Reading the Constitution "the way the founders meant it," part two

We can be forgiven for thinking that reading is easier than it is, that meaning is less elusive than it is. We start reading at a young age, and when we do, we feel there aren't that many ways to interpret, "See Dick run." Maybe we all suffer from the delusion that what comes after Dick and Jane is really just an addition of more complicated words that hide a still simple meaning, that all we do between kindergarten and grad school is move from, "See Dick run" to, "Perceive Richard perambulate." 

In fact, though, reading is incredibly complicated, and it doesn't matter much whether you're operating from an "intent of the author" or "intent of the text" point of view. Proponents of both probably prefer their approaches because they think that in them they have found greater simplicity, but both have their difficulties. 

If we think the best way to read is to try to understand what the writer meant by X, we sometimes have to play psychologist or historian or sociologist in a way that may never lead to conclusive results. Hell, how often do we all say things when we struggle ourselves to understand what we mean by them? And that's in spite of having essentially all the inside information possible. Humans always have multiple, overlapping and sometimes contradictory reasons for the things they say. Looking to the writer to sort out what the psychologically complicated writer meant isn't always going to help make sense of things.

On the other hand, an intent-of-the-text approach has its own problems, because it can be hard to know where to stop interpreting. If a Shakespeare play includes a line that says, "There is no clock in the forest," and you see links between that and some French literary theorist's work on temporal assumptions in pastoral literature, does it matter that Shakespeare would have had no idea what you were talking about? If you see a conflict in ideas about race in the character of Shylock, does it matter that Shakespeare himself wouldn't have been aware of those conflicts? At what point does this re-reading of an older text become an exercise in injecting our modern ideas into it? Or is it appropriate to read our modern ideas into it, because modernity has, we hope, more understanding of the topics now than the writers themselves did? 

When I wrote about author-centric and text-centric approaches to reading the Constitution a few weeks ago, it may have sounded like I was arguing that text-centric approaches are better, or that author-centric approaches are too simplistic. That's not entirely the point. I don't think either text-centric or author-centric approaches are entirely satisfying. A good reading of nearly any text involves at least some of both, and a good reader will instinctively know which kind of reading to apply based on the nature of the text itself. The more important point is that reading isn't easy. People who think it is, or who have political motivations to make it seem like it is with a given text, are happy to jump from author-centric to text-centric readings and back again without even noticing they're doing it, acting the whole time like whichever mode they're operating from is the natural and obvious one.  

"The founding fathers would be rolling over in their graves"

One conservative author-centric tactic is to conjecture on how the founding fathers might have reacted to American society today. What would Madison, Jefferson, Monroe, Hamilton, Franklin, etc. have thought of same-sex marriage? Drag shows? Divorce rates of around fifty percent? Out-of-wedlock children? The conjecture is usually that the founding fathers would have been aghast, would have wondered where America went so wrong. This is based on the fact that (so we believe) these things did not exist in 1789 America, and to the extent they did, they received society's unmitigated disapproval. Therefore, any political argument that the Constitution allows for--much less approves of--such social trends is unthinkable.

It has a certain common-sense appeal, but there are reasons to be suspicious of the intuitive appeal. Yes, if Jefferson had been given a crystal ball and seen visions of the future that included a gay wedding and a drag show with no further explanation, he might have thought his future country was destined for the judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah. If, however, he had been told about all humanity would learn in the ensuing centuries about science and human nature and comparative religion, of all that would happen in world history, he might have a different opinion. In a different hypothetical scenario, what if Alexander Hamilton had drunk from the fountain of youth in 1789 and lived until the present? Would he have continued to think like a man of his class, race, and time in 1789, or would he have come to think like a modern humanist neo-liberal? 

It's an impossible question to answer, of course, which only points to the limitations of author-centric readings. 

Reading is hard, but not impossible

I get why people want to think that reading is easier than it is, and not just people whose political opinions I disagree with. When I was in graduate school, I was subjected to a host of continental European literary theorists and philosophers--what one critic has called the "French Foreign Legion" of thinkers. At least some of them seemed to believe reading was so hard, that true communication was so impossible, we could never understand what anyone meant by anything, and reading was all just a masturbatory journey of trying to decipher a code that could never be deciphered. I found that more than a little bleak, and probably unnecessarily bleak. Just because something is difficult does not mean it's impossible. Or perhaps more accurately, just because something cannot be done with perfect precision does not mean it can't be done with relatively more or less precision, that there aren't some readings that are closer to the truth than others. If that's not true, then the reason most people write and read--the hope to find one's most difficult-to-formulate thoughts either reflected or shared--is a stupid reason to create or read literature. The desire to connect would all be in vain, would always be in vain. 

It's tempting, then, to adopt a philosophy that takes the ability to grasp meaning in writing as a given, if nothing else in defiance of joyless and abstruse philosophers who would have us questioning why we read at all. But overly simplistic readings in the defense of meaningful human discourse is no virtue, just as insisting on the complexity of interpretation in spite of the difficulties that come with it is no vice.

Reading in good faith

What's important more than sticking to any one theory of exegesis is to be honest about the extent to which one is shifting exegetical approaches speciously in support of one's own position. For example, when Justice Alito argued in his opinion in his Dobbs opinion that we could try to partly define the meaning of "liberty" by looking at what political liberties people had in 1868, he was taking an extra-textual, or author-centric approach, however much he might have claimed to be sticking to the text of the Constitution, which chooses to leave the term vague. But when Lauren Boebert says she doesn't believe the Constitution supports a separation of church and state because that literal phrase isn't in the Constitution itself but instead in a "stinking letter," she is being a fundamentalist about sticking only to the text. As others have pointed out, Justice Kavanaugh both did and did not accept unenumerated rights in the Constitution on Dobbs. He sided with the majority in determining that since the Constitution does not mention abortion, it isn't protected, but then he speculated that travel from states where abortion is illegal to those where it's legal would be protected by a Constitutional "right to travel," which is not a right mentioned in the Constitution, either. 

You ever see someone and feel like you already know what kind of person they are, because you feel like you've met that person several times before? That's the vibe Boebert has always given off for me. 

There's nothing wrong with going back and forth between author-focused, text-focused, and even reader-focused (i.e., what does the text mean to me?) readings. There's nothing especially wrong about mixing straightforward and nuanced exegesis. The question is whether one is doing these things in good faith, because one passage seems to call for a type of reading that is different from another passage, or whether one is doing it because it's the most expedient way of proving the point you knew you wanted to prove all along. 

I suggested that we owe the author-centric reading to Christian exegesis. My friend, an expert in the classics, disputed that, but I think that Christian hermeneutics has undoubtedly had an influence on how many Americans approach their reading of other texts. Christianity's belief in a Jesus who is "the same yesterday, today, and forever" had lead to a belief that the way people understand the Bible today should be the same as how people understood it 2,000 years ago. (As though there was unanimity then!)

This isn't the only way Christian hermeneutics have influenced the way ordinary people think of the Constitution. There is a type of Christian reading of the Bible that will assume a literal reading is the obvious best approach when the Bible is saying women should be submissive to men, but then applies a great deal of nuance when the Sermon on the Mount instructs believers to turn the other cheek. I don't mean to single out Christians for irresponsible reading here, when they're certainly not the only ones who practice reading negligence, but Christian exegetical readings seem to be especially relevant to and influential in readings of the law in America. 

My goal isn't to necessarily get anyone to drop their cherished religious or political philosophies. If that were my goal, I know I'd fail at it. Cherished ideas are not typically abandoned in a day's work. My goal is humbler: to encourage everyone to question their own analytical and interpretive practices, to question whether the approach taken is determined by what the facts seem to call for or because we want the facts to line up with what we believe.

The preamble, which I ironically bring up here at the end of this post

In the case of the Constitution, I think one passage that both author-centric and text-centric readers often overlook is the preamble, which gives several reasons why the Constitution was written:

-to form a more perfect Union, 

-to establish Justice, 

-to insure domestic Tranquility,

-to provide for the common defense, 

-promote the general Welfare, and

-to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity

When we are in a quandary about how to read something not made explicit, I think this preamble is the best heuristic available. Asking ourselves which reading helps to form the better union, better establish justice, better promote the general welfare, is the right approach. 

Of course, there are a lot of vague terms in there: union, justice, welfare, liberty, etc. Those words have an even greater sense of awe and mystery in the original because the founding fathers liked to follow a pseudo-German custom of capitalizing nouns they thought were important. It's like they knew words like union, justice, tranquility, welfare, and liberty were ideas too big for even their prodigious and curious minds to hold, so they wanted to preserve as sense of awe around them and leave it up to others to think of those ideas according to their own lights. It's the reason the list of reasons for writing the Constitution ends with the concept of "Posterity," that is, us. 

I would argue that this mention of posterity is a hint that the Constitution can be read somewhat more loosely than an orthodox Jew reads the Torah. The Constitution is something the founding fathers gave to us. Why? To form a more perfect union, establish justice, etc. If modernity generally feels that "liberty" includes the right to an abortion, the founding fathers didn't mean to keep us tied to only the freedoms they explicitly laid out. 

This is the only way toward the "new birth of freedom" that Lincoln hoped for. Lincoln himself was a rather creative reader of the Constitution. He had to be. The exigencies of the day called for reading the Constitution in a way nobody ever had before. He decided that his first responsibility was to protect the Constitution, and that if the country collapsed, it would be impossible to do that, so he took powers for himself that the Constitution didn't say he had in order to save the Constitution. 

Was he right? Probably not about everything, but he was about a lot of things. I think we, too, should seek to fit the Constitution to the reality of the day, rather than the other way around. 

Literary reading and originalist readings of the Constitution

In any Lit 101 class in America, you're pretty much guaranteed to get the following scenario. A professor explains how a text is saying things beyond what is literally written on the page, either through implication or symbolism or juxtaposition of images or metaphor or other indirect methods. One student or many, annoyed by what seems a kind of legerdemain or sophistry, will object. "How do you know that's what Hawthorne meant by that?" Or, "What if Melville was just telling a good story and the whale isn't a symbol of God or the universe or anything? Where does it say that it's a symbol of those things?" And so on.

On the one hand, I admire the spirit of these classroom heretics. It represents a deep-seated American skepticism toward authority, be it political authority or intellectual. You can see this skepticism in some of our earliest literature, like "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." In that story, the learned school teacher is held up as an object of scorn and derision by the strong and practical Bram Bones. It's kind of like Disney's Beauty and the Beast, only in this version, Gaston is the hero and the professor really is just crazy. I remember my advisor as an undergrad at Walsh University commenting on "Sleepy Hollow" being an example of how once an idea gets into a culture, it never quite goes away. We still have a strain in America of preferring the rough and manly man to the nerd, a strain that can be seen in any number of Adam Sandler movies or Animal House. The classroom skeptic objecting that the professor's fancy readings of stories flies in the face of good 'ole common sense and is just meant to give the professor an excuse to show off and lord his learning over other people is part of this tradition.

NERRRRRRRRRRRRD!

 

I've dealt with this strain of thinking before as a commenter on literature. For example, when I wrote about various readings of homoeroticism in Lord of the Rings, I got a couple of people insisting that because Tolkien was a devout Catholic, he didn't intend for anyone to read the relationship between Frodo and Sam in a romantic way, and therefore any reading of Sam and Frodo's relationship that left room for romantic feelings was unequivocally wrong.  

The argument against "common sense" readings

It's usually at this point that annoying literary experts like to invoke something called the intentional fallacy. Introduced by W.K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe C. Beardley, the intentional fallacy sought to tear down what had long been considered to be (and still is considered to be by most ordinary people) the "common sense" approach to literature, which is that "in order to judge the poet's performance, we must know what he intended." (Wimsatt and Beardley use "poet" throughout their essay, as that is the art they are considering, but their argument works nearly the same for other works of art.) 

Wimsatt and Beardley argue that although a work of art obviously originates in the mind of the poet, "yet to insist on the designing intellect as the cause of a poem is not to grant the design or intention as a standard." The gold standard is not to arrive at what the poet meant, but what the poem itself says. There are several reasons Wimsatt and Beardley see for this: 

1) The design or intention is not available to us, except in what is in the poem itself. "How is (the critic) to find out what the poet tried to do? If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do."  

2) Just like you judge a car by how it works or a cake by how it tastes, so with a work of art. Poetry doesn't mean; it is. Critically, Wimsatt and Beardley point out, this makes poetry different from "practical messages," which "succeed if and only if we correctly infer the intention." Whether this matters when looking at non-fiction like, say, a constitution, we shall consider later. 

3)  When we read a poem, we should read the words as the words of the speaker of the poem, not the author. The author might have views at odds with the speaker in the poem she created.

4) Authors revise works. Does that mean the intent changes? Which intent in the creative process is the one we should take as the "real" intent? 

As a society that believes strongly in intellectual property, we have come to accept that the author maintains not only commercial interests in her work, but controlling interest in how those works are interpreted. New Criticism, though, which adopted the intentional fallacy as a principle, does not accept "the authority of the poet outside the poem." Instead, "the poem belongs to the public," because "it is embedded in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge." 

This might sound like sophistry, but I think even with what Wimsatt and Beardley called "practical messages," we occasionally see an application of the principle. The other day at work, a person above my immediate boss sent me a calendar invitation for a one-on-one meeting. I don't normally have one-on-one meetings with this person. The request came a day after we announced a rather significant reorganization within my office. I wondered: was I about to find I'd been made redundant by the reshuffle? The next day, however, I talked to my teammates and found we'd all gotten the same meeting request. We then deduced--correctly--that this was more of a "let's talk about your feelings after the announced reorg" meeting. 

When I talked to this person, I told her how all of us had been scared when we got the meeting invitation, because we didn't know when we got them that we weren't the only ones getting them and there was no explanation of what the subject of the meeting would be. She acknowledged that she should have been more careful sending the invitations out, although it was, of course, not her intent to frighten us. 

Judging the author's intent in this case is important to how I feel about the author with whom I work, but it isn't important to judging the message itself. The message did something the author did not intend. If a meeting invitation can do this, how much more a work of art. 

So how do you read a text, then?

Instead of trying to deduce what an author wanted to say in a text, the correct subject of literary studies is to look at the intent of the text. If we judge an engineer's intent by how the car works, then for an author, all we have to go on is the text they left. We can still use biographical and historical information in our study of the work, but it now plays a different role. Rather than using it to find the author cluing us into hidden interpretations not found in the work itself, we use it to establish ground rules for "the public" to use. 

For example, if a word meant something when the author wrote it that it doesn't mean now, we should use the meaning that was in circulation when the author wrote it. If a text from 1803 says someone was "gay," that means they were happy. If a text refers to something that happened in the real world, we can research to find out what the author knew or thought he knew about that real event. 

What we can't do is look at events in the life of the author or extratextual statements the author made about the work and use those to try to intuit what he really meant in a work of art. The work of art may say things we think the author clearly did not mean to say, but if they are in the text, then the text matters more than our psychoanalysis of the author. If Tolkien disapproved of homosexuality but his text contains images and interactions between characters that readers often see as involving varying degrees of same-sex romantic feelings, then it's in the text whether Tolkien wanted it there or not. 

This does not mean we go to the extreme of favoring the "intent of the reader" over the intent of the text. We don't read more homoeroticism into the story because we happen to enjoy that which is homoerotic. We don't ignore attitudes present in a text because we dislike them. We are disciplined and keep within the words and spirit of the text. However, "intent of the text" standards do tend to lead to more freedom of interpretation than "intent of the author"-based ones, because rather than assume a unitary mind of genius and a single, coherent purpose, we are permitted to view the text as being at times in tension with itself. 

What's this got to do with reading legal texts?

You might say that it's well and good to read a novel or sonnet like this, but with the law, shouldn't we try to understand the original meaning of the authors? Isn't a law more akin to what Wimsatt and Beardley called a "practical message" than a poem? Wouldn't an "intent of the text" standard lead to too much freedom of the reader, leading to an inability to ever know what any law meant and, eventually, to anarchy?

It's simple. We just get 1,000 psycho-analysts together to read all the surviving correspondence of all the people in this painting, and....

In the case of the U.S. Constitution, of course, determining the intent of the author is an incredibly complicated task. It had many authors, some of whom were at loggerheads with each other throughout the writing. It is a compromise document that went through multiple rounds of edits. Whose authorial intent do we give precedence to? We have, in The Federalist Papers, an extra-Constitutional record some of the key writers left explaining their thinking behind the writing. To what extent is that extra-Constitutional record authoritative in determining authorial intent? And what to make of the fact that the Constitution didn't end in 1789, but has been added to over time, with some additions and changes explicitly overwriting other parts? 

Dobbs vs. Jackson Women's Health Organization and Alito's attempt to recreate the intent of the authors

Justice Alito, who wrote the majority opinion in the case overturning Roe v. Wade as a precedent, seemed to lean, whether he was aware of it or not, toward an "intent of the author" reading. On the first page of the opinion, he lays out the question before the court as whether "the Constitution, properly understood, confers the right to an abortion." This "properly understood" suggests that there is a single, correct reading of the text. It's an assumption in reading heavily influenced by Biblical hermeneutics, which itself is a large part of the reason why the West assumes "intent of the author" to be the common-sense approach to reading. The opinion assumes there was genius behind the writing of such authority that there is only one way to read the product of such genius. 

The crux of the issue for the six justices who went along with the decision was whether the right to an abortion was meant by the term "liberty" in the 14th Amendment. Roe v. Wade rested heavily on the argument that a right to abortion was implied by the term "liberty" in the amendment, the first article of which reads: 

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Roe made the argument that abortion was guaranteed by implication in other amendments, but because Casey, the 1992 case that partly upheld Roe, mostly focused on the 14th Amendment, so did the court in Dobbs. Alito proceeded to undermine the argument that "liberty" implies the right to an abortion through a three-step process:

First, he insists there should be a high standard for applying implied, rather than explicit, rights. To claim a right was understood as implied when written, there is a burden of proof to prove that implied right is "deeply rooted in our history and tradition." He indicates that the court was "guided by the history and traditions that map(ped) the essential components of the Nation's concept of ordered liberty." This is an extremely non-textual source of interpretation, and many have contested the court's prowess in historical analysis, but the court felt highly confident both that it was an appropriate source to use in determining the meaning of "liberty" and that they had analyzed it correctly. 

Having established the added burden of proof for implied rights, he states that "liberty" isn't a very useful term. He doesn't say why, but one can suppose he means that liberty is vague and means something different to everyone. He doesn't consider that this is exactly why the term is there. If we think of a Constitution as a car and judge it by how it works, then one thing we can say about this particular constitution is that it seems to become increasingly difficult to change the further from its original writing we get in time. Perhaps the vagueness of terms like "liberty" is there to compensate for this feature. Future generations may not be able to keep making amendments, but in order to help offset this flaw in the design, there are words in it that have had protean meanings in every generation. They were vague when written, they're vague now, and the vagueness is a feature, not a bug. Rather than consider this (because it isn't explicitly stated in the Constitution that we should do so), the court instead tried to establish what kinds of liberty people had in 1868 and suggest that the Constitution only guarantees those liberties and no more (although this standard also isn't explicit in the text itself).  

For the majority justices, because "liberty" is vague and doesn't explain what sorts of rights "liberty" should apply to, that means abortion isn't explicitly covered as a right by the term. That being the case, the heightened "deeply rooted in our history and tradition" standard applies.

Having first stated that implicit rights have a higher standard of proof than explicit ones and then arguing that the right to an abortion as a subset of "liberty" is an implied right, one that should be established only if we can see that this right has been accepted broadly throughout the nation's history, Alito moves to his third and final step. The court plays historian to determine what "liberty" might have meant--or more precisely what it did NOT mean--in 1868 when the amendment was ratified. The court found that:

Until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. No state constitutional provision had recognized such a right. Until a few years before Roe, no federal or state court had recognized such a right. Nor had any scholarly treatise. Indeed, abortion had long been a crime in every single State. At common law, abortion was criminal in at least some stages of pregnancy and was regarded as unlawful and could have very serious consequences at all stages. American law followed the common law until a wave of statutory restrictions in the 1800s expanded criminal liability for abortions. By the time the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, three-quarters of the States had made abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy. This consensus endured until the day Roe was decided. Roe either ignored or misstated this history, and Casey declined to reconsider Roe’s faulty historical analysis.

Since the world didn't think of abortion as a right one's liberty entitled them to in 1868 anymore than they thought murder was a right protected by "liberty," it is not protected in the Constitution. If the nation means to enshrine abortion as a right, it must do so explicitly in a law. It cannot expect the court to keep applying its understanding of modern opinion on abortion in order to change the meaning of a text from what its authors meant by it. 

The unspoken context of the broken balance of power 

It might be small comfort to those who find the decision deeply upsetting, but the opinion does, I think, leave open a possibility for making abortion legal by an easier road than might have once been thought. Because Alito claims the Constitution doesn't say anything about abortion, that means that if Congress could pass a law protecting the right (haahahahhahahhaha...Congress pass a law...but I digress), that law would be constitutional. Unlike the court's decision when it struck down a New York gun law, abortion doesn't have a Second Amendment to overcome. It wouldn't take an amendment to protect abortion, just a law. 

Of course, nobody expects both houses to pass such a law, even though about sixty percent of Americans think it should be legal more or less on the terms Roe set forth. The reason we look to nine godlike wise people in robes to rescue us with their sanity when the law fails us is because the law seems to always fail us. The Federalist Papers explained how the Constitution was meant to protect both from the tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of the minority, but the line between protecting the minority and tyranny of the minority can be pretty thin. That 39% of America that wants abortion to be illegal happens to be a majority in a large number of states, and those states each get two senators. Ergo, the outsized political influence in one house of Congress from a minority group.  

It's the same reason we can't get legal weed, in spite of polls suggesting nearly everyone wants it. It's the same reason we've twice in recent memory ended up with a president for whom a majority of people did not vote. We have a system that is showing its age. If we were to set it up now from scratch, it would never look like this, but because our system is so intractable, we're likely stuck with it forever. We're the beta version of democracy, and we have a lot of bugs. 

There's a small part of me that almost welcomes this decision, because maybe it will force Congress to do its job. Maybe it will fix the system, even if it does so by breaking it for a while. But I think most of us doubt that's a likely outcome. When the court recently made it harder for the EPA to enforce emissions laws, one environmentalist criticized the decision by saying the court "was insisting on a clear statement from what it knows is an effectively dysfunctional body." In other words, what was really devastating was that the court was saying if Congress wanted to give the EPA a certain authority, they should say so in clear words, but they know damn well Congress isn't capable of that, because Congress doesn't work. 

Nearly all of us probably agree with this assessment. On some issues, there is a minority who perhaps welcomes the dysfunction. Coal companies probably aren't that unhappy that Congress doesn't work well for the interests of the majority. Right now, neither are anti-abortion activists. But it's not good for any of us in the long run. We know that. That's why the decision is upsetting. Yes, we ought to have an explicit law saying abortion is a protected liberty, but we don't, and we're not likely to get one, even though most people want one. That's why we look to justices to be wise and benevolent gods who intervene to fix the other branches when they don't work. 

Intent of the text and flexibility in a failing Republic

Am I cheating by wanting the court to read the term "liberty" the way 61% of people today read it, instead of the way people in 1868 read it? I said that when the meaning of words shifts over time, we should prefer the original meaning. But that's truer for denotative meanings than connotative ones. To use a somewhat facetious example, if the Declaration of Independence had stated that one of our endowed rights was "the pursuit of gayness" instead of "happiness," that wouldn't be an argument for gay rights. Gay has a different denotative meaning now than it did then. 

But words like "liberty" are nearly all connotation and little denotation. When those words appear in a document, they invite a sort of freedom in the reader. Spousal abuse was accepted and expected in the first century, but few Christians today think that spousal abuse is one of the things Paul's explanation of love in 1 Corinthians allows. Hardly any pastor would say that because Paul wouldn't have objected to it in a husband, it must be part of what 1 Corinthians means. Paul wrote words that were greater than him, which means they mean things he himself might have objected to. He was brilliant, but also limited by his time, which means the fullness of what he wrote wasn't even apparent to him. He certainly didn't have full control over it. 

That's why it's better to read from what the text says than what we imagine authors would have agreed or disagreed with about what the text says. In 1868, assumptions about women did not permit them to have abortions in many cases. Assumptions about women also meant they couldn't vote or own property or have sex with men they weren't married to or work in the profession of their choice. Would the court apply these standards to EEO laws prohibiting sexism? Say it's not in the Constitution? 

Some are worried it might, but I doubt even this court has the guts to go that far. That's because whatever the court might say about the importance of explicit intent of the authors of the Constitution, it also knows there is a limit to this kind of reading. As others have pointed out, even when Clarence Thomas suggested following up this decision with a number of other reconsiderations of implied liberties, he did not mention Loving v. Virginia, the case that overruled miscegenation laws. The Constitution has changed its explicit views of race since 1789, but there is no Constitutional amendment mentioning marriage between races. Still, I doubt this court would go back and use historical analysis to relook at miscegenation laws and argue the Constitution doesn't outright ban them. That's because whatever the court might say in its high-minded and humble "we are but poor stewards of the words given to us" approach to this case, it very clearly is happy to decide for itself what "liberty" means by its own standards, but only when it agrees with those standards. Not when 61% of the people agree with those standards. 

The Constitution is full of contradictions and tensions that threaten to tear any reading of it apart.  Nearly any text about anything that matters is. Authorial intent readings seem humble, because they place the reader at the feet of the master who wrote the words, but in fact, this approach to reading is often a ruse to force a reading the reader prefers and use an argument from authority to defend it. These kinds of readings sometimes force us to seek for a unity that doesn't exist within the riven and difficult text. 

The founding parents knew they were taking on a hard job. They did the best they could. That the result wasn't a perfect success doesn't detract from their accomplishment. By focusing on the accomplishment itself in the form of the text, we have the freedom to in turn do our best to deal with the problem we face in running a democracy. Within this freedom is the only space to fill in the inevitable imperfections. Americans at their best are nothing if not pragmatic. If the rules don't work, we fudge the rules. As the 1935 case Home Building and Loan v Blaisdell found, we should not always read the Constitution with "literal exactness like a mathematical formula," especially when the exigencies of the day obviously demand something else. That same opinion argued that even though the Constitution clearly dictates that no state shall pass any law "impairing the obligation of contracts," still states should be able to alter contracts to help the indebted in times of crisis because 

"into all contracts, whether made between states and individuals or between individuals only, there enter conditions which arise, not out of the literal terms of the contract itself. They are superinduced by the pre-existing and higher authority of the laws of nature, of nations, or of the community to which the parties belong. They are always presumed, and must be presumed, to be known and recognized by all, are binding upon all, and need never, therefore, be carried into express stipulation, for this could add nothing to their force. Every contract is made in subordination to them, and must yield to their control, as conditions inherent and paramount, wherever a necessity for their execution shall occur."

That's American pragmatism. We have a very good Constitution, and the balance of powers works most of the time, but when it isn't working, we don't wring our hands about how it doesn't work. We stick a penny in the fuse box and make it work.  Believing that when the Constitution was written, they slew a ram and thus began the third covenant doesn't give us the freedom and flexibility to deal with our problems. That's always and only going to serve the interests of people who want to turn back the clock. Sticking to the text, especially a text like the Constitution that seems to invite open readings, is a better option. 

It's a dangerous option, of course. It can lead to anarchy if taken too far. The way to avoid going too far is to take the text seriously without taking it as holy writ. 

I'm unqualified to write this post, but who isn't? A wrap-up of Best American Short Stories 2021

A few months ago, I offered a defense of those who try to educate themselves about fields in which they are not experts. That defense went so far as to suggest there may be some topics where it is appropriate for lay people to question experts, or in which there is no one field of expertise central enough to the question that any one type of expert can claim plenary authority. 

I'm about to offer a critique of the Best American Short Stories 2021 anthology. I've already analyzed every story in the collection. Every year I've done BASS (this is my fourth), I've debated doing a wrap-up. In one sense, it's kind of pointless, because the collection itself is made up of stories that were never intended to go together. Editors who choose the twenty winners aren't under any kind of compulsion to pick stories that work well together, and it's quite possible that if they did, it would make the collection as a whole weaker rather than stronger. So evaluating the twenty stories that happen to have been chosen together as a whole is a little like ordering twenty different items off the menu from twenty different restaurants and then critiquing them as a single meal. 

Nonetheless, BASS is the best-selling of the many annual short story anthologies that come out every year, and as such, it's an interesting and revelatory artifact, one that tells us something about the American literature and culture that produced and consumed it. Twenty menu items from twenty different restaurants might not deserve to be critiqued as a set, but jointly they do present an interesting subject for study of American food culture. That's how I intend to look at BASS.

But I'm not qualified

I'm not an expert in literature. At best, I'm a well educated lay person. I got an M.A. in English in 2003, and I originally intended to go on for a doctorate and professional expertise in literature, but I changed my mind. For the past eighteen-plus years, I've been focused on other subjects. The one that's taken up most of my time has been the Korean Peninsula. In the few weeks since I read my last BASS story, I've been reading a Korean collection of short stories called Inconvenient Convenience Store (불편한 편의점). Like all Korean literature I read, it's taking me a long time to finish. My point here is that even though English language literature is still a passion of mine and something I like to do, my professional life doesn't even leave me much time to be a devoted amateur critic. I might not read ten books in English in a year. So I hardly qualify as an expert in American literature. 

There's another subject relevant to discussion of an anthology like BASS I'm also not an expert in, which is what most corporations would refer to as "diversity and inclusion" or "diversity, equity, and inclusion." One hardly needs to be an expert to realize that BASS and every other anthology like it strives to provide a diversity of voices not just aesthetically, but in the sex, gender, sexual orientation, race, and national origin of its writers. Given that this effort to achieve diversity is so salient a goal in each volume, it would seem like a critic seeking to describe what this effort achieved would need some deep grounding in the field of diversity and inclusion in order to analyze the accomplishments. In this subject, though, I'm even less qualified than I am as a literary expert. I try to read at least something on D & I topics, and maybe in a random group of ten people at any given workplace who are forced into an awkward D & I discussion hour together, I might have less stupid things to say than eight of them. But even though I've occasionally allowed myself a foray or two into posting on D & I-adjacent topics, I usually feel a lot of doubt and anxiety when I post on them. The most likely possible outcome seems to be getting myself canceled for being stupid. Which is a dumb concern, given I'm not even enough of a thing to be canceled, but I worry about it nonetheless. 

Then again, nobody is really qualified

If the only kind of literary analysis worth writing is an assessment of a work qua literature, placing it in its literary context and assessing its worth by the esoteric rubric of literary professionals, then I'm not the right person for the job. But then, I don't think that's the only kind of literary analysis worth producing or reading. Seeing as how anthologies like BASS continue to be marketed to, bought by, and read by people doing all manner of work for a living other than literature, then it seems only reasonable that there could be critical analyses of those stories also produced by and meant for a lay readership. 

I've always seen the sermon as my model for literary criticism. While a preacher may borrow academic approaches to sacred texts learned in seminary in order to orient listeners to the meaning and context of passages, the preacher's goal isn't academic. It's practical. It's to change the way listeners think about and live their lives. 

I believe good literature works the way religious people believe sacred texts work. I think it makes its readers better, challenges their assumptions, or at least helps readers to feel less alone. That's how I approach writing about fiction. I assume the reader goes to fiction for similar reasons, and I try to open up texts to help stories do these things for the reader. As part of that process, I have just enough "seminary" learning to manage the necessary intellectual part of reading in order to enable the "spiritual" aspects of it, if I can use that word. 

In short, if the goal of reading is to become a better person and not to know more about literature as a subject--and that should be the goal--then a literary preacher doesn't need to be the most erudite person in the room. In fact, literary experts might be so inured to an academic way of thinking about stories that they've lost something of the ability to be personally transformed the way a banker or clerk or mechanic or computer programmer who reads might be. The fact that I work at something else that demands my attention most of the time and can only occasionally turn my focus to thinking about literature might make me better able to talk to normal folks than literary experts can. 

So here goes

That apologia for the hubris involved in my critical efforts behind me, there are a few things that stand out to me. 

In 2018, after my first full BASS blog-though, I talked about how Harold Bloom had such derogatory words to say about the Best American Poetry anthologies of the late 80s and early-to-mid 90s because of how winners were chosen based more on the identities of the poets than on the quality of the works. I haven't really changed my opinion since 2018 of the effect of identity as one of the criteria for choosing stories (although I don't think it's the only one, and maybe not always the central one). I would still say today that while Bloom saw entries that were identity-based and bad, I see stories that are identity based and actually quite good. But this goodness itself might present a problem. 

In a recent article on how we might finally have really reached peak TV, Linda Holmes wrote this about "good" and "great" TV:

"What resonates the most, though, from that talk in 2015, is the way Landgraf talked about the good and the great. A lot of people who heard those "peak TV" numbers from critics — 400 shows! — groused back that it didn't really matter, because most of it was terrible. Landgraf, on the other hand, was careful to point out that this was not the point he was making. He didn't think the problem was too much bad TV; he thought the problem was largely too much good TV. Or, maybe, too much good enough TV. The head of FX, after all, doesn't care about total garbage shows or about how many of them there are; that's not the competition, either for viewers or awards, or for critical attention. (There was a lot of speculation at the time that this part of the speech reflected in part FX's frustration at a lack of awards recognition for The Americans.)

Here's what he said about too much good TV: "There's just too much competition, so much so that I think the good shows often get in the way of the audience finding the great ones." 

I'm hardly the first person to say this, but I think American arts have become great at creating good work, which makes it rare and difficult to create, find, and support great work. I think BASS is an example of this. There is a lot of imagination in the stories, but not much capital I Imagination. There is light, but seldom thunder. I enjoy most of the stories, but can remember little from most of them not long after reading them, even when I've taken the time to read and re-read them carefully enough to write seriously about them.  

Perhaps the thing I'll remember most about this anthology will be how many stories featured an unnamed central character. If I counted right--which I doubt I did, but I think I'm close--only seven of the twenty stories featured a main character whose real name was given. The rest either gave no name or used a nickname/title, like "Girlie" or "The Teacher" or "the son." This isn't a new phenomenon, although I don't think I've seen a collection of BASS stories that displayed it so fully. It immediately called to mind Stephen Marche's critique of a Sally Rooney novel, in which he introduced the concept of the "literature of the pose," which has replaced the literary voice. The literature of the pose is, above all else, about being "right," or more appropriately, not being wrong:

Each sentence passes quality assurance...The writing of the pose is, first and foremost, about being correct, both in terms of style and content. Its foremost goal is not to make any mistakes...One never loses oneself in the writing. Rather, one admires, at a slight remove, the precision of the undertaking.  

This unwillingness to name characters seems related. Names come with baggage and meaning. We can often tell something about the sex, gender, race, and social position of a person from the name. To give a character a name is to invite a whole host of criticisms of that character, so it's better not to name them. Mary Gaitskill recently described an aversion her students had to describing the way faces looked:

Fascinatingly, one student told me that he didn’t like to describe what people look like because he thought it was like staring at someone which was rude. Another remarked in a similar spirit that in describing people you have to assign value to their appearance in terms of conventional beauty standards. This second statement is completely untrue; conventional beauty standards can be made irrelevant when describing a face if you want to focus on how the person’s nature animates that face.

The reluctance to assign names and the reluctance to describe faces seem related. Writers feel that to describe something or name it is somehow an act of colonial violence. Better to avoid it and so avoid criticism. 

A few things I will say about the focus on diversity and its impact on literature 

Literature really only does two things well. It can make us see the world through someone else's point of view, and it can make us question our assumptions about the world. The diversity-forward literary anthology excels at the first and sometimes is a little wanting on the second. 

I don't want to act like doing the first thing well isn't hugely important. Of all the attempts in the last twenty years to change the way our culture talks about D & I categories, I think the improvement in the diversity of stories and voices available to readers and viewers has been the one of the most practical benefit. I saw this benefit when Mrs. Heretic, my very white wife very much from majority-white Ohio, started teaching in 99% black schools in Baltimore in 2007. About the only bridge to her kids going in was the fact she had read a fair amount of contemporary literature by black authors in college. I thought she was going to get eaten alive. But to my wonder and amazement, just that literary introduction really was extremely useful. She walked into schools where students openly told her how much they hated white people and somehow connected enough with those students that there are still dozens of former students every year who go out of their way to tell her how much she meant to them and how she was their favorite teacher. Literature more than did its job of helping her to see the world through the eyes of other people. That forever changed how I think about literature's potential utility in a very real-world and pragmatic sense. What literature did for Mrs. Heretic, I believe it's also doing for many other people, even if it seems like part of America is becoming less interested in hearing what people different from it has to say. 

It does seem to me that the diversity-forward approach does job number one extremely well, but probably at the expense of not doing job number two very well. If you wanted to respond that I'm a white male with the privilege to care more about thundering soliloquies that question cosmic justice than the stories of black boys suffering from unfair human justice, I won't defend myself. My background and the privilege that comes with it has a huge impact on what I want out of a story. Bloom wanted Truth (capital T) and beauty in art and felt anyone who wanted anything else was a fool. I want Truth and beauty in art but realize art can do other things besides that. 

Still, I can't help but be disappointed sometimes in how anthologies seems to take cues from the Democratic Party. There is a coalition to keep together with a large number of constituencies, so it's important to try to keep as many of those constituencies as happy as possible. It leads, sometimes, to collections that feel like a Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden campaign: full of competence and utterly devoid of excitement or vision. Maybe that's what you want in a technocrat, but it's not what I want in the few stories I have time to devote myself to in a year. Or at least, it's not what I want most. 

Perhaps in a hundred years, historians of literature will look back and find our era's focus on the primacy of politics in literature, with identity issues composing a major chunk of that political concern, to be natural, given our political reality. Even living within the current time, I can see reasons why that would be true. But I also see how the focus on politics is making even the political thought in fiction less daring, more concerned with not making mistakes than with imagining new realities. I can see how much anxiety there is surrounding correct thinking about identity, and how this anxiety--like anxiety almost always does--has the ironic effect of making insightful thinking about identity more rather than less difficult. The water of D & I thinking is so stirred up in 2022, it's very hard to see anything through the churn. 

Haguillory

If you ask me what my two favorite stories from BASS 2021 were, I'd say "Switzerland" by Nicole Krauss and "Portrait of Two Young Ladies in White and Green Robes" by Jane Pek. "A Way with Bea" by Shanteka Sigers would probably take honorable mention. But the story I might remember most, the one that most seems to me to speak to the political moment, might be "Haguillory" by Stephanie Soileau.  

The white title character is incensed that black people in New Orleans seem to get all the news attention after the hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. He thinks there are white people struggling, too, and that their struggles are being overlooked because all the attention is focused elsewhere. Haguillory is mean and hyper-protective of his turf, but he also shows a spark of human decency. 

We could write Haguillory off as another white man unaware of his own white privilege. We could see him like one of those people who claim "all lives matter," missing the point that black lives are statistically more threatened in American than white. I'm very confident that's what the text of the story wants us to see. I do see that, but I also see something else.

In 1970, economist Milton Friedman wrote a hugely influential article entitled "The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits." He essentially argued that businesses should be indifferent to their social impact. An oil company should drill oil as cheaply as it can get away with. If society wants to reign the oil company in, then it's up to society, through the apparatus of government, to force them to do so, rather than incumbent on the oil company to do what's "right" on their own. 

I think Friedman's way of looking at things has had influence way beyond business. I think that all the various political factions in America believe it's their responsibility to fight as hard as possible for the interests of their constituents, and if that results in them getting more than their fair share of limited resources, well, then the other factions should have lobbied harder. Americans tend to believe that this free market of ideas and the competition between interests will somehow lead to the right balance. One thing it won't lead to, though, is solidarity. It won't lead to a belief in shared interests or mutual prosperity. Instead, it leads to a belief in a limited pie of resources where a bigger share for someone else means a smaller share for you. 

Within such a system, is Haguillory wrong to resent the fact that a rival for aid is getting more press? He is wrong as a human being, but not in the twisted moral experiment of a Friedmanian political landscape. His job in this dystopia that also happens to be the real world is to push for the maximum advantage of his group. If the other group doesn't get enough, they should have fought harder.

Moreover, it's perverse to try to talk to Haguillory about privilege. Although more nuanced positions acknowledge that there are varying levels and types of privilege and that whiteness is only one of them, there are plenty of morally zealous people out there more than happy to harangue Haguillory for his white privilege. To someone in his position, falling out of the bottom of the middle class and surrounded by others doing the same, the notion of "privilege" is perverse. Even if his whiteness has been a benefit to him, it violates all laws of logic and decency to talk to someone like him about his privilege. Of course that kind of talk is going to activate his self-preservation instincts. He can only think one of two things: either he has no such privilege, or if he has been privileged, there is something terribly wrong with him to be struggling so mightily even with those advantages.  

The diversity potpourri approach to literary anthologies does some things well and others less well. I'm not arguing that it's the wrong approach for the hour, and Lord love a duck, I'm definitely not arguing, like one terrible and unfairly-privileged-in-every-way old white writer recently did, that old white men are discriminated against in publishing. They are not. 

If I had to try to distill my moderately informed, still-in-progress, and very much influenced by the same anxiety everyone else feels thoughts on this into a few sentences, it would be this: Our current political system relies on tenuous alliances between groups with only partially overlapping interests. The literary model of pushing diversity somewhat models this political system. Both the political and literary approaches require grace, goodwill, and the ability to communicate nuanced and imperfect systems with conviction and the power to convince, but all of those things are in short supply. Which means that the best you can hope for, perhaps, is conflicted and at times ambivalent cooperation with the approach being offered. 

I enjoy BASS. I like most of the stories in each volume. I profit from them. I am seldom mentally and spiritually undone by them. Maybe I've been reading too long. Long-time church members find it more difficult to rekindle the fire they felt early in their spiritual lives; maybe it's like that for secular readers, too, and it's got nothing to do with the literature being written today. But part of me feels, when I do manage to find time for literary fiction, that I'm doing it for the same reasons I keep voting for Democrats: it's not that I'm enthusiastic, it's just that I don't know of a better option.

Haguillory doesn't live in a world where his rights are politically threatened because of his race. He does, arguably, live in a world where people of his struggling economic class get a bad deal from the political system. In order for him to avoid thinking that pushing for the improvement of others is not an unfair threat to him would require a level of goodness and broad-mindedness that I'm not sure most people possess. Haguillory isn't without kindness, but he also only has a normal person's amount of it, not more. He lives in a political system in which not feeling resentment of others competing for limited resources with him requires above-average moral and mental qualities. Which means it's going to be a strained system. The only ways for a system to survive are to make the demands on ordinary people something that ordinary people can actually do or to compel, shame, or inspire them to become better people who can live up to the demands of the system. 

Is contemporary American literary fiction doing enough compulsion, shaming, or inspiration? To judge by America's racial backsliding, maybe not. I suspect, though, that there's something else going on here. Good fiction like that in BASS does engender empathy for others. If it's not working on a social scale, I'd guess it's somewhat similar to how masks work at stopping the spread of disease, but mask mandates don't. People seem to be the problem to the proposed systemic solution. 

Which is why even though it's important to have people slugging away at the scrum of public policy and policing to get us through the pandemic of the moment, it's also critical to have some obsessive dreamer locked away in a lab somewhere. She's thinking of something that seems to have no relevance to the pandemic that's raging, but because she is dedicating her full intellect and imagination to something everyone else in neglecting during all the hub-bub, she makes a discovery with relevance to fields never expected. Her refusal to think about what everyone is shouting is the only concern of the moment is what allowed her to figure out a way out of the mess for all of us. 

That's what I wish BASS had more of. Instead of 18 of 20 entries being about the disease du jour, I'd like more that are about reimagining what a cell is, or how DNA functions, or some strange problem in astrophysics. Instead of mostly being about how to drive a car safely, I'd like more on how we could move society past cars. We can have stories about Haguillory's shortcomings, but I'd also like some imaginative pieces on a world where it was easier for Haguillory to be less selfish. 

James Patterson might find the identity balancing in anthologies like BASS as evidence of "another form of racism," but I don't. I see it as evidence of the modern cultural tendency to apply safe answers to problems that are so intractable, they now require imagination, boldness, and heresy, things that are the opposite of safe. 

Just the way it is: "Haguillory" by Stephanie Soileau, Best American Short Stories 2021

I commented earlier in BASS this year, when discussing Vanessa Cuti's "Our Children," about how some stories intentionally leave out more than the barest hints about character motivation. "Haguillory" by Stephanie Soileau does it a little bit differently: we get some hints about what motivates her central character Haguillory, but at the end, we're still kind of grasping for a fuller explanation. Possibly, the ultimate motivation eludes us because at some point, it's impossible to answer what makes people be kind, or cruel, or empathetic, or selfish, or whatever. It's a mystery, and if we knew the answer to that question, we'd have a lot more kind people in the world. 

Synopsis

Haguillory and his wife Dot have settled into the routine of older couples who don't like each other that much. They avoid each other, with Dot staying up late to fret over the news about hurricanes Katrina and Rita, then going to bed in a different room from Haguillory, where she sleeps until late. Haguillory is a mean old cuss, the kind who looms large in the mythologies of neighborhoods across America, one who poisons the neighbors' trees and dogs. 

The story is contained in one day when Haguillory rises to go crabbing and Dot decides to go with him. This is the first action in the story that doesn't have a deeply explained motivation. She simply says she wants "to see how things are down there." That might make sense if what she meant was that she wanted to see how bad the damage from the hurricanes had been at the Sabine marshes where they go to catch crabs. But it seems like she's already been there since the hurricanes. The hurricanes, we learn later, were almost a year ago, and Dot was last in the marshes "months ago," so she's seen them since the hurricanes. That's why Haguillory is confused, and suggests they'll look "about the same as last time." 

But she goes, whatever the reason. Haguillory fusses about this and that as they drive an hour or so to the spot where they go crabbing. We get local flavor and see that the area still isn't close to getting back to normal. There are FEMA trailers and trash from the destruction strewn about. Lots of people, including Haguillory, still haven't been paid by their insurance companies for the damage, leading to a humorous local distaste for claims adjusters. 

Eventually, a family pulls up behind where Haguillory and Dot are crabbing. They're looking for a cat the father abandoned in this area a week ago. He was tired of the cat pissing on one of his kid's beds, which is especially obnoxious because the family has been cooped up together in a FEMA trailer for almost a year. The father originally lied and said the cat went missing, and now the mother is angry at him and frantically looking for it. Dot sympathizes with the mother, but Haguillory can't see why anyone would fuss so much over a cat. The family leaves as a storm is approaching. As Haguillory is packing up, he sees the cat. He throws the cat into the canal, possibly thinking he is being merciful, although it isn't clear to whom he is showing mercy.

The names

There are a number of clues about underlying meaning in the story. The first is in the names of the two main characters. The title character's name is apparently one still in use in Cajun country. It means "active" or "dynamic" or something like that. "Dot," on the other hand, is sort of the opposite. Not the real meaning of the name "Dottie," but the connotations of "dot," which would suggest a static point somewhere. Haguillory is restless and roving, but Dot is fixed. This might explain why Dot is more capable of empathy, more welcoming of others. She feels more secure in her place, while Haguillory feels like he always needs to defend his territory, to the death, if need be (at least the death of trees and dogs). 

What's eating Haguillory

There are a lot of things that set Haguillory off--Dot not being fast with a crab net, maggots costing too much, his son adopting a child of color--but what seems to particularly irritate him are the editorial choices of the news. He complains at one point about the news always showing the same thing: "New Orleans this, Katrina that, like those people were the only ones who'd been hit by a storm." More pointedly, he thinks of "those looters in flooded New Orleans...who seemed to think their suffering entitled them to inflict suffering on others." 

What's got Haguillory's goat is that he feels the news' tendency to focus on one set of people affected by the hurricanes leaves others out. When he sees the family looking for their cat and hears about them having been in a trailer for a year, he thinks, "They'd never show that on the news. It was sad, how they forgot about some people, not about others." 

It's not hard to decode what he means

It's very easy for those of us reading this story post Black Lives Matter to know what Haguillory really means when he's complaining about what he sees on the news. "Those people in New Orleans" means "black people." Haguillory is incensed that the news is focusing so much on their suffering when there are plenty of white people suffering, too. It's the "all lives matter" argument all over again, but put into a event from a decade earlier. Haguillory thinks the news is focused too much on the suffering of black people to the exclusion of white people. 

Why does Haguillory feel this way?

This is the really difficult "why" question to answer in this story. Although Haguillory is a miserable old buzzard, he's not without empathy. He truly feels sorry for the family he sees. He gives one of the children a multitool he won at a painters' union gumbo dinner. (Karen Carlson said in her look at this story that we don't know what he did for a living. Was he a painter? Or is the "painters' union" something I don't understand?)  After giving the gift, he seems to reveal his motivation for having given it: "I feel sorry for y'all." That's a pretty clear example of empathy. 

I think the reason Haguillory feels so incensed about the attention black people are getting on the news is that he sees his own piece of the pie shrinking thereby. If the world is going to tend to their suffering, there won't be enough left for them to tend to his. We don't know why Haguillory has killed his neighbors' tree or dog, but we can assume it's for some kind of encroachment onto his property. Nothing makes him madder than someone invading what he views as his space, taking what he views as his. 

In the parlance of our times, he is objecting to the loss of white privilege, to the end of the long-standing foregrounding of white stories and white grievances over black. 

This is conjecture, of course. The only hint we get about why he killed the tree is that he gathers the pecans it dropped onto his yard and threw them away. But it seems a likely explanation. Or, maybe, he's mean just because he's mean. He did string Dot along when he met her by telling her a fake name "just for the hell of it." He's a "tete dure," a hard head. Maybe he's not threatened at all, but just hates what he hates because he hates it. It would be the same answer Bruce Hornsby and the Range cited hearing decades ago for why there is prejudice in the world: That's just the way it is. (Note that the song itself does not believe in this line, just as the speaker in Robert Frost's "Something There Is That Doesn't Love a Wall" doesn't actually believe that "good fences make good neighbors.")

The fish and the cat

In addition to the dog, Haguillory is twice cruel to animals. He mutilates a garfish he has caught and then throws it back in the water, and when he finds the family cat, he chucks it in the water, too. Dot gets mad at him for crushing the fish, but Haguillory is genuinely confused by her anger. "Was it his fault the gar was an ugly fish?" he wonders. It's similar to his logic when he suggests, earlier in the story, that his adopted grandchild of color should go back where she came from if she doesn't like it here. He wonders, "Did she think he had fun saying that kind of truth?"

So Haguillory sees himself as a bringer of hard truths. Gars are ugly. They should be killed, because they're ugly. The cat is a burden and should be killed. This is why, to his mind, killing the cat is a "kind of mercy," the final line of the story. Haguillory actually sees himself as a keeper of some kind of order or good in the world. So perhaps his dislike for news about black people is another thing he files in his mind under this self-image. He's not a miserable old buzzard, he's just telling an unpopular truth. Sounds a lot like the apologia for Trump I often heard. 

One tantalizing detail in the story is the way Haguillory equates the cat to Dot. Early on, he thinks that when it gets hot, she'll be "spitting mean--mean as a cat with its tail on fire." What does this mean, then, when he can't understand all the fuss over a cat, and why he thinks it's "merciful" to drown the cat? Merciful for whom? The family or the cat? Or both? What kind of mercy does he intend to show Dot?

Guest editor Jesmyn Ward wrote in her introduction to BASS that Haguillory "changes, just a hairbreadth," after his chance encounter with the family and their cat, but I'm not sure he has. If anything, he might have slipped even further into his beliefs. His belief in his "mercy" has some uncomfortable similarities to what a Republican Congressman said in 2005 after thousands of homes of poor people in New Orleans were destroyed: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." Haguillory believes he's ultimately showing mercy to those he thinks of as unworthy by putting them out of their misery. 

Your involvement will not help: "Love Letter" by George Saunders, Best American Short Stories 2021

Paula Fox said that a story begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one. Some theorists of narrative feel that "theme" in fiction isn't really about an answer, but about phrasing the problem in a powerful and novel way. That's certainly how the logic of "Love Letter" by George Saunders operates. The premise of the story sounds like something I would hate. It's a grandfather in the late 2020s writing a letter to his grandson. The grandfather begins trying to answer specific questions the grandson has asked about three people the grandson wants to help, but ends by trying to answer a bigger question: why didn't he do more before the 2020 election to prevent an eventual Trump-initiated dictatorship in America? 

The story was originally published in The New Yorker in April 2020, about six months before the 2020 presidential election. It sounds like the kind of story you'd read in a creative writing 101 class, something a zealous, middle-class liberal would have written after getting their "writing prompt" from social media. "How will you answer your children when they ask you what you did when the world was in trouble?" was a pretty typical meme in 2020. It still is now.

Saunders manages to somehow make it not bathetic and painful to read, mostly by focusing not too much on the political aspects of the future, but on the human aspects of the family to which the grandfather and grandson both belong. The grandfather is keenly aware of beauty in life, the geese flying overhead and the grandson's generosity toward his sister. Normally, a keen sense of beauty and a belief that the small experience of beauty is what matters most in life is a good thing. But grandpa didn't live in ordinary times. 

It's a disservice to the story to take what was made into a very human narrative and dissect it back into its bare facts, but I'm going to do it anyway. I know Wordsworth warned that "we murder to dissect," but I'm hoping I can break this down in order to learn more about how it works, then put it back together still living, but with a greater understanding of how its biological processes work. 

A letter received and questions asked

Grandpa has gotten a letter from his grandson Robbie. Robbie has asked three things. First, what should he do about his friends, whom Grandpa, for security reasons, calls only G and M. (Monitoring of citizen communications has become prevalent in the near future.) G is in the United States illegally, and although M is here legally, she knew about G's being here illegally and did not report G. Second, Robbie has asked what to do about his friend J, who seems to be in prison for some kind of political objection to the current administration. Third, Robbie has asked what Grandpa and Grandma were doing in 2020, back before everything went to shit. Why didn't they do more to stop the U.S. from sliding into this state? We don't see Robbie's letter. We have to infer what it said from Grandpa's reply. Grandpa has written his letter by hand, because he thinks it might be less likely to be intercepted by the government that way. 

Grandpa's replies, simplified

Relative to the first two questions, Grandpa believes Robbie should be pragmatic and not get involved. He qualifies this belief by saying he understands why Robbie would feel he ought to get involved and that he isn't saying Robbie should "stick his head in the sand." But if Robbie does get involved, it won't do any good, and Robbie will end up being hassled by the same people who are harassing his friends. Moreover, some of the repercussions might rebound onto Robbie's family. In sum, Grandpa feels that "Wisdom, now, amounts to making such intelligence accommodations as we can." 

Grandpa does understand how difficult it will be for a caring person like Robbie to do nothing, and he hints that, if the worst happens, he and Grandma might be willing to use the money they have saved to help Robbie help J. But that would not be Grandpa's first choice. 

Grandpa's answer to the third, much bigger question, is more complicated, but I think anyone who's been at a loss to understand American socio-political developments since 2015 as much as I've been will find it understandable. In fact, it's a very good explanation of the dilemma many sensible people feel, meaning Saunders succeeded thematically, if the point of theme is to present the question well. 

Like a lot of sensible people, Grandpa and Grandma DID object to the rise of Trump. They voted against him. They wrote members of Congress. They would have gone to a march, but nobody organized one, and Grandpa was busy with work and dental conditions that prevented him from organizing anything. Grandpa did write a couple of letters to the editor after the 2020 election, but eventually, he got a warning from the police to knock it off. Anyhow--and this is the much bigger point--the letters didn't do any good, anyway. "Those who agreed with me agreed with me; those who did not remained unpersuaded." Isn't that the real predicament we're in now? Somehow, the Internet, with its access to practically all the information anywhere from all human history, seems to have made humans more closed-minded than they were before. No wonder those who opposed Trump "soon grew weary of hearing ourselves saying those things and, to avoid being old people emptily repeating ourselves, stopped saying those things." 

Well, that's the whole rub, isn't it? We who have opposed not only Trump but the whole angry babble of political incoherence in which he arose have been nothing if not baffled. We've made our arguments. We think we're right. Nobody has changed their minds. What to do?

Two questions Grandpa's reply leaves us with

Grandpa excuses himself for not having done more in 2020. It all caught him by surprise. The overthrow of democracy didn't look like what he'd expected it to look like based on history. To have had any chance of stopping it at all, he and Grandma "would have had to be more extreme people than we were, during that critical period....And our lives had prepared us for extremity, to mobilize or to be as focused and energized as I can see, in retrospect, we would have needed to be. We were not prepared to drop everything in defense of a system that was, to us, like oxygen: used constantly, never noticed." 

It's easy for most of the people who were probably reading The New Yorker in April 2020 to see themselves in that description. When Grandpa asks Robbie, "What would you have had me do? What would you have done?" most of us probably don't know the answer, either. 

Given when the story appeared, the primary question it was asking its reader was what responsibility they had to act prior to the 2020 presidential election. For me, now reading this story as part of Best American Short Stories more than six months after the anthology was published in late 2021, I can look at that election as history. Trump showed himself more willing than I even believed to jettison laws to achieve his aims, but he was stopped. He was stopped, in part, by people who had enabled him while he was in office, like Mike Pence and William Barr. To me, that refusal of key figures in his circle to collaborate with him was at least somewhat reassuring that the system hasn't collapsed yet. We now have a whole other set of issues to worry about here a year and a half after that election, some of which include good, old-fashioned threats from without. 

Was Saunders' warning in April 2020 overblown? Hard to say. It was fiction, not an editorial, so nobody in the story was telling us to do anything. In fact, Grandpa is excusing inaction. It's up to the reader to determine how wrong Grandpa is and what we should do to be different from him. Whether any of us did enough, the election is now past, leaving us only the future in which to try to make the best decisions for ourselves and the future to whom we will answer. 

Because Grandpa lives under a growing dystopia, his letter leaves us with a second moral question about what the responsibility of those living under tyranny are. 

I've been following North Korea for a good chunk of my adult life. Those who don't know much about it have a hard time understanding why the people don't rebel. They seem to think they would if put in a similar situation. But Grandpa's logic when he tells Robbie to stay out of it is the logic nearly everyone in a dictatorship follows. Grandpa isn't inhumane. He simply realizes that Robbie's "involvement will not help." It's better to try to survive, maybe even flourish, as much as the system will allow, then use your status within the system to try to bring what small succor to the suffering you can. 

The terrifying thing to me is that I don't know if Grandpa is wrong. There are some people of very strong moral makeup who believe it is everyone's responsibility to do what is right even if you know the outcome is doomed to failure. Even if you know you will be sent to a prison camp and tortured. I respect those people. I praise them. But I'm not that strong. I know how weak the human body is, how a person skilled in causing pain to it can make you do anything to make the pain stop by applying the right force to just one finger of one hand. 

Moreover, those brave enough to oppose the dictatorship tend to get purged early on, leaving few left after the early days. That's what happened in Russia after the Ukraine invasion: a weekend of protests, followed by mass acquiescence. Dictatorships were always hard to stand up to. They're much harder to stand up to now, because technology has made nearly all dictatorships competent. 

The question for us in the real timeline 

The 2020 election didn't go the way it did in "Love Letter." We still live in a society where I can talk about what an ass Trump is and nobody's going to do anything about it. If anything, it's depressing how little the world we note anything I say, how little good it will do to write a considered essay or a moving story. There's already a glut of voices, a superabundance of discourse. Smarter, more incisive voices than mine go unheeded; why should anyone listen to me? I don't need police warning me to "stay off the computer" to be discouraged from writing like Grandpa did. The lack of effect from all I've written is discouragement enough.

Dictatorships are much better to prevent than overthrow. So what's my responsibility to try to keep ourselves left of the totalitarian horizon event on the timeline? This story provides a small piece of that puzzle. Grandpa remarks at one point on how everyone failed to see what a profound and happy accident our democracy was. They "did not know the gift was a fluke, a chimera, a wonderful accident of consensus and mutual understanding." 

What we lack now, what is currently threatening to blow this gift to smithereens, is a lack of consensus and mutual understanding. I have tried to reestablish some of that through writing, but given that it seems unlikely I'll ever be widely read, I think the extent of my ability to influence the future will have to be through interpersonal contact at an individual level with other members of society. In that contact, I will need to "see things through their eyes," not, like Grandpa did, in order to gain advantages when dealing with them, but in order to build "consensus and mutual understanding." 

It's easy to talk about consensus, but one thing I think most people overlook is how hard it is to achieve. Abortion, which, if Saunders were to revisit his letter-to-the-future project, would be the letter he'd write this week, is a perfect example. About one-third of the country believes that a book written by dozens or hundreds or authors over centuries of time long before humans knew what a cell was or where the Earth was relative to the Sun tells them that abortion is a sin. That's not written in a declarative way, but they believe it's a shadow command based on what's there. How do I achieve consensus with them on abortion? I've tried, but it's not easy to do. 

Still, maybe these fault lines exploding open all over the place serve a purpose. Those who look back to the mid-20th century as a zenith of American life think the country was less divided then. It might have been, but there was also more forced unity through strict enforcement of codes of polite behavior. Those codes included things like avoiding political discussions. Maybe partly because of our long history of avoiding those discussions with our neighbors, we're not good at having those discussions now. A functional democracy is about the slow work of building trust and figuring out how to coexist with one another, how to find matters we agree on, like not wanting Russia and China to be the model for the government of the future, and work on those things. If democracy is an endless succession of "into the breach moments," a series of crises to surmount (as every election ad would have us believe), then it will never become strong. It will limp along until a crisis strong enough to topple it finally puts it out of its misery. It will be all disaster relief and no construction to prevent disaster damage in the first place. 

I don't think this is the moral of the story Saunders would have had us draw. I think Grandpa was supposed to engender a sense of urgency among readers in early 2020 by showing us the results of even a well-intentioned semi-complacency. But I have the advantage of reading the story now, and to me, the lesson is that we managed to survive that crisis, and the most important thing we can strive for is to bring the general tenor of discourse back down from a roar to a lively cocktail party discussion. I could go out and light myself on fire. I could treat every day like a last-ditch stand against what I perceive to be my political enemies. But that kind of involvement will not help. 

I realize I've kind of answered a question that Saunders' story only meant to ask, but that's the thing about how stories work. They take seed in the brains of writers, but grow in the minds of readers, and writers can't control what the native soil in readers' minds might do to the final organism.