I'm going to start this with the best advice I can give any of you, in the midst of everything. The one bit of wisdom that will make all of this a heck of a lot easier.
Don't read this.
I'm serious. Don't read a single word, don't read Mr. Tuohey's rebuttal and for the love of God don't read that first column that started all of this. Get out of here, open up Bent and go make up your own mind, read it and digest it and decide what you think about it. Because that's the most important thing here, not two people debating over the contours of a source material that is going to mean nothing to you unless you read it first.
However, if you've read the story and the column and the rebuttal (which I hope you have, it makes it all quite easier to follow and I so hate re-explaining) and you're in desperate need of some more fitfully entertaining arguing, you are so in the right place. But, please, keep in mind, there's an old adage about arguing over the Internet that isn't really very nice and might apply here. So you may want to stand back, to avoid getting any of it on you.
Mr Tuohey makes some good points, but I do have to say he's wrong right off the bat. In the first few paragraphs, he terms me a "so-called" critic, which is way off base. I'm not a critic at all, his later term of "reviewer" is much closer to the actual truth. I don't have the background for critique and I certainly don't have time to do the research for it. Thus, I don't call myself one. What I do is give my impressions of a story and take an element of it, sort of piece apart that element and see how it applies, not only to that story but to writing as a whole. And maybe in the process we can see how it affects us and why it does. Sometimes I succeed in this, oftentimes I don't. It's a constant highwire act we play here, and you're all just along for the ride. Unfortunate, but it's true.
I will cop to the descriptions of "rambling" and "highly digressive" though. Sorry, but that's just how it rolls around here.
But back to the important stuff.
The main issue Mr Tuohey seems to have with my review is that I let the metaphor go way over my head, not perceiving what the crucial elements stood for. What I had tried to make clear was that I got the general gist of it but what lost me was that it seemed so dang obvious. There was no need to pull back the curtain, as I tried to do, because everything seemed spelled out for me right there on the page. Joe Schom, a man so self-absorbed as to have his proverbial head up his ass, becomes a man who literally has his head up his ass.
The police, representing minions of the State that oppress those who do not get in line are in fact . . . minions of the State who oppress Joe for not getting in line, as imagined in a scene that might make Al Sharpton giggle in its utter lack of subtlety. In the story, the System is broke, obviously, but the police might as well be wearing shirts that say, "The System is broke and we are but its Tools." They are police only because they need to represent something, otherwise if not for the mention of Ding-Dongs and guns, we wouldn't know what they are at all. It hardly seems organic, instead of the story leading us to the metaphor at hand, it's up front and center, striking us like a hammer.
And again it happens with the doctor, who represents the increasingly dehumanized nature of medicine that treats people like pieces of meat by . . . treating Joe like a dehumanized piece of meat, fit only for experiments. In the end, it feels like the literary equivalent of expressing how much I hate my high school principal by writing a story about shooting him in the head. Sure, you can probably guess that I don't like him very much, but that doesn't mean you're going to enjoy reading about it, or suspect that there's anything deeper to it than that. It's the difference between "telling" and "showing", and it seems to me there's too much of the former, with all the subtlety of a brick to the head.
So Joe is screwed over by the two elements of society that should be helping him out the most. I got that, like I said, it's not subtle and maybe it's not meant to be. But having gotten that, it leads to a further question and one that I may have avoided in the original review . . . why should I care?
Mr Tuohey feels that the reason I backed away from my original assessment of the metaphor is that I couldn't handle the bleak truths that the story seems to suggest, that when faced with the endless abyss that lurks behind the story, I squealed like a little girl and stepped back, burying my face in my mother's bosom. Now, I certainly don't want to turn this into a "whose penis is bigger" contest by stating that I've read much bleaker works of fiction than this, perceived them as such, and survived. That's rather irrelevant to the discussion at hand, to be honest, schoolyard taunts aside.
I don't see the abyss. Sorry, but I don't. What I see is a very cleverly written tale that seems to know that it's clever and in fact revels in it, to the point where I can feel it whispering over my shoulder, "There, that moment there, where the landlady only cares about her rent, that shows how she only perceives him as a source of income and not as a person . . . isn't that skillfully said? Or where the doctor thinks about being in the medical journals without really caring whether the patient survives or not, doesn't that do a great job of showing how the profession only cares about research, not people. Wasn't that masterful?" And it is clever and it is well written by someone who knows their craft. All the metaphors are properly placed, the descriptions are deftly worded, the waypoints are set to lead us right to where the author wants us to go.
What's missing is the resonance, the part that is supposed to make me put the story down with a chill going down my spine, my soul growing numb with a dawning recognition of the world as it is, as seen through the lens of the story. And I don't see it, because every time I look through, all I see is the artifice, the scaffolding of the story itself, stretched out and calling attention to its own construction.
It's a dystopia, sure, but not one we can easily relate to, if at all. Maybe it's the fault of the main character, who more or less brings about his own doom by choosing to make himself helpless and thus allows society to walk all over him, to his eventual demise. We're introduced to him as a jackass, and it's not long after that he disappears up his own rear end, purely because it's the only thing he finds worth noticing at all. In essence, he's no different from a drug-ridden derelict you see on the street. I'd like to help him, I'd like to help them all but before I do that, you've got to help yourself. And Joe makes no move to save himself, or even struggle. He doesn't so much let an uncaring society take its toll on him as let inertia roll right over him. He sits in front of the train and doesn't move . . . well, what did you think was going to happen? That landlady's got to make a buck somehow, right?
I applaud Mr Tuohey for not taking the uplifting, life-affirming route and have Joe grow into a better person, a freedom fighter driven to take down this terrible society. He dies and that does seem right. But that end seems to come too much at the passive hands of Joe and not enough at the hands of this dispassionate cruel society he's supposed to live in. What makes the books by Orwell and Kafka and all those people scary, really, truly scary, is that the protagonists are truly faced with forces beyond their control, that society has become warped to the point that it can basically do whatever it wants to you and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. And through those protagonists, their recognition becomes our recognition and we see that the world we live in isn't all that different from ours. A few slips, a few slides, and we're there, before we even realized it.
What it's missing is the heart, and not the kind that makes you go "Aw" and hug your family. It's the kind that makes you feel anything at all, that makes a story more than just words on the page. Because you can be clever and construct a handy metaphor, and you can be shocking and frank by mentioning feces a lot and you can tell me how you're exposing the harsh truths of the world . . . but at the end of it I'm still thinking to myself, "Well that was a nicely written story." And I don't think that was the author's intent at all.
I've got the story, but what I've got is a photo-realist's painting of a scene, where all the lighting is right and the anatomy on the figures is perfect and everything is just like real life. It's got all the right pieces, that's for certain. But something is . . . off and it's the thing that tugs and pulls and makes you give a damn, at the end of the day. There's writing about rape and there's writing about being raped and that's about as clear as I can make the difference.
His final quote from my Australian counterpart makes a good point in that very often in this world people aren't going to agree. Every story is going to be someone's favorite and someone else's least favorite and that's just the way it is. Even the classics aren't immune. My favorite novel of all time, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for fiction back in 1974. The fiction jury recommended the book unanimously, but when it came down to the final say of the Pulitzer board, they rejected it outright, saying that the book was "overwritten and obscene" (among the nice terms). Thus, no Pulitzer Prize in that category was awarded that year. Nothing is certain when it comes down to opinion, or analysis.
If there's rawness present, I don't see it. If there's bleakness there, I don't feel it. The metaphor lays like a neon reflection on the surface of a lake, broken into unrecognizable forms by any stray ripple, revealing nothing underneath but more water. And we can argue all day and all night whether that's the fault of the reader or the fault of the text. Everyone has to make that decision for themselves. Mr Tuohey seems pretty sure he knows the answer and maybe he's right. He's only doing what any writer worth a darn should do, defend his work to the death.
Me? I'm less certain, but I think I prefer it that way.
In the end, the author's interpretation trumps all else, in my opinion. You can read what I say and agree to whatever extent you'd like, but as far as I'm concerned, Mr Tuohey has given us the final word on what to expect from the story.
Robert, I want to thank you for your entertaining and well constructed rebuttal, as well as for your patience. I wish every author would do something like that, it would liven things up once in while. I probably shouldn't wish to be called pedantic and convoluted on a regular basis, but if I'm going to call 'em as I see 'em, I can expect no less from you or anyone else.
It has been a pleasure, sir, and I say this with the utmost sincerity. I look forward to reading you again, here or anywhere else. Whatever I may think of your fashion or style, I hope you keep doing it for as long as you can. So this story wasn't my thing. So what? There's plenty of room in this world for those stories, and many others. And that's why we all have to keep doing what we do, no matter what.
And that's my final word, such as it is. Everyone else who's still here, go back and read "Bent", read the other fine stories on the site. Something, anything.
Just don't stay here, please.
• Michael
"Oh, it's very hard to fight, I tried to find a plan of action but I couldn't get it right . . ." – Teardrop Explodes, "Treason"
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