Monthly Archives: December 2008
Mainstream
The recognition that the Bush administration, especially Cheney and Rumsfeld, authorized and directed the torture of prisoners is now taken for granted by Newsweek. What’s that say about the state of the nation? In the linked article, it wasn’t so much the information — which has been widely known for a long time — but the tone that struck me. I don’t think they should hang, but not because they don’t deserve it — because we’d be better off being merciful. Of course, we’ll be lucky, as a country, if we get a public apology. More likely, Bush will give everyone, including himself, a pardon & we’ll be told that it’s better for the nation of we just let bygones be bygones.
Short Fiction Notes: Flannery O’Connor
I’ve just reread O’Connor’s “And the Lame Shall Enter First” and “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” & it hasn’t been so long since I read “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” It’s not my purpose in these notes to produce an analysis, but to catch a sense of my own reactions to various writers’ work. If Chekhov is cool, O’Connor is over-heated. She is celebrated for her unflinching portrayal of life’s cruelty, but what bothers me is that she seems to take pleasure in cruelty. Though she was a devout Catholic, here stories give little evidence that she believed in redemption. Indeed, in “The Lame Shall Enter First,” she parodies the very idea of redemption, punishing the admittedly reprehensible Sheppard beyond justice. If the idea is to schematize the idea that there is no justice in this world, well, we can read the (pre-Christian) book of Job. But, for a Christian, O’Connor seems much more fascinated by evil than by the possibility of good. I’m not looking for simple and uplifting tales of moral triumph here, but I find O’Connor’s pleasure in her characters’ pain unseemly.
Her enjoyment of cruelty makes O’Connor an acute observer of hypocrisy, though. I recognize Sheppard in various Sunday School teachers and Youth Pastors I encountered growing up & I certainly wish I had had Rufus Johnson’s wit in order to respond to them, if not his criminality. But I found the reversal of expected belief — Sheppard the atheist, Johnson the believer — implausible. It’s necessary, of course, for the moral reversal the author wants to pull at the end, but it strikes me as forced and hyperbolic. Come to think of it, she also pulls an unbelievable reversal at the end of ‘Everything that Rises Must Converge.” Not that the boy can’t be conflicted & contrary, but that his resistance to his mother throughout the story, until the very end, is ultimately so weak. His weakness makes him less interesting than he might be. Again, there is a remorselessness in this work that repels me. However insightful O’Connor’s imagination, it is insight gained at the cost of moral tunnel vision.
Between Storms
Just went out into a bright, sunny afternoon to shovel the walks and deck clear of last night’s foot of snow. It’s cold — hovering around zero — so the snow is light and easy to move. I cut a racetrack around the dogrun in back so that the terriers wouldn’t be over their heads. Have to keep ahead of the shoveling, though, since the forecast is for another foot starting tonight. As I was taking a break & leaning on my snow shovel, I stood still near the bird feeder and let the chickadees fly up and down around me, cold enough that I could hear the beating of their wings. All the while I was there, a harry woodpecker braced himself against the pole with his tail and pecked at the suet I’d put out yesterday. The sun was remarkably warm for December, though the air was cold, & we were all enjoying it, I think, the animal pleasure of warm sun in mid-winter.
Short Fiction Notes: Chekhov
Because I have been trying to write some fiction, I have been reading the acknowledged masters of the genre, beginning with a little Barnes & Noble edition of stories. What appeals to me about Chekhov is his coolness, his detailed dispassionate descriptions of people and events. He is sympathetic toward his characters, but he does not indulge them. And Chekhov should also dispell the common notion that a short story must have a crisis and resolution, or that the main character must change or see the world differently. Writing to his publisher (who also wrote stories), Chekhov said that the job of the storyteller is to present and defina a problem, not solve it. That strikes me as good advice, which I am trying to take to heart as I write my own stories.
I spent some time yesterday diagramming the scenes in the famous story “Goosberries,” which is structurally a straightforward story within a story. [The link is to an earlier translation than the one I read.] Ivan tells his friends the story of his brother, a government clerk who has scrimped and saved enough to become a landowner in his retirement. In doing so, he has become complacent and self-satisfied. But the setting is everything. Ivan tells this story while sitting in the upstairs room of his friend Alehin, whose farm Ivan and his friend Burkin have stopped at, taking shelter from a rainstorm. The two farmsteads function almost as two additional characters in the story, with Alehin’s productive and in good trim, while I’van’s brother’s farm is described as chaotic and disorganized (though this description is Ivan’s, not the narrator’s). Ivan urges Alehin not to become complacent like his own brother, which is odd since the two characters are about as different as can be imagined — the obsessive brother and Alehin, who is described as a kind of healthy animal.
Well, my intention is not to retell the story. [Here is a pretty good e-notes summary of the story.] What interests me is the way that Chekhov refuses to take sides. The narrator notes that “no one was satisfied” with Ivan’s story (despite the fact that it is told with passion and good will) and the brother’s situation — which the reader gets only through Ivan’s eyes — is not dismissed or belittled despite Ivan’s attempt to use it as a warning. Alehin is presented as self-sufficient, part of the landscape. The problem the story presents is, How is it best to live? It does not provide an answer.