necessary scenes

george r r martin is not upton sinclair

The Champion, 1824. Artist: Sir Charles Lock Eastlake

Hello friends—

First of all, I will be at Edinburgh Book Festival and have events:
8/20: “American Intimacy” where I’ll chat about my work with Andrés N Ordorica.
8/20: “Sunday Salon” with…Ira Sachs, director of the new film Passages, which is my favorite movie of the year so far. So good. I can’t wait.
8/21: “Essay Means to Try” with Brian Dillon, whose brilliant new book Affinities came out this year. It’s going to be so much fun!

If you’re around, it’d be great to see you!

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I spent all of July in Paris, teaching and working on a new novel. But to do so, I had to move all of my July follow-ups to August. The doctors could only see me this week, which itself would have been fine, but I leave for Edinburgh on Friday and there are several things needing my attention work-wise before that trip. This is all to say that this has been a week of doctors, appointments, and meetings—the very opposite of a month in Paris, working on a novel.

Because this is a week of doctors, I have spent a lot of time hungry and under-caffeinated. Coffee raises my blood pressure and I’m trying to make a good impression on the blood pressure cuff these days. The last few mornings, I’ve felt like a very cranky bear. The thing that’s been getting on my nerves most lately is yet another discourse around necessity in art.

At some point in the last couple of weeks, social media, by which I mean Twitter, became enflamed once again in an argument over the “necessity” of sex scenes in movies. This argument has surfaced every couple of weeks for the last five or so years with increasing frequency and intensity. Just when I think that we’ve seen the last of it, some tumblr-addled child molts into digital maturity and rips it back open.

The argument against sex scenes sometimes goes something like: sex scenes do not advance plot and do not advance character understanding and just serve to titillate the audience. Sex scenes also put a lot of strain on actors and sometimes the filming of such scenes can be coercive and gross and difficult and intensive emotionally for little artistic reward. Also, they make audiences uncomfortable. So why have them? My favorite is when someone said it was like, “microdosing porn in public” or “subjecting others to your kink.” Exquisite!

These arguments are kind of silly, obviously, but then, there are somewhat more serious moral claims made about what is necessary to depict in art, specifically violence and sexual trauma and racism, etc. What do we do about those things? For example in Game of Thrones, the cavalcade of rape and sodomy and gruesome violence. Or a show like The Idol, which some found to be not only badly written but indulgent and hideous, containing unnecessary moments of mean-spiritedness toward women. Are we glorifying violence and hate by depicting them?

I can see how these moral claims might appear legitimate. After all, are these artists not merely trafficking in violent imagery to create self-indulgent art that upholds as many harmful power hierarchies as they purport to subvert. Like, is Game of Thrones doing with maternal death what the images of brutalized slave bodies did for abolition? Like, that is a fair question to ask. But I think the question is built on a relatively modern phenomenon which sees attention as the key currency of our time. By paying attention to anything, we are endowing that object or subject with a great deal of power and influence. This is why the highest achievement in an artist’s life is not to create a beautiful eternal work but to get your work turned into a TV show. And why the ultimate reward for readers is not having encounter a transformative work of literature but to see your favorite book turned into a movie. Not even a good movie, but a thing that other people will see and invest in, the movie as object, not as aesthetic experience. Attention is Grace for the digital age, and the inclusion of anything in a text that has gotten attention ( a platform) is viewed as a new Saint’s artifact. So there cannot be a discussion of why a thing is included or not included—the mere inclusion of anything within a text that people will pay attention is seen as an endorsement because, again, attention is Grace, mana.

However, if you take a moment to divest yourself from this frame—that all attention endows an object, person, place, subject, etc, with an inalienable shimmer of the divine—and you pretend for a moment to be alive in, like, idk, 1955, you start to see that actually, it’s kind of a wild way to live your life. I’m not saying we should be chill with the depiction of say, the mutilation of children, but I do think that we should be able to at least identify when we are making a sensible moral claim and when we are making a claim that is more about our personal comfort. I think also it would help if we could, for a moment or two or a lifetime’s worth, ponder how it is we arrived at this particular place where any attention elevates a thing to a level of Grace. When did popular culture become invested with all this sacralizing moral force and why do we expect Game of Thrones to be some sort of agenda-setting treatise. Like, George R. R. Martin is not Upton Sinclair. The creators of the show are not Upton Sinclair. And we should mock them for pretending to be. I don’t think the question is “should art depict violence and trauma and cruelty and gore and sex?” I don’t think the question is whether sex and violence are necessary in art. I think the more salient question is: does this work want to be a moral intervention into power structures and life? Does this art seek social change?

In my estimation, we have let the waters get too muddy, and we’ve started asking the wrong questions of artists and creators, trying to eek out moral instruction from art made of vibes when the artists themselves made no pretense at moral instruction or intervention in a big social way. We act as though art provoking us or unsettling us or showing us something gruesome is an actual harm. Something being in bad taste is not, like, a moral lesion. Unless your morality is beauty, in which case, apologies.

Sometimes when we make the moral argument of necessity—this is unnecessary and it displays violence toward marginalized groups—we are making an argument that the image offends us and is in bad taste and we would like to not to have to see it and also making a claim that the image will make it easier for hate to flourish. And okay, there are is some juice in that idea. Hate symbols, you know. But I do think there is a great amount of daylight between something being a depiction of violence in bad taste and an actual, like, harm being doing to a person and group of people. One can become the other, yes, but, like, it’s not automatic. And I find that we make political arguments about aesthetic matters and then act like we’re not, and I find that really annoying.

But anyway, that’s the moral claim in the necessity discourse. I’ve got a bigger bone to pick with the counterarguments for the “unnecessary” in art.

With sex scene discourse, the counterarguments for take various forms, ranging from, “grow up, sex is a part of life, stop being a virginal dweeb” to “sex is important because it does character work and demonstrates a great deal of a character’s experience without using words.” But the one I find most perplexing is when the counterargument takes up a defense of non-necessity in art: “who cares if it doesn’t move plot along, art should have unnecessary things in it!!!”

I hate this argument almost more than I hate the argument against including sex in narrative art. Almost. We have lost our minds. Like, what you are describing is not something unnecessary, but something digressive or discursive which by means of its inclusion broadens the terrain and concern of the film or the book or the whatever under consideration. Those are not unnecessary things you’ve just added for fun. Those are deeply integral aspects of the experience of the art.

This sort of reasoning crops up in literature all of the time. A common (wrong) refrain about Moby-Dick is that you “don’t need the whaling bits” or “why didn’t anyone tell me how weird this book is, it is rules, it’s not just whaling stuff!!” as though there’s something wrong with the whaling stuff and somehow that weirdness is a reward for getting through the whaling stuff in the first place, or when people say about Anna Karenina that you don’t need the scything or the long passages about estate management. Often, it also refers to violence, particularly rape. Someone once told me that my first book didn’t need such an explicit sexual assault in it and that it made the book sensationalized rather than earnest. Someone told me that it’s actually a step too far if one of the white character actually says the word nigger. I got a recent rejection of a story because the editor thought it was too gritty and contained too much gun violence (there was a gun mentioned in one flashback of an assault). The subtext of the rejection was that the story didn’t need the thing I had included.

You also see it in some reactions to people toward the work of Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard, that his work is filled with unnecessary detail, that he goes on and on about quite mundane things. This is true somewhat, that he does write about mundane things. But so do all writers. Everyone writes about mundane things. Because life is mundane. Ideally, job one of the writer is to have something to say about the material of life and to arrange them in a way that gives some insight. Novels aren’t all firefights and explosions. Knausgaard’s great gift is the clarity with which he sees the details of life and the way he is able to render them in language so that we feel as though we are experiencing them first hand. And in doing so, he imbues those details with a lot of tone and atmosphere and subtext, so that you really do feel like you are skimming along the waters of a consciousness, without it feeling forced or worked. It’s a kind of directness that is rare and exceedingly difficult to do. He tricks you into having better thoughts than you otherwise would have imagined yourself capable of having.

Another defense of the unnecessary that crops up in writing advice forums and in threads and tweets (now posts), is that “you need an unnecessary scene where the characters are just hanging out to give the story room to breathe.” And I would argue that that is…not an unnecessary scene? That is a very necessary scene? It literally has a function? How can it be unnecessary if it has a function? I mean, truly, use your human mind. Words mean things. And you might say, oh, these people who say that mean that the scene is not important for plot reasons, that’s what necessary/unnecessary is about. And I would argue that a scene where the characters are hanging out is in fact also still directly related to the plot. because in the scene where the characters are hanging out, they are also, hopefully, if it is well written, processing what they have experienced up to that point. It’s not just a breather for the audience. Hopefully, the characters are processing—dealing or not dealing with what they’ve done and said and heard and had done to them. Hopefully, in your “rest scenes” there is actually quite a lot of plot happening, and hopefully, in those scenes, something is happening to make the next thing happen.

In a story, all things are related. What a character feels about what is happening is as much a part of what they do next as anything else. We only believe character action when it seems to come out of real human response to situation and circumstance. That’s why some plots appear more plausible to us and some appear implausible. You can make a set of implausible events feel likely and believable to a reader if the characters respond and behave in ways we might imagine ourselves behaving or someone behaving. This is how the fantastical and speculative fiction work. This is how fairy tales and fables work. Bears don’t talk. But if they did talk, they might behave in certain ways that are familiar to us. Wolves don’t go around dressing as grandmothers, but we do know that wily people will do anything to get what they want, including dress as a grandmother to trick a little girl alone in the woods. Pigs don’t build houses, but if they did build houses, we might imagine that they’d pick an assortment of materials that made sense to them depending on their personalities and quirks. But that is about plausibility, not necessity.

To return to the matter hand, let’s talk about genre a little. Some readers who are not familiar or amenable to the conventions of high-fantasy or science fiction might find world-building details to be boring info-dumps that impede the narrative progression when all they want is to hear about the pew pew pew and the pow pow pow and the overthrow of the shadowy evil legions of the night. Aren’t these stories supposed to be about plot? A more seasoned reader might read the same passage and think, oh, how efficiently the world is evoked, only two pages of government description. However, by the same token, a reader who is less versed in the conventions of high fantasy might be really drawn to a romantic subplot in a fantasy novel whereas a more hard-boiled reader of the genre very well might think that romance is extraneous and just gets in the way. In both cases, upon reread, both of these readers might find value in parts of the novel they dismissed earlier and might come to see that the romance is a wonderful deepening of the stakes of the world or might come to understand why it is significant that the author spends two pages talking about tariffs as it explains the economic system that has brought our two characters together in the first place. The issue is not that the author has included something non-necessary to the “plot” of the novel. The issue is that the reader has encountered something that impedes them from getting at what “they are reading for.”

I remember in ye olden times of the literary internet, when people didn’t yet know to be embarrassed by their trite binaries and gleefully divided themselves into all sorts of cringe categories: Pantsers vs Plotters, Character-Driven vs Plot-Driven vs Voice-Driven, Reading for Plot vs Reading for Language vs Reading for Character, etc. The extent to which these became markers of entire worldviews and the things around which people built their personalities cannot be overstated. To some people, Pantser vs Plotter was as solemn and permanent as a medical diagnosis. I mean, truly, people would write these long blog posts about why they outlined even as an identified pantser as though they were talking about a disability accommodation.

Often, what feels necessary or unnecessary in art is as simple as our own preferences and whatever agenda governs our engagement with a given work. And what feels necessary to you on this read might not feel necessary on the next because your attention has shifted slightly. When someone says that something was not necessary to the text, I imagine that what they are saying is that they personally found it boring as a reader or they found it disengaging or alienating and are unable to consider that alienation is an aspect of engagement. It's like a long conversation with someone you are getting to know. There are these pockets of inattention, sure, moments when your focus goes soft and slack, when you are less receptive to what they are saying and so you let them blur slightly. But that doesn’t mean that those moments are unnecessary. They are just places where you stop paying attention, and where, upon reflection or revisitation, you might actually find a lot of value or insight.

This feels like something that is wrong with the way we read or conceptualize our reading rather than a thing that is wrong with a text or a story or a movie or a novel or even a relationship with another human being. We are so unable to conceive of a revisitation or a reread that we put all of this emphasis on maximum extraction at first encounter, and anything that gets in the way of that maximum extraction is unnecessary to us, and not only that, but we feel hostile toward it because it stands between us and our gamified notion of cultural engagement. Anything that impedes the skim or the smooth and tranquil uptake of information is interpreted as a flaw or a non-necessity to be either eliminated or celebrated, in the case of our wrong-headed bozos who think that “unnecessary rest scenes do necessary work.”

This May, I published a novel called The Late Americans. It’s a novel with about seven or eight main characters, and it functions as a bit of a relay among the characters. Focus shifts chapter to chapter as people who have been in the background step into focus and take over the story. It has been interesting watching people engage the novel, seeing what people feel is necessary or unnecessary in it. Some find the depiction of sex unnecessary. Some find the focus on artists unnecessary and like the parts that are about non-artists. Some prefer the parts about the artists, specifically the cranky writer, and think everything else is extraneous. This happened with my second book, Filthy Animals, too. Some people thought it should have just focused on the recurring characters in the stories and not the interstitial stories. They considered the book to be a novella with some extra stuff thrown in rather than a book about many different things that resonate thematically together. I found that read of the book rather perplexing. I mean, if I wanted to publish a novella, I would have published a novella. I don’t need to puff up a book. What I put into a book feels urgent and necessary to that book. My concept of assembling a work is that it contains many different readings depending on the pattern of stress and unstress that we put upon it. That is my ideal, my goal. That you can read a book differently depending on where you put the stresses.

I recently read Zadie Smith’s new novel The Fraud. It is a brilliant book. I loved it. Part of why I loved it is its changefulness. It’s a described as a historical novel, though I don’t think it really is. I think it’s a Zadie Smith novel dressed up with the lightest trappings of a historical novel. And that is already plenty. The novel follows Eliza Touchet, who is a bit of a helpmeet, housekeeper, and secretary to her cousin William Ainsworth, a Victorian novelist of self-sabotaging productivity. The novel chronicles a real-life legal phenomenon, the Tichbourne Trial in which a man claiming to be the presumed-dead heir to a large estate and fortune is accused of being, well, a fraud. And it becomes a long protracted legal battle. Eliza becomes particularly fascinated by one of the witnesses in the trial, a formerly enslaved man, and the novel becomes part testimony of his experiences in Jamaica. Now, there are some people who will (and have) said that the long excursion into slavery and life in Jamaica is a distraction from the main plot of the novel. That it gets in the way of our intrepid writer/reporter Eliza figuring out what the trial means about contemporary (Victorian) life. I disagree. Very much. In my mind, one of the book’s remarkable accomplishments is that Smith reformulates the novel of slavery. She does something striking and interesting and new with a genre that has felt…frankly, sentimental and deeply boring, to me, personally. I don’t historical fiction—I mean novels about slavery. But what Smith achieves in The Fraud, capturing in shockingly brief pages a whole spectrum of experiences, sensations, and ideas, is something that will hopefully indicate a new and much more artistically interesting way forward for the genre. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the Jamaica sections of that book should be studied and taught and memorized.

But of course there are going to be people who say, “I kinda want to know more about Ainsworth and how he married his housekeeper and also Charles Dickens. I do not want to know about slavery” and who will then find those parts of the book unnecessary despite them being central to everything. To me, that response is…very telling, but also the reason the book must exist. To challenge the idea that there is some dominant narrative that is the narrative and that anything that impedes or discomforts one in taking up that narrative is extraneous. In fact, Smith’s novel makes a striking point that we can only have a full picture when there is a full accounting and that the seemingly small digressions can open up these vast plains of the imagination—Eliza Touchet is intrigued by Andrew Bogle and his testimony at trial, just the few words he utters, and so she tracks him down in the street and gets him to tell her his whole story and what comes out is one of the most brilliant pieces of writing of the last twenty years? Like? ? ? ? Zadie’s mind!!!!

Anyway.

I am heated about this idea that it’s okay to include unnecessary things in art—movies, books, stories, and paintings, etc. That the unnecessary is what makes art enjoyable. I think that’s really dumb and misunderstands what is at question. What you are saying is “unnecessary to the plot in this very narrow conception of plot that I have” and it’s a very constraining and diluting way to conceive of narrative and to conceive of art itself. What goes into a work is selected and by virtue of its selection becomes necessary to the work. It is not unnecessary. It is not nonessential. For some experiences and reads of a given text, those things are critical. What feels necessary to a given work has more to do with the reader and the frame of mind they are in when they come to the work, what they are looking for—those are the things that set the agenda in the mind. This is not inherently bad or evil or wrong. It is very human. But ideally, one also has the good sense to know that it is but one set of stresses, just one of the many patterns the thing can contain. There is more. There is always more.

To put it another way: you’re always unnecessary in someone else’s reading.

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