The poetics of patriarchy: "Ambivalence" by Victoria Lancelotta

In the past, I've enjoyed blogging through the short stories in the annual Pushcart anthology, probably more than I've enjoyed blogging through Best American Short Stories. The stories in Pushcart have a different feel. They're less likely to be products of the elite of literary fiction. Sometimes, they're by complete newbs, and that gives the volume a rawer, more outlaw feel to it.  

I also approach a Pushcart blog-through differently from BASS. With BASS, I force myself to at least write something about every story. Even if I'm basically passing, I have to at least say why I'm passing. With Pushcart, though, I only do the stories that move me. If that's only three in the whole volume, then I only write about three. There's no pressure. Also, since many of the writers in Pushcart are complete unknowns, unlike the majority of writers in BASS, I tend to avoid writing about a story I didn't like. There aren't a ton of critics out there putting fingers to keyboard about these authors, so why make the one critical piece on their work something negative? There's no point to it. Since I don't like writing negative pieces, the decision to skip those makes the project a lot less arduous. 

So it's unusual that I'm writing about a story from Pushcart I didn't like. I don't actually mean that the story isn't written well. It fulfills very precisely the expectations of our time for what a short story in a literary journal should do. The writer did what she needed to do to get published by a hard-to-get-into literary journal (The Idaho Review). It's precisely because the story is a success at what it is that I felt while reading it like something clicked about why I don't like a certain type of story, one that's extremely popular now and possibly even the default aesthetic for developing writers. What follows is a critique not of this particular story, but of that aesthetic. If this work is such a good example of a particular literary style that I wanted to use it as a springboard for a deeper examination, then it can only be seen as a success.

No ideas but in things

I don't know if William Carlos Williams' dictum of "no ideas but in things" really was a watershed in cultural history, but it feels that way to me. Hardly a writing advice book fails to cite this credo. It fits the aesthetic approach of Ray Carver, who was probably held up as the ideal writer in many graduate writing programs when I was in school. 

Fiction has always featured use of significant details that appeal to the five senses in order to establish setting, tone, mood, and theme. Don Quixote, nearly the first true novel, did it. Homer gave us the wine-dark sea. There's nothing new about stimulating the brain's sensory apparatus through evocative words, but in no-ideas-but-in-thingsism, the things are no longer just setting. They start to take over. We don't have a woods laid out so we can imagine people doing things in it, but rather a woods that contends with the people for our attention. Setting isn't just there to provide a place for characters to do make decisions in. The props are the show. Mood isn't supporting the action, it is the action.

It's appropriate a poet like Williams was the one who bequeathed this idea to us, because it's fundamentally a poetic logic. More precisely, it's the logic of lyrical poetry, rather than narrative poetry. The guiding force isn't the plot, but rather the emotions and feelings of the narrator. We aren't concerned with hunting a deer in the woods, but with a stream-of-consciousness series of sensory impressions that accompany hunting a deer in the woods. The end result for a short story that employs this aesthetic is that you get a story where it can be challenging to summarize the plot. Sometimes, there isn't much of a plot. There's people and the things around them and the feelings those things evoke.

Does this photo make you horny? It does for our main character.

Lists!

That's the effect of the approach in "Ambivalence" by Victoria Lancelotta. It's such a poetry-as-story approach, in fact, that its opening lines break into poetry-like line breaks: 

On Wednesday mornings the father hoists someone else’s
       daughter onto his naked lap
       bends someone else’s daughter over the press board motel desk
       flips someone else’s daughter onto her skinny back
       does not think about his own
       will not think about his own.
       His own is younger than this one
       But not by much
       not by enough.

I read a lot of stories in litmags and anthologies that seem ruled more by the logic of poetry, the dictates of language over logic that poetry brings, and the associative and connotative connections of imagery over movement from one plot point to the next. One of the characteristics of these stories is that they're just chock full of stuff, of "things." In an early description of Samantha, the too-young girl the father is having sex with on Wednesdays, we get things that appeal to nearly all the senses: "This one has lavender-pointed toenails and skin that tastes like watermelon candy. She has sticky lips and straight white teeth and when he looks at them he can think of nothing but what they feel like on his nipples." 

One of the frequent characteristics of a lyrical-poem-as-short-story is the list. Lists are a frequent device in poetry. Even more traditionally narrative stories often will resort to mini-lists, often in the form of triplets that the narrator is noticing. In "Ambivalence," though, the narrator is so frequently listing things, the lists begin to take over. "Herewith, a partial accounting of things the father doesn't know," begins one list. In another place, we get a list of things the father doesn't think of when he's banging the young tweaker: "No daughter, no five-bedroom house, no three-car garage...no tennis club membership, no Saturday tee time...No airport lounge priority pas and no NFL season tickets." 

These lists are sometimes of the more common variety, the one of listing things the POV character is noticing. For example, the father is aware of many of the peculiar props present in Amish country in Pennsylvania, where he goes on Wednesdays to have sex with Samantha. He thinks of taking her to a restaurant with "plastic tablecloths, plastic flowers. A small wooden triangle pegged with brightly colored golf tees meant to keep children busy." Soon after, he lists off things he remembers his daughter having put in her mouth when she was young. The story goes way beyond these lists of items in the immediate scene, though. Anything in the story can help build a list. 

Nihilistic realism

Some people really love this poetic device, but at some point, I found it oppressive. By constantly putting the human characters in a world of unending things that can be listed and then including their own behavior among those lists, the story puts human behavior into a category of "things," things that just are. Human behavior is no different a thing from a road. Both include things to be listed. Human behavior cannot transcend, then. It's part of the environment it's playing out in and will only ever get dragged into it.

Because of this, the story ultimately feels more like it is admiring self-destructive sexual behavior in young women and the predatory men who take advantage of them than it is critiquing it. Or, if not admiring it, it is impotently bemoaning it. The tone is almost one of  joy that such things exist, because they give the narrator such exquisite lists to make. There is no thought of building a critique of either men who take advantage of such women or of the women who make youthful bad decisions (as Emma Cline did in one of my favorite short stories), because a critique is an idea, and ideas should only exist in things. Long, relentless, and eventually disheartening (even if perceptive) lists of things. If this is realism, it's realism with a series of nihilistic assumptions lurking behind it. 

Maybe someone will say that if I felt oppressed by the poetic of the narrative, then it succeeded, because women feel oppressed by the sexually predatory men who take advantage of women like these. I'm not so sure. Part of this story reminded me of the HBO series Euphoria, which I watched about ten minutes of and then turned off. (Only to have my daughter watch it on my account, so HBO kept sending me updates about the show.) I don't care if the actors are over 18. They're playing kids--wildly oversexed kids. Don't tell me that if I feel uncomfortable, then the show is succeeding. That show gratifies the very men who prey on young women's immaturity and poor decisions. It gratifies sex offenders. It normalizes behavior that hurts the people who perform it. It's exploitative and so is this story. While Euphoria is exploitative in that it takes teen angst and turns it into a titillating HBO show with lots of T&A, "Ambivalence" is exploitative in that it takes advantage of the poetic possibilities in suffering to luxuriate in those possibilities without offering a roadmap out. Roadmaps out are preachy, didactic. Things listed in sharp and clever detail are smart, modern, objective. 

The revenge of poetry students

This has ended up sounding like a criticism of this story, but it isn't. The story was written under certain aesthetic expectations, and it succeeded in meeting those expectations. It's certainly not the only story to have done this. It was just a clear enough example that the outline of what those aesthetic expectations were became clear to me. Plenty of other stories do what this story did. They find some injustice, some imbalance in the world, some tragedy, and they explore the poetics of its awfulness with a sharp eye and a complete unwillingness to impose any kind of corrective force to it. 

I often think that a decent working definition of literary fiction in the 21st century might be "fiction in which plot is not a primary consideration." Obviously, this definition doesn't work for every story you might find in The New Yorker or The Georgia Review or The Missouri Review. There are still a lot of great stories with plots you could summarize. These are usually my favorites stories. This definition does work, though, for a surprisingly high number of stories. Robert Olen Butler's From Where You Dream pushes this kind of writing, one in which a story feels like a dream, and his book has been extremely influential. I think a lot of writing programs think they've succeeded when their students begin to write like this.

When I was in graduate school, my advisor, Cris Mazza, once remarked in class that because fiction sometimes sells books and poetry hardly ever does, it's somewhat easier to have an objective discussion about what works in fiction than in poetry. If nobody expects that a poem will ever be read by more than a small handful of award panelists or graduate advisors, then it's hard to know if the poem "works." With a story, though, there's at least some hope that if the story "works," then people will like it. I thought this was a good argument, and it had something to do with my decision to change from a poetry focus to one in fiction. I felt kind of bad for poets, actually. 

But perhaps poets have gotten their revenge by exporting some of their aesthetic preferences into literary fiction. Maybe many of the people writing literary fiction, or the editors of literary fiction, are others who once wanted to be poets. In any event, while I don't necessarily hate every story that conforms to the aesthetics of lyric poetry, I do more readily connect with stories that have at least some plot to them. This story was more of an evocative description of the status quo into which a disruptive force would naturally come in a more traditional narrative structure than it was a tale of people and their trail of decisions.  

Other views: My friend Karen Carlson is actually ahead of me in reading Pushcart. When we do BASS, she's usually behind, meaning I've already stolen all the easy stuff to say about a story. Now I have to follow her, which is going to make it a lot harder for me to have anything original to write. Here's her take on this story. 

Why don't the best literary fiction writers tell stories the way our best story-telling friends do?

I knew a guy in the Marine Corps who'd been an honest-to-god cowboy before joining the military. He'd also spent a few years at Colgate, but by far, the more fascinating part of his past was that he'd once ridden a horse, carried a rifle to protect against bears, and herded animals. His first name was Michael, but he always went by his middle name, Bevan. Bevan! Have you ever known a Bevan? He's the only one I've ever come across, and his stories were as unique as his name.

His companion on many of his cowboy adventures had been a dog named Dog, who once--as Bevan told it--saved him from a giant rat that was leaping toward his throat out in the barn by catching the rat mid-leap and ripping him into two pieces with one shake of his head.

Bevan was a natural storyteller. He had a sonorous voice, and he knew how to draw out a story, build suspense, and get a laugh. People loved to listen to him.

It occurs to me from time to time, while reading the best literary fiction, that stories in, say, The New Yorker don't read like the kinds of stories Bevan would tell. All that metaphorical language that must have taken days of fasting and psychedelic drugs to come up with. All that tightness of language. When a scene is described, it's never in the language a normal person uses when telling a story. I can't imagine Bevan saying this, for example: "He was wearing a tattered coat and a faded black shirt, which gave him a penurious appearance. He ordered a coffee. I ordered a mint tea." (From "Sevastopol" by Emilio Fraia.) Or this: "There were six of us in the house. We were all about the same age, and at some point during the summer—I had moved in at the beginning of March, when the mornings were still cold, veins of ice glittering over the front steps—this became claustrophobic, unbearable. The house smelled of sweat and bike tires and something at the back of the oven being charred over and over again." (From "Old Hope" by Clare Sestanovich.)

What gives? Why don't the best story writers write stories that sound like the people we think of as the best storytellers? 

Part of it is obviously the difference between the spoken medium and the written. Bevan can use his voice or his body language as a tool to convey feeling, emotion, or humor. The writer can't. All the writer has is the word on the page, so she has to sometimes use her tools in ways we don't normally think of in order to get the same effect. We're all familiar with the concept of having different vocabularies for speaking, listening, writing, and reading, with reading being the one where we know the most words and can handle the most complexity. So it's only natural that writers would push language to limits it isn't build to handle in the spoken word.

Nonetheless, I wonder sometimes if we aren't missing out by how seldom the tone of the spoken story influences the written one. It wasn't always that way. American literary history is full of writers whose voice could easily transfer to the stage or the barroom, from Twain to O.Henry to Vonnegut. 

The distance between modern American fiction and the spoken story is nearly as great as the distance between modern American written poetry and music. I don't really want every poem I read to be as easily understandable on first listen as a typical song lyric. Most of the poems I encounter, I'm going to encounter in written form, and if it's a written story, then it needs to use the full set of tools the written word has at its disposal in order to be engaging. But every time I go to a poetry reading and have absolutely no idea what a poet is talking about when I hear a poem I've never seen before read out loud, I wonder if the propagation of the printed word hasn't robbed poetry of some of its organic pleasure. Poetry, more than any other genre, ought to be pleasant--dare I say fun??--to hear out loud. A modern poem that delights in upsetting expectations and resisting meaning provides one kind of enjoyment, but it's a different one from words that make music that conveys a feeling we've all had but couldn't find words for. A poem that requires hours to dissect, one that literally nobody can make much sense of hearing it read aloud without studying it beforehand, is providing a very different experience to the reader from what poetry offered for thousands of years of human history. 

Storytelling has followed a similar, albeit less extreme, path. I'm not suggesting we all start telling stories the way Ira Glass does. The truth is, I'm not a great oral storyteller. In fact, I'm kind of bad at it. When I tell a story at work, I tend to get more "cool story, bro" type responses than fascination. So naturally, I'm going to lean toward the page-centric, written literary story when I've got something to say. But I think it's worth considering, when writing those dense stories, whether what we're writing has the potential to captivate a non-literary specialist, and if it doesn't, whether maybe it should. It doesn't necessarily have to be "fun." I don't think writing about child soldiers or rape or abuse is going to lead to a story that's fun to read. But it can still be captivating. It can still cast a spell on a reader that makes the reader feel he must keep reading, as opposed to a story a reader only gets through out of a sense of duty. 

The last story I had published, "The Lifesaver on Board the Jamaica Mon," was me re-discovering what I myself find captivating. I actually had fun writing it, which I don't think has happened since I got serious about writing six years ago. After years of trying to learn how I'm supposed to write, I feel like how I'm supposed to write and how I want to write are finally re-converging a little bit. (Yes, I'm annoyed by an editorial insertion in the first sentence that put a questionable hyphen where a comma should go, but I'm trying not to let that spoil my fun.) 

This is what I want to do from now on. I feel like I'm sort of figuring out style and voice. I know what a Jacob R. Weber story is, at least sort of. It's kind of a big step for me. And maybe the strongest evidence that it's really happening isn't so much the stories I'm writing, but my ability to quit chasing false leads and spend hours and hours writing stories that aren't really the kind of story I want to write. 

Greater empathy or immunity from it?

A friend of mine was telling me the other day that over a weekend, he and his daughter were sitting on the couch when the movie Dead Poets Society came on. His main reaction to re-watching it was that it hasn't aged well, but his daughter was moved by it. When I think back to when I first watched it, I think I was moved by it, too. Nowadays, my thoughts of the movie tend to be closer to those of Kevin Dettmar or Stephen Marche. It's a lot of schmaltz with a few superficial ideas about the humanities or how literature can affect our lives.

When I first started to study literature in a semi-serious way, I checked out a poetry anthology from the library on base where I was stationed. I have forgotten what anthology it was, but I remember reading a justification of why poetry mattered in the introduction. That essay argued that learning to read poetry well could help us to separate the truly moving from the "mawkish," a word I learned for the first time reading that essay. Its meaning is close to James Joyce's definition of sentiment, which was "unearned emotion." And this really is one of the better uses of not just reading poetry, but of close reading of any kind. People who are easily swayed by emotion can be manipulated, whether it's by the people in their lives or the companies that advertise to them or the governments that ask for their compliance. Learning to read in a way that withholds your emotional responses to characters until they have earned it can also teach you to make real people in your life earn your love and loyalty.

But doesn't this sort of clash with another oft-cited benefit of reading literature, especially literary fiction, which is that it increases our empathy? People who defend the value of reading literature will often cite studies that suggest those who read fiction, especially literary fiction, have a higher level of empathy than those who do not. So how does that square with the idea that literature also teaches us to be more discerning about the things we give our emotion away to? Wouldn't being more discerning mean the claims others make to you emotionally have less sway?

After I started reading seriously, I remember one of the things I lost interest in was country music, which I had only just been introduced to by friends in the Marine Corps. Whether because I really started to know what fake sentiment was or because I wanted to appear to, the emotional register of country music didn't interest me anymore. Some people think reading literary fiction--which, let's face it, is just an industry term for "serious" fiction or maybe even "worthy" fiction or "quality" fiction or something like that--makes people discerning. Some think it makes people into snobs, too good to sing along to "Friends in Low Places" or to enjoy the kinds of movies that don't qualify as "films."

You think you're too good to cry at this, Jake? Do you? 

Not too long ago, I dumped all over a story about a young child with a brain tumor, because I thought the story relied on a false appeal to emotion. Was I being too harsh? Have I become so skeptical about the possible existence of bathos I'm now unable to recognize genuine pathos?

There are two dangers for those who read a lot of fiction seriously when it comes to empathy. One is the same one that concerned Saint Augustine: that we will become so enthralled with our vicarious empathy, we fail to care about the real suffering person in the real world. The other is that we can get desensitized to pathos, the way too many action movies can make someone desensitized to violence. Nothing moves us anymore.

For me, I think the latter is a real danger, but it's probably a danger even without being a discerning reader or film viewer or music enthusiast. For everybody, life makes it harder when we're older to become emotional about the same things that make us emotional when we're young. "Win one for the Gipper" might work on college athletes, but it's not likely to work on 35-year-old cornerback just trying to survive one more season. Discerning reader or not, life has a way of taking the sentimentality right out of us.

The ennui we get from excess of empathy from literature is a disease that brings its own cure. By inoculating ourselves early to the false promises of cheap emotion, we help preserve our limited supply of empathy throughout our lifetimes. We also learn to focus our care on proper objects. Literature teaches us to be more disciplined about giving our love away, so it doesn't become too diffuse to have an effect.

We ought to remember that everyone is going to have their own empathy level. Bridge to Terebithia is the saddest thing in the world if you're eleven. It was sad to me when I read it with my son a few years ago, but not as sad as it was to him. We all change as time goes by. It really is okay to be moved by Mr. Keating standing on the desks if you're sixteen. The sort of person who finds that satisfying at sixteen is the same sort of person likely to find it no longer satisfying at forty, because she needs something more enriching and less sweet to keep drawing nourishment from narratives about made-up people.

In other words, yes, literature should make you more discerning the more you read. That might mean you like fewer things. But narrowing your own empathy to a finer point shouldn't mean you lose so much empathy you forget what it's like to experience emotion more broadly. When it starts to do that, I think that's when literature actually becomes destructive, and maybe it's time to take a step back and do something else for a while. There's likely never been a time in history when there is a greater danger of this kind of emotional eating beyond our ability to digest, because we now live in a world where we can stream hours and hours of high-quality fictional stories in our homes. We're building our own empathy-resistant super bugs the way we're creating antibiotic-resistant diseases. Superfluity of emotional response-causing narratives might be making us less empathetic overall.

Breaking the rules well: starting near the end of a story and when to really start at the beginning

Like a lot of writers, when I read advice on how to write well, my first instinct is to look for counter-examples that negate the advice. Anyone who is drawn to do creative work probably feels this instinct. We don't like to be told you can or can't do something, even if it's friendly advice from another creative type. This is probably a healthy instinct; every great work probably breaks some rule or another. But anytime a rule is broken, it probably does so following the logic of some other rule. The "rules," in fact, are nothing more than generalizations drawn from inductive reasoning from thousands of stories that worked.

On the one hand, if you could write a great story from merely following a list of rules, everyone would do it. You need to be able to show readers something they've never seen before by breaking the rules in the right way. On the other hand, if you've written a story and it doesn't have anything in common with any story anyone has ever cared about, you might need to ask yourself if you haven't broken the rules in a bad way.

One rule that comes to mind is the one best expressed by Kurt Vonnegut: start as close to the end as possible. Vonnegut himself followed this in a lot of his novels by having a narrator write to us from the perspective of someone who is already at the end. The narrator will drop hints throughout the novel of what the end is. The world has ended, and I'm writing to you from the future of this novel, for example.

I think the standard literary short story probably should follow the "start near the end" advice most of the time. Let's say you have some character in mind who grew up with a hard-knock life. He never knew his daddy and his mama never loved him. He discovered he was good at math by running numbers for a local mob boss. A kind-hearted teacher realized his gifts and got him a scholarship. But on the night before he leaves for Yale, he accidentally runs over the mob bosses's kid with his car. Nobody saw the accident. He can leave and nobody will ever know it was him. He has to decide, right there in the rain and in the dark of night somewhere, what he will do.

You start that story near the moment your hero hits the kid with his car, not back in his childhood. You can fill in the details of his past life from how your hero reacts to hitting the kid. His thoughts and actions will fill in the details for the reader so the reader knows all the stakes involved.

Different from "write the story with the end in mind"

"Start the story near the end" isn't the same as the principle, advocated by some writing advisers, of writing the whole story with the end in mind. This separate advice has to do with plotting throughout the story, not deciding where to begin. It is simply the idea that everything in your story should contribute to the eventual end. Even though most writers of "serious" fiction now eschew this idea, and advocate writing without pre-determining the end, I think it's still possible to let the end "just happen" on its own and still write with an eye toward the end of the story. This comes about through editing and revising the draft once an early version has shown you the way to the end. Dream, then draft.

But that's not what I'm talking about when I mean start your story near the end. I mean pick the spot where the crux is. Look at the entire arc of your character's life. Figure out what this story is about and start the story right at the crucial moment. Don't start "Bartleby the Scrivener" with the boss's decision to go into record keeping as a profession. Don't start "Gift of the Magi" with Jim and Della falling in love and getting married.

When don't you start near the end, then?

The epic seems to be a place where you should ignore the rule about beginning near the end. In an epic, you really want to start back at the beginning somewhere. Tolkien doesn't start Lord of the Rings with Frodo deciding whether to drop the ring into the fires of Mount Doom. Game of Thrones begins with a scouting party that picks up the first clues of a coming doom that will take 4,000 pages to fully materialize.

Reader expectations in the epic seem to be that they're going to get a long story, one that goes more or less in straight chronological fashion, and that it's going to give us a pretty complete timeline as it happens.

Of course, that still doesn't mean you start at the actual beginning. Tolkien had a world plotted out back to the creation, but he doesn't start the story of Frodo and the ring with the Valar singing Arda into existence. Martin also has a long history in his world that pre-dates the Game of Thrones series, but he still is focusing that series on a part of the timeline of his world that makes sense for that individual story.

I've argued that Justin Cronin's The Passage started too early; we spend over 200 pages seeing how the vampire apocalypse came, then another 500 pages watching as characters a hundred years in the future re-learned the whole history. Obviously, since the book did very well and millions of readers love, it, most people disagree with me, but the point is that it is possible, even in an epic, to start too early.

Limits to the rules and using your intuition

There isn't any rule for how to determine the exact correct point at which to begin a story, which should make fellow rule-breakers happy. Whether you're writing a tight short story with expectations that we are starting near the climax, or writing a fantasy series with expectations of hundreds of pages of world-building, there is a point that is too early to begin, and a point that is too late. You're going to have to use your own intuition to feel out where the sweet spot is. It is helpful, though, just to have the issue raised to your consciousness, to mull it over while thinking of some of your favorite stories or reading new stories in the future. What makes this the right place to begin? Is this similar to a story I want to write, and should I begin in a similar place in it?

A diverting exercise to try sometime is to take a story you love and imagine it beginning somewhere else. If it did, how would you still include everything in it that needs to be there? Is it now too difficult to tell the story, because you need to rely too much on flashbacks? Are you taken out of the moment too much? Then, try it with your own stories. Sometimes, you might find by starting it somewhere else that you've actually improved the sense of urgency within it.

F***ing the pig and why I'm rethinking what I want to write

The show Black Mirror is a little bit hit-or-miss to me, but when it hits, sometimes it just crushes it. The premises of some shows are so compelling, I had my first long conversation about one of the episodes before I'd even seen it. Just the description of it was enough to draw me in.

Jump off here if you've never seen the show

Anyone who's seen the pilot episode will probably remember it forever. In it, the British Prime Minister is awakened to hear some shocking news: someone has kidnapped a popular young princess, and is threatening to kill her unless the Prime Minister has sex with a pig that same day and broadcasts the act live on television for the world to see. There are technical provisions in place that prevent faking the act. 

There is a provision that makes it less preposterous: The Prime Minister can wear a condom. 

A friend of mine told me this premise in a bar one night to entice me to watch the show (it worked), and we spent the next two hours dissecting this thought experiment. We added wrinkles to it: what if, instead of a princess, she's a poor woman with kids? What if it's ten people whose lives are at stake instead of one? Fifty? A hundred? A million? What if it's a school full of kids? 

My friend tended toward the "no negotiations with people who make me fuck pigs" end of the spectrum. I had to add a lot of people with lives hanging in the balance before he would consider carnal knowledge of a pig. (I might claim some hypocrisy here. He loves bacon.) 

The show itself isn't really about the morality of what the right decision is. It's more about the media and how media-driven public perceptions can change in an instant and determine what politicians do. At the beginning of the day, the public supports the Prime Minister's decision not to pork the pork, but after an effort to trick the kidnapper fails and the princess pays the price, the same public begins to demand he do it. The Prime Minister ultimately bows to public pressure and does the deed, but he does it so save his political career, not to save the woman. But I didn't know all this when talking about it in the bar with my friend, so we treated it like it was more or less an ethics problem: given the situation--hostage, demand, pig--what is the right course of action for the Prime Minister? I've been thinking this over for almost a year, now, and I'm still not sure what the right answer is.

Turns out, The University of Alabama has been running an advanced program in theoretical ethics for decades. 

The no argument

My friend had some good reasons to say "no" other than just not wanting to do it. First, how do you know that anyone sick enough to come up with this plan would actually release the princess? But more to the point, let's say you do what the pig perverts ask and they do release the girl. You've saved her life, but what if there are other people who then try the same thing? Now, ransoming humiliation out of politicians can become an easy way to get any politician with an agenda you dislike out of politics. You've opened the floodgates to all kinds of evil. 

The yes argument

I wanted to agree and vote no on this, but there was something that didn't sit right with me. Try changing a few parts of the situation, and you might come up with a different conclusion:

-What if, instead of schtooping a swine, the kidnappers say you must give up your life in her place? You must drink poison on national television or the woman will die with suffering. Wouldn't most people say that yes, one ought to sacrifice oneself for another? Or at least that doing so would be noble? So why is it noble to give your life to save another, but not to just be humiliated to save someone? Does pride mean more than life?

-What if it's not the Prime Minister being asked? What if it's just some random schmo, and the kidnappers have picked him as the patsy at random from a phone book? They just want to humiliate a random person. What should he do?

-What if there were no public shame element to it? Let's pretend a woman has a rare form of cancer, and scientists have discovered that pigs produce a chemical that defeats the cancer. However, they only produce it when a human male has sex with them, and so far, the hospital hasn't found any volunteers. So there are no cameras and no agendas--just the need to have intercourse with a pig to save a life. 

-Even my friend had to admit that the argument for sexing Sooey became stronger when you started adding victims, especially if the victims were children. This, of course, brings about the difficult question of how many people become enough to fuck a pig and how many is few enough to not do it. 

I couldn't help feeling there was a good moral argument that at least the first time this happens, the morally correct action is to take whatever drugs you need to take so you aren't in your mind and your equipment works, and to fuck the pig. 

Okay, I might have been encouraged to take this position because every time I said, "I think you've got to fuck the pig" in that bar, I enjoyed watching the bartender who was eavesdropping on us shake his head. But I don't think I was only ready to say there was a good argument for banging the bacon because it got a rise out of the bartender; I think that it might actually be the right thing to do. Snort coke, take an entire bottle of Viagra, hire porn stars to whisper in your ear, and do the deed. After that, resign your post in politics and retire to a monastery somewhere to live our the rest of your life. 

Two caveats: 1) Only the first person this happens to should comply. Once is noble sacrifice. Twice is inviting an outbreak of copycat crimes. (And actually, now that Black Mirror has done this idea, I don't think anyone in the real world ought to go along with it. It could very easily become a popular form of criminal mischief, like an extreme form of SWATing.) 2) Nobody can blame you if you say no. If the kidnapper's requirement was to stab yourself in the eyeball, I don't think I could make myself do that, either. How do you overcome the body's instinct not to do some things? I don't know if all the drugs in the world could get me to do it. Even if I could bring myself to try, I'd probably fail. 

More important than the yes or no

The bigger deal to me as a writer is that I can't remember having had that animated and engaged a conversation about a "literary" story in a long time. Literary fiction seems to feel that setting up a moral choice that a character must make where there are competing moral claims is beneath it somehow. That's for science fiction. It's too plot-based. Yet people love reading for these reasons. Moreover, it's clear to me what the social value is of a story meant to engender a debate over the right or wrong path in a certain situation. I'm not always sure what the social value of literary fiction is. Lit fic seems to produce a million versions of the same story, where we open a window into the psyche of a character faced with a private form of crisis, and we try to convincingly render the psychological process in the character that leads to some kind of internal change. It sometimes feels like literary fiction is the same story over and over, just with a never-ending quest to find an overlooked type of character to tell it about and a new form to fit the story into.

I've never really read sci-fi, unless you count Vonnegut. I took a course in high school on sci-fi and fantasy, where I read a lot of the best-known sci-fi short stories from a hundred years ago when I was a teenager. Since then, I've never really examined the genre. I'm rethinking this. I've written before that I'm not totally sure literary fiction is the right genre for me. All the stories I've written in the last five years have been lit fic, but maybe it's time to change that. Maybe this is the year where I take a break from the road I've been on, read some new stuff and re-think what I want to do with writing. It makes sense that I would try to write the kinds of stories I myself find compelling. 

Beginning, middle, and never end

With it being as cold here as it is everywhere right now, and since I am too weakly constituted to deal with the cold, we've been doing a lot of what everyone else is doing: streaming shows all day long. Mrs. Heretic and I are currently watching the entirety of The Mindy Project, which neither of us is crazy about, but since we're too lazy to figure out an alternative, we'll probably watch to the end.

In the mornings, I write short stories where I try to bring about a convincing and satisfying resolution in five thousand words or less. In the evenings, I watch shows where the goal is to keep the story going for as long as it is profitable to keep it going. There are, of course, little climaxes and little denouements within the episodes and seasons of a TV series, but the big resolution is withheld indefinitely, until the stars want to do something else or the sponsor decides to cut bait.

Interrupting ancient tradition

The basic plot structure of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution or denouement has been more or less the cultural expectation in the West for over 2,000 years. Aristotle described plot in a way that people growing up in my era could find very easy to recognize. It can be a little difficult to find the structure in some ancient stories, partly because we have only fragments of some of them, but it's there. All the literature we read in school follows this outline, whether it's Shakespeare's plays, Homer's epics, 19th-century Romanticism or 20th-century realism. The only exceptions are stories that are intentionally trying, through some avant garde sensibility, to subvert classical plot structure. For the most part, though, it's been something that's been constant whether we're watching Star Wars or reading Faulkner.

When television became ubiquitous, plot structure changed only slightly. Instead of being treated to a story where a character faced challenges, adapted, and either overcame or was overcome followed by a hard ending where we were forced to imagine what would happen afterwards, viewers got miniature versions of the plot cycle repeated over and over. Every week, the stage was re-set and the play took place again, with variations from the last episode, but still very similar. Beaver Cleaver learned life lessons, then would forget them the next week and have to learn all over again.

This wasn't totally without precedent in Western culture. There had been serial narrative. Dickens, of course, is the first example that comes to mind. But a Dickens story, even broken up into dozens of magazine installments, still is headed towards an end the whole time. It's a traditional plot structure that just takes a while. A better early analogue for 20th-Century TV would be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with narratives progressing toward an ending, but then re-set to do something similar again. The earliest analogue in American literature would be James Fennimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo stories.

In talking about 20th-century television, I'm talking mainly about the sit-com, or dramas like The Fugitive or Kung Fu, where the overall meta-plot of the story didn't really advance much from episode to episode. This was the dominant model, but there were others. The daytime drama or soap opera had plot cycles or "story lines" within a larger story that, if the network executives were lucky, would never end. The daytime soap was held in low esteem, thought to be trash for shallow housewives, but there were night-time versions with a slightly better reputation.

Around the turn of the century, shows like Ally McBeal started to give audiences something different. This was a comedy where things that happened in one episode carried over into the next one, allowing writers to do things they hadn't been able to do before. As the Internet and fan forums started to exert influence in how people watched TV, fans loved being able to speculate on what would happen with a story from season to season.

As a result, plot cycles started to operate on many levels. There was still the plot cycle of each individual episode, but there was also an emerging plot cycle of a season. As CD sets got sold by season, we started to think of the season as the fundamental unit of a TV show, not the episode. This has accelerated with shows that are now made for streaming services that get released as an entire season and watched, often, in one binge session.

Like having sex for five years

In general, opening up TV narrative past the episode and into the seasonal aspect has made it better. In the old days, shows required us to forget what we'd seen in past episodes, a characteristic The Simpsons has had endless fun making mocking. The application of consequences to TV shows has made it easier for audiences to suspend disbelief and get into the shows.

However, there is a built-in problem with TV's season-by-season approach to building narrative. The climax in plot has the same name as the high point of sex for a reason. Plot is supposed to delight, to build expectation, and then eventually to deliver on that expectation and resolve the tension. Odysseus is supposed to eventually make it home. With a TV show, however, as long as there is a promise of one more season, then we cannot ever really get to the big orgasm. It might sound great to have sex forever, but at some point, delayed gratification starts to pass a point of diminishing returns. (Mrs. Heretic might opine at this point that this would explain why I'm fond of short stories. At least I don't write a lot of micro-fiction.)

There are three plot cycles in a TV series: the episodic, the seasonal, and the overall series cycle. As long as the series cycle is not resolved, Odysseus will never get home again. The audience never gets its big orgasm. In a great series, you can have moments that certainly feel orgasmic, like when Sansa Stark releases the hounds on Ramsey Bolton's ass. But for most shows, we just get points in the narrative that feel better than others--like season openers or finales. (One strength of Game of Thrones is that the series always had an end point in mind. It is just a very long plot instead of an indefinite one.)

Finally, at some point, the audience gets rubbed raw by all this foreplay. The show starts to jump the shark, and the executives, if they're smart, plan for a final season that finally resolves the show's big narrative issues. So we do finally get resolution. But there is a strange effect on the evolution of a show.

House, Nurse Jackie, and essential character armor

We all know about plot armor: the certainty an audience has that the show's main character cannot die until the end. The modern TV series introduces another kind of armor, one that makes the main character invulnerable from fully maturing past his or her shortcomings until the end.

I commented before about the movie Train Wreck, how it's satisfying once Amy Schumer's character finally overcomes her self-destructiveness. But it's also clearly the end, because now we, the audience, have nothing left to laugh at. With shows like House or Nurse Jackie, the main character is not going to fully overcome (or be overcome by) their shortcomings until the end, and the end is not now until we have the announcement that we are in the show's last year. Until then, we can have false climaxes--both House and Nurse Jackie had a season where the main character kicked their addictions and tried to live right. But that made it hard to keep the momentum of the show going. For viewers, it was an interesting contrast from seasons past, but we all knew that the writers would pull the plug out of the tub of that transitional season.

In a movie like Train Wreck, the main character's personal development is linear. Events change her little by little until she makes a big change. In a TV show, the character is resistant to hundreds of events before it starts to change the character. The development isn't linear; it's a circular holding pattern. The character gets close to getting it right over and over, but always falls away until the show finally gets clearance to land.   

The TV series does not have to answer one of the big questions in traditional narrative--Why now? Why are we being allowed into this person's life at this point in it? Usually, it's because that's the point we need to start at in order to witness the change. In TV, though, we come in at the point where the change is furthest away.

The result on modern viewers

It's hard to say what the actual psychological effect of stories are on readers and viewers. Hopefully, they help to produce empathy. But does reading about or watching a character overcome personal flaws (or fall to them) help the reader to do (or avoid) the same? I'm not sure, although I operate on faith that it does. I feel like it has in my own life, so I write in the belief it might do the same for others.

But I feel like there is an entirely different psychological effect of a television show that goes on indefinitely and only decides to end when external factors make it end versus a story that ends organically on its own terms. Not to sound like one of those annoying people who make a big show of how international and cosmopolite they are, but I prefer watching a Korean drama, where there is an end built-in from the beginning, and we are working toward it through all 20 episodes. The season is also the series. It has an entirely different narrative impulse.

I suppose a show where the main character limps on for seven years with the same basic issues is more like real life than a show where the main character overcomes a flaw within the space (to the audience) of a few hours. We do tend to face the same life issues year after year and decade after decade. So maybe the modern, streaming show is a truer model of how to deal with our weaknesses. Maybe Bojack Horseman can't stop doing drugs and drinking and wallowing in self-pity, but he can try to find ways to deal with his horrible flaws so he can face his day-to-day issues. He wins some, even if he usually loses, and the losses have much direr consequences. But maybe that's really all most of us can really do--try to minimize the downside of ourselves rather than overcome it and conquer mightily.

But this feels like a loss, somehow. The greatest fiction in fiction might be the illusion that we have control over our lives, but as Lander said in Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, "Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth." I think readers and viewers lose some sense of agency when they follow narrative arcs that last from the time our kids start kindergarten to the time they're asking out prom dates, especially if we all know the show only ended because two of the characters left to go be on a different show.

Speaking of The Underground Railroad, I hear it's going to become a series on Amazon Prime. I look forward to watching it. It will deal with a question the writers of Handsmaid's Tale are dealing with now: how do you take a single novel and turn it into several seasons of stories? If there is a novel that's not itself a series but that might work for a TV show, it's this one. Like the underground railroad in the story, the narrative of the book has a lot of hidden passages that might lead to places nobody even knows about. Since the book is as much about the journey of African Americans as it is about the main character, it ends with more questions than answers.

The age of streaming video, which most are viewing as a golden age of television, has given us some brilliant moments and some stuff that's just better than being outside when it's freezing. I hope The Underground Railroad will become some of the best we've yet seen.

Be careful of the advice you take (with bonus microfiction)

I get sent links in my email to columns about writing, because some algorithm has figured out I'll read some of them. The articles I read are a mix of good and bad, with both usually being pretty easy to spot early on. The danger is when you read an article that's good in general, but all wrong for you.

The other day, the algorithm sent me an entry from this little blog by a woman named Mary Jo Campbell. I knew nothing about her, but it was a focused entry on how to write micro-fiction, so I read it. I thought it was fairly well done; it contained some advice most writers already know, like the importance of details and creative use of language, but it was generally worth my five minutes. However, if I hadn't already known the conventions of literary fiction pretty well, I'd have been led astray by some advice she gave. Here's the 100-word story she wrote that she shared as an example:

What Brings Us Together

My fingers are cold yet sweat drips down my armpits, under this black polyester suit jacket. Mom’s smile is her phony-phone-voice as she busies herself introducing the families that enter. The chosen groomsmen are called to the front of the aisle, one brother taller than the next, sleek in their dark combed hair, smooth complexions, pressed suits. Solemn handsome faces contrasted by the pink blotches on the bride-to-be’s cheeks. They are each handed a pair of too-small, bright-white gloves. I swallow hard as my brothers line either side of Bob’s casket.

I've said before I'm not a huge fan of 100-word stories, but they are a thing, and it's a way to get your name out there, so I guess I'd grudgingly write some if I thought I could do it well. But there's something about this story that doesn't sit right with me, at least as literary fiction. It seems to violate a critical aesthetic principle, voiced by Meg Wolitzer in the Introduction to this year's Best American Short Stories anthology. Wolitzer begins by discussing how the first short stories she was assigned to read in middle school were always the kind with a surprise ending, stories like "The Gift of the Magi." These stories conditioned her to always look for the big twist at the end, to consider it a sine qua non of a good story. Later, however, she came to realize that "if everything is surprising, then nothing is," and to dislike "an unearned surprise for a surprise's sake." She later comes to a more mature understanding of surprise: "...the idea of 'surprise' wasn't abandoned entirely; instead, it was given a shine and polish and a more mature translation. It's possible to see that a whole story--not just the ending--might itself take on what had been considered the function of an ending."

In other words, the whole story should shock one's expectations, should undo the reader's way of seeing things.  As a reader, you will "find yourself in a place you didn't know about before."

Campbell, however, specifically recommends the shock ending, calling for "...a twist the reader won’t see coming. But after a re-read, they feel that gut-punch of realization." The story above seems mostly designed for the sake of the surprise ending. There are details given that are clearly meant to lead the reader astray, like the mention of "groomsmen" and a "bride-to-be." (Campbell writes in the blog that this was taken from a cousin who died just before getting married. That's nice to know, but the story as it stands is a little confusing. Why are groomsmen at a funeral? When I read it, I wondered if someone died at the wedding, and they just had the funeral right there that same day because the church was already booked.)

It's nicely written, it has good details, and the unexpected, jangling simile of the smile actually "being" the voice is nice. So is the alliterative word play of "phony-phone-voice." There's nothing wrong with the story, except that it's not literary fiction. I finally realized at this point that Campbell's blog clearly calls attention to the fact that she mainly likes YA fiction. I missed that up front, because I was assuming the algorithm was smart enough to know I write one and not the other.

The lesson is to pay attention to the advice you're getting and where it's coming from. Most writing advice is universal, like use good details. There are some principles, however, that change according to tastes and are genre-specific. So pay more attention that I did.


BONUS FLASH FICTION!!!

Just to give everyone a chance to shit on my writing, instead of me just picking on someone else's (even though I've said I liked her story), I hereby submit to you all the only 100-word story I've ever tried to write. According to the rules, the title isn't included in the word count
-----------

Professor Mulkin Equivocates before a Greater Power

Professor Mulkin tried to be both seen and invisible in the Book Bonanza!; he hadn’t been in a bookstore since Borders closed, hadn’t even known they still existed. He saw only DVDs of TV shows and tween vampire fiction. His wife, recovering in the hospital, had asked for an adult coloring book.

He had written for the Times criticizing such fare and those who read them. They signaled the end. Now, he asked for them out loud. He paid for his purchase with his card, finding it suddenly easy to forgive every crime in history. 

--------------

I have no idea if that's a good literary fiction 100-word story. Like I said, I don't know of any of these things that have really dazzled me. I think they're just an effort to be cute and prove literature isn't always stuffy--like churches telling us that Jesus is cool. This was my best effort to do something with the form. If it sucks, it won't really hurt my feelings much.