Comedy and culture in U.S. literature and society

Moore Flight

Sincerity, Sarcasm, and Distance: Commonalities in Lorrie Moore's "How to Become a Writer" and Sherman Alexie's Flight

Write what you know. There is probably no more common adage in the world of creative writing, whether it be fiction, journalism, or any other genre that forces the imagination to squeeze out words and meanings in new and hopefully startling ways. In fiction and poetry, and increasingly (for better or for worse, and probably the latter) this does not, of course, mean to only write the truth, or at least not the concrete and objective kind of truth that we are still trying to convince ourselves exists, but to write from a perspective that is sincere in conveying true ideas. Tim O'Brien summed it up when talking about true war stories -- some of the most true are about things that never could have happened, and telling the events that really did happen doesn't guarantee a true story. Writing what you know doesn't mean writing about experiences, but rather from experience. It means to write honestly.

There are, of course, as many ways to accomplish this as there are authors, and probably many more. Honesty and sincerity can look quite different depending on whose version of an honest tale one is reading. Certain perspectives and voices suggests levels of distance and detachment that can make a reader question the sincerity of the author, narrator, and/or speaker. In the hands of a truly skilled author, however, even the most blithe and superficial statement can be rendered meaningful and revelatory, leading the reader to a deeper connection and involvement with the story and its characters despite the presence of an evident cynicism or perceived nonchalance in the text creates a purposeful and deliberate disconnect between the intellectual and the emotional trajectories of the story.

Two authors who make excellent use of this dichotomy are Lorrie Moore and Sherman Alexie. Both authors write from amazingly raw and willingly exposed emotional centers, but have such obvious and irrepressible wit that the emotional content of their stories is often couched in phrases and situations that may seem callous to the casual reader. A patient and open reading of the text, however, reveals the hidden insecurities and what are possibly the most tender emotional subjects and observations for and of the narrators/characters in Alexie and Moore's stories. Comedy is, of course, a common defense mechanism, but the use of humor by these authors is neither a cliched way of dealing with emotion or a clever attempt at avoiding it altogether, but rather is used as a way of exposing the basic inadequacies of straightforward language in expressing emotional content.

Alexie's Flight follows the odd time-shifting trials of Zits, a fifteen-year-old half-American-Indian boy who has been shunted from foster home to foster home since he was six, and who grapples with severe self-doubt and self-hatred as well as thoughts of violence. He already describes himself as a drunk though he is barely in high school, and has nor friends and no place in the world that he can see. Flight sees him inhabiting the bodies of various other people in different periods of history who grapple with issue similar -- though more explicitly rendered -- to his own as he searches for understanding and identity. Moore's short story "How to Become a Writer" involves a different search for identity; the narrator addresses the reader in the second person describing how "you" would become a writer -- presumably if you followed a path that matched the narrator's and likely the author's.

Both of these characters in these stories -- Zits and "you," that is -- share biographical details with their authors, and yet despite this intimacy (or likely because of it) there is also a conscious creation of distance and detachment in the language of the texts. In the third chapter of Flight, Zits describes who is perhaps "the only real friend of [his] life" as a "pretty white boy" who "doesn't even like or respect Jesus -- or Allah or Buddha or LeBron James or any other God" (Alexie 24). In what is otherwise a very poignant passage, where Zits is explaining is near-instant love for this boy he meets in jail, the mention of LeBron James in the company of various prophets/deities is a not-so-subtle cynical undercut of what could be an intensely emotional scene. It is not further referenced, and this type of occurrence doesn't appear again in this passage, but there is a sense of slight self-mocking throughout due to remarks like these.

The self-mocking is anything but slight in Moore's "How to Become a Writer." The speaker opens by telling you to try to be something else, and to fail at it quickly: "Early critical disillusionment is necessary so that at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire" (Moore, par. 1). Despite the possible (and probable) veracity of this sentence, there is an obvious tongue-in-cheek quality within the sentence. The speaker is mocking herself -- or you, technically -- for wanting to be a writer in the first place, because it just means being a failure at something else. This is not the same kind of deep seated self-hatred that Zit experiences in Flight; there is far more conscious irony and developed cynicism than a believable fifteen-year-old could embody, but there is still an obvious self-disdain that becomes almost explicit here, as if the arch-ness of the expression were a substitute for true emotional content.

That is, in fact, exactly what Moore manages to accomplish with this tone, just as Alexie's more subtle yet equally sarcastic interjections reveal the true depth of the sincerity with which Zits is speaking to the reader. In Flight, the end result is a defensive but deeply hurting adolescent; the fact that he employs flippancy in the limited fashion he does is actually a testament to the level of his emotion, as the average fifteen-year-old -- even Holden Caulfield, for the most part -- would never be able to admit to even the depth of emotion that is portrayed in the cited passage.