Short Story Openings

I never intended to become a short story writer. In grad school, I didn't even bother with short stories, knowing they were the slow road to publication in the shadows of the more prestigious novel publication. Every serious writer usually wants to be known as a novelist, ultimately. There's just a stigma to short story writing. Of the successful short story writers I can think of, I'm sure there is still some ambivalence for them in that they have staked their reputations, however unwittingly, on short fiction.

Nevertheless, here I am. I did set out to publish as much short fiction as I could two years ago when I saw that the traditional approach to attempting to get a novel published (get an agent, get a book deal, etc.) was taking forever. So I decided to work on a level that I could see the results, and I'll admit, I am further along in two years than I could have dreamed. Awards, publication, a life changing trip to Thailand, and meeting some amazing writers along the way have been some of the payoffs. I think I can say I now know a little something about writing short fiction.

When I began, I had no idea what to do with a short story. I did what I always do, I make the attempt, and I try and try until something happens. This involved reading a lot and experimenting. If nothing was going to happen within a few months with those first stories, I thought for sure I'd know I had failed. My first serious attempt was "What You Catch a Glimpse of, Forget as Soon" (available to read in pdf here, page 44) which was, in my mind, not so much a story as an exorcism of energies around so many things I was struggling with at the time. That story just carried me in the writing of it, and I thought it might resonate with others. It did. Along with that story I tried to revive some earlier stories (mostly unsuccessfully) and took a chapter from my thesis novel and transformed it into a story which then received a place and was picked up (for a time, by two magazines--see here) and got me invited to Thailand. As for "What You Catch a Glimpse of", it received enough favorable response that I saw that it had something in it that worked. When it works, you try it again, maybe altering it a bit as you go. But this is about how to begin.

Story openings

The first problem is always the beginning (not necessarily the first problem you have writing a story, but the one you have when you want to get it published). This is a successful example in journalism, of a beginning, also known as a lead:

Back in the heady days of the dot-com boom, casual Fridays seemed to lead to casual weekdays and, in short order, a re-definition of the entire concept of "dressing for success." Call it the anything-goes dress code, where flip-flops and Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirts were often the sartorial norm for highly educated, well-paid professionals in the Bay Area.

("Dressing for Success: Follow the Dress Code to the Top." The San Francisco Chronicle, Jobs Section, 8 April 2007.)

That's a zinger of a lead, that first sentence, and it's what propels a reader into the piece. The same approach can be applied to short fiction. That opening has to start a fire of some kind. Here are some examples of first sentences (in bold) with their follow up sentence or sentences, more or less at random:

Underwater, there are many ways to die. This was the first thing I learned. Today we are doing our safety checks. The scuba instructor points to the board, he goes down the list, nitrogen narcosis, he says, carbon monoxide poisoning, hypothermia, air embolisms, the bends, blackouts. My son suffocated in the womb. The cord was stretched too tight and he died. I have a pain in my ears every time I dive. I can't go past ten feet without feeling the pressure in my head. The doctors say that in the womb babies learn to breathe liquid before they learn to breathe air. I think it's beautiful to think of my son this way.

(Urban Waite,"Open Water", Agni)

I could say, for example, "There is no amount of money that will bring the six-year-old girl back to life, but even so, our company will provide a reparation to the family." I could say these words in English, Hindi, and Arabic—but not Urdu.

(Matthew Quick, "Do Not Hate Them Very Much", Agni)

To go back to my own stories, this is what I devised for openings:

There are gestures, unmarred by the words put to them after all has failed. When Y. stopped you from talking to apply lip balm to your dry lips. Or she sidled up to you to read what you had written for her. When you lay on the grass together she put her head on your chest and curled her body around you. In the night you watched her sleeping, you heard her teeth tapping as if taking little bites of number twelve spaghetti, so quietly. Her hand gripped your shoulder. Gestures cannot be undone, incomparable.

("What You Catch a Glimpse of, Forget As Soon." 21 Stars Review, March, 2008.)

The last words I called to Maren, My darling, please take hold of me!

In the water she did not hear me.

("It Was a Tree That Saved Me"Evergreen Review, Issue #115, January, 2008.)

These openings throw you into the world of the story, and clue you into what the story is about. I would even go so far as to say they encapsulate their stories. How?

Underwater, there are many ways to die. : A man who attempts to master his fear of dying after his own son dies. To take it a bit further, the parallel to the unborn child's experience is metaphorically related to that opening sentence.

I could say, for example, "There is no amount of money that will bring the six-year-old girl back to life, but even so, our company will provide a reparation to the family." : A truck driver rationalizing an accident in the urban strife of the Iraq war complicated by ethnic divisions.

There are gestures, unmarred by the words put to them after all has failed. : A man coming to terms with a relationship in light of reflection and self-knowledge.

The last words I called to Maren, My darling, please take hold of me! : A man loses his partner in a tsunami and wanders the beach looking for her.

This is a good approach if you have a powerful story to tell and you want it to be read--isn't that what all short stories should aspire to? I'm not saying short story openings can always be interpreted this way, and I doubt every writer would agree with this approach, but if I can find examples of it in a handful of successful stories, then I believe it must have some truth.

Interested in reading more? Check out a recent post, on Philip Roth's First Person Point of View in Operation Shylock 

Metamorphoses It Was

A very short fiction, "Seven Dreams Under the Knife", is now available to read online, here. 

Never knowing whether to call this a short story or a poem, or unclassifiable, I submitted this piece under many forms--so thanks to editor John Burgess at Snow Monkey for taking it on. Also, to read some of my submission drama, look at my March 22nd post here.

Crafting a Chair

When I'm working on short fiction, invariably I have half a dozen books lying open--a kind of loose reference to see how an accomplished writer evokes their magic in a turn of phrase or when utilizing tone--if only to remind myself what I'm attempting to do with my 6500 word story that is on the fourteenth draft, the fifth title change, and contains more mixed metaphors and false sentiment than a Harlequin romance.
The books I'm looking at (at the moment) are Paul Theroux's The Collected Stories, Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers, Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth and Norman Rush's Whites. You can't go wrong with such a stellar selection (one of these is a novel, and McEwan is about as masterful with tone as Yehudi Menuhin). Or maybe you can.
The best writing looks effortless because maybe it is--for a master. For the rest of us, I think reworking a story beyond reason becomes apparent in the reading. I can't tell how many times I've had a story idea that I worked and reworked to the point where I should have simply put the thing out of its misery. Too many to count. I'm sure this is the case for a lot of writers starting out, and once you find your "method" or at least a method that works, you shouldn't linger any longer in the workshop than you have to.
Chris Abani once told me writing fiction should be like crafting a chair. I interpreted his words to mean you go into the workshop with a clear objective in mind. Maybe you pick up where you left off the day before, and you can see this chair is going to take a few weeks. But you are working to get it finished. Hopefully it will be beautiful when you are done. It's not about mass production, in other words. Too often I compare my story to another writer's story as that is what it suggests to me--in other words, it's a kind of copy cat style--trying to replicate what another writer has done successfully. Which is both the danger and solace of returning to those reference works. You can try too hard with a story to make it fit into a mold that it will not fit into--and the organic growth of the story isn't there. 
There isn't anything wrong with imitating a successful story, as long as what you end up with is distinctive enough to stand on its own. Once it takes on that life it will never (or rarely) be compared to what has gone before. But the best stories I've written, the ones that have gotten me notice and acknowledgment from editors and readers are definitely not the ones that I am still working on after nearly two years and more than twenty or thirty drafts. (And is there a limit? Maybe seven or eight solid drafts. If you can't get the story down in the first two or three, maybe the idea is half-baked and you should let it sit until you can finish a first draft.) On the other hand, the best ones are written in a kind of fever of inspiration, where I took the trouble to commit it to paper. In a sense, I felt as if I had to write it. I'm grateful for that. I think you can force inspiration, but it's sweeter when you can trust it to come to you, eventually.

Philosophy Made Me

As I read this article, "Against Readings," in The Chronicle Review, it reminded me of my own literary beginnings, which really began with philosophy. 

 

While studying fiction in grad school for creative writing, there was an expectation to treat the books we were reading as academic exercises. But I felt there was something alienating with literary interpretation; as much as I would have liked to have considered I had the potential to undertake that work, I had always preferred my own approach: unhindered reading, culling from a well of intuition, and drawing my own conclusions. I discovered that my advisors--steeped in and perhaps blinded by their academic backgrounds--often had a hard time with my open approach. 

Unless one is incapable of thinking deeply, carefully and thoughtfully about what they read, I have never understood why any approach other than a self-interpretive one makes sense. I think this rings true for someone like me who indoctrinated himself in philosophy out of curiosity and circumstance. Stuck every Saturday at the mall for two hours, after boredom with video games (or I ran out of money), I wandered the aisles of B. Dalton's and found The Myth of Sisyphus, Walden, the Tao te ching, Being and Nothingness, and Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness (believe it or not at a ripe fifteen). Eventually, there were generous readings of Emerson and William James. After the enlightenment of half a dozen courses that touched on these subjects in my undergraduate years, I ended up with some clever misinterpretations of Derrida via a whacked out architecture curriculum with undigested bits of Foucault thrown in for good measure until, searching for solace amid this despair, I finally discovered literature capital L (Henry Miller, Thomas Mann, Borges), landing in a no man's land of my own making. But I wouldn't have gotten there without philosophy. 

Early on there was no one to talk to about what I was reading--that would have to wait for college and some surprisingly astute teachers--I didn't know anyone who had read these works, and I wasn't finding copies of them in high school. I was secretly proud, and quietly uncertain, but somehow affirmed to have discovered my own rejected thoughts in their alienated majesty in books written long before I was born. 

 

The Little Book

To someone who considers himself fly-by-night with grammar--or more aptly, as if a proficiency with grammar is a bit like dowsing for water--this critique of Strunk and White's esteemed little book is highly entertaining. Besides which leaving me further clueless on the subject.

International Super Hype

With the economic meltdown there is constant talk of the publishing world collapsing, but you wouldn’t know it to read the reviews. The latest big books are still promoted and heralded--winning prestigious prizes in France, no less, a sure sign of literary inflation--and bid upon at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and the book lovers get caught up in these things (I am one, usually). The latest hype is for Jonathan Littell’s, The Kindly Ones (at the Complete Review here, another here, and Laila Lalami's L. A. Times review, here.)

I've read the glowing and scathing reviews, encomiums and apercus, enough to be marginally intrigued to look into the book. The publisher's (Harper Collins) page provides a generous sample to read. Along with the mixed reviews, the opening pages were enough to put this reader off.

Ruth Franklin’s review in The New Republic sums it up: "The Kindly Ones is not an important novel, because it fails absolutely to add anything of significance to our understanding of its subject [...]"

It's subject is a one size fits all Nazi cog (to use Franklin's term) who yet revels in his twisted personal depravity, explaining his complicity in the mass killings because he's just like every other human being on the planet.

My distaste for the subject matter and its execution are clear. Franklin talks of the Nazi functionaries: “They were, the overwhelming majority of them, unremarkable men, "small cogs" in a killing machine, who showed little initiative of their own but were prepared to obey orders unquestioningly and then go to dinner.”

Franklin talks about how we want to attribute to men capable of this behavior the embodiment of “absolute evil.” But there are shades of gray, maybe what Littell is attempting to portray; the only problem is that it Littell's character sounds like he is clearly over the edge, definitely not in a kindly margin. (For some reason this called to mind an interesting spectacle on Nightline a few weeks ago where Deepak Chopra squared off with two Christian fundamentalists to argue, “Does Satan Exist?”) 

I think what unnerves about the subject and its fictionalization is that it’s taking the crime of the century and treating it as if it were something less than what it was. This can be seen to attempt to diminish the crime through the humanizing of (one of) its proponents.

However, when it’s said that truth is stranger than fiction, there is a resistance to fictionalizing an event that should have never happened. Any sympathy for such a character is seen to ameliorate or apologize for the horrific reality. Unfortunately, that’s also what makes it a controversial--and challenging--choice.

As with any book, there is probably a great deal of calculation for the writer to write what might be controversial, what might catch on. If you’ve got the ability, then you tackle it. I understand this. This is the scaling of a great peak. You don’t take it on unless you can stay with it. So, no criticism to the writer his accomplishment there.

In this case however, I'm grateful to let the reviewers wade through this 900 page monster.

Short Story Purgatory?

A. O. Scott’s piece in the Times, “In Praise of the American Short Story,” trumps out yet again a silent consensus that the short story has been getting short shrift for far too long--note that’s the “American” Short Story. But to keep mentioning the denigration of the short story only ghettoizes it some more. The tide is probably turning as these things do, over time.

For those of us in the trenches of fiction writing, short stories are the best--maybe the only?--game in town. It’s the one way to get yourself published though it doesn’t necessarily lead to the payoff of a novel’s reception. As for success? I think writing a good story and having it recognized is quite rewarding. I think because a story is short and has so many venues, as well it doesn’t have a single designated venue, it is looked down upon. But short story writing is where writers begin if they want to be published. It isn’t always the case that writing short fiction will get noticed, but there are many writers I admire who started out with short fiction and have largely become known for their novels (Philip Roth, Norman Rush, Paul Theroux, Ian McEwan, Denis Johnson, Junot Diaz, to name a few). With a short story, if it appears anywhere at all, it’s usually in a journal of which there are thousands upon thousands, or it appears in a collection that is the sum of parts, i.e., what is considered inferior to a novel.

Under the Knife

Prescriptions for writing abound. “Eliminate repeated words.” “Never write a boring sentence.” These come from the Gordon Lish school of writing via n+1. In the Lish arena, the student would be asked to read their piece aloud until they came to a boring sentence--called out by the master with great mocking fanfare, undoubtedly--and the student would be forced to sit down.

In my fiction, I was eliminating repeated words because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Also, I had an editor once return a story with repeated words circled. As for never writing boring sentences, it’s never easy. Of course you can hold up these ideas to the point that you lose the sense of the writing, if you had it to begin with.

And that seems to be a prescription, too, to be clear about what you are going to write before you begin.

Another good idea might be to eliminate as many words as possible--I’m not talking about repeated words, but excess words--avoiding wordiness. Maybe you pare it down and rewrite it a few times. I’ve sometimes shied away from this procedure, if only because a first draft sometimes has a rhythm inherent in the linkage of sentences as written. Perhaps even a poetry.

Why is it that poetry is so often invoked in fiction writing--what does it mean exactly? I suspect I have a bias against poets because they can be so precious about their work, romanticizing their little gulag. Poetry is rarely exciting, to me. Poets seem like the martyrs of the writing universe.

Yet, I like poetry in fiction, if I understand it correctly.

What does it mean to say a fiction writer’s writing is poetic?

I look at E. L. Doctorow, because I’m reading Loon Lake at the moment. Besides the actual use of a kind of verse in the novel (although I’m not sure if it’s bona fide verse, in the sense that it’s made up for a fictional work), here is a passage that I would say is poetic:

“They were hateful presences in me. Like a little old couple in the woods, all alone for each other, the son only a whim of fate. It was their lousy little house, they never let me forget that. They lived on a linoleum terrain and sat in the evening by their radio. What were they expecting to hear? If I came in early I distracted them, if I came in late I enraged them, it was my life they resented, the juicy fullness of being they couldn’t abide...”

This also happens to be the opening to the novel. Which is where you are going to notice poetry and in a sniff decide if this is a book you should read, should a reading of such be your thing.

It’s not a fellow writer’s thing. He occasionally laments how writing is literary or maybe that’s too literary because he believes he is secretly a blockbuster writer who has a commitment to providing airport fiction as he sees this as the only way to break in to publishing.

I don’t get it. Those airport reads bore me. But I’ll also admit that sometimes the literary stuff bores me, too. The problem with those (non-literary) books is that there’s no love of language. Maybe there’s a bit of craft in storytelling--there would have to be, it seems--but generally the work feels mired in a lack of spirit.

Getting back to revision...How do these approaches necessarily lead to good prose?

The Lish school as I’m calling it seems to approach the writing on the level of sentence and word choice, which is fine, but what happens when you need to stretch your legs--which is where all good fiction should inevitably go? (this can be argued, and I’ll shortly contradict myself...) I think of this because another writer who I’ve been looking into again lately (leave it to the NYTimes to get me to dust off my shelves), Donald Barthelme, seems to write in this style that Cheever had a hilarious comment on (“The stuntiness of Barthelme disconcerts me. . . . Blooey. It’s like the last act in vaudeville and anyhow it seems to me that I did it fifteen years ago” (this in the Bookforum review of Cheever's ouevre)). What is it about this style that feels like McSweeney’s co-opted as if it were a province of their (some might say) elitist identity? I think this is what we talk about when we talk about being clever. It’s whatever no one gets, or gets in only their way, but that a clever writer can imitate enough so that only a select few think they get it. So many journals claim and decry cleverness in equal measure, that it ruins it for those writers of us who don’t necessarily look at what we do as trying to be clever; maybe that’s the point, that if you actually are good at what you do, not everyone is going to get it. They’re only going to see you as a wannabe... Maybe I’m hypocritically doing the same thing criticizing McSweeney’s.

I never thought of “Seven Dreams Under the Knife” as clever. I had a woman run away from me when she read it. (How’s that for intrigue?) But this is also a woman who had plastic plants and scant aesthetic taste and thought my minimally appointed rooms here in the Mission resembled Van Gogh’s room at Arles. Initially, I was flattered by these revelations; upon reflection, I’m guessing that it was a perception of “cleverness” dogging me.

Maybe I could have stretched my legs on that piece, but after all the prescriptions about revision, I considered it done. I saw it as a gem that I didn’t want to do anything more with than see published. Which, however humbly, it is, finally.

Story Known As

I'm pleased and astounded by this news--my story, “Seven Dreams Under the Knife,” was picked up by Snow Monkey for their May 2009 issue--this makes three publications in six weeks. 

This piece has taken an interesting route to publication. Initially I’d sent it out to a reception of wariness and general incomprehension. One journal offered that it generated "a lot of discussion." This is when it was titled “Metamorphoses”; I often felt criticized as if I’d co-opted a title from Kafka (it was more of an homage). Rather than getting discouraged, however, I persevered. I changed the title twice before I settled on “Seven Dreams Under the Knife” which says exactly what the story is about. 

Words Are Expendable

One of the most important lessons I retained from my advisors was the idea of revision. That this work is almost as important as the actual writing. Some might say it is the writing. But how much is too much revision--and, how do you know when a piece is finished?

I don’t know when a story is finished--maybe you rush it and finish it and find it’s not quite right. You could live with it for a year or two and then, nagging, is the idea that you left a loose end. I had this happen recently, and even after I had the story published, I recognized I could have fleshed it out a bit more. On the other hand, there is often a fear that something you’ve created is maybe perfect, so why mess with it? I keep about 3 or 4 banker’s boxes full of old novel drafts, and I sometimes come across an early version that feels, if only for an (illusory) moment, superior. How is that draft 370 pages and the current one 270? What did I cut out?

I think a writer can get too caught up in the ideas of is the writing perfect (or perfect enough) to submit to some outside critic (which is what submitting work to journals is), and I suspect this is why a lot of writers starting out don’t submit their work. I’ve made a habit of it. I know my work, in a sense, and when I’m satisfied with it, I’d like to put it out there. Is this merely a confidence game? I don’t know that I’ve become so hardened to criticism, I certainly welcome it, as I’m trying to communicate my art to the world.

I think there is something to the confidence you gain when you begin to have work accepted for publication. Passing muster with an advisor in grad school (and ultimately with a thesis-which means at least three people have read the thing) is where it began for me. I wasn’t merely workshopping the writing, (which maybe serves a more self-acknowledging function--you don’t need this group other than to validate your gut instincts.) but now complete strangers are reading and commenting on my work. The danger then might be that you get soft or less critical.

I developed this idea that I should make the writing as perfect as possible before I sent it to my advisors, rather than worrying if it was “finished”--because I found that the more I pushed myself to tighten whatever I had, the closer I got to seeing what it was, what it wanted to be (note: yes, I believe the writing aspires to something we can’t entirely grasp--I often say, “let the writing be what it wants to become,” because of the other block that says, “I don’t know what to write.”) I do this with most of my fiction, and I am trusting the process.

As for those old drafts, there is something to be said of striking while the iron is hot. If I didn’t love the writing enough the first time around, there’s probably a good reason it didn’t make the cut.

Words are expendable--another thing we hoard as precious in our apprenticeship.

Maybe another truth is that I didn’t have the patience with the writing initially. I have plenty of half-starts, some I’d consider very good, but they just don’t inspire me enough to keep returning to them, trying to figure out what they need to become. In some ways the fiction is alive, like a plant, and if you neglect it too long, it withers.

Neverending Iraq War

It's been a lucky few weeks for my fiction submissions, and perhaps in conjunction with square root day (3-3-09), I've received word of another publication, for "What We Have Seen Waiting for the War to End," in Homestead Review. 

Absurdist Shipwreck Tale

I'm pleased to announce that Wisconsin Review has picked up my short story, "The Edmonton Farrell," to be published in their spring issue, 2009. As a friend pointed out to me, they only accept twelve stories a year. The timing is apt, as it allows me to continue my application for an NEA grant--not that I necessarily have a chance, but why not?

Toward Ephemeral Criticism

Reading with the intent to find something worthwhile to say about what I’m reading is unavoidable. What I am aiming to reveal is perhaps ephemeral. It is through this process that I became interested in writing, and this practice naturally led to wanting to write about books. Thus, I became by default, a book critic. Rather, I like to think, a book commentator.

I’ve consciously avoided (sometimes) writing negative criticism.

Critics’ negativity is easy--it’s easier to swing a sledgehammer than it is to dovetail a joint. And if a critic is so desperate to tear a work down, doesn’t that say more about the critic than the work in question? As Roland Barthes says in Mythologies: “[...] if one fears or despises so much the philosophical foundation of a book, why become a critic?”

Criticism derived from a position of what the work in question is not is a sure way to go negative. This is like a demand for more of the marble to be left on the sculpture before Michaelangelo worked it away. Then there is the criticism that is merely comparative. Why draw the baseline so low that even those who can’t expect to be moved by anything unless it flashes on a screen or is operated by a remote won’t be interested?

I think of Joyce’s Ulysses, a work that has probably received more unwarranted criticism for the mere fact of it’s canon-wreaking status, and it’s presumed impenetrability, than from actual, considered, methodical and thoughtful readings.

Art takes time to digest. It’s not easy.

Susan Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation,” (in the book of the same title) is one of those ground breaking essays that aspire to an ideal approach to criticism. 

Sontag makes the point in the essay that she only seeks to explore works that interest her, thereby largely avoiding the problem of negative criticism, perhaps. But maybe this has led to a lot of not talking about just how poorly written and conceived a work may be (say, a piece of fiction, James Frey’s Bright Shiny Morning, for example). Talking about a bad work is unwitting publicity--it seems to be taken for granted that any publicity is good publicity, these days.

Skirting a whole boatload of problematic issues related to literary criticism, however, Sontag holds up film as offering possibilities for critical inquiry that do not follow in the vein of literary criticism, because, “cinema, unlike the novel, possesses a vocabulary of forms.” Further, “It also owes the happy accident that films for such a long time were just movies; in other words, that they were understood to be part of mass, as opposed to high, culture, and were left alone by most people with minds.”

I think this has changed somewhat in the forty-five years since this essay was written. I don’t dispute Sontag’s still relevant assessment of interpretive criticism, and in general, I would reason that an x for y translation (what an “interpretation” of a written work is, essentially) is often a logical way to attempt to understand a literary work. I think I understand Sontag is implying that the impulse to explain a written work through exegesis or elaboration is more or less merely a reiteration.

Sontag goes on to talk about form as a source for revealing the variety and character of a written work: “To the extent that novels and plays (in America), unlike poetry and painting and music, don’t reflect any interesting concern with changes in their form, these arts remain prone to assault by interpretation.”

The problem with attempting to discuss and deliberate formal innovation in a work of literature is that it might not be the thing that jumps up and bites you on the ass with its obviousness. Whereas an interpretative tack in criticism allows almost anything in the work to be taken for something else and elucidated into the light. A least common denominator view tends to guide the general and mass view of the work (For example: it’s published. It’s a literary work. It must have merit).

Milan Kundera, in Testaments Betrayed, and an essay on the abuses of Kafka criticism, addresses this pitfall as he discusses how Max Brod promoted a kind of lazy (and popular) critical reading of Kafka which soon became de rigeur for looking at his work, what Kundera calls Kafkology. “Kafkology is not literary criticism (it does not examine the value of the work: the previously unknown aspects of existence that the work reveals, the aesthetic innovations by which it affected the evolution of art, etc.) Kafkology is an exegesis.”

In The Art of the Novel, Kundera says that the “sole raision d’etre of the novel is to discover what only the novel can discover.” Kundera makes an intriguing case for a revolutionary approach to writing a novel, through the examples of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and others—which also address the formal challenges put forth by Sontag, however unlikely it is to be acknowledged by novelists writing today.

Sontag asks, “What would criticism look like that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place?” The answer is a lofty goal. One that might seek to make every critic be an artist equal to the work they are reviewing. Sontag’s implication is that one needs to create an alternative work on top of the work under scrutiny. Isn’t it enough that the critic can enlighten us about the work in question? This is encapsulated in a remark Clive James wrote in the New York Times on this subject: “When you say a man writes badly, you are trying to hurt him. When you say it in words better than his, you have succeeded.” 

Sontag goes on to say: “Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art—and in criticism—today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are. This is the greatness of, for example the films of Bresson and Ozu and Renoir’s The Rules of the Game.” And, furthermore: “In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret”.

In its generally ungraspable ephemerality, isn’t film, rather, too open? Could it be said that because film is a visual medium that attempts to portray a representation of life through characters, that its presentation of this has multiple layers of nuance? Film looks, more or less, like life (or life-like). It is a much more passive medium than a work of literature. Reading a book requires a larger act of willfulness.

Film presents an overload of visual information, still much less than actual life; but in either realm, much is taken for granted, as if it is a priori. There are far too many details to claim the significance of one over another unless it calls attention to itself. It would be ludicrous to try to decipher the symbolism of John’s shirt.

This is clearly viable in literature: the reader is taking in one word at a time, one sentence, one sentence in the context of a paragraph, one paragraph in a chapter, etcetera. From a series of parts the reader extracts a whole, a unity (more or less). The intent is focused. What is brought to the work requires a leap of imagination toward being able to not reduce the story to words on a page—it requires of a reader to reach into their own imagination. Because in order to know that John has a red shirt, the author must tell us John has a red shirt, and therefore, impart a significance to that object through the tag of calling it out.

I think Sontag’s aesthetic brilliance let her get carried away by this notion of film as a kind of stand in for non-interpretive critical inquiry that literature should aspire to. Although I like the ideas she presents, I’m not sure the literary equivalents for what she is talking about are on most critics’ radar. It becomes more difficult when the slightly vague, poetic “luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are” is a goal for criticism.

Bolaño Phenomenon Ambivalence

Considering the recent state-side publication of 2666, which I have not yet read (and am still considering for a slot in my fickle holiday reading), I am devouring everything written on Roberto Bolaño, and enjoyed this (anonymous?) clearheaded take in n+1 on the late author’s oeuvre:

“Why [...] you begin to wonder, are you reading these books? What for, if they are each going to eschew psychology, characterization, pretty language, and neat conclusions, and if the narratives are all to devolve into shaggy-dog Iditarods mushing after some fugitive poet or novelist about whom—even if he ever turns up—we learn next to nothing? Why read and write at all if these empty Chinese boxes constitute the only goods ultimately in receipt?”

I also wondered at times, in my post haste reading frenzy and romance with The Savage Detectives, why Bolaño’s other books were not capturing my imagination so well. Other than Last Evenings on Earth which I read twice (and a few of the stories paled on reading number two, although “Anne Moore’s Life” and the title story stand out in their excellence), I admit I had to slog through By Night in Chile, and never finished Amulet, hoping I’d find the inspiration at some future date.

Bolaño ambivalence, perhaps? n+1 responds to this, I think, quite aptly:

“[...]Bolaño somehow also treats literature as his and his characters' sole excuse for existing. This basic Bolaño aporia—literature is all that matters, literature doesn't matter at all—can be a glib paradox for others. He seems to have meant it sincerely, even desperately, something one would feel without knowing the first thing about his life.”

Intrigued as ever to delve into another nearly one thousand page behemoth (how can I avoid it?), I’m sure I’ll have more to say when I finally get around to reading 2666.

Serendipitous Beckett Pilgrimage

I’m almost always tempted to say, I’ve written about this before, because I think I have, only with less detail. It starts with a dream, or I should say, I can locate a resonance in a dream. I was walking through a park in a European city, along a lake, trying to find a consul building. I asked a man, in French, for directions. He was very helpful, my seer, I suppose, as I found what I was supposed to. I had no idea what it meant, only that this dream in particular had the presentiment of vital knowledge. I jotted down the details of the dream and forgot about it.

My friend was getting married, in Brussels. I’d been preparing my first work for my graduate writing program; in the previous two months I’d been re-introduced to my past, via Samuel Beckett, a writer I’d almost forgotten and had stopped reading over the previous fifteen years. My friend suggested I fly out for the wedding. Seemed like a crazy idea--for less than a week?--why not. That would make it a special trip. I was in need of some inspiration before I began the two years of my intensive writing program, so I booked a flight and was off by the end of the week.

I leave a gap in details here to cut to the chase.

I was in Brussels, given directions over the phone by my friend’s (future) wife about how to get to the wedding ceremony. I set out on the subway, seriously jetlagged, and made it to Parc Malou. As soon as I wandered into the road that curved its way into the park, I was certain I was lost. Or that I had been there before. A man on the grounds was working and I asked him, to my own surprise, in nearly flawless French, how to get to the consul building. When I walked through a canopy of trees I remembered, I had been here.

I mention that anecdote because it seemed to presage a taste of the magic that was beginning to occur with my writing.

Over that visit I had a day to myself and decided to go to Paris on the 185 mile per hour Thalys. Just a day, morning to evening. My excitement at the arrival into Paris was both overawing (I never fail to feel an unparalleled thrill arriving in this city, especially by train. I had been there exactly eleven years earlier, and, another seven years before that. I make no apologies for my romanticizing of Paris, much to the disgruntlement of my grad advisors at that time--the literary baggage hauled through that city over the years is enough to satisfy my wanderlust.) The October air was summery, warm; the smell of the Metro--somehow like smoking rubber, I always think--was an intoxicating draught that told me, yes, I am here. I’ve arrived. Something about that dream had been providential, perhaps. (I’m not, or wasn’t, until very recently, a person who put a lot of stock in fate, or destiny; it’s hard not to view things this way now. I think it comes with age and a healthy interest in peculiar vision-quests). I knew that my graduate work was in the back of my mind, as well as in my backpack (Moby Dick). Being primed for inspiration, I set out for Boulevard du Montparnasse and Boulevard Raspail. I sat in a cafe and had a thimble of espresso and decided I’d go find Beckett’s grave in Montparnasse. Why? I’d really wanted to start my psyche fire, so to speak. I’d come to Paris for twelve hours and I was going to come away with a piece of it.

In that wandering around, I eventually found it, quietly. Almost hesitantly. It’s not a remarkable slab of granite. Just plain, minimalist even, nearly unadorned, simple. Here lies the man. I know this will sound, basically, as if I am, possibly, not normal. I suppose I’m not. I don’t care. I felt his presence, benevolent; I felt welcomed. I wanted to acknowledge a debt to him and the integrity of my work that I’d nurtured from back in the early days of my writing when Beckett was my guiding light. This light for the dispossessed. Was I that? I was happy to be. A lightness, a sense of purpose, a confidence, seemed to settle around and within me. I thanked Beckett. I’d like to think I was acknowledged.

From Impossible Lives

I'm pleased to see another publication of my fiction, "The Watch," an excerpt from my novel. Curiously, I'm the only XY chromosome presence in this issue, make of that what you will. This is in Driftwood magazine, see and order it here.