Subject: Re: [Re: What distinguishes short fiction from very short fiction, besides length?]
From: Bloomyberg (bloomyberg@usa.net)
Date: Wed May 10 2000 - 22:59:12 GMT
"Tim O'Connor" <tim@roughdraft.org> wrote:
>I have an anthology called "Sudden Fiction," which contains extremely
>short stories -- one to perhaps three or four small pages -- and that
>tried to showcase the minimalist movement of the 1980s, but while it
>was intellectually engaging, there was not much emotional engagement.
>Most of the stories were like local stations whizzed by when you are
>on an express train. You know you passed SOMETHING, but you don't
>quite know what, and you don't, in the end, really care. My
>experience with really short fiction is that too often it's about a
>technique and not about engaging the reader. An exception, I think,
>is Hemingway's "A Very Short Story," which manages to compress an
>awful lot of character and malice in a tiny space.
That's funny. I was going to mention Sudden Fiction International, but I
thought that I'd stick with Short Shorts. Then I wanted to mention "A Very
Short Story," but I didn't want to write "An example of a very short story is
Hemingway's 'A Very Short Story'", as I thought that it would evoke
snickering.
I hesitated to write that short stories can be multithematic and that novels
can concentrate on a single event, but then I remembered Ulysses and Catcher.
It's true that Catcher is not about a single day in the life, as Ulysses is,
but it seems so incredibly focused on a very small handful of themes. A short
story may be multithematic even if it delineates a single event, and a novel
can examine a very short span of time or action, as Ulysses does.
Which reminds me of something the writer Clark Blaise once said, about there
being no perfect novels, only perfect short stories, because there will
inevitably be dull stretches in novels due to their length. I disagree,
because I think that Gatsby is a damn near perfect novel.
-Bloomyberg
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