In “Final Boy,” your story in this week’s issue, Rick is a writer of fan fiction about the eighties sitcom “Charles in Charge.” Well, Rick wouldn’t call it fan fiction. How does Rick think of his writing, and how does it fit into his conception of himself?
Rick is a guy who has always loved books and used to study creative writing. He’s worked for decades in the gig economy, long before it was even called that, doing freelance copy editing and the like. But until he got into watching old episodes of “Charles in Charge,” he hadn’t figured out how to unleash his literary vision. He takes his artistic responsibilities seriously. As he says, it’s all fan fiction, by which he means all art is in conversation with prior cultural artifacts, building out from them, in the best case. Fan fiction, he believes, is just more honest about the notion of originality. I suppose he wouldn’t see what he was doing as that different from what Jean Rhys did in “Wide Sargasso Sea” or what Robert Coover or Percival Everett did in novels sprouting from “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” It comes down to a matter of quality. Rick thinks that the other writers in the “Charles in Charge” community, or space, aren’t pushing the aesthetic envelope as much as they should.
Rick also operates as a kind of human interface for an A.I. therapy company, a “beef puppet for a large language model,” reading advice from a screen to clients he sees remotely. Both his writing and his therapy work involve a certain slant on what authenticity means in various contexts. How were you thinking about this balance?
For Rick, there is a strict line between his writing and his therapy work. With his fiction, he may be using the preëxisting universe of an old sitcom for his frame—perhaps like using an old legend about a prince in the Danish court—but, in the end, these are Rick’s stories and Rick’s songs, and he’s aiming to achieve human connection with his writing. He eschews using A.I. to write his fiction. And he rejects the idea that we are “just lesser versions of ChatGPT,” or that, even if we are, we are each trained with a unique swirl of experiences and interactions with art. That’s what can be authentic, our proprietary blends, as it were. The remote therapy job disgusts Rick precisely because it erases the human. He’s basically a tool of the A.I. and of a cynical corporation, much to the detriment of his clients, which is why he must make his hero’s journey and take up the lance against the large-language-model dragons.
Rick is in a bit of a pickle. His income is uncertain, and he’s been living with Bennett, a younger drinking buddy who, in turn, is basically squatting in his dead aunt’s apartment. Now Bennett’s in a coma, leaving Rick in the wind. The fact that this story is extremely funny can mask how grim it is—how do you think about this tension? Do you, in general, have any guiding precepts about the balance of humor and hardship in your work?
This tension is at the root of everything for me. Sometimes I think about that famous passage in Beckett’s “Watt” about three kinds of laughter—the bitter, the hollow, and the mirthless. None of them are, strictly speaking, laughs but “modes of ululation,” howls. But the mirthless is the finest and deepest one. It is the “laugh laughing at the laugh,” a “saluting of the highest joke.” It laughs “at that which is unhappy.” Laughter is an answer when there can be no answer, only a grim kind of consolation. But, hey, I cherish the lighter chuckles, too! Life is horrible, wonderful, and funny, often at once. Certain extreme situations, of course, resist any tone other than solemnity, but not many. Most of the writers I admire have a sharp sense of humor, even the ones who thumb the scale for the tragic. You can scream into the void, laugh into it, or both. The void doesn’t give a shit. But the human standing next to you might appreciate some variety.
The question of “occasion”—the writing teacher’s invocation of why this story, why now—becomes part of the story itself. At the end, Rick decides that he needs to “dump out the vats” and write from “pure feeling.” Is this Rick’s fresh start, or a reversion to his old ways?
It’s both, which is why it just might work. ♦
