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.