I think most people would consider me to be a pretty polite person. I'm a door-holder-opener, an “No, after you” guy, a handshaker. I reflexively call older people “Sir” or “Ma’am” (which they don’t always care for).
But in a book or a story, I love a rude character. Maybe even especially because I spend my real life in a state of hyper-politeness. There's no better way to hook me; I always sit up a little when I find a character who bluntly misbehaves. The audacity!
One example: In the first few paragraphs of Deb Olin Unferth’s story, “Wait Till You See Me Dance”, an office assistant invites the narrator to join her at an “Indian dance”—later we discover that the office assistant is not Native American and has not been invited to this dance in any way.
The narrator immediately recalls a previous encounter with this same office assistant, in which the woman told the narrator that every time she sees her she thinks of the character Mary in the film It’s a Wonderful Life. Specifically the alternate-reality version of Mary in the universe where George Bailey doesn’t exist, and so Mary becomes a spinster.
Clarence, the angel cries out:
“‘She’s an old maid! She works at the library!’ You should put that on your voicemail.”
“I don’t work at the library.”
“People would know they had the right number.”
After that she called me Mary and soon had them all calling me Mary.
It is a hilarious and confoundingly rude exchange. Who says something like that to someone else?
Charles Baxter calls a character like this the “Captain Happen” of the story. In response to so many boring student stories that go nowhere, Baxter developed the idea of injecting a “narrative enabler” in one’s work, the sort of character who blurts out whatever is on their mind, who rustles feathers, stirs the pot, etc. If everyone in your story is too reserved or polite, it is difficult to wind up in any real conflict.
But a “Captain Happen” like the office assistant will never fail to jolt things to life.
The office assistant says whatever is on her mind, behaves rashly and impulsively. She’s the one inviting the narrator to the dance. She’ll also turn out to be the stubborn antagonist who refuses to allow the narrator to pass an undeserving student in her writing class, so that he won’t be deported back to a warzone.
All this is plainly key to the story’s machinations, and to the plot as a whole. But it misses one great aspect of the use of this particular “Captain Happen” which is just that it simply hooks us into the story right away. It is her comment about the narrator being like Mary in It’s a Wonderful Life that compels us to read on.
Who says something like that? We must find out.
It’s a great example of the importance of another thing that I find a lot of otherwise fine stories are lacking: some early, clear audacity.
Audacity has two meanings: first, a “willingness to take bold risks” which sounds good, but then also second, “rude or disrespectful behavior; impudence.”
A good story needs both of these aspects of audacity to stand out in some way, to grab our attention. If a story can take a “bold risk” within the first few paragraphs, we’re compelled to find out how that risk pays off. And then, as the second definition suggests, if that bold risk also somehow shocks our sensibilities, then so much the better.
It’s exciting to be in the hands of a writer who is not afraid to be rude or disrespectful. We may suspect, and rightly, that they're actually just more honest than others are willing to be.
And something is at stake, beyond whatever is going on in the story. It isn’t about wondering if this character will achieve a goal, but if this writer will achieve a goal—will they be able to land this plane, now that they are off on this daring course?
In Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, she describes the life of the writer, and the work we do, through all kinds of metaphors and anecdotes. In high school I wrote an essay about her description of writers as being like inchworms who stretch out blindly from sentence to sentence, panicking each time that they may find themselves failing to get to the next inch. What, no more? What, no more? she imagines us saying. In other anecdotes she compares writing to chopping firewood, to rowing against a tide (waiting for it to change), playing a game of chess against an invisible opponent, etc.
But in the final chapter of the book she barely talks about writing at all. Instead she tells the story of a stunt pilot she went to see, whose shows she found terrifying and exhilarating. She describes the joy of watching him get himself out of seemingly impossible situations, again and again—until one day he crashes and dies. It’s the risk of that seemingly-inevitable crash, she realizes, that made the rest of his flights worthwhile. That death brings meaning to life is not a new idea, but stripping mortality out of it, you can see Dillard’s final chapter—which she never directly connects back to writing—as a reminder that it is the risk of failure that brings joy to success. If we don’t sense some very real risk on the part of the writer, we won’t enjoy seeing them when nail it, against all odds. It isn't just the character who must be audacious, but the writer.
This struck me again recently as I was reading a story by Anthony Veasna So in his collection Afterparties. “Superking Son Scores Again” really takes its first audacious risk right in the title (what’s a Superking?) but then doubles down on this by the end of the first paragraph. We find out that Superking Son is a foul-mouthed grocery store employee who the narrator believes to be “an artist lost in the politics of normal assimilated life.” His store sells lychees and jackfruits smuggled through customs in the underwear of various Mings (aunts, in their Cambodian-American enclave). Superking Son can be “cruel, incredibly so,” and yet the narrator and his friends “idolize” him for he—as we discover finally in paragraph two—is the “Magic Johnson of badminton.”
Badminton? Like… badminton? I confess I’ve always thought of it is a kind of lightweight alternative to tennis. The sort of thing gym teachers make you do to cool things down when everyone is being too aggressive. I think of it as comedic, graceful… something, like croquet, that fancy people might play at a garden party. The little shuttlecock with its springy head, plastic feathers on the sides sort of floats back and forth, regardless of how hard you hit it.
But not in So’s story.
I quickly Googled “Cambodia badminton” to confirm my suspicion that it is a sport that is taken much more seriously in Southeast Asia, a hangover of Colonial days. Bored imperial soldiers would play the game, and it stuck around and became popular there, and played very competitively.
My guess is that So was well-aware of the initial absurdity of describing someone as being the “Magic Johnson of badminton” — using a familiar, American basketball player that way — and so it strikes me as a kind of audacity in the best possible way to launch the story with what turns out to be a purely earnest statement.
We're really supposed to believe that this is a story about a truly amazing badminton player? Certainly I’ve never read a story about badminton before. In So’s story badminton is never treated as being silly at all. Far from it. Superking plays badminton with violence and power. Like his life depends on it. Like it is Life itself. (And now that I’ve watched a few SEA matches on YouTube, I know that So wasn’t simply making this all up—badminton can be and is played with the kind of intensity he describes, with all the athleticism and fanaticism that white American readers like me are used to seeing in stories built around baseball or soccer or football or basketball, or even tennis.) Very quickly, the story put me on my back heel, reevaluating my priors. Maybe I don’t know anything about badminton after all, I’m thinking, by the third paragraph. Suddenly I’m reminded that my own father was, in college, a state-ranked table tennis (ping pong) player. He used to play his AT&T coworkers in our garage until he was drenched in sweat. Is that any less ridiculous? Of course not.
The audacity, in other words, more than pays off. So takes that bold risk—faces the skepticism he must have known would come in saying “I’m writing a story about tough Cambo dudes who play in a renegade street badminton league.” The story quickly turns me around as a reader, and makes me cheer his success even harder when the whole thing works better than I initially imagined. I thought I was watching a plane crash, but it turns out it was a stunt pilot the whole time.
That’s what great fiction can do—must do.
In Unferth’s story, the rude office assistant ends up conning the narrator into driving her to the Indian Dance, which turns out to be hours away, and requires them to dress up in ridiculous homemade outfits and dance in front of the Native people whose party they are crashing—and in the end it becomes this sort of beautiful, freeing thing for both of them. Their own audacity pays off, just when you can’t imagine how it possibly could.
In his essay “The Perfect Gerbil”, George Saunders takes us through the classic Donald Barthelme story, “The School” line-by-line, showing that Barthelme pushes us along with a series of little surprises. These can be as small as a little verbal tic on the part of the narrator, or as large as the death of several of the young classmates at the school. Saunders likens these moments in the story to the little motorized propulsion wheels on a kid’s Hot Wheels track, boosting the car’s momentum before it can run out. Saunders calls these moments in the story “gas stations.”
If these little surprise/pleasure moments are gas stations, then think of “the audacity” of the story as the initial launching mechanism.
Before any conflict has developed, sometimes before a character has even been really introduced—the story needs to turn its stores of potential energy into a burst of kinetic energy.
That’s the purpose of “the audacity” in the story. It sets the stakes, not within the story, but of the story itself.
I think this is why that second definition comes so handily into play here. Surely we can take “bold risks” without also being rude or impudent, right? But when someone like the office assistant is rude, calling the narrator an “old maid,” we may respond with some shock, and want to know what the response will be—is the narrator going to knock her lights out now? I hope this lady falls in a hole! (which, in fact, she will.) But we also have a curiosity about the rudeness itself—earlier I said that part of our attraction to rudeness may be that we know a rude person may simply be more honest than a polite one.
In another essay on reading Slaughterhouse Five in Sumatra (great badminton there!) as a young man, George Saunders talks about Kurt Vonnegut’s gifts as a humorist, and how humor in a story is really just a kind of “rapid truth telling.” Vonnegut tells us the truth about things much more quickly than we expect him to. And that is both rude and shocking, and also compellingly honest. We love comedy as diversion, as entertainment, but also because we expect it will, subversively, get to truths that we don’t normally get to hear people talk about.
Author Idra Novey writes, in an essay, “Learning to be Embarrassed on the Page” about how important it was, in beginning to write fiction, to be able to write things that shocked and even embarrassed herself. Working as a translator of Argentinian fiction by Vizconde Lascano Tegui, she found herself facing passages that made her blush, as he described a man who falls in love with a goat and “daydreams about her udders.” She chose the book, she writes, “for its audacity.” She admires that Tegui “has no fear of embarrassing himself on the page” and finds a similar quality in the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, who Novey has also translated. In The Passion According to G.H. a woman has a religious experience as she consumes a live cockroach. It's one of the most moving spiritual sequences I've ever found in literature.
“To risk something real as a writer is to risk making a fool of oneself,” Novey realizes, and so begins to keep a journal for all her own blasphemies, including fornicating whales. Later, during a scene in her novel where a bathtub was filling up with water, Novey compulsively decided to let it overflow and flood the room and the apartment below. Tegui’s “outrageousness” was infectious, she realizes, happily.
Novey puts her finger right on it in her conclusion.
In the rest of my life as a professor, as a translator, as a parent, I couldn’t be reckless. I had to be responsible and reasonable. But life had led me to translate four books, have two children, adjunct at three different universities, and I was restless for a place where I didn’t have to be reasonable, where I could make up whatever I wanted—an orchestra of three-toed lizards, for example, playing whatever they needed to play. That unregulated place became my debut novel, Ways To Disappear.
I imagine my reader in this same position—the same one I find myself in most times too. I have to be responsible and reasonable, all day long. I teach, I parent my children. I make the food, do the laundry, the dishes, clean up, pay bills. I have a calendar jammed full of obligations.
But each day I get up early—recklessly early, really—and sneak downstairs to read for fifteen minutes. I need that time to be restless and unregulated. I want to sit in the dark and write a page or two in my journal before anyone else can wake up to stop me.
It’s an audacious act—a reckless, irresponsible thing—to write anything at all. Readers know that. They take a risk in sitting down to become lost in a world that doesn't really exist, to care about people who aren't actually real. That's audacity too. And we honor that with our willingness to be rude, strange, surprising, and reckless. To play badminton at the speed of light and drive our old maids to the Indian dance and do whatever else we can to honor their reading time with peril and possibility.