Reading is Writing #2: Dubliners, If I Survive You
Place-based short fiction. Jonathan Escoffery throws a 100mph fastball.
The first two books I read for my MFA were Dubliners by James Joyce and If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery.
Both are works of place-based fiction, meaning their action is confined to a geographically (and chronologically) limited setting. I read them because I have written and am continuing to write, a series of interconnected short stories about a loose cohort of people in the process of leaving New Haven, Connecticut. “Little Beach House” is the first story in that loose, conceptual series, followed by “The Rat and the Roman” (If you know a magazine editor hmu). The unnamed story I took to workshop at Bennington last month is another such story.
Joyce and Escoffery have had a huge influence on the fiction I’ve been writing this last month. So we’ll talk about them both in a fair bit of depth. The discussion of Joyce will be a bit limited, but for Escoffery’s work I wrote what Bennington’s program calls an Annotation, meaning an analysis of craft elements that I’m including in the packet of schoolwork I am sending to my professor later this month. It’s a bit more formal than my Joyce stuff.
Writing about Dubliners without mentioning “The Dead”
Everyone’s read “The Dead,” so I’m not going to talk about it. It’s as good as they say it is. Instead, I’m going to talk about “Two Gallants,” which is about two men, Corley and Lenehan. Corley has seduced a woman and is trying to persuade her to give him something. Lenehan fucks around Stephen’s Green while Corley and the woman meet, then Corley returns carrying a gold coin. It’s a simple story.
Stylistically in this story, Joyce is clearly playing with naturalism, a philosophy of literature which sees its characters as limited by a combination of social background and inheritance (in Zola at least, read Brandon Taylor, whose substack is probably the single biggest influence on Get Literate.) Joyce is beginning to shade towards the greater freedoms of modernism, where social critique tends to be a bit more submerged and uncertain, compared to Naturalism’s forthright determinism.*
At the end of “Two Gallants,” we see a neat moment that encapsulates the shift from naturalism to modernism, in my layman’s opinion.
Lenehan has waited some hours for Corley, finally his friend comes walking back with the girl. Lenehan follows them at a distance, assuming the girl has rebuffed Corley’s attempt to get money from her. He watches as the girl goes back into her house and Corley remains on the sidewalk:
Then the hall-door was opened slowly and cautiously. A woman came running down the front steps and coughed. Corley turned and went towards her. His broad figure hid hers from view for a few seconds and then she reappeared running up the steps. The door closed on her and Corley began to walk swiftly towards Stephen’s Green.
Lenehan hurried on in the same direction. Some drops of light rain fell. He took them as a warning and, glancing back towards the house which the young woman had entered to see that he was not observed, he ran eagerly across the road. Anxiety and his swift run made him pant. He called out:
“Hallo, Corley!”
Corley turned his head to see who had called him, and then continued walking as before. Lenehan ran after him, settling the waterproof on his shoulders with one hand.
“Hallo, Corley!” he cried again.
He came level with his friend and looked keenly in his face. He could see nothing there.
“Well?” he said. “Did it come off?”
They had reached the corner of Ely Place. Still without answering Corley swerved to the left and went up the side street. His features were composed in stern calm. Lenehan kept up with his friend, breathing uneasily. He was baffled and a note of menace pierced through his voice.
“Can’t you tell us?” he said. “Did you try her?”
Corley halted at the first lamp and stared grimly before him. Then with a grave gesture he extended a hand towards the light and, smiling, opened it slowly to the gaze of his disciple. A small gold coin shone in the palm.
There’s a level of humor and irony here that is missing from the naturalistic texts I’ve read. Corley is pretty clearly fucking with Lenehan, keeping him in suspense for the pleasure of it. It’s such a neat touch of individual distinction, out of place in the determinism of naturalism. And the level of anger running in Lenehan, the menace, the sadness, seem to me to be examples of modernism’s devotion to the emotional lives of people. Their idiosyncrasies and their psychological realities matter in a way that is not reducible to sociological category.
It is here that some of the proponents of what we might call identitarian or viewpoint fiction are making a reactionary mistake: writing sociologically can reify the social boundaries it sets out to demolish. Good literary fiction does not call for fidelity to political principle, or to a close reading of socio-political realities. Good literary fiction instead calls for a fidelity to the emotional lives of its characters; they exist in a world, but the world does not constitute them. The democratic Zola does not actually have faith in the people as individual people, but the ironical Joyce can see them whole.
What gives Dubliners its power is precisely this commitment to the emotional lives of ordinary people in a specific place. Joyce’s characters are stuck in the long, hopeless political interregnum between Parnell’s death and the outbreak of the World War. They are living in a world that constrains them at every turn, battling against it, screaming for air, for a bit of gold, for a bottle of beer or a trinket at the bazaar. I have lived through a city like this. From 2008 to 2020, if you lived in places like New Haven and Somerville you lived through the blooming and wilting of political hope, through a cycle of repressed social struggle against the racist carceral state, through the emergence of tech as a religion and the decay of liberalism. Everything was ending and no one knew it. We were waiting for a coughing traveler like the Europeans were waiting for a gutshot archduke.
To capture a time and a place like that requires the emotional attention, the careful individuality and the idiosyncrasies Joyce gives his people. I hope I’ve got that.
But anyways, Jonathan Escoffery brought the heat.
If I Survive You: Second person skimming stones and first person boulders.
I found If I Survive You (2022) by Jonathan Escoffery to be totally fascinating. While I could write a whole annotation about the tension in “Splashdown,” I think it would be more useful to interrogate some things I struggle with: Perspective and narrative voice.
“In Flux” and “Odd Jobs” are both stories about Trelawny, an American born to Jamaican immigrant parents. The former is second person, shifting between present action and occasional intrusions of the past tense; the latter is first person, past tense.
The second person has a bifurcated effect. The reader confronts action with considerable immediacy: “Your father slaps his knee and cackles. “Ignorant monkey” he says, before leaning in and turning the radio two or three notches louder. He smooths his moustache with two fingers, kneading the smile from his face when he notices you watching.” (20). This passage is viscerally uncomfortable. The radio gets louder in it, as Topper (Trelawny’s father) uses it to impress a point upon his son. At the same time, he tries to restrain himself from gloating. It’s tight, likely only a couple seconds pass, but the reader feels how awkward it is in that car. There’s a callousness to his actions, but also a self-consciousness.
Still, the second person leaves room for a sweeping move as seen in the passage: “It’s America….are inferior,” (4). Here we get the emotional tone of a whole sweep of time, rather than the actions of single moment.
Escoffery uses this flexibility to shift rapidly between close, often uncomfortable social encounters to a broader, connective commentary that situates those moments in relation to the story’s main thematic concern: the instability of racial identity.
Second person also pushes the audience to identify a character’s actions and thoughts as their own. First does this too, but it is less confrontational. Second is, I think, the less subtle narrative voice—it feels written at you at times—because first requires some construction of identification. When we come to uncomfortable moments in the text, like Trelawny’s exchange with Justin, the second person encourages the audience to resist what is happening. You are this way, the text says. A reader who flees from that identification opens up an analytical distance. “He stares at you in silence, looks around, faces you again, ‘Do you have some kind of fetish or something?’” (41) reads as almost an accusation against the reader, particularly the white reader, for enjoying and identifying with racial alienation. I found myself sweating a bit in that scene. What is the source of aesthetic enjoyment in this story, if not a fetish for racialized discomfort? (Saying black in this case would be breaking with the logic of the story—Trelawny still has not decided on his own blackness at this point.)
But how does the shift to first person between stories change things?
For one, it restricts Escoffery to a single, roughly continuous incident. Where “In Flux” covers more than two decades, “Odd Jobs” covers a few days. Again, we follow Trelawny through an event that tests the boundaries of race in Miami. However, here Trelawny rejects and then is forced into sexualized blackness. On the first page we get Trelawny the wage laborer as a sex object: “The caterer forced me to serve poolside in glitter and a Speedo.” (73). Then in the craigslist ad on the same page racialized phonetic play (“I’VE NEVER HAD A BLACK EYE”) from a white latina named Chastity, who wants to hire a man to hit her. Trelawny goes to Chastity after an exchange about his fortunes with St. Pierre, an old high school classmate. St. Pierre is a security guard, tasked with enforcing the sanctity of property against the unemployed Trelawny.
The audience knows the whole time that things at Chastity’s are going to lead to violence, whether Trelawny hits her or not. Trelawny dwells on the chance that a neighbor might overhear their contentious negotiations and attack him as he leaves. Instead, he negotiates a better rate of pay and ends up hitting Chastity. The moment is played as a delicate transaction of power that leaves Trelawny wanting her to strike him back: “I began to ask if I’d gone further than she’d wanted, but my words came out: Do me now.” (85) But his turn comes not at Chastity’s hands, but that of her whole family, who arrive as he is making a sandwich, and the release he finds is not the almost sexual release he gives her, but “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.” (86)
This story works because the past tense makes it read as a completed event and because the first person brings the reader close to the action. “In Flux” skims across the surface of several thematically connected events, where “Odd Jobs” sinks into its past.
Escoffery reprises some of “Odd Jobs” themes—sexual fetishim of black or non-white men, isolation of white women, money as the medium of exchange for sexual power—in “If I Survive You,” the last story in the collection.
But this last story takes on the second person again. Here the narrative voice gradually merges with the protagonist’s and we get Trelawny from a future perspective enjoining his past self to tell his father everything that has happened to him, while his past self is still in his employer’s apartment. A shift to the future tense leaves the reader stuck in the moment of half-consummated tension between Trelawny and Morgan, the white woman who has hired him to watch her and her husband have sex. We have the possibility the story could end otherwise, the knowledge it will not.
By the time the narrator abandons the second person for the first, the piece seems to be addressing both reader and Trelawny: “Tell him—across the expanse of time and distance as I am telling you now—all that I can’t say to him.” (256) In this paragraph, ‘him’ seems to refer both to Topper and to Trelawny, ‘you’ to Trelawny and the reader, ‘I’ to future Trelawny and to Escoffery. The identities of characters, author and reader collapse in a flow of revelation, in a process analogous to Trelawny’s ability to collapse and shift between racial and social categories in “In Flux,” as long as he is in Miami. With the weight of the rest of the book behind it, the reader experiences a process of dissolution and reconstitution as father, son, author, reader. It’s a moment of intrusive authorial voice that is only possible because, while approaching the narrative closeness of “Odd Jobs,” this final story returns to the second person for most of its duration.
I’m not sure what impact If I Survive You will have on my work; there’s a lot to metabolize here. But I generally default to a close third in the past tense or to first person in the past tense. I suspect this is because those voices feel easier to control as author and because the running monologue in my head is first person in the past tense. But in a work as concerned with dissolving identity into a place and then crystalizing identity in moments of dramatic confrontation, the alternation between different narrative voices plays a key role in taking the reader through these thematic movements.
Which is a long way to say: if I’m interested in writing place-based fiction, maybe I should try switching from first to second to third between stories.
Next Week: Clarissa Dalloway throws a party, Toni Morrison asks me if I’m white. Or maybe something else (Does Emilia Perez violate the Monroe Doctrine?) I don’t know. Are you not entertained?
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*Oh I just know someone with a Phd is going to screencap this and own me. I’ll read your dissertation, I assure you, but not this year.