Earlier when I’ve paged through my past blog posts to locate my favorite for a particular year, one usually jumped out at me. For 2018, I find myself torn between two favorites. The tiebreaker in a case like this is: Do I have anything more to say on the subject?
On one hand is my write-up of Cat’s Cradle, a book I’ve adored and been fascinated with since I was young. I could easily write another 5,000 words on the many dimensions and subtleties of Vonnegut’s greatest work—yes, even greater than Slaughterhouse-Five. For the purposes of this series (a look back on my favorite posts over the last ten years), I’m willing to stand pat. My 2018 post doesn’t express everything I could say about the novel, but it touches on what I think are its most salient aspects.
1970s edition I purchased in junior high school. I still have it on my bookshelf.
The other post from 2018 I’m proud of regards Planet of the Apes—the original 1968 film, and not any of the sequels in what has become a rather exhausted movie franchise. I opened that write-up copping to the film being “a guilty pleasure,” that it is
campy, riveting, preachy, and provocative— Franklin J. Schaffner’s sci-fi classic is the very definition of middle-brow entertainment, in that it pleases the senses while challenging the mind.
It turns out that, yes, I do have a little more to say on the subject.
Often when I gear up to write about a book, I’ll go back and re-read it so it’s fresh in my mind. For my Apes post, I didn’t re-watch the movie, but rather read Pierre Boulle’s original 1963 novel, which I’d never picked up before. I didn’t spend too much time discussing the book, though, since my focus was on the film. That’s a shame, because the novel is quite the curiosity.
Boulle dismissed attempts to label his Apes as science-fiction, preferring to call it a “social fantasy.” The term comes across like a hipster pose, but it makes sense. Much as Gulliver’s Travels isn’t really about seafaring, the interstellar aspect of Apes is a literary contrivance for explaining how his character Ulysee winds up in a society run by simians.
Structurally, the book reads something like utopian literature. In works such as Ecotopia, The Dispossessed, or, obviously, Thomas More’s Utopia, the narrative is not centered around character(s) dropped into a tight situation and navigating conflicts toward some kind of resolution. Rather, utopian works spool out pages of exposition to detail the clockwork innards of a fictional society operating on principles quite different from our own.
Boulle likewise spends many precious pages explaining how the simians live, work, compete, and cooperate. So, is Planet of the Apes a utopian novel? It’s not so simple. As with the film, the human astronaut Ulysee is feared by the simians, who view his existence as a threat to their comprehension of the universe. Their plans for him are not kind.
While that might make the book sound dystopian instead, that’s a difficult label too. Prior to Ulysee falling from the sky onto their planet, things seem to be going pretty well for the apes. Their society isn’t bleak or oppressive or authoritarian. They merely have an all-too-recognizable reaction to the unexplainable, this human that talks and reasons, a creature they normally hunt for sport and trophy.
The genius of Boulle’s book is that it’s structured like a utopian novel, but instead of describing an alternate society, it describes our society, with humans swapped out for apes. (Unlike the film, the apes of the novel live in a mid-twentieth century world, with cars, telephones, and even tobacco.) Boulle’s clever twist permitted him to write about our world as though it was an exotic place. In the terminology of critical theory, it defamiliarized our society. That, in turn, permitted him to write about us from a distance. As with the movie series, the ape device became a powerful fulcrum for criticizing all manner of human activity, from animal cruelty to racism, from religion to capitalism.
I remain surprised how under-appreciated the book is today—another sad example of a successful Hollywood adaptation smothering out its source material.
2016 was a busy year for blogging. Amazon accepted Bridge Daughter for their Kindle Scout program, which entailed a month-long nomination process before they agreed to publish it. It was the start of a fairly intense roller coaster ride, most of which I captured in blog posts along the way.
Amazon’s imprimatur on the novel opened many doors. With a single email sent on a single day of the week to a mere sliver of their customer base, Amazon could generate hundreds of book sales, as though rubbing a lamp to summon a djinn. Amazon’s backing also led to a movie production company inquiring about film rights. They read the book and they asked questions, but ultimately they passed.
(Amazon dismantled the Kindle Scout program in 2018, which I still consider a tragedy.)
Of the long-form blog entries in 2016, I produced three that I remain proud of. I’m torn which to feature here. My account of Don Herron’s Fritz Leiber tour still evokes nostalgia. Don Herron is the creator of the classic Dashiell Hammett tour in San Francisco. Getting a chance to meet Herron and take his lesser-known Fritz Leiber tour was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as he no longer leads it save for special occasions.
Another piece I’m proud of is my review/analysis of the Generation X cult classic Slacker, one of my favorite films. This entry has an untold side story: A few months after posting it, an online film aficionado site on Medium asked if I was interested in adapting the review. Unfortunately, what the editor wanted me to write about wasn’t what I found interesting about Slacker, and the opportunity fizzled out.
On Literature by J. Hillis Miller
The third is a blog post I keep returning to as a kind of manifesto: “Fiction as a controlled experiment,” a write-up of my thoughts on the book On Literature by J. Hillis Miller.
Miller was a scholar at Yale and U.C. Irvine, and known for promoting deconstruction as a means of literary criticism. I discovered On Literature on a shelf of used books in a Tokyo bookstore, and assumed it would be thick with postmodern terminology and abstruse theories. Instead, On Literature is personal and ruminative. Parts of it read like a confessional. Miller admits to a lifelong love of reading, and writes in glowing terms on several children’s books he marveled over in his youth.
What caught my attention the most, however, is when he confesses to viewing a work of fiction as a “pocket or portable dreamweaver.” He describes books as devices that transport the reader to a new “hyper-world” for them to experience. The way he describes it reminds me of the linking books in the classic video game Myst.
Myst linking book
This quaint vision of narrative is unfashionable in the world of literary criticism. Miller’s vision is also, in my view, charitable to lay readers, who are less interested in high theory and more interested in enjoying books, and curious why some books are more enjoyable than others.
But I do think this vision—”a pocket or portable dreamweaver”—is also a useful guide for an author developing a story or a novel. Miller insists a work of fiction is not “an imitation in words of some pre-existing reality but, on the contrary, it is the creation or discovery of a new, supplementary world, a metaworld.” That is what the creation of story is—not merely revealing or reporting an already existing world, but creating a new one in the author’s mind, and, in turn, recreating it in each reader’s mind. These multiple worlds are similar but never exactly the same.
Miller died in 2021 due to COVID-related issues, one month after the death of his wife of over seventy years. Reading On Literature makes me wish I could have enrolled in one of his courses. Whereas so many of the European deconstructionists seemed intent on subverting the power of literature, Miller was plainly in awe of the written word, and strove to promote it. We need more readers like him.
The year 2015 was more productive than the prior for blogging. I managed to eke out twenty-six blog posts, or about one every two weeks. In the world of blogging this is nothing to crow about. I never intended for this blog to be a daily writing exercise, though. I sought to stretch myself in terms of research and preparation for the longer pieces, and to produce longer work that stood on its own, rather than be impressive in its volume.
By far, the most popular blog post of that year, and for this web site’s existence, is “Dashiell Hammett, The Flitcraft Parable (from The Maltese Falcon).” This long post gave me the chance to air a theory I’d developed on the Flitcraft Parable, a brief tale private eye Sam Spade tells femme fatale Brigid O’Shaughnessy in an early chapter of the infamous detective novel. It’s an odd digression for straight-talking Spade to make, and an odd digression in general, for the novel is a model of brisk narration and economical prose. As I wrote in 2015:
One cannot imagine the Flitcraft Parable finding a place in pulps like Black Mask, magazines that instructed their writers “When in doubt, throw a dead body at ’em.” No gun is leveled, no whiskey is poured, no dame is saved. In The Maltese Falcon Dashiell Hammett crafted the most iconic private detective novel ever, the singular representation of an entire form, and yet in it he wrote the most unorthodox story of detection ever.
And that is an important point about the Flitcraft Parable, for it is a story about a rather simple bit of detection Spade was hired to perform many years prior to the events of Falcon. There’s not of a lot of chin-scratching in the parable itself. Rather, the chin-scratching comes later, as Spade attempts to explain what it all means, while O’Shaughnessy characteristically shrugs off its significance.
Like the parables of Christ and the Buddha, the Flitcraft Parable’s shape and ending is ambiguous, and its meaning elusive. Even the reason for Spade telling the parable is debated. I won’t cover it all here, it’s best explained by my post.
By far, the most substantial criticism I received for it was that I’d over-thought my reasoning, and that there was no proof Hammett knew of Charles Sanders Peirce’s work (which I think unlikely). I posted a follow-up in November 2015 giving an alternate, but related, explanation of the parable.
This blog launched on the first of August, 2014. It was not a big year blog-wise, but I still managed to put out eleven posts (one of which I’ll return to later this year). Worried I would run out of ideas, I devised “Twenty Writers, Twenty Books,” a series where I discuss the books and authors that have left a deep impression on me. (So far, I’ve only managed to finish twelve of the twenty writers. To look at it another way, this writing project is still generating blog posts ten years later.)
Those last months of 2014, my focus was fixed on the finishing edits of Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People, the first book I put out under Kindle Direct Publishing. The novel’s opening line (“The Petrenkos were barbecuing people”) was first typed by me in 1999. After fifteen years, countless drafts and rewrites, and a couple of near-misses with agents who were interested but couldn’t get behind the book, I gave up trying to find it a home. I even considered giving up on writing altogether. Thankfully, I reconsidered, put it on Amazon, and began working on my next novel. (The whole tortured history can be found at The Tusk.)
But my favorite blog post from that first year is without question “B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” the first entry in my Twenty Writers series. Oddly, it’s one of the newer books on the list, in the sense that I had read it only a few years’ before (whereas most of the other books on the list I discovered earlier in life). Sierra Madre made an indelible mark on me. It made me think about why an author writes a book, and not merely how—but I was doubly fascinated by the mystery surrounding the identity of its author.
It turns out that while the book and John Huston’s movie are incredibly well-known, the true identity of the author has been largely shrouded in mystery to this day.
Hal Croves, 1947. Taken while on the set of John Huston’s adaptation of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Humphrey Bogart speculated Croves was actually B. Traven.
I love a good literary mystery, and the mystery of B. Traven is one of the best of the 20th century. While researching the blog post, I read numerous online sources and articles, two books on the subject, and even scoured old editions of Treasure, including the rather optimistic (and rather incorrect) introduction to a 1963 Time-Life edition which declared the matter of his identity settled.
One notable outcome of the blog post was former Chief Executive of BBC Broadcast Will Wyatt reaching out to me via email in 2015. Wyatt wrote and developed the BBC documentary B. Traven: A Mystery Solved and its companion book The Man Who was B. Traven, titled The Secret of the Sierra Madre in the United States. (A transfer of the BBC show can be found on YouTube.) Wyatt’s gracious email pointed out that no one to date has refuted his theory of Traven’s identity. By utter coincidence, I had just weeks earlier discovered a copy of the UK edition in one of the last great used bookstores, Phoenix Books of San Luis Obispo. (I’ve long intended to write a post about The Man Who was B. Traven, but never followed through.)
Coincidentally, as I was writing this post in late December, Wyatt again reached out to me via public comment. He once more defended his work, but also challenged the other theories of Traven’s identity, most of which are based on speculation or hunches. Due to his comment, I’m updating the 2014 post to better explain Wyatt’s research, which was previously only alluded to briefly.
Perhaps not reading your book first was a mistake on my part, but I, a mere fan of Traven’s books, and writer of the occasional novel that does not sell in high volume, did not intend [the 2014] post to be the final word on Traven’s identity.
Rather, this post was intended to cover the breadth of the theories out there, farfetched or otherwise, and to give a general feel for Traven’s most likely background. I also wanted to explain why I find so much inspiration in Traven’s works, especially The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Alas, all this came too late for the original 2014 post, which relies on Michael L. Baumann’s B. Traven: An Introduction (1976). Baumann treats the question of Traven’s identity as a mystery of literary analysis, which lines up with my interests in the subject. As a German-speaking German-American, Baumann discerns that Traven’s work was most likely written in that language and then crudely translated to English for an American audience. He also offers a clear-eyed interpretation of the themes and political bent of Traven’s novels.
Since I wasn’t interested in proposing a candidate or “solving” the mystery, Baumann was a good primary source to work from. I only wish I could have delved more deeply into the breadth of the Traven theories proposed to date. The tornadic multiplicity of names and initials and pseudonyms linked to Traven is bewildering, fostered by Traven’s generous use of them to cover his tracks.
My fascination is not to keep the mystery alive, but to turn the mystery around and face the mirror at the reader, to give a name to the insatiable curiosity Traven inspired—to remind us there was a time when authors shunned publicity (“the creative person should…have no other biography than his works”) rather than relentlessly strove to build their personal brand.
“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
Honestly, I did not foresee this. The stories a year ago about an upcoming Apple TV+ adaptation of William Gibson’s masterpiece seemed more than promising. As I wrote:
The truly big news is that Neuromancer has a reasonable chance of being adapted to the screen. Apple TV+ may not be the leading force in streaming entertainment today, but it’s established a track record of producing high-quality material and taking some risks along the way. I know I sound like the eternal fanboy when I say this, but, “This time it might be real.”
I’m not an avid follower of the Hollywood sausage grinder. Perhaps the project is still being developed, or an incredibly secret production shoot is happening as I write this. All I know is, over the past twelve months I’ve occasionally tried Internet searches hoping to find some evidence of progress. So far: nothing.
As I wrote last year, the number of failed starts on a Neuromancer adaptations are legion. The Wikipedia section on the topic does not do justice to the number of aborted starts reported over the years. Someone should make a gallery of fan-produced movie posters. Chalk up this latest disappointment as another virtual corpse to throw on the digital pyre. What’s a reader to do?
What-if film poster for a nonexistent production of Neuromancer (Peter Stults)
Here’s what you should do: Go and read the book. Don’t wait for a director’s vision, or a big-budget green light. Go straight to the source.
Neuromancer is marketed as Book One of the Sprawl Trilogy, a series which also encompasses Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. Gibson’s near-future Sprawl is also the setting of several of his earlier short stories, including “Johnny Mnemonic.” (Many of these stories are collected in Burning Chrome.) Thus, Gibson had the advantage of mapping out Neuromancer‘s territory well beforehand. It was in these stories that he honed his subjects and style, the street hustlers with colorful handles and underground operatives rewiring high-tech for subversive means. His work has a streak of the computing counterculture, mirroring the early days of the Homebrew Computer Club and phone hacking, where computers were not merely a technology, but liberation.
The story centers on Case, a console jockey and professional hacker-for-hire. An entanglement with a prior employer has left him unable to connect to the virtual world of cyberspace, an analogue to our Internet that users connect to mentally, rather than via screen and keyboard. Crippled by this punishment, Case scrounges on the streets of Chiba City, Japan, living in coffin hotels and getting by trafficking in stolen tech.
Things shift when he meets Molly Millions, a punk street-smart mercenary who sports several body modifications and tech implants. (Molly wound up being a Gibson fan-favorite, and is featured in several other stories and novels.) She introduces Case to the shadowy Armitage, who offers to re-wire Case so he can join cyberspace once more, on the condition he perform illegal hacking work against megacorporations and the military. Thus, the novel is many things at once: Future noir; a dystopic exploration of a decaying world saturated with computer technology; and, at its core, a heist story.
Published in 1984, and set in the 2030s, the novel has a couple of howlers, such as the protagonist trying to fence “three megabytes of hot RAM.” That was on the high-end of computer memory in PC-compatibles when I first read the book in 1988. Gibson later admitted he used the word “modem” without knowing what it meant. “I was working from the poetics of an emergent language,” he explained. These problems are not important and should be set aside.
While you’re setting aside the anachronisms, also set aside some of the hype, such as William Gibson supposedly predicting the Internet (which he’s never claimed). A lot of people inside the technology community had foreseen the rise of a worldwide information network before Gibson published. Believe it or not, some also predicted mobile, wearable, and even implanted devices. Once the early computer pioneers figured out how to connect two computers to exchange data, it wasn’t a great leap of imagination to picture the logical conclusion. (Engelbart’s 1968 “Mother of all Demos” was not about mice and hypertext, but about collapsing the distance between man and computing technology.) Even Gibson has admitted that “wet tech”—direct-connecting a human brain to a computer—is probably a non-starter in our immediate future. And, whenever an interviewer has asked Gibson why he chose the 2030s to set his story, he’s always insisted that he was actually writing about the 1980s.
Instead, focus on Gibson’s imagery and rich settings. He took computers out of the realm of men in lab coats standing over coffin-sized boxes in dust-free rooms. He put tech on the street, in the pockets of skate punks and the ears of all-night sushi line cooks. Phone phreakers and blue-boxing from the 70s and 80s—an early hacker culture where the phone company was the dreaded megacorporation—offered Gibson a clear-cut model to scale up from. Instead of a single domineering power to #Resist, he described hundreds of megacorporations colluding to run the world. Instead of an obscure nerd subculture, he gave exotic tech to everyone, even folks sleeping on mattresses on rain-soaked streets. Neuromancer is a book set during a perpetual war between the haves and have-nots, and the battlefield is cyberspace.
Brazilian edition of Neuromancer
Focus on Gibson’s language and linguistic style, which blends the technobabble of computer programmers with Japanese idioms into a kind of poetry, interwoven with the colorful Chandleresque prose of hard people doing hard things. To pull choice passages from the first chapter, two of countless throughout the book:
Now he slept in the cheapest coffins, the ones nearest the port, beneath the quartz-halogen floods that lit the docks all night like vast stages; where you couldn’t see the lights of Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company, and Tokyo Bay was a black expanse where gulls wheeled above drifting shoals of white styrofoam. Behind the port lay the city, factory domes dominated by the vast cubes of corporate arcologogies. Port and city were divided by a narrow borderland of older streets, an area with no official name. Night City, with Ninsei its heart. By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless, the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned silver sky.
And this:
He passed yakitori stands and massage parlors, a franchised coffee shop called Beautiful Girl, the electronic thunder of an arcade. He stepped out of the way to a let a dark-suited sarariman by, spotting the Mitsubishi–Genentech logo tattooed across the back of the man’s right hand.
Was it authentic? If that’s for real, he thought, he’s in for trouble. If it wasn’t, served him right. M-G employees above a certain level were implanted with advanced microprocessors that monitored mutagen levels in the bloodstream. Gear like that would get you rolled in Night City, rolled straight into a black clinic.
Gibson humanizes the exotic technology without the tedious tendency of other science fiction authors to try and explain it in a calm, reasonable fashion. This world gone mad abandoned rational discourse decades prior. His characters are at utter ease in the trappings of this disjointed world, and even a bit blasé about it. That three megabytes of hot RAM? It’s stored in a Hitachi deck. Later, Case stays in a luxurious Hilton hotel drinking coffee from a Braun percolator. So often science fiction relies on defamiliarization (technology familiar to the characters seeming magical to us). Gibson reverses that polarity. He uses consumerism to his literary advantage, rather than to make some clumsy ironic comment the way DeLillo and David Foster Wallace feel the need to do.
Neuromancer puts forth a fragmented society that is at odds with the other major science fiction dystopia, 1984. Contra Orwell’s totalitarian nightmare, Gibson lays out a world of emaciated nation-states muzzled by constipated corporate power and incestuous multi-billionaire families. Meanwhile, the population hides in the shadows, barters on the gray market, and, of course, jacks into cyberspace for fun and profit.
It’s a potent brew—one part hard-boiled cityscape noir, one part philosophical science fiction, and one part a pessimistic vision of unfettered capitalism’s endgame, all told in a gritty, poetic tongue that matches the rain-mirrored, neon-iridescent streets of Chiba City.
Don’t wait for the movie. Don’t wait for the streaming series. If you’ve not read Neuromancer recently, pick up a copy and read it again. And if you’ve not read it at all—what are you waiting for?
What if I told you that there’s been a sea-change in American storytelling over the past half-century? Not merely a change in subject matter, but that the fundamental nature of American narratives radically shifted? Would you believe me?
Now, what if I told you that a writer twenty-five years ago described these “new” stories, and even predicted they would become the dominant mode in our future? Would you believe that?
In 1997, Charles Baxter published Burning Down the House, a collection of essays on the state of American literature. It opens with “Dysfunctional Narratives: or, ‘Mistakes were Made,’” a blistering piece of criticism that not only detailed the kinds of stories he was reading back then, but predicted the types of stories we read and tell each other today.
Baxter appropriated the term “dysfunctional narrative” from poet C. K. Williams, but he expounded and expanded upon it so much, it’s fair to say he’s made the term his own. He borrowed a working definition of dysfunctional narratives from poet Marilynne Robinson, who described this modern mode of writing as a “mean little myth:”
One is born and in passage through childhood suffers some grave harm. Subsequent good fortune is meaningless because of the injury, while subsequent misfortune is highly significant as the consequence of this injury. The work of one’s life is to discover and name the harm one has suffered.
Baxter adds that the source of this injury “can never be expunged.” As for the ultimate meaning of these stories: “The injury is the meaning.”
To claim this mode of writing has become the dominant one in American culture demands proof, or at least some supporting evidence. Baxter lists examples, such as Richard Nixon’s passive-voice gloss over the Watergate cover-up (“mistakes were made”), Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, and conspiracy theories, among others.
“Dysfunctional Narratives” doesn’t succeed by tallying a score, however. Rather, it describes a type of story that sounds all-too-familiar to modern ears:
Reading begins to be understood as a form of personal therapy or political action. In such an atmosphere, already moralized stories are more comforting than stories in which characters are making complex or unwitting mistakes.
Don’t merely consider Baxter’s descriptions in terms of books. News stories, the social media posts scrolling up your daily feed, even the way your best friend goes into how their boss has slighted them at work—all constitute narratives, small or large. Dysfunctional narratives read as if the storyteller’s thumb is heavy on the moral scale—they feel rigged.
It does seem curious that in contemporary America—a place of considerable good fortune and privilege—one of the most favored narrative modes from high to low has to do with disavowals, passivity, and the disarmed protagonist.
(I could go one quoting Baxter’s essay—he’s a quotable essayist—but you should go out and read all of Burning Down the House instead. It’s that good.)
Dysfunctional narratives are a literature of avoidance, a strategic weaving of talking points and selective omissions to block counter-criticism. If that sounds like so much political maneuvering, that’s because it is.
“Mistakes were made”
Let’s start with what dysfunctional narratives are not: They’re not merely stories about dysfunction, as in dysfunctional families, or learning dysfunctions. Yes, a dysfunctional narrative may feature such topics, but that is not what makes it dysfunctional. It describes how the story is told, the strategies and choices the author had made to tell their story.
Baxter points to Richard Nixon’s “mistakes were made” as the kernel for the dysfunctional narrative in modern America. (He calls Nixon “the spiritual godfather of the contemporary disavowal movement.”) He also holds up conspiracy theories as prototypes:
No one really knows who’s responsible for [the JFK assassination]. One of the signs of a dysfunctional narrative is that we cannot leave it behind, and we cannot put it to rest, because it does not, finally, give us the explanations we need to enclose it. We don’t know who the agent of action is. We don’t even know why it was done.
Recall the tagline for The X-Files, a TV show about the investigation of conspiracy theories: “The truth is out there.” In other words, the show’s stories can’t provide the truth—it’s elsewhere.
More memorably—and more controversially—Baxter also turns his gaze upon Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, which features the use of recovered memories (“not so much out of Zola as Geraldo“) and grows into “an account of conspiracy and memory, sorrow and depression, in which several of the major characters are acting out rather than acting, and doing their best to find someone to blame.”
In a similar vein, a nearly-dysfunctional story would be The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy. It centers on a family man who, via therapy, digs through memories of a childhood trauma which has paralyzed him emotionally as an adult. He gradually heals, and goes on to repair his relationship with his family. Notably, his elderly father does not remember abusing him years earlier, leaving one wound unhealed.
Another example would be Nathanael West‘s A Cool Million, which follows a clueless naif on a cross-American journey as he’s swindled, robbed, mugged, and framed. By the end, the inventory of body parts he’s lost is like counting the change in your pocket. It might be forgiven as a satire of the American dream, but A Cool Million remains a heavy-handed tale.
This leads to another point: A dysfunctional narrative is not necessarily a poorly told one. The dysfunction is not in the quality of the telling, but something more innate.
Examples of more topical dysfunctional narratives could be the story of Aziz Ansari’s first-date accuser. The complaints of just about any politician or pundit who claims they’ve been victimized or deplatformed by their opponents is dysfunctional. In almost every case, the stories feature a faultless, passive protagonist being traumatized by the more powerful or the abstract.
There’s one more point about dysfunctional narratives worth making: The problem is not that dysfunctional narratives exist. The problem is the sheer volume of them in our culture, the sense that we’re being flooded—overwhelmed, even—by their numbers. That’s what seems to concern Baxter. It certainly concerns me.
A literature of avoidance
In his essay Ur-Fascism, Umberto Eco offers this diagram:
one
two
three
four
abc
bcd
cde
def
Each column represents a political group or ideology, all distinct, yet possessing many common traits. (Think of different flavors of Communism, or various factions within a political party.) Groups one and two have traits b and c in common, groups two and four have trait d in common, and so on.
Eco points out that “owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between four and one,” even though they do not share any traits. The traits form a chain—there is a common “smell” between the political groups.
Not all dysfunctional narratives are exactly alike, or have the exact traits as the rest, but they do have a common “smell.” Even if a 9/11 conspiracy theory seems utterly unlike A Cool Million, they both may be dysfunctional.
Likewise, in the traits that follow, just because a story doesn’t include all doesn’t mean it “avoids dysfunction.” Rather, dysfunctional narratives are built by the storyteller selecting the bricks they need to buttress their message:
A disarmed protagonist
An absent antagonist
Minimal secondary characters
An authorial thumb on the scale
“Pre-moralized”
A vaporous conclusion
Authorial infallibility and restricted interpretations
The most common trait of the dysfunctional narrative is a faultless, passive main character. Baxter calls this the “disarmed protagonist.” Baxter differentiates between “I” stories (“the protagonist makes certain decisions and takes some responsibility for them”) and “me” stories (“the protagonists…are central characters to whom things happen”). Dysfunctional narratives are the “me” stories.
And the errors these “me” characters make—if any—are forgivable, understanding, or forced upon them by dire circumstances. Compare this to the mistakes the people around them make—monstrous, unpardonable sins:
…characters [in stories] are not often permitted to make interesting and intelligent mistakes and then to acknowledge them. The whole idea of the “intelligent mistake,” the importance of the mistake made on impulse, has gone out the window. Or, if fictional characters do make such mistakes, they’re judged immediately and without appeal.
Power dynamics are a cornerstone of all narratives, but one “smell” of the dysfunctional variety is an extraordinary tilting of power against the main character. The system, or even the world, is allied against the protagonist. Close reads of these narratives reveals an authorial thumb on the story’s moral scale, an intuition that the situation has been soured a bit too much in the service of making a point. This scale-tipping may be achieved many ways, but often it requires a surgical omission of detail.
Hence how often in dysfunctional narratives the antagonist is absent. A crime in a dysfunctional novel doesn’t require a criminal. All it needs, in Robinson’s words, is for the main character to have endured some great wrong: “The work of one’s life is to discover and name the harm one has suffered.”
Poet Marilynne Robinson
Name the harm, not the perpetrator. Why not the perpetrator? Because often there’s no person to name. The harm is a trauma or a memory. The perpetrator may have disappeared long ago, or died, or have utterly forgotten the wrongs they inflicted (as the father does in Prince of Tides). The malefactor may be an abstraction, like capitalism or sexism. But naming an abstraction as the villain does not name anything. It’s like naming narcissism as the cause of an airliner crash. This is by design. Abstractions and missing antagonists don’t have a voice. Even Satan gets to plead his case in Paradise Lost.
No ending is reached in a dysfunctional narrative, because there’s only a trauma, or a memory, or an abstraction to work against. These injuries never heal. Memories may fade, but the past is concrete. By telling the story, the trauma is now recorded and notarized like a deed. “There’s the typical story in which no one is responsible for anything,” Baxter complained in 2012. “Shit happens, that’s all. It’s all about fate, or something. I hate stories like that.” These stories trail off at the end, employing imagery like setting suns or echoes fading off to signify a story that will never conclude.
The most surface criticism of these narratives is that we, the readers, sense we’re being talked down to by the author. “In the absence of any clear moral vision, we get moralizing instead,” Baxter writes. A dysfunctional narrative dog-whistles its morality, and those who cannot decode the whistle are faulted for it. The stories are pre-moralized: The reader is expected to understand beforehand the entirety of the story’s moral universe. For a reader to admit otherwise, or to argue an alternate interpretation, is to risk personal embarrassment or confrontation from those who will not brook dissent.
And making the reader uncomfortable is often the outright goal of the dysfunctional narrative. The writer is the presumed authority; the reader, the presumed student. It’s a retrograde posture, a nagging echo from a lesser-democratic time. (When I read A Brief History of Time, I was most certainly the student—but Hawking admirably never made me feel that way.) Dysfunctional narratives are often combative with the reader; they do not acknowledge the reader’s right to negotiate or question the message. With dysfunctional narratives, it’s difficult to discern if the writer is telling a story or digging a moat around their main character.
“What we have instead is not exactly drama and not exactly therapy,” Baxter writes. “No one is in a position to judge.” A dysfunctional narrative portrays a world with few to no alternatives. A functional narrative explores alternatives. (This is what I mean when I write of fiction as an experiment.)
This is why so many dysfunctional narratives are aligned to the writer’s biography—who can claim to be a better authority on your life, after all? But the moment a reader reads a story, its protagonist is no longer the author’s sole property. The character is now a shared construct. Their decisions may be questioned (hence the passive nature of the protagonists—inaction avoids such judgements). If the author introduces secondary characters, they can’t claim similar authority over them—every additional character is one more attack vector of criticism, a chipping away of absolute authority over the story itself. That’s what happened to sensitivity reader Kosoko Jackson in 2019, whose debut novel was pulped due to questions over his secondary characters.
Of all the traits listed—from the disarmed protagonist to the vaporous conclusion—the trait I find the “smelliest” is authorial infallibility and restricted interpretation. That’s why I used weasel language when I called Prince of Tides “nearly-dysfunctional:” The book is most certainly open to interpretation and questioning. In contrast, questioning a conspiracy theory could get you labeled an unwitting dupe, a useful idiot, or worse.
A Cambrian explosion
What Baxter doesn’t explore fully is why we’ve had this Cambrian explosion of dysfunctional narratives. He speculates a couple of possibilities, such as them coming down to us from our political leadership (like Moses carrying down the stone tablets), or as the byproduct of consumerism. I find myself at my most skeptical when his essay stumbles down these side roads.
When Baxter claims these stories arose out of “groups in our time [feeling] confused or powerless…in such a consumerist climate, the perplexed and unhappy don’t know what their lives are telling them,” it seems Baxter is offering a dysfunctional narrative to explain the existence of dysfunctional narratives. He claims they’re produced by people of “irregular employment and mounting debts.” I strongly doubt this as well. In my experience, this type of folk are not the dominant producers of such narratives. Rather, these are the people who turn to stories for escape and uplift…the very comforts dysfunctional narratives cannot provide, and are not intended to provide.
Rather than point the finger at dead presidents or capitalism, I’m more inclined to ascribe the shift to a handful of changes in our culture.
The term “The Program Era” comes from a book by the same name detailing the postwar rise and influence of creative writing programs in the United States. This democratization of creative writing programs was not as democratic as once hoped, but it still led to a sharp increase in the numbers of people writing fiction. Most of those students were drawn from America’s upwardly-striving classes. And, as part of the workshop method used in these programs, it also led to a rise in those people having to sit quietly and listen to their peers criticize their stories, sometimes demolishing them. (Charles Baxter was a creative writing professor and the head of a prominent writing program in the Midwest. Many of his examples in Burning Down the House come from manuscripts he read as an instructor.)
With the expansion of writing programs came a rise in aspiring writers scratching around for powerful subject matter. Topics like trauma and abuse are lodestones when seeking supercharged dramatic stakes. Naturally, these writers also drew from personal biography for easy access to subject matter.
Another reason is staring back at you: The World Wide Web has empowered the masses to tell their stories to a global audience. This has created a dynamic where everyone can be a reader, a writer, and a critic, and all at the same time.
The natural next step in the evolution of the above is for storytellers to strategize how best to defend their work—to remove any fault in the story’s armor, to buttress it with rearguards and fortifications. (This is different than working hard to produce a high-quality experience, which, in my view, is a better use of time.) And there’s been a shift in why we tell stories: Not necessarily to entertain or enrich, but as an act of therapy or grievance, or to collect “allies” in a climate where you’re either with me or against me.
Pick up a university literary magazine and read it from cover to cover. The “smell” of dysfunctional narratives is awfully similar to the smell of social media jeremiads.
These are not the kind of stories I want to read, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distance myself from them. Writers should strive to offer more than a list grievances, or perform acts of score-settling. If it’s too much to ask stories to explain, then certainly we can expect them to connect dots. Even if the main character does not grow by the last page, we should grow by then, if only a little.
The Illuminerdi (via) reports Apple TV+ is tooling up to produce a streaming adaptation of William Gibson’s cyberpunk masterpiece Neuromancer. The big question Illuminerdi concerns itself with is which actor will play protagonist Case, a drug-abusing hacker hired to pull off a virtual heist in cyberspace.
The story buries the lede. The truly big news is that Neuromancer has a reasonable chance of being adapted to the screen. Apple TV+ may not be the leading force in streaming entertainment today, but it’s established a track record of producing high-quality material and taking some risks along the way. I know I sound like the eternal fanboy when I say this, but, “This time it might be real.”
Neuromancer is a brilliant novel, one of my favorites, and by my lights, the book that rearranged science fiction. Just as Raymond Chandler did not invent the hard-boiled detective novel, William Gibson did not invent cyberpunk. But both authors took earlier bricklaying done by them and other writers, pulled it all together, and buffed the final result to a chrome-like sheen. There’s science fiction before Neuromancer, and there’s science fiction after Neuromancer.
Hence Neuromancer on film has been a hot topic among science fiction fans since the book was first published in 1984. Every few years over the subsequent decades, news would percolate up that a movie adaptation was in the works, only for the organizers to lose interest, fail to find finding, or simply not get the green light. The Wikipedia section on Neuromancer‘s numerous aborted film adaptations doesn’t do justice to its rocky history. Fake movie trailers have been sewn together; fan-made movie posters have been photoshopped. The rumors, anticipation, and disappointments surrounding the film’s production are legion. (My response to hearing of this latest adaptation attempt: “I’ll believe it when I see it.”)
There were several sidelights along the road to this moment, starting with Johnny Mnemonic in 1996. At first glance, it appeared the perfect aperitif for Neuromancer fans: Mnemonic was an adaptation of a Gibson short story set in the same story universe. The film landed flat, though, and is pretty grating to watch. (Some call it a cult classic—I can’t tell if they’re being ironic or not). Keanu Reeves turned in a cold performance (which he claims was intentional) within a confounding and bizarrely campy narrative. Some say Mnemonic was underfunded. Gibson said it was overfunded. Even if the studio execs were clueless in their meddling—not a stretch to imagine—I still think postmodernist director Robert Longo was simply in over his head.
(That said, I’ve not seen the new re-edit Johnny Mnemonic: In Black and White, so I’ll reserve judgment whether the film is irredeemable. I admit: The stills look damn promising.)
Johnny Mnemonic: In Black and White
It took The Matrix (1999) to give hungry cyberpunks the cinematic meal they were waiting for. There’s so many parallels between it and Neuromancer, you can’t help but think the writing/directing Wachowskis owe Gibson a pitcher of beer (if not a brewery). But Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) was on to something when, after viewing the film, he claimed “Cyberpunk? Done.” By using up Neuromancer‘s best devices, as well as every philosophical question explored by Philip K. Dick, the Wachowskis came close to shutting the door on the most interesting development in genre fiction since the 1930s. The banality and repetitiousness of the next three Matrix films—including 2021’s Resurrections, which I held a sliver of hope for—only seemed to cement Aronofsky’s point.
(Cyberpunk’s heyday in the 1990s has passed, but neo-cyberpunk lives. The new breed exists where a worldwide computer network is no longer an imagined future, but a concrete element of the story’s past.)
I’m perennially suspicious of Hollywood adapting books to the screen, especially science fiction. Too often screenwriters will ditch the most memorable and gripping parts of the source material to slide in Tinseltown’s tired narrative shorthand. Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle leaps to mind. I’ve not seen the recent adaptation of Foundation, but at least one reviewer thinks Asimov’s classic hasn’t actually been adapted. Still, Illuminerdi reports William Gibson is signed on as an executive producer for Neuromancer. That gives me a touch more confidence in the direction of the project.
But only a touch. In 2015, I wrote how Hollywood has abandoned “‘tight, gapless screenwriting’ to scripts focused on world-building, sequels, expansion, rebooting.” That was written in time when superhero franchises were claiming greater real estate at the cineplexes, and Hollywood had finished converting Tolkien’s charming tale about wee folk into a eight-hour epic-action trilogy. Cinema houses still ruled back then. Like a sneeze coming on, the theater owners knew a violent upheaval was imminent. Today, streaming services are the premier way to deliver movies to eager audiences. And that’s what worries me the most.
MIlla Jovovich as Molly Millions in Neuromancer (fan-made movie poster)
My dread is not that this cyberpunk classic will be adapted to television instead of the silver screen—it’s to see it adapted to a medium that expects seasons and episodes. As with High Castle and Foundation, the streaming services love season-long episodic television: All the better for binge-watching.
Episodic television ushers in the narrative shorthand that Neuromancer absolutely does not need: every hour ending on a contrived cliffhanger; the sexual tension of when-will-they-hook-up; the let-down of the couple separating (complete with the trite break-up language of television: “I need some space” or, “This is going too fast”); and so on.
Even if you’re coming in without having read a page of Asimov, you’ll still notice the drawn-out plots that go nowhere, the padding, and the weird choices the show has the characters make to keep the plot from moving forward. Cheap, nonsensical melodrama fills the series…The show also wants to have pew-pew laser battles and ship fights and spacewalk mishaps and junk, none of which offer anything you haven’t seen before, and are usually used to just run out the clock anyway.
He makes this sharp observation:
Then there’s the show’s terror that people might not make certain connections, so it shows something, has the character comment on it to themself, and then maybe throws in a flashback to someone saying something relevant even if it was said three minutes prior.
This comes from television writing 101: “Tell them what they’re going to see, show it to them, and then tell them what they saw.” If that sounds like how to organize a Powerpoint presentation, you’re right. It’s also why television writing in 2022 remains hard-wired to the narrative structures of I Love Lucy.
Just as Gibson’s console jockeys rewired systems to hijack signal broadcasts and repurposed wet-tech to bore holes through firewalls, let’s hope modern streaming technology is bent to Neuromancer‘s whims, and not vice-versa.
Addendum: One of the criticisms I’ve received, here and elsewhere, is that Neuromancer cannot properly be condensed into a two-hour movie, hence a series is a better fit for its adaptation.
I agree a multi-part show is appropriate for Neuromancer‘s intricate story line. I loathe condensing Neuromancer into a ninety-minute film almost as much as I loathe seeing Neuromancer: Season Two on my TV screen. However, when I originally wrote the above post, I kept fishing around for a good example of a multi-episode streaming series (for illustrative purposes), and failed to locate one.
This morning I recalled The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story (which started life on FX and moved to Netflix). Its miniseries format would work well for Neuromancer. Each segment builds the story and develops characters toward a conclusion, like chapters in a novel. There’s a beginning, a middle, and a door-closing end.
My gripe is that Apple TV+ may attempt to “episodize” Neuromancer, making it more like a soap opera or a recurring show than a single story told a chapter at a time. This is what happened to Man in the High Castle—which was more “inspired by” than a retelling of the source material—and what appears happened to Foundation.
