This is failure.

Or: How Not to Tell a Story.

Those of you keeping track of my recent exploits know that I've been taking part in the FirstPerson Arts StorySlams here in Philadelphia (home to sport- and food-related heart troubles). My prior 2 experiences in front of the mic have been described here and here. I consider these two performances successes.

On April 9th, 2012, I bombed.

Sigh indeed, CB.

As a writer I've experienced various types of rejection, but failure is something I consider philosophically, emotionally, and psychologically distinct from rejection.

While being rejected can feel like failure, it is only a failure in one way: failure to connect to a particular reader or set of readers. When The New Yorker rejects my stories, it's just a failure to tell their kind of story. No journal disputes the idea that they have particular tastes, though vague descriptions of "we just want good stories" can make a writer feel like a journal will literally publish anything when, in reality, they will only publish the stories that appeal to their tastes.

And sure, some stories are failures. But they are not failures when they are rejected. They fail first. But they fail on the page and can be reworked.

Now, as a writer, my performance is controlled and often isolated. The stories and novels I construct come together over many hours of thinking*, writing, revising, and more thinking. Much of that is done alone. Or, in my mind, which is essentially the same thing.

As an adjunct, my performances in front of the classroom can involve failure -- failure to make points clear, failure to answer student questions, etc. -- but I can, at any moment, correct those mistakes. Even if I feel like I wasn't "at my best" I don't feel like I've failed since the next class meeting can correct and adjust prior class's shortcomings. Maybe it's an unfair distinction: but the failure in the classroom feels temporary when it happens.**

So, here we are. Or, there I was, the final storyteller at the StorySlam on Monday evening. World Cafe in Philly. Full house.

I'd spent about an hour and a half practicing my story in the car and knew I'd have to be careful. The topic -- Identity Crisis -- had befuddled me for weeks. Finally, I'd decided to tell a story about how I don't drink. Except -- as is obvious by that prior sentence -- there is no story to "how I don't drink." It's an essay at best.

Worse, by the time I got picked, my planned outline had evaporated in a haze of caffeine and distraction caused by 9 other stories. As I walked up to the microphone, my mind blanked. I opened with a line I hadn't practiced:

"So. I'm an asshole."

My idea for framing my story/essay -- stumbled upon during the evening -- was to paint myself as an asshole about alcohol. This would help me tie together a bunch of random experiences to create the illusion of a story where I develop from a teenager to an adult -- shedding my negative attitude towards alcohol even though I never end up drinking. The ultimate conclusion would be that I lived my life based on a decision made by my 9th grade self, which is a pretty dumb thing to do. It makes sense in summary form.

However, because I'd practiced the story a particular way, I didn't know what to do with this new opening line. I jumped around, skipping past any narrative elements. I made a joke regarding Straight Edge music which would have been fine except another storyteller had a similar thread in her performance. I blanked on the narrative details about my time in college when I was friends with a very religious guy that found Biblical justification for wine coolers; I forgot to mention another guy that was a recovering addict but resented the fact that I'd never had a drink whereas he constantly fought the urge for the party life he'd had to leave behind.

I left out the story. In a storytelling event.

By the end, I managed to remember my conclusion, but I'd already failed. The audience had nothing to follow. My delivery suffered

In the end, I got the lowest score of the night. And I'm okay with that, though it sure helps to fail after previously succeeding.

*In the coffeeshop I consider a home, I've spent lots of time staring out the front window at the Martin's Cleaners across the street; I've also made people in my line of sight uncomfortable.

**My focus here is performance failure, not failure to educate.

A Modest Proclamation

Erik Smith claims I should not blog about this because it's making a joke about a serious thing. But that's part of the fun of being alive, right?

While sitting at my normal coffee shop / workplace, a strange conversational thread lead to this nearly offensive but genius joke.

Matt Groening tells a story about how he panicked at the last minute and, in the waiting room at Fox, replaced his idea for a Life is Hell animated show with The Simpsons, a show featuring caricatures of his family members.

Now, some dialogue:

Me: Now, who knows if that thing with Groening really happened. Same with Abraham Lincoln, right? Who knows if he really wrote the Emancipation Proclamation on the train on the way to the speech.

Andrew: Yeah, because the original idea was to EAT the slaves and he panicked.

Me: Well, that was satire, and it wouldn't really fly with his audience.

Andrew: Oh, crap. It might be better to free the slaves! 

Me: I don't want to risk losing the message in satire.

Andrew: So, it was originally a Modest Emancipation?

Me: Clearly.

A MODEST EMANCIPATION. that is the greatest lost political speech known to Western thought.

If you don't know what A Modest Proposal is, then this joke is lost on you. If making light of the composition of the Emancipation Proclamation offends you this joke, too, will be lost on you. But don't hold it against me.

What is this StorySlam stuff anyway?

My friend and fellow storyteller Andrew Panebianco convinced me to participate in the First Person Arts StorySlam back on March 12th. Despite suffering from an inconvenient and down-right evil headache that would last four days, I managed to construct and perform a story that netted me a ticket to the Grand Slam (as well as the Audience Favorite tag, something my ego quite enjoys). The Summer Grand Slam takes place at The Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. Tickets can be purchased here. I will be there, as will 9 other fantastic storytellers. It's a saturday night in May, so you have nothing better to do!

But what the heck are these Story Slams?

Essentially:

5 minutes + 1 true story inspired by the pre-determined topic + microphone + audience = Story Slam. 

There are three judges, randomly picked, who judge on content and performance. The entire audience gets to vote on their favorite storyteller of the evening. The judge's scores determine who gets to go to the Grand Slam, an event where the ten finalists get to compete for the title of Philadelphia's Best Storyteller.

The events take place at two different locations on an alternating basis: the World Cafe, over by UPenn, and Le'Etage a hip crepery/cabaret bar on Bainbridge (down by the fascinating putridity that is South Street).

But really, this is about 5 minutes + 1 true story + microphone + audience.

I'm not a non-fiction storyteller, in any professional sense. I started with fiction back in 2nd grade with a story called "My Trip to the Moon." It won the best story award, beating out everyone else in the 2nd grade classes. (I consider it my greatest achievement, since I also drew the pictures that went with the story.) I moved to poetry in HS, a natural move since I was full of anxiety and liked the way words sound. I returned to fiction in college, then went through a non-productive lull before earning an MFA in fiction as a last-ditch attempt to be a writer before I gave up and got a real job.

Still, telling stories is telling stories. In some ways it's harder to mold the truth into a story shape since life does not always offer beginnings, middles, and ends. Fiction lets you do all sorts of crazy things without concern. Nonfiction is flexible, but at the StorySlam events, there's an honor system. The stories being told are true. And it's a challenge to take the truth of my experience and shape it into a 5 minute story without violating that rule. Sure, the storytellers conflate, reduce, restructure, add dialogue, remove people. But no one is (or should be) telling fiction.

The topic on Tuesday was "Best Ever." Despite being full of all sorts of random stories, Andrew and I both found ourselves at a loss for stories that fit this topic. While walking from the train to L'Etage, though, we had a shared epiphany -- the topic was too good, too positive. We're not positive storytellers! We want to make people feel bad about the world and thus earn cheap emotional points! We want to tear people down, because it's really easy to bum people out. As that wise philosopher Homer Simpson said about the band Smashing Pumpkins: "Making teenagers depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel."*

[*EDIT: It might have been Bart or Lisa Simpson, actually. My memory for Simpsons quotes used to be better.]

To declare something the Best Ever was to affirm that the world had good things in it! At the very core of our being, we shuddered. Best Ever? The horror! The horror!

In addition, and perhaps less juvenile, the issue with the topic (for me) was that it kept pointing me to anecdotes not stories. And instead of putting my MFA and awesome storytelling brain to work, I kept retreating and declaring the topic to be crappy. Of course, the topic was just as good as any other -- it was meant to frame and inspire an evening's worth of stories and nothing more. All of the topics for the StorySlams are just suggestive enough to get people going. Duh.

So, we arrived at L'Etage with nothing.

Creperie Beaumonde is downstairs, L'Etage is upstairs. Either way, it's hip because it serves delicious crepes.

I had practiced my prior story 6 or 7 times; this time, I had spent the afternoon driving to and from work practicing stories that had no endings or, worse, no middles. But inspiration struck as I sat drinking one of the most normal tasting bar-sodas I've ever had (seriously, can bar soda be any worse? Only those of us who don't drink suffer from this issue, but it's an impotent issue). I'm not sure the soda had magic powers, but some alignment of the stars, the lighting, the soda, and Andrew's own anxieties about storytelling caused me to dredge up a story. A full-blown story -- beginning, middle, end. (Well, the end is a bit weak, but it feels enough like an ending.)

Left for a few moments to ponder the best ever things in my life and, after striking lines through sappy but truly best ever things like my son, my wife, my recent book deal, my dog, my sister, Radiohead concerts, etc. I realized I should just embrace my negativity and tell a story about how something that was supposed to be the Best Ever was in fact pretty mediocre and, thankfully, really weird.

I'm not a cynical jerk, I just can't change how I'm hardwired.

And at least we can all laugh together, right?

Enjoy my tale of the Best Ever Hotel that was not the best ever.

My Victory at March 12th StorySlam 2012

This is a bit overdue, but I participated in the First Person Arts StorySlam in Philadelphia back on March 12. The topic was "Around the World," so I couldn't help but describe the time my first real job required that I go overseas to help train Filipino graphic designers in order to save my company money without affecting productivity. Ah, the global economy. Despite my reservations -- not just due to the fact that the trip occurred a few months after 9/11 -- I agreed to go. The experience changed my life, but also confirmed that my ethics were not well defined or, even, strong enough to guide my decisions.

Enjoy this slightly NSFW video of my performance, which earned FIRST PLACE and got me a spot at the GRAND SLAM, which occurs on May 19th at the Annenberg Center.

NOTE: longtime, observant fans will note that a heavily fictionalized version of this experienced appeared in part of my short story "When You Know You're From Somewhere Else" in StoryQuarterly back in 2009

Springsteen, Women, and why artists are always looking in from outside

Here's a blog post responding to a blog post about a blog post. I love the internet!

Monica D'Antonio over at X Rated has an excellent essay about Bruce Springsteen's song presentations of men and women. Read it as well as the original article by Rebecca Bohanan ("The Only Three Women in Bruce Springsteen's Music"), which sparked Monica's analytical fury.

Then, because you have an hour of your life reading 3 articles about Bruce Springsteen, consider my additional thoughts here (with very inadequate summaries of Bohanan and D'Antonio):

Rebecca Bohanan acknowledges that Springsteen's a man and is thus entitled to write about men; but she accuses him of stereotyping females as saviors, objects, and/or goals. She cites lyrics (many of which are from 70s/early80s). She says she's a huge fan of his music, but that he's writing about a male type that's 50-60 outdated; and his women are barely present.

Monica's analysis (why didn't you read it, fool?) does an excellent job of citing lyrics to contend that Springsteen has plenty of male-female relationships that are about friendship; she also points out that the damaged men are often unhappy regardless of what the women do, which I'd like to expand upon a bit.

With music and poetry, people often fall into the trap of equating narrators with the authors. Some singers/poets invite that merging; others exploit that mistake.

I contend that Springsteen is not even writing from HIS perspective in most of his songs (especially once he achieves commercial success -- you think he's really knocking girls up, robbing banks, working at factories, etc after BORN IN THE USA?)

I reiterate, first, that the artist always views the world from the outside. Thus, they are from the world but disconnected. That disconnection comes before the artwork can flourish. The art is as much an escape as getting into a car and driving to a new town (and then writing songs about the old town). But there is a difference between the man who yearns of a chance to drive away from his burdens and sadness and the artist, who truly escapes but still suffers -- as the Marxists of the Harlem Renaissance learned, the working class doesn't have time to write stories and poems and songs about their own plight if they are working 12 hours a day. The artist is privileged in that they have opportunity to create, power to create, or the will to sacrifice time to create. This does not make the artist a better human being than a man or woman who works, raises kids, etc; this simply makes the artist an artist. The artist chooses the nontraditional path -- the chance to communicate something, but still suffer.

Remember: the artist is always outside looking in.

Springsteen, an artist writing from the outside of a world he knew first hand, is writing about a perspective that still exists, despite what Bohanan wants to admit. The alienated male stuck in ideas/communities does seem socially and politically 50-60 years out of date, but one cannot wish it away. It still exists. Nor can you fault the artist for shining light on it, unless they seem to be celebrating the suffering or championing the old ideas. Springsteen is not championing the class struggles of the men he sings about; at worst he's not writing songs about the class struggles of women. But is that really worth criticizing him for? (Consider: would he be able to satisfyingly represent the female perspective? maybe. Or, more interestingly, would Bohanan critique a singer who sings about the pain of racial divides? Even better, why isn't she critiquing Bruce for focusing on white men?)

According to Bohanan, these songs miss the opportunity to champion her ideology that men and women can achieve both happiness and equal power in relationships. I happen to agree with that ideology. But -- and this is what irritates me about her article -- not all men and women think that way! Springsteen is singing about the men that don't think that way; or, more accurately, he's singing about the men who are discovering that they don't think that way, but don't know how else to act!

Springsteen sings about these men and women and, while he champions their ability to survive, he never cheers the culture that allows their situations to exist! (As Monica points out, Springsteen doesn't seem to think their outdated/traditional perspectives will lead to any type of happiness.) It's a career-spanning critique: the struggle of men raised to accept traditional gender roles, struggling in near poverty (and worse). And maybe he's a Romantic, but Springsteen seems to think that Love (yes, with a capital L) still exists and can make the pain bearable.

It's here that I'm reminded of a quote from James Baldwin's story "Sonny's Blues," where the narrator confronts his brother Sonny about his (Sonny's) heroin addiction. They begin to talk about what's really important to them -- the nature of surviving in post-War Harlem when drugs and music offer a way out for guys like Sonny who cannot achieve middle class success/happiness.

"But there's no way NOT to suffer, is there Sonny?"
[...]
"No. There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it, to keep on top of it, and to make it seem--well, like you. Like you did something, all right, and now you're suffering for it. [...N]obody just takes it!"

Springsteen's men use love the same way Sonny uses jazz and heroin -- they still suffer, but they feel like they're doing something if they don't suffer alone. In the climax of James Baldwin's classic story, the narrator watches his sober brother play piano with 2 of his friends and the connection amongst the musicians is foreign (to the narrator) but beautiful. It's the thing that will keep Sonny alive, even if he suffers. Springsteen is talking about the same thing, as far as I'm concerned. Love, even if it can't cure suffering, makes suffering bearable. Love makes the working class man, who's brought up with the traditional male gender role of silent suffering provider, feel less alone.

Bohanan basically comes across as an elitist citing sexism when she misses that Springsteen is a class critic.

Does Springsteen focus on the way class destroys men more than women? Yes. Are there female artists who focus on the way class destroys women? Yes. Do we need one artist to do both? No. Bohanan would have done better to find the complimentary artist that highlights the struggle of working class women, instead of blaming Springsteen for doing something he clearly hasn't been trying to do!

WHEN THE ONLY LIGHT IS FIRE by Saeed Jones

First things first: you should buy this book:

When the Only Light is Fire by Saeed Jones

If you are anti-Amazon, it's also available from Alibris or from Sibling Rivalry Press.

Second things second: you should buy this book because buying books of poetry is not difficult, helps the universal purpose of poetry (to communicate), and also keeps the economy healthy. Thus, it's patriotic.

Third things third: you should encourage other people to buy this book because then you can discuss the poems. It will give you something important to talk about aside from your pointless existences or the new ailments and sufferings of your life. 

Fourth things fourth: While you can read the rest of this post without reading Saeed Jones's book, the post will make a little more sense if you've read the poems. Plus, I can't just quote the whole damn thing here; it wouldn't be fair.

"I've heard that some men can survive / on dust mites alone for weeks at a time. // There's a magnifying glass on the night stand, / in case it comes to that." -- "Sleeping Arrangement"

Now, to the point:

I have a general issue with poetry -- I don't think it's a waste of time and ink; that's not a valid critique generally or in this case, even if I believe that the role of poetry has been marginalized in our visual- and narrative-demanding culture. But I tend to see poetry as highly personal and highly personal things like poetry and song lyrics often need to be decoded in ways that cannot always be done successfully, especially if the poet would prefer NOT to let us in. Sylvia Plath, for instance, writes poems that are highly coded. She wants us to experience the poems as poems, not as cliched windows into her soul. "Daddy" has a beautiful rhythm and sound, and it rises to a climax that can be felt when she closes with "I'm through." There's no denying the aesthetic beauty of that poem. 

But once you know that Plath didn't hate her father, that her father taught German at a university, that her father wasn't a Nazi, etc, "Daddy" takes on a new and more complex meaning outside of how beautiful it sounds. No longer is this a "poem about daddy issues." It's now a poem about grief and loss. And grief is so much more profound (in my opinion). How would we know that meaning aside from decoding things? 

Basically, I cannot see a work outside of its time and place or disconnected from its author. This doesn't mean I must know an author's biography to enjoy the beauty of language; it just means that I tend to look for these things to enhance my understanding of the poetry as whole. That jerk TS Eliot would of course scoff and call me a ninny. Fair enough, but he's dead and also willingly spent time with Ezra Pound so I don't really have to worry about him. 

TS Eliot: poet, jerk.

And yet, even if I look at WHEN THE ONLY LIGHT AS FIRE as simply a text, in the way that total dick T.S. Eliot would suggest, I don't miss out on the emotional power of a line like: "And if I ever strangled sparrows / it was only because I dreamed / of better songs." 

Sure I can celebrate that line metrically, but there's a human voice there, a human mind. A mind that is not mine, does not have my background, and yet has succeeded in communicating across the differences of race and class and age to punch me in the gut. I don't need to be Jones or to know him intimately to know that he is a specific, profound human being and that the speaker of this poem (Saeed? Someone else?) has felt something concentrated, unique, and real. TS Eliot wasn't denying that emotions needed to be at the center of poems; it's just the natural outcome of trying to experience art through only an aesthetic lens. Eliot would suggest that there are no barriers between a reader and a piece of art as long as the reader is looking at things aesthetically. I can't know the artist and even if I did, I might not know the artwork any better if armed with knowledge. So, I get what Eliot is saying. I just don't like to think that art lacks blood and fiery synapses.

There are, of course, specific barriers between me and Saeed Jones. I'm a white guy from New Jersey. Jones is an African American born in Tennessee, raised in Texas, who lives in New York City. I'm straight, he's gay. I'm this, he's that. We both wear shoes, we both have eyes, we both write. To paraphrase Tim O'Brien: everything is true if you generalize enough.

Saeed Jones: poet, not a jerk.

But, really, none of this is a true barrier unless I make it one. It would be easy for me as a straight white guy to only read poetry by straight white poets. From New Jersey. Easy, and perhaps not nearly as dull as one might expect. (Seriously, BJ Ward is an excellent poet. So is William Carlos Williams.) But  those labels on bookstore shelves or on Amazon ("Gay/Lesbian Literature" or "Gay/Lesbian Poetry") signal things that can act as barriers even though they do not have to.

Put simply, I don't need to be a gay black man to like Saeed Jones poetry. Just like I don't need to be a British actor to like Shakespeare or a baseball player to root for the Phillies. And yet, the labels can make it easy for me to dismiss a text. 

Think of it outside of poetry for a second. If my wife tells my she wants to see a film that's called a Romantic Comedy I might balk at seeing the film with her. I don't think I need to belabor the point or even suggest certain movies that are "romantic comedies" and yet don't feel like romantic comedies, right? 

Right. So as a straight guy I can read these poems. And as a great poet, Saeed can write about anything he wants without losing the power that he has as a great poet -- the power to wrestle/shape/control/unleash words. He does not have to (and does not) write only about the topics determined by labels. 

Because the labels are guides but they are not the writer. Sure, some writers might be happy to hang onto a label and give their readers exactly what they expect -- that is essentially how genre fiction works, how erotica, thrillers, action movies work. But if we assume that all labeled things are only what their label says, then wouldn't we be seeing the entire world as genre'd? And then we'd see less and less of the world.

Consider: 

"I don't read young adult books."

"I don't read memoirs."

"I don't read books with male/female narrators."

"I don't read gay or lesbian poetry."

"I don't read literary fiction."

"I don't read fantasy novels."

"I don't read."

I can read this:

"After his gasp and god damn / grunt, after his zipper closes its teeth, his tongue leaves / its shadows, leaves me / alone"

and feel a certain kind of loneliness. I don't need to be Jones or the speaker to know that feeling. I don't need to have ever had that loneliness to know that loneliness.

Isn't that what self-professed book nerds love? To feel things we've never felt? May never feel? Isn't that how stories and poems get all wrapped up in the concepts of compassion and empathy? 

True, the labels we are given or adopt (or both) can help draw in people who may understand us before we even speak, who already have expectations about us. Labels help filter the world so if we want to read something by a blonde Latino writer of High Fantasy Novels narrated by dragons, we can find such a thing. But those labels can be trouble -- they can give people excuses not to spend time with our words when our words might be exactly what they need. 

How lonely is that feeling? 

See the world in genres then start cutting out entire genres. See what you're left with: flavorless mush. Worse, the inability to connect to others about stories. 

Worse worse: you write blog posts condemning the very thing you've been guilty of a thousand times; but hopefully you (I) will change.

On exoskeletism

So, here's a blog post about postmodernism. As such, you should know what makes something postmodern:

1. distracting self-awareness
2. the potential for resolution cancelled out by a gerbil wheel of perpetual-ness*
3. constant wordplay that calls attention to language and the author's wit**
4. the understanding that truth doesn't exist but a yearning that makes one look for it constantly
5. a fervent belief that language cannot truly capture reality***
6. a layered feeling whereby the reader seeks out answers to questions but only finds new questions (call this this "Lot 49" aspect.)
7. Footnotes****

The Crying of Lot 49 is a very very very fine book.

 *(See: Finnegan's Wake which begins in mid-sentence and ends with the beginning of that opening sentence)
**Note that this behavior is not new for postmodernists, but is simply dredged back up from prior movements, such as the metaphysical poets who loved to flaunt their wit, much like monkey's who fling their shit while laughing. 
*** Example: how do the words -- or even the sounds made by the words "My dog is a fat, lazy animal" really capture the truth of her fatness and laziness?
****See?

Sable in all her fat, lazy glory.

Now, there are other postmodern traits I could mention, but suffice it to say that the movement as it regards literature is very focused on language and truth. It's the literature of distrust. The stories abound in conspiracy, fueled by the erosion of faith in politics, religion, the family unit, and the human mind as a knowable, reliable, and delightful thing. Basically, when the bombs dropped on Japan in WWII, life and humanity became a joke. Why not laugh at absurdity, there's clearly no god here to keep us in line, right? I see a bumper sticker that says No God, No Peace; Know God, Know Peace and have to laugh. 

But, more to the point, there's the issue of form and how it can overwhelm story when put in the hands of the postmodernist. The postmodernist champions form based on the foundation setup by the modernists. To quote that cat-loving anti-semite T.S. Eliot "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality."

More precisely, he ends the landmark essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" with:

"To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad. There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done."


Emphasis mine, of course. This essay places form over the poet/writer. But the postmodernists end up, in some high-profile cases, placing form over story or character. Think about it this way: if traditional storytelling emphasizes the emotional components of characters and choices (and those choices are plot) then form is the skeleton. In literature prior to postmodernism, the stories are flesh covering bone. 


But in postmodernism, the stories are flesh covered by exoskeleton. Take away the exoskeleton and you're left with a puddle of mush. But who cares about the mush when the exoskeleton is so alien, so wonderful, so not human. ah, and that's the crux of my little analogy -- postmodern stories can feel cold and inhuman.

~~~

The postmodernist delights in how stories are told, how narrators may "smile and smile and still be a villain," how details are less meaningful than the delivery. Consider the work of Thomas Pynchon -- an author that writes tangled, conspiracy-laden novels (many of them massive). It's hard to hold on to a particular character in, say, Vineland, but not in The Crying of Lot 49. Oedipa Maas has an unusual name and gets herself lost in conspiracy upon conspiracy, but she's still there, at the center of it all, as the novel ends. While I would have no problem accepting that Oedipa is not an emotionally engaging character, she's at least memorable. Buuuut, her story does not necessarily hinge upon an emotionally engaging quest.

But now consider the great postmodern short story collection The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, who is not just the author but also the main character. (how meta!) Basic summary: O'Brien gets drafted to serve in Vietnam, debates running away to Canada, sees some terrible things, kills someone, hits rock bottom, and then discusses why he's a writer. Throughout, he interrupts his story arc to discuss the process of storytelling and how soldiers cope with the idea of death.

At a few particularly postmodern points, O'Brien declares that a true war story may not be factually true. It may be 100% fiction and yet truer than a story that is 100% factually accurate. He says that story-truth is more true than happening-truth. Put simply, there is some kernel of meaning at the heart of a story -- don't call it a moral, call it a close replication of the feelings the storyteller desperately wants to transfer from him or herself to the audience. "I want you to feel what I felt," O'Brien says throughout the book. It's the only truth left -- the truth of what someone felt in a particular moment. we tell the story to share that feeling (and to bring the dead back to life). It's impossible for language to make a reader/listener feel exactly the same feeling, but with story-truth one can get close.

Now, there's no joking around here. O'Brien believes storytelling saves his life (Vietnam mucked him up, to understate it). Storytelling is a game, but it's not play without consequences. There's delight in storytelling but that delight is part of the medicine. and it's part of the entire story collection. Most importantly, the collection completes the emotional arc of Tim O'Brien the character. It is human postmodernism.

Maybe we can just call it a good book instead of having to label it.

~~~

Personally, I have no inherent issue with either "type" of postmodern fiction. I delight in the formal games sometimes and also delight in stories. I have no problem enjoying Pynchon or Don DeLillo (two classic "idea" novelists often accused of writing non-characters). I have no problem enjoying Tim O'Brien or Toni Morrison (two authors credited with emotionally driven novels).

But I understand the objection to the exoskeletonism of certain postmodern texts. And this is where I stop typing even though there seems to be more I could say.

~~~

Shout out to Andrew Panebianco for discussing what he calls the "preciousness of postmodernism" and being a co-thinker on the idea of exoskeletism.