August 10, 2015 / Vito Gulla / 0 Comments
Lately, I have heard a lot about ideas such as cultural appropriation and cultural exchange, ideas of privilege and oppression, ideas, which, ultimately create a quandary for the artist. Of particular note, has been the increased calls for diversity, both behind the art and in the thing itself. These goals, I believe, are admirable and well within reason. It is largely benign, of neither insult nor disfigurement to American art at large; instead, it is to our shared benefit. We should have a plethora of unique and boisterous voices to admire. Good art is always worth striving for. However, there seems to be strain of these criticisms that seems ill-defined at best, an uncertainty, an inability to articulate exactly what the critic wants. The closest I have to a definitive statement comes from J. A. Micheline’s “Creating Responsibly: Comics Has A Race Problem,” where the author states: “Creating responsibly means looking at how your work may impact people with less structural power than you, looking at whether it reifies larger societal problems in its narrative contents or just by existing at all.” There are a couple of ideas here that I take issue with, ones that don’t necessarily mesh with my ideals of the artist.
Hegel wrote that “art is the sensuous presentation of ideas.” Nowhere is the suggestion that art comes attached with responsibilities. I’m not saying that art doesn’t have the power to shape ideas, but more so, there is often a carefully considered and carefully crafted idea at the heart of every work of art. That overarching theme is given precedence and whatever other points a critic discerns in a work fails to recognize the text’s core. In other words, how can we present evidence of irresponsibility of ideas that are not in play?
This, no doubt, branches out of the structuralist and post-structuralist concepts of binary opposition, and most of all, deconstruction’s emphasis on hierarchical binaries. I no doubt concede that such things exist in every text: love/hate, black/white, masculine/feminine, et cetera. However, the great flaw in this reasoning is that these binaries, even when they arise unconsciously, conclusively state a preference in the whole. Such thinking is a mistake. If we reason that such binary hierarchies exist, why should we conclude that they are unchanging and fixed? Such an idea is impossible, regardless how much or how little the artist invests in their creation. Let’s take a look at a sentence–a tweet, in fact from Roxane Gay–in order to make such generalities concrete:
I’m personally going to start wearing a lion costume when I leave my house so if I get shot, people will care.
We will ignore the I of this statement as it is unnecessary in order to make this point. We have to unpack the binaries at play. First, we note the distinctions in life/death, animals/humans (and also humans/animals). These binaries exist solely inside this shell, yet, if we consider this as a part of a much larger endeavor, we are likely to find contradictory binaries in other sentences. When exactly can we decide the author has concluded? How can we determine the author’s point? Can we ever decide? Now think of applying such an act to a text of 60,000, 80,000, 100,000 words. There’s no doubt it is possible. Yet, should we sit there and count any and every binary that privileges one of the terms? Would that move us any closer to a coherent and definitive message? I find it unlikely.
Of course, I’m not advocating for a return to the principles of New Criticism nor I am saying that post-modern philosophy and gender/race/queer theory have no place in the literary discourse, but to simplify a text, to ignore its argument, seems inherently dishonest. Critics are searching for validation of their own biases, a want to see what they see in society whether real or imagined. This is by no means new, as Phyllis Rackin notes in her book Shakespeare and Women, “One of the most influential modern readings of As You Like It, for instance, Louis Adrian Montrose’s 1981 article, ‘The Place of a Brother,’ proposed to reverse the then prevailing view of the play by arguing that ‘what happens to Orlando at home is not Shakespeare’ contrivance to get him into the forest; what happens to Orlando in the forest is Shakespeare’s contrivance to remedy what has happened to him at home’ (Montrose 1981: 29). Just as Oliver has displaced Orlando…Montrose’s reading displaces Rosalind from her place as the play’s protagonist….” Rackin’s point is clear: If you go searching for your pet issue, you’re bound to find it.
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I am not fond of polemical statements nor do I want to approach this topic in a slippery-slope fashion as it simplifies a large and complex issue which is too often simplified to fit the writer’s implicit biases. In order to explore thorny or shifting targets such as these, we need to strip away whatever artifice clouds our judgement and consider the assumptions present therein. Unfortunately, most of the discourse has been narrowly focused, boiling down to little more than a sustained shouting contest, a question of who can claim the high ground, who can label the other a racist first. This is not conducive to any dialogue and only serves to make one dig in their trenches more deeply. It is distressing to say the least.
One of the assumptions most critics make goes to the pervasiveness of power, that power is, as Foucault puts it, everywhere, that there is no one institution responsible for oppression, no one figure to point to, but instead, it is diffused and inherent in society. Of course, Foucault’s definition of power is far from definitive and impossible to pin-down. Are we merely subject to the dominance of some cultural hegemony, some ethereal control that dictates without center as some suggest? This, it seems to me, only delegitimizes the individual. Foucault suggests that the subject is an after-effect of power; however, power is not a wave that merely washes over us. It is a constant struggle for supremacy. Imagine it on the smallest scale possible: the interaction of two. Even when one achieves mastery over the other, the subordinate does not relinquish his identity. These two figures will always be two, independent to some degree. The subordinate is relinquishing control not by coercion but by choice. Should the subordinate resist, and he does so simply through being, the balance of power shifts however slightly.
Existence is not a matter of “cogito ergo sum,” but a matter of opposition, that as long as there is an other, we exist.
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Many people have made the distinction between cultural exchange and cultural appropriation, that the former is a matter of fair and free trade across cultures while the latter is an imposition, a theft of cultural symbols used without respect. While this sounds reasonable, the exchange is impossible.
There is no possibility of fair and equal trade: One will always have power over another.
We assume that American culture is some definable entity, that there is some overall unity to it, but just as deconstructionists demonstrated the unstable undecidability of a text, a culture too is largely undecidable. A culture is not some homogenous mass, but a series of oppositions at play, vying for influence.
We can use myself as an example. Of the categories to which I subscribe or am I assigned, I am a male, cis, white, American, Italian-American, liberal, a writer, an academic, a thinker, a lover of rock n roll, and so on. Each of these cultures are in opposition to something else: male/female, cis/trans, white/black, white/asian, white/hispanic, et cetera. These individual categories form communities based on shared commonalities, but to suggest that these segregating categories can form a cultural default or mainstream is deceptive. Each sphere is distinct from the other, a vast network of connections that ties one individual to a host of others based on one facet. Yet this shared sphere does not create a unified whole. There is no one prevailing paradigm. It is irreducibly complex.
So what’s the point here?
Cultural appropriation, if such a thing exists, is inevitable.
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It should go without saying, but these ideas of oppression and power are ultimately relative. Depending on what community you venture into and your privilege inside it, you will find yourself in one of these two positions—always. America is as much a text as a novel or any other piece of art. We can count up our spheres of influence, those places we are powerful and those places we are powerless and come no closer to overall meaning.
This is not a call to throw up our hands in nihilistic despair for the artist. The artist would be wise to remember their own power, their ability to draw the world uniquely as they see it. If an artist has an responsibility at all, it is not to worry what part of the binary they are or are not privileging, what hierarchy they summon into being. Someone will always be outraged, oppressed, angered as long as they are looking for something to rage about, regardless of whether it is communicated consciously or not.
Freudian criticism often looks at the things that the author represses in the text, the thoughts and emotions that the author is unwilling to admit explicitly. When asked to give evidence, the critic often claims that the evidence does not need to be demonstrated because it cannot be found: It is somehow hidden. And it is this vein, that sadly, has infected our current approach to texts. We co-opt a text for our own biases, to express what the critic can project onto them, rather than what the work itself describes. We look for any example which might fit our goal and consider it representative of the whole. That is cherry-picking at its most obvious, and an error we should all strive to avoid.
We tend to forget that there are bad texts available to us, that do absolutely advocate the type of propaganda that critics infer in works that approach their subjects with care and grace. How can we scrutinize The Sun Also Rises as antisemitic, as heterosexist, as misogynist when we have books like The Turner Diaries that clearly are? How can we damn Shakespeare for living in a certain era? How can we cast out great works which recognize the complexity of existence and ignore those which undoubtedly make us uneasy?
To the point, we are more enamored by the implicit over the explicit. The central argument of a text is what deserves our attention, how it is made and whether it is successful. We cannot presume to know the tension of other binaries as that text is still being written, constantly shifting, unending in its fluidity.
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It is easy to make demands on the artist. Anyone can do it. Criticism is one of the few professions that does not require any previous knowledge or qualification. It is, at its heart, an act of determining meaning, and many, I would argue, have been unsuccessful. The hard part is creating meaning. And to those who make some great claim on what art should or should not do, my advice is simple: Shut up and do it yourself, because, by all means, if it’s that easy, demonstrate it.
June 19, 2015 / Vito Gulla / 0 Comments
Let’s be honest: I’m one bitter bastard. I got into this game because I wanted to write great fiction, because I wanted to reinvent the literary discourse while, at the same time, nodding my head to those great masters who cemented the tradition and inspired me in the first place; however, the further I get along (and the more I read), the more often I find myself frustrated and alone. When I was in grad school, I didn’t find too many people who shared that dream. There were some, of course, but most seemed content to write because they liked it, which is a fine reason to do it. A few were interested in money and were the most indignant when it came to used books. (These people I found to be the most insufferable. If you’re upset that consumers want to buy your book for less, it does not mean they are bad people or they are purposely fucking you. You indebted yourself to a monopolistic corporation in order to reach a larger audience: Get over it or negotate a bigger advance.) But probably most upsetting were those who had no connection to the tradition, no real knowledge of literature, and no real talent. These students tended to be the ones who left with books deals and agents. And this is something, I think, is endemic to the MFA hedgemony. Writers are pushed into the wild without real training or skill, and they, in turn, help to shape the literary discourse in their own image, which marginalizes quality fiction.
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I read an excerpt from a novel that was getting a lot of press and praise at the time. It was in Narrative, and I haven’t really heard much about the novel or the author since then. But I read it without expectation. It told the story a young woman who goes to a party, discovers it’s kind of a lesbian orgy, goes home, and then realizes she’s in love with a woman from the party.
Most of the dialogue is banal and useless: “Patsy must have spotted you, the pale woman said now. Iris smiled. I’m Sylvia, the woman said. Iris, Iris said.”
When you’re writing, you have the ability to go anywhere and show anything. So why the hell did this author choose to waste ten seconds of my time? How about a sense of conflict? But in this excerpt, that problem is buried.
Iris put her hand to her hair to fix it, and the dwarf with the white fez came by. Champagne? he said. Oh, please, Iris said. Rose looked at her. Well, here I am thinking, Look at this little bumpkin, and here you are, having your way with Armand and who knows what else. Shame on me, she said. Oyster? Iris opened her mouth.
This was not the kind of party where you said, Oh, I’ve never eaten oysters, or, Oh, gosh, they look wet and disgusting, which they really did. If oysters were the path to parties like these and beautiful, dazzling, dark Rose Sawyer, Iris thought she could toss back oysters like cold beer on a summer day. She managed two and chased them with champagne.
Iris clearly has never had an experience like this, and that’s where the problem lays. But she doesn’t seem to be doing little more than observing. Instead, the author emphasizes description over character and reaction:
“Who should lead?” Rose said.
“I could,” Iris said quietly.
“But you don’t want to,” Rose said, and she put a strong arm around Iris’s waist. All Iris’s dancing, her show routines, waltzing with her father, the senior-year parties with Harry Bledsoe and Jim Cummings, who were the best dancers in Windsor, faded away. She was dancing for the first time, right now, her face against Rose’s smooth, powdered cheek. Breast to red silk breast, thigh to black silk thigh. They did two promenades and a slow twist, as if they’d been practicing, and Rose pulled Iris back to the divan. More champagne appeared.
Again, we get very little in the way of conflict or anything interesting. The character, in this excerpt, is so unwilling to do anything more than observe and hold momentary, somewhat thematically relevant conversations. Why isn’t she doing something? Just because she’s scared or beguiled or lost doesn’t mean Iris should be useless. She has choices to make, more interesting choices with actual stakes attached, not a dishonest twist to generate interest after your reader has fallen asleep. But the writer doesn’t seem interested in telling a compelling story or even creating an character we care about or want to know about: The writer is, like most players in literary fiction, too concerned with crafting gorgeous prose and not what it expresses.
And though this may not be indictative of the work as a whole, you’d think an excerpt in an important magazine like Narrative would be one, complete and two, interesting. But instead, we’re given tedium and useless description, two things readers tend to skip.
This is why literary fiction can’t find broad appeal.
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It’s pretty easy to identify the problem when it presents itself on the page, but it’s a little more difficult to look at that same problem and cite it institutionally. If literary fiction’s greatest threat manifests itself through boredom, the question arises: Why? The answer, I believe, is surprisingly simple. We have the blind leading the blind. Few writers running, publishing, or submitting to the big, little magazines these days have mastered the form. They rely on instinct and intuition. They write, edit, and decide with their gut. They don’t seem to have a set of objective criteria that determines good writing, and if they do, there is but one consideration: the prose. These editors and writers are the most disappointing of all. They spent their early years reciting Virginia Woolf and lines of poetry but never truly took the time to discern what made that prose better than others. These writers are quick to object to theory and rhetoric. They don’t like definitions or structures. They merely listen. Does it sound right? Often times, the work they produce or publish is little more than a fragment, an ancedote, inconsequential, not at all a story.
I too grew up loving the music of language (and I still find sentences or images that make me stop reading and write the words on my thigh with a finger), but I’m not foolish enough to say that is the sole criterion on which to judge. Good sentences are a given. They should not be considered special. A writer with sloppy prose is not worth reading regardless, and a writer with masterful prose and nothing to say is even worse.
Many of these writers eschew the tradition. They claim that form is limiting, that they need the freedom of a true artist. But if you have yet to learn the basics, what do you really have to deconstruct? How can you experiment with something you don’t fully understand? The budding bodybuilder does not start with drop sets and complexes: They learn the movement first. And can we really say that artists are hamstringed by their own ever-expanding knowledge? Does the musician suffer because he learns scales and modes? Is the painter stifled when she practices composition? I think not; in fact, that mastery most likely enhances their abilities. Yet, rarely, except with genre writers or writers for the screen, do I hear anyone talk about the governing laws of story. All great artists honed their craft. They emulated their forebearers. They practiced.
Hunter S. Thompson famously wrote out sentences from The Great Gatsby. Ben Franklin memorized articles from The Spectator. Joyce said he was content to go down in history as a scissors and paste man. But they didn’t just learn to write sentences. They discovered how a work was constructed. They processed the elements that comprised its composition. They taught themselves to search for le mot juste and the best available means of persuasion. They perfected the form before they destroyed it.
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One of the most obnoxious trends in recent years is the rise of flash fiction. Editors have propped it up, thinking it “competes” with Facebook and video games and television. (It doesn’t. They’re entirely different media.) Because of its brevity, flash fiction, usually under 1000 words, can be finished before you put away your dick after a piss, but, in most cases, I would not describe it as a satisfying experience. At its best, it is a first paragraph or ten from an otherwise incomplete story.
Here’s an example from Tin House’s Flash Fridays.
The story, titled “The Girls Where You Live,” relates the uninteresting tale of a young man (our narrator) who meets up with a homeless guy who tells the narrator to “not eat the pussy.” The narrator trades the homeless man two cigarettes for seventy-five cents. The author then follows:
I was drunk. We were all drunk it seemed. Everyone I knew. We drank until we felt like copies of ourselves, which would vanish, and whatever plans we’d made too, in the morning’s first blue light. I saw the man, and the cashier and the store, which was plastered, ceiling to linoleum, with liquor, beer, cigarette, and cigarillo adverts in bleary swathes of imagery, as through a fogged window polished with your hand. And in the corner near the door, there was a coin-operated candy machine half-full with jellybeans, except where were the children? Where were the mothers who’d dug through their purses and found one last quarter?
“That’s not very gentlemanly,” I managed.
In a story of less than 1000 words, this author, who is somehow or another an MFA candidate at Johns Hopkins, wastes the reader’s time with an expositional onslaught of pseudo-philosophy. And our conflict? He mildly disagrees with the homeless man.
This is followed by some questions about where the narrator is from, and the narrator answers that there were many pretty girls in his hometown. They converse about the girls’s hygiene, and the story ends with:
“I’ve met kids like you, you know. “ He said, “I’ll bet your mamma traded you silver dollars for your baby teeth, didn’t she? I bet she smelled all over just like the palm of her hand. When I lost a tooth, when I put it beneath my pillow, do you know what I found in the morning? I found a tooth. And there was still a bit of blood on it. And it was mine. And I buried it in the yard like a dog.” He laughed madly again, which shook the whole of him and rattled his eyes.
I left him there, laughing and gasping, and hocking loogies into the stormdrain.
What? I’ve offered a large portion of the story here, but even if I wasn’t so curt in my description, I doubt you’d have any better understanding of this than I do. Just what the fuck did I read? I get that the author believes he’s highlighted something profound, something about class, but I just don’t see it. This might be amusing if you still get a chuckle from hearing about pussy. (I’ve had sex, and I’m over the giggles. Thanks.) Otherwise, what’s the point? There’s very little sense of conflict here. The description is a vehicle only for itself. The dialogue doesn’t advance the narrative (if anything, it delays it). And the characters seem poorly drawn and one dimensional. Where’s the arc? Where’s the plot? Where is any evidence of craftsmanship?
Of course, this is no mere aberration. Here’s one from McSweeney’s Quarterly, called “Don’t Get Distracted.”
It begins, “One morning in January, I was walking to my studio feeling happy because I had spent the night with a new lover. I passed a mother and father carrying a baby…. A man walking in front of me turned around and said that it must be the couple’s first baby, because otherwise they would have covered its head….”
The first sentence is mostly forgettable. Why does this story start with “Everything is great.” Characters whose lives are perfect are boring. Then some insignificant man says something significant. (This seems to be a popular trope in shit fiction.)
Our narrator and the man walk together and converse, and he tells her, “Ladies must always walk on the inside.”
Our narrator asks why, and the man responds, “Ladies must walk on the inside because if they walk on the outside, it means that they’re for sale. If a man says he loves you, pay attention to which side of the sidewalk he lets you walk on.”
She thanks him for walking her home and the conversation, and he tells her, “Remember, don’t get distracted.”
And the story ends with her reply, “I’ll try not to.”
Seriously? Seriously? Fuck you.
Again, there isn’t much more to that story than what I offer here. How is this publishable? How is this quality work? Who does this appeal to? It’s banal. It’s trivial. It’s not interesting. The theme here, about what men do for their women, isn’t explored at all. Does the narrator fall in love with the man she’s walking with? Does she reconsider her relationship with her new lover? Does she realize that she loves her lover? I don’t fucking know. You know why?–because it’s fucking hidden. What is this, a goddamn scavenger hunt? There’s not enough detail to make analysis worthwhile. The author doesn’t seem aware of plot or structure. The author doesn’t use the best available means of persuasion. The author doesn’t even seem to recognize that a theme without context or clarity is no theme at all. And while we have a symbol in the form of the sidewalk, it doesn’t help if that symbol doesn’t illuminate anything nor is its meaning explained.
And just one more example of the “short-short story,” which is apocryphally attributed to Hemingway: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
First, if Hemingway did write this, it’s by far one of his worst, and lacks the brilliance of his stories like “Hills Like White Elephants” or “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” Second, this isn’t a story. It might be the beginning of a story, but it’s certainly not a complete one. What is the status quo? Fuck if I know. What is the inciting incident? Baby dies? What is the debate and break into act two? Who knows? The midpoint? Suck a dick. The third act twist? Fuck off. The climax and resolution? Somebody is poor.
Wow, I am blown away.
Who are my protagonist and antagonist?
What is the point of view?
What is the conflict?
What is the setting?
Are there symbols?
What is the theme?
I know I may seem like the crotchety old man here, but flash fiction is not a great innovation in storytelling. It’s not subverting the form for any clear purpose. It doesn’t change the short fiction form because of its limitations. And it is certainly not learning vaulable lessons from the micro content we find on the web. I’m not saying that YouTube and Twitter can’t be inspirations or help to mold the form–they can–but if all we’re getting out of those models is that people like things short, we’re not asking the right questions.
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If there is one writer who offered more formal innovation than any other to English writing, it must be James Joyce. In one book, he invented and reinvented English prose and style. Ulysses is a towering momument of the possibilities of literature, the same way Watchmen is to comics or The Odyssey is to epics. But the novel took Joyce seven years to write. He mined every form of media to make an enormous compendium of forms, which still adhered to the conventions of story and the novel. (If you deconstruct it, you will still find all the necessary elements of story.) Of course, he was forty years old when he wrote it.
But let’s go back a few years, before he was a God of English prose, when he was still finding his way as an artist. Whenever people talk about Dubliners, they usually bring up one of two stories: “Araby” and “The Dead,” two master works in the collection. Rarely, do people talk about “Counterparts” or “Clay” or “Two Gallants.” Some of the stories in Dubliners are better than others, and if you compare something brilliant, like “Araby,” with something not very good, like “After the Race,” it’s pretty clear that even Joyce struggled with the form.
“After the Race” was one of the first stories Joyce wrote, published in 1904 in The Irish Homestead, and it’s easy to tell. The prose is great, as is to be expected, but there is very little in the way of a narrative or causality. The story doesn’t seem to be much more than an insignificant collection of scenes strung together. (Yes, there is a theme about class and money, but it feels lost in the shuffle.) Worst of all, it fails to showcase Joyce’s finest skills as a writer: human interaction. Whether alone or with others, Joyce’s characters, from Molly Bloom to Gabriel Conroy, spend the majority of their stories talking about important things, and I don’t just mean things like economics and Shakespeare. They are in constant conflict. Every word is a bullet in the larger Alderian power struggle. In Jimmy Doyle, the protagonist of “After the Race,” is little more than a detached observer. But even his consciousness isn’t all that interesting. And what few choices he does make are given to us in summary rather than action:
They drank to Ireland, England, France, Hungary, the United States of America. Jimmy made a speech, a long speech, Villona saying: —Hear! Hear! whenever there was a pause. There was a great clapping of hands when sat down. It must have been a good speech. Farley clapped him on the back and laughed loudly. What jovial fellows! What good company they were!
Now I get that Joyce is trying to show Jimmy’s ignorance, how he can’t see that his own friends think he’s an utter jackass, but Joyce’s over-reliance on summary deadens that effect. Had he had the characters interact in a real, complete scene, the story would be much more significant.
But again, Joyce was a young man then. He wasn’t experimenting: He was learning. And even still, he had already grasped theme and irony better than most veteran writers, but he wasn’t a master of the form. He knew he had more practice ahead of him.
I don’t see many young writers with this kind of awareness, who consciously work on their weaknesses. If you read Dubliners to completion, you can see, in a non-linear fashion, the growth of one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists, from ignorance of form to mastery of it.
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In our quest for the new and exciting, we have embraced the mediocre and inconsequential. I doubt very much that Hemingway or Fitzgerald, Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy would ever make their prose their only concern. The masters demonstrated through their work that they gave care to plot, character, theme, symbol, conlict, setting–all the the conventions of story. And when they did subvert our expectations, there was a discernable reason, because the old ways weren’t enough to express it.
I too want to subvert the tradition, but I also respect it. There are many fine things we have gained from it, but few people these days are interested in textbook fiction, the kind we study in college classrooms. They seem to think that the ability to analyze a work lessens it, that discerning the truth of it robs it of its glory.
It’s funny. I always thought of myself as a literary revolutionary, someone who would overthrow the order. Yet most of the work I find does it in ways I don’t particularly agree with, from people unaware of what came before them, which seems to make me the old-fashioned traditionalist, but when I think about it, if bad, incomplete stories are what’s trendy, I guess maybe I am part of the revolution–just on the losing side
April 29, 2015 / Vito Gulla / 0 Comments
Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about the experiences of people of color in MFA programs. First, there was Junot Diaz’s piece at the New Yorker last year. And just recently, David Mura wrote up an essay on Gulf Coast‘s blog. Both of them describe their experiences as people of color in the MFA hegemony, and I have no doubt that their frustration is real. There are a lot of white people in MFA programs, and it can be alienating I’m sure. (We only had one person of color in my MFA cohort and only a handful of professors of color, and I cannot say how they did or did not feel. I did notice that race was rarely discussed but only because it seemed that the white people tended to write about white people and the people of color tended to write about people of color. I did not feel, fortunately, if it was brought up, that it would not be ignored or trivialized.) But in both articles, there seemed to be an underlining idea, one that made me somewhat uncomfortable as an artist. They suggested that writers have a certain responsiblity to depict their reality, which I agree with, but that comes with a caveat: that a writer’s reailty should consider the reality of others.
And this got me thinking.
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In Mura’s article, “Student of Color in the Typical MFA Program,” he says that a lot of white people are ignorant to this topic of race, unwilling to discuss the ways they consciously and unconsciously uphold white supremacy in their fiction. He writes:
If and when the student of color voices her objections to the piece, more often than not, neither the white professor nor the other white students will respond to the actual critique; nor will they inquire further into why the student of color is making that critique.
They disregard this opportunity to discover their own whiteness, to investigate why a particular character is a stereotype, and potentially, right the problem. I think these are all fine ideas worth exploring. (I am, after all, Italian-American and, therefore, bleed marinara.) But there’s an implicit assumption, if the writing workshop recognizes and discusses and agrees upon this attempt to fix things in their stories, that I find problematic: Artists, with a little help from others, can fully control their message and its effects on the individual reader.
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A few years ago, I was reading an article in College English by Gay Wilentz. It claimed that The Sun Also Rises was an anti-Semitic work, conveying the nation’s anxiety over the Jewish usurper. The author gave many examples and laid out her case as best she could, but it was something I didn’t buy. The novel seemed so much more complex than that. Sure, there were a lot of characters who hated Robert Cohn because he was Jewish, but I wasn’t sure if the novel necessarily endorsed that type of behavior. After all, Jake Barnes’s opening narration presents Cohn as a somewhat tragic figure. Barnes describes him as “very shy and a thoroughly nice boy,” who “never fought except in the gym.” He even tells us that the reason Cohn took up boxing in the first place is “to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he felt on being treated like a Jew at Princeton.” If the novel is trying paint Cohn as a Jewish stereotype, it doesn’t seem to be very successful. Even later, when Barnes goes fishing with Bill, Bill asks him to say something pitiful. Barnes answers, “Robert Cohn.” That seems to run contrary to this idea of Cohn as the Jewish boogeyman. And furthermore, while the rest of the cast are quick to call Cohn a “kike,” Barnes, as far as I can remember, never utters the word himself. But instead of recognizing these points of contention, the critic ignored them: They weren’t relevant to her data set.
She had an argument, and she was going to prove it.
Most people would ask what was Hemingway’s point? They might even wish to summon the author through séance and ask him his reasoning, but I feel this too wouldn’t be very valuable. Why should we worship Hemingway’s analysis? He’s not God of the text, just the vehicle from which it came out. There’s a complexity there, and it’s not easy to say exactly what it is or is not.
And it’s not just in literature that I see this either. Tyler Shields, a photographer did a photo shoot with Glee cast member Heather Morris.
A few people said that these photos glamorize domestic violence, and the photographer himself later issued an apology. Now let’s actually look at some interpretations of these photographs.
In the first photo, the woman, who has a black eye, is restrained by the iron. She clamps down on the cord to bite it. She is dressed like a 50s housewife. The first way we can perceive the image is that it is a sexualized fantasy, depicting what some wife beaters probably masturbate to. But personally, that’s a little simplistic. She’s restrained because she’s bonded to domesticity, a burden the iron represents. Her husband, most likely, gave her that black eye. But the fact that she’s biting through the cord suggests resistance, the desire for escape. And if we look at the next photo, where she places the iron over the man’s crotch and smiles, there seems to be another message, and that’s one of empowerment. I’m not saying these are the only interpretations. And none are superior. But there does seem to be a problem with saying that because one of these interpretations angers us, that is no longer valuable or useful. It’s art, and it isn’t designed to have a specific, concrete meaning. That’s the beauty of it, the–as the deconstructionists would put–undecidability of it.
So why does the artist need to apologize? Should Shields have foreseen this possible consequence? And if he did, how could he correct it? There’s no doubt a meaning Shields perceives as viewer himself (not that his is the “correct” one). But let’s say someone mentioned this possible interpretation, and he reshoots. Won’t there be another argument against him–somewhere? Isn’t there something which will always rub someone the wrong way?
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Roland Barthes, in his book Image, Text, Music, wrote: “To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing.”
It seems like giving a text a critic does the same thing.
We assume that because the author has summoned the work into existence that he or she is God, but if we fool ourselves into believing this, then there is no further cause for investigation. But if we say that because an interpretation is valid and that interpretation evidences a message we disagree with, then the work must be condemned and extinguished, unworthy of appreciation or discussion.
But I think this too starts with the wrong supposition.
Art is an act of creation, not just on the behalf of the creator, but the individual viewer too. It is an act of two halves of the same soul coming together to create meaning, and that meaning exists uniquely between each reader and each author. If we impose our flawed and cherry-picked readings on all others–and the author–we do all art a disservice.
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I was so excited my junior year of college. I had known I wanted to be a writer from the moment I failed physics my freshman year, and I was finally getting a chance to take a class in creative writing.
My excitement quickly subsided as I realized that I was the only person who actually wanted a career as an author. Everyone else, it seemed, took the class as an easy elective. Nonetheless, I persisted regardless, scribbling voluminous notes on people’s manuscripts that they tossed in the trash after class.
We spent the first half of the semester writing poetry, and in that time, I wrote two bland poems. One was an image poem; the other was about consumerism–or something like that. They were not very good poems, but I had little interest in writing poetry. I wanted to be a novelist.
I read anything I could get my hands on. I explored the Canon, read as many books off as many great novels lists as I could find, burned through the recent National Book Award and Pulitzer winners (including Diaz’s Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which I loved). I spent afternoons in the library, and in the evenings, after work, I paged through Wikipedia trying to pick up every bit of literary history there was. I also was particularly fond of Bret Easton Ellis.
One of our first fiction workshops showcased one of my peers and me. I couldn’t wait to learn what the weaknesses were in my writing, places where the pacing sagged, where characters motivations were unclear, where the style could be sharper. I longed to learn the craft, the necessary elements in telling a story. All I had to go on, at that point, was what I picked up from the great fiction I had read and a few articles I had read online. I couldn’t wait to have it all explained by an expert.
I should have known what I was in for after we discussed the first author’s work.
My professor, an academic and poet (I use that term loosely as she has fewer artistic publications than I do and is at least twice my age. One of her poems that I found online told the story of how Oprah was at the foot of her bed and told her to go for a run or something. It was not a worthwhile read.), didn’t focus on the writer’s craft. Instead, she handed out a photocopy of the definition of heterosexism. She said that the writer’s liberal use of the word “faggot” conveyed a heterosexist attitude.
I found myself as the only voice of descent as the rest of the class sat in silence.
It wasn’t long before we moved on to my story, a near twenty page ode to Ellis. There was sex, men who couldn’t orgasm and woman who could, murder for hire, a double-cross, and sex. I do not think the story was well-crafted now, but I was young and immature and still learning as an artist. I had some idea that I was showing how some men may feel in society and how they go to crazy means in order to reassert their masculinity. It was a model of bad behavior that spoke for itself. Instead, my story was accompanied with the definition of misogyny. My professor said my story was inappropriate for class and expressed a hatred for women.
Needless to say, I wasn’t all that happy about it. At first, all I could muster when she asked for my opinion was that I felt like a douche.
However, after I thought about it, I tried to say it was pretty clear that my character was a scumbag, that people shouldn’t be going to the lengths he did, that I didn’t need to spell out what a bad man he was. I even referenced a letter from Chekov, who wrote:
You abuse me for objectivity, calling it indifference to good and evil, lack of ideals and ideas, and so on. You would have me, when I describe horse-stealers, say: “Stealing horses is an evil.” But that has been known for ages without my saying so. Let the jury judge them, it’s my job simply to show what sort of people they are.
But the conversation didn’t make any difference.
When I got my draft back, I learned that she had graded it as well. I “earned” a D-. (Who the fuck grades drafts, anyway?) That, I felt, was pretty unfair. I had written the longest story in the class, one that had a beginning, a middle, and end, one that had dialogue and description (a lot of description). And as far as I could tell, I was the only one who actually took the class seriously!
Her notes didn’t say anything about craft either. She didn’t tell me that acts needed to be shortened, that the plot was non-sensical, that the characters were unrealistic, that the symbolism didn’t work, or the theme wasn’t clear. She focused on the meaning, her meaning.
Of course, I’m not one to take defeat lightly. The first thing I did was appeal the grade to the dean, writing a two page letter on the multitudinous meanings of literature, citing everything I had learned from my theory classes. I gave a list of novels which, at some point in time, were deemed controversial and had graphic, shocking sexual and violent content.
My appeal was dismissed out of hand.
But again, I wasn’t going to roll over, and I did the one thing I could do: I wrote. I wrote a new story for my next workshop, one squarely aimed at my professor’s philosophy, one which would be so carefully written as to prevent any misinterpretation. I was going to be so damn clear and so damn moral that even Jeremy Collier would blush. I told the story of a writer who was attacked quite regularly for his perceived misogyny, who felt he was being misread because he thought of himself as a feminist. (I’ve always been known for my subtlety.) The story contained a plethora of footnotes that gave an overload of information. All profanity was excised, replaced with “[expletive deleted].” The protagonist is a bit of a jerk, but his favorite author is a female feminist poet (the poet part was an attempt to suck up to my professor so I wouldn’t fail), who he talks to early on about something unrelated to the plot. And the climax takes place at a reading, where a radical female feminist stands up to shoot him, but of course, even that violence I neutered. Her gun shot not bullets but a flag that read, “Bang!”
It was not a very good story, but I thought the message was clear: Feminism is good, but radicalism isn’t.
The day of the workshop came, and nobody seemed to have much to say, not even my professor. At the end of class, she handed me back my manuscript, and I searched through and read her notes. She highlighted the climax, where I had added a footnote explaining who my antagonist was and why she was a bad person and how she promoted the wrong brand of feminism, essentially that being a radical separatist was bad.
My professor asked, however, “Why do you want to depict feminists this way?”
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David Mura and Junot Diaz both teach at a writer’s conference exclusively for writers of color, called The Voices of Our Naton Association. Mura writes:
On a larger level, the student of color in a VONA class doesn’t have to spend time arguing with her classmates about whether racism exists or whether institutions and individuals in our society subscribe to and practice various forms of racial supremacy. Nor does the student have to spend time arguing about the validity of a connection between creative writing and social justice.
And there’s a part of me that agrees with that last bit about creative writing and social justice. I think that artists don’t write exclusively to tell a story: They have a message–and they should. But it doesn’t mean that it’s the only reason they write. It’s a pretty complicated affair, and fiction doesn’t serve just one person. Joyce didn’t like what he saw people doing in Ireland, but that’s not the only reason he wrote what he wrote. He wanted to convey, according to me, consciousness, the subjectivity of experience and perception, the cost of becoming an artist, the paralysis that infected Irish individuals, the beauty of sex, the Irish identity, his disgust with the Church. But he also wanted to write beautifully and tell a story and make people feel things. And he never does so didactically.
I don’t think we can have our cake here and eat it too though. There’s a difference between writing an essay and writing a story. An essay’s meaning is not up for debate, for the most part: It is a reasoned, logical argument. It’s meaning is fixed and can be defended or attacked. Frankly, it’s a better medium for making a point. A story, however, never once commits itself to one idea only. It is not a clear cut argument: It is a collection of evidence that can be interpreted and enjoyed or interpreted and hated.
And we are utterly helpless to control it. It’s that last part that really frustrates everyone else, but I’m OK with that.
I’m not in the business of pleasing others. I don’t write because I want to confirm your biases. I don’t write to make you feel better about yourself. I’m not trying to, as Vonnegut said, open my window and make love to the world because I know I’ll catch cold. Instead, I write to show you the reality I perceive, the world I inhabit.
We are the masters of our own little universes: Critics be damned.
April 25, 2015 / Vito Gulla / 0 Comments
I just started teaching drama to my comp II class, and typically, the first play we do is Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet. It’s one of my favorite plays by one of my favorite dramatists. There’s a line that I’m particularly fond of:
The great fucks that you may have had. What do you remember about them[…]? I don’t know. For me, I’m saying what it is, it’s probably not the orgasm. Some broad’s forearm on your neck, something her eyes did. There was a sound she made…or me, lying, in the, I’ll tell you: me lying in bed; the next day she brought me cafe au lait. She gives me a cigarette, my balls feel like concrete.
It’s a great one because it’s so damn true–with anything you’ve ever enjoyed. Those fragments of memories that come streaming through your mind, it’s always one moment, always that one little image, insignificant, divorced from any goal or objective, but for some reason, it stays.
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When I was on the verge of adolescence, I couldn’t wait until the Christmas of 1998. I must have pestered my mother everyday to get my present early. Most of them could wait, but the one I needed was The Ocarina of Time. Of course, it did little to change the delivery date. I did eventually get it and played from start to finish in a few weeks. It was (and probably still is) the greatest game I have ever played. But at the time, I didn’t know why, didn’t know how to express it. All I knew was that it was different and “fun.”
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I’ve always been interested in movements, those paradigm shifts for the entirety of art. It’s nice to have those categories, to point to those commonalities of an era. And there always seems to be some figure who is leading the charge. Romanticism had Byron, Keats, and Shelley. Transcendentalism had Emerson and Thoreau. Naturalism had Crane. Modernism had Joyce and Woolf. Post-Modernism was Burroghs and Ginsberg. But what about now? What–really–is pushing us forward? We’re not at a loss for good authors: Junot Diaz, Johnathan Letham, David Eggers, Johnathan Franzen, Jennifer Egan, and this list goes on. They’re all wonderful in their own right. And we still have those legends who creep out from behind the curtain every so often, like Roth or DeLillo or Pynchon. But I don’t see anybody trying to shake things up. Everyone seems to be content with the way things are. It’s been over twenty years since Tom Wolfe said we should move back towards realism, as if that was the only way to capture an era. But nobody seems to want something different, something that is in the moment and also new. To me, the magic of movements isn’t just what they aimed to depict but how.
I guess what I’m asking is, Why aren’t we trying to reinvent ourselves?
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I once did a Google search for the movement after Post-Modernism. Most were unhelpful. The answer was typically Post-Post-Modernism. It didn’t give an explanation of the movement’s philosophies or goals or what differentiated it from what came before. The closest to a definition I found was a few writers who were thrown under the bus.
But then I saw something that seemed a little more interesting. They called it the New Sincerity.
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By the time I made it through my first year of undergraduate, I had probably watched more movies than most people watch in a lifetime. I had no interest in becoming a filmmaker because controlling a set and overseeing actors and editors seemed like a lot of work. Not to mention, somebody is going to come along to fuck it up. The less hands on what I’m making, the better.
I guess that’s why I choose writer instead.
But I spent a lot of time thinking about those movies too, about the choices those directors made and why. Little things started to fall into place: the use of shadow, the actor’s placement in the frame, the transition between scenes. I realized that the very good and the very talented didn’t leave things up to chance. They shot something a certain way not because it was cool or looked nice but because it had meaning.
A great movie wasn’t just good craft. That was a given. You had to make sure the acting was good and that the characters were realistic and believable and the dialogue felt true and that the costumes and sets and editing were spot on. Those things, production value, were what it made it easy to watch. But the true geniuses thought more deeply, saw things differently, they needed to convey something.
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Just recently, my girlfriend was reading some book in bed, something that recieved attention here and there in the papers. I read a few pages over her shoulder, and other than pointless fragments, the book had a good voice and good prose and seemed true and beautiful. It didn’t take me long to recognize what it was though.
I rolled over and shut my eyes, and my girlfriend asked me what I thought.
It’s just what this world needs, I said. Another book about World War II.
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The thing that bothers me about all the short fiction I read in the magazines is that they never seem to talk about the world I live in. It’s either a sorry account of hipsters trying to find meaning in their world of irony or about some long ago historical event or some academic who spends his or her time trying to bang students and read Proust. Rarely, do I find stories about real people, stories that aren’t preoccupied with rehashing the past.
I guess it’s easy to blame the MFA. It seems like the only people who read the magazines anymore are the MFAs trying to get into them. So I guess it’s about catering to your audience. But I don’t think all of us are that self-involved. I mean, I have an MFA too, but the last thing I want to do is read a story about workshops or seminars or some dickhead who enjoys Derek Walcott–especially when the reference is empty, only an attempt to display how widely the author has read.
I like reading probably more than the next guy, but I would never say it’s the only thing I do. And even though I’m a college professor (adjunct, of course), I certainly wouldn’t say it’s the most exciting part of my day.
When I get together with my friends, we spend a lot of time just talking, maybe have a few drinks, watch a movie, play some video games. We have things we want to do, things that worry us, things we like to do. I think we spend more time on our phones and on the internet than we do a lot of other things. And I don’t think it’s bad either. There’s a lot of great stuff on the internet: There’s Wikipedia and Facebook and Twitter and Imgur and Youtube and YouJizz. It’s a part of our lives now. Sometimes, it seems like the only constant, especially when you have to wonder how you’re going to pay off your student debt on your retail job salary–even though you went to college for medieval history.
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For as long as I can remember, I wanted to do something great. I wanted to make some kind of discovery, do something that had never been done before. For a time, it was going to be paleontology. By sixth grade, it was end global warming by discovering nuclear fusion. That lasted til college, and I settled on writer.
I guess I’m still pretty naive.
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Whenever you read a novel that focuses on technology, it seems like the message is always the same: This thing can be dangerous. Emerson probably said it best: “The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.” I understand the perspective, but I feel it’s far too common. Everyone seems to be a little too glass-half-empty on the subject, and it’s not an idea that seems to be going anywhere anytime soon.
Just look at the new Alex Garland movie, Ex Machina. Now, I have little doubt the film won’t be worthwhile. Garland’s writing is pretty damn good, and I’ve enjoyed everything he’s done with the exception of The Tesseract. But if the trailers are any indication, it seems like we’ll be getting that same old message once again. Of course, I haven’t seen it (though I probably will) and I’m rushing to judgment and maybe it’s just me, but why isn’t anybody saying how awesome this all is?
Instead, people seem to pine for that great yesterday, when things were simpler. There’s the paleo diet. There’s internet blocking software. There’s parent-controlled time limits on iPads. There are people going off the grid.
I don’t know about you, but I like progress.
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So where do we go from here? I don’t know exactly. This isn’t a manifesto. It’s not a how to guide on the direction we need to take to get out of this rut. If this is anything, I think it’s a push towards something greater. After all, the first step is admitting you have a problem.