The Purge
James DeMonaco
Universal Pictures

You can tell a lot about a film just by figuring out its focus. When a film forwards a provocative premise–say, that a 2022 America has achieved stability by culturally sanctifying a 12-hour annual “Purge”, wherein all crime is legal–one might think its focus is on the ramifications of this decision.

Heck, if this were a work of hard speculative fiction, you might even be right in expecting a film that negotiates the complexities of such a society: How does it function the other 364 days? How do the people old enough to remember a time pre-Purge feel about this whole situation? Why aren’t children excluded from the legal mandates? Why is the technology of this film barely functioning at a post-’90s level? And if the rhetoric of the Purge is that everyone needs to let off some steam by committing murder once a year, how do the people who don’t feel this patriotic need negotiate their inexplicable disinterest in something researchers tell them is universal?

Instead, the pointed absence of such exploratory, world-building quandaries, or any real interest at all in the technological possibilities of 2022 America (there isn’t even a proper panic room in this house) suggests this film is less a work of scifi and more a work of direct social commentary–a straightforward home invasion flick where the issue is less why these folks are in this situation, and more what they will do to survive it. To this end, James Sandin (Ethan Hawke) is a home security salesman of considerable success, living with his wife Mary (Lena Headey), sulky teenaged daughter Zoey (Adelaide Kane), and long-haired (a.k.a. bleeding heart) prepubescent son, Charlie (Max Burkholder), in a gated community with all the usual duplicitous airs and festering tensions of the stereotypical upper class.

When the Purge starts, the Sandin family disperses within their locked-down house, which creates the perfect opportunity for Charlie to find himself alone before the security console; knowing the password, he shuts off the lockdown procedure to help a bleeding, frightened man (Edwin Hodge) crying out in the street–the prey of a band of smug, entitled, private-school-reared Americans who will do anything to get him back. This, coupled with a stowaway in Zoey’s bedroom, sets the stage for a Trolley Problem writ large: It’s okay for James Sandin to tacitly profit from the wholesale slaughter of people when he has no direct hand in the killing, but if he’s compelled to proactively offer someone up to slaughter in order to save four other lives, will he do it?

The Purge is only James DeMonaco’s second time directing; his history as a screenwriter being more substantial, I can almost accept the visual weaknesses of the film–the puzzling lack of an establishing shot for the Sandins’ home, despite it being the lone setting for a thriller; the incoherent sense of space at many junctures, such that it’s difficult at times even to tell what floor everyone’s on; and the all-too-frequent familial separations (not under duress, either! “just ‘cuz”), which suggest that the layout of the house is a mystery even to its owners. Certainly, DeMonaco has some shots almost impossible to screw up, including one where a Purger at the Sandins’ front door takes off his mask to reveal a face that, simply in its ruthlessness, is almost just as grotesque. Nonetheless, as a general rule, one senses that physical horror is not the central interest of this piece.

However, while much of the movie is preoccupied with the Trolley Problem, in DeMonaco’s construction this issue cannot sustain an hour and a half unto itself. What this leaves is more difficult to pin down. The Purge is not about the depravity of some human beings, as rape and prolonged torture are barely alluded to, and crimes against the extremely defenceless, utterly unaddressed, and it’s not about constructive social criticism, since alternatives to this system never receive a single syllable on screen.

Instead there is a blatant exploitation of contemporary “One-Percenter” discourse, tethered to our worst fears about blind, vaguely religious patriotism. To this end, on-screen TV and radio commentary routinely drives home that the Purge is really about killing the poor in the name of American Jesus (or something similar), since only the rich have the capacity to defend themselves at all during this 12-hour blackout. The “lesson” we’re left with on this accord, though, is rather muddled: One-Percenters have problems, too? The obliviousness of the richest folks to the depravity of the system they thrive upon makes them morally purer than the rest of the upper class, second only in righteousness to the poor?

There is also, quite blatantly, a racial component to this slaughter–and this, more than anything, is the death-blow to this film’s potential to be interesting, because it serves as a reminder that there were other entry points to this world that DeMonaco could have used, but didn’t. How many affluent-white-man-defending-his-family-and-his-castle movies do we really need?

If technological prowess and possibilities don’t matter (and on top of the lack of a panic room, there’s nothing interesting in the way of make-shift or diverse weapons, either–a child’s toy is the height of DeMonaco’s technological intrigue); if suspense is not really a priority (as evidenced by the extreme underdevelopment of physical space); if the ethics of the world as a whole are only addressed in a cursory, foundational manner; and if the only real question the movie deliberates upon at length is whether a person could be compelled to murder in order to save his nearest and dearest… couldn’t we at least have had a different location and character complement?

When I think about films striving for the right balance of social commentary and coherent, intriguing world-building, Night of the Living Dead comes to mind as a perfect example of how the “light” touch is best. There, too, we find an atypical situation that stirs folks living normal lives to make decisions that truly test their latent moral fibre; but without explicit word or comment the whole film through, Night of the Living Dead ends with a gunshot that shocked viewers into realizing a monster yet remains in all our midst, even with the film’s more fantastical creatures defeated.

Granted, not every film is going to be adroitly transgressive, but if a movie cannot attain a certain level of thoughtfulness, it should at least strive to be entertaining, and The Purge achieves neither. If it serves any function, then, this flick only calls attention to a bevy of missed opportunities–ones I sincerely hope future creators will take up and do much better by.

There are very few literary agents in Canada, though, and all but three of the places I submitted to never so much as responded, so I was soon left trying to shop the text to publishing houses directly–also with a very poor response record (I only received one rejection). Since literary agents are rather ruthless in their requirements these days–a pitch, credentials, and five pages of sample writing, tops–I quickly realized that the credentials mattered more than anything. One needed to get published for fiction in top tier Canadian literary magazines first (according to explicit recommendations on the literary agent listings), so after having submitted little but poetry for years, I started submitting primarily short stories.

I wrote a great many general literary pieces during this period, noting (as I grew into my short story voice) that I had a rather sparse writing style–one which focussed more on the situation than relentless character background, and one which did not state things plainly, but rather, rewarded the reader who paid attention. I did not find stories like this in many places in Canada, so I would at times attempt more atmospheric or blatantly telegraphed works, but my heart always lay with a different writing style.

None of my fiction in this period got accepted, then, but as I was writing stories routinely now, I found myself preoccupied with a greater diversity of topics over time. To this end, I eventually started writing science fiction for the first time since I was a kid. I started submitting science fiction, too. And while the literary fiction markets did not budge, over time my science fiction voice grew stronger, and I started publishing in that incredibly friendly domain. (And the difference–in response times, in support, and in the sheer range of published styles–has been incredible. No complaints!)

These days, I am torn. I now have two “trunk” novels of a literary bent, and two more novels in progress–one a work of literary scifi, and one a work of hard, far future scifi. I still have stories I want to tell in a literary register, absent the scifi, but I see less and less likelihood that I’ll get the opportunity. In the meantime, a) my scifi voice is daily improving, b) I’ve been deeply fortunate in the number of times editors have taken a chance on me to date, and c) with scifi, I find myself able to address more issues in a broader, more fearlessly experimental register than I ever managed with literary fiction.

I shouldn’t be gloomy, then, in giving up trying to publish straight literary fiction. I have one more such work in a submission queue at present, but when I received a rejection letter from The Fiddlehead today, that settled the question of future short story submissions for me. I will probably continue to write literary fiction stories as the mood strikes me, but try to do anything with them? I fail to see the point right now.

Mind you, when I was an utter novice, I greatly anticipated rejection letters from The Fiddlehead, because they at least offered personalized responses–a tremendous reprieve from the inscrutable form letters I so often received. As I became more experienced and self-aware as a writer, though, I found these personalized responses more excruciating than the form letters, because what the personal notes said seemed to suggest more about the readers than about the writing itself. Almost all of them also had basic typos, including in two cases the inappropriate use of an apostrophe–which happens (folks are human), but really doesn’t make the fact of rejection easier to bear.

Anyway, I submitted a story to The Fiddlehead a few months ago, and I received a rejection from the slush pile reader today. This rejection was an exasperating read, because it suggested a completely inattentive reader–but I’m the writer, so of course it would exasperate me; and of course I would think they Just Didn’t Get It. Nonetheless, this rejection is indicative to me of a pattern I’ve seen across the board–while reading short stories published in Canadian literary magazines, and while reading rejection letters my own literary fiction has received to date. I understand, then, that Canadian literary magazines prefer things to be utterly telegraphed–for character backgrounds and motivations to be spelled out in full–but I don’t write that way, and I doubt I ever will. So I give up. No more submissions to Canadian literary journals from here on out.

What to do, then, with the last of my literary short stories? Some of them will join the “trunk” novels, for sure, but I still like one or two, so why not toss those up here, for all the good they’re doing on my laptop? Here, then, is The Fiddlehead‘s rejection letter, and the story the reader rejected. If you agree with the rejection, by the way, that’s totally fine by me. I’m just the writer, and writers are often stupidly blind to their own failings. But to me, this is nothing more than a stylistic mismatch, and with it, I give up on ever being a good “fit” for Canadian literary fiction magazines.

That said, I have a lot of optimism for my future as a writer in the scifi domain, where I have been able to explore an extensive diversity of subjects already, and don’t intend to quit pushing the limits of narrative form. I’m just frustrated that this other form, literary fiction–a field I have tried to publish in for ten years now–still seems as closed off to me as ever.

Nonetheless, I recognize how incredibly lucky I am to have had the successes I have had to date, and I cherish the kindness and the warmth of the people I have met in just the last two years publishing in scifi journals. Down the line, I hope I have the opportunity to support others the way I’ve been supported–and I hope, too, that all the themes and topics that matter most to me won’t be closed off because of my utter failure as a writer in this one, near-and-dear regard. Cheers and best wishes to you all, then, and all the luck in the world with your own creative pursuits–whatever form they take.

***

“Dear Ms Clark,

Thank you for submitting your story, “Nothing from the Heart,” to The Fiddlehead, but I’m sorry we cannot offer you publication. I appreciated the quality of your style, and the careful use of subtext, but felt that too much of the story was kept from the reader. It is never clear why the reporter has come to Clem’s house, or what it [sic] at stake for either character. From an observer’s perspective, the controversy seems quite trivial, so why is the reporter pushing it after 14 years? Perhaps a more forthcoming narrative would clear up some questions.

Best wishes,

Martin Ainsley”

***

Nothing from the Heart

Maggie Clark

The woman from The Herald arrived at eleven, just as she had said she would on the phone message left the night before. Clem waited a quarter of an hour, but when she peeked through the front room curtains, the woman was still there, seated in Clem’s white wicker chair with a book and a basket, her umbrella resting open and still dripping at the top porch step. The woman was reading, and as she read she had a habit of running two fingers over her lips, which even at a distance seemed small and pale. When it came time to turn a page the fingers were replaced with teeth—a quick flash worrying the skin, then the fingers again, pressed overtop like a seal. It was raining steadily now, the sky light grey even as heavy drops hit the windowpanes, and Clem’s gutters burbled under their loads. The woman looked up and Clem did not realize immediately that she had been sighted; but when one fat raindrop supplanted another on the glass, and gave her to see those twin oval frames lifted and set intently upon her, Clem drew back and let the curtain fall, a beat lodged in her chest as she braced for some rapping or hollering at the front door. Neither came.

Clem watched the mantle clock for ten minutes before taking another peek. Nothing had changed. The air was still heady with rain, the woman was still reading, and two fingers kept fastidious purchase over her lips. Clem turned away and felt the beat lodged in her chest loose itself like a winged insect, only to strike at her ribs and throat when she spoke a quick prayer and opened the front door.

The woman only looked at her and waited, until Clem’s lips parted before she was sure of the words. “Come in,” she said, as if hearing herself at a distance, and she watched the woman rise and take account of her belongings before stepping inside.

“I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name.” But Clem was not sorry. She retreated further into the house as the woman slipped out of her boots and procured a pair of black flats from her purse. They fit snugly over stockinged feet with prominent blue veins.

“Meredith Langley,” the woman said. It rang a bell. Clem certainly remembered her face—not far removed from the column profile on the Herald Online, save that now the woman was not smiling, and there was a much poorer showing with the foundation on her cheeks and the concealer under darkly wrinkled eyes.

“I remember you, of course.”

The woman touched her glasses. “Yes, I imagine you would.”

Clem made for the dining room, willing herself calm as she cleared the breakfast dishes and took down two mugs from a shelf.

“Thought about calling the police on you. It would’ve been well within my rights.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Clem was silent, the clink of dishware between them.

“Let me hazard a guess.” The woman’s hand trailed over Clem’s dining table, catching at a split running width-wise down its polished hardwood top. “Too many people to deal with if you had.”

A deep, ragged breath propelled Clem into the bright yellow notes of her kitchen, where she cleaned and filled the kettle. “I’ve read all your online articles on me. Mama didn’t think I should, but then, mama…”

The woman was in the doorway when Clem turned around.

“Jesus,” Clem said, pressing a hand over her chest; her eyes darting up in way of apology. The beat was headed for her bones now—she was sure of it, all that quivering inside. The woman held up her basket.

“I brought a few things—tea, chocolate, some toiletries. I know on the big screen someone’s always bringing a casserole, but, well, I’m not the cook at home.”

Clem realized then that she was still wearing her mother’s apron—faded white polka dots on cornflower blue; frills all up the plain cotton straps; sunflower patches sprouting from the pocket in front. “It’s been six months,” she said. “I can take care of myself.”

“Oh, no doubt,” said the woman. “I saw all the boxes stacked on your porch. Amazing what you can get delivered these days.”

A flush climbed Clem’s neckline. She dried her hands on her mother’s apron and shut the pantry door on stacks of tinned soup, dry pasta, and sauce.

“That stuff’s for a special project.”

“No, it’s not.” The woman spoke slowly, but firmly. “You know I know it’s not.”

Clem offered up a quizzical look the woman matched by waiting until the pieces fell into place. Surveillance was nothing new, but Clem realized she had never thought it would continue through a death. “I should’ve filed for a restraining order,” she said quietly.

“Ah.” The woman held up a hand. “But for that, I believe you do need to leave the house for a while.”

The boiling water made its piercing call. Clem steadied herself by the weight of the instrument in her hands; passing back into the dining room, the notion came to her of hurling the kettle, or at least its contents, at the woman now setting fresh tea bags from her basket into each mug.

“Are you religious, Mrs. Langley?” she said instead. “Do you believe in our risen Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ?”

The woman sat by the head of the table and blew steadily against the steam rising from her mug. Her glasses were old, and visibly worn at the hinges. “I was raised Catholic,” the woman said. Clem paid more attention to what she had not.

“Then you know you cannot judge me. You never could.”

“Do you think I ever meant to?” The woman set down her tea and smoothed folds from the narrow runner bridging the length of the dining table. “You were just a child, Clementine. Four years old when it began.”

Clem needed no reminding. How much bigger the room had seemed then; how majestic the sunlight spilling over the long and jumbled line of paint jars, paints with names like quests unto themselves: Burnt sienna. Crimson red. Ultramarine. And then the ones she had named herself, little meticulous labels on the side of every pot: The Deepest Green of Eden. Blessed Art Thou White. Hosanna Pink, and later Purple.

“When I began,” she said.

The woman’s eyes creased at the corners, and she held her mug up to her lips a long and patient while, until Clem was certain the rain had stopped.

“Why are you here?” Clem said at last. “What do you want?”

“Oh, I’m off duty,” the woman said. With a sliver of a smile that did not reach her eyes, she set her purse on the table and tipped the contents out. Phone, wallet, loose receipts from many weeks past, eyeliner, lip balm, the book she had been reading out front, and a key chain laden as much with accessories as keys. Again, Clem took note of what was absent. The woman lifted her charcoal-grey lapels for good measure.

“I promise,” she said. “I’m not bugged.”

Clem’s eyes flooded with a stinging heat. “Then what—”

“You know what’s hard about small town news?” the woman said. “How much we know one another. The reporters, the people we write about. Everyone. Good grief, the mayor’s on Dave’s hockey team—Dave Barkley, my editor-in-chief. And that arson case last year, the one with the pregnant teen from LCI? Debbie’s daughter used to go on play dates with her. Deborah Shaw, our senior news reporter. Every now and then we get funding for a spring intern—someone fresh out of their first term at a journalism program out west—and you can just see it dawn in them, that utter frustration borne of purist ideals; the conviction that we should be disclosing everything. Every association. Every potential bias.”

Clem watched the woman’s gaze drift along the table, and her two fingers come up to rest at her lips. “Your mother,” the woman said, and then paused as though it were a statement unto itself. “Almost all of us were in high school around her—some a couple years before, some a couple after. Me, I was in senior year when she started out; that made me the least connected, and still—still I remember hearing when she got pregnant. When Kenny—” The woman attempted something of a deeper, wistful smile, but it turned quickly to a grimace. “When your father… at the warehouse. That was huge. The whole town was shaken. And I shook your mother’s hand at the service. Donated to the fund the church set up—for her, and for you. So now, tell me, how do you summarize a thing like that?”

Clem swallowed with difficulty, then nodded across the table. “That would’ve done, what you just said.”

“Oh, I said something of it before, Clementine—in my first column on the matter, back when you were four. The Herald wasn’t online then, though, and those archives still aren’t searchable in any coherent way. I’d be surprised if your mother kept clippings of it, either, such as the content was. But after that first one, you must understand, it was like preaching to the choir; the whole town knew your mother’s story by then, especially after you started making a splash with the nationals, and the big town dailies. It was in the back of all our minds.”

“So why keep going? You’d had your say, and plenty others were having theirs, too.”

“Because the story kept getting bigger, of course. Because soon you were what the town was best known for. And because people wanted updates. Whether they thought of it all as a fraud or not, they wanted to know what happened next.”

“Like we didn’t get enough of that from the big city papers,” Clem said. “And the tabloids. You know, most of the time mama had to keep the phone unplugged because of people like you—and worse. People who’d just call to say the most awful things.”

The woman’s lips drew wide and thin. “You mean people and papers that didn’t buy into it. I know your mother talked to plenty of the rest.”

“Well, why not?” Clem felt the errant heartbeat filtering through her bones now, a pounding right up to her skull. “The things you called her. You, Mrs. Langley. Some of the nationals, too, and the tabloids, sure, but you. Those are things you’ll have to answer for some day, Mrs. Langley. Those are things He’s going to find written on your heart.”

Clem searched for some sign of contrition, but the woman seemed unmoved by even these words of power, and Clem only felt all the worse for intimating the woman’s final judgment to no good and moralizing effect.

“There are plenty in town who’d agree with you,” the woman said instead. “Folks who’d rather our town be known for the ‘What if’ over the fraud theory any day. Folks who felt that, no matter what, your mother was still one of our own, and even if I didn’t see that, I had a duty to protect our own from outsiders, and there were better things I could’ve been doing than raising questions again and again about your mother’s wildest claims.”

“We prayed for you, you know.” Clem spoke so suddenly she had to catch herself with a sharp inhalation of breath—the memories quick to rise to any opportunity. Even now Clem could hear her mother appealing for the eternal welfare of ‘that woman’ at The Herald, and herself answering with what still sounded in her head like the smallest, the slenderest ‘amen’. Clem took another slow and ragged breath to extricate herself from even that much dwelling upon the distant sound of her mother’s voice.

“Every night for weeks after each of those columns,” Clem said. “We prayed that you’d one day know peace, so you wouldn’t need to spout all that anger anymore just to get through the day. That’s the trouble with reporters like you, Mrs. Langley—you write down all those words, you look for all the facts, but you leave nothing for the heart. Nothing. There just isn’t room for people like me in your world, even though you must know, you must, that there are more things in heaven and earth than exist—”

“Yes,” the woman said. “I know.”

Clem tightened her hold on her mug, its heat matched by her own, just under the skin. “Then why was it so hard to just believe? What was so awful about my family’s story that you couldn’t even entertain the possibility that it was true?”

The woman watched her closely now, and there was a knot in Clem’s stomach at the thought that pity was what she saw in the woman’s weathered face.

“It’s not awful for a child to hope,” the woman said. “Or even to believe that she can commune with her deceased father in another realm. What’s awful is a person taking advantage of that hope, and claiming that this child’s been given prophetic sight and the artistry to match. Saying that God has allowed a miracle to occur in your drawings, Clementine, then selling those drawings to gullible people at the highest possible price.”

“You call them gullible.” Clem trembled with fresh indignation at the woman’s words, which seemed almost brought to life from columns past. “That doesn’t make it so.”

“Fair enough.” The woman inclined her head. “I concede that. But if there’s a loving God in the world, I still can’t believe He’d choose to intervene in human affairs in such a frivolous way, while staying silent on all the famines, and the diseases, and the violent wars that devastate our sense of dignity every day. I just can’t believe that, Clementine. Can you?”

But ‘if’ was the only word Clem had registered; she fixed her mind on it with utter incredulity. “God gave me this gift,” she said at last. “That’s all I know. I know not to what end, but if you believe that our Lord is a good Lord, and a just Lord, and a loving Lord, then that should be enough. The rest is not for us to know.”

“Oh, but sometimes it is,” the woman said. “In this day and age? Your mother never submitted you to even the simplest of tests, Clementine, and why would she? She was already making plenty of sales online. What did she stand to gain from the truth?”

“But there are videos. The TV news teams—”

“They got a few minutes, tops, of you with your brush on a nearly completed canvas. And even then the experts questioned your technique, your colour choices in contrast with finished works that had already been released. Your mother never allowed them to record the whole process—not one painting from beginning to end. She said painting was a time of tranquility and spiritual connection for you, and she couldn’t let anyone tamper with it. Her word, Clementine: ‘tamper’. As if we were the ones messing with the ways of the world.”

“I met him, though,” Clem said. “You can’t say I didn’t. I was only eight weeks old when daddy died, but I drew him perfectly after he came to me in a dream one night, when I was just four years old. Mama had all his pictures locked away, but I knew. I just knew.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did she have all those pictures locked away? Doesn’t it seem a strange thing to do? Especially for your mother, who so believed that Kenny was in Heaven, looking down and watching over the two of you? You were only four, Clementine. And such dreams that children dream. How easily they buy into an adult’s guiding words.”

“So you are here to try to debunk it after all, then,” Clem said, rising. “Like a vulture swooping in at her leisure. And mama only six months passed, God rest her soul. You should be ashamed of yourself, Mrs. Langley, to come upon me at a time like this just to say such vile and nasty things.”

But the woman’s gaze had already shifted past the table and up the cream-print wall, where it settled on a foot-long wooden crucifix mounted just above a dusty looking glass.

“You don’t get many visitors anymore, do you, Clementine? Besides the deliverymen, I mean. Six months you’ve been cooped up in here, and all those visitors dropping off after two months, maybe three.”

“I have friends,” Clem said, though even she caught her voice faltering some. “People write me. I’ve got lots who say I’m in their prayers.”

“I see,” the woman said. “Customers? Church folk your mother knew? Home-schooled as you were, did you make many friends your own age?”

When Clem said nothing the woman sighed. “Did it ever occur to you that, deep down inside, they knew? That they liked being a part of that terrific ‘What if?’ while it was popular, but a part of them always knew whose was the real hand on the brush? And that once that hand had passed on, it would only be a matter of time before it emerged that your ‘gift’ was gone as well?”

“I thought you said these people were gullible. Now they’re conniving. Which is it, Mrs. Langley?”

“People can be incredibly conniving when the aim is to keep their dearest, deepest deceptions intact.” The woman paused. “But I’m not trying to break them of that habit today, Clementine. Or ever again, where your story’s concerned.”

Clem’s eyebrows shot up. “You’re going to leave us alone, then? You promise?”

The woman seemed taken aback by Clem’s choice of pronoun. “Yes,” she said carefully. “I promise. Clementine, you’re eighteen now, and by my reckoning you’ve run out of remnants of your mother’s work to sell. Now, maybe you picked up a thing or two about art yourself, and you can apply to a college program after getting your high school equivalency—your mother’s insurance money must surely cover something to that end. And I hope you do. I really hope you can find it in yourself to leave this house again. But you have another option, too—to take back your mother’s story; to make it yours, in print. It’s rightfully yours anyway, and you can do so much good by telling it yourself, with all the complexity, and the honesty, that it deserves.”

“So much for honour thy father and mother.”

“There’s also a bit in the Bible about bearing false witness. I understand it’s hard, though, knowing at times which should come first.”

Clem shut her eyes and bowed her head. The beat inside her bones had turned at last into a full-bodied prayer, which she uttered in silence while standing—her hands clutching white-knuckled at the table’s edge, a fleeting thought in mind of simply passing out.

“I have an intern now,” the woman said while Clem prayed. “Her name’s Wendy, and she’s marvellous. Really, anything on the web she just gets, and she’s quite the patient teacher, too—even with us old birds at the office. She’s the one who made me realize that there’s no such thing as local news anymore. Not in this town, at least. Not since The Herald went digital. Now whenever anyone, anywhere, hears your name and the claims attached to it, my columns come up just as easily in the search engines as any by the nationals, or the online TV broadcasts.

“The difference being that I was always writing for an audience that already knew your mother—at least, as much as I knew her, if not more—so my audience had a context to read even my harshest words against. But none of these folks online know that. None of them were here when we all heard about the warehouse, so how could they understand that it scared a lot of us strange for a while? And I don’t blame them for not being interested, either, because what they want to know is important, too: Is this story a fake, or isn’t it? But I still wish I’d been kinder, Clementine. I do. And I do wish your mother’s choices had made kindness an easier feat for people like me.”

“But I’m not a fake,” Clem said. “And neither was she.”

The woman pushed her glasses higher up her raw-boned nose. “Misguided, then. Not quite as miraculous as first made out to be.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Clem said. “I’m just in the middle of one—the next one, I mean. I didn’t know if I ever could—again—but last month I broke through the grief. Really I did.”

The woman’s expression, while impassive on the whole, could not mask the flicker of doubt behind those worn-out lenses. “What,” she said. “You mean a painting? In progress?”

Clem felt a warmth course through her then, much calmer than the heat that had preceded it. She did not need to glance at the crucifix to draw further strength from its embodiment of grace. “Would you like to see it? Would you like to watch?”

The woman hesitated. “It could just be another unfinished canvas you found among your mother’s things. Or, you know, Clementine, you’re eighteen now; there could easily be a skilled artist in you yet.”

“So?”

“So nothing about this changes your mother’s claims when you were four.”

“All right.” Clem shrugged. “But still. It’s something, isn’t it? And maybe even something good?” Now it was Clem’s turn to wait, the woman scanning the whole of the dining room before pushing aside her mug.

“All right,” the woman said at last. “Why not?”

The room had barely changed since Clem’s earliest recollections, except that now it was smaller in a way that the bright white walls and the slanted windows, for all the sun they were letting in at the close of the morning’s storm, could not repair. The wall trim moulding still bore shapes of childhood images in primary reds, yellows, blues, and greens; the rug over dark wood flooring was frayed and spattered with flecks of paint nearly fifteen years deep. Another white wicker chair sat in one corner, a stack of Bible scholarship and romance novels in an uneven stack by its side. There was only one easel, wrought of towering, maple legs, and it was set in the centre of the room with workbenches on either side. By the far wall leaned a canvas a metre long on either side, draped in stained white cloth.

As the woman paused just inside the doorway, surveying all the little toys and accessories still strewn about the room from ages past, Clem moved the canvas, cloth and all, onto the easel and rooted about for brushes, cups, and paints. When she looked up the woman had one hand on the wicker chair, and two fingers over her lips as she read the title of each stacked book.

“Your mother’s seat, or yours?”

Clem paused, and for the first time searched the woman from The Herald for some presence of her mother—in the neck-folds, or the slight stoop at the shoulders, or the general reediness of the woman’s frame. How old her mother had looked, too, nearest the end.

“Ready?” Clem said, drawing up a stool before the easel. The woman turned and, with a slight nod, gave Clem her full attention. But there was something in the woman’s expression—something already braced for disappointment, two fingers still resting upon those small, pale lips—that left Clem dizzy, her body almost rag-doll limp when she faced the mounted work and realized how long it had been since another human being last shared this space with her, and how many eyes were truly set upon her now. No prayers came to Clem over the beating of her own heart, but before tearing off the protective cloth, her hands clung for what seemed an eternity to that rough fabric—like an apron, or a shroud.

This is probably why my only memory of my grandmother is of her folding plastic bags, one by one, at the end of a table heaped with junk, in a kitchen with counters heaped with more. Outside her door the very floor was falling apart, wooden tile by tile, while in the dual-purpose closet/food cupboard opposite my room, with the sliding doors that refused to sit right on their runners, ancient tin cans and new alike served as an obstacle course for intrepid mice, who left their offerings all about the white shelves, the floor, the garbage bags of miscellanies and out-of-seasonal wear, and yes, even the cat’s dishes. The grocery store plastic bags were wedged in a container mounted on one wall; we’d stuff new ones in the top, and pull out what we needed from the bottom. This made my grandmother’s attempt at instilling order in this half-finished, half-run-down household all the stranger; to be sure, she had an efficient way of folding plastic bags, but wherever would we put them, if not back in that tube?

I never asked. She was rather quiet around me, though in hindsight I can’t tell if I was simply foisting my own feelings about the house, and the family situation in general that she’d walked into, onto her as an outsider–an intimate stranger in her son’s adult home. Maybe she was happier with seeing us than she let on; maybe she was withdrawn for other reasons entirely. Beyond this meeting, though, I would have little occasion to know the truth before she died, to establish a rapport with this woman who had been such a part of my father’s difficult childhood in turn. Certainly, my siblings and I would have the occasional conversation with her at holidays, but even then, as the years progressed and dementia set in, these conversations became as difficult to follow as they were always cordial, and remote.

These days, I don’t go to the house of my childhood if I can help it anymore. For almost ten years now, my bedroom has been my brother’s, with curious artefacts of my own life there still in the shelves. After eighteen years of loving him unconditionally as both older sister and unofficial third guardian, we had an abrupt falling out, after which time did its indifferent work. I think my attempt at unconditional love was probably the problem; it was too suffocating, although at the time I thought I was giving him something he needed–something his parents weren’t able to do due to all the pain and the anger that they were also working through. As I have been told in heated exchanges, it was “not my job” to fill the role that I did, but that is a difficult fact to accept when my three younger siblings were once rushing to me time and time again in fear about events in progress. Not a single person in that whole situation wasn’t hurting in their own way, and the only thing I can call myself thankful for now is that we all survived it–in some position, I have to hope, to become stronger people as we press on.

Regardless, my brother, too, has become an intimate stranger; I hear reports of his life and it seems to be working out well (and I really am glad); I know that he has friends and community and passions, and I have no doubt he’ll continue to grow in directions I cannot even possibly anticipate now. I have male friends in their forties, fifties, and sixties who talk of going through wild and uneven periods in their young adult life, and changing drastically thereafter: soft-spoken social workers who started out as hardened gang members; devoted family men who treated their first partners in ways that shame them to this day. Extreme cases, certainly–but object lessons all the same. Life is long, and as much as we are ever ourselves we also show a remarkable capacity for fluid expression of ourselves over time.

I don’t expect that my brother will ever forgive me for speaking up, though–it’s simply not reasonable to wait on another adult to change their mind about desiring interaction again–and so I see before us the fate of many siblings: of many people, period, who cared for each other deeply at a time and now are unknown to one another in every practical way. There are so frightfully many of those in life, too, that sometimes I find it all rather hard to bear–even if I know how utterly complicit I am in the creation of most.

The first person I loved in a romantic way, for instance, I knew in my gut I wasn’t good enough for. The person came from a stable, happy, and well-off family, and when we shared classes that person could focus on the material even at the end of the day, while I struggled to stay awake because the walls of my family house had shaken with argument late into the night. I saw myself very much as part of the problem in my family, which prevented me for years from seeing the use in extricating myself, or from seeing the possibility of transformation, let alone being good enough for another human being. How could I be, when it seemed the very fact of my existence was already so terrible for so many? I walked this person home for years, then, and we were an important part of one another’s adolescent metamorphoses, but when we went to different universities–me in a different city because I needed that geographical distance–I knew in my gut that this friend of mine deserved better. We met once for coffee that first year, quite amicably, and never spoke again. Thanks to the wonder of social media, I am fortunate to say this person seems every bit as happy as I’d hoped they would be.

Some of my strongest friendships in the years to follow only emerged “through the fire” of similar attempts at erasure on my end–for once I care about folks, it is still sometimes difficult to see that I can best show how much I care about them by being in their lives, especially when my proximity only means that they end up seeing so much more of what I’m still working through. Such is the persistent and routinely maddening legacy of self-hatred born of guilt, which can and must be undone day by day–but some people have stuck through my phases all the same, for better or for worse, and it brings me to tears just thinking about how fortunate I am.

There is also, I should add, the intimacy of genuine strangers in all of this–for I have always delighted in conversing with people I meet on the street, at bus stops, or in places I routinely frequent. I consider it important to thank people who get me from place to place, or to pass on a friendly word to people working long hours, or to greet or smile at folks in my neighbourhood, or just to ease the agitation of an interminably long line, and it’s lovely to see that so many people share the impulse. In my immediate neighbourhood, too, I’m especially mindful that there are many new immigrant families coming from parts of the world where people are generally more friendly and open on the streets with one another. I’ve had folks around here tell me that one of the greatest adjustments has been to how little eye contact, let alone conversation, most Canadians make–and I consider that very much a shame.

Nonetheless, as more acquaintanceships and friendships become mediated primarily through online media, the prevalence of the other kind of intimate stranger–the one with whom a fonder, closer past was once shared–can become decidedly alienating. On Facebook, for instance, I see friends who expertly utilize the medium for what it is: a mode of superficial performance; a lighthearted, off-the-cuff sharing of photo memes and silly status updates; a logistics tool for organizing in-person encounters (and pressuring folks into showing up); and above all else, an easy way to keep an idle eye on a wide range of people one has come to know throughout all the bizarre turns in life.

I am not very good at these kinds of performances. I’ll post enthusiastic statuses one minute, and the next minute despise their grotesque silliness. I’ll post longer statuses related to science or world news links, then take them down and replace them with just the link. And while I routinely say “Facebook isn’t really the place to have these conversations” (thinking instead, G+!), I’ll get into long-winded conversations with people who hold diametrically different views, even though I should really know better by now.

The last is especially hard, because all it really takes is one conversation where someone outs themselves as a poor debater–as dishonest, as a holder of rather ugly views for terribly articulated reasons, as profoundly un-self-aware–for all future encounters to acquire the tension of a caricatured Thanksgiving dinner, with that one awkward guest in the room. When a body falls into more arguments than they should online, this happens with depressing regularity–and I do, so something has to change on my end. (And I’m trying.) I want to have genuine conversations about topics I consider important, but in having these conversations I often just find more and more folks I don’t wish to talk to anymore. That’s a level of cynicism I don’t enjoy in myself–but to consciously use online media in a more flippant manner to avoid such encounters seems more cynical still. A third option is required.

One final anecdote: I am a disconcertingly coherent dreamer. I can read, “write”, and construct valid mathematical equations in my dreams. I even routinely dream mystery adventures that play out sensible story-lines, which of course come to their most satisfactory conclusions just before I wake up. But the strangest dreams I have are simple, calm conversations with people I used to know better, or people I feel I have harmed in some way and cannot effectively reach now to make amends. These are not self-congratulatory talks; nothing ever gets resolved in full, and in measured tones these dream personas pull no punches and make good points as to why. At best I might say I leave these dreams with a better understanding of the irreconcilable minutiae of life, but after I’ve woken, and adjusted to the fact that these conversations did not happen in real life, I feel sadly haunted above all else. Understanding alone does not bring peace.

The older I get, then, the more I realize that writing ever was and will be the means by which I best know how to communicate honestly with other people, and to navigate the ache of knowing that so very much in life is never perfectly resolved. I cannot expect to be understood; I cannot expect even to be read; and conversely, I cannot expect to understand other people, or their positions, as adequately as they, too, deserve. But there is something comforting, all the same, in continuing to make the attempt–like a marooned sailor tossing bottles into the sea–at fighting the strange life current that finds us so close, so often, to understanding and supporting one another… and then turns altogether aside.

My paternal grandmother will never know it, but I still take comfort in that one small gesture of hers which I best remember, and the promise borne within: that while understanding is hard, and helping (not hindering), often harder, we are nonetheless surrounded by other people marooned on their own islands, ever tossing message-laden bottles into that most divisive current; hoping against hope that even one finds rest on other, tender shores.

Except with books ‘n’ stuff instead of the American flag. Wish I had a porch, though! The humidity’s really coming on fast!

Also: Thankfully, I’m now headed into my 48-hour writing break. It’s been wonderful getting back into the groove of submitting fiction; last week I revised and resubmitted two stories, and wrote and submitted another one. This week I have designs on finishing another short story and working on the longer MS.

Hope your own writing goals are within reach!

To state my case plainly: I have entered a phase in my studies that is not new to me, but weighs just as heavily each time I pass through it. It is a phase in which the blatant cyclicality of history discourages me from further participation in general discourse, and I wonder at the point of education at all, if it only brings me so often to such disillusioned ends. I feel this sort of futility after reading the works of Classical antiquity; I felt it while reading medieval literature in two graduate-level courses, and Evangelical lit in another; I feel it whenever I review histories of science, facts and fictions of Soviet Russia, or philosophical treatises of any sort.

Reading four primary texts from my Victorian literature CAE list this past week–two by Dickens and two by John Stuart Mill–I similarly could not avoid noting how little ever seems to change in either the range of our ideas or the general obstinacy with which they are met. I can marvel, certainly, in how limited Mill’s On Liberty (which I have read before) seems through the lens of 20th-century political theorist John Rawls, but when even the general cast of Mill’s views might prove scathing rebuke to the behaviours and infringements of current “democratic” governments, I cannot deny how tediously permanent this ethical tension between State and Individual seems to be.

In Hard Times, too, when Dickens makes a caricature of utilitarianism in order to forward an uneven and underdeveloped portrait of industrial town life (something he might well have left to Gaskell, whose comments on the same are much better informed), I cannot help but reflect on how much sloppy argumentation surrounds us every news cycle (and not to mention, personally, in most every debate I foolishly allow myself to get caught up in). It is one thing to exchange arguments with those for whom the measure of success in any given exchange lies in how completely both parties come to understand one another’s positions, and through them, to better articulate their own; it is entirely another to attempt to discuss anything significant with anyone who holds the very discussion of ideas to be a form of personal attack, or who is quick to rely on personal attack and related snap evaluations of differing points of view in order to achieve a kind of “victory” over the other.

There are other forms of dishonest or ignorant argumentation in public and private experience alike, but these suffice to describe a variety of failed conversations I have had this year, with the unfortunate consequence that, even before starting this week’s readings, I already felt at a loss as to how to discuss anything of use with many otherwise well-meaning folks in my acquaintance. If that seems an altogether arrogant statement, let me just add that this feels more a loss to me than to anyone else, as I hold it to be of the utmost importance to test the continued worth of those ideas I presently hold dear, whereas other people are unlikely to be mortally wounded if I decline to engage them in further, seemingly useless debate.

Mill expresses a similar feeling, in Autobiography, as excuse for choosing solitude to general companionship at one juncture in his young adult life:

General society, as now carried on in England, is so insipid an affair, even to the persons who make it what it is, that it is kept up for any reason rather than the pleasure it affords. … [M]ost people, in the present day, of any really high class of intellect, make their contact with it so slight, and at such long intervals, as to be almost considered as retiring from it altogether. Those persons of any mental superiority who do otherwise, are, almost without exception, greatly deteriorated by it. (159-60)

Yet I question the power of books alone to provide the company needed to test one’s beliefs, and to keep one generally honest and prepared to make full use of their learning to date. Whatever “deterioration” is suffered by participating in “general society” (in great part, Mill argues, because of the tacit oppression of dissenting opinions that naturally follows from routine exposure to people for whom “[a]ll serious discussion on matters in which people differ [is] considered ill-bred” [159]), it cannot be avoided by eschewing company altogether–and one might even be all the worse for absenting oneself from the social current by which broad, cultural transitions are most often propelled.

I should wonder, for instance, if there were not intellectuals during the Russian Revolution, or in early 1930s Germany, or 1920s China, who looked up from their books one day entirely bewildered by the press of dogma all about them, and so found themselves utterly at a loss at that late hour to enact meaningful resistance against dehumanizing state movements. What use is a polished understanding of concepts like justice and liberty throughout the long, hard road of history, if they cannot be directly employed to the needs of the day?

But then again, what use is a polished understanding of anything, if that polish only serves to reveal the vicious grin of historical redundancy? When Mill also writes in Autobiography, after ascribing to his father an argument for the amorality of religious doctrine that almost perfectly matches my own views, “The time, I believe, is drawing near when this dreadful conception of an object of worship will be no longer identified with Christianity; and when all persons, with any sense of moral good and evil, will look upon it with the same indignation with which my father regarded it” (29), I laughed and then sighed–for how long a wait the world is still enduring on that accord, and no doubt will continue to endure long after my death.

Mill shares this gloomy outlook, too, when he writes:

I am now convinced, that no great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought. The old opinions in religion, morals, and politics, are so much discredited in the more intellectual minds as to have lost the greater part of their efficacy for good, while they have still life enough in them to be a powerful obstacle to the growing up of any better opinions on the subjects. When the philosophic minds of the world can no longer believe its religion, or can only believe it with modifications amounting to an essential change of its character, a transitional period commences, of weak convictions, paralysed intellects, and growing laxity of principle, which cannot terminate until a renovation has been effected in the base of their belief leading to the elevation of some faith, whether religious or merely human, which they can really [168] believe: and when things are in this state, all thinking or writing which does not tend to promote such a renovation, is of very little value beyond the moment. (167-8)

Where I part from Mill, though, is again in his temporal language–for while he speaks of a transitional period, I find very little in history to suggest a time that was not transitional: a time, indeed, when opinions upon the most urgent questions of the day were not invariably of a muddled and diverse nature–some arising from careful analysis (marked by extreme prejudice or otherwise); others arising from a passion or intuition not by any measure to be harnessed to syllogistic argument; others still–likely in the majority–arising from whimsical remarks founded on a general disinterest in engaging with the issue altogether.

In my own argumentative practice, then, I try to avoid the language of temporal urgency, for I see very few cases in which it is not employed solely for stylistic effect. When someone laments, for instance, the changing of social circumstances from those they knew best as a child, or at least heard favourably of from predecessors, and further suggests that the pillars of civilization will crumble if the current path of social upheaval continues, listeners should well and truly ask if this person has demonstrated enough historical breadth to support such claims. An individual lifetime is terrifically short, after all, especially when assessed against the ancient sweep of human history; if I cannot trust a speaker to speculate reasonably about the likeliest outcome of a specific course of action–if, instead, I am to expect a climate where those ideas tethered to the most extreme outcomes, however implausible, are given greater public regard–how on earth can I expect reason to prevail at any other juncture of political or social discourse?

If my rereading of On Liberty discouraged me, though, and if my reading of Hard Times frustrated me, and if Autobiography provided only the bitterest salve of philosophical communion, Our Mutual Friend bound and dragged me back to some measure of practical feeling, and compassion, for a world in which this conflagration of dissenting, unequally yoked voices is nonetheless our own, and doubtless teeming with others made equally despondent by the general improbability of ever being more than carried along by their generational tide.

Our Mutual Friend is Dickens’ last novel, and among his longest. It suffers from prosaic padding at junctures, with descriptions often as repetitive as they are circuitous, and while it takes some time for all the different characters he introduces to become inextricably linked, the links themselves often teeter on unlikely, but terribly convenient, coincidence. Nonetheless, the story gains considerable poignancy as it comments both on the corrupting influence of money, and the haphazard state of contemporaneous London, which has people of all walks of life, with all manner of attributes, striving in their own confused ways toward the acquisition of vague notions of improved class status.

Three plots vie for supremacy in this gargantuan tale: 1) The story of the Harmon fortune, promised to John Harmon if he marries Bella Wilfer, but delivered instead to Mr and Mrs Boffin, working-class persons whose strength of character will be tested by the sudden wealth, when John “dies” and a certain “Mr Rokesmith” arises instead to test the character of the pseudo-widow; 2) The story of Lizzie Hexam, daughter of a waterman of poor character and associates, who sends her brother to school to better himself, and for her trouble finds herself the subject of headmaster Bradley Headstone’s violent passions, while secretly grieving that her lower class gives her no right to the love of one Eugene Wrayburn, a barrister; and 3) The experiences of poor Twemlow, a man of good family connections and the air of old money who finds himself in the whirlwind company of Mr and Mrs Veneering, “bran-new” money, and their society of similarly superficial acquaintances/”oldest friends”–some of whom, like Mr and Mr Lammle, are early ruined by participation in these circles, and so conspire to ensnare others in turn.

As with most all of Dickens’ narratives, Our Mutual Friend provides a staggering multitude of distinct characters (the above description leaves out, among others, Rogue Riderhood, Pleasant Riderhood, Miss Abbey Potterson, the Podsnaps, Mortimer Lightwood, Reginald Wilfer, Lavinia Wilfer, Mrs Wilfer, Betty Higden, Johnny, Sloppy, Jenny Wren, Mr Dolls, Riah, Fledgeby, Silas Wegg, and Mr Venus). To be able to juggle so many dissenting points of views, such that one might know even a secondary character simply from a turn of phrase over so long a narrative, is an impressive feat, and one that certainly seems to excuse Dickens’ rather blunt and explicit foregrounding of the opinions he clearly intends his story to impart. As Bella proclaims at one juncture:

I have hoped and trusted not too, pa; but every day he changes for the worse, and for the worse. Not to me–he is always much the same to me–but to others about him. Before my eyes he grows suspicious, capricious, hard, tyrannical, unjust. If ever a good man were ruined by good fortune, it is my benefactor. And yet, pa, think how terrible the fascination of money is! I see this, and hate this, and dread this, and don’t know but that money might make a much worse change in me. And yet I have money always in my thoughts and desires: and the whole life I place before myself is money, money, money, and what money can make of life! (435)

This is the difference, perhaps, between Our Mutual Friend and Hard Times, for neither spends much time developing an interior life for its characters, such that readers can cleanly see how they progress from one point of view to another, and both have direct articulations (like the above) of their overall thematic purpose. However, while the surrounding cacophony of human struggle in the former allows Dickens to telegraph his themes so blatantly (cushioned, as they are, in that deluge of supporting detail), the latter is pared to a rather straightforward narrative, and in that form the interiority of its characters as they make pivotal transformations is more visibly absent.

This is not to say, of course, that the two-dimensionality of Dickens’ characters in Our Mutual Friend is not also fairly self-evident: Dickens himself may decry money and class-climbing, but his fixation on female beauty in this text (Mr Rokesmith loves Bella even when her beauty is all she has to commend herself to anyone, while Lizzie’s beauty and manner of speech drives a man to attempt, then commit murder) also suggests a limit to his critical eye. While the tome utilizes the language and institutions of science, law, and finance in a decidedly crude manner, his authorial voice ever falters on the threshold of Feminine Virtue, best exemplified here in Feminine Beauty. Though the pursuit of women in this text brings some men to their deaths, there is nothing in this vein, as in the others Dickens derides, to suggest that the pursuit itself was in error, or at the very least based on an unreasonable certitude that having a “Home Goddess” (354) would fix everything.

So it is, then, that all the characters in this novel, including the one Dickens himself portrays through a most unusual omniscient point of view (giving voice even to trains, water, and the dead at times), exert themselves bluntly upon this universe–stating their cases plainly; driving doggedly for their ends–and while the conclusion is very much of the “Bad Guys Dead / Good Guys Wed” variety, a greater sense remains of so very many voices still competing to be heard long after the book is closed.

I have said elsewhere and often that there is no reason to live if not for one another; having had no choice about being born, the choice to terminate one’s life while still of satisfactory mind and body is nonetheless a choice to leave other persons to manage the confusion and, yes, even the futility of the struggle on their own. Dickens was a popular writer in his time, not regarded as quite the same calibre as writers of more interior, psychological texts, but what he lacked in an attention to inner life, he made up for in his sweeping, grand scale portraits of society as a whole. Mill may well have struggled, then (as I certainly struggle from time to time myself), to live with intellectual honesty and rigour in a culture made up of many different human beings aspiring to very different interactive ends–but Dickens is the more correct, I suspect, in putting faces to each dissenting member of society. These are our fellow creatures, and so long as we comfortably draw breath we owe to them a debt.

As to what to say to them, I should like to think that, even at my most cynical about the likelihood of meaningful discussion ensuing, or of inveterate History itself being transformed by the encounter, I can still try my luck with a simple “Hello” and see what happens next.

There really is nothing else for it: never was, and might not ever be.

Every grad student, of course, has a different method: Some swear by binders filled with notes; some proselytize about mind maps; others suggest spreadsheets, and lots of them. I put together a database Thursday, and it’s useful enough in its own way–but it’s not me. That’s when I realized I already have a way to synthesize material. I write essays: lots and lots of essays.

I’m sorry to say, then, that you might just see a lot of doctoral studies posts around these parts for the next seven months.

I promise to try to make them relevant, though! Because, honestly, what’s the point of working through Victorian literature if I can’t adequately defend its relevance to reading and writing practices today?

Without further ado, then, attempt the first:

What We Talk About When We Talk About Social Realism:
Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Cranford, and North and South as Case Studies in Narrative Cohesion

We in the 21st century tend to think we know what a novel is (the things that keep cropping up on “Heather’s Picks” and Oprah’s Book Club lists, right?)–and further, we look back at the 19th century as a place where, surely, people understood what a novel was. How else to explain the tremendous tomes that emerged in the Victorian period–your Dickensian behemoths; your sprawling works of Hardy and Eliot; yea, the colossus of Vanity Fair?

But reading the works of mid-19th-century writer Elizabeth Gaskell, for instance, should provide an immediate rebuke to any notion of the novel emerging as a literary form wholly distinct from precursor texts. This should in some sense be evident just from the publication record for these and other writers: Gaskell–like Dickens, Hardy, Eliot, and Thackeray–published her works first in serial form, with weekly and monthly publications the norm for the period. Two- or three-volume collections (or, less frequently, the single-volume novel) followed soon after, but they did–far more often than not–follow.

This distended publication schedule meant that Gaskell (like other such writers of what we now experience as singular texts) had the double-edged sword of reader response throughout the production of her narratives: able, if not outright compelled, to shift the focus of her plot to suit readership demands.

The very form of serial publication also meant that chapter breakdowns–already somewhat episodic by virtue of their size–were further enhanced (intentionally or otherwise) to suit weekly or monthly lulls in the content. While one would certainly hope for readers who had attended closely to prior issues of a given story, clear and repeated references to previous plot points still proved useful in ensuring that an overarching through-line endured from one week (or month) to the next.

Conversely, there was also more leave to launch into an entirely different note with the next chapter (introducing, say, a new perspective or new group of characters), because the kind of immediate narrative continuity we often expect from texts when read in full simply did not apply to the serial form; there was already ample temporal and spatial distance between one chapter and the next [1].

The aims of the magazine or newspaper as a whole also had to be taken into account when deciding a story’s direction–and for Gaskell, publishing in Dickens’ Household Words, that meant two things: 1) Some of her work was directly prompted by the demands of the journal, with its express engagement in “the raising up of those that are down, and the general improvement of our social condition” [2]; and 2) the length of her prose–somewhat ironically, given the source of such directives–was curtailed at times by Dickens’ editorial limitations to that end [3].

Experience also plays a not-inconsiderable role in the strength of a given tale. Mary Barton (1848) was Gaskell’s first novel, and though this story of impoverished Manchester workers during the 1830s and early 1840s launched her into considerable contemporaneous acclaim, as a writer with something meaningful to say about the difficult tension between (Christian) morality, labour politics, the forward march of industry, and the generally appalling plight of the urban poor, it is surely her later revisiting of such themes, in North and South (1855), that stands the more coherent, stable narrative.

To be sure, the former charts a linear enough course for its protagonist, Mary Barton, whose father (John) is so aggrieved by the mounting rates of starvation, disease, and brute death among Manchester’s working class that his part in Trade Union politics escalates to the most desperate and irreparable of acts. Mary, a young woman, undergoes a familiar, dramatic love plot–carelessly thinking she might rise to the status of a lady under the courtship of a man of high society (Harry Carson); spurning the abiding love of her hard-working, heart-o’-gold childhood friend (Jem Wilson); and so inadvertently playing a part in the ruination of both men. And, indeed, the story gains clear momentum once the consequences of this love-plot reach their crescendo in a murder mystery, a plot device that provides the story an obvious sense of urgency through the amount of time left before the accused will hang (if not saved).

The trouble with this story’s stability, though, lies in how very much else the novel struggles to convey, with the first half of the text pitching forward at an inconsistent rate–sometimes hours, sometimes days, sometimes months, sometimes years at a time between narrative episodes. The topics of these sections also cant uneasily between attempts at direct commentary about the story’s surrounding historical circumstances; moral defence and pre-emptive caution (on the narrator’s part for upper class readers, clearly) about the nature and cause of working class behaviours; groundwork for the story’s central love plot; and various fixations on secondary characters, who sometimes fall away (particularly through death) in lone, off-hand lines.

One gets the impression, really, that Gaskell finds the cadence of episodic long-form writing as she progresses through this piece–although the path she takes makes it difficult to integrate all her earlier themes. All the socioeconomic and political discourse negotiated in narratorial asides throughout early chapters, for instance, all but falls away once the murder plot arises; only after that whole messy business has been settled does the narrator return to broader social causes. However, even then, the way these topics are returned to in the novel’s closing chapters suggests increased authorial restraint. Unlike the heavy-handed narratorial asides in the first half of Mary Barton, the characters themselves debate these issues, with the narrator providing little more than examples of enacted policies. (Readers of North and South will no doubt recognize this style of social commentary–the characters themselves forwarding various positions in debate–as more consistently present within that later text.)

The narrator of Mary Barton is also peculiar in other ways. I’m tempted to call her an “extremely limited third-person narrator”, because at times she narrates stories of working-class lives with often unworldly omniscience, but at other times she openly has the same knowledge (and no more) as Elizabeth Gaskell [4]. The narrator writes, for instance, as evidence for a given claim: “If you will refer to the preface to Sir J. E. Smith’s Life (I have it not by me, or I would copy you the exact passage), you will find that he names a little circumstance corroborative of what I have said” (p. 76). At another juncture, referencing the “Seed of the Soul”, the narrator further states that she forgets which (“The Jews or the Mohammedans”) believe in the indestructibility of a specific vertebra (p. 133). Gaskell/Gaskell’s narrator seems similarly interested in conveying how she might respond to a given situation, even if such a comment is not directly relevant to the narrative–for instance: “Many people have a dread of those mysterious pieces of parchment. I am one. Mary was another” (p. 313). What possible purpose might this alignment serve?

Gaskell’s next set of works for Household Words, a single story pressed by Dickens into a collection of linked stories that eventually get published as the episodic novella, Cranford, offers some insight. Here, too, we have a decidedly partial and limited narrator–albeit, in this case, a first-person construct named Mary Smith. Mary switches between direct accounts of goings-on in staid little Cranford, an isolated community of mostly spinster women living on precarious means while attempting (through eccentric social strictures) to retain the last shreds of class-based dignity, and descriptions of the various letters she receives detailing further aspects of daily life therein. This makes Gaskell’s narrator a slightly more empowered agent than those found in a popular form of Victorian narrative, the epistolary novel; Mary is at once approachable to female readers of the same class, and just authoritative enough to command their attention for an anecdote or two.

In the general pursuit of social realism enacted by great swaths of Victorian literature [5], this approach to narrative voice has its advantages–not just to the cohesion of various short stories within a single (eventual) collection, but also to the establishment of a given narrative’s function within the context of its medium. There is some sense in Cranford, even, that Gaskell anticipates cultural dismissals of serial fiction as a meaningful conveyor of social “truth”. Between the characters of Miss Jenkyns (the elder) and Captain Brown, for instance, we get express description of a possible form for such criticism, and a counterpoint that can no more be heard by the accuser than a solid exemplar of good serial writing will ever be read by the truly obstinate:

…by-and-by, Captain Brown sported a bit of literature.
‘Have you seen any numbers of “The Pickwick Papers?”‘ said he. (They were then publishing in parts.) ‘Capital thing!’
Now, Miss Jenkyns was daughter of a deceased rector of Cranford; and, on the strength of a number of manuscript sermons, and a pretty good library of divinity, considered herself literary, and looked upon any conversation about books as a challenge to her. So she answered and said, ‘Yes, she had seen them; indeed, she might say she had read them.’
‘And what do you think of them?’ exclaimed Captain Brown. ‘Aren’t they famously good?’
So urged, Miss Jenkyns could not but speak.
‘I must say I don’t think they are by any means equal to Dr. Johnson. Still, perhaps, the author is young. Let him persevere, and who knows what he may become if he will take the great Doctor for his model.’
…
She thought she would give a finishing blow or two.
‘I consider it vulgar, and below the dignity of literature, to publish in numbers.’
‘How was the “Rambler” published, Ma’am?’ asked Captain Brown, in a low voice; which I think Miss Jenkyns could not have hard. [p. 10-1]

In a subsequent narrative episode, Miss Jenkyns appears victorious when Captain Brown gets killed by a train after being “deeply engaged in the perusal of a number of Pickwick’” (leading Miss Jenkyns to “[shake] her head long and solemnly, and then [sigh] out, ‘Poor, dear, infatuated man!’ [p. 19]), but this is a rather sly misreading of the situation. Rather, as readers were already informed, Brown looked up from his reading, saw a child in the way of a train, and took immediate steps to save it. This alignment of reading practice with heroic moral action, while not expressly suggesting that a higher ethos necessarily follows from reading social criticism in serial form, certainly cannot be said to suggest that such reading dulls the moral senses.

If Gaskell once felt the need, though, to defend her use of such a medium to describe the lives of persons at the peripheries of English progress, by the publication of North and South a far surer tone (weighted, perhaps, by the greater extent of her own experiences among Manchester’s working poor) resounds in her work. A third-person narrative, North and South offers a more realistic excuse than Mary Barton for shifting attention from one class vantage point to another: the female protagonist, Margaret Hale, is raised among London’s gentry; hails from rural, middle-class comfort; and after her father’s decision to leave the clergy on moral grounds, is compelled to move to Manchester, where her rural work of comforting the downtrodden finds easy correlates among the ailing working class. (I myself am hard-pressed to imagine a more seamless invitation for female mid- to upper-class readers to step outside their shoes and consider the plight of England’s working poor.)

North and South is also not somehow exempt from the travails of sustaining a love plot, but here Gaskell finds a much more direct way of employing the text’s primary relationship–between young Margaret Hale (of genteel stock) and the somewhat older John Thornton (a ‘Milton manufacturer’ [p. 88] with a history of working in shops [the horror!])–to the book’s more central thematic concerns of what constitutes both sustainable and ethical socioeconomic policy in an era of disproportionate privations among England’s poor [6]. Margaret and John are perceived, after all, to belong to different classes–and beyond this, they hold decidedly different views about a) how the other regards their class divide (much to the aggregation of misunderstandings requisite to prolonged romantic tension), and b) what role good “masters” of industry should naturally play in the lives of the working class.

In these conversations, then–as in many a surrounding argument with the story’s other main characters, who hold differently conflicting opinions about appropriate socioeconomic policy–Gaskell manages to shift the burden of social realist commentary away from both the providence of Mary Barton‘s unevenly declarative “omniscient” voice and Cranford‘s tentative female pseudo-presence, and into the more immediately relevant, plot-progressing debates between central characters in North and South.

In so doing, Gaskell creates a mid-19th-century Victorian novel that, despite the inevitable complications of serial publication [7], achieves and sustains a more consistent balance between stories of “the individual” and of English society as a whole. Any writer hoping to effectively address the social issues of his time would be wise, then, not just to study the success stories of social realism in the English literary tradition–but also those works that, while certainly not failures, invite serious reflection on the import of narrative voice and cohesion in telling any tale with chops enough to stand the test of time.

—

[1] More on these broad assertions about production and reception once I get into my lit crit readings. (I’m especially looking forward to Laurel Brake’s Print in Transition, 1850-1910: Studies in Media and Book History.) These are place-holder observations drawn from general reading practice for now.
[2] Letter to Gaskell from Dickens, 31 Jan 1850, as recorded on xxv of my 2011 Oxford World’s Classics edition of Cranford.
[3] As Gaskell writes in an introduction to the two-volume 1855 publication of North and South, “On its first appearance in ‘Household Words’, this tale was obliged to conform to the conditions imposed by the requirements of a weekly publication, and likewise to confine itself within certain advertised limits, in order that faith might be kept with the public.” (p.5, Penguin Classics 2003 ed.)
[4] This is much different than even the fluctuating presence of Dickensian narratives, for when Dickens launches into a decisive social critique within his sprawling plot structures, there are no such tentative notes on his part.
[5] A pretty foundational consideration and concern for 19th-century writing, which I will expound upon more after completing my Dickensian readings (fingers crossed) next weekend.
[6] More on this, and related broad allusions to domestic policy and crises from the 1830s on, after reading selections from Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, as well as the related comments of Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin.
[7] Gaskell was compelled to compress components of this novel to fit Dickens’ demands at the time of first publication, and though “to remedy this obvious defect, various short passages have been inserted, and several new chapters added” to the two-volume 1855 publication (p. 5), the final text still bears some mark of the haste engendered by original production circumstances.

The Great Gatsby
Baz Luhrmann
Warner Bros.

All great national novels are about failure. They have to be: Any attempt to describe a nation-state’s ideals without incorporating the folly of its myriad, competing realities cries out for ruination–if not from within, at least from without. So it is that a character like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby can seize a fragment of the American dream–the conviction that a man who owns nothing might through industry live to inherit the world–hold it too tightly, and lose all.

Yes, that was a spoiler. In the case of The Great Gatsby going without seems almost preposterous–like reviewing Titanic without suggesting the ship goes down at the end. But I will say this much: This review is not about fealty to the book, although I got the distinct impression while watching the film that director Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge, Romeo + Juliet) understood how very much the major turns in his story arise first and foremost from the cadence of the written word. Why else would Luhrmann return with such frequency to scenes from his frame narrative, which has narrator Nick Carraway writing The Great Gatsby while describing it to his therapist? Why else, too, would Luhrmann allow CGI words to supplant visuals and subsume music when approaching some of the most iconic lines in Fitzgerald’s text? Simply put, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby oozes internal crisis, and by cleaving so much to the source material, at times the film has no choice but to defer.

Like the book, too, this film is emphatically a lament, a eulogy–and ascertaining precisely what it strives to eulogize is a better route to evaluating its success than mere comparison with the source text.

To this end, we are given to understand that Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) is a not-exactly-rich man (though from monied stock) broken by the experiences he bears witness to one frenetic summer in Long Island, New York. There, in a modest cottage on West Egg, he neighbours the most extravagant home of the “nouveau riche”, a palatial estate owned by the elusive Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), and swarmed every weekend by city folk eager to bask in the excesses of wealth on prominent (yea, even blatantly phallic) display.

Across the water, on East Egg, lives Nick’s cousin, Daisy (Carey Mulligan), a “golden girl” married to a blatantly racist, philandering millionnaire (also of old money) named Tom Buchanan. As befits the times, Tom (Joel Edgerton) gets away with his racist commentary, and his philandering (and his egregious moustache, I might add), for Nick is no proactive interloper, but rather a watcher of surrounding events whose first articulated moral qualm with proceedings arises when it seems Gatsby has been gradually befriending him in the hopes of an opportunity to have tea with Daisy.

Such cultural double standards make bold and routine appearances in much of Luhrmann’s employment of Fitzgerald’s source material, and in conjunction with his choice to use decidedly contemporary music (rap, chamber pop, recent jazz re-workings of classic material), the reviewer may well wonder how much we both can and should take the socioeconomic hypocrisies of the 1920s as having direct correlates with hypocrisies today.

Whatever the answer, Daisy is offered no simple choice between two men. Rather, she’s made to choose between continuing a marriage with a man who was sleeping with another woman the day their daughter was born, and living with a man whose only request of her is that she completely recant ever having loved the man she married. An act of violence at one man’s hands brings about her ultimate decision–but it, too, is a conflicted moment for Luhrmann’s viewers, who at this juncture already know the other man, for all his talk of superior bloodlines, is also capable of brute force.

Similarly, while Tom’s regular lover remains a secondary character in this film, trapped in a lurid middle kingdom of the impoverished and downtrodden coal miners at a pit-stop between Long Island and the Big Apple, Luhrmann also takes a critical opportunity (through musical accompaniment as much as through visual attention) to align our sympathy at a vital moment with her.

And then, of course, there’s Gatsby: Gatsby, who believes himself a child of God in the most blessed of senses–a streak of cosmic brilliance destined to hurl ever upwards or else not at all. In his recollection of the past, he perceives that choosing to love Daisy was an act of choosing to inherit less than his full entitlement of the heavens. Even though a powerful vein of post-WWI PTSD ever lingers as a possible reason for his obsessive tendencies, how much are we really to sympathize with him in making all his future aspirations rely on another person’s complete concession of personal experience to his vision of her at that one, precious moment five years past?

Indeed, can we really sympathize with anyone in this world of big talk and fast riches? Does even our narrator, for all that we see he has been laid low with depression after the events that unfold that one extravagant summer, deserve our sympathy for being shocked–utterly shocked!–at the callousness and the cruelty of the company he keeps, after what we viewers are given to make of their deeply flawed characters from the start?

Certainly, Baz Luhrmann lines this adaptation with the kind of visual spectacles well befitting the circus-like excesses of the rich, the gaudiness of the urban working class, and the oppressive squalor of the abject rural poor. But as Nick stresses (over and over) that Gatsby was the most hopeful human being he had ever known, and ever would again, he (at least through Luhrmann’s directorial lens) hardly makes the point that this kind of hope was worth having or aspiring towards in the first place.

As many in the Occupy Wall Street movement just a few years back were not protesting the injustice and disparity of existing social structures, so much as the fact that they had not been given the opportunities they desired to come out on top of it, so too might Nick be said to be reaching for a green light on a distant shore that we should all have put out of mind… a long, long time ago. For a film expressly cautioning against living in the past, it’s difficult to tell how much Luhrmann’s opulent retelling of The Great Gatsby nevertheless relies on the hope that we will.

Duotrope.com, one of the best tools a modern short-story writer could probably have, tells me I have submitted 36 different pieces (sometimes quite often) over the last four years. That’s about two-thirds of the work on this computer, with its three years of files; the other third are stories that never got quite so far in the production process. On a separate storage disc, as well as on Google Drive, lies a wasteland of works come long before–completed “trunk” novels and novellas that will stay where they are forever; myriad short stories and poems and plays of varying value to me; treatises that document many a sad occasion in an elevated register, as has always been my way with private essays and related correspondence.

What a strange, heaving morass is the weight of a writer’s past–and how fragmentary, how utterly selective, the output that eventually makes it to the published page.

I’ve spent the bulk of my last two years working on science fiction, for instance, and my moderate success in that arena has started to see me pegged as “the scifi writer”. This does not entirely accord with the range I’m writing–for instance, I submitted a mystery story in the past few months, and a literary fiction submission that was hanging in limbo got withdrawn, revised, and resubmitted thereabouts as well. The story that started coming to me tonight was in the “literary” register, too (whatever the heck that means: no aliens; no flying spaghetti monsters; but magical realist and speculative fiction devices can still pass depending on an author’s say-so?), and after sifting through the dregs of my mostly abandoned “literary” fiction submissions, I found one I felt comfortable dusting off and submitting again.

Other genres–like theatre and film–still haunt my writing; just yesterday I sent out a short story with a fragment of a screenplay nestled amid other detritus recovered from an imagined near-future world. Poetry does, too, but in a much more muted way–whispers in the prose, really. Though I miss writing poetry immensely, a set of iron bars came rather securely down on that whole form a couple years back, and I haven’t been able to navigate my way out of it since. I even catch myself writing story-length prose poems from time to time (I always catch it in the escalation of internal rhyme when I read a draft back)–and if I’m brave enough, I might just submit one of those to the right venue before the year is through.

Certainly, I have written a great many formal stories relying on tried-and-true genre tropes–stories which, whether or not they’re ever accepted for publication, feel to me as sound as they’re going to get at this juncture in my writing life. But I also seem to veer toward narrative forms that condense or upend narrative conventions, like the short story in the style of feature-length journalism that will be released later this year by Analog; or the short story I sent out yesterday, that melds IM conversations with broadcasts (TV, radio, screenplay), a description of a sixteen-panel comic, a letter, a memo, a religious text, and a two-part oral tale, in order to convey how cultural interpretations of a given event will gradually shift over time.

(I did similar with an earlier form of the story accepted by Analog, actually; it garnered the interest of another publication, and on the back of that personal rejection, I got some very fine encouragement to continue working in such an experimental mode. Suffice it to say, the editors of contemporary scifi magazines rock.)

Going through my old “literary” fiction works, though, and then cross-referencing them with relevant markets on Duotrope, I remembered with some sadness why I’d started working almost entirely on science fiction during these last two years: 1) There are few venues where a minimalist style of “literary” writing (sparse, terse, heavy on the dialogue) would even be considered in the first place, 2) the wait times are maddeningly long, and 3) relatively few journals offer anything more than token payment for one’s work. So while I did send off another work of “literary” fiction tonight, I did so with the knowledge that submitting such stories will not be anything but a tangential effort for some time yet (if at all).

The impulse to write diversely, however, is still strong in me: Form must follow function. The story that needs to be told must dictate the way it will be told–as a play, as a film, as a “genre” story, as a poem, as a piece of “literary” fiction. I’m very rarely the best person to tell the story that comes to mind, but I try–and hopefully I’ll keep getting better at it as I go along.

Meanwhile, whatever is to be done with all the pieces of my writing that demonstrate how wide my interests are, yet will likely never see the printed page? I worried my Smashwords page tonight, puzzling over this very question. I only have four stories there right now, with the express mandate that my short stories there will always be free, and already they make for strange company: Two are stories that never amounted to a greater series (and now likely will not, because I have little but deep sadness and regret surrounding my time with that whole, most excellent sport); two others are works that quickly ran out of possible scifi/spec-fic journals with relevant aesthetics. As “submission” pieces, then, they are dead in the water. One, “Uncle Remy’s Whizz-Bang Circus“, I see now as an exercise in the use of science-fiction-as-literary-backdrop; the other, “Fat of the Land“, was my attempt at conveying a very different social structure working with at least as much individual compassion as our own. Both stories are, I presume, failures in some critical way, and though I haven’t given up fealty to them just yet, perhaps that will come in time.

What I’d rather see emerge, though, is some measure of synthesis in my future work: to see the failed or otherwise aborted themes, cadences, and voices of old writings resurface–whole, wise, and well-integrated–in anything and everything I produce from here on out. That, to me, would demonstrate actual development as a writer to a stage worthy of even just these last two years’ accomplishments, which still feel rather incredible to me, and entirely undeserved. (At the very least, too, such development might just spare me from more of this writerly insomnia!)

For now, though, all I can say is that, while I have been actively writing for as long as I can remember, I still feel so damnably new to all of this. And I have, it seems, the digital paper trail to prove it.

Ah, well. What can I add in closing, except to invoke the old writer’s refrain: “Maybe tomorrow I’ll write better”?

Now there’s a thought to sing me (I hope) to sleep!

Oblivion
Joseph Kosinski
Universal

I came into this film having heard nothing but middling reviews: Great visuals! Predictable plot! Lousy script! And so forth. Consequently, my expectations were perhaps just low enough to appreciate the film for what it was: an action scifi. But to my pleasant surprise Oblivion was a more intelligent variation therein than I had imagined–and certainly, I don’t think enough credit was given this film for its self-awareness of scifi films come before. It’s this latter point that continues to interest me.

Cultural standards seem different, that is, for a scifi film and, say, a relationship drama. In the latter, if a disaffected male person wanders from a difficult romantic entanglement, goes on figurative or literal walkabout trying to figure out what it all means, and encounters a quirky female person who aggravates and unsettles him but ultimately makes him whole again, these moves are considered predictable conventions of the genre–interesting when subverted, but stable enough to be tangential to your viewing experience. The conventions don’t matter so much as what’s done with them.

The same does not seem to hold, though, for scifi, where the expectation of innovation is immense–and certainly, played upon by film producers themselves. I wonder, though, if this is necessarily going to have to change as more and more Hollywood output seems to hold to scifi/spec/scifantasy premises. Surely at some point we’re going to have to accept that certain plot devices are standard to the genre, and what matters more is how they’re used?

Oblivion, for instance, seems extremely cognizant of the traditions on which it was built. Following a two-person clean-up crew on a world shattered by a decades-long war with an alien race identified as the “Scavs”, the film opens with protagonist Jack (Tom Cruise) explaining a mandatory memory wipe five years back, and its relationship to dreams he is convinced are more than dreams. There is no intended trick, then, in his later discovery that these dreams are in fact predicated on a real memory, and that the memory wipe itself is not a good thing. Rather, these narrative outcomes are promised at the outset–an obvious incongruity that should immediately frame the expectations of viewers not to trust anything Jack takes as truth.

And yet some folks were disappointed that the memory wipe / lost memories arc is predictable? I’d argue that the writing of this film does not try to sell it as anything more grandiose; we’re in a position of dramatic irony when Jack informs us of his memory wipe, and we know then that this story is about Jack ascertaining (and fleshing out) what we already understand in theory. Oedipus Rex is by this same metric a “predictable” play, as original audiences would have already known at the outset what Oedipus takes the whole damn production to figure out–but such criticism would entirely miss the play’s point.

I saw mindful resonance, too, of quite a few scifi works in Oblivion: “Sally” (Melissa Leo), the voice greeting Jack’s mission partner, Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), should alert scifi viewers to Clarke’s SAL-9000 (from 2010), while the glowing red eye of drone bots (their very shape inspired, perhaps, by the Portal games?) should at least invoke 2001: A Space Odyssey for the general public. Jack being a lone maintenance worker on the planet’s surface, his nurturing of a flower smacks of WALL-E, while developments in his plot-line anticipate an audience familiar enough with works like Moon that the writing decidedly does not attempt to over-explain what’s happening. The human underworld promised by previews for this film (with Morgan Freeman as Beech) also invokes any number of dystopian/resistance societies (the bread-and-butter of countless scifi works), and of course, the ultimate plot device has many express correlates to Independence Day.

This is not to suggest that Oblivion is intended, either, as mere homage; it simply seems to be constructed in such a way that telegraphs to its viewers how mindful it is of its diverse scifi heritage. The plot devices and narrative crises in this film are in many ways a fairly coherent synthesis of scifi themes come before, so the pleasure arises in the variations this script brings to one and the same.

The drones in this film, for instance, are given a surprising amount of personality; we’re invited to spend multiple occasions actively wondering what the drones will do, and they’re constructed in such a way that makes their mood very clear from the positions of their “arms”. Moreover, when they’re put to combat purposes, they utilize a number of moves machines-with-guns in films rarely (if ever) do to win fights.

Fights in general in this film are intelligently constructed (a couple disorienting CGI location switches notwithstanding): Jack does not get easy wins, and incurs a lot of damage. There are no laughable shots, as with Looper, of people trying to shoot at close range and repeatedly missing. This is the kind of choreography, rather, that one should expect after Cruise’s long legacy in prominent action series. Even the final “fight”, a battle of wills that must be plausibly won by the human component, offers a reasonable risk of failure and relies on a judicious use of dialogue.

I was also left to wonder how much Oblivion might have been playing, quite consciously, on a kind of 1950s domesticity through its first third, where long shots of Jack and Victoria’s home in the clouds expressly situate Jack as the man-who-goes-to-work, Victoria as the woman-who-stays-home, and the whole situation as both idyllic and a direct threat to Jack’s individualism, his basic humanity. Certainly, for a time, the film invites viewers to be suspicious of Victoria (when really, they should just be suspicious of a giant pool in the sky, emptied and replenished at leisure in a time of water rations?), and I was worried that the film would go too far with this, Basic Instinct-style. It does not–and in how it reins in the fear earlier scenes invite, Oblivion does suggest a director and screenwriter mindfully playing on such structural expectations.

Suffice it to say, there are a finite number of plot types in any narrative genre, and when a film is about the survival of humanity, there are in turn a finite number of powerplays that might be explored therein. Are we exhausted as a culture with killing godheads on the big screen? Perhaps. But it remains a tried-and-true metric of scifi film–and in Oblivion, I don’t think it’s an exceptionally reductive one, either. Rather, what this film offers is familiar, but not insultingly so; the script does not suggest that every new development is meant to come as a great surprise to us, and director Joseph Kosinski (TRON: Legacy) further seems to anticipate an audience with some understanding of where this film exists in the history of scifi.

What emerges, then, is a fairly coherent variation on the theme, and a challenge, too: Can we appreciate a scifi film that negotiates the familiar with fresh faces, as we routinely do in other filmic genres? Or conversely, are viewers right to demand that scifi as a genre ever aspires to something more?

Other non-fiction in the issue includes Jeremy L. C. Jones’ interview with Yoon Ha Lee, “Assassinating the Reader” (on the back of her short story collection, Conservation of Shadows), Craig Delancey’s “Another Word: The Singularity Is Dead. Long Live the Singularity!” (a fun romp through the work of Hilbert, Gödel, and Turing in relation to the unchecked optimism often embedded in the sci-fi trope of imminent Singularity), and a very happy word from editor-in-chief Neil Clarke in relation to how many fantastic award nominations Clarkesworld raked in this past year.

That said, Clarkesworld has fiction, too! (Who’dda thunk it?) Check out this month’s other offerings while you’re poking about:

In James Patrick Kelly’s “Soulcatcher“, a human named Klary is wreaking her revenge on a “xeni” named Harvel Asher, who has a “pet” Klary knows better as kin. Is the trap she sets too elaborate? What unintended consequences will there be?

In Andy Dudak’s “Tachy Psyche“, Wang Zhe is caught in a discordant temporal moment–the physical universe slowed to a crawl as he faces death in the fight to reunify China. Military experimentation? Tibetan spiritual journey? A matter, surely, of perspective.

In E. Catherine Tobler’s “(R + D)/I=M“, lessons in trespass and communion emerge through the story of two ethereal Martians stealing impossible grapes on a human settlement. The lessons in this story are as old as dirt–yet still so difficult to learn.

In Liz Williams’ “The Banquet of the Lords of Night“, a chef in a world ruled by the powers of Unlight is whipping up something… brilliant. A commentary on the power of art as resistance? Or just a really super reprint from Asimov‘s in 2002?

In Michael Swanwick’s “From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled“, Rosamund (dead human/simulated record/survival suit) narrates the journey of a lone survivor, Quivera, in the wake of Babel’s destruction. Unsurprisingly, language itself comes apart at the seams in this reprint from Asimov’s (February 2008).

Happy reading!