What's my motivation here? "Our Children" by Vanessa Cuti, Best American Short Stories 2021

Non-writers might think all writers agree that it's important to reveal a fictional character's motivations for what they do and say. We're all familiar with that line put into the mouth of flustered actors and actresses: What's my character's motivation here? Actors supposedly find it impossible to embody a character without having enough of a backstory to understand why they are doing the things called for in the script. Many (most, probably) literary stories seem to want to give the reader something similar to what these theoretical actors are asking their directors to give them--an understanding of what is going on in the character's head and why.

But there are some who argue for something quite different. Aatif Rashid explains this contrarian view of motivation here: 

In Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt argues that Shakespeare’s characters are compelling because he makes their motivations purposefully unclear in order to create greater psychological complexity: “Shakespeare found that he could immeasurably deepen the effect of his plays, that he could provoke in the audience and in himself a peculiarly passionate intensity of response, if he took out a key explanatory element, thereby occluding the rationale, motivation, or ethical principle that accounted for the action that was to unfold. The principle was not the making of a riddle to be solved, but the creation of a strategic opacity. This opacity, Shakespeare found, released an enormous energy that had been at least partially blocked or contained by familiar, reassuring explanations.”

This idea clearly challenges one of the traditional notes almost every writer receives in a writing workshop, that readers didn’t fully understand what a character wanted and so the writer should clarify those motivations. Add a backstory that explains why this character decided to leave their husband. Tell us about their mother and father so we can understand why they’re so withdrawn. Give them some past trauma to explain their present depression. Alongside such notes, we’re also taught that a character’s want should drive the story’s plot. And so, writers end up clarifying their characters’ desires with such precision that their narratives becomes perfect structures of cause and effect—this character left her husband because her mother never left her abusive father. This character is withdrawn because his mother never told him she loved him. This character is depressed because her brother drowned when she was young. It’s Freud reduced to teleology, and it cheapens the complex reality of human experience.

It would be wrong to think that providing motivation is an either/or choice. It's more like a spectrum. You can provide zero clues as to motivation ("John shot Bob"). You can provide small clues as to motivation ("John shot Bob because he hated him,") leaving it up to the reader to try to find clues in the text that would explain the hatred. You can give a simple backstory ("John shot Bob because he hated him for having rejected his script for a Game of Thrones spin-off with Tormond Giantsbane working in a modern-day cubicle job.) Or you could go one more step--probably too far--and give the backstory and then also explain what the backstory did to the psyche of the character. ("John shot Bob because he hated him for rejecting his script; for you see, John always had an inferiority complex that came out when he was rejected...")

There's probably not one right answer for all stories. Different stories likely feel more or less satisfying with different levels of revelation of motivation. It's important to pick the right one for each story, not have a grand aesthetic to cover all fiction.

"Our Children" leans toward not explaining motivation

In "Our Children, a woman first divorces a man with whom she had two children, then marries the man she left him for, who also has two children. They endure all the turmoil of upending two families and starting a new life together. There are four major life choices the main character makes, which are given differing levels of explanation as to motivation. However, the tendency for all is to lean toward less explanation, rather than more.

Choice One: Deciding to marry husband #1 (Peter) in the first place. From the first line, we see a character who doesn't put too much stress on the "why" of her life choices. She begins to explain her life by saying, "I was once married to a man." This matter-of-factness, the way she was married to "a man," as if any man would have fit the bill, tells us a lot about her lack of introspection when making major decisions. Perhaps it's normal for young people. Nearly everyone, whether they got divorced or not, can relate to her saying she "didn't know what marriage was supposed to be. I had no idea what I was expecting." This is close to "John shot Bob." 

Choice Two: Leaving Peter for husband #2 (Dan). The main character shows more agency about this choice, more conscious thought behind her decision. She calls him "Dan" in the first line about him, rather than a generic "man." She provides an attempt to explain why she fell for him: he was feeling sweet potatoes in the grocery store, something the narrator also does but most people don't. This would be in the "John shot Bob because he hated him" realm of exposition: yeah, it's an explanation, but it invites further questions. In spite of being somewhat more in charge of her own destiny with this choice, the main character is still somewhat passive when meeting Dan. She talks of "something that happens to me," and the reader begins to suspect that her life is all "something that happens to her" and few actions she is willing to own. The main character seems to believe fate dictates life in ways she cannot control: "Everything that was to happen had already begun to happen." 

The main character does sometimes show flashes of a more active side to her, usually in the form of outbursts of anger. This anger tends to be focused at the combined children she and Dan share. She flips a bowl and swears in front of them to show she is capable of being formidable. She enjoys the quieter, more adult-like feeling of the house when the children are not around. She describes it as "cooler." Preferring cool things to hot makes sense for a character who prefers to avoid taking responsibility for her own life. Hot is the temperature of active things. 

When thinking about how she would explain being a homewrecker to Dan's ex-wife, she still uses the language of someone who feels more like a victim of fate than a captain of it. "I wouldn't have chosen it this way." "Two people fell in love...I did not intend for this to happen." "There was a glitch." And so on. 

Choice three: Leaving the children at a cabin. This is probably the most consequential decision she makes. It is also the one that has, paradoxically, both the most and the least attempt at an explanation. It's got plenty of attempts at an explanation--it was that black tail of smoke from the fire, it was the rot in the walls, it was the sound of a raccoon eating a chipmunk--but they all seem to be non-sensical. If she had ever been hauled into court and forced to explain her actions, it probably would have come down to this: "I wasn't in my right mind." Again, she uses the language of one being passively controlled, "a puppet waking, someone's hand in my back." There is no motivation to give because there almost is no motivation. A puppet has no motivation of its own.

Choice four: Going back for the kids. While most people have never left their children in the wilderness, anyone can understand the sense of panic the main character felt, the question she puts to Dan, "Do you know what our lives will be like" if they don't leave the children.

The decision to go back is obviously a turning point in the main character's life. She has done it on her own, without even Dan coming with her. (Karen Carlson read it as the couple going back together, but I didn't see Dan in there. I guessed he was still passed out back home.) She has obviously made a choice to be mother to "our children" by the end. The concluding scene shows her at her most motherly, calling to the children. A transformation has happened. But why? Surely a character's cathartic moment of transformation should have some kind of account of how it happened, right? 

When she panics in the cabin, leaves the kids, and convinces Dan to run with her, they go back home, get drunk and high, and have sex all over the place. She then has a possibly drug-induced vision of an imaginary future for the four children. It's something of a Swiss Family Robinson/Robinson Crusoe dream. The four children would immediately adapt to living in the wild, learn to live off the land, and thrive.

I tend to think leaving a bunch of kids alone in the wild would end up like this more than what the narrator imagines.

Why would this make her go back at top speed to be with the kids before they woke up? Wouldn't it have the opposite effect? A catharsis has clearly taken place in which the main character has changed and is now actively choosing to be a mother, but unlike most turning points, we have nothing to tell us why. She was picturing them happy without her, picturing herself happy without them, and then in the next scene, she is barreling down the highway to return to their "hot, sweet" bodies. (Okay, that sounds bad to say "hot, sweet bodies" about kids, but it's not pervy.)   

One possible reading is that she never really ran out of the cabin. At the end of her vision of the children's future, she imagines her daughter one day marrying Dan's son. "They mate like bobcats on a flat rock in the sun. Or like humans in a room of the cabin, its door locked." Maybe her sudden return in her vision to the cabin where she ran out from is her mind returning to the cabin she never actually physically left. Soon after imagining the children marrying, she thinks of names they might give their child, and the last one she thinks of is "something familial" like Dan. And then the scene changes and she's eastbound and down back to the cabin. Was this small thought of "something familial" among all the other parts of her vision enough to make her choose the life she has apparently chosen by the end?

Or was it the episode with the deer in her vision? The kids kill a deer, meaning to eat it, then realize they have no idea how to safely butcher a deer carcass. Not wanting to die of food poisoning, they leave the animal, but not before one boy takes its tooth as a trophy, thinking "things die for no reason all the time." Was this a terrifying enough intrusion on her fantasy that she decided to go rescue the kids?  

We don't know. This isn't the kind of story that's going to beat us over the head with explanations of motivation. But maybe we can think of what makes choices three and four different from choices one and two. The main character seems to have made choices in life somewhat without much forethought, guided only by instinct. She has regretted some choices, and wonders why she couldn't have made the best choices all along. Still, she has freedom to undo the decisions she regrets, which allows her to remain somewhat passively pulled along by the river of fate. Until kids come along. Kids are the end of a significant portion of liberty. They are the end of the ability to passively let life come to you. You have to be actively in it with kids. 

Of course, she had kids before leaving her first husband for Dan, but they didn't have the same "hot" feeling to them. Her own kids, she could probably think of as something that "happened" to her, but a big blended family of kids is something she chose. Or needs to choose. 

This realization causes a moment of panic in her (whether real or imagined), but the panic eventually resolves itself. We're not going to go deep into the why. We're not going to get a backstory from her childhood about why she was a commitment-phobe. She was scared and then she wasn't. Since every reader can relate to the panic that comes with having children (even if they've never had them), every reader can easily imagine that there is a good reason without being given one. Iago hates Othello. Why? Who knows, but people hate others for lots of reasons, so maybe sometimes it's enough to just know someone hates someone else, just as anyone can understand the angst surrounding kids (even if we know our own damn decisions gave us those kids) and the final decision to stay with them. 

Karen Carlson noted something similar about the lack of motivation in her take here. Rhiannon Morgan-Jones expresses her sympathy for the mother and the her difficulty managing the expectations put on mothers here. 

To hold, as 'twere: "The Miracle Girl" by Rita Chang-Eppig (Best American Short Stories)

C.S. Lewis once wrote that no miracle could possibly take place that skeptics wouldn't see as explainable by natural forces, and no natural phenomenon could take place that a believer wouldn't see as miraculous if determined to do so. To Lewis, this meant that what people saw in a claimed miraculous event told you more about what those people believed going in than it did about the event itself. I'm not sure this is always a solid heuristic; I believe there is an objective reality and that it is what it is independent of what humans bring to it. However, there are a number of cases where the observer really does play a role in determining what is really going on, and literature often sets up these kinds of cases.

In Rita Chang-Eppig's "The Miracle Girl," the reader comes across a number of open questions, which are voiced or merely implied to varying degrees. The point-of-view character is Xiao Xue, overlooked and underloved second sister to Xiao Chun, who miraculously experiences the stigmata while attending a Catholic school run by missionaries in Taiwan soon after Mao's revolution has swept Chiang Kai-shek off the mainland. Xiao Xue finds her older sister's miraculous signs and wonders to be more of a nuisance than a blessing. It reminds Xiao Xue how much more everyone loves and adores her older sister than her. Xiao Xue's feeling of being second-best in a race between two people (i.e. last place) is mirrored by the feelings of racial inferiority inculcated into her by the missionary school, where she is taught to believe that "Mongoloids" are a second-class race of people. 

The answers to the following open questions will be answered differently by every reader, such that the text is holding up a mirror to the reader as much as it is opening a window into its characters. Here are some of the half-spoken questions going on in the story:

Open questions

1. Is Xiao Chun really experiencing miraculous signs? One need not be a Christian to accept that within the context of this fictional story, a character could "really" be replicating Jesus's wounds in her own body. The narrator begins the story by off-handedly treating it as a miracle: "On the first day of her stigmata...." However, in the second paragraph, the village doctor Wong Daifu asks her whether she "didn't hurt herself accidentally," a doubt that never quite goes away. The wounds are described as "thin ovals with fringes of red, protruding skin." Would that be a miraculously repeated crucifixion wound, or is that more like what you'd see if someone had dug into her own skin in order to fake a stigmata? 

Xiao Chun generally evinces a truly devout and generous soul, giving away her lunches to others, showing generosity to her sister when others are upset by her, and generally being "the inside of a nautilus shell, bright and pure." But there are hints that Xiao Chun isn't all she seems. As much as Xiao Chun talks about God's love, Xiao Xue certainly never felt that love when she was being punished by Sister Eunice at the missionary school. "Xiao Chun never once defended her or begged Sister Eunice to stop. Instead she watched Sister Eunice mete out the punishment, "the impulse of a smile at the corner of her lips." Xiao Chun does seem genuinely pious, and as such would be the sort of person blessed with the stigmata. But is she a little too pious, such that we might suspect she is stigmata-ing herself because she wishes to have that level of approval from God? In the most cynical reading, might she be faking miracles just to show up her sister? 

2. A second question is the obverse of question number one: Is Xiao Xue guilty of the sin of envy, such that she is at odds with her sainted sister for no reason, or is she a victim of being made to feel second-class by everyone such that her rebellion is justified? Is Xiao Xue like the unnamed narrator of Robert Browning's Poem "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," in which one monk spews hatred and jealousy of another one for imagined hypocrisy? 

Certainly, there are people in Xiao Xue's world who think she's guilty of envy. Xiao Chun for one, who forgives Xiao Xue when she hacks up Xiao Chun's hair while she is asleep. When Xiao Xue shows herself ungrateful for being forgiven, Xiao Chun warns her that "envy is a dangerous sin." We could write off Xiao Chun's interpretation of her sister as Xiao Chun's own self-interested interpretation, but in at least one point in the story, it does seem that Xiao Chun is genuinely not a phony. It comes when Xiao Xue tries to steal attention back from Xiao Chun by eating berries she knows will make her sick. The plan fails and everyone ends up thinking Xiao Chun has miraculously healed her sister, making Xiao Xue even more jealous. On the way home from school, Xiao Chun delivers what seems like true and good advice:

"'Have you ever thought,' she said, 'that maybe I get more attention because I'm not constantly making trouble just to get it? Because I actually think about other people? All those times Mom had trouble standing after scrubbing the floor, did you once offer to help? Maybe you don't get attention because you don't deserve it.'" 

She walks off, leaving Xiao Xue to stew over her words for a beat that feels significant, like Xiao Xue should be reflecting on these words a bit just as we we as readers can't help but do. If this were a movie, that beat would strongly suggest sincerity on Xiao Chun's part (although we'd also want to read a lot into the tone of how the line was delivered, something we don't get in the text of the story). 

Of course, Xiao Chun could be right in a sense but also wrong in another. Perhaps Xiao Xue is petty and jealous. But can we blame her? She's an unwanted second daughter, told that she "always shows up at the wrong time," that Mongoloids are second-class, that she has ugly and untamable hair, that she should accept her ming (fate, more or less). Shouldn't we celebrate her rebellion, if that's what she's rebelling against? 

When Xiao Xue eventually begins an escalating series of self-harm actions to get attention, it's fairly understandable. If the stigmata are fake, then Xiao Xue is right to be upset, because her sister is faking it to get attention. But if they're real, then Xiao Xue also has reasons to feel bad. She already thinks that possibly her "sister was beautiful because God favored her." If God has also shown his approval of Xiao Chun through miraculous signs, how worthless does that make Xiao Xue by comparison? 

Have you read the good news of Heidi Pitlor? I was going to try to photoshop a Best American Short Stories anthology into their hands, but I lack the skills. 

3. Are the missionaries forces for good or evil? Nowadays, most people who aren't Christians (and many who are) are likely to think of the missionaries of yesteryear as an evil force, one that destroyed cultures and sought to beat the savage out of non-European people. This is especially true after more recent discoveries of massive graves of children at Indian schools in North America. The residents of Xiao Xue's village are a little more ambivalent about the missionaries, though. The missionaries make sure everyone is fed (at least everyone who shows up to church). They provide a school that's nearby so that students don't have to walk uphill both ways six miles in the snow. They speak the language, both the lingua franca of Mandarin and the local language of Hokkien. They're willing to sacrifice. Sister Eunice turned down a rich suitor in order to become a nun. All the missionaries faced danger when the Communists won the revolution. They aren't total hypocrites, and they're willing to back up the commitment in their words with actions. 

On the other hand, what the missionaries are preaching is clearly (to us) full of harm. They taught (often, apparently) a story of God giving baths to the various races. He gave white people a bath first, so they came out sparkling clean. Then he gave a bath to "mongoloids," who only got partly clean because the water was a little dirty from the first bathers. Then he gave a bath to people from Africa who got the least clean. Although Xiao Chun claims her sister is missing the point when she sees the lesson of the myth as "Asians are dirty" and "Asians are second-class," we readers in 2021 (2022 for me) can see that Xiao Xue is right. The missionaries, seeking to bring blessings to the poor savages, have caused permanent damage to their self-image, especially among the young people, who lack "immunity" from what they teach.

The missionaries and Xiao Chun

I think we can somewhat pull questions one and three together, because their answers are related. Xiao Chun almost certainly has some hypocrisy lurking behind her rapturous piety, some phoniness. The missionaries also, as countless movies, documentaries, novels, and breaking news items have told us, are hiding hypocrisy on their end as well. But none of that means that there isn't also some sincere goodness about them, nor that people should ignore all of the things they have to say. Xiao Xie is right to object to the world telling her she isn't good enough, but she should also listen when her sister tells her she ought to be more aware of others. We as readers can certainly pick out the hypocrisy of moralizers around us, but that doesn't necessarily free us from the obligation to sometimes do as the moralizers say, if not as they do. 

For the missionaries and Xiao Chun, although the story does portray them fairly, including both good and bad characteristics about both, at the end, they are not blameless. They have helped create such an inferiority complex in Xiao Xie that she has gone on a self-harm spree. The stigmata of approval in others has led to Xiao Xie's stigmata of desperation. 

Perhaps God/ming/the universe does smile on some people, for reasons that don't make any sense and aren't at all fair. Some are born beautiful, which studies have shown leads to all kinds of social advantages. Some are born in rich countries and have advantages the rest of the world does not, a fact which some of those in rich countries make take as a sign of God's approval. There are all kinds of privilege one can be given. (Privilege itself now being something which moralists of a different stripe are as happy to hit others over the head with as missionaries once were about Jesus.) This story shows the importance of employing that privilege with a light hand. To those without privilege, every exercise of that privilege (or social media post of the #blessed variety) can feel like an accusation or a reminder of how fate has blessed us all unequally, something that always makes those blessed less wonder what that means for them. 

Should Xiao Xie envy her sister for being beautiful and (possibly because she is beautiful and others are kind to her) kind? No. Should Xiao Chun be less smug about her own virtue, a virtue that might be a result of good fortune more than hard work? Definitely. There's a lot of blame here that sort of reminds me of the 2003 movie Monster, based on the life of serial killer Diane Wuornos. In that movie, instead of blame lying principally with either society or the criminal, we get blame all around. Society is completely guilty of having let Wuornos down. At the same time, Wuornos is also to blame for her inability to control her rage. It rejects the "personal responsibility/societal responsibility" false dichotomy that liberals and conservatives have been clashing over for two hundred years. 

As cleverly ambiguous as "The Miracle Girl" is, I think it's still a story with a moral lesson (as much as that is often seen as a criticism nowadays). It's not a pat lesson, like "envy is bad." It's as complicated as morality in real life is often complicated, with overlapping lanes of blame, responsibility, and the chaos of fate all interweaving. It's a morality built out of the reciprocity of social interaction, how all relationships involve a complex web of responsibilities to one another. 

I started by saying that people tend to read into stories what they bring into them. What you as a reader bring out of this will very much depend on where you were in life when you read it. Whether the mirror of this story reflects your status as Xiao Xie or Xiao Chun in the roulette wheel of life, it's a story relevant far beyond its specific historical moment, one that speaks volumes to a status- and social-media-obsessed world that wants to demonstrate God's favor through by self-marketing evidence of their own favor. It's a story that reminds us of the consequences of a world without kindness. 

 

Other readings of this story: 

Karen Carlson's at a Just Recompense

Rhiannon at Notes from this pretty sight (which Karen made me aware of)  

A shallow interpretation: "To Buffalo Eastward" by Gabriel Bump, Best American Short Stories 2021

I'm putting a disclaimer up front: I've only read The Great Gatsby once, in high school. I've also only read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man once, in college. I've never read Joyce's Ulysses, and from all I know of it, I never intend to. The Cliff's notes seem enough. 

That rather shabby background might seem to put me in a poor position to produce a credible reading of Gabriel Bump's short story "To Buffalo Eastward," since allusions to those three novels play such a central role in the narrative. However, I'm going to suggest that my half-assed familiarity with these three novels makes me, in fact, the perfect reader of this story.

That's because the narrative is full of characters who perform half-assed readings: of songs, of books, but mostly of people. The unnamed central character (Karen! The drinking game begins with the first story!) known only as "Invisible Man," is on their* way from northern Michigan to somewhere east of Buffalo. They're headed there after a disappointment in love. Not really a breakup, more a hoped-for, impossible dream that never fully materialized. Invisible Man was into a girl who turned out to be more interested in marrying a guy she'd been seeing. 

A journey to a destination is often the stuff of epics (like the original Ulysses), but in this case, it's something of an anti-epic. The great American travel adventure has always been about an adventure west, into the wild. Invisible Man, though, is headed back east, back past that great symbol of wild American adventure, the buffalo. IM's journey is much like their narrative--full of digressions and meanderings. They confess about their indirect story telling: "I have problems telling stories. I get on one track and backflip to another, running in the opposite direction." 

As the story slowly unfolds, IM stops at bookstores on the road and runs into a few people. The most notable of these people are the three IM meets near Cleveland, who all give names made up on the spot taken from novels. There's Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker, two women who name themselves for Great Gatsby characters, and then there's a carpenter/bookstore owner/landlord who calls himself Sancho Panza, Don Quixote's esquire. (Okay, I have read Quixote with a fair amount of care, and more than once, and in Spanish, but I don't think you really need to know more than most people know about it for this story.) 

Sancho and Invisible Man are having a drink in a bar while watching a baseball game. IM narrates some of the details of the game, but manages to get the name of one of the teams wrong, calling the Twins "Minneapolis" instead of "Minnesota." When the girls enter the bar, they ask what Sancho is reading, and are told it's Joyce. "Dubliners!" one of them shouts. "Finnegan's Wake!" shouts the other. They obviously have about an English 101 knowledge of Joyce. They probably have only read the books that were assigned to them in school, which is why they give themselves names from The Great Gatsby. They have a similar reaction to Invisible Man's name. "The lights!" one of the Great Gatsby girls yells, which is about all I can remember of that novel I read more than twenty years ago. 

The Great Gatsby girls are only capable of the most cursory understandings of the texts that lurk at the back of the story. Daisy Buchanan calls herself "alone and boring," meaning the character in the book she is named for is alone and boring. Her companion complains that this is "a shallow interpretation," but all the characters are interpreting shallowly. They listen to songs on the radio, but without trying to understand what they mean: "We tried to guess the words to songs we hadn't heard before, wouldn't hear again." They go through long periods of silence because "there was nothing to know." When they pile into Invisible Man's car, they can see IM's "life laid bare for them to inspect and handle" in all the books, clothes, and trash in the car, but instead of trying to learn from what's there, they throw it into the trunk with the rest of the mess. 

Everyone ends up going to an office building Sancho allegedly owns, where they pass several more people they catch only glimpses of. The entire world continually presents them with texts they are only reading the covers of. They get high off pills Sancho gives them. They spend hours talking about relationships that have gone bad, partly through the inability to truly understand the people in their lives. This talking, though, does not lead to real connection: "We spent hours like that: talking and not understanding one another's eyes."  

It's not that the characters do not desire something deeper. They are briefly attracted to "charts and graphs and memos" they find in the office building, because through them they "felt connected to important happenings." While high, Jordan Baker dreams of going to the deepest parts of the ocean, archetypal symbol of the unconscious. She imagines a submarine, but Invisible Man thinks that "there wasn't a submarine." Even if there is really a submarine, a passageway to deep understanding, it would be beyond Jordan's ability to comprehend: "It's all scientific, these things I don't understand." 

In the end, although Daisy Buchanan has called for "an adventure," Invisible Man is the only one able to keep moving on with their journey. Why? What makes IM different? Perhaps it's IM's ability to read others a little more deeply. When Invisible Man first meets Daisy and Jordan, Invisible Man struggles "to find a difference between" the girls, but soon finds it possible to distinguish "unique lines and blemishes" between the two. 

Maybe even the mistake with the baseball team was meaningful. The team is the Minnesota Twins. It's an unusual name; most teams are named for cities, rather than states, with relatively few exceptions. And "twins," of course, are the one thing most people can't tell apart without getting to know both people really well. Perhaps the "mistake" of putting the Twins in a more specific location than just Minnesota is Invisible Man's meandering mind finding meaning, putting it in the more specific spot with more concrete meaning. IM has taken something indistinguishable and generic to most people and interpreted it on a deeper level, giving it identity it didn't have. Perhaps this tendency will eventually allow IM to give themselves identity others find it difficult to see. Not all minds that wander are lost, in this case. Invisible Man calls them "Minneapolis" because she is paying attention and wants to see the team's "unique lines." 

IM claims to have vague features that leave others confused about their ethnicity, and of course there is the issue of whether IM is male, female, or something else. IM needs a close reading to be understood. IM shows throughout the text that they have this capacity for close reading, which means that even if nobody else understands them, they will eventually succeed at understanding themselves.  

IM pays attention to details, which helps to orient her in the vastness of space. One advantage IM seems to have compared to Jordan and Daisy is that IM doesn't get swallowed up in the ocean, the thing too deep to comprehend. Instead, IM has many memories of lakes. IM's happiest memory of their recent unrequited love happened on a lake. Their first time getting high was on an island in a lake. When that happened, IM and their friends "all linked arms and looked out a broken window onto our lakes. The late-night stillness heightened our experience, as if the water was one big mirror that could swallow our souls, the ghosts inside us." . 

Daisy's ocean is an abyss that confounds her. Invisible Man's lake is a mirror that helps them see themselves. It would be easy to write off the drug hallucinations as lazy writing, as I saw someone do in one amateur review online, but it's hard to deny that these kinds of drug trips are journeys into the sub-conscious and can be disorienting in a troubling way. That journey into the mind parallels the physical journey Invisible Man is making. Drug trips are risky writing, but I believe this particular trip is consistent with the theme of the story. 

The concluding scene shows that one of the girls has scrawled "Invisible Man, make it where you're going" on IM's car window, and I believe they are going to make it. They're going to make it because their ability to distinguish, to read deeply enough to understand others and their surroundings, will keep them oriented. Even the wandering storytelling is a means of self-preservation for Invisible Man, something that keeps them moving on a journey instead of stopping, that keeps them swimming instead of sinking. 

At least, that's how it seems to me without doing any real research, which I think is how the story is asking to be read. 

*I originally read the protagonist as a woman, but Karen Carlson and Rhiannon Morgan-Jones made a good argument for the central character maybe not being a woman. I read Invisible Man as a woman because of the "take this wrench so those boys don't take advantage" passage, but Karen and Rhainnon are probably right that there are other facts in the story that suggest otherwise and that the ambiguity is probably a feature, rather than a bug. I've gone with "they/their" in this post, although I have to confess it made it difficult to write in places, because I ended up with overlapping "they/their" pairs--one for Invisible Man and one for the whole group. For Karen Carlson's take on this story, have a look here. For Rhainnon's, see here. 

The critic America deserves, if not the one it needs

I'm going to blog about this year's Best American Short Stories, although I said I wouldn't. That I couldn't. That I needed to move on from literature and do something more practical with my life. After a year or so of sticking to that resolution, though, I think that all things considered, blogging about literature in the way I do might be one of the less futile things I could do with my time. 

A lot of that has to do with what I chose to blog about, how I approach it, and how few others are doing something similar. I analyze stories based mostly on nothing more than a close reading, a passing familiarity with theoretical approaches, and a heavy influence from having listened to thousands of sermons that were built around textual analysis. My goal is to create readings of stories that intelligent laypeople can understand, enough that they feel their experience of a story was deepened by what I had to say about it. If possible, I try to find some practical application of the reading, just like a Protestant pastor would with a Bible text. If there were thousands of people doing this for collections like Best American Short Stories or the Pushcart anthology, I likely wouldn't be compelling enough to rank high among them. But that's not the case. The numbers on my blog clearly tell me that there are still people in the world reading short stories, wanting to understand them better, and finding the resources out there slim enough they're willing to spend a few minutes with me. 

Literature may not be the most important thing in the world, but if becoming better at reading fiction that tries to capture the essence of life in its exasperating emotional and psychological agony makes people a little less prone to celebrating the maudlin, the mawkish, and the banal, then it's a useful way for me to spend my time. 

So I'm going to get back at it. It's not easy for me to write critically about the stories regarded as the best produced today. On a personal level, as a writer myself, I have two reactions, which are contradictory and come to me in alternating waves. Either I feel that I'm writing stories on par with those being hailed as the best, and my exclusion from them is an injustice, or I feel that I have been left out because I'm an inferior writer and that nobody should care what I have to say about stories I'm not good enough to have written myself. 

To analyze short stories, I have to ignore both of those voices, because whether I'm a good writer of fiction has nothing to do with whether the analysis I create is worthwhile. It's no exaggeration to say that at the very least, in relative terms, my literary analysis of these stories is worthwhile, because very often it's almost the only thing out there. (Although I'm not completely alone as long as my buddy Karen Carlson is still at it.) 

People have been complaining about the death of criticism forever, as one Times Literary Supplement article pointed out recently, but if you'd like proof that I'm not exaggerating, try finding good, professional criticism of the stories I'll be blogging about for the next few weeks or months, the ones from Best American Short Stories 2021. You'll see I'm not making this up.

I can guess at a couple of reasons for this. One is that most readers of short stories are writers themselves, as everyone knows, but since writers now are told that building social networks is nearly as important as writing itself, penning anything remotely critical about another writer is a risk not worth taking. 

It's also just plain hard work. Karen introduced me two years ago to a blogger who planned to try to blog through BASS with us, but he gave up after a few stories. That was just for one volume of BASS. Reading thoughtful, challenging stories in a way that does any justice to them is not easy. Doing it over and over is grueling, and it's not like anyone's paying me for it. If there's any result of it that I hear about, it's just as likely to be negative as positive. 

Nonetheless, this is a niche fate seems to have ordained I somehow fill, though I often feel slow of speech and slow of tongue and like fate should send anyone but me to do it. The more it seems like the world may not have as long a history in front of it as I once thought, though, the more it seems to me like I ought to tend the garden I have and think less about whether it's the one I think I ought to have. 

The spring of healing: what a lackluster novel I read as a kid tells us about "America first" philosophies

I read a lot as a kid, although I may not have always read the best the world had to offer. My mom, something of an expert in early literacy, believed it was important for young people to read what they liked to read, rather than for parents to obsess over whether their children picked entirely edifying material. Therefore, I was given a relatively long leash with my reading choices, as long as I was reading something. For a few years, one of the chief sources of reading material for my brothers and me were the slightly dated copies of Sports Illustrated my grandfather brought us. I don't know where he got them, but they were free, and we all liked reading the same articles and then going over favorite lines with each other afterwards. 

When I got older, I started to get into fantasy novels a little bit. Not obsessively--sports-based reading was still my favorite--but enough that I would mix it up here and there. One series I picked up from my dad was Piers Anthony's Xanth series. It was set in a magical world with a geography very similar to Anthony's native Florida. It was also full of puns, something I found funny enough to read maybe the first dozen or so novels in the series, but eventually tiring enough I never read the many he's written since then. 

I might have begun to catch on even as a young reader that Anthony isn't a virtuoso as a writer. If I didn't then, I definitely realized it when I read of few of his novels to my son several years ago. Even my son seemed to realize something was amiss. He kind of liked the first novel, but by the end of the second, he was ready to move on to something new. 

Still, I wouldn't say that Anthony is a bad writer. He's an example of a kind of writing I have a greater tolerance for than many people in literary fiction seem to have, one with some great ideas but who is a little bumpy getting those ideas across. (One of the things that perhaps delayed my ability to get stories published was my level of tolerance in my own work for less than stellar presentation as long as the idea underlying it seemed sound to me.) In particular, I was fond of the thought experiments that appeared in his work.  

Probably the most notable thought experiments in Xanth are the meetings various mortals have with the demon who created the world. This demon is apparently locked in some kind of supernatural game with other demons, and he twice (that I read) asked mortals for help in winning his game. (If I recall correctly, Anthony admitted to borrowing some ideas for these scenes from articles he read about game theory.)

(Aside: I won't delve into the alleged misogyny in his works. I'm sure it's there, but for me to deal with it, I'd have to go back and read him seriously, something I just don't have time to do right now. It's got nothing to do with what made me remember Xanth recently.)

Yeah, like, a whole lot of puns

Reading about "realist" political philosophy brought another Xanth scene to mind

There's another, less pronounced thought experiment from Xanth that came to mind for me the other day. I was thinking about the nature of  "America first" arguments, and, more broadly, about "realist" philosophies of how a government should behave in international geopolitics. It started when I read about John Mearsheimer's belief that Western bad behavior was primarily to blame for Russian aggression in Ukraine. It echoed comments I've heard from other quarters, always coming from people who identify themselves as proponents of "realist" political philosophies. 

According to this line of thinking, the West has made a mistake trying to promote the growth of liberal democracies friendly to the West in places like Georgia and Ukraine. Expansion of the EU and NATO were needlessly poking the Russian bear, which nobody thought of as a threat prior to 2014. These analysts claim the US should have allowed Russia to maintain enough hegemony over its near neighbors for its own comfort, even if this meant letting those countries fester in a quasi-vassal state status. Even if it meant their citizens had to live under autocracy. 

Realists would argue that the reason we should have allowed this to happen, rather than attempting to bring these countries more closely into a Western orbit, was for one simple reason: it would have been in our self-interest to do so. In "great powers" politics, the U.S. should no more think of fostering friendly democracies on Moscow's doorstep than Moscow should think of placing a missile base in the Yucatan Peninsula. This just foments conflict, and conflict is bad for U.S. interests, measured--I suppose--in things like stock values and gas prices and GDP and whether people have the emotional energy to spend on some dumb event that happened at the Oscars. 

Trump was apparently influenced by this kind of thinking. His "America first" concept (I won't call it a political philosophy, because I don't think Trump is capable of sustaining any line of thinking deeply enough that it could rightly be called a "philosophy") seemed to involve a fairly straightforward, transactional calculation of debits and credits of any possible move in international politics. If something was "good" for America (according to whatever measuring stick he used for "good"), then we did it. If it was bad for America, we didn't. 

The healing spring and the complexities of self-interest

While thinking about this whole realist idea of how the world works lately, some neuron in my brain harkened back to something from Xanth. I had to get onto Reddit, find an Anthony community, ask a question, and wait a few days to fully remember what it was, but eventually, I found it. 

In the first novel in the Xanth series, A Spell for Chameleon, the main character Bink comes across a wounded soldier. He is directed by a dryad to a nearby magical spring that brings healing to those who touch or drink its waters. While Bink is investigating the spring, a finger he lost as a child is restored. However, the spring stirs to life and warns him that. "Who drinks of me and acts against my interest will lose all that I bring him." 

Seems legit. 

Bink immediately sees complications in this condition placed by the spring, because he wonders how the spring will judge actions for their effect relative to its interests. He assumes that there could be no logging or mining near the spring, because these would harm it in an immediate and tangible way. But what if a king levied a tax on lumber, and because of that tax, lumberjacks cut more wood in order to make up for lost revenue? Would the spring cause all those who had been helped by the spring to fight against the king? In fact, "...any action had widening results, like the ripples of a stone dropped in a pool. In time such ripples could cover the whole ocean. Or the whole of Xanth." Bink wonders if, should the spring's magic become strong enough, the spring might become the real ruler of Xanth. 

Bink realizes, though, that the interests of one spring are not the interests of all springs, nor of Xanth. He rejects the spring's terms and tells the spring to take its healing back. 

Bink was smart enough to realize something advocates of a narrowly defined self-interest fail to point out: that self-interest is complicated. Of course we all want what's good for us. Idealists want that, too. But what's ultimately good for us depends, often, on the unintended consequences of millions of decisions, none of which can be accurately guessed ahead of time, because the entire system is irreducibly complex. 

We have, of course, a great deal of responsibility to try to read the realities of the present, break down that which is complex, and make our best effort to calculate the effects of certain actions versus others. I myself mostly objected to the war in Iraq because of pragmatic, rather than idealistic reasons; that is, I thought the stated goals were unachievable, not necessarily immoral if they had been achieved. Right now, I'm more than half convinced the United States should get over the idealistic opposition to proliferation and accept North Korea as a nuclear state, mostly because the practical reality is that we've failed to prevent them from becoming one, so we might as well try to live with that reality. 

We have an obligation to reduce the complexity as much as we can, but at some point, we are making best guesses. A commitment to always keep recalculating for self-interest, based on new information, is a formula for being in a constant cycle of reassessment and reapplication of new strategies. That's great if you work for a think tank and you want to be producing a new calculation every few weeks, but it's bad for formulating a predictable and consistent policy.

Much more to the point than that, though, if we are humble enough to assume that we're going to miscalculate now and again and end up harming our interest in ways we didn't intend, shouldn't we do so for reasons we believe in, reasons we accept as worthy of suffering for? Rather than decide, case-by-case, whether supporting one would-be democracy or another is more trouble than it's worth, isn't it better to say that we believe, in the long run, that democracies (assuming they're organic and not something we're foisting on other countries) are worth supporting, even if there are costs? To say that in the long run, we believe that the costs of not supporting a democracy are worse? 

Mearsheimer stated that there are always practical and moral elements to politics. He said it would be great if the two always aligned, but that sometimes, a country has to accept an immoral policy because the costs of the moral policy are too great. I wonder, though, if in an irreducibly complex game, it isn't ultimately safer sometimes to take the moral route simply because it's the moral route. This is what Bink elected to do when he gave up his own physical wellbeing in order to keep from putting himself in a compromising position. (In the story, there is a twist when he makes this decision, but the point is that he was willing to make this decision.) Sometimes, the very complexity and danger of the game might make a certain moral naivete more, rather than less, safe.  

Realism in political science doesn't mean "realistic," as opposed to someone who believes in fantasy. Realists emphasize the fundamentality of conflict or competition in world events, while idealists emphasize cooperation. It's not supposed to be a question of dreamers versus realists, but I think the cognate nature of the two words has led some to believe that political realists are more grounded in the real world. In fact, though, both realists and idealists care about self-interest and are looking at the real world for clues about how to achieve it. One might say the fundamental difference between them is more one of how both come to grips with irreducible complexity.

The most realistic, pragmatic, eyes-wide-open, non-dreamy belief might be that making hard political choices for moral reasons might sometimes be the most pragmatic solution. As I've suggested before, sometimes, when faced with a decision where it's impossible to predict all the bifurcating future time lines, it might be best to rely not on calculations, but on what I've called ontological ethics. That is, when in doubt, we make decisions guided by a sense of who we are. 

We might still, of course, make wrong calls this way, but there are benefits that can accrue from making decisions out of a sense of who we are. It gives our allies reassurance that we will remain consistent even in the shifting face of events. It gives our adversaries security that they can predict our policies, making them less likely to miscalculate. It gives us an internal sense of purpose and mission. There are real, pragmatic values to these things. One could say that in the long run, moral decisions might be better for our self-interest. 

Or not. In the long run, as John Maynard Keynes is said to have noted, we're all dead. At some point, this experiment in democracy will fail or fade, or the multitudinous problems of the human race will doom us to extinction. If we have to go down, though, I'd rather go down for something I believe in than a wrong guess about what would have been good for us. I'd rather refuse the immediate good that seems to offer itself rather than be compromised by it. The only way to win a game of irreducible complexity, perhaps, is not to play it.  

The responsibility to live happily for others is too much to bear

Since Russia first invaded Ukraine, I've been stuck on the same bad idea: that I should go to Ukraine to help fight against the invaders. This is an inherently stupid idea, for any number of reasons. I've been having foot pain for over a year, pain doctors can't quite figure out the source of and which makes it difficult for me to walk long distances or to run any distance. Now to add to that, I'm getting a test next week to see if I have a hernia. I'm kind of old, and have a lot of miles on me. Even though I was once a Marine, I was a linguist, and don't have any advanced combat training. Even if I did, I'd have forgotten it all by now. I'd likely be in the way. Then, there are all the practical reasons, like how I'm my family's main earner and it would cause hardship if I left. Still, in spite of how terrible I know the idea is, I can't put it out of my head. Russia has invaded a country without cause, and it's now hitting civilian targets without compunction. To act like the world is a normal place right now seems perverse. 

Yet life around me does seem to be going on like normal. The weather turned warm in the last few days, and people were out biking and walking together. A few grills in the neighborhood reemerged, the scent of meat cooked outdoors mixing with the already-prevalent South Asian spices that typically fill the air in the streets around here, flooding my senses with the feeling of being surrounded by people alive and enjoying life. 

And why shouldn't they be enjoying themselves? The United States government has decided it has limited means it can take to help Ukraine without making the situation much worse. If the government is already at the end of its resources, what can any of us do? It won't alleviate suffering if we suffer, too. It reminds me of what Thae Yong Ho, the former North Korean deputy ambassador to the UK who then defected to South Korea, concluded when his family decided to defect:

"I decided to claim my rights as a human being. I couldn't live as a slave any longer. Having lived my life that long as a slave was enough. I made up my mind to defect. If we defected, it would cause significant problems for our siblings and parents, but we chose to first seek freedom for ourselves. It would suffice if we lived our lives to the full for their sake" (translation mine). 

Thae was lucky, because by extreme good fortune, he was able to defect along with his wife and two children, whereas most North Korean diplomats are not able to take their children abroad with them. Still, he knew he would be making life harder for family members not lucky enough to escape. He made the decision that rather than everyone living as a slave together in North Korea, he would find what happiness he could for himself and his family, and that happiness would justify his decision. It would have to.   

We who are, for the moment, spared from warfare in our streets could choose to suffer in order to honor the suffering of others, but that would only ensure that there is only ever suffering in the world. Moreover, this isn't just something that started a few weeks ago; there was more than enough suffering long before Ukraine that anyone who was paying attention could have felt guilt over enjoying life. As you drink your coffee perusing the internet (I assume for hours and hours, because you've finally ended up bored enough to visit this blog), a child is being abused by her parents. Many children are dying of preventable diseases and malnutrition. Someone was killed by a drunk driver. Somebody who supports a family living paycheck to paycheck just lost their job. Before Ukraine, there was already Yemen. 

There is, in fact, so much suffering going on in the world at any moment, that the quest for those who are temporarily spared from suffering to enjoy themselves on behalf of those who cannot is far too much to take. None of us can possibly love life enough to somehow balance out all that suffering and make life on Earth appear to make sense somehow. 

Some people assert that the suffering of others should make me all the more grateful for what I have. On the one hand, I understand this sentiment. Knowing that innocent people are dying in Yemen or fighting for their lives in Kyiv should provide me with enough sense of proportion to be kind to the server who is running late with my order or to suffer Beltway traffic with grace. In another, deeper sense, though, the notion that because terrible things have happened to others but I personally have been spared I should therefore be grateful is perverse. 

Thankful to whom? To God? I don't have one specific reason why I'm an agnostic now. There are a whole host of reasons. If I had to pick just one, though, I think the existence of suffering might be the one I'd pick. Not just suffering, but suffering that is both broad (abundant and ubiquitous) and deep (profound and acute). Does anyone really believe in thanking God that a meteor struck the house next door and spared you? What kind of capricious lunatic runs creation like that? Not one I'd ever express gratefulness toward. 

There is a difference between acknowledging I live better than ninety percent of the globe and being thankful that ninety percent of humanity doesn't have it very good. The knowledge that human life is such a shabby affair for so many makes it much harder, rather than easier, to enjoy my relative good fortune. Certainly, it makes it hard for me to live life to the fullest on behalf of those who are barely living.  

Why I'll probably spend the last few decades of my life on the couch doing nothing

All writers have had to deal with the question of how to support themselves so they can focus on writing. The top four solutions in history have been:

1) Succeeding commercially enough to be able to support oneself. This is nice work if you can get it, but most writers, even the ones we remember through the ages, have not. 

2) Marry well. Also nice work if you can get it, and a few writers, both male and female, have, living of the fortunes of their spouses while turning their attention to writing. Most people don't manage to do this, though, so they have to rely on either option three or option four.

3) Accept a life of penury. Much like those called to religious professions might take vows of poverty, some view writing as a pursuit so serious, it requires limiting the demands of the flesh to the bare minimum. 

4) Take on all the normal responsibilities the majority of humans do, and do the best you can to write with the time and energy you have left over after all of that. 

As I've mentioned many times on here before, there was a time in my life when I really thought I was going to choose option number three. I wrote a whole personal manifesto in which I determined that lots of people can have kids, but only a few can create lasting art. Based, I guess, on the notion of scarcity, I felt like it was therefore important enough for me to devote myself to writing that it would be okay if I never had kids or found a serious job. 

I'm not sure what changed my mind. It might have been going to graduate school and realizing how few people who "did art for a living" I liked. It might have been that I got tired of leaning on family and friends who had real jobs to help me survive. Maybe it was a biological impulse to reproduce reasserting itself after lying dormant. It could have been all of these things. In any event, I quit graduate school with only a Master's and got what for lack of a better term we'll call a "real job." I've been in the "real" economy since. Mrs. Heretic and I had one biological child and adopted another. It's been rewarding in all the ways living a normal life can be. No, I wouldn't trade my kids for a novel people will still be reading a thousand years from now. 

Not for lack of trying, but I could never quite shake the need to write. I tried to become a normal person who worried about normal things, but there were two hard facts I couldn't escape: the world didn't make sense, and I felt a need to try to make sense of it. Writing was how I tried. It still is. 

A funny thing happened on the way to taking door number four, though. I meant to get the kind of job that would pay the bills and enable me to take care of family but leave me free to reserve most of my mental and emotional energy for life outside of work. That didn't happen. Well, I mean, maybe it did. Some people in my profession do seem to do their nine-to-five and then leave it at the plant. They go home and coach little league or have bowling night or whatever it is normal people do, and they don't think about work when they're not there. 

I've never been able to achieve true indifference to work. What I do has seemed important enough to me to deserve my best effort, or at least as close to my best effort as is possible to achieve at work. That's meant spending time on my own to improve my understanding of matters related to work. Mostly, it's meant trying to improve my skills in whatever language I've been translating from, because that was always the core ability I had that would make or break the quality of my output. 

I've come home from work, then, and felt the urge to keep on working. But that's not the only impulse I've felt. I also feel the impulse to work on writing, because the universe ain't getting any more comprehensible. And I also feel guilty about not being involved enough in family matters, such as keeping on my son about getting ready for grownup life. Or maybe I feel guilty about how Mrs. Heretic sometimes wants a partner she can sit down and watch television with, but I'm always off trying to fit a full-day's effort on three different things into a single day. 

Usually, this all manifests itself in one very mundane, but to me very important, question each day. What do I do with the little bit of time each day I get to call my own? Do I write? If I do, do I write fiction? Do I write for this blog? If not writing, then I should read? If so, what do I read? Should I read Korean news? A Korean fiction book? A Korean non-fiction book? What about some modern fiction in English, so I can learn from it to improve my own writing as well as better know the lay of the land in a world I want to inhabit? Or what about reading some non-fiction about a science or history or philosophy or religion topic, something to feed my soul as it grapples for answers about the world? 

None of this makes me unique, of course. Everyone has limited time and more things they'd like to do than they have time available. Lately, I've come to a realization, though, about how badly I've managed my time in my life. Not that I haven't managed to buckle down and get productive. I've done that plenty. But I keep changing my mind about what I'd like to be productive about. One week I think I should put dreams away and focus on knowing everything about Korea I can. The next I tell myself what's life for if not to follow my dreams, so I chuck work and write. Or read something completely not work-related. At the moment, I'm trying to have it both ways and read a book on religion (God's Problem by Bart Ehrman), but the Korean translation of it.  

All I've really managed to accomplish by ping-ponging back and forth between subjects in my life is that I'm okay at a few things but probably not great at any. I've suspected this for a long time, but every time I try to force myself to pick one thing to go all-in trying to master, I am wracked by self-doubt. What if I've picked the wrong thing? What if I'm putting all my effort into something I'll never be that good at? The result is that I start and stop efforts to keep moving in one direction over and over. 

Lately, I've been doing something with my free time I've never done before: nothing. I'm so exasperated with myself and my inability to pick something, I just do nothing. I fritter my precious free time away, hate myself for having wasted it, then do it again the next day. 

Essentially, I feel I've frittered so much time away that I'm now too old to become great at anything. At that point, I become momentarily frantic and start to work doubly hard to make up for lost time. Soon after that, I am overwhelmed by how hard it is to get better even when I'm trying my best, start thinking that all the effort is pointless, and I stare off at nothing for an hour until it's time to go to bed.

I usually return to the idea that what I ought to do is focus on work and other practical matters I all too often neglect. I should make money, save money, and use that money to help people who need it. It's what I settled on in my early thirties when I gave up on writing. And I succeeded for years at keeping my mind on secular matters. But I just couldn't keep that other person locked away for good. 

Some intellectual-minded people tend to look down on those who live an unexamined life. I don't do that at all. The wise preacher in Ecclesiastes--possibly the book that has dealt with how little the universe makes sense better than any other--didn't come up with much better. "Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart...Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life God has given you under the sun--all your meaningless days" (Ecc 9:7,9). 

I probably still have a few more rounds of futilely cycling through trying to get better at things I think of as "important" in my life, but I'm starting to imagine the later acts of my life not involving much serious thought at all.