January 27th, 2020 - You Will Never Be Forgotten

Dear TNY,

Boy, “You Will Never Be Forgotten” is something.

I’m gonna say some other things later about some things.  Now I’d like to say that the most interesting part of this story, the job the woman had, left a lot on the table.  Had, instead, the story focused on that, I think that could have been something far more…something.

Okay.  The story.  The only thing I could ascertain from this story was authorial intention.  Something was intended here.  Very much.  One does not fucking hammer so hard on a plot point if there isn’t intention.  What I can’t figure out is if the intention was to cause us to be empathetic to the woman or to cause us to have no empathy for the woman.  It’s definitely an agenda story, but I’m not clear you, TNY, or the author have heard of reader fatigue.  Not agenda fatigue, across all stories, which does exist and I’m over it, as previously mentioned.  What I’m saying is fatigue in this story alone.

I am going to let some other people talk now.  First, John Gardner:

“We cannot think about things but only about the names of things”; in other words, to build up a complicated argument we need abstractions.  If we wish to think usefully about wildlife preservation, we must abstract the dying white rhinoceros at our feet to dying white rhinoceroses in general, we must see the relationship (another abstraction) between dying white rhinoceroses and dying tigers, etc., and rise, finally, to the abstraction “dying wildlife.”  In the same way, a writer consciously or unconsciously abstracts the elements of fiction.

And a message from researchers Bal and Veltkamp:

Finally, another reason why nonfiction may have less strong effects on empathy than fiction has been presented by the theory of psychic numbing [39]. Slovic argues that the way a message (e.g., about victims) is presented to people influences their capacity to experience the affective information in that message and to feel sympathy. Specifically, it is easier to experience affect if a message presents information about a single, identifiable individual, than when information is presented about entire groups or using statistics (i.e., you can place yourself in the shoes of one other, but not of thousands). As a result, it has been shown in research on donating behavior that people will donate more money after reading information about an identifiable individual that suffered (e.g., one individual faces hunger) than after reading a message showing group statistics (e.g., 3 million people face hunger) [40]. In other words, a process of psychological numbing towards stories about large groups of people or objectified or statistically presented facts (which are often presented in non-fiction such as newspapers) is likely to occur, while fictional narratives, which are characteristically about individuals and their personal stories, may influence people to a much stronger degree. 

In sum, because the focus of fiction is primarily on eliciting emotions, rather than on presenting factual information, fiction reading will be more likely influence empathy than non-fiction reading.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is Gardner has outlined exactly how to have an effect (or affect, as B & V put it), if that’s your intention (and that’s seems to be the lever attempting to be pulled behind any agenda story; as opposed to the lever of trying to get someone to fucking care about another human and not the agenda).  You have to get people to care about one fucking rhino, not the rhino’s death.  And then a mess of abstractions has to happen to get you to care about all the animals.  And you have Bal and Veltkamp saying that psychic numbing disables the ability to experience sympathy (empathy being even more difficult to achieve than sympathy).  But here this story sits.  Trying to accomplish something, but (in light of the fact that is it about one character…rather, one agenda) providing so much psychic numbing that no empathy is possible.

Kinda seems like, if your intention is unclear, you’d want to know that as a writer.  You’d want to know that as a magazine.  You’d want to know, and I might be out on a fucking limb here, how the artform you purport to conduct yourself in…works. And if you have beef with how all that works…take it up with all the evolution that brought us here. Just saying, boats are built a certain way. It’s because they fucking work.

But hey, who am I?  Your special club has a lot of members and you guys all seem to know what you’re doing.  Right?  Right.

I was recently told that a profession is a not a skill.  It is merely something you get paid to do.  So one does not relate to the other in any way.  Sometimes one gets paid for real masterful expression of skill.  And sometimes one is The Fucking New Fucking Yorker. Fuck.

Nick