Sturgeonblogging: Kenneth Schneyer's "Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer"

The story presents itself as exactly what the title says: a major artist, dead at least thirteen years (probably more, but probably not all that much more), is having a career-spanning exhibition, and these are some of the notes from the accompanying program. Through these notes we learn the broad outlines of her life, seen, necessarily, from the outside and in retrospect, and of her art, seen from the same perspective. She was born in the late 1950s and died in 2025; she painted (seemingly her only medium, or at least the only one mentioned here) in a microscopically hyperrealist style that nevertheless left room for what might broadly be called the nonrepresentationally metaphorical, particularly in the shape of the brushwork; she was a lesbian; her life, as most lives do, contained both happiness and a great deal of pain. She also, though the possibility does not seem to occur to the writer of the notes, may have been able to see (or perhaps was unable not to see) the souls of the dead.

I should say in the interest of full disclosure that I have a fondness for this story independent of its virtues as a story. I first encountered it, or at least the first half of it, read aloud in Schneyer's own impressively theatrical voice, during an evening which also included a great deal both of excellent food and of people telling me how smart and interesting I am. Given these associations it is difficult for me to bring to this story anything even approximating that mythical beast, objectivity; and it is very likely that I come to it with a much greater willingness to be impressed than I typically would.

That said, I was surprised to see Martin Petto, in discussing the Nebula shortlist (on which this story also appears), assign "Selected Program Notes" to the category of "RUMIR* [stories] that awards should weed out but instead tend to elevate." He is absolutely correct about this tendency (and this year's Nebula slate in general was a prime example, as is the case most every year), but I cannot agree with his assessment of this particular story. After RUMIRing it, he describes it as "a slipstream story told through... a frame that exists solely to conceal the fact [that it] doesn’t get any further than feeling very slightly strange." Leaving aside that I don't think I ever understood what "slipstream" was meant to mean (did anyone?), and leaving aside also that I agree, as description if not as evaluation, that the story does not "get any further than feeling very slightly strange" (I don't think it wants to), I think Petto has wholly misjudged the role of the frame.

*A very useful acronym from Joanna Russ: "routine, unoriginal, mildly interesting, and readable".

Before I explore the question "what is the frame doing?" directly, I'd like to address the science-fictionality of the story. It has chosen for itself the fairly uncommon, but far from unheard of, strategy of beginning in the recent past and progressing to the near future. But while its use of the conceptual construct of "the future" makes it by some lights ipso facto sf, there is very little in these future sections that we normally associate with sf: no significant technological change is mentioned, the way life is lived goes on largely as it does today*, and so forth. Given that the story is already "speculative" — enough so for today's sf publications, at any rate — by virtue of Latimer's possible relationship with the dead, and given that the technically sfnal element adds very little in the way of the actually sfnal — why does the story bother to extend into the future?

*Latimer is able to marry her partner in Rhode Island, but when Schneyer was writing that by now already-accomplished legal change was so obviously imminent — I would imagine that many same sex couples were already reserving facilities for their ceremonies — that including it is hardly speculative.

The mere fact of publication in a venue specializing in sf cues the reader to look for ways in which the story at hand "is" sf. With this story in particular, the reader quickly realizes that though the earliest "events" (i.e., dates of paintings) are in the past — 1978, 1984... — things are going to continue through to the future; the first clear sign of this is the date of death, 2023, given for Latimer's wife on her first mention in the third note. Seizing on this, the reader begins to look for ways in which these past events might influence future ones, and, once the future arrives, to look for the ways in which the future is different from the past because of that past. These, at least, are the traditionally sfnal elements I would imagine most seasoned sf readers would look for on a first reading.

They will find none. And while looking for the the hints of science fiction the reader has been cued to look for, the more fantastical elements can easily slip by on a first reading (I know I at least did not notice them at all until I re-read). This sort of sleight of hand could easily be dismissed as empty trickery, but for me it is a way structurally to enforce a first reading experience that approximates the "in-world" feeling a reader (or indeed the writer) of the actual notes might have. These people, living in a real world into which the paranormal does not, for them, routinely impinge, would be, as we just were, looking for entirely other information in these notes than clues that Latimer has some sort of communion with the dead.

And after all there is no way to know if she "really" does — we could just as easily ascribe it, as the writer of the notes does, to her combination of attention to detail (from which it is easy to assume that her accurate depictions of people long dead is a result of scrupulous research) and "such obvious imagination" (from which we could interpret, for example, her saying "You have to paint what you see, not what you think you're supposed to see" metaphorically and routinely). And here we begin to see some of what the frame is doing: we, as readers, are not inside Latimer's head, and as such we can never know what she knew, what she saw, what she felt; placing layer upon layer of mediation* and indirection (and indeed misdirection) between her experience and our own is one way to attempt to be true to this unknowingness.

*Another layer, which I won't have occasion in this essay to delve into deeply, is that since these are "selected" program notes, there is presumably, somewhere, a selector — and who is to say why this person has selected what they have selected, that they have not singled out notes that provide an even more distorted portrait?

This method of "representing" Latimer, too, makes for an interesting comparison with her own representational methods. Where her painting is hyperrealist — several times the notes suggest looking at details through a magnifying glass — the story sketches in her life with broad gestures. As such it is almost as if the story of Latimer were, much as one of the paintings discussed does (though along a different axis), criticizing her own artistic methods — as if to say, on the one hand, that there is no need for such detail, and on the other, that it is irresponsible to presume to be able to give so much detail about one's subject.

But there is another sense in which Latimer's enterprise and Schneyer's here are much alike. Repeatedly the notes point out that Latimer's composition and brushstrokes tend to push the viewer's gaze away from the putative subject of the painting, or from subject to subject. "It is as if the viewer is being pushed away from people and towards nature," says the description of the earliest painting; in another we read that Latimer "employs radiating brushstrokes which emanate from the model"; in yet another, "The composition pushes the eye of the viewer back and forth between the different groups in a sort of tennis match." And so it is with the story, in which the reader is constantly pushed away from one potential "plot" or "protagonist" or "central concept" in favor of another (or in favor of nothing, of an absence), in which the written equivalent of brushstrokes emanate from one area only to illuminate another.

The story's ironies reach probably their height in the one note not detailing a painting: the one on a video clip taken from a "documentary concerning contemporary artists" in which Latimer was featured. It is here that Latimer says "You have to paint what you see, not what you think you're supposed to see" as she sketches out a precise portrait of a long-dead young girl who is of course absent. And it is here that the notes give us, as a "discussion question" (at least one of which follows each of the notes):

Now that you see Latimer's manner of speaking and moving, are you surprised? Does she seem like the sort of person who would produce this sort of work?

Aside from being a parody of the kind of superficial discussion prompts common to the form Schneyer is mimicking, the questions are almost teasing the reader — who has of course not seen Latimer at all, as she is simultaneously long dead, in the future, and not real. She is actually absent to us as the dead girl is supposed to be to her.

As a whole the story raises and plays with (in the sense that play can also be serious) questions of its own appropriateness, indeed of the appropriateness of storytelling in general. In what sense can an absent person be "represented"? What does it mean that we are watching a "story" unfold? In the note on "The first of Latimer's paintings to draw critical attention" (and the one which is later criticized in another of her paintings), a Self-Portrait with Surrogates which portrays the "notorious child abuse and murder case" in which the aforementioned girl was the victim, we read that "None of the figures [the girl, her mother, and her father] displays any emotion; it is as if they are spectators at the event." Not only is this a reminder of our own spectatorship at an event — Latimer's life — which includes much pain, loss, and death, it also calls into question our reasons for spectating, and the involvement we feel in the event: what are these "emotions" we tell ourselves we feel when we say that a story is moving, or affecting, or sad or even happy?

The story ends, after a discussion of Latimer's final completed painting, with a last discussion question:

The title Comfort was suggested by Paula Tarso, executrix of Latimer's artistic estate; we do not know what Latimer herself planned to call it. Do you think the name fits?

Far more than simply raising once again the matter of Latimer's absence and unknowability, more even than raising again the questions about appropriateness that the story has been dealing with, this ending places the reader in the uncomfortable position of being implicitly given the authority — which the reader cannot actually possess — to determine appropriateness (i.e., by asking us if we think the name fits, the question implies that we are in a position to make such a judgment), while simultaneously having that authority relegated to the realm of mere opinion, in which everything is valid to the point that nothing is. Is this assignment of meaning to an absent woman's life and work appropriate? You decide!

By way of a review of Kenneth Schneyer's "Hear the Enemy, My Daughter"

Pardon my negligence--I've been reminded that it's considerate to include a BIG HUGE SPOILER WARNING. If you don't want to know details from the latter parts of the story, don't read this.

I've been pretty insulated from contemporary science fiction for quite a number of years now--by both inclination and circumstance.

By "inclination" I mean that for a long time whenever I would pick up whatever book I would see the sfnal masses raving about I would get a few chapters in and give up, finding the book weighted down by frustrating post-cyberpunk tendencies (chief among them a smugly hip postmodern glibness), the worse than frustrating new scientific misogyny, the wholesale and unquestioning importing of the worst aspects of "mainstream literature" into sf--or all three. Above all a bland sameness seemed to pervade everything. I knew that there must be good work being done somewhere in sf, but as my interests lay for a time in exploring deeply other areas--poetry, "the classics," feminist and other radical theory and history, modernism--I never got around to looking beyond this unpleasant surface. And so while I've never stopped reading sf, I've read very little of what's been written in the past, say, ten years or more. Even those few "new" writers I've stumbled across and been excited about--e.g., Candas Jane Dorsey, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kij Johnson, Rachel Pollack--have mostly been publishing literally since before I was born (Johnson, the only exception on that list, published her first story when I was six)--and mostly write more fantasy than sf, dammit.

By "circumstance" I mean, especially in the past few years, my limited internet access. Because it appears that the best work in sf--at least in the short story--is being done almost exclusively online now. And even that good work which actually appears on pieces of paper is difficult to hear of anymore without the internet. I wish this weren't the case for a number of reasons--accessibility and permanence being the two major ones--but I understand and am forced to accept the economic rationale behind it (the enthusiastically chosen embrace of the politically and ecologically unstable technology at the expense of print, on the other hand, though perhaps to be expected from sf people, I do not accept).

But now I'm slowly beginning to explore what's going on in the field today. A year ago a friend subscribed me to Fantasy and Science Fiction, which in that time has published a small handful of good stories--and one or two excellent ones--and a whole lot of unreadables. I've picked up a few recent Nebula Award anthologies, which I've found to be about 50/50, again with a small number of really excellent stories. I've just bought Athena Andreadis's The Other Half of the Sky, which a few stories in I'm finding touch and go (as is to be expected with all-original anthologies) but frequently marvellous (Nisi Shawl has become a priority). And though my internet access is still quite limited, I've just begun regularly reading Clarkesworld and Strange Horizons, both of which I've peeked at before and been impressed with, but only with the latest issue of each* have I started reading them thoroughly.

*As I write, anyway. By the time I'll get to publish this there will have been at least one new issue of Strange Horizons.

Which, finally, brings me to the concerns which prompted this post. It is easy in criticism to come off much more negative and harsh than one means to, so I want to make explicit before I begin that these issues of these two fine magazines are quite good. When I talk in the rest of this post about my "concerns" and "nagging senses" and so forth, I mean by these words just what they say, no more; and I discuss these feelings not because the stories are bad but, quite the contrary, because they're good--which is precisely why my concerns are concerns. I also want to make clear at the start that even though I ascribe particular problems to particular stories, what I'm really talking about is not really a problem of the stories themselves, rather of a larger trend of which I see these stories being a part.* On their own, independent of this worrisome trend, I suspect I would have found no problem with these stories, or at least not this problem.

*I could be wrong about this!--which is exactly why I started this review with a lengthy explanation of my lack of deep reading in contemporary sf. If I'm wrong, if this isn't a trend, I will be delighted to learn it.

First I read James Patrick Kelly's "Soulcatcher" from Clarkesworld, a solid story dealing with interesting concepts, though with perhaps a bit too much focus on MFA-style "fine writing" for my taste (I am not firmly opposed to this type of writing, though I am suspicious of it). Nagging at me throughout, though, was the sense that the whole story would be greatly improved, the interesting concepts better dealt with, if the story had been...well, if it had been about anything else other than what it was about: revenge, murder, violence. I do not say that stories cannot be about these things, but...well, I'll get back to that "but" later.

The second story I read was Andy Dudak's "Tachy Psyche", also from Clarkesworld, which I found to be just as solid (and impressively concise considering the broadness of its world) and conceptually even more interesting, though undercut in both by its frankly obnoxious semi-surprise ending.* But once more, the thought nagged at me that these fascinating (if not necessarily "new") notions, this play with time and consciousness, could be much better explored if the story had been about anything other than what it was about: political intrigue, murder (except at the end maybe not!), violence.

*I could write a whole post about the poverty of surprise endings, but I think I would just get depressed. Suffices to say for now that in sf I tend to find that surprise endings are where the story should have started.

Then, the vicissitudes of timing and attention led me to read third Kenneth Schneyer's "Hear the Enemy, My Daughter" from Strange Horizons. This is probably the best story out of the three*--and yet guess how I felt about it? On the sentence level Schneyer's writing is a nice combination of sf's traditional clarity with a sort of dreaminess (the attempt at which leaves much other contemporary sf feeling simply leaden). The interweaving explorations of communication and complexly ambivalent emotional attachment between parent and child on the one hand and human and alien on the other are intriguing and superb. And yet: war, murder, violence.

*Though not the best out of the two issues entire, that being E. Catherine Tobler's lovely "(R + D) / I = M"--a story which would require far more re-reading and re-thinking before I at least would be able to write about it.

Now, these tendencies are far from universal; Tobler's story, for example, could in some ways be said to be "about" violence, but in a very different, and individual, way, one that reflects a much more nuanced understanding of what violence consists of, one that seems to grow organically out of the needs of the story and of the writer. And this last point brings me to the center of my concern, which is that this focus on violence feels obligatory to me in much the same way that (as I argued in my review of 2312) the mystery structure has become obligatory. It has become so reflexive that it becomes the center of stories it seems alien to; one often gets the sense that the writer has not even considered whether the flashy spectacle of shooting and stabbing and blood is approriate to their enterprise, nor that they feel any responsibility towards this violence they have conjured into the world.

As someone who writes tries to write sf, I know it can be very difficult to figure out how to display one's sfnal ideas, through what lens to examine them; and just as the mystery story seems to offer up a helpful structure within which to lay out these ideas, "Oh I guess they'll try to kill each other" seems to provide a quick, convenient--and familiar--"plot" on which to hang them. But responsible writers should be more patient with their ideas, should not go for the quick, the convenient, the familiar, but the necessary.

And I'm not saying that violence is never necessary. Obviously violence in all its forms is something that can, and sometimes should, be written about; it is a thing in the world that demands attention, and to ignore it entirely is just as irresponsible as its lazy use. In "Hear the Enemy" in particular it does seem much more integral to what Schneyer is fundamentally trying to say than it is in the Dudak and Kelly stories--which is probably in large part why I think it's the most successful of the three. Even still, though, one frequently feels that he is just going through the motions, making gestures towards "genre tropes" that perhaps he feels he needs to hit. When I finished the story, I felt to some extent that I had been enlarged by it, which is always a wonderful gift for which I am grateful. But I felt in other ways that I had grown small.

I've never read anything else by Kenneth Schneyer; I don't know him; I don't know what his feelings and needs are, but as a reader the "war story" aspects of "Hear the Enemy" do not strike me as a felt need. This feeling is all the more apparent because much in the story does; it would be one thing if the whole story were just sleepwalking, one could simply write it off, but this story is not: it is much better than that. This passage, which I will quote at length, in which the narrator, Halima, speaks about her complicated estrangements from her young daughter immediately after she, in the previous scene, has described the earliest stages of an attempt to understand an alien biology, language, and social structure (including parent/child relationships), is a good example of the kind of thing I mean:

Kesi's use of language misleads me into thinking she has a mind like mine. She uses a subject, verb, and object in ways I understand, and so I imagine that she means by it the same thing I would mean. But a four-year-old, in some ways, is as different from an adult as a chimpanzee.

Last month she cut into small pieces Jabari's decoration for valor, which I stupidly left sitting on a low table after I had shown it to her the day before. I had not guessed that she was able to use her little scissors so well, nor that they would cut something that seemed so durable. When I saw the scattering of silk ribbon and golden twine on the table and floor, I felt dizzy and had to sit down. It was just a thing, it was not Jabari, but it was one more bit of him that I will never have again.

I asked Kesi what she had done. She saw the tears in my eyes and knew that something was wrong.

So she said, "Nothing."

I said, "But Baba's ribbon is all cut to bits."

She looked right at it and said, "No, it isn't."

It wasn't a lie, not in the sense that you would mean it. Kesi has learned enough about words to know that they have power. She knows that adults speak of things that are not present in the room, and that these things turn out to be true. It is logical, from her perspective, to think that the words make them true. She wished that the ribbon were all in one piece, so she told me, with conviction, that it was. I do not think she expected magic, but rather that the world would conform itself to her words, as (from where she stands) it seems to conform itself to mine.

But at the moment she said it, a miserable voice in my head screamed, liar! In that instant I judged her, found her untrustworthy, unloving, selfish. I hated her, and not for the first time.

Then I returned to myself and saw a scared, sad little girl who had not understood what she had done. I took her into my arms and we cried into each other's shoulders.

And I wondered whether someday I will misplace the reason to forgive her--whether there will come an instant of hatred that does not fade.

I find fascinating here the interplay of Halima's three narratives of Kesi's internal life ("It wasn't a lie," "liar!," "a scared, sad little girl") with one another and with the knowledge we have as readers that neither she nor we can be sure if any of them are "right." All she, and we through her, have is a set of observable behaviors, to which we must try to attach meaning. The parallels between this and the situation Halima faces with the captured Sheshash are perhaps obvious, a bit on the nose, but nevertheless sensitively and intelligently explored, revealing areas of experience that might otherwise have remained obscured. My favorite of the ways in which Schneyer achieves this is the moment when the captured Sheshash escape from their cell, in which he removes even the observable behavior:

How Ishish and Ashashi escaped is not important to relate. Our technology perplexes the Sheshash as theirs perplexes us. It may simply have taken Ishish this long to realize that what we thought was an impregnable chamber was as easy to violate as air.

I'm not sure how I feel about the word choices at the end there--impregnable/violate--but apart from that this is a really intriguing little uncertain pause in what might otherwise be a straight "action" sequence.

Now compare with this telegraphic paragraph that comes very nearly at the end of the story:

I fired my weapon. The baby popped like a balloon.

We are worlds away from the previous passages, and not in the good sfnal sense of "worlds away." This type of thing, particularly coming as it does at the end of a section, indeed the penultimate section of the story, its "climax," casts us into the worst aspects of sf's pulp roots.* To me it reads like a line from some rushed novelization of Paul Verhoeven's film of Starship Troopers written by someone too overworked to notice the irony in the movie.

*Which still also have many good lingering effects, mind you.

Again, I don't want to be harsh. The reason I complain so hard about these negative aspects of Schneyer's story is that I can feel a powerful urge in the story to be better, a desire which it very nearly fulfills. But to place this kind of by-the-numbers sensationalistic writing about by-the-numbers sensational plot elements at the very crux of the story--this is the specific moment around which everything Halima has told us revolves, her guilt about it the whole reason for her telling--is to undercut it all. Not fatally, but very nearly.

I said before that the violence in this story feels integral to it in a way that it doesn't in the other stories I've mentioned, and this is true. Indeed, in fine sfnal tradition the extreme violence of the war between the humans and the Sheshash literalizes the metaphorical violence of the parent/child relationship (in a way that is far less hokey than that sounds). And yet, and yet. I keep coming back to three concerns, separate but related; much like Halima with Kesi, I cannot say which--if any--of these three is genuinely at play here or in any of the other stories, but I worry that some combination of them is at play in a much higher proportion of sf than one might wish:

First, I worry that impatient--or, worse, lazy--writers are going to spectacular violence because it is readily available in the "genre toolkit" and provides a way to explore their ideas without having to fully engage with them. I do not think Schneyer is guilty of this, at least not very much, but I do feel that if Kelly and Dudak had had the patience to live with their ideas a bit longer they might have found better things to do with them.

Second, I worry that this ease, what I described earlier as familiarity, is a part of a much larger system that discourages us, as readers, as writers, and as humans, from thinking or caring about the consequences of violence, even in fictional terms. I am not being a moral scold here about "desensitizing" or what have you; cause and effect is not that simple. But I submit that even in a story which revolves entirely around guilt over violence, the creeping presence of glibly formulaic language like "The baby popped like a balloon" is indicative of a cultural--that is to say not arising from the individual--inability to deal with the reality of violence, the equivalent of a looking away even as it pretends to unrelenting attention.

And third, I worry that even in those stories where the violence is integral--as it is in the Schneyer--the reflexive turn to violence as subject matter is silently steering the kind of ideas that sf is willing to explore. To put it in heavily simplified terms, I worry that the thought process starts, most likely unconsciously, with "my story must include violence in order to belong to sf" and only then goes to "what kind of story can I tell?" If this is true of Schneyer, it makes the story he's written out of this thought process all the more impressive...but it is also a little depressing to think of a writer capable of what he is manifestly capable of being limited in this of all ways, by sf of all fields.

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UPDATE: On twitter, after pointing out that he doesn't "acquire or edit the magazine's fiction" himself, Niall Harrison comments: "My argument...would be that the story is in part about the tension between simplistic, war, 'friend/enemy' understandings and complex, multivalent person-to-person understandings, and that therefore the crudeness of 'popped' is apt: it indicates the narrator failing. Making a choice to fail, in fact." I find myself in absolute agreement with his assessment of the story's themes, but hadn't thought to apply them to the language of "The baby popped." Now I am. The suggestion that this language might be "a choice to fail" in particular is fascinating to me, and I'm thinking I'll need to re-read the story with this notion in mind.