Short-Short Sequences, Series, Sounds and Visions
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an online journal of trespassing art, science, and philosophy www.trespassingjournal.com Trespassing Genre: Issue 2, Winter 2013 Short-short Sequences, Series, Sounds and Visions Laura Tansley I see short-short’s everywhere. Scratched in to walls, printed on posters, between covers, beneath glass cases, in music. After nearly a decade of study, it’s not surprising that I have a preoccupation, that I might see a short-short rather than a piece of art, a poem, novel or a song. But what is surprising is that I’m always surprised by where I find them, and when I do find them, they consistently manage to change my understanding of the short-short and its reach, its potential; its definition spreads. What occurs to me now, as my research continues, is that the short-short story is about questions, and may always be about questions. What are the very things, the handful of things, when everything else is washed away, that makes a story? Or, what is it that makes truth/s in a story? Its forms are about questioning borders, and the questions that arise from existing in the margins. But the short- short is slippery, and my answers to these questions will never quite stay still. On short-shorts I first read Carolyn Forché’s ‘The Colonel’ in 2004 in a Creative Writing module called Microfiction I at the University of Cardiff. Forché’s piece was succinct and it stayed with me long after the words on the page ran out. So it was microfiction, for me, for a time. On trying to reference the piece for an essay I realised the version I had read had come from Flash Fiction: Very Short Stories. Fine. So it might be a microfiction then, and also a flash fiction: a very short story. Years later I found it again in an anthology called Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present. Ok, so it is still prose, still very short, but it exists in that blurry space between prose and poetry, in the space that questions what prose and poetry are – it even has a geographical designation, it is American. Searching for ‘The Colonel’ online, the first results I get are from poets.org and poetryfoundation.org. There is a YouTube video of Forché performing the piece which she introduces by saying, “This is the poem, ‘The Colonel’”. So it is a poem then? And the first sentence (or should I say line?) “What you have heard is true” (Forché 16), begs the question: is it even fiction? Forché is certainly regarded as a political writer, often drawing attention to human rights violations in her work, so could ‘The Colonel’ be interpreted as a lyric essay? And it was written in San Salvador. So could ‘The Colonel’ be (Latin)-American-flashing-micro-(non)fiction-prosetry? The short-short is exhilaratingly untidy and inconsistent in its definitions and, in its scrutiny of language, it blurs the boundaries between not only short prose and poetry, but 85 Trespassing Journal, Issue 2, Winter 2013 between fiction and non-fiction as well. The short-short can choose to waylay any categorisation in favour of truths and narrative and each time a short-short is translated into different contexts, its meanings expand; there is no fixed point of understanding because the short-short so readily defies strict definition. On a number of occasions works that I have been introduced to as short-short stories have appeared elsewhere under different generic designations. ‘Women’s Novels’ in Murder in the Dark by Margaret Atwood and Charles Simic’s pieces from The World Doesn’t End were other examples used in the undergraduate modules Microfiction I and Microfiction II. I also rediscovered them in the anthology Great American Prose Poems. The editor, David Lehman, discusses in his introduction the definition of prose poetry and in doing so raises more questions about genre and designations. He writes about how the last line of a prose poem “[slows] down the action…making the extraordinary seem somehow routine” (12). The “macabre twist”, as he describes it, that I recognise as a staple description of short-short writing, is used by him to define another genre (12). He goes on to discuss how Charles Simic’s prose poems could almost be treated as prose fiction, but for him their “extreme brevity, the ambiguous ways they achieve resolution, and their author’s unmistakably poetic intent” prevents them from being so (12). Why? Is brevity opposed to prose, fiction or otherwise? Is ambiguous resolution? What if we ignored the author’s intent, or were unable to know this – would the pieces fall apart? 1 So what is the difference between poetry and prose, then? In the SOED prose (as a noun) is that which is without metrical structure; a story, a narrative. As a verb it describes something straightforward and tedious. I try dictionary.com. It gives the same definitions, but includes different origins. I see the word prosa meaning straightforward, I see another, provertere, meaning to turn forward.2 Turning forward is intriguing; turning forward seems to mean veering whilst still progressing, taking a different, perhaps unknown route, turning and changing, re-turning, always turning towards, not turning away. Turning in writing, any kind of writing, rather than following the most direct route, might create something uncertain, powerful. This is the focus my writing and research takes, but seems indistinguishable at times as a distinct and clearly demarcated genre. Charles Baxter describes the short-short in the introduction to Sudden Fiction International as “between...the personal and the crowd”(25). Between the singular and the plural. As if we could all be the same person in the crowd, but just for the instant duration of a short-short; that tiny, subjective moments can reveal grander objective realities. The short- short is a capturer of transience, of the fleeting, but also of the eternal. It is contradictory, conflicted by its speedy pace and demand for an ambling consideration from the reader. The experience of brevity, the feeling of fleetingness, is as much a part of the short-short as the subject matter which should linger with the reader, like smoke, like light spots, like a ringing in the ears. The emphasis on the size of the short-short and, sometimes, the promise of an epiphany, can affect the way in which it is read. The reader can sometimes be tempted to devour it without pausing, but the short-short is also reflective, curious about its own 86 Trespassing Journal, Issue 2, Winter 2013 making and so encourages the reader to take pleasure in the journey, to savour it, repeat it even, and remember it. The length of the short-short should encourage this but equally, with speed comes forgetting. Perhaps our desire to consume prose (differently, sometimes, to how we consume poetry, which often sets different expectations for the consideration of rhythm, sonority and phonetics and so may require different approaches), can overtake the desire to pause, and these slowed down, reflective moments can become lost as we speed past. Contradictions persist with the short-short. Despite the short-short’s uncluttered sentences, its simplicity and straight-forwardness, its directness and minimalism, the short- short remains enigmatic. The way in which the short-short distils or sieves away the unnecessary does not necessarily reduce complexities but can draw attention to them as superfluous material is discarded. The micro-scope reveals the relationship between oppositions such as hidden depths and sharp focus, a sense of completeness within a hint of suggestion, of inclusion with exclusion, of speed and slowness. The short-short is aligned with uncertainty, contradictions and questions, and its compatibility with technology seems to compound these characteristics. Is there a difference between reading a short-short online and reading a short-short in a book? Is reading a short-short online a simulation of reading a short-short in a book? With a Kindle or an iPad it is definitely a simulation, the flick of a finger on the screen recalls the sound and feeling of turning a paper-page. Perhaps it is like the difference between hearing and reading a piece – unrealised nuances, pronunciations, pauses are all part of the aural experience. There is no touchable equivalent. So what of the online short-short, the short-short that exists temporarily, electronically? Does this exacerbate the transience of the form? It seems important to establish because the short-short is content on the internet, popularised in the last ten years by online magazines, journals and blogs that saw the potential (both creatively and administratively – quick to read, easy to deal with, easy to dispose of, not so easy to forget) for a form that could capitalise on the short-sharp bursts of linked information the internet provides. The paratextual flourishes here. There are no page numbers imposing a direction to go in, allowing the reader to move through sites and texts in a non-prescribed order, creating a kind of choice-based progression which alters our experience of a short-short. On short-short sequences Geoff Ryman’s 253: a novel for the Internet about London Underground in seven cars and a crash is a hyper-real, hyperlinked simulation of a tube journey in a series of pieces 253 words long (a number chosen because it is the same number of passengers housed on a typical Bakerloo line train) that manipulates the choice-based progression of online information. The reader is guided by tube-like anonymous announcements; fictional advertisements become illustrative distractions.