No Idea of Order at Key West

In my sudden zeal to relive the heady days as an undergraduate English major, I came across this relic in my Norton Anthology:

Here we see a long-ago incarnation of yours truly, taking notes on Wallace Stevens's "The Idea of Order at Key West," most likely in Intro to Poetry, circa 1985. It's clear from the flat, dutiful quality of these notes that I was recording my professor's statements as he walked us through the poem. That is to say, I had literally no idea what he, or Stevens, was talking about. The interpretation of the poem was as incomprehensible to me as the poem itself. Yes, this is auditory. Yes, this is conditional. This is spiritual language. So what? I didn't understand how any of these concepts elucidated the poem, or vice versa. Thanks in part to the New Critical practices my teachers were steeped in at the time, the whole discussion became an echo chamber of abstractions.

The final proof of how lost I was lies in the title of the next poem, "The Poems of Our Climate," where you see my younger self filling in the o's. Now, I was not normally one to engage in this activity. In fact, I recall thinking at various times in my youth that filling in o's and p's and e's in printed text was a sure sign of idiocy. Yet here I am, not only doing that very thing, but carefully shading the o's for a 3-D effect. I had completely thrown in the towel on Stevens.

Rereading the poem now, I find both more and less here than these notes suggest. I'm certainly less intimidated by it, and can sort of relate to it without being able to articulate exactly what it's "about." And that's probably because I simply have much more experience, with poetry and with life. Also I don't have to write a paper about this, which reduces the anxiety level considerably; but if I did have to write one, I would likely spend a lot more time on the poem's aesthetic qualities, and how they create an experience that doesn't necessarily represent anything beyond itself. That is, poetry happens within the poem. It is not always, or at least not solely, a pointer.

With this hindsight, it seems critical that anyone teaching such poems in high school and college remember how increasingly distant our young charges' experiences and concerns are from those of a middle-aged white poet in 1935. How might we bridge the gap?

I think we could start with the advice Dean Bakopoulos gives in this marvelous piece from the NYT. Before even beginning to wrestle with a story or poem's "meaning," whatever we're trying to get at with that, first let students select sentences or phrases or words that move them. They don't have to know why these words speak to them, only that they do on some level other than pure logic. They might like the words, in fact, because they're confusing. They present a new, unfamiliar experience.

After a while, you might begin to introduce some context, like Stevens's particular interests and concerns, and some general concerns of his time and place and class and culture. How is this individual mind interacting with external ideas and questions, as well as with physical places and experiences like hearing and seeing and feeling?

I frankly have little experience teaching poetry, and find more experimental pieces much harder to deal with than this one. But it does behoove us, when we teach, to try to put ourselves in our students' shoes, remembering how little we knew, back in the day, about the lives of those to whom this poem speaks more readily.

Giving your characters an inner life

This lovely piece about James Gandolfini got me thinking about literary characters and what makes them seem real to us. My former students know I've been grinding this ax a long time. But this is another way that writing fiction very much resembles acting: in both cases, you can't reveal everything there is to know about a character. Good characters (like good stories, according to Hemingway) are icebergs; much more of them exists below the surface than above. And, let's face it, that's true of actual human beings as well. That's why, in fact, fictional characters who seem to have a lot going on inside them feel more real than those whose thoughts, beliefs, and actions are always transparent and aligned.

So, keeping Gandolfini as Tony Soprano in mind as an example, here are some ways we fiction writers can make our characters more real--as opposed to, God help us, more likeable.

• Embrace contradiction. Tony was a wildly violent man who fretted over his violent tendencies, took his daughter to visit colleges, and became quite fond of a family of ducks. We all fret about certain characteristics we possess; we don't think they're quite honorable or consistent or helpful, yet we can't quite smooth ourselves out. Your characters can be the same way: an elementary school teacher who fears children, a doctor who's addicted to cocaine ... Let them be aware of these contradictions without knowing how to resolve them.
  
• Use interior monologue. The psychiatrist in The Sopranos was a device than enabled us to hear what went on inside Tony's head. In fiction, we can just write that stuff out. Where else but in fiction do we have direct access to another person's thoughts? Take advantage of that opportunity. After all, I think, therefore I am: that's how I know that I, at least, am real. Of course, you can overdo interior monologue or use it as an excuse to tell rather than show. The test is whether it reveals character, rather than explaining it.
  
• Let characters wonder what each other thinks. It's my sense (isn't it yours, too?) that we humans spend a lot of time wondering what other people think. It might be one reason why some of us read fiction--to at least have the sense that we're inside someone else's head. So a realistic fictional character would probably have this desire also--to know what her husband is really thinking about when he shrugs and says "nothing." Our common, everyday tragedy is that none of us can ever really know this for certain. In their world, your characters live this tragedy, too.
  
• Explore emotion. As Gandolfini said, let your characters really feel emotions. Those emotions can be confusing, "wrong," in conflict with one another, etc. They can explode volcanically, or the character can work hard at suppressing them, but the emotions themselves never go away.

The "broken windows" theory of feminism?

I haven't read Lean In yet, because, until recently, I felt it didn't apply to me. I actually do work in corporate America, though as a consultant, and offsite, and for a small, woman-led company where all but one employee is a woman. Also, though I used to be "in management," I have since leaned out on that score altogether. I have determined that I do not like managing others. In my case, I would argue that this is not an entirely gender-based decision; my father always refused leadership positions throughout his career, preferring to focus on "the work itself." My mother stopped working outside the home after I was born. That is a whole other roiling kettle of fish and worms and what have you, which I will perhaps address elsewhere.

Anyway, I'm now thinking Lean In might have relevance for me, and for a lot of us, after all. As Frank Bruni put it in a recent column, we've received a deluge of reminders of "how often women are still victimized, how potently they’re still resented and how tenaciously a musty male chauvinism endures." But I still find myself shrugging my shoulders, thinking "what do you expect?," when I encounter such resentment and chauvinism personally. For me, such experiences feel like "no big deal" in the scheme of things. Millions of women deal with much harsher forms of belittlement and victimization than I do. Yet why shouldn't those of us who are relatively privileged stand up against those little, supposedly meaningless slights? Why wouldn't this lead, ever so quietly and gradually, to improvement, in the same way that repairing broken windows in crime-ridden neighborhoods seems to lead to a reduction in crime? Why not chip away, in our own small way, at the gigantic edifice of subtly demeaning rhetoric that we all participate in?

I'm thinking, for instance, of a moment a few months back when I went to observe a class of second-graders. The teacher introduced me to the class, and quickly asked me if I went by "Mrs." or "Ms." She actually might have offered "Miss" as the second option; I didn't quite hear. I have a Ph.D., so my correct honorific is "Doctor." But I felt I could not say that without sounding like a horrible snot. I don't use my husband's last name, so I can never be a Mrs. That left me with "Ms.," which I chose, hitting the "zzz" sound as hard as I comfortably could. The teacher introduced me, and the whole stupid moment was over in a second.

Except. Those second graders didn't get to see a woman called "Doctor." And I dismissed my own accomplishment in earning this degree, because I was afraid of looking obnoxious and possibly making the teacher herself feel diminished.

I gather that Lean In, though more focused on corporate settings, addresses these kinds of seemingly small snafus that professional women get entangled in all the time. Trying to avoid discomfort, our own and others' (and others' discomfort further contributes to our own, doesn't it?), we "lean out" of situations where we could be setting forth our qualifications and furthering our own--and other women's--interests.

Even now, I feel somewhat foolish for writing this post. Who cares what that class of second-graders thought my title was? I was only there for fifteen minutes; none of them will even remember me. And I did a nice thing, didn't I, by not contradicting their teacher in front of them?

But all these little stupid moments add up.

OK, once and for all: Is getting a Ph.D. in literature a waste of time?

Yes. No. Oh, who can say?

Well, in theory, I should be able to say. I got my Ph.D. in comparative literature [redacted] years ago, and I'm one of those twisted yet oddly grateful souls who didn't become a professor. I ought to have warnings and/or encouragement to offer those on the front end of the process--not to mention solace and/or encouragement to those, possibly drifting in adjunct limbo, who are now thinking of stepping all the way out. 

But I must start by saying: are we really still having these arguments? Really? Literally these same laments, and dismissals thereof, have been flying about for longer than the [redacted] years since I first ignored the warnings aimed at me. Nothing has changed. Tenure-track jobs still prove more elusive than starring roles in feature films. Universities continue to admit more grad students than they can ever hope to place in such jobs--because they supply cheap academic labor, because they represent the next generation of a culture and philosophy that at least some people hope to preserve, and because they still want to come. So it shall ever be, evidently. And while we non-professors--eventually--generally find satisfying alternative careers, we still seem to have no good answer to the question, What is a literature Ph.D. for?

My experience is just one experience. And even [redacted] years later, I find myself unable to wrap it in a comprehensive, persuasive ball of wisdom. Here, then, are some random questions and the answers I would give you, today, if you asked.

Would you do it over again, knowing what you know now?
No.

Are you still glad you did it?
Most days, yes. It has undoubtedly opened doors, though the person on the other side has often been surprised to see me there. I've learned to use that surprise to my advantage.

Did you learn to think better?
Probably. Yes. What kind of a question is that? I will say I learned to pay very close attention to language, although the attention was focused through a very narrow lens. Emotional reactions, including simply taking pleasure in an author's beautiful words, were right out. I hope that's changing. I now believe that this is a much better way to think about--and with--literature.

Did you learn to write better?
God, no.

Could you have tried harder to get a tenure-track job?
Yes. But the answer is always yes, isn't it? The best advice I ever heard was: If you can do something else, you should. I felt that I could, indeed, do something else, though it took me awhile to figure out what that was. Not everyone has the luxury of that kind of time, though.

Did others fail to warn you sufficiently?
I doubt it. We all think we're the exception. Sometimes we are. Warnings can scare off the ambivalent, but not the truly determined.

A toned-down rant on education, with bonus crackpot theory

So this is very cool.

It's TED Curator Chris Anderson's animated talk, "Questions No One Knows the Answers To." Are kids everywhere watching this? And adults as well? I hope so.

As I have mentioned, I went to an excellent public school and had a presumably excellent science education therein. Yet never, not once, did it dawn on me that the purpose of this education was to be able to answer questions that were as yet unanswered. In doing countless experiments that turned out either right (yay, you got the blue foam!) or wrong (you idiot, you made black sludge!), and taking lots of multiple-choice tests, I was given to understand that science was about confirming what was already known. The black sludge was simply an error, not a result of processes that were just as real, and just as interesting in their own way, as those that made the foam. Science was proving you could follow the directions.

I can think of a number of reasons I got this message. One is that I was an extraordinarily rule-oriented child (I am only a little less so as an adult). After all, I also didn't get that art was about "expressing yourself," so much as properly rendering what you saw in front of you. So I may have simply missed the part about how we were learning scientific techniques through these repetitive experiments, so that we could later use them to make new discoveries. It may also be that my own teachers either didn't know or didn't think it important that science was about discovery. Their emphasis on mastery of the known might have reflected their own experiences and philosophies.

Or there may have been an even larger purpose behind this kind of teaching. The system cannot function if everyone in it is constantly innovating. Nothing would get done. In truth, we need people--lots of people--to implement known processes and principles. Maybe that's what this education was about: because most people will (by choice? by necessity? whose choice? whose necessity?) be implementers rather than visionaries, they must be trained as such.

Was there such a governing philosophy behind education? Is there one now? All the standardized testing going on now suggests that the answer to the second question is yes. Even if that is not the stated purpose of the testing, it will assuredly be a pronounced effect. Is that intentional on some deep, unacknowledged level? Or am I just being paranoid, or unrealistic? Should I just be grateful for the conscientious training of drones? I'm one, also, most of the time.

On sexism and sympathy

I read Jonathan Franzen's now notorious piece on Edith Wharton a few weeks ago, and I admit to not being immediately enraged. Mostly I was focused on his ideas about how authors create sympathy for characters, since this is a preoccupation of mine (and I taught a class on this topic a few years ago). Franzen suggests that characters who evoke our sympathy have some kind of strike against them, some recognizable handicap that they must overcome. He then pivots to the meta-suggestion that Edith Wharton's own handicap was her looks, I believe in order to engender our sympathy for her--a successful, talented, and privileged person of the sort we (Americans? women? who?) might otherwise tend to resent. The handicap notion is not new, but certainly worth considering as a way of understanding why readers root for certain characters. Maybe in reading fiction (and nonfiction, for that matter), we seek reassurance that we can overcome our own flaws as we make our way through our real lives. But that would be a "therapeutic" reading, of which more in a moment.

All that said, Victoria Patterson and others who've seized on this piece as yet another example of Franzen's sexism aren't wrong. I mentioned this very issue when describing my ambivalent but generally positive response to the treatment of Patty in Freedom. In Patty's autobiography particularly, I sensed Franzen struggling with his own handicap as a writer, which is his contempt for women. I think he realizes that this holds him back, and in a strategy that works on an interesting level, he represents his own contempt as Patty's self-loathing--thus creating sympathy for her, if only as the author's helpless tool. This is not to say Franzen only feels contempt for women; I think he wants not to feel it, and Freedom and the Wharton piece are both efforts to struggle with an aspect of himself that he doesn't like.

My, I am making assumptions about the author's personal life based on his writing, though. How about that? As it happens, this gets at the main point I wanted to make about this latest Franzen face-plant. For Franzen--and a very large number of other critics--fiction written by women is always read as "really" autobiographical. Not just women, but all non-straight-white-male authors, are subject to this treatment: critics read their novels sociologically, to find out what it is, or was, like to be them. This is fair and right in the case of memoir, but not in fiction. Why is it that Edith Wharton's novels are really about her own resentment of pretty women, whereas Franzen's novels--also about women and their families--are about The Human Condition? Why don't we read Freedom to understand Franzen's feelings about, I dunno, his divorce, his mom, his own looks? To be fair, in interviews he has alluded to events in his own life, suggesting they shape his fiction. The point is, that's true for every writer. To pretend that our biographies play no role in creating our art is ludicrous. However, I don't write fiction to tell people my personal problems. I think it's safe to say that we choose to write fiction in part to convert our experiences into something different, something that's no longer ours as such, but might pertain to a wide range of people, all of whom will interpret the story differently and make it their own. And if Franzen's fiction is about The Human Condition, then mine is, too.

I suspect (continuing my psychological analysis of Franzen, which, I should point out, I have no real business doing) that Franzen's real concern is that his own novels will be read as "personal" and not "universal." That they'll be seen as therapeutic documents and not as Art. Really, the more I think about Patty's autobiography--written explicitly as part of her psychotherapy--the more it seems like Franzen's own struggle with the whole concept of women as writers. Are they capable of creating Art that transcends their own neuroses, Art for Art's sake? Or will their writing always be tied to--and tied down by--their own unmanageable bodies and emotions? By encasing Patty's autobiography in his own larger Work of Art, Freedom, Franzen seems to suggest the latter.

This idea resonates with Franzen's famous spat with Oprah Winfrey years ago, which seemed to center on his not wanting female readers. Oprah does use books for therapy, and her audience is overwhelmingly female. But by choosing Franzen's The Corrections for her book club, she made the horrifying suggestion that his book could be used that way as well. Of course, they've since made up, and Oprah's book club read Freedom.

So let's just lay out the diagnosis. Franzen's condescension toward women writers represents his own fear of being a second-class artist. I have that same fear, although I would settle for second-class status at this point in my career...

On being a rereading chicken

Lisa Levy's post on The Millions about rereading reminds me of a class I taught at Stanford called "Does Literature Matter?" One of the assignments was to reread a story, book, or poem that meant something to you in the past, and write about how you and the story had both changed. This assignment always seemed to produce the best papers. As Levy suggests, I think that's because rereading generated multiple layers of reflection: yourself then, yourself now, yourself now seeing yourself then. And somewhere in the middle, the "text itself," which is always changing as its readers change. To reread is to consciously experience the fluidity of yourself, and all the things that surround and bolster your "self."

That all sounds great and important. And yet I, myself, am not that much for rereading. I suspect I'm afraid of being sucked into the past, and/or former selves, many aspects of which I would rather not dwell on or in. When I do reread, I tend to do it for some purpose other than pure pleasure: for the Borrowed Fire experiment, or to study techniques of a writer I admire (which is really the point of BF anyway). Those are partly the hazards of being a semi-professional reader.

What do I reread purely for pleasure? Popular science books mostly. Maybe that's because my own emotional history isn't bound up in them. There aren't a lot of places in them to deposit one's hopes, fears, and dreams for later--possibly blindsiding--retrieval.

In praise of unlikable characters: Pete Campbell

So I blew through the fourth season of Mad Men on Netflix, and made a surprising discovery: Pete Campbell is my favorite character.

This discovery interests me because I have been harping off and on about the issue of likable characters in fiction. In fact I created a class around the topic at Stanford a few years ago. To recap, it always bugged me in fiction workshops when people would say something to the effect of, "I just don't like this character," meaning...well, I wasn't sure, exactly. The story wasn't working for these people, but was it because they felt the character was immoral? Or they couldn't "relate" to the character, meaning he/she didn't evoke sympathy in the reader? Do all characters have to be someone we would want to be friends with in real life? I thought not. But characters to have to engage us, and I have been at pains over the years to figure out how.

In the first few seasons of Mad Men, Pete was the character I loved to hate. I hated his pinched expression, his sense of entitlement, and his peevishness when that sense ran up against some real-world obstacle. (Also he was a jerk to Peggy, and his wife, and all women, but that of course doesn't make him anything special in the MM world.) He was like a little boy entering the grown-up world a little too soon, and finding out that it was not at all what he'd expected.

But who can't relate to that? Who hasn't felt, after a long day at some office, that "I was led to believe there would be cake" feeling, and wanting to whine about it? Where is the damn cake? And the freedom, and the knowledge, and the power that all adults were supposed to have, all of which I was supposed to have, too, once I grew up? It's all a big ruse, this adult thing? Now what am I supposed to do?

Also in this past season, I've noticed another quality in Pete that I admire: his commitment. Even as he sees (and complains about) the Don Drapers of the world trampling on the less handsome and less lucky and (so far) getting away with it, he still puts on his suit and shows up at work and does his god-damnedest to haul in new clients. We may not think much of the value of the work he does, but he does it extremely well. Despite all the problems he sees, Pete is not yet ready to give up on his dream. He signed up to be an ad man, and that's what he's going to do.

Lots of credit, of course, must go to the actor, Vincent Kartheiser, who plays Pete without a trace of vanity. He never winks at the audience, inviting us to mock Pete or to remind us that he isn't "really" this guy. The commitment we sense in Pete is the actor's commitment.

So what does this all mean for writers trying to create interesting characters? By which I mean, characters who are complex and engaging and challenging--not simply mirrors held up to flatter readers' (and our own) moral vanity? Well, the creator of characters must understand them. I may not like or admire Pete's peevishness, but I know where it comes from; I've felt it, too. In other words, Pete feels like a creation from within. He's not a cartoon, observed and imitated from outside, but grown out of common, if embarrassing, emotions.

All of which suggests that a great character might start out as some complex twinge in the heart, rather than as an image, or a type, or a role you need played in your story. And you need to commit to that twinge, not wish it away, or wink at it.

Why we need models

Writing models, that is. Not supermodels. Well, I suppose we need them, too. They make us feel fat and old, which causes us to buy lots of clothes from China, which stimulates the economy and allows us keep on existing in the state of anxious pseudo-prosperity we have come to know and love. Or something.

Still with me? On the Ploughshares blog, Angela Pneuman takes up the age-old question of whether creative writing can--and needs to be--formally taught. On the matter of whether MFA programs are helpful to writers, and to contemporary literature in general, she says, "I am--helpfully--100% ambivalent." But she is certain about the importance of models as part of teaching.

It is impossible to teach without, on some level, invoking guidelines, and it is impossible to invoke guidelines without invoking the culture’s dominant aesthetic, which is most likely as familiar to us--and often as unexamined--as the air we breathe. We are either teaching to this aesthetic or calling it out and teaching against it, but there is no getting out from under the umbrella of (some) ideology--contrary as we may be, far as our meaning-making systems may be flung.

It's true that you need to know the rules in order to break them. And it's not enough to recognize those rules in some abstract way: You have to have engaged them, gotten inside and driven them around as if they were a car. Only then do you begin to realize that total, flagrant, mindless imitation of said rules is much harder than using them to go your own way.

Case in point: In one of the most fun classes I've ever taught, I had students rewrite a scene from the movie Ghost World in the style of Jane Austen. Now, assigning students to write in Austen's style wasn't a new idea, though the Ghost World angle might have been. One point of the exercise, of course, was to see what Austen's style "did" to the Ghost World story, to understand that style and story cannot be separated. At the same time we discovered that Ghost World is not as different from Pride and Prejudice as we had thought: The propriety in Austen's voice brought out the rule-bound nature of Ghost World's 1990s suburbia. Enid, the movie's heroine, struggles against these rules, as does Elizabeth Bennet; Elizabeth finds a way to thrive within that setting, while Enid finds another, more ambiguous solution.

But what was really exciting about this exercise was that each student's piece was quite different. It wasn't that some had failed to fully grasp Austen's style (or Ghost World). Rather, because each writer was different, they were drawn to different aspects of that style, and chose different scenes to translate into that style, which further destabilized it. A's Jane Austen was not B's; just as Elizabeth's choice wasn't (really wasn't) Enid's.* The sincere attempt to imitate actually brought out originality.

Having had this and countless similar experiences, though, it's still hard to keep this need for models in mind. There's probably never a point where you can fully dispense with them; conversely, they can always help you, especially if you're struggling with some writing problem. Yet my instinct still says: I want to be original. I want to do this on my own, not copy someone. The thing to remember is that the best models (Pneuman celebrates Virginia Woolf in this instance) show us what's possible, not what's impossible. They show us possibility in general. When we start rejecting models or guidelines entirely, that's when we start to reach for cliches--because that's what comes most readily to hand for everyone.

The other key is to know when you have a good model, one that opens up possibilities rather than shutting them down. Formal education helps with that.

*In fact Enid's departure on the empty bus at the end suggests suicide, which I hasten to say I'm not advocating for writers who find "the rules" or the so-called MFA style oppressive. Please don't off yourself, literally or as a writer, because you find Raymond Carver boring. Let's say instead that you need to take the bus farther out. Look at 18th century literature or international literature or...

Can creative writing be taught on the sentence level?

After reading about (not actually reading) Stanley Fish's new book on sentences, as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates's lovely discussions of Jane Austen's sentences, I am wondering: Can creative writing be taught on the sentence level? Could there be a class (or, say, a series on an obscure blog) that dissects literature sentence by sentence, in order to improve students' (or fellow writers') own writing?

I've never taken a creative writing class that dove that deep, except on occasion. It seems one ends up talking mostly about "flow," believability, characterization, plot, and structure on a higher level. But can writers be taught, through example, to craft better sentences, word by painstaking word?

I'm rushed today, but intend to think about this more...

Thoughts on teaching well

I'm thinking about the interview with Brian Greene on Fresh Air, and why I believe his books are the best--by far actually--science books for non-scientists that I've ever read. Obviously being in love with your subject, and enthusiastic about explaining it from scratch, over and over, while always seeking new and better ways to explain it, are all critical.

But Greene also shows a tremendous faith in his audience. I think it's this attitude that makes the work of explaining far more enjoyable for everyone. Witness this exchange with Terry Gross, as Greene is explaining the basics of string theory as opposed to the standard (particle) model:

If we change that idea and envision that these particles are actually not little tiny dots but little tiny loops, little loops of string, a little piece of string that can vibrate at different frequencies, that change from a dot to a string is able to cure the mathematical inconsistencies between general relativity and quantum mechanics at least on paper. We haven't tested. We have not been able to test these ideas yet. That's the big issue. But at least on paper, that modest change from a dot to a loop cures the problem.

GROSS: How does it cure the problem?

Prof. GREENE: That's a very interesting and difficult question, but I'll...

GROSS: Yeah, I figured it would be difficult.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Prof. GREENE: I'm absolutely willing to give it a shot.

GROSS: Okay.

Prof. GREENE: So first let me just give you what the problem is in a touch more detail...

This little exchange, which I've bolded, says so much. How often does it happen that some sage (on a stage) is explaining some complex concept, and the non-specialist listener says or thinks something like "this will be too difficult for me." (If you listen to the audio, you can hear a note of defeat in Gross's voice, a note that's pretty familiar to any non-expert talking to a specialist--as is the laughter.)

But then Greene says "I'm absolutely willing to give it a shot." He takes that difficulty upon himself as a challenge, because his listener is obviously interested and willing to take on her part of the challenge. He reduces the listener's sense of intellectual inferiority by recognizing that he has to do something hard here, as well--explain this complex topic clearly. And he goes on to do so surprisingly well.

Smart people write for n+1

I am way too swamped with grant-writing to say anything intelligent about The Brothers Karamazov for probably another week...which means we have to wait to have our conversation with the devil himself!

In the meantime, via 3QuarksDaily, I offer you this wonderful article in n+1 by Mark McGurl. It weaves together all my interests: monsters, genre vs. literary fiction, and characterization. If I were this smart, I would not have had to teach my course, "Imitation of Life"--I would have already known all the answers.

Alice McDermott on whatever you can get away with

In my never-ending quest for reassurance from famous writers, I came across this 2000 article by Alice McDermott in the AWP Writer's Chronicle. Here's one reassuring bit:

For the first half of the composition of each of my novels I have been consumed by a sense of not knowing what I'm doing, and for the second half I have been consumed by the certainty that I know exactly what I am doing and should not be doing it.

Check, and check.

McDermott turns out to be one of those writing teachers who says writing can't be taught. What she's really saying, though, is that writing can't be taught *directly.* She's right, I think, on this count:

[O]ne of the most subtly disconcerting things a writer can say to a student goes something like this, "John Cheever [or Updike or Chekhov or Flannery O'Connor, or Munro or James or whoever] did exactly what you're attempting here in a story called." That slow burn you can detect behind the student's enthusiastic nod as she diligently copies down a title is, I believe, the one true indication of a real writer, a real writer who even as she obediently copies down the suggested reading is thinking, No one has ever done exactly what I'm attempting to do here, you stupid ass.

Not that I am ready to claim the mantle of "real writer" by any means--but more and more, I feel this resistance to models as such. Yet I'm reading widely and voraciously, looking for...well, inspiration is too hackneyed a term; more like some glancing blow that shakes up a locked-up portion of my mind--or heart, I should probably say. When I'm reading, I'm not so much thinking, I could create a scene or character like that--as, Oh, this is possible; therefore this other thing (that I want to do) could also be possible.

That sense of possibility is the point of McDermott's article. The bulk of the piece is taken up with a sort-of reading of Nabokov's Bend Sinister, not as a model to follow, but an example of what can be done in fiction. (First of all, thank you, Alice McDermott, simply for not presenting us with yet another Raymond Carver story, whose brilliance we are assumed to already recognize and desire to emulate.) Nabokov, McDermott points out, breaks pretty much every rule beginning writers think they know. Which means, of course, there are no rules. Except for one. Pivoting off a quote from Nabokov describing what the novel was "about," McDermott says:

The plot moves, turns, develops, not in order to accommodate the author's cleverness (and there is much cleverness in contemporary fiction), but to reveal, to record, the beating of Krug's loving heart. [....]

Advice to writers then: without that heart at the center of your fiction, advice can't help you. If it is there, then no one, no one, can-or needs to-tell you how to write your stories.

It seems the advice we most need is how to write with heart--with our hearts, to put it ever so sappily, because no one else's can do the job for us. No writing class can teach us how to do that. I suspect we can only learn this indirectly, by immersing ourselves in other stories that have heart. We can recognize how we feel when we're reading them, and see if our own work makes us feel the same way. In fact, writing with heart is painful and scary. As Nabokov puts it, we're delving into the "torture an immense tenderness is subject to," and that tenderness is really our own. No wonder we need reassurance, and still need our teachers.

Borrowed Fire: Moby Dick: What is life?

Into the home stretch with Moby Dick...and I'm struck this week by how much the book has to say about characterization. Although if I'd taught it in my "Imitation of Life" class, I don't know if we would have had room for anything else (especially on the quarter system). Perhaps I'll use excerpts in the future. Anyhow, last week, I suggested that Ishmael, as a semi-embodied character /narrator, or an embodied (dis)-embodied (oh, post-structuralism, will you never release my brain from your tentacles?) narrator-device thingamajig...here's the point: "Ishmael" is a fundamentally different kind of character than Starbuck, say, or Ahab. The name "Ishmael" does not represent something that we would ever mistake for a living person. This week, we discover that Ahab is the opposite of Ishmael in this sense: Ahab--so he claims anyway--is life itself.

We learn this during a thunderstorm right out of a Gothic novel, with the ship as the lonely castle, complete with the looming forms of scary black men (the harpooneers), their teeth and tattoos illuminated by lightning. Ahab pops up on deck to do his Victor Frankenstein impersonation.

"Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e'en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at best; whenceso'er I came; whereso'er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there's that in here that still remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee."

[Sudden, repeated flashes of lightning; the nine flames leap lengthwise to thrice their previous height; Ahab, with the rest, closes his eyes, his right hand pressed hard upon them.]

"I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but I can then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take the homage of these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take it. The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eyeballs ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground. Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee! The javelins cease; open eyes; see, or not? There burn the flames! Oh, thou magnanimous! now do I do glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what hast thou done with her? There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater. Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read my sire. Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!"

The Frankenstein parallels here are really quite interesting, though they are not actually my focus in this post. Maybe another time I'll talk about the business of breathing life / fire into one's "child," the "unbegotten," and who makes whom. I guess this indirectly bears on my point, though, which I will now get to.

In "Imitation of Life," I wanted to ask how authors portray life itself. Not how they create verbal imitations of "living beings," but life--"the life force," if you must. It seems to me that Ahab, here, provides a pretty good answer. The force becomes evident in contrast, in defiance, especially against overwhelming power. Life comes through, even comes into being, in opposition to this book's conception of God: "I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here." Personality--life--comes into relief in the face of impersonal, incomprehensible power. The conflict makes Ahab mad, and it's his rage that makes him more vividly alive than any of the other characters. Rage distills him. We feel Ahab's full commitment to his quest; his racing pulse, his bulging neck tendons as he yells, the pain that (we learn elsewhere) still surges through his phantom leg. And he makes a convincing case here that the best way to worship an indifferent God is to defy him. If God gives us life, the way to accept that gift--to live most fully--is to resist the implacable force to the end of our days. Ahab resembles Milton's Satan, a far more compelling character than God.

Anyway, if you're worried that your characters seem a little "dead," try giving them an overwhelming force to defy. Hopeless rage gives them energy, and also makes them seem both honest and brave.

Literature and the compassion deficit

I've been thinking a lot lately about the need to show compassion, or "mercy" as Steve Almond puts it,* to the fictional characters one creates. I've been trying to do more of that, after receiving critiques from readers that they could not relate to some of my characters. As students from my class, "Imitation of Life," know, this whole issue is an obsession of mine. The class itself grew out of the frequent comment one hears in fiction workshops, to wit, "I didn't like this character." Meaning the story needs fixing.

But it's not just writing students who say such things. Michiko Kakutani recently eviscerated Jonathan Lethem's new novel, Chronic City. Among her objections was that the main character "expects his friends to stay up all night listening to his stream-of-consciousness rants." Kakutani does not want Perkus Tooth as a friend! What a burden he would be! Whereas Gregory Cowles's review in the weekend NYT Book Review takes these "dorm-room" style rants as satire, which, I suspect, is how they were intended. This is not to say Kakutani is wrong to dislike the book. I'm I am saying that tastes differ, and expectations about what readers can and should seek from literature differ. So Lethem did not awaken mercy in Kakutani. Cowles either did not expect that awakening, or he found it in recognizing Tooth's foolishness. He did not disengage because Tooth was annoying.

Still, in consciously trying to be merciful to characters I'm satirizing in my own work, I am finding that the work becomes more complex and subtle. So this has been a good experiment thus far, and I'm learning lots. In fact, I expect this is ultimately the way to go. So why am I still resistant to the relatively simple, and it would seem moral, guideline of showing mercy? Because I still don't believe characters are equivalent to people. And if readers are seeking to find mercy in themselves, or in the world, as they are reading, what does that say about the real world? In other words, are readers turning to literature to experience the compassion that they do not experience in life? Why can we not turn to each other for compassion, and seek different experiences in literature?

But it's not for me to judge people for what they seek when they read. And perhaps what many really want from literature is something more complicated than "liking" characters or having good feelings about them. Perhaps they seek emotional challenge--to have mercy awakened for characters who are not so easy to like, and to see how that feels. It may be too risky to feel compassion for chronic complainers, freeloaders, abusers, and worse in real life. Then those people attach themselves to us, wear us down, and do considerable damage which we are well advised to avoid. So we seek guidance or practice in dealing with such people in literature, a way to go through the complex emotions and reassure ourselves that we can be merciful--even if we aren't as merciful as we'd like to be in our everyday lives.

Also this concept works better if we think of "character" in very broad outlines. It's not just representations of recognizably human beings, fitted with bodies and stamped with first names and surnames. Character could include tone and voice, so even if one's work is more abstract, it could still awaken mercy for conditions or experiences.


*H/t Kim Wyatt. Actually Almond is saying writers should awaken mercy in their readers, which implies the author is feeling it when she is writing. Here's one place Almond made the statement, a 2003 interview with Bookslut. The rest of the interview is well worth reading.

The Art of Living

A great discussion on KQED's Forum about literature and the good life, with my friends Lanier Anderson and Josh Landy.

Another ending, another beginning

I just turned in my grades for winter quarter and am feeling blue. The students did fine (as usual) and reading their final papers was painful only because I realized this was the end--the last official exchange we would be having. Almost everyone's gone for spring break, the campus silent except for a few echoing footsteps on the arcade. The weather is beautiful, so it feels like it should be summer, but it's not; in a week everyone will be back, and I'll be back to my old afternoon work schedule. I'll have more time to write, which is nice, which is the point, in fact... But I'm really going to miss teaching. I haven't applied to teach again next year, which will be a first in five years. During the eight years before that, when I wasn't teaching--when I had what I thought were "real jobs" in industry, which I wouldn't take now if you paid me a whole lot--I used to dream about it. Usually I was teaching a huge class in some high-ranking but chaotic community college (De Anza, I think), but sometimes I did dream about Stanford itself (where I had taught briefly in 1994). I always woke up feeling like I'd been to an exotic place, or like I'd done something wild and exhilarating, like ski-jumping. Now I've been able to do that for real at Stanford, and it's been marvelous.

Acting workshop

I've been meaning to write about the excellent time we had in class last week with Rachel Anderson, a grad student in the Stanford Drama Department. She has directed several productions at Stanford including Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and Osofisan's Farewell to a Cannibal Rage. She's also an actor.

For the first part of class we talked about what it takes to put on a play; what was interesting is that we understood all the parts except the one between "getting money to finance" and "opening night." What goes in rehearsals? How do actors find their characters? How do they work together? I wondered why the "tech rehearsal" occurs so late in the game--that's perhaps the first time actors get to put on the full costumes and make sure dresses don't get hooked on furniture, etc. But if an actor needs to wear the costume to understand why, for instance, she can't bend over or wave her arms a certain way, why not wear the costume sooner? Answer: because the costume, more likely than not, hasn't been made yet. So it seems harder to work outside-in under these circumstances. For practical reasons, it seems, psychology often has to come first.

During the last half hour or so, we did a few acting exercises. One was to make a brief statement about something banal that had happened to us that day (mine was about buying a latte). Then we repeated the line while doing different things with our bodies, such as glancing around the room, or, in my case, lying back in the chair like a client on the therapists' couch. (I must have been radiating something for Rachel to suggest that.) Anyway what was amazing is that changing position and action really did change the line delivery. Not only was it harder to make my voice do certain things when I was lying back, that difficulty--or maybe the position itself--changed my emotions slightly. So by lying back I started speaking more slowly and dully. No other effort was required to make this rather striking change in how the line came out. I, for one, really am malleable from the outside in. Shiatsu massage, here I come.

My self and the motion detector

Today in class we talked about what we think of (or feel) when we think of our selves. We sense the presence of a self, but where is it located, and what is it made of? The discussion was in conjunction with psychologist Dan McAdams's article, "Personality, Modernity, and the Storied Self" (Psychological Inquiry 7:4, 1996). In one section McAdams paraphrases several theorists on the postmodern self:

Psychologically, what the I has traditionally considered to be "my" self--that which is mine, that which I have self-reflexively authored, made, constructed, explored, controlled--may no longer be mine...Persons are creatures whose very identities are constituted by their social locations or their momentary locations in discourse.

McAdams then asks:

It is difficult to know just how literally to interpret some characterizations of the postmodern self. One wonders: If the multiphrenia of postmodern life is [so] extreme... why is it that most men and women are still able to function more or less adaptively in daily life, rarely forgetting their names, histories, and goals?

I asked the class what constitutes their personal senses of self, despite what we know to be all its contingencies. We came up with notions like morals and values, memories of the past, a sense of consistent qualities or behaviors, the way others think of us--and the fact that they do. We didn't talk much about the physical aspects of selfhood--how important a role the body plays--though we described how we feel other things and people are parts of our selves (of the "me" that the "I" works to create, in McAdams's terms).

After class today, as I stood washing my hands in the restroom, the motion-sensing lights went off. I waved my arms and took a step forward, then back, but the lights stayed off. I dried my hands and left the room, and just as I opened the door the lights came back on. So I began wondering. Not whether I cease to exist when motion-sensors can't see me (I haven't gotten that Philip K. Dickian), but what aspects of self cease to be. It is quite humiliating to be ignored by a sensor--to not "show up," to have one's departure mistaken for an entry. I've found in airport restrooms that faucets won't turn on for me (and for me alone). At times like this my sense of solidity starts to frazzle around the edges. I'm not as "there" as some other people--bigger? Less transparent? Who move in a way that's more convincingly human?

Jane Austen's Ghost World

Yesterday I did an exercise with my students in which we rewrote a scene from Ghost World (graphic novel or movie) in the style of Jane Austen. The "write in the style of Austen" exercise is not a new one, neither to me nor to teachers around the world, but I think the Ghost World component is unique. It's the second time I've done this and it was, again, a blast. It reminded me once again that constraints make for great art. Of course you immediately realize you have to break down the dialog of Enid Coleslaw and her snide pal into polite or seemingly polite ripostes, adding adjectives and adverbs. What you then see is that the irony in Austen's characters' speech, while equally edgy, is sort of an outside-in version of Ghost World's. (I haven't quite figured out how they mirror each other.) Also Ghost World is, in fact, a social "novel" that explores the niceties (or lack thereof) of relationships.