Boring Stories

On The Dog Story and Henry James

Sometimes my daughter asks me to tell her a story, and she’ll want me to make up the story. Two of my stories in particular have stuck with her. One is about a girl who stays up late to see Santa Claus. Another is about a dog who does bad things and eats things it shouldn’t. The latter is often told in endless iterations, in almost the exact same words, with the dog eating a succession of improbable things.

She loves this story so much that by telling it I can get her to do things she doesn’t want to do (i.e. “I won’t tell you the dog story if you don’t get dressed right now!”).

The dog story is objectively tedious, even on the first telling. I was going to relate it in full at the beginning of this blog post, but I refrained, because I knew I’d lose half the readership before it was done (instead I’ve put it in block quotes at the end). I’ve tried to tell my daughter better stories: I particularly liked one about a girl who did bad things so her parents took away her toys, but then the girl tricks the parents into buying her all-new toys. My daughter liked that story, but it’s nothing on the dog story.

I genuinely cannot tell which part of the dog story appeals to my daughter. I think the idea of things talking that don’t normally talk (like a talking house) really does it for her. There’s also POOPING, which four-year-olds like a lot.

Some of the elements of the dog story are really random, like the dog always eats the bad thing, and then it eats the parents of the bad thing. Who knows where this element came from? But if I leave it out, my daughter gets upset and makes me start over!

I feel like there’s some broader point to be made here about storytelling and taste, but I don’t know what it is! I just find it fascinating that I’m able to come up with a story that I don’t particularly like, but which pleases my daughter so much. I think that’s a function of live storytelling—you enjoy pleasing your audience, and you learn to please them by reading their reactions. This is a process that’s cut off by the traditional media ecosystem. When you’re writing a novel, you really have to go by your own instincts, and your instincts are often very different from that of your readership. This one reason it’s so genuinely rare to encounter a good writer of fiction for unsophisticated readers—someone like, say, Brandon Sanderson, who can create entertaining fiction that appeals to unsophisticated readers. This is a much, much rarer skill, honestly, than being a good writer of sophisticated fiction. I think there’s a reason that a number of popular writers these days have a fan-fiction or self-published fiction: these writers had unmediated access to their audiences, so they’re in closer touch with the animal passions and desires of the readership.

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On the complete other end of the spectrum, I’m halfway through Henry James’s Wings of the Dove.

This is not a novel written by someone who cared about the reactions of their readership. Even most Henry James fans don’t care for Wings of the Dove. It is so dense, so looping, so concerned with trivia. And yet I find the book to be much more interesting than almost anything else I’ve read recently.

Shockingly, even to me, I am pretty engaged by Wings of the Dove. I genuinely do not mind the extreme length or slow pace of the book.

Wings is basically a book about ten or fifteen conversations—it’s a bit like Rachel Cusk, in that the conversations are played out at length, with the reporting of dialogue exchanges that would be omitted from most novels. But it’s unlike Rachel Cusk in that we have an omniscient narrator who also relates the viewpoint characters’ impressions in a kind impressionist detail. The narration doesn’t try to relate their physical or sense impressions, instead it tries to give an overall impression of what it’s like to exist as them in this social situation.

The book has a plot. It’s about these two penniless English people, Morton Densher and Kate Croy. The latter’s been taken up by her rich aunt Maud, who wants Kate to marry well, and who intends to endow Kate with her fortune. But Densher and Croy are in love and would prefer to marry, except Densher doesn’t want to marry without money. Meanwhile this rich American orphan, Milicent Theale, enters the orbit and becomes friends with Kate. I believe at some point Theale becomes married to Densher, and Croy sits around waiting for Theale (she is sickly) to die so Densher can inherit the fortune, but I haven’t gotten to that yet.

Here’s a taste of the impressionist narration (from a scene where Milly talks to her new doctor for the first time):

She told him, on this, straightway, everything; completely free at present from her first embarrassment, disposed even—as she felt she might become—to undue volubility, and conscious moreover of no alarm from his thus perhaps wishing she had not come alone. It was exactly as if, in the forty-eight hours that had passed, her acquaintance with him had somehow increased and his own knowledge in particular received mysterious additions. They had been together, before, scarce ten minutes; but the relation, the one the ten minutes had so beautifully created, was there to take straight up: and this not, on his own part, from mere professional heartiness, mere bedside manner, which she would have disliked—much rather from a quiet pleasant air in him of having positively asked about her, asked here and asked there and found out

And here’s a taste of the dialogue (where Milly and her companion, Mrs. Stringham, talk about how both Milly and Kate apparently know Densher, but neither has talked to the other about him):

‘How will it be against him that you know him?’

‘Oh how can I say? It won’t be so much one’s knowing him as one’s having kept it out of sight.’

‘Ah,’ said Mrs Stringham as for comfort, ‘you haven’t kept it out of sight. Isn’t it much rather Miss Croy herself who has?’

‘It isn’t my acquaintance with him,’ Milly smiled, ‘that she has dissimulated.’

‘She has dissimulated only her own? Well then the responsibility’s hers.’

‘Ah but,’ said the girl, not perhaps with marked consequence, ‘she has a right to do as she likes.’

Then so, my dear, have you!’ smiled Susan Shepherd.

Milly looked at her as if she were almost venerably simple, but also as if this were what one loved her for. ‘We’re not quarrelling about it, Kate and I, yet .’

‘I only meant,’ Mrs Stringham explained, ‘that I don’t see what Mrs Condrip would gain.’

‘By her being able to tell Kate?’ Milly thought. ‘I only meant that I don’t see what I myself should gain.’

‘But it will have to come out—that he knows you both—some time.’

Milly scarce assented. ‘Do you mean when he comes back?’

‘He’ll find you both here, and he can hardly be looked to, I take it, to “cut” either of you for the sake of the other.’

It’s very difficult to convey the hot-house atmosphere of this novel. All of these people feel like their options are incredibly limited. Theale is utterly free and in control of her money, but she’s also absolutely alone, and she feels herself to be rather drab and boring. Croy is the hope of her penniless sister and father, who are depending on her to get her aunt’s money. Croy has value only because her aunt loves her—without that, her value is zero. Croy and Theale genuinely care for each other, but they’re very guarded in their interactions with each other, always trying to figure out what the other wants, because in their world all relationships are so transactional.

To me the novel very much resembles the modern condition of…having a social life, particularly amongst yuppies in the city. Very little is really at stake in our social relations, but so much feels at stake. Who we see and whom we spend time with are such elemental, essential decisions—critical to our well-being—and yet we often feel very powerless in making them.

Money and social class are an ordering principle in this book, but conditions of material want enter very little into the picture. Money is about freedom and value. Aunt Maud and Milly Theale have value, but at the same time, they have these desires that their money can only partially fulfill. Maud is a more-sophisticated Miss Havisham, trying to rejuvenate herself and live again through her management of Croy’s life. Meanwhile Theale is just a very lonely person—conscious of her own goodness and worth, but still feeling like these don’t quite entitle her to other peoples’ time.

I’m quite astonished both that the novel exists and that James allowed himself to develop his talent in this way. Although middle-period James (best exemplified by What Maisie Knew) began to develop in this baroque, self-indulgent direction, his late-period novels represent an incredible heightening of this style. You need to really pay attention here to figure out what’s happening on a literal level. Sometimes it’s quite hard to tell where we are, who is talking, and what we’re talking about. It’s one of the most difficult books I’ve read—up there with Ulysses, and far surpassing The Recognitions.

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I have no general theory of fiction that would allow me to account for the fact that significant portions of the population would find both the Dog Story and Wings of the Dove to be equally boring. In both cases I think the reader and listener simply doesn’t care what is going to happen next. Neither the plight of the dog nor that of Kate Croy are particularly compelling to the average reader or listener. But what makes them compelling to some subset of readers?

Obviously it’s a function of how many stories you’ve heard. If you’ve heard comparatively few stories, the Dog Story is surprising and enchanting. If you’ve heard almost every story, then Wings of the Dove feels surprising and tension-filled.

Lately I’ve been taking a short break from novel-writing, and I’ve been trying to write (very) short stories in this style that combines a strong omniscient narrator, a strong authorial stance, and a certain metafictional element. This isn’t the kind of metafiction that deconstructs the concept of story—it’s more like metafiction a la Henry Fielding, where you’ve got a real fictive dream (you believe in Tom Jones’s existence), but the narrator is also like, “Here’s how I’m gonna tell you a story that you’re gonna like.’

One story I wrote, for instance, is about a husband and wife who are journeying on a starship to defeat an evil at the center of the universe, but the evil starts talking to the husband and convincing him that actually this reality is a lie, and he’s really a God, and his wife is a mere adjunct to his consciousness.

I’m enjoying this direction in my fiction! It’s arisen out of my feeling that, you know, isn’t it tiring to start reading a story and be like, “James Kelven woke up early on the last morning of his life.” I mean, aren’t we tired of being hooked and lassoed and made to jump through hoops? Don’t you just want to open up a story and have it get to the point and be like, “Here’s the story: in James Kelven’s world, you get harvested for your organs if you’re a dummy, and this guy is dumb as a box of rocks, and he’s just failed his latest IQ test.”

The danger here is that most stories are very familiar, so if you strip the padding from the story, you reveal there’s not much there. Like, if you’re telling the story this way, James Kelven can’t join the resistance, he can’t start protesting, he can’t bleat about the inherent dignity of all life. He’s got to do some wholly different and surprising thing.

Most people who try and strip the bones out of stories end up rejecting the need to tell a story at all: they try and deconstruct the notion of story, insisting it is fallacious or hegemonical or bad in some way. But Henry James doesn’t do that. He tells a fucking story. He uses his crazy writing style to tell stories that can only be told in this insane style.

For instance, like a third of the way into this book, Henry James introduces the character of Milly’s doctor, and Milly and the doctor instantly get along and have a long, intimate chat. And it’s so random, and yet so true to life, if you’ve ever known any sickly people, the way that they can become so intimate with a trusted doctor, and the way that a doctor can become a kind of death doula, preparing them for death even as he purportedly attempts to cure them. But this encounter, which is so not germane to the plot, could only make sense if you’ve been deeply immersed in Milly’s feverish consciousness.

That’s the thing, this kind of writing style both allows you to make sudden pivots in tone and situation, and it also demands those pivots. So form and plot and character are all working in concert, just as they would hopefully do in my dumb-guy-organ-harvesting story (which is not a real story I’m going to write).

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Of course when James decided to fully embrace his late style, he already had a flourishing career (albeit one marked by his considerable disappointments when trying to write for the stage). Meanwhile, I feel a sinking suspicion that my own experiments will never see publication. I find that sci-fi markets are very, very conservative. They want stories that look like other stories. Sci-fi markets really like lush, detailed, sentimental stories, and my experiments are the opposite of those three things. And literary markets are more open to experimentation, but I’ve never sold a longer story (i.e. over a thousand words) to a literary market of note.

But on the other hand who cares? Having now released two very traditional books in one year, I’ve seen that the rewards for being formally traditional also aren’t extensive, at least with my subject matter and style. So in the meantime I’m content to just have fun.

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Addenda

I was on a podcast! The Characterist—where you bring your character in to do therapy. We discussed Jhanvi, from The Default World.

Also, I’ll stop including these appeals soon, but my book is out now. You can order it here. I also have events forthcoming in SF (TODAY!!!) and NYC (June 6th). Click on the links to RSVP.

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The Dog Story

Once upon a time there was a dog who was never allowed to go on a walk. Why was it not allowed to go on a walk? (MY DAUGHTER: Because it did bad things and ate things it wasn’t supposed to!) But the dog loved walking, it wanted so much to walk!

So it told its owner, “Please let me walk pleeeease.”

And the owner said “No, because you always do bad things.”

And the dog said “But I’ll be good, just teach me how to be good!”

And the owner said, “Okay, the number one thing you need to do to be good is not eat anything that can talk.”

That’s easy, the dog said, “I’ll just check before I eat anything to make sure it can’t talk.”

So the dog went on a walk and had so much fun, until it saw a [house / star / bowl of chex-mix / cat on a spoon ] that looked so delicious. And the dog went and asked, Can you talk?

And the [house / star / bowl of chex-mix / etc] said, “Nope.”

So the dog ate the [house]. And what happened next? (MY DAUGHTER: The dog heard a voice from its belly!)

And the voice said, “Oh no why did you eat me?”

And the dog said, “Oh shoot, my owner will be so mad!!!”

And then the house’s parents came and said, “Why did you eat my little house?”

So the dog ate the parents!

And then the dog went back home, and its owner took it for a walk, and it POOPED out the house and the parents.

(MY DAUGHTER: Now say ‘The End’)

The End.