The "Cell Phone Dilemma" in contemporary American fiction

From the Slate.com discussion I posted yesterday, another excerpt:

"You asked about the multicultural novel. OK, here goes. The majority of so-called multicultural novels are nothing but new wine poured into old bottles. What's the great subject of the novel? Marriage, of course. In the West, we've lost that subject. Marriages aren't arranged anymore. Divorce is no longer unthinkable. You can't have your heroine throw herself under a train because she left her husband and ruined her life. Now your heroine would just have a custody battle and remarry.

What the multicultural novel has going for it is the marriage plot. They can still use it! The societies under examination are conservative, religious, still bound by custom and tradition. And so—voilà—you can be an Indian novelist or a Jordanian novelist and still avail yourself of the greatest subject the novel has ever had. Arranged marriages, dowries, social stigma at divorce—it's all back again, in perfect working order.

This doesn't mean that these novels can't be enjoyable. I don't blame them for using the marriage plot. But using it in the way they do has consequences. Though these books are coming out now, they're already at least a hundred years old. Plus, the 19th-century subject matter begins to infect the prose. It makes the characterization creaky. There are cobwebs between the sentences. Entire paragraphs smell like mothballs. The multicultural novel is not alone in this. Most novels smell like that. My old teacher, the great Gilbert Sorrentino, used to put it like this. Of all the books coming out, he'd say. "These books don't exist. I mean, they exist. But they don't EXIST!""

This is fascinating, since as an MFA student, I've seen white Western writers being blamed for not being "progressive" or "modern." And yet what Eugenides says here I have found in my (admittedly) limited experience to be true. Our program's minority writers, while very talented, are indeed using this subject matter to power their work. This creates a weird rift between the minority writers (many of whom think they're startlingly avant-garde and au courant) and those who are writing about white American middle-class characters. It's almost impossible to do the marriage plot without having something else: something hugely novel or monumental included in a story/novel--the drama of Westernized/Americanized marriage is nonexistent!

As an aside, this says something interesting about the current significance of marriage in our (American/Western) culture. It is so easily entered into and fled from that there is literally no drama to wrest from a story centered on characters getting together or breaking apart, aside from the universal emotions of joy and anguish, which, incidentally, do not a plot make. Something greater than typical human emotion has to be at stake for a story to work, I think, unless it is being executed perfectly, which I'm certainly not capable of. I like the ideas of societal norms and pressures exerting force on characters and relationships, but in our country, the impact of marriage or divorce on a wider community (beyond the family) is superficial at best. At worst, no one really cares whether the neighbor two houses down gets divorced--we pretend to care, but we're more interested in a voyeuristic, cynical way than sharing actual compassion or empathy. Marriage and divorce are so light and inconsequential in our current white Western cultural moment, that we simply can't use them for much.

I liken this to what I call the "Cell Phone Dilemma." In America today, it is almost impossible to achieve plausible suspense if a character breaks down in an unknown quadrant of a city, or even has car trouble on a country road. Why don't they have a cell phone, the reader can rightfully ask? And if they do, they must use it. Only by working it into the character--oh, he's a creaky old technophobe!--or having a technological malfunction--the battery's dead and I forgot my car charger!--can we even attempt to create the suspense that 15 to 20 years ago arose instantly, naturally from a particular, understood set of circumstances. Our historical literary moment has forever changed, at least in
America. However, the cell phone dilemma can be rectified if you set your characters on a back road in Kenya, perhaps, though even this is becoming more difficult, as industrialization creeps in and offers more and more people the same technologies that Americans have.

Thus, the ability of multicultural writers to utilize the marriage plot.

The next logical step, of course, is, if you're a white American writer, to ask: What's next? As you may have guessed, I haven't yet figured it out, though I'll be pondering this interesting question, in the interest of keeping my writing out of the dark ages and allowing it to truly illuminate the current American cultural moment.

The phylogeny of literature

I'll begin by excerpting an exchange between authors Jim Lewis and Jeffery Eugenides found on Slate.com here.

The first quote I'm interested comes from Jim Lewis: "Perhaps the problem is this: We were taught, all too readily, to think of literature as progressing within the context of historical forces. Joyce leads to Beckett, Borges leads to Barth, Pynchon begets DeLillo, and so on. But of course, things don't work like that. You can tell the story that way, and it'll make some sense, but not for long. (Curiously, it makes more sense when the story is about the visual arts in the 20th century—but that's another conversation.) It's an over-optimistic and simplified view of the way literature works and changes, a view built, I suppose, on the model of progression in the natural sciences. But it holds sway in the academy, at least it did when we were there, and even for those who know it's untrue, its force lingers." (italics mine)

Not only does Lewis hit on an interesting point about literature here, but also about science and the abstractions we rely upon to understand our world. It turns out that this evolutionary ladder model is seriously flawed (probably for any discipline it tries to explain) but it especially impedes our understanding of evolutionary relationships and the framework of our biological, ecological world. The late Stephen Jay Gould wrote about this in his book Full House as well as in various essays. He points out the curious depiction of the evolution of life forms on earth as following a flawed model of "progression," which makes it easy to assume that evolution seeks models of greater complexity as a kind of perfecting tendency. Indeed, many murals or paintings show first a kind of primordial life, leading to fishes, but then in the next panel, where we see lizards and dinosaurs, we no longer see the ameobas or fishes. And so on till mammals, primates and finally, humans. But of course this is a serious problem, since not only do we not inhabit a world filled solely with humans, but that there is nothing necessarily final about our current evolutionary form. Also, we all know full well that we share the earth with cats and cockroaches, giraffes and germs. For a really in depth explanation of how this evolution is not indeed directed, but instead seems so due to naturally imposed limits, read Full House--it's brilliant.

What I'm more interested in exploring is the abstraction of this linear, progressive evolution as applied to literature. As a writer, (and a relatively young, not-as-well-read-as-I'd-like one), I often try to place myself in the context of all the writers who have come before. Since we experience the passing of time as linear (a Western abstraction, since some cultures experience time as circular), we tend to constrain our thoughts to the orderly succession of one entity after another. Of course, once we think about it, we rationally understand that there is a simultaneity to the occurrence of events and the existence of entities.

As in science, then, it is thus much more productive to think of the evolution of things as a great, shrubby, branch-y affair. Just as the radiation of creatures led to a great profusion of diversity, some branches continuing on, some dying out, but many coexisting at the same time, so it is the case with literature at any given moment. We have difficulty with this, I think, because of our tendency to want to categorize neatly, and also our relatively weak ability to hold opposing and contrasting thoughts in our minds at the same time. We enjoy the discrete, the singular. The effusive and fecund we may enjoy on an aesthetic or emotional level, but once we try to apply reason or logic to them, they intimidate, confuse and escape us. Thus, our resistance to the non-linear shrub.

However, it is just this model of the shrub that we should attempt to incorporate into our understanding of literary evolution. If we accept and use this model (which is a sort of abstraction in and of itself), we can acknowledge the direct influence of others, while also understanding the complexity of any particular artistic moment. What this means for me, as a writer, is that rather than saying, "I am post-Joyce, post-Proust," etc., I can say, "I am *of* Joyce, *of* Proust," and so on. This distinction changes the focus from a historical time-based relationship, (not always that relevant, even in the biological sciences, since sometimes creatures lose traits that they've gained, and sometimes, more rarely, gain them back,) to indicate a phylogenetic relationship, i.e., one based on what we might call "morphological" similarities. If, for example, I read David Foster Wallace, and adopt his footnotes (which I will never do, but let's go with it for now), I am now of his "kind." It is important to stress that this is a more of a convergent evolution situation. Instead of having to inevitably adopt footnotes, as is likely with a direct descendent, I find them to serve my literary survival in a particular way that is not the same as Foster Wallace's usage, and so I adopt them. Because of the structural similarities, however, I will be associated with Foster Wallace if I continue the footnote trope, just as birds and bats are associated as "flying creatures," though their wings are not exactly similar, but confer a certain structural ability that wingless animals do not have. It makes talking about literature more complicated, since we can, as artists, have evolved out of a certain innovation without having realized it, as 20th century novelists did, not having to begin with the conventions of the very first novels. They started in an entirely different place, as a human begins a human at birth, not having to re-evolve, because of its genome.

Literary genomes are just as tangled and complex, which makes it difficult to know where I'm starting, how I got here, and what I'm capable of developing. Still, while the metaphor has some very obvious holes (conscious choice not being possible in the biological model of heredity), I think it is helpful for a working writer to place herself not in a historical time slot, but rather to accept her time and her talents as a piece of the phylogenetic shrub that is literature. In this way, we do not feel as though we must expend so much energy just to chop down the tree, focusing our efforts, instead, of helping the organism to thrive by being as vigorous and productive as we are able.

So, you're thinking about an MFA...

...and you're wondering whether or not to go for it? It's a good question, and one worth asking. I have just finished the first year of a two-year MFA program, and during this summer of writing, I have a lot of time to evaluate what I've gotten out of it, and how far I've come as a writer. Since my revision is actually moving along today and I feel a sense of self-confidence, my opinion of the enterprise is very positive right now. Actually, even in my darkest moments, I still feel like this educational adventure is paying huge dividends. More than anything, I am gaining a supportive, intelligent and critical group of writer-friends, which is aiding me in my progress. I do feel like it can speed up the progress of a writer, helping her to find her voice or to become aware of common, habitual and fatal literary mistakes. It's commonly repeated that the most productive years for an MFA are the 3-5 years post-degree, which I think is probably the case. There are the anomalies who publish while in a program, but I think it takes a few years of steeping in this advice and just endlessly practicing and reading before something really polished comes out. Also, age is a factor. I'm relatively young, and I think that if you've been writing for ten years already (as opposed to just two or three) that that will make a huge difference in your level. I often feel like a snake whose skin is too big for my body--I am growing, but I haven't filled out yet. Age and experience will help with that aspect, I think.

The page to get you started would be the Associated Writing Programs page, which has a lot of helpful information. They also publish a book about writing programs--a directory of sorts--every few years. If you're serious about this, it would be worth the investment. One final comment: Don't go into major debt to do this. If you're good, you should be able to get *something* from a program--either a stipend, or a teaching assistantship--something. If you can't, keep looking at programs that are affordable or will offer you something. And another thing: If you get rejected year in, year out, no matter how many places you've applied, I'm not gonna say give up, but take a few years to live your life, read a lot, and then re-evaluate your writing--get an opinion from someone outside your circle of friends and associates. MFA programs aren't looking for polished writers--they're looking for people with the potential to produce polished work--but until they see that, they probably won't take a chance on you. Either way, keep writing--if it brings you joy, you should do it, no matter what, and you never know what will come of it... Good luck.

You can learn a lot from genre, even if you aspire to lit-ra-ture.

I am in the process of revising a story that I'd like to send out by the end of the month. Revision is almost always a frustrating process (thus, the procrastinatory blog post), but I have recently found a website that gives some really good advice. The author who runs it, Holly Lisle, is a sci-fi and fantasy writer. I have never read any of her work, but the way she talks about writing makes me believe that she takes it just as seriously as any writer of literary fiction that I know. I am trying to escape what she has termed "revision hell," where I do nothing but languish in a story fiddling aimlessly and without certainty. It's tough, but I think I'm making headway.

Here's just one of the many pages from her website that I've found immensely useful. It's worth it, I think, to wander around the site, too--you can come across some really great, inspirational articles.
Workshop: Burn It, Bury It, Let it Live

Happy revising! I shall get back to mine now. I'll let you know how it works out. I may even post stories to this site from time to time. We'll see.

Welcome to my nascent blog.

First, about the name. I'm a writer, with some writer friends. One of my very best writer friends was talking about publication in a literary journal known as Glimmer Train, but he couldn't remember the name, and so he said something like, "I'll send the story off to Sparkle Boat, or whatever the hell it's called."

Since I really enjoy word play, this creative switcheroo really tickled me, and so, partly in tribute to my friend and his topsy turvy worldview and partly as an effort to focus on all things verbal, literary or creative, I'm naming my blog Sparkle Boat. I hope you enjoy it.