Friday, April 30, 2010

The Critical Essay: The Road

In the same MFA application aforementioned, I was also asked to write a critical essay about some aspect of craft. This rather open-ended question made me tear my hair out in tiny tufts, which I then superglued to my miniature troll, who now sports Chinese dreds. Just kidding. Or am I?

In fiction, setting and character are typically defined with specific attributes that are either fictional or real. People and places have names and readers adjust their mindset based on the data provided by the author, such as “heavyset, middle-aged Caucasian, Bob Goldfarb, living in Beijing in the year 1985.” However, when authors choose to cloak their settings and characters in anonymity, a different relationship is created between the reader and the work. In this essay, I will explore how Cormac McCarthy’s use of anonymity in setting and character has a notable impact on the reader’s experience of his 2006 novel, The Road.

In The Road, McCarthy presents a post-apocalyptic journey of a man and his son struggling to survive in a barren and unforgiving world. From the beginning of the novel, the reader enters a world where time and place are not revealed. The titular “road” and its environs are described in detail, but where the road lies is never disclosed. The two main characters are referred to only as “the man” and “the boy” or “the child” throughout the novel. Suspended in a world sans bearings, the reader is plunged into an environment similar to the man’s own as described on page 11: “Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief.” The breath that sustains the reader through the novel’s uncoupled world is the voice of the man, as the novel’s third person limited point of view is based on his perspective.

McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic world is full of gruesome details, but the unidentified locations described in a matter-of-fact tone creates distance between the reader and the macabre:
The city was mostly burned. No sign of life. Cars in the street caked with ash, everything covered with ash and dust. Fossil tracks in the dried sludge. A corpse in a doorway dried to leather. Grimacing at the day. (12)
Had McCarthy identified the city as an actual city, e.g. Los Angeles, the reader’s reaction would be fraught with his own feelings and associations with Los Angeles. Imagining Los Angeles “mostly burned” evokes visceral sentiments, while the desolation of an unnamed city feels remote. The reader remains as untethered as the man and the boy as the story moves from one nameless place to the next.

The nondescript leathery corpse in the quote above also garners little sympathy from the reader. Throughout the novel, the dead are part of the setting and described as objects rather than people:
They passed a metal trashdump where someone had once tried to burn bodies. The charred meat and bones under the damp ash might have been anonymous save for the shapes of the skulls. No longer any smell. (150)
This removed approach to the dead not only provides distance for the reader, but also illustrates how de-sensitized the man has become, since he is the one relating the grisly details around him. By creating an impersonal world of devastation, McCarthy channels the reader’s sympathy away from the surroundings and towards the main characters instead.

The people are just as anonymous as the places in The Road. Not only do the man and the boy remain nameless, but their physical descriptions are vague as well. In a rare instance when the man comments on the boy’s appearance, he describes how the environment has affected his son rather than pointing out distinguishing features: “The boy was so thin. [The man] watched him as he slept. Taut face and hollow eyes. A strange beauty.” This perspective is starkly realistic, since a father would hardly describe the color of his own child’s hair and eyes to himself. Without providing defining characteristics, McCarthy lets the reader fill in the details himself. However, the anonymity of the characters does not evoke detachment, but a sense of closeness and universality. The man and the boy could be anyone, including someone the reader knows or even the reader himself.

Without set identities, the distance between the reader and the man narrows as the narrative delves deeper into the man’s perspective. McCarthy reinforces this by jumping into second person at key moments, such as when the man considers shooting the boy to save him from torture at the hands of the enemy:
Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn’t fire? It has to fire. What if it doesn’t fire? Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? (114)
The reader imagines himself in the same circumstances, facing the same heartbreaking decisions as this “any man”, anywhere. The universality of the man’s struggle becomes even more apparent against this backdrop of anonymity.

McCarthy’s use of anonymity in The Road has a dual effect on the reader. On the one hand, it distances the reader from the horror of a post-apocalyptic world, while on the other, it draws the reader close to the man and the boy. The macabre does not take over the story and the focus stays on the internal struggles of the characters. By means of indeterminate settings and faceless characters, The Road’s underlying humanity shines in its rawest form.

Work cited:
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage International, 2006. Print.

The Personal Essay

I was recently asked to write about my desire to be a writer and my creative philosophy in an application for a Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing. Here's what came out of the piehole.

Ever since I was a little kid, books have held a certain magical quality for me. I grew up in a bifurcated world under strict, over-achieving immigrant parents. Inside our modest home, we were sealed in a hermetic bubble of Hong Kong urban culture, relishing the familiarity of Cantonese. Outside, we were exposed to the sprawling plash of Los Angeles suburban life, embracing the language of strangers. But for a few hours every weekend, the two worlds would intersect like circles in a Venn diagram. My mother, who barely understood any English, would bring me and my brother to the local library and release us into the wilderness of guided imagination.

On our first visit to the Chevy Chase Branch Library, my brother, five years my senior and precocious at the age of ten, milled around in the sci-fi and fantasy stacks, muttering for me to leave him alone and shooing me towards the children’s section. My mother, settled at a round wooden table with a pile of imported Hong Kong newspapers and gossip rags, pointed at a long wall of colorful spines and whispered in Cantonese, “Start with the first book on the first shelf and make your way across that wall until you’ve read every single one.” A clever woman, she was probably banking on the obsessive compulsiveness of her youngest to give her some peace. I followed her instructions to the letter with dogged enthusiasm. Each book knocked loose a brick or two from the walls of my sheltered childhood, revealing magic portals to other places, real and phantasmic. My mind bloomed with possibilities.

The allure of books followed me from that small-scale library through primary school, secondary school, university, and my first career in finance, traversing oceans, hurdling mountains, spanning continents, and even roving the occasional desert. Lurking in the fringes of consciousness was the notion that someday I would portray realms on reams of paper, preserve moments in masterful prose, fashion unforgettable characters in indelible ink. However, mediocre performance in a creative writing course in college cudgeled the notion deep into my subconscious. It remained comatose for almost a decade.

About a year and a half ago, I gathered up every frayed tassel of courage and quit a nine year career in finance to write a novel. My closest friends rejoiced; even acquaintances were not surprised. I, however, was terrified. Writing meant exposition. Vulnerability to subjective judgment. Lack of a steady income. Most petrifying of all, writing meant an attempt to do the one thing that I was most afraid of failing at. It took me six months to extricate myself from the decrepit clutches of ancient fears and compose the first sentence of my manuscript.

I did not have much to go on when I began working on the novel. The memory of that one horrendous quarter in creative writing certainly didn’t help. But I took a deep breath, determined a purpose and an ideal audience, and plunged in. The purpose: to offer a realistic account of grief as a twenty-something. The ideal audience: those suffering from grief first-hand, or those interested in how grief affects young people. Devising the plot line was not extremely difficult since the novel is based on personal experience. Devices emerged naturally and characters blossomed beyond real-life counterparts. I immersed myself fully and loved every moment of it, even the horrible headaches when the mind clamps down like a vise, refusing to cooperate, or the sleepless nights when the mind becomes possessive, refusing to release you from your fictional world, forcing you to conjure and rewrite without respite. During those nine months, I stopped reading, self-conscious that my voice would take on the inflections of other authors. I floundered and danced, capitulated and endured, crawled and ran, until one day the manuscript felt strong enough to stand on its own two feet. That was about a week ago, at the end of March.

I read through my manuscript and love the courage and hope it represents and all that it is trying to be. But I know that it could be more. That is what leads me now to pursue a creative writing degree, especially one where I can study craft under the guidance of effective storytellers, given that an effective storyteller is what I aim to be.

The storytelling capacity of books has affected me unlike any other media. Motion pictures, music, visual and performance arts stimulate my mind through the senses, but the written word accesses another part of my brain, demanding interaction. As a reader, I actively participate to form a three-dimensional world through an author’s two dimensional clues, or four-dimensional, even, if the fourth dimension is consciousness, emotion, spirit, or in one word, humanity.

The books that have impacted me the most are the ones that give a true sense of humanity. These books last beyond a season, reaching readers across generations and past cultural or physical borders. A true sense of humanity is what I seek to convey in my work, whether it be a novel about grief, a children’s book for kids with muscular dystrophy, a phantasmic tale of magic hippos, a short story about life after divorce at sixty, or even a horror/thriller featuring expatriate psychopaths in Shanghai.

There is also a part of me that is intent on giving voice to the specific experiences that I have been through as a product of diaspora and immigrant ambition. This is not because I believe that each of my experiences is unique, in fact, quite the contrary. Each fragment that has made me who I am is a link to someone else in the world whose journey has incorporated a similar fragment. The sum of these fragments makes me unique, of course, but the fragments themselves allow me to reach across oceans and hold hands with the most unexpected of kindred spirits. I may be Cantonese-American, but I am no more an Amy Tan protagonist than a Jhumpa Lahiri character. I am as interested in reading Kingston’s The Woman Warrior as Collins’ The Woman In White.

That’s the beautiful thing about being made up of fragments. From shards of culture, language, heritage, and upbringing, there is an opportunity to fashion bridges instead of walls. The stories waiting to be told of our polychromatic humanity are infinite, from chronicling the grit of reality to spinning the cloud-stuff of imagination. I hope to become one of many storytellers creating magic portals that will line the shelves of that very library where the world first unfurled for me.