Literary Talk

A dirty secret; the shock of recognition; shallot etymology; why guys dig girl-on-girl action; and whether fiction matters.

Confessional
I don’t like being read aloud to. I don’t like books on tape, and when I go to fiction or poetry readings, it’s sometimes a struggle to stay engaged. I don’t know why that is, but the feeling is so pronounced that I’m sometimes tempted to yank the offending material from the reader’s hands—not that the content or its relative merit have anything to do with my impatience.

Still, I try to get to readings as often as my work schedule allows, most notably the KGB Fantastic Fiction and New York Review of Science Fiction series. I go not least because people have been very supportive at the few readings I’ve done, and because I invariably meet interesting people and am exposed to material I might not otherwise come across. And because fiction matters. (More on that in a moment.)

So it was with my usual mixed feelings that I hooked up with at KGB on Wednesday past to hear Paul Witcover read from his Dracula novel, Asylum; and Sarah Langan to read from her forthcoming book, The Keeper.* Both of them rocked the fucking house, as the kids say. It wasn’t just that the material was compelling and graphic, though they were (nota bene: neither of these books is for the faint of heart); what struck me was how well the authors knew people.

With both authors I had that shock of psychological recognition that one gets when a character does something that one couldn’t have anticipated, but seems so completely right when one reads it. More than once during the readings I said to myself, with rueful admiration, “How does he/she know that?” Fantastic fiction as a whole has (justly) been criticized for insufficient attention to characterization and psychological realism, but these two writers are joyous exceptions to the stereotype. Beyond living, breathing, real characters, I was riveted by both writers’ exquisite (and disturbing) wealth of detail. (I don’t mean to lump the authors’ work together, by the way: they are mining different veins of ore in different ways—the connection is the superb execution by both of them.)

* Full Disclosure: Witcover kindly gave me a copy of Asylum at the recent Readercon (I hadn’t cracked the cover prior to the KGB reading); despite that, I would say we have a nodding acquaintance—friendly, but not really friends. Before Langan’s reading I had never heard of her, and couldn’t have picked her out of a police lineup of garden gnomes. I’m not above plugging friends’ books when I think they deserve it, but this isn’t one of those instances.

Intermission
Dinner afterward at Uncle Mao’s Old Home, Fill ‘er Up an’ Keep on a-Truckin’ Cafe was excellent, though the Napalm Conch seemed not to agree with . Among the dinner throng were , Rick Bowes, and . We debated the etymologies for scallion and rapscallion (they’re unrelated), and inexplicably referred to Nick Kaufmann in the third person, a practice that metastasized over dinner to include the rest of us at the table, and many other personages, living and dead. I’m not sure if this verbal tic was caused by the food or the Stalinist Revival decor.

Exegesis
Upstream I said, almost in passing, that fiction matters; I have had a lot of dark nights of the soul when I wasn’t at all sure. Lately I think it does, a belief I come to via girl-on-girl sex.

I have had several female friends ask me, “What is it with guys that they’re so turned on by lesbians?” The tone of the query has ranged from curiosity to mild exasperation to barely-suppressed fury. The subject is a staple among stand-up comics, in sitcoms and films, and even in television commercials. Equally common is the observation that guys are infatuated with a fantasy of lesbianism at odds with reality. But the reality isn’t what matters here: why do so many guys fantasize about lesbians?

Probably there are several reasons why guys think lesbians are hot—sexuality is so plastic, and so highly idiosyncratic, that you could make the case that there are as many explanations for the fantasies as there are guys having them. But I think one explanation—one that’s probably more often true than not—is that fantasies about lesbians are a safe method for guys to role play in a way that their gender training doesn’t normally allow.

Lesbian fantasies allow guys to step outside their gender armor of toughness and dominance, and let themselves experience tenderness and softness. (And yes, there are certainly guys who can get in touch with their gentler sides without lesbian fantasies, but I don’t think they’re in the majority in our culture.) That’s what fantasies are good for: putting ourselves in someone else’s head; in someone else’s skin. The high degree to which we can empathize with what other people are feeling is one of our most human attributes.

And what is storytelling, if not that same kind of fantasy role playing? For the duration of the story or novel, we can project ourselves into the hearts of its characters. We can try out the roles of hero and villain, lover and beloved, carpenter and king. Fiction is a chance to put on the mask of The Other, and to walk (or dance or sail or fly) in his shoes. Or her shoes.

Does it matter? You bet your ass it does. There’s a reason why bigots don’t want to see the objects of their hatred portrayed in fiction or on screen: it’s much harder to hate someone once you understand them from the inside. The right-wing homophobes who protested against Brokeback Mountain (the film—E. Annie Proulx’s transcendent short story sailed below their radar), were right to fear its effect on society, since seeing gay men as real people is bound to make people more accepting of them. For a long time Blacks struggled with the same near-invisibility in film and television—a struggle that’s not over yet, I suppose, but the increasingly common presence of Blacks in leading roles in film and on television has done at least as much to further racial equality as any civil rights legislation.

If that sounds like a sermon, I don’t mean it to be. No one, least of all me, wants to read fiction because it’s Good For You. Of the many pleasurable things about reading fiction, the one that may matter most is that it makes you feel connected to other people. It can be a cold, lonely world out there, and fiction can bring us back inside the circle of the campfire’s light.