round-up: 2/02
song recs, book recs, quotations, etc.
Happy Sunday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
What I’m listening to
What I’m reading
Quotations
What I’m listening to:
And my January playlist:
What I’m reading:
No such thing as a free toilet: Starbucks reverses open bathroom policy
A Way of Living: On Direct Action and Survival Work in the Face of American Fascism
We Only Have Ourselves: The How-Tos and DOs and DON’Ts of Mutual Aid
Young People Have Lost All Trust in the System and Are Ready to Fight About It
Quotations:
There’s a commonplace phrase: write what you know, in response to which, I often respond: write what interests you.
For me, sentences and paragraphs should always be telling you something beyond their explicit content. They should be suggesting the workings of a mind.
The truth is, every generation, and every culture for that matter, has different but overlapping words and concepts to make meaning out of our felt sense that past experience shapes present feeling. “Trauma” is the word and concept most present in the U.S. at the moment. Any one of these words or concepts, whether psychiatric or religious, is susceptible to overuse and thus simplification. Frankly, I’m just interested in how people are trained to describe themselves to themselves and how they sometimes manage to become aware of that process and alter the course of it. I suppose awareness, or psychic maturation are two other ways of describing it. And this is always, necessarily, a social reality. It happens in and through relationships to others. And that’s where fiction comes in. To me, it's a bringing to life of the experience of these relational realities. Call that what you will. In structural terms, this is something that doesn’t change from generation to generation, or culture to culture. Humans relate to each other and understand themselves in the process.
I am wary of invoking the notion of “trauma” as a narrative device or storytelling fuel because it’s turned into a whole thing that I find counterproductive to engaging with the characters in their multi-dimensional glory, but I do like to think about a character’s “baggage,” the stuff they’re bringing to the story at the time the reader first encounters them. Everyone has a past, and dealing with what’s past is part of the present.
In its various, conflicting modern forms, feminism has a tendency to overcorrection and unprincipled endorsement of behaviours which, when exhibited by men, are (correctly) dismissed as sexist. I’m not suggesting that people should be ‘not nice’. I’m not suggesting that a woman exercising her agency to behave like the worst male stereotype you’ve ever met, or that being a hostile, uncaring person is liberating, actually, when women do it. I’m suggesting that ‘be nice’ as a blanket maxim is not as straightforward or positive as it first seems. It often means ‘don’t make others uncomfortable’.
Those of us who do have agency regularly use it to make other people happy and comfortable, even in instances where we don’t want to, and for people who are not deserving of this extreme consideration. This training in, and prioritisation of niceness increases the social cost of subversion. It makes a woman not ‘being nice’ look closer to shockingly uncaring behaviour.
The problem is that niceness turns women into liars. It isn’t necessarily consideration. It’s often evasive. It prioritises imminent comfort over truth, even when the truth would be helpful and leads to outcomes that are anything but ‘nice’.
A woman was walking down the sidewalk. It was a neverending sidewalk, a treadmill sidewalk. She was watching her reflection in the dark store window, watching herself walk. As she walked, men looked at her and sometimes they made noises with their mouths. She looked straight ahead. She had her headphones in. Her mouth was the color of lipstick and she made it flat and hard. She looked at a blank spot on the horizon, a third space that only she could see. While she walked she glared hard into the secret thing. At that still point in the middle of everything, a portal opened. The harder she made her face, the bigger she thought the opening looked. She walked towards it. As she was walking she passed by her one true love and he looked at her and made an approving noise with his mouth. She didn’t recognize him because she was staring hard into the place in the middle of everything. It went on like this forever.
-Kara Rota, “Forever”
What I encounter in workshops and drafts and sometimes even in published pages is a cooly objective first-person narration, stories and novels told from an I lacking both explanatory power and the impulse toward explication itself. The deracinated I is a filmic projection, dancing on cinema’s halogenic glow, but lacking the charisma and poetic force of cinema qua cinema. The first-person narrator without interiority, subtext, and indeed the very capacity for thought or judgement is the purest expression of the passivity that organizes much of contemporary life. This passivity extends from the realm of the aesthetic into the realms of the personal and the political. We have a generation of writers who have watched more movies, television, and footage of human life than they have experienced of that life firsthand. Even their understanding and experience of their own inner lives originates in skits, memes, and video essays. They have no philosophers or prophets. They have YouTubers and influencers, and in this shallow, highly processed and highly mediated experience of consciousness, there is no thought. Merely the telepathic beaming of image from the screen to the interior of the person’s mind.
This generation of writers did not grow up as readers. They grew up as watchers.
I have read pages and pages of scenes narrated from the first person in which an unnamed narrator sits in a room looking at light on a wall or at a cell phone, describing without affect a whole range of physical expressions—gestures, faces they pull—and yet nowhere on those pages does a single thought appear. Not even glancingly. Say what you will about the highly-stylized and voice-driven narration of novels like Luster or The Flamethrowers or Topics of Conversation or Everything is Illuminated, novels which burst with subjectivity and affect, and which might feel a little cheesy by the astringent standards of today’s lobotomized first-person narrators, but at least there was color. Thought. Emotion. Movement. Observation.
I feel that this is especially in true in the case of first-person fiction. It causes me a special pain when I read lines like I frowned or I felt my lips twitch into a grin or I could see or I could hear or I wiped sweat from my brow. As far as I am concerned, these constitute grave breakdowns in the consistency of the POV. If you are writing in first-person POV, then every object noted in the story is perceived. If there are sounds, obviously, the narrator has heard it, otherwise it would not be in the story. If there’s a glass on the table, I don’t need you to say I could see a glass on the table. Sometimes people write first person as though they are describing something happening to another person instead of to the person currently narrating the story.
What these writers are writing is not life. They are writing a mediation of life in stock moves and maneuvers they have gotten from somewhere else without fully understanding them. How else does one arrive at the notion to write in first-person without interiority. Why bother with first-person narration at all, then? What is its function?
It seems to me that many writers, particularly beginning writers, are after the sense they get when they watch a close-up of Isabelle Huppert’s face in furious silence in The Piano Teacher. Or the sense of implication they get from watching Viola Davis’s quivering lips, wordless, but moved by great emotion. They want that. They write their first-person narrators with mute interiority because they are mimicking what they have seen without the skills or the understanding or acute sensitivity to understand what is going on inside of those women. They are after the silence of the blasted female consciousness, so denuded and effaced by suffering and trauma that their faces project a gorgeous, raging silence.
The purpose of the first-person narrator is not to witness a string of arbitrary actions, but to understand the process by which this individual integrates or fails to integrate that string of arbitrary actions into something of meaning. The first-person narrator lacking a psychological process is merely a badly conceived third-person narrator, faulty and misfiring, mistaking the physical world for the totality of life and history.
A withholding narrator is usually a sign of an insecure author, someone who is hoarding their revelations rather than disclosing them. This often is because the author is afraid that they will have nothing else to say later on. A first-person narrator keeping secrets from a reader makes sense if the story takes the form of a direct address, with a clearly delineated point of telling (the place from which the story is told). Otherwise, it just feels like shoddy writing.
We sometimes remake our stories as we tell them, catching ourselves, realizing things only in the recounting. Use this. Make it a part of the story. Make the telling active, by which I mean, what is it like for the narrator to go over things again.
There is a danger of linearity in the non-retrospective first-person narration, as though we are encountering people who have no past and no history at all. A tendency to focus only on the forward march of time. This is a mistake. One must integrate a whole life into the narrator.
Am I a monster or is this what it means to be human?
-Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
In addition to the sense of loss of future, infertility is such a blow to the sense of self. It is viewed as a bodily failure, a feeling of being inert.
If you want to do it, you just find the time anywhere. At a hockey practice or wherever, if there’s an activity that your kid is doing. Just sit in the car and write wherever. I think one of the things I’ve learned to do as a writer is just make the best of any new situation. Even standing in line for bagels the other day, I was writing on the back of a receipt.
I think it’s hard to be young and to feel like you’re creative and there are those people for whom it happens overnight. But it usually doesn’t happen that way.
I have typically spoken to students about what I call the epistemological pleasures of the two genres, the writing of them and the reading of them, and why they matter—yes, pleasure matters! And must be defended. The simplest version of the difference is that with fiction, there is the pleasure that you are in the presence of the author’s inventions, even when it is autobiographical, even if that is the slimmest veil. And with nonfiction, you are in the presence of the author’s best attempt to understand themselves in relationship to their subject. Especially when that subject is the self.
My pride in my work comes from creating it in spite of the fallibility of my memory. Much of my personal essay work and my teaching about this comes from beginning with the understanding that your memory is an imperfect record and proceeding anyway toward the truth. And using as possible the different archives around you, the ones you meant to leave and the ones you did not.
In Severance, the fantasy is likewise at the service of an emotional reality. Mark Scout, we learn quickly, isn’t simply alienated at work, he’s alienated from living. The death of his wife won’t leave him. He opts for severance because it means he has eight more hours of the day not to think about his pain. He takes comfort in his workplace alienation, a wrinkle in the allegory that brings the story part of its punch. Life out in the world isn’t so great. He might not know what escalating horrors exist for his work self, but he knows the destructive, slow immolation of self-help and bad dinner parties and drinking and grief can’t get much worse. Or that’s the gamble. Let work rule you, so that you don’t have to rule yourself.
That’s all for today—
-Despy Boutris
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