Where to Draw the Line?

Notes in Relation to Story and to John Pistelli’s novels Major Arcana and The Class of 2000

POST VIA LIBERATION LIT

Note #1

In one sense, John Pistelli’s novels Major Arcana and The Class of 2000 are basically fictionalized flights within Mr. Pistelli’s neighborhood – Pittsburgh’s houses, streets, and various public and private institutions. Events are largely episodic, if loosely causal over long periods. Neighborhoods. Cultural scenes. Characters talking ideas, social and personal commentary. To what end? To what events? Domestic violence and crippling attacks. Philosophical stances. Coming of age. Affairs. Symbolic and real suicide. Poverty, deadly accidents. Careers. Social and personal expression and care. Criticism and lit. The high school world. The college world.

Such novels are sometimes written as autobiographical fiction, or autofiction, for a variety of reasons. It’s a way for imaginative worlds to more readily transcend their make-believe constructs to create powerful impressions, by the automatic touch of the daily real – a mix of autobiography and fiction, with purview often smeared between real and make-believe. Autofiction’s throwing the real self of the author into the narrative mix adds literal authority, if not certain fact, to the make-believe. Autofiction may come off as lazy but can help authors achieve what especially well-constructed autobiographical fiction achieves, a compelling intensity, perhaps because we are never more intense or caring, or imaginative, than when detailing our own selves and our loved ones. With fiction there is the greater need to tightly, intensely craft constructs – pure fiction – to give inherent, internal tension – often by way of great conflict, deepest fears and desires, compelling questions, and staggering paradox, with powerful causality, escalating everything as you go.

If your make-believe construct is not tightly wound in these ways, then some other major skill needs to be employed to captivate an audience. This can be as true of nonfiction as fiction, but more imperative in fiction, because fiction needs to create and prove its internal integrity, the actual gravity of its construct, unlike, say, the irrefutable fact of life itself. Pistelli’s Arcana and 2000 both seem to pursue a pure fiction route, and both seem more milieu descriptive than story expressive – more intricate portraiture of character and culture than rush of event. Major Arcana, with its obnoxious professor protagonist, might as well as have been titled My Life as a Troll for its first half, at least; whereas, The Class of 2000, with its besieged late teen protagonist, might as well have been titled My Life Trolled – to give a sense of the rough, tough nature of these worlds, however highly drawn.

Stories fundamentally consist of more than two things happening in a row – resulting in a revelation of knowledge and experience. This thing happened, causing this next thing to happen, resulting in this other thing. That’s basic story. Beginning, middle, end. The basic three act movie. Throw in a couple more things happening (ideally causally) and you’ve got a five act prestige TV pilot. And the same holds for any number of subsequent TV episodes – themselves causally linked, ideally.

Of course within any one “thing” – or act or part – any number of other things (scenes and events and exposition and so on) can happen in myriad ways. Tight and intensifying causality, among other literary tools and devices, can be useful to hold many disparate parts together in compelling ways, especially in the dramatization of conflict, questions, paradoxes, or greatest fears and desires of main characters and actions. Ideally, all this makes up some great event, the great event of story – that sequence of more than two things happening in a row to great impact of experience and knowledge. A main character or characters doggedly pursuing a goal may be the simplest and most profound way to create and understand story.

Less intense and less powerfully constructed stories can wander around the neighborhood of an author’s familiarities and interests and moods. Unless, I’m missing something, Pistelli’s two novels under consideration here prioritize sketches of character, concept, and personal history over event. Plus, the author has an ideological ax or ten or ten thousand to grind. Who doesn’t? Your stories would be dead if you did not. The quality of the grinding is often a matter of taste, which leaves no one off the hook for making and receiving the story – author and audience.

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Note #2

There can be a “Who Cares?” problem with literature, and that’s one of the difficulties that the would-be big social, political, or epic novel faces with readers this century in face of extremely popular film and video stories, especially as compared to the video-less peak of the novel’s height of expression in the 1800s, the Victorian novel.

The problem is at least two-fold. The first part is that society is radically different in crucial ways than it once was – environment, technology, population, and so on – and the second-part of the problem is that big storytelling is also radically different given the creation and rise of video – as movies, TV series, and endless shorts.

Any ambitious contemporary novel that does not account for these radical changes by way of its content and structure is a throwback, often a trying throwback to an outmoded time. That said, some people like throwbacks, and it’s always possible to write interesting novels in dated fashions. It’s also easy to wonder, why would you want to, especially if you sacrifice the essence of much of what has been learned and changed in the meantime.

Any shrinkage of the reader’s attention span may be an issue, and may need be accommodated in novel form but doesn’t seem to be the main issue, which is more with changes in the world and storytelling, with shifts in types of attention rather than duration. Differing kinds of attention have always been a competitive challenge in storytelling – the differing pulls of the advanced literary versus the mass popular, for example. Big Victorian social novels that most effectively bridged the gap between the high literary and the popular like Les Misérables and Uncle Tom’s Cabin have a lot to teach authors about ambitious storytelling, to this day, but so do contemporary big movies and TV series amid the radical transformations of the world.

So much that is immediate today is remote, and so much that is remote is immediate and visible, unlike in the time of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Les Misérables, given the birth of video and especially the internet and how the world exists audio-visually (as if magically) in a computer in your hand in a smartphone. Reality, always a tricky thing, can be hard to figure given this intense and paradoxical contortion of intimacy and exile in our lives. What world do we actually live in the most anymore, and how – the intimate or the remote? Which is more real, more meaningful – and how can we best put our hands and minds on any or all of it?

Note #3

By now it seems to be a crime if even non-script-writing Master of Fine Arts programs in imaginative writing fail to offer contemporary audio-video storytelling 101 courses. After all, billions of dollars have been involved in honing powerful, emotional, and conceptually compelling storylines and worlds in big industrial storytelling centers like Hollywood and far beyond. Storytellers of any type must to some extent compete with what is produced by seemingly infinite dollars, labor, and other resources. It’s wise to do so, since much of what powers the great video epics today both overlaps and correlates strongly with key and core precepts, seemingly eternal, articulated in Aristotle’s Poetics millennia ago.

If you would rather do your own alternate thing in story, fine, do it, as there is inherent value in that as well. But if you want to creatively compete with the greatest storytelling both of history and the current day, then you might do well to employ all the most powerful tools and insights and modes of telling that exist, that have endured, and that are so very forceful, prominent, and advanced in more-or-less grand fashion today. Don’t write a novel that imitates Netflix – write a novel that encompasses and bests it, that subsumes it.

If as storyteller, you think you can just ramble on in the mind of one character or another episodically and in pinched mental and emotional orbits, then you’ve amputated most of what storytelling can do and is currently doing to sweeping effect in this extraordinarily comprehensive and explosive, fragile and fractured age. The character-driven episodic can be done and done well but it can also appear ironically both clipped and aimless, whether in print or video.

We live in endlessly perilous and brutal times – no matter how domestic our lives, or how international – and if we are not so aware in our stories increasingly then we risk fiddling while Earth burns, while despair, disease, aggression, genocide, ecocide, omnicide condemn us all, and all life. If Earth goes up in flames, then none of the social or personal justice issues matter. It’s over. This is the event of our lives and of all life. That doesn’t mean don’t focus on infinite kinds of justice and causes, high concepts, myriad life cases, and other vital issues and realms, it means put things in great perspective. It’s all-hands-on-deck time, not least in the capital country of rapacious and deadly Empire, America, which is increasingly embroiled in a kind of simmering civil war that masks the wholesale depredations of Empire, the plutocracy, against all the people and the planet.

This is what the big social or political novel or any truly big ambitious novel is all about – or should be about because it needs to be if it is to explore and reveal the full human condition and its possibilities, and interact with it and impact it in imperative ways. The civil wars of gender politics and other forms of identity politics rage while the Empire’s war on the People and Earth consumes all, and, oh-by-the-way stokes all the identity wars to great profit. Is there only one war that should be fought, one story that should be told? No, there are many but the fact is that all stories now are contained within the great war for species and planetary survival.

Note #4

What is an experimental novel?

It’s sometimes said that an experimental novel is simply a novel that doesn’t work. But if so, as with a failed science experiment, you can learn something from it. To a certain extent all novels are experimental, though many fit into long established orders of form and content. As form is the shape of content, experiments in content can result in more profound experiments than experiments in shape that attempt to re-form well-worn content.

Dynamic consciousness of people and the world, people in the world makeup the guts of the novel, but this consciousness is nothing without the events of the world. The human consciousness explored can seem to be a consciousness of the events, of life, as if life itself is conscious through us, through human apprehension of guts, heart, and mind. Whether the consciousness explored is robust or diseased, suffocating or liberatory, retrograde or revolutionary, basic action underlies story and its structure that the author builds to convey the novel world. In a fundamental sense, actions are story. Unfortunately, an all-encompassing sense of event or action is too often elided from literary novels.

It’s structure, the scaffolding of the novel, not content where the story may typically be most directly felt to work or not work – often no matter the consciousness and events depicted, but structure is an easy and too-obvious target for considering the quality of story. When great consciousness and events are depicted on rickety scaffolding little but shallow critique fusses over imperfections, limitations, or even yawning gaps of form and style, structure and expression.

Structure as easy target is also why stories with great imperfections, limitations, and voids of consciousness and event – which are typical in establishment literature – are commonly obsessively critiqued for any shortcomings of technique. If only the technique were better! Then another gutted story from the ideologically warped and constricted publishing establishment could be saved.

Aristotle’s Poetics laid out basic structural tools for telling effective story, millennia ago, rather than focusing on content and expansive qualities of human consciousness that are vital to effective and powerful story – though some modal qualities of human consciousness and the human condition are touched on, such as tragedy and comedy. In other words, Aristotle left the especially hard part to artists to figure out going forward. In Poetics, Aristotle is no revolutionary of human consciousness but a skilled technician of certain types of story.

Some of the techniques and types have become classic. To deviate from them can be said to be “experimental” – whether as success or failure or some mix. Pistelli’s novels Arcana and 2000 can seem more familiar than experimental (despite a kind of video play within the novel 2000 and various jags in Arcana), but are they? Could the structure not be more compelling? The familiarity is found in the reliance on the characters as the focus of the story rather than on the larger event or events of the story which can seem to exist almost nominally in the background rather than being foregrounded to drive story.

There’s a long history of such literature, and to each their own, but the effect is telling. You can’t easily get swept up in the events in such novels, so if you don’t resonate with the characters or the thought (which Aristotle ranks second and third behind action), you’re in trouble as a reader. Events encompass characters, whereas characters are mere parts of events, even in the extreme, say, in a Beckett play where you’ve got mainly only one character who can do practically nothing while buried up to her waist and then neck in the ground. Poor Winnie! “Poor” because she’s Winnie, extraordinarily valiant but wholly overpowered, due to the crushing event of her life that buries her alive.

Now that’s a story point-blank told by the whale of an event happening to the main character. Happy Days, ironically, indeed. Deed first. Character second. Per Aristotle and the Poetics, no less. That said, given a larger frame, what is most crushing to us all today is very different from the baggage of Winnie’s life, as it was during Winnie’s day too if you look more fully. This is why the moderns and postmoderns can be so maddening. Call them all post Victorian – post great social engagement, very roughly. They sort of rolled over in the face of world wars and the escalations of Empire. And the plutocrat establishment loved it and praised it to the skies! And still does.

We need to move beyond that in a big way, including past the Victorian age, which was itself far from fully engaged, let alone revolutionary. Oh, how controversial! In the literary world. And to the liberal and conservative mindset. And even to progressives. The most pressing content of our day is far more desperate than anything the modernists and postmodernists expressed. And far more than the Victorians could imagine. Why mainly look back to find your inspiration? Look ahead, to what might be imagined. You can look back to be inspired, even guided, there’s value there, but it can also be like seeking needles in haystacks. If you go big, ultimately, today in lit you go anti-omnicidal or you go home. The obliteration of Gaza and Palestinians shows us the horrific infernal reality and the scourge of the full human condition on the planet in our time, especially when extrapolated to Earth’s ongoing ecocide, and potential nuclear omnicide. It shows us the limits and the need for change and action, not least in the stories that we learn and live by, that transform and move us.

Is this, our fundamental contemporary state of being, unfair to raise in relation to the big psycho-socio-conceptual novel of Major Arcana? The Intellectual, or the Intellect, as Troll? Let alone the more conventional and focused, almost broken male neighborhood novel, The Class of 2000? My Life Trolled, by Life. Fair or not, the double point emphasized is 1) the distinction between novels as big action and event and novels as episodic sketch, and 2) to note where contemporary novels sit in context of the major event of contemporary life that is the ongoing sixth mass extinction, the Anthropocene, the terminal glide path of all life that we are currently riding and driving, some more quickly and forcefully, desperately and fatefully than others.

Arcana and 2000 mainly read as a series of character sketches and conceptual asides, Arcana in particular with sometimes seemingly interminable private personal histories. Great character analysis and philosophical dissections of these novels could be undertaken. I will not do so, and will leave that to those who resonate much more to that sort of thing. It’s quite a study though. The states of being – warped, beat, and lost – come to mind. Or – twisted and demoralized. Trolled or trolling. The novels also focus on the occasional inverse to these brute realities and psychological sketchiness. If you can take a step back from it all in both novels, what you’ve got is a kind of high-minded low comedy or dramedy, of contentious Pittsburgh area and high school days on the one hand and a contentious Steel City university and intellectual world on the other. That’s not all that these novels are but a central chunk.

Clearly, this is not a proper review of these novels but rather notes on an encounter and reflection upon them. A character analysis of Simon Magnus, a foremost character of Major Arcana, could be blistering in many ways, private and public, for example, but also utterly redundant of many cultural and character critiques long-since waged in the culture wars. So to that I say, No thanks. I’ll focus instead on these novels’ relation to the nature of story in and of the nature of life today.

Note #5

What most does Mr. Pistelli wish to bring to these novels? In The Class of 2000 he seems to be attempting to draw up and draw out and memorialize a sense of his Pittsburgh childhood home – unless I’m mistaken – Pittsburgh or various areas in Pittsburgh, in his way and time, his once-upon-a-time, as made distinct by his sensibilities. It’s not autofiction, I assume, but you wonder if it may as well be. Then in Major Arcana, the story grows up, metaphorically not literally, from the high school senior protagonist matched with a high school teacher to a college professor matched with college students and various associates. Pistelli continues the socio-culture wars from the vantage of higher ed and greater adulthood rather than secondary ed and lots of adolescence. These are not really political novels and not really epics. These are social and cultural and conceptual novels. Where these novels “descend” to brutal realism or snide jabbing, they can be tough to take, though some people like that. Where the novels live is in the mournful or simply willful ambiance of people trying to muddle their way through a too often violent, mad, and broken world.

Pistelli writes as much, knowingly and perhaps partly unwittingly, in nearly the last lines of The Class of 2000:

That day I began writing these reminiscences and speculations, these records distorted by passion and prejudice, in an effort to understand my life and my times.

I have only avoided speculating about Lauren—hers is the only life, in its goodness and simplicity, that I can’t comprehend.

Now that author Pistelli has trolled about in these his two most recent novels via his characters mainly, and much less so by his plots, one wonders if in his next major work he will explore something that he has not as fully comprehended in these novels but might like to, something simple and good, something Lauren-like, where character is more revelatory of event or action than even of character itself, less meandering chronicle and essay, more dramatic action and vast stakes, less gazing upon the bewitched face of the human species and more on some gripping action that reveals the full play of life, and that, ironically perhaps, may better cast indelible character.

Stories that are structured strongly by action, though with some reflection, even a lot, are not for everyone, and possibly not for the author under consideration here, though he makes some gestures toward it in both Arcana and 2000, and comes closest in 2000. Scholarly turns toward fiction often tend toward discourse and reflection foremost and fundamentally rather than toward action, despite the form and content being necessarily novelistic – story – not essay.

2000 achieves more of the heart, Arcana more of the mind, as intended apparently. While both novels think and bleed, love and hate, Arcana and 2000 seem to be more victims of society and the past than new agents within and transcending, a not uncommon fate of what might be thought of as novels of reflection, as opposed to novels relentless in their wholesale novelty in new event and action, writ large and often paradoxical, and yet novels more often than not propagandistic. Not infrequently, great novelists are great, sometimes notorious, ax grinders who throw everything into showing the sharpness of their ax. Reflection, character, even plot may come secondarily.

Pistelli reaches for the ax, no question, though he flips the script, so to speak, structurally against story in favor of discourse. When considering the ideological basis of any novel, it’s hard not to notice first whether or not the ideology is artfully thrown, while hard-thrown it often is, more directly so than typically realized. When considering the ideology of story, it can be difficult to overcome the prejudices and biases of your own ideologies. Both after and with the ideology, comes the action. Character third and thought fourth. (Second and third, as Aristotle has it, after the action – ideology aside.) Less character upfront and more or better action can lead to bigger and better character, and to greater story. See the heights of story, and the peaks of popular fiction, such as they were and are, and see Hollywood and Netflix at their best. See how the ancient epic and other forms of story have moved through the novel to film and video. That said, there are no guarantees in story approach. It’s an art and a complex one at that, the massive form of the novel in particular.

The problem, the temptation, the mirage, the false lead for creators of story often comes from considering, or rather feeling – what’s more compelling on its own? – a character sketch or a plot sketch? A character sketch typically, because it contains emotions, personalities, and intimate ideas rather than a stark outline of events, places, and people. But it’s the events that cause the characters to transcend themselves and fully manifest in and of the world, to generate experience and reveal the universe, our lives, life in far greater whole. Without the events, the characters remain sketches, or lone portraits. It’s the events, the actions that bring great life to individuals and to groups and to societies.

Note # 6

Where to draw the line? How to flyte the wicked, praise the good, and shade every grade of grey imaginable in story? The classic way is to show action, character, and thought – the world – preferably in that order. A curious order, especially in the lead, it may seem to those most mind-heavy or star-struck, those most idea or character focused, but such is story. Classic story, at least. Popular story. High story. We always want to know what happens because we always want to know – to be able to judge for ourselves. The people and ideas are only part of it, the story of life, even if they are the flesh-and-blood stars and the abstract points of brilliant illumination. The people and ideas are wholly bound by the world in motion, in act, in story. You can deny this – many try to – but not escape it.

In any novel it always needs to matter whether your main characters live or die, especially when they seem likely to live for long. This compelling state is a lot easier to pull off in a novel where your main character is a besieged teenager rather than an obnoxious professor. It’s not impossible by far to foreground the half-daft, the warped, or the spiteful, or even the violent, but you had better call upon some serious level of talent to do so for any sustained period of time.

The more you read in Major Arcana, the more detail you get of a couple students of Simon Magnus and their mothers, curiously, among others. The novel-opening and on-campus suicide of Jacob Morrow, filmed by fellow student Ash del Greco, serves as more of a culminating event than an inciting incident, which is indicative of the novel’s mode of reflection upon personal histories, and conceptual and cultural battles, rather than the creation of new action in the world. You’re basically reading fictive biography and essay rather than story, call it biofiction more than autofiction, or conceptfiction, or philosofiction, or psychohistory and cultural critique – it can give the feel of a textbook – with parallels drawn between tarot archetypes of the Major Arcana cards and the novel’s characters.

Note #7

Where does it all end in the big novel that is Major Arcana? Where it began – with a couple of college students’ descent into madness, in a life-ending event in the middle of campus, somehow inspired by the angry professor, graphic novelist, mockingly genderless or “all-gender,” Simon Magnus, topped by a dollop of Youtubed psycho-babble from the suicidal Jacob Morrow:

“You can tell them you think I died to prove that the mind is the most powerful force in the universe,” he said, “but tell them I think I died to prove that love is even more powerful than that. Tell them I died to prove I’m not the only thing in the universe.” …

For almost a month, Jacob Morrow’s death became the local habitation of the always ambient culture war.

Aristotle might have said, Pistelli, take your novel and condense it into this “almost a month” to which you refer and make it one great big action. But Pistelli being Pistelli metaphorically footnotes Aristotle and goes his own way, for the better or the worse, readers will decide.

Well, if Pistelli can do it, so can we – let’s hit the idea and hit it again: What contemporary lit too often slights or outright ignores is that the characters are not the story. The characters may be the reason for the story, but story begins and runs through action and event and ends in ideas and experience. If we want to know, if we want to “get the story,” we ask, “What happened?” not “Who happened?” We might want to know “Who was involved?” but we will definitely want to know “What was done?” You want to know the actions first. The particularities and complexities of the persons and reasons involved come second and third in importance. True in life, true in story, as ongoing event and action.

If you say, One student killed himself in a fit of psychobabble on campus while another student filmed it and said they were inspired by a bizarre Professor and the class they were in together,” you’ve got the story (sort of in reverse order, the several causal things that happened). If you want to continue the story, you go to “What happened next?” In this case – professor lost professor’s job, some revelatory discussions were held, life hiccupped, people reassessed, and everyone moved on. Or almost everyone.

But if that’s all that happened then what was the long novel about, the big story? Well, in the end, in Major Arcana, it takes awhile to sift through the denouement, post-climax, which unspools most naturally, but mainly the novel consists largely of episodic fictive histories slipping toward the culminating event, pre-told. So what makes it compelling if the story barely exists? You need to find yourself invested in all the biography and philosophy, because the story itself is quickly dispensed with. And even the resolution is longer than the story. Everything is.

What to make of it all? There is a lot. Tellingly, we might do well to recall the near final lines of The Class of 2000:

That day I began writing these reminiscences and speculations, these records distorted by passion and prejudice, in an effort to understand my life and my times.

I have only avoided speculating about Lauren—hers is the only life, in its goodness and simplicity, that I can’t comprehend.

From The Class of 2000 to Major Arcana, John Pistelli moves from the daily trials of a socially and domestically besieged high school senior in an embattled Pittsburgh neighborhood, and his embattled and fraught households, to what is ultimately a cautionary tale about friends and lovers, professionals and students – the two Steel City college undergrads and the Major Arcana archetypes of the doomed Jacob Morrow and his friend and lover Ash del Greco – a young woman who may not be “good and simple” like Lauren of 2000, but who is complex, caring, and confused in an adult milieu that is just as hapless and seemingly chaotic as that of The Class of 2000.

Rather grim recurring themes similarly expressed, differently exemplified. Is Pittsburgh Evil? Or emblematic of some kind of doom and gloom? It’s not clear. But if you need to know, John Pistelli might be the one you want to hire to try to find out.

John Pistelli has published three previous novels of which I’m largely unfamiliar, all five novels apparently set in Pittsburgh or a city of its type. Oh, Pittsburgh! Are you marked by three rivers, or four? Including one underground that Pistelli metaphorically boats about on? The Steel City seems to be quite the buckle on the Belt of Rust in the novelized visions of this author. Don’t know if he has ever given Pittsburgh the Hollywood treatment, at its best, in any of his three early novels. Especially if not, it might be worth taking a shot at it in his sixth.

POST VIA LIBERATION LIT