minor beef[s] is a new feature where you can express your literary gripes, complaints and pet hates …
Is there a writer you despise who is getting too much praise? a lauded critic whose opinions suck? a trend which makes your skin crawl? Let us know …
In my seventies, writing serves as a mature re-calibration of days long past. Accordingly, these pieces are composed in the third person, as Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes and others have done. But that epistemological stance has not been well-received. One venue’s readers accused me of lying, because of the third person voice. Another venue’s more appreciative rejection praised the submission, but noted that “the style is too elevated . . . We’re more inarticulate and rougher around nouns and verbs.”
Across the few acceptances and many rejections, there’s a dominant editorial ethos: Call it Trauma Porn, where emotional catharsis is conflated with literary worth; performative vulnerability is miscast as authenticity; therapeutic processing services the reader, and confession becomes a public good, a secularized form of tent-revivalism. Along the way, there’s a rabbit-like profusion in these narratives of what can be called “the fictional I,” “ a pronoun-as-trope” that claims an unmediated, present-tenseness to trauma, denying the reality of interpretative retrospective processes forged across years and decades. Trauma content is self-validating, a prime mover, never to be an object analyzed for deeper patterns or consequences. Restraint is jettisoned in favor of a detailed menagerie that is its own self-referential raison d’être, eschewing any project other than putting itself on display, myopically failing to discern broader systemic patterns.
The fictional I’s master identity, the primary social status that the MFA-inspired clan often claim, is one as a specific victim. The idea that one’s master’s identity might transcend victimhood, that a person could productively detach and examine “what happened to me” never appears. Excised is any possibility of a conditional or incomplete understanding, because, after all, the wounded narrator stakes their irrefutable claim: “This is MY truth.” What results is “the readerly text,” as Barthes put it, one devoid of multiple interpretations and reinventions. Hallelujah, brothers and sisters! Come one and all, witness this: Salvation has been reached, the narrative arc has closed, and the demons of mystery and ambiguity have been exorcised. Are you not satisfied!
If a submission deviates from this script, the most common risk-averse generic rejection is that the piece is a “not a fit” for their publication. When more detailed rejections arrive, common phrases include“we didn’t feel it,” “this feels distant,”“readers need to connect with your struggle,” or “where’s the hope or healing?”
We can turn the last question on its head: An ethos that denies how present consciousness shapes the examination of the past; that fails to acknowledge the reconstructed and limited nature of memory; that rejects applying second-order paradigms (sociological, psychological) transparently, that jettisons ambiguity and unresolvability, where’s the hope for literature, in all of that?
minor literature[s] 