If this story had been written
by anyone other than T. C. Boyle, The New
Yorker probably would not have published it.
But a short story by Boyle
cannot be ignored, for he has written so many of them and they have been
enjoyed by so many readers that he has made a place for himself in the history
of the form. Boyle is a professional
writer, making at least part of his living from his writing. As a result, he is
probably always on the alert for something about which to write a story. When New Yorker fiction editor Deborah
Treisman commented on the magazine's website that his fiction is often
politically or culturally topical and asked him if he imagines his way into a
scenario while reading or watching news stories, he says he reads widely and
that as a fiction writer, he cannot help transposing what he learns into a
scenario for a novel or a story
For example, “La Conchita” (which originally appeared as one of the two
dozen stories he has published in the New
Yorker over the years, and which reappeared in his collection Wild Child), is one of those stories that Boyle culled from the
newspapers. In early January 2005, Southern California had received more than
its average rainfall for an entire year.
La Conchita, a small town between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, tucked
up against the hills separated from the ocean by Pacific Coast Highway, was
struck by a landslide, burying many homes and killing several people.
To make a story out of this tragedy, Boyle had to come up with
something personally human at stake created by the mudslide. Since it was not only a disaster for the
locals, but it also blocked the highway between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara,
Boyle invented a courier who tells the story in tough film noir language and
carries a hidden pistol. While transporting a human liver to Santa Barbara, he
is stopped by the slide. While trying to get the liver to the man whose life
depends on it, he also tries to dig out a man and his daughter from underneath
a house. Although exciting, it is a predictable
plot-based action story, "ripped from the headlines."
For "The Fugitive," Boyle focuses on a story that appeared in
Southern California newspapers in the late summer of 2014 about a young farm
worker, age 24, named Agustin Zeferino in Santa Maria, which is just north of
Santa Barbara. The following newspaper article appeared in a Southern
California newspaper t on August 23, 2014:
Santa Barbara County health officials issued an arrest
warrant Friday for a 24-year-old man suffering from tuberculosis who
discontinued his medication. The man poses a public health risk, county
officials said.
Agustin Zeferino, 24, had received medication for his
illness, but then stopped his treatment about two weeks ago. Zeferino has
drug-resistant tuberculosis, which is a highly contagious and rare form of the
disease that can be spread by coughing or sneezing.
Even though tuberculosis can be cured with treatment,
people with drug-resistant cases are required to continue taking medication for
18 to 24 months. In California, it is a misdemeanor to discontinue treatment
ordered by a health official.
Boyle
told Treisman about this story: "What is vitally important to me is point
of view. I want to dig into the actual
and see what it's like at is core. Each
of us justifies his/her own views and
actions. Sometimes, we find common
ground; more often, we don't."
However, he does not tell the story from the point of view of the young
Mexican, who he names Marciano, but rather from a third-person point of view of
a more educated narrator, albeit from the perspective of the young Mexican—a tactic
that allows Boyle to insert some authorial comments or observations. For
example, the case worker is named Rosa Hinojosa, which Marciano keeps repeating
over and over in his head because of the rhyme, which somehow made him feel
better." It also allows Boyle to use language he has picked up from websites
about multi-drug resistant tuberculosis—language that Marciano would not use,
since he has not read the same websites, e.g. "because he'd stopped taking his medication a year ago, his
case of tuberculosis had mutated into the multi-drug resistant form, and his
life was at risk, because after this there were no more drugs." When Marciano is being pursued by
authorities, Boyle/narrator says for him: "Paranoia was when you felt that
everybody was after you even if they weren't, but what would you call this?
Common sense?"
When Treisman asks Boyle whether his authorial sympathies were with
Marciano, "who doesn't ask for very much in life and whose freedom is at
risk, or with Rosa Hinojosa, who is simply trying to do her job and protect
society—or with those countless others whose lives Marciano puts at risk,"
Boyle says his sympathies lie with both characters whose points of view he
hopes to "inhabit in order to explore not only the dramatic possibilities
of the scenario but the ethics as well." However, this simply is not true,
for we never get the perspective of Rosa. We only get Boyle's answer to the
question about Zeferino's behavior many Southern California residents must have
had on their minds--"what was he thinking?" To this date, Zeferino
has not been located. Many think he
managed to get back to Mexico, where he died of his illness.
It's not a great story, but then most stories that are "ripped
from the headlines"--stories that deal with social issues or that simply report
mere historical facts are usually not great stories.
However, when a story presents
"hard facts" within a symbolic structure, objects and events are
transformed from mere matter into meaningful metaphors by the motivating force
of the story's own thematic and structural demands. For example, in Hemingway's
"Hills Like White Elephants," the spatial symbolism of the story, in
which the characters are positioned between two railroad tracks--each for
trains going in opposite directions from the other--and between two kinds of
landscape--one alive and green and one brown and dead--is motivated by the
basic inescapable nature of the conflict between the characters, not by the
realistic necessity of verisimilitude.
In the old allegorical tale or
romance form, the received traditional conventions of the story or its
underlying conceptual framework
justified the structure of its events.
In the romantic Poe tale, the obsessed mind of the teller or central
character created the hallucinatory world of the story. In the O. Henry well-made story the
"reality" of the fiction derived from the preconceived ironic pattern
that governed or motivated its events and objects. In the modern short story, no received
tradition, obsessed narrator, or calculated pattern exists to justify or
motivate its tightly unified structure.
However, in spite of what seems to be a realistic style in which events
are motivated primarily by mere sequence and verisimilitude, modern realistic
stories are still able to create a metaphoric sense of reality.
Fully mimetic characters in a story
do not make the story realistic if the situation they confront eludes their
power to incorporate it within a framework of the familiar, natural world. The realistic impulse creates a realistic
story only when it succeeds in convincing the involved character or the reader
that the mystery confronted has been, or can be, integrated. When a character moves from ignorance to
knowledge--a common structural device in the realistic novel--this indeed means
he or she has been able to bring the confronted experience or phenomenon within
the realm of the naturalistic, cause-effect world.
If, however, the knowledge arrived
at is metaphysical and inchoate, that is, not satisfactorily the knowledge of
social, natural, psychological frameworks, then it remains revelatory,
intuitive, unsayable. Revelation does
not necessitate change if what is revealed is an aspect of human behavior that
cannot be accounted for socially, naturalistically, psychologically, or is so
morally intolerable that no change in
the perceiver can affect any change in the basic situation: in short, when nothing can be done about it
and when language seems inadequate to express it.
Raymond Carver knew well the short
story's tradition of centering on that which can be narrated but not
explained. He accepted Chekhov's
demanding dictum: “In short stories it
is better to say not enough than to say too much, because,--because--I don't
know why!” The writer from whom Carver
learned about the short story’s shunning of explanation was Flannery O'Connor,
who insisted that the peculiar problem of the short-story writer “is how to
make the action he describes reveal as much of the mystery of existence as
possible." The storyteller's
effort to make the reader see what does
not exist in the world of external perception is a primal source of the storytelling
impulse, as old as myth, legend, folktale, fable, and romance--all forms that
attempt to objectify and actualize that which exists as a purely subjective
state.
As Flannery O'Connor says: “If the
writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious,...
then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go
through it into an experience of mystery itself.” For this this kind of writer, O’Connor says,
“the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate
motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been
exhausted."
Short prose narrative since Boccaccio has always been more structure
than stuff, more form than content, more artifice than nature--which is simply
to say, more art than reality. This fact
of the form has always been a thorn in
the side of readers who believe that the purpose of fiction is to provide as
faithful a mirror to external reality as it is possible for language to do. Ever since Boccaccio's ten young storytellers
fled plague-ridden reality for the language-bound world of story, short
narrative has been characterized by its self-conscious creation of an alternate
world of artifice.
I note parenthetically that the short story has been criticized since
the nineteenth century by a number of critics and novelists concerned with
art's social involvement and awareness.
It was criticized by naturalist writers in the nineteenth century and
has been scorned by Marxist writers and critics of the thirties to the present
day. James T. Farrell scolded the form
in the thirties for its sterile formality and its failure to be a vehicle for
revolutionary ideology. Maxwell Geismar
lashed out against The New Yorker school of short story writers
such as Salinger, Roth, Malamud, Powers, et all in 1964 for the narrow range of
their vision and subject matter and their stress on the intricate craftsmanship
of the well-made story. Malcolm Cowley
has criticized advocates of the so-called anti-story for having nothing to
write about except their own effort in finding it difficult to write about
anything. And more recently, so-called
minimalist stories have been blasted for being so damned minimalist and lacking
in social context and relevance.
T. C. Boyle's "Fugitive," in spite of the suggestion of
universality of its title, never creates the kind of symbolic structure of
human mystery that a great short story embodies. It is simply a narrative of an unfortunate
young man who contracts a disease that, if not controlled, may contaminate others.
It’s a social issue of local importance, not an existential issue of universal
significance.
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