Rock Island, IL

It’s been pretty serious around here lately. Some days you can cut the air with a hacksaw. Friendship, banking, Darwin, Haitian prisoners, “sexist” language, the distributists—always the distributists—theodicy, aesthetics, and a tiny little half-protest against movie-going that, judging from the fall-out, would make you think a man had got some poor girl with child. Talk about gravitas.

All this has been provocative stuff, of course, and readers have dutifully put up their challenges with impressive displays of intellect. But add to it the long and inexplicable absences of Kauffman, Beer, and Shiffman, which have caused a few people to worry that there’s been some sort of PoMoCon-sponsored Front Porch chainsaw massacre that mild-mannered Mitchell is trying to keep hush-hush, and you’ve got yourself an unjocular Porch to say the least.

Is it Lent around here or something?

Then the one-year milestone passes with a mixture of congratulations and ill will but with hardly any of the irreverence we’ve come periodically to expect from this merry band. To some of us this is a matter of great embarrassment.

So between committing acts of intellectual imperialism in the classroom and catching up on my sleep in committee meetings I flipped through my “Mischief” files to see if there were anything that could be done about the general seriousness that has had the unfortunate effect of raising the level of discourse on The Porch.

Not much, really. I mean, I’ve got my list of inappropriate jokes (What is a man’s view of safe sex? A padded headboard), my list of Bill Clinton jokes (What does Ted Kennedy have that Bill Clinton wants? A dead girlfriend), my list of poorly-worded want ads (A superb and inexpensive restaurant. Fine food expertly served by waitresses in appetizing forms), and my collection of church bulletin blunders (At the evening service tonight the sermon topic will be “What is Hell?” Come early and listen to our choir practice).

I’ve also got my collection of blooper headlines (Singapore Addicts Turn to Dried Dung; Man Minus Ear Waives Hearing; Stiff Opposition Expected to Casketless Funeral Plan), my bulleted advice on “how to write good” (even if a mixed metaphor sings it should be derailed), my list of excuses for student absences (Please excuse Gloria. She had been sick and under the doctor), my collection of medical bloopers (This 54-year-old female is complaining of abdominal cramps with BMs on the one hand and constipation on the other; Patient moves her bowels roughly, three times a day), my indicators that the Peanuts cartoon strip is getting old (Peppermint Patty comes out of the closet and we learn why Marcie’s been calling her ‘sir’ all these years), my alternate ways of saying someone is stupid (If he were any dumber you’d have to water him), and my list of religious variations on “Shit Happens” (Hinduism: “This shit happened before”; Rastafarianism: “Let’s smoke this shit!”; Jehovah’s Witness: “Knock, knock. Shit Happens”; Judaism: “Why does this shit always happen to us?”; Confucianism: “Confucius say, sheet happen”).

I also have the results of a “Worst Simile” competition (“He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree”; “His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free”), and, of course, my list of well-wrought remarks on drink (“I drink to make other people interesting”; “Work is the curse of the drinking class”; “When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading”).

Then there is that list of words alleged to have come from some Washington Post “Style Invitational” contest, according to which you take a given word, add, change, or remove a letter, and offer a new definition (“Foreploy”: any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of obtaining sex; “Sarchasm”: the gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the recipient who doesn’t get it; “Reintarnation”: coming back to life as a hillbilly”; “Crapture”: The bliss of becoming unconstipated, as in Philippians 1:22: “But if I live in the flesh, this is the fruit of my labor”).

I’ve even added a few of my own (“Pusse”: a group of men deputized to chase tail and/or cat around; “Renige”: to take back a racially insensitive remark).

But after all my researches I’m only half-way through one file, and it seems untoward not to offer something that hasn’t been completely and unabashedly pinched from other sources.

Which is when I began to think of all the great novels I haven’t written yet . . .

What makes a novel great (as all discriminating readers of fiction know) is its opening line. “Call me Ishmael.” “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” I mean, who could read these gripping sentences and not clear the calendar immediately? Who could keep from settling in under a warm blanket for hours upon hours—upon hours—of blissful reading?

A good workshop on writing fiction—for novelists are made, not born—should begin with exercises that help young Melvilles and Dickenses, budding Trollopes and Austins, aspiring Hemingways and Faulkners, craft catchy opening lines. Indeed, nothing will serve a budding novelist more usefully than a file full of such lines awaiting the narratives that will complete them.

Consider the following from the Bar Jester’s file, “Promising First Lines for Great Novels Not Yet Written”:

“When the dinner conversation turned from politics to Aunt Doris’s bunion, no one noticed that Uncle Mortimer had excused himself with a Reader’s Digest and was, at this moment, enjoying a massive and viscous bowel evacuation in the upstairs lavatory.”

“Professor Gretchen VonBusenHausen-MacOglethorpe sat in her socially constructed office angrily scratching her hairy leg. She’d finally had an idea, but the damn thing had died of loneliness.”

“It was only because he could carry two cups of coffee and a dozen glazed donuts simultaneously that Peter Long was the most popular man in the nudist colony.”

“When Boris Stankovich broke wind in the echo chamber, he knew he’d never hear the end of it.”

“You can imagine Luke’s surprise when the big scary asthmatic in the black Halloween costume said, ‘I’m your father!’”

“Fr. O’Brien usually sat at the bar in Seamus’s pub and drank beer and smoked cigarettes, but today he sat there forlornly drinking a martini and smoking a cigar. “God,” he said to Sean Gallagher, the bartender, ‘I can’t wait until Lent is over!’”

“Suzy Stackwell blinked slowly, leaned forward, and told Professor Johnson that she would do anything for an A. ‘Anything.’ ‘Really?’ he said, leaning toward her, returning her earnest gaze. ‘Will you study?’”

“The mechanic wiped his hands on a rag, took one sideways glance at Mrs. Limpmaker, his least favorite customer, and said, ‘Your problem, lady, is your crank case is as dry as dust.’”

“Arnold saw a very old man weeping inconsolably on a park bench. ‘Sir, what’s the matter?’ he asked. ‘I’m 92 years old,’ the old man said, ‘and my new wife is a 22-year-old nymphomaniac who owns a liquor store.’ ‘And that’s what’s making you cry?’ Arnold asked, somewhat flummoxed. ‘No,’ the old man said. ‘I can’t remember where I live!’”

Now those are all very promising, and in each case the hard work is pretty much done.

But a novelist can’t stop there. There’s also the matter of symbols. You have to have them. No great novel is without them, and anyway it is the novelist’s duty to provide the professional critic with something to write about in the clear and ringing pages of PMLA.

So in Moby-Dick, for example, the white whale is a somewhat important symbol. It stands for white male hegemony. Likewise Daisy’s “white childhood” and “white car” in The Great Gatsby stand for the oppression of white females in all American, British, and Martian fiction, to say nothing of the literatures in which such white southern girls as Daisy (and Jordan Baker) do not even appear, including post-colonial fiction, epic poetry of the ancient world, and graffiti in lower Manhattan. And let us not forget Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter, that noble emblem of subversive female behavior, which Hawthorne inadvertently gave the highest mark in the most attention-grabbing color.

In the examples from the Bar Jester’s file there are opportunities aplenty for such symbolism—and therefore grist for the theory mill: the Reader’s Digest is the “fixed” canon of the white male academic elite; the hairy leg is a co-opted phallus; the donuts are objects of conquest, or perhaps the many wedding rings that Peter Long will use in an attempt to keep his wives chained to Euro-centric values; the flatulence is a repressed subconscious urge, perhaps for dominance of the “other” or subaltern; the asthma and the Halloween costume are privileges to which only white males have access; the cigar is a symbol of cigars; the A is the mark of approval that women must always seek from men, so long as men horde all the wealth and power; the crank case is a pantry with no cupcakes, and the park bench is the contested locus of memory, amnesia, aporia, and maybe even a few other words that don’t mean anything.

Each is an object that will accumulate significance over the course of a novel, and by the end each will have been deployed to deconstruct prevailing enlightenment paradigms and undermine the assumptions of late capitalism’s world of commodified human relations and gender identities, which are inevitably and invariably complicated by socially sanctioned heterosexual taboos imposed upon gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered persons.

For that is what great novels—indeed, that is what all great works of art—are about. (This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof.)