Submerged Populations vs. Representation

On Max Delsohn’s ‘CRAWL’ and Anton Solomonik’s ‘Realistic Fiction’

Josef Albers, Variant/Adobe, Gray Turns Violet, 1958, Oil on Masonite

Two short story collections by trans men were released in 2025, CRAWL by Max Delsohn and Realistic Fiction by Anton Solomonik. (A disclosure: Max Delsohn is a friend of mine.) Both collections are humorous, and both collections feature a lot of pink on their covers. I’m fond of these color schemes, as if together these covers wink at their contents’ ironic approach to representing masculinity. One might expect the covers to assert their authors’ identity more firmly, considering how rarely books are released by trans men. To my knowledge, no organization is publishing statistics on trans publications, but I would be surprised if more than a handful of literary fiction books by trans men are published each year; expand that to other genres and you might, optimistically, number more than a dozen. So as a trans man, I was quite excited to have two literary story collections in one year, and I’ve wanted to write about these two collections together. Although they’re different in style and tone, their commonalities signify a refreshing direction for transmasculine literature.

And yet, discussing identity in Realistic Fiction and CRAWL feels like an essentializing act, pigeonholing both works as “trans guy books.” This is the trap of representation discourse: noting the significance of identity risks portraying the work as relevant only to those with a vested interest in said identity, or worse, as an obligation; reading for representation makes reading a political duty, like eating your vegetables or calling your senators. There is also an evaluative element, as the lens of representation inevitably calls up the specter of positive or negative representation. This limits the scope of critique and devalues the work’s artistry.

While I did feel personally “represented” by some of these stories, in that I recognized experiences and feelings from my own life, reading these funny, crude, imaginative, and absurd collections should be no one’s homework. These stories should be read because of their quality, not because of what they do to represent trans lives. Yet writing about these books as if how they depict trans life has no bearing on their quality would be disingenuous.

Aid comes to me through a definitional theory of short stories that predates our modern representation discourse, hailing from the 1960s: Irish writer Frank O’Connor’s language regarding the short story’s “submerged population.” In the 20^th century, O’Connor was regarded as one of the preeminent short story writers of his time. He elaborated on his submerged population theory in a 1961 lecture series at Stanford, lectures that have been collected in The Lonely Voice. To O’Connor, the chief element which distinguishes the short story writer from the novelist is that, while the novel is primarily concerned with how a character relates to society, characters in short stories don’t have the option of relating to society; they are remote, set apart, “outlawed figures wandering about the fringes.” It is this focus on the outlawed figure that gives the short story writer license to articulate “an intense awareness of human loneliness” and gives the short story its particular lean towards characters whose isolation and absurd framing make them ill-fitting to be novel heroes.

The short story draws its outlaws from a submerged population, by which O’Connor does not necessarily mean a group marginalized on some identity axis, but rather any group the writer feels an affinity for and in which there is potential for alienation. In The Lonely Voice, O’Connor writes:

We can see in [the short story] an attitude of mind that is attracted by submerged population groups, whatever these may be at any given time — tramps, artists, lonely idealists, dreamers, and spoiled priests . . . the short story remains by its very nature remote from the community — romantic, individualistic, and intransigent.

Gogol had his officials, Turgenev had his serfs, Chekhov had his doctors and teachers, Joyce had his Dubliners; some of these groups, yes, we’d consider to be marginalized or oppressed using today’s vocabulary, but almost all of the writers O’Connor analyzes through this lens are cis-heterosexual white men, and we don’t think of their bodies of work as representing the underrepresented. Instead, their work is generally acknowledged as universal, but they achieved this universality through dedicated focus on alienated groups.

Opting for the language of “submerged population” over the language of “representation” is not a picayune difference in word choice, but an ideological difference. Representation discourse presents a utilitarian argument, one that fundamentally elevates a story’s political utility over its artistic merits. Recognizing a writer’s attention to their submerged population is an artistic analysis that both recognizes the importance of the submerged group to the writer’s craft, and gives craft primacy over political utility. For O’Connor, when a writer brings a submerged group to life — and, crucially, when the writer gives their submerged characters full autonomy to act out their own values and culture, independent of those dictated by their society — this is the mark of a genuine storyteller. Far from pigeonholing marginalized writers to a niche audience, this framework correctly places them beside Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Joyce, et al.

CRAWL gives attention to its submerged population through studied realism, its characters feeling like they could have walked into fiction from real life. Most of the collection’s trans men have ties to queer and trans community, but these ties generate more angst than succor. In “Same Old,” a character must wrestle with the responsibility that he has (if any) to another younger, suffering trans man. In “Geeks,” Ray is tortured by his unspoken love for another trans guy, one who calls him “brother” and whose emotional unavailability seems tied to his transition. “Don’t Be Boring” examines the friendship and exploitation between a trans man and a cis gay man as vicious as he is gorgeous. And in “The Bubble,” Delsohn’s most direct confrontation with an idealistic vision of community, he exposes the thorny intricacies of trans community over the course of one summery afternoon in a public park. We find the protagonist of “The Bubble,” after he’s spent hours attending to the emotional wounds of his fellow trans dudes, discouraged by the utopian ideal of “community.” Any trans person who has tried to live in community with other trans people will recognize his disillusionment: “[That] ‘trans family’ speech was a pipe dream. Or it was one big family of babies. Just babies smearing shit all over each other and calling it ‘community.’” The story ends with its narrator, despite his cynicism, choosing once more to reach out to a trans person, after witnessing how they’ve been mocked by a cis crowd.

This scene, in which a non-binary transmasculine person is laughed at for being absurdly “tiny,” gets at a recurring theme in both collections, a contradiction at the heart of transmasculine experience: we want to be taken seriously, for our manhood to be taken seriously — yet there’s something inherently ridiculous about masculinity, so there’s much to laugh at in the desire to become a man. CRAWL is a riotously funny collection with jokes on every page, and often humor itself becomes Delsohn’s subject matter. One of his characters, a stand-up comic, reveals that he can’t stop joking about his shortness. “I thought if I kept talking about how short I was, I could somehow exorcise the shortness from me, or at least prove I had some sort of handle on the situation. . . . Onstage, my short jokes rarely failed. On dates, cis girls loved them.” This reveals a classic tendency among trans people, the urge to make ourselves the butt of every joke, pre-empting a cis person doing it for us. (When this character starts dating a trans woman, she has moved past this urge and doesn’t think his height is notable nor funny, telling him, “You hang out with cis people too much.”)

If CRAWL draws humanistic, realistic portraits of trans men to bring its submerged population to life, Realistic Fiction leans into absurdity. Solomonik’s title is tongue-in-cheek: these stories are not “realistic” as we usually understand that term, or perhaps they lean so far into literalism that they come out the other side, into the surreal. There is something deeply weird and almost uncanny about Solomonik’s characters. They’re crushingly self-conscious overthinkers with absurd motivations and goals, and their language is too precise and overly literal, making the reader both laugh and cringe away. Solomonik’s prose is lethally funny, with sentence constructions that defamiliarize both interiority and action. Take how he writes about sex in “How to Run for Local Office While Building a Community Out of Nothing”: “Making sure, swift, rhythmic movements, he began to manually stimulate his, at first, only semi-erect genitals. He made rapid progress.” A different character declares that he’s finally figured out what sex is for: “[I]t’s essentially a form of networking.”

In this same story, Solomonik exposes what’s funny about the idea of “representation” for white trans men. Ashton, a trans man, seeks to become New York’s first trans congressional candidate. “I’d be the perfect figure for these, like — troubled times, or whatever. . . . Kind of like a member of a disadvantaged group, but not. Kind of like a white male, but not.” We laugh at this, but it also articulates the awkward way white trans men fit into the paradigm of marginalization: the least disadvantaged members of a disadvantaged group, a submerged population in the sense of being invisible, whose invisibility makes their marginalization difficult to see. White trans men should, theoretically, have access to the very top of the social hierarchy, but that “theoretically” conceals a wide swathe of experience, and the tension created by this gap also creates humor.

The tone of this collection is satirical, but what exactly is it satirizing? Satire is meant to punch up, at targets that have political power, yet cis people are not Solomonik’s primary focus. Instead, like Delsohn, Solomonik’s humor interrogates positive portrayals of trans acceptance and community. While CRAWL questions trans community and assimilation through realism, Realistic Fiction’s satirical tone presents characters too strange for either assimilation or kumbaya notions of in-group acceptance. In The Lonely Voice, O’Connor posits that this quasi-satirical mode might be unique to the short story form. Regarding Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” he claims it “uses the old rhetorical device of the mock-heroic, but uses it to create a new form that is neither satiric nor heroic, but something in between — something that perhaps finally transcends both.”

There is something affirmative in achieving this transcendence, though it’s not the kind of “affirmation” demanded by our representation discourse, which requires that stories by marginalized writers provide some overtly political uplift for the represented identity. Often, the question of affirmation determines whether representation is judged as positive or negative. In “Enamored of the Abyss: On the place of affirmation in art,” Garth Greenwell argues for a concept of “affirmative art” that allows affirmation to come through form’s beauty, rather than solely through subject matter. “The value of art can’t lie only in the particulars of a story. . . . It has to lie also . . . in that province particular to art; it has to lie in significant form, in style charged with feeling and meaning.” Through attention to form, we can find affirmation in subject matter which may imply negation, such as James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, which Greenwell acknowledges as operating on homophobic logic. Yet the novel’s formal qualities, the beauty of its prose, provide an “amplitude of expression” about love between two men, suggesting that even through tragedy Baldwin’s work made the lives of gay men intelligible and lifelike, and gave them meaning.

With this definition of affirmation, the irony within both Solomonik’s and Delsohn’s collections — that both write about trans men’s yearning to be taken seriously, yet their trans men are often laughed at, undermined, even humiliated — takes on a different meaning than the disempowering, abject stance it might seem from a superficial reading. Solomonik’s characters have a rigorous self-awareness, reflectinggranted dysphoria’s lethal compulsion to minutely examine and evaluate every desire. In “The Meaningful Ex,” the protagonist is caught up in an unhealthy, BDSM-like relationship with a cis man, continuously arguing with his ex about whether this relationship is exploitative. He’s painfully aware of this argument’s consequences: “My whole identity as a man depended on my being able to make the distinctions I was now making.” The more legible affirmative approach would be to say that this character’s manhood is innate, valid regardless of any sexual dynamics; but in depicting the internal traps and tests that trans people set for ourselves, Solomonik gets at a deeper truth, which is that to be a man is to recognize that manhood is forever contingent. This is not affirming to trans masculinity because it suggests that our genders are neither fixed nor invulnerable, but in his honest portrayal of trans male sexual hang-ups and embarrassed yearnings, Solomonik gets to affirmation through abjection — and, crucially, through absurdity, through characters so stilted and obsessive they become defamiliarized. It’s like seeing the real social dynamics of trans life captured accurately through a funhouse mirror.

In CRAWL, “Maude” meticulously details the psychological journey of one character’s decision to transition. Our narrator is trapped in rumination for the story’s first seven pages, mired in recursive questions about their own transition, stuck in OCD spirals:

I’ve gone on and off testosterone twice. Nothing feels certain; nothing feels truthful or inevitable or right. So it’s a decision after all, a choice, just like everything else, just like moving to a new city or leaving a relationship or staying right where you are. There are pros and cons, costs and benefits.

This rumination defies the talking points of mainstream trans politics, which prefer, for political reasons, to depict dysphoria as innate and fixed and transition as almost mystically inevitable, definitively not a choice, particularly not one wracked with uncertainty. But “Maude” illustrates a transition that I recognized from my own life, wherein I did not “just know” that I was a man. Instead I adopted male pronouns and started testosterone while I was still indecisive; I lacked “proof” that I was really a man, and instead had to make a leap of faith, not knowing if my mind might change in the future. It’s precisely because “Maude” does not strive to empower its protagonist that I felt affirmed — affirmed by the care Delsohn takes in exploring this kind of transition, one in which uncertainty isn’t quelled.

With the release of these two collections so close together, transmasculine literature may be starting to define its trajectory. This is not to say that from here on out every short story by and about trans men should be funny, or surreal, or horny, just because those attributes apply to many of these stories. But in rejecting the self-serious expectations of identity-focused literature, these collections sidestep the burden of proof of trans validity; rather than taking trans masculinity at face value, they give their characters freedom to act beyond the constraints of purely political affirmation. I hope that this freedom will encourage other trans male authors, and perhaps even men, in general. I’m not saying that these collections can solve the male loneliness epidemic or rescue masculinity from its constant state of crisis, but I’m not not saying that.

O’Connor argues that we can’t understand great short stories by whittling them down to the “point” they may be making:

A work of art . . . is not only something more than the point; it is by its very nature different from the point. . . . [T]he surface of a great short story is like a sponge; it sucks up hundreds of impressions that have nothing whatsoever to do with the [point].

This quote makes me think of Delsohn’s prolonged psychedelic descriptions in “The Geeks” and “Same Old,” in which badly-timed mushroom/acid trips prompt disaster; and of Solomonik’s “Moving to Boron,” which features a roommate named Punk Skunk and a protagonist obsessed with a 1980s anime about Alexander the Great. Both collections are rich with the tangential, O’Connor’s “hundreds of impressions” that animate their submerged groups and convince the reader to embrace the absurd. Rather than serving some political utility for marginalized groups, these short stories achieve universal deep feeling through their outlawed figures, embracing the legacy of the short story’s great masters.

Caio Major is a graduate student in the MFA-Fiction program at Syracuse University. Currently based in Syracuse, he has strong attachments to Salt Lake City and New York City. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Electric Literature, trans rag, and Reading Into Culture, among others. You can read more of his writing at his Substack, Second Adolescence.