drmstream[writing]

The post on this blog that gets the most traf­fic day in and day out is my rumi­na­tion on the last para­graph of Joyce’s The Dead.  It’s an amateur’s impres­sion­is­tic take.  That last para­graph has cap­ti­vated me ever since the first time I read it, and I go back to it as a reminder of how mag­i­cal great writ­ing, wher­ever you find it, can be.

Given the traf­fic that Google sends me, there are a lot of us out there who are try­ing plumb the mys­tery of that para­graph, most likely for an Eng­lish assignment.

(If you’re work­ing on a paper, good luck, and try to answer a ques­tion that you find inter­est­ing, rather than prove a the­sis that you find work­able.  Eng­lish teach­ers need to lighten up on the struc­ture of the essay and help you explore the inter­ests of your mind!)

One writer believes that the fac­tory of writ­ing teach­ers and aspir­ing writ­ers — and it’s taken me my adult life to real­ize that the best thing to do is drop the “aspir­ing” and just write — is being ill-served by our fas­ci­na­tion with Joyce’s great story and last para­graph.  We’re all miss­ing the point.  What made Joyce’s story great was how utterly of the moment it was, and how his work cap­tured the mys­tery of peo­ple try­ing to put who they were into words, through con­ver­sa­tion, learn­ing through interaction.

And through­out “The Dead,” these peo­ple are try­ing to come to terms with who they are and how they’re sup­posed to talk. An hour or so later, Gabriel Con­roy finds him­self in an awk­ward lit­tle spat with Miss Molly Ivors, another pro­fes­sor, about the Gaelic revival. Ivors calls Con­roy a “West Briton,” a code name for an Eng­lish sym­pa­thizer, because he pub­lished a book review in an Eng­lish jour­nal. Con­roy thinks she’s an idiot for jump­ing on the Gaelic band­wagon. Their friendly dis­cus­sion of pol­i­tics turns ugly and, although we don’t know why, Ivors leaves early.

Let me offer a few dis­claimers. I don’t write short sto­ries. I read a lot of them, but I don’t read enough of them to make seri­ous gen­er­al­iza­tions that can’t be shot down. But after my last non-scientific sur­vey, I can say that there’s def­i­nitely some­thing wrong with the Amer­i­can short story: Peo­ple don’t read it for plea­sure, and they don’t read it to fig­ure out where we are or who we’ve become. When news­pa­per writ­ers need to come up with some­thing lit­er­ary that says it all-let’s say after an act of ter­ror­ism, or after a pissy polit­i­cal summer-they head to Yeats (you know, the part about the cen­ter not hold­ing), not the con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can short story.

Write about what we’re try­ing to become in the here and now, with pas­sion.  This writer doesn’t think it’s happening.

I actu­ally do find it, but not always in fic­tion.  It’s out there among all the blog­gers that I encounter, work­ing to tell their story in the moment, a lit­tle fil­tered, a lit­tle raw.  They cap­ture the lan­guage and adjust.  Some­one on Twit­ter like @avflox is telling a mod­ern story of sen­su­al­ity and iden­tity in a new way, with a new lex­i­con, that is as com­pelling and uncer­tain as any good story.  Or @jessicagottlieb, or thou­sands of oth­ers who are writ­ing about what means a lot to them.

It’s a dif­fer­ent kind of short story, a dif­fer­ent kind of lit­er­a­ture, with a prism of iden­tity that’s more poet­ics than nar­ra­tive.

What do you think?

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