Literary reading and originalist readings of the Constitution

In any Lit 101 class in America, you're pretty much guaranteed to get the following scenario. A professor explains how a text is saying things beyond what is literally written on the page, either through implication or symbolism or juxtaposition of images or metaphor or other indirect methods. One student or many, annoyed by what seems a kind of legerdemain or sophistry, will object. "How do you know that's what Hawthorne meant by that?" Or, "What if Melville was just telling a good story and the whale isn't a symbol of God or the universe or anything? Where does it say that it's a symbol of those things?" And so on.

On the one hand, I admire the spirit of these classroom heretics. It represents a deep-seated American skepticism toward authority, be it political authority or intellectual. You can see this skepticism in some of our earliest literature, like "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." In that story, the learned school teacher is held up as an object of scorn and derision by the strong and practical Bram Bones. It's kind of like Disney's Beauty and the Beast, only in this version, Gaston is the hero and the professor really is just crazy. I remember my advisor as an undergrad at Walsh University commenting on "Sleepy Hollow" being an example of how once an idea gets into a culture, it never quite goes away. We still have a strain in America of preferring the rough and manly man to the nerd, a strain that can be seen in any number of Adam Sandler movies or Animal House. The classroom skeptic objecting that the professor's fancy readings of stories flies in the face of good 'ole common sense and is just meant to give the professor an excuse to show off and lord his learning over other people is part of this tradition.

NERRRRRRRRRRRRD!

 

I've dealt with this strain of thinking before as a commenter on literature. For example, when I wrote about various readings of homoeroticism in Lord of the Rings, I got a couple of people insisting that because Tolkien was a devout Catholic, he didn't intend for anyone to read the relationship between Frodo and Sam in a romantic way, and therefore any reading of Sam and Frodo's relationship that left room for romantic feelings was unequivocally wrong.  

The argument against "common sense" readings

It's usually at this point that annoying literary experts like to invoke something called the intentional fallacy. Introduced by W.K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe C. Beardley, the intentional fallacy sought to tear down what had long been considered to be (and still is considered to be by most ordinary people) the "common sense" approach to literature, which is that "in order to judge the poet's performance, we must know what he intended." (Wimsatt and Beardley use "poet" throughout their essay, as that is the art they are considering, but their argument works nearly the same for other works of art.) 

Wimsatt and Beardley argue that although a work of art obviously originates in the mind of the poet, "yet to insist on the designing intellect as the cause of a poem is not to grant the design or intention as a standard." The gold standard is not to arrive at what the poet meant, but what the poem itself says. There are several reasons Wimsatt and Beardley see for this: 

1) The design or intention is not available to us, except in what is in the poem itself. "How is (the critic) to find out what the poet tried to do? If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do."  

2) Just like you judge a car by how it works or a cake by how it tastes, so with a work of art. Poetry doesn't mean; it is. Critically, Wimsatt and Beardley point out, this makes poetry different from "practical messages," which "succeed if and only if we correctly infer the intention." Whether this matters when looking at non-fiction like, say, a constitution, we shall consider later. 

3)  When we read a poem, we should read the words as the words of the speaker of the poem, not the author. The author might have views at odds with the speaker in the poem she created.

4) Authors revise works. Does that mean the intent changes? Which intent in the creative process is the one we should take as the "real" intent? 

As a society that believes strongly in intellectual property, we have come to accept that the author maintains not only commercial interests in her work, but controlling interest in how those works are interpreted. New Criticism, though, which adopted the intentional fallacy as a principle, does not accept "the authority of the poet outside the poem." Instead, "the poem belongs to the public," because "it is embedded in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge." 

This might sound like sophistry, but I think even with what Wimsatt and Beardley called "practical messages," we occasionally see an application of the principle. The other day at work, a person above my immediate boss sent me a calendar invitation for a one-on-one meeting. I don't normally have one-on-one meetings with this person. The request came a day after we announced a rather significant reorganization within my office. I wondered: was I about to find I'd been made redundant by the reshuffle? The next day, however, I talked to my teammates and found we'd all gotten the same meeting request. We then deduced--correctly--that this was more of a "let's talk about your feelings after the announced reorg" meeting. 

When I talked to this person, I told her how all of us had been scared when we got the meeting invitation, because we didn't know when we got them that we weren't the only ones getting them and there was no explanation of what the subject of the meeting would be. She acknowledged that she should have been more careful sending the invitations out, although it was, of course, not her intent to frighten us. 

Judging the author's intent in this case is important to how I feel about the author with whom I work, but it isn't important to judging the message itself. The message did something the author did not intend. If a meeting invitation can do this, how much more a work of art. 

So how do you read a text, then?

Instead of trying to deduce what an author wanted to say in a text, the correct subject of literary studies is to look at the intent of the text. If we judge an engineer's intent by how the car works, then for an author, all we have to go on is the text they left. We can still use biographical and historical information in our study of the work, but it now plays a different role. Rather than using it to find the author cluing us into hidden interpretations not found in the work itself, we use it to establish ground rules for "the public" to use. 

For example, if a word meant something when the author wrote it that it doesn't mean now, we should use the meaning that was in circulation when the author wrote it. If a text from 1803 says someone was "gay," that means they were happy. If a text refers to something that happened in the real world, we can research to find out what the author knew or thought he knew about that real event. 

What we can't do is look at events in the life of the author or extratextual statements the author made about the work and use those to try to intuit what he really meant in a work of art. The work of art may say things we think the author clearly did not mean to say, but if they are in the text, then the text matters more than our psychoanalysis of the author. If Tolkien disapproved of homosexuality but his text contains images and interactions between characters that readers often see as involving varying degrees of same-sex romantic feelings, then it's in the text whether Tolkien wanted it there or not. 

This does not mean we go to the extreme of favoring the "intent of the reader" over the intent of the text. We don't read more homoeroticism into the story because we happen to enjoy that which is homoerotic. We don't ignore attitudes present in a text because we dislike them. We are disciplined and keep within the words and spirit of the text. However, "intent of the text" standards do tend to lead to more freedom of interpretation than "intent of the author"-based ones, because rather than assume a unitary mind of genius and a single, coherent purpose, we are permitted to view the text as being at times in tension with itself. 

What's this got to do with reading legal texts?

You might say that it's well and good to read a novel or sonnet like this, but with the law, shouldn't we try to understand the original meaning of the authors? Isn't a law more akin to what Wimsatt and Beardley called a "practical message" than a poem? Wouldn't an "intent of the text" standard lead to too much freedom of the reader, leading to an inability to ever know what any law meant and, eventually, to anarchy?

It's simple. We just get 1,000 psycho-analysts together to read all the surviving correspondence of all the people in this painting, and....

In the case of the U.S. Constitution, of course, determining the intent of the author is an incredibly complicated task. It had many authors, some of whom were at loggerheads with each other throughout the writing. It is a compromise document that went through multiple rounds of edits. Whose authorial intent do we give precedence to? We have, in The Federalist Papers, an extra-Constitutional record some of the key writers left explaining their thinking behind the writing. To what extent is that extra-Constitutional record authoritative in determining authorial intent? And what to make of the fact that the Constitution didn't end in 1789, but has been added to over time, with some additions and changes explicitly overwriting other parts? 

Dobbs vs. Jackson Women's Health Organization and Alito's attempt to recreate the intent of the authors

Justice Alito, who wrote the majority opinion in the case overturning Roe v. Wade as a precedent, seemed to lean, whether he was aware of it or not, toward an "intent of the author" reading. On the first page of the opinion, he lays out the question before the court as whether "the Constitution, properly understood, confers the right to an abortion." This "properly understood" suggests that there is a single, correct reading of the text. It's an assumption in reading heavily influenced by Biblical hermeneutics, which itself is a large part of the reason why the West assumes "intent of the author" to be the common-sense approach to reading. The opinion assumes there was genius behind the writing of such authority that there is only one way to read the product of such genius. 

The crux of the issue for the six justices who went along with the decision was whether the right to an abortion was meant by the term "liberty" in the 14th Amendment. Roe v. Wade rested heavily on the argument that a right to abortion was implied by the term "liberty" in the amendment, the first article of which reads: 

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Roe made the argument that abortion was guaranteed by implication in other amendments, but because Casey, the 1992 case that partly upheld Roe, mostly focused on the 14th Amendment, so did the court in Dobbs. Alito proceeded to undermine the argument that "liberty" implies the right to an abortion through a three-step process:

First, he insists there should be a high standard for applying implied, rather than explicit, rights. To claim a right was understood as implied when written, there is a burden of proof to prove that implied right is "deeply rooted in our history and tradition." He indicates that the court was "guided by the history and traditions that map(ped) the essential components of the Nation's concept of ordered liberty." This is an extremely non-textual source of interpretation, and many have contested the court's prowess in historical analysis, but the court felt highly confident both that it was an appropriate source to use in determining the meaning of "liberty" and that they had analyzed it correctly. 

Having established the added burden of proof for implied rights, he states that "liberty" isn't a very useful term. He doesn't say why, but one can suppose he means that liberty is vague and means something different to everyone. He doesn't consider that this is exactly why the term is there. If we think of a Constitution as a car and judge it by how it works, then one thing we can say about this particular constitution is that it seems to become increasingly difficult to change the further from its original writing we get in time. Perhaps the vagueness of terms like "liberty" is there to compensate for this feature. Future generations may not be able to keep making amendments, but in order to help offset this flaw in the design, there are words in it that have had protean meanings in every generation. They were vague when written, they're vague now, and the vagueness is a feature, not a bug. Rather than consider this (because it isn't explicitly stated in the Constitution that we should do so), the court instead tried to establish what kinds of liberty people had in 1868 and suggest that the Constitution only guarantees those liberties and no more (although this standard also isn't explicit in the text itself).  

For the majority justices, because "liberty" is vague and doesn't explain what sorts of rights "liberty" should apply to, that means abortion isn't explicitly covered as a right by the term. That being the case, the heightened "deeply rooted in our history and tradition" standard applies.

Having first stated that implicit rights have a higher standard of proof than explicit ones and then arguing that the right to an abortion as a subset of "liberty" is an implied right, one that should be established only if we can see that this right has been accepted broadly throughout the nation's history, Alito moves to his third and final step. The court plays historian to determine what "liberty" might have meant--or more precisely what it did NOT mean--in 1868 when the amendment was ratified. The court found that:

Until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. No state constitutional provision had recognized such a right. Until a few years before Roe, no federal or state court had recognized such a right. Nor had any scholarly treatise. Indeed, abortion had long been a crime in every single State. At common law, abortion was criminal in at least some stages of pregnancy and was regarded as unlawful and could have very serious consequences at all stages. American law followed the common law until a wave of statutory restrictions in the 1800s expanded criminal liability for abortions. By the time the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, three-quarters of the States had made abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy. This consensus endured until the day Roe was decided. Roe either ignored or misstated this history, and Casey declined to reconsider Roe’s faulty historical analysis.

Since the world didn't think of abortion as a right one's liberty entitled them to in 1868 anymore than they thought murder was a right protected by "liberty," it is not protected in the Constitution. If the nation means to enshrine abortion as a right, it must do so explicitly in a law. It cannot expect the court to keep applying its understanding of modern opinion on abortion in order to change the meaning of a text from what its authors meant by it. 

The unspoken context of the broken balance of power 

It might be small comfort to those who find the decision deeply upsetting, but the opinion does, I think, leave open a possibility for making abortion legal by an easier road than might have once been thought. Because Alito claims the Constitution doesn't say anything about abortion, that means that if Congress could pass a law protecting the right (haahahahhahahhaha...Congress pass a law...but I digress), that law would be constitutional. Unlike the court's decision when it struck down a New York gun law, abortion doesn't have a Second Amendment to overcome. It wouldn't take an amendment to protect abortion, just a law. 

Of course, nobody expects both houses to pass such a law, even though about sixty percent of Americans think it should be legal more or less on the terms Roe set forth. The reason we look to nine godlike wise people in robes to rescue us with their sanity when the law fails us is because the law seems to always fail us. The Federalist Papers explained how the Constitution was meant to protect both from the tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of the minority, but the line between protecting the minority and tyranny of the minority can be pretty thin. That 39% of America that wants abortion to be illegal happens to be a majority in a large number of states, and those states each get two senators. Ergo, the outsized political influence in one house of Congress from a minority group.  

It's the same reason we can't get legal weed, in spite of polls suggesting nearly everyone wants it. It's the same reason we've twice in recent memory ended up with a president for whom a majority of people did not vote. We have a system that is showing its age. If we were to set it up now from scratch, it would never look like this, but because our system is so intractable, we're likely stuck with it forever. We're the beta version of democracy, and we have a lot of bugs. 

There's a small part of me that almost welcomes this decision, because maybe it will force Congress to do its job. Maybe it will fix the system, even if it does so by breaking it for a while. But I think most of us doubt that's a likely outcome. When the court recently made it harder for the EPA to enforce emissions laws, one environmentalist criticized the decision by saying the court "was insisting on a clear statement from what it knows is an effectively dysfunctional body." In other words, what was really devastating was that the court was saying if Congress wanted to give the EPA a certain authority, they should say so in clear words, but they know damn well Congress isn't capable of that, because Congress doesn't work. 

Nearly all of us probably agree with this assessment. On some issues, there is a minority who perhaps welcomes the dysfunction. Coal companies probably aren't that unhappy that Congress doesn't work well for the interests of the majority. Right now, neither are anti-abortion activists. But it's not good for any of us in the long run. We know that. That's why the decision is upsetting. Yes, we ought to have an explicit law saying abortion is a protected liberty, but we don't, and we're not likely to get one, even though most people want one. That's why we look to justices to be wise and benevolent gods who intervene to fix the other branches when they don't work. 

Intent of the text and flexibility in a failing Republic

Am I cheating by wanting the court to read the term "liberty" the way 61% of people today read it, instead of the way people in 1868 read it? I said that when the meaning of words shifts over time, we should prefer the original meaning. But that's truer for denotative meanings than connotative ones. To use a somewhat facetious example, if the Declaration of Independence had stated that one of our endowed rights was "the pursuit of gayness" instead of "happiness," that wouldn't be an argument for gay rights. Gay has a different denotative meaning now than it did then. 

But words like "liberty" are nearly all connotation and little denotation. When those words appear in a document, they invite a sort of freedom in the reader. Spousal abuse was accepted and expected in the first century, but few Christians today think that spousal abuse is one of the things Paul's explanation of love in 1 Corinthians allows. Hardly any pastor would say that because Paul wouldn't have objected to it in a husband, it must be part of what 1 Corinthians means. Paul wrote words that were greater than him, which means they mean things he himself might have objected to. He was brilliant, but also limited by his time, which means the fullness of what he wrote wasn't even apparent to him. He certainly didn't have full control over it. 

That's why it's better to read from what the text says than what we imagine authors would have agreed or disagreed with about what the text says. In 1868, assumptions about women did not permit them to have abortions in many cases. Assumptions about women also meant they couldn't vote or own property or have sex with men they weren't married to or work in the profession of their choice. Would the court apply these standards to EEO laws prohibiting sexism? Say it's not in the Constitution? 

Some are worried it might, but I doubt even this court has the guts to go that far. That's because whatever the court might say about the importance of explicit intent of the authors of the Constitution, it also knows there is a limit to this kind of reading. As others have pointed out, even when Clarence Thomas suggested following up this decision with a number of other reconsiderations of implied liberties, he did not mention Loving v. Virginia, the case that overruled miscegenation laws. The Constitution has changed its explicit views of race since 1789, but there is no Constitutional amendment mentioning marriage between races. Still, I doubt this court would go back and use historical analysis to relook at miscegenation laws and argue the Constitution doesn't outright ban them. That's because whatever the court might say in its high-minded and humble "we are but poor stewards of the words given to us" approach to this case, it very clearly is happy to decide for itself what "liberty" means by its own standards, but only when it agrees with those standards. Not when 61% of the people agree with those standards. 

The Constitution is full of contradictions and tensions that threaten to tear any reading of it apart.  Nearly any text about anything that matters is. Authorial intent readings seem humble, because they place the reader at the feet of the master who wrote the words, but in fact, this approach to reading is often a ruse to force a reading the reader prefers and use an argument from authority to defend it. These kinds of readings sometimes force us to seek for a unity that doesn't exist within the riven and difficult text. 

The founding parents knew they were taking on a hard job. They did the best they could. That the result wasn't a perfect success doesn't detract from their accomplishment. By focusing on the accomplishment itself in the form of the text, we have the freedom to in turn do our best to deal with the problem we face in running a democracy. Within this freedom is the only space to fill in the inevitable imperfections. Americans at their best are nothing if not pragmatic. If the rules don't work, we fudge the rules. As the 1935 case Home Building and Loan v Blaisdell found, we should not always read the Constitution with "literal exactness like a mathematical formula," especially when the exigencies of the day obviously demand something else. That same opinion argued that even though the Constitution clearly dictates that no state shall pass any law "impairing the obligation of contracts," still states should be able to alter contracts to help the indebted in times of crisis because 

"into all contracts, whether made between states and individuals or between individuals only, there enter conditions which arise, not out of the literal terms of the contract itself. They are superinduced by the pre-existing and higher authority of the laws of nature, of nations, or of the community to which the parties belong. They are always presumed, and must be presumed, to be known and recognized by all, are binding upon all, and need never, therefore, be carried into express stipulation, for this could add nothing to their force. Every contract is made in subordination to them, and must yield to their control, as conditions inherent and paramount, wherever a necessity for their execution shall occur."

That's American pragmatism. We have a very good Constitution, and the balance of powers works most of the time, but when it isn't working, we don't wring our hands about how it doesn't work. We stick a penny in the fuse box and make it work.  Believing that when the Constitution was written, they slew a ram and thus began the third covenant doesn't give us the freedom and flexibility to deal with our problems. That's always and only going to serve the interests of people who want to turn back the clock. Sticking to the text, especially a text like the Constitution that seems to invite open readings, is a better option. 

It's a dangerous option, of course. It can lead to anarchy if taken too far. The way to avoid going too far is to take the text seriously without taking it as holy writ. 

I'm unqualified to write this post, but who isn't? A wrap-up of Best American Short Stories 2021

A few months ago, I offered a defense of those who try to educate themselves about fields in which they are not experts. That defense went so far as to suggest there may be some topics where it is appropriate for lay people to question experts, or in which there is no one field of expertise central enough to the question that any one type of expert can claim plenary authority. 

I'm about to offer a critique of the Best American Short Stories 2021 anthology. I've already analyzed every story in the collection. Every year I've done BASS (this is my fourth), I've debated doing a wrap-up. In one sense, it's kind of pointless, because the collection itself is made up of stories that were never intended to go together. Editors who choose the twenty winners aren't under any kind of compulsion to pick stories that work well together, and it's quite possible that if they did, it would make the collection as a whole weaker rather than stronger. So evaluating the twenty stories that happen to have been chosen together as a whole is a little like ordering twenty different items off the menu from twenty different restaurants and then critiquing them as a single meal. 

Nonetheless, BASS is the best-selling of the many annual short story anthologies that come out every year, and as such, it's an interesting and revelatory artifact, one that tells us something about the American literature and culture that produced and consumed it. Twenty menu items from twenty different restaurants might not deserve to be critiqued as a set, but jointly they do present an interesting subject for study of American food culture. That's how I intend to look at BASS.

But I'm not qualified

I'm not an expert in literature. At best, I'm a well educated lay person. I got an M.A. in English in 2003, and I originally intended to go on for a doctorate and professional expertise in literature, but I changed my mind. For the past eighteen-plus years, I've been focused on other subjects. The one that's taken up most of my time has been the Korean Peninsula. In the few weeks since I read my last BASS story, I've been reading a Korean collection of short stories called Inconvenient Convenience Store (불편한 편의점). Like all Korean literature I read, it's taking me a long time to finish. My point here is that even though English language literature is still a passion of mine and something I like to do, my professional life doesn't even leave me much time to be a devoted amateur critic. I might not read ten books in English in a year. So I hardly qualify as an expert in American literature. 

There's another subject relevant to discussion of an anthology like BASS I'm also not an expert in, which is what most corporations would refer to as "diversity and inclusion" or "diversity, equity, and inclusion." One hardly needs to be an expert to realize that BASS and every other anthology like it strives to provide a diversity of voices not just aesthetically, but in the sex, gender, sexual orientation, race, and national origin of its writers. Given that this effort to achieve diversity is so salient a goal in each volume, it would seem like a critic seeking to describe what this effort achieved would need some deep grounding in the field of diversity and inclusion in order to analyze the accomplishments. In this subject, though, I'm even less qualified than I am as a literary expert. I try to read at least something on D & I topics, and maybe in a random group of ten people at any given workplace who are forced into an awkward D & I discussion hour together, I might have less stupid things to say than eight of them. But even though I've occasionally allowed myself a foray or two into posting on D & I-adjacent topics, I usually feel a lot of doubt and anxiety when I post on them. The most likely possible outcome seems to be getting myself canceled for being stupid. Which is a dumb concern, given I'm not even enough of a thing to be canceled, but I worry about it nonetheless. 

Then again, nobody is really qualified

If the only kind of literary analysis worth writing is an assessment of a work qua literature, placing it in its literary context and assessing its worth by the esoteric rubric of literary professionals, then I'm not the right person for the job. But then, I don't think that's the only kind of literary analysis worth producing or reading. Seeing as how anthologies like BASS continue to be marketed to, bought by, and read by people doing all manner of work for a living other than literature, then it seems only reasonable that there could be critical analyses of those stories also produced by and meant for a lay readership. 

I've always seen the sermon as my model for literary criticism. While a preacher may borrow academic approaches to sacred texts learned in seminary in order to orient listeners to the meaning and context of passages, the preacher's goal isn't academic. It's practical. It's to change the way listeners think about and live their lives. 

I believe good literature works the way religious people believe sacred texts work. I think it makes its readers better, challenges their assumptions, or at least helps readers to feel less alone. That's how I approach writing about fiction. I assume the reader goes to fiction for similar reasons, and I try to open up texts to help stories do these things for the reader. As part of that process, I have just enough "seminary" learning to manage the necessary intellectual part of reading in order to enable the "spiritual" aspects of it, if I can use that word. 

In short, if the goal of reading is to become a better person and not to know more about literature as a subject--and that should be the goal--then a literary preacher doesn't need to be the most erudite person in the room. In fact, literary experts might be so inured to an academic way of thinking about stories that they've lost something of the ability to be personally transformed the way a banker or clerk or mechanic or computer programmer who reads might be. The fact that I work at something else that demands my attention most of the time and can only occasionally turn my focus to thinking about literature might make me better able to talk to normal folks than literary experts can. 

So here goes

That apologia for the hubris involved in my critical efforts behind me, there are a few things that stand out to me. 

In 2018, after my first full BASS blog-though, I talked about how Harold Bloom had such derogatory words to say about the Best American Poetry anthologies of the late 80s and early-to-mid 90s because of how winners were chosen based more on the identities of the poets than on the quality of the works. I haven't really changed my opinion since 2018 of the effect of identity as one of the criteria for choosing stories (although I don't think it's the only one, and maybe not always the central one). I would still say today that while Bloom saw entries that were identity-based and bad, I see stories that are identity based and actually quite good. But this goodness itself might present a problem. 

In a recent article on how we might finally have really reached peak TV, Linda Holmes wrote this about "good" and "great" TV:

"What resonates the most, though, from that talk in 2015, is the way Landgraf talked about the good and the great. A lot of people who heard those "peak TV" numbers from critics — 400 shows! — groused back that it didn't really matter, because most of it was terrible. Landgraf, on the other hand, was careful to point out that this was not the point he was making. He didn't think the problem was too much bad TV; he thought the problem was largely too much good TV. Or, maybe, too much good enough TV. The head of FX, after all, doesn't care about total garbage shows or about how many of them there are; that's not the competition, either for viewers or awards, or for critical attention. (There was a lot of speculation at the time that this part of the speech reflected in part FX's frustration at a lack of awards recognition for The Americans.)

Here's what he said about too much good TV: "There's just too much competition, so much so that I think the good shows often get in the way of the audience finding the great ones." 

I'm hardly the first person to say this, but I think American arts have become great at creating good work, which makes it rare and difficult to create, find, and support great work. I think BASS is an example of this. There is a lot of imagination in the stories, but not much capital I Imagination. There is light, but seldom thunder. I enjoy most of the stories, but can remember little from most of them not long after reading them, even when I've taken the time to read and re-read them carefully enough to write seriously about them.  

Perhaps the thing I'll remember most about this anthology will be how many stories featured an unnamed central character. If I counted right--which I doubt I did, but I think I'm close--only seven of the twenty stories featured a main character whose real name was given. The rest either gave no name or used a nickname/title, like "Girlie" or "The Teacher" or "the son." This isn't a new phenomenon, although I don't think I've seen a collection of BASS stories that displayed it so fully. It immediately called to mind Stephen Marche's critique of a Sally Rooney novel, in which he introduced the concept of the "literature of the pose," which has replaced the literary voice. The literature of the pose is, above all else, about being "right," or more appropriately, not being wrong:

Each sentence passes quality assurance...The writing of the pose is, first and foremost, about being correct, both in terms of style and content. Its foremost goal is not to make any mistakes...One never loses oneself in the writing. Rather, one admires, at a slight remove, the precision of the undertaking.  

This unwillingness to name characters seems related. Names come with baggage and meaning. We can often tell something about the sex, gender, race, and social position of a person from the name. To give a character a name is to invite a whole host of criticisms of that character, so it's better not to name them. Mary Gaitskill recently described an aversion her students had to describing the way faces looked:

Fascinatingly, one student told me that he didn’t like to describe what people look like because he thought it was like staring at someone which was rude. Another remarked in a similar spirit that in describing people you have to assign value to their appearance in terms of conventional beauty standards. This second statement is completely untrue; conventional beauty standards can be made irrelevant when describing a face if you want to focus on how the person’s nature animates that face.

The reluctance to assign names and the reluctance to describe faces seem related. Writers feel that to describe something or name it is somehow an act of colonial violence. Better to avoid it and so avoid criticism. 

A few things I will say about the focus on diversity and its impact on literature 

Literature really only does two things well. It can make us see the world through someone else's point of view, and it can make us question our assumptions about the world. The diversity-forward literary anthology excels at the first and sometimes is a little wanting on the second. 

I don't want to act like doing the first thing well isn't hugely important. Of all the attempts in the last twenty years to change the way our culture talks about D & I categories, I think the improvement in the diversity of stories and voices available to readers and viewers has been the one of the most practical benefit. I saw this benefit when Mrs. Heretic, my very white wife very much from majority-white Ohio, started teaching in 99% black schools in Baltimore in 2007. About the only bridge to her kids going in was the fact she had read a fair amount of contemporary literature by black authors in college. I thought she was going to get eaten alive. But to my wonder and amazement, just that literary introduction really was extremely useful. She walked into schools where students openly told her how much they hated white people and somehow connected enough with those students that there are still dozens of former students every year who go out of their way to tell her how much she meant to them and how she was their favorite teacher. Literature more than did its job of helping her to see the world through the eyes of other people. That forever changed how I think about literature's potential utility in a very real-world and pragmatic sense. What literature did for Mrs. Heretic, I believe it's also doing for many other people, even if it seems like part of America is becoming less interested in hearing what people different from it has to say. 

It does seem to me that the diversity-forward approach does job number one extremely well, but probably at the expense of not doing job number two very well. If you wanted to respond that I'm a white male with the privilege to care more about thundering soliloquies that question cosmic justice than the stories of black boys suffering from unfair human justice, I won't defend myself. My background and the privilege that comes with it has a huge impact on what I want out of a story. Bloom wanted Truth (capital T) and beauty in art and felt anyone who wanted anything else was a fool. I want Truth and beauty in art but realize art can do other things besides that. 

Still, I can't help but be disappointed sometimes in how anthologies seems to take cues from the Democratic Party. There is a coalition to keep together with a large number of constituencies, so it's important to try to keep as many of those constituencies as happy as possible. It leads, sometimes, to collections that feel like a Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden campaign: full of competence and utterly devoid of excitement or vision. Maybe that's what you want in a technocrat, but it's not what I want in the few stories I have time to devote myself to in a year. Or at least, it's not what I want most. 

Perhaps in a hundred years, historians of literature will look back and find our era's focus on the primacy of politics in literature, with identity issues composing a major chunk of that political concern, to be natural, given our political reality. Even living within the current time, I can see reasons why that would be true. But I also see how the focus on politics is making even the political thought in fiction less daring, more concerned with not making mistakes than with imagining new realities. I can see how much anxiety there is surrounding correct thinking about identity, and how this anxiety--like anxiety almost always does--has the ironic effect of making insightful thinking about identity more rather than less difficult. The water of D & I thinking is so stirred up in 2022, it's very hard to see anything through the churn. 

Haguillory

If you ask me what my two favorite stories from BASS 2021 were, I'd say "Switzerland" by Nicole Krauss and "Portrait of Two Young Ladies in White and Green Robes" by Jane Pek. "A Way with Bea" by Shanteka Sigers would probably take honorable mention. But the story I might remember most, the one that most seems to me to speak to the political moment, might be "Haguillory" by Stephanie Soileau.  

The white title character is incensed that black people in New Orleans seem to get all the news attention after the hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. He thinks there are white people struggling, too, and that their struggles are being overlooked because all the attention is focused elsewhere. Haguillory is mean and hyper-protective of his turf, but he also shows a spark of human decency. 

We could write Haguillory off as another white man unaware of his own white privilege. We could see him like one of those people who claim "all lives matter," missing the point that black lives are statistically more threatened in American than white. I'm very confident that's what the text of the story wants us to see. I do see that, but I also see something else.

In 1970, economist Milton Friedman wrote a hugely influential article entitled "The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits." He essentially argued that businesses should be indifferent to their social impact. An oil company should drill oil as cheaply as it can get away with. If society wants to reign the oil company in, then it's up to society, through the apparatus of government, to force them to do so, rather than incumbent on the oil company to do what's "right" on their own. 

I think Friedman's way of looking at things has had influence way beyond business. I think that all the various political factions in America believe it's their responsibility to fight as hard as possible for the interests of their constituents, and if that results in them getting more than their fair share of limited resources, well, then the other factions should have lobbied harder. Americans tend to believe that this free market of ideas and the competition between interests will somehow lead to the right balance. One thing it won't lead to, though, is solidarity. It won't lead to a belief in shared interests or mutual prosperity. Instead, it leads to a belief in a limited pie of resources where a bigger share for someone else means a smaller share for you. 

Within such a system, is Haguillory wrong to resent the fact that a rival for aid is getting more press? He is wrong as a human being, but not in the twisted moral experiment of a Friedmanian political landscape. His job in this dystopia that also happens to be the real world is to push for the maximum advantage of his group. If the other group doesn't get enough, they should have fought harder.

Moreover, it's perverse to try to talk to Haguillory about privilege. Although more nuanced positions acknowledge that there are varying levels and types of privilege and that whiteness is only one of them, there are plenty of morally zealous people out there more than happy to harangue Haguillory for his white privilege. To someone in his position, falling out of the bottom of the middle class and surrounded by others doing the same, the notion of "privilege" is perverse. Even if his whiteness has been a benefit to him, it violates all laws of logic and decency to talk to someone like him about his privilege. Of course that kind of talk is going to activate his self-preservation instincts. He can only think one of two things: either he has no such privilege, or if he has been privileged, there is something terribly wrong with him to be struggling so mightily even with those advantages.  

The diversity potpourri approach to literary anthologies does some things well and others less well. I'm not arguing that it's the wrong approach for the hour, and Lord love a duck, I'm definitely not arguing, like one terrible and unfairly-privileged-in-every-way old white writer recently did, that old white men are discriminated against in publishing. They are not. 

If I had to try to distill my moderately informed, still-in-progress, and very much influenced by the same anxiety everyone else feels thoughts on this into a few sentences, it would be this: Our current political system relies on tenuous alliances between groups with only partially overlapping interests. The literary model of pushing diversity somewhat models this political system. Both the political and literary approaches require grace, goodwill, and the ability to communicate nuanced and imperfect systems with conviction and the power to convince, but all of those things are in short supply. Which means that the best you can hope for, perhaps, is conflicted and at times ambivalent cooperation with the approach being offered. 

I enjoy BASS. I like most of the stories in each volume. I profit from them. I am seldom mentally and spiritually undone by them. Maybe I've been reading too long. Long-time church members find it more difficult to rekindle the fire they felt early in their spiritual lives; maybe it's like that for secular readers, too, and it's got nothing to do with the literature being written today. But part of me feels, when I do manage to find time for literary fiction, that I'm doing it for the same reasons I keep voting for Democrats: it's not that I'm enthusiastic, it's just that I don't know of a better option.

Haguillory doesn't live in a world where his rights are politically threatened because of his race. He does, arguably, live in a world where people of his struggling economic class get a bad deal from the political system. In order for him to avoid thinking that pushing for the improvement of others is not an unfair threat to him would require a level of goodness and broad-mindedness that I'm not sure most people possess. Haguillory isn't without kindness, but he also only has a normal person's amount of it, not more. He lives in a political system in which not feeling resentment of others competing for limited resources with him requires above-average moral and mental qualities. Which means it's going to be a strained system. The only ways for a system to survive are to make the demands on ordinary people something that ordinary people can actually do or to compel, shame, or inspire them to become better people who can live up to the demands of the system. 

Is contemporary American literary fiction doing enough compulsion, shaming, or inspiration? To judge by America's racial backsliding, maybe not. I suspect, though, that there's something else going on here. Good fiction like that in BASS does engender empathy for others. If it's not working on a social scale, I'd guess it's somewhat similar to how masks work at stopping the spread of disease, but mask mandates don't. People seem to be the problem to the proposed systemic solution. 

Which is why even though it's important to have people slugging away at the scrum of public policy and policing to get us through the pandemic of the moment, it's also critical to have some obsessive dreamer locked away in a lab somewhere. She's thinking of something that seems to have no relevance to the pandemic that's raging, but because she is dedicating her full intellect and imagination to something everyone else in neglecting during all the hub-bub, she makes a discovery with relevance to fields never expected. Her refusal to think about what everyone is shouting is the only concern of the moment is what allowed her to figure out a way out of the mess for all of us. 

That's what I wish BASS had more of. Instead of 18 of 20 entries being about the disease du jour, I'd like more that are about reimagining what a cell is, or how DNA functions, or some strange problem in astrophysics. Instead of mostly being about how to drive a car safely, I'd like more on how we could move society past cars. We can have stories about Haguillory's shortcomings, but I'd also like some imaginative pieces on a world where it was easier for Haguillory to be less selfish. 

James Patterson might find the identity balancing in anthologies like BASS as evidence of "another form of racism," but I don't. I see it as evidence of the modern cultural tendency to apply safe answers to problems that are so intractable, they now require imagination, boldness, and heresy, things that are the opposite of safe. 

Literary court, juvie edition: "Little Beast" by C Pam Zhang, Best American Short Stories 2021

I've played "literary court" a few times before when looking into entries from Best American Short Stories. Once was with Mary Gaitskell's "Pleasure" and another was with Danielle Evans' "Boys Go to Jupiter." It's an idea I stole from my son's middle school English teacher. One year, they had the class divide up into prosecution, defense, judge, and jury and argued over whether a character from a story was guilty of murder, based on the text. I thought it was lame then, but I guess I've come to change my mind, because I keep raiding the idea over and over. 

This year's going to be a little different, though. There's no arguing that our protagonist, called "Girlie" by her father, is guilty. At the very end of "Little Beast," we learn that she has apparently poisoned her father with an overdose of sleeping pills. It's going to be a charge of manslaughter or reckless negligence, rather than murder, because she didn't kill him on purpose. Instead, she needed to drug him in order to carry out her other crime, which was faking photos and evidence that suggested her father had sexually assaulted her. 

She's definitely guilty. It seems she's already confessed to the crime of lying about sexual violence and waiting for her punishment when the authorities bring her the news that her father is dead. 

What drove her to such a rash, reckless, and perhaps "beastly" action? Even though the death was accidental, the staging of a sexual crime wasn't. Let's assume we are the person assigned to determine what to do with her, and we are using the text of this story--how did it come to us? I don't know. It just did--to determine how "beastly" Girlie's actions were, or whether we can understand what led her to her fateful decisions. 

Motivating factor #1: "slopping"

The opening line is something of a head-scratcher. "At thirteen, I felt my body slopping." How does a body "slop"? When I think of slopping, I think of a bucket full of water that's being carried, and the movement of being carried makes the water slap and slosh around and spill over the sides. How does a body "slop"? Doesn't a body come with skin to contain all that slopping? 

Reading on, "slopping" is Girlie's word for two character traits she abhors. One is oversharing, in which sense the thing "slopping" out would be too much personal information, particularly of an uninteresting nature. "I spilled into conversations and overshared the banal." Girlie's father is an oversharer extraordinaire,  "He laughed too loud. In public, he was fond of asking what had clogged our toilet, what size training bra I wore." 

That's one half of what "slopping" is to her. Of course, there are two parts to water in a bucket slopping. It goes forward and back. The second half of the meaning of "slopping" for Girlie is being too interested in what others have to say. It's being too eager to please, which Girlie sees as a kind of weakness. "My posture was liquid and my spine nonexistent," she criticizes herself, then uses the same weak spine imagery for her father leaning forward to hear her speak. "I mumbled, which made him bend closer. In his soft spine, in his supplicant's pose, I saw and despised myself." 

Girlie is mortified at how much of her father's natural, affable weakness has invaded her. An avid biology student, she thinks about how his "DNA ran riot through my cells...his shamefulness breaking out, like acne, over me." 

Girlie sees this over eagerness to both know and be known by others as "supplication," that is, begging. Begging for approval, begging to be noticed. She dislikes begging, because, as the scholarship student at an uber-rich girls' school whose father is the janitor, she already feels like she is too much seen as a recipient of charity. 

Motivating factor #2: the desire to be unknowable 

The opposite of an accommodating, "slopping" personality is someone who is a complete enigma, someone who tries neither to understand others nor to be understood. Girlie is not interested in being friends with most of the girls in her school, because none of them contain any secrets. She has already learned their secrets through her father's janitorial work: "...because my father was Alta's night janitor, he knew their secrets by way of secretaries and cafeteria ladies, by way of lockers and trash cans." Girlie isn't interested in these knowable, sloshy girls.

What does interest her are the four "a bit strange" girls at Alta. "Not glowing but shadowed girls, skinny wraiths with bitten nails, dark circles, dry hair." These "shadowed" girls are wrapped in mystery and keep their secrets. "Under Alta's bright lights, these girls' lashes drew vertical bars over their eyes. More than anything, I wanted to know what inside them needed caging." 

Motivating factor #3: longing for control

Girlie ends up becoming one of the strange girls when she develops an eating disorder. She sees her father's obesity as an outward sign of his inward sloppiness/slopping/slovenliness, and Girlie views her anorexia as "the discipline to shape" herself differently. In other words, as many researchers of eating disorders have found, her eating disorder is about her trying to gain control. The same seems to be true of the other four "strange" girls. 

Girlie stumbles into anorexia almost by mistake, but she studies the other girls and tries to mimic their other attempts to control and to push away the world. She pretends to be a cutter, but can't. Girlie has obstacles in her path to becoming like the other girls, precisely because she has been given so much love by her father. "I was poor in neglect, in that cold, instructive pain...I'd had dinners of chicken and mashed potatoes, dutifully stirred halfway through heating so that they neither burnt nor froze my tongue." 

As a result, Girlie fails to truly become one with the "clot" of other girls. She becomes what she has always hated, a desperate, fawning acolyte of the girls, trying to get them to like her. "I spoke from the edge of my seat, spit flying, my spine curving toward my audience of four." It's this failure to be seen as damaged on the level of the other girls that forces Girlie to her ultimate expedient of pretending her father has molested her. She wanted to be mysterious, aloof, and in control, but she is none of these things, which forces her to her last resort. 

Motivating factor #4: The news

Girlie has time on her hands while her father cleans the school at night, and she often occupies it watching the news. There, she finds all the lurid, barely euphemized violence against women that seems like it's been the lead of local news for as long as I've known what local news programs were. "Late at night the coverage gave way to the faces of girls and what was done to their bodies. Staticky clips from dispatcher calls. Teary interviews. But loudest of all, the silence. Newscasters resorted to euphemisms even as the screen showed photo after bloody photo." 

Girlie finds the same type of stories in the backs of magazines at the library. Stories of women being abducted, imprisoned, raped, and terrified by men. Girlie associates these stories of women being trapped with her own predicament when her father is knocking on the bathroom door, wanting to make sure she is okay. The women in the news were made captive by males intent on evil; Girlie is made captive by her father's all-too-present love. This association makes her lash out at her father, calling him a pervert for wanting to see her. This accusation makes the father leave her alone, fleeing from "the thing inside me." It's her frequent contact with the violence in the news more then anything that puts the "beast" inside her. It's the news that awakened her to the "clot of violence" which she ends up wanting to join.

How mitigating are these motivations? 

Is Girlie a beast, or is she a victim of a society that fetishizes neglect and violence? Should we send her to the juvie slammer, or should we try to help her with therapy? Is she someone to fear, or someone to pity, as much as she would hate our pity? 

Had she not accidentally killed her father with an overdose of sleeping pills, she would probably have straightened out on her own. She was planning her own acts of contrition while waiting for her father to arrive, and it seemed like she had come to terms with accepting his love as better than whatever misguided adulation she could get from faking abuse. If only he hadn't died, things probably would have worked themselves out. 

This story somewhat follows the logic of horror, in which the universe tends to give people the punishment they deserve. I think a juvie judge could probably afford to go easy on girlie. If the punishment is too lenient, the universe will probably take care of it. 

Speaking of horror, it's rumored that Hollywood types read BASS, trolling for ideas. "Little Beast" probably makes the best movie/series crossover of all the winning stories this year. I mean, I wouldn't watch it. Horror movies scare me, and not in a good way. So do goth girls. But I can see how this story is a rich vein that could be tapped visually. I hope someone's got sense enough to mine it. Sounds like Karen Carlson would watch it.  

Being timely by not trying: "Biology" by Kevin Wilson, Best American Short Stories 2021

I remarked when looking at Best American Short Stories last year that it's really hard for fiction to be an art form that comments on the issues of the moment. Fiction takes a while to write, a while to get approved for publication, a while to edit, and finally a while to be published. For an annual anthology that then adds its own added selection, editing, and publication time cycles to the process, it often means that fiction responding to an issue of the present is actually responding to an issue of years ago. That's the case in this year's anthology with George Saunders' "Love Letter." While "Love Letter" could still be read years from now with profit for the way it frames difficult questions of how much of one's personal life it makes sense to sacrifice for the general good, it is not responding to a national issue of the present as an artifact of an annual anthology. As an entry in the Best American Short Stories 2021 anthology, it isn't responding to an issue of 2021. Well, not 2021 after January 6th, anyhow. 

It's not anybody's fault that fiction doesn't provide immediate responses to issues of the moment. Social media makes the conversation shift almost daily, if not even faster. One of the reasons it's so hard to accomplish anything politically is that voters are constantly following a new shiny object every day, preventing them from the kind of slow and methodical labor on one issue that's usually necessary for progress. For fiction, that means that if you try to write a story about the issue of the moment, it might not be an issue of much concern by the time your story is published. 

That's why it's so remarkable that Kevin Wilson's "Biology" seems to be commenting on an issue that's come up in the news lately, although it wasn't an issue on anyone's radar back when he wrote this story. It wasn't even on the radar when Best American Short Stories 2021 came out last fall. I'm talking about Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill. I can't even summarize this bill, because it's so full of vague language, nobody agrees on what it says. But what it will probably do is make teachers less likely to discuss issues of sexual identity with students. 

Along comes me with my tardy read-through of BASS 2021, and to my surprise, the next-to-last story is about a teacher who connects with an awkward, troubled, gay 8th grader, partly by discussing sex and sexual identity. You can't get more timely than that, although the timeliness is completely serendipitous. It's a reminder that while you certainly shouldn't avoid writing about the topic du jour as a writer if that's what moves you, you shouldn't feel like writing about other things is somehow escapist. If you write the story that's stuck in your brain and won't come out until you create it, in time, it will be of pressing interest to somebody. 

Why "Biology"?

This story could well have been called "Death Cards," the game that Patrick, the awkward gay kid mentioned above, invents. The game is a compelling and critical element in the story, and thematically relevant. A big part of the theme has to do with the randomness of the cards we get dealt in life. Instead of using the game's name as the name of the story, though, it's called "Biology." The simple reason it's called that might be that Kevin's teacher-guide, Mr. Reynolds, is a biology teacher. But biology itself takes on a meaning in the story that's parallel to that of the death cards.

Patrick's Death Cards game involves a mix of cards he has created. Each card holds a hypothetical life event on it, belonging to one of four stages of life. There are nice things that can happen--first kiss, first job, win a contest--but also "death cards" featuring "people dying in horrible, graphic ways." The game, as such, involves little more than drawing cards to see what kind of life experiences you get before you die. It's all luck. 

Patrick's card game is not unlike the biology Mr. Reynolds teaches, "where the babies fight each other to the death in order to be the one who gets the food from the mother. One time he brought in this weird slug and told us about how its mouth was like sandpaper and it could tear out the eyes of a baby bird, or something like that. He talked about egg wars where different bird species tried to fuck each other over." Or, as Patrick then puts it more succinctly, Mr. Reynolds teaches about "the horrible shit that all living things did just to keep themselves alive." 

Patrick is a boy obsessed with the "horrible shit." It populates his game that he has to play by himself because nobody will play with him. Patrick has nobody to discuss these thoughts with, and he's probably on his way to either hurting himself or someone else. "If I'd had a gun, if I knew how to get a gun, I would have murdered everyone in the classroom," he recalls, thinking back on his junior high school years from his perspective as a grown man. 

Bad teacher, but good for Patrick

We had a good teacher story earlier in BASS 2021 with "A Way with Bea," but Mr. Reynolds isn't a very good teacher, by his own admission. He's kind of mousy, and suffers from Vietnam War-induced PTSD. Patrick discovers, however, that Mr. Reynolds is able to withstand the insults the students throw at him without it affecting his own self-image. "This might help you Patrick," Mr. Reynolds tells him when Patrick starts spending lunch period in Mr. Reynolds' room, "If people think you are strange, different, they can be cruel. They look for instability, and opening. My car, it's not me, is it? It's just this piece of metal that I drive to work every day. But people can look at it and laugh, and they think it hurts me, but it doesn't. Because it's not me." 

Patrick is temporarily turned off to Mr. Reynolds' biology when Mr. Reynolds doesn't affirm his belief in evolution. Evolution had been a consoling theory to Patrick, because it represented the "idea that you could be something but turn into something else." Mr. Reynolds doesn't offer Patrick any great hopes for the future, though. He thinks life is like Death Cards. "You just pick cards and you can't really control it." That might not seem like the inspirational message Patrick needs, but it turns out it's the exact realistic kind of advice he needs. Mr. Reynolds gives more hard truths when Patrick comes to his house to see him: "Life does not always have to be bad, Patrick, but maybe right now it has to be for you. But get out of here, go to college, a college in a big city or with a lot of students, and then maybe you can figure this out. Maybe you can find happiness." When Patrick wonders if he might not ever find happiness, Mr. Reynolds acknowledges that this is possible. "Maybe...but just try, okay?"

Mr. Reynolds doesn't hide the cruelty of the world, not in his lessons nor in his private conversations with Patrick. It's evolution. It's biology. But by allowing Patrick to imagine a world without so much cruelty, without "death cards," he gives Patrick the space to keep breathing long enough to get past the worst of it and survive childhood. 

Mr. Reynolds isn't this bad, but he's probably not winning any teacher of the year awards. 

They talk about sex

Mr. Reynolds does not shy away from Patrick's questions about sex. Although Patrick noted that Mr. Reynolds was somewhat squeamish talking about human bodies, the teacher still delivered answers with scientific precision when asked. He's kind of asexual. He might have been gay once, but that time has kind of passed, and now he's just not interested in sex. He had sex once, with a prostitute in Vietnam, because he was being harassed by members of his unit to, and he hated it. When Patrick says he might be gay, Mr. Reynolds tells him that doesn't mean there is anything wrong with him. 

Patrick got what he needed to survive junior high and high school. It wasn't by much, and all his issues aren't behind him as an adult. But Mr. Reynolds, by his willingness to answer the questions Patrick had and to share what little wisdom he had, likely saved at least one life. That wouldn't have been possible if Mr. Reynolds had thought that he'd get fired for answering Patrick's questions. Mr. Reynolds needed freedom.

Hell, if you think about it, Mr. Reynolds was probably taking an unwise risk when he let Patrick come alone into his bedroom. Patrick asked if he could kiss Mr. Reynolds. That all might have gone south. But it didn't. 

It's hard to change minds. That's my entire lesson in democracy I've learned in the last 30 years. But minds do change. I don't think advocates in Florida will make many inroads by preaching about the dangers LGBTQ youth face when they can't talk about their sexuality with adults, because the people pushing the laws often believe the sexuality of those youth amount to an immoral life choice. But a story about a person, told in intimate detail, might alter the amount of rigidity with which someone holds their views. It might not pop the lid off the jar, but it might loosen it. 

I understand that parents want to prevent outsiders from influencing their children in ways parents object to. But why would parents think they alone can provide all the guidance a child needs? Sometimes, kids are just very different from their parents, and the answers they're looking for aren't at home, they're out in the wide world. That never happened for me, personally. I don't have a teacher I look back on and think they changed everything for me. But I can see how it would happen. This story is a believable, sweet account of a teacher having an unexpected positive impact on a student, and it's also an argument for why teachers should not be muzzled when interacting with students. 

The story's also a great example of how to be timely without trying. 

Other looks:

Karen Carlson looks at the story's envelope structure, something I did not discuss. 

The ceremonies of connection: "Palaver" by Bryan Washington

One question that might occur to a reader while observing the interaction between son and mother in Bryan Washington's "Palaver" might be: why are these two people even still trying to maintain a relationship at all? There are obvious, long-standing resentments between the two, enough that the son had to take off and flee to Japan, where he now teaches English to juvenile delinquents, just to get away from it. The two barely seem to be speaking the same language, hence the title, which refers to a sort of meeting between peoples of differing tribes who don't share the same language or culture. 

The son is having his palaver with his mother at the same time as he is constantly having to palaver his way through his life in Tokyo, where he does not speak the language beyond perhaps survival level. (The mother is holding a "magazine neither of them could read," presumably because it's in Japanese. He's lived there for three years and doesn't seem to know much Japanese, which is forgivable, because Japanese is one hell of a difficult language. It's not something you just pick up by living there.) Meanwhile, the mother is also unable to speak the language. She may be in Japan for the same reason her son is. She and the boy's father are "going through it," meaning having relationship troubles. Those troubles seem to have been endemic to the marriage. She reads, but does not respond to, the father's texts while she in visiting her son. 

These overlapping palavers might seem to be even more disorienting for son and mother than just having to work out their own issues would be, but it seems that having to navigate the confusing streets of Tokyo actually helps the son and mother to make progress in their own relationship. As mother and son move about, they find themselves partaking in a number of non-verbal ceremonies, almost transactional in their nature. They involve a simple gesture that is then met with a simple gesture in return. I count five total such ceremonies:

1. They are waiting for a train and a mother brings along a set of twins. "Both of her kids waved. So the mother and her son waved back."
2. The mother goes exploring while her son is at work. She sees some women in front of a shrine in a park. The women "asked the mother to take their photo, so she did. When they asked the mother if she wanted one of herself, she smiled as they snapped about forty."
3. In a bar, while waiting for her son, the mother "realized that the bartender had been watching her. They made eye contact, and the bartender nodded, reaching for another glass."
4. In a different bar, the mother orders a glass of wine, and, "Another woman sitting alone made eye contact, and the mother nodded, and she nodded too." 
5. In the final scene, the mother watches a bride taking newlywed photos. "When the woman looked up, they made eye contact. The mother smiled at her, and the woman smiled back."

The mother also engaged in a similar action-for-action ceremony with her husband. She has mostly been reading, but not responding to, his texts while she is in Japan. But when he sends just an emoji, "she responded immediately, without even thinking about it, just as a reaction. She thought about how there are some things we simply can't shake." 

That's kind of how all of these social transactions take place. They're instinctive reactions. Someone smiles at you and you smile back. Someone nods their head, and you do the same. Someone takes your photo, you offer to do the same for them.

People are sometimes critical of "transactional" habits in relationships, perhaps because it might seem like transactions involve calculations about gains and losses. That would mean people only engage in actions that benefit them, rather than out of a sense of devotion or love. 

But the simple transactions of "Palaver" are actually a key to unlocking communication for mother and son. Having learned from the simple transactions in the many "palavers" he negotiates every day, he now proposes another transactional arrangement to his mother. They will alternate telling stories. If he tells her one, she will tell him one. By swapping stories that are really about their lives, but told in a third-person "once upon a time" way, they are able to learn about each other and ultimately somewhat bridge what has been an unbridgeable gap between them. The mother resists telling her stories for a while, and instead we, the readers, get to hear the stories she would have told her son if she'd been willing to. Eventually, though, she opens up to the game, and the two seem to have gone beyond a palaver to real communication by the end.

We get a sense that the mother might have been using this method for getting through tough times in her relationship with her husband for a long time. She mentions to the son at the end something about "when you've been in a relationship with someone as long as your father and I," and her retelling of how they met suggests theirs in not simply a toxic relationship, but a loving relationship with troubles. 

The answer to why the son and the mother continue to struggle to have a relationship in spite of how difficult it is to communicate is the same as why we nod back at someone who nods to us. It's natural to do. And perhaps just the simple gesture of trying can sometimes be enough of a healing ceremony to bring a breakthrough when least expected. 

Other readings:

As usual, Karen Carlson does a more thorough job than I do of explaining background, in this case background to the word "palaver." 

Inheritance: "You Are My Dear Friend" by Madhuri Vijay, Best American Short Stories 2021

I barely convinced myself to blog through Best American Short Stories this year, and I may never do it again. I've already listed several reasons why, and this next story reminds me of another one: I end up saying the same things year after year. 

In this case the thing I'm about to repeat is how different American letters are from those of most other countries on Earth. The big annual Korean anthology of best short stories that comes out every year--to use one counterexample--comprises almost entirely stories written by people born in Korea about people born in Korea. Understanding deeper, connotative meanings of most stories requires cultural knowledge that the readers of the stories will all share in common. 

Because the United States is more much ethnically and culturally diverse, though, our literary canon is constantly being filled with stories written by people from all over the globe and featuring characters from all over the globe. This year's BASS alone has stories in which significant action takes place in Nigeria, China, Afghanistan, Taiwan, and now India. 

Korean literature isn't like this. Much like Korean film, which was heavily government subsidized for years in order to guarantee the development of indigenous movies the country could be proud of, the support for Korean literature is generally there in order to strengthen and expand the influence of specifically Korean culture. The country sees to need to apologize for this. 

The prerequisites to be considered in Best American Short Stories, as series editor Heidi Pitlor reminds us every year, are:

1) Original publication in nationally distributed American or Canadian periodicals. (This stretches the meaning of "American" to "North American," but not including any other North, Central, or South American countries besides Canada.) 

2) Publication in English by writers who have made the United States or Canada their home.

3) Original publication as short stories (excerpts of novels are not considered). 

That seems like a reasonable way to define what an "American" story is. It was written by someone living in America for an American audience. Since that's the case, it is not only appropriate, but necessary, that a significant number of selections in a representative anthology of American short stories be by people from and about people who live somewhere other than the U.S. and Canada. We're a nation of immigrants, and the cultural heritage these immigrants have brought with them becomes our cultural inheritance as well. American arts are enriched by the nutrients the cultural tides of the world bring to us. 

At the same time as it is enriched by the stories from people all over the world, American literature is also made more complicated by this mélange, just as American democracy is both stronger for its diversity but also more challenging in many ways than democracy in a more monocultural, monolingual society is. It's one reason many conservatives suggest we upend the complexity by enforcing linguistic and cultural homogeneity. That's not the right solution, and it kills all the benefits of a diverse society for a small gain that will probably never even really result in meaningful unity, anyway. But it's understandable it would occur to some people when they look at the complexities involved in running a society like ours, where our culture is something of an amalgamation of all the cultures of the world. 

What this has to do with "You Are My Dear Friend"

"You Are My Dear Friend" doesn't require any special knowledge of India to understand what is happening on the surface. Geeta's parents died when she was young. She was then raised in a Catholic orphanage, after which she became an au pair to foreigners working in India. She is working as an au pair for the Bakers when she meets Srikanth, who is much older than her and who has already been married and divorced. He has a grown daughter somewhere. Geeta marries Srikanth and spends her days as aimlessly as she spent them as an au pair when the children were in school. Srikanth, mystified by her lack of direction, suggests she have a child. She is unable to get pregnant, so she ends up adopting Rani from a sketchy adoption center where they don't ask too many questions. Rani is a traumatized child and ends up being too much for Geeta and Srikanth, who send her away to "people who understood her...people used to dealing with girls like her." 

I get all that with no more difficulty than I would understand a story about people in Ohio. (And maybe with less difficulty than I followed the people in Louisiana in Stephanie Soileau's "Haguillory." Parts of the U.S. have always been half like a foreign country.) But I feel like I am probably missing significant levels of the story because there are connotations to place names, personal names, and cultural practices that I miss. Jharkand, Odisha, Bangalore. I can look these places up, but I don't know what they might mean to the average Indian without needing to look them up. Bangalore is the big city and Jharkand and Odisha are the sticks, I get that. But is there more I'm missing? I can look up Naxalism and have a sense of it, but I'm sure it has a much deeper meaning to someone in India than it would to me.

One of the main functions the narrative is fulfilling seems to be a critique of Indian society, but in what sense am I the right audience for this story? Even if I understood better what the critiques were aiming at, what could I do about it? Write my member of Congress? That doesn't even do any good for issues in America, so what good would it do about an issue in India? It can serve to educate, of course, and since India is a country of such importance in the world, it wouldn't hurt me to learn a thing or two by reading a story told that gets a little bit into the Indian weeds. But the effect of the social critique is probably lost on me and many other readers in the Americas.

So what can else I pull out of the story?

There is something else at the heart of the story, though, and I don't think it requires a whole lot of specific understanding of anything Indian to pull it out. The life options of the characters in the story are limited or expanded based on the resources, emotional and material, left them by their parents. The Baker girls have love from their parents and Geeta both, as well as riches from their families, and we never worry for their well-being. Srikanth is able to live comfortably off the house he has inherited from his father, a house his father did nothing more to earn than win a lottery. Geeta's parents were poor and died when she was young, but even that brief time with them left her an emotional inheritance that, "despite their curtailed presence in her life, had at least encased her in the solid outline of their love." I know someone close to me who has said something similar. She was raised by her grandmother until she was seven when her grandmother died. But she's told me that things her grandmother told her sustained her through years of being sent from one relative or group home to another after that. Sometimes, even little attempts to share love go a long way.

That's how it is with the maid. Geeta bought her several trinkets when they both worked at the Bakers together. One of those trinkets was a fake silver pendant engraved with the words "You Are My Dear Friend." Geeta only bought it so the maid wouldn't be jealous of Geeta's freedom during the day when the kids were at school. It's cheap and not at all heartfelt. But it means a lot to the maid, who never takes it off and is still wearing it after Geeta leaves the house. 

Even a small emotional inheritance can be powerful in providing the necessary resilience and self-esteem necessary to survive. Nobody in the story is more lacking this kind of inheritance than Rani, the girl Geeta and Srikanth adopt. Geeta doesn't get the full story, but it's clear there was trauma, something involving "a weak, protective mother, an absent, unpredictable father, poverty, the looming threat of outsiders, the fear of corrupt authorities." 

Rani acts out against Geeta, attacking her first verbally and then physically. One particular obsession for Rani is Geeta's jewelry. The girl wants Geeta to send her jewelry to Rani's mother. Rani thinks Geeta is a rich woman and that she can use her riches to help her mother. "Always it was the same demand. She wanted Geeta to send jewelry to her mother. Geeta lived in this big house, she was rich, so there had to be jewelry. Where was it?"

Geeta tells Rani that she may one day give Rani jewelry, but if she does so, it will be for Rani, not for her mother. 

So here, I'm about to apply the little bit of Indian cultural knowledge I have, which is probably exactly the right amount of "a little learning" to qualify as a dangerous thing. India is especially enthusiastic about gold. Families hoard it. It has significance in religious ceremonies, but it is also thought to be a secure form of wealth. Passing on jewelry to children, especially gold, is something all parents aspire to do. So when Rani and Geeta are talking about jewelry, they're talking about something of tremendous value, even more than we in the West put on it. When Rani demands Geeta give jewelry to her mother, she is rejecting Geeta as a mother, the person who would pass on the thing of greatest importance. She is saying it isn't fair that Geeta has this wealth, that it should have belonged to her own mother. She is saying it isn't fair that she has nothing to inherit. 

I may be so wrong about this that it would be a huge howler to an Indian reader. As the story itself makes plain, Indian culture isn't one thing. Geeta and her husband have to resort to English as a lingua franca, because there are so many languages spoken in India. There might be people in India who don't care at all about gold. But I think the story is leading us to think that Rani, at least, thinks of it as a thing of enormous value.

Geeta ultimately goes along with her husband's wish that they send the girl away. There was much more Geeta wanted to say to her husband about the girl, but she never did. "She had lost the habit of speaking of herself, and now it was impossible to recover the details that could have made her permanent." 

Geeta's failure is that she does not realize how precious even her most casual acts of kindness might appear to others, what a powerful inheritance she has to leave. That's what happened with her "Dear Friend" pendant. She could have provided Rani with the kind of "encasing in a solid outline" her parents gave her. Geeta was a good au pair but a bad mother, because as a mother, she bore the weight of passing along self-esteem she did not have to bear as an au pair. In this sense, Rani was right to be angry when she learned of Geeta's gift of the cheap pendant. The point isn't that it was so cheap, it's that Geeta didn't even give something cheap to Rani. She didn't even try, and often, just trying makes up for many imperfections in the effort. 

And that is universal. We all have some inheritance of kindness we can pass on, and it might be of far more value to others than we imagine. 

Other reading:

In Karen Carlson's take on the story, she ponders something I pondered after my first reading: am I completely missing what the hell this story is about? Karen ponders the possibility that the opacity is the point. 

Just the way it is: "Haguillory" by Stephanie Soileau, Best American Short Stories 2021

I commented earlier in BASS this year, when discussing Vanessa Cuti's "Our Children," about how some stories intentionally leave out more than the barest hints about character motivation. "Haguillory" by Stephanie Soileau does it a little bit differently: we get some hints about what motivates her central character Haguillory, but at the end, we're still kind of grasping for a fuller explanation. Possibly, the ultimate motivation eludes us because at some point, it's impossible to answer what makes people be kind, or cruel, or empathetic, or selfish, or whatever. It's a mystery, and if we knew the answer to that question, we'd have a lot more kind people in the world. 

Synopsis

Haguillory and his wife Dot have settled into the routine of older couples who don't like each other that much. They avoid each other, with Dot staying up late to fret over the news about hurricanes Katrina and Rita, then going to bed in a different room from Haguillory, where she sleeps until late. Haguillory is a mean old cuss, the kind who looms large in the mythologies of neighborhoods across America, one who poisons the neighbors' trees and dogs. 

The story is contained in one day when Haguillory rises to go crabbing and Dot decides to go with him. This is the first action in the story that doesn't have a deeply explained motivation. She simply says she wants "to see how things are down there." That might make sense if what she meant was that she wanted to see how bad the damage from the hurricanes had been at the Sabine marshes where they go to catch crabs. But it seems like she's already been there since the hurricanes. The hurricanes, we learn later, were almost a year ago, and Dot was last in the marshes "months ago," so she's seen them since the hurricanes. That's why Haguillory is confused, and suggests they'll look "about the same as last time." 

But she goes, whatever the reason. Haguillory fusses about this and that as they drive an hour or so to the spot where they go crabbing. We get local flavor and see that the area still isn't close to getting back to normal. There are FEMA trailers and trash from the destruction strewn about. Lots of people, including Haguillory, still haven't been paid by their insurance companies for the damage, leading to a humorous local distaste for claims adjusters. 

Eventually, a family pulls up behind where Haguillory and Dot are crabbing. They're looking for a cat the father abandoned in this area a week ago. He was tired of the cat pissing on one of his kid's beds, which is especially obnoxious because the family has been cooped up together in a FEMA trailer for almost a year. The father originally lied and said the cat went missing, and now the mother is angry at him and frantically looking for it. Dot sympathizes with the mother, but Haguillory can't see why anyone would fuss so much over a cat. The family leaves as a storm is approaching. As Haguillory is packing up, he sees the cat. He throws the cat into the canal, possibly thinking he is being merciful, although it isn't clear to whom he is showing mercy.

The names

There are a number of clues about underlying meaning in the story. The first is in the names of the two main characters. The title character's name is apparently one still in use in Cajun country. It means "active" or "dynamic" or something like that. "Dot," on the other hand, is sort of the opposite. Not the real meaning of the name "Dottie," but the connotations of "dot," which would suggest a static point somewhere. Haguillory is restless and roving, but Dot is fixed. This might explain why Dot is more capable of empathy, more welcoming of others. She feels more secure in her place, while Haguillory feels like he always needs to defend his territory, to the death, if need be (at least the death of trees and dogs). 

What's eating Haguillory

There are a lot of things that set Haguillory off--Dot not being fast with a crab net, maggots costing too much, his son adopting a child of color--but what seems to particularly irritate him are the editorial choices of the news. He complains at one point about the news always showing the same thing: "New Orleans this, Katrina that, like those people were the only ones who'd been hit by a storm." More pointedly, he thinks of "those looters in flooded New Orleans...who seemed to think their suffering entitled them to inflict suffering on others." 

What's got Haguillory's goat is that he feels the news' tendency to focus on one set of people affected by the hurricanes leaves others out. When he sees the family looking for their cat and hears about them having been in a trailer for a year, he thinks, "They'd never show that on the news. It was sad, how they forgot about some people, not about others." 

It's not hard to decode what he means

It's very easy for those of us reading this story post Black Lives Matter to know what Haguillory really means when he's complaining about what he sees on the news. "Those people in New Orleans" means "black people." Haguillory is incensed that the news is focusing so much on their suffering when there are plenty of white people suffering, too. It's the "all lives matter" argument all over again, but put into a event from a decade earlier. Haguillory thinks the news is focused too much on the suffering of black people to the exclusion of white people. 

Why does Haguillory feel this way?

This is the really difficult "why" question to answer in this story. Although Haguillory is a miserable old buzzard, he's not without empathy. He truly feels sorry for the family he sees. He gives one of the children a multitool he won at a painters' union gumbo dinner. (Karen Carlson said in her look at this story that we don't know what he did for a living. Was he a painter? Or is the "painters' union" something I don't understand?)  After giving the gift, he seems to reveal his motivation for having given it: "I feel sorry for y'all." That's a pretty clear example of empathy. 

I think the reason Haguillory feels so incensed about the attention black people are getting on the news is that he sees his own piece of the pie shrinking thereby. If the world is going to tend to their suffering, there won't be enough left for them to tend to his. We don't know why Haguillory has killed his neighbors' tree or dog, but we can assume it's for some kind of encroachment onto his property. Nothing makes him madder than someone invading what he views as his space, taking what he views as his. 

In the parlance of our times, he is objecting to the loss of white privilege, to the end of the long-standing foregrounding of white stories and white grievances over black. 

This is conjecture, of course. The only hint we get about why he killed the tree is that he gathers the pecans it dropped onto his yard and threw them away. But it seems a likely explanation. Or, maybe, he's mean just because he's mean. He did string Dot along when he met her by telling her a fake name "just for the hell of it." He's a "tete dure," a hard head. Maybe he's not threatened at all, but just hates what he hates because he hates it. It would be the same answer Bruce Hornsby and the Range cited hearing decades ago for why there is prejudice in the world: That's just the way it is. (Note that the song itself does not believe in this line, just as the speaker in Robert Frost's "Something There Is That Doesn't Love a Wall" doesn't actually believe that "good fences make good neighbors.")

The fish and the cat

In addition to the dog, Haguillory is twice cruel to animals. He mutilates a garfish he has caught and then throws it back in the water, and when he finds the family cat, he chucks it in the water, too. Dot gets mad at him for crushing the fish, but Haguillory is genuinely confused by her anger. "Was it his fault the gar was an ugly fish?" he wonders. It's similar to his logic when he suggests, earlier in the story, that his adopted grandchild of color should go back where she came from if she doesn't like it here. He wonders, "Did she think he had fun saying that kind of truth?"

So Haguillory sees himself as a bringer of hard truths. Gars are ugly. They should be killed, because they're ugly. The cat is a burden and should be killed. This is why, to his mind, killing the cat is a "kind of mercy," the final line of the story. Haguillory actually sees himself as a keeper of some kind of order or good in the world. So perhaps his dislike for news about black people is another thing he files in his mind under this self-image. He's not a miserable old buzzard, he's just telling an unpopular truth. Sounds a lot like the apologia for Trump I often heard. 

One tantalizing detail in the story is the way Haguillory equates the cat to Dot. Early on, he thinks that when it gets hot, she'll be "spitting mean--mean as a cat with its tail on fire." What does this mean, then, when he can't understand all the fuss over a cat, and why he thinks it's "merciful" to drown the cat? Merciful for whom? The family or the cat? Or both? What kind of mercy does he intend to show Dot?

Guest editor Jesmyn Ward wrote in her introduction to BASS that Haguillory "changes, just a hairbreadth," after his chance encounter with the family and their cat, but I'm not sure he has. If anything, he might have slipped even further into his beliefs. His belief in his "mercy" has some uncomfortable similarities to what a Republican Congressman said in 2005 after thousands of homes of poor people in New Orleans were destroyed: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." Haguillory believes he's ultimately showing mercy to those he thinks of as unworthy by putting them out of their misery.