Woolf always used the novel as a means for acute social criticism—to dilate those moments of moral complicity and complacency found in the daily lives of middle-class Westerners. Her celebrated style brought ordinary syntax into ever-closer contact with the layers of consciousness that operate just below our cultivated personalities, turbulent areas of inner life where the stability of human character and morality breaks down and creates, as Zadie Smith put it recently, “grave doubts about the nature of the self.” Woolf’s faith in this moral power of fiction allowed her to wager that the lived quality of a black person’s experience, however dimly apprehended, was not ultimately divorceable from the deepest self-understandings of white people.
Woolf, in other words, dared to insist that there are “other” people in our midst; all around us (and within us) are hidden facets of humanity. Virtually everything in our society encourages us to deny, repress, disavow, distort, or irreparably damage that truth, which is, of course, one of the main goals of racism. Part of this invisibility is the result of a social system beyond any individual’s making. But Woolf’s point is that the perpetuation of this invisibility is our collective responsibility. To make us safe from the abjection of living in a society built on the foundations of violence and stratification, we assure ourselves that such a status belongs only to a well-defined stranger. The power of great fiction to challenge that common sense lies only partially in reflecting our lives to us like a mirror; a great deal more resides in its capacity to dispossess us of our preferred assumptions, plunging us into knowledge like photographic paper into its chemical bath, revealing, even against our will, all the gray areas we find inconvenient, unpleasant, even impossible to acknowledge.
Ninety years ago, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” was banned in the United States. Today, a popular literary novel can contain so many oral sex acts that readers yawn.
This is progress, mostly. But how did we get here?
I was 40,000 words deep when I realized that my book was not working. Titled Poet’s Calculus, it was a tour of the concepts of calculus, connecting each to a topic in the humanities. Interested in mathematical limits? Check out the fluid meanings of Adrienne Rich’s poetry. Curious about velocity and acceleration? Turn your attention to these paintings by Edgar Degas. The flaw that has taken you 30 seconds to see—my connections were strained, baffling, and defiantly obscure—took me ages to accept. Finally, my editor told me that the titular word “poet” wasn’t playing well with the marketing team. Also, she added delicately, they weren’t crazy about the word “calculus.”
The book was due in four months.
I had precisely one card up my sleeve. A now-abandoned chapter had explored this exact phenomenon: the life cycle by which a piece of writing collapses, improves, and evolves.
Over time, curtain calls grew to include underscoring, bits of comic business or a brief reprise of a beloved song. Stars like Al Jolson, Pearl Bailey and Sammy Davis, Jr. would often come to forestage after a show had finished and do a few of the numbers they had made famous — strategies to extort a standing ovation and goose word-of-mouth.
These days, when standing ovations are de rigueur and box office records break weekly, many still want in on the post-curtain action. Reprises have given way to glossy remixes and confetti canons. Remember that old theory that you should leave them wanting more? This is more like leave them wanting to post an Instagram story.
The pizza toast was like liturgy, like an old friend comforting me as I wept into my hands. The pizza toast was everything I needed it to be at the very moment it arrived.
You see: I was in the middle of an epic walk across Japan. On this trip I was following the old Nakasendō historic highway, and would go on to walk more than 1,000 kilometers (about 621 miles) in total. On this particular day I was grappling with an eight-hour stretch of scorched asphalt that I had nicknamed “Pachinko Road.” The Nakasendō connects Tokyo and Kyoto and parts of it cut through forests, others through sleepy farming villages, and others still through suburban hell-sprawl. I loved the sprawl, how it made you contend with how a certain portion of the world is just one continuous big-box store. But on Pachinko Road, it all had a slightly Japanese twist: Japanese Duane Reades, tonkatsu fried-pork chain restaurants with piglet mascots, chain udon noodle and curry shops you can find in any Japanese prefecture and, yes, pachinko parlors — those loud, smoke-filled gambling warehouses so alluring, so Sirenic, they necessitate warning signs throughout their parking lots. Warnings that implore parents not to leave their infants in their cars as they play, hypnotized for hours by small metal balls. This was the belt of Japanese road I had now been walking for two days. A belt where parents accidentally roasted their children.
In Samuel Beckett’s classic play “Happy Days,” a woman sits on stage, buried up to her neck in a heap of sand, keeping up a patter of cheerful conversation. At one point, she pauses and surveys her situation.
“Ah earth,” she says. “You old extinguisher.”
The three central characters in Hiroko Oyamada’s enigmatic novel “The Factory” also watch themselves being slowly and systematically buried alive, but by another great extinguisher of the self: work. They are new hires at a large corporation called the Factory. What the company creates remains a mystery; its only discernible product appears to be the dread and wild confusion it induces among its employees.