The best short story I've ever read

While I've been blogging through the short stories from Pushcart, I've also been taking time to do a side project I've wanted to do for a while. Sixteen years ago, when I was getting ready to start my job as a translator, I was looking for something to work on to improve my Korean with. Rather randomly, I picked up the Korean version of the year's best short story collection for 2003. One of the stories in it, "A Wildflower Seed" (들꽃 씨앗 하나) by Yi Chong-jun (이청준), has stayed with me ever since. Over the years, I lost the book that story was in, and I was having a hard time remembering what the series was called so I could get a replacement, but I finally figured it out and have spent the last week re-reading the story. When I started, I was thinking I'd like to translate it in the hopes of sharing it with the world. But there are a lot of reasons that might not work out. Yi died in 2008, and I really have no idea how to get a hold of his family to ask for permission to publish his work in translation. I've never done a literary translation before, so I have no idea how that world works. I intend to try, because it's my favorite story ever and it deserves a wider audience, but since it's unlikely to work out, I here present a synopsis and a brief analysis of why it's my favorite story.

It's a pretty simple story, although rather long, sort of in that no-man's land between a long short story and a short novella. Jin-yong comes from a poor country town. And when I say poor, I mean really poor. This story takes place in South Korea in the years right after the Korean War, when Korea was poorer than India and devastated by three years of conflict. Jin-yong's father was a casualty of that war, and Jin-yong lives with his mother and younger sister. In order to lift his family from poverty, Jin-yong heads off to the big city ("K City, which I assume is Kwangju") as soon as he graduates from elementary school. He does odd jobs and studies at a private academy to pass middle school. The plan was that he would do this for three years and then take a job in his hometown as either a school teacher or a civil servant. But as he gets near the end of middle school, the rules change. The job he wants now requires a high school diploma.

Jin-yong takes the entrance exam and passes with flying colors, but he has no money to attend high school. (Since high school is not mandatory at this time, it seems the only school available charges tuition.) A teacher at the middle school offers to help Jin-yong out. He knows the administrator of the high school. He thinks he can either get Jin-yong a scholarship or a payment plan. But Jin-yong needs to go back to his little village and pick up a tax form showing that his family is poor and return with it by Saturday at 3 P.M. Jin-yong learns of this on Thursday. Without the form, there is no high school and no eventual job that will get his family out of poverty.

South Jeolla Province, 1950s. 

He takes the earliest bus on Friday morning. There should be time to get down to his hometown, get the document, and return to Kwangju that same day, leaving plenty of time to have everything set up for high school. He desperately wants to see his family while he is back home, but he doesn't think it will be the responsible thing to do, given his time crunch, and he intends to go down and back without stopping at home.

Fate has it in for Jin-yong. The bus breaks down, causing a delay of hours. The delay is longer when a woman on the bus realizes her money has been stolen, and she forces everyone to help her try to find the thief. Ji-yong arrives at City Hall too late to get the document that day. He tries to see the bright side, figuring at least he'll be able to see his family, and maybe he can still get the document in the morning and make it back to Kwangju on time. But his mother and sister are both away. He learns from an uncle that they have gone to find work. The uncle helps Jin-yong by making him a new stamp, which Jin-yong will need to obtain his paperwork. At the crack of dawn, Jin-yong rises, gets his document, and gets on the bus back.

But now there is snow. The authorities have shut down the road leading through Wolchu Mountain. It looks like Jin-yong is not going to make it. The bus driver hears his story, and within an hour, the bus is suddenly allowed to pass, because they are carrying an important military officer to a meeting in Kwangju that he must attend. It's not clear if the bus driver and this officer have come up with this plan to help Jin-yong or if the officer really had a meeting, but I suspect the former. The bus makes it, with great difficulty, through the mountain, but Jin-yong gets back to Kwangju too late. His teacher, who promised to wait until two before going to the high school, isn't at the middle school anymore. Jin-yong runs to the high school, but everyone has gone, and a guard tells Jin-yong he missed the deadline to apply. So all of Jin-yong's desperate efforts, as well as the efforts of everyone who tried to help him, come to naught.

One of the most uplifting things I've ever read. No, really. 

What I've just described sounds like a really depressing art house film. But it's not. In his short analysis of "A Wildflower Seed" within that 2003 anthology, Lee Dong Hwa called it a "failure story," which, one would assume, is the opposite of a "success story." As Lee put it, the hero had an objective--get the document back by three on Saturday, meet the next step in your plan to lift your family out of poverty--and he failed. In the hands of another writer, this would have been a critique of capitalism or society. The message would have been: Look! This person did everything to try to lift himself up by his boot straps, and it didn't work out! The dreams of capitalism are all lies! But that's not what this story is about.

Lee Dong Hwa listed three reasons why this story is actually more hopeful than depressing, calling his essay on the story "Hope Stronger than Fate." I also have three reasons why I love this story, and while the Venn Diagram between my reasons and Lee's overlap a bit, I'll present mine without referring to his.

1. Jin-yong might not succeed, but by God you want him to. 

In creating Jin-yong, Yi gave us something rare: a flat-arc character who is good from beginning to end but also totally believable. Just to have written a character the reader can feel so unashamed to root for and so terrible to see fail is a noteworthy accomplishment.

2. Jin-yong owns his own destiny

The funny thing about Jin-yong is that at the story's end, he isn't blaming others or blaming fate. He blames himself. This is, on one level, ridiculous. He is taking on responsibilities nobody would expect someone his age to have to take on. He did everything he could to get the document back on time. He just had rotten luck. But that's not how he sees it:

But when he thought about it, this wasn't something anyone else should feel bitter or sad about. Others had done nothing but help him out. In the end, what had made things not work out was that he, of his own fault, did not meet the timetable. He felt only shame and sorrow. He felt guilt about his teacher, his uncle, the workers at city hall, the bus driver, even this guard at the school. He felt shame in front of all of them. But more than anything, he felt shame and sorrow about his mother and sister, waiting with their hearts in their stomachs for him to return home in glory. 

Sounds harsh, yes? I was crushed when I read that. I thought, what a terrible story. But I kept ruminating on it for days afterwards. There's something noble about that way of looking at things. By reserving blame for himself and feeling only gratitude toward the many people who tried in vain to help him, Jin-yong maximizes his own agency. He refuses to give in to fate, to say he got bested by circumstances beyond his control. If it's his fault, that means he can do better next time and turn failure into success.

There's always a dangerous balancing act with this kind of story. Blame the individual too much, and society gets off the hook for creating conditions nobody should have to overcome. Blame society too much, and the individual escapes responsibility for his own actions. Jin-yong decides it's better to err on the side of blaming himself, because this is the only way he can feel control of a life where fate seems at war with him. He may have lost the battle, but a reader can leave the story with a sense that he might still somehow, however improbably, win the war. He certainly won't win the war if he allows himself to dwell on how fate cheated him. Even if he does not manage to win the war, his failure is one of the noblest things I can imagine.

I've thought about this story virtually every time I've faced any kind of adversity since I first read it. Not that I would dare compare myself to the many real people who have faced lives like Jin-yong's, but I do think that I, as a first-worlder, have a lot to learn from people like Jin-yong. We focus a lot on the impact of society on the individual in the first world, which sometimes makes us lose our drive to overcome that impact. I love this story for the way it restores my drive.

3. As much as it focuses on individual responsibility, it is very much about how we are all bound together.

People help Jin-yong along the way. His teacher, the old men at city hall who arrange to get him on the road quickly, the bus driver, his uncle. And the great thing about Jin-yong is that he notices these things. On the first morning of his trip, when the bus first starts to have problems, the driver and his on-board young mechanic work together to nurse the bus onward. Jin-yong thinks that, "Compared to himself, sitting with nothing useful to do but wait, he felt sorry for the driver and his helper who kept working hard in the cold. And he felt nothing but gratitude for their hard work, which would enable him to take care of his work that day."

Jin-yong repeats this gratitude over and over. It's one of the reasons he's so easy to root for. He comes from a culture that understands the bonds that tie people to one another. He find it easy to empathize with others. Even when the woman delays him further by crying over her stolen money, he feels sorry for her and her family who will have to live without the money. Jin-yong's entire motivation for pulling himself up by his bootstraps is to take care of his family, not to be rich himself.

There are some incredibly touching moments of kindness Jin-yong receives, much of it from grumbling old men who pretend to be much put out by Jin-yong's impertinence and impatience.

Much as Jin-yong's self-blame allows him to maintain a feeling of control over his destiny, the care others show to Jin-yong allows the story to both reflect the real troubles in society but also to demonstrate that love and kindness are at work as well, and can do much to help overcome those troubles.

Reviews of stories abuse the word "beautiful." This is one of the few stories I've ever read I would call beautiful. The wildflower never actually makes an appearance in the story, but if I had to guess what the meaning of the title is, I'd say it has to do with how the beauty of something can lay hidden in the ground for a long time before it is evident. South Korea's strong social ties and the belief of Korean individuals that they controlled their own fate allowed the country to turn from a devastated country to the powerhouse it is today almost overnight.

I've thought about this story more than any short story I've ever read. I'd love a chance to translate it for real so I can spend more time thinking about it.

What makes a story not work? "The Bar Beach Show" by Olabajo Dada

When I started a concerted effort last fall to blog more reviews of contemporary literature, I was worried I wouldn't be able to be honest when I thought something fell short. I'm a writer myself, and in a literary market that seems based on a lot of Twitter-based mutual admiration between writers, I worried I'd be blacklisting myself if I didn't radiate enthusiasm about every story. I was spared having to find out for the most part when I blogged through Best American Short Stories, because I honestly liked 18 of the 20 stories in the collection.

Now, I've come to a story in the Pushcart Anthology I don't think was up to snuff, and if I'm going to have any integrity about this, I need to call it like I see it. I don't get any kind of snarky thrill out of picking apart a story, but I really think there were some fatal flaws in "The Bar Beach Show" by Olabajo Dada.

It's a promising plot: a man makes coffins for the Nigerian military, who puts on a show every other Sunday (the titular Bar Beach Show) where the military publicly executes prisoners by tying them to barrels on the beach and mowing them down with machine guns. Akanji, the coffin maker, isn't really into this job, but he's got a sick wife and he needs to pay for her medical care. There's a lot of potential here for heavy-hitting social commentary. So why doesn't the story work?

An actual photo of a Nigerian prison. Found on grandmarketsquare.com, which did not credit the photographer

1. The prose is sloppy. This story badly needed editing. The first paragraph has this sentence: "On the day of the show, while children played soccer and flew kites around lovers moseying along the shoreline, who patronized hawkers peddling snacks, and swimmers rose and fell with the waves, soldiers set up barrels right next to a bamboo stage where invited musical guests entertained the crowd just before the show's most popular attraction." I don't even think that sentence is grammatically correct. The clause "who patronized hawkers..." is unclearly linked to what came before; I first thought the children were patronizing hawkers, but then I realized it was the lovers moseying along the shoreline. But that's all within the "around lovers..." clause, which means we've got one hell of an interrupting clause. The clause is so long, in fact, that it interrupts the parallelism of "children played soccer and swimmers rose and fell" such that by the time I got to the swimmers, I was all turned around in the sentence and had to go back and read it again and again. There are a lot of these kinds of constructions in the story, where sentences are so impatient to get information to the reader they can't finish one sentence before starting in with something new. A lot of the story needed to take a breath and slow down.

In fact, there's another guilty sentence in the first paragraph: "Then, with much ceremony and to deafening cheers and jeers, the soldiers paraded newly condemned criminals and tied them up to the barrels. And while they wailed and pleaded and ceaselessly pleaded their innocence, the soldiers yanked out their assault rifles and mowed down the convicts like inanimate paper targets. Their bodies..." There are two subject pronouns here that don't refer to the subject nouns that came immediately before them. Soldiers are the subject of the first sentence, but then the "they" that follows in the next sentence refers to the object of the soldier's action, the prisoners, not the soldiers. Once we've made this shift to prisoners as the subject, we then move back to soldiers doing the action of "yanking," but then we immediately get back to a "their" that refers to the bodies of prisoners, not soldiers. This would have been easy to edit down. I'd have rejected the story after that first paragraph. Yes, I can understand what it means, but why make the opening lines disrespect me enough to make me work that hard?

2. There are a lot of weak adjectives doing all the work. I never really saw the scenes here, because there isn't much in the way of imagery. We get a lot of adjectives. Page one: flashy, deafening, succulent (in a way I'm not sure made sense), inanimate, sombre, ear-splitting (also in a way I don't think makes sense--is a hammer ear-splitting?). The attempts at imagery don't really work, like soldiers shooting people like paper targets. That's just comparing one thing soldiers shoot to another thing they shoot. Not much imagination at work there. Later on, we get, "Two hefty soldiers off loaded the truck while a stocky officer stood by supervising, arms akimbo." That's a sentence that could have been written by any beginning fiction student.

3. The organization seems off. There are eight sections to the story. All but two are from Akanji's point-of-view. Only two and seven differ, and the characters from two aren't the same as seven. Those sections are really just there to get information to the reader we couldn't get another way, not to establish new characters or a new reality to the world of the story. These characters really don't get to be anything more than automatons necessary to move the plot. These two sections don't have enough power on their own to justify their break from the rest of the story.

4. The plot is a cheat, entirely meant to give us a surprise. Akanji sold his soul to help his wife, but guess what? His wife is dying anyway, and he's going to get double-crossed by the major he works for! For some reason, Major Okoro is worried enough about whether his coffin maker's heart is in the work that he tells another character (in section seven, when Akanji is absent), that he's going to find a new carpenter and kill Akanji. Why the hell would he do that? Couldn't he just fire Akanji? Is he worried that Akanji will somehow blow the lid off the big scandal that Okoro made money off selling the coffins to wives of victims? Of all the scamming things he's got going on, he's really worried about this one? More than he's worried about a trail of murders he'll create to cover up what seems a small crime in the world of the story?

The promise of the plot is in its social commentary, its satirical take on a Nigeria wanting to put on a show to discourage lawlessness while corruptly preying off the weak. It's fine to end a story about the evil state with "I fought the law and the law won," but Akanji doesn't even fight. He has no arc at all, not even a negative one. No character does. In fact, every character in the story other than Akanji is a cutout, just there to serve the interests of the plot. There is no change in anything from beginning to end. There is no hint at what is special about Nigerian corruption compared to corruption anywhere else in the world. I don't feel I learned anything, even knowing as little as I do about Nigeria, from beginning to end. There is nothing in this story that offers hope or an explanation for why there is no hope. It's just an anecdote, told in mediocre language, with a bit of a twist.


That wasn't any fun at all.

Checkmate, theists: "Midwinter" by D. Nurkse

When a story is only one page long, like "Midwinter" by D. Nurkse, you'd think the author wouldn't have time to start off with what seems like a digression: a Sunday School teacher asks her children a religious trick question. But "Midwinter" is, in fact, entirely about God, and the opening is no digression, but leading us right into the main point. It's nice to have a story that's about the big stuff. I think most people, even if we don't like to admit it, even if we're pretty determined agnostics or atheists and unlikely to change, still think about God fairly often. It doesn't make sense to never write stories that clearly tackle subjects including God.

In "Midwinter," we start with a question from a religious teacher, "Could you love God in a world without death?" This question belongs to a school of reasoning in Christianity called theodicy, or the attempt to explain how evil can exist in a world governed by a God who is both all-loving and all-powerful. This question from the teacher is kind of a weak offering in this school. It's akin to the "if there were no evil, we wouldn't appreciate good" line of argument. A better argument for those who try to reconcile God and suffering is to appeal to free will, stating that God did not want moral slaves, because He wanted creatures capable of loving Him and obeying Him freely. Such freedom HAS to allow evil to exist, Christians argue, but the ability to love freely also means the ability to choose not to love. If nobody can hurt other people, then love is meaningless. There are downsides, like ALL THE SUFFERING EVER IN HUMAN HISTORY, but freely given love from an agent with free will is enough of a good that it outweighs all the bad that exists. (I'm intentionally kind of mangling the argument there, but even expressed well, it's not much more convincing, at least to me.)

I've always thought this made God seem like kind of a negligent parent. As human parents, we also want to allow our kids to grow up to make their own decisions, but we also understand we can't let them knock the bloody hell out of other kids "or else they will never really be free." I don't understand why free will has to be an absolute, such that God really could not occasionally stop talking and having wine with the other deities long enough to come back to the playground and break up a fight or two. Why can't God have the same sense a human parent does? Why do we have to allow for the fullness of human depravity in order for love to mean anything?

As Shakespeare put it, "There was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently." No matter how strong your philosophical argument for why suffering is possible with a loving God who has the ability to end it, it will never satisfy the existential feeling of suffering. Even those who don't directly experience suffering on this scale ought to have enough empathy to realize the universe doesn't make sense.  

"Midwinter" works as a fictional short argument against theodicy. The children are unable to answer the question their teacher poses to them. They are thinking of their uncles, away in Korea in "the winter after Inchon." That is to say, in the winter of 1950, the winter that would make David Halberstam call his brilliant history of the Korean war The Coldest Winter. Their uncles are carrying things: "a bazooka, canned peas, pictures of us." (And here, the callback to "The Things They Carried" was almost so hammy it broke the spell, but not quite.) Those "pictures of us" bring us an ironic parallelism. The uncles are away in a war that makes no sense, a war that challenges theodicy. But they attempt to hold onto their beliefs by thinking of their loved ones back home. Meanwhile, those loved ones back home are having the very beliefs the uncles need to hold onto challenged by thinking of what the uncles are enduring.

In spite of attempts to skirt around the question, such as the response of one class clown, "probably for half an hour," there is no getting around the fact that there just isn't a good answer to it. The students can feel this more than they can reason it out. That's the real problem with theodicy arguments, I think--they might have some power in an abstract sense, but they really do nothing to assuage the sense one gets while enduring suffering that this just isn't right. The story ends with the students wondering why nobody has fixed the squeaking heating system, which reminds them all of hamsters going around on endless wheels. We end with a mini-allegory of man and God:

Oil it!  We said under our breath. Who knows why it never happened--who skipped a day on the task chart, who was distracted, why that small trapped creature is still advancing, there in the darkest month, in the cage of a circular journey.

God is the negligent maintenance man, and all humanity is the hamster stuck on the wheel, uselessly going around in the middle of bleakest winter.

It's like Dusk 'Til Dawn, only good: "Spectral Evidence" by Victor Lavalle

Remember that old Richard Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino movie where about halfway through, it stops being a movie about bank robbers and becomes a vampire movie? That's what Victor Lavalle's "Spectral Evidence" reminded me of, except that unlike that movie, all the parts of Lavalle's story work, both in part and as a whole.

It starts off like an unsuspecting, regular-old literary fiction story. We've got a woman who runs a psychic business. She knows she's a fraud. She prepares for each customer by telling herself they all know she's a fraud, too. That's her life as it's introduced to us, but then we get the plot-moving complication: a girl comes in and wants to know if her mother, now a few years dead, is still alive somewhere. The girl, Abby, wants to know a little more than that, actually. The form her question takes is the question we'd all like to know: "Is there something...after all this?" The psychic is especially affected by this, because the girl makes her think of her own daughter, Sonia, and what it would have been like for her daughter if the psychic had died when Sonia was a girl.

That's a good start, but then it gets weird and better. The psychic goes home, flashes back to thoughts of her daughter, during which we learn that Sonia killed herself not too long ago. The psychic had been estranged from Sonia for four years prior to Sonia jumping off a building. That's an interesting story development, and one that helps explain why the psychic connected with Abby so much. But there's a much bigger twist coming. Turns out the psychic actually does hear from her dead daughter Sonia. The woman who knows she is a fraud when she talks to customers about communications from beyond death actually hears from dead people.

But the funny thing about it is that her daughter only says one thing to her psychic mother. It's the same thing, over and over: It's too dark in here.

In the third act, Abby's father comes to the psychic's business. He is distraught, and there is a hint of violence brewing. It turns out Abby killed herself not long after leaving the psychic's business. When the psychic answered Abby's question about "is there something after this" with a simple yes, that seems to have maybe been the impetus for Abby committing suicide. Having been reassured that she wouldn't end with killing herself, Abby decided to go ahead with something she'd been considering a long time. Maybe Abby hoped to be reunited with her mother.

It's not long after this that the psychic starts to hear from Abby, too. The message is no different from the one from Sonia: It's too dark in here. As with Sonia, the psychic can hear the message, but she doesn't know what it means.

The psychic resolves to quit lying to people, but this doesn't mean what we'd expect it to mean. For the psychic, it doesn't mean she's going to stop telling people about the messages from the dead. Rather, she's going to tell people exactly what those messages say. The story thus becomes the first step in her resolution to tell the truth, no matter how disturbing that truth may be.

We, the reader, can try to puzzle out along with the narrator what "it's too dark in here" means, but I think the point is that if there is a message for the living from the dead, the living either are too daft to understand it or it's too frightening to be fit for our ears. So it's best to ignore it. It's a rather life-affirming message, in the "there's nothing but this life, so you'd better pay attention" kind of way. In this sense, this quick-hitting little story with two suicides and messages from the dead turns out to be all about how important life is.

If you're going to write a satire, why be subtle about it? "All Politics" by Jessica Burstein

I was halfway through my master's degree in English at University of Illinois at Chicago in 2003 and had been accepted by the school to the Ph.D. program. Halfway through getting a master's, though, was enough for me to see that academia in the humanities was an insane asylum. Nothing I've heard from friends who continued on that route and are now working as professors has ever made me regret my decision. As much as my current work might be a bureaucratic mess, and as many head-scratching moments of "is this really what I want to do for a living?" it induces, it's a drop in the ocean to what my friends seem to face.

That's also the vibe I get from Jessica Burstein's "All Politics," included in the 2019 Pushcart Anthology. The title is misleading, because politics hardly figure directly in the story at all, but in another sense, it's right on the nose, because the entire point of the story is the political uselessness of humanities departments. As much as folks complain that the humanities have gotten "too political" or are "all about politics," in reality, they're so deep in their own dysfunctional cultures, they're hardly political at all. Or, to put it another way, if everything is political, then nothing is.

The first-person narrator, who only tells us her nickname of "Red DeMur," a name she is a little too proud to have picked up from black people at the gym-- "not the black guys who work at the university; the other black guys"--has gotten a fellowship to Oxford. She glibly reveals that the subject of her lectures that won the fellowship--"installation art, mostly earthworks"--is something she is only dabbling in, but dirt is somehow trendy, and she gets the gig. She's happy to escape the increasing budget cuts of American universities: "taking out the phone lines, restricting our access to the copy machines (professors still love to copy things), shutting down the library, merging the humanities with the new Diversity in Diversity Zion Protocols Center..." In Oxford, however, she finds that the humanities are equally impotent. The only difference is, as she puts it by way of how Brits and Americans work out at the gym, that "Americans grunt; the Brits just endure, quietly." Americans humanities departments might make more fuss about their growing irrelevance, loss of status and budgets, but it's happening to them just the same. (Of course, even Americans don't make that much fuss. As Red tells us: "...in these days of budgetary brouhaha, the university was getting it in the neck. And taking it, since basically, American professors are spineless. By basically I mean unequivocally. American professors are the worst. Or as we like to term it, the best.")

Along the way to discovering the differences across the pond, "Red" gives us the usual list of accusations against the humanities, although in such crisp and witty detail they feel fresh. She name-drops intellectuals, pop culture icons, and artists, both putting them into the mouths of her characters and also putting the actual famous people into her story to interact with Red. Red considers feeling empathy for a moment for humanities students, but then realizes they are "willfully oppressed," and therefore not in "actual need of empathy." This frees her as a professor to enjoy "being pandered to." Meanwhile, much of her narrative, far from being the insightful and revealing narrative we'd think it should be from someone who is allegedly an expert in culture, is full of banalities. These are the funniest part of the story. Burstein is really good at nailing these. For example: "So off I went to Oxford. It's in England. Long flight. Oxford was neat. They put me up in an apartment, or, as they say there, a 'flat.'" At least one-third of the story is Red talking about how she works out at the gym.

Much of the name-dropping is full of red herrings, an example of how in the humanities, it can be as important to make sure you signal that you are aware of the influential figures as it is to actually have original and intelligent thoughts about them. When Red wears a shirt where a woman is blowing her brains out with a gun, but the blood comes out as butterflies, the best she can come up with is to say that it's somehow "very symbolic." This was, by the way, the same thing one of her students had to say about the "Out of the Woods" video she saw while taking Red's Taylor Swift symposium.

Enough. Burstein did a good enough job beating the hell out of humanities departments that I don't need to keep explaining how she did it. It's a good reminder that I'm glad I didn't go down that route, and I'm happy to move on to the next story knowing I avoided at least one land mine in my life. 

Elegy without a ceremony: "Secrets Deep in Tiger Forests" by Poe Ballantine

Fiction often deals with tragedies and traumas, but there are a number of performative functions a story can play in framing a trauma. It can memorialize, lament, celebrate, heal, criticize, exhort, blame, excuse, or simply bear witness. None of these approaches is better than the others. For major traumas in human history, such as the Holocaust, it's important that culture produce art that plays all of these roles.

A culture can, perhaps, end up with an imbalance in the actions the stories of a particular generation perform. It can produce too many patriotic stories in response to trauma, for example. For 20 years after Eritrea gained independence from Ethiopia, its literature produced little else than stories lionizing the martyrs of the revolution and pointing to their suffering as a reason why Eritrea needed to go it alone.

I wonder if American literature hasn't produced too much literature of the lament or elegy form in response to the non-stop American wars of the last 17 years. The veteran with PTSD story is so ubiquitous nowadays, I wonder if it's partly responsible for the stereotype that all veterans suffer from it. If this is true, then the very act of creating stories meant to help veterans may be inadvertently hurting some of them.

Stories don't have to be about Iraq or Afghanistan to really be about Iraq or Afghanistan. Much like M*A*S*H used the Korean War to comment on the war in Vietnam, some writers are using Vietnam as a stand-in for talking about the Unending Wars. (I talked about a story like this in 2017.)

"Secrets Deep in Tiger Forests" by Poe Ballantine is also such a story. It's set in what appears to be a working-class neighborhood during the Vietnam War, at a time when young men are coming home in body bags or as shadows of their former selves. The unnamed first-person narrator is a teenager only a few years shy of the same age as the young men who went off to war from his neighborhood. He observes the effect of the war on those around him, especially Raja, the older son of the Carrs next door.

The Carrs have had a lot of bad luck, it seems. Mrs. Carr died a year before the story takes place, and her oldest son Raja "went off to war a serious boy in a uniform, but when he came back, he was no longer Raja." Raja can't even talk. He just laughs and smiles. Raja's younger brother Whitey is acting out, beating up on the narrator once a week, and then being nice sometimes in between beatings. Mavis, the older of two daughters, is pregnant, and gossip says her father is also the father of her baby, although the father has since also died of leukemia. The youngest daughter, Queenie, is starting to show signs of a budding sexuality herself, a sexuality the narrator notices, and it probably won't be long before she gets pregnant herself.

The narrator comes home one day to find Raja has been carted off to a mental health facility. He'd have gone to the facility sooner, but the wait to get in was too long. The family couldn't keep taking care of him. The story ends with a grief that can't find a voice: "...old peasant women with mangled teeth who yacked and yelled at me without a sound."

It's a very short story, and maybe best viewed as a sad bildungsroman in which the narrator learns about the world he's about to inherit and doesn't find much to look forward to. The kids in the neighborhood who've just gone the path he's about to go down came back mean or broken or dead. America is a place where young men are very often fed to whatever issue politicians believe cannot possibly be resolved without sending them to die. It still is. As much as America wanted to keep the Unending Wars from becoming Vietnam when they started, they became much more Vietnam than even Vietnam was. Even President Trump cannot find a way to end our never-ending commitments there, although he's certainly tried, above the complaints of his generals.

Yes, Colonel Potter, that sums up my thoughts on 18 years of war with no end in sight.

In addition to a bildungsroman, the story could also be seen as an elegy. It's meant to honor and remember Raja and those like him who came back a shadow of what they were when they left. As Lincoln said of another group of war dead, it is "altogether fitting and proper" that we should honor our casualties of war like this.

But the story doesn't really offer any kind of way out for young men touched by war. For those dealing with the after-effects of war, the narrative in this story and in our culture seems to be that you will be forever broken, and it's okay. Society can only commiserate with you in your brokenness, not try to find a way to make you whole.

Contrast this with another story of a war veteran who came back changed, the unforgettable  Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko.  It's about a WW-II vet, the mixed-race Tayo, who comes back from hell in the Pacific. He is at risk of following the route many native Americans who came back from the war did, losing himself in alcohol. But medicine men help Tayo to find his own ceremony in a world that is losing all sense of the sacred, his own way to repair the broken web of the world.

The reality of Ceremony is every bit as awful as that of "Secrets Deep." Silko wasn't ducking reality by having Tayo find a way back after hell. I'm not suggesting that stories should never end without redemption. Nor do I object to occasionally dwelling or even fetishizing our sadness. I am an artist, after all. But I wonder if our generation has too great a fondness for merely diagnosing our ills. If we can post on social media about our solidarity with troops struggling to overcome trauma, we feel we've done our job.

James Mattis has spoken before about how emphasizing the PTSD aspect of military service may not be helping military members to get better. Of course we should recognize and treat illness. But as folks used to say in church, that doesn't mean we need to spend so much time talking about the devil we end up praising him. It's okay to encourage people to put themselves back together. It doesn't all have to be appreciating how broken they are.

Maybe it's because when it comes to repairing spiritual wounds, our culture doesn't have much to offer. We have no ceremonies to cleanse ourselves, because we don't believe in anything sacred. Our view of psychological healing is a consumer one: we go to a professional who gives us drugs. We continue going forever, which means we consume forever.

I'm not saying nobody should see a psychiatrist, although I wish we were as skeptical about diagnoses of depression as we are about diagnosing too many kids with attention deficit disorder. But we need more than just a consumer doctor-patient model to make us well again. We need a spiritual life as a society. One of the sources of that healing spirituality is our mythology, our stories.

There's nothing wrong with Ballantine's story. Ballantine isn't to blame for the predilections of society. But the fact this story made it into a year's best anthology says something, I think, about how our culture views trauma and recovery. For us, a coming-of-age story about war and trauma is complete when we realize how psyche-rending the trauma is. The boy is a man when he is unmoored, confused, sexually frustrated, and unable to find a voice to express all that he now knows.

New story up: "Haulers" is now on Crack the Spine

Just a short post here to announce my latest story to get published. It's called "Haulers," and it's here on Crack the Spine. Basic premise: guy who hauls trash for a living is having a hard time getting over his 15 minutes of infamy that happened when he ended up in a viral video he'd rather forget.

More to say later about this story and how it came to be, but for now, I'll just let the story do the talking. Have a great weekend.