Something there is that doesn't love a pressure-treated privacy fence: "Time of the Preacher" by Bret Anthony Johnston (Best American Short Stories 2025)

When people who haven't been trained in literary analysis read the criticism of those who have, I imagine they often think the "pros" are just making it up and reading too much into the story. Lay people are probably prone to object, often with good reason, that "it doesn't say that anywhere in the story." 

I say "with good reason" because skepticism about unusual claims is typically a good thing. When Freud and his acolytes claimed to be able to interpret dreams, skepticism was well-founded. A lot of literary criticism probably feels similar to a lay person to the flim-flam interpretation of dreams. Both are claiming that an image can work on two levels: a literal or conscious level as well as a connotative or unconscious one. 

The difference to me is that with literary interpretation, treating an image or a word or a figure of speech like it might have a second layer of meaning is warranted, because words really do have connotations. We all experience this. It's why using words associated with monkeys or apes in close proximity to a black person is likely to draw anger. It's why conservatives get worked up about the treatment of the American flag or the National Anthem, although the former is just a piece of cloth and the latter just a song. Dragons, tigers, rainbows, spark plugs, Donald Trump's hair--all of them evoke both literal and figurative associations for us. The figurative ones might be hard to pin down, and they certainly won't be exactly the same in every person, but they objectively exist, and there will be an approximate nearness of meaning for most people. Or maybe rather than saying these things "objectively" exist, I should say they "phenomenologically" exist, which is to say that objectively, people nearly universally have a subjective experience. It comes to almost the same thing for interpretation. 

Two levels of political meaning in "Time of the Preacher"

In analyzing "Time of the Preacher" by Bret Anthony Johnston, I'm going to claim that there is a lot of political meaning in the story. This is true on two levels. One is that the main character, Holland, has pretty clear political opinions. This claim won't be hard to prove, because the story is full of evidence for Holland's political beliefs. The second claim is that the story itself holds certain political ideas, and this claim, I'll wager, will be met with greater skepticism, more objections of, "Where does it say that in the story?" 

Note that when I'm saying "the story" holds political ideals, I'm not saying Bret Anthony Johnston holds those ideas or that he meant to put them in the story. That may be, but when someone writes fiction, they're handling materials that are instable. All of those images and incidents and words, each of which has an uncertain connotative meaning, can end up creating meaning that the author did not intend. That's why most literary critics don't talk about what the author intended; they talk about what the text suggests. 

Meaning level one: Holland's political beliefs

It's pretty easy to prove that Holland leans conservative. The story is told from a third-person limited point of view, which means all of the thoughts about characters in the story are coming from Holland's mind. In the very first sentence of the story, we get Holland's impression of the people he is building a fence for. He finds them to be a "tiresome academic couple." Academic many not always mean "liberal," but it usually does, and it's clear that Holland, at least, thinks they are. Moreover, while still in the same neighborhood of the "tiresome academics," a man walking two small dogs asks Holland if he can build a skateboard ramp. Holland tells him no and then thinks one word to himself: "Liberals." Now, if Holland had simply thought this one person was a liberal, he would have thought "fucking liberal" or something like that. Instead, he thought in the plural, meaning Holland was lumping this one person in with others he thinks to be similar, and expressing a negative opinion about them as a group. I guess liberals walk little, annoying, pussy dogs and ask for stupid construction projects, in Holland's mind. 

If this wasn't direct enough, then his interactions with his ex-wife Mandy definitely are. Mandy calls him a libertarian, a group of people in some ways more liberal than conservatives (they generally are pro-legal-abortion), but also more conservative in some ways (they want to get rid of nearly all taxation). In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which this story is set during, libertarians were bed fellows with Republicans/conservatives, because both wanted to limit the amount of government-mandated restrictions on personal activity. Holland, like many conservatives, wasn't a big fan of wearing a mask, and did so only perfunctorily to placate his liberal clients. When Holland and his wife had argued most recently, it had been about taxes and the mid-terms. When Mandy left Holland, she apparently left Holland's politics as much as him, because now she's married to a guy with the type of job Holland associates with rich liberals, and she also drives a Tesla, while he drives a who-gives-a-fuck-about-emissions pickup with a smoke stack. (Remember when Teslas were something liberals drove?) 

The pandemic wasn't the beginning of every act and possession becoming encoded for one's political beliefs, but it did become more pronounced at this time. The type of car one drove could tell something about your political beliefs. Whether you wore a mask said something about your beliefs. At work, a liberal co-worker friend of mine once got upset because a co-worker had a sign at his desk for Black Rifle Coffee. Only in a country where nearly any purchase can be coded for political beliefs would a coffee advertisement be an indirect way to put up a "Trump 2024" sign at your desk within a workspace where political signs were not allowed. "Time of the Preacher" makes use of these codes that we all recognize to tell us something about the characters. 

What the story says about conservatives and liberals

So it's pretty non-controversial that Holland is politically conservative. That doesn't mean that the story is, though. In fact, writing a story about a conservative can be a pretty effective way to critique conservative political beliefs. Is that what's happening here? I'm almost instinctively conditioned to expect as much, since this is an anthology of literary fiction, and the politics of literary fiction are pretty solidly liberal. 

However, I think the story's more complicated than that. During all three of Trump's campaigns, there was a tendency to equate blue collar workers with Trump supporters, and to claim that liberals were often well-off beneficiaries of a liberal status quo. The actual math behind this is not that clear-cut. A Pew Research poll in early 2024, before the election, suggested that 58% of low-income families supported Democrats. However, in the 2024 election, Trump split voters making less than $50K a year and won voters between $50,000 and $100,000. It's also a little bit tricky to equate "low income" with "blue collar," since many blue collar workers now make over $100,000 a year. But at any rate, Trump has certainly tried to associate himself with blue collar work, and there has been a shift in the direction of Trump among these voters, even if total blue collar support for Trump in particular and conservatives in general hasn't quite become totally overwhelming. At the very least, while I'm driving around Ohio, I'm not at all surprised to find a pickup truck with decals on it for an electrician or a plumber, and the truck has Trump stickers. 

In Holland's world, many of the stereotypes that Trump supporters have made hay with are existent, and pretty clearly so. Holland is a conservative blue collar worker doing work in liberal communities for wealthy liberal clients. Liberals look down on him for being blue collar. (Mandy makes fun of his smell and says he should bottle it, perhaps because she thinks liberal women secretly want to be with manly men like Holland. In any event, she's treating him in this respect like he's an "other" for working hard outdoors.) In spite of how liberals perceive him, Holland is brave and manly and resourceful and liberals are effete and cowardly, hiding behind masks and walls. Mandy has to call Holland to look for a snake because her software-designing husband "appreciates snakes even less than (Mandy does)."  

The story also challenges the notion that liberals are kinder than conservatives. When Mandy (is it too much of a reach to read "Mandatory" into her name, in the context of the pandemic?) needs help finding a snake, she calls ex-husband Holland, although she hasn't bothered to check in on him at any time during the pandemic. Mandy apparently comes from some amount of money, since she's taken over properties from her parents, but rather than call an exterminator and pay to have the snake removed, she calls on Holland. Maybe to seduce him one last time, maybe to cheap out, maybe because she trusts Holland more than someone she doesn't know. She certainly puts out a couple of signals that she might be open to seducing him, including mentioning it as a possible motivation. But whatever her real motivation, the point is that Holland comes. He is tolerant of Mandy's mental health issues (another conservative stereotype of liberals, particularly liberal women, is that they're all in therapy, all gobbling down psychotropic drugs, and all unhappy). He really tries to find the snake, at personal risk. Hell, Holland is even kind to animals, building a house for abandoned chickens. 

This doesn't mean, though, that the story is giving a full-throated endorsement to conservative talking points. For one thing, Holland, for all his bravery, calls himself a coward at one point, because he's too afraid to have an honest and emotional conversation with Mandy. Secondly, there is apparently a critical watershed moment going on in the world, and although Mandy recognizes it, Holland doesn't. 

Holland listens to Willie Nelson. Is this a signifier of a conservative, a liberal, or someone who rejects labels altogether? Stick around to find out. 

Two allusions

Figuring out what the story is actually saying about Holland as a person and about his politics can be helped by looking at two very subtle allusions the story makes. One is the name of Holland's fence company: "Good Fences." This is a reference to Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall." The poem is about two rural neighbors who repair the stone fence between their property every year. The narrator is a little confused about why they even bother doing it, when the fence just keeps toppling down, and it's not really keeping anything out. But the neighbor twice repeats the phrase, "Good fences make good neighbors." 

This phrase has come to be known for the way people cite it in earnest, when the original poem is questioning its validity. That is, people now say, "Good fences make good neighbors" as a pretext for building a privacy fence so they don't have to see their neighbors (in other words, to become bad neighbors). But "Mending Wall" is poking fun at the neighbor's fideism in the efficacy of fences. Good fences don't actually make good neighbors, it is saying. In fact, nature itself seems to be trying to rip down walls between people. 

Holland is, in some ways, the inverse of the saying, because he is a good neighbor who makes good fences. Nonetheless, those fences are making people into worse neighbors. And the worsening quality of neighbors is part of the whole threat that Mandy feels but can't quite express. 

The second allusion is in the story's final paragraph: 

..In the truck bed, the old recliner jostled, swayed. There, deep under the seat's cushion, the snake--a copperhead, hungry, still gray at five months old--lay coiled and alert. The world was reverberating from every dark direction, a chaos that frightened and confused her, so she curled tighter, made herself smaller. She stared with unblinking eyes into nothingness. She flicked her tongue, trying to decipher the numberless threats in the cold air.

This is something of a nod to W.B. Yeats' poem "The Second Coming," which foresees either a sphinx reborn or the coming of the beast from the Revelation of St. John:

 ...a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Mandy senses that something epochal is happening, some fundamental change in the tides of history, but she can't quite put her finger on it. Three times she tries, and every time, she links it to the uncanny sense she has that it's a bad omen that her tenant, a preacher, has skipped out on her. "The world's on fire, and preachers are skipping out under cover of darkness" is one of them. Another is this: "I just keep thinking this is the end of the world. A snake in a house previously occupied by one of God's servants doesn't help." And finally: "If you can't count on a preacher to stick it out, who's left?"

Yeats' poem seems to think that something terrible is about to happen to world civilization as a result of the breakup of Christian consensus. Mandy apparently thinks something similar. Snakes, of course, play a fundamental role in Judeo-Christian mythology, with the serpent being what talked Eve into eating the fruit that ended paradise. At the end of "Time of the Preacher," the snake is a symbol of some profound evil waiting to unleash its venom on the world. That evil isn't the pandemic itself. The snake is afraid of all the noise coming from the truck. The noise is like all the bedlam of the pandemic. It's after the bedlam has died down that the snake is going to grow bold and come out to strike. 

Perhaps the real terror, the real snake waiting to strike at the heart of civilization and cause chaos, isn't the disease. It's the increasing alienation of people from one another. The liberal/conservative divide is an obvious example. We know just from seeing the car someone is driving whether they're in our camp. We can't imagine marrying or even being in close communion with someone who has different political opinions from us. Just before they leave one another from the preacher's home, Holland thinks of trying to run to Mandy to console her when she's crying, overwhelmed by the feeling the world is falling apart. He refrains, though, because he knows she'll just "fumble for her mask and retreat across the yard." 

We have a conservative who is still willing to brave the dangers of the pandemic and keep down one kind of wall, his mask. But he's not brave enough to risk approaching a liberal who hides behind her mask. The story seems to accept some criticisms of liberals, like that their insistence on safety ("safe spaces," after all, is a liberal creation) is helping to increase alienation rather than reduce it. But conservatives in the story are happy to help them build those walls, and they're also too chickenshit to go over the wall to connect. They'd prefer to write off the people behind masks and walls as "liberals" without even trying to connect. They're cowards, too.

Holland and Mandy both have a perspective to contribute to one another, but ultimately, they fail because each has their own particular kind of walls they put up. What results is a failed union, similar to our failing political one. 

A third allusion I'm not really touching

Holland listens to Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. Willie once put out an album called "Red Headed Stranger," which featured a song called "Time of the Preacher." Actually, the album has three different songs by this name. It's apparently a "concept" album, which I think usually means that the stories are linked and tell one running story. I listened to the album and can't really tell what running story is there. Nor can I tell what the "time of the preacher" is. The song basically is about a guy at the end of the pioneer age of America (1901) whose woman leaves him and he goes crazy. In two places, the song states either that the "lesson has begun" or that the "lesson has ended." So maybe the singer is the preacher. Or the "time of the preacher" is a time of historical change, when the voice of a preacher holds a warning for society. (To complicate all this, there is a movie based on the album that came out eleven years later, and it identifies an actual preacher named Julian Shay as the man who was jilted by his wife. I'm going to ignore the movie.) 

Willie Nelson is himself an interesting signifier politically. (Forgive me for my mistakes here. My mother loves Willie, but I'm far from an expert. I'm relying on Google to help me with this.) His "outlaw country" image made a lot of anti-establishment people embrace him. He was always into what might be called "progressive" causes, like his pro-environment stance, but many of his fans didn't really notice until recently, when he endorsed Democratic candidates. He's now beloved by the left, although the right hasn't completely abandoned him. Holland is still listening to him. Maybe Willie is a libertarian in the best sense, in that what he really wants is to be his own authentic self. Maybe Willie, and libertarians generally, are a potential bridge between left and right. 

Willie may or may not be the preacher of his song, but he is sort of acting as a preacher in the story, a voice still capable of connecting left to right. In a country where even your consumer choices are constrained by your politics, these voices are becoming rare. By identifying strengths and absurdities of both left and right, the story is also acting prophetically. The time of the preacher is partly about Mandy's understanding that the preacher's disappearance is a sign of the end, but it's also about how the story itself has arrived to offer a way out. The final lines of the story are the only ones that break from third-person limited (Holland has no way of knowing what's in the chair). So this seems to be the intervention of the voice of the preacher, telling us, prophetically, what is about to happen and why. 

See also: Karen Carlson's take on this story, which focuses more on the relationship between Mandy and Holland. 

I think I go back to San Juan: "Maritza and Carmen" by Lyn Di Iorio (Best American Short Stories 2025)

Donald Trump does so many outrageous things, it's hard to remember the once-unthinkable thing he or his administration did last week let alone in his previous administration. But in 2017, for about a week, one of the things liberals pretended they cared about and Trump supporters pretended wasn't a problem was the response to two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico: Irma and Maria. What particularly incensed liberals--or at least what gave them a chance to seem upset so they could lash out at Trump--was how long it took to get Puerto Rico's shambolic power system back up and running. Perhaps the only long-lasting political effect for the mainland of the whole ordeal was a lingering image of Trump tossing paper towels in one of the worst photo ops of all time. 

For Puerto Rico, the after-effects have been much more lasting, and also much harder to pin down. One clear result seems to have been the growth of a larger block of Puerto Ricans supporting statehood. For a long time, there have been three blocks on the political future of the island: full independence from the mainland, full statehood, and a continuation of the current status of protectorate. Pre-2017, supporters of the status quo often argued that Puerto Rico had a pretty good deal that allowed them to have a mix of reasonable autonomy, low taxes, and protection from the United States. However, autonomy had already been undermined in the 2000s when Puerto Rico had been unable to pay its debts and been forced to accept an outside, unelected board to run its economic affairs. 

When the hurricanes hit and the federal government proved unable or unwilling to provide prompt aid, the "protection" leg of the old status quo platform suffered a serious blow. Since 2017, public sentiment in Puerto Rico for continuing the commonwealth has dropped significantly, while support for both full statehood or full independence have gone up. Right now, support for full statehood is the strongest sentiment by a healthy margin, with people feeling that if Puerto Rico were a state, it would have been given support that other states suffering from natural disasters have received.  

Identity and politics

"Maritza and Carmen" takes place after the two hurricanes, and it features a woman whose life has been completely erased by the storms. She can't remember her past, other than in flashes. When her new lover Juancho finds an article about her daughter who is looking for her, Maritza, who now realizes that her former name was Carmen, isn't especially interested in meeting her daughter Taína. Juancho reads about Maritza's real identity in the newspaper El Nuevo Dia--the new day--emphasizing that Carmen/Maritza is claiming her right to personal tabula rasa-hood.  

In a sense, by making the story all about Maritza/Carmen's desire to figure out her own identity and to reject whatever of her past that doesn't fit her new vibe, the story is taking a huge step back from the political. But as feminist theorists have been telling us for more than half a century now, the personal is political, because the rubber of power structures meets the road of personal decisions in the tiny decisions of our private lives. So Maritza's identity crisis is political; it's simply a political drama played out on a small scale. 

Maritza prefers her new life to her former life as Carmen. In her new life, she is sexier (both her daughter and Juancho use this word), thinner, and less uptight. It's tempting to think that Maritza, with her sudden power to remake herself, is a microcosm of Puerto Ricans post-2017. Maritza--whose very name is a diminutive of Mary/Maria, the storm that took her memory from her, although she claims to have taken her new name from the Nuyorican woman who saved her--is redefining her identity at a time when many of her fellow Puerto Ricans are doing the same thing. However, Martiza, unlike many others, does not seem interested in a more "authentic" version of Puerto Rican identity. She is dismissive of the patron of Juancho's cafe looking at reprints of a island artist, "as if she were in a gallery." When she learns that her daughter's name is Taína--closely related to the Taino, the aboriginal dwellers on the island--she reproaches herself for not picking a better, more original name. Her daughter bemoans the loss of a Taino relic, but Maritza has other worries. 

Although Juancho chooses the foods he makes based partly on "family comfort and criollo identity," Maritza seems not particularly interested in either. But it isn't just Boricua enthusiasm Maritza is short of. She's also not interested in her former ideologies that she embraced prior to the hurricane, the ones associated with life on the mainland or her former career as a police officer. When she learns that she was once married to a white man in New York, she has no interest in learning anything about him. When she finds out she used to be a police officer, she wonders why, when she dislikes the police. She mocks the "mainland American dream" of West Side Story by taking the name of the girl Maria from the musical and replacing it with the hurricane of the same name, then distorting a line from one of the musical's most recognizable songs: "Maria, Maria, Maria, Maria, all the horrible sounds of the world in a single word." 

Maritza is now in a state where she rejects both her pre-hurricane identity and any attempt to force her post-hurricane reality into too strictly defined a reality. She isn't a microcosm of the people, striving for a more authentic sense of identity. She isn't Puerto Rico, she's just Maritza, and she isn't looking to the outside world for meaning at all. In this sense, she's representative of another Puerto Rican reaction to the hurricanes: autogestión. It means something like "self-management," and, in spite of how non-politically Maritza attempts to hold to the view, it's a very political, social movement. Since Puerto Rico realized that the mainland isn't going to jump to any hoops to improve life on the island, the island has since begun to look to itself. Maritza is a more extreme version of this; for her, autogestión has to do with managing her own life.

It's kind of a humble choice. It may not sound as grand as a proudly patriotic, full-throated "Boricua" vision, one in which a person's every choice is circumscribed by the need to be authentically Puerto Rican. Maritza is more concerned with how the flowers she puts out on the tables look. It's a classic "tend your own garden" kind of ending, literally. It may not sound grand or inspiring, but in the reality of a post-Maria world--both the hurricane and the musical and all it represents--it's all Maritza can scrape together. 

One reality of the post-Maria world for Puerto Ricans--and for Maritza as well--is the loss of a sense of place. Although even long before 2017, Puerto Rican movement between the mainland and home was often described as "El vaivén," referring to the tendency of people to move back and forth, the hurricanes turned that up a notch. Many people soon after had no choice but to depart for the mainland. Maritza had returned to Vega Baja before the storms. If there was a born-again Boricua moment for her, it was then, before Maria, not after. Vega Baja was where her family was from, including one progenitor who had helped create the island's constitution. 

It's an interesting inversion of expectations. One would think that after the hurricanes, when the island became aware of the extent to which the mainland didn't really care, would be the moment of a turn toward Puerto Rican nationalism, but it isn't, at least for Maritza. This came before the hurricanes, and that turn is rejected as much as anything else by Maritza. After waking up with her memory gone, Maritza is in Arecibo, then she is sent to San Juan (passing by Vega Baja on the way). At the end, Martiza seems content to stay in San Juan, along with Juancho, whose name, like Maritza's, is a diminutive, in this case a diminutive of "Juan," the saint for whom the city in which they live is named. Both Maritza and Juancho are content to live diminutive lives shaped by the great events around them, and escaping only by their willingness to be too small to notice.

Life wish, death wish, red fish, blue fish: "Unfathomably Deep" by Sophie Madeline Dess (BASS 2025)

This must be that thing that happens once a year in blogging through a short story anthology where I have to pause to remark on how the stories in said anthology are not intentionally lined up such that two consecutive stories interact with one another. Best American Short Stories has long maintained a tradition of listing its stories in alphabetical order according to the surname of the author. They maintained this practice this year, in spite of the change of editor. So when two stories have similar themes or subject matter, it's a coincidence. 

Sometimes, it's one hell of a coincidence, though, enough to make me wonder if the guest editor selecting the winning stories is actually such a genius that, as they read through, they were able to consider how the stories would play out through juxtaposition by considering author surnames. "Let's see, yes, Wilson's story is about as good as Baker's, but if I choose Wilson, it'll go right after Weber, and both are about a family mourning the loss of a dog..." I can't believe any editor chooses stories like that, but in all the years I've been doing this, "Unfathomably Deep" by Sophie Madeline Dess, coupled with "Abject Naturalism" by Sarah Braunstein, the story just before "Unfathomably" in the 2025 BASS, have got to the take award for "two stories most difficult to believe just happened to end up next to one another." This is because of the way both stories squeeze all the meaning they can out of the uncanniness of the female body. 

Freud just won't go away

I always wondered, from the first moment I realized there was such a thing as literary theory, why Freud was such a big part of it. In any anthology of or introduction to literary theory, psychoanalytic criticism will probably occupy a large chapter somewhere near the front (because it was, chronologically, one of the earliest influential theories in modernity). A good chunk of that chapter on psychoanalytic criticism will belong to the work of Sigmund Freud. 

When I first found myself spending a chunk of a semester learning to apply Freud to a literary text, I was surprised. Freud isn't very influential in the actual practice of psychology or psychiatry anymore. The science of the brain has advanced far enough that we can pretty easily dispense with a lot of his key concepts. For example, we don't really think that dreams are the unconscious trying to tell us something, even while repressing that message. I don't think anyone believes that women go around their whole lives wishing they had penises. Even if we aren't professionals in mental health or cognitive science, we can read his work and see a good deal more cultural assumption than rigorous science in it.

And yet...

Some of the major concepts in it have appeal, not as science, but as a way of explaining art and why certain motifs continually show up in literary works. Freud isn't relevant much anymore if you're going to a mental health professional to try and quit smoking or to deal with your anxiety, but it's hard to read some stories and not think of his categories. So as unlikely as it seems, Freud is still worth considering, not as a psychologist, but as a cultural thinker who brings psychology into the discussion of art. He's more Joseph Campbell than Michael Gazzaniga. 

I wonder whether doctors who did bloodletting or doctors who tried to fix patients based on the images from their dreams have done more harm in the world. 

Life and Death

Two concepts in Freud are the "life wish," which he called eros, because one way this wish manifests itself is in the decision to have children through sex, and the "death drive," which he called thanatos. Thanatos manifests itself in all of humanity's violent and risky behaviors. Since sex can be one of those risky things, it's pretty clear that the life wish and the death drive are kind of mixed up in one another. For a male to do his part in traditional procreation, he has to have an orgasm, which has been compared to death in many cultures and languages. 

In "Unfathomably Deep," the two drives are completely mixed up for Izzie, the first-person narrator. They're so mixed up, they almost have the same name. One is Danielle, her dead sister, and the other is Daniel, the doctor-in-training who's doing his OBGYN rotation at the place where Izzie is a hired actress playing a patient. 

But which is death and which is life? It'd be easy to say that Danielle, as the dead one, is the death drive, while Daniel, playing a doctor helping Izzie to achieve her make-believe pregnancy, is life. But when Danielle died, she was herself pregnant. And the frequent references to Medea, who killed her own children, mean that even Doctor Daniel's role in bringing forth children could be tied to death. 

When the story opens, we immediately get a very funny play on the meaning of the words of the title. Immediately below the title of the story and the epigraph from Medea, we get the opening line: "Three men were supposed to spread me open, check me out." Izzie, as a fake gynecological patient, is getting an exam of her "unfathomable depths." In Freud, the unconscious mind, deep waters, and the vagina all occupy similar psychological territory. There are a number of reasons why. The ocean is deep, the unconscious mind is deep. The womb is watery. The vagina is a depth to plumb. All are something primordial from which our existence stems. 

Izzie's psychotic break into her own unconscious comes on the bank of the river, and it is described in terms of falling into a depth: "Then, as you all know, I fell in. Not down into the water, but backward, into the steep ravine that's cracked up my brain." This psychotic break is then followed by Izzie plunging both herself and Daniel into the water, where she kills him with love.

In addition to being life, Daniel is also sort of an Adam-like person to Izzie. She is first attracted to him because he doesn't do the interview right. He reassures her when he is supposed to be clinical and unemotional. She sees him as Edenically innocent: "My god, it's gotta be so beautiful to be dumb. To be born with such a stagnant little forever face. To be born so entitled to a certain eternity. It's gotta be like nothing just to live and live and live and live!" 

Contrasted to Daniel's innocent stupidity is Rebecca...ahem...Apple, the genius. That is, the fruit of knowledge, contrasted to Daniel's Edenic and stupid innocence. What attracts Izzie, though, is the thought that she might find depth in Daniel. Or, failing to find it, to create it herself. 

Daniel is innocent and child-like and is training to help people have innocent babies, but Izzie baptizes him, against his will, into the depths of the unconscious, the "unfathomable depths" of the womb from which we come and which ultimately leads us to death. 

Look! It's all here in one painting! Life! Death! Water! Unconscious!

On the one hand, one could look at this story as just a rendering of the break of a mind traumatized by the death of a beloved sister. But it's more than that, because it takes the local trauma and mythologizes it to universal levels. "They say I'm made of myth," Izzie speaks to her listeners. At the beginning of the story, her listeners seem to be friends listening to her meet-cute about Daniel, but by the end, they seem to be more the psychiatrists treating her in a mental institution after she kills Daniel. Or has a mental episode in which she thinks she kills Daniel. Izzie means "myth" here as a lie; she's saying her listeners are skeptical. But also, she has become a myth. She's become Medea. 

A lot of people tend to wonder, when reading a Freudian explication of a story like this, whether the author intended it. I think it's quite possible, given how well-known Freud's basic ideas are, and the extent to which the story plays with them, that there was at least some conscious desire to make use of Freudian images. But also, it doesn't matter. It's an example of why Freud is still relevant: because his ideas, while not great for treating mental illness, can sometimes do a great job of giving us a language to discuss ubiquitous images and motifs that crop up in human thinking. Medea is a mother. Mothers are the source of life. Medea murders her children. Life and death are bound up together. The gift of life is always an eventual gift of death. When we overcome our death drive long enough to "dive into" the female depth and create life, we are also creating eventual death for someone else. This life may start out innocent, but eventually, it will get sucked into the business of life, which means it's on its way out of Eden before it even gets started. 

Anything can go wrong, but it doesn't: "Abject Naturalism" by Sarah Braunstein (Best American Short Stories 2025)

A lot of story titles try to sneak in unassumingly and maybe even make you forget about them by page three. They also make an effort not to tip where the real heart of the story might be buried. That's true of "What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?" which was the last story in BASS I just posted about. At story's end, when I went back to the beginning and remembered that was the title, I had to do some post-facto thinking to re-insert the story's title into my overall understanding of it. Like many stories nowadays, it didn't even have the words of the title appear in the narrative itself.

None of that is true of "Abject Naturalism" by Sarah Braunstein. Rather than being a quick onramp into the story, something I read and then immediately sprang past into the narrative, the title made me stop and consider it before I moved on. In everyday meaning--at least among the kinds of people likely to use "abject" in a sentence--the word means something like "extreme, but only for bad things." In my mind, the word most likely to follow "abject" in a spoken sentence is "poverty," and the words most likely to precede it are something like "He/she/they lived in..." 

So maybe it's just talking about "really bad examples of naturalism," or "naturalism taken to extremes that are bad." If that's the meaning, it sounds like something an erudite critic would say about a painting. What would this meaning of "abject naturalism" in the sense of "naturalism run amok" be? Well, that makes us consider what naturalism is. The line between naturalism and realism can be hard to draw, but one boundary we might use are these words from Encyclopedia Britanica: "Naturalism differed from realism in its assumption of scientific determinism, which led naturalistic authors to emphasize man’s accidental, physiological nature rather than his moral or rational qualities." 

This emphasis on the "physiological" nature meant naturalism was more likely than realism to focus on humanity's grosser functions, its various excretions and weird growths. It's borderline scatalogical, but not like a gross-out comedy; more like a gross-out horror. In this sense, naturalism matches the meaning of the term "the abject" from theorist Julia Kristeva. I've delved more deeply into the meaning of "the abject" in this analysis of its use in female horror stories, but here, I'll define the abject briefly as whatever reminds us of our status as animals, as blood-and-meat carrying bodies that die and decay. Women are particularly depicted as abject because, among other things, their monthly bloody cycles and their fertile bodies remind us of our "naturalism." If we think of naturalism in this way, and this meaning of abject, the title becomes something like "Abject Abject." A double dose of abjection. 

And that's what we get

From the first lines of the story, it's this kind of naturalism, the gross and abject kind, that we get: "The baby's father left before the Cesarean incision had fully healed, when it was still a raised red line, tender to the touch, glistening with Vitamin E oil." In its reminder that female bodies produce other bodies, that those bodies get scarred in the process, it's introducing us to the uncomfortable facts of the female body, the ones that horror movies play with.

In fact, there are a lot of hints at horror in "Abject Naturalism." The narrator, Toni, is a former creative writing student who's given up, but when she did write, she wanted to write scary stories, scarier than Stephen King. (And what, in society, it more "abject," in the sense of being "thrown out," than one of the many former students of a writing program who have now given up, "all early sense of specialness evaporated"?) At many points, we get hints that a horror story is about to break out. Toni lets her daughter Amelie go jogging, and we, along with Toni, worry she won't make it back. There is a neighborhood man, Marco, who gives Amelie a telescope. He seems harmless, but we worry that Toni's decision to put off Googling him might be a mistake. When Amelie, commenting on deformed animals at Chernobyl, remarks that "anything can go wrong," we might be tempted to see it as foreshadowing. 

Nothing ever does take that turn for the worse and terrifying, though. Toni certainly faces disappointment. Her writing never takes off, but the jerk who got her pregnant, a romantic-adjacent foil to her naturalist nature, not only abandons mother and daughter for "texts," but then he goes and has a successful writing career right where Toni can see it. So Toni's dreams don't come true, but it's not all bad. Having decided to keep the baby when she gets pregnant and then committing to motherhood, right away "something lucky happened" to Toni when she finds a cool apartment in a hip part of the city for a good price.

The "abject" never goes away. Rather, it's there on every page. From Toni becoming a phlebotomist who draws blood, to her friends obsessing about their children's periods, to the body odor of the homeless in the library where Toni reads the father's successful novels, there is plenty of the gross and everyday about the story, what my mother used to call "bathroom talk" when my siblings and I were kids. However, when Toni is touring her lucky apartment, she notices that although her Cesarean scar is smarting, it's now so subtle "she could almost forget about it." The abject is always there, but it's not so "abject," in the sense of it not being as acute. 

Graduation from "abject" naturalism to "mere" naturalism?

The title of the story comes from a criticism that Toni's writing instructor made of her work, calling a story in which a couple fights about a skunk they need to get rid of "abject naturalism." This instructor went on to say the story's weakness was that "the plausible was described plausibly, credible things occurred in credible order." This is probably similar to the criticism many have made about contemporary fiction in the realist vein. Anis Shivani has called it "plastic realism," and many other critics have bemoaned our era's overreliance on verisimilitude. 

Personally, I've been more annoyed by "plastic magical realism" in contemporary fiction than realism, as I feel like the fantastic is more likely to feel forced and fake, but in any event, you can be too much of anything. There can be "abject" anything. 

Naturalism was a strange name for a trend in art that wasn't really about seeing nature for what it was. Instead, naturalism tended to see nature only in its "red in tooth and claw" version, never the symbiotic one, and it saw humanity's fate within nature as basically doomed. "The Open Boat" by Stephen Crane is one of the examples of literary naturalism most often assigned in schools, and if you've read it, that's the kind of "nature" that naturalism saw, a nature that was, at best, indifferent, and at worst (and more likely) out to get us. 

Toni's journey is the move from "abject" naturalism, one that fetishizes the gross and offputting and horrifying, to "mere" naturalism, one that can also see some good in the world because it actually considers the world on its own terms. She graduates from drawing blood to filing papers for the hospital, because paperwork makes more money. And naturalism, in the sense of letting nature speak for itself, is perfected in Toni's daughter, who uses the telescope to see the stars.

The strange climax

Toni and her daughter sharing a night looking at the stars through the now-fixed telescope is the denouement, but the climax is just before it, when Toni and Marco use the telescope to spy on the neighbors in their home. If ever there was a moment when the plot was going to take a turn toward horror, this was it. Suddenly realizing Marco used the telescope to look at people feels very Hitchcockian. But it turns out to be very tame. They see one person asleep and the other reading, occasionally scratching his balls. Toni finds "The dullness of the scene, the abject naturalism, aroused her." 

So is Toni's arousal her slipping back into fetishizing the abject? I don't think so. Instead, she's realized that the big, frightening thing, which is humans qua human animals, isn't really that frightening. It's more like what she'd always wanted to write, something much more terrifying than King, but also funny. The abject isn't terrifying. It's just a thing. That's naturalism that actually takes nature seriously. 

The story ends with as much abject grossness as it began with--Amelie throwing up in the coat room of her school after ODing on donuts and coffee too early in the morning. But Toni has come to terms with the abject now. She's gone beyond seeing nature as an impersonal force out to get us nearly to the other extreme: She reads the fact that "Bohemian Rhapsody," a song about a murder, ends just as she is dropping Amelie off for school in nearly providential terms: "When she starts the car, the radio is playing the right song, Freddy Mercury announcing a homicide, and they sing together, and it ends just when she pulls up to the school, as if God himself has set the needle down."

The world is a tough place. The story alludes to some of this toughness when Toni briefly thinks about the immigrant families in her neighborhood. I could probably just as well do an "against the grain" reading of this story that comes up with a reading totally at odds with the apparent catharsis of the narrator, one that argues that Toni only is able to become reconciled to abject nature and to develop a belief in at least some goodness in the world because of her privilege. But I leave that reading to others and stop here with the "with the grain" reading. 

The trans climax that never comes: "What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?" by Emma Binder (BASS 2025)

While being mostly unemployed the last ten months, I spent some time digging into the philosophy of religion. I don't just consider this to be the most interesting subject there is to study; it's the most essential. My interest in literature is really just a side quest of my main effort to figure out whether God exists. I gave a lot of thought to just becoming a full-time DoorDash driver so I could listen to philosophy podcasts while I work and then be free at home to read more, but I  ultimately landed on considering the people in my family and trying to find something that will provide for them a little better. So I guess I really am starting law school this week and putting the study of the thing I most want to do on hold for a while longer.

In any event, one of the side issues in the philosophy of religion is that of substance dualism. Are the body and the mind two things, and is the mind really the soul? Is who we really are somehow separate from the physical trappings we come in, even though we can't point to this other, more essential thing? Traditional philosophers are mostly the only ones who cling to dualism nowadays. The vast majority of scientists and philosophers believe that all we are is our bodies, that our brains are part of our bodies, and that our experience of a separate self apart from our bodies is somewhere between a useful fiction and an illusion created by old Western philosophy and theology. I would guess most everyday people have kind of muddled beliefs, and that if you were to ask them, you might get answers suggesting dualism, and you might get answers a materialist would make, depending on how you framed the question. 

It's kind of ironic that advocates for trans people end up promoting a kind of dualism. In a popular form of explaining their issues, they tend to talk as though they have a mind trapped in the wrong body. It's how Jazz Jennings explained things almost twenty years ago on 20/20, and it's been a pretty consistent trope of trans advocacy as long as I've been aware of it. The irony here is that trans advocates, who are about as far from traditional theology as you can get, are using a lot of similar language to that of traditional theologians, who are about the last people on the planet still talking about dualism and also some of the most hostile to trans platforms.  

Of course, people a lot smarter than me realized this long ago, and intellectuals associated with trans rights have already produced work that attempts to deal with this seeming inconsistency. One response is something like, "Well, we have to explain this to cisgender people so they'll understand, and because of the lingering influence of dualism in Western thinking, this provides an avenue that is politically expedient, if not strictly philosophically correct." Taking a different approach, Gayle Salamon has explained, using phenomenology (here, we can say phenomenology mostly means the study of subjective experience), that even though we don't have a separate soul, our psychological experience makes it feel like there is a disconnect between body and mind. It might be a disconnect between two physical systems, but it feels like a war between two separate things. 

I'm sure that dualists would seize on this "apparent but not real" contradiction and use it as evidence that the split is real, but I'm not mostly concerned with who is right in the dualism/materialism debate here. I'm just pointing out that trans narratives do tend to lead to a dualist, brain-vs.-body metaphysics.

And now we finally get to the story

"What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?," the third story in this year's Best American Short Stories collection, does some interesting things with the dualism (real or implied) of many trans narratives. Early in the story, Cody, the trans man protagonist, thinks back on past visits to Pearl Lake in rural Wisconsin where he grew up. During the time of the flashback, he would have been living as a young woman who felt out of synch with his body. At the lake with his sister Molly, though, he felt comfortable: "Out there, in the shadow of the woods with only himself or his sister, Cody had a body and it served an uncomplicated purpose. He was an animal among animals. He felt the clock of light in his blood."

In this flashback, Cody is having one of his few moments of feeling whole. How did he accomplish that wholeness? Not by uniting mind to body, but by obliterating mind. In many forms of traditional dualism, it's having a mind/soul that sets humans apart from animals. But Cody is here "an animal among animals." That is to say, his mind isn't out of synch with his body, because it isn't there. That's why he "had a body and it served an uncomplicated purpose." 

Cody's fleeting moments of happiness as a teen weren't a result of the union of an estranged body and mind, uniting, after much work in therapy and much medical intervention through testosterone and other treatments. His happiness isn't an improved dualism; it's an enthusiastic embrace of materialism. There is no conflict between mind and body because mind doesn't exist. As part of this instinctive, animalistic happiness, Cody felt "the clock of light" in his blood. Since the advent of the industrial revolution, clocks have served as cruel masters of humanity. We have to get up when they tell us to, go to bed when they tell us to, and plan to arrive everywhere when they tell us to. But animal, materialist Cody lived by the circadian clock of light that he felt inside of him. There was no society telling him how to be based on what it saw; he was free from a society handing him his identity. 

This looks a lot safer than what the guys in the story were doing.

The climax that comes and the climax that doesn't

There are two climaxes teased in "What Would I," one that happens and one that doesn't. The first one takes place all within the first five pages. Cody sees a bunch of guys ice fishing on ice they probably shouldn't be on, because the weather has been warming. But they're guys, who always think they know best and always underestimate the danger they're facing, so one of them ends up in the drink. Cody hesitates to go out to help him, and then, "without another thought"--his materialist, animalistic self reasserting itself--goes out to help him. 

This first climax ends with a setup to the second one, the one that never happens. Cody, having saved Greg, the man who fell in the ice, wraps him up with his jacket, and then he forgets to get his jacket back before Greg drives off, taking his cell phone and wallet with him. This leads to Greg tracking down Cody and inviting him out to drinks.

Cody reluctantly agrees to go to the local watering hole, the kind of place where tough and burly local men hang out. The whole time Cody is there, he's worried about them "clocking" him, a twist on the internal "clock of light" Cody felt before. Cody grew up around people like this before taking off to a friendly queer community in rural Massachusetts, and he's aware that if they do clock him as trans, it might be dangerous for him. So we, the readers, are waiting for one of two climaxes. Either Cody will be clocked and have to run for his life, or he will be clocked, and we will find out that hey, surprise, the guys are cool and let Cody know he's safe with them. 

Neither of these endings happen, though. Instead, Cody gets progressively more and more frightened that they will clock him, and he bolts as soon as he thinks he can do so with dignity. One of the three men at the bar follows him into the parking lot, but not to beat Cody up. Just to say thanks for saving Greg and to give Cody a hug. It's acceptance, but not the big Acceptance of what we might call an "ally" in the parlance of our times. 

While fretting his way through the night at the bar, Cody tried to use his father's clothing as armor, literally. He hoped the clothes would "shield" him and allow him to be one of those people who "moved through the world unquestioned." Based on Kevin's growing inquisitiveness, the shield might have only been partly effective. Cody kept hoping in the bar for a song to come on that would "anchor him in his body," meaning return him to his unitary, animal state, but it doesn't come, and he's left with the weak devises of subterfuge to hide his split selves from others. Cody barely manages to escape with his dignity. As he leaves the bar, he feels that he has been released "from a frozen world into fresh air and life." He couldn't find his unitary and animal self in the bar, trying to blend in as a man among other men. He isn't "anchored" again until he's far from the bar.

Cody's story as a small-town, rural queer kid who grew up troubled and misunderstood, then found acceptance, identity and happiness when he left, is a pretty standard story, told in almost every queer community in America. Cody muses on how he is a different person depending on his environment. When he feels safe, he's "easy, warm, funny, and shameless." Cody wishes he could be this person in Iron River where he grew up. He senses that he needs to come to grips somehow with Iron River, even if he never goes back once his dad either dies or recovers. Maybe he will never feel like his complete and comfortable self there, but he knows he has to learn to at least be okay with having come from there. 

At the end of the story, Cody has not managed to find a way to live permanently in the materialistic, animal self that brought him the only happiness he ever knew while growing up in Iron River. He is out walking on the ice. Earlier, he thought of how the ice was all connected, but here, he is thinking of the fractures in the ice, and he wishes he could be "brazen and unafraid, like any other man." At the end, not only has Cody has gone back to a kind of fractured dualism, but instead of the triumphant uniting of the soul and body that sometimes comes with the dualist view, the two seem as far apart as ever. We are denied a third climax, the psychological climax of Cody either absorbing his discordant soul into his materialist body or uniting soul and body into a unified whole.

The part where everyone hates me

I've admitted before to being a bad liberal when it comes to trans issues. Although I fully believe in supporting anyone in a quest to find fulfillment, and completely reject traditional notions of sex and gender that would critique trans goals either on religious or natural law grounds, I still don't think everything I'm being told by advocates for trans rights makes sense to me. To greatly simplify, my doubts come down to two things. First is the seeming muddling of sex and gender terminology that some advocates use, then applying that conflation to policy goals. The second is a more practical one: I don't think the care now available is advanced enough that it accomplishes its goals. If you could take a pill and magically change your male body that's out of synch with your female brain into a female body that went along perfectly with how you see yourself, great, do it. But what we have is painful, long, comes with risks, and still leaves many people worrying the whole time that they'll be "clocked." My hesitation to accept sex reassignment surgery isn't a moral objection; it's an entirely pragmatic, and it's kind of like me thinking that getting a hip replacement right when the procedure was first invented wasn't necessarily a good idea. 

"What Would I" offers both the materialist and the harmonized-dualist solution to fractured trans identity, but neither is a complete solution. The animalistic, materialistic solution is only achievable in the right environment. Unsafe environments make the corporal grounding needed impossible. So it is a partial solution, but not a complete one. The harmonized dualism possibility is limited by the state of medical technology. "T" can help, but it's not going to fully prevent raised eyebrows, even from people who mean you no harm, because they are going to sense that something is different. 

None of this is a reason to abandon trans political goals. But it is a reason to separate the language of advocacy from the language of real, lived experience. To advocate is to lie. You might wonder, if I feel this way, why I'm about to go to law school, when a lawyer's chief job is to advocate. It's a good question, and an even better one when I consider who much the law school's advocacy for the law as a profession annoys me. They can't stop talking about how hard law study is and how different legal work is from everything else. This isn't truth talking; it's the desire to make law sound important. It's exaggeration meant to improve the standing of the profession. I hear similar things from every profession when they try to make what they do sound more difficult than people think it is, just like advocates for political groups always try to make their plight sound as dire as possible. 

I am skeptical of the truth of propositions from advocates, but I can accept a kind of social dualism, one in which we allow advocates to do their thing but where we also reserve space for ourselves to be honest about what lived experience is like. Trans advocates can say, "Here's a problem, and here's a solution that would help if we could do it." If the lived experience of trans people demonstrates sometimes that this solution isn't always as great as advocates make it sound, that's actually okay. Advocates do their thing, sometimes, to give us space to try solutions that are less than ideal. 

When I read trans stories, I am trying to understand how the trans person views the problem, what solutions they look to for their problem, what they hope those solutions will do, and then whether those solutions actually do the hoped-for thing. What I like about a story like this one is its break from advocate-like narratives. You might do everything to try to find happiness as a trans person, and it still might not work. Or it might work, but only in the right environment. That actually helps me feel more connected to the needs and wants of trans people rather than less, but it means they're just like everybody else, groping in the dark for what they hope will make them happy, maybe succeeding a little bit here and there, but also meeting with failure as much as anything. Far from making me think that everything the advocate pushes is bunk, it makes me think that this is a group I can find common ground with and maybe even understand, because we are both equally lost and looking, perhaps quixotically, for light at the end. 

Andrea Long-Chu wrote an op-ed years ago explaining that her upcoming sex transition surgery might not make her happier, but that it shouldn't have to in order for her to be allowed to get it. The idea behind trans rights isn't that everything they try will work. It's a big problem, one that is probably beyond our current medical capacity to fix so that everyone will feel "in their body" in every environment. But the point is to give people the freedom to try solutions and the support to maximize success and mitigate failure. This story is a useful, honest, and human portrayal of someone stumbling through as he tries to navigate a problem with the solutions available. 

For Karen Carlson's take on the story, which includes an analysis of the title which I neglected to do, see here. 

Literature's effect on my future study of the law

It looks like after nine months of looking for a job, applying to three different schools for three very different ideas, getting six job offers I decided I didn't want, and generally feeling for most of 2025 like I don't have any great path forward with my life, I'm going to spend 2026 in law school. I got offered a full ride to the only law school that's within driving distance. I don't feel complete certainty this is the right decision. It's not the material; I've started reading through three of the law books we'll be using in my first semester, and I find law interesting enough I don't think I'll hate what I'm doing, at least while I'm in school. It's more a question of uncertainty whether law four years from now will be a relatively secure path to a good career. There are concerns about AI taking jobs, or whether anyone will hire someone who by then will be in their late 50s and just coming out of law school. But the job search these last nine months has been discouraging enough that this seems like a risk that's just barely worth taking. I'm going to need to work until seventy or near it, I think, and that means it's probably better doing what it takes to find something I'd enjoy and something that will pay decently rather than just settling into whatever I can find and trying to ride it out until I can fully retire. 

As I've been looking through these law books, it's pretty clear that my past study of literature is going to have a strong influence on how I think about the law. Probably the most important issue from literary criticism and literary theory that's going to color how I see the law is the notion of intent.

Three types of intent

This is something I've talked about so many times on this blog, anyone who reads it regularly is probably sick of hearing me talk about it by now. I spent a lot of time on it in my post about how to think of homoerotic subtext in the Frodo-Sam relationship, which was one of the posts I've written that got the most hits. Perhaps clairvoyantly sensing my own future entrance into law school, I looked at types of intent in a post on what I saw as the weaknesses of originalist readings of the Constitution. I'm sure I've covered intent in criticism elsewhere, because it's something I think about almost every time I start to pull apart a work of literature.

If you haven't read those posts before or if you've never thought much about what it means to consider what a literary work means, here's my much shorter version. Most people assume that to consider what a piece of literature--a poem, a short story, a novel, an essay, etc.--means is to figure out what the author meant when they wrote it. This seems like it's a common-sense approach, and in fact most people tend to act like almost the only way to get an iron-clad answer about what a poem means is to find an interview with the author where the author answers that very question. Failing that, as we do in almost every real-world case even when the author is still alive and much more when the author is long dead, we read about the history big and local during the time of the author's life. We research the author's autobiographical information. We read the letters they wrote, read the speeches they made, study the various manuscript versions available of the works we want to know better. Piecing all this together and adding a little bit of psychological inference ("He wrote this to cope with the loss of his third child") is how we best determine the meaning of a given work. 

As reasonable as this sounds, there are problems with this seemingly common-sense approach. One is that a poem or novel is an intentionally imaginative work. In a work with great imagination, an author often isn't trying to convey intent in the same way they are when they leave a note on the door saying they're going out for milk. Meaning is much more open-ended, and authors themselves aren't necessarily thinking of what something "means" when they write a fantasy novel about a three-headed dragon or a lyrical poem about watching a boy try to tie his shoes. 

Secondly, the more complicated the work one writes, the less one is able to control the meaning. If I tell my wife I work late tomorrow, the meaning is pretty clear, but if I try to explain to her my feelings for her, I might say all kinds of things that could be construed in many ways. For example, if I tell her, "I like the way you look when you get all dressed up and put on makeup," I might be saying I think that her choices in how to adorn herself for very formal events are especially praiseworthy, but what she might hear is, "I wish you'd quit dressing like a slob all the time and not wearing makeup." 

And here, I might object, saying she has mistaken what I meant, and maybe I have a point, because I know in my own mind what I was thinking. But is she totally wrong? What if she's lately mentioned a few times that she feels like she's letting herself go, and she thinks I no longer find her attractive? Given this context, mightn't she be justified in thinking, based on what I said, that I meant something else? Mightn't my text have a life of its own, one that is at cross purposes with what I thought my intent was?

I want her to use the intent of the author (me), but she is using the intent of the text. That is, she's judging based on what I actually said. And maybe she's got a point. Maybe I meant to give her a compliment, but, given the context of everything, I might have said something that had a meaning I didn't intend. I can't complain that she's willfully misconstruing me, because I have an obligation not just to say what I think is right and assume everyone will do the work to get inside my head and fix the imperfections of my speech, but to craft speech that actually says what I mean it to. 

Maybe my wife and I will be able to go to therapy and work through communication enough that I will make slightly better utterances and she will be a little more able to understand what I had in mind when I said them, but with literature, the utterances are so complicated, and the mind of the author so remote, we will never be able to to achieve the same level of understanding. A 1000-page novel set in a fictional medieval Europe has, by its very nature, a much more complicated system of meaning than my short, mostly declarative sentence about my feelings. 

Some readers will attempt to deal with this by denying that a story means anything. It's just there because it's fun or interesting, and to try to make it mean something more is a trick played be people who want to sound smart or start controversies. But this over simplifies the human mind, which always tries to make meaning out of stories. Particularly with a well-crafted story or poem or song, where everything was put there for a reason, it's logical to assume that there are at least some conclusions we can make about those decisions. If everyone dies at the end of the story, what does that say about the universe of the story? If all the women in the story are fatuous publicity whores, what kind of message does that convey about women, or at least about the kind of woman who is in the story? Those kinds of questions aren't gratuitous; they're baked into our DNA as human readers. No human would read those kinds of narratives and not attempt to create a theory that makes sense of them.

I think the real problem people have with reading from what the text says instead of what the author thinks she meant is that you can end up with a reading that the author herself would deny. Doesn't the author have a more authoritative say than the reader about meaning? While it's valid to give authorial interpretations a privileged position on the basis of being interesting, I think the reason we shouldn't deny readings that the author disagrees with is twofold. First, authorship and criticism are two different skills. It's quite possible the writer, although he has great imaginative sight and powers of summoning worlds with words, isn't actually very good at reverse engineering and figuring out what an already created work means. Many authors are lousy critics. (Which is why I wonder so much why Best American Short Stories keeps having authors pick the best stories instead of critics. Also nearly all contests have authors as the judges.) The second reason is that literary creations are works just like chairs and power tools and steak sandwiches. If the creator says, "This is a comfortable chair because I made it with velvet so it would be comfortable," but the critic says, "This is not a comfortable chair because it has a giant lump in the middle," the critic is well within his interpretive rights to do so. The critic is using the text of the chair, whereas the creator is using his intentions. Isn't the critic's reading from the text the more valid one?

The third type of intent happens when readers interact with a work and it takes on a life of its own. Say that a creator makes a crockpot, and nobody thinks it's a very good crockpot, because it burns its users. But the users eventually find it actually makes a very good space heater for the same reasons that made it a bad crockpot--it puts off heat around it. The creator might be upset, but the users are happy. This might be the case when a work of art develops a following of rabid fans who create their own subculture based on the art. Perhaps most people who have interacted with the work more casually think this subculture is silly. Maybe even the author thinks it's silly, but the fans are happy. This type of intent is the intent of the reader. The reader is entitled to this type of intent. After all, they're the ones the work was meant for.

Applying types of intent to the law

When considering the law, as in any other kind of interpretive venture, we have to consider which type of intent makes the most sense. One very influential school of legal interpretation is the originalist school. Five of the nine Supreme Court justices are at least partly adherents of this philosophy. Originalism is located somewhere between intent of the author and intent of the text. As Justice Barret explained a few months ago on an episode of the podcast We the People, originalism tries to avoid some of the weaknesses of authorial intent thinking. It isn't trying to use psychoanalysis to dig up the unobtainable mental states of Madison, et.al. in 1787. Rather, it aims, whenever the text isn't extremely clear (meaning it isn't saying something unambiguous like "the President has to be at least thirty-five years old") to find the "original public meaning." That is, with a textual passage that could be read multiple ways, such as "No person shall be...deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law," one way to help fix the meaning is to look at how it was understood as a practical matter at the time it was adopted. 

This was, quite controversially, the logic that supported the decision in the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Originally, when the Supreme Court ruled in Roe that a woman's right to an abortion in the early stages of pregnancy was protected, they reasoned that decisions over reproduction and family planning were core rights that would be included in "life" and "liberty" under the Fourteenth Amendment. In Dobbs, the Supreme Court decided instead to look at the long tradition of the United States to see if society considered the right to an abortion to be a core liberty covered in the Fourteenth Amendment at the time it was passed. Not surprisingly, it was not, because it was passed in the mid-nineteenth century, when women couldn't vote and those who could had very different notions about the rights of women than we do now. 

The strength of originalism and original public meaning (OPM) is that at least we know what we're using as the basis for argument. We might disagree about what a law means, but it can't just mean anything. We know what kinds of evidence we are considering: the text of the law itself and the historical records of how people understood and put the law into practice. The closer those records are to the time of the passing, the more authority they hold. 

I don't mean to outright condemn originalism, or to suggest that those who hold to it are intellectual weaklings. It's a coherent theory. Reasonable people (to use the Holmes test) could stick to it throughout a lifetime without getting themselves into any greater a self-contradiction than proponents of almost any other theory would. If one of the goals of law is to provide predictability, it has more hope of that than many other legal theories. Still, the weaknesses of OPM are many. First, when there was always a diversity of opinion about how to read the law, whose original public meaning do we decide from? Do we pick the one that's the most ubiquitous in the available records? The one the Supreme Court first went with, no matter how convoluted the reasoning? (If so, this would leave us with some very unfortunate readings of the Fourteenth Amendment from the Chase Court.) Do we ignore essays, editorials and law review articles from the time of passing and only focus on statutes? If so, wouldn't the statues lead us in a circular direction? Consider abortion and the Fourteenth Amendment. If we only look at statues at the time it was passed, it's not surprising that a right to an abortion wasn't considered a core liberty at the time of its passing. Women suffered from all kinds of legal and social prejudices, and those were reflected in the statutes. But maybe the point of the Fourteenth Amendment was to reverse some of the statutory prejudices at the time. If so, an OPM reading would defeat an amendment meant to change the status quo, because it would only look to the status quo itself to determine what the norm was. It would require strict scrutiny for any non-enumerated rights, even if the intent in passing an open-ended amendment was to leave the door open to many unenumerated rights. It would require specific language in the Constitution, when it has, since its first draft, been a document with a predilection for strategic ambiguity. 

When considering Constitutional questions, diversity of opinions among both authors and original recipients is more the rule than the exception. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention (which was originally supposed to just edit the Articles of Confederation, not write a new constitution) disagreed every day among each other about what they should write. Opinions changed throughout the months of the convention. Opinions of framers continued to change after passage of the Constitution. Most importantly, immediately after passage, it became clear that there was a difference of opinion within the original public as to the meaning. It took less than ten years for parties to form because of a difference in Constitutional theory. These differences of opinion were strong and never went away. The Civil War was a very bloody and expensive disagreement about differing Constitutional theories.

All of this is to say that the original generation that wrote and passed the Constitution did not agree on what they had agreed to, and no successive generation has been able to agree, either. Many of the first Supreme Court justices were framers of the Constitution (Jay, Rutledge, Wilson, Iredell, etc.). Because the Supreme Court originally gave its opinions seriatim, or one opinion for each justice, we can see that even in the very few cases the court originally took on, the founders didn't agree about what the Constitution meant. 

Even if everyone in this photo were a brainwashed member of a death cult, there is no way you get that many smart guys into a room and have them all agree about anything.

When there is disagreement among even the original public that liquidated (to use the Madisonian term) the meaning, a contemporary court determined to use original public meaning is likely to use its own prejudices to determine which opinions among the original public mattered. In Dobbs, the court shrugged off evidence of widespread practical indifference to abortion laws, particularly prior to "quickening." It privileged statutes over historical research into folk customs. This is neither intent of the text nor of the author. It's intent of the reader, in this case the reader being the six justices who signed off on the decision. 

Maybe intent of the reader is impossible to avoid in any interpretive effort. We'd like to think that in the law especially, intent of the text should be the main focus, because whatever was said before or after passing the law about why we passed it, the text itself ought to be the main focus, because it's what we can say the people have actually agreed to. With intentionally ambiguous phrases in law such as "liberty" and "due process," we are forced into the same kind of position we are with respect to imaginative literature. If it's not a straightforward law, we can have a room full of people insisting they are the only ones looking closely at the text but all disagreeing on what it means. We might all agree that it doesn't mean just anything, and we might even mostly get to some general agreement about the ballpark it's in, but there is room enough to accommodate the entire political spectrum from right to left within the text, and the text is really all anyone can hold us to. 

Making this whole situation worse for those who would like clarity, our common law tradition has attempted to deal with ambiguity in the law through precedent, meaning the law isn't just the law, but the tradition of interpreting the law through past decisions. Those decisions themselves include ambiguities which then must be interpreted and liquidated. The law doesn't become clearer through the years; the body attempting to understand it merely grows, and rather than coming to a better understanding of what anything means, we simply deal during different political periods with whatever constraints on the law different groups can achieve. 

OPM not only occupies a middle ground between intent of the author and intent of the text. In fact, it also is adopting quite a bit from intent of the reader, because by looking at how people understood the law, it is dipping its toes into something that in literature is called reception theory, which is very much within the tradition of the intent of the reader philosophy. 

If we are going to use intent of the reader to interpret the law, why not go whole hog about it? Since we today are the people bound by the law and the ones who have to deal with its consequences, and not the people who originally passed it, why not submit it to the public today how we ought to read the law? Why limit the intent of the reader to five people in robes, however learned in the law they might be? Why rule out readings of the law that look to high-level intent, rather than the specifics of how that intent was incorporated at the time of its writing? Why couldn't a contemporary justice say, as Jesus once did, that the laws are made for man, not man for the laws? 

In saying that in evaluating a term like "liberty" by what we mean now rather than what it meant to given readers in the past, I am not saying we ignore denotative meanings. If "gay" meant "happy," we shouldn't try to read it like it meant what it means now. But terms that have always had expansive or protean meanings, like liberty, should be allowed to drift with time. It matters more what people think liberty means now that it matters what people thought it meant just after the Civil War.

Navigating out of nihilism

Like a lot of people, I assume, for the past ten years I've been kind of stuck in a state of deep anxiety when thinking about political life and discourse. It feels like somehow, we've gone from the very healthy and enlightened notion that reasonable people can disagree about many things to the notion that because reasonable people disagree so much, nothing is true. If something were true, we'd all agree, right? So since we can't agree, that must mean the truth doesn't exist, and therefore whatever you can convince people is true is as good as the truth. What makes this kind of cynical nihilism so frustrating is that it uses many of the same devices and tools as an earnest searcher for truth does. Its rhetoric is similar. On the surface, it feels like political sophists using cheap rhetorical tricks to win over the masses are playing the same game the earnest are, so how could we get mad at them?

I don't think the problem is originalism. Originalism is just a method for trying to make sense of legal texts. Its not a monolithic movement. Outside of the Supreme Court, originalists who fundamentally agree on method still disagree about where the methods take them. For example, some originalists agree with unitary executive theory and some don't. The way out of cynical nihilism isn't to pick a better theory of interpretation, because any theory can be used to argue for bad interpretations. And I don't necessarily think that originalists are inherently more cynical than anyone else is.

When I've moved between different kinds of intents as a literary critic, I've generally done it based on which way of looking at a text yields the most interesting reading. Perhaps with literature, there's less of an imperative to find the "right" interpretation, because "right" has a different meaning in literature than it does in law. If Frodo and Sam really do exhibit homoerotic subtexts, nobody is going to go to jail or lose their business. Nor will those things happen if Frodo and Sam don't exhibit anything homoerotic in their relationship. Literary reading perhaps matters most because it allows us to use enjoyable narratives to practice reading ambiguous texts for meaning so that we are better at it later when it has more immediate consequences. 

But that's not to say that literary reading doesn't have any stakes of its own. When we read a story or poem that stirs our imagination through its own imaginative efforts, it forces us to ask fundamental questions of meaning not just in literature, but in the cosmos. If this story moves me, why does it do that? If this ending makes me sad, why? If I think the picture this story paints of reality is true or false, why do I think that? If this poem has given voice to something I've always thought but never been able to put in words, what are those words? 

Using literature to better understand the big questions is a humanistic pursuit, because these questions are inherently human questions. Consistent with the literary pedagogy of my time, I've mostly followed a text-based approach, for two reasons. One is that it's the simplest and yet the most flexible. If there is a dragon in the text, we know we have to deal with a dragon and not the history of agriculture. But dragons mean so many things metaphorically and metonymically that the readings one can draw from the presence of a dragon are limitless. If the dragon is in the text, and there aren't any limitations set on what the dragon might connote, then we are free to see our own extended meanings. The second reason is that whatever intent the author had, she tried to accomplish it with a product, and that product is the text. The text is meant to be seen as the final result of the intent without reference to other things. 

However, if reading literature is an inherently humanistic quest, then it's important not to lose the human element by burying it in text. I used to think "intent of the author" readings were simplistic and naïve; now, decades after leaving those kinds of readings behind, I find myself drawn to them again. Maybe we can't enter into the actual mental state of the author at the time of final revision, but we can, through close attention to the text, try to recreate what Wayne Booth called "the implied author." This is the author we have to imagine to ourselves as having written the text we are reading. 

We do this kind of reading all the time when we see graffiti. It's a very simple message, usually, but that doesn't keep us from drawing big conclusions from what we see. There was a urinal at my job once that had a placard over it that bragged about how much water the agency was saving by having a flushless urinal. On that placard, someone scribbled the word "stinks!" From that one word, I could imagine an independent thinker, someone who doesn't just accept that because someone is telling him that a given step is a good one that it is one. I imagine a likely political conservative, someone who is skeptical of efforts to improve the environment and thinks they often do more harm than good. 

Maybe I've read too much into that one word, but I can't help trying to do it. I suspect it's a common condition. We try to reason our way out to the characteristics of the person writing a text, at least enough to imagine what might have been going through their heads when they wrote something. That doesn't mean that if I read about a kind character I think the author was kind, but it means I can assume some things about how the author understood kindness.

In the law, I think I am likely to adopt something of an "implied author" approach to law, one that tries to unite the three intentions. We read from our intent as readers to live in a just and happy world back to the minds of the writers of our laws. How do we accomplish this? Through the medium of the text. The text is what links author to reader.

The effort in reading the law, then, is like the effort in reading literature. It's not a question of simply trying to figure out what a text means (intent of text), or what someone meant by a particular text (intent of author). It's realizing that the brightest minds of past generations have dealt with problems similar to the ones we face and trying to understand how they answered them through the medium of the text. 

I realize that in law school, and even more after law school when I'm grinding through immigration forms or depositions or whatever else it is I'm actually doing, nobody is going to be asking me anything as lofty as what my judicial philosophy is. Nonetheless, I can't help trying, when pouring over textbooks full of the records of past generations trying to figure out fundamental issues in society, to solve the same problems along with them and figure out what I think of those solutions. 

The future of this blog as a home for literary criticism

I intend to try to still do literary criticism on here. I don't know if that's realistic. Law school is demanding for younger, smarter people than me. For me to try it at my age is possibly foolhardy. Even if I greatly reduce my goals so that I only do Best American Short Stories in a year, that might be too much. I only have so much energy to read and think and write, and any mental resources I use for the blog will be unavailable for law school. Still, I intend to try. These years of literary thinking have left a mark on me that's been obvious from the moment I started reading my first law textbook. 

Even though literature seems to not want me, in the sense that I continually get my work rejected, I still think the discipline of reading critically is one that's worth the effort. I plan to keep trying to make the effort.