Do novels owe us happy endings?

  

I conclude my class on 20th century American novels with students reflecting on the books we read during the semester. And I offer my own reflection: 

Do novels owe us happy endings?

I imagine you answer that question quickly: “No.”

However, many of us gravitate toward works that end happily. This makes sense if we look to literature
for entertainment. Happy thoughts and experiences are more entertaining than sad thoughts and bad experiences. There is some entertainment value in the catharsis of tragedy, but even in our favorite sad stories we look for some signal that something was gained through a character’s pain or sacrifice.

Art, though, is different. When we think of novels as art or Literature (with a capital L), we may value “honesty” more than entertainment. We may want stories that represent the world to us as it actually is, not as we wish it were (Realism vs. Romance). We could say that The Sun Also Rises is Literature because it ends ambiguously. I do not sense that Brett is going to change. I think her unhealthy behavior will continue, and I think people are really like that. I do not know about Jake. I think his final line of the novel could hint that he is done with wishing for things between them to be different, although he cannot tell her this straight. Absalom, Absalom! is Literature if only because it is constructed and narrated in a way that makes the reader do much work; in terms of this discussion it could be Literature because Quentin Compson has found no satisfying answers to his real
question – Why is the South so messed up? – despite working through the saga of Thomas Sutpen yet one more time. Perhaps he does have his answer. Perhaps he knows why the South is so messed up: because of men like Thomas Sutpen and the South’s complicity in their crimes, but this answer does not help him. Coming closer to the truth about Thomas Sutpen – and,  perhaps more importantly for Quentin, the truth about Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon – does not make him feel satisfied. Those answers do not reconcile him to his Southern heritage. I do not know that Kurt Vonnegut finds a satisfying solution to the problems he identifies in Breakfast of Champions. The novel ends with his own tear, after all.

This can be a major role for novels: articulating the problems of a generation or community. Another role could be imagining solutions to those problems. Ceremony does this. It imagines a solution to the problems created by U.S. colonialism for American Indian people: get in touch with your community’s pre-colonial culture and never forget your responsibilities to the land. Perhaps Beloved does this too for African American people: do not dwell in your trauma; live for your present and your future. The House on Mango Street may suggest to young Chicanas: do not let your community limit how you imagine your own life.

If we turn to novels to help imagine solutions to our society’s problems, we may feel frustrated because some of the solutions are not realistic. Sometimes they are not workable solutions because the problems have not been correctly or clearly articulated. That is the criticism of The House on Mango Street some students make. Some people feel Cisneros blames poverty for some of the problems faced by her characters, when instead she should ask who is responsible for that poverty. They may believe that the correct conclusion is not imagining an escape from the location of the poverty but imagining ways to fix the system that creates the poverty.

You could say that the less realistic those solutions are, the less likely a novel is to be classified as Literature (capital L). Emotionally rewarding but unrealistic solutions to big problems may classify a novel as “escapist” or “fantasy” or “mere entertainment.”

What led my thoughts down this path? In past semesters, I have sensed that some students are moved by The House on Mango Street in ways they are not moved by other books in this class. Even though Sethe learns in Beloved that she is “her own best thing” and that she needs to be present for her living daughter, and even though Ceremony ends with Tayo and the Laguna land healed, with an awareness of a transcendent connection among all living things, I sense that some students have been more moved by The House on Mango Street. It is a brief, beautiful book; I am not criticizing it, but this reaction got me thinking about what kinds of books we could or should be reading. It reminded me of a quote I had on my office door for a long time. The quote is about poetry, but it easily could apply to novels:

Let us remember that in the end we go to poetry for one reason: so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.

- Christian Wiman

 

I hope you keep reading and that you look for those works which help you more fully inhabit your life and your world. I hope you find writers who help you think in new ways and feel in new ways.

All Hat, No Cattle: AI, college essays, and Bloom's Taxonomy

 

I have seen many discussions on the use of artificial intelligence in the classroom, especially lamentations from college instructors. 

 

A frequent comment is about the theory that AI writing apps like to use em dashes, and the presence of multiple em dashes in a student's essay raises the instructor's suspicion. Many instructors say this makes them sad -- because they like to use em dashes too.

 

However, I have not seen that as a marker of AI use. More telling, to me, is the presence of clinical topic sentences on every paragraph. By clinical I mean the sentences are precise and concise, unlike other sentences in something produced by AI, which tend to be filled with adjectives and adverbs and other efforts to sound erudite. 

 

Few undergraduates have mastered the topic sentence, especially when they are writing about narratives (I teach literature at the university level). Their sentences tend to be focused on the plot rather than the point of their analysis. I would venture to say that many professional academics have not mastered the topic sentence. 

 

In my classes, I would say the biggest indicator of the influence of ChatGPT, Gemini, or whatever is the substance of the essay rather than the style. Essays produced by AI seem like empty shells to me.

 

In my class, I emphasize this formula for essay writing: claim + evidence + explanation.

Added to this formula is the guideline: explanation should be longer than evidence. For instance, if you cite two sentences from a text, you need to write more than two sentences that explain their meaning and their significance to your claim; this needs to be true explanation and not simply summary or restatement.

AI writing tends to be big on claims and short on evidence. Sometimes it offers explanations, but without evidence those explanations are lacking. (This may be like the adage: All hat, no cattle.) Those claims are often sophisticated and heavy on adjectives and adverbs, as if the author is very familiar with the topic in a way that undergraduates rarely are. For instance, describing a story in laudatory terms can suggest the student is familiar with the author's work, the genre, or other the work of other writers to which this author can be compared.

During the fall semester, my encounters with AI-produced essays reminded me of Bloom's Taxonomy. It looks like this:

 
AI writing frequently demonstrates evaluative thinking without providing the analysis, application, or understanding that forms its foundation. If it provides analytical claims, it frequently does not support those with the application and understanding to support them.

For instance, in the last batch of papers for my class on the history of the American short story, I asked students to explain an element of fiction (understand) and then discuss how this element is found in two short stories we read (apply). They need to explain how this element is used to create an effect on the reader (analyze). I do not require them to say to what degree the element is effectively used (evaluate).

Essays that I suspected involved AI made big claims about the themes or effects of a story without providing a clear explanation of the element being used for analysis, without evidence from the text that demonstrates that element, and without explanation of how those textual moments support the claim of a particular theme. 

(When evidence from the text is provided, it occasionally consists of fake quotes.)

A sign that suggests to me AI was involved (in the absence of fake quotes) is when an essay is heavy on analytical conclusions without the supporting application: claims without evidence and explanation. A big sign is the presence of sophisticated evaluative statements without corresponding analysis and application.

 

For instance, several essays this past semester discussed "grief" as a theme in Raymond Carver's "Why Don't You Dance?" Students made the claim that a character's actions were driven by grief without explaining what he might be grieving (the story famously never states this explicitly; little in that story is explicit). They claimed the character's odd actions were the product of grief without explaining how those could be related to some kind of sorrow. They did not question the discussion of grief in what AI provided for them possibly because they had not done their own thinking about the story.

It seems grief has been discussed in relation to Carver's story many times elsewhere, because if you ask ChatGPT or Gemini to write about "Why Don't You Dance?" you will get responses that discuss grief. AI mentions grief because it notes the frequency of that word in discussions of this story, and it is likely using that word will satisfy the prompt it has been given.

Academic writing is like math in a classroom: you need to show your work. AI writing provides answers, but it rarely shows how that answer was derived from the text being analyzed. 

The Limits of FU Money: Some money can make you brave, but a lot of money can make you cowardly

Seeing tech billionaires lining up to kiss Donald Trump's ring and seeing media corporations cave to pressure from a mad king unhappy about the jokes made by their late-night jesters makes me think of John Goodman.

In the 2014 film The Gambler, Goodman's character makes an internet-famous speech about money and the freedom it can bring. He says a person's goal should be to accumulate $2.5 million, buy a house free and clear, and create a "Fortress of Solitude." There the person can live with their family and not worry about pleasing anyone else. No one can tell them what to do, because they now have "fuck-you money."

He goes on, "A wise man's life is based around 'fuck you.' The United States of America is based on 'fuck you.' You're a king? You have an army? The greatest navy in the history of the world? Fuck you. Blow me."

Goodman's character today might tell a different story today, as the mega-wealthy fawn over the king and beg him to love them. 

One would think that fuck-you status had been reached by billionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and Bill Gates. But there they were, on the Joni Mitchell Patio -- Trump paved the paradise of Jackie Kennedy's Rose Garden and put up a parking lot of white tables and chairs with golden umbrellas.  

During Trump 1.0, some people referred to his Florida home as the Southern White House. In Trump 2.0, he is turning the White House into the Northern Mar-a-lago.

The tech bros yucked it up with Trump, and Gates, of all people, praised Trump's "leadership" in artificial intelligence policies -- despite Trump eliminating foreign aid, including food and medical supplies, to Africa. Gates has spent years working and millions of his own dollars to help African communities. 

Weeks before the grotesque patio love-fest, Cook gave Trump a literal gold brick in the Oval Office.

Why are these men debasing themselves this way, when, surely, they have fuck-you money? Was Goodman's character lying?

When I thought of Goodman and his speech from The Gambler, I thought of a graph that would chart the relationship of money to freedom. The line would start low, go high, and then drop again. It would represent the Mountain of Freedom.

The x-axis would represent the amount of money you have. The amount increase as you move from left to right. The y-axis represents the amount of freedom you have. It starts low and climbs as the amount of your money increases. But at some point it begins to decline. Even though your wealth increases further, your freedom diminishes. 

On the left side of the chart, where you have little money, you have little freedom. Because you need money to survive, you must perform tasks you do not want to do or pretend to believe things you do not believe or pretend to like people you do not like. 

As the amount of money you have increases, you gain freedom from those undesirable activities. For most Americans, this does not come until retirement. That is when we have secured enough resources (through savings or pensions and through paying off our homes) that we can live in our Fortresses of Solitude.

However, if the money line keeps rising, ironically, you can lose freedom. Either from an irrational desire to gain even more money or from a pathological fear of losing the money you have, you resume performing tasks you do not want to do or pretending to like people you do not like or pretending to believe things you do not believe. 

Or the money twists you, changes you, and you begin liking people you had disliked and betraying your previous beliefs. 

Zuckerberg and Company do not need any more money. They have more money than they can spend in ten lifetimes. And yet there they were, flattering an ignorant buffoon at the White House. He is a man with a fraction of their intelligence, but since he possesses no shame or scruples, he is willing to abuse his power, enabling his greed, his petty resentments, and his delusions of grandeur. And because they love their wealth more than their dignity, the wealthy suck up to him.

Meanwhile, corporations worth billions of dollars run by CEOs worth millions curry favor with the minions Trump has appointed to various federal agencies. If they have a merger in the works that needs federal approval, they are willing to silence their employees (Stephen Colbert at CBS and Jimmy Kimmel at ABC) only because Trump does not like being criticized. Other corporations are willing to eliminate their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs to avoid the regime's disfavor. They will do anything to keep the money flowing. The company store has sold its soul.

On either side of the Mountain of Freedom are valleys of enslavement: the Valley of Poverty and the Valley of Obscene Wealth.

Regular people want enough. The Rich always want more.  

It is hard to tell who owns whom. Do the wealthy own their fortunes, or do their fortunes own them?

Unfortunately, under the current administration, they may end up owning the rest of us.

Democratizing Capitalism Can Be A Trainwreck

Currently, about 62 percent of Americans have money invested in individual stocks, mutual funds, or exchange-traded funds. That compares to about 25 percent when I started investing in 1990.

This is considered part of the democratization of capitalism. This means more people -- not just the wealthy -- can benefit from the mechanisms of capitalism. Some of them will be able to grow generational wealth (or at least plant the seeds for it). A lucky few will grow rich in their lifetime. 

However, this democratization is limited. More people then ever have access to investing, but that does not mean they have gained much (if any) control over the levers of capitalism. Most of these people hand their money to someone who invests on their behalf. These average investors are participating in the system of capitalism, but they are not changing the system. They definitely are not controlling it.

Giving their money to investment managers and corporations to invest may increase the financial wealth of regular Americans, but those controllers of capital have goals that differ from those of regular Americans. In The Master's Tools: How Finance Wrecked Democracy (and a Radical Plan to Rebuild It), Michael McCarthy writes about how corporate capitalism, through lobbyists and campaign contributions, too often dominates how governments allocate resources and regulate day-to-day life for Americans.

"The political capacities these levers generate offer distinct ways for the masters of finance to remake formal political institutions in their image" (12).

Corporate America is dedicated only to maximizing profits, whereas regular people have multiple priorities, including their health and safety. McCarthy writes, "We know that finance capitalism underinvests in socially and ecologically needed goods and services" (13).

I tried to think of an example to illustrate this and the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, came to mind.

Thirty-eight cars of a freight train came off the tracks in the town. Poisonous chemicals were released, and everyone within a mile of the derailment was evacuated. I wondered how many people impacted by the derailment might own shares in the company that owned the train: Norfolk Southern Corporation. 

Several industrial facilities were located near the crash site: U.S. Stoneware, Ceram Fab, Strohecker Inc. (according to Google Maps). I cannot find retirement plans for their employees on their web sites. However, the derailment impacted the whole town with clouds of chemicals and other disruptions, and I can find information about the retirement plans for teachers at East Palestine High School and East Palestine Elementary School, which are located within 2 miles of the crash site.

Employees there would be members of the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System. Their retirement account investments include ETFs for major stock indexes, such as the S&P 500 and the Russell 1000. Those indexes included Norfolk Southern in 2023. I assume some of the workers at the industrial sites mentioned above also had investments in these indexes and therefore in Norfolk Southern.

While those workers were trusting investment professionals with their money, Norfolk Southern was dissuading government officials and regulatory agencies from strengthening safety regulations. According to The Lever, an online publication: 

Documents show that when current transportation safety rules were first created, a federal agency sided with industry lobbyists and limited regulations governing the transport of hazardous compounds. The decision effectively exempted many trains hauling dangerous materials — including the one in Ohio — from the “high-hazard” classification and its more stringent safety requirements.

Having a secure retirement would be one goal of  workers in East Palestine, but they would have other priorities, such as living in a safe and healthy environment. If Norfolk Southern had asked them about their priorities -- as part owners of the company -- they probably would have said, "We want you to operate safely, especially since you pass through the heart of our town."

However, the people investing on behalf of those East Palestine workers had just one priority, and that was shared by the Norfolk Southern executives: maximize investment returns. 

The workers were part owners of the means of production (the trains and their tracks), but they did not control the means of production, despite living near it. 

The major owners of the means of production rarely live near them. Those things would be a lot safer and cleaner if they existed near mansions and country clubs.

A short video related to this question of the undemocratic nature of American capitalism was posted in March of this year. (Generic Art Dad on Facebook and @genericartdad on Instagram.) In it, he discusses how banks knowingly make loans to private equity firms who will use the money to acquire a company. The investors will then strip the company of assets and leave it holding the loans. The banks do not care if the loans go bad because once the acquired company goes under, they will have sold the loans to others -- including pension funds.

The demise of the acquired companies hurts their workers and the workers who participate in the pension funds that might have purchased the bad debt.

"The people who bear the brunt of this aren't exactly at the table to push back," says Generic Art Dad.

To truly democratize capitalism, workers and regular citizens need a voice on the boards of directors for companies, and their daily priorities would need to be reflected in the decisions of the investments professionals responsible for their money.  

How to measure a civilization? By regular folks or ambitious boobies?

Henry David Thoreau is most famous for a book he wrote about building a cabin near a pond in the woods. In fact, we just celebrated the 180^th anniversary of his move-in day: July 4, 1845.

However, he also had some things to say about bigger structures – the pyramids in Egypt – and the people who built them.

Thoreau's cabin: $28.12

Thoreau has been on my mind recently as I contemplated the iconic structures by which we remember civilizations. Pyramids. Towers. Statues. Cathedrals. Skyscrapers. Dams, Bridges. Etc. Things you would see in a game of Sid Meier’s Civilization.

For the United States in the 21^st century, I do not think of any grand structures. I do not think of ambitious public works. We do not seem to build those now. One could say the iconic works of this century are corporations rather than structures. 

In 2018, Apple became the first corporation with a valuation of a trillion dollars. Now several companies surpass that amount, including Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. 

Some of these entities are involved in the lives of possibly every American, especially inside the technology that we use daily. As the Orange King says, “Everything is computer!” I will focus on Amazon, though. Not everyone shops on Amazon, but everyone knows its logo and sees its delivery trucks each day.

When people think of the United States in the 21^st century, they might think of these corporations as its greatest accomplishment, and the leaders of these corporations might be considered its leading citizens. In fact, several of them were on stage during the coronation of the Orange King. In a past era they would have been called “titans of industry.” Author Thomas Wolfe might have called them “Masters of the Universe,” which is phrase from his novel Bonfire of the Vanities; it is a name for the men who steer the nation’s money and influence the nation’s fate -- and who are known for their extravagant lifestyles.

Thoreau would be disappointed in this lionizing of wealth-hoarders and what they have built. Thoreau asked people to evaluate the greatness of a civilization by the standard of living for its regular people rather than the achievements of its elites.

One of Bezos's yachts: $400 million

I agree with him.

In the first chapter of Walden, Thoreau writes that the workers who built the pyramids “were not decently buried themselves.” He suggests a mason in another era who “finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut…”  He writes, “It certainly is fair to look at that class by whose labor the works which distinguish the generation are accomplished.”  

Much of Thoreau’s first chapter is devoted to asking why people spend their lives working rather than living. He questions the lifestyles people choose (or have forced upon them) that require so much labor. Returning to the topic of pyramids, he suggests the laborers had better things to do with their lives – like living them. In fact, rather than ask how could people build such marvelous structures, he asks why would people build them at all? In the second chapter of Walden, he writes: 

“As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.”

I suspect Bezos, an ambitious booby himself, would disagree with this sentiment. After all, he famously said he wanted his thousands of Amazon employees to “wake up every morning terrified” of not pleasing their customers. Bezos believes his company is worth the sacrifice of its workers’ lives and happiness.

Thoreau would judge American civilization not by the valuation of Amazon’s stock and Bezos’s wealth, but by whether his employees were treated well and felt their lives were being spent wisely.

Far from urging people to wake up terrified in sheets drenched in sweat, Thoreau urges his readers to be awakened by their “aspirations from within” rather than from without, by an alarm clock or “factory bells.” He urges us to awake in the morning “to a higher life than we fell asleep from.”

Again, I agree with him.