Just a touch of daylight between form and content: "Roy" by Emma Binder "(O. Henry Prize Winners 2024)

I am foolish enough to believe literature has tangible benefits for the people who read it thoughtfully, both individually and communally. Among the real benefits of reading literature seriously are:

• It helps develop a sense of empathy, even if the extent to which this empathy gets transferred to real-world action varies.
• It helps readers developer the ability to consider other perspectives.
• It forces readers to reconsider how language functions, how it is a constant mediator for our discovery of the world. If language is the water of the ocean we swim in, then literature can help us to become aware of what we would not otherwise be aware of. It makes us use language more precisely and hear/read it less gullibly. 
• It can present us with a safe place in which to consider moral and ethical questions.
• It can allow us to imagine different realities, which both gives us space to reimagine whether the way things are is how they must be and also gives us a sandbox in which to isolate certain facets of reality and imagine what would happen if those changed.
• It can help humans to work through personal and existential issues, like whether there is any point to life and if so, what. It can also help people to cope with the difficulties of life just by being enjoyable in a highly immersive way. 
• It teaches us how to think about important questions that don't have concrete answers, questions like, "What is beauty?" "What is ethical conduct?" or "What is human nature?" Notice that just because there is no one right answer doesn't mean that a nihilistic insistence that all answers are the same is right. This has important implications for the political life of a community. Learning to be as precise as we can about the imprecise conclusions of literary study can help us avoid imprecise thinking about the equally imprecise conclusions of political life. 

A "good" story will fulfill one or more of these functions. Of course, essentially any story can force us to into the aesthetic questions of what beauty is or what a good story is. A bad story forces us to try to explain why it's bad. So a good story should resonate in more than one of these categories. 

American literature of the last twenty to thirty years, or at least "high" American literature, seems to have emphasized the first three benefits of the study of literature from the list above more than the others. This is seen in short story anthologies like Best American Short Stories, which often feature stories with extremely novel language and form. 

These stories seem to accept the majority belief within "high" American literature that form is inseparable from content. I understand where this belief is coming from. People only experience a story through the arrangement of words on the page, so you can't really say that the plot is what matters and that form is only a tool to tell the story. Readers experience both together. 

At the same time, I can't help thinking something is lost when form is treated with such reverence that stories only a few people really can connect with become the ones literary fiction most recognizes. Or when stories read more like poems than prose, using a poem's associative and chaotic logic, its jarring language that resists understanding and interpretation. Being a translator for most of my adult life has taught me to respect the power of language, and I do think a story should try to respect this power. But being a translator has also taught me that language can be pretty flexible and that humans are good at filling in gaps where language fails. We wouldn't love our favorite stories as much if they were told any old way, but we might still love them if they were told differently. We might even love them if told in somewhat less than a virtuoso's voice. Some of my favorite stories were told by only moderately talented "authors" in a formal sense.  

Okay, I'm ready to talk about the story now

"Roy" doesn't stand out for memorable or inventive prose. I don't mean to say its language isn't good or that it's told in a hack manner. It's just that neither language nor structure is what will stand out in memory for most readers. It's pretty much straight chronology in first person. Uncle Roy is a well-worn character, the hick from the Upper Peninsula who wears denim overalls and eats snakes and possums and drinks too much and gambles too much and plays scratch-offs and likes Hank Williams. In a few places, the imagery is either muddled or weak. The best example might be the final line of the story: "There was a spark growing inside me, calling me into a different future, like a train hurtling fast into the wilderness." That's a pretty good example of a mixed metaphor. The spark is also a train? And do sparks call people? Do trains? "Roy" has established trains as an image linked to freedom and self-discovery by telling us Roy once tried to run away from home on a train, but sparks are new to the story in the last line. 

The story doesn't suffer for any of that. The reader is willing to look past its occasional inexactness or conventionality in language, the occasionally stock character nature of Roy, because somehow it all works. It works because Sophie, the first-person narrator, is a believable and sympathetic young woman whose struggles with coming of age as a gender non-conforming woman in small town Michigan feel very real. We can feel how Sophie's environment, from her judgmental friends who take on making her over as a project to her at times catatonic mother and denial specialist father, are suffocating her. When Roy, the least advisable caretaker imaginable but the only one available, comes to watch over Sophie and her sister while their parents go to be present at the last days of a grandparent, we can feel the same relief she feels as she expands into her true form, the form she's been twisting herself out of the whole time. 

In the hands of a capable artist, a character can be none the worse for being familiar. 

"Roy" is a good story in part because of how it forces us to ask hard questions about the world. What is it that children really need when they're coming of age? Nobody would think Roy was the answer, and in a lot of ways, they'd be right. If Roy had been pulled over while driving the girls drunk to the casino, and child services had placed them in protective care until their parents returned from Grandma's, nobody would have said that was the wrong decision. Roy puts the girls in danger with his drinking and his guns, which he mixes. And yet, Roy has a sense for what kind of person Sophie really is that nobody else does, and he nurtures it, perhaps without even meaning to. He calls her tough, and she loves it. It fits in ways none of the clothes her friends have been putting on her do. By the end of the story, she is answering to her own ideas of identity, something that never would have happened either in the care of her distracted mother or the well-meaning mother of her friend who served her casseroles and salads. 

Roy does everything wrong as a caretaker, but he nonetheless is the only person able to give Sophie the gifts of self-recognition and self-acceptance. Does this force us to rethink what the goals of parenting should be? I'm not saying parenting books should include drunk marksmanship and tales of how a child's mother once banged the child's uncle, but we might pause to consider how the most unlikely people in a child's life can provide unexpected benefits. So part of the reason "Roy" is a good story has to do with that.

The other part, for me anyway, is the way it calls the form/content unity into question. Of course, proponents of this unity would rightly point out that "Roy" is inseparable from the language in which it is told. But I can't help feeling that there are form/content unities and there are form/content unities. With some stories, the language, style, and arrangement call attention to themselves by being unusual, jarring, difficult, virtuosic, or all of these things. With those stories, it feels wrong when you try to restate them in different words. Other stories, like "Roy," have some "give" to the narrative. It could have been told slightly differently and would still feel the same. It can't be that the words themselves cease to matter, but there is a different relationship between form and content in a story like "Roy" than in a story, like, say, "Bears Among the Living" by Kevin Moffett. Which means that while it might be true that form and content are always part of the same whole, they fuse in different ways, the same way different molecules present different characteristics depending on the bonds between atoms. "Roy" is also a good story because of the way it forces the reader to consider or reconsider the bond between form and content, and to admit that at times, the bond can be a relatively weaker one. 

Finally, the story teaches us to empathize with Sophie. An occasional reader of this blog commented while I was going through BASS this year that he didn't like a lot of the stories because of what he called an "agenda." He didn't use these exact words, but I get the sense he felt that some stories get picked because they meet the approval of editors who want to push for more underrepresented voices, rather than because of their merit. I tend to feel that even if a story is picked because it fills a quota or meets an agenda, it might still be excellent. There are far more great stories written every year than can get published, let alone anthologized. If a story is anthologized in part because it is about a traditionally underrepresented category of people, that's probably more of a tie-breaker than the whole reason it was picked. "Roy" might fit in with the public discourse about sex and gender of the last fifteen years, but it's also a believable and moving portrait of a person who we all know is out there. Even if you're a die-hard social conservative who thinks this stuff about gender nonconforming and non-binary is a bunch of moonshine, you know Sophie is a person who exists, and whatever view of the world you build, it has to account for people like her. 

The great theme of BASS 2024 is that when trouble strikes, it's okay to hide or run away

It's sort of ridiculous to try to draw themes for short story anthologies like Best American Short Stories. None of the stories in it were written with the intention of going together. They're culled from hundreds of thousands of stories published in English each year, whittled down to a list of top candidates of around a hundred or so, then whittled down again to the final twenty. They are intentionally chosen to demonstrate diversity of voices, not unity. While the O. Henry Anthology ("The Best Short Stories" collection, rather than "Best American Short Stories") does seem to give some consideration in its mix of stories to creating unity by selecting stories that share subject matter or theme and then try to place them in conversation with each other, BASS really doesn't. Even their choice of story order, always done by author last name, reflects this. If one story seems to be placed where it is because of its relationship to the story before it, that's just a coincidence.

Nonetheless, the BASS anthology is a cultural artifact, and as an artifact, it represents the culture that made it and the culture which it hopes to shape. In a thousand years, if someone happened to leaf through the digital pages of BASS, things might leap out to them that don't to us. (Man, the third decade of the 21st century was sure obsessed with their lame technology!) In spite of the piecemeal way in which is is assembled, it still presents itself, to an outside observer, as a singular object, so I'm going to look at it, just briefly, based on a reading that seeks for some kind of unity. 

The things that pops out at me most are the number of stories in which the reaction to trauma or stress is to hide or run away. Let's see:

-In "The Magic Bangle," the narrator attempts to hide in plain sight in order to be able to turn his gay-hating town into a gay paradise. 

-In "Viola in Mid-Winter," Viola uses a glamour spell to remain hidden from a romantic partner who hurt her. 

-"Blessed Deliverance" features a narrator who keeps his own name hidden, and the climax features rabbits being set free to run away. 

-"The Bed & Breakfast" features a young narrator trying to avoid her own coming of age as long as she can. 

-In "Dorcester," the narrator runs away from reading his poem when he realizes what a phony he is. 

-"Seeing Through Maps" has a son who runs away to escape his family's crazy. 

-"Engelond" is about an attempt to escape one set of circumstances followed by the desperate attempt to flee the first attempt to escape.

-"P's Parties" features a narrator who enjoys remaining hidden in the anonymity that parties provide. 

-Where do I even begin with the theme of hiding in "Baboons"? The utility of hiding as a survival mechanism is possibly the central theme of the story. 

-In "Valley of the Moon," Tongsu retreats from a modernizing society after the Korean War, preferring the presence of ghosts and moonlight on his family's secluded old farm. 

Is this a reflection of society?

Again, this is all a very tenuous thing to do because of the semi-randomness of a BASS anthology, but let's look at BASS as a product of a certain time. That time is really 2023, of course, because that's when the stories were published. And many were written, at least in part, long before that. Since the anthology says "2024" on it, though, and since it came out weeks before the 2024 election, it's hard not to read that as the historical moment of the anthology, even if the individual stories belong to a somewhat different moment. The 2024 election,  for now, stands out to me partly for the way in which so many people I know have disengaged from news since the election, because they just can't deal with it. Or the way in which some rich people who don't like Trump have moved to another country. Going underground, either literally or emotionally, seems to be a big part of the reaction of the 48 percent of us who didn't want this outcome. 

We used to do all kinds of drills in school that had us hide under our desks. They must have had a lot of faith in the structural integrity of desks in those days. 

I've come to be kind of skeptical about the ability of fiction to directly change the course of political history. The BASS 2024 story that most directly addresses American politics, "Democracy in America," is easily the weakest story in the anthology. I realize there are a few examples from history of fiction that has changed politics through a frontal attack, but those example are rare and limited. Fiction is great at a limited number of things, and at those things, it's not just great, but really great. It's great for imagining different ways things could be. It's great at helping develop empathy. It's great at raising questions. It's great at helping people to become clearer thinkers about issues with no obvious right answer. It can, when a story becomes so widely a part of culture that it is on the level of myth, affect the self-image of entire groups of people. 

And it's great at helping people to escape or survive hard times. 

That's BASS of 2024. Nothing in the anthology is going to change the political course we're on. It probably won't even elevate our dumb national political discourse by the slightest nanometer. But fiction has been a part of human society for as long as we've been around because it has a useful role in our survival in a wide variety of social contexts. In the current context, that role might be to help folks batten down the hatches emotionally and prepare for the storm. 

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.

My semi-annual crisis over whether literature has any social utility: "Anyone Can Do It" by Manuel Muñoz

If it's true that fiction can get around the prejudices people carry with them and subtly change hearts and minds, then our culture now ought to be full of the best, most empathetic people in history. We have more literature available to us than any culture in history, with many of the great works available for free online or on Kindle. There are resources to help understand that literature. And then there's the Golden Age of American Television, with streaming services giving us quality programming to challenge and stretch us. (Yes, there is plenty of good stuff to go along with the straight-to-Netflix Adam Sandler movies.)

When I read a story like "Anyone Can Do It" by Manuel Muñoz, my first thought is whether a short story is actually good for anything in the face of a massive social issue. This is the second year in a row Best American Short Stories included a story from the point-of-view of illegal immigrants. Last year, it was "Everything is Far From Here" by Cristina Henriquez, which I didn't care for, largely because it didn't seem to say anything about the border and incarceration that hasn't already been said a million times. (Incidentally, most of the traffic I get on my site seems to be from students who are assigned Best American Short Stories in school. I can tell which stories are the ones they want to write about by following which of my posts they click on. Henriquez's story is by far the least-clicked link from 2018 BASS.)

This year, "Anyone Can Do It" is a solid piece. It's not clear whether the protagonist is actually illegal. She claims throughout to be from Texas, although, because the characters in the story talk about Texas as though it were still part of Mexico ("the Matamoros side of Texas" as well as the "Texas side of Mexico"), it's not clear that her claim would be recognized by the INS. (And I do mean the INS rather than ICE, because this seems to be set a few decades ago.) What the story does right is take a big social issue like illegal immigration and the socially useful work done by immigrant labor (picking fruit, in this case) and look at it from an intensely personal lens.

Delfina's husband doesn't come back from the orchard one night. Nobody's husbands in the neighborhood do, and everyone is worried they've been rounded up. A woman named Lis from down the street cons Delfina into using the family car to take the two of them to go work in the orchards while Lis's daughter watches Delfina's son. Delfina is suspicious, but eventually gives in. Lis steals Delfina's car, takes their joint daily wages, and runs off.

It's full of suspense for the reader as we watch the bad thing happen to Delfina in slow motion. We listen to her slowly talking herself into it, even though she is right to be suspicious, because what are her options? If she doesn't take a chance with Lis, she won't be able to pay the rent in a few days.

We see the "law" contrasted with "justice," as Delfina's son steals a toy car from a store while she is on the phone with her family. We know he shouldn't have done it, but given his life, who would want him to take it back? Even a reader who has particular political views about illegal immigration shouldn't fail to empathize with her as she struggles to take care of her kid. And the possibility that she might actually be from Texas, meaning she might be legal, means that at least that one objection can be held at bay.

For that matter, because Delfina is cheated by another member of her own community, while the only person who is kind to her is an old white man, a white reader can read the story without feeling personally attacked. So if any story is going to change how a hardcore send-em-all-back immigration hardliner feels, it would be this one.

But I don't think it will. The actual human cost of our current social policy isn't hidden. There are signs all around of what it means. Even if "change" from this story isn't measured in people changing their political views--because I can believe someone might feel genuine empathy and still think it's important to secure our borders--at the very least, the story ought to challenge the comfortable belief that immigrants are lazy and soaking up our social services. The title "Anyone Can Do It" has a double meaning. On the one hand, it's what Lis tells Delfina about work in the orchards, that it's both "easy and hard." Which it is. It's a simple thing to learn, but repeated thousands of times in the heat. The other meaning of "anyone can do it" is what skeptics of immigrant laborers might say, that their lives aren't really that hard, that they've actually got it easy.

Will this story make anyone stop saying that? Because I feel like with the advent of this surplus of great stories our culture is currently experiencing, we're also experiencing a sudden stubborn refusal to be emotionally moved by stories. Maybe we're so used to stories that stimulate empathy in us, we're actually building up an immunity to empathy.

If you're a student looking to this blog for help with meaning or theme or whatever from this story, I doubt you even need my help much. This isn't a difficult story to understand. The meaning is all right there. It's about the tough lessons experience teaches us, about how you can't survive without trusting someone but it's also a great risk, and about the real human cost of abstract political policies. Nobody could read this story and miss those things.

But even if we set the bar incredibly low for what "changing hearts and minds" might look like for a story like this one--if we say, for example, that it's a success if just one person reads it and does not, in his next conversation about immigration, immediately assume the lives of immigrants are easy--will this story succeed? Or is it just written for those who already believe?

It's not the fault of an individual fiction writer that we now live in an age where people can so insulate themselves against beliefs they disagree with that they become impossible to convince. But that's our age. Given how difficult it is to change anyone's mind, what am I actually hoping to accomplish when I write a story? What is anyone?

I don't believe in giving up. We have to keep trying, because to stop trying, to give in to some nihilistic impulse, is to be okay living in a world where nothing we do matters. So people should keep writing, if only to not live in that world. But I don't want to support the false hope that if someone can only write the right story, things might get better. While we have to maybe give ourselves that hope in order to get on with our daily lives, I don't think we can avoid the conclusion that it's probably a fool's hope. It just that it's a fool's hope that's about the only hope we've got.

Thanks to the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute students at UC Davis for making Workshop Heretic part of your class

I got a great note today from a student at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UC Davis. The student was part of a class of ordinary people from all walks of life who spent eight weeks studying Best American Short Stories. They made use of my humble little blog (and also Karen Carlson's blog) while discussing the stories.

I'm tickled to death to hear this. My ideal readers are not literary professionals; they're ordinary people looking to make serious reading part of their lives, and this group is exactly that. I understand tomorrow is the class's last day, so thanks to all, and I hope everyone enjoyed the reading.

The flat arc, Lord of the Rings, and going the distance

We're almost a week into the new year, meaning, according to all research, that a fair number of people have already abandoned their New Year's resolutions. People can be forgiven for thinking there is some magic to keeping a resolution; we're often fed the notion that change only comes as a result of some great epiphany at the end of unusual events. The character arc of most fiction, be it in books, movies, drama, or TV, follows this formula. A character is stuck in some place, then events come along that crescendo until they finally reach a point where the character realizes something that prompts a change. The change allows the character to overcome the thing that has been preventing him or her from finding happiness.

Three kinds of arcs

(Caveat: I'm definitely plagiarizing someone in this section. I'd be happy to cite the proper source, but this is now so widely circulated, I don't really know where the following classification of character arcs began. I'll have to just be content with saying this isn't me.)

Generally, the trajectory or arc a character follows in a narrative can be classified as one of three types of arc:

The positive arc: Most of us are pretty familiar with this one. It's what I just described above. We meet a character and learn about that character's traits, which are a blend of positive and negative. The negative traits are causing some kind of problem in the character's life. (This is sometimes called "the lie the character believes.") The character faces a series of challenges that force her to face up to the weakness (or to see through "the lie") and change. The moment of change is the climax, and it is followed by the denouement, which shows us how the climax allows the character to resolve the issue.

One reason I really like Finding Nemo is that you can teach a lot of narrative concepts easily from it. It follows a perfect narrative cycle of rising action-climax-denouement. It also has three characters who clearly have positive character arcs.

The negative arc: This is an artsier example, at least for main characters. Stories in which the main character gets worse instead of better tend not to satisfy, so we usually relegate the negative character arc to a secondary character. In a negative character arc, the person has a chance to change for the better, but fails to. Sometimes, this just means retreating into the negative traits that cause the problem (continuing to believe "the lie"), but it can also mean the character actually goes from good to bad or bad to worse. Charles Foster Kane from Citizen Kane is one familiar example of a main character with a negative arc.

The flat arc: In a flat arc, the character doesn't essentially change. We might see the character dealing with challenges better in some sections than others, but the character's view of how one ought to face challenges doesn't really change. Often, it is a secondary character with a flat arc. This character is not changed by events nearly as much as the character causes change in others. This character comes into the story knowing something, and this knowledge unlocks the mysteries another character (usually the main character) needs to unlock, or helps the main character see through "the lie." Once in a while, a story will be about this "impact character," and the story becomes about how the main character changes others, rather than is changed. Chauncey Gardner in Being There or Amelie from the movie of the same name come to mind.

There can be mixed arcs. Frodo Baggins has basically a flat arc: he is able to endure from beginning to end because he is basically humble and true and good from beginning to end. However, he is wiser at the end. So are all of the hobbits, and while their basic character remains the same at the end as it was at the beginning, they have also changed enough that they are able to defeat Saruman and his lackeys in the Scouring of the Shire.

Lord of the Rings and the flat arc

Nearly all the main characters in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings have flat arcs. There are a few exceptions, like Saruman, Boromir, and Gollum (all negative arcs), but most of the characters are very much the same at the end as they were at the beginning. The movies changed this for a couple of characters, because the movies needed to make money and people really love positive character arcs. I understand why everyone loves positive arcs. It's important for us all to believe we can change. That's a good thing to believe. If you didn't it'd be hard to get out of bed in the morning.

But I'm a big fan of the flat arc. The fact is that most of us don't really need an epiphany to get past the hurdles in our lives. We just need to do the damn work. Most people who resolved to lose weight or run a 10K this year or whatever know what they need to do to accomplish their goals. Lack of knowledge isn't keeping them from losing the weight. It's lack of tenacity. One of the great secrets to life that isn't really a secret at all is how important it is to put your head down and keep on going.

Aragorn, the movie

There's one character arc in LOTR in particular I'd like to look at a little closer. Owing to the influence of the movies, Aragorn has come to be seen as an example of a classic positive character arc. Kristen Kiefer on her writing blog makes this very mistake while discussing--go figure--the subject of character arcs.

Aragorn is sort of a fantasy George Washington in the movies. He's happy fighting wars, but reluctant to assume the responsibility of ruling. Afraid he might not be worthy to be king because of mistakes made by his forefathers, Aragorn spends much of the trilogy denying the mantle of hope for mankind that others are trying to put on him. This "lie that he believes" is chipped away at bit-by-bit, until finally he decides to become the king he was born to be when the father of the woman he loves tells him it is the only way to save Aragorn's love.

It's a nice story. The trilogy itself came out right after 9/11, and America immediately read its current political situation into the challenges faced by the Fellowship. We saw Frodo's reluctant resolve to do what needed to be done to stop evil as our own story of facing up to extremism. So making Aragorn over into a Washington resonated with us, as well.

Tolkien's Aragorn

But that's not Tolkien's Aragorn. Tolkien's Aragorn was two when his father Arathorn was killed fighting orcs. Aragorn was taken to Rivendell by his mother, where Elrond took on the role of father to him. While in Rivendell, he was given the name "Estel," Elvish for "hope." No one spoke of his true name or lineage in order to protect him from the enemy. When he became full-grown, though, Elrond told Aragorn who he really was and "delivered to him the heirlooms of his house."

This included the shards of the sword Narsil, the one that cut the ring from Sauron's hand. Aragorn is, in fact, carrying this broken sword with him when he meets the hobbits in the books, because it is part of his destiny to carry it as the heir of Elendil.

The only heirloom Elrond does not give to Aragorn is the sceptre of Annuminas, which he says Aragorn needs to earn by way of a hard and long test. This test becomes Aragorn's whole life, which he spends in wandering and fighting the enemies of the free people of Middle Earth. His wandering is not something he does to avoid being king; it's what he has to do to earn the right to be king.

The day after Elrond told Aragorn who he was, Aragorn met Arwen, Elrond's daughter, and immediately fell in love. (Arwen had been away for many years at Lorien, which is why Aragorn had never met her before.) Elrond, sensing Aragorn's true feelings, tells him this:

"Aragorn, Arathorn's son, Lord of the Dunedain, listen to me! A great doom awaits you, either to rise above the height of all your fathers since the days of Elendil, or to fall into darkness with all that is left of your kin. Many years of trial lie before you. You shall neither have wife, nor bind any woman to you in any troth, until your time comes and you are found worthy of it."

The next day, Aragorn begins his long test. He wanders for thirty years, learning about the world as he does, becoming friends with Gandalf, and "uncovering the plots and devices of the servants of Sauron." He then sees Arwen again in Lothlorien, and she falls in love with him. She believes he will achieve great things. He does not know if he will be able to live up to her hope, but he says he will "hope with her hope."

When Elrond learns of Arwen's choice, he is grieved. He tells Aragorn that he will agree to lose his precious daughter to him, but only if by doing so, he can help to restore mankind. He will not allow Arwen, therefore, to marry him unless he becomes the king of a reunited Gondor and Arnor.

This is critical to understanding Aragorn. He wants to become king more than anything, because only by becoming king can he have what his heart desires, which is to marry Arwen. At no point in his story does he ever waver from his determination to become king. What we see in him is not reluctance to be king, only an uncertainty about whether he will be able to pass his test. He does, it is true, remain long hidden, and he keeps many false identities. But this is a strategic decision on his part to delay coming forth until the time is right, not born out of a concern that he might somehow have the same moral failings his forefather Isildur did when Isildur failed to destroy the ring. Aragorn refers over and over again to his wish to return to Gondor as heir to the throne, beginning as far back in the trilogy to the Council of Elrond, when he explains Boromir's dream thus:

For the sword that was broken is the Sword of Elendil that broke beneath him when he fell. It has been treasured by his heirs when all other heirlooms were lost; for it was spoken of old among us that it should be made again when the Ring, Isilur's Bane, was found. Now you have seen the sword that you have sought, what would you ask? Do you wish for the House of Elendil to return to the Land of Gondor?

And, in fact, the ring having been found, it is Aragorn who has the sword remade--not Elrond--and Aragorn does this before the Fellowship leaves Rivendell on the quest. He sees the quest as the end of his long trial. It's the denouement to a catharsis he had decades ago, not a moment of new revelation.

Most of our lives are flat arcs

One of the questions about literature I most often ask myself is whether it's ultimately good for people who spend a lot of time reading it. Certainly, I think that believing we can make our lives into positive-arc stories, ones in which we change and overcome our challenges, is a healthy belief. But we might also end up in long and futile cycles of waiting for some kind of enlightenment to strike us before change can happen. In reality, most of us are in a story that's more like the Aragorn of the books than the Aragorn of the movies. We don't have some great moment of revelation where we suddenly see we've been doing it all wrong. We've known for a long time what we were trying to do with our lives, and we know what we need to do to accomplish it. It's not a mystery, it's just hard, and we might fail at it.

Aragorn doubts himself. Four times, after the Fellowship breaks, he criticizes his own decision-making and puts the blame on himself for the group's difficulties. But he doesn't doubt his ultimate goal, just his ability to accomplish it. There is no catharsis in Lord of the Rings for Aragorn, no moment when he stops "believing the lie." He's got a game plan from very early on, and the story for him is just that game plan developing over a long time.

As we try to accomplish our dreams in our own lives, this arc is more likely what we need to succeed. We don't need a great unmasking of some truth. We don't need to learn some secret we don't already know. We don't need a new plan; we just need to do better at the plan we've had all along.

Asking the right kinds of questions of literature

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." 

Are Frodo and Sam...you know? A guide to the most common discussion at your next LOTR movie marathon viewing

I will be hosting a Lord of the Rings (LOTR) movie marathon in the near future, which explains this being my second LOTR-related post in two weeks. Much like Carlos Fuentes needed to read Don Quixote once a year, I occasionally have a mystical need to re-visit Frodo's quest to Mount Doom. It's like eating or having sex. I can only go so long without it.

Even though I've said before I'm not crazy about everything in Jackson's movie trilogy, it's still easily the best way to enjoy the story in a communal fashion. It'd be awfully hard to read through all three books in a day with a group of people. And even the films' flaws can be a good point of discussion.

If you watch the movie in the company of a lot of men, as I have many times, one topic of conversation that infallibly arises is the level of homo-eroticism in the films. Jokes and comments about homo-eroticism are a constant when a group of largely heterosexual males gathers. In my personal experience, this is as true today as it was three decades ago, even though now you would be hard-pressed to find a man even in a group of hetero-normative males who thinks there is anything essentially wrong with homosexual behavior. The jokes today have lost their mean-spirited edge of fag-bashing, of guarding hetero-normative standards by threatening harm to those outside the standards. But the jokes are still there. Why?

In my short story about male identity in the Marine Corps, "Brokedick," the main character notes that "most of the jokes they'd played (in the Marine Corps) had been either homo-erotic or homophobic. Possibly both." The Marine Corps requires that men within it become closer than most men become in normal life. But that closeness, when it starts to take on a deep and spiritual dimension, threatens hetero-normative standards. Men need to be close in the Corps, but the closeness required is itself suspect--or at least uncomfortable for most men. So men play jokes like "tea-bagging" one another. By doing this, they are able to hide physically homo-intimate behaviors that are a corollary of spiritual closeness in plain sight.

When men watch a story like Lord of the Rings together, certain male characteristics are called into question. There are heroes who demonstrate tenderness, gentleness, and compassion, traits that do not fit the standard male hero archetype. The men watching these things are at once uncomfortable with them and drawn to them. So we cope by joking about them.

...and joking, and joking, and joking...

Three types of intent

Before getting into various ways to interpret the physical and emotional closeness of Frodo and Sam, the two most important characters in the Rings trilogy, I need to make a quick digression into the question of intent.

Intent of the author

Most people who haven't studied literature seriously would most likely assume that the most important type of intent--maybe the only one that matters--is the intent of the author. Many, many discussion fora on the Internet have discussed the question of homosexuality in the relationship between Frodo and Sam in terms of Tolkien's intent (one example). Tolkien lived at a time when homosexuality was seen as a mental illness, an abomination. Tolkien was a devout Catholic. Tolkien cannot have meant these things, so Sam and Frodo cannot be gay, however it may seem to a modern reader.

It may surprise those who assume the author's intent to be the only intent that matters to find that literature scholars actually speak of something called an "intentional fallacy." That is, to think of literature only in terms of what an author meant is a mistake. This might seem crazy, and nothing more than a rearguard justification for the inventive interpretations of literary professors, but there is a point to it. We all say things that others take to have meanings we don't intend. If I tell my wife she looks nice for an older woman, I may insist I didn't mean it as an insult. I might say she is wrong to take offense, that she didn't understand my intent. But clearly, my intent is not the only thing that matters in such a statement.

Similarly, when an author writes a story, there are often images, symbols, and language in it that suggest things on their own that the author never imagined. Shakespeare may not have had in mind modern theories of the meaning of time when he wrote "there is no clock in the forest" in "As You Like It," but it doesn't matter. The statement expresses psychological truths about the way people experience time in a pastoral setting. Critics are free to view the statement's meaning on its own terms.

Intent of the text

The idea that the final written product of the author, rather than the author's mind, is the right place to look for meaning, is called "intent of the text." When I was in graduate school, we all learned to start our thoughts on what we'd read with "the text states..." rather than "Shakespeare states that..." Such a reading doesn't completely ignore the author. A reader still needs to know what a "nunnery" meant in Shakespeare's day in order to interpret a statement including a reference to a nunnery. But that doesn't mean a critic needs to restrain her possible readings to only those that she can plausibly argue might have occurred to Shakespeare himself.

There is obviously a great deal more openness in this kind of interpretation. If Frodo and Sam appear to exhibit a closeness that can best be explained by a sexual attraction, even an unspoken and unspeakable one, then that interpretation is on the table, whatever Tolkien himself believed.

However, a reading focused on intent of the text does not make any kind of reading possible. One still has to take the text on its own terms. Frodo and Sam are not space aliens. They are not ciphers for Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan, written by a prophet who guessed their presidential race 40 years ahead of time. But there is a kind of reading that might allow for this.

Intent of the reader

The most radical kind of reading is one that focuses on the reader's intent. What matters in reading a text isn't what the author meant or even what a close reading suggests. It's what the reader feels while reading the text. Much scholarship that examines Frodo and Sam in sexual terms actually focuses on fan fiction, in which readers of the stories respond by writing their own follow-on fiction about Middle Earth. This includes "slash fiction," erotic stories that focus on same-sex relationships. In a reading like this, if a reader feels that Sam and Frodo seem gay, then there really isn't anything to say that such a reading is wrong.

Which intent do I intend to follow?

A product of my academic times, I tend to favor the intent of the text, but I don't really exclude any type of intentionality when examining a text for meaning. Reading for authorial intent maintains the human side of the humanities, as one tries to see how the life of a writer lead to a certain work's creation as a response to the events of that life. A text-focused reading maintains integrity and intellectual rigor. Focusing on the reader preserves the reason any of us read: not just what does it mean, but what does it mean to you? When I attempt to give some ways to look at Frodo and Sam's relationship, I will try to keep a balance between them all.

Five Ways to Look at Frodo and Sam's relationship and sexuality, from least interesting to most

1. Frodo and Sam are sexually attracted, but either they hide it from each other or the text hides it from the reader

When I was in graduate school, Queer Studies was still a relatively new thing. I thought it was a little bit dull, because a lot of it back then seemed to amount to little more than reading old texts to see if one could find any secret clues about whether a character in it was really gay. One blogger (from whom I stole the above picture) followed this kind of reading in asserting that Frodo and Sam are "queer coded." The writer quoted a passage often cited by those who see something essentially romantic in Sam and Frodo's relationship:

Then as he had kept watch Sam had noticed that at times a light seemed to be shining faintly within; but now the light was even clearer and stronger. Frodo’s face was peaceful, the marks of fear and care had left it; but it looked old, old and beautiful, as if the chiseling of the shaping years was now revealed in many fine lines that had before been hidden, though the identity of the face was not changed. Not that Sam Gamgee put it that way to himself. He shook his head, as if finding words useless, and murmured: “I love him. He’s like that, and sometimes it shines through, somehow. But I love him, whether or no.

The blogger, Monique Jones, suggests that if Sam were a woman, we'd naturally assume the text meant romantic love here. It's a bit artificial to suggest that it must be a spiritual, Platonic love Sam speaks of.

I do believe there is a lot more at play with Frodo and Sam than just friendship. But if it's sexual attraction, then the story to me sort of just ends there. They're gay. So what? That doesn't really make their relationship more compelling to me. It doesn't add anything to my "reader's intent" interpretation. It's a possibility. There are portions of the text that certainly suggest something much stronger than friendship is there. It's possible it's romantic attraction. But if it's true that their friendship is not like most friendships, then it's also true that their sexual attraction is not like any other sexual attraction I've ever witnessed.

As Yvette Kisor put it, "What seems less likely to prove fruitful is a singular focus on the question of the homosexuality of characters in The Lord of the Rings…. Did Tolkien write a homosexual relationship between any characters, specifcally Frodo and Sam, in his novel? Clearly, no. Can readers fnd such relationship(s) in his novel? Clearly, yes."

Sam and Frodo as frustrated lovers just doesn't leave much room for continued, interesting readings.

2. Frodo and Sam are a little bit gay

Being gay may not always be the either/or thing we see it as. There is no one gene that determines sexual orientation. It's a host of genes, and those genes don't always do the same thing to everyone. Homosexuality is "epi-genetic," meaning there need to be environmental factors that "switch on" those genes.

So Frodo and Sam may have demonstrated some of the characteristics of a homosexual couple and yet still been, for the most part, heterosexual. We can reject the false dichotomy between being a rugged, hyper-masculinized heterosexual and effeminate homosexual.

3. Frodo and Sam are the closest friends ever, and every man should feel depressed he isn't close enough to another man to hold hands as they walk toward their doom 

Leonna Madill offers what I find to be a more interesting application of queer theory and feminist theory. She argues that LOTR is "not a text that invites criticism of hegemonic masculine values, but it is a text that can provoke multiple discussions about its various messages about masculinity." One discussion of hegemonic masculine values Frodo and Sam encourage is the meaning of male-male friendships. This is even truer and more interesting if Frodo and Sam are straight, rather than gay. If they are gay, all the intimacy between them is explained--perhaps even explained away, one might say--if it is all merely sublimated sexual attraction. The question of what all those gestures of affection mean is actually much more interesting if they aren't gay than if they are.

The deeper a friendship goes, the greater the intimacy within it. But modern, American masculinity--even in an era in which we no longer think homosexuality is a sin--does not feel comfortable with intimacy between men. This limits the friendships. There is a reason most men today will say their wives are their best friends. They are the only people with whom we are physically intimate, so they are also the ones with whom we tend to be emotionally intimate.

But what if we are limiting our friendships in this way? What if our insistence that any sort of physicality be kept out of a male-male friendship made those relationships anemic? Frodo and Sam aren't an example of a gay pair keeping their love on the DL; they're comfortable hetero-sexual friends without our hang-ups over what holding hands or laying you head on someone's lap means. As Madill put it, "male friendship can be more complex than simply protecting a friend from harm; caring and showing affection is another means of nourishing a friendship."

4. Frodo and Sam's relationship mirrors a parent-child relationship

The physical affection between Frodo and Sam could be understood as part and parcel of their parent-child relationship. Carolyn Hoke summarized this reading, first proposed by Verlyn Flieger. Frodo starts off as the grown-up, the wiser, more mature one. When Sam is first allowed to participate in Frodo's adventure, he "springs up like a dog invited for a walk." However, Frodo is eventually worn down by the ring, and Sam, like all children eventually do, must care for the parent who once cared for him. Sam carries Frodo "like a hobbit-child pig-a-back" when Frodo cannot carry on anymore. As Hoke puts it:

This physical aspect accentuates the spiritual bond between the two hobbits, such that in a way, it seems as if the two of them are linked in a strange, inverse relationship of power. When Sam is childish, Frodo is mature and capable; when Frodo grows physically and emotionally weak, Sam is the strong one who helps him see the Quest through.... comparing their parallel journeys in this way leads me rather to compare the hobbits’ relationship instead to that of a Parent and Child. Initially, in a Parent/Child relationship, the Parent takes control and directs both their paths, but as both mature, the Parent falls back into the second-childhood of old age and it’s up to the Child to carry their combined burdens.

5. Frodo and Sam are "married" for the duration of the quest

There is a sense in LOTR that some things happen because they are meant to happen. "You don't really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck?" Gandalf asks Bilbo at the end of The Hobbit. Gandalf also suggests at one point that what others call chance might not be chance at all.

In a world where things happen by design, one of the most obviously meant-to-be happenings is Sam's marriage to Rosie Cotton. Sam is a gardener who marries a woman named Rose. They have thirteen children named for flowers. Clearly, there is some providence involved in this union. So Frodo and Sam aren't frustrated lovers meant to be together but denied their chance by the world. Sam was always meant to be with Rose.

Yet Sam can't really be the husband, father, and lord of Bag End he was meant to be until Frodo leaves. With Frodo around, Sam is "torn in two," as Frodo puts it. That's because when Sam agreed to come with Frodo, he agreed to see it through to the end. Throwing the ring into the fire was the end for most people, but it wasn't for Frodo. Frodo carried the ring long enough that he would never truly be free of it until he traveled to the undying lands. That means Sam can never really be free of his duty to care for Frodo until Frodo leaves.

That's a pretty profound bond they have. The only bond we have in most societies that comes close is the sickness-and-in-health, til-death-do-us-part version of traditional Western marriage. I'm not sure that either hobbit realized the profundity of their tie at the beginning of the quest. Frodo didn't know when he set off from the Shire that he was headed to Mount Doom. He thought he'd be gone a short while. Sam didn't know he was headed with Frodo to Mount Doom, either. He just thought Frodo needed someone to look after him.

Frodo and Sam realize what their bond is to one another while on the trip. That passage quoted earlier in which Sam looks down at a sleeping Frodo and realizes he loves him is something Sam only realizes after Frodo has become "old and beautiful" as a result of fighting the ring's power. Frodo was called to confront evil itself and he answered the call. In that fight, Frodo became something Sam loved.

The ring binds its wearer to it. The only reason the hobbits were able to fight its power was because their bond to one another grew along with the ring's power. Their bond needed to be stronger than any bond in existence, and that meant it was a little bit of every relationship. It was master-servant. It was friend-friend. It was parent-child. It was man-wife. It was every kind of relationship you can think of, which made it deeper than any relationship you can think of. The two were, in every sense, bound to one another. You may think of them as married. Their intimacy was appropriate and natural.

Many people have opined that Frodo and Sam's relationship was more spiritual than physical, and they are right. But the spirituality of it doesn't necessarily preclude the physical. While they were together, they were bound, body and spirit, to one another. I tend not to think of the physical side of that as a Brokeback Mountain-type sexual awakening, but that doesn't mean it cannot include parts of that. C.S. Lewis distinguished between the Four Loves--storge, philios, eros, and agape--but we need not think that there are clear borders between them. Sam and Frodo developed agape love to such a degree that they were able to use the other loves, eros included, to help one another.

In the end, Sam cannot divorce Frodo. Only death can do them part, which is why Frodo needs to leave. The time when he has interrupted Sam's purpose is over.

Or is it? The book suggests that Sam may one day follow Frodo. Sam was, after all, a ring-bearer, too, if only for a brief time. Before telling Sam he must no longer be torn in two, but be one and whole for many years, Frodo wonders aloud, "Your time may come" (to go to the undying lands). I can only wonder, too.

Ontological ethics

When Christianity no longer held water for me in my mid-twenties, I spent a lot of time trying to dream up alternate systems for ethical decision-making. Not that Christianity provided the greatest system for making tough choices to begin with (in applying the Golden Rule, for example, how do you decide who the most important "other" is to do unto when there are competing interests?), but I had a hard time coming up with something to replace it, and pretty much all my attempts failed.

One of the more promising-seeming attempts to me was something I thought I might term "ontological ethics." That is, when a morally ambivalent situation arose, I could look to a pre-existing statement about my identity, about who I was, to guide me. This is, I think, something of the thinking behind the mission statements or identity statements that some organizations write. They hope to be guided in tough times by a statement of identity. Many have argued that this was what made Johnson and Johnson's highly ethical reaction to the 1982 Tylenol scare so admirable and why the company enjoyed such a good reputation afterwards.

I saw an example from literature I thought might provide a model. Well, only sort of from literature. It was Jean Valjean from Les Miserables, but I was primarily thinking of the Valjean from the musical, not the Hugo novel. That's because the primary ethical test Valjean faces in the musical is one he puts in rather pointed and ontological terms.

I confess. I like musicals 

If you've forgotten, the context is this: Valjean was a criminal who was released on parole. He broke his parole and became a wealthy factory owner and mayor, but the obsessive inspector Javert is determined to find Valjean. He believes he has found him in the mayor, but is unable to coax Valjean to reveal his true identity. Javert lays a trap for Valjean: he lets Valjean think that he has found a man Javert believes to be Valjean, and that Javert intends to send this innocent man to prison for life.

Valjean gives serious thought to letting the man go to prison. He is not without good reasons:

I am the master of hundreds of workers
They all look to me.
Can I abandon them, how would they live,
If I am not free?
If I speak, I am condemned,
If I stay silent, I am damned.

From a utilitarian standpoint, Valjean is probably better off letting the other man take the fall for him. It's a difficult time for working folks, and Valjean is a benevolent factory owner. His arrest and the loss of all he has built will probably mean empty stomachs for many children dependent on the wages his workers earn. From a "greatest good for the greatest number" reckoning, Valjean should shut his damn mouth.

But Valjean has decided before this particular ethical dilemma that he is not ruled by utilitarian choices. He was saved by an idealistic decision made by a priest that was the antithesis of utilitarian thinking. Therefore, Valjean determines that:

My soul belongs to God, I know
I made that bargain long ago
He gave me hope when hope was gone,
He gave me strength to carry on...
Who am I? Who am I?
I'm Jean Valjean.

That's great, but maybe a little too neat

I was very attracted to this resolution Valjean arrived at by applying an ontological solution. It seemed incredibly profound. But maybe a little too profound. This resolution was kind of a contrived and stacked solution. Of course he's able to answer his dilemma by simply answering the question of who he is: that literally is the question. Try to think of a single ethical dilemma you've faced where simply determining who you literally are so easily resolves the problem. I bet you've never faced such a thing.

(Side note: I'm probably misusing the term "ontological." Although ontology is the branch of philosophy that deals with being, I think it's more concerned with fundamental questions of existence, like what it means to exist and how we can know if something really exists. Questions like "who am I?" are more personal questions asked in modernity, and are more pop psychology than philosophy. A Google search reveals only a very moderate use of the term "ontological ethics," and if it were a more philosophically valid term, I imagine it would have a lot more currency. I don't see anyone using the term in the way I meant it twenty years ago.)

Three levels of a similar dilemma

Let's say you're a Marine, sworn to uphold the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. In scenario one, you are a corporal ordered to lead your squad up a hill, and you believe the attempt will fail and you will all die without serving any useful purpose in the defeat. In scenario two, you are a General ordered by the Pentagon to carry out a strategy you believe will be ineffective and lead to many more deaths on both sides of the war than an effective strategy might. In scenario three, you are the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and you are being told to plan and prosecute a war you know the President has rigged evidence in order to start. It's an unjust war, you believe, but one the President feels needs to be fought for larger geo-political ends that justify the means.

The Corporal

As a corporal taking the hill, you aren't being asked to do an ideologically unethical thing (assuming the conflict you are in has passed whatever just war tests you apply to it--you're here, after all, so I assume you believe in the war on some level). You're being asked to do an unethical thing from a utilitarian or practical standpoint. Sacrificing lives for a cause is noble; doing it for nothing is stupid and unethical. Of course, there are possible complications. You might be wrong. Maybe the officers know something you don't know. Maybe they're counting on you to lead your squad so well you accomplish the impossible. Maybe this bad choice is the least bad choice they have.

You could refuse if you're sure the plan is bad and will kill people for nothing. But then you'd go to the brig, and someone else more enthusiastic about following bad plans will take your place. You could follow it out fully and hope for the best, but then you'd be the one who has to live with dead Marines and thinking you could have done something to help them.

There are also alternatives that try to avoid the worst effects of either choice, a Captain Kirk-like searching for the choice that avoids the no-win scenario: You could pretend to carry out the orders with alacrity, but find all kinds of procedural reasons to slow-roll the plan. You could hope that if you slow-roll it long enough, it will get cancelled.

Valjean himself ends up with a mixed response. He turns himself in, but when Javert will not give him three days to wrap up his affairs, Valjean clocks him and escapes again.

The General

The General is in an incredibly tough spot. His objection to his orders is in a murky area between ideological objections and practical ones. He could refuse his orders. As a General, he may be able to simply retire, and he could then write an op-ed in retirement about why he thinks the war is being handled wrong. But again, it's likely someone else will take his place who is a lot more gung-ho about carrying out what he thinks is a broken plan.

He has many of the same half-measure options the corporal does. He could carry out his orders according to the letter of the law, but refuse them in spirit. He could find dozens of subtle ways to undermine the strategy. He could use his position on-the-ground to slightly alter his tactical orders from what the Pentagon wanted. If he does it well, he might alleviate some of the worst parts of the Pentagon's plans. If he just quits, his influence will be limited to whatever credence the public gives to his post-service testimony.

The Chairman

The Chairman's position is the most problematic. He has the most evidence of a clear, idealistic moral wrong, but he also has the most leverage to be able to mitigate the effects of the wrong. He could, of course, quit his job, take his case to the public, and hope the court of public opinion vindicated him. But what if the President, in spite of fighting a war against his objections, rather likes the Chairman and takes his opinion seriously? What if the Chairman, by staying at his post, can at least change the kind of war America fights, if not the raw fact that there is a war?  Should he give up his best shot at influencing the situation in order to make a point?

What all three quandaries have in common

None of these moral dilemmas can be solved by applying the Valjean test. You can't say "Who am I?" and come up with an answer that will point you in the direction of a solution.

But maybe there is something similar that could be useful

If you've ever taken a multiple choice test, you're probably familiar with the strategy of answering the same thing to two different questions, because you know it's the right answer to one of them, and you figure it's better to know you're getting one of two right rather than take a chance of missing them both.

While I don't think real life offers us many instances where we can just ask ourselves who we really are and get a useful answer to a moral question, it's possible that we can develop a heuristic that will at least limit our possible errors. It's a different question from "Who am I?" It's "If I have to make a mistake, what kind of mistake would I rather make?" For the corporal, for example, his possible mistakes are: 1) Stand up for the safety of his troops and be wrong that the mission was really doomed, or 2) Err on the side of following orders, and find out that his suspicions were correct, and his Marines died without accomplishing anything discernible.

To use an example more common to many of us, let's say someone is asking us for money. We suspect they're scamming us, but there's maybe a twenty percent chance the story we're getting is real. Is it worse to trust someone and be a sucker or to doubt someone and miss a chance to help?

If we decide for ourselves what kinds of mistakes most suit who we are, and we stick to making those kinds of mistakes, we may not improve our chances of getting it right in any one situation. We might, however, limit the types of mistakes we are likely to make over the long term. Assuming that out of 1,000 truly difficult decisions, one type of action or the other is likely to be the right one in about 500 of them, we can, by being consistent, be right at least 500 times. And we'll find it easier, perhaps, to have failed on our own terms. Changing the kind of mistake we're willing to risk making with each situation, however, makes it possible we will be wrong more than half the time. (It also makes it possible we'll be right more than half the time, but do you want to take those odds?) It can also leave us bitter when we make choices that don't suit our own inner voices.

Still not sure this is satisfying

I don't know if twenty-some years of pontificating on this has led me to a more satisfying solution than I started out with. For one thing, it's possible there are some people with such a developed ability to weigh outcomes, they really can make the correct decision more than half the time. I wouldn't want to preclude people from making decisions differently from one situation to the next if they can really do it well. For me, though, I tend to be so often paralyzed by tough choices I almost just never even make them. At least having some rough algorithm might get me to make the decisions.

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.