Allusions, Franchises, and "To 'Jaws,' or not to 'Jaws?'"

Office Hours

Thanks to all of you paid subscribers for the incredible and ongoing discussion of Grace Paley’s “A Conversation with My Father” over behind the paywall, and thanks to Paul Karasik for these cartoons of two recent Story Club writers:

Now, on to our question of the week:

Q.

Hello George!

My partner and I are reading Lincoln In The Bardo (her first time), and she drew a connection between it and The Waves by Virginia Woolf. That novel is constructed as a series of interior monologues, similar to LITB, and it also ends with the phrase, "The waves broke on the shore," which parallels the line repeated by the angels/beings who come to tempt the ghosts out of the Bardo: "You are a wave that has crashed upon the shore." I am curious if that was a conscious choice or a happy accident.

But that curiosity brings me to a larger question: what is your relationship with literary and cultural allusions in your work? How do they affect your P/N meter? You trust the idea that comes to you in the moment; that idea happens to be, or turns out to be, a literary allusion. How does that strike you in the revision process? Do you think to yourself, "Ah no, that particular allusion is too self-indulgent, does too much harm to the story at hand." Or is there some greater meaning it adds that justifies it?

Beyond literary allusions, I've noticed some authors who tend to write something like, "The friends went to see an old horror movie about a handless serial killer who stalks a honeymooning couple," instead of "The friends went to see Jaws." Assuming a story that takes place in our reality, is there a part of you that first writes a character walking into McDonald's and then, upon reflection, decides, "No, no, she walks into Frank's Uptown Burger Shack," as that is more specific? Or is the image of McDonald's, which is so ingrained in our public consciousness, specific enough to conjure an image that moves the meter in your head toward P?

Thank you for Story Club! It's been a source of delight for me since I subscribed!

A.

First, thanks for reading the book.

The short answer is that, to my embarrassment, I haven’t read The Waves – that line about the waves likely originated in Buddhist teachings somewhere – this idea that, while we’re alive, we’re like an individual cresting wave, which then very quickly returns back into the larger mass of water.

But to your larger point (and, as always, this is just my particular stance – not an attempt at a “general theory”):

I don’t feel much interest in direct literary allusions – they seem a bit tricky and contrived to me. They assume that the reader will know the work you are alluding to and they also seem to come out of the sense that your story isn’t quite working on its own – it needs the “support” of another work. That is, if I purposely drop in a reference to The Tempest, that feels like I’m trying to give my story some “unearned oomph,” trying to compensate for the fact that the story isn’t yet saying what it wants to say, by hitching its star to some ostensibly related work.

I guess I feel that a story should be a very primary experience, not dependent on anything but itself for its power and its meaning.

I know that many great writers work this way (and have made great work in this way) but it’s not natural or appealing to me.

And I’ve learned that my work is better if I lean into what is natural and appealing (to me).

“Be more like yourself” is a credo I’ve internalized, which amounts to: “Do more intensely what delights you, no rationale required.”

Now, of course, we’re always doing a different sort of “alluding,” in which our story is understood to be part of a larger lineage.

So, for example, when I was writing “Victory Lap,” and once the basic action was in place, I understood the story as being in the lineage of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and Joyce Carol Oates’ “ Where Are You Going, Where Have you Been.” Or, later, I understood “Tenth of December” to be in the lineage of “ Master and Man,” and also a story called “Walking Out,” by David Quammen.

When I come to this sort of understanding, I tell myself, “Ah, good: you are working in a fertile field; that is, other writers have felt this general topic to be fraught.” And then I think: “Now, try to do something different than they did; take the argument a step further, if you can.”

This predisposed me to seek out a “happier” ending for “Victory Lap” since, in both the O’Connor and the Oates stories, the evil presence comes out on top. If I hadn’t known these two stories, and recognized that my story was in that lineage, I might have “settled” for an ending that had already been done.

This strategy, designed to keep me from duplicating the work of others, also can have the effect of expanding that particular rhetoric, of asking, “Are there other ways these things can turn out?”

“Victory Lap” ended up asking what was, in my work anyway, a newish question, which was: “When good gets done, how, exactly, does that happen?”

On the pop culture question, I suppose this is part of the world-building/style specification each of us does anew with each story. All the decisions of this type that we make in the course of writing a story should be specific to that story and its goals (which we are discovering as we go).

But it might relate to our good old P/N meter, in the following way.

Back when I was writing the stories in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, I had an aversion to using real store or franchise names, just because I was working hard to make an alternate America and whenever one of those terms would show up, it snapped the reader back (I felt) into a more familiar America. So, with a few exceptions (particularly in “Bounty,” the novella at the end of the book) I tended to invent store/company/franchise/TV show names. But they had to be, I felt, good (evocative, funny) names, names that do some work on their own, other than merely substituting for the more familiar name. If the reader felt the writer to just be doing an auto-swap, that would have the effect of making the fictive reality feel less vivid, not more.

But I want to say again: this is part of the larger world-building we are doing, via the language we choose, in every piece of fiction. There is no general theory.

Part of the challenge here is that certain names are so familiar that the mind zips past them. “We drove past the Wendy’s on Fifth Street” doesn’t do much work. And yet: there is a Wendy’s on Fifth Street, and it is an actual place, inside of which people are living their lives. How to make that place signify?

And so much of our physical world and our actual lives are spent in and around such places.

When I was in high school, my dad quit his job and bought two Chicken Unlimited franchises on the south side of Chicago. My memories of those restaurants are so vivid and rich but they were, after all, “just” franchises. And yet not. They were made up of individual spaces (the place near the back door where the grease cubes were kept; the walk-in refrigerator where, occasionally, you’d find yourself briefly alone with a female co-worker, to the mutual awkwardness of both parties, but also, it was kind of exciting) and so on.

A “franchise” is just as much a relic of human activity as the pyramids. The mind of a human being working the drive-through at Taco Bell is as valid as that of a king in his castle in ancient times.

So maybe, as in so many things literary, the answer is: specificity. What does the character actually see, think, perceive? What are the constituent parts of the phenomenon? Is there a new way of expressing the thing? A way of getting free of habitual perception, the expected more of expressing that perception? What’s going on beneath our usual way of understanding a given moment?

All of the great Out There is real and valid, and it is up to us to find language to make it as new as it, in every moment, actually is.

And that’s “literature.”

How do others approach these questions?

P.S. Our Office Hours physician who questioned whether or not to continue writing had this to say about Story Club’s collective advice:

“Thanks beyond words for your responses to my question. I was so moved by your collective remarks that it took me a few days to know quite what to say. The health issue I mentioned kept me out of commission for several months, but I am on the mend back to writing and doctoring daily. The few who have read my drafts since the pause say that the work is less cryptic and far more open-hearted than it has ever been, and I credit you all for that gentle prying.”