Fiction as a Theory of Action
What does it mean to "do something", anyway?
Stuff Getting Written
For anyone interested in the academic side of things, I’ve got a two-part review of Lexi Eikelboom’s delightful book, Rhythm: A Theological Account, which takes a musical, metrical approach to religious questions. You can find that at the University of Pennsylvania’s Genealogies of Modernity project.
I’ve also been working for a new organization called unRival, which amplifies stories of peacebuilding and nonviolent resistance across the world. I love these people dearly, and would love it if you check out the website (still a work in progress) and see what we’re all about.
Also, if you want to stay tuned into Christ & Pop-Culture, where I write regularly about art and religion, I’ve got a new piece coming out there this week or next. I’ll leave it a surprise for now, but it’s probably may favorite thing I wrote all last year…
Finally, my latest novel is proceeding apace (more on that below). I’ve put close to 200,000 words into the project so far, and I think I’m finally ready to…uh…write the whole second draft very quickly? That probably doesn’t sound really impressive, but trust me, I’ll have fun things to share soon.
Life Getting Lived
15 February 2021 will go down in history as the first night that Rowan slept through the night—or as close as he can come to it right now. We went down a little before 11p and didn’t wake us until 5:30a the next morning. There was much rejoicing.
This meant I also got to get up early for the first time in a long time. I’ve become a morning person in the last 2 years (though not without great effort). Last summer, I learned to love those lonely first few hours while Jenna stayed in bed after a late shift at work and I got to drink coffee, read, and think as the sun came up.
… I fell asleep a lot, too, but on those days that I started getting things done early in the morning and winding down at night, I felt pretty great.
This small choice—and it was a choice—to become a morning person is a little stranger to me than you might expect. It still surprises me that this college night-owl could swerve so hard in the other direction. Since my janky career path took me into the field of behavioral and organizational psychology, I’ve become more interested in why people do what they do. Turns out, I’m not the only one.
What Would A Dragon Do?
Decision-making—or rather, having agency—has been on my mind a lot. It’s also a broad topic in fiction—probably the topic. The main definition of a story is that things happen, or people do stuff, and we can’t help but watch.
So as I was soliciting advice and laying out outlines for a few ways the plot in my WIP fantasy novel could go, I paid close attention when my friend Sam showed me a split between active and passive routes for the story: characters doing things, or things happening to characters:
Dragon is forced to reveal their identity vs. Dragon chooses to reveal. The latter is a bit more of a positive spin on their relationship, while the former at least brings up a "When were we going to discuss this?" conversation.
Main Character is forced into immortality vs. Main Character chooses immortality (even if it doesn't work out). The former shrinks MC's presence by taking agency away, Arthur-Dent-like.
Big Bad proactively makes MC immortal vs. Big Bad opportunistically makes MC immortal. The former makes them seem more long-planning; the latter more impulsive and perhaps spiteful.
These aren’t simple choices, either—they matter to the story. In what I am glibly calling a cross between The Witcher and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a young man in a fantasy city full of magic and monsters is just trying to get by while working in a bar. If you’re familiar with the lingo of roleplaying games, he is an NPC—a “non-player” character whose life doesn’t affect the main story, who you might interact with and forget about. I started this novel with the thought that “NPC-status” is all a matter of perspective: just because you leave the tavern and go off on some grand adventure doesn’t mean that the unassuming dishwasher isn’t going through some serious shit that makes your exploits look like a toddler’s tea-time. But then, what makes their story worth telling as much if not more than your own?
What Counts as a Story Worth Telling?
People doing things are, of course, much more complicated in actual life than on page or screen. Recently at TL;DR Press, a bunch of us went back and forth about this problem as it relates to conflict in stories. We tend, for good reason, to believe that “good stories” have active characters. Author Briston Brooks went on record to remind us of this and to juxtapose it against the “recurring issue” of what she calls “inactive protagonists” in contemporary writing. Such characters, she suggests, mostly experience things happening to them. Instead of reacting to their environments, really interesting characters go out and get what they want:
… But what are the deeper implications of such categories? What of actual human beings who spend their lives responding to their environments and circumstances, whose stories are more about survival than ambition?
This isn’t just a matter of narrative stakes. Several writers, including Vida Cruz, piggy-backed off Brooks to explain that traditionally “active” characters are Western constructs. More than that, they are a uniquely colonial identity, adventurers and “men of action” who pursue what they want at other people’s expense. The colonized experience—and that of most people living today, whether under empire or by capitalism—is not nearly as proactive. Most of us respond to circumstances and try to carve out lives for ourselves. Do we accept the implication that such stories aren’t interesting or proactive enough to be worth telling?
What we end up with is a pretty serious argument about what meaningful human action looks like and how you represent that in fiction.
What Does It Mean to “Mean It”?
I doubt Brooks was suggesting that non-traditional narratives aren’t worth telling, or that the only proper form of conflict is the Hero’s Journey. I sense a bit of an overreaction on Cruz’s part. But her reaction makes sense and makes us attend to something fiction does that we honestly can’t take for granted these days: it presents human action as meaningful.
We can actually trace these tensions back about 30 years. Artists educated under the lit-crit vogue of the Ivy League in the 70s and 80s grew tired of academic and literary trends that reduced people to determinate products of their material environments, or after-effects of a language that “has happened in us and before us”. Human agency gets downplayed in postmodern fiction; the literary heights here are occupied by the fever-dream comedy of errors that is Gravity’s Rainbow, or else Alain Robbe-Grillet famously complaining that phrases like, “at the foot of a mountain”, were absurd. Mountains do not have “feet”, and such anthropomorphizing had no place in the late 20th Century. Better to describe a structure’s exact positioning in terms of mileage and slope angle than to speak of mountains with “feet”, God damn it.
But writers in the New Sincerity movement (David Foster Wallace is most famous here, but also Jeffrey Eugenides, Ben Lerner and others) wanted to push back against things like this. They believed “Theory” had made us suspicious of things that didn’t deserve suspicion, like language and intention and un-ironic sorrow or joy—you know, sincerity. Couldn’t it be possible to have our infinite Cartesian egos bruised by postmodern Theory and still appreciate the responsibility of being a person?
If this sounds like a very privileged or even a very white male question, that’s because it is, though I don’t think it’s less serious on that account. Rather, as Rachel Miller wrote for Brooklyn, New Sincerity came a little late to the party and, though it’s still learning how to be an ally, it is a necessary one:
This new sincerity seems to be overwhelmingly white, because people of color have been rightly mad for ages… [E]very goddamn person has something at stake even though they might not know it yet, and every goddamn person needs to be responsible, now. Am I repeating everything that’s already on the Internet? Yes! But it must be repeated, because otherwise the constructive anger, the anti-sarcasm, and the new sincerity will disappear, and we’ll be much worse off than we already are.
New Sincerity isn’t totally devoid of voices of color; Teju Cole’s Open City is an outstanding example. Cole’s narrator Julius tries very hard to be a kind of postmodern “effect” of his environments, without much agency of his own, but that doesn’t help him when voices from his past come to hold him responsible for his actions. Julius’s status as a “passive protagonist” is thus a very important part of the plot.
Which brings us back to the simple fact that we can’t take such things for granted, in fiction or elsewhere.
No Such Thing as Not Acting
Infants do this thing called “reflexive smiling”. All those big grins Rowan gave me in the first weeks were totally unrelated to me or what I was doing. Of course that’s not true anymore, but something about it still bums me out a little: where, exactly, is the line between reflex and intention? At what point are we acting on our own? … And is this even the right question?
We can glean some insight, I think, from the fact that the best stories involve a spectrum of activity and passivity. The best-written characters seem thrown into their own worlds, just like we feel thrown into ours. We respond to our circumstances with the added terror of knowing we are responsible for the choices we make, even in and amongst our limited options. Interactions like the one between Brooks and Cruz make us realize that fiction can place everything at stake, right down to our very ideas about acting and not-acting.
The stakes go deeper than the words on the page, or what they help us imagine. Cruz reminds us that the “inactive protagonist” is a mainstay in subaltern stories. The “survivor” is an implicit critique of the traditional protagonist championed by Brooks. Editorial preference for one type of protagonist or the other is not just an artistic question—it’s a political one, because some common element of human experience always gets shoved aside so another can come out into the light and become normative.
But such choices also prove to us that fiction does touch us, that it’s capable of transforming our lives and outlook. Fiction makes us want to be like the characters we love, or else to use their experiences as models for interpreting our own experiences and avoiding mistakes. Whether active, passive, or reactive, the characters we read are windows into our own thoughts about agency and responsibility; they become our theory of action, of how we are or are not responsible for our encounters with the world. In these ways, the stakes of representation go beyond this-or-that voice being heard; it becomes about the full symphony of human experience.