Introduction
Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people, some of whom write short
stories, learn to mistrust and even to revile it. The word wears spandex,
pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. It gives off a whiff of
Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle, the fake-butter miasma of a movie-
house lobby, of karaoke and Jagermeister, Jerry Bruckheimer movies, a
Street Fighter machine grunting solipsistically in the corner of an ice-rink
arcade, bread and circuses, the Weekly World News. Entertainment trades
in cliché and product placement. It sells action figures and denture adhesive.
It engages regions of the brain far from the centers of discernment, critical
thinking, ontological speculation. It skirts the black heart of life and drowns
life's lambency in a halogen glare. Intelligent people must keep a certain
distance from its productions. They must handle the things that entertain
them with gloves of irony and postmodern tongs. Entertainment, in short,
means junk, and too much junk is bad for you — bad for your heart, your
arteries, your mind, your soul.
But maybe these intelligent and serious people, my faithful straw
men, are wrong. Maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what
pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted — indeed, we have helped
to articulate — such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment. The brain
is an organ of entertainment, sensitive at any depth and over a wide
spectrum. But we have learned to mistrust and despise our human aptitude
for being entertained, and in that sense we get the entertainment we deserve.
I'd like to believe that, because I read for entertainment, and I write
to entertain. Period. Oh, I could decoct a brew of other, more impressive
motivations and explanations. I could uncork some stuff about reader
response theory, or the Lacanian parole. I could go on — God knows I've
done it elsewhere — about the storytelling impulse and the need to make
sense of experience through story. A spritz of Jung might scent the air. I
could adduce Kafka's formula, as the brilliant Lorrie Moore did in this space
last year, of a book as an axe for the frozen sea within. I could go down to
the café at the local mega-bookstore and take some wise words of Abelard or
Koestler, about the power of literature, off a mug. But in the end — here's my
point — it would still all boil down to entertainment, and its suave henchman,
pleasure. Because when the axe bites the ice, you feel an answering throb of
delight all the way from your hands to your shoulders, and the blade tolls like
a bell for miles.
Therefore I would like to propose expanding our definition of
entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the
encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature. In so doing I will only
be codifying what has, all my life, been my operating definition.
Here is a sample, chosen at random from my career as a reader,
of encounters that would be covered under my new definition of
entertainment: the engagement of the interior ear by the rhythm and pitch of
an original prose style; the dawning awareness that giant mutant rat people
dwell in the walls of a ruined abbey in England; two hours spent
bushwhacking through a densely packed argument about the structures of
power as embodied in nineteenth-century prison architecture; the
consummation of a great love aboard a lost Amazonian riverboat or in
Elizabethan slang; the intricate fractal patterning of motif and metaphor in
Nabokov and Neil Gaiman; stories of pirates, zeppelins, sinister children; a
thousand-word-long sentence comparing homosexuals to the Jews in a page
of Proust; a duel to the death with broadswords on the seacoast of ancient
Zingara; the outrageousness of whale slaughter or mule slaughter in Melville
or Cormac McCarthy; the outrageousness of Dr. Charles Bovary's clubfoot-
correcting device; the outrageousness of outrage in a page of Philip Roth;
words written in smoke across the London sky on a day in June 1923; a
momentary gain in my own sense of shared despair, shared nullity, shared
rapture, shared loneliness, shared brokenhearted glee; the recounting of a
portentous birth, a disastrous wedding, or a midnight deathwatch on the Neva.
The original sense of the word entertainment is a lovely one of
mutual support through intertwining, like a pair of trees grown together, each
sustaining and bearing up the other. It suggests a kind of midair transfer of
strength, contact across a void, like the tangling of cable and steel between
two lonely bridgeheads. I can't think of a better approximation of the relation
between reader and writer. Derived senses of fruitful exchange, of reciprocal
sustenance, of welcome offered, of grasp and interrelationship, of a slender
span of bilateral attention along which things are given and received, still
animate the word in its verb form: we entertain visitors, guests, ideas,
prospects, theories, doubts, and grudges.
At some point, inevitably, as generations of hosts entertained
generations of guests with banquets and feasts and displays of artifice, the
idea of pleasure seeped into the pores of the word. And along with pleasure
(just as inevitably, I suppose) came disapproval, a sense of hollowness and
hangover, the saturnine doubtfulness that attaches to delight and artifice and
show — to pleasure, that ambiguous gift. It's partly the doubtfulness of
pleasure that taints the name of entertainment. Pleasure is unreliable and
transient. Pleasure is Lucy with the football. It is the roguish boyfriend who
upends your heart with promises, touches you for twenty bucks, and then
blows town. Pleasure is easily synthesized, mass-produced, individually
wrapped. Its benefits do not endure, and so we come to mistrust them, or our
taste for them.
The other taint is that of passivity. At some point in its history, the
idea of entertainment lost its sense of mutuality, of exchange. One either
entertains or is entertained, is the actor or the fan. As with all one-way
relationships, grave imbalances accrue. The entertainer balloons with a
dangerous need for approval, validation, love, and box office; while the one
entertained sinks into a passive spectactorship, vacantly munching great big
salty handfuls right from the foil bag. We can't take pleasure in a work of art,
not in good conscience, without accepting the implicit intention of the artist
to please us. But somewhere along the course of the past century or so, as
the great machinery of pleasure came online, turning out products that,
however pleasurable, suffer increasingly from the ills of mass manufacture —
spurious innovation, inferior materials, alienated labor, and an excess of
market research — that intention came to seem suspect, unworthy, and
somehow cold and hungry at its core, like the eyes of a brilliant comedian.
Lunch counters, muffler shops, dinner theaters, they aim to please; but
writers? No self-respecting literary genius, even an occasional maker of
avowed entertainments like Graham Greene, would ever describe himself as
primarily an "entertainer." An entertainer is a man in a sequined dinner jacket,
singing "She's a Lady" to a hall filled with women rubber-banding their
underpants up onto the stage.
Yet entertainment — as I define it, pleasure and all — remains the
only sure means we have of bridging, or at least of feeling as if we have
bridged, the gulf of consciousness that separates each of us from everybody
else. The best response to those who would cheapen and exploit it is not to
disparage or repudiate but to reclaim entertainment as a job fit for artists and
for audiences, a two-way exchange of attention, experience, and the
universal hunger for connection.
The short story maps the most efficient path for spanning the
chasm between two human skulls. Cartographers employ different types of
maps — political, topographic, dot — to emphasize different kinds of
information. These different types are complementary; taken together they
increase our understanding. In other introductions to other collections of short
stories, I have argued for the commonsense proposition that, in constructing
our fictional maps, we ought not to restrict ourselves to one type or category.
Science fiction, fantasy, crime fiction — all these genres and others have rich
traditions in the American short story, reaching straight back to Poe and
Hawthorne, our first great practitioners of the form. One of the pioneers of the
modern "psychological" short story as we now generally understand it, Henry
James, wrote so many out-and-out ghost stories that they fill an entire book.
But the same process of commercialization and mass appeal that
discredited entertainment, or the idea of literature as entertainment, also
devastated our notion of the kinds of short stories that belong in college
syllabi, prestigious magazines, or yearly anthologies of the best American
short stories (another victory, in my view, for the enemies of pleasure, in their
corporate or ivory towers). In spite of this general neglect by the literary
mainstream, however, those other traditional genres remain viable and lively
and powerful models of the short story, whether in the hands of a daring soul
like Kelly Link or those of a crime novelist, like Dennis Lehane, who takes a
brilliant chance on the form that brought us some of the best work that
Hammett and Chandler ever did.
I guess that in the end all this talk of pleasure and entertainment
is by way of acknowledging the obvious: I have no idea if these are the twenty
best short stories published in the United States during 2004, or not. And
neither do you. Or rather, you may feel very strongly that they are not, or that
some of the stories here deserve the honor and some don't. But as you make
your assessment — as you judge the product of my judgment — you will be
relying, whether consciously, unconsciously, or in full-blown denial, on the
same fundamental criterion as that on which I relied: the degree to which
each of these stories catches hold of you, banishes everything but the
interplay of your imagination and the author's, your ear and the author's, your
solitude and the author's. That's entertainment. Short stories entertain; they
aim to please. These are the twenty stories that pleased me best.
Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin. Introduction copyright © 2005 by
Michael Chabon. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Best American Short Stories 2005 by Excerpted by permission.
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