12/17/2023 0 Comments Rarify meaningThen I calm down and remember another shtick item: Chekhov’s line, in “Gooseberries,” where he says that every happy man should have an unhappy man in his closet, to remind him, with his constant tapping, that not everyone is happy, and that, someday, life will show him its claws. Jon chose love! Jeff chose to not kill! You want darkness? Watch TV! Like ‘C.S.I.’! Read ‘Little Red Riding Hood!’ Chick makes one mistake, gets eaten by a wolf! And she’s a kid! Or how about the Bible? Plagues of locusts, and then the nicest guy in the world gets crucified? Are you kidding me?” One is: “I know, I know, I’m so sorry, I’ll try to do better, I really do enjoy living!” The other is: “Well, wait a minute, what do you mean by ‘dark’? anyway? What makes this story dark’? I don’t find it ‘dark’ at all. And maybe (the argument goes) it was necessary to make this exaggerated sugar-guy and cut him in half in order to remind ourselves, at sufficient volume, that undeserved misery exists-to sort of rarify and present that feeling so we might feel it anew.īut yes-this “why so dark?” question comes up a lot, both inside and outside of my head, and, when it does, I always have two opposing impulses. It is saying, If this happened, what would that be like? Its subject becomes, say, undeserved misery-which does happen. And he’s made of sugar.Īre people made of sugar? Is it raining? How often does a guy get cut in half on his birthday? Still, the story about the sugar-guy being cut in half on his birthday in the rain is not saying: this happens. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. Somehow-maybe due to simple paucity of means-I tend to foster drama via bleakness. So thanks for asking! One of the most truthful answers I’ve come up with is just to paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, who said that a writer can choose what he writes about, but can’t choose what he makes live. I’ve done a lot of (mostly defensive) thinking about this darkness thing, and have formulated a good amount of shtick along the way. So most of what I’m doing on a given day is just trying to insure that the wild ride happens, trusting and hopeful that the thematics will take care of themselves. I think the writer’s main job is to provide a wild ride for the reader. Well, I should first say (thereby covering my ass for the entire interview) that I am not very good on questions of intentionality, i.e., questions of the “Why did you do that?” variety. I’m sure you get asked this all the time, but where do these ideas come from? “Escape from Spiderhead” reminds me a little of an earlier story of yours-“ Jon”-which dealt with teen-agers who were held captive in an institution as test subjects for advertising. Recently, he chatted with Deborah Treisman, the magazine’s fiction editor, about good and evil, dosing while working, and the writer’s main job: “to provide a wild ride for the reader.” George Saunders’s story “ Escape from Spiderhead” appears this week in The New Yorker.
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