I kind of like literary journals asking for background on the story

Almost every literary journal a writer might send a story to for consideration will generally tell you that all they want in a cover letter is a brief statement of facts and a concise, third-person biography. Most advice will tell you the same thing. Just say your name, the title of your story and a word count, your previous publications, and then say thank you for considering it. No cute stuff, no pontificating on the meaning of your story or what compelled you to write it. 

Today, I submitted a story to the Gordon Square Review, a little journal in Cleveland, which is not far from where I grew up. They did something unusual in their instructions for submitting a story:

We request that no cover letter or author bio be included in your submission. Instead, please share with Gordon Square Review what the story is about, the writing process of the story, and any context you believe is important to know while reading story.

Explaining something about your story before someone reads it might sound like a perfectly natural thing to a non-writer, but it was so unexpected, it made me stop to think why I found it so surprising. If you're writing a novel, the people looking at it generally want a whole lot of explanatory stuff before they even look at the manuscript. Often, they only look at the summary or pitch. Not so with short stories, though. Is it because short stories are high literature, and readers feel the story should be able to speak for itself? Or is it because journals are so swamped, they kind of want to know who else has already published you so they can cheat and use that as help for knowing whether they should pay more attention?

In any event, I really liked that Gordon Square did this. That's strange, because I hate writing pitches and summaries for the novels I've sent in. For some reason, these very informal directions for a cover letter to the short story, though, felt fresh and almost enjoyable to follow. 

I don't get a lot of comments on this blog considering the number of readers, which might be because it's such a pain to put comments in, but I'd like to hear from any writers out there to see if you have opinions on whether you like instructions like this or not.   

Two interpretations of the Taco Bell Quarterly (and its hate boner for The Paris Review)

If you're halfheartedly a part of literary Twitter like I am, you've probably come across The Taco Bell Quarterly at some point in the last few months. If you haven't, your first instinct might be to think it's a joke. Which it isn't, as much as it might disguise itself as one. It's definitely hard to explain exactly what TBQ is; even the magazine's founder, M.M. Carrigan, has offered differing and possibly contradictory explanations for the journal's raison d'etre, mostly through pithy and provocative Tweets. Although Carrigan is witty, the one thing TBQ is not is a joke. At 26,400 followers on Twitter and growing, they may not yet have made good on their boast to be "more relevant than The Paris Review" (which has a million followers), but they're certainly not a joke. Their following has grown to the size of a decent literary journal, and I've seen approving re-tweets from some very hip authors, if not yet many establishment darlings. 

There are two more assertions I can make with certainty about what TBQ isn't. The first is that it's not establishment. It's set up to poke and prod at the literary establishment, frequently taunting The Paris Review in particular. TBQ's Venmo/PayPal is @ParisReview, for example. The second is that it's unaffiliated--unaffiliated with Taco Bell, unaffiliated with The Paris Review, unaffiliated with everything. (At one point, Carrigan joked about asking Taco Bell for a million dollar literary grant, the result of which was that Taco Bell "continues not to sue" TBQ.) 

So that's what it's not, but what is it? TQB offers some explanations of its own, both in the journal itself and also through Carrigan's barrage of hilarious, come-and-get-me Tweets. I'd like to examine two different ways of looking at TBQ and its meaning--both what it hopes to signify as a literary artifact and also what it means as a product of its literary and economic time and place.  

I imagine Taco Bell isn't suing because it's realized that it has more to lose in public perception than it has to gain in suing the journal. It also isn't hurting Taco Bell to be associated with something hip and counter-culture, because that makes Taco Bell seem hip by association. Kind of like why Arby's changed its mind about suing Nihilist Arby's. 

But first, the meaning of TBQ in its own words

Here is how TBQ describes itself on its website: 

Taco Bell Quarterly is the literary magazine for the Taco Bell Arts and Letters. We’re a reaction against everything. The gatekeepers. The taste-makers. The hipsters. Health food. Artists Who Wear Cute Scarves. Bitch-ass Wendy’s. We seek to demystify what it means to be literary, artistic, important, and elite. We welcome writers and artists of all merit, whether you’re published in The Paris Review, rejected from The Paris Review, or DGAF what The Paris Review is. 

First and foremost, TBQ is about great writing. It’s about provoking and existing among the white noise of capitalism. We embrace the spectrum of trash to brilliance. Taco Bell Quarterly has tens of thousands of readers. We’ve been interviewed or mentioned in Vox, Salon, Food and Wine Magazine, Mental Floss, Yahoo, The Guardian, The New York Post, Publisher’s Weekly, Literary Hub, Bon Appetit and dozens more.

Is this real? A joke? A literary psy-op? We don’t fully know. We just decided to write about Taco Bell. We are absolutely not affiliated with Taco Bell and make no profits. We can’t even get extra sauce in the drive-thru. Employees treat that shit like unicorn blood.

That part-facetious, part-rebellious self-explanation holds within it all the seeds of the varied ways of looking at the magazine, both as a literary product and a social phenomenon. 

Meaning one: it's an outlet and a meeting place for the rejected

One unusual characteristic of the literary fiction community is that a significant percentage of its members frequently face rejection from the most powerful members of their own community. It's well known that a good percentage of the people who read literary magazines are those who hope to one day be published in them. Major literary conferences are largely attended by dreamers hoping to make connections with or soak up wisdom from the few who've made it. Most aspiring writers have found their way blocked by "gatekeepers" (who are often themselves just other struggling writers volunteering their time). Faced with rejection, there are three possible reactions: revolt, persistence, or giving up. TBQ represents a little of all three. 

The constant jabbing at The Paris Review is the revolt, of course. TBQ isn't the only journal to have been founded partly by people who were tired of being rejected by other journals, but it is one of the best at making its feelings about rejection known. The existence of a journal named for a fast-food restaurant perhaps best known to most people for being cheap and for being a great late-night post-drinking option also represents a kind of resignation. It's sort of like getting kicked out of a fancy, high-society restaurant for being underdressed, and rather than going home to get a coat and tie and going back to try again, you decide to just go to Taco Bell in your tank top and shorts, because who needs those snobs, anyhow? Carrigan once ran a string of Tweets about appearing at a literary conference with a trash can into which attendees were encouraged to throw their literary works, as if to say that at some point, continuing to struggle to "make it" is futile. 

Some examples of the revolt:

Revolt

Revolt

A Tweet very much on the fringe between giving up and persistence

There's plenty of anger in the revolt and the giving up. At times, TBQ accuses the establishment of not just being snobs, but fascists who hold onto authority and prevent the emergence of minority voices. Even when it's at its angriest, though, there's sometimes a note of sweetness mixed in and a call to persistence. A pinned Tweet that's been re-Tweeted nearly 7,000 times catches this vibe:

Not all of the Twitter followers of TBQ are the literary rejected, but nearly all of its followers are intimately familiar with rejection. TBQ lives in a world in which powers--some corporate, some of the elite cultural gatekeeper variety--are blocking the masses from publication and recognition as writers. Not just recognition, but money. TBQ recognizes our capitalistic backdrop and the need all artists have to make a living to sustain themselves. Which is what drives the second interpretation of TBQ.

Meaning Two: It's both a reaction against and a concession to art's commodification by capitalism

Taco Bell restaurants are faux southwestern missionary-style buildings with fake adobe exteriors. The cuisine is an unholy mix of Midwestern crockpot cuisine with other influences we might, if we take a wide view of things, call "Mexican." It's gauche and Philistine, like any culture is when it's dictated by commercial logic.

Naming the journal after a symbol of crassness is a call to storm the bell tower and take back real art. TBQ isn't about loving Taco Bell; it's about Taco Bell as a symbol of the ugliness of art run by gatekeepers in thrall to power. It's an aesthetic descendant of Dadaism, answering nonsense with nonsense.

Or so I thought. But while that might be lingering in the background, there is too much actual love for Taco Bell being professed by the journal for it all to be ironic or for Taco Bell to be purely a symbol of ugliness in art. In fact, much of the journal's actual literary output is more about how Taco Bell played a positive role in the lives of narrators than about how Taco Bell is a symbol of a dying and decaying society. Or perhaps the narrators do acknowledge that Taco Bell is a symbol of a sick society but still find room for elegies to that society's dying beauty. 

In "Un Espinella to a White Friend," J. Villanueva writes of a Mexican narrator talking about Taco Bell with an over-eager white friend. The white friend, perhaps motivated by wanting to show off to his Mexican friend how much he knows about "real" Mexican culture, has questioned why anyone would want to eat at Taco Bell when it's "not Mexican." The narrator responds that, "I know what's served at Taco Bell."  For the narrator, though, while he is well aware that Taco Bell isn't "real" like the Mexican food that is part of his "cultura," it's still "food for (him)." The poem seems to argue that if it tastes good, it is good, an argument that the millions of people who eat at Taco Bell would agree with. It's also a very democratic aesthetic when applied to art, like Duke Ellington's "if it sounds good, it is good." 

This hint of justification or apology for Taco Bell is all over editions four and five of the magazine (the two most recent). "Spondylolisthesis, or why I eat Taco Bell" has a narrator who finds comfort after an abusive relationship in the Crunchwrap Supreme, discovering "decency" in a meal that comes with napkins and straws. The short story "Crazy, Stupid, Tacos" features a protagonist who remains unhappy as long as she resists the crassness of a Taco Bell-themed hotel where she has gone unwillingly for a destination wedding. The character only finds happiness when she stops fighting the crassness and learns to make peace with it. 

The directions for writers submitting to TBQ are pretty much this: "Put Taco Bell in it somewhere." Carrigan advises that this can be as simple as "shoehorning a chalupa" in there somewhere. Most of the published works in TBQ 4 and 5, though, go the other route, highlighting Taco Bell front and center, either as a setting or as a symbol. About half make the connection to Taco Bell right in the title of the work. Rather than rejecting Taco Bell as a symbol of all that's bad in society and therefore art and therefore writing, most writers are celebrating it. 

The relationship to capitalism of TBQ, in fact, seems to be less, "It's all bad, let's burn it all down" than, "Okay, it's bad, but we can't change that, so let's at least try to get ours, too." No work demonstrates this more than Catherine Weiss's "Everyone at the KFC-Taco Bell drive-thru is on their way to the pro wrestling show." The narrator is watching fans of a garish, kayfabe, staged but still violent "sport" eat at a garish, fake establishment built on industrial violence toward animals. The narrator, who seems to have either decided not to have children or been unable to have children because of a disability, looks at all this absurdity and wonders if she, too, wants in. She wonders if she also wants to "order some small human a taco" and what her wrestling persona would have been. The narrator is, like so many rejected authors, looking at those who've managed to gain something she's hasn't, and rather than throw scorn on all of it, she decides to change herself slightly:

are there leagues for disabled people?
at 35      i have almost decided i will be happy

by staying happy i have almost decided      the sound
of a body percussing the mat would be enough

Many poems look on the surface like they take the whole TBQ project as a joke, offering comically mock-grandiose titles such as "Saturn Devouring His Crunchwrap Supreme" or "Six Modern Haiku for a Taco Bell Drive-thru" or "An Ode to the Taco Party Pack." While these begin as facetious, they often end up falling back into a tone that's mostly earnest. That's TBQ in general: a joke that seems to have become serious. 

There are some works in which Taco Bell holds negative connotations. In "Happy Birthday from Taco Bell," the restaurant is a continuing reminder for a young woman of the place where she was raped. No work, though, seems to confront the conflicting meanings of Taco Bell as a symbol and of a literary journal named for the restaurant as much as Cynthia Arrieu-King's "TBQH." 

The title itself is a reference both to the name of the journal itself and an introduction to the speaker's voice. Anyone not familiar with the abbreviation gets it immediately spelled out in the opening line, "To be quite honest." It is followed by an assertion that when art and capitalism mingle, art withers:

To be quite honest

If we want to make art, yet look for money to spring up in its place

Who will have extra lettuce but the bombers, artillery manufacturers, oat milk saboteurs?

Poems will have to remain garlands and garnish, the older ones our menu

Unlike most of the works in TBQ, "TBQH" never makes its peace with Taco Bell. It launches into a series of "Taco Bell questions," which are really questions about the sustainability and viability of society itself. It arrives, ultimately, at a "the party's nearly over and someone will have to be paid" attitude toward our society's unquestioning consumption. The narrator and an interlocutor pull up to the drive-thru window, the moment when, in most of the works in TBQ, a narrator would make peace with Taco Bell and enjoy what corrupt enjoyment is available to us. But "TBQH" is too honest for that. Instead, it keeps questioning right up to the very end, asking, ominously, whether the window they're approaching is the window for picking up their order or the window for paying. 

Unironic kitsch

Most of the work in TBQ, though, is much more forgiving of Taco Bell than that. Maybe that's because for most of us, Taco Bell is the kind of restaurant we've spent more of our lives in than fancy, high-brow restaurants. For most writers, the journals that have published us are more like Taco Bell than the five-star Paris Review. Taco Bell is a more realistic setting and symbol of our lives than other places. Nearly all of us have eaten there, have memories there. Most of the work in TBQ is nostalgic about Taco Bell, because most of us, when it comes down to it, are nostalgic about our lives, even though our lives are as far away from the high art we hoped they'd be as Taco Bell is from real Mexican food. 

TBQ is about surviving in the reality of an ugly, corporate-driven world where not even art is free from the ugliness. There are a number of ways to enact that survival. For TBQ, it means eating the Crunchwrap Supreme of capitalism with both hands, selling merch (I really like the "I survived the poetry discourse" coffee mug) and constantly hustling for donations. TBQ is a statement that if we live in a world with Taco Bells in every town, then an artist has a right to find a way to thrive in that world, even if it means embracing the madness. Embracing the madness that is itself an enemy of art can become an act of beauty in itself. 

I don't know how long TBQ is going to keep growing. One problem it's already running into is that its own success means the the journal that partly sprang up as a reaction against rejection is now having to reject an awful lot of writers seeking to be published by it. Carrigan recently Tweeted that less than half of a percent of people submitting would be published, but writers should "live más" anyway. The journal is perhaps less counter-literary-establishment than one would expect. It reads like a lot of other queer-focused literary journals might read, with the exception that every volume is a themed volume about Taco Bell. There are limits to how revolutionary a literary journal can be and still be a literary journal, just like there are limits to how anti-capitalist anyone can be and still survive in a capitalist society. 

TBQ doesn't ignore or deny these limitations, though. They're there, but that's not a reason to give up. The journal is always on the edge of saying fuck it, let's give up. It's always a breath away from becoming Nihilist Arby's, but it never quite goes there. TBQ may have adopted Taco Bell's "Live Más" slogan as part of the joke, but somewhere along the way, both its staff and its contributors have somehow mostly imbibed the message for real. If a term had to be applied to the journal and the Twitter community growing around it as a movement, the term might be unironic kitsch. It's an aesthetic of trying to make real art and real sentiment out of garishness, because garishness is the only raw material the world offers us to work with. 

Reading the Constitution "the way the founders meant it," part two

We can be forgiven for thinking that reading is easier than it is, that meaning is less elusive than it is. We start reading at a young age, and when we do, we feel there aren't that many ways to interpret, "See Dick run." Maybe we all suffer from the delusion that what comes after Dick and Jane is really just an addition of more complicated words that hide a still simple meaning, that all we do between kindergarten and grad school is move from, "See Dick run" to, "Perceive Richard perambulate." 

In fact, though, reading is incredibly complicated, and it doesn't matter much whether you're operating from an "intent of the author" or "intent of the text" point of view. Proponents of both probably prefer their approaches because they think that in them they have found greater simplicity, but both have their difficulties. 

If we think the best way to read is to try to understand what the writer meant by X, we sometimes have to play psychologist or historian or sociologist in a way that may never lead to conclusive results. Hell, how often do we all say things when we struggle ourselves to understand what we mean by them? And that's in spite of having essentially all the inside information possible. Humans always have multiple, overlapping and sometimes contradictory reasons for the things they say. Looking to the writer to sort out what the psychologically complicated writer meant isn't always going to help make sense of things.

On the other hand, an intent-of-the-text approach has its own problems, because it can be hard to know where to stop interpreting. If a Shakespeare play includes a line that says, "There is no clock in the forest," and you see links between that and some French literary theorist's work on temporal assumptions in pastoral literature, does it matter that Shakespeare would have had no idea what you were talking about? If you see a conflict in ideas about race in the character of Shylock, does it matter that Shakespeare himself wouldn't have been aware of those conflicts? At what point does this re-reading of an older text become an exercise in injecting our modern ideas into it? Or is it appropriate to read our modern ideas into it, because modernity has, we hope, more understanding of the topics now than the writers themselves did? 

When I wrote about author-centric and text-centric approaches to reading the Constitution a few weeks ago, it may have sounded like I was arguing that text-centric approaches are better, or that author-centric approaches are too simplistic. That's not entirely the point. I don't think either text-centric or author-centric approaches are entirely satisfying. A good reading of nearly any text involves at least some of both, and a good reader will instinctively know which kind of reading to apply based on the nature of the text itself. The more important point is that reading isn't easy. People who think it is, or who have political motivations to make it seem like it is with a given text, are happy to jump from author-centric to text-centric readings and back again without even noticing they're doing it, acting the whole time like whichever mode they're operating from is the natural and obvious one.  

"The founding fathers would be rolling over in their graves"

One conservative author-centric tactic is to conjecture on how the founding fathers might have reacted to American society today. What would Madison, Jefferson, Monroe, Hamilton, Franklin, etc. have thought of same-sex marriage? Drag shows? Divorce rates of around fifty percent? Out-of-wedlock children? The conjecture is usually that the founding fathers would have been aghast, would have wondered where America went so wrong. This is based on the fact that (so we believe) these things did not exist in 1789 America, and to the extent they did, they received society's unmitigated disapproval. Therefore, any political argument that the Constitution allows for--much less approves of--such social trends is unthinkable.

It has a certain common-sense appeal, but there are reasons to be suspicious of the intuitive appeal. Yes, if Jefferson had been given a crystal ball and seen visions of the future that included a gay wedding and a drag show with no further explanation, he might have thought his future country was destined for the judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah. If, however, he had been told about all humanity would learn in the ensuing centuries about science and human nature and comparative religion, of all that would happen in world history, he might have a different opinion. In a different hypothetical scenario, what if Alexander Hamilton had drunk from the fountain of youth in 1789 and lived until the present? Would he have continued to think like a man of his class, race, and time in 1789, or would he have come to think like a modern humanist neo-liberal? 

It's an impossible question to answer, of course, which only points to the limitations of author-centric readings. 

Reading is hard, but not impossible

I get why people want to think that reading is easier than it is, and not just people whose political opinions I disagree with. When I was in graduate school, I was subjected to a host of continental European literary theorists and philosophers--what one critic has called the "French Foreign Legion" of thinkers. At least some of them seemed to believe reading was so hard, that true communication was so impossible, we could never understand what anyone meant by anything, and reading was all just a masturbatory journey of trying to decipher a code that could never be deciphered. I found that more than a little bleak, and probably unnecessarily bleak. Just because something is difficult does not mean it's impossible. Or perhaps more accurately, just because something cannot be done with perfect precision does not mean it can't be done with relatively more or less precision, that there aren't some readings that are closer to the truth than others. If that's not true, then the reason most people write and read--the hope to find one's most difficult-to-formulate thoughts either reflected or shared--is a stupid reason to create or read literature. The desire to connect would all be in vain, would always be in vain. 

It's tempting, then, to adopt a philosophy that takes the ability to grasp meaning in writing as a given, if nothing else in defiance of joyless and abstruse philosophers who would have us questioning why we read at all. But overly simplistic readings in the defense of meaningful human discourse is no virtue, just as insisting on the complexity of interpretation in spite of the difficulties that come with it is no vice.

Reading in good faith

What's important more than sticking to any one theory of exegesis is to be honest about the extent to which one is shifting exegetical approaches speciously in support of one's own position. For example, when Justice Alito argued in his opinion in his Dobbs opinion that we could try to partly define the meaning of "liberty" by looking at what political liberties people had in 1868, he was taking an extra-textual, or author-centric approach, however much he might have claimed to be sticking to the text of the Constitution, which chooses to leave the term vague. But when Lauren Boebert says she doesn't believe the Constitution supports a separation of church and state because that literal phrase isn't in the Constitution itself but instead in a "stinking letter," she is being a fundamentalist about sticking only to the text. As others have pointed out, Justice Kavanaugh both did and did not accept unenumerated rights in the Constitution on Dobbs. He sided with the majority in determining that since the Constitution does not mention abortion, it isn't protected, but then he speculated that travel from states where abortion is illegal to those where it's legal would be protected by a Constitutional "right to travel," which is not a right mentioned in the Constitution, either. 

You ever see someone and feel like you already know what kind of person they are, because you feel like you've met that person several times before? That's the vibe Boebert has always given off for me. 

There's nothing wrong with going back and forth between author-focused, text-focused, and even reader-focused (i.e., what does the text mean to me?) readings. There's nothing especially wrong about mixing straightforward and nuanced exegesis. The question is whether one is doing these things in good faith, because one passage seems to call for a type of reading that is different from another passage, or whether one is doing it because it's the most expedient way of proving the point you knew you wanted to prove all along. 

I suggested that we owe the author-centric reading to Christian exegesis. My friend, an expert in the classics, disputed that, but I think that Christian hermeneutics has undoubtedly had an influence on how many Americans approach their reading of other texts. Christianity's belief in a Jesus who is "the same yesterday, today, and forever" had lead to a belief that the way people understand the Bible today should be the same as how people understood it 2,000 years ago. (As though there was unanimity then!)

This isn't the only way Christian hermeneutics have influenced the way ordinary people think of the Constitution. There is a type of Christian reading of the Bible that will assume a literal reading is the obvious best approach when the Bible is saying women should be submissive to men, but then applies a great deal of nuance when the Sermon on the Mount instructs believers to turn the other cheek. I don't mean to single out Christians for irresponsible reading here, when they're certainly not the only ones who practice reading negligence, but Christian exegetical readings seem to be especially relevant to and influential in readings of the law in America. 

My goal isn't to necessarily get anyone to drop their cherished religious or political philosophies. If that were my goal, I know I'd fail at it. Cherished ideas are not typically abandoned in a day's work. My goal is humbler: to encourage everyone to question their own analytical and interpretive practices, to question whether the approach taken is determined by what the facts seem to call for or because we want the facts to line up with what we believe.

The preamble, which I ironically bring up here at the end of this post

In the case of the Constitution, I think one passage that both author-centric and text-centric readers often overlook is the preamble, which gives several reasons why the Constitution was written:

-to form a more perfect Union, 

-to establish Justice, 

-to insure domestic Tranquility,

-to provide for the common defense, 

-promote the general Welfare, and

-to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity

When we are in a quandary about how to read something not made explicit, I think this preamble is the best heuristic available. Asking ourselves which reading helps to form the better union, better establish justice, better promote the general welfare, is the right approach. 

Of course, there are a lot of vague terms in there: union, justice, welfare, liberty, etc. Those words have an even greater sense of awe and mystery in the original because the founding fathers liked to follow a pseudo-German custom of capitalizing nouns they thought were important. It's like they knew words like union, justice, tranquility, welfare, and liberty were ideas too big for even their prodigious and curious minds to hold, so they wanted to preserve as sense of awe around them and leave it up to others to think of those ideas according to their own lights. It's the reason the list of reasons for writing the Constitution ends with the concept of "Posterity," that is, us. 

I would argue that this mention of posterity is a hint that the Constitution can be read somewhat more loosely than an orthodox Jew reads the Torah. The Constitution is something the founding fathers gave to us. Why? To form a more perfect union, establish justice, etc. If modernity generally feels that "liberty" includes the right to an abortion, the founding fathers didn't mean to keep us tied to only the freedoms they explicitly laid out. 

This is the only way toward the "new birth of freedom" that Lincoln hoped for. Lincoln himself was a rather creative reader of the Constitution. He had to be. The exigencies of the day called for reading the Constitution in a way nobody ever had before. He decided that his first responsibility was to protect the Constitution, and that if the country collapsed, it would be impossible to do that, so he took powers for himself that the Constitution didn't say he had in order to save the Constitution. 

Was he right? Probably not about everything, but he was about a lot of things. I think we, too, should seek to fit the Constitution to the reality of the day, rather than the other way around. 

Literary reading and originalist readings of the Constitution

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

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

NERRRRRRRRRRRRD!

 

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

The argument against "common sense" readings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So how do you read a text, then?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The unspoken context of the broken balance of power 

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

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

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

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

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

Intent of the text and flexibility in a failing Republic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I'm not qualified

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

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

Then again, nobody is really qualified

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

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

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

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

So here goes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Haguillory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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