I’ve been revising the hell out of my LHC piece as of late and after getting a lot of feedback from other MFA students–and during my latest rewrite of the ending–I realized that the general thrust of the piece was building to the question of whether or not we as a species have moved beyond humanity. I’m quite pleased with this development as it dovetails nicely with what we’ve been discussing in Digital Media Theory this semester, and it gives me yet another opportunity to rework the text from this new perspective. If the protagonist–a scientists living underground in the Large Hadron Collider–comes to the end of the story with a few new insights and many more questions about post humanity, then I need to seed those queries and revelations from page one on. I know many apprentice writers really hate revision, but I’m an adamant proponent of the school that believes revision is the only way to make a story complete. So to sum up: Jack Kerouac can go fuck himself.
Lately, I’ve been rereading George Saunders’ Pastoralia which was originally the inspiration for this writing project that would be slightly less realistic than what I’m used to writing. While reading Saunders, I found myself sighing a breath of relief as my work doesn’t appear–to me at least–to be especially derivative of his early work. But then that got me thinking about what it is about Saunders I enjoy, when I dislike so much of experimental writing, especially all that nonsense that came out in the 60s and 70s and overshadowed true masters of the form like Richard Yates until the golden age of 1980s working class realism swung everything back into equilibrium. And I think what it comes down to, for me anyway, is that I’ve always pegged realism and experimentation in two very separate camps: one is interesting in making you feel emotions and one is interested in making you think intellectually.
I’ve always been drawn to work that has an emotional center which is why it’s been hard to enjoy work like White Noise and The Crying of Lot 49 as much as I’m supposed to. But Saunders packs a lot of heart into his stories. And I’m not talking about sentimentality. Richard Yates–my literary god–was a staunch opponent of all things sentimental. But I think early Saunders gets a bad wrap when it’s called purely intellectual or merely exercises; Saunders is interested in characters and the choices they make, not so much in the overarching structures of society. I guess the reason why I’m so much more interested in the emotional core of stories is because of my undergrad where we read nothing but realism and everyone heavily favored T.S Eliot and the new critics, but I’d like to think even if that wasn’t the case I wouldn’t have been swayed completely into the other side of the literary aisle.
