By: Cameron MacKenzie
Many years ago, I made a decision that I would value my time over money. That felt like a noble and empowering decision to a 25-year old, but in the years since I've kicked myself more than once, such as when my friends tell me about their recent trip to Barbados or how evenly their new Green Egg roasts pork butts.
That's all to say that sometimes my funds run a little lower than I'd like and, since summer is quiet in academia, I'll pick up a side gig for what my grandfather used to call "walking-around money." This year I decided to write study guides at a company called GoodGuides[1] for around $800 a pop. Writing thirty pages or so on various pieces of fiction would be, I figured, easy money.
I got to pick my first story, and I chose "Kew Gardens" by Virginia Woolf. I love Virginia Woolf, and I happen to know a lot about her. I know she was writing in London in the 1920s and 30s, she was bisexual, glamorous, difficult, thrilling, snobbish, and a genius. Her story "Kew Gardens" is about four pages long, and it's a masterpiece. There's no plot. A snail is a principal character, and the ending defies any clear explanation. Believe it or not, this is the sort of stuff I live for.
I got right to it. I outlined the story. I outlined the paragraphs. I (yes I did), outlined the sentences. I broke the thing apart and put it back together. I had the themes and the key quotes. I had the historical and philosophical contexts. I could tell you why she wrote the thing, and I could tell you what it meant. Or what I thought it meant. And here's where I got stuck.
I'm an authority in this stuff, and these people are paying me for my level of expertise. But I know enough about this kind of literature to know that it defies a simple explanation. This type of literature is, in fact, built to avoid easy explanations–in fact, it was built to critique them. Woolf said so herself. "Kew Gardens" was written as a critique of people who want, and are happy with, the easy answer. But that's precisely what the GoodGuides people want to see: a clear, definite, authoritative explanation. That's what my time, to them, is worth. The story itself has a lot to say about a contract like that.
Let me give you an example. There's a great scene in "Kew Gardens" between two kids walking through the park on a date.
"Lucky it isn't Friday," the boy says.
"Why? D'you believe in luck?"
"They make you pay sixpence on Friday."
"What's sixpence anyway? Isn't it worth sixpence?"
"What's 'it'–what do you mean by 'it'?"
"O, anything–I mean–you know what I mean."
It's a simple exchange–it sounds like throwaway dialogue–but the boy gets stuck on this idea of it meaning "anything." How can a specific word mean anything at all? He begins to think that words might be "inadequate" to express reality. But what, then, is reality if we can't describe it with words? These thoughts begin to pitch the boy over into panic–he senses something "massive" rising up behind the words, something "looming" up over them both. Then he reaches into his pocket, and he grabs a coin. This coin, he reassures himself, is "real, all real," and it has a purpose: to pay for the drink they're going to have together–the reason they came to the park in the first place.
Put another way, meaning can slip underneath words, but money holds it fast. Money gives it anchor, and purpose, and clarity. There's an explanation!
But I can't say the whole story is like that, because it isn't. There's another couple that are remembering their wedding; there's an old man who's ranting about Argentina; there's two old ladies going over their shopping lists. The whole story moves like a butterfly across a garden, landing in one spot and then another, exploring one group and then another, revisiting that snail I was telling you about before refocusing on a praying mantis. And if I were to tell you the whole story was about money, that the moral of the story was about money, I'd be lying. A little bit, but not completely.
You see, Woolf was fed up with good guys and bad guys and predictable plots and neat and tidy endings. The world isn't like that, she said. People aren't like that, she said, so stories shouldn't be like that. People think they're talking about one thing when they're actually talking about something else. People think they know what's happening when in fact something completely different is happening. And while we could say money helps clarify things, what is the money for? In this case, desire. The boy is here on a date, and the money is only a means to that end.
I broke "Kew Gardens" apart and put it back together. And I put it back together in an interesting way, because I've been doing this long enough to be good at it. But I also know that there are other ways to put it back together–some worse than mine, some better. This sort of literature is, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, neither right or wrong, only interesting or not. And that goes for the critique of it as well; the summary of it; the meaning of it. What is an authority supposed to do with that?
This is not the sort of thing the editors at GoodGuides want from their writers. And so, after trying to bend all of this into 15k words that really end up explaining what the snail is doing in the story, I bailed. I couldn't do it. I turned in my badge.
First, it was taking so much time that it ceased to be worth it; second, in order to tie this story up in a bow, I would've had to lie to the reader. And if I, and by extension my employer, am supposed to be the authority on this story, the role of the authority is–in truth–to give agency to the people who trust him enough to listen. That's what "Kew Gardens" is really worth. And that's what my time is worth as well.
[1] Not the company's real name.
Opinions expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily those of SagePoint Financial, Inc.