In the US, we are feeling the sickening after-effects of an attempted insurrection committed by people, many of whom, before that day, had never acted against their country or shown the least sign of being violent. What’s happening over here? Good question. And the truth is, nobody knows.
But here’s one way of looking at it: these people were told a false story and acted on it, with a level of passion and violence that would suggest true belief.
That false story – a set of false stories, really, bundled together – came to them via their newsfeeds and radio talk shows and partisan televisions shows with an alluring hi-tech gleam. In the face of this onslaught, their story receptors proved inadequate to the moment, and they exhibited a failure of what Hemingway called one’s “built-in, shockproof, shit detector”.
The stories these people fell for were laced with agenda, told for profit, designed to agitate, titillate, divide and antagonise; thrown together quickly; misshapen by the demands of the delivery vehicle, which limited the number of characters used or prioritised likes and shares. These stories entered the minds of their audience the way any story does, and their audience processed them earnestly, as if there was something vital to learn in them, because that’s what our minds do.
There are signs in a false story – tells, we might call them – slight hitches in the language or logic of the story, that someone versed in reading fiction comes to recognise.
We are convinced by a passage in a story (or not), and by that we learn that language comes especially alive when truthful. That is: our minds learn to sense when a narrative is in harmony with the actual and when it isn’t. “Tom ran across the fresh-cut grass, which smelled, as all fresh-cut grass smells, of kerosene,” strikes us as false. This, written by Tolstoy, about two men riding through a blizzard in a horse-drawn sled, strikes us as true: “The snow was falling from above and sometimes rose from below. The horse was evidently exhausted, his hair had all curled up from sweat and was covered with hoarfrost, and he went at a walk.”
That rising of the heart to that second example is the feeling of one’s bullshit detector being tuned.
Now, I’m not suggesting that the way to head off future insurrections is to require all citizens to read classic short stories. Not everyone is susceptible to fiction’s charms and anyway, people have been reading literature before, during, and after every catastrophic period of history, and readers of literature have, at times, been leading the mayhem.
And yet.
In his beautiful essay This Is Water, David Foster Wallace talked about the power of choosing to subvert or interrupt our default settings; about consciously transforming our internal narratives regarding the annoying people around us (in those other cars, in that checkout line). What went unstated in that piece, but was, I think, strongly implied by it, is the idea that immersion in art can be a way of training ourselves to enact this interruption of our default settings.
If you’re a writer, your default settings will show up, unchallenged and proud of themselves, in your early drafts.
I once wrote a story called The Barber’s Unhappiness. In the town where we were living, there was a barber who spent a lot of time out front of his shop, smoking and ogling women. He ogled in an obnoxious but egalitarian way: old women, young women, women whose faces were passing by on the sides of buses – it didn’t matter. I was a new husband, the father of two baby daughters, and a freshly minted feminist, so decided to, in prose, crucify him.
For the first few months, this went well. Every day, I got to inhabit the mind of this sexist dope and cosy up to the reader by making fun of him. The humour of the story had to do with how blind this guy was to his own faults, as he harshly judged everyone around him, especially the women. What a crude, arrogant misogynist! Who, though past 40, still lived with his mother! Hah! Take that, idiot!
But soon the humour started wearing thin and the story flatlined. I kept writing different versions (hundreds of pages’ worth) of the same scene, in which my barber (once again, still, over and over) kept being wrong in exactly the same way.
The story, I soon concluded, had a technical problem – a structural issue. I went around mumbling this for months: “The problem is, you’ve got a structural issue.”
Finally, I realised it wasn’t a structural issue, it was a condescension issue. I was puppeteering the poor guy, keeping him so far beneath me that I’d given him no hope of improving. He wasn’t a person; he was a machine I’d created whose purpose was to allow me to make fun of it. I just kept kicking him, and that repeated kicking was, as well as a bit mean, something worse: static.
The short story is about change. This is not a short story: “Once upon a time, an asshole stayed an asshole.” In real life, sure, that narrative (“Asshole remains asshole”) abounds. But a story wants change and should be set within a window during which a change might reasonably be expected to occur.
The problem was, I’d made my barber a concept: The Terrible Sexist. It was as if I’d built a robot and trained it to walk only in a straight line, then was unhappy because it never went around corners. Also, I noted, I didn’t like him. Why would I? It’s hard to like a robot as he keeps robotically doing the obnoxious thing you’ve programmed him to do.
One way to make a character more likable is to make him more vulnerable. (Give the robot a bad wheel.) Looking for a source of vulnerability, I turned to myself. What were my vulnerabilities? Well, one candidate came rushing into my mind and, in my panic that I might spend the rest of my life on this one story, I let it in: I have this hereditary skin condition that causes me to cut easily and heal slowly. When I was a kid doing a lot of sports, my legs and feet were always cut, bandaged, scarred or blistered, and I dreaded going to the beach because it was generally expected that one would wear a bathing suit there.
For my barber, I went the extra mile: I lopped off all the toes on one of his feet. He was still a jerk (still harsh, still sexist, still went around rejecting women for not being attractive enough, although, even factoring out the foot thing, he wasn’t all that attractive himself) but now he had no toes on that foot, poor bastard. And was self-conscious about his feet in his private moments, like I’d been, and, as I’d done, he dreaded going to the beach, which of course, in the story, I immediately made him do.
Before this, I’d known what I thought of him. Now I wasn’t sure. I’d confused myself. Did I like this guy or not? Was I for him or against him? I’d preset him to “misogynist”, but now he started becoming, or becoming also: “slightly bullied son”, “lonely person”, and “sad self-doubter when alone”.
So, I didn’t know what to think of him and neither did the reader. What resulted was increased dramatic tension. The reader found herself doing a sort of mental squinting, wondering whether I meant for her to like this barber or not, walking forward into the mist of the story alongside me, trying to figure it out.
A friend once explained why a mutual friend was so interesting to look at. It was, she said, because sometimes he looked extremely handsome, almost prince-like, but at other times, from another angle, he resembled a pug. And this was true, I realised the next time I sneaked a quick look at our friend from that angle. He was interesting to look at because you were always trying to decide: pug or prince? But you never could, not definitively.
Likewise in a story. If the writer knows too well what they think of their character, the reader comes to feel she’s not needed. Her opinion is irrelevant. Who wants to be in a relationship like that? And she drifts away.
Now, I’d made my barber more vulnerable in response to the demands of the form (I never would have infused him with my skin issue had the story not flatlined). When it did, I got desperate, and admitted (or mandated, or accidentally blurted out) that he and I were made of the same cloth: we shared a defect. But more than that, we shared a habit of mind, the habit of secretly worrying about that defect. I had accidentally tenderised my relationship with him, which expanded the range of his possibilities, and suddenly it seemed – because he was now partly me – that he might change, or, at least, could.
On my writing table I keep a framed Richard Pettibone postcard: a train races across a landscape, accompanied by the quote: “These excursions served to carry my roots ever deeper into the vigorous soil of truth.”
Truth, in the case of the barber story, meant acknowledging that the barber and I existed on a continuum. He was knowable to me. Or, more accurately – since I had no idea what that real barber was like – “he” (the character) must have existed within me. I generated him, brought him forward, made him up, out of … me. Even his sexist excesses came out of me. I knew they were excesses, he didn’t; I exaggerated them like crazy, but he had never been an entity apart from me. In that early, flatlining period, I had pretended so, at my peril.
Who am I? Everybody. As Whitman said: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Individuals within that multitude are always flickering on and off within me, stepping forward, then receding. And these individuals resemble the individuals who flicker on and off within you.
This is the idea on which fiction is built.
When I call up the concept “my first kiss”, neurons light up in my head (a golf course! A 1969 Camaro! The smell of a now-discontinued 1970s perfume!). Then I type that phrase and you read it and neurons light up in your head in a pattern similar, but not identical to, the one in my head, and we are both, somehow, united, around the concept “first kiss”.
That is: our respective neuron-firing patterns are roughly the same in response to the same stimuli. (Put that on an inspirational T-shirt.)
Now, so as not to get too dreamy about this: the guy who charges into a school and kills a bunch of kids – he’s also on a continuum with me. And with, you know, Gandhi. This idea of existing on a continuum doesn’t mean, “We are all good,” or “We are all, brothers and sisters, exactly the same,” or “All is forgiven, no matter what you do,” but, rather, something like: “Wherever you are on the human continuum, I can know you, approximately. I’m going to proceed on that basis: whatever tendencies are large in you, must be here somewhere, perhaps smaller and/or nascent, in or me.”
Could I, approximately, know the people in that crowd that rushed into the Capitol? Of course. Does that tendency – to fail to know propaganda when I see it, and react to it with violence – exist in me too? I know for a fact that it does. Why is this more comforting than terrifying? Well, because it implies that these people are not beyond my understanding, nor your understanding, and that no one is.
In fiction, a broad signifier (“misogynist barber”, “extreme rightwinger”, “typical housewife”, etc) gets fractured into a pattern of more specific, nuanced signifiers and these, because they are more finely observed and less conceptual, tend to be more precise. We move from broad assertion to a series of increasingly specific actions, which complicate and might even contradict one another, creating a pattern that is more ambiguous, that puts us into a state of higher alertness, that keeps challenging and overturning our judgments.
The happy news is that we’re good at this. We like it up there at that higher elevation. Things up there can feel more workable.
I don’t know what to do with “a harshly sexist barber”, or “a violent rightwing extremist”, but as the former becomes (or expands into, also) “self-loathing man, trapped by his fears, made brittle by a physical flaw, afraid of growing old alone” and the latter becomes (or expands into, also) “grandfather of three, who feels he has been passed by, and, for solace, listens to angry talk radio for too many hours a day, except when he has to take a break to help his wife, who’s just had hip surgery” – well, what happens? I don’t forgive the sexist remarks the former keeps making or the violence the latter is suddenly out there committing, but, in both cases, I know more. I have a fuller picture.
This is not a form of enabling, not what I’ve heard called “idiot compassion”. (You hit me in the head with a rock and I meekly bow in your direction, thanking you for the geology lesson.) I see it, rather, as a form of empowerment: armed with a fuller picture, I’ll know better when to act, and how. I’ll also know when to sit still and do nothing. (Many of these insurrectionists are facing the consequences of their actions, and that’s as it should be. I’m speaking here, not of what we do with them legally, but of how we might think about them, of how we might more accurately imagine their mental processes and motivations.)
Reading a story, the reader is led along the following path: she passes judgment on a character. This feels good. (“That barber is a jerk. I hate him.”) The story complicates matters. (We see the barber in a moment of toe-related angst.) That initial judgment now seems facile. We slide into a state of uncertainty. (“What does this writer want me to think of this guy?”) We don’t know what we think. This makes us uneasy. As with the case of my prince or pug friend, we linger, trying to figure it out. (This tension is why we keep reading.)
But look at what else is happening: we’re being shown the quality of our own mind. Look how quickly it rushes to judgment. Look how uncomfortable it feels when asked to put aside that original judgment. Look how hard it struggles to get back to a place where it can rest in a state of certainty. On the other (more hopeful) hand, look how willing it is to reboot in the face of a new fact. Look how it delights in its close dance with the mind of the writer. Look how it assesses for truth by recalling situations from its own life; how it longs to be led, by the writer, up along a path, towards that “knowing more”.
What our mind is learning when it reads a good story is that its current state, whatever it is, is temporary. That state is like a weather system that’s just rolled in. It feels so real and solid, we might mistake it for us. But then that system moves on, and another rolls in.
The result of all of this might be something like humility.
“The time to make up your mind about people is never,” said Katharine Hepburn’s character in The Philadelphia Story. A great writer such as Chekhov can sometimes seem to be saying, “Come with me, I’ll show you how good you are at abiding with another person, even one you might, in real life, reject out of hand.”
Neuroscientists now suggest that the mind is always doing a form of fiction writing: proposing a broad scale model for the moment that is occurring, then improving that model by way of sensory input. Strangely, this revision process apparently occurs from the back of the brain (broad, early draft) to the front (final product, ie, this moment). The approximate, first-draft model (“This seems to be a restaurant”) gets modified towards greater precision (“A barbecue restaurant that is … in the process of being robbed?”) and then the whole thing may, most truthfully, become a series of unmediated observations (“People running, broken glass, smell of burning meat, man cowering under table holding single French fry”).
When we read a story, we are doing something that comes naturally to us, but under more amenable circumstances, with more time to reflect, than in real life. As in those slow-motion fight scenes in The Matrix, things happen more slowly in story-world and we, like Neo, are invested with new powers: to absorb at our leisure; to expand our capability for sympathetic compassion; to learn that there is always more to take into account and that, in doing so, we are always, always, the better for it.
• Liberation Day, short stories by George Saunders, is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
