The futility of writing about "ordinary people"

On the East German novel THE QUEST FOR CHRISTA T (by Christa Wolf)

For a period of about five years, after I graduated college, I was obsessed with writing about “ordinary people.” Of course, this ambition never came to anything, because when I thought of an “ordinary person” I simply conceptualized a person without any extroardinary attributes: they’d be neither courageous nor intelligent nor virtuous nor marked-out by any special position or talent. They’d possess, I allowed, an average amount of goodness and a simple sort of conscience, but I never gave them the will and the courage to allow those things to guide them.

The prototypical story of this period, which I tried to write several hundred times, was about a boy who is called into Fairyland to become a magical adventurer, but he refuses to go. He’s simply afraid—afraid of dying, afraid of the unknown, and his own deep sense of unworthiness convinces him that the offer is really a trap (which it is!). To me, nothing seemed simpler or more rational than that someone might be afraid. And yet, I could never figure out what happened next in the tale! I thought that somehow the boy’s good sense, his knowledge of his limitations, his deep feeling that he would be unable to defeat the Dark Lord, would somehow render him superior to other heroes. That he would defeat evil because he was wise enough to know how difficult it is to defeat evil.

But nothing came of it, because, of course, at some point he would need to make a positive action of some sort!

The fairies were evil, trying to lure him to his death—but even then, if he refused, so what? So he lived—then what? To be a hero, he’d need to take action to uncover and destroy their plot, and he didn’t.

Recently I pulled The Quest For Christa T off my shelf, a novel by East German novelist Christa Wolf. It is ostensibly about a similar attempt on the part of the novelist, to capture the essence of her rather ordinary school-friend Christa T, who has just died of cancer.

There is nothing outwardly special about Christa T. She comes to the narrator’s school from some other town, and she sticks in the narrator’s memory because one day, she blows a trumpet, very loud, announcing herself, and the narrator remembers that expression on her face and wonders why she did it, what was her secret? But she and Christa are forced to evacuate by the oncoming Soviets (this is in World War II), and they are separated. Christa T is scarred by two events in the evacuation: the sight of a soldier, frozen to death in the snow, and the sight of a farmer smashing a black tomcat against a wall, killing it.

They reunite seven years later at school. Christa T is always attempting to write something—sketches, poetry, fiction—but never gets anywhere. She considers marrying one man, then turns him down. Finally she leaves school, after being caught up in a love affair (her boyfriend steals away the girlfriend of another boy, who gets upset and is kicked out of school after having a breakdown while giving a talk). Her idealism and that of her generation wears away—the implication is they lose their belief in socialism. She returns as a teacher to a small town, where she accepts a marriage offer from a local veterinarian, and she runs his household, bears two children, then dies of cancer.

The narrator remains her friend, although they often don’t see each other, and you can feel the tension in the writing as she tries to reconstruct not just the facts of Christa’s life, but also to imbue them with some meaning, some sense of the woman herself. The tension never leaves the prose—it’s a labored book, and hard to read, for all that it’s quite short. Even in the end, there’s a kind of disappointment, as if maybe the book hasn’t succeeded:

One day people will want to know who she was and who it is that’s been forgotten. They’ll want to see her, and that’s only natural. They’ll wonder if that other figure was there, the one we obstinately insist on when we mourn. Then people will have to produce her, create her, for once. So that doubts may be silences, so that she may be seen.

One basic question hangs over this book: “Why is this character worthy of our time?” And it’s not one that, I think, critics have totally been able to answer. On the back of my edition of the book, there’s a lot of talk about politics. One blurb says “between the lines lies the real story of Christa T.—the story of an individual crushed by the pressures of uniformity.”

But it’s not clear that’s the real story. The real story is quite human. At the end, the narrator asks Christa about the moment with the trumpet, and in Christa’s answer you realize that on a very basic, banal level, Christa has simply always wanted to be unique, to be special, and she’s always feared that she isn’t good enough. That’s what both fuels and stymies her attempts to write:

She always has an urge to put down her pen, to listen to music, very old music or the latest. To fuel her dangerous wish for a pure and terrible perfection. To say all or nothing, and to hear, unmistakably, inside oneself the echo: nothing.

In the end, Christa isn’t an every-woman. It’s a struggle to bring out her specificity, because she does nothing special, but we still see that she has a special sensitivity. When a young veteran asks to marry her, she questions him whether he’d ever killed anyone, had ever smashed any cats against a wall, and we know that she’s unwilling to ever be involved in anything sordid. Similarly, when she tells stories about her kids, the narrator notices that she’s loving, but unsentimental, that she notices the bad and the good as well. Christa T’s struggle is a result of her attention to facts, attention to detail, and her difficulty reconciling her desire to be extraordinary with her knowledge that this is a difficult or impossible thing to be.

Christa Wolf succeeded where I failed precisely because she is able to bring out some quality of heroism in Christa T. Which is to say, you sense that Christa T is different from those around her. That she is sensitive and alive in a way they aren’t. At some point she is contrasted with a literary friend, Blasing, who has concluded:

It’s not worth it, every time to pay with one’s own being. all he can do is advise everyone to circulate faked currency. Nobody can pro e anything and you can withdraw the currency at any time, quickly and painlessly: faked love, faked hatred, faked concern, and faked indifference. Besides, if you happen not to have noticed: the fake looks more genuine than the real thing because one can learn to regulate the doses as needed.

I think you get the sense—and perhaps this is where the political critique comes in—that Christa T could’ve achieved more, been more feted and remembered, if she’d been willing to say or do things that were untrue. Not to lie, precisely, but to give the right answers, to conjure up the right emotions at the right moments.

But I don’t think it’s fair to say she is “crushed by uniformity”. She leads a good life! She has a good husband and a good household. She still struggles, to the very end of her life, to write, and she does leave behind some good sketches, which the narrator uses to create this novel. In the end the narrator says:

I asked myself what other life I would’ve advised her to live. And as often as I’ve thought about this since then—I can see no better life for her than the one she chose herself.

The only thing the narrator would’ve wanted for her—the thing the narrator would’ve given to Christa, if this was a matter of fiction rather than biography—is that she would’ve allowed Christa to live.

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There’s a line near the end of the book: “writing makes things large.” I don’t know if Christa T is truly an extraordinary person—maybe most people have the same simple honesty, the same simply disdain for violence and falsehood, that she had. I’m struck sometimes, reading about politicians, that some of them do things I can’t imagine most people doing. I can’t imagine that most people would take the expensive vacations with Harlan Crow that Clarence Thomas reported, for instance. Or would allow him to buy their mother’s house and let her live in it rent-free. Most people would be cognizant of the honor of being a Supreme Court justice and try to pay respect to that position.

But who knows? I’m surprised sometimes by the things people are willing to say. Twitter and Facebook let out a dark side of people. It feels very much like the faked currency that Blasing recommends handing out. I think, for instance, of myself, and the way I wanted so badly to turn the ordinary person into a hero. It was something I didn’t and couldn’t believe to be true. If the ordinary person was heroic, then heroism meant nothing, and all of our striving for excellence and virtue meant nothing. Yet during that period I went around talking all the time, I am sure, about the simple life and about how people don’t need achievement to be happy, and about how someone could find dignity and honor in simple work. It was nonsense and, worse, condescending nonsense, at least in the way that I meant it. Ordinary people, ordinary life, can never be worthy of celebration, because to celebrate something means to hold it up as an ideal.

I think what I was reacting against was the pressure I felt to get awards, to win fellowships, to sell books and to succeed on traditional metrics. And my rhetoric went unexamined because during that time, the 2010s, it also became fashionable to become contemptuous of meritocracy, to call it a mirage, and to talk trash about the professional-managerial elite and the limousine liberal class of which I’m a part.

Christa T is a writer. She has an aim. She strives to put down something true. To rob her of that ambition, and to claim that she sought fulfillment just in being a mother and a wife—that would, I think, be false.

Being an artist or a creator isn’t the only laudable goal. There’s a whole literature of refusal, about protagonists whose heroism lies precisely in their refusal to act. The most notable story in this vein is “Bartleby the Scrivener”, about the clerk who would ‘prefer not to’ do his job. His response is madness, but it represents something very ssane—our mulish desire to get around external constraint. I also recently read Miroslav Krleza’s On The Edge of Reason, a Croatian novel about a man whose life is ruined because he calls out a high official at a party, muttering under his breath that the man is criminally insane (because the man was boasting about killing four robbers in the aftermath of WWI). He refuses to back down or apologize from his statement, even though in the past, to get ahead, the protagonist has tempered his speech (or “circulated false currency”, to use Blasing’s formulation) a number of times.

There’s something very uncomfortable though in extoling the heroic and extraordinary. It makes us think, what about the scriveners who do their work? Are they not heroic? What about the people who say nothing at the party in Krleza’s book? Are they cowards? Are they unworthy of books? What about us? What if someone wrote our life? Is it something that’s possible? Are we heroes? Or counterfeiters?

The temptation is to say “Yes, everyone is a hero in some way.” But surely this can’t be true. Most people, one thinks, do precisely what is expected of them. Not all the time, it is true, but most of the time. There is a reason we are reading about Christa T and not about her husband or her ex-boyfriend or the man she rejected. They weren’t special; she was.

And yet if most people are not special, not worthy of a book, and some are, it’s very difficult, I think, for the author not to include themselves in the latter category. If Christa T is special merely because of her artistic sensibility, then surely I, with five books under contract, am just as special! It’s the natural consequence of the world-view I have just expounded, and yet it’s so frightening that one shrinks away. To say that I, right now, sitting on my bed at 11:40 AM, writing a blog post, am special? Am a hero? That I exemplify an ideal? It would be an act of shocking ego to say such a thing.

And yet…it’s true. I suppose that I could qualify that statement by saying “Everyone is a hero to themselves”. I don’t know if that’s accurate, but I suspect that a large number of people I consider un-extroardinary would certainly consider themselves heroes (and many, if I knew the facts of their life, would have a greater claim to the title than I do).

But from my own perspective, as a woman writing words with my own fingertips, it’s become impossible to write except from a place of pride and ambition. I believe in ideals, and I strive to meet them myself, and I succeed at least some of the time, and that’s the worldview that I put into my books.

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Addenda:

It’s probably foolish, but I’m exploring various ways of increasing my email list. One of them is a giveaway. Our house is groaning under the weight of all the books I buy, so I tend to give away books once I’ve read them. I decided that instead of putting them in the little free library I’d try to give them away to subscribers. I’m running a little raffle. If you’ve thought about joining my email list or becoming a paid subscriber, this could be a good incentive. The books I’m giving away are:

• FATHERS AND CHILDREN by Ivan Turgenev (NYRB)

• BOYS WEEKEND by Mattie Lubchansky (Pantheon)

• SPELLBOUND by Bishakh Som (Street Noise)

• OUR PHILOSOPHER by Gert Hofmann (NYRB)

• KAPO by Aleksandar Tisma (NYRB)

• A HUMAN BEING DIED THAT NIGHT by Pumla Gobodo-Madikzela (Mariner)

• I'M A FAN by Sheena Patel (Greywolf)

• THE QUEST FOR CHRISTA T by Christa Wolf (FSG)

I’ve read all of them in the past few months, and I bought all of them new in the last year. Click here to enter.

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Other Interesting Posts

• I liked Blake Smith’s meditation on why he’s unable or unwilling to sell out and speak the words you need it to succeed in Gay Studies. I am, generally, a proponent of selling out to the extent you need to secure your livelihood.

• Read

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• BDM
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