Alexander Chee's Blog, page 3

Hermaneutics of Various Kinds

It was National Coming Out Day yesterday, and I was too busy to observe it any particular way except to think about how impossible it feels now to be closeted. How impossible it would be to be, say, like Proust, especially as characterized here in Anne Carson’s The Albertine Workout, which examines Remembrance of Things Past through the idea that Albertine is a disguise for Proust’s driver, Albert Agostinelli, an idea she calls “The Transposition Theory”. I have been playing this as I work, and this line stays with me, among others: “Albertine’s behavior in Marcel’s household is that of a domestic animal/ which enters any door it finds open or comes to lie beside its master on his bed/making a place for itself.”

Also of interest to me in the same vein is this investigation John Banville made into the life of Kafka–and his sexuality–at the New York Review of Books. And then without any hidden sexual content, Donna Tartt in conversation with her editor, Michael Pietsch.

Iris At Last

I remember a former classmate back at Wesleyan recommending I read Iris Murdoch–her novel The Good Apprentice. “I think you’d like her, based on what you’re writing,” he said. I admired his work above all the other student writers in our very small advanced fiction class–he seemed older than the rest of us somehow and younger at the same time, his hair dyed into leopard spots, his clothes always stylishly punk, even when awkward, and sincerely punk, too–none of that store-bought stuff.  His face was eflin or Vulcan, or the face of a Vulcan elf–beautiful in an otherworldly sort of way. He was also, I know now, like a character from an Iris Murdoch novel himself–he even looked like the young man on the cover, the butterfly like a mask on his face. He was, to my mind, our most talented fiction writer. He gave it up when he began reading Foucault to become, eventually, a queer theorist. He had a boyfriend he’d later marry–they met in prep school, something I envied, and the boyfriend would go on to write and produce one of the few recent successful rock operas in recent history. If Iris was writing now, I believe he–they, really–would be in her newest novel.

Given that admiration I had for this hero of my school days, I still find it hard to believe I didn’t begin reading her back then, but I can only think I was afraid of being influenced, something that now seems ridiculous, but is so common among the young, and that deprives them too often of an education they might otherwise get earlier.

In any case, at some point late last spring, as the whole world was crisping up with that end of times heat and turning into the bleak muggy early summer that threatened to sweat us all to death, I remembered his recommendation. Another friend loved her too, and had sent me an essay she was writing on her. So I got some recommendations, read some samples, chose and downloaded A Word Child, as a test (I often buy an ebook for an author I’m uncertain of) and began.

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A Word Child was, quite simply, some of the most fun I’d had reading something in a while. The style of the book itself was its own pleasure–I almost didn’t care what she was saying, or, he, her narrator, that is. An angry old man in the body of a slightly younger man.

I was trying to rescue myself from despair when I began, for when I do not have a good novel to read, I read myself sick with news on politics, and become full of despair. To my surprise, I found as i I had stuck myself into the life of one of the nastiest narrators I’ve ever run into, and had, well, a lot of fun. Some examples, from what I highlighted:

I thought of them as ‘students’ though they studied nothing but pleasure.

There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life’s bright mysterious expectations.

I was one for whom the spoken and written languages are themselves different languages.

Clifford was a glittering object, good-looking, clever, charming when he wanted to be so, and surrounded with the sort of melancholy and the sort of mystery which make women feel for men pity, then quickly love.

Life isn’t a play. It isn’t even a pantomime.

My ‘home’ was a small mean nasty flatlet in Bayswater, in a big square red -brick block in a cul-de-sac. Outside the cul-de-sac was a busy noisy street, beyond that street were some modest dingy shops, beyond the shops was a Bayswater tube station (District Line and Inner Circle), beyond that was Queensway tube station (Central Line), beyond that was Bayswater Road, and beyond that was, thank God, the park. I instinctively denigrate my flat: it was doubtless my own life which was small and nasty.

I know this last paragraph looks somewhat ordinary, and it is, which is part of what is so good about it–it has the feeling of someone figuring something out as they talk to you, and telling you something you can believe, even as it also tells you about his neighborhood and how he feels about it, and his life, all at the same time.

And so I went under, in the grip of the spell, her spell. The irony for me was that all around me was the whole “likable character” controversy, as well as the question of whether Salter was or was not a misogynist, and so on–and it was like walking through a party with a bitter funny friend who insistently pushes you to think a little more, to second guess, just when you think you know what you know. If Iris ever thought about likable characters, well, this is what interested me–this is the cliffhanger, as it were, and I’ll address it in another post soon–I bring up the Salter misogyny question because this narrator of hers was one of the most misogynist first person narrators I’ve ever read a novel from, if not the only one. I have found it challenging before–I was entirely overwhelmed by the misogyny in Updike’s Rabbit, Run, for example, so much so that it was hard to finish the novel, I was so angry with Rabbit by the end.  But not so with Hilary Burde, not quite the same level of annoyance. I suppose I could say it was a matter of degrees–Rabbit really hates his wife in some terrible ways, his mistress also, whereas Hilary seems to hate everyone, but especially women who need something from him, or need him to change. I could say I read through to the end in part to see if I ever would see him change, if he would ever relent or learn something about his narcissist ways, but even that isn’t quite convincing. The effect puzzles me even now, it almost feels like a betrayal of myself, but I think it gets back to what Claire Messud was saying when she so famously said, last year, some of what I’ll post here, in PW:

As a writer, I subscribe to Chekhov’s world view: “It’s not my job to tell you that horse thieves are bad people. It’s my job to tell you what this horse thief is like.” The more accurately one can illuminate a particular human experience, the better the work of art. I’m not an autobiographical, or biographical, writer, except in some abstract sense. If I had to summarize, most broadly, my concerns as a writer, I’d say the question “how then must we live?” is at the heart of it, for me. It can only be addressed in the individual, not in the general; each of us on this planet must come to terms with this question for him or herself.

As a reader, I’ve long felt passionately about fictions that articulate anger, frustration, disappointment—from reading Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, in high school, when I thought, “my God, fiction can do this? Fiction can say these unsayable things?” to reading Beckett or Camus or Philip Roth’sSabbath’s Theater to Thomas Bernhard—these are all articulating unseemly, unacceptable experiences and emotions, rage prominent among them. Because rage at life and rage for life are very closely linked. To be angry, you have to give a shit.

I think I can go out on a limb and say Iris would agree (without a Ouija board, though, if I was to ever ask a spirit a question, it would be her).  And then the interviewer famously says, I wouldn’t want to be friends with her, speaking of Messud’s narrator in The Woman Upstairs, and Messud says,

For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t “is this a potential friend for me?” but “is this character alive?”

I’ve been thinking about this issue because it is common now to disallow a novel for containing this kind of a character or narrator, and that makes me uncomfortable, because misogyny is real. For our fictions to relate to the world, we can’t ask them to be better than we are.  My situation also is that my good friend Roxana Robinson wrote that essay on Salter, and I’m having dinner with her, to talk about novels, including Salter and Murdoch. So, I will hang out with her, see if she’ll give me a quote and write more soon on why I think Murdoch’s use of a misogynist succeeded next week. Because it isn’t enough to say she’s a great artist, there’s something in there we can see if we look hard enough.

The NYTBR Map to Fictional Characters from Manhattan (and Their Novels)

In 2005, Randy Cohen proposed the creation of a map of Manhattan created from the many novels written about the city, with entries crowdsourced from readers of the New York Times Book Review. The results are here. It is easily the most fascinating way I’ve found recently to find something new to read or discover something new about New York.

Thank you to Randy Cohen for introducing me to it.

Bibliomane

I’ve been slowly alphabetizing my books and discovered there are a few books I own three copies of.

1. Voyage in the Dark, by Jean Rhys

2. The White Album, by Joan Didion

3. The Bloody Chamber, by Angela Carter

I did go through a phase where I was buying copies of books I had in storage. I was living in many sublets, and missed my books. But I apparently didn’t sell any of the duplicates, and then went on to keep purchasing them, as if I both couldn’t forget them and couldn’t remember if I still had a copy at home. The White Album I own in paperback and mass market paperback, but I have three identical copies of the Bloody Chamber in paperback, plus a fourth, high-end Folio Society edition of it (that is stunning–everyone should get this). And two of my Voyage in the Dark copies are the same edition as well.

Also, I can’t sell any of them. I tried to put some in the sell pile and then couldn’t. I have no idea why I have this attachment.

I’ve been away from this blog a long time, I know. I’m back to regular updates here. See you again soon.

On Reading The Great Gatsby Now

No one was more surprised than me, probably, when I began reading The Great Gatsby as an adult, first out of curiosity–what was that book I read as a child?–and then for pleasure–hey that book I didn’t understand as a child…there’s something in there–and then lastly, for structure, because I was very curious as to the way the novel seemed so natural–and this is the trick a realist novel aims for, to seem as if it just happens.

And so I’m sticking my head out later today to discuss it online on Twitter, 4PM ET, for #classicschat with @weegee and @janiceharayda.

I’ve been trying to think of what questions to ask or issues to bring up. I’ve been arguing in my head this week with Kathryn Schulz’s excellent condemnation of the book at Vulture/NYMag, also known, to me, as “thinking about it”. She attacks it precisely because it is a classic–and part of her animosity is that she hates that she feels she is supposed to love it–she even feels ‘commanded’ to love it–and she doesn’t. And this strikes me as exactly what is wrong about the conventional way classics are taught. No novel should be presented that way, it just starts the reader off in a bog of resentment. So I begin this in a sympathetic position to hers. Like her, I don’t think any novel should be sacrosanct–that strikes me as a mistake in thinking about novels, actually. I’ve always believed classics must prove their worth to each age as time moves on–it’s always a literary death match, as it were–does this novel speak to us anymore? Posterity doesn’t care about what we think is sacred now. The question I ask of novels that are classics is why does this story still find readers? And lovers, say, like Haruki Murakami, whose astonishing love for the novel resulted in his translating it, and he details why gloriously. The thoughts I have on this novel are probably found between these two poles.

But I also don’t recognize the novel in her evaluation of the novel’s qualities. And as her post goes on, it becomes more of an attack on Fitzgerald than an attack on the novel’s merits–the novel as bad novel because the writer is a bad person–soon, it feels like she’s piling on, and is talking about the likable character issue, is the author a good person, couldn’t he write better female characters, and that… seems to misunderstand the stakes. He was writing about shallow people, and this includes shallow women. He was fascinated by them and the way they fascinate others. If he’d set out to write something deep about a deep woman, that would be different. Was he a sexist? Sure. Was he a man of low morals? Probably. Was he a bad person? Probably. Not very smart? Probably.

It doesn’t matter, though. As my friend, the playwright Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas said to me, the hardest part of having a social justice background and being an artist is that art is not fair.

And the hardest truth about writers, of all the ones I’ve learned in my time as a teacher of writing and as a writer, is that one does not need to be a good person to write a compelling story. One does not even need to be a terrifically smart one. How often have you seen a brilliant person, and a brilliant good one, haunted by their inability to write a novel? This is because you only have to have a grasp for low cunning, for fascination and engagement, and detail. Every addict I know is an amazing storyteller, and many, I don’t doubt, if they weren’t so busy getting their fix, could be on bestseller lists. This is because Fiction is never very far from a con, the lie that keeps going as long as it can to see what it can get. How often have we seen a writer in an interview surprised by the depths contained in what they wrote? That’s because in telling a story well, we necessarily reach past the grasp of ourselves as a person, out into a larger sphere that is beyond us. And how else does one learn of moral failings up front and personal unless one has committed them?

If anything commands me now that I resent, I think it is the idea of the likable character and the honorable writer, more than Gatsby. Over the last decade, these have become two of our culture’s sacred cows, more than any particular novel, because no novel and no writer really lives up to these standards. The idea that a writer must also be a good consistent person, and the character too, or the book is a failure, stalks nearly every review. Schulz calls Fitzgerald a failed moralist as a way of criticizing him, accuses him of writing “the fable of the fox and the grapes, a story of people who criticize exactly what they covet”, but I can’t fault him there. Doesn’t that hypocrisy, as it were, make a fable complicated enough to be a novel? That irony is precisely what is interesting to me. We all feel like hypocrites sometime–that may be the most universal topic of all. And it’s hard enough to write a good novel without also having to be a good person and to only write about good people in the bargain. Are we really going to try to stake our claim there as a culture? Perhaps all novelists are failed moralists. Perhaps that is what drives people to write a novel, or enables the vision requisite to do it.

What I read for and what I teach my students to write for is situations that are sympathetic, even if the characters–and writers for that matter–are not. In a good literary novel, everyone takes turns being the monster, I think–it teaches that none of us are exempt from being evil, or having evil thoughts, or wrongdoing. The evil are not different from us, and neither are the hypocrites. No one is a race apart. And that is the reason why someone like me, at least, attaches to the narrative here.

When I think about Gatsby, I begin somewhere near the racial anxiety that is often thought of as a leitmotif, but that strikes me as the novel’s unconscious theme: Gatsby, to me, is about how hard it is to succeed in America, even if you’re white and American, because America was built for Tom Buchanans, not for Daisy Buchanans, and not for Gatsbys. This is maybe more true than it was during the time Fitzgerald wrote it. American social mobility has not been so low in almost a century. With Gatsby, we see him trying to pass himself off as a member of Tom’s untouchable class–as like or even better than Tom–success just dripping off his every move plus a war hero to boot–precisely because he has been given to expect that to some extent. He’s been told he can have anything he wants in America, and what he wants is money, prestige, and Daisy. But more than that, he wants the moment he lost back, the moment she was there, waiting for him, lost to his time in the service. And his crass overproduced life is a mirror for his self-loathing.

As for Tom, this world that loves a Tom Buchanan allows his decadent exhaustion with his privilege–it is in fact one of the privileges of his class, that he can hate what he has at times, and rebel against it, and return to it. He and his kind have built the world to be this way. Part of that deal is the scam that lets people like Gatsby think they can get in on it–he and his kind have profited for generations on the idea that someone can rise to their level from nothing. Tom allows Gatsby in a little so he can teach Gatsby where the line is that he can’t cross. He can’t come all the way in–no one but a Tom Buchanan can.

In his world, he can have a mistress and still be jealous of Gatsby and Daisy, and that is his right. I don’t see him as someone who fears losing Daisy, as much as I see him as someone who doesn’t want Gatsby to have Daisy, even when he doesn’t desire her anymore, because it will mean his world, the one that protects his privilege, is coming apart. Tom’s almost too banal to hate or even resent, but even he is at times sympathetic, or his situation is. To my mind, it’s still one of the most honest books about how life in America actually is, for all its shortcomings, and all of Fitzgerald’s. And that’s why I read it.

I’ll write more about the structure later.

“Heaven”

A year ago, I was going through files. I found a story I’d written back when I was in graduate school, a story that I didn’t know what to do with then–it seemed too small, and yet too long to be flash fiction. It was eventually part of a longer manuscript of interconnected stories that was then going to be a very long, strange kind of novel–a novel that wouldn’t seem at all strange now, actually. That possible novel got me an agent, my first one, as for a while it looked as if William Morrow was going to do the book. When they didn’t, I then set it aside with the rest. I put it away with all of them. And then I didn’t look at it for a decade.

I wrote Edinburgh instead. I published it, and then began The Queen of the Night.

When I did look at this story and its brothers again, I thought, oh, this is very good, and I was pleased with it, and… I put it away again.

TriQuarterly then asked me if I had something and I thought, I wonder if I do and went into those files, and found this. It was less than a decade this time since the last time I’d looked it over. Now it just seemed like a mistake that it had never been published. I gave it a light revision–the possibility something will be published makes it suddenly seem very different–and then I sent it on to them, and they loved it.

Which is to say, I have a new story, “Heaven”, up now at TriQuarterly.

 

 

On Fiction Vs. Nonfiction, Briefly

A friend and colleague writes:

I have a question for you. I have a former student, a good writer, who’s applying to _______. She’s applying in fiction, but she’s writing memoir.

In my class, I said it didn’t matter as long as she was okay with having her work discussed in the same way we’d discuss fiction. (Referring to “the narrator” instead of “you,” etc.) I don’t have a problem with being restricted to certain story lines or characters because things happened a certain way. In fiction I often treat the story lines and characters as something that exist in their own right, apart from the story, because that’s how writers often feel about them. (E.g., No, I can’t change it and make these characters get married because that wouldn’t be true to the story–that kind of thing.) So it doesn’t seem very different to me. That’s my standard response when someone brings nonfiction to a fiction class I’m teaching.

But I’m proofreading her application manuscript today, and suddenly it occurred to me that you can’t really apply to the fiction program with a nonfiction ms–in fact it says so in the application guidelines.

But what’s the difference, really? How much do you have to change something to call it fiction? (And the related question: How much are you allowed to change something and have it qualify as nonfiction?) I realize I have no idea. It seemed like something you might have an answer to.

A: I suppose the question is always, how would they know? And if something is well-structured and well-dramatized, isn’t that all that matters? Those are the surface issues. To the extent that events are staged in nonfiction by the memory and imagination, some try to say there’s no difference, but I think great nonfiction uses the limits of the world as a frame, or a foil, or both, and more–it can, if it’s willing to go wherever the world leads the discoveries. Some writers change things because they are sure a better essay waits for them if they just invent this one thing, they say it ‘makes the story better’, but, for me, that is actually when the writer turns away from the world–and from their task. When I feel this, I know that is my ego acting on the essay, aspiring to something that doesn’t actually belong to me or the essay. The result of that strikes me as being neither fiction or nonfiction, but a carnival of your ambition, with a truth only for you in it–about what it is in you that made you do that. And I think the same is true in fiction–when you push into the story’s rules, rules you set up, to make something happen that does not belong there, it’s a betrayal of yourself. You’re not letting the story be the editor.

There’s a certain ruthlessness I can admire to the student who is willing to submit the work to either program and go wherever she is admitted–it’s a writerly ruthlessness. But I don’t know that it’s best for her in this instance. Ideally, she’d consider her career past this story, and what the impact would be. Some stories we write have the potential to lay waste to all of our personal connections, for example, and the ruthless confessional memoirist often reaches their 30s with fewer friends willing to be the next subject and the wrong kind putting themselves forward. But perhaps she’s at the edge of a felix culpa–perhaps she’ll throw her cards to the wind and it won’t matter and we’ll see where she ends up, and what kind of writer she becomes.

It’s worth noting that most of my favorite writers wrote both fiction and nonfiction, and that their training was not what decided their fate. Having said that, graduate school is more than a sort of bus stop to the rest of life–it’s the place a student is tested as to whether they can become a peer, really–thus the ‘defense’ of a thesis–and their cohort professionally becomes their peer group for the rest of their life. A lot of the important issues in the decision are not about what’s in this manuscript, in other words.

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Underneath, to address the related issues: I think you could change one thing and reasonably call it fiction. But the question is, what is the thing, and why? And what is the right reason? Autobiographical fiction is interesting–it’s where things get fuzziest, I think. There are strange double standards that run all over the place–fiction is supposed to be entirely invented! And the yet there is an industry of snooping into what was ‘true’ and what was not, the one question every fiction writer faces relentlessly on tour. And it is asked with a gleam in the eye–an “I caught you I bet” look.

Lorrie Moore has a quote I love about fiction, where she calls it “the consolations of the mask”, but the relationship between the writer and the story isn’t the relationship between a face and a mask. The story is something the mask calls into being once the writer puts it on.

Even the act of concealing an identity typically unleashes something. You could call it that you’re more free to say things, but it’s more than that–when you do this, you access the part of you that is larger than what you agree to be by daylight to friends and family. A more chaotic, unruly self. Consider the story of Ingeborg Day, the author of Nine and a Half Weeks, one of the more interesting stories I’ve read this year. Sarah Weinman looked into the anonymous posture she struck to write the book, and it’s a fascinating portrait of a writer who wrote two very different confessional books–one way to look at them is, what she was willing to say if she was masked, and what she was willing to say if she was hidden. The mask she put on was over her name, and what she wrote is called a memoir. But that is where it is fuzziest–it is most likely the memoir of whoever she was behind the mask that was Ingeborg Day. The fictions then are more likely in the memoir she wrote, Ghost Waltz. But this is why people try to say the differences don’t matter, and I think they still do.

As someone who writes both fiction and nonfiction, who studied to write both, and teaches the writing of both, the difference to me, approximately, begins in the epistemological pleasures of each, which is often dismissed as an unserious claim–the dismissal rolls over this distinction (it doesn’t like distinctions perhaps?), to say if the pleasure is what matters then the distinctions don’t matter. But this happens out of a disregard for the importance of pleasure and its types, I think, as well as its sources. Pleasure is one of the most important forces of all. It’s why everyone lies about their own.

As Elizabeth Bowen said, Fiction is the lie that tells the truth–a poetic truth that justifies the lie, or at least, it must justify the lie–if it does not, it’s only a lie. Fiction contains a truth that perhaps can only be approached through invention. So, for example, people ask of my first novel why it wasn’t a memoir, since aspects of it were autobiograpical, and the answer is that describing only my life would not have described what I learned from living my life, and so I made something to fit the shape of what I knew. And this is true in all of my fiction.

Nonfiction is a moral exercise, an attempt to struggle with the world and its contents ethically and imaginatively, within the limits the writer can perceive and then push against. But it is a struggle with ‘what is’. Creative nonfiction is about using the self as an instrument, for speaking of and with the world, an exercise in a kind of rearrangement of the facts that gets at poetic truths of the world by inventing new connections between what is known. Your work functions like a photograph conducted in X-Ray, or ultraviolet, or infrared–you try to show something you can see that hasn’t been described but is there.

With fiction, even the photograph is invented, as well as the spectrum, if you look hard enough, but you don’t have to, because it is a con, in service of the good. Fiction is a trickster God. Nonfiction is archeology.

The pleasures of reading each—in fiction, you trust the writer is presumably the inventor of all the reader sees, and that it is all to one end. He or she can pursue whatever they need imaginatively to tell their story, but they are bound by the terms of their invention all the same, and the reader keeps the tally–a false moment, ironically, will harm, even though it is, at another angle, all false moments. It is a paradox from start to finish, a moral test of the liar’s sincerity.

In reading creative nonfiction, the writer is bound by the world, much like in the Hanged Man card of the Tarot–but it is this world, and the parts we can’t change, how we live them, well, within those limits is transcendance, and the art of it all. When we read creative nonfiction we are watching a kind of moral highwire act, an attempt to use compassion and imagination along those limits, here in the world.

In the end, I think of it as like a tree–the root system is like a mirror of what is above, but sunk into the earth, or vice versa–the branches mirror the roots, but reach through the air. So, fiction is the tree above ground. Nonfiction is the root. Fiction can reach into the air, is free to play with whatever blows by. Nonfiction is in the earth, bound by it, but connected to it in a way that is intimate and direct. There is a continuum, yes, but the root is the root, and the branch, the branch–and each cannot do the work of the other.

I hope that helps! My views of the difference are not in vogue. But I am glad I had specific and different teaching for each.

Some Favorite Longreads From the New Yorker Archive.

The New Yorker asked me for a favorite Longread from their archive, along with Dwight Garner, Maud Newton, Sloane Crosley and Laura Miller. It was an almost overwhelming task but I immediately thought of Joan Didion’s electric “Letter from Lakewood”.

If you’re going to get a subscription and dip into the archives, especially via iPad (highly recommended–the iPad/tablet version of the magazine is excellent), here are some more suggestions.

The Tiny Feast by Chris Adrian
The Dinner Party by Joshua Ferris
Something That Needs Nothing by Miranda July
Alone by Yiyun Li
The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm
The Custodian, by Deborah Eisenberg
Nilda by Junot Diaz
Cinnamon Skin by Edmund White
Lesbian Nation by Ariel Levy
Reverting to a Wild State by Justin Torres

And, of course, the 114 stories Mavis Gallant has published there, and the excerpt from her diaries.

Some Reinventions

I’m rebooting Koreanish, thus the appearance.

You can also follow me at Tumblr, at Cheemobile, in the meantime. More soon.

One More Thing

Houghton had its launch meeting for my new novel, The Queen of the Night. I think it went well.