Best American Short Stories drops at midnight. I'll be back to analyzing it this year, as it's pretty much the highlight of whatever it is I do on this blog. Each BASS comes with a foreword by the editor and guest editor, which I usually ignore. It's always about how things are dire in the world and how it's a miracle that art like BASS continues to survive and how critical art is in these dark times.
Since the first election of Trump in 2016, I've not been a fan of two trends among liberals. One is the tendency to over-catastrophize. The election of such a mercurial and at times vengeful person to the highest office is calamity enough without looking for extra reasons to find it terrifying. The second is the refusal of liberals to acknowledge their own part in creating the monster of Trump. The result is that I've spent the last 8 years loathing the fact that Trump ever got past eleventh place in the primaries on one hand, and chiding fellow liberals on the other for finding a Trump conspiracy under every bottle of ketchup on the other. Those BASS forewords sometimes trip both of those triggers of mine.
Nonetheless, it does look like somehow, my fellow countrymates are going to elect him again in two weeks, and this time, not feeling any need to surround himself with grownups in order to make himself look like a real politician, Trump is going to feel free to do whatever dumb thing pops into his head. Meanwhile, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are all feeling bolder to do whatever they want to do, because they doubt the strength, resolve, and ability of what has been the world order to do anything about it. It really feels like Trump will be elected, he will force Ukraine to take a terrible deal or be conquered outright, and what has been called the liberal world order will officially come to an end. In its place will be a much more frightening world.
In the 90s, it seemed to me at one point like in a mere twenty years or so, the world would have all its major problems solved. It now feels the opposite of that, like some kind of definitive doom is imminent, and only unlikely chance can prevent it.
That's the environment in which I approach an attempt to seriously read twenty short stories that represent the best of what American letters produced in 2023. In the middle of the greatest angst I've felt since I was a kid thinking about nuclear fallout, I'm going to put all of my effort into reading, thinking about, and communicating my thoughts about twenty short made-up stories. It's a hugely frivolous thing to do, and it's also the only thing I can think of to do.
There's never a time when there aren't more useful things to do than write or read or think about literature. We could always be feeding the poor or righting a wrong or curing a disease, but we read anyway. I don't know if this is a good or bad thing in the human race, but I know it's in our nature. So if we're going to do it anyway, we may as well try to do it well. So for the next several weeks, I'll be neck-deep in trying to do the least fuzzy-headed readings I can do, readings that are hopefully what the authors who wrote these stories deserved.
I was recently in a conference with about a hundred participants. The event organizers decided, for some reason I'll never understand, to start the conference with all hundred or so of us giving self-introductions. Part of the self-introduction was to include the answer to the ice-breaker question, "What's the best job you ever had?" With so many of us, it ended up taking a very long time. Attentions waned early. I stopped paying attention about 1/3 of the way through. I don't think I even listened when it was my turn to go. When we had finally gotten near the end, a guy near the back named Eddie got up. Eddie was not content to stick to the formula, and Eddie did not know how to read the room, which clearly just wanted the introductions to be over. Eddie proceeded to not just tell us his favorite job (he'd been a cop in Philadelphia), but his favorite story about being a cop. It involved a man he'd pulled over on the street who ended up having a sock full of chicken wings in his pants. As he went through his animated telling of the story, which he'd obviously told many times and enjoyed telling, he used a voice that might have been a semi-racist caricature of the person he'd pulled over. At the end, we all kind of laughed nervously, and the event leader, who obviously was familiar with him, said, "And that is everyone's introduction to Eddie."
What this has to do with the latest literary brouhaha on Twitter
The latest Twitter culture-war-inspired literary spat (meaning all of like .002% of the US population noticed it) has to do with an interview Hobart editor Elizabeth Ellen did with Cuban-American writer Alex Perez. In his interview, Alex kind of reminds me of Eddie. He makes me uncomfortable at times, and he obviously has his take he wants to get through, and there's really nothing to do but get out of the way until he's finished. But at the end of it all, I honestly did have a few laughs, was challenged a few times, and found it hard to not like the guy. At the conference, Eddie was never alone during breaks, and he was at the center of a few groups during drinks in the evening. I'm sure most everyone needed to walk away now and then to get a break from Eddie, but you also didn't want to miss out on a few minutes with him completely.
That's not the way most people apparently feel. Many of the editors at Hobart quit over the interview, leaving a statement on their way out the door. They called the interview misogynist and white supremacist, but they also called it "boring." A LitHub article on the subject called it "tedious." It was many things, but I don't think "boring" or "tedious" were it.
In short, Perez, who went to the very exclusive Iowa Writer's program, feels that the high-brow world of literature to be taken seriously (as opposed to literature for the masses) has been infected by "wokeism." It's run by a cabal of rich white women in Brooklyn who push an agenda of diversity, but whose real interest is to stay in power. They mouth conformity to certain woke principles and demand the writers they grace with publication to do the same. So does the majority of the literary community.
Yes, that sounds boring when I summarize. I'm tired of articles ranting about wokeism, too. But Perez somehow isn't boring. He has a unique background as the child of Cuban immigrants who were disappointed their son chose writing over baseball. This isn't your typical Praeger University claptrap. There's a sense that Perez has earned at least some of his gripes. I don't think his critique of rich whites and his perception of how the baseline political take of a rich white has changed in the past ten years can be completely dismissed. From his perspective, I can see how he'd think that.
There are reasons to think that the current ideological majority surrounding writing--the kind of ideology you'd see assumed at places like the AWP conference--isn't entirely sound. Surely, no ideological consensus is ever fully correct. Surely, any political consensus always needs critiqued.
Some of the same white writers I see on Twitter lambasting Perez I've also heard in private expressing their own doubts. They've sent in stories using fake, person-of-color-sounding names. They've complained that they didn't fit the right demographic to get into a collection. I'm sure a lot of that is white fragility and sour grapes, but I don't think it all is. We all sense something isn't quite right, but it's hard to say exactly what, and it probably isn't altogether safe to ask the question.
I've tried from time to time on this blog to question what it is I find troubling about the assumed ideology I find around literary journals and publishers. I don't know that I've ever succeeded. The closest I've seen anyone get was this love letter to the profession of literature by Mark Edmundson from a few years back. I was hoping Perez would knock it out of the park a little more, and I was disappointed that at times, he used the lazy shorthand "wokeism" to describe that difficult-to-pin-down something that makes so many people feel uneasy. The closest he got was this:
What connects people isn’t color or creed or gender or stupid political taxonomies, but the existential despair that comes for us all. How do you respond to that despair once it comes for you? I never feel closer to a person than when they share a piece of their despair with me, and rarely, if ever, does it have anything to do with politics or ideology. It’s always about loneliness or heartbreak or loss, etc. It’s about life. The best art reflects that despair we all face back at us; it doesn’t separate us from other people.
I tried to write something similar when I summarized the most recent Best American Short Stories a few months ago. I also did it four years earlier, again summarizing BASS. One Asian Tweeter responded to that part of the interview by saying, "cool unfortunately my existential despair comes from the fear of being stabbed in the street as an asian woman." I totally understand that, and I don't want to put my existential despair that I'm privileged enough to feel in front of real existential (as in, will I live or die) fear. I just know that the writing I remember and that provides solace to me in my life usually is responding to that.
Even Jonny Diamond, writing his piece for LitHub, acknowledged that "like all clichés, there is some truth to it." That's sort of what The Economist said about Trump's critique of the world order. My problem with Trump wasn't that he was assailing ideas I found too sacrosanct to assail, it's that he did such a shitty, illiterate, incoherent critique of it. Perez wasn't Trump-level incoherent. He seemed kind of like one of the Eddies of the world. I'm sure I'd find having a few beers with him to be more enjoyable than dull, even if I might find some of his ideas confounding.
Perez and others who are trying to critique what they're calling "wokeism" because they can't find a better word yet are trying to do something very difficult. I'd like it if, when they did an imperfect job of it, the conversation focused more on that "truth behind the cliche" that they are trying to get at than it did on rage about one's beliefs being questioned. Auto-naming things "misogyny" and "white supremacy" is just about as lazy as calling something "wokeism."
Hardly anyone reads serious fiction now. Novelists have very little voice in public discourse, or at least discourse that affects anything. To tell the truth, I'd never paid any attention to Hobart before yesterday. (I don't write fiction under 2,000 words, normally.) Clearly, something is off the rails. It's off the rails enough that we ought to be willing to hear just about any spaghetti-at-the-wall idea out there for what's wrong. Perez's ideas were off in a lot of places, but I'd rather see subsequent analysis of where the wheat beneath the chaff might be than burning the field to the ground.
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.
Millenarian beliefs that the deluge is nigh are not new, but it's not a stretch to say American culture is experiencing a high tide of fin-de-siecle sentiment. We've been drowning in post-apocalyptic stories for years. Perhaps somewhat differently from past concerns about the impending end of the world as we know it, today we can actually point to rational, scientific concerns. Superbugs, climate change, dwindling water to satisfy a growing population, an overdue supervolcano beneath Yellowstone--there are plenty of reasons to feel dread that don't require any religion at all.
Add to that the unusual nature of the current political cycle. While we've had dramatic swings in political philosophies before, we've never quite had this kind of politician whose entire appeal is that he has come to destroy politics. Trump's appeal to the far right--even if he doesn't have enough of a political philosophy to be far right himself-- is now engendering an almost equally radical swing from the left, and we may well end up with a choice between two highly unconventional candidates in 2020. This swing to the extremes seems to also be limiting the space Americans have for common understanding, making us more likely to hate the other side. There is stress on our institutions.
If we look for reflections of this stress in a literary anthology like the 2019 Pushcart--an anthology that, with its focus on smaller presses, can possibly boast to be somewhat more representative of the concerns of ordinary Americans than other anthologies with big names who occasionally make a living out of art--we can certainly see this angst informing narratives. Several stories reflect contemporary nervousness, such as Julie Hecht's "Taco Night," about an aimless woman experiencing a sort of fugue on the night of Trump's election. Or Poe Ballantine's "Secrets Deep in Tiger Forests," in which Vietnam is a stand-in for contemporary concerns about unending wars and the effects of those wars on those who fight them and those who don't. In the entire anthology, no story reflected a basic pessimism about the future as much as Julie Burnstein's "All Politics."
Western optimism in general and American optimism in particular owe their philosophical roots to humanism, an outcropping of the Renaissance that stresses the centrality of humanity and believes in the ability and duty of humanity to use reason to overcome its problems. Humanism gave us modern universities. But in Burnstein's story, the university--in particular, humanities departments, which have the specific task of propagating humanism's core tenets--are rotten to the core and utterly beyond redemption. Because humanities departments themselves are in thrall to their own perverse politics, they are unable to have any impact on politics in the general culture. Without the spirit of humanism to guide them, Western political bodies and the cultures they prop up don't have much hope.
Now this, THIS is a humanities department that can change the world.
But there's a lot of optimism in Pushcart 2019
Along with the pessimistic, though, and actually outweighing it, there are stories that reflect a fundamental optimism about the future, be it the future of humanity, of Western culture, or of basic cultural institutions like family.
I noted a similar swing from a renunciation of the values that have dominated Western culture for centuries to an attempt to restore those values in some way after reading through another anthology, the 2018 Best American Short Stories. This doesn't mean that we are going to see an upswing of writers of serious fiction calling for a genuine return to the values of yesterday, or to make Western culture great again, but it does mean I see modernity struggling to find what it can salvage of humanistic values from the ruins.
This is true from the opening story, Karen Russell's "Tornado Auction," about a man who is obsessed with selling baby tornadoes the way many people now sell prize animals at auctions. It's a world that's mostly like ours, but under a little more environmental stress: some people make a living creating rain or wind. The protagonist is alienated from everyone in his life, especially his children, who do not appreciate his dangerous and unprofitable passion. But we find in the story's most touching moment that his hobby, misanthropic as it seems, is actually what he clings to desperately in order to prevent him from becoming overwhelmed by how powerfully he feels the weight of human bonds, especially the family kind. It is his way of escaping suicidal feelings or the oppressive weight of "something worse than freedom" he feels when he realizes he is a father to children he loves more than he can handle.
Russell's hero, Bobby, faces a very modern conundrum. We fetishize individual freedom, but it is also what is killing us. Jonathan Franzen explored this at length in the novel Freedom, how in the name of freedom, we allow people to waste and consume to the detriment of all. Bobby doesn't give up his freedom. He tries to turn the power of the freedom he loves into an instrument to keep alive the very bonds he seeks to run from. It doesn't work out well for him, and in fact, the story itself is nearly destroyed by the power of the ideas it is working with. But it's clear in the end that the sentiment of the story is in favor of a belief in the family ties that bind.
Nothing is freer of human ideals of right and wrong than an act of God, but also, nothing is more destructive.
In "Acceptance Speech," a gardener expounds upon how the way of things in nature is self-destructive: bacteria in a petri dish will eat their food faster and faster until they choke themselves. She claims that man is headed in this direction, and the sooner we get our own destruction over with, the happier she will be. But the whole time she is weaving the thread of the futility of life in the natural world, she is knitting herself into that tapestry of life. She reveals at the end that she has become purposefully and happily pregnant.
It's not clear exactly how she progresses from misanthropic nihilist to born-again optimist, but it's clear she didn't do it by closing her eyes to all that is wrong in the world. She embraces the future while still realizing it is, almost without any doubt, doomed. Her award for which she is giving her speech was given for ripping out every beautiful plant from her garden and putting ugly things in their place. But when she got to the end of ripping the beautiful things out, she felt that her very honesty about how the ugliness of the world was, in fact, a kind of lie. She felt this when she juxtaposed her own honest pessimism to the self-blinding optimism of her husband: "I knew, from my husband's wounded puss that the garden, however glorious, was no reply to his infant questions unanswered, but a terrible lie."
Her pessimism does not disappear, but rather, she finds a way to merge it with her husband's optimism. Having torn out everything beautiful, she finds there is yet something in the garden left to love. But she is only able to find this out after tearing all the beautiful things out, much as our culture today is only able to find a remnant of humanism worth clinging to because it has so mercilessly attacked the foundations of humanism for so long. Nothing still left standing can possibly be the weak stuff.
In Taddeo's "Suburban Weekend," we have the familiar "love and family are a lie" theme challenged, however, timidly, by a bumbling hero who spends most of the story eclipsed by the person she is trying to save. It is interesting that the suicidal friend in need of saving is named "Fern," making her view of the world the more "natural" one. Liv--whose name is almost comically on-point, because it is her goal to help her friend to do just that--is a comedian who is nearly unable to deal with her own personal issues. This brought to mind Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival, in which the theme is advanced that comic mindsets are better suited to survival than tragic ones. "Suburban Weekend" is sort of an exploration of whether that philosophy has an evangelical side to it, whether it can not just save those who follow it, but whether its followers can use it to save others.
In the end, it isn't clear that Liv can save Fern. (That is, in a sense, that she can save the natural world.) But the reader admires the love she shows when she tries to save her friend, and the reader ends up wanting to show that kind of love, too.
Liv can't have less luck at saving a Fern than I have had in my life.
The not really exceptions
There are some stories that seem to possibly challenge the fundamental optimism of most of Pushcart, but they are actually just validating a humanistic view of progress and the future by way of pointing out exceptions. Gabriel Brownstein's "No Time Like the Present" is about the disasters that can happen when we fail to get a hold of our psychological disorders, the things that rob us of peace. But by critiquing the inability to fix the problem, the story is also asserting a classical humanist concept: that problems can be solved if the right solution is applied through hard work. Similarly, Victor Lavalle's "Spectral Evidence" sounds like it ends in a very dark place. When the narrator ends with the promise that "from now on whoever comes to see me is going to hear truth," it's not a comforting truth she's going to tell. It's that whatever comes after death is frightening and best not to think about. But again, this is the failure of reason showing that the solution is to apply reason correctly. It's an injunction against becoming obsessed with what one cannot control and focusing on the here and now. In its renunciation of the after-life and its recommendation to focus on the physical world, it is perhaps the most classically humanist story in all of Puschart 2019.
The most interesting exception, although I found it to be not a very interesting story in its own right, is Robert Coover's "The Wall." Coover combines the ancient tale of two lovers separated by a wall with the modern political resonance of a wall--although the later is never overtly stated. Coover seems in this parable-like story to examine the idea that troubles tend to be mounted by the societies that face them, but that this just leaves society with another wall to get over. The wall might be psychological, and it might just be the realization that every freedom brings new chains, or that there is never any end to walls. Rather than being overtly pessimistic or optimistic, it is philosophical about the whole notion of pessimism and optimism, and, really, about the future. It's old-guy lit.
Because I make everything about Lord of the Rings
The point has been made many times that American optimism is unjustified and quite possibly dangerous. We don't take seriously the idea that we might destroy the world because we always think Elon Musk or John Wayne will be there to save it for us. I have often thought that America could use a good dose of reality to cure it of its confounded optimism and bring out the dour Calvinists we all might have been.
But then I'm reminded of something Frodo Baggins said about another group of foolishly optimistic and inward-looking fools: "...there have been times when I thought the inhabitants (of the Shire) too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them." He says this just after Gandalf has revealed the truth about the one ring and the threat Frodo brings to everyone in the Shire by keeping the ring there, the moment when Frodo decides he must leave to save it. When the time comes to leave and he thinks about having once felt this way about his fellow hobbits, he concludes, "but I don't feel that way now." Frodo has to face terrors and truths and become wiser than any inhabitant of the Shire in order to save it. By doing so, he becomes unable to live in it any longer, but he is content to have saved it for his gardener friend Sam. Which brings me back again to "Acceptance Speech." The wisdom the gardener finds that makes her rejoin the world around her isn't a philosophical argument, it's the sadness in her husband's face. She's not unaware of the cold truths of the world in which cute otters rape baby seals. But when she returns from plumbing the depths of rot in the world, she doesn't leave the garden like Frodo left the Shire; she decides to return to it, a goth Eve with her fool of an Adam. The sense from Pushcart and from intelligent, liberal-minded folks in the world who have spent the last few decades tearing down pillars of classical humanism is that we need to find something left with which we can plant a new garden.
There are two things about my life I've beat to death on this blog: that I used to be a rather devout evangelical Christian, and that when I stopped believing, literature partly filled the gap in my life where Christianity used to be. I ask a lot of literature. So I was intrigued by an essay that appeared on Lithub last week by Rachel Vorona Cote, who confessed to a similar habit. As she put it in her essay ""The Complicated Comforts of Marilynne Robinson,": "I have a nasty habit of asking too much from books."
Her essay is a personal look at her own pain and an attempt to use literature to overcome it. In late 2017, she was discouraged by the first year of Trump's presidency and personally undone by her mother's death. She was in a place where people often turn to religion, but knowing ahead of time from personal experience that heading to church would end up fruitless, she was looking around for something religion-like to fill the void.
Gilead
She tried Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. It is a very well-regarded novel about an aging Congregationalist minister, John Ames. I read it last year. Almost nothing happens in it in the present. There is some action that takes place in flashback, but much of the action in the novel gets sidetracked by Ames' own theological musings. Still, it's not like being preached to for the length of the novel. Ames, in fact, is a bit too introspective to be a fire-and-brimstone preacher. In one of the few passages I highlighted from the book, he says of himself that "...there is tendency in my thinking, for the opposed sides of a question to cancel each other more or less....If I put my thinking down on paper perhaps I can think more rigorously. Where a resolution is necessary it must also be possible."
But Ames never really quite succeeds in achieving his resolution. The conflict of the book, if it can even be called that, is that Ames is concerned that the ne'er-do-well son of his lifelong best friend is going to try to move in and marry his much younger wife when Ames dies. But the conflict more or less takes care of itself.
Cote found comfort in reading the book. She had hoped that Robinson could be her Virgil, "a woman of faith to guide me through her theological web--and who could believe in my stead what I feared couldn't possibly be true. That I would find my mother again. That she had not been obliterated by death. That our shattered country might stumble onto a path of progress, however slow and aching."
Although Ames asserts that the "purpose of a prophet" is to "find meaning in trouble," you won't find that meaning explicitly stated in Gilead. I found reading it to be akin to looking at a painting for an extended period of time. I was left more with a continuous mood or feeling than with what you might call a discursive kind of impression.
This was enough for Cote, at least mostly:
"Gilead could not entirely soothe my despondence: it couldn’t assure me that Mom was peeping into my apartment’s darkened windows, or directing her love-filled gaze at Dad while he slept. It couldn’t even convince me that her soul awaited mine in some obscure afterlife. But John Ames would have believed this to be the case, and somehow, that was enough for me."
She found that simply vicariously huffing off the faith fumes of someone else was close enough to the experience itself to bring comfort. She read another Robinson novel, Housekeeping, which I have not read. But then, she did something I find telling: she read a book of essays by Robinson. As Cote put it, she was hungering "for a more explicit manifesto." She had been comforted by living in Ames' head for a bit, but she was looking for something that offered a less poetic sense of meaning here in the modern world.
But Robinson's refusal to be more certain of herself in her non-fiction is a double-edged sword for Cote. Robinson is not an agitator; she is too circumspect about her own conclusions for that. On the one hand, this is the hallmark of a rational thinker, but on the other hand, too much self-circumspection can lead to inaction.
It's a familiar conundrum for liberals. Cote nicely sums up this conundrum in the concluding paragraphs:
If Robinson’s nonfiction feels insufficient in the face of a political crisis, it’s because certitude seems foolhardy, and a bit smug. The agnosticism that plagues me in mourning strikes me as productive, even necessary in the political sphere. We do not have the luxury of always being sure, especially when we are a solitary voice within a purportedly democratic cacophony. To achieve anything worthwhile we must writhe and grapple like blind animals in a net, stumbling upon deliverance without the satisfaction of knowing it’s within our reach.
Still, too much fear and doubt becomes unwieldy...
Truth and Comfort
"Too much fear and doubt becomes unwieldy?" Tell me about it. Agnosticism seems to me to be the most intellectually honest position to take, but the thing about agnosticism is that its adherents are, well, agnostic. Which doesn't mean, of course, that they are "indifferent," as many people are now starting to use the word. It means they just don't know what's right. An agnostic can look at the faith of a true believer and be genuinely jealous. Look how that person seems filled with certainty. Look how much she accomplishes. I wish I could believe like she does.
I don't think it was wrong of Cote to expect a lot from a book. I keep reading because I am constantly hoping I will find something that can help me resolve my honest uncertainty with my desire to be more certain. But I'm not sure Gilead is the right place to look. Musicians and prophets may both have been inspired by the gods, but they bring different things. Musicians--and Gilead is more like music than a sermon--bring comfort. Prophets bring truth that demands action.
There's nothing wrong with comfort, but even an agnostic like me can see the wisdom in C.S. Lewis's warning: "If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth--only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair." That's the reason Cote found herself wanting to read non-fiction: she wanted truth.
In fact, I'd say that it's only because Cote was steadfast in wanting truth that she found any comfort in Robinson at all. It wasn't a deep and satisfying comfort, but it was a small comfort. It was enough to keep going on. And maybe that's the most an intellectually honest person will ever get. The most you can hope for is to string together enough moments of hard-won comfort until you reach a point, like John Ames did, where you live long enough "to outlast any sense of grievance you may acquire."
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.
With so much that's truly troubling going on in the world, a fiction writer wonders whether fiction is relevant. The news changes day-to-day, but stories take weeks or months to write, then weeks or months more to be published. A novel can take years to write and years to get to the finish line. By contrast, South Park, a show which takes hundreds of people to produce, managed to get an episode about the Trump election out about a week after it happened.
I realize that writing isn't an either-or thing. I can write stories and take a break now and then to write about events of the day, sometimes on this blog. I've done that now and again, although I try not to give into temptation too often to take on subjects other than writing.
The news is a mix of impending war and a president who won't take the political slam dunk of just saying neo-Nazis are bad. (Or he will say it, but add that there are lots of other bad people, too.) What the fuck is the point of the story I'm trying to write about the girl who falls in love with a performer at a Renaissance festival?
This is a question I've answered for myself before. But that answer sometimes seems kind of weak when compared to the urgencies of the time. Yes, there will always be news headlines that scream to take our attention away, and if we always paid heed to them, nobody would ever create art. But in a world where information moves so fast, it just feels like fiction writing is a slow answer. If my novel were picked up for publication today, even the next season of Rick and Morty would probably make it out before the book did.
There are responses to this, of course. Fiction can focus on that which is timeless, which would fill a niche in a world that is always thinking only of the last 24 hours. But it's hard for me to see that fiction is doing this effectively. Here's a tough question for those who would defend the relevance of fiction: when is the last time you can think of that a short story or novel figured prominently in public discourse?
A few posts ago, Anis Shivani, or someone doing a cyber impersonation of him, left a comment after one of my posts. This was pretty exciting for me, since I've quoted him a lot on here and really find a lot to love in his Against the Workshop. He has given voice to a lot of misgivings I've felt not just about workshops and writing programs, but the modern fiction establishment. I suspect when he writes these critiques, he's saying things many have felt, but few have the courage to proclaim.
I decided to read and then write a critique of his first book of short stories, Anatolia and other stories. After reading it a few weeks ago, I've been stymied about how to write this critique. I'd hoped that I'd find in his stories an alternative aesthetic I could aspire to, something different from what dominates the journals and winning short story anthologies year after year. Turns out, I didn't really connect much with this group of stories. I liked them less than I like most modern fiction, not more.
Which led me to ask myself: have I become so inured to a certain hegemonic aesthetic that I'm incapable of responding positively to alternatives? This is a strong possibility. So, rather than write a straight critique of Shivani's work, I've decided instead to try to trace what it is that makes his writing different, what there is about it that makes it belong to another time, and then interrogate my own assumptions about fiction that make me prefer a modern approach, or at least an approach that's more ubiquitous in modern literary fiction.
Hopefully, this will also serve as something of an answer to a friend of mine, who has sent me his fiction before, and I've found myself saying "I like it personally, but I don't think I'd publish it if you sent it to me, because I don't think it succeeds at certain things." I hope this will explain what I mean better than I've done so far.
Distance between author and narrator
One characteristic of Shivani's collection that's different from most modern fiction is that there is very little daylight between the point-of-view of the narrator, in whose voice the stories are told, and the author, Anis Shivani, lurking behind that narrative voice. Modern fiction-writing theory teaches writers to practice a form of Shakespearean negative capability popularized by the Romantics, that we should withhold ourselves from interjecting too much of our own selves into the work. Shivani (and my friend) are nearly opposite this kind of approach: the author and narrator are often almost one and the same (or the main character is antagonistic to the author's philosophy, and there as a cautionary tale). It's fiction that's strongly tied to the philosophical novel.
Shivanian aesthetic
I know where Shivani, the author behind the works, stands on each piece of fiction in this collection. Because one story is about a writer who goes to a sham of a writer's retreat called "Go Sell it on the Mountain," I don't even have to guess what Shivani's aesthetic is. He tells us. His first-person participant in the retreat says the following lines, both to reject the writing he sees others writing and to describe his own type of story-telling, which is rejected by other participants:
Her ((another writer at the workshop)) writing was curiously glassy on the surface: it gave you no entry point, no means to project your living, breathing mass of flesh onto the consciousness of the author. This kind of writing was in vogue now, while I wrote in the old-fashioned raconteur's spiraling manner, leisurely getting to the core of the story. My models were the forgotten writers of the thirties, forties, and fifties, like Roderick Lull and Morley Callaghan, who killed you with their explosive revelations of your own culpability in injustice.
Or, in another instance, the narrator shares these thoughts in a workshop with another writer, only to have his thoughts attacked by the workshop moderator:
"...what is the narrator's moral stand toward the lead character's afflictions? Does she have a moral opinion? Or is she neutral to her ups and downs? I don't see the author present behind the scenes.
The author in Anatolia and Other Stories is always visible, and often barely behind the scenes. In addition to the story of a writer finding his aesthetic out of place with hucksters selling false hope to the talentless, there is another story of Arthur, an old professor who feels out of place because he is being crowded out of the world by an academy and wife who espouse theoretical notions he thinks are ludicrous. Change "Arthur" to "author" on that one, too.
Summarizing
This voice where the thoughts of the author are often pushing into the narrative has a certain feel to it, like we can only proceed so far before we get a summary of what we've just gone over. There are frequent insertions of phrases like "Of course," usually preceding a sneering recounting of some fallacious habit of some character. (There are 43 instances of "of course" in the book.) In another place, it's "Oh, I'm sure he said something about the need to pace ourselves..."
I used to hate hearing the workshop stock phrase that a story "floats," meaning it doesn't have enough flesh and bones to tie its ideas to Earth. But these stories float a lot. There are powerful ideas in play here, so powerful, in fact, that there cannot be any shortcuts past incarnation. But in many stories, the word comes to dwell among us without first being made flesh.
In no story was this more evident than "Repatriation," a frustrating, semi-apocalyptic tale of people not sufficiently Anglo-Saxon enough being shipped out of the United States to...well, they never do make it anywhere. The story is nearly haunting, nearly palpable, but it keeps resorting to summarizing statements of how we got to where we are, brief quips from a fictional history. There is a tantalizing line in the story about how the refugees on the ship, not allowed to have books with them, "trade in poetry." I wish the whole story had been about that. Instead, it's part tirade, part oh-yeah-by-the-way-some-things-happened-on-the-ship, part details from the life of a hazy first-person narrator before the roundup.
Telling over showing
"Show don't tell" is one of those workshop mantras that rightly deserves some rebellion against it. It's not historical. It rejects the "instruct" in "instruct and delight." It overlooks that wanting moral instruction from stories is a core aspect of human nature.
Shivani tells a lot. Even when he shows, he often follows it up with telling. In "Independence," we get this summary of a character, rather than hints from action, dialogue, etc.:
Was it that he faced his mortality in the mirror the innocent boy held up to him? Was it that he saw in the boy's mindless questions and motiveless harmony some challenge to the ordinary man Saleem himself had become? Saleem had never been a rebel; he'd never gone through the wild phase his university classmates had, putting their fathers through the ropes, driving their poor mothers to distraction.
In one instance, right after we have a scene rendered, with Julie pinching the cheeks and ruffling the hair of her child, we immediately get an explanation of what those actions meant: "The good thing about Julie was that she didn't jump into defending her mothering skills when Saleem accused her of shortfalls in that area. She listened seriously, like a good pupil." Or later, "Their father pinched and rolled his chin, in an expression of concern." That's showing and telling in one sentence, the action and the explanation of the action all in one.
I'm not really criticizing this trait; this is more of a description of where Shivani lies on a spectrum of descriptive and prescriptive narrative. I'd like to see more fiction written near this end of the spectrum. I just didn't find this collection was a particularly effective representative of its spectrum.
Or am I just a tool of my environment?
Shivani the critic has convincingly--to my mind, anyway--attacked the modern academia-publishing complex in serious fiction for its dogmatic insistence on an unimaginative, bourgeois form of realism, what he would, after over a decade of developing his thoughts, come to call "plastic realism." I realize that in my critique of Anatolia, I've assumed a position well within the mainstream of this kind of realism. Perhaps, as much as I've railed against M.F.A. programs and suggested I don't find much on the scene that deeply inspires me (all of my top five authors are dead), I have, without meaning to, been commodified by this system. Maybe in the process of trying to get published by literary journals, I've ended up adopting the aesthetic I think is likely to get me published by them, and become, in the process, the sort of person who can't appreciate something like Anatolia that doesn't conform.
I don't think this is the case. I wanted to like these stories. I admire Shivani the critic so much, I was dying to love Shivani the story teller. He commented on my blog. I wanted to write about how I really got his fiction. I just didn't. Not that there was nothing to like in these stories, but nearly all the gold in it were thoughts similar to what Shivani has penned elsewhere in non-fiction form. As a story teller, I think he's a very good critic.
The stories I want to read and write
I don't mind being told how to feel about a story. I like it. I prefer it. But the moral grounding has to come organically from the story, or at least feel like it does. When Dori tells Marlin "It's time to let go!" it's pretty clear we've come to the climax of both the story and of Marlin's narrative arc. There's nothing thematically subtle about that line. But that line also works, because it is grounded in a real drama of a guy trying to find his kid.
I once tried to write these types of philosophical narratives, where I'd have some thought about the world, stick it into a character, and then try to make that be enough to bring a world to life. It never worked. Jonathan Franzen's intellectual characters work not because they have brilliant thoughts--although they sometimes do--but because their brilliant thoughts do not solve all the problems in their lives. Sometimes, they are the source of nothing but anxiety. Franzen's characters do not exist just to have thoughts Franzen wants them to have. They have thoughts because that's part of what they do as fully formed characters. They might be characters similar to Franzen, but that's not the same as saying they're puppets Franzen has giving us his prophetic vision of life through the guise of a nominal story.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm a Philistine, or just an unimaginative critic. Maybe I'm unable to transcend the bourgeois tastes of my time. That's completely possible. Maybe I've developed such a knee-jerk response against what I think won't get published, I've equated it with something that shouldn't get published.
I might be wrong about what I like, but I don't think I've confused what I like for what I ought to like. Not yet. And my requirements for what I like are definitely not modern. I've never improved much upon Horace's "instruct and delight."
Way back when I first started sending in stories to see if I could get them published, I saw an off-handed comment somewhere on the Internet that went something like this: "Famous Author X thinks it's weak to always submit to places with a high chance of publication. You should go for the big game." That probably slowed me down to getting my first publication considerably. I really wasted a lot of time only sending in to magazines like The Atlantic. Eventually, I adjusted, and soon my fourth story will be published, followed soon after by the promised book of short stories from Washington Writers' Publishing House.
Still, I can't get over the lure of the big boys. How great would it be to get published by Glimmer Train or New England Review or Prairie Schooner? Wouldn't it bring instant gravitas when I submit further work in the future? Wouldn't it give me a leg up searching for agents for my novel?
I wrote a couple of stories earlier this year that I regard as the best I've done yet. I decided to try to shoot the moon and go for some of the big boys I've been avoiding. The rejections are just starting to come in now. You'd think it would be easier to take a rejection from a top-tier journal, but it's not. I can't help but getting excited when there's a response from a publisher that could really bring a breakthrough. That means the let-down hits me a little bit harder. If you get a rejection from a smaller press, there's always the chance your story was actually good but they're just too overworked to notice. With the top presses, a rejection feels more authoritative.
Also, one journal has a mean form rejection letter. Instead of the many formulas for "we're not saying it's bad, only that we're not publishing it," this one said "Unfortunately, it's not for us." That sounds like something I'd say about jello with pineapple in it.
I've read a lot of writers use the strategy of going big then going small. Try a story out with the big guys, then go for something more approachable. If that fails, maybe rework the story or put it away for a while. That makes sense, but it's a frustratingly slow way to do business. Getting published is like playing a really tough boss level of a video game, only there is a three-to-six month lag between trying something and seeing whether it worked or you have to hit re-start.
I'm happy getting published by smaller presses. It's really enough that anyone reads something I've written and likes it. But 2017 was supposed to be a year that gave me some clarity on how much effort to keep putting into writing, and for how much longer. It started off with a bang, a quick acceptance and then the big news of the book. I really wanted a second big breakthrough with a major journal, but now that very effort has got me back to feeling like I'm grinding in vain. With odds this big, it really feels like I'm waiting for that unreliable girl to show up for our date, and she's an hour and half late, and everyone in the restaurant is starting to feel sorry for me.
Self-doubt so deep, it's going to need some sequels...
I read a really great short story a couple of weeks ago, so of course I've kind of been feeling like shit since then. The story was "The Devil's Triangle" by Emma Duffy-Comparone. Karen Carlson, who just keeps doing her thing at A Just Recompense, was nice enough to point at that Duffy-Comparone is also the writer of "The Zen Thing," which, like "Triangle," won a Pushcart Prize. I thought both were great stories.
I don't feel shitty because she's far more successful than me. That's true of zillions of writers. It's complicated. I'll try to unpack it. I tried to get all the overlapping zones of uneasiness I'm feeling into one post, but it was impossible. Let's start with one more or less consistent thought.
It's good in a way I can't be good...
She has a knack for punchy and imaginative metaphorical language. I can go to almost any page to find an example:
"Claire's guinea pig, Pam, sat on chicken wire, breathing rapidly. Mika had taken her when she moved out of the apartment. Now the animal was barely recognizable, polka-dotted with scarlet sores like sucked cough drops, her nails brown and corkscrewing into her feet, her left eye oozed shut, the right cloudy as if rinsed with half-and-half."
...but that's not the problem
I just don't write like that. Which is fine, everyone writes to their strengths. A lot of writers I admire don't write like that. But I guess I've lately felt shamed into thinking I should want to write like that. A friend recently sent me this interview by David Vann, in which Vann praised "the quiet and beautiful books, Latinate in style, not violent, slow-paced..." The literary equivalent of Manchester by the Sea, let's say. Sometimes, I feel like that kind of writing is the only "serious" writing. Or at least the only writing that is taken seriously.
but what's the point of that kind of narrative?
I liked Manchester by the Sea. I really did. Okay, not for like the first hour. But eventually, I liked it. It was "quiet and beautiful," to use Vann's phrase. It was also very "slow-paced." The subdued tones, the attention to small things, made the few outbreaks of raw emotion far more poignant when they broke out. I'll admit, I found that scene, when Lee and Randi finally try to talk about the loss of their children, extremely moving. There were two characters I found very believable for the way they tried with so much earnestness to say the unspeakable to one another, and it's hurting them that they can't find the words, so they strain harder to get the words out, but they just can't.
Duffy-Comparone's story had a similar emotional approach and outcome. It is the story of triplets, but one is gone and, by now, beyond just "presumed" dead. The other two, who are now just "twins," are trying, each in their own failed ways, to move on. After pages and pages of slowness, of cloudy-brained wandering through a landscape of sharp details, we get an explosion in the last few pages. The ending, when they both seem to have hit their rock bottom and appear ready to maybe eventually take some baby steps toward moving on, is probably close to how the actual getting over something like that would be. So maybe the reader has experienced vicarious loss and redemption on a microcosmic scale by reading it.
But what has all this emotion accomplished? St. Augustine mistrusted poetry for causing these very same kinds of vicarious emotions:"forgetting my own wanderings, and to weep for
the death of Dido, who slew herself for love, while I looked with dry eyes on
my own most unhappy death, wandering far from Thee, O God, my life. For what is
so pitiful as an unhappy wretch who pities not himself, who has tears for the
death of Dido, because she loved Aeneas, but none of his own death, because he
loves not Thee?"
To put it in a more secular way, what good does it do for me to feel emotion over a story if it doesn't result in a change in my way of living in the world? Or, barring that, at least a significant change in my thinking? Proponents of literature like to say that literature (and stories in any form) make us see life more sympathetically by living it through the perspective of another. Fine, I suppose Manchester and "The Devil's Triangle" did that. Moreover, maybe by experiencing the pain of another person whose life we can view with a blend of both emotion and objectivity, we can learn to better process our own pain.
Those seem like nice things, but they can't be enough to give literature the honored place in world culture it has had for thousands of years.
An example I can actually think of where fiction might have made me a better person
Here's an example of a story that changed my life: I was about to leave Chicago to come to Maryland and start my job after graduate school. I saw Monster, which is based on a true story, but parts of it were obviously imagined. Aileen Wuornos just has bad damn luck. Most of the world shits on her. A few people are kind to her, but their kindness is not enough or not timely enough to make a difference. The movie doesn't really excuse Wuornos for becoming a serial killer, but it does make one wonder how things would have turned out for her if she had received a little more kindness when it might have still done some good. The last murder she commits is of a man who picks her up and, when she offers to have sex with him, says he'd rather offer her a meal and a place to stay. He and his wife have a room, he says. But it's too late for her.
I left that movie wondering what difference it would have made if he'd been there ten years earlier. So I decided I would try to make enough money that I would have a spare room in my house to give to someone who needed it.
I don't think that's the point of most current fiction
That's a pragmatic outcome of fiction. But I don't think that's the outcome most contemporary fiction is going for. A story is considered successful if it merely creates a simulacra of real emotion in the reader/viewer. It is, to use the phrase from Anis Shivani I've already quoted a few times, "cheap counseling for a bereaved bourgeoisie."
Contemporary fictionoften seems not to be offering anything to say about the nature of suffering its characters go through. It's trying to be, itself, a way to experience and overcome suffering. It's not a means to express something, it's the ends. The words and images and internal emotional logic of the fiction are a world unto themselves. The idea isn't to say something true about the world, to hold up a mirror to society. It's to become its own world. A story has succeeded when it becomes itself.
Meanwhile, in the real world...
One of my first workshop heretic moments came in 2003, when I openly wondered in class about what the point of writing the kind of poems and stories we were trying to write was. One poet got very angry with me. How could I say there was no point to writing poetry? A woman in Nigeria had just been acquitted of stoning to death for adultery because people wrote about it! I wanted to ask her how many poems she thought the judges had read. More than likely, they read about one document: an order from a government official to let her off. And that official had probably read a threat from a Western ambassador or two. No poems, I'm going to guess.
I posted a few weeks back about the struggles of a woman I know to get medical care for her daughter, who has a severe medical condition. That post was partly the result of buzzed blogging, but it was also a result of listening to Chris Hayes' interview about his book A Colony in a Nation. He took time to talk about how the proposed changes to the Affordable Care Act would especially hurt mentally ill people. It was non-fiction, and I found it far more moving than any story I canremember reading lately.
What story could I write that could be as necessary as Bandi's The Accusation, which is fiction but of a pointed political nature, a cry for a people and a finger wagging directly at a dictator?
But this book's coming out...
I have so much more work to do now that I have a book coming out. I have editing. I have decisions to make about the cover, the credits. I'm supposed to do readings and promote myself and send my book to be reviewed and get people to write blurbs for the back of the book and generally become my own literary pimp. Then, I need to write more so I can follow this up and keep marketing myself.
A friend of mine was once a chess player with a very strong rating. I'm jealous of that, because I like chess and wish I were as good as him. I'm always surprised he stopped playing. I recently asked him why, and he said, "I got to be better than 99% of players with X level of effort. But it would take X^2 level of effort to become better than 99.1% of players. I thought my time would be better spent getting good at something else."
As I think about jumping into the deep end of writing and whether it is a humanly enriching enough activity to justify a much deeper time and energy commitment than I have so far given it. How, for example, will writing allow me to keep that room in my house for someone to use? If writing can't provide something better for the world than that, what I am doing spending my time doing it?
