"Hinges" by Graham Swift: When Words Have a Role to Play

 Graham Swift, interviewed about his story "Hinges" in the Nov.14, 2022 electronic version of The New Yorker, says it's a story about words and indeed it is.

The tale leads up to the funeral of a father, to be "done" or perhaps "conducted" by a minister unknown to the family before surviving members awkwardly consult with him about the Order of Service and who will say what -- not that anyone really knows what they might say at that point. This makes what is almost always a ritualistic event -- certain words, certain phrases, safe, expected -- even more stilted than might otherwise be the case.

Moreover, it doesn't appear much actually can be said about the deceased father. He spent his working life in a blanket factory in the north of England and apparently much of his subsequent years, with his wife, in a retirement community located in the southern part of the country. Stock homilies -- "he was a family man" -- are about it.

From start to finish, certain words and phrases associated with death and funerals immediately come to the minds of family members and mainly, in this case, to the deceased man's daughter since the story is told from her point of view. There are roles to be played and lines associated with those roles to be spoken.

That's not quite all there is to it, of course. The daughter both wonders why she and others are stuck with some words and she recalls the mother of a childhood friend who wouldn't play the game. This stirs up other memories -- her first crush, on an older man who it appears her mother -- and other women -- might have found sexually attractive as well. Just a hint or perhaps a figment of imagination. But the man, a carpenter who comes to fix a door ("hinges")  also seems to have been a friend of the father, and that for some reason surprises the then-much-younger daughter.  

"I don't think I'm alone as a writer in seeing sex and death as a sort of inseparable combo," Swift says in the interview. Sex and death, heath and humor, humor and sex -- a wheel of narrative in Swift's view.

Swift is English and there is a distinctly English sense of understatement to the story. Most American writers in this day and age would exploit the potentially transgressive aspects of the tale to a far greater extent than does Swift. He simply intimates there may be a skeleton of one sort or another in a family closet and leaves it at that. Which families don't have something in their background that perhaps comes to mind because it can't be mentioned at a funeral as opposed to because it can?

The bottom line: this is a story with which a lot of readers can probably identify, English or not,

Conflicting Directional Arrows for Lethem's Woketariat

 In my previous post -- Jonathan Lethem, "Narrowing Valley" -- I discussed Lethem's view that he could not write the expected conclusion to his New Yorker short story because to do so, he would have to misappropriate the culture of an Indian, or Native American, and, well, as a member of the woketariat (those for whom prevailing political correctness comes first and foremost), that was impossible.

The story is all about a coming showdown between a white family about to take possession of a patch of desert purchased sight unseen from an anonymous "Realtor" and the Indian who presumably actually owns if -- if "owns" is the right word for Native American land.

So, Lethem simply bailed out as the confrontation neared, leaving his readers rather distinctly short changed, but New Yorker editors, presumably also anxious to be politically correct, apparently impressed and, who knows? even relieved.

No Indian appeared in his story so he could avoid getting into trouble for daring to write about a person with a cultural background other than his own.

Now let's look back a couple of years to a post I wrote in June 2020 on a New York Times article on the work of Wallace Stegner.  It was the first in a Times series on American writers "who show us who we are." Stegner, by the way, was once known as "the Dean of Western Writers."

In the course of discussing Stegner's work, A.O. Scott, the author of the Times article, noted that Stegner's work had been criticized by, among other, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, a writer and member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, because Stegner failed to significantly address the indigenous peoples of the region or a variety of non-white immigrant groups.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. 

Perhaps Mr. Lethem, who talked in his New Yorker author interview about making political correctness conundrums "teachable moments" at Pomona College where he is a professor of Creative Writing, could horse that one over. Maybe he could even put it up for a vote and let us know what the students decided.

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).

Ben Okri's "The Secret Source" Takes the Easy Way Out

 Ben Okri's short story "The Secret Source" in the Sept. 12, 2022 online version of The New Yorker is an interesting read -- until he gets to the conclusion. There, shifting gears from a disturbingly, all-too-plausible conspiracy theory centering on water shortages, readers are left with a fairy tale non-finish.

In the usual New Yorker author interview, Okri claims the ending is valid because reality is ambiguous. Thus, it's up to the reader to interpret the abrupt, fantasy-world conclusion it in a fashion that is "true for you."

This reminds me of the proverbial tale of attending an exhibition of abstract art with the artist present.  Looking at one piece, someone tells the artist: "I really like it, but what does it mean?"

"It means whatever it means to you," the artist responds.  

If you like that sort of thing, you'll probably like Okri's effort, but to me, he simply takes the easy way out. The story, strongly reminiscent of George Orwell's "1984" in the sense that remote, anonymous government authorities bent on nothing but staying in control have found ways to quash all significant dissent as conditions worsen. And just as in Orwell's story, there are truth seeking protagonists, but too far on the fringes of society to have much clout, and increasingly at risk as they attempt to press ahead.

Okri, in the interview, suggests a number of possibly interpretative routes for the end of his tale. Too bad he didn't use his considerable powers of prose to spin one out. 

Art, Receptivity and Bold Face Names

 The April 24, 2022 issue of "T, The New York Times Stye Magazine," is supposed to be all about creativity, but much of it is little more than a list of Bold Face Names such as one might find in a high school newspaper. Various names one might know from one branch of the arts or another have either been persuaded or paid (I'm not sure which) to offer snippets, or as much as several paragraphs, of advice to young artists, most of whom are probably not readers of "T."

Much of the advice is, well, fairly pedestrian or predictable in nature. Glancing through it, one is tempted to conclude that a person is by nature inclined to the arts, or not. If you are, one way or another -- and it appears there are as many ways as there are artists -- persevere. 

In her introduction, "T's" chief editor, Hanya Yanagihara, made an interesting observation: "art demands a state of receptivity." While it isn't totally clear what she has in mind there -- it seems she's talking about receptivity on the part of the artist herself lest the creative process not work -- I think there is another way of looking at it.

It's a bit like the classic question: does a tree make any noise as it falls in a forest if no one is there to hear it? (I'm sure science would claim to be able to answer that one definitively, but that's not what I have in mind.)  Rather, the question is: if a person creates a work of art and there is no receptivity on the part of the public, is it really art?

All too often, it seems, money is a proxy for validation. If a book, or painting, sells, it's valid. If it doesn't, well perhaps that proves it's "worthless" not just as an article of commerce, but in terms of its aesthetic qualities as well.  Then, of course, there are the storied artists ignored or rejected in their lifetimes, only to be acclaimed after their deaths at which point others manage to reap the monetary rewards. 

"No one's opinion about you or your art should matter more than your own," intones Ms Yanagihara -- a little homily if ever there was one. In one reading, it could be viewed as profound (if commonplace) wisdom. On the other, it could be viewed as another way of believing "it's all about me" -- one of the curses of contemporary life.

Then Ms Yanagihara goes on to assert: "You have to finish at some point. The people who get published aren't necessarily the most brilliant writers. The ones who get published are the ones who complete their work." 

While some clearly recognizable form of completion suitable for an article of commerce is no doubt essential in that context, such isn't the case if commercial success isn't required.

In the case of aesthetics alone, a creative endeavor is finished when the intent of the artist has been realized  -- or if that word calls into question "just who is an artist? -- the intent of the creator. Hopefully the creator will then experience a sense of satisfaction whether "receptivity" rears its head or not.

"Art is created in front of the easel, but it's just as often made while gardening or waiting for the subway or sitting on a park bench," Ms Yanagihara said. If so, there is arguably no need for her issue of Bold Face Names, except, of course, as a vehicle for glossy, expensive ads for Canali suits and Rolex watches. Just the thing for young artists.