On Cutting Some Slack

Even my most libertarian friends, with their dreams of desert freeholds or serene isolation from the rest of us, have to own up, sooner or later, that we live in a community.  That unless you are Ted Kaczynski, making bombs and manifestos in an isolated cabin, you'll have to deal with people in a way that is civil and constructive, even if it isn't always friendly.

This is where slack-cutting is of value.  The quality that lets slide the irritating quirks of others, usually with phrases like "Oh, that's just [him/her]" or "I have to work with [him/her] later, so I'll let it go".

Public hostility is different.  Recently I was rudely and aggressively insulted in front of a large crowd.  I had respected the offender, and in some ways I still do—in ways that will be enough to work with her if I am called upon to do so.  After her tantrum I can no longer like her, but I've cut slack to a practical ground, where any contact I have with her can be useful, though I am reasonably sure it can no longer be pleasant.

Fiction writing—or at least some of the characterization that a fiction writer does—can begin in cutting slack.  You let things slide because you're interested in seeing where they head, because you realize they may make good copy up the road.  But it's good as well for people who do other things.

I tend to pace in the classroom.  It's because I can't stand still when the ideas are good.  I can see that it might unsettle someone: twice in twenty-five years of teaching, people have complained, but for the most part my students put up with it, out of their own kindness and graciousness and, I certainly hope, a returned respect for me and for my forgiveness of late papers, class-cutting, and improvised apologies and excuses for the aforementioned.  I also hope they get excited by the ideas as well, and realize we all have different ways of making that known.

Still, when I saw a student evaluation that expressed real discomfort with my pacing—that went on about it for a paragraph or so—I took stock of my habit.  This was mid-semester, on a large internet site, so it gave me time to correct my behavior to less discomfort a student who was apparently very upset about it.  I tried to check the pacing—a practice I found a little distracting myself, since I had to call myself out on a number of occasions—but I figured the class was about the students instead of about me, so I could adjust as much as I could.  And the student mentioned that it had gotten better…in the four subsequent evaluations where she registered complaints that it had happened to begin with.

Yes, I said 'she', because it wasn't hard to figure out who it was.  She dropped pure factual information into the paragraph—the course she was taking from me, and that she was taking yet another simultaneously—so I knew instantly.  Don't ever think you're that opaque on anonymous evaluations.  She graduated before three of the five complaining paragraphs were published, but in her aftermath she left me thinking:

First time, maybe the second time, the problem was about me.  By the fifth time, it's about you, my dear.

Which speaks to cutting slack.  One thing we can learn is how to do it.  Because the things about someone else are sometimes about you.  I've learned it too often in my own life, made too many mistakes, indulged too many bad quirks and habits, to not hope for slack from those of you I have offended.  Which doesn't mean that your own little performances won't show up in something I write someday.  

 Because that's the way I roll.

Downton Abbey: Some Thoughts

So, we've caught up with Downton Abbey around the Williams house,  and the verdict is still, all in all, favorable.  Rhonda loves period narration, the Austen-like feel of the show, the nuance of character, the visual sumptuousness.  I agree with much of that (for some reason, I've never been as big a Jane Austen fan as a number of my friends, though I'll immediately own up to her brilliance), but for me, the first two seasons were (so far) preferable to the one we are currently watching.

Here's why.

The first two seasons I found more centered on history, the approach and disaster of the Great War.  It might be just my own interests—I'm fascinated by the event, and have expressed its crucial importance in every damn Modernism class I've ever taught—but it was important to the show as well, in that historicity is what makes it rise above soap opera.

Oh, the history is still there—Branson's Fenian fervor and Edith's budding feminism—and I'm still hoping those situations will blossom in the story line rather than remaining clever window-dressing.  And the show's treatment of slow democratization and British class bigotry (present then, present now) always makes for good story.  The broad characterization that is one of the strengths of British comedy holds up well here reminding me how many British actors are versatile and genuine pros, and how we don't see enough of that on diva-haunted American television.  And yes, I know, this is some of the better programming out of Britain, that a large portion of their television diet is as bad as ours, but they don't have hundreds of channels—hundreds!—filled with complete crap, thank you, and at least they can put forth some literate scripts that you can see performed without your having to pay a small fortune for HBO or Showtime.  I do, by the way, succumb to the PBS-watcher's mythology that the Brits are more literate than we are, because when it comes right down to it, they are, along with the rest of the industrialized world.  It's more evident to us because we speak their language.

So that's the praise: historicity, acting, a verbally attractive script.  But I'm concerned in this third season that it's less and less distinguishable from, say, Falconcrest (which I didn't watch, but saw trailers where well-dressed women were slapping each other. I think it was Falconcrest.  Perhaps Dynasty.  The point being that, at least to my tastes, there's a vanishing point in soap operas in which one is indistinguishable from another).  Soaps are a different form of storytelling from historical fiction, and when you bring them both together, when you cross genres, each should be schooled by the other.  Here's hoping that the rest of this season, and all of the one that follows, bring Downton Abbey back to what I was liking so much as it gathered speed.

What I Learn from Fiction

Having recently passed through (one might say “survived”) a blog tour concerning my novel Vine, it seems like a pretty good time to address one part of the experience.

The reviews, which were mixed/favorable, tended to major on the things that I usually hear.  People liked the things I expected them to like, and had reservations about the things that usually draw misgiving.  Said misgivings often major on the texture of the language (I write in long sentences because they slow the eye and make one think in nuances; I sometimes use obscure words—I was once called a “poseur” by an Amazon reader, which made me smile, because I believe that any English speaker who uses the word “poseur” is, well, a poseur). Others contend that “nothing happens”, and I will admit that there are few swordfights, rappels down the side of skyscrapers, and cold-cocking of a dozen ninjas in a long bout of foot-fighting; for me, “what happens” to most people—the events that define their lives—are nuanced changes in the way they understand things, the way they regard each other and themselves.  That being said, there’s a virtue in more thunder and lightning, and I’m working toward it. In summary, one of the mixed reviews objected that the book was not for the “casual reader,” and though to me that is neither a badge of honor nor a valid critique, I’m fine with my work being characterized that way.

What I don’t get, however, is the insistence on finding a character with whom you can “identify”, or at least how “identify” is used when people say that. We all identify with characters in fiction, but I submit we have to do part of the work in order to do so: and in that lies the cool part.

You have to stretch.  It’s one of the ways that fiction deepens your understanding, but it’s not like mainstream TV, where the viewer can passively identify with characters so broad and typical that you can dilute almost any of your own personal traits to fit that character on the screen.  In short, you identify passively, because that’s the way the character is designed—to reach the widest market.   

I like what  fiction does better.  How it takes you out of your comfort zone, and, with a little work on your part, brings you to understand a character with whom you  don’t readily “identify”.  How it expands your prospects.

In VINE I made up a character named Bucky Trabue.  A chain-smoking, right-wing Republican operative with a dose of outrage and corruption.  Now, in real life, I would be appalled every time one of his candidates won office, but in the book I began to like him: I framed my imagination to see the world the way Bucky saw it, and I came out understanding him, and in a way identifying with him.  Certainly liking him, and emerging maybe a bit deepened from the encounter.  He has a part in the new thing I’m working on: I liked him enough to ask him back.

You may not want to stretch with the characters you read about.  May want to sit back, relax, and “identify” in a generalized way.  And no, I’m not criticizing you for making that choice.  Just saying that not all fiction makes that kind of transaction, and that meeting someone different than you—in real life or in fiction—can be a good and healthy rendezvous.

Tragedy for the Aughts

The old, clunky Gilbert Murray translation of Euripides’ Bacchae ends with this from the chorus:

                    There be many shapes of mystery,

                    And many things God makes to be,

                                         Past hope or fear.

                    And the end men looked for cometh not,

                    And a path is there where no man thought

                                         So hath it fallen here.

The Greeks seemed to believe that when it came to the gods, you sacrifice, then duck.  You make a deal and hope they will keep it.  Wooden though Murray’s version of the lines may be, it sums up the feeling you often get at the end of a Greek tragedy: that something larger than you are has brushed against you, and whatever it was, it wasn’t all that concerned about your well-being.

As 21^st century humans, we don’t recognize that kind of force too often.  Or at least put it in those terms.  We know there are overwhelming forces that buffet and drown us, currents in which our small vessels are lucky to stay afloat, but we often mark those down as huge sociopolitical things, economic factors that influence our daily lives, but in ways we scarcely notice or, if we do, we get used to.  They won’t block us from our dreams, we tell ourselves, in what is a very Western (and especially American) tone of voice.

The Greeks, even though they started the whole Western thing, were hardly as optimistic.  Theirs is dark wisdom that still makes sense in the back of our brains.  We know we are ducking things we cannot face, and maybe those things have to do with those dreams we are chasing.

Really early in the first big critical discussion of tragedy—the Poetics—Aristotle draws a contrast between the characters of Tragedy and its sister, Comedy:

Since the objects of imitation are men in action, and these men must be either of a higher or a lower type (for moral character mainly answers to these divisions, goodness and badness being the distinguishing marks of moral differences), it follows that we must represent men either as better than in real life, or as worse, or as they are…. The same distinction marks off Tragedy from Comedy; for Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.

Aristotle also goes on to say that the fall of the tragic hero comes from hamartia.  It’s a term that people used to translate as “tragic flaw”,  but some of the Classical scholars I know tell me that it’s an archery term for missing the mark, closer to “tragic error”.

I think that one of the changes that can take place in modern tragedies, especially in America, has to do with our perspective on what Aristotle is saying.  Perhaps a good tragedy, I told myself, could come from precisely that sense we sometimes have as to how special we are as individuals, that each of us is, indeed, “better than in real life”.  So I have Stephen Thorne as one of my principal characters—a theatre director who plans a disruptive version of the Bacchae, Euripides’ very disruptive play, to thumb his nose at a city where he has been neglected and overlooked for years.  In case you don’t know the play, this is how the Muse Polymnia sums it up in the first pages of Vine:

The story, after all, is hard. King Pentheus of Thebes tries to put down the new worship of Dionysus, a cult that is turning the heads of his female subjects. Pentheus imprisons the Great God, dismisses him.  For such disrespect, of course the divinity exacts revenge.  Dionysus persuades the poor king to dress himself in the garb of the Maenads—the female devotees of the god.  Dressed in regal drag, he may witness the sacred mysteries. or so the god tells him as he leads the tressed and fabulous king into the mountains, handing him over to the Maenads, who tear him limb from limb.

You can see why it could turn heads in a conservative city.  But the mistake Stephen has made is that he imagined himself all that special in the first place, that the neglect of his talents was in no way justified, and that he can control the play once it commences.  Serious hamartia,  I hope, and I also hope you will enjoy and shudder as this most contemporary and American version of ancient Greek tragedy awakens and uncoils in your presence.  Enjoy.

On Difficulty

Sometimes—not always, but sometimes—people object to Vine because of its “difficulty”.   They claim obscure or abstruse words,  long sentences, fragmented episodes.  These are things that get in the way of the story, they claim.  Things that disrupt the pleasure of reading.

Let me make my case.

Suppose you were at a diving event.  Which would you rather see:  a lithe young Australian doing a back one-and-a-half off a high board, or a dumpy, fifty-something Irishman such as myself attempt a cannonball from poolside?  Not for the comedy, mind you.  For the sheer athletic and aesthetic pleasure of a dive.

It’s what they call degree of difficulty.  We are impressed by things exceptional, things that ordinary folks don’t or can’t do.

It’s why literature is more than writing, though we tend to forget it because of the very nature of the literary medium. Neither you nor I would expect to be playing a trumpet well enough to record if we first picked it up a month ago.  But writing is regarded as different, because we all use language.  Everyone can communicate with sentences, but to really write is to delight in the ways of communication, to juggle and manipulate them.

The story itself is part, not all, of fiction, I think.  If it were simply story, if it were the writer’s job to get out of the way, there would be very little difference between how fiction and journalism are done.  But with fiction it seems there is more emphasis on the way the story is told—on language or rhetoric.  In fact, fiction that employs transparent prose and linear, causal narrative is really basically a holdover from the mid to late 19^th century—writers like George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, Stephen Crane.  Writing before and after that relatively brief window of time is often writing that calls attention to itself, that is ruffle and rhetoric, back-pedaling  and leaping perilously from one circumstance to the next.  Look at Tristram Shandy or The Pickwick Papers or Frankenstein on one side of that window, Lovecraft or Joyce or Garcia Marquez on the other.  These are fictions that delight as much in how the story is told as in what is told.

So I will play with ways of telling.  I will offer my readers a chance to work with the story I tell, to help me make that story by their involved and intelligent work with the words I give them.  I hope that doing some work has its rewards, that the reader emerges, deepened and exercised, from something of mine that they’ve read.  If they don’t, they don’t.  If they choose not to undertake my offer, I understand:  I respect that they want something else from the reading experience, and the two of us wave and walk our separate literary paths.

But in itself, difficulty is not a bad thing, I maintain.  It is a choice, a tactic to reveal and challenge, not a posture or design to intimidate.  Indeed, I think that difficult fiction can respect the reader more; in asking you to shoulder more of the burden than to sit back and be entertained, it is asking you to undertake something that can be a different, and sometimes a better adventure.