Editing: Samuel Pam’s Salvation

I’ve looked again at this short story. It was completed over a year ago now, so I was able to look at is with fresh eyes; indeed, I had forgotten a lot of the content. Apart from some minor changes here and there, the main changes I made were to the sexual comments. I’ve replaced the more direct ones with innuendo comments, since, in this context, they seem much more funny and more appropriate. I received some feedback from a reader who made a comment about them. Though his feedback would not have alerted me to the specific problem or remedy (literary criticism is an art that few readers possess), I found that on reading the story back, some of the more direct comments fell flat to my ears, whereas when I replaced them with innuendo, they seemed funny.

If you’re curious enough to want to compare those passages with the new wordings, here is a copy of the story with the replaced comments marked.

The other issue I wrestled with were the passages in the last few pages that gave Samuel’s thought processes when he was talking to Andrea on the bench. Some other readers had mentioned that they had to think about them and perhaps found them heavy going. I have to say that when I first read them back, they made my head hurt. And they were certainly quite different to anything that had come before in the story, so were they incongruous and would the story be better without them? I made the other corrections, then re-read the story the following morning. This time round, I found that the passages at the end seemed to shed a new light on the whole of the previous story, and changed the meaning, in my mind, of the previous story, and of most of the episodes. I found myself comparing Sam’s thoughts at the end to the activity in the Ministry of Education, to Western Medicine (and the pharmaceutical company’s call centre), and to advertising ‘Spamming’, and, indeed, to the activity of marketing in general, and I found myself acknowledging that all these activities, and many other professions and activities, did indeed seem to be based on self delusions, that, when you step outside of their models and look at their activities from the outside, you can appreciate that what they are doing is invalid and misguided, though, of course, to the people on the inside, their activities (and models) seem valid.

So, I felt that those passages at the end of the story, though initially they may perhaps seem incongruous, on reflection, I think that they greatly add to the depth of the story. When I experienced the story this last time round, I have to say that I found it profound. Or perhaps I am merely a victim of self-delusion in the same way that the organisations featured in the story are…

 

Read the final version here.

[also see: Editing further: Samuel Pam's Salvation]

 

20 August 2009