View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
But no one could have guessed what she was thinking. And for those who looked at her once more from the doorway, the birthday girl was only what she appeared to be: seated at the head of the filthy table, her hand clenched on the tablecloth as though grasping a scepter, and with that muteness that was her last word. Fist clenched on the table, never again would she be only what she was thinking. Her appearance had finally surpassed her and, going beyond her, was serenely becoming gigantic. Cordélia stared at her in alarm. The mute and severe fist on the table was telling the unhappy daughter-in-law she irremediably loved perhaps for the last time: You must know. You must know. That life is short. That life is short.
Pale, kicked out of a Church, she looked at the stationary earth from which she’d departed and back to which she’d been delivered. She straightened out her skirts primly. She didn’t look at anyone. Contrite as on that day when in the middle of everyone the entire contents of her purse had spilled onto the ground and everything that was valuable while lying secretly in her purse, once exposed in the dust of the street, revealed the pettiness of a private life of precautions: face powder, receipt, fountain pen, her retrieving from the curb the scaffolding of her life. She rose from her seat stunned as if shaking off a collision. Though no one was paying attention, she smoothed her skirt again, did what she could so no one would notice how weak and disgraced she was, haughtily protecting her broken bones. But the sky was spinning in her empty stomach; the earth, rising and falling before her eyes, remained distant for a few moments, the earth that is always so troublesome. For a moment the woman wanted, in mutely sobbing fatigue, to reach out her hand to the troublesome earth: her hand reached out like that of a crippled beggar. But as if she had swallowed the void, her heart stunned.
And thus I don’t understand the egg. I only understand a broken egg: I crack it on the frying pan. In this indirect way I give myself to the egg’s existence: my sacrifice is reducing myself to my personal life. I turned my pleasure and my pain into my hidden destiny. And having only one’s own life is, for those who have already seen the egg, a sacrifice. Like the ones who, in a convent, sweep the floor and do the laundry, serving without the glory of a higher purpose, my job is to live out my pleasures and my pains. I must have the modesty to live.
I don’t want this house. I want a justice that would have given a chance to something pure and full of helplessness in Mineirinho—that thing that moves mountains and is the same as what made him love a woman “like a madman,” and the same that led him through a doorway so narrow that it slashes into nakedness; it is a thing in us as intense and transparent as a dangerous gram of radium, that thing is a grain of life that if trampled is transformed into something threatening—into trampled love; that thing, which in Mineirinho became a knife, it is the same thing in me that makes me offer another man water, not because I have water, but because, I too, know what thirst is; and I too, who have not lost my way, have experienced perdition. Prior justice, that would not make me ashamed. It was past time for us, with or without irony, to be more divine; if we can guess what God’s benevolence might be it is because we guess at benevolence in ourselves, whatever sees the man before he succumbs to the sickness of crime. I go on, nevertheless, waiting for God to be the father, when I know that one man can be father to another. And I go on living in my weak house. That house, whose protective door I lock so tightly, that house won’t withstand the first gale that will send a locked door flying through the air. But it is standing, and Mineirinho lived rage on my behalf, while I was calm. He was gunned down in his disoriented strength, while a god fabricated at the last second hastily blesses my composed wrongdoing and my stupefied justice: what upholds the walls of my house is the certainty that I shall always vindicate myself, my friends won’t vindicate me, but my enemies who are my accomplices, they will greet me; what upholds me is knowing that I shall always fabricate a god in the image of whatever I need in order to sleep peacefully, and that others will furtively pretend that we are all in the right and that there is nothing to be done. All this, yes, for we are the essential frauds, bastions of some thing. And above all trying not to understand.
1.
Craft is a set of expectations.
2.
Expectations are not universal; they are standardized. It is like what we say about wine or espresso: we acquire “taste.” With each story we read, we draw on and contribute to our knowledge of what a story is or should be. This is true of cultural standards as fundamental as whether to read from left to right or right to left, just as it is true of more complicated context such as how to appreciate a sentence like “She was absolutely sure she hated him,” which relies on our expectation that stating a person’s certainty casts doubt on that certainty as well as our expectation that fictional hatred often turns into attraction or love.
Our appreciation then relies on but also reinforces our expectations.
Here is a convention up for debate, one in the process of becoming visible: in an essay on the pathetic fallacy, author Charles Baxter argues that setting in literary realist fiction should less often reflect the protagonist’s inner state. Baxter has seen too much rain when the hero is sad, too many sad barns when the hero has lost a child (as in the famous John Gardner prompt). In reality, rain is not contingent on emotion and objects do not change their appearances to fit people’s moods. (The Gardner prompt, to describe a barn from the perspective of a grieving father, is more about what a person in a certain mood would notice—but the point holds.) Baxter thinks realism should do more to resist story conventions and accurately represent reality.
Yet on screen, the pathetic fallacy seems widely accepted (especially if there is no voiceover to provide a character’s thoughts), and student fiction seems more and more influenced by film expectations than prose expectations.
What tone tells us is that if fiction regularly presents a difficult world, it also indicates how to make sense of that world—and for whom the world is difficult. Whether positive or negative, fiction always says something about how we live, and not in an individual sense but a contextual one. When we write fiction, we write the world. Even if that world looks almost the same as ours, it will always be a representation, not a universal. If there is a distance tone inhabits, it is the distance between our world and the world of the story.
nother common rags-to-riches plot is the marriage plot (see: Cinderella). Typically in this case, a poor straight woman becomes the love object of a rich straight man and thereby gains wealth. Here the world also fails to be changed. This world suggests women should become sexual objects to rich men if they want to become rich. Such, of course, is our world, which also has consequences for purpose, theme, and audience. (It should be noted that in many Cinderella stories, the character arc is fairly shallow: the love object starts off being extremely desirable—that is, beautiful, good, selfless, etc.—and her desirability is simply better showcased by a “change” like a makeover. It is her desirability that actually changes the lover, who goes from, say, an asshole-with-a-heart-of-gold to learning how to be a better person.)
As Kurt Vonnegut says (see the chapter “What Is Craft?”), the Cinderella story makes money. People consume it and reproduce it. This means something. There are all sorts of interesting theoretical reasons for this, and most of them boil down to: the story says that there is hope of becoming powerful in a system by accepting your powerlessness within it.
Writing other characters with similar but different types in fact helps make each type stand out. One of the best ways to emphasize the heart of gold the asshole has is to introduce an asshole without a heart of gold (and/or the “too nice” character who gets stuck in the friend zone). The easiest way to invite sympathy for a character is to write in a worse character. The easiest way to make the protagonist’s change stand out is to write a similar character who is never able to change. Characters (fictional beings that require meaningful choices) always exist in relation to each other (and the world). They may be opposite (foils) or similar except for some crucial difference (mirrors) or models of different ways of becoming (often mothers and fathers) or so on. But like a single word in a system of language, what gives a character meaning is its difference from others.
Take, for example, a domestic drama about a couple falling apart. They fight, they break up. They go their separate ways. One of them falls ill and dies. The other goes to the wake, to remember their good times. At the wake the body stands up and starts eating brains. Now it’s a zombie story.
You could build the possibility of zombies into the rules of the story, the way “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” starts with the grandmother not wanting to go to Florida where the criminal called the Misfit has broken out of prison, and ends with the Misfit killing the grandmother—you could make the illness mysterious or give one of the lovers a dream about zombies or set their first date at a zombie flick—but it’s not necessary that you should plant these kinds of seeds.
It’s not actually prior rules that make zombies seem like a frustrating turn of events or an interesting one. Some of it is personal taste or the question of audience—I never questioned the bike ride in my MFA workshop because I didn’t care whether a bike ride could go on all day or not; I would be happy to see zombies interrupt a familiar domestic story. On a craft level, the complaint that something is not “believable” or “realistic” or that we don’t “buy it” or that it’s not “earned” is really an indication that the story doesn’t seem to recognize that something unusual has happened. This is why planting seeds is one way to make the change read more “smoothly.” But it’s not the only way.