Notes on ‘Remembering Arthur Mendington’
I have a complicated relationship with Remembering Arthur Mendington. I loved it as I wrote the first couple thousand words, hated it when I wrote the last few thousand words, loved it when editing it, and hated it while formatting it for the final release. I’d say my feelings now, while writing this quick retrospective piece, have fizzled down to a mild indifference leaning towards appreciation.
I like Arthur Mendington. He’s a murderous idiot so utterly free of consequences that he is almost endearing in some ways, and I think I fulfilled my goal to channel my larger grievances with the United States at the time into a figure of central hatred. Something unexpected was the development of an autonomous narrator, who acted as their own character; how their perception of Mendington changed throughout the story became a critical piece of it, which was not in any plan or outline I had for the story at all.
To divulge my goals with Arthur Mendington a bit further requires some knowledge of my own personal feelings. Though one can easily glean from Shall My West Hurt Me? that my criticisms of the United States are ample, I tried not to let them impact what I hoped would be an honest and historically respectful collection. In many ways, Remembering Arthur Mendington is effectively me forgoing that respect to paint, in one human being, all of the contempt, carelessness, and utter disregard for human life inherent to the American Empire in one of its more blatant states, being from the Mexican-American war through westward expansion following the Civil War. This grievance of mine did not just originate from history, though, but from current events, the most egregious of which being the U.S.’s illegal war with Iran and continued support of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, in addition to the support of United Arab Emirates despite its demonstrable contribution to the largest humanitarian crisis of the century, the Sudanese Civil War. For all of these reasons and more, Arthur Mendington is the way that he is—I’d like to think I telegraphed that pretty well.
I was greatly inspired by Don Quixote and Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man here, both in prose style and thematic content—the more ramshackle style of the narrator here was aided greatly by Melville’s own highly region-specific dialect he employed to capture 1850s St. Louis, in addition to the laudatory and hilariously verbose chapter titles that Cervantes employed. My intention was for this story to be a comedic satire of all things American, while also being an exploration of how such undeniable atrocities can be viewed in a positive light by those that are hopelessly devoted to the perpetrator. I think I managed to portray and deliver upon those intentions in a way that fulfilled my expectations.
As for the negatives, I have plenty to talk about. For one, the story is just too damn long. It’s almost a short novella, without having much reason to be outside of my own inability to contract my more wordy tendencies. Depicting comedy in a successful way is also still definitely a skill I’m working on with regards to fiction. I felt that as a consequence of my inexperience here, much of the value of the story suffered in a way that I couldn’t exactly do much about with such little practice; that being said, I certainly improved my abilities for future reference.
