Category: Lit

There is such a rich symbolism in the first section of Anthony Marra’s The Tsar of Love and Techno – an ostensible collection of short stories that may as well be a fragmented novel, as they all web together by the end – about a Soviet image censor, a kind of artist who specializes in erasure. The character goes to work in a bunker every day where he is tasked with eliminating the faces and bodies of convicted dissidents from the archives of approved images, a task which demands that he carefully reconstruct a background in the negative space where the body was, filling in the light, adding details of the world that would have been in the image but for the dissident’s presence, sometimes adding other people and faces in their place where the context requires it, before sending the sanitized image back to be displayed somewhere. Our protagonist has a history of erasure himself, having allowed his own brother to be taken by the secret police in his youth, and so he approaches this task with a reverence and penitence that makes every reverse-portraiture almost prayerful. And without alerting his superiors, wherever he can, he subtly adds into that negative space a face that could have been his brother, at different stages of his life, if he had lived to reach them.

It makes me think of an overused prescription in writing, which states that one must always show and never tell the facts of the story. If you had to teach what this means in practice, this would be the object lesson. Because the rule is not really editorial in nature – it has to mean more than simply stripping out the expository parts of your story and adding in some kind of action in its place. Action can be prone to glide along the surface, action can obscure the interior of the character as often as it illuminates it. Showing something feebly is less useful than just telling it. So you have to imagine the action that is so expressive in its nature as to render all of the explanation you might otherwise give it useless. That is more than just censoring your explanatory urges. That is imagining a world more perfect in its impulse to self-expression.

In the expressive gesture Marra gives us here of erasure-as-creation, as-penitence, as-protest, there is so much conveyed about the character and his society that any explication you might add would only reduce its impact. If you teach writing, or are trying to teach yourself, it’s worth the time to internalize.

Sometimes you get exactly the thing you wanted, and by its nature it challenges you in ways that you weren’t prepared for. Which might be the best kind of gift. A little while back I penned a bit on what I would like to call extra-humanism, or the need for culture that moves away from the strictly anthropocentric perspective, that finds ways to express attitudes that value something in the universe — anything — besides us and our specific uses for the world.

Enter Andre Alexis’ Fifteen Dogs, a delightful and tight little novel that brings the meddling Greek gods into a wager over whether dogs might be happy if they were gifted human intelligence. It’s a novel I picked out pique, without much anticipating how well it would speak to that niche. The plot goes that fifteen dogs in a Toronto kennel are blessed in the night by Hermes, swiftly figure out how to open their cages, escape into the streets, develop more advanced language, food gathering techniques, social structures, and create a kind of community in the park, eventually meeting mostly unhappy ends as they struggle to understand their place in a world in which they belong to neither the human nor dog world.

I think that, as I began the novel, I expected the central insight of the book to be a kind of referendum on human intelligence in the sense of its inescapably human qualities, that treated dog-kind as a kind of blank slate on which we would be reflected, a perfect outsider who could explore the value of our intellectual gifts without being socialized to accept any aspect or consequence of them. What I got instead was a little more frustrating and perhaps a good deal more valuable. The most striking development in the novel was how distinctly unhuman these dogs remained — remaining fixated on aspects of pack hierarchy, and trying to maintain that structure violently; skeptical of the concept of “love” while emphatic in the expression of “loyalty”; and despairing at their lack of belonging in the dog identity they had left behind. At one point, a pack leader bans the use of advanced language, insisting the dogs continue to communicate in the natural, limited vocabulary they have always used. Of course, this vocabulary is now just as alien to them, so many miles behind where they minds have now ascended, and so they end up crudely imitating each other’s imitations of dog expression, desperate to recover its authenticity. The struggles that consume the pack end up having very little to do with the nature of human intellect as we consider it, and everything to do with an imagined amplification of dog nature as filtered through that intellect.

This can be frustrating, sure — can’t a pack of dogs with all this freaking critical thinking figure out how to critique their own obsession with pack dynamics (although, fair, shouldn’t humans)? Where are the borders around “dog nature,” and how much more interesting might this effort have been if the dogs were able to leap past these petty obsessions to apply their new minds to becoming something more novel and dangerous than just hyper-competent versions of what they were?

But on the other hand, it’s rare for a book to posit any other border, any set of values outside of the human, to explore what the world would look like through those values, and to not care if the reader feels challenged or frustrated or gratified by them. Of course a work with a truly extra-humanist perspective is going to piss off some humans. That’s the point of expressing values we don’t necessarily share.

So I have to tip my hat in the end, because when you want more challenging work out there in the world, the best gift you can get in return is work that challenges what you thought that would look like, how it would feel, how it would subvert expectations that you have precisely because you’re conditioned to expect too limited a field of perspective.

Two thoughts on Karen Russell’s novel, which as always are riddled with the kinds of quasi-spoilers that you can’t properly discuss a book without:
1) So we have a family of charming modern-day gator wrestlers running a failing amusement park on their own private island off the coast of Florida. Beautiful concept. As their business dwindles, every member of the family strikes out on their own fanciful voyage — one into communing with the dead, two others for different careers on the mainland (to spite each other), while the youngest stays behind, the only child left really invested in preserving their home the way it’s always been.
In the last third of the book, Russell comes so close, so close to a thematic revelation, one that seems so clear and imperative and impressive the moment its possibility comes into view, before backing away to the safety of her charming world and themes. We get there by following each character abandoning the park in their own way throughout the novel, and each strikes one as a little self-absorbed, their expansive plots a bit indulgent and somehow beside the point, since our hearts and our focus are always with the youngest child on the island. Vast sections following these characters feel a little strained and aimless until tragedy finally strikes in the final third, suddenly and actually shockingly, recontextualizing many the fanciful elements of the novel into something far more grim. And at that moment, that grim and sudden recontextualization is the most emotionally powerful thing the novel has offered. It appears poised on a thematic shift that condemns each neglectful character out on their fanciful, self-absorbed voyages — that condemns the identity of the family itself by extension — and almost seems ready to marry its form with its substance in a fascinating way that rewards the reader for actually feeling annoyed with all the long asides into ghost stories and the trials of minimum wage work on the mainland — seeing as each of them, in a sense, have represented the blindness of the family towards the most vulnerable among them, who is left alone and desperate without them when a stranger comes to knock. There is a moment when the tone of the book is beckoned to flip on its head, and condemn everyone and their collective sense of identity, the romance of their self-preoccupations, and it was a book I was unexpectedly thrilled to find there, waiting and patiently assembling its case.
And that version of the book holds for just a moment, before we walk it all back, quickly and without apology. Characters are given the chance to save the day, and they do; reconciliations are efficiently achieved; no one is much accused, much less condemned; the romance of the family with its idea of itself is tattered, but intact, as they begin new lives together on the mainland, diminished but proud.
Leaving that whole other, devastating book lurking out there in the swamp. Oh so pregnant with what could have been.
2) Setting: There are books that offer a setting that feels like a character. There are books where setting helps identify the characters. There are books where characters help shape their settings. But I don’t know that I have ever (or possibly will ever) read a book where setting is so profoundly developed along all three of these dimensions. An island, physically and culturally removed from the world. Where each character’s life’s work is set out for them over generations, their family gator-taming circus act. Where the characters all work to make the show and the theme of the park an extension of their self-conceived family identity — a gift shop of family artifacts and tchotchkes with their faces emblazoned on them, a personal mythology on sale that is half-invented for the tourists, half-invented for themselves. The island is not just a character, it is limitedly coextensive with all the characters, and they cannot exist outside of it nor it outside of them. It is a fascinating and unique device that I have a hard time imagining how one would ever fashion its equal in terms of the utterly inextricable symbiosis between person with place.

The sole element of magical realism in Mohsin Hamid’s “Exit West” — a novel that follows a pair of refugees across the world in the midst of a period of mass migration — is a series of doors that lead directly from one country to the next, which are utilized in such a delightfully understated way as to reveal their import very slowly — and even in the end, not explicitly. Rather than a scene of caravans and dangerous voyages, we get sent to a series of clandestine agents who can guide one to where the magical door has opened in the basement of a tenement, letting us walk out of a burning middle-eastern city and suddenly appear in an abandoned bedroom in London. On either side of the door, we experience the utter realism of a refugee crisis. At first, the device appears almost superfluous, perhaps even distracting — what’s the point of this device in a world where real population flows are taking place all the time, by even more dramatic means? But as the scale of migration swells and we see the social change that falls out from it, we’re left with a beautiful message about how contingent our social structures are on a few psychically insignificant physical barriers. Overcome by migrants, London develops into a massive social works project that guarantees refugees 40 meters and a pipe. California experiments with competing forms of democratic representation for non-citizens in a society going through a kind of jazz age of cultural fusion. These developments are always taking place in the background of what is foremost a love story between our two heroes, and so the import of the doors themselves and the revolutions they cause is almost easy to overlook in the stream of things. But there’s something very valuable being said about how significant a few physical laws and barriers are to shaping the world’s social possibilities. Tweak even a little thing, put a couple of small portals in the world through which migration becomes simple, automatic, possible for whoever truly needs it, and our social structures would turn on their heads. The social consciousness of the planet is informed by a few walls, a few borders, a few seas and deserts, and who could say what we would be capable of if it were just as simple as the people who needed to leave a place walking through a door and finding themselves where they had to be.

“Now, sitting in the hot, steamy  kitchen, he thought that all this kow-towing to stupid idiots who cherished the idea that they were God’s Chosen just because they had white skins, had to come to an end. The silly bastards, he thought, they had been stupefied into supporting a system which had to bust one day and take them all down with it; instead of permanent security and justice, they had chosen to preserve a tyranny that could only feed them temporarily on the crumbs of power and privilege.”

Alex La Guma, In The Fog Of The Seasons’ End

Or, What Stories Should We Tell, Lacking a Word for the Breach

Hypothesis: that human societies are still trying to get their heads around a set of artistic, cultural, religious, and philosophical responses to a pretty radical realignment of our understanding of man’s relation to the natural world post-1850. The arts, religion, philosophy — these are all essentially storytelling disciplines, explaining ourselves to ourselves, to pass on to our children this learned idea of what it means to be human. So over a really, really long time — say, 10,000 BC, with the advent of agriculture and human settlement, up to the start of the industrial revolution — we’ve developed narrative and thematic frameworks for understanding our place in the world that implicitly endorse a few assumptions. These might include: 

• On a large enough scale, the planet could always absorb human expansion/industry/development, and so these were categorically positive things.
• Human beings are separate from and higher than animals/nature in a certain moral sense, i.e., the goal of ethics is to maximize human flourishing.
• The natural world is bigger and more powerful than human beings could ever meaningfully influence — maybe there’s a panoply of Gods up there controlling the environment that we must contend against, but anyone who invokes the idea of man controlling the earth is just modeling hubris. We don’t even need a vocabulary for the concept.

During this period, Homer and Shakespeare set templates for the Western literary canon, the planet’s major religions developed their basic tenets, and around the world we developed mythologies and storytelling templates that model these basic assumptions about who we are, what we could do, and how the natural world responds. We developed archetypes for explaining this to our children, and those archetypes are founded at least in part on this pre-anthropocene understanding of our relation to the world.

Now, in the last 150 years, things have shifted a bit.

In 1800, estimates have the human population at less than a billion. Currently, estimates say we’ll breach 10 billion in this century. Consequently, in the last couple decades, the concept of a “carrying capacity” of the planet has emerged where there was no real conceptual corollary before.

In 1859, The Origin of the Species turned man’s understandings of his role in the ecosystem on its head, and its moral implications are still being culturally absorbed. What has dominantly been a story of man’s separation from/superiority to the life around us (or even from our own racial subgroups) has been sharply reframed. Now we have to ask, are we morally differentiable from our evolutionary competitors, and if so, on what grounds?

Within the last seventy years or so, we’ve started to understand our capacity to actually damage a planet. Nuclear weapons are the most obvious, uncontested version of humanity’s existential threat to its home. Climate change is likely to dramatically upset civilizations around the globe and the ecosystem services they were built around. There is also a real outlier risk where humans don’t curb their GHG emissions, or runaway feedback effects pick up, that has caused accomplished climate scientists like NASA’s former Goddard Institute chief, James Hansen, to posit extinction scenarios. And even if it’s not speculative human extinction, our impact on the broader ecosystem is uncontested. Half the wildlife on earth has vanished in the last 40 years – past tense. We refer to our impact on the planet as the “sixth mass extinction,” right up there with the one that took out the dinosaurs. I look to thinkers like evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson, with his “Half Earth” call for a human retreat from 50% of the planet in order to preserve ecosystems, as just the beginning of a cultural response to our new understanding of our place in the world.

So these are pretty enormous shifts in our moral, cosmological, and human development frameworks in a historically-speaking pretty short period of time. 150 years ago, we were a fraction of our current size as a species, had sparse experience with extinction, had no meaningful lens to understand environmental destruction on a large or permanent scale, and assumed our role in creation was as its disinterested keeper, or at worst, consumer. Man’s cultural perspective was therefore appropriately insular – our mythologies evolved to mostly explain man’s relation to himself.

This is no longer true to a large degree, and I wonder if we’re still trying to react.

Culture clearly has a place in this dialogue. Scientific headlines can inform how we tell stories about ourselves, but they are an input. We have always been a storytelling species. We will always need to explain ourselves to ourselves through some sort of narrative device. And today, there remains some cognitive dissonance between what science is telling us now and the body of story we’ve inherited. You might even extrapolate that our state of political inaction towards environmental/planetary/interspecies challenges derives from this cognitive dissonance. “Common sense” just tells us there’s no way we should be concerned about blowing up the planet or the moral plight of animals or exhausting our natural resources. But that common sense is inherited from some long cultural narratives that predate these shifts.

Hypothesize that there’s some sort of extra-humanist movement in art or culture that’s waiting to really come into its prime. I don’t know what form they will take or who will write them, but I think in my generation and beyond there will have to be writers, filmmakers, philosophers, politicians, etc. who try to tell new kinds of stories that are responsive to this shift. We will need stories that operate outside of our relationships with each other and consider our relations to a broader, more vulnerable, more interconnected, more morally weighted environment. What could it look like, raw speculation – maybe non-children’s stories that come from the perspectives of animals. Mythologies that reflect human conflict with ecosystems. Morality plays that emphasize the power of people to preserve or destroy a thing that is not us. Maybe the rebirth of allegory as a popular mode of dramatizing conflicts that are larger than human contestants. I don’t know. But there is  something missing in the minds of people that I think reflects us not quite having come to terms yet with some real shifts over the last 150 years in understanding our relationship with the rest of creation. With the fact that we’re not even the imperishable center of our own world. And we may not yet have the mythic, narrative, cultural archetypes in our vocabulary to put that breach into the necessary terms.

Let’s be real — every character is Don DeLillo’s head on somebody else’s body. Speaking in the same abstract, existentially distracted stream of consciousness. Grammatically unmoored half-sentences recording the silently gravitational minutia of place and time. Seguing unannounced into deep psychic spectres of American life.

Even children. Yes, I would like to play with the ball. It glistens red and the tactile sense of the grooves under your fingers, satisfying yield to control. The textured rubber, submitting minutely, pliant. The industrial process that produces such an instrument. Every one alike, thousands of them identical in the hands of actual, believable children like me. The American ball industry, always churning. I am conscious my complicity in its oscillations.

I mean, I love this man, but just have to point this out.