Office Hours

Why We Do This

I want to start by extending a huge THANK YOU to the over 1700 (!) people who responded to last week’s Office Hours post.  We’ve got an amazing list of underacknowledged masterpieces, that I will (soon, someday) compile into a master list and redistribute.

It’s exciting to see how many great stories there are, and also to see how many engaged, passionate readers of the short story form we have among us.

Over beyond the (very small, barely noticeable) paywall, we’re just starting to work on Tolstoy’s story “The Devil.”  It’s a rarity, in that he provided two endings.  The story – which has got some sexual themes – was never published in his lifetime.  Was it too dangerous? 

Maybe so.

It should be a lively and fun process.  Please join us.

This week, I’d like to talk a little about our larger project here – why we approach stories the way we do here at Story Club.

As I wrote about in “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,” a good reader is someone who has made himself sensitive to micro-truths and micro-falsities in a piece of prose. Right now, on the other side of the paywall, we’re rediscovering this truth as it relates to Tolstoy’s writing, through which, I’d claim, a reader is propelled by the authority in every line – the extent to which what Tolstoy is telling us seems true to us, based on our experience in the world.

When Tolstoy, in “The Devil,” writes, of his main character’s growing feelings toward his fiancée that once “he decided to make her his wife his feelings for her became stronger,” something rings true about this.  We may not like it, or approve of it – we may think, for example, that his strong feelings should have preceded the engagement – but somehow, it seems plausible; maybe we’ve seen such an engagement or heard about one like this.  This, in turn, makes us want to keep reading – Tolstoy has made a particular relationship, and we now want to hear more about it.

Truth (accuracy, plausibility) has served a propulsive purpose.

Whereas, if I write, “Tom was one of those very tall guys who, as we all know, always wears blue shoes,” your reaction is, or should be: “Wait, what?”

Because you’ve never, in the real world, observed the pattern “tall guys wear blue shoes,” you feel, just there, that some sort of wool is being pulled over your eyes.

In response, your reading energy drops.  A warning light goes on.  You pull slightly away from the writer.  (All three of these refer to the same experience.)

So, learning to be a good reader is a matter of becoming sensitive to the small fluctuations in one’s reading energy while, at the same time, becoming more capable of discerning where and how a sentence makes (or fails to make) its meaning.

“She was always saying mostly that the sun in her eyes was generally too bright and so tended to often be buying or borrowing someone else’s sunglasses” – well, that’s a sloppy mess.  We resist it.  Unlike the tall guys/blue shoes example, it’s not false, exactly – it doesn’t seem to intend to mislead us – but it’s not clear what it does mean to say. 

And we can feel that, as we read it, and can, with practice, learn to say precisely where it went off track for us. (Was she “always” saying it?  What’s with that “always/mostly” combo?  It seems, from the construction of the sentence, that it’s the sun that tends to be buying sunglasses.  Is the intention that she is “buying” someone else’s sunglasses, or…or what? And so on.)

It’s a valuable thing, to recognize that not every sentence actually succeeds in saying something.  And/or that it may be saying multiple, contradictory, things; it may, in fact, just be a blur of words. 

Valuable, in other words, to recognize that a sentence – every sentence, even a good one – is not the world but only an attempt to represent it.

Through the kind of close reading we’re practicing, we’re trying to develop a superpower, the benefit of which is that we won’t ever need to be afraid of an idea again – a valuable skill in our time, when there are forces afoot, from across the political spectrum, that somehow feel that morality consists of obliterating an idea rather than engaging with it.

As an example of an idea-fearful tendency: I was reading recently about this group called Moms for Liberty, which wants to ban certain books or make them more difficult to obtain.  Under the guise of so-called “parents’ rights,” a movement like this undermines the traditional student-teacher relationship, the one that cedes a certain authority to the teacher because he or she has studied in a field and has some knowledge of what is happening in that field that a student ought to know about.

And the books this type of group comes after often take up the experience of marginalized groups.  From a recent article in The Guardian: “The American Library Association (ALA) has found that in US public schools last year, “a record 2,571 unique titles were targeted for censorship”, often by parent-led groups, “a 38% increase from the 1,858 unique titles targeted for censorship in 2021”. “Of those titles, the vast majority were written by or about members of the LGBTQ+ community and people of colour.”

At that rate (2,571 books), it seems pretty unlikely that the people advocating removal have read all of the books in question.  They are, then, I suppose, against the general idea of a book, or its topic, but it can’t be the case (since they haven’t read it) that they’re against the book itself; against that particular delivery system consisting of words, phrases, images, structural features, and so on.

The motivation here seems clear, at least to me: such a person is afraid, afraid of an idea that somehow, she thinks, threatens her. What is that idea? Well, approximately: “Someone else’s experience, which I have previously considered, might be just as real as mine.”

But a person who has taught herself to read well will understand that the meaning of a book is irreducible and, therefore, the book must be read before one decides what to think of it.

Furthermore, if such a person reads a book and finds it objectionable, what she will do (in a perfect, Story Club-resonant universe) is discuss why she found it so, rather than attempt to ban it or remove it from the shelves. 

That person has the basic confidence that, if her child reads a book with an idea in it that she, the parent, feels is bad or false or harmful, that book, discussed, will no longer be dangerous, but will have been defanged, defanged by analysis.  It will just sit there, the mere pile of pages that it actually is, hurting nobody.

But people who haven’t learned to read well, tend to read fearfully, afraid of sentences because they haven’t yet realized what sentences are: offerings, conditional offerings. 

If the sentences are false, a good reader sees through them, and responds with the most honest cancellation of all: she finds something better to read.

This tendency to want to obliterate ideas can also come from what strikes me as a more understandable inclination: the idea to not insult anybody; that is, the desire to omit potentially offensive ideas from a piece of writing.

What should we do when we sense a lie or noxious idea in a piece of writing?  What should we do if we sense racism in a piece of prose, or sexism or homo- or trans-phobia, or bias against poor people, or, for that matter, any idea that offends us?

What I say we do first is: calmly point out exactly where we started to feel that thing. 

We weren’t feeling it…and then, suddenly, we were.

Why? Where, precisely?

That is: if we’re reading along and that little voice in our head goes, “Eww, this is sexist,” we can turn to that voice and ask, “Where, exactly?”  And then, once we’ve identified that place, we can ask something like, “If I disallowed, for the time being, the word “sexist,” how would I describe the issue this piece of writing is presenting to me?”

At this point, we’ll often find that what first struck us as a moral flaw is actually (is also) a technical flaw. 

That is, the moral flaw will have a tell. 

Say I read a story and it upsets me, because I feel that the author has an anti-Illinois bias. 

I ask myself “Where, exactly?” and identify this sentence:

“Adam had that well-known trait associated with Illinoisans, of always rudely and secretively farting whenever he was riding in a car with someone.”

That sentence has a technical issue, which is: it flies in the face of logic.  It’s untrue. All it takes to refute that sentence is one Illinoisan who, you know, doesn’t do that.  And, as an Illinoisan, I will happily claim to be that person.  (While I have, in the past, farted in a car, I don’t always do it, and therefore that sentence is demonstrated to be false.)

So, our reading energy has dropped for two, co-arising, reasons: we sense bias in the sentence AND the sentence is untrue. 

Why is it good for us, as readers, to recognize this? 

Well, for one thing, it helps us put emotion aside.

Often, when we hear or read something offensive, we rear away, we feel like bolting, we get panicked and angry – and, therefore, whatever Pandora’s box that thing has opened, stays open, continuing to irritate us and make us feel out of connection with the world.

Whereas, as we learn to read more precisely, emotion-laden judgment can give way to technical awareness.  We’re like a mechanic in front of a car that won’t start.  That car doesn’t scare us, it intrigues us, because we have a method.

It’s a process free of, or at least less freighted with, the kind of imprecise, uncontrolled emotional response that causes anxiety because that response is unmoored, unlocated, and under-articulated. 

Of course, these ideas have some relevance from the other side of the page as well – from the writer’s side.

If, heaven forbid, we happen to be the person who wrote that Illinois-dissing sentence above, there’s still hope for us, which lies along the holy path of revision.

What if we revised as follows: 

“Adam always farted as soon as he got into a stranger’s car.”

Now, I have no idea what that’s about, but note that Adam has become a character, with a trait, and it’s actually sort of an interesting trait, and what the sentence above says about Adam can’t actually be quarreled with.  It’s an assertion, about an imaginary person we’ve just created together, that doesn’t say, “Ugh, this is how things always are,” but, “Huh, what if things were, once upon a time, like this?”

To my way of thinking, this habit – of moving from the general and castigatory to the specific and individual – is a good one for writing, but also for life itself.

Now, as reader, is it our responsibility, to make these sorts of allowances for someone who writes something sexist, racist, homophobic, etc.?  Not at all.  And many people who’ve had to make these corrections all their lives (not only in writing but in person) might understandably be tired of doing it.  And if such a person, encountering such an offense in a text, feels like making an “Ugh,” sound and throwing that text in the trash, I support that.

I do think, however, that if one has the bandwidth to analyze such a text and find its technical flaws, this can be such a powerful thing to do so – it returns the power to the one “reading” that text (that comment, that moment) and takes the power away from the offender.

As for the writer of such a text – well, if our Illinoisphobe above, prompted by our specific, technical critique, revises, “Adam had that well-known trait associated with Illinoisans, of always farting whenever he was riding in a car with someone,” into, “Adam always farted as soon as he got into a stranger’s car,” or (even better), “Adam often farted as soon as he got into a stranger’s car” – is he still an Illinoisphobe? 

Well, he might be. 

But at least he isn’t being one in that sentence.  And maybe, having made the correction, he’s become more aware of that tendency in himself and (if we’re being dreamy and hopeful, as we so often are here in StoryClubLand) this realization might even have had a slight reforming effect on him.

This, then, in my mind, is our larger project: to become such good, precise, insightful readers that no idea frightens us.  We can be offended and speak out against bad/hateful writing, but, when we do so, we do so from a position of specificity and, therefore, power.  We’ll become more active, empowered advocates for what is true, because we’ve become so good at discerning and diagnosing falsehoods. 

This is another way of saying that we aim to embolden ourselves to engage with anyone, about any- and everything, confident that, even in the heat of a battle of ideas, we can stay calm and maintain our equanimity, exuding patience and, yes, even love (and firmness, don’t forget the firmness), toward our so-called “enemies,” because of the confidence – the technical confidence – we’ve developed.

A story, an essay, a campaign speech, a diatribe, a hymn of approbation: all of these are within our power to assess.  Each proceeds linearly, in time, and is false or true in every increment and we can be in relation with the text at every step of the way and can use that given text, not only to see what we think is true or false, but to expand our ability to see that everything, in its time and place, is both true and false.

We learn to read, in order to learn to think more independently, in order to be more truly free.