Dear Readers...

2012 is closing quickly.  A number of projects are opening up for me, so for the near future I have decided to focus my efforts on work outside of this blog.  You can still keep up with the news from my writing life at my homepage.  And I will be continuing to write and comment on literature and publishing over at the Boston Book Blog.  Feel free to browse through the archives here.  And check back for any significant updates I may post (including news about the release of my novel).

Happy 2013, and good reading!

Writing Workshop Pros and Cons

Ah, the writing workshop. A staple of your diet if you intend to pursue any kind of serious writing. Some writers are successfully helped by them and go on to publication. Some writers bounce from workshop to workshop as a hobby. Some writers stay far away and insist that if writers of the past never had workshops, they’re not necessary. Here are some of the pros and cons of the workshop: 

Pro: Critical feedback from peers 

By far the most significant benefit of a writing workshop is getting feedback from your peers on a story you’ve written. Writing is a solitary act done in a vacuum, and to have an audience of experienced readers who know what they’re talking about pick out your blind spots is valuable. 

Con: Feedback is through subjective eyes 

Having a dozen readers of your work giving you feedback is fantastic, but each one of those readers has different preferences of what they like to read: some may enjoy sparse style, some may enjoy verbose imagery, some may prefer something in-between, which means someone in the group isn’t going to like your style. Different literary preferences are fine, but it won’t give you a supportive reading of your story. 

Pro: Exposes a stuck story to readers 

If there’s a story you’ve been working on for a while that you know is just off, bring it to workshop. Having your friends say “It’s the best story ever!” when you have 80 million rejections of it doesn’t lead to any solutions; get some experienced eyes to look at it and help you nail down what you need to change to make it publishable. 

Con: Ultimately it’s up to the writer to judge appropriate feedback 

Not everything everyone says is going to be useful, so you have to choose which feedback you’ll keep and which you’ll toss. Ultimately, if you feel the readers were way off on their assessment, and you choose not to take their advice, it leads to wasted time for all parties. 

Pro: Creates a personal, intimate atmosphere of writers 

Reading one another’s work gets you real intimate, real fast! The expression goes, “Writing is easy; all you do is sit down and open a vein”; you’re essentially showing your bloody pages to strangers, and that creates a bond. Workshoppers have to provide a safe environment for one another while gaining trust quickly, which can make for a fun, deep class. Plus, you can get into some really good discussion about authors, books, and the writing life. 

Con: Workshops are ultimately fake 

While that intimacy and bonding might be valuable for your work, after the MFA or after the workshop class you will be back to writing on your own. Will you sustain it? The workshop environment is a contrived safety net. Enjoy what you get from the workshop because it will disappear quickly. 

Pro: Helps grow the writer 

A writer chooses to engage themselves in a workshop because they desire to grow as an artist. Revealing your private work for others to read and critique is a huge step in trust, but one that can lead the writer – if they’re willing – to growth. There’s an inspiring article in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers of a writer growing from a fumbling first year MFA student into a published author. 

Con: Doesn’t guarantee publication or growth 

Unfortunately workshopping a story will never guarantee publication. It won’t even guarantee revision, and the person’s work you just spent an hour workshopping could go home and toss it in the drawer and never look at it again. On a macro level, a whole MFA program could be spent workshopping stories that the writers never revise or sends out. 

There you have it. Keep these in mind if you’re thinking about pursuing an MFA or joining a local writing group. If you’ve been through the workshop wringer, feel free to add your pros and cons below!

Kafka's Narrator, or, Why So Many Animals?

Franz Kafka is mostly known for stories that were written through a third person voice, yet it seems he was very interested in exploring narrative through first person as well. We see very swiftly moving plots in “The Metamorphosis,” “In the Penal Colony,” “A Hunger Artist,” and “Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor,” where third person seems to stimulate and extract a more expository voice from Kafka. He presents us with characters and setting that are located in time and space, and that move across a plot arc. His work in first person often downplays plot, overshadowing it by long paragraphs of philosophic musings (the kind of on-going musings that an editor would pare back quickly). Yet it’s his first person narrative work that might be the most experimental and ambitious. The only stories told in first person that have a somewhat forward-moving plot (in the way a reader would expect it) are “A Country Doctor,” “The Village Schoolmaster,” and perhaps “A Report to the Academy.” In these stories there is a pinpointable beginning, middle, and end. His stories that seem more like musings or sketches, yet which are very long in scope, are “The Great Wall of China,” “Investigations of a Dog,” “A Little Woman,” “The Burrow,” and “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.” There are similarities between all of these stories, in that the reader is never made clear on who the narrator is. We may know something of their life and their pursuits, but we gain very little about them. For instance, we know that the narrator of “The Great Wall of China” is some kind of member of Chinese society. We know that the narrator of “A Little Woman” is in a relationship with the insufferable titular character. We know that the narrator of “Josephine...” is a member of the race of mice. But we get very little else on these characters, save the thoughts, politics, and philosophies of their brains. 

It’s interesting to note that Kafka often writes from the point of view of an anthropomorphized animal. His first person narrators have included a chimpanzee reflecting upon his entrance into human society; a dog who witnesses other dogs standing on their hind legs enacting a musical number, and attempts to discover the societal implications of it; a burrowing animal who concerns himself with the protection of his food store only to let his imagination get the better of him at a noise; and a mouse who tells about a singer and her influence on their society. (“The Metamorphosis” is the only story in which a human is actually transformed into an animal; all these other stories start with human-like, sentient animals.) Who knows why Kafka chose to write stories like this, through an animal’s point of view. He may have seen it as a way of fantastical detachment from the subject matter he wanted to write about. He may have used it as commentary to show that human thoughts and worries are animal-like, but conversely could show that animals, if sentient, would have the same thoughts and worries as humans. One example is in “The Burrow,” when the narrator hears a whistling sound within a passage near to his dwelling. His imagination flies away with what it could be, from ventilation holes catching a breeze to an enemy of prey digging close to threaten him. By the end of the story we don’t know what the whistling noise was, but the imagination of the narrator made the terror all the more real. It’s something we as humans do: use our imagination to over-inflate the worry and terror of a situation we can’t determine the cause of. 

The effect is heightened in the fact that these narrators exist in a world that is so narrow and almost paranoid (paranoia could well describe the state of the narrator in “The Burrow”). These narrators are not out living in their own story, so to say, interacting with others and moving through a plot line. They are tumbling through thoughts in their own minds, and the reader could almost get a sense of being in a very tight, confined space with them. The only reality we know in the story is the one we happen to see through the eyes of the narrator, and even that reality consists of the narrator’s own thoughts and philosophies of reality, not reality itself. For example, the reader can only know Josephine through the lens of the narrator, which is somewhat detached, skewed, and cynical towards Josephine and her place in society. In “Investigations of a Dog” we’re not even sure what kind of society this is in that humans are never seen and food “falls from above.” We have to cling to Kafka’s narrators and keep up with them through the mysterious corridors they walk. Or is Kafka playing with the idea that reality is only what we make or see of it?

Kafka and “In the Penal Colony”

I remember reading “In the Penal Colony” years ago and thinking, “Cool, but what? But cool.” Of course as one gets older one can see the deeper workings crafted into the story, like the necessary swirls and flourishes around the straight letters of the story’s written verdict. “In the Penal Colony” is vividly portrayed, wildly macabre, and filled with negative space, so to speak, in that what’s not mentioned rings as loudly as what is. 

There are four characters who are simply known as the officer, the explorer, the soldier, and the condemned man. In the translation by the Muirs those titles are not capitalized as actual titles. The men therefore are not only nameless positions or attributes, they are de-personified positions or attributes, further making them into “everymen.” The penal colony remains unnamed, and it is on an unnamed island somewhere. Only the Commandant’s title is capitalized, yet in going back and forth between the old Commandant and the new Commandant the reader has no choice but to blur the two. 

The action of the story is somewhat straightforward: In a penal colony somewhere there is a strange, unique torture device that renders a condemned man’s verdict in script upon their body until they die; the officer in charge explains the apparatus to a foreign explorer, straps the condemned man in, but then frees him, inserts himself into the machine and, malfunctioning, the machine kills him. 

But this is a story written by Franz Kafka, which means we’re left with more questions to ask of the text than answers we may receive. 

The first is this: Is this a commentary on capital punishment? Yes and no. This story could be read seeing the torture device as a barbaric, inhumane piece of judgement (as the explorer pronounces it), a device itself that is falling into disrepair in the colony because the greater authority no longer cares about its special kind of exacting justice. Spare parts are hard to come by. The people of the island no longer come out to watch the executions. The new Commandant has little interest in it. The old Commandant built it and advocated for it, but it seems to be the last vestige of an old regime and ideology. Kafka may be, and probably is, commenting on capital punishment. But for a writer who turns his characters into bugs, there must be more here. 

So then we ask, What else is there? Why this particular method of judgement, an elaborately creative machine that essentially carves art into the body while killing it? Why no trial for the condemned man, his judgement pronounced on hearsay with no chance for defense (like Joseph K. in The Trial)? What is the significance of the sixth hour, when “Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted” and the condemned man seems to have an epiphany of his crime? Why does the officer continue to wash his hands, like Pilate after condemning Jesus to crucifixion? Why the mention of the different issues with language, in that the officer and the explorer speak French, which the condemned man does not understand, effectively shielding him from the comprehension of his own death? In what language is the judgement written upon the condemned, or is it a language only the officer can read? The officer has the pronouncement of his own condemnation “Be just!” already scripted for programming, so was his self-execution preplanned? Does the officer’s mercy in letting the condemned man go therefore make him “worthy” of the judgement of “Be just!”? Why the overt messianic theme surrounding the grave of the old Commandant found hidden beneath a table at the tea house? Is there any connection between Mosaic/Levitical law and the apparatus, the return of the the messianic figure who will reestablish that law, and the fact that the people have turned away from absolute justice and any belief in the prophecy? Is the officer acting as a substitution, atoning for the sins of the nameless condemned man he allows to go free, and therefore with his death obliterates the old structure of the law and judgement; is the officer the resurrected Commandant? Why the farce of the solider and the condemned man, who provide this strange background play? Why is the officer given so much real estate with his words in this story? Why are we not seeing an actual prisoner’s execution, but a man who is a solider and a watch, obviously part of the penal colony staff? And what is the significance of the ladies always surrounding the new Commandant? 

Thematically, Kafka seems drawn towards this idea of judgement, especially judgement pronounced by either an absent party (The Trial, “The Metamorphosis”), an unexpected party (“The Judgement”), or an unfair party (“In the Penal Colony”). He explores the ideas of a person sentenced to something by an outside force (bureaucracy? society? God?) and then having to suffer the consequences of it, which usually lead to death (“The Judgement,” “In the Penal Colony,” Joseph K. was eventually executed, and essentially Gregor Samsa’s condemnation to live as a bug lead to his death). What he’s portraying is a world without free will, or a world with a false sense of free will. Determinism is fine within a worldview that contains a sovereign, just God, but Kafka is giving us a world devoid of not only a guiding divinity, but a world devoid of any kind of objective system, truth, or moralism to latch on to.

Kafka and "The Metamorphosis"

One of the classes I'm in this semester centers around the writing of Anton Chekhov and Franz Kafka. We are now on to Kafka, and what follows are some of my responses.

I enjoy Kafka. There’s something strange and intriguing about what he does in fiction, and though I haven’t widely read his work, I like it. I even named my blog after one of his quotes (“Axe to the Frozen Sea”). I even paused over the flattened, dead body of a cockroach on the platform at Government Center once and asked, forlornly, “Gregor??” I think “The Metamorphosis,” like Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” is one of those stories that will always drive me crazy in a good way, in that I want to understand it more and more, but as I keep peeling layers there’s more layers. Gregor wakes up one morning transformed into a giant bug, and is still concerned about making his train, and thinks that if he could just get to work everything would be fine. The only person in the story who is significantly unaware of the effects of his transformation are him! Obviously he’s aware that something is wrong, as he sets about trying to coordinate his little legs and tip over his beetle-body to get to the floor and open the door; obviously he’s aware that something dramatic has happened to him (maybe one could look into the psychology of denial on Gregor Samsa as he wakes). But waking up to find oneself turned into a giant bug would seem to elicit a much more of a reaction than what Gregor gives. Which would make the reader think that he’s not really a bug at all, but that it’s a symbol for something else that provokes alienation from his family who, even if he’s not a bug, treats him like a bug. But then again he’s crawling around on the ceiling and eating garbage, so he must be a bug! Ah, Kafka! (It’s like Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to.” What does that mean? Ah!)

There are so many themes in “The Metamorphosis” – identity, communication, alienation, economy – but not one is overtly made the focus of the narrative so it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what Kafka is getting at. (Maybe he’s getting at entirely nothing.) Kafka creates a world where the transformation into a giant bug is not explained, and its origin is not questioned (the family does have a conversation about what they will do about this thing that befell them, but they never ask about how it befell them in the first place). That in and of itself suggests that there is something working on a deeper level, but what? Was Kafka, as a Jew living in Prague in the early 20th century, commenting on the alienation and rejection the Jewish community was receiving around him (anti-Semitic material often called Jews insects)? Is the story about some conversion or lifestyle choice a man makes that garners rejection and ostracism from his family? Is it about vocational identity and losing the ability to be a breadwinner in the household? Related to that, is it about finding happiness and identity in work, rather than have someone financially provide, as Gregor’s family discovers? Is it about a decent into insanity? Is it about Grete’s sacrificial love? Is it about miscommunication, and the transcendent power of music to communicate when Grete plays her violin? Is it a reverse It’s a Wonderful Life, where everyone is actually much better off without Gregor? Kafka leaves the reader to figure this out (which is why it drives me crazy!) and one could even question if Kafka was even aware of these different things woven into the story, or if he just wrote an experimental piece of fiction because he wanted to.