Discussion → Very Short Fiction
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A story in my view has three meanings: what is said, (literally), what the words mean, (metaphorically), and a third meaning which belongs to the reader. If a writer clearly shapes that third meaning so that the project of the story is realized in its reading, the story succeeds, despite or because of length, form, page structure.
Odd how these notions, (which I believed I cooked up on my own) align with Linguistics divisions of utterance. The locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary. The said, the intent, how the said is heard (or read) by the reader/listener.
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I hope I'm not posting this twice, but the first crack at a comment didn't show on my computer so--
In my view, a successful story has three meanings: the literal, or what is said, is the first. The metaphorical,or what is suggested by the literal is the second. The third meaning must occur in the reader and if an author has shaped his or her story perfectly, the project of the story will be realized in its reading by another, regardless of form, length, page construction.
I thought I cooked up this formula myself, but read recently that in linguistics, (at least some scholars in that discipline), divide utterance into three parts. Locutionary--what is literally said. Ilocutionary--what is intended. Perlocutionary--what is understood by the reader or listener.
[All this sets aside post modern critical theory and its magic loco labyrinths and assertions about the impossibility of meaning.]
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I love writing short stories, especially flash fiction. I've written poetry for years. Only recently have I started writing fiction. I like to write about moments in time. The majority of my stories are like photographs, a simple quick glance into the lives of my characters.
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The idea of the 'perlocutionary' - that the reader participates in the creation of a story (or utterance's) meaning - seems especially relevant to a discussion of very short fiction in that the shorter a story becomes (as we see in 'hint fiction' or stories of only a few words) the more the story seems to depend on suggestion for its success.
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why does this call to mind Frank O'Connor's jab at Hemingway in The Lonely Voice? something about how Hemingway crouched behind rocks and took pot shots at the reader....
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That's what I find most fascinating about very very very short stories like hint or nano -- that with the reader needing to be so engaged, using so much more of their imagination to fill in the blanks, different readers take more away from certain stories than others. What I might take away from one story, my wife might have a completely different take. Is this right or wrong? Again, that takes us into the sticky idea that stories need to follow a specific set of rules to make them true stories ...
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Well, yeah Febe, I think a short text may aspire to simply represent a kind of scene or moment, (as Robbe Grillet claimed he was doing in Snapshots), and that's cool, or it may be generated to contain a kind of savor or intimation of greater original meaning or meanings.
Scott, if the reader is purposefully shut out, ambushed, hornswaggled, then, yes, I agree, the author is up to something that's sort of unsavory and equally uninteresting. Being cryptic is so fucking easy. Works that most interest me seem to have an understructure or history of complex problems for which the story is an elegant solution.
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O’Connor seemed to object to the detached manner of Hemingway’s voice precisely because it was detached, and because it thus created an atmosphere of unreal stoicism in which his characters arguably became complicit. At the same time, it is difficult to distinguish between this very detachment and the powerful suggestiveness for which Hemingway's best stories are known.
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"Works that most interest me seem to have an understructure or history of complex problems for which the story is an elegant solution."
that's another great wording.... i'm going to have to print out this thread, i think.....
E-- i'm going to have to reread it now. absolutely it was the detachment that was O'Connor's problem. maybe i'm wrong, but i took him as saying that the detachment was dishonest, that Hemingway's stories were as controlled and controlling (thinking of perlocution now) as, for example, O'Connor's own; Hemingway was just 'hiding'.....
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so, i'm wondering: what's wrong with hiding?
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Wasn't it Chekhov that said something along the lines that the colder a writer is toward his characters, the more it forces the reader to care about them? Not sure if that's the same thing as "hiding," but that idea has always struck me as quite effective.
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Robert's question about different meanings for different readers goes to the heart of any art that intends to be more than a populist commodity. I just don't know how to answer it beyond the old case-by-case dodge.
I would argue that no writer can "hide" and, further, that the true subject of every narrative is the teller's ineptitude. Those places where she or he most overtly fails to concoct a figure or method or strategy which is both new and memorable and somehow true to life or thought are what defines a style, an attack, what you tell and how you tell it. So, Gary, I agree that nothing is wrong with hiding--one must hide as a writer just as one must hide as an actor.
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Robert's question about different meanings for different readers goes to the heart of any art that intends to be more than a populist commodity. I just don't know how to answer it beyond the old case-by-case dodge.
I would argue that no writer can "hide" and, further, that the true subject of every narrative is the teller's ineptitude. Those places where she or he most overtly fails to concoct a figure or method or strategy which is both new and memorable and somehow true to life or thought are what defines a style, an attack, what you tell and how you tell it. So, Gary, I agree that nothing is wrong with hiding--one must hide as a writer just as one must hide as an actor.
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I think Scott is right to point out that Hemingway’s detachment, in O’Connor’s view, is akin to ‘hiding,’ and that ‘hiding’ (for O’Connor) is tantamount to a trick, which in art, some might say, is cheating. What complicates that estimation is the sense one gets from much of Hemingway’s work that his aesthetic was filtered through his worldview or personal history, and that detachment itself – as a trait that protects the psychologically wounded – was central to his worldview.
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I love Jim's phrase, "the true subject of every narrative is the teller's ineptitude." I don't know that I agree, but I also don't know that I don't. Perhaps it's because my own ineptitude is so great that I am so obtusely angled toward the longer form.
Maybe story is not the right word, and so when we talk about flash, we don't talk about flash stories. The landscape of language is littered with zombie metaphors, undead and awaiting revivification.
We are, according to the neurologists, hardwired for narrative. We know who we are because we have a constant narrative going--resulting not just from the rationalization of experience but also from the ongoing processing (perhaps rationalization) of the moment by moment reaction to stimuli. That personal narrative--the thing lost I suppose in amnesia--is not just past and present, but future, as well. (I am driving to work; I work on the 12th floor of a brick building; my office is on the left; when I get into my office I am going to log onto my computer and finish/start _____). But it seems to me that we must all have some idiosyncratic way of constructing such narratives, which is probably also soldered fast to the kinds of stories we tell and read.
What tends to interest me as a reader is how form and content converge. (Which certainly includes the artifice of constructed language.) How one might amplify or subvert the other. But at the same time, I'll admit to being a fairly sluttish reader, seduced by the next decent string of words that sashays past.
But Jim is right to talk of writers and readers and meaning. And Edward brushes very close to something else that interests me when he talks about "hint" fiction, and that is the proliferation of information.
It seems to me that a reader in 2009 brings vastly more to his/her reading than one did in 1989. And exponentially more than one did in 1889. Which may make the ultra-compact narrative possible or all but inevitable. Our cultural exposure to such a variety of information, it seems to me, makes it possible for a writer to infer vastly more than could have been inferred before--or makes it impossible not to infer.
But the thing also is that the refraction of information makes it possible not to say likely that much inference or allusion materializes in front of crossed eyes. But I don't know that that matters, either. In one way or another, perhaps we are all, as Febe said, trying to capture "moments in time," however ineptly, although we all might define those words (moments, in, time) differently. I can only speak for myself but I seem to be permanently aware (a story I tell myself, I guess) of the evanescence of the moment, and a kind of desperation to capture it, but there's also a conundrum in there that every moment behind the camera is itself evanescent.
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Steve: Sashay! Great nearly-dead word rescue.
Everything else was good too.
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It's a trend that's turning into a style. When you get this many people excited about a form and starting to enjoy and experiment with it then it kind of creates itself. I think this is what happened. Out of necessity and awareness of the times flash fiction appeared. It now seems as natural as breathing. And many practitioners have become artists. It had to be invented first. Played with. Refined. Defined. Deconstructed. And built again.Destroyed. Remade. Reinvented. You get it. It begs for new life. It once was the form of new life.It remains largely attractive. Again because so many talented writers are engaging it it is illumined today. But art is not about following a set of rules but believing in yourself and writing what you will.This short form forces us to burst with creative energy. That's why I like it. It's fun to read.
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all right, i'll take a stab at answering Gary's q (what's wrong w/ hiding).
w/ Hemingway, the metaphor for 3rd p narration goes from God to camera. (And, yes, the camera hides more than God does).
the thing about writing 3rd p narration in the classic, pre-Hemingway style: writers couldn't escape the 'reality' of what they were doing--trying to put a story together on paper. but when 3rd p narration goes camera, it's like all you have to do is let the camera run. Now stories are told in 'scenes.'
in the mid-forties, when Hemingway is approaching his apex in terms of influence and popularity, Iowa starts up the first MFA program and you have writers going into universities and writing instructional texts. my guess is that 'show don't tell' gets big in the proceeding years. 'Show don't tell' certainly fits Hemingway well enough.
back to the 'what's wrong w/ it' q: for young writers, reading 'show don't tell' in instructional texts.... it's too bad. It alienates them right away from what storytelling is or should be--thinking in story. 'Scene writing' teaches young writers to think more like essayists, i'd argue. They ask: what's my 'claim' in this 'scene'? (answer, for example: 'he's a manipulative prick'). They think: how do I show him being a manipulative prick without actually saying he's a manipulative prick?
how much bad writing can be ascribed to this?
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I think, Scott, we got here the old argument that has separated writers into Chekovians or Tolstoyites in criticism, workshops and literary arguments, for the whole of my life. As a Chekhovian, I think you have it backwards, naturally. Urging students to spatter opinions and judgements in a story not only shuts out readers, and closes doors and windows, but can make for stories that read like barely dramatized essays.
A numb, uninflected and author-seemingly-absent story
is always more interesting to me. We are all voyuers and eavesdroppers, I think. Why we love movies: it's okay to stare at and overhear strangers.
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no fair. i get to be a Chekovian too.
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