Disagreeing With The Dead · 7:32pm Jun 21st, 2017
I just listened to Lecture 12, "Structuring a narrative without a plot", from the Teaching Company series Writing Great Fiction by James Hynes. (I don't recommend the series, as it's bloated; Hynes takes a long time getting to his point and then belaboring it, and it's often a trivial or obvious point.)
In this lecture, Hynes talks among other stories about James Joyce's "The Dead", the last story in Dubliners. "The Dead" is considered the greatest short story that the person currently considered the greatest writer of the English language wrote. Let me tell you why I think it's a bad story.
It takes place at a Christmas party in Dublin in 1904. Gabriel Conroy discovers at the end of the story that his wife is still in love with a boy who, many years ago, caught his death of cold waiting in the rain for her. Most of Joyce's famous short stories are like that--"epiphany" stories, in which the main character suddenly realizes something new (and always crushingly disappointing and disillusioning) about his life.
I'll contrast "The Dead" with another epiphany story by Joyce, "Araby", which I think is much better. In Araby, a young boy has a crush on a girl down the street. One day she asks him if he's going to the street bazaar across town, a one-day only event. She wishes she could, but can't. He immediately says he's going and promises to bring her something from it. The word "bazaar" is so exotic and exciting that he is sure he can find something there to impress her with his romantic feelings. But mundane circumstances conspire to keep him away from the bazaar until it is almost closed, and when he gets there, only one stall is still open, and he buys nothing.
"Araby" has a stronger set of metaphors: the bazaar and Arabia are metaphors for the exotic romance of girls, and his need for train fare, his uncle's schedule, and the stubbornly slow train are metaphors for the mundane time-vampires and petty money shortages of lower-middle-class life which drag us down and keep us from ever reaching our goals. But most importantly, it lets you know what it's about: his longing for this girl.
Hynes said,
The structural brilliance of "The Dead" is that it does not set up a conflict at the start of the story. It holds your interest by giving you a plotless but entertaining and exquisitely detailed account of its main character and his social situation. Then it blindsides you at the end with a conflict that neither you nor the main character even knew existed. The conclusion of "The Dead" is powerful partly because of what it says: that happiness is precarious, and sometimes, it's founded on a lie. But it's also powerful because of the way that Joyce plays with your expectations... If he had set up a conventional plot, opening with Gabriel wondering if Greta was happy in their marriage, for example, the ending simply wouldn't have worked. The power of the story comes from the way it gives us what looks like an ordinary situation... and then surprises both Gabriel and the reader with something extraordinary... A conventional plot would have killed "The Dead".
The reasons Hynes gives for why "The Dead" is so great are why I think it's bad: It gives you no clue what the story is about until the final pages. Hynes says that gives it more impact, but I say that's bollocks. The ending in "Araby" hits you harder because you're hoping for the opposite sort of ending, rather than, as in "The Dead", hoping for nothing at all except to finally finish the damn thing (which is 16,000 words long, 7 times as long as "Araby").
"The Dead" is, furthermore, full of gratuitous red herrings. It has scenes without Gabriel, so that it's hard to know how much attention to focus on him. It has another character, Freddy Malins, who's more interesting than Gabriel and sometimes seems to be its focus. There is a melancholy vignette about another guest, Bartell D'Arcy, who is a wonderful singer but doesn't want to sing because his voice is not what it once was. The other characters debate religion, ethics, racial prejudice, politics, and art. Gabriel worries about a speech he has to give, which he finally gives at about the halfway mark, and it is about the new ideas and principles of the new generation, and whether perhaps in its over-intellectualization it might lose track of its humanity. In short, the first 14K words of "The Dead" is a bloated mess which Joyce seems to have deliberately stuffed full of red herrings, to keep the reader continually guessing as to what the story was about.
The dialogue in "The Dead" might be as fascinating as Haynes claims it is if you were actually at that party listening to it. Experiencing it as a reader is another thing entirely. Fiction is not a random slice of life because real life is usually boring, and it is boring because it has no structure, just like "The Dead". The problem with this random, peripatetic dialogue is that while one might tolerate it in real life, a reader understands she is reading a story, and is struggling to make sense of it. There is simply no sense to be made of the first 14,000 words of "The Dead". If a reader is passive or stupid enough to be content to listen to 14,000 words of babble as setup, why, then she might appreciate the story. But an intelligent reader, knowing that Joyce is supposed to be very clever and hence searching for metaphors, plot points, and foreshadowings that aren't there, is too exhausted by word 14,000 to care anymore.
Just as important is that "The Dead" is just an epiphany, while "Araby" is a story with an epiphany at the end. That is, "The Dead" rambles for 14,000 words, then jams an epiphany onto the end. "Araby", by contrast, has a plot: The main character wants something (the girl), forms a plan to get her, executes the plan, confronts obstacles, and reaches a kind of climax within this plot, at which point he has his epiphany which reveals the flaws in his understanding of the subject he's been thinking about for the entire story.
I'm not a devotee of the character epiphany--I usually like characters to realize things more gradually; it's my readers I like to hit over the head with a sledgehammer. (You're welcome.) But I do write epiphany stories, and when I do, they work like "Araby", not like "The Dead": The Corpse Bride, Burning Man Brony: Fear and Loathing of Equestria, The Magician and the Detective, Fluttershy's Night Out (original ending), and the dual epiphany in Beauty and the Beast (reader gets an epiphany from the main character's false epiphany). None of those endings should come as surprises, and the idea that, following Hynes' logic, they would be better stories if I ripped all the foreshadowing out of them so that the shock at the ending was completely unexpected--well, it strikes me as perverse. It would make the ending appear arbitrary rather than inevitable, and hence turn the story from something with an opinion about how life works into yet another post-modern voice shouting that nothing makes sense. I suppose, in this age that loves Axe Cop and the Random tag, there is a market for that, but count me out.
It's been far too long since I've read Dubliners to have anything useful to say. I'll have to re-read it when I finish Ulysses, to see if I agree with either viewpoint here.
Hm.
Restructuring a narrative without a plot.
"Hynes takes a long time getting to his point and then belaboring it, and it's often a trivial or obvious point."
Sounds like he's Showing instead of Telling. (sorry, couldn't resist)
Anyway, in online fiction, Interesting trumps Plot. Modern humans have been trained to be short attention spanned creatures, starting most probably with the remote control and the advent of more than three channels of TV to watch. There's a word for a MLP fanfic that runs on for 14k words before anything interesting happens.
Boring.
Heck, there's a similar word for any Amazon e-book in which nothing interesting happens in the 'Read Me Now' sections. Non-seller.
Now, I'm a fan of the head-fake, the unexpected reveal, and the cliffhanger, but what comes before that *has* to be interesting and somehow germane to the plot or it gets skipped over, tl;dr, and a couple of clicks later the reader is catching up on Instapundit or watching cat videos. I'm willing to bet this is more related to the way the characteristics of the Common Book-Reader have changed over the years than to any real functional advice to writers. Possibly, it also relates to the function of books as escapist literature (present and past) and a tendency of popular authors being famous for being popular.
Think about it for a second. Reader A meets Reader B on the street and talk about The Dead (which is written by a Famous Author, and therefore a Conversational Topic of Importance). Reader A has read it all the way through, and can take social 'brownie points' for being able to snub Reader B, who only managed to struggle through it part-way before being forced to stop. Reader B can't even fake it, because the story has taken several unexpected turns at the ending.
That segment of "The Dead," moving between a mix of people, topics, and perspectives at a single time and place without much other immediate connection, seems like it could work perfectly well in a novel or generally longer piece of media. But then, that's assuming the content outside the scene grants structure and interest independent of that contained within the scene itself, that the reader has reason to intrinsically care about each piece already.
I don't know that I have a lot to add to this conversationally at the moment, but I want to note that I really enjoyed this blog post.
(Then again, I tend to enjoy anything that has negative things to say about Joyce, even if it also has positive things to say about him as well.)
What a long, strange trip it is.
is Axe Cop still relevant? I've never heard anyone talk about it since 2009, when it was a mildly amusing novelty. is the writer still 5 years old to this day?
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It got a TV show, which I only saw for the first time sometime last year (seasons in 2013 and 2015, looks like). It was okay, but seeing more than a couple episodes seems like a waste of time, since there's a fair amount of sameness between them (I've seen maybe half a dozen).
Jeez, "Narratives Without Plots" should probably be my ponyfic motto.
Not charmed by Axe Cop?
It's not. You can hear it, in the film adaptation made by John Huston. That film (which also stars Anjelica Huston) is well-directed, faithfully written, and perfectly acted, and it is boring as fuck. The one real saving grace is that it is less than an hour and a half long, which is faster than it took me to read the story for my English Lit class many years ago.
(Yeah, I'm not a fan of The Dead.)
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I was briefly amused by Axe Cop, but I felt despair for the human race when, out of all the webcomics in the world, that was the only one that received traditional media attention and a TV deal. If you asked me to list my 100 favorite comic strips or graphic novels of the past 20 years, maybe 97 of them would be unsyndicated, web-only comics, but those all get ignored by non-web culture.
I don't know if it's because people wanted stuff like Axe Cop, or because the media wanted it. I think the best amateur web content, in blogs, journalism, fiction, and comics, is reliably better than the best professional content. But that doesn't fit the narrative the media has about amateur web content all being mash-ups and the wild, untrammeled creativity of teenagers. Amateur web content isn't supposed to be good. What the media wants from non-professionals is stuff like Axe Cop.
I also hate a lack of foreshadowing. Part of why I love fanfiction is the tags. I may not get the outcome I'm expecting, but as a reader I should get the process I'm expecting. I don't need to guess ahead of time whodunit in a mystery, but I should know from the beginning it is a mystery.
4579170 When the professionals go to a new format to get "edgy" new content, they start with a preconceived notion and find a representative of the new format that fits their notion. Only after the format is less new does really unexpected versions of it rise to the top.
New blog title:
I enjoyed your blog, as usual. I do like Joyce in some ways (especially Ulysses), and even if I hadn't known The Dead was Joyce, it would have been easy to guess by the style and technique—it flows very like what I recall of Ulysses. Have to say, though, I do agree with your points about it.
* Don't hurt me. The story deserves it.
I must admit I see the point to randomness or even pointlessness in a story trying ta emulate real life. Be it for poignancy, drama or horror.
Look at Stalin, for instance. Easily among the closest we've had to a real life evil overlord... And what did him in in the end was not chosen ones fighting through the entire Russian army, but a simple stroke in his bedroom.
Still, I will readily if not gladly admit that type of story element can come across as nothing more then a titanic, gilded middle finger to your readers.
Think the only time I've seen it done genuinely greatly done was in Watchmen, actually. The 'I did it twenty minutes ago' scene.
Made perfect sense for the world, the characters and the deconstruction theme of the story...
But at the same time it was, to be blunt, cynical to the point of nihilism. And you can't really blame anybody that walked away from the story at that point in disgust.
It's a potent tool, realism, is what I think I'm trying to say, but one that should be used with great care. Otherwise you'll just run headlong into stuff like, say, how come the Gotham SWAT team haven't shot the Joker by now?
Fine basis for a What If? A horrid one for near any other story.
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I've heard that you've got about half a page to grab a reader. If they don't see anything interesting before then, and they haven't heard anything that points to that it'll get better, then that's all you get.
Heck, that's the generous estimate I've heard. I've also heard the figures of 100 words, and the first four-five paragraphs thrown around.
There are exceptions, of course. Even the most rabid fans of Tolkien I've met will (begrudgingly) admit that the first book doesn't really get started until a few hundred pages in at about the gang reaching Morria.
But, well, that's Tolkien. A man of such genius, that people that start frothing rabidly at the mouth if you dare say that sci-fi and fantasy are literature still begrudgingly will admit to be great, classical stories despite having (
) elves and dwarves in them.
As an author just starting out, you're not getting that luxury, if ever. Heck, I usually try to follow Jim Butcher's example, and have the first line be either a joke, an action beat, foreshadowing and/or all of the above. Takes a lot of work, and banging your head against the desk getting that one line just~ right, but the result is always worth it in my opinion.
I read 'Araby' recently and I did like it, for similar reasons to you- despite being a rather short story it had an overt goal and purpose the character was striving for, and I liked all the little details around money and greed throughout the story that helped build the sense that the family was low-income, and how that is played with at the back of the boys mind.
I did find the ending rather abrubt and jarring (some sort of metaphor I didn't grasp?) , but it was still interesting.
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I tend to agree on these points. I'm also fond of stories that emulate realism, incorporate some element of randomness, or which have an idiosyncratic "dream" logic to them. But as you noted, it's very difficult to do well, and it must be done sparingly. Joyce is still one of the tiny few who can do so. There are a few films that use a similar plotless structure very effectively, Richard Linklater's Slacker being a good example.
As for Tolkien, as much as I guess I would qualify as a rabid fan, he did have his flaws. The opening is a bit slow, but it's also a necessary setup, and I'm rather fond of the slow build in general. The "Tom Bombadil" passage, for example. It's an important part of the story, but it's also such a jarring tonal shift that it feels out of place.
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I think that has more to do with the meta narrative of Axe Cop (older artistic brother puts to page the stories of his much younger sibling) than anything to do with the comic itself.