The Sum of a Story

Week 1 stories: 

• “I Can Speak!” by George Saunders - The New Yorker 
• “Slingshot” by Souvankham Thammavongsa - How to Pronounce Knife
• “Lady Neptune” by Ann Beattie - The Accomplished Guest
• “Synchronicity” by John Keeble - O. Henry Anthology
• “Mott Street in July” by Xuan Juliana Wang - Home Remedies
• “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolsen is Buried” by Amy Hempel - Reasons to Live
• “Light-skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands” by Alexia Arthurs - How to Love a Jamaican

When I was in English 100, we spent a month reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? We spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the author—Philip K. Dick—was “trying to say,” what the story was telling us about ourselves as humans and all of that. I remember thinking the prof was reaching at one point, thinking there’s no way that bit meant anything more than what it said (though I’ll never remember which bit it actually was, sorry). I remember going up to her after class one day and asking, “Isn’t it possible Phil was just trying to write a good story?”

I was just starting to take myself seriously as a writer, or at least was trying to. I’ve always said the reason I went back to school (after my theology degree) was to become a better writer, to read and think about good writers, not in any real hopes of finding a perfect job that would provide a six figure income or anything like that. But at the time, I just wanted to write good stories. 

I remember the prof looked confused, maybe even offended. She said—and I can still see her saying it—“I think any writer who wants to be taken seriously is trying to say and do more than just tell a story.” 

Back when I knew it all, her response was frustrating. The reason anyone reads is to read a good story, I thought. Are we actually supposed to—are writers even expecting us to —look this deep at their stories? 

Anyway, now I actually think the worst thing someone could say about a short story is it was a good story but wasn’t doing much besides that. 

The first short story I remember reading is “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. I was in the break room at McDonald’s, and one of my coworkers said, “Do you read?” I told her yes. She said, “Read this,” and she slid a text book across the table. She was finished her break and left me there with the book. I read the story and thought—well I don’t know what I thought. I knew I didn’t like it; back then I thought everything should have a happy ending for it to be worth my time. The Lottery does not have a happy ending. I remember sitting back in my chair and thinking it couldn’t possibly end like that. Then I read it again. I didn’t even eat my Big Mac. When I got back on the floor, my coworker asked what I thought. 

“Why did you make me read that?” I said.

She said, “I know, right?” 

It was, I think, the first time I had asked myself of a work of fiction: “what does it mean?”

A quick google search will tell you the story has a lot of themes: the violent nature of humans; the importance of challenging tradition; how we are vulnerable as individuals. None of that really mattered to me the first time I read it. I just hated its ambiguity. 

We read it again in English 100, some six years after that first time I read it, and we had lively discussions about what it could mean in which I was a vociferous participant. After one class, the prof asked me if I thought Jackson could have just been trying to write a good story. 

~

In my third and fourth years as an undergrad I worked as a TA for 100 level English classes. I held office hours, and students could drop in to talk about their papers, or just to ask questions about what they were reading or whatever. Some semesters I was very busy, but others I didn’t have a single student drop by or even email me. One of these semesters, I shared an office with a math TA. I sat in my corner reading or doing homework, and she sat in hers helping student after student figure out some wild math problems I wouldn’t have been caught within a country mile of. Her students all seemed ridiculously frustrated when they came in, but most of them left seeming as if they at least sort of understood what they were supposed to be doing. The woman seemed exceedingly happy with herself with each student she helped. 

One day, about half way through the semester, I asked her if she really—like actually—like mathematics as much as she seemed to. 

“Oh I just love it,” she said. 

“Love it?” I said

“I just think it’s so beautiful,” she said, which didn’t make any sense. She said it off to the distance, not to me exactly, as if she were picturing some sort of glacial waterfall spilling down the side of a mountain. “I just like how it seems so complex, but it’s really actually simple once you understand what your looking for. And I love that there’s a right answer. Like, there might be a dozen ways to get there, but if you don’t get there it’s wrong. There’s always an answer.”

I think I said, “Hmm,” and was likely thinking how that’s where our majors differed, being that people were always complaining about the subjectivity of English classes.

“I mean what does it say about the universe that there is that kind of certainty?” She asked. “I take a ridiculous amount of comfort in that certainty,” she said. 

There is comfort in certainty. But I find beauty in the ambiguity of literature. 

After last week’s post, I was trying to think of better metaphors for the difference between novels and stories, and for whatever reason I started to think of them as math problems. I emailed a friend who has spent many more years than I have thinking about stories, and I said Whattayou think of this: novels spend time working through a problem and, in the end, offer their sum; stories present a problem, but leave the reader to work out its sum on their own. 

He said he liked that metaphor, and we spent time thinking about if that’s true of all stories, or all novels, and he eventually said, “I've generally thought of stories--at least those in the realist mode--as presenting characters with a situation that requires a response, but these characters find that nothing in their personal experience up to that point, and nothing that they've been taught by their culture at that point is capable of solving what you call the "problem,” if you’ll forgive the bad pun.” 

It’s not a metaphor but I think it’s an interesting way to think about stories. It still leaves room for ambiguity; still leaves room for presenting a problem, for allowing the reader to work it out; still leaves room for a story to muscle its way into your brainspace in that maybe it is this incapability to work out the problem that leaves us wondering “what does it mean?”   

I’ll quit it with this obsession I seem to have of distinguishing between the two genres now. Moving forward, I’m going to try to talk about specific stories that I’m reading, and how they’re doing what I think stories do. That might sound dreadfully boring to some of you, but if not, I hope you’ll join me.