Recently, I had the privilege of having a short story appear in Moth & Rust: Mormon Encounters with Death, published by Signature Books (2017). It’s a collection of short (most of them around 1,000 words each) essays, sketches, short stories, illustrations, poems … even a play. And of course, the small attractively bound paperback, though somber looking, is about death through the lens of Mormons and Mormonism.
One of the selections, the short story told in first-person titled “Hollow” by Kathryn Lynard, struck me badly. The story is written well, but I felt that something was clearly manipulative about it. It’s not unusual for Mormon literature—what I would call Mormon lit in service of the faith—to be dogmatic, even hackneyed. This story is not hackneyed. Again, it’s well-written, genuinely atmospheric and compelling reading.
It’s also about abortion, which orthodox Mormons hold in contempt and for which the LDS Church has a special kind of hell if the person guilty of it remains unrepentant. Abortion was arguably the wedge issue that propelled most Utah Mormons to vote against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Presidential election and helped elevate Donald Trump, who is ostensibly “pro-life,” into the White House and, in my view, precipitated the most serious political emergency of our lifetime as Americans.
All of this to say, that when I first read this story, I knew I was going to be triggered all over the place and that my first impulse was going to be to shoot flaming arrows. Curiously, a good friend who, like me, is a self-described post-Mormon and is pro-choice, did not find the story “Hollow” offensive.
He and I are still talking, but I admit to wanting to send one of those arrows his way when I realized he disagreed with me. Still … I’m struck by Lynard’s story, that there’s something wrong-headed and manipulative about it and that I need to call it out. And not just because I’m a pro-choicer “baby-killer” who earlier this year received a surgically evacuated and bloodied doll beneath my “I Stand for Planned Parenthood” lawn sign here inSaltLake City.
Clearly, I needed some help. I decided to enlist someone who knew more about a strange term that kept leaping into mind regarding my agitation: “agit-prop.”
I’ve asked Sonja Farnsworth who like me has an MA in Speech Communication/Rhetoric but who unlike me is brilliant and even-keeled, to talk me off the ledge and to help me determine if I’m just a defensive progressive with a post-Mormon axe to grind or if I actually have a point.
Sonja is a graduate of Brigham Young University (BA) and San Jose State University (MA). She is a regular contributor at the Mormon-related Sunstone Symposium, a book reviewer, and contributor to more than one collection of essays largely about women and the LDS Culture. She and I exchanged emails about the story, and I wanted to feature it here in this post.
First, I thought I’d give a summary of the story “Hollow” by Kathryn Lynard so that those who haven’t read it will know what the text is we are examining today. The nameless narrator of this story leaves her parents’ home on a frigid Saturday morning in January with her boyfriend Dave. He picks her up in his new truck and they drive to what we soon learn by inference is an abortion clinic. Dave pays the $200 in cash at the receptionist’s desk, while the narrator, who has mixed emotions about what she’s about to do, fills out the required paperwork. It’s clear from the text that her parents do not know anything about the pregnancy nor that she has been sexually active. When the survey asks if the unwanted pregnancy is the result of contraception that has failed she ticks, “yes,” even though, the reader learns that the young couple were just careless: they hadn’t used any contraception.
Once in the sterile room, sans Dave whom the narrator is trying not to inconvenience too much, she is asked if she still wants to go through with the procedure. She says yes. The nurse assists with the local anesthesia and the doctor, a black woman with “eyes [that] had the look of old pain,” does the scraping and vacuuming of the fetus out of the narrator’s body. From there, the young woman/narrator is left to dress. She reports: “Salt water appeared on my gown as my eyes and skin purged themselves clean.”
Dave drops his girlfriend off, saying he knows she needs to rest and that he is going to meet some friends: “I nodded again, excusing him from any further responsibility. …Dave kept the engine running as he said goodbye, and as I walked up the driveway I heard him pull away a bit too fast.” The narrator’s grandparents are there. She enters the house, and hears her mother and grandmother calling her name. “wanting to hear all about the places [on a Saturday morning] I hadn’t been.” [italics mine]
DGP: Sonja, what did you make of this story in general terms? Or did I prejudice you against it before you read it?
SLF: I don’t worry that you may have prejudiced me against the story. As George Linzer (a writer I follow on Medium) expressed it,
Bias is not a sin that needs to be debated or eradicated, and a biased point of view is most certainly not something to be dismissed from conversation. Rather, it is something that needs to be more frequently acknowledged and embraced as a useful starting point for productive discussion…
We all come into the world with proclivities that result in implicit biases, and since it’s more constructive to admit them than deny them, I appreciate the chance to explore “Hollow” with your concerns about bias on the table. Chapters 9-13 of The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis demonstrate ways in which investigators can restrain their biases by applying certain tests to their reasoning and exposing their conclusions to criticism. We can consult it and other sources about bias detection at the end of this discussion if we want to.
That said, the word “agit-prop” is a portmanteau of “agitation” and “propaganda.” It differs from regular propaganda because it’s designed to embed in an audience ideas a propagandist calculates will arouse it to activism in the service of a cause. It can be any form of media—a poster, a pamphlet, or well-written fiction like “Hollow.”
What strikes me about “Hollow,” is that it’s a short, easy-to-read, tightly-constructed story—the kind people read when they feel rushed as most of us feel these days. Unlike a sign saying, “Abortion is murder,” “Hollow” does not announce its purpose, make any claims, or does any special pleading. Consequently, its readers will tend to relax their defenses—and most people do anyway in the presence of a story. Because you shared your concerns that “Hollow” might be agitprop, the fairest way to proceed is to see if it meets the criteria—(e.g., if it walks like a duck, if it quacks like a duck…it’s a duck).
In general terms, “Hollow” is appropriate for an anthology about death and dying because of the way Lynard interlaces it with symbols of mortality. The story begins with the phrase, “It was January,” setting the scene in the dead of winter. The word “cold” appears twice in the first paragraph and once in the second, and the words “frigid,” “froze,” and “frost” all appear in the sentences that follow Lynard’s central character to the abortion clinic.
Continuing the theme of lifelessness, Lynard leaves her central character nameless. This calls forth the Hebrew concept of people’s names being their link to the creative force. When the nameless woman says, “I had close-cropped hair that was bleached a color of white called silent snow,” the words “silent” and “snow” evoke death because corpses are silent, and snow is nature’s shroud. To put it succinctly, Lynard’s “Hollow” is a story about a woman whose life is suspended, living in a lifeless landscape.
DGP: Once Lynard sets up the scene of a stark and dead environment, what else does she do in your view to further the aims of what we are referring to here as agitprop?
SLF: Having set the scene in an allegorical coffin, Lynard fashions her main character as a facsimile of the woman that inhabits pro-life arguments against abortion—promiscuous, self-absorbed, careless about conception, disinterested in the fetus, prone to taking the easy way out, and disposed to using abortion as a form of birth control:
We hadn’t used a condom that afternoon in the emptied house. We knew we should have, but we were already in my parents’ bedroom—their bed was bigger than mine—and didn’t have much time before I had to leave for work. Ask we walked into the bedroom, Dave asked if it would be OK, and I said yes, even though I didn’t know.
As the plot takes the young woman through the medical paperwork, Lynard takes her readers into the young woman’s mind as she describes the mundanity of filling out forms. (The scene reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s observation of “the banality of evil.”) At this point, Lynard gives the boyfriend a name (Dave)—a whisper of a hint that he is more alive than his impassive girlfriend who observes his subtle emotional responses about the potential child she is carrying but turns away from his feelings because they’re something she “can’t afford to pin down.” As she’s prepped for the procedure, she describes it in terms that make it seem banal and when she recounts the physical pain she feels from administration of the local anesthetic, her concern never extends to the fetus. At this point, Lynard provides insight into her reasons for giving her story the title “Hollow”:
What followed were bright lights, deep pressure, and the noise of suction. There was a moment of silence before the doctor confirmed me empty.
With the word “empty,” Lynard serves the pro-life movement’s valorization of the fetus by dehumanizing the mother and trying to ensure that readers view pro-life women as a kind of human void with all the concomitant characteristics the word “empty” evokes. In Christian terminology, a true Christian is “filled with the spirit.” In contrast, “Hollow” proposes a nameless, spiritually impoverished heroine, cut off from the purpose of life.
We know little else about Lynard’s protagonist except that she’s become pregnant through hurried, unprotected sex in her parent’s bed—a violation of parental privacy based on lack of her own resources and explored humorously in an episode of Seinfeld. From that, we can deduce she lives at home, and in having sex with Dave, is in territory she has no business being in. She relies on Dave to pay, evoking a sense of sex in exchange for money. And (in a dig at feminist pro-choice women who aspire to escape male oppression) she is spinelessly afraid to displease her boyfriend Dave because he’s paying:
I avoided eye contact with the other women as I followed Dave to the receptionist’s desk. His job was to pay money. I watched him pull a wad of folded bills from his back pocket and count them out, two hundred dollars in twenties. When I scheduled the appointment, I opted for local anesthesia instead of general to save money, a favor Dave was unaware of.
The other prominent female character Lynard features is the African American abortion doctor. This portrayal of a black woman doesn’t conform to any of the stereotypes of black women, such as the welfare mother or the domestic. However, the black doctor’s dark, substantial presence (in contrast to the sad, passive Dave) becomes the story’s most prominent collaborator in the abortion. Lynard leaves her nameless as well and makes her the administrator of six searing shots of local anesthetic.
DGP: There’s satire and then there’s agitprop. What’s the difference in your view? Are they related? I think I could have embraced satire about abortion and the debate it has engendered, as many of us did the 1996 Sundance Film Citizen Ruth, written by Jim Taylor and debut director Alexander Payne. Instead, in “Hollow,” the author’s message about abortion seems manipulative. The story is deeply coded to confirm the bias of an ultra-conservative community and institutional church that appears to believe that abortion is exclusively, or at least most importantly, about killing babies. I think the editor of this collection, Steven Carter, might have seen this as a stark, technically well-written work that would represent the more traditional Mormon writers out there. It was, perhaps, an effort to be inclusive of the Mormon experience. Still, I’m wondering if it should have been excluded because of its polemical nature. Also, except for the death imagery which you’ve pointed out, the only connection to the collection’s subtitle is that the author is LDS.
I know I’m making a judgment here on the literary merit of “Hollow.” I’m not asking you to do that as well, but I would like you to weigh in on what you think more broadly the role of art, particularly the literary arts, plays or could play in the public discourse that abortion is exclusively about murder . . . art being something, ideally, that is less about messaging and more to do with aesthetics, expression, and story without having an overt agenda.
SLF: Agit-prop and satire are language-based communications with different goals. Satire operates through a universal appeal that exposes and denounces the irrational, peels away layers of deception or pretense, and jumpstarts self-exploration with no fixed intent. Agit-prop is politicized and calculated to elicit an activist response predetermined by its creator. In “Hollow,” the author arguably hopes to create activists and single-issue pro-life voters by dehumanizing women who choose abortion. Yes—and “Hollow’s” aesthetics, expression, and story serve an agenda because it denies readers the opportunity to see abortion as the complex, contradictory issue it is. Lawrence Tribe, Harvard law professor emeritus, called the abortion debate a “clash of absolutes” because both “pro-choice” and “pro-life” represent profound ethical principles. But instead of building bridges between them, Lynard’s story tells a one-dimensional tale–abortion is murder, and only the dehumanized could commit it—end of story. “Hollow” may be artful, but it’s not art. It’s tightly packaged, well-presented moralism. Great literature is relevant, and if “Hollow” doesn’t tell a great truth, it doesn’t meet that standard.
DGP: You’ve studied a lot about confirmation bias in general and the alt-right rhetoric targeting Hillary Clinton, which I think you could argue has been unprecedented in our contemporary age. I understand the vitriol of a Sean Hannity or fellow Mormon Glenn Beck. Especially Hannity has balked at being called a journalist, preferring to see himself as a commentator/entertainer, as if either of those when it relates to social and public issues isn’t contingent on any kind of truth claims. But “Hollow” is fiction and I can’t help but call foul a little faster with Lynard’s veiled attempt at vitriol which I believe it embodies.
Wallace Stegner wrote that “culture is a pyramid to which each of us brings a stone.” It’s all culture, I suppose, but I’d like to think that when it comes to literary fiction that we need to call out one another when we fall to indecorous approaches for nefarious reasons. I would much rather read grit lit of Denis Johnson’s short story “Dirty Wedding,” which is also about abortion (and admittedly much longer), than “Hollow” because it doesn’t presume the reader is an idiot who can’t possibly be human if he/she doesn’t come to the conclusion at which Lynard is driving.
SLF: From a propaganda analyst’s point of view, the problem with “Hollow” is not that it takes a position that expresses vitriol against women but that it’s misleading. Few women who choose to end their pregnancies are like Lynard’s nameless, emotionally dead protagonist. And not all pro-life advocates see abortion in a way that portrays women who have abortions as somewhat inhuman. Pro-life advocate Dr. Randall O’Bannon articulated more nuanced views by suggesting that the legalization of abortion has created “the cultural machinery that forces these cruel choices on women, that lets men off the hook, that leaves women to care for households of children all alone, and that makes society less accommodating to the demands of motherhood.”
And though I disagree that legal abortion is the culprit in leaving women feeling unsupported in motherhood, at least O’Bannon sees women as fully human. He doesn’t blame them as much as understand their economic and emotional situation. His concern is that, “Collectively … factors may conspire to force many of these women to consider an option that goes totally against their nurturing natures and pits the needs of one or more of their children against another.” His sense that we have created a world in which women are afraid to have babies does not single out women (the least powerful of the two sexes) for blame. It exposes more humane reasons women choose abortion—ones in which mothers are fully human players.
DGP: Is “Hollow” a cautionary tale for all of us, especially as we find ourselves embedded in a seemingly intractable politicized age?
SLF: There’s a case to be made that “Hollow” represents the current America in which Americans see those with opposite points of view as less than human. In Lynard’s defense, I suggest that acting out of concern for the unborn is a grand, loving impulse that has done incalculable good in the world for centuries. Her story is undoubtedly sincere or perhaps an exploration of concerns she may have about women who chose to end their pregnancies. But that begs the question of what is accomplished when protective zeal toward the unborn dehumanizes pro-choice women and publicly accuses them of murder. A narrative that turns the notion of “abortion as murder” back onto itself till it symbolically kills the mother is disquieting for the way it does not consider the context of fear in which women view motherhood when society offers shrinking options for raising a family in the nostalgic, pro-family way pro-lifers envision.
DGP: Thank you, Sonja. Let’s talk about bias detection next time. I think many of us are chronically uncertain about our own bias these days, or not uncertain at all–at least publicly. I’m not sure which is more egregious–for one to be so so worried about how bias impacts one’s attempts at dialogue and therefore remaining silent or being absolutely certain that one has no bias and therefore shouting everyone down. Next time?
SLF: Yes. Next time.
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