Teens, Traumas, Tropes
and other things that turn up in your writing even if maybe you don't want them to
Welcome, creatures! In this edition I have a book note as well as some flotsam about “traumatized” writing, and tropes common to both gay and “ex-gay” literature. No lifeguard on duty, swim at own risk etc etc.
The Accidents
I recently read Richard van Camp’s 1996 novel The Lesser Blessed, about a high school kid who (like Van Camp) is a member of the Dogrib Nation, living in northern Canada. This kid has a troubled past and a poetic mind, a crush on the local easy girl and a tumultuous relationship with his best friend. I liked The Lesser Blessed a lot, and when I say it read very “YA,” that is only partly criticism.
It’s YA stylistically: patchy, with lots of swerves from prose to poetry:
I was the beast.
I was close to the beast.
He was running beside me.
I could hear the hoofs scrape against the pavement before the deliverance kick to a swelling face.
And there were scorch marks on the road where we danced.
It’s YA in the protagonist’s personality: endearingly docile, believably vulgar. Kid is a mess and really wants to learn, I love that.
A lot of this book reminded me of things like Dorothy Allison’s “River of Names,” or the passage toward the end of Leaving Atlanta where the teacher recalls all the ways children died in her rural hometown. What it’s like to live in a community of constant accidents, half-accidents, events that steal people’s lives and hopes and children. The events are often partly somebody’s fault, but there’s also of course the socioeconomic question, why do all these accidents happen here; and in spite of both individual and structural sin, they’re still thought of as accidents, terrible things that grab and shake and change you because that’s what life is like.
When the accidents are treated that way, the book is powerful. It became, for me, less powerful and more genre-YA toward the end, where a) redemptive heterosex reared its ugly, uh, head; and b) we learn that the central backstory accident was not, of course, an accident at all. Imho this narrative choice gives the protagonist too much agency: It’s the teenage idea that we really are responsible for, like, our parents’ divorce or any of the other things that happen. I can accept a) because sex can feel like forgiveness or hope, although I wish this story hadn’t let the girl herself be such an instrument of the narrator’s self-discovery. But b) felt like a perverse form of wishful thinking.
Feinting in Coils
I have not read the essay arguing that “the trauma plot” has taken over contemporary literature. In general, you guys know that I read according to my own obsessions; I’m not able to assess or even really notice trends or tendencies, because I do not choose to be “in the conversation,” as they say. But I did read Brandon Taylor’s post about trauma in writing, ways in which writing can mirror the experience of trauma in life and reasons you might want or very much not want your writing to do that. It’s very good, you should read his thing, I’m only going to riff around the edges.
Taylor argues that “the essay itself took on many of the characteristics of a narrative about trauma, or a narrative under the influence of trauma: the discursive roaming, the feints, the bits of self-deception discovered almost by accident and folded into the inquiry at the heart of the essay.” And this description of traumatized narrative really struck me. Because look, I could be misreading, or imagining a different kind of trauma writing than what Taylor is talking about, but I’m used to hearing about these specific characteristics of fiction in two contexts: the camp aesthetic in gay writing, the flamboyant display of one’s own damage, disclaiming by revealing every vulnerability, tenderness is a weakness etc etc; and writing under totalitarianism.
I remember my high-school English teacher startling me by saying that Ellison’s Invisible Man reminded him of nothing so much as the work of Soviet writers. I think that was partly because of Ellison’s reliance on symbol and mystery, absurdity, all the elements of phantasmagoria. But also because Invisible Man does feint, it does want its revelations to feel accidental, it wants you to notice where it flinches. The evasions, the idea of an inquiry that twists away from and around its central object—all of that is writing under political oppression.
There’s probably something useful to be said about the shift from a political critique to a psychological diagnosis. When we encounter a novel with these feints, this roaming quality, should we think first of the political context or of the psyche? Of course politics and psychology can’t be cleanly separated like that; and one of Taylor’s central points is that the psychological explanation is simplistic, which of course is also true of political readings of literature. Simplistic but not wrong: nobody wants their style to be diagnosed as a symptom, but it is nice, you know, when you figure out how to make your symptoms into style.
True and Free
I’ve spent years now listening to gay and ex-gay Christian narratives, and yet it was only very recently that it struck me that they have at least a couple tropes in common. I don’t know what to make of the fact of these shared tropes. What does it mean that people turn to these images to explain their lives as gay Christians and as, uh, I’m-not-a-gaylord-I-just-crush-a-lot Christians? (...sorry not sorry.)
The first trope is integrity—becoming who you are. The “true self” beneath various false selves or masks. For me the most poignant and spiritually-rich articulation of this trope comes (oh, of course!) in Dunstan Thompson’s poetry. The early tormented poetry does some traditionally queer work with mirrors, the false self of the mirror, the false friend. And then the later devotional poetry is so blunt and beautiful in its insistence that “the daily going up of self in smoke” is how we become ourselves. Surrender self-will to discover not conformity, but individuality. Be seen and loved; let the eyes of your lover or the chisel of the sculptor help you see yourself through the eyes and under the chisel of your Creator.
And the second is liberation. “I have been set free from that lifestyle,” we all say this—but for some people the lifestyle is shame and self-hatred. The image, especially, of being liberated from death into life. Some people represent the gay club as the tomb from which they were Lazarus’d by the Lord; for others, that tomb is the closet. (And for some it is both, you know, you can have awful and/or addictive experiences in gay communities and still come to accept yourself as a gay Christian.)
I suppose to the extent that I draw a conclusion here, it is that you can be liberated to live as your true self, while still being a big flamer. If liberation and integrity are what you long for, and what you trust that Christ promises, you are right; you can have what you seek, and still be gay. It is possible; nay, it is fun!
icymi
I watched a movie about punk pioneer Poly Styrene, and called for more narratives where the social critique of mentally-ill people is allowed to be more than a symptom. I read a Southern Gothic novel in which innocence isn’t lost, but sought. And I gnawed a bit on a beautiful, frustrating conversation about “the meaning of birth.”
Now Playing
The Jim Carroll Band, “People Who Died”
House fire via Wikimedia Commons.