Compare and contrast

Kathleen Winter, shortlisted for the Giller, says:

“For me, the struggle is to be a human being who is beyond gender.”

Consider, on the other hand, Annabel Lyon’s recent remark:

“I don’t think intellect is gendered in any way. I don’t think with my vagina, I have a brain.”

Annabel Lyon adds a penis

Hey, don’t blame me for that title—she’s the one that said it. In an interview with The Tyee, on the topic of how she writes men so well: “I thought of a woman, and added a penis.” I’m just repeating it, as one of my usual desperate attempts to attract inappropriate traffic.

She’s riffing on one of my favorite movie lines, as Melvin Udall, the misanthropic romance author of As Good as It Gets (played by Jack Nicholson) responds to a fan’s gushing question as to how he writes women so well: “I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.”

(Because we are a society of half-wits, this line is usually attributed to Nicholson, instead of to Mark Andrus and James L. Brooks, who wrote the frigging screenplay. Because who’s ever heard of them?)

The facetious part of her answer attracts all the attention, but I’d rather look at what else she said: “I don’t know. I don’t think intellect is gendered in any way. I don’t think with my vagina, I have a brain.”

This recalls a remark by Jim Harrison on the question of male writers writing women:

I don’t see gender as the most significant fact of human existence. It’s that old idea that when you suddenly wake up at 3 a.m., what sex are you? I don’t get that. It’s sort of the flip side of male chauvinism. It’s a female chauvinism or refusal to think that anyone can have any solid form of empathy of any sort.

Both writers hit what I think is the essential point: the secret of writing the other sex is to discard the idea that it is really so alien. It’s in that idea that we find the dessicated, wooden cliches of gender: men are from Mars, women do not reason, etc. These will not lead you to a rounded, human character.

Harrison’s further remarks aren’t entirely accurate, I think; it’s not “female chauvinism” that insists men can’t understand women, but a widespread assumption embedded in our culture. Men have been, until recently, encouraged not to understand women. You’re supposed to stand around in the garage, wiping your hands on an oily rag while you tweak the valvy thing connected to what you hope is the carburetor of your 1966 Mustang convertible, and say, “Women. I’ll never understand them.”

Whereupon your buddy is supposed to say, “Ain’t that the fuckin’ truth.” Then you both swig your Labatt Blue, from the bottle, and the subject turns to hockey.

This attitude is, for obvious reasons, something of a roadblock for the male writer: you can’t write people who you insist you’ll never understand.

We make the opposite assumption about men: men are supposed to say what they mean, and to have internal lives no more complicated than, say, empty inkwells. So we encourage women to think they understand men all too perfectly, which to the female writer is an obstacle of its own: you can’t make a compelling character out of something that permits complete understanding.

I like to compare this gender question with racial research of the Philippe Rushton kind:  in our rush to define differences, we ignore variations. Not all men, or all women, think the same way. We are more alike than we are different; as Lyon has it, intellect is not gendered.

More on this topic anon.

On the coming short fiction zombie apocalypse

Today I ran into this piece at n + 1 on the state of American fiction, which is four years old (thus demonstrating how badly I keep up), but worth a read. It begins with a thought-provoking premise:

…the American short story is a dead form, unnaturally perpetuated, as Lukács once wrote of the chivalric romance, “by purely formal means, after the transcendental conditions for its existence have already been condemned by the historico-philosophical dialectic.” Having exhausted the conditions for its existence, the short story continues to be propagated in America by a purely formal apparatus….

Let us not delve too deeply into the historico-philosophical dialectic; the natural general principle that will subsume this case may remedy and, at the same time, eliminate the system of base rules exclusive of the lexicon.* Let’s just accept that the conditions that created the golden age of the short story, the golden age of the magazine in which we had no television, no longer exist, and inquire as to what does sustain the short story as a form.

That would be creative writing programs, and the little magazines that are inseparable from them. The large number of story collections published here in Canada surely reflect not so much the excellence of the Canadian short story as the large number of MFA grads with pockets full of published stories, looking to get a book out before they write their novels.

In short, the short story is stumbling around like a zombie, its dead flesh reanimated by MFA tuition payments. Which reminds me of something the movies never quite explain: after they eat us all, what will the zombies do next?

It’s a fascinating question—I mean whether the short story today is an unnatural creature, not my little aside about the living dead—that one could argue either way. Unfortunately, the n + 1 piece quickly goes off the rails, crashes through a stand of red pine, and tumbles down a steep embankment until it comes to rest in a small, rocky creek, into which it spills its entire load of carbon tetrachloride, thus wiping out an entire generation of salmon and unwittingly demonstrating the importance of variability in the life histories of migratory fish. It transpires that the author simply doesn’t like short things; 19th century Russian novels are the only way to go.

Consider the rather disingenuous complaint about opening sentences:

“The morning after her granddaughter’s frantic phone call, Lorraine skipped her usual coffee session at the Limestone Diner and drove out to the accident scene instead”; “Graves had been sick for three days when, on the long, straight highway between Mazar and Kunduz, a dark blue truck coming toward them shed its rear wheel in a spray of orange-yellow sparks.” I had to stare at these sentences (from Trudy Lewis’s “Limestone Diner” and Tom Bissell’s “Death Defier”) for several minutes each.

Really? Several minutes? That sounds like a literacy problem to me.

That the contemporary short story begins in medias res is a trivial complaint. What about big problems? Jim Harrison, who never misses a chance to bash MFA programs, complains of the “teeny” poems and “little” stories that result. Harrison’s instinct is expansive; he continually risks sentimentality, insisting that the work has to matter, has to deal with the stuff of human desire.

This sprang to mind recently as I read Patricia Young’s story collection, Airstream, and Annabel Lyon’s first book, Oxygen. Every story in Oxygen is brilliantly written, but brilliant writing can’t rescue the weaker stories in the collection from their essential lack of substance. “Sexy Rex,” for example, is an empty exercise: a couple has a dog, dog gets lost, dog comes home. The writing is precise and rich with detail, but none of the characters ever takes on any genuine humanity.

In Airstream, on the other hand, every story surrounds, without needing to resolve, some human crisis. Every story touches on something vital, without ever tipping over into sentimentality or backing off into the kind of ironic posturing we adopt when we fear tipping our hand. This is what short stories should be.

It’s not enough that stories make pleasing word patterns. They should ask us, also, to give a shit. When I consider what I too often read in our little magazines—formal innovation for its own sake, big conceits overlying empty characters, etc.—I don’t.

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* If you thought that phrase meant something, you were in error; it is computer-generated bafflegab courtesy of the Chomskybot.