is from out of town: she lives in a minaret in the Thar Desert. 

The double-edged sword of identity

Identity is both something a community gives us and something we develop for ourselves. Both self-given and community-given identities have strengths and drawbacks, although we in the West probably think of self-given identity much more positively than we do the community-derived kind. Judith Butler, who probably has had more influence over gender theory and theory surrounding sexuality than anyone, was wary of identity. She believed identity came with high costs for both conformists and deviants, and she wanted both community-derived and self-derived identities to lose their power. She hoped for a general relaxation of our focus on identities. 

It's this relaxation of identities that presents a more permanent hope to Kartik and Shahrukh than hiding does, either out of sight of in plain sight. From the moment Kartik meets Shahrukh, he is in a world where the limits between communities begin to blur. Shahrukh is a Muslim named for a Hindu film maker. He speaks a mix of Urdu and Hindi, thus blending two linguistic communities. When they walk around the city, Shahrukh points to a Hindu temple dedicated to Lakshmi, which is next to a minaret (a tower next to a masjid/mosque), which represents a blend of two religious communities. 

The ultimate symbol of this hoped-for blurring of lines comes with the celebration of Holi, when the people of Hyderabad throw colors on one another:

On Monday they stand on the balcony and watch people on the street smear one another’s necks and faces with color and water. The sectarian difference, made particularly volatile under the current regime, vanishes. The only riot is that of colors staining the air pink, blue, and green. The only guns fired are water guns. The only shrieks are those that rise from throats drunk on bhang: milk steeped with cannabis, ginger, cardamom, and rose and served cold. 

In a carnivalesque moment, identities are blurred and it's possible to glimpse a future in which safety in community will be able to co-exist with one's own preferences. We don't know exactly what the magic bangle tells Kartik and Shahrukh about their future, but it involves the sound Kartik has longed for, the two claps that mean a friend is approaching. 

I would need a hell of a lot of bhang to not hate being around this many people who think it's okay to smear color on me. 

The story brings to mind another theoretical concept Butler was fond of, one she took from Foucault, the concept of "performative" speech. Most language merely repeats past usages of language, which is what makes it intelligible. But speech is also constantly being used in novel ways, ways which make the language change and evolve. At the extreme end of creative speech acts are "performative" acts, those which make something come into existence. Making a promise is such an act. In the story, a djinn predicting the future is performative, and woe to those who work against it. 

In a sense, though, the whole story is a performative act, an act of conjuring a better future through imagining that future. Akella himself reads the story that way in his author note from Fairy Tale Review: 

I recently endured a homophobic attack in Hyderabad, my hometown. In “The Magic Bangle,” I reinvent Hyderabad’s old district as a queer utopia. This decision was inspired by the myths my maternal grandmother once told me. In the South Asia of her tales, nonhumans and humans were equals, wish-granting djinns didn’t demand sacrifices, and god was a friend whose blue face you could playfully smear with mud. The telling of such fairy tales, I believe, isn’t escapist; it’s a way of wishing a desired future into being, of believing that “another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” (Arundhati Roy)

India already has much of the blurring of cultural and social lines that would make such a utopia come to be. Hindi and Urdu are both spoken in many families. Masjids are next to Hindu temples. Although the Modi administration has tended to make lines worse by acts of preference to Hinduism, the pieces are there. "The Magic Bangle" is a prayer to a hoped-for future to appear. 

Post-script: is political progress possible without identity politics?

I'm certainly sympathetic to a desire to blur lines and a dislike for identity politics. Butler was one of the few theorists I found myself (to the extent I could understand her) agreeing with as a student. It seems a bitter irony that one of the products of the influence of theory in American culture has been identity politics. 

Part of Butler's concern was that even if you create a new identity that is recognized by the community--say, LGBTQ people--that new community will no sooner come into existence than it will seek to create its own standards, which will reward those who conform and punish those who do not. Shows like Modern Family get big kick out of showing just how rigid some gay communities can get with policing dress, speech, and acts among their members. When many people say "that's gay" to mean "that's stupid," I think they're more referring to something like this, to a highly rigid, dogmatic, and fastidious guarding of arbitrary rules, than they are saying "homosexuality is stupid." 

Beyond the way sub-communities will continue to ostracize and create more and more sub-communities, I also find it gross the way identity politics gets commodified by capitalism. I often think that the reason corporate America embraces DEIA programs so fully is because it's good for the bottom line. If you can get people to self-identity as part of a community with knowable wants, then it's easy to sell to them. Get your Pride Day swag. Play your fuck-the-man rap music on an app you paid for on a phone you paid for while driving a car you paid for. The guy next to you is listening to a conservative podcast telling him how evil your music is using the same phone and driving the same car. No wonder the number of identifiable interest communities keeps growing.

So I'd love to put an end to America's obsession with identity, except there's a voice inside my head that just won't let me. LGBTQ didn't just become an identifiable community because evil corporations created them. It became a community because society was denying its members a necessary constituent of happiness. In our particular form of government, the most effective way to acquire rights is to form the type of community that is called an interest group, one that can collectively pressure the government for change. When dealing with the government, it's best to be able to present clear and unified demands, which means marginalizing sub-groups. There was a time not so long ago when groups like this were literal fortresses for LGBTQ people, when they meant the difference between life and death, or at least life and a life not worth living. So while it may be annoying when Pepper raises an eyebrow at your choice in ascot, that particular policing of community was inevitable the moment there was a group being unjustly discriminated against in society. 

I was all ready to give "The Magic Bangle" my full-throated approval, and I do, in fact, really like the story and join in its prayer for a future without borders. Part of me, though, wonders if the skillful literary resolution of the story can be turned into a real-world solution. Can performative speech really change the world, can an incantation really perform magic? 

Kartik tells a story of two lovers who are not allowed to be together, so the gods turn them into two intoxicating substances, tobacco and cannabis. It seems like it's only in moments of intoxication that borders really break down. The revelers at the Holi celebration have been drinking milk mixed with cannabis. Maybe that's what it takes to break down barriers is just a succession of intoxications. If so, "The Magic Bangle" is itself such an intoxication, and I hope those who read it felt a moment of blurred lines and blurred identities like I did. 

See also: Karen Carlson's reading of this story here. 

All the dumb clichés that are maybe true this time

Best American Short Stories drops at midnight. I'll be back to analyzing it this year, as it's pretty much the highlight of whatever it is I do on this blog. Each BASS comes with a foreword by the editor and guest editor, which I usually ignore. It's always about how things are dire in the world and how it's a miracle that art like BASS continues to survive and how critical art is in these dark times. 

Since the first election of Trump in 2016, I've not been a fan of two trends among liberals. One is the tendency to over-catastrophize. The election of the stupidest man ever to hold the highest office is calamity enough without looking for extra reasons to find it terrifying. The second is the refusal of liberals to acknowledge their own part in creating the monster of Trump. The result is that I've spent the last 8 years loathing the fact that Trump ever got past eleventh place in the primaries on one hand, and chiding fellow liberals on the other for finding a Trump conspiracy under every bottle of ketchup on the other. Those BASS forewords sometimes trip both of those triggers of mine.

Nonetheless, it does look like somehow, my fellow countrymates are going to elect him again in two weeks, and this time, not feeling any need to surround himself with grownups in order to make himself look like a real politician, Trump is going to feel free to do whatever dumb thing pops into his head. Meanwhile, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are all feeling bolder to do whatever they want to do, because they doubt the strength, resolve, and ability of what has been the world order to do anything about it. It really feels like Trump will be elected, he will force Ukraine to take a terrible deal or be conquered outright, and what has been called the liberal world order will officially come to an end. In its place will be a much more frightening world. 

In the 90s, it seemed to me at one point like in a mere twenty years or so, the world would have all its major problems solved. It now feels the opposite of that, like some kind of definitive doom is imminent, and only unlikely chance can prevent it. 

That's the environment in which I approach an attempt to seriously read twenty short stories that represent the best of what American letters produced in 2023. In the middle of the greatest angst I've felt since I was a kid thinking about nuclear fallout, I'm going to put all of my effort into reading, thinking about, and communicating my thoughts about twenty short made-up stories. It's a hugely frivolous thing to do, and it's also the only thing I can think of to do. 

There's never a time when there aren't more useful things to do than write or read or think about literature. We could always be feeding the poor or righting a wrong or curing a disease, but we read anyway. I don't know if this is a good or bad thing in the human race, but I know it's in our nature. So if we're going to do it anyway, we may as well try to do it well. So for the next several weeks, I'll be neck-deep in trying to do the least fuzzy-headed readings I can do, readings that are hopefully what the authors who wrote these stories deserved. 

How to punch at the meaningless multiverse

In ten days, Best American Short Stories comes out with its 2024 edition. I intend to blog through the stories, as I have almost every year since 2018. The big exception was last year, when I quit after seven of the twenty stories. Although I quit after the seventh, it was the sixth that did me in, which was Da-Lin's "Treasure Island Alley." I didn't outright hate the story, but I didn't think it was strong enough to merit being in a best-of collection. Trying to explain why proved too much for me, and left me feeling like I'm not good enough at this to keep doing it. 

So before I launch in to the 2024 version, I thought I might spend a minute getting the monkey (king) of that story off my back. What bugged me about that story, why was I so unhappy with my inability to explain what didn't work for me, and what do I want this blog to be in the future?

Let's start with this question: If I quit because I didn't think I was good enough, what does "good enough" mean to me? It doesn't mean creating analysis as good as someone whose whole life is literature could write. I've been clear about that since I started doing this. I abandoned literature as a profession after my M.A. for a reason, and part of that reason is that I didn't see the profession focusing much on communicating its knowledge to non-professionals. As someone who dived partway into the deep end of literary studies and then returned to the general population, my hope has been that I can shed some of the light that serious literary studies can bring to reading fiction on readers who are curious and intelligent but who may not have the background I do. I'm learned enough to understand how more advanced readings of fiction go, but not so much that I've forgotten how the kinds of stories that appear in BASS might appear to Jenny from HR who tries to read a few good books a year when she's able. 

Success to me is helping Jenny from HR to read a story in a deeper, more meaningful way by opening it up on a level she wouldn't have thought of on her own, but which she can still understand. It's writing posts that are part college-level paper and part personal reaction, because it's important to bring intellectual seriousness to reading, but also to keep in mind that we are doing this to become better people or to achieve a deeper understanding of life in some way. It's knowing there are smart people out there who very understandably read a BASS story and think, "What about this story is supposed to make it one of the best?" then helping them to see the answer to that question.

I never felt like I needed a ton of theory to do this. I was introduced to theory, both in undergrad and in grad school, in a very haphazard way. I never took an "Intro to Theory" class, for example. I just came across theory and then did the best I could to research until I understood enough to handle the assignment I had. That felt sufficient for what I want to do here, but last year, I decided that if I'm going to keep doing this for a few more decades, I ought to maybe get a little firmer grasp of both theory and the history of criticism. 

Right before starting BASS last year, I'd gotten into just enough theory and criticism that it actually made blogging harder. I was in "a little learning is a dangerous thing" territory, for sure. Rather than mostly using close reading, intuition, general knowledge of life and a little bit of professional knowledge, I now wanted to start putting more of the heavy-hitting esoterica of the profession into my work. But I was still too green at it to pull it off. As a translator who's learned a few languages, I liken it to the advanced intermediate phase of language learning, the one that takes the longest. You start to be able to read and maybe hear more sophisticated material. You get a feel for the terroir of the language, and you want your own use of it to reflect that taste and mouthfeel, but your active language skill isn't on the same level as your passive skill. Instead of getting better at speaking, you're suddenly worse, because rather than saying things in the simple way you've been saying them, now you're trying to remember that cool word or phrase you just heard and stumbling all over yourself. It's easy to feel at this phase like you're never going to get it, but you've got to remember that your passive and active skills will not advance at the same rate, and you have to allow yourself to keep using your safe and simple approach to speaking and not trying for too much until you're ready. There's almost always a simpler way to say something that will do eighty percent of what you want it to do. 

This year, I'm still not any kind of literary expert. I haven't gone back and gotten my Ph.D. I've continued to slowly read theory and criticism on my own. It will appear in my blogging this year a little more than it has before, but I'm still mostly relying on the old mix of close reading and instinct. When I'm feeling like a text is too much, I'm going to keep it simple rather than try to do too much. My work as a blogger here is a lot like my work as a translator. I'm trying to get the ideas across intact from one system to another. There's going to be some loss, but maybe the people receiving the message don't need every nuance that's there in the original. Or maybe they're capable of understanding more than I'd guess. 

In that spirit, I'd like to briefly return to "Treasure Island Alley" and attempt to explain more simply what didn't work for me. Often, when I don't like a story at all, I take a pass on it. A deep reading is hard work, and sometimes, if I just really don't understand a story, it's too much for me to do the work. I feel like this is justified; even literary professionals don't spend most of their time researching work they don't enjoy. Plus, I don't get any catty enjoyment out of shitting on a story written by a living author who takes their work seriously. I usually give only a brief explanation of why something didn't work for me, because I think it's owed, and then move on. Last year, I felt like I wanted to try a more detailed critique. I tried for something that was complicated beyond my ability. Now, I'd like to try a simpler version.

The quick critique after a long preamble

William Wordsworth was a self-serving douche who abandoned his liberal politics later in life when it didn't suit him anymore. He was a bad friend to Samuel T. Coleridge. He also changed poetry and aesthetics for the better forever. Two of his best known precepts about poetry, which I think apply to fiction as well, were that it should be a "spontaneous overflow of emotion" and also "emotion recollected in tranquility." In terms of the actual craft of writing, this tends to mean taking a subject that is deeply personal and working to achieve mastery over it through exacting use of words and imagery. You need both. Mastery of language by itself isn't enough, and raw emotion isn't enough. 

However, when the subject is something really massive, like, say, the absurdity of life in a multiverse  that shows no hint of ultimate meaning and in which all things die and move on to an uncertain fate, I don't believe that the emotion and the tranquility should be equally balanced. This is the big everything you're talking about here, the white whale of the universe. This is the reality of children getting cancer, of how everything survives by eating other living beings, of how everybody lives with uncertainty and fear until they die and go who knows whither. 

True aficionados of boxing enjoy highly technical boxers whose every move in the ring is controlled and calculated. These boxers might win a lot of fights by decision, rather than by knockout, because rather than lunge for big shots, they keep themselves out of range of punches continually and then take small shots when they're available. 

When a writer is taking on the Great Asshole behind life in the meaningless multiverse, though, I don't want a highly technical boxer. I want a street brawl. This should feel like someone trying to kill the murderer of their children, not like fencing at the Olympics where it's for points. There should be shots taken and received. There should be wild swings taken in rage that land nowhere. Craft should sometimes go out the window. 

Does this look like a guy who cares about workshopping his story?

The best example of this kind of writing is, of course, Moby Dick, the original harpoon shot at the white whale. Melville, interjecting his own voice over that of his narrator Ishmael as he does often in the novel, calls the whole novel nothing but a "draft of a draft." And there are, in fact, some glaring plot holes and technical mistakes in the novel. To me, though, those mistakes make the novel better, rather than worse. When you're stabbing at your enemy from hell's own heart, that is not the time to write eleven drafts that are more and more controlled. 

Other examples of wild swings at the meaningless multiverse that are made better by their imperfections are the science fiction story "The Difference Between Love and Time" by Catherynne M. Valente, the sci-fi/kung fu mashup movie Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, and the high-concept sci-fi comedy series Rick and Morty.

I was recently talking about Everything, Everywhere, All at Once with an Asian-American colleague, and I was trying to explain how the movie's imperfections were part of what made it so great. She thought I was criticizing it, and she said I would have appreciated it more if I were an Asian-American woman, but in fact I was trying to say that the very mess of parts of it were why I liked it so much. Remove Hot Dog Fingers Universe from the movie and you have less of a movie, even though it would have been 87% less silly. The movie is dealing with alienation big and small, both with a young Chinese-American woman feeling like her mother is disappointed in her and also feeling like the fact that infinite versions of herself spread out over the multiverse mean nothing matters. It ain't got time for worlds that make perfect sense. 

Here are the first two sentences from "Treasure Island Alley": "The mourning women are howling. Even with fingers in her ears, Xuan-Xuan hears their loud cries from the big white tent that appeared overnight in the alley." 

Here are the opening lines to "The Difference Between Love and Time": "The space-time continuum is the sum total of all that ever was or will be or ever possibly could have been or might conceivably exist and/or occur, the constantly tangling braid of physical and theoretical reality, (steadily degrading) temporal processes, and the interactions among the aforementioned. It is also left-handed." 

Obviously, the second one has not completely given up the "recollection in tranquility" half of Wordsworth's equation, but the rambling tone of the first sentence, the struggling to deal with the way that there is so much to contain in the story that it will never all fit in, fits the theme much better than "Treasure Island Alley's" restrained approach that takes a textbook Iowa Writers' Workshop five-senses approach. 

"Treasure Island Alley" is a mismatch between form and content because its balance of "powerful emotion" and "recollection in tranquility" is out of whack. With the big white whale of everything, the balance between the two shouldn't be equal. "Treasure Island Alley" feels like a story that went through workshops. It feels like a story that was worked on for a long time. It's fine to actually spend years working on a story, but the end result, when you're talking about going up against the absurdity of life in the multiverse, shouldn't feel like you spent years. It should feel like you sat down at a keyboard and bled all over it in one sitting. "Treasure Island Alley" feels like the result of therapy and weekend retreats. There's no mess in it. 

From time to time, people recommend therapy for me. I'm sure I have issues that therapists often claim to be able to deal with, like anxiety and indecisiveness. But I'm never much interested in it. I have some friends who go to therapy, but because those friends are dealing with such insurmountable life issues that are out of their control, there's not much the therapist can really offer. A therapist can be useful for someone who is clearly hurting themselves, like a person with anger issues who keeps getting fired or arrested. What can they do for someone married to a borderline schizophrenic who has taken their kids and moved to Thailand? What can they do for someone who is struggling to take care of multiple sick family members? Someone who is already doing the best they can, who really has no obvious improvements they can make to improve their lives? Nothing, really. Just sit there and reaffirm what they're already doing. 

I don't go to therapists because ultimately, most of my anxiety and indecisiveness comes down to how it seems like we're in a scary, violent, chaotic, lawless universe with no power playing parent to keep all the unruly children from killing one another. Therapy has nothing useful to say to me about that. Fiction might, but not if it gets therapy language all mixed up into it. Therapy is useful for people who've already decided it's worth the effort to try to change. It can't answer the question of why it's worth trying to change in a universe that is, by all appearances, devoid of meaning. I feel like "Treasure Island" has so much recollection in tranquility to it because it didn't do enough feeling the powerful emotion it should have. 

It's quite possible that I'd rather actually be around a writer like Da-Lin in real life than around the people who more successfully recreate the feeling of being disoriented in the multiverse. Apparently, at least one of the creators behind Rick and Morty has a very questionable character. Maybe if he quit thinking so much about the disorienting multiverse and more thinking about self-compassion or saying phrases like "grief is love with nowhere to go" or whatever they say in therapy meetings, he'd be less awful to be around. Would he also then be less adept at tackling the big fish of the universe? One of the most interesting developments of the last few seasons of Rick and Morty has been Rick's embrace of therapy with Dr. Wong. Will Rick eventually be able to incorporate the very terrestrial wisdom of Dr. Wong, knowing all that he knows about the reality of everything? Can the therapy of the calmest and most perceptive therapist in the universe help the smartest man in the universe? 

I don't know, but it's interesting to see if Rick can ever escape his never-ending dark night of the soul precisely because he's so obviously actually been in that dark night. A story that starts to cauterize wounds before they're fully formed isn't quite there. It might be a healthier attitude to life, but it's a weaker story.