Reviews & Criticism

Charles Baxter’s dysfunctional narratives

Leave a comment
Charles Baxter
Charles Baxter

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 would read, watch, and tell each other today.

Baxter appropriated the term “dysfunctional narrative” from poet C. K. Williams, but he expanded it so much, it’s fair to say he’s made the term his own. He borrowed a working definition of dysfunctional narratives from 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 several 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 description 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 coworker undercut them at the office—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. The term 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, who found much to blame him for, but portrays herself as all-but-blameless. 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:

onetwothreefour
abcbcdcdedef

Each column represents a political group or ideology, all distinct, yet possessing many common traits. (Think of different flavors of Communism, or 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.

"Burning Down the House" by Charles Baxter

Likewise, in the traits that follow, just because a story doesn’t include all of them doesn’t mean it “avoids dysfunction.” Rather, dysfunctional narratives are built by the storyteller selecting the bricks they require 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.” He 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 characters 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. Often it requires a surgical omission of details, the good fortune in the main character’s life that would be considered a success, or even the result of unearned privilege.

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
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 all by design. Abstractions and missing antagonists don’t have a voice. The point of a dysfunctional narrative is to avoid giving the antagonist a voice, or for their voice to be hobbled (by making them loudmouthed, insensitive, or enfeebled, to offer a few examples). 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 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 to protect them from attack.

“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 the author’s 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, the author 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. For a dysfunctional narrative, the fewer the secondary characters, the better. (This is what usually sandbags grand conspiracy theories. If the conspiracy requires tens or hundreds of participants, it seems impossible no one involved would eventually blow the whistle.)

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. Questioning the moral outcome of a short story about abuse in a writing workshop? Unthinkable.

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 number of people writing fiction. Most of those students were drawn from America’s upwardly-striving classes.

The workshop method used in these programs led to a rise in those aspiring writers 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.) The realities of publication odds means that those workshops may be the only place for a writer’s stories to be read and analyzed. It would be natural for those writers to focus their creative energies on minimizing criticism in the workshop.

With the expansion of writing programs came a rise in those writers scratching around for powerful subject matter. Topics like trauma and abuse are lodestones when seeking supercharged dramatic stakes. These writers also drew from personal biography for easy access to subject matter. A common rebuttal in workshops to criticism is, “Well, this really happened.” It’s a good way to silence dissent in a workshop. Reality doesn’t always make for a good story, though.

The Program Era also ushered in a heavy-handed emphasis on character-driven fiction over plot-driven fiction. I’ve come to believe this too could have led to a rise of dysfunctional narratives in writing programs. I explore this theory here.

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. Inaction in fiction has come to be praised as a literary virtue. Stories with characters who take matters into their own hands often are derided as genre fiction.

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. Collecting allies is equated to collecting followers on social media, with likes substituted as populist approval of one’s message.

The next step in the evolution of the above is for storytellers to strategize how best to defend their work from criticism—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.) Dysfunctional stories are defensible stories.

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 use their stories to settle a score. If it’s too much to ask stories to explain, then certainly we can expect them to feature human, contradictory characters who connect dots and discover fresh truths in our fragile world. Even if the main character does not grow by the last page, we should grow by then, if only a little.


. Last updated .

Hell freezes over: Netflix adapts “White Noise”

Leave a comment
White Noise promotional photo

While I’m mildly optimistic about the announced adaptation of Neuromancer to Apple TV+, I found myself…stunned? aghast? tickled?—when I heard Netflix has adapted Don DeLillo’s White Noise to its streaming service. As I wrote on Mastodon and Twitter:

White Noise is not the kind of book one associates with popular entertainment, nor its author as the kind of person to acquiesce to its adaptation.

This merely touches the surface of my reaction to Netflix’s latest project.

If you’re not familiar, the novel White Noise is a 1985 literary comedy about Jack Gladney, a “professor of Hitler studies,” and his nuclear family in a fictional Midwestern college town. The early chapters depict suburban life as one soaked in crass consumerism, commercialism, and the ubiquitous nature of mass media. Things go pear-shaped when a railroad car spill on the edge of town triggers an “airborne toxic event,” leading to an evacuation and the concomitant strain on the family unit.

Remember, this is branded a comedy. The comic thrust of White Noise comes from its supposedly scathing parodies of American middle-class life. Take the novel’s opening paragraphs, where Gladney observes the college’s students returning to campus in single file:

The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags — onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints.

You’re forgiven if you stopped reading halfway through and skipped down. You didn’t miss anything.

Critic B. R. Myers categorizes this manner of list-making as a symptom of “a tale of Life in Consumerland, full of heavy irony, trite musing about advertising and materialism, and long, long lists of consumer artifacts, all dedicated to the proposition that America is a wasteland of stupefied shoppers.” That’s pretty much what the first half of White Noise adds up to. There’s more of these dreary lists in the book, and plenty of tin-eared dialogue to boot, as evidenced in this exchange between Gladney and his wife:

“It’s not the station wagons I wanted to see. What are the people like? Do the women wear plaid skirts, cable-knit sweaters? Are the men in hacking jackets? What’s a hacking jacket?”

“They’ve grown comfortable with their money,” I said. “They genuinely believe they’re entitled to it. This conviction gives them a kind of rude health. They glow a little.”

“I have trouble imagining death at that income level,” she said.

“Maybe there is no death as we know it. Just documents changing hands.”

“Not that we don’t have a station wagon ourselves.”

“It’s small, it’s metallic gray, it has one whole rusted door.”

Or this moment—the most famous in the book—when Gladney’s school-aged daughter talks in her sleep:

She uttered two clearly audible words, familiar and elusive at the same time, words that seemed to have a ritual meaning, part of a verbal spell or ecstatic chant.

Toyota Celica.

A long moment passed before I realized this was the name of an automobile. The truth only amazed me more. The utterance was beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder. It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky, tablet-carved in cuneiform.

I suppose for a certain type of person, this is a scream, gold-shot and looming. I’m not that type of person.

It’s the phoniness of White Noise I can’t let go of. The excuse of “it’s a satire” does not forgive the writer from grasping and depicting the reality of a situation. The power of satire is to capture the genuine and turn its underbelly over to tickle it—to reveal its absurdities in both premise and execution. DeLillo never accomplishes this. Professors don’t inventory their students’ goods from afar; husbands don’t tell their wives that the station wagon has a junky door (when any wife would full-well know this); and if a daughter was repeating a car make and model in her sleep, no one would declare it a religious experience. The absurdity of White Noise is not the mindless consumers populating it, but that this novel somehow is considered a smart skewering of them.

Compare the above to George Carlin’s ridiculing of American materialism in his infamous “Stuff” sketch:

DeLillo’s range-finding jabs are timid compared to Carlin’s honed wit, from the basic observation that homes are just lockboxes for our precious objects, to the game-theoretic anguish of weighing which personal goods make the cut for an overnight excursion. He even indulges in his own Consumerland-like list (“Afrin 12-hour decongestant nasal spray”) that is far briefer, funnier, and better-curated than DeLillo’s weary catalogs. The laughs aren’t merely at Carlin’s on-stage antics, but in the gnawing sensation that we’re guilty of what he’s describing—and Carlin’s tacit admission that he’s guilty of it, too. Meanwhile, in White Noise, we’re supposed to be chortling at the mindlessness of our inferiors. DeLillo is othering America—for whose benefit? Why, Americans like him: Americans who deny their American-ness.

(In this sense, I suspect the Netflix adaptation will execute much like Adam McKay’s smug Don’t Look Up, a spoof also predicated on an America stupefied by cable television and fast food.)

It’s not merely the elitism that fails to connect. Gladney’s field of “Hitler studies” is never really fleshed out. It could have been a fascinating device (although it risked from page one falling into the trap of Godwin’s Law). As the book wears on, the Hitler studies thing feels like a gag DeLillo thought would reap comic gold, and only realized chapters in that the idea had run out of gas. The best he can do is have Gladney deliver a lecture comparing Hitler to Elvis Presley—there’s your Godwin’s Law at work. When Gladney admits he’s only recently learned German, you realize how thin the satire really is: This is not a real professor of Hitler studies.

When I say “Gladney is not a real professor of Hitler studies,” I don’t mean it in the same way that W. H. Auden said Shrike is not a real newspaper editor in Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts. Auden meant that Miss Lonelyhearts is not about newspapermen or journalism—the premise of a man taking a position as an advice columnist is merely a convenience to place the book’s heart-wrenching confessional letters into his hands. Gladney’s field is very much intended to satirize him and academia, but the joke is never explored and left unfulfilled. It becomes a shingle to hang around Gladney’s neck, doing precious little to inform his worldview or way of life.

The main course for White Noise, though, is the American bourgeoisie. The metaphysics of supermarkets are discussed by the book’s characters (always with a straight face). Death is discussed in excruciating abstractions and legalistic terms. The book concludes with Gladney looking out over a hazy dusk, the air thick with toxic chemicals, and admiring its beauty. (No—really.)

White Noise by Don DeLillo

What’s the problem with Netflix adapting the book? In truth, I don’t care much one way or the other. What stunned me—and motivated those posts on social media—is that White Noise was always intended to be a sharp poke in the eye for middle America, with plenty of scorn reserved for major corporations and the mass media.

In other words, White Noise satirizes the type of corporation that’s adapting it into a movie, mocks the people that corporation will be marketing the film at, and despises the corporation collecting its profits as the mindless mob watches on from the comfort of the sofas in their McMansions, with their living rooms, their family rooms, their bedrooms, their candy rooms, their office rooms, their great rooms.

Why do they have great rooms?

What is a great room?


. Last updated .

Sherlock Holmes: The enduring allure of history’s greatest detective

Leave a comment
Sherlock Holmes

Mystery and Suspense Magazine has published my article “Sherlock Holmes: The enduring allure of history’s greatest detective” on their web site. In it, I explore the traditional reasons why critics and fans think the Baker Street detective remains popular—even immortal—to this day, and offer in return my own thoughts on the subject:

What is the enduring appeal of this shape-shifting character? Doyle gives no indication that Holmes is particularly attractive or magnetic in personality. He can be cold, abrasive, and downright rude in moments. One cannot help but feel Dr. Watson is a man with a remarkable reservoir of patience. How many Sherlock Holmes adventures open with the detective challenging Watson to discern the history of a person from nothing more than a walking stick, a battered hat, or a muddied shoe? Watson entertains Holmes and his games of deduction, but always as the lesser, never as the equal. (In my experience, medical doctors are not the sorts of people who take well to being talked down to.) Why would such a man continue to fascinate and entertain well into the 21st century?

My thinking on Doyle and his creation has shifted over the past few years due to a renewed appreciation for the Sherlock Holmes canon and, of course, writing a reinterpretation of his classic The Hound of the Baskervilles.

The Mystery and Suspense article is here.

For more background on my thinking, there’s “Sherlock by Train” and “Why I wrote ‘A Man Named Baskerville'”.

And you can learn more about A Man Named Baskerville, which is available in Kindle and paperback.


.

West’s Disease and “Sadly, Porn”

3 Comments
W. H. Auden, Dan Strange (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Update, 7 Jul 2022: I’ve taken a fair amount of heat for the sin of admitting I’d not read Sadly, Porn before producing the following post. Note that I did read the Amazon sample before writing what follows, which is 10% of the book’s opening; I don’t count that as a full read, and didn’t want to quibble about that point when I first published this. Scott Alexander’s review quotes substantially from the book as well, but again, another quibble.

What my detractors don’t seem to get is that this post spends the bulk of its energies examining W. H. Auden’s “West’s Disease” and not Edward Teach’s book. The post originated as a comment to Scott Alexander’s follow-up to his review, but as my comment grew and became more involved, I decided to publish it here, on my blog.

As such, this post should be framed as “If Astral Codex Ten and Resident Contrarian are correct about this one point in Sadly, Porn, it relates to West’s Disease in this way…”

But, of course, it depends on the reader to carry the logic from there, and not simply dunk on me and walk off with LOLs.

I am now reading Sadly, Porn. For the record, I’ve read nothing so far that changes my mind on any of my thoughts below. If anything, it’s only cementing my position.

Allow me to state this up-front: I’ve not read Edward Teach’s Sadly, Porn. Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten (ACX) has, though, and in response wrote a rather lengthy and discursive review, as well as a follow-up on the comments it elicited. At this moment, most of my understanding of Sadly, Porn comes from these sources (which I freely admit is an imperfect substitute for reading the book).

From what I’ve gathered, Sadly, Porn is a meandering and intentionally obscure treatise (diatribe?), grounded in psychoanalytics, which purports to explain—among other things—the ways people lie to themselves. Released in December 2021, the Kindle edition clocks in at over 1,100 pages, brimming with extended discourses on topics you might think plucked from the air, such as a ten-page examination of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. It’s also larded with David Foster Wallace-esque footnotes and Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius-style exhortations directed at the reader. The author opens with a thirty-page erotica story which, he later claims, is only included to scare off readers. (An odd strategy, since there are a multitude of writers producing such fiction for a lucrative living.) Really, to get a good idea of the book’s scope, read the ACX review.

What lit my interest in it comes from ACX taking a stab at boiling down Sadly, Porn to its core thesis:

Psychologically healthy people have desires. Sometimes they fantasize about these desires, and sometimes they act upon them. You’ve probably never met anyone like this.

Psychologically unhealthy people, e.g., you and everyone you know, don’t have desires, at least not in the normal sense. Wanting things is scary and might obligate you to act toward getting the thing lest you look like a coward. But your action might fail, and then you would be the sort of low-status loser who tries something and fails at it.

Again, from what I’ve gathered, Edward Teach believes that social status is the chief (or even sole) motivator of human behavior. (Or, perhaps he doesn’t; ACX makes it clear the book is too cagey to state its arguments plainly.)

Teach certainly paints us all as loathsome meat-bags of pettiness. Yet there’s something familiar about his observations that makes it difficult to reject his assertions. In a time where social media has devised a multitude of ways to score our social standing (via follower counts, likes, retweets, and so on), and in a culture endlessly promoting concepts like self-actualization and fame, his claims about the primacy of status-seeking has substance.

Now compare Teach’s accounting of Man’s damnable condition with W. H. Auden’s analysis of Nathanael West’s novels, where he first describes “West’s Disease”:

This is a disease of consciousness which renders it incapable of converting wishes into desires. … All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: “I refuse to be what I am.” [But the sufferer] cannot desire anything, for the present state of the self is the ground of every desire, and that is precisely what the wisher rejects. [Emphasis mine.]

Nathanael West
Nathanael West

To simplify Auden’s distinction: A wish is the simple act of imagining oneself as a different person, or in a different situation; a desire is imagining how one might convert one’s current self into a different person or situation. A wish is wanting to be thin; a desire is vowing to join a gym and work-out every day (even if one doesn’t act on it). West’s Disease is the inability to transform one to the other, leading to inaction, loathing, and rage.

The finest examples of West’s Disease may be found in The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West’s most well-known novel. It’s a brilliant and acidic look at 1930s Hollywood, as witnessed by a motley group of misfits well-distanced from Tinseltown’s glamour, money, and success. “Hollywood’s success as a dream factory is predicated on knowing our wishes and actualizing them on the silver screen,” I wrote two years ago. “That’s why Hollywood appears a tantalizing cure for West’s Disease.”

Auden’s diagnosis that a person with West’s Disease “cannot desire anything” echoes another summation of Sadly, Porn from blogger Resident Contrarian:

[Teach asserts] we in general are incapable of action; we don’t want to act but also can’t act, and we rely on a nebulous “them” to put us on a track towards having to do it. … we want a situation where we don’t have to take an action, but where an action is demanded of us by circumstance.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that RC’s example (“you don’t want to talk to the pretty girl; you want her to trip so you have to catch her”) sounds like a stock scene in a Hollywood romantic comedy. And I do equate wishing, in Auden’s terms, with Teach’s idea that we crave an externality to occur that actualizes our wishes for us. Teach is perhaps exploring Auden’s wish mechanism a bit more fully, but it looks to me that Auden in 1962 struck upon the same vein of thinking that Teach is attempting to communicate in 2022.

The Day of the Locust movie poster
Poster for The Day of the Locust (1975) movie adaptation

West’s Disease is what paralyzes the misfits in The Day of the Locust. These Hollywood outsiders witness the fruits of Hollywood’s money and glamour being distributed to others, never themselves. They want success, but success is supposed to come to them, not vice-versa. Faye Greener, the only character who can claim to have a film career in front of the camera, complains “the reason she wasn’t a star was because she didn’t have the right clothes.” (There’s a similar shrugging passivity in McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?)

But Auden is less absolutist than Teach. It’s West’s Disease, after all: It only afflicts certain individuals, whereas Teach finds it to be widespread. (Perhaps Teach is right, though. Perhaps West’s Disease is contagious and has spread virulently since 1962. Or since 1939, when Locust was published.)

Auden also does not pin down West’s Disease as a natural state of the human psyche, but as a result of modernity:

There have, no doubt, always been cases of West’s Disease, but the chances of infection in a democratic and mechanized society like our own are much greater than in the more static and poorer societies.

When, for most people, their work, their company, even their marriages, were determined, not by personal choice or ability, but by the class into which they were born, the individual was less tempted to develop a personal grudge against Fate; his fate was not his own but that of everyone around him.

But the greater the equality of opportunity in a society becomes, the more obvious becomes the inequality of the talent and character among individuals, and the more bitter and personal it must be to fail. [Again, emphasis mine.]

This jibes with one of my intuitions as I read ACX’s review: That Teach’s near-universality of status-seeking in the human psyche is more likely the result of (or greatly amplified by) recent trends in technology and social organization. Auden wrote the above when notions like meritocracy were ripe in the air and corporate ladders were being erected sky-high. Today, social media and tabloid-esque journalism is king, can show you the numbers to prove it, and has disjointed our culture in unexpected ways.

What’s more, 21st-century American popular media doesn’t merely make “inequalities of talent and character” obvious; our celebrity-obsessed culture revels in and celebrates them. As Budd Schulberg wrote about status climbing: “It will survive as long as money and prestige and power are ends in themselves, running wild, unharnessed from usefulness.”

The Day of the Locust opens describing those with West’s Disease as those who “loitered on the corners or stood with their backs to the shop windows and stared at everyone who passed. … They had come to California to die.” In the final chapter, they rise up in revolt, and Los Angeles burns. Auden saw West’s Disease as damaging not merely to the individual, but to the society around them.

Teach seems to treat West’s Disease as an intellectual, and perhaps masculine, failing. (Apparently cuckoldry is a running theme throughout Sadly, Porn.) The book adopts a scolding and sneering tone toward the reader, implicating them as weak and blithe to this delusion of false desires and status envy.

I know which author I’m inclined to listen to.


. Last updated .

IFComp 2021: Closure

Leave a comment

See here for my IFComp 2021 scoring and reviewing rubrics.

The headline for Closure by Sarah Willson is “An ill-advised sad teen heist.” That truly is an appropriate summation for this quick and tidy parser game.

Closure opens with a Mad Libs series of questions (“What’s an activity you like doing around the house on a day off?” and so forth) before launching straight into the situation at hand. You receive a text message from your friend Kira:

i did something totally cool and normal that you will definitely not disapprove of

i'm in TJ's dorm room right now

TJ being Kira’s ex-boyfriend, naturally, who is away for the afternoon. Kira is Watergating his room to reclaim an old photo from when they were a couple. Kira texted you because she needs your help searching for said memento.

The innovation here is to use an interactive fiction parser as an SMS interface, where your commands are not actually instructions for the story’s “you,” but rather for Kira as she frantically ransacks TJ’s dorm room. All of my commands received character-appropriate responses from Kira rather than the flat, characterless responses typical for text adventures (although I didn’t try anything too wacky). Even when I got a touch stuck, the hint system remained in character:

>hint
you're asking me? that's why i texted you in the first place!

ok, let's see

if it were me, i'd probably…

Another nice interface touch: When Kira sends multiple messages to you in succession, you have to press a key to receive each one. It’s a clever way of emulating the natural pauses when texting.

There’s a Rorschach test within Closure: My first command to Kira was LEAVE, which she promptly refused. I betrayed my principles and began assisting her in her search. The game’s setup makes you complicit. I felt a bit guilty throughout my session.

Most everyone has been in this situation, or at least knows someone who was—well, maybe not texting while breaking-and-entering, but madly jealous and forlorn, along with the concomitant regrettable decision-making. There’s not a lot of time for character development or nuance in Closure; it’s Kira’s hyper-focused mindset and the frisson of her situation which sustains interest.

Is there room for improvement? I suppose so, but I admire the minimalism of the project: You’re dropped into the situation, you navigate Kira through it, and you witness a transformation. It’s not deep, nuanced stuff, but it doesn’t purport to be. Closure is more like a breezy short story, a slice-of-life, than a full-bodied, novella-like game. It can be finished over a short lunch.

I confess: Within twenty seconds of opening Closure, I thought, “This isn’t my kinda game.” The pleasant surprise was its constrained scope and smart design choices drawing me into Kira’s little adventure.


. Last updated .

IFComp 2021: What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed

Leave a comment

See here for my IFComp 2021 scoring and reviewing rubrics.

Amanda Walker’s What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed opens with a scene that could have been cut-and-pasted out of any number of text adventures from the days of yore: A bare room, a closed door, and a locked wooden chest. However, before this comes an introduction suggesting all is not as it seems:

…as you try to bring your hand to your eyes, you have no sense of your hand. No sense of your eyes. It is a strange sort of seeing. Looking down at where you– your body– should be, you see nothing. You try to open your mouth, to call out, but you have no sense of your mouth. No sound comes from you.

This disembodied sensation is not fleeting. This is your state of being throughout the game. Ghost Guessed takes one of the core assumptions of interactive fiction—the player’s ability to interact with the game world—and turns it on its head. You can LOOK and EXAMINE and glide from room to room, but otherwise, you appear unable to interact with the world around you.

Soon, some shattered glass and an opened piece of jewelry reveal you are capable of manipulating the world by your emotions. And your emotions are strongly felt: Doors don’t open, they slam open. Boxes fly across rooms to you, but rather than being caught, they soar through your incorporeal form and crash to the floor. This linkage between strong emotions and violent results is the game’s strongest element. I’m not encyclopedic when it comes to the taxonomy of the spirit world, but I believe this is known as a poltergeist, a “noisy ghost.”

While this concept of emotions-instead-of-actions may sound like a device, it’s handled rather well. Not only is the technique discovered organically, each emotion is tied to the character’s past. Learning how to manipulate the world reveals and defines your character and her history. The other story elements are gleaned through a steady accretion of detail within the house.

The title comes from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall” (“to a young child”):

Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

Ghost Guessed is as doleful as its nineteenth-century namesake. It reminds me of other Gothic literature from that time period. As you float through the house, a picture develops of a quiet country estate occupied by a moneyed family, where the secrets are locked away upstairs whilst whispers downstairs are exchanged over tea and cakes. The bulk of the dramatic arc has already occurred when the game begins, but there’s plenty of empty space within this hushed, reserved home for the main character to realize the totality of what’s happened, and to grow from it.

Side note: The content warning indicates the game contains violence and child abuse. This turned me off at first, but I came to see it’s all handled tactfully and without sensationalism. Kudos.

None of the puzzles were difficult, but I would recommend anyone starting the game to examine everything. I don’t think of this as a “puzzle” game, however.

What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed is an elegiac game, a story of tones and grays within an interactive fiction, solemn without becoming moody—good for a rainy day.


.

IFComp 2021: Unfortunate

Leave a comment

See here for my IFComp 2021 scoring and reviewing rubrics.

Unfortunate by Jess Elizabeth Reed opens with a straightforward yet unusual premise: You and your frenemy Lux, both amateur fortune tellers, agree to a bet:

If you could give accurate readings to everyone at the party, then they would teach you what they know. But it [sic] you couldn’t, then you’d be banned from doing readings at their house ever again. Somewhat stupidly perhaps, you accepted the challenge.

This isn’t fortune-telling in the sense of crystal balls and satin-shrouded parlors reeking of patchouli. You merely take a person’s hands and react to the images passing through your mind. The game permits you to decide what fortune you’d like to give, based on a menu system. As you offer readings, you record them in your notebook.

The party is attended by a clutch of hip baristas and bookstore clerks in a house of thrift-store furniture and long-playing record players. From the brief conversations, you gather there’s a backstory between some of these people—just like one would at a real house party of twentysomethings. I wish this exploration could have gone deeper; the conversation system offers a limited number of questions you may ask, and the responses range from perfunctory to minimal. Still, they are in character:

[Your reading:] Your love life is volatile and has the potential to wreak havoc.
Irene: Bite me.

Once the readings have been offered, there’s a shift in the game. Events begin occurring, and those fuzzy readings you gave begin to seem relevant. “Sometimes the only way to be successful is to make your own luck…” reads the game’s introduction.

Alas, the title Unfortunate has a double (or even triple) meaning. The game’s minimal approach is marred by typos and a lack of detail work. You can CHECK NOTEBOOK to review your fortunes, but no notebook is to be found in your inventory. A number of mentioned objects cannot be examined or are unusable, such as a shower curtain that can’t be opened, or a closed door that fails to hinder your path between rooms. Opening a box reveals an important item, but the description concludes “You open the cardboard box, revealing nothing.” None of this is fatal, but it all adds up to an end product that feels decidedly unpolished.

More seriously, at a key point the game settles into a state where I can’t leave the kitchen. I can consistently reproduce the problem. It occurs right when the game is winding up, which takes some of the air out of the tires. I suspect the bug is triggered by one of the readings I’m giving, and that I’m selecting the same reading each time I play. I’m not motivated enough to figure out which reading for which character causes the failure, however.

I sense the author’s intention was for the various combinations of readings to trigger new situations at the party you had to deal with. But as I couldn’t move forward once the readings had been made, my speculations about Unfortunate remain just that.


. Last updated .