Short Stories and the Cultural Moment
I was thinking how story modes fall along roughly the same lines. What I mean by that is whatever your preoccupation: love, marriage, family, friendship, etc., this trope fills out, in general, the story urge. Mine might be danger, or the survival of it. (I know when I read Vollmann, or Norman Rush, even Bolaño; my favorite stories involve peril and a touch of mystery.)
Of the 2021 Best American Short Stories collection, Nicole Krauss’s “Switzerland” stood out so far, though I feel like the portrayal of the unnamed narrator makes herself seem a little frail, a little danger flirt, but she tells us about hinted at violence as she tries to live the life of her friend, Soraya. I just felt the mystery was more interesting than her need to dare to be an object. (But maybe this reveals how little I understand of such violence directed at you when you are much weaker, smaller. A woman. And yet how much more interesting if she were portrayed as standing up to this violence, like her friend, tough. Though, presumably, look where this got her friend. (It's unknown, unrevealed in the story).)
As well, David Means’s charming dog story “Clementine, Carmelita, Dog” was a masterful point of view story mediated through the human lens, of a dog’s life. As much as my inner reader wanted to say, no, I was drawn so quietly and assuredly into this beautiful portrait that it reminded me how Means, on occasion, excels at his craft. Other standouts were Jamil Jan Kochai’s “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain”, and Bryan Washington’s “Palaver.” These stories played with structure and material in an interesting or experimental way that was absorbing and compelling. Stephanie Soileau’s “Haguillory” had such a surprising, humorous (perhaps tragic) end that I couldn’t help but smile.
But there were exceptions. In general, I read these stories from this much younger crop of writers and feel less connection to them, their innocence. It makes me think, as when I attended the Virginia Quarterly Review conference four years ago that I was somehow more knowledgeable, had more life experience than my young colleagues. At some point, I have been free from these youthful, perhaps even sentimental, views of family, life, love, friendship, etc., and I don’t expect to read another story of that type that will manage to have much appeal to me. I suppose it's inevitable, and why it is harder to connect with the growing younger crop of editors obsessed with gender and sexual politics, most of which leave me cold.
But we’ve landed in this area where it is more about who the artist is, rather than what they do. That’s our cultural moment. To me, it’s a shame. The writing is what should matter.
This veer toward politics, I think is what Jed Perl regards in his recent book, Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts, as an attempt to “link art to something else—something that can be more dependably defined.” (17) He goes on further to say, “I want us to release art from the stranglehold of relevance—from the insistence that works of art [...] are validated (or invalidated) by the extent to which they line up with (or fail to line up with) our current social and political concerns.”(19) But this is also the sign of the times, the moment we are in, where such politics are like the fire on the hillside. To look away at all is regarded as neglectful.
I can feel, reading these stories like a barometer, that my world is going away. I'm not sad about it or anything, I just don't think the alternative on display has much to do with me, either. There's nothing to rail at, really. I will just keep on in my way and rise above it. I make no appeal to a general readership. No one may get my work, but I'm not about to try to conform it to be acceptable. Like all now older people, I feel somewhat a sense of pity and despair for the younger generation and wonder if I am trying to make my way in the wrong field. But I suspect I won't easily fit in many places. Frustrated with all of this, the growing sense that I may become irrelevant, I have, in the last few years, turned toward poetry.
This is what it means, perhaps, to evolve into your practice. Maybe it is natural I turned to poetry. Dare I suggest it was to survive? I don't know. I'd rather say to evolve. I'm never now going to make an appeal to younger writers/editors, except by some fluke, which is how it feels when I land any publication these days, as if I have fooled someone. I want to say “Ha! I'm not a millennial!” I think half the time they might go, oh, we didn't catch that.
I don't understand the world, but when did I ever?...And here's where I segue back to what I wrote previously: I do like to publish (maybe I have to?), and so I do have to decide how I'm going to fit in to the world. Or do I? Can't I just do what I do, as it is, evolving? For all of my recent feelings of disconnection with the greater publishing world, I don’t plan on quitting my creative work any time soon.
So much has changed in the past few decades (during the time I seriously took up writing), and I am guessing it will continue to change. You either evolve or die. I've continued to write regardless of what seems to be happening out there.