The fiction introduction to our previous issue praised storytelling. The following pieces, however, are less interested in narrative brilliance than they are in character, situation, and language. They explore the possibilities of fiction simply to meditate on the world. They are effective not because they untangle the relationship between human affairs and time, but because they imply stories that we all already know.
“I Saw her from Across the Room” examines the lush sensibility of a woman who, unhappily transplanted from Turkey to Jordan, escapes a dull marriage by falling into a lesbian affair. The piece manages to luxuriate in sensuality without indulging in Orientalism: it celebrates the sensuality of life, not the East, while probing the conflation of one's self-identity with one's home and one's lover.
“Windmills” depicts the enmity between our warring selves. It portrays the self as a stage in which now one, now another of our personalities monologs at the podium. Unlike the psychobabble common to many explorations of the self, “Windmills” does not portray our identities as pure expressions of an id. The selves come equipped with the entire tradition of Western philosophy and literature: their conflict is so insoluble and so destructive because the selves are well-armed.
“Vegas Thunder” recounts the troubled childhood of a boy with an absentee mother and an unknown father. The eponymous protagonist - named after the city where he was conceived - has all the wisdom and humor of Huck Finn, but little of the naivety. The story chronicles a classic American choice: to run away from home or remain in a home that is no home at all.
Lastly, “The Pacific” tells the story of a teenager coping with the mental illness of her older sister, whose behavior swings between irrational violence and chemical indifference. The piece couples descriptive realism with a poetic language foreign to the young protagonist. This technique makes the domestic troubles of a family at once tragic and beautiful.
These pieces might have taken others forms. They could have appeared as philosophy papers, social commentaries, or private blogs. The authors chose fiction instead because fiction, whether in poetry or in prose, is the only genre that authorizes the writer to invent, comment upon, and plead for an entire universe. Fiction keeps our world explicable and, at the same time, fresh and mysterious. It liberates us from the tyranny of non-fiction with all its canons of argument, evidence, and predictable conclusions.