Discussion → Very Short Fiction
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I think fiction writers are in a position to discuss praxis (a word I identify with strongly) in a way that leads to more collectivity than we have seen. Ron Sukenick published some of his views on these topics before his death several years ago. He wrote that fiction writers still believe they may stand to profit from their writing and so stay more mum on craft and meet together less. Poets have discussed poetics sometimes to the point of breaking into it as a form that replaces poetry itself. I have used the word prosetics. Jim's offered definitions here, brilliant ones, remind me of what I mean by "having a prosetics." I have been most interested in definition myself, but definition can be something personal and idiosyncratic. I skipped theory in school or skipped schools that dwelled on theory. I became peripherally aware of it and read writers, like Derrida and Barthes, for example, as imaginative writers in themselves, without learning to play by or against rules that derive from philosophy. I used the word "form" almost obsessively when I didn't understand something I was doing in terms of structure and genre only to be corrected, say, 15 years later, by poets (poeticists) with the word "design." There was something taboo about saying "form." Yet this discussion (one really of praxis) of short short fiction (and its relatives) cannot to my mind be summarized by the word "design." Again, I want to call it form. Design is related to the surface, perhaps to paragraph formation, style to language at the word and sentence level, and form (structure?) is that thing ... Jim called it scaffolding, I remember once ... that exciting thing in prose fiction that for me conjures up the new.
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I was taken to task when I was young by a writer who knew, for calling my work experimental. And so now I know. We're much too late.
The shorter forms can be realistc or nonrealistic, but have in common the necessary innovations that disguise what they lack (read: short cuts) with perceived experience (read: the illusion of wholeness). In an imagist poem this is achieved by movement. Set the image in motion and it is doing something. To achieve resolution in a traditional modern story, I might write an epiphany (read: switch to lyric mode). The shorter the piece, the more perfect the transition must be (read: loud, no time for subtlety). And so the shorty writers may seem more adept with the tricks (more practice, frankly, more whole pieces turned out in fewer days). But as readers and writers I think we are less invested. Not to diminish; we can be wowd, but if not...read two or three more in no time flat.
There's no doubt the web has popularized the form, and in some ways has led to a tyranny of shorties on the web. Very few online eds. will take long form, and the expectation, the justification is that it's what online readers want. So what may seem a revolution in style was dictated by editors, because who wants to read long works from a screen? Who wants to continuously print out reading material? These editors, unpaid and toiling to publish a cadre of mostly younger writers, be they connected or unconnected to writing programs, may have also seen thelves as reacting to the tyrrany of realism that dominates mainstream and literary publishing.
I would posit that the same technologies that gave us tweets, the phone, will also bring back (OK it never went anywhere - reinvigorate?) the long form. The reading experience on the iPhone is damned good and people are reading novels without complaint, freed f desktops, laptops, and holding the words in the hand, taking them on the go and the handy little iPhone also remembers the last page read.
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I see Eudora Welty as an experimentalist, going by her language practices, yet she solidified into a classic even before she died. Experimental to me means, along one train of thought, innovation. Occasionally, writers innovate in ways that affect other writers' practices. There's innovation yet to come and innovation we have barely assimilated within various traditions. I see it as a form of pessimism to say "nothing new under the sun." I see it as a kind of critical assault on the artist -- perhaps too strong a word -- to say originality is not possible. Zadie Smith in an oft-mentioned article in the New York Review of Books refers to "postmodernism" as a short-lived (and dead) experiment (beyond which we are now clear to get to the business of more enduring literature, as if experiment does not deepen conventionality itself). I was described as an experimental writer when I was in school. I didn't react as if pigeon holed, but I did suffer for it in that there were (at the time) few places to publish, for example, "fragmented" or politicized stories or fiction influenced by poetry. I didn't manage to publish a book on deadline: deadline seems to be about 30. I see that writers of very short stories face similar difficulties in publishing: they may not be a very small group.
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every act of writing seems to me to be an experiment--
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I agree with Ann, especially about the business of the experimental and/or postmodern and the role of praxis, (which retards somewhat a "pure" fiction".) The postmodernist notion that literature was exhausted, by 1968, say, making the only subjects available the impossibility of writing about anything other than the impossibility of writing and/or riffs and variations on existing works was just wrongheaded and, I think, an invention of critics, not writers. Sideliners.
I also agree that Welty was experimental in the extreme and would go further to say many writers seen as experimental--no names here--are ordinary in the extreme.
Because I started as a visual artist, the spillover imperative of form following function, or form and content, was a given for me. Long long or short short, on kindle, iPhone or page.
Ann's own heroic (in my view) search for a form,(as maybe opposed to a design) as she recounts it, is a kind of model of how one arrives at the authentic and true new. It's a question of defining the self in the context of what is going down and has done, (again--one's ineptitudes as much as one's strengths) and hunting out the ideal means of address for such a creature in such a landscape, bound to be a hybrid of forms, sometimes radical masquerading as traditional, sometimes transgressive, (is this this fiction or non?)bound too, to be misunderstood. I remember how some of Rick Barthelme's first stories were reviewed, for example, as if he were trying to replicate Updike and failing. It was like reading about a quarterback failing to hit a home run.
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I reread Zadie Smith's NYRB review and found a bootleg copy of her "Fail Better" essay I had read in the Guardian. Her critical voice is engaging, full of irony and exuberant detachment, and informed by her take on literary canons. In an interview she admits, ironically, to writing 19th c. novels. I feared that I had misrepresented her position on postmodernism and found I hadn't: she doesn't say much about it beyond a view -- not verifiably hers -- of pomo as historically determined, a patch in time. Maybe because she's British. CW promotes an American agenda, something that English departments I knew did not do; critics (who sometimes become poets after hire) scoff at CW in theory.
It's so complicated. Length in fiction pertains to form and to genre once it's complete.
I think Jim is not far off in saying that a quest for form, however accelerated or housed (as mine was) in a CW program, is or may be heroic as breakthrough, but what it entails is not on a c.v. Marriage is a form. Children is a form. House. Book. Then there are more open arrangements: Rent. Internet. Travel. Today I said my sister's relationship with her beau is "Homeric." He travels to men's conferences and festivals, and she holds down a flat: hearth and dogs and sewing business. An open variation.
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Hoo-eee, Ann brings up some really interesting stuff. Form. Content. Web. Print. Portability. Things have changed so much since I was a pup, hammering away on my Smith Corona, or the IBM Selectric I wrote my first novel on but sold in 1985 or 86 in order to by a two-sided floppy disk drive so I didn't have to keep swapping out floppies to save documents.
Smart people with highly sophisticated equipment have done studies on how people look at web content, where their eyes go, and how long they will look at particular areas of the screen, and applied serious scientific rigor to the construction of web content that grabs quantifiable eyeballs. And such rigor is deeply important when it comes to things like charging for web ads and quantifying unique and repeat page views.
Which has of course spilled into the cultural whatever-the-word-is-for-the-unconscious-perception-of-the-zeitgeist (zeitgeistgestaltverstehen?) And which in turn has dribbled its fluids or gasses or memes into the forms/designs/templates we have for fiction writing (which phrase suddenly seems sort of out of whack/date and not entirely adequate for what we're talking about here).
Big Segue Alert!
Sometime around the release of There Will Be Blood, I read in The New Yorker a review of (or perhaps an essay on) Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood's score for that film. Sasha Frere-Jones, maybe. If I recall the review, and my memory just isn't that good, it talked about how Greenwood had seriously studied cello and composition before Radiohead took off, but then left his studies to do "real" (i.e., paying) work. The reviewer/essayist said something about how it was good that Greenwood had been so successful with Radiohead and not finished an education in classical music, because his Popcorn Superhet Receiver, from which that TWBB score took a part, didn't have the self-consciousness, or the trendiness, it might have had had he pursued that education. And it included things that a more highly "trained" cellist/composer might have left out.
Like Ann, I more or less avoided theory, although my own dodge was one borne more of blithe ignorance than of any conscious path. Ever the sluttish reader, I read what I wanted to read, and still, to some extent, do. And came to my conclusions about how and what I wanted to write based more on what I could write. I remember a woman in a grad school CW workshop using the phrase "authorial intentionality" and all I could think of—given the moment, the topic of discussion, and her overall demeanor of haughty superiority (in toxic combination with my own more or less assholish self-absorption)—, What an asshole. (You can decide for yourself who was the bigger asshole.)
I tend to think that -isms and theories are more interesting for what they tell us about ourselves, our collective way of viewing things at a particular point in time, and for marketing purposes, than for any really profound thing they have to tell us about literature. I also tend to find theory useful mostly for the ways in which it can be used to subvert.
At a very basic level, Gary is completely right that every attempt at getting something on the putative page is an experiment—in writing, in vanity, in ineptitude, whatever. I'm not sure that any writer who is "experimental" in Jim's take on it is ever consciously aware of experimenting except in the way that Gary puts it. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that when you set out first to be "experimental," the experiment is doomed to failure. Please argue with me on this point. That doesn't mean that like Molly in another thread or Ann in this thread is setting out that way in trying to do something/find something that makes her head go up and down in recognition of the sensation that this feels right. Which certainly can include I-don't-want-to-do-that.
Zadie Smith's essay in NYRB, Two Paths for the Novel (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22083), in which she pits Joseph O'Neill's Netherland against Tom McCarthy's Remainder, and finds the former—in all its lyrical realism—wanting, and wanting in a big way. I love this for its trenchant insight and for its (apparently) effortless picture of the nose on our collective face: "to read this novel is to feel a powerful, somewhat dispiriting sense of recognition. It seems perfectly done—in a sense that's the problem. It's so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in fiction that it throws that image into a kind of existential crisis, as the photograph gifts a nervous breakdown to the painted portrait."
I have no doubt that if I read Netherland, I'd like it. I have those neural pathways and they are well worn The excerpts I've read, and the excerpts I've heard O'Neill read in his many radio appearances, seem "perfectly done." (Maybe, as the saying has it, to the point of putting a fork in it.)
On the basis of Smith's recommendation, I read Remainder. (I really seem to want to type these titles as Reamainder and Neitherland, but I'm not going to explore that ugly bit of my self/sub-conscious.) For a couple of hundred pages (for a couple of hundred pages!—call it walk-out-of-the-theater length) I kept wondering why I was reading. And then it started to happen. All of the parts McCarthy had put into place began to add up and it was as though the governing metaphor began to explode on me, but it wasn't in the sense of Bang!, it was more implosion, I guess, in the sense of feeling some trapdoor opening beneath the fundament of my expectation and all of it falling away. McCarthy's novel is "realistic," to a point, but it's not done in Realism. Or it totally subverts Realism in the way the "hero" continually reenacts reality. And for me the end of the novel is nothing short of mind-blowing. I don't know that I'd find that in Netherland, and I don't know that I wouldn't.
The point is, at least for me, that you could take a machine and scan both books and learn quantifiable things. Such as difficulty of reading in terms of vocabulary. You could hook readers up to sophisticated machines and calculate how often they closed the books, how many times they flipped back to reread certain pages—but of course you wouldn't know why. Certainly we have metrics on Netherland and Remainder—the former was/is a bestseller, the latter largely ignored (it would seem).
There are those who would argue with me on this, I'm sure (and please do), but there are some things—taste, perhaps—that can't be usefully quantified, to which metrics cannot be applied usefully, except in terms of commerce. And surely mainstream editors are going to go with the familiar.
Like Ann, I prefer the engagement of the longer form (I'm just getting started at 10,000 words). And having recently read my first (free) ebook (novel) on my iPhone, I found the experience more or less agreeable. Indeed, as it was a thriller (my sluttish reading habits again), I found myself going back to it the same way I go back to Wild West Pinball. Which tells us something, too, about the nature of electronic reading.
I think Ann is totally on to something in her (it appears to me) mistrust of what Smith calls the well-worn neural pathways of realism. And in the apparent easiness of the shorties. The question that arises for me, though, is are we wearing new, stunted neural pathways in short-short-short fiction, and if so, what are they doing?
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the other day i remarked to jurgen how much i was enjoying the exchange on matchbook, and then observed that the comments were far in excess of the flashes whose brevity they extol.
in this comment i have already exceeded scott's recent sixteen worder. in pointing this out with eleven words, i now have written 22, this 'graf alone, now 27.
point being that every attempt to elucidate art is not art, and misses, sometimes brilliantly, the point. only art can comment upon art, and for me, the age of experimentation in the sixties has not been matched as yet, and no really good writer of the period embraced the descriptor "postmodern," nor knew, as don barthelme remarked, how to slap a saddle on this rough beast. nevertheless, they rode.
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Stephen, segue is a great word. Ben Marcus in his essay on experimental fiction opens with an account of what takes place in the brain while reading. Is it neurolinguistics or metaphor? Another whole field called narratology, I think, connects narrative to quantuum physics. I think it was you who said that we have a vaster reserve of knowledge and information and our brains glean inference more quickly today (you related that to reading flash fiction). The Victorians used hand-held fans as sign language and read long books.
Gary, supposing you're right, supposing you are right (it reads right what you say), what then if art criticism becomes art, becomes becoming? Is it art or artifice? My form of pop culture is not TV nor even, very often, pop novels, but is (though I think of it as authentic) writer biography and interview. I gave up: sitting on the floor in bookstores to read blurbs.
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ann: you, i am still trying to figure, have been for a few weeks now--. you don't fit any known-to-me category, mercifully. i like that. on the other, sure, art crit could be art (as could most anything), assuming it gave up crit. but to do well as crit would it not have to stand apart, in the german notion of critique? philosophy, as in philosophy-of, e.g. philosophy of art, philosophy of literature which, sadly, i taught, once upon a time) is always already a second order operation.
on the steve-stuff, which i appreciated, segue and all: no one can imagine a planned poem (robert frost) and, furthermore, "god will find the pattern and break it" (john ashbery). and barack was reading o'neill, which surely indicates the stream has been mained, but this other, this flash neurology empirically based line, kicks the discussion where lit-types generally fear to go. no matter. we're ill equipped to zeit the zeitgeist.
i'm gonna hold on to the image of ann sitting on the floor of the bookstore reading blurbs. the ideal reader? updating updikes midwestern boy in the stacks.
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Stephen, have you been reading Fn on iPhone? I just got one and am surprised how little reading I do at the computer now. And I'm reading Fn much more - looks great.
But I know you didn't peck out that reply on iPhone ;)
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Ann, it seems to me that the best "art" "criticism" is art itself. Which may be what you're saying. Hard not to read Barth or Barthelme or Coover and not come away with a sense of implicit criticism of what preceded it. (Which of course I missed entirely when I first began reading them in the 70s, because I had no real grounding in what they were criticizing.)
That's the thing, though, isn't it? These days maybe we have frames of inference rather than reference. Or both. And so what makes one heart go all aflutter with recognition (I am thinking here of my daughters and the music they listen to, as though it were new [which it is, to them]) may leave another entirely unmoved. I don't doubt that it's always been this way, to some extent, but today the extent seems greater because we have the technology and the volition (however right- or wrongheaded) to have so many microcultures as to make "universal" reference significantly less likely.
WRT Gary's comment on length, I see no irony at all in having a discussion that's lengthier than the work, or, actually, I would if what we were talking about was a particular piece and not a sub-genre, or whatever you'd call flash fiction.
I hadn't heard of narratology, which made me giggle. I'm now going to have to go and look that up.
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Quantuum, so I laughed. I am due to vacuum with my new turquoise blue Miele. I shall never misspell (sp.) zeitgeistgestaltverstehen. Further, schmooze has an e.
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Donald Barthelme's piece, "How I Write My Songs," straddles the gap between (or is a fusion of) art and art criticism in the most literal sense. Is it a story masquerading as criticism, or criticism masquerading as a story?
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Seems we're back to the perlocutionay. I suspect most of us are on Fictionaut because there is, here, a ghost of a whisper of a chance that we will be read by someone who will comprehend us.
I'm not worried about Flash burning new cliche micro-troughs in the mind as, it seems to me, the gesture of ommission paradoxically opens out what is left and, rearranges my relation to each remnant text and as yet, I can't find a pattern or sequence of received ideas in such works as I can and do in most short stories and most novels--excepting the works of the folks here, naturally.
Weary and tedious points here: a book in three dimensional space is a fetish-worthy object and requires no electricity and has a kind of weight that is often part of the experience of reading it and it may be written on, or in, and, in some cases, dropkicked across the room. Hardware stores and hard copy libraries make me happy to be an upright land mammal.
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Edward, re: "How I Write My Songs." When I read this story for what was perhaps the third time some years ago, I read it (and others in 60 Stories) aloud, alone, and laughed so hard I went down on the floor, slapping the carpet with one hand, and weeping. Only one other book (story) had ever seemed so funny to me, and that was Berryman's novel, Recovery. All right, it's a parody, as I see it, of what: songwriters. Song writing. Sure, the reader of short stories, of these stories in particular, is going to feel that song writing is an easier art than short story writing. Bear in mind that the music & singing will bring in a different dimension. Try it, he says. It's for everyone. [Or think of trying it, then don't and say you did.]
Your question: is it criticism masquerading as story or story masquerading as criticism? It is an advice (how-to) article masquerading as story in a context of short stories: a motivational article backed up by copyrighted snatches.
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John:
No. Haven't been reading Fn on iPhone. But that would be a suggestion for Jurgen--get started on that iPhone Fn.app.
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Fn works fine on the built-in browsers for my Palm Pre and my wife's iPhone, no app needed.
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Everything needs an app.
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Touche.
Group Description
We're an online literary journal that publishes works of short, indeterminate prose and accompanying criticism. We feature one author every posting period (every two weeks). Every so often a question related to the form and function of fiction will be posted here for discussion.
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