I’m going to start by having a big spring cleaning inside my head and throwing out all the broken stuff and the toys I outgrew a long time ago—all the stuff that isn’t doing anything but taking up space and contributing to the fire-hazard, in other words.
Stephen King. Gerald’s Game. (1992)
“…to be an english teacher, you have to fall in love with stories, with literature. And what you’re doing when you do that is you’re always trying to see things from someone else’s point of view. You’re trying to occupy a different space. … Sometimes you love a poem so much, every time you read it, you learn something new, and you feel transformed by it.”
Professor Bill Dobson, The Chair 1.6 (August 2021)
My previous post on Selena Anderson’s short story “Godmother Tea” from Best American Short Stories 2020 (ed. Curtis Sittenfeld) noted that even though Anderson never explicitly names the city the story is set in, certain details seem to pinpoint it as Houston. This facet of the setting becomes more relevant in light of the pivotal role it ends up playing in the main narrator-character Joy’s climactic epiphany:
I wanted so badly to be in harmony with the city I called home and with my time on this earth and for this to show in my face and the way I talked.
“Godmother Tea” dramatizes other fundamental fictional principles when part of the character Joy’s epiphany is also that she has the ability to change what she wants: in literary fiction, the plot is a product of a main character’s fears and/or desires, and culminates in some kind of character change. The passage above also reflects the general significance of a character’s surroundings on the fundamental nature of their character. Character is a product of circumstance, and circumstance is a product of setting, and/or a cause of it.
And what else is a setting but the space you’re in?
Since that post, I’ve been inspired to use setting as the primary focus for this semester’s advanced fiction workshop, in harmony with Matthew Salesses’s discussion in Craft in the Real World (2021) of the need to acknowledge “cultural and historical context,” which is inextricably linked to setting. Anderson’s use of a Dr Pepper in the exchange that constitutes “Godmother Tea”‘s denouement is a marker of broader Texan identity; the use of Robert Earl Davis, Jr. a marker of a more specifically Houstonian identity.
Houston itself is known as the “Space City” for its being the headquarters of NASA; you can go there and sit in the orange seats in the famous preserved control room that received the transmission “Houston, we have a problem.” (You can also sit in the cockpits of actual rockets.) The prominence of this aspect of Houstonian identity is reflected by the names of our professional sports teams: the Astros, the Rockets.
This past May, when my wife’s family came to visit for the first time since Covid, they stayed at a nearby AirBnb that was marketed as the “Astronaut House.” This turned out to be an unassuming gray brick duplex whose outer-space-related features amounted to a coffee-table book about rockets and a painting of an Aladdin Sane astronaut.
At the time of their visit, I did not know how soon we would have to move out of the space where we had lived for the past eight years. The search for a new one took us to entirely different neighborhoods, inducing visions of entirely different lives. Part of the identity of Houston-at-large is the diversity, distinction, and different flavors of its individual communities, though of course none of this is resistant to the blight of gentrification visible in the spreading cancer of its high-rise condos.
In the end, after a frustrating search, we ended up in a place only four blocks from our old one, but the contrast between them despite their proximity has led me to further reflect on the influence of your immediate surroundings, of your setting, of your space.
We lived what my visiting father-in-law designated an “urban lifestyle,” by which he meant in the midst of a lot of activity, car traffic and foot traffic for restaurants and bars and a nail salon so popular it required valet parking. Trying to turn left out of the driveway onto the main drag we lived on often meant taking your life in your hands. Through our living room windows I could watch decked-out bar-goers runway-saunter down the sidewalk in front of our house. (Once, shortly after buying a Chinese money plant at the store down the block, I found a $50-bill on the sidewalk that must have fallen from one of these bar-goers’ pockets.)
Our new place is walking distance from all of this, but it’s on a side street no one uses unless they live on it–or are renting the Astronaut House, which is across the street. And this difference in what could be considered our outer space, quiet and crickets instead of incessant engines and exhaust pipes, feels almost like a different planet.
The inner space of the new place is different too, with more of it as in literally more square footage, and more windows, which means more light. “It’s transformative,” a friend said of its potential. But before we had much time for this metamorphosis to take hold, we had to go on a long road trip up to Oregon, planned before we learned our lease wouldn’t be renewed. And there’s nothing like driving across the country to make you consider the relevance, the limitations and mandates, of different settings. Of how you are a product of your place.
On the trip we drove across the windmill-dotted plains of North Texas and stopped in Amarillo, where we stayed in a converted shipping container and the stench of manure hung in the air while flies multiplied, plague-like. Towering granaries and tagged boxcars punctuated long stretches without gas stations on the way to our next stop in Colorado Springs, a conservative college town where we had trouble finding takeout food after 7pm but were surrounded by majestic green ridges in the Garden of the Gods. The rock-piled landscape of southern Wyoming was shrouded by a heavy gray smoke plume from somewhat distant wildfires, and the car’s brakes started grinding in Twin Falls, Idaho, around 4pm on a Friday, just in time to learn that mechanics didn’t work there on the weekends. (Turned out to be a rock caught in one of the rotors.)
Personal and collective histories alike reside in landscapes. I was reminded of this when I got flashbacks to a road trip from a decade earlier, when we’d taken the same route through the Rockies, and reminded again when we passed through one of the one-horse towns in Eastern Oregon where the speed limit on the one-lane highway drops to 25, giving us a chance to take in the faded murals of the original covered-wagon passage on the Oregon Trail adorning the sides of several abandoned-looking storefronts. Setting can provide potential story structure in offering a bridge between past and present in addition to a bridge between individual and collective.
Seeing so many states, you saw how many different things you might see on the other side of the windows you chose to situate yourself behind. But on this particular trip, between the Northwest’s wildfires and the Delta variant’s recent breakthrough, it felt like outer spaces and inner spaces alike were potentially contaminated.
It wasn’t safe to open the windows, and it wasn’t safe to close them.
We spent last year on Zoom windows, often flattened even further by static avatars and blank squares, an experience that has made it abundantly clear that digital space can be as emotionally consequential as physical. The destruction of the boundary between physical home and work places also largely destroyed my ability to concentrate (today’s New Yorker newsletter is a collection of pieces about “The Challenges of Remote Living”).
Now we’re returning to the high school’s downtown building, just a couple of blocks from where the Astros play and a Texas-shaped hotel-rooftop swimming pool. (The return to full capacity also means there won’t be enough space between bodies to maintain social distancing, yet another reminder of the dramatic potential latent in physical proximity.) I was offered a classroom for the fall semester that, in lieu of windows, would boast a “window decal.” As though it were not the window itself that mattered, but merely the appearance of one.
But in the current Covid climate it seems advisable to have windows that actually open, rather than just metaphorical ones….
An open window provides ventilation, so that inner space can mingle with outer. It is the interplay of these influences, after all, that makes us who we are. “Godmother Tea” reinforces this connection when it begins with a focus on the character’s space:
The center of my apartment was empty, as spotless as a bald spot, and I liked that. That was my choice. I’d gotten used to that. But now my mother’s charity of inherited furniture crowded the room.
… Now there was hardly any space to move around.
This use of “inner space” is a physical reflection of the character’s emotional state (or inner inner space, or headspace); as also reinforced by the references to her talking like a white girl, Joy feels disconnected from her Blackness and so ends up alienated from Black and white communities alike. While her in-scene encounters with the two individuals Nicole and Andre play out this sort of double-cycle of larger alienation, the structural backbone of this story is Joy’s encounters with the godmother that bookend/contain those encounters–the godmother’s first appearance qualifies as the story’s inciting incident where the action starts to rise (with the opening of Joy’s mother giving her the mirror and having lunch with her establishing the status quo), while the godmother’s disappearance signifies the climax. But another “reversal,” as Janet Burroway designates it, is reinforced at the end to provide a sense of closure: Joy ends the story outside her apartment complex (outer space) instead of inside her apartment where she started (inner space), a concrete shift that signifies she’s now seeing things from a different, seemingly more expansive, perspective (the inner inner space…).
And perspective, or access to others, is what fiction is all about. As Henry James puts it in his preface for The Portrait of a Lady (1881):
The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million– a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will. … at each of the[ windows] stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every other. He and his neighbours are watching the same show, but one seeing more where the other sees less, one seeing black where the other sees white, one seeing big where the other sees small, one seeing coarse where the other sees fine.
(From here.)
Chapter 42 of this novel is credited with heralding modernism in its representation of point of view as internal rather than external, the action taking place entirely within the character Isabel Archer’s thoughts as she realizes something important while her physical actions in the chapter consist of nothing but sitting in a chair: yet another version of the headspace that might be considered “inner inner space.”
In “Godmother Tea,” Joy’s “badly expired” driver’s license characterizes her “embarrassingly typical” approach to life, a detail that then plays a role in the physical setting when she drives to the DMV that turns out to be closed in a sequence that reinforces the link between a character’s identity and location. I recently got my updated driver’s license with my new address on it, but there was some confusion, initially, over the precise digits of this address. When I tried to clarify with my landlord (who was wearing an Oregon Trail computer game t-shirt the first time I met him) which of the two numbers on the house designated the upstairs unit that was our part of the duplex, he only created more confusion, seeming to think the addresses were interchangeable. “It’ll be fine,” he said, when I said I didn’t want to turn on our utility services at the wrong place. Which in my mind was another way of saying it didn’t matter if we didn’t know exactly where we lived.
But it does matter. This semester, we’ll take Houston as our inspiration, and focus on the exploration of space in its various iterations.
-SCR
the pva creative writing review 