At last, the writer himself is skeptical of literature so I don't have to be: "Dorchester" by Steven Duong (Best American Short Stories 2024)

Pretty much every year I've blogged BASS, I've hit a point where I start to wonder if literature has any real social value, by which I usually mean whether it has the ability to help change anything from bad to better. There will be very heart-wrenching story about something terrible going on in the world, and I'll wonder: does this story, as sharply as it's written and as keenly as it observes the terrible thing, do anything? Does it help at all to make that terrible thing less terrible, less likely to happen? Stories that have led me to ask these kinds of questions include "The Hands of Dirty Children" by Alejandro Puyana and "Anyone Can Do It?" by Manuel Munoz.

"Dorchester" by Steven Duong even outdoes me with its skepticism about literature, because it goes a step beyond just wondering about whether literature, in this case a poem written by the main character, Vincent, has any social utility. Vincent questions not just whether literature is useful in fighting injustice, but whether the community that produces and supports it is always true and honest. Accusations that poets lie go back at least as far as Plato, of course, but Vincent seems to be calling out art in a way even Plato didn't. Plato complained that poets made up events that hadn't ever really happened. Vincent is accusing art of being, at least occasionally, emotionally false. He's not accusing just any poem of this kind of falsehood, but his own poem about a recent hate crime against an elderly Vietnamese woman, a poem that has gone viral among the kinds of people who follow poetry: 

Even then, before the poem was published, before it was widely shared by online literary types and blown up by the Chinese American congresswoman who retweeted it in May along with the appropriate hashtags, I knew that the best response to a horrific act of violence was not this poem. I told myself that I had to put my feelings into words, that this was how I dealt, how I coped and mourned. And it was. But there was also a thrill in writing about something so recent and terrible, a thrill, too, in connecting it to the various swirling traumas of my own life, however tenuous the connections. Even before I had a full draft on the page, I imagined people encountering my poem on a pristine website, sharing screenshots of it, chittering away in various comments sections, making careful conjectures about the relationship between the speaker and the poet. I wanted the noise. It was ugly of me to want it so badly, but I did.

That's some pretty bold stuff, even in a work of fiction, because it's opening the door to the possibility that artists are sometimes publicity whores, even when they're seemingly writing about tragedies concerning communities they themselves identify with. I imagine that's a part of art most "online literary types" would prefer not to think about. Conservatives have been accusing liberal outrage about certain high-profile instances of injustice as "virtue signaling" for years, and Vincent isn't too far from saying the same thing. 

Vincent works among these "online literary types." It's not exactly clear what his employer is. It might be a literary magazine, or it might be some kind of community arts organization. One of Vincent's jobs appears to be to convince people to pay $800 for a six-week lyric essay class, which itself seems a wry kind of commentary on the ways in which "literature" is for privileged people. The workers there seem well meaning. Vincent describes their opinions on politics and literature as "pristine," the same word he used to describe the website he dreamed of his poem appearing on. 

Pristine things usually require some effort to maintain in a pristine state. They have to be encased in plastic and set on a shelf, kept apart from interactions with the environment that might damage them. Calling both the website and the ideology of the literary workers pristine is to point out how insular they are. Everyone complains about how the Internet and social media have served to divide us by allowing people to only associate with others they agree with, but the "online literary types" are no different. 

Vincent compares writing his poem to doing his job. They both are very easy to do once you figure them out:

    About his job:  "It was a job anyone could become good at given enough time and Adderall."

    About his poems: "My poems came from a scary and uncertain place, and this was because they came easy to me. This was the most shameful part. It was easy for me to write in an angry way, using a large and prophetic voice I did not entirely believe in to describe the hurts I had accrued, to write the word body and mean a thousand imagined bodies, bruised and bleeding, to write the word war and mean some argument I had with my mother once over dinner. I wrote like this all the time. I wrote this poem about the woman in Dorchester in one sitting."

Nearly all advice about writing poems or stories or essays or whatever tends to present it in terms of "craft." It breaks down writing a great poem or whatever into techniques and steps. Because anyone can do these steps, it seems like a wonderfully democratizing thing to have art consist of the performance of craft. But it also means that anyone, whether they are sincere or not, can simply master the steps and perform them. AI can do it. An artist can also help his cause by understanding the expectations of the reading community, which Vincent clearly does. Erica tells Vincent his poem is brave, but there's nothing less brave than writing a poem that the intended community is guaranteed to approve of. 

The antithesis of bullshit

In stark contrast to Vincent's cynical use of craft, the expectations of his literary community, and even his own identity is his relationship to Leah, his quasi-dominatrix girlfriend. Although they met under circumstances that led them to perform certain community expectations, telling sob stories about how hard it was to grow up Asian to the Asian student society in college, Leah and Vincent soon develop a great deal of authenticity in their relationship to one another. Vincent tells Leah his big family secret, which is that his mother lied about them being refugees who got out on a boat just as Saigon was collapsing. They were actually regular immigrants who left Vietnam nine years after the war. 

It's not clear why Vincent's mother preferred to tell the story the way she did. Maybe she wanted to inspire her kids with stories of her family's narrow escape. Maybe she enjoyed being admired for her perseverance through trials. Whatever the case, Vincent, who originally applied to his writing program saying his mother's stories were the inspiration for him wanting to be a writer, is now afraid that he will somehow inherit her penchant for framing stories in ways that wrap himself in the suffering of others for the sake of his own ego. 

Admitting this to Leah unlocks something in her. "I had greased some secret machinery in her, whatever it was that allowed her to be who she was." She sticks two fingers down his throat, yanks his head down, and presumably forces him into cunnilingus. But before that, she tells him the words that become the bedrock of their relationship. She says she doesn't think she can ever lie to him. 

It's surprising, given how much time Vincent spends in a collar around Leah and how much of the time is her ordering him around and ignoring his wants, but their relationship is kind of sweet, and it works. It works because there's no bullshit to it. It's possible to try to guess at reasons why each person craves the roles their do in their dominant/submissive relationship. Maybe Vincent, whose mind is always racing as he crushes packs of Adderall, likes the way being put in a collar and told what to do focuses his mind. Maybe Leah, who suffers anxiety in crowds or from unexpected noises, likes the comfort of being in control. Whatever the reasons, what's most important about the relationship is that it's not something either one does to gain approval from any communities they belong to. Nobody knows about it but them. They do it because it feels right and it feels honest to them. They'd tried other arrangements, and none felt right. So they do it this way. That's all there is to it. 

Leah's way of talking to Vincent echoes the honesty of their arrangement. "She always texted in short commands like this. It was a great power of hers. Her economy of language drove me into brick walls again and again," Vincent confesses. She just says what is, and this has more power than any of the carefully curated language used by the writer-administrators he works with. She's a better judge of his poem that anyone else is.  

I wonder if dominatrices in general make good literary critics. 

What kind of change has Vincent undergone at the end?

It looks for a moment like Vincent disavows bullshit, that he has refused his inheritance of "the liar's gene" from his mother. The moment when he is about to be honored by reading his viral poem aloud at a "Stop Asian Hate" rally, he "swallowed two Adderall and boarded the red line to Dorchester." Getting on the bus to Dorchester is exactly what the speaker in his poem, the one he wrote but didn't mean, did. It seems at this point that he's trying to give his poem some after-the-fact sincerity by meaning what he didn't mean when he wrote it. He realizes he doesn't belong on the same stage as the daughter of the slain woman. She means what she says. So he goes to Dorchester almost as penance, to try to recapture some authenticity. 

That's what seems like the catharsis, but then there's a denouement that seems completely out of tune with the catharsis. Back with Leah and serving her needs, he checks a mouse trap he's set. There's a mouse in it, and although Vincent had wanted to set the mouse free, he can see the mouse's legs are maimed and he'll have to put it out of its misery. He can immediately see himself writing a poem about killing the mouse, and as he writes it in his head, he is already starting to duck the truth. "There were so many ways to write the true thing, but I wouldn’t. I wanted the lie. I wanted what I wanted, and no amount of leaves and water could carry it away from me." The "leaves and water" are a reference to something a therapist had recommended to him, that when he had a stray, interrupting thought, he send it down a river in his mind, like a leaf on a current. But Vincent can't. He's got the "liar's gene" too bad. 

The story is, in my mind, at least the equal of Plato in terms of calling the value of art into question. It's obviously not telling us that art is always insincere, or else this would have been a non-fiction essay instead of a short story. But it is the work of an artist who is willing to undergo more honest introspection than most, who will tell us artists need to beware when they are being feted, because it is so easy to substitute what we want for what is true. It may be baked into the DNA of the artist such that it will never be completely eradicated. 

The people around Vincent tell him his poem is "brave," which of course it isn't. But Duong writing this story was brave, and it was brave of The Drift to publish it, and it was brave of BASS to include it in its anthology. 

See also: Karen Carlson's look at this story, in which she disagrees with the narrator about the poem's quality.