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| We can cut wherever we please, I my dreaming, you the manuscript, the reader his readings... " |
| -Francis Ponge, "Petits Poemes" |
Sometime after the resurgence of microwave ovens and before the emergence of VCRs, the midget fiction came into America's favor. Small of intent and large of portent, the short-short story the prose poem, versiprosa texts suddenly fit and accommodated. Other fiction genres, one must suppose, had become too capacious to handle. Midget fictions can be gnoshed quickly while longer forms, specifically the novel, the novella, the noveleenie and short story, take longer to bake in Minerva's oven.
The short-short story, Stuart Dybek once wrote, resides in a "No-Man's Land between prose and poetry," or like some barely graspable ice floe, as Joyce Carol Oates contends: "Very short fictions are nearly always experimental, exquisitely calibrated, reminiscent of Frost's definition of a poem a structure of words that consumes itself as it unfolds like ice melting on a stove." The nearer these texts come to resolution, the closer they move toward their own dissolution.
The prose poem in particular, with its essential, inborn ability to criticize and be skeptical of itself, is a utopian, implosive genre that seems to want to stretch itself, to embrace previously excluded types of disquisition.
The short-short fiction also has been a highly politicized genre – the more extreme the mode of composition, the more fundamental the belief in (and largely unrealized) utopian possibilities that dwells behind it. The best examples of the genre include what Fredric Jameson in Marxism and Form (1971) called "the reaffirmation of the existence of marginalized or oppositional cultures." In A Poverty of Objects (1987), critic Jonathan Monroe called the prose poem the genre "of class struggle within literature," and a "particularly amenable site for an examination of antagonisms of class and gender generally and the kind of exclusions that are preconditions of such antagonisms." We see this at work and play in Rosemarie Waldrop's The Reproduction of Prose Poems (1987):
We can now talk about formal sex in the same sense that we speak of formal concepts, you roared with violent gallantry, but this woman, my God! She was showing us downstairs. At the door, she pressed her body against yours and pressed and pressed until I put a quarter in her hand. Then she covered her mouth as if in fright or in order to protect the wet impact of your lips or, again, to keep a cry from rising into the air on large, trembling wings. I introduce this metaphor in order to get to the source of your confusion between formal sex and sex proper, which has looped the whole of traditional philosophy to the moment, toward the end of day, when the equator embraces the torrid zone.Waldrop's prose begins with change of the subjective to the impersonal viewpoint, and in gender "role" identification and the work itself seeks to find a way of managing its oppositions, of making peace between the oppositions. Her book as a whole, as with the precursive works of Rimbaud, Novalis and Schlegel, argues against hierarchical classifications, "a mutilation you must constantly sharpen your language for," Waldrop warns at book's end. Rather than consider the proem as just a genre among many, a viewpoint that actually attempts to restrict it, we should see a broad process of cultural transmutation occurring within it, through its variety of discourses and forms.
Two 1987 anthologies, widely diverse in content and yet both intent on framing these miniatures, are Robert Shapard and James Thomas' Sudden Fiction and Robley Wilson Jr.'s 4-Minute Fictions. The latter compilation of pieces apparently was named after TriQuarterly magazine's "Minute Fiction" issues of the mid-1970s.
These anthologies weren't the first to capitalize on shortness; Irving and Ilana Howe gathered up similar little firebrands in 1982 with Short Shorts: An Anthology of the Shortest Short Stories. Consisting of a few texts too long to be considered prose poems, the collection includes short stories by Tolstoy, Kleist, Boll and Kafka. And, in 1976, poet and translator Michael Benedikt compiled a mostly Francophile anthology of prose poems. Nevertheless, the short-short genre seems "new," due to the muchness of it, and has seemed to mark a kind of watershed for North Americans: The contents of these books are nearly completely contemporary works and are almost entirely made by Americans.
The stories comprising 4-Minute Fictions were gleaned from Wilson's own North American Review. More rangy, Sudden Fiction flies wilder and more freely. You can sense the fun Shapard and Thomas had in putting the book together. The stories in the more traditional 4-Minute Fictions are marked by sameness, which is not to say they are bad. They are mostly well written short-short stories, of the sort that North American Review has published for years, but indistinct from one another presented en masse.
While both books feature on-the-short-side works, Sudden Fiction gathers more bizarre oddments showing the true north, south, east and west of the encompassing genre. There are parables and fables (Russell Edson, Robert Fox), prose poems (Robert Coover), heart attacks (Max Apple, T. Coraghessan Boyle), questionnaires/lists (Lucas Cooper and a relaxed Jack Matthews, but no Richard Grayson), dreams/myths (Steven Schutzman), letters (Chet Williamson), obituaries (Fielding Dawson) and what-have-you's from others. Especially valuable is its 30-page practicum, "Afterwords." Here, dozens of writers contribute paragraphs, and sometimes stories, which attempt to critically define and make distinct their short-shorts from the genre's larger big brothers and sisters. The short-short, says John L'Heureux "should disturb us with its not quite homely or acceptable truths, like Ecclesiastes, like the Parables. Ontologically, the short-short story is an exercise in virtuosity that tightens the circle of mystery surrounding what we know, or what we think we know."
These Nervous-Nelly texts, featuring small (or no) casts of characters set in non-exotic places, make us work, participate and collaborate, and they disturb. "The form costs," reports H.E. Francis, "It sacrifices most of itself." Mark Strand concurs: "Its end is erasure." And yet they survive, despite their shortness of breadth. They thrive.
As these little tales vanish before our eyes, even as we read them, a great desire wells up, a wistfulness such as one experiences on waking from a honeyed dream, and one wants to hold them longer, to decipher them. (By death, all is decoded.) Short-shorts in their authenticity are not further examples of minimalist fiction, the dread blankness of the 1980s. Rather, short-shorts are direct descendants of magical realism, of wonder, the musical fugue and, as James B. Hall says, "cloisonné, ivory carving, the couplet." But with short-shorts, readers must rhyme the final rhyme.
Robert Coover's typically utopian "A Sudden Story," used cleverly as the Sudden Fiction foreword, is full of possibilities and typical of aspects of the genre. It begins, "Once upon a time, suddenly, while it still could, the story began." His yarn is a weird take on an amnesiac Grendel of olden days:
The hero, coming suddenly upon the dragon (he'd been tracking for years through enchanted forests, endless deserts, cities carbonized by dragonbreath, for him suddenly was not exactly the word), found himself envying, as he drew his sword (a possible ending had just loomed up before him, as though the horizon had, with the desperate illusion of suddenness, tipped), the dragon's tenseless freedom. Freedom? The dragon might have asked, had it not been so stupid, chewing over meanwhile the sudden familiar sourness (a memory?) on his breath. From what? (Forgotten.)And there it ends, an interactive fiction begging readers to make a move, to click a link.
Not all is perfect with Sudden Fiction, and one must resist the urge to let its contributors speak as its only and best signalers. Take, for example, Jayne Anne Philips' ugly line, "the whole sky sobbing potato juice"; and Hemingway's usual misogyny rearing up in "A Very Short Story," included probably for its title only. Better off disqualified as short shorts or prose poems are those pieces by Wolfe, Taylor, Sexon, Chapell, Williams, Garrett, Rushkin, Davis and Malamud. Their stories are simply too long for the genre, long enough to fit more comfortably, say, in 4-Minute Fictions. (Both books incidentally, include works by Philips, Boyle, Dybek and Raymond Carver.) In Wilson's brief introduction, he dutifully says the short-short is really nothing new, or not too new at least, dating to the 1930s when examples of it were published in such mainstream magazines as Collier's, Liberty and The Saturday Evening Post. One can go beyond that, of course, by pointing to Petronius' "The Widow of Ephesus" and other fables and wisdom literature of old. Says Wilson:
Fiction covers everything, is eclectic, clings to no armature of critical fashion; likewise this anthology [...] For every sad story, a happy one. For every taste, a dish.Almost so, for its writers don't paint from as varied a palette as in Sudden Fiction, and its stories seem like retrenchments for conservative language, form and gender/genre classifications. No matter; sub-rosa governments thrive in many other gardens.
We've all been expelled from the Garden of Possibility, as literature points out time and time again. But the exiles who suffer most are those who still dream of perfection. It is with trepidation, then, that one reads "Wearing Dad's Head" because, through it, it becomes quickly apparent that author Barry Yourgrau dreams violently, even painfully of a perfect, but lost, Garden.
Rest assured, the multitude of deaths in these alarming, allegorical short stories are strictly phantasmagoric. In them, a strange young narrator watches passively as mothers and fathers run symbolic gauntlets dreamed up by their Oedipal son. On one level, Yourgrau's 70 midget fictions resemble battle tableau from the psychological warfare in "Krazy Kat" or between comicdom's Calvin and Hobbes. In the latter and in these fictions, an Orc-like youngster by turns decimates and rescues his family members from partly real, partly imagined terrors. And on another, an Adamic youngster, apparently terrorized by the Eden provided him, thrashes out at his "father," trying vainly to rearrange his world though, in fact, he deranges it.
Readers will come away from these prose poems knowing they've suffered the same fate as "father" because Yourgrau's young narrator works us so very hard. In the first dozen pages, old dad, poor dad, dad loses his head here a kind of apple to his pilfering son. The son dons the head as his own, causing no more concern from mom than if he had just announced he'd borrowed his father's class ring for an after-school fist fight. The boy strolls down to the creek and finds a neighborhood of children all wearing their dads' heads.
By the end of "Cleavage," the by-now resurrected father is blond and quietly "nonplussed," having been transformed by the possibilities of the form into a cardigan-clad woman. The narrator's family, and we, nervously await an explanation from Yourgrau, but none is forthcoming. "The silence is measured out in the clank of a fork scraping up rice, the sawing of a knife through a fibrous pork chop the grinding of mastication, the gulping swallow of iced tea." There is no explanation; there is only a revelation: Yourgrau's mirthful boy wonder is to blame; storytelling wreaks its own havoc. In another small piece, Yourgrau's "Tongue," the narrator's tongue lies on the carpet like a piece of sodden firewood. The men pace around me, red in the face, pounding their thighs with huge fists. "You pathetic fool," they shout at me, "what have you done, what have you done!"
If one can withstand the flatly paced sentences that begin nearly every story "I come into the kitchen," "I drive with my parents for a picnic," "I trap a butterfly with a glass," "I'm eating lunch," - the rest of his tour will bump and grind.
Influenced by French Symbolist poetry, Walt Disney cartoons and tales of adventure, Yourgrau and the other short-shorters mentioned here also owe much to surreal, screwball and thriller movies, hard-boiled Americana, Westerns, children's fables, the subconscious and all the possibilities and oppositions found in literature's untamed margins. And with these tiny tableaux you can take the shortest road to get there.
Tell us what you think. Email talkback@pifmagazine.com
George Myers Jr. in 1987 published the anthology Epiphanies: The Prose Poem Now (now out of print). He also wrote Alphabets Sublime: Contemporary Artists on Collage and Visual Literature.
Myers edits LitKit (formerly George Jr.): "A Larkabout...for readers with brains."