Therapy isn't the (only) answer

On mythic, legendary, and Romantic action

Once upon a time, a man started to say mean things to his wife.

He didn’t want to be mean, but it was difficult for him to stop, because each incident was absolutely within the bounds of what was allowable. For instance, his wife had a demanding job, and she frequently took work calls during evenings, weekends, and vacations. One summer she cleared her calendar so she wouldn't take any calls one Saturday while her dad was visiting, and he said, "Oh, so for someone you care about, you're free." She laughed it off, but he kept picking at it. "No seriously, you'd never clear a day like that for me."

"Sure, I would," she said.

"Then do it," he said. "Give me a day."

"Honey, cmon," she said. "You know I have to be available!"

But he picked and picked, knowing she wouldn't do it, getting worked up about the idea that she wouldn't give him a whole day. And yet…deep down, he didn't want to spend an entire uninterrupted day with her. He certainly didn't want to use his precious marital capital to get that day! If she was going to clear a day, he'd rather she do it to be with their daughter, so he could go off and see some friends! Nonetheless, he kept insisting, "Just one day!"

"I can do something in September maybe?"

"Four months away?" he said. "Your dad told us a month ago he was coming—you just cleared time. You didn't tell him, oh come back in four months!"

She didn't respond to this devastating and, to him, unimpeachable point. The fact was, when a friend or relative was in town, she had time—she found it. But she wouldn't do that for him.

He was in the right, but how many of these little fights could he pick before their marriage unraveled? Probably a lot of them! But the number was certainly not infinite.

When he spoke to his therapist about this issue, she took his side, saying it sounded like he had some major concerns, and that he was seeking proofs of his wife's love. The man had noticed a tendency of therapists to be captured by his opinion—they rarely questioned or challenged him. His last therapist was always guiding him towards forgiving his inner child. She was convinced that he bore some grudge against himself, thought himself undeserving of love—she said what whenever he talked about himself, there was a heaviness, a sense of darkness. She wanted him to accept that he was a fundamentally good person, with needs that deserved to be met—he had fired her shortly after meeting his now-wife. But maybe he shouldn't have. She obviously had a point—he'd created a situation where he constantly looked for proofs that his wife was insufficiently dedicated to him. And he'd done the same thing to others: to his friends, for instance. A longtime friendship had ended after he'd prodded, all but forced, a friend to say she thought he was a whiner—that he complained too much, and that she didn't sympathize with his complaints about his life.

But the inner child thing didn't resonate with him. He felt hemmed in by all this therapy stuff. He didn't want to work on himself. He had too much reflection already. He felt there was no point asking any friends or family for their opinions, because it would always be the same: therapy for him; couples’ counseling for them. Talking, just endless talking.

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When they want to solve a problem, human beings have three main options: the mythic, the heroic, or the Romantic. But this man was not educated in the humanities—he didn't understand, on even a basic level, the action of psychology, literature, or religion. When he pondered how to change his life, he essentially had two arrows in his quiver: the psychological and the criminal. The psychological was a weakened form of mythic action—psychology used introspection to achieve some kind of catharsis, sapping some of his primal drives of their power to compel action. Since he'd rejected this course of action, he was left with the criminal: an affair, an addiction, or simply the slow drip of cruelty. He could try to annex his own darkness, giving himself over to it, and thus escape from the lash of conscience. In other words, he could accept (or even revel in) the fact that he was simply a dick.

But the man didn't want to do that either, his only option was a harm reduction strategy. He knew instinctively that you don't want to get into the apologize / abuse cycle, where you alternate increasingly abject apologies with increasingly big blow-out fights. He tried to keep his meanness to a steady drip of bitter comments—every time he held back on one, he congratulated himself, thinking he'd given his marriage another day.

Once he was watching a romantic comedy with his wife, and he said, "Wait a second, I don't get it—the girl at the beginning of the movie has a great job and apartment, and she can do whatever she wants, whenever she wants—she sleeps in on Saturdays, goes for long walks by herself, stares soulfully into the water—"

"Tom!" said his wife. "That was a really depressing scene!"

"Seemed happy to me," he said. "No kid, no responsibilities."

His wife laughed, but Tom kept thinking—I mean it, I really mean it. I just want to be alone. And yet when his wife went on a week-long business trip, he went a little wild, drinking too much each night after putting his daughter to bed. Once he woke up bleary and hungover to his daughter saying, "Dad you FORGOT to wake me up, you forgot!" He had a call from his wife, who'd watched his daughter on the nanny-cam putzing around her room for an hour, calling for him. While making his daughter dinner he called his wife and got mad at her for spying on him.

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As I mentioned earlier, this story is complicated by the fact that the man did have plenty of options—he simply wasn’t aware of them. The options were the mythic, heroic, and Romantic. To start with the latter, because it's simplest—he could simply choose his sorrow. To choose the fact that he has this hole inside him, to choose the fact that he's married a woman who's unable to appreciate it. To sublimate that anger and pain into love for her—to love her three times or ten times as much. To gleefully allow her to take her work calls—to love her, in fact, for her love of her work. To love this especially in her (she ran a nationally-prominent do-gooder organization, if that matters, and ran it quite effectively). This was in fact how he'd felt when they first met—he'd loved her very independence, the very fact that he alone could give her the freedom she needed.

If the Romantic was impossible, he could try the mythic or heroic. The heroic option involves that most difficult of maneuvers—actually changing another human being. He would need to expand himself, to become less abject, to somehow display competence and strength on a level that would bring out a corresponding weakness in his wife and binds her to him in a wholly new way. In short, it would involve adding a new element to their marriage. The heroic option generally happens only by accident—as when one partner suffers a health calamity or job loss and the other steps up, covering the household uncomplainingly, providing support and aid, and causing their partner to see them in a new life. He could also try to develop sexual superpowers and woo her that way (the common idiom for this doomed maneuver is that they try to “reignite their spark”). In short, it involves re-envisioning and reinventing their entire relationship, often through the display of exemplary qualities that his partner had not previously known.

The final option is mythic action: the manipulation of value-laden symbols in a way that ushers some kind of alteration in a person's essence. The most common form of mythic action in modern secular society is the sacrament of marriage itself: to go from being 'a couple' to being man and wife is still a value-laden experience that causes a mutation in how the couple is seen. Buying a house is another form of mythic action: When a person owns property, their relationship to their neighbors and neighborhood often changes profoundly, even if the property they own is no different, outwardly, from the one they used to rent.

Mythic action is most effective when condoned by society. You can't simply start stealing food and killing poor people and expect it to mean the same thing it would if you were a Spartan youth. Conversely, because it is so societal, mythic action is effective even if you do not personally believe in the ritual. Even if you think marriage is bunkum and claptrap, you will change, as a person, if you get married—this occurs precisely because society now treats you differently—men speak differently to you—they assume you’ve been initiated into unspoken mysteries.

What Tom didn’t need a therapist, he needed a shaman. Any such figure possesses a handful of rituals that they understand well, and they would've been able to guide him through the appropriate ritual and then guide the community to see him anew. In the absence of such a practitioner, our hero was left at the mercy of the fates. Of course, the most powerful mythic action of all (at least in modern society) is the divorce. In this case, the magic lies not in the divorce itself, but in the reason you give. That reason becomes an incantation—a statement of value—this thing is important enough to me that I am willing to blow up my life on its behalf.

In this case, the man through his cruelty was slowly eroding the goodness of his marriage, making it easier for him to (someday) give up. And in the narrative about his wife's overwork and lack of care, he was preparing for himself a mythic excuse. He did not want anyone in his life who didn't have time for him. He wanted to be cared for on a small, daily, ordinary level. And yet, his current wife does care for him. She cares for him by putting up with his silly gibes and cruelties. She cares for him by taking care of their daughter so he can see his friends. She cares for him by rubbing his feet at night—by listening to his fears about ending up alone—by putting up with visits from his crazy brother who gets drunk and passes out in their basement—by never pressuring him to earn more money or get a different job—by giving him the time and space to be alone and brood (which he obviously does quite often). And his next wife, if there is a next wife, won't necessarily treat him better. His salvation will come entirely from the act of sacrifice—the fact that he walked away from a perfectly-good love. His inner child will, for whatever reason, read this as an act of protection and finally stop feeling so fucking wounded.

So yes, the man's divorce would have solved the problem that ailed him, and his second marriage would've been long and happy and prosperous. But you know what, the idea sort of depresses me. Surely, as an author, I can do a bit better than this relentless naturalism. Yes, in real life, divorce would be likely and would solve this man's problem. But...in this story, something different happens.

In this story, the woman surprises him one day by clearing a week from her calendar. She says that her dad has offered to take care of their daughter, and she asks where he'd like to go. He says...I don't know. She says you pick. He says I really don't know. She says well I'm not choosing. He says...Rome? So they go and stand in the Colosseum, and he goes looking for the seven Egyptian Obelisks decorating Rome’s streets, and he tells her excitedly about the Palatine and Capitoline hills and about all the mad, bad emperors, and the old, lame good ones. And she doesn't even bring along her computer and her phone. And she gives him a very decent blow-job on their second night, and on their final night he actually gets it up to penetrate her. And they stay happily married ever after. Because it turns out that he was neither the myth, the hero, the criminal, the neurotic, or the romantic lead—he was the damsel in distress, just looking to be saved. And, finally, he was.

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Discussion

The above is an example of the kind of essay / story / tale pieces I've been writing in my spare time lately. Kind of unclassifiable, huh? I think that I can get something like this published in a literary journal (I once had a story in the Indiana Review that I told in the form of a spreadsheet), but there's an equally large chance that the undergrads or MFA students assigned to read slush will take one look at this style and be like...this isn't fiction.

The frustrating thing about being a Great Books reader (and the reason it isn't always the best thing for a writer's artistic development) is that it exposes you to the full breadth of narrative art. For instance, the most popular and enduring works of art in history are all epic poems: The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Mahabharata, the Kalevala, etc. But there are two kinds of epic poems. There are the poems composed in prehistory, and then there are the epic poems composed during historical time, by named authors, in conscious imitation of the tradition of epic poetry. There is a huge difference, for instance, between The Aeneid and The Odyssey. The latter was old even at the moment when it was first written down at the command of the Athenian dictator Peisistratus: it was a story that'd already circulated for hundreds of years. The Odyssey was more remembered than it was composed. The Aeneid on the other hand arose in historical time. It was the creation of a single author, self-consciously trying to create a great work of literature.

The point is: why don't people write epic poems anymore? There doesn't seem to be any real reason. We have examples of long poems even of quite recent pedigree (Eugene Onegin) that've received critical acclaim and mass readership. I know some epic poems are composed, but considering the age and pedigree of the form, the number of practitioners is quite small.

I think to some degree the problem is that the skills have been lost—so few people are able to compose in rhyme and meter. And most poets don't have a strong understanding of narrative. So if they tried to compose an epic poem, they would produce something allusive and modernist that would be really difficult to read.

Anyway, I'm not writing epic poetry, but I am working in an equally ancient form: the anecdote.

There is such a fetish in literature of figuring out "the origins of the novel”, but the whole thing strikes me as rather silly. Just look to wherever you see people writing in prose, and that's where you'll find the origins of the novel. Aesop, Herodotus, and Plutarch all contributed their DNA to the novel. The novel is not some kind of radical break with the past. Everyone understands the idea of, you know, just telling a story. And whenever people try to tell simple stories, without poetic flourishes, you get novelistic writing. I'm talking about jokes, biographies, annals, hagiographies, fables, and all manner of other writing.

The difference between pre-modern prose and modern prose fiction is that in modern prose fiction we are very embodied within the subject. We construct images, describe feelings, physical sensations, etc. Modern prose fiction is a union of poetry and prose—it's almost like the traditional purview of poetry (sensation) has been annexed to prose.

But this is quite recent! If you go back even to Jane Austen, you'll see relatively few visual images, relatively few sensations. With the realists we start to see more images, more description, but it isn't until early 20th-century modernism that fiction gains the intensely interior, embodied quality. It's at this point that that the novel of manners and novel of sentiment have fused to become, as Edith Wharton called them, the novel of feeling. The exploration of the day-to-day, moment-to-moment experience of what it's like to be alive.

But this is a very particular, very historically contingent form! And, to be honest, I'm a bit tired of it. Sometimes I just want to sit down and tell a story! But I don't want to do it in an avant-garde way, as a method of questioning or unsettling the concept of storytelling. Rather, I think my way of storytelling goes back to the earlier, simpler, and most natural modes of storytelling. To recall Barth's formulation, mine isn't the literature of exhaustion, it's the literature of rejuvenation.

Anyway, this is a very long postscript / apology. I've been reading a lot of Henry James lately, and I kind of admire how, when he was publishing a compendium of his work at the end of his life, he wrote these very long prefaces to all his novels where he explained his thoughts about how he'd constructed them and how fiction ought to work.

Normally that's not something you're supposed to do, and I agree that a work of art ought to stand on its own, without explanation. But I think usually the context for a work serves as its explanation (i.e. if you encounter a story in a literary journal, you understand that you are reading a work of Program-era fiction in the United States).

Anyway, sharing fiction on this Substack is an experiment. I’ve just been writing so much lately, and I’ve gotten tired with the incredibly long and slow process for getting fiction published in literary journals. I hope my story doesn’t disappoint, but I guess I’ll see from the unsubscribe rate how / whether it works out.

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Other Notes

— The Default World was mentioned in The Dallas Voice.

—The book was also a clue (I believe it was “Default World author Kanakia”) in the Slate Crossword on May 30 (thanks, obviously, to a reader of this Substack who’s a fan).

—I’ve now gotten several enjoyable and intelligent emails from reader of the blog, and I’ve had fun with the resulting exchanges, so please feel free to email me! Someday I might be too famous and important and busy to want to hear from readers, but today really isn’t that day.

—I also had my first anecdote accepted for publication: “Anti-Capitalism” will appear in the sci-fi journal Lightspeed. It’s a story about why superheroes don’t spend their time fighting poverty and world peace (the answer is that it would be a drag. Using your sun-blasts to fight the Galactic Devourer is fun, whereas sitting in an electrical generator and using your powers to create limitless energy would just be kind of a drag.)

—With regards to the sadness I wrote about last week, none of the quasi-Stoic advice I got was the least bit helpful. Yes, it would be great if I didn’t care about the things I care about! That really would solve all my problems! What helped the most were people who’d read my book reassuring me that it did indeed have value; and other authors telling me about their own experiences feeling like failures or having books underperform. Just a note for next time you need to reassure someone! I have an author friend who’s much more successful than me and who’s written an incredible book and who relies on writing for her income, for her book to underperform is truly heartbreaking in a way that my situation is not.