Looking for life after literary fiction

Can one Marie Kondo one's reading life? Decide to leave unread that which does not bring one joy? It seems obvious that one could, although since my late teen years, I've made a lot of my reading decisions based at least in part on what I thought I should read. In fact, I probably weighed should over want to most of the time. It comes with making literature your major, I guess. You fall into a habit of thinking that if you're not reading something on an assigned list, you'll pay for it in the end. 

Since I took up writing seriously ten years ago, I've probably gravitated toward literary fiction at least in part because I thought it was what I should read. It wasn't the entire reason, though. There were at least two other reasons. First and by far the larger of the two reasons is that I read seeking answers to life's big questions, and I thought I'd find that more in literary fiction than in, say, books about sexy cowboy werewolves. I mean, I'm sure Renee Rose and Vanessa Vale have a lot of great thoughts about why there is something rather than nothing and the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena, but perhaps it's fair to say that these thoughts don't quite make it into their fiction. I wanted fiction that met my expectations of substance. So in a very real sense, literary fiction is what I want to read. The second reason is because I felt like my own writing was probably more like literary fiction than anything else, and I wanted to learn from others to improve my own work. 

After ten years of it, though, I've been a little disappointed in literary fiction's ability to come through in either category. On the one hand, I can count on one hand the novels and short stories I've read in the last ten years that I found deeply transformational in terms of how I view my place in the universe. Meanwhile, although I've definitely improved as a writer and now accomplished things that are pretty good for an amateur, I'm stuck and unlikely to get unstuck. My ceiling seems to be to occasionally get a good response from the top tier journals but never quite make it in. Since I do not wish to only be a consumer of fiction but a producer as well, I've found my participation in a scene I can't break into very frustrating. Frustrating enough that I will drop my annual critical project in the middle because a story rubbed me the wrong way and I wasn't quite able to explain why. 

But it's not like I'm going to quit reading altogether. At times over the last ten years, I've wondered whether I really am a lit fic writer (or primarily a lit fic reader). I love a well-made sentence, or a voice that sticks with you for days after you read it, but there were times I found myself wishing I could read a story once in a while where you could summarize the plot in a few sentences. Or where I could even tell what the plot was the first time through reading. 

So after putting down this year's Best American Short Stories, the first thing I picked up was an anthology of science fiction short stories. There wasn't an obvious equivalent to BASS in sci-fi, but "The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023," edited by R.F. Kuang, had "American" in it, so I picked that. 

It's different, all right

The first story in the anthology was first published in Conjunctions, which I know as a publisher of lit fic, so I was wondering if I'd even made a change. This story, "Readings in the Slantwise Sciences" by Sofia Samatar, could have been in BASS. Well, kind of. If could have been in BASS if the guest editor were really into hippie fantasy. But in general, it was still what I would characterize as being a somewhat language-centric story. 

After that, though, there started to be a real divergence from lit fic. One thing that surprised me was the prevalence of fantasy. I guess the name of the book did have fantasy in it, so I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was sort of guessing the mix would be about 17 sci-fi to 3 fantasy. Some of the stories were a little bit tough to classify as either, but I believe the anthology more or less alternated between sci-fi and fantasy, with some of the fantasy entries being horror.

I did not care for most of the fantasy, and I found myself wishing the publishing industry did not find it necessary to package sci-fi and fantasy together. I don't find they really have that much to do with each other or scratch a similar itch, and rather than making each other strong by joining forces, I found that the combination was in danger of causing their mutually assured destruction. I'm not going to go into depth about why I disliked most of the fantasy entries, because it's not my thing and that really is all there is to it. I find few things less magical than magic. "Pellargonia: A Letter to the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology" by Theodora Goss was an exception, but for the most part, I was much more interested in the sci-fi stories.

One of the difficulties in writing science fiction is how to explain how your world is different from the reader's world (and often how your world got to its current state from the reader's world) without boring the reader with exposition. 

This is an especially perplexing problem for a sci-fi short story, which has very little space in which to build an alternate world. Consider "Rabbit Test" by Samantha Mills, one of two stories in the collection reflecting concerns in the current, real world about bodily autonomy in the wake of the overturn of Roe v Wade. The world of this story has a whole slew of new controls on nubile and especially pregnant women to introduce, so how does it do it without a lame screen scroll type of information dump?

Guest editor R.F. Kuang, echoing advice she herself has received, recommends dealing with the problem by writing "not from the point of view of someone encountering a world for the first time, but of someone who has lived in this world all their life...What do they notice? What is new to them? What is so natural to them that it hardly warrants comment? What are the bizarre pronouncements that only they could make?" 

Some of the stories in the BASFF anthology pull this off better than others. "Murder by Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness" goes in the complete other direction. It reads like a mockumentary, and at least half of the narrative is exposition, the kind that would be given to the viewer of a non-fiction documentary. I found the effect a little bit dull, and this was one of the stories I struggled the most to get through. Other stories pulled off Kuang's advice much better. "Termination Stories for the Cyber Dystopia" by Isabel J. Kim, "Pre-Simulation Consultation" by Kim Fu, and "The Difference Between Love and Time" by Catherynne M. Valente were the three best stories in the collection. "Termination" in particular was extremely adept at getting the reader to understand its world without breaking from the narrative to explain it. 

Committing to the bit

Huang expressed her love in her introduction for stories that "commit" to whatever storytelling choices they make. This love spills over for her into "camp, silliness, and everything stylized." This includes Moulin Rouge, which I also love, but also the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies, which I detest. She loves ""genres that lean fully into what they are," stories that "take themselves completely seriously."  She is tired of "leather-clad superheroes winking to declare, 'Don't worry--I'm not taking this too seriously." She is wary of irony, which she feels often substitutes for wit. 

Compare this to literary fiction. If literary fiction had a motto, it might be an adaptation of what Harold Bloom wrote about poetry in his introduction to the 1997 Best American Poetry series' "best of the best" anthology. He said that "all bad poetry is unfailingly sincere." I think this could well be the motto of a lot of literary fiction as well. It might believe that all bad fiction is unfailingly sincere. 

So we have two poles here, lit fic preferring cool detachment over sincerity, and Kuang's vision fo alternate world fiction as charmingly naive and self-serious. Since I've been reading literary fiction for a long time, I've probably come to identify a little bit with the idea that I should have some level of detachment from my own work, that I need to be its master and, no matter how emotionally I identify with its subject matter, that I should make decisions about the story with an objective eye.

There were times while reading BASFF that I could, in fact, have lived with a little less "commitment"  and a little bit more attention to language, form, and style, the very things I've been thinking literary fiction overemphasized at times. I'm not going to name stories here, but a few used words wrong or had a style that was so "sincere," so untainted by discipline and art, it became jarringly unpleasant.

However, on the whole, I found it a welcome reprieve from literary fiction. I liked stories where plot was at the center. I liked stories that were quixotically taking on universe-sized questions rather than soberly putting a small portion of existence under the microscope. While my literary fiction reading might have occasionally made me too snooty for some parts of the anthology, I also found myself wishing that many literary fiction stories could allow themselves the openness, silliness, or lack of concern for propriety in the stories I was reading. 

I suppose it should be no surprise that my preferred style might be somewhere between high art and low. I need enough plot and "commitment" to be engaged, but also enough skill and control to be entranced. I don't want so much earnestness there is no thought of form, but I don't want form to take over so much there is no possibility of earnestness trumping form, leaving some parts technically imperfect but emotionally resonant. 

Politically, I'm too conservative to be a liberal and too liberal to be a conservative, so why shouldn't I be in a no-man's land aesthetically in writing as well? In any event, it was enjoyable to do something different, so I'll probably continue with "different" for a while. 

 

 

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.

Why I sometimes feel like the literary fiction community is full of self-assured, shallow liberals

If anyone were to piece together the occasional political strands of this blog, he might be tempted to conclude that I was a political conservative. After all, I've used a number of posts to complain about liberal rhetoric or liberal culture (here, here, here, here, and here, for starters). But I write these posts because I consider myself to be more liberal than conservative. I'm a mix of some centrist-liberal and some centrist-conservative ideas, but if I had to pick an island to live on and the only two choices were Isla Conservativa and Isla Liberal, I'd go with the liberal one. I write critiquing liberal modes of expression because I don't want the people I share an island with to talk like idiots. We are supposed to be better than that.

Habits of how we talk about complex things should be even less cluttered by bum thinking in the culture surrounding serious literature. Since literature often operates for me as a stand-in for religion, I rely on the people who take that kind of literature to heart to exemplify solid thinking. It ruins my faith in the value of literature when those who are closest to it are lazy thinkers, much as it ruins the faith of a Christian when everyone in the local church is judgmental and selfish.

But the default political views in literary fiction, views that seep into everything, seem to be a very lazy stripe of liberal politics. For example, an essay this past week on the usually excellent and reasonably influential website Lithub committed all the sins I've come to hate from people whose politics I generally agree with. While writing "When Fiction Pulls Back the Curtain on American Conservatism," ostensibly a review of two novels with conservative main characters, Colette Shade first veers to the side to spend more than half the article talking about why American culture is essentially conservative. By "conservative," Shade means "the theoretical voice of animus against the agency of the subordinate classes," a definition she takes from Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind. Much of her quick analysis of conservatism and the last 50 years of American politics comes from Robin.

In the course of developing her views on conservatism, Shade exemplifies three characteristics of liberal rhetoric I've come to dislike. She dismisses the strengths of conservative arguments, she argues against a straw man version of conservatism, and she is unable to argue effectively for why a liberal philosophy is better, or even what such a philosophy would entail.

Sin number one: dismissing conservatism

But first, an aside

Conservatism and liberalism are two forces that ought to exist in dynamic tension with one another. Consider a poor, black child in Baltimore. She is up against every hurdle in the world. A conservative would say you have to encourage that child to rise up above her circumstances, to believe that with hard work, she can achieve whatever she puts her mind to. The conservative is right. A liberal would say you have to teach the child how the past has conspired against her to put her at a great disadvantage, at no fault of her own. You must make the child understand that if she fails, it is not her fault, because otherwise, the child may grow to think there is something inherently wrong with her instead of the world she was born into. The liberal is also right. For the child to have a chance, she will have to inhabit a space where she both accepts personal responsibility and also understands that there are factors beyond her control. Too much of one and she has no self-esteem. Too much of the other, she has no agency. 

This dynamic tension needs to exist in hundreds of ways. We need personal freedom, but we must also sublimate personal freedoms for the good of the community. We need to try new ideas, but we also need stability. We need peace, but we also need to defend ourselves when peace breaks down. For liberals, conservatism isn't the enemy. It's the balance we need for our ideas to exist. 

And now, what I mean by "dismissing conservatism"

Shade mostly talks of conservatism in neo-Marxist and economic terms, rather than strictly political ones. For her, the conservative world is a world in which "the right of property ownership has superseded even the right to clean air and bodily autonomy for those without means." Conservatives, in her logic, exist only to enrich themselves at the expense of others. Conservatives, in a word, do not care about the good of the world as a whole, they care only for themselves.

There is a reason why conservative ideas got into the world. It wasn't entirely something pushed on the poor by the rich. There were environmental stresses that caused the poor to accept the rule of the rich. The poor continued to accept these rules partly because of political oppression, but also because the poor often judged that rule by the rich was better than the alternative. Pre-historic Central American citizens of large cities chose to continue to live in the town under authoritarian rule rather than flee to the jungle. People made a choice for security over individual freedom. We might deride the choice, but unless we've lived with true environmental stress and scarcity, we really can't judge.

A friend and I were talking recently about the rights of trans-gendered people. He, the more conservative one, made a point I had a hard time arguing with. The fact that our society is able to even talk about these issues is a sign that we are living with abundance. In a time of stressed resources, nobody gives a damn about these kinds of things.

This is what I feel is missing from the Hulu show The Handmaid's Tale. It's easy to root for the oppressed when she's fighting to get the boot of her oppressor off of her neck. But the show takes place in a world that is dying. What would the oppressed do to save that world if they were in charge? We don't know. It's possible that, as in the musical Urinetown, the soft-hearted underdogs would, if put in charge, end up making everything worse.

Shade's essay, though, sees only the boot. It does not see conservatism as a force that keeps community together. There is no dialetic to be achieved through synthesis with its forces; it is only a thing to be annihilated.

The closest Shade comes to offering respect for conservatives is when she calls it a "frighteningly coherent ideology." But she fails to interrogate its coherence. In fact, the internal consistency of some conservative philosophy is what gives it universal and perennial appeal. To be coherent, in philosophy, is difficult to achieve, and not something to be lightly dismissed. Liberals wish they had as much coherence.

This musical ought to be required viewing for anyone about to write a story about a spunky underdog. 

Sin number two: arguing against a straw man version of conservatism 

Shade claims that the novels she is reviewing--The Sport of Kings and Mr. Bridge--provide the reader with "valuable attempts to use fiction to peer behind the facade of American conservatism." She compares reading these books--one about a man who uses his privilege to try to breed Triple Crown-winning horses, the other about a quiet racist--to reading Lolita. She views conservatives on a level with pedophiles in this analogy. She believes we can understand these loathsome beings, but that such understanding should never imply acceptance.

Although assuring the reader that the best fiction "embraces the moral totality of human existence--the range of good and bad actions of which people are capable--and suggests that there is some value in understanding all of it, including the bad," Shade is herself offering only the bad sides of conservative ideals. She has picked two books with awful conservative characters and joined her analysis of them to a one-sided essay about how America is essentially conservative, meaning it always seeks to stomp out the little guy.

Shade briefly alludes to conservative intellectuals who reject Trump, such as the folks at The National Review, but then quickly dismisses such conservatives by claiming they are a small minority and that most Republicans like Trump. She does not interrogate the notion that Trump himself is not, as The National Review would tell us, a conservative, nor does she interrogate whether the Republican Party itself is becoming something other than a conservative party.

She seems to be a breed of liberal who see in conservatives only hypocrisy. There is a kind of liberal who wonders why Christians decry abortion but do not themselves adopt, ignoring the rate at which Christians do, in fact, adopt. There is a kind of liberal who wonders why religious people ignore Jesus's injunctions to help the poor, ignoring that conservatives are either more generous than liberals or at least no less so.

Back when I was a Marine living in Hawaii, my first wife worked for a very conservative oral surgeon. I was just starting, then, to discover a lot of liberal ideology, and I would bring books like A People's History of the United States to the office to read while I waited for my wife to get done working so I could take her home with our one car. The doctor would come out from the back, where Rush Limbaugh was playing on the radio, and criticize the book I had and all such "revisionist history." I would roll my eyes at how little he understood.

But that same doctor routinely provided extensive medical care for young people whose parents, he knew, would never pay their bill. He might grouse about it and criticize parents for having kids they couldn't afford to take care of, but he gave them expert medical care, free of charge. "What am I going to do, let the kids suffer?" he'd say.

Conservative economics basically believes that if people follow their own interests, rather than having those interests directed for them, then economic growth as a whole will be greater. This growth benefits society in a broad sense even while it hurts some individual members of it. Conservative economics does not teach that you cannot donate the money you earn out of your own self-interest to charity. It does not stop the wealthy from forming charitable organizations that carry out large-scale philanthropic projects. And, of course, there a ample examples of rich people doing exactly this kind of thing. Liberals may argue that these are just crumbs to the poor after robbing them of a meal, to which conservatives reply that inequality is better than everyone being equally poor, as has happened in some socialist experiments.

I am not an expert on these things. Most literary writers aren't. We present the world as we see it in great detail. That doesn't make us economists. We can certainly present portraits of the unevenness of capitalism by showing the contradictions within society. We can be the voices of the people who tried for the American Dream and failed for reasons not entirely within their control. We can show the ugliness that exists beneath America's gilded promise. But we ought to be circumspect about conclusions we make with too much certainty. That's not considering "the totality of human existence."

Shade has essentially reviewed two books in which the worst kinds of conservatives are presented, then tried to link these portraits to an argument that conservative ideals are evil and have always threatened to destroy America. If someone else had reviewed two novels with extremist Islamist terrorists, then tied that to a brief history of how Islamist governments violate human rights, readers would have cried foul. But Shade isn't capable of granting that there are good conservatives--and even a good conservatism--with as much liberality as she would grant to Muslims and Islam.

Sin number three: not knowing how to argue for liberal ideology

Right at the outset, Shade acknowledges that she is probably preaching to the choir: "Whether you like it or not (and if you're reading this, the answer is probably "not"), America is a deeply conservative country" (emphasis mine). She is admitting two things by starting this way: that the literary fiction community is deeply liberal, and that she can assume this political viewpoint when addressing the readers of a prominent literary fiction website.

Because Shade is also part of this community, there is a cost to this ideological unity: Shade and others in that community are insular and exhibit a provincial way of thinking. They are so used to assuming a particular political philosophy in those around them, they have lost the ability to even articulate that viewpoint to outsiders. They are like Christians who only associate with other Christians who have lost any ability to "give an answer for the hope within them," to use St. Paul's phrase. If anyone challenges their views, they grow anxious and upset, and rather than engaging in the marketplace of ideas, they insist they do not have to engage with racists and misogynists.

Shade is not, to be sure, without some facts at her disposal. She is able, aided by Robin, to present at least something of a case for how America is fundamentally conservative and why this is bad. She cites several facts of life in America for the poor--many of which I very much agree with as realities that should be at the top of our agenda to address--as examples of the failure of our conservative beliefs.

I’m not referring to policy polls, party registration, or even the fact that Donald Trump is our president. Rather, I am referring to the material realities of daily life in America: the $2 a day on which our poorest citizens live, the for-profit healthcare system and the 45,000 Americans who die because of it every year, the veneration of the U.S. military at sporting events (and even at the putatively liberal Oscars), the fear of a violent black underclass that’s used to justify the imprisonment of millions of mostly poor people, the bipartisan obsession with “competition” and “innovation,” and the corporate exploitation of the natural world that imperils all life on earth.

Again, I agree with a lot of these assertions. However, there is a lack of balance to the picture Shade is presenting here. For example, many countries have a class living in abject poverty. America has the means to at least preserve the lives of most of these people (often through the volunteer efforts at soup kitchens of essentially conservative people). So in some ways, our system is better for our poor than it is elsewhere.

She also fails to acknowledge that there are a lot of conservatives who care about the same things. The libertarian strain of conservative is probably the most ideologically committed to ending mass incarceration. Some conservatives actually take seriously the "conserve" portion of their philosophy. Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, just agreed to make Maryland one of the states supporting the Paris accords. Hogan has also asked for Maryland to be exempted from offshore drilling.

Shade is quick to push aside Trump and insist that the problem with conservatives predates him, but the two examples she chooses for novels are exactly the kind of people who put Trump over the top. They are not conservatives in any considered sense.

We have quickly forgotten how much America was not particularly thrilled with either Trump or Clinton. We have ignored the extent to which many people voted for one or the other candidate as a default least-terrible option. We have forgotten that many conservatives voted for Clinton and many liberals thought both candidates so terrible they voted for neither.

But liberals have adopted a siege mindset since the advent of Trump. We have no independent vision of the world, only a rebuttal of all things Trump. We are utterly wrecked. Rather than take this as an opportunity to remake ourselves, we are doubling down on simply opposing what we see as ugly rather than proposing what we view as beautiful.

We could be trying to reach out to conservative intellectuals right now, people who have fled the Republican Party since Trump showed up. We could be remaking a platform that represented a new vision of the sweet spot in the dynamic tension between conservative and liberal ways of looking at the world. Instead, we are constantly focused on cutting up all the bands that tie us together with conservatives in a dynamic tension.

If Trump proves anything, isn't it that America is essentially NOT conservative? That we're willing to blow up the status quo and try new things, even if those new things are really, really stupid?

How this all poisons the world of literary fiction

A lazy, self-assured liberal politics is the default political position in literary fiction. Shade clearly assumes it in her readers. That's the world I'm trying to enter when I submit stories to serious literary journals. That's the assumed view of the world on the minds of many gatekeepers reading those stories, and it's the worldview of the senior editors those stories get passed on to.

It's no accident that the stories I've been able to get published so far are all about people whom capitalism has failed in some sense. I've written a number of stories I think are possibly better than the published ones, but if you don't count my book, I've only had one story about a white, middle-class, American character published. (Joke's on those publishers, though. Nearly all of my downtrodden characters maintain a belief in the American dream, a belief they continue to hold onto at the end of all the stories I had published.)

Literature ought to keep an open mind to the data the universe is giving our senses. That includes data that refutes the deeply-held beliefs of the literary community itself. The literary community ought to be a place full of lively debate of all kinds of beliefs about the world. It should not be a place where one can assume liberal politics when addressing the community. That leads to tepid, boring work. Even when I read something I agree with, I find it dull.

I'm not trying to put myself out like Tim Allen or James Woods do, saying a liberal establishment is against me because of my conservative politics. I am, by and large, politically liberal. If, in the tension between personal freedom and social good, you are not sure what choice to make, I believe you should always err on the side of personal freedom. I'm not asking people to change their political beliefs. I'm begging, with tears in my eyes, for literary people to do what literary people ought to do: consider how what you are saying seems to others who view things differently from you. Consider whether your rhetoric increases understanding and healing or just makes both sides dig the trenches deeper. Consider that your own entrenched beliefs may be part of what brought us Trump, not the antidote to him.

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. 

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
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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. 

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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.