What Do We Mean When We
Ask What a Story Is About?
Reading a story called “False Spring” by Ben Lerner in
Paris Review #205, I came across this sentence:
Bundled debt, trace
amounts of antidepressants in the municipal water, the vast arterial network of
traffic, changing weather of increasing severity—whenever I looked at Lower
Manhattan from Whitman’s side of the river I resolved to be one of the artists
who momentarily transformed bad forms of collectivity into negative figures of
its possibility, a proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body.
I was floored. At that moment I
realized I had no idea what his story was about.
This revelation sent me into a hallucinatory moment. I
could see myself in front of a college classroom, “Contemporary Literature”
perhaps, even though teaching is one job I have studiously avoided all these
years. “Today we are discussing ‘False Spring.’ Does anyone want to start by
telling us what this story is about?” Some smart-alecky kid (myself, in
college) would have an answer.
Up until that
stupendous sentence, this particular story had been a fairly straightforward
tale, told in the first person, apparently about a guy in New York post 9/11
(in the same paragraph, there is a reference to “the present absence of the
towers.”) who is wrestling with the concept of fatherhood brought on by being
asked to be a sperm donor. He takes some
swipes at hipster Brooklyn. There is a story within a story about a woman who
finds out that the man she thought was her father wasn’t, negating her cultural
and personal identification. These details of plot are what a story is about in
some sense. They might make up the first paragraph of the publisher’s blurb or
a review in a popular magazine. It wouldn’t do for my mythical English class
though. We would be more interested in the sudden appearance of Whitman, and
that wonder word “proprioceptive.” It gets harder and harder to know what a
story is truly about the more you think about it.
In most
non-imaginary English classes, the topic of what a story is actually about is
not open to discussion. Or maybe that opinion is the product of one bad
experience I had in college. I got an “F” on a paper about Margaret Atwood’s
first novel Surfacing. It was the
only thing on our reading list that hadn’t been discussed in class, so I had no
idea of the professor’s interpretation. Apparently, we did not agree. I never took
another lit class. I gave up on the idea of talking about books in public at
all. It seemed such a challenge to try
and say what any book was truly about much less what it meant to me.
And yet literature
still had its formative grip on me. I read everywhere, everything. My worldview
was formed by the authors I’ve talked about in this blog and elsewhere—Anais
Nin, Gertrude Stein, Lawrence Durrell, and then there are the classics like Pride and Prejudice and the contemporary
scene, where I am guided by my daughter. Yet I never gained the confidence to
be outspoken about my devotion, in fact, I avoid it. What’s going on? Working
in bookstores has taught me that everyone has their opinions, and it’s a good thing,
too, or the last few bookstores would be gone. The bookseller‘s skill is not
necessarily knowing what someone should have read in the past, but to know what
they should read next. It is our constant search for surprising sentences.
