Johathan Lethem, "Narrowing Valley" and the Woketariat

 At the bottom of the preceding post -- Marisa Silver's "Tiny, Meaningless Things ... " --  I talk about a relatively new class of society: the woketariat. In a nutshell, these are people for whom political correctness trumps other values.

Johathan Lethem, the author of the Oct. 24, 2022 (electronic edition) New Yorker short story "Narrowing Valley" is a professor of creative writing at Pomona College, an award-winning writer and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" fellowship.  He's also arguably a member of the wokerati, or the woketariat.

"Narrowing Valley" is a story about an earlier story and it's laced with cultural references, presumably giving it a writerly quality. A potentially dramatic denoument is in the offing, but the tale never gets there. It just ends.  

Therein lies what Lethem suggests may be the real tale: the state of prevailing political correctness and what he clearly feels is his obligaton to toe the line.

The problem is this: the presumably dramatic denouement would involve an Indian, or Native American, man as a key protagonist  -- and for a white male to create such a character would, in Lethem's world, constitute cultural misappropriation.

Just imagine the flap that could ensue,and the possible adverse consequences for Lethem himself, given that cancel cuturse has far less to do with culture than it has to do sociopolitical power and who gets to hold desireable jobs.

In the usual New Yorker author interview, Lethem says he's enmeshed in conversations with students and colleagues on a daily basis as to what is permissible in the current environment. "This story's hesitation, precisely at the limit of a willinness to invent a Native character to advance its cause, is informed by it," he said, adding: "I don't mean that as a defense, but I hope it might be a useful description."

Elsewhere in the intereview, Lethem says: "The tone I struck here -- that of nervous guilty riffing in the treacherous realm of 'appropriation' -- may seem almost to beg a reader's own anxieties into play. Or a readers's condemnation. That risk is one of the subjects of the story, really."

Nominally, this is a tale about a whilte family about to attempt to occupy some desert land purchased from a "Realtor"  sight unseen. But the land has a history and apparently wasn't the "Realtor's" to sell. Rather, it is Native American land and so the story is "headed into crsis" because the white family in question, traveling west in a Winabago, must meet an Indian.

Sounds like an interesting exchange of views, or more likely a clash of some sort, is in the offing, but, alas, no. Lethem simply can't bring himself to "appropriate" the Native American protagonist. So the story ends abruptly (as many New yorker short stories seem to), in a casino -- on Indian land, of course. Ironic -- get it?

Good thing Alfred Uhry was't Lethem or we wouldn't have "Driving Miss Daisy." Altenarively, good thing DuBose Hewward or Ira Gershshwin wasn't Lethem or we wouldn't have "Porgy and Bess." And so forth and so on..

Within "Narrowing Valley," Lethem refers to a white make writer as "another exemplar of the Exhausted Normative."  In other worlds, "please take me out into a pasture and shoot me. Liberate that Pomona creating writing post and award it to someone far more worthy." Hmmm. would the new occupant be able to write a story involving a white male, or does cultural misappropriation go only in one direction?

I will have more to say on wokerati-type issues in due course.

 

Marisa Silver's "Tiny, Meaningless Things" and the Precariat

"She eats less now than she used to, but she hasn’t got used to grocery shopping with that in mind. She watches the women who roam the aisles gripping baskets barely weighted with a single chicken breast, two oranges, a child-sized carton of milk meant for lunchboxes. Walking advertisements for precarity."

That's from Marisa Silver's story "Tiny, Meaningless Things" in the Oct. 24, 2022 print edition of The New Yorker.  It's about a 74-year-old widow who lives by herself after a short-lived second marriage and who has a difficult time connecting with or relating two her adult daughters, and vice versa. 

The Blogger spell checker didn't like the word "precarity" in the paragraph above and probably not without reason.  Although it is a perfectly legitimate word, it's not a word one hears bandied about much. I'm not sure I've ever come across it in a text previously and I read a lot. 

Dictionary.com defines precarity as "a state of existence in which material provision and physiological wellness are adversely affected by a lack of regular or secure income." The Cambridge Dictionary simply calls it "the state of being uncertain or likely to get worse" or, alternatively, "a situation in which someone's job or career is always in danger of being lost." Other definitions are similar if stated in slightly different ways.

While "precarity" pretty much encapsulates the state of affairs in which readers find Evelyn, the protagonist of Ms Silver's well-crafted tale of what it's like to be an elderly woman whose grip on the world is slipping away, there is a problem with using such an unfamiliar term. I remember it more than I remember much else about the story.

Central to the tale is Evelyn's relationship with a young boy who lives with his family in another apartment in the same building. It seems to have developed both as a result of idle curiosity on the part of the boy and because Evelyn is overjoyed to discover someone actually has an interest in her. No surprise: it doesn't end particularly well when, arguably with Evelyn's encouragement the boy begins testing certain boundaries. 

In her New Yorker author interview, Ms Silver says she doesn't know why Scotty, the young boy, did what he did, but that he would probably say "Because I wanted to,"  Well, maybe. Children test boundaries and if Scotty, at age seven, could be candid, he would instead say "Because I could."

If it can be done, it will be done: that is a fundamental aspect of human nature.

But back to precarity: according to an entry in Wikipedia, around the year 2000. a version of the world -- the precariat -- gained currency in the global social justice movement to describe a class of people with no job security and no prospect of regular employment, presumably as a result of the ills of globalization.

This would be a class lower than the proletariat -- a Marxist notion of people with jobs, but exploited by their capitalist employers such that they are unable to reap in full the rewards of the work they do under what is known as the labor theory of value.

More recently, we've also begun hearing about the woketariat, or a class of people devoted to pushing political correctness above all else.  They don't seem to be in jeopardy of much of anything as might be expected given the unassailable moral high ground they perceive themselves to be occupying.

 

"Come Softly to Me:" Ritual in a New Yorker Short Story

“A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, actions, or objects, performed according to a set sequence.” So says Wikipedia, adding that rituals are common to all known human societies.

What else? Well, among other things, many cultures have rites associated with death and mourning. And one of the many purposes of ritual is social control – such as keeping a family together when various members may be prone to go off in differing directions or have tensions or conflicts among themselves, one might imagine.

Sticking with Wikipedia, rituals generally involve the recitation of fixed texts, the performance of special music, the manipulation of certain objects and the use of special dresses. They are also typically formal, traditional and invariable. They are often characterized by careful choreography performed by groups.

I mention all of the above because that is what the Oct. 10, 2022 (online edition) New Yorker short story “Come Softly to Me,” by David Gilbert, is all about. In fact, readers will encounter pretty much all of the above in Gilbert’s generally well-drawn tale.

Lots of stories conform to one familiar formula or another. What makes them interesting – absent surprise endings -- is setting, character development and perhaps a subplot or two. In that context, a couple of Gilbert’s characters definitely tend to stick in one’s mind.

But the story, which involves an extended family, has a lot of characters and it can be difficult to follow or understand who is who until well into the piece. And for a fairly long short story, the ending is rather abrupt and unconvincingly mystical, given the participants. But endings are rarely easy: I suppose the hardest part of flying a plane is bringing it in for a satisfactory landing (before the age of computers, that is).