Reality Hunger (39 page)

Any opportunity that a writer has to engage the reader intimately in the act of creating the text is an opportunity to grab on to. White space does that. I don’t ever want to be bored, and I certainly don’t ever want any of my readers to be bored. I’d much rather risk them getting annoyed and frustrated than bored.

The gaps between paragraphs = the gaps between people (content tests form).

These fragments I have shored against my ruins. Cyril Connolly’s
The Unquiet Grave
. Eduardo Galeano’s
The Book of Embraces
. Richard Brautigan’s
Trout Fishing in America
. Sven Lindqvist’s
A History of Bombing
.

The grandfather clock is the reflection of its historical period, when time was orderly and slow.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock
. It stood there in the front hall in its great, carven case, with a pendulum like the sun or the moon. There was something monumental and solid about time. By the 1930s and ’40s, wristwatches were neurotic and talked very fast—
tick-tick-tick-tick
—with a second hand going around. Next, we had liquid-crystal watches that didn’t show any time at all until you pressed a button. When you took your finger off, time disappeared. Now, no one wears a watch; your phone has the time.

If fiction has a main theme, a primary character, an occupation, a methodology, a criterion, a standard, a purpose (is there anything left for fiction to have?), it is time itself. One basic meaning of narrative: to create time where there was none. A fiction writer who tells stories is a maker of time. Not liking a story might be akin to not believing in its depiction of time. To the writer searching for the obstacle to surpass, time would look plenty worthy a hurdle. If something must be overcome,
ruined, subverted in order for fiction to stay matterful (yes, maybe the metaphor of progress in literary art is pretentious and tired
at this point
(there’s time again, aging what was once such a fine idea)), then time would be the thing to beat, the thing fiction seemingly cannot do without and, therefore, to grow or change, must. Time must die.

Nonfiction, qua label, is nothing more or less than a very flexible (easily breakable) frame that allows you to pull the thing away from narrative and toward contemplation, which is all I’ve ever wanted.

Stephen Dobyns says that every lyric poem implies a narrative, but the lyric poet might just as easily reply that every narrative poem obscures a lyric. The man in the restaurant crushing a wineglass in his hand acts out an emotional complex not wholly explained by a hard day at the office, or being cheated in the taxi, or what his companion just said. If the narrative writer is instinctively curious about the individuating “story,” the distinct sequence of events preceding that broken glass, the lyric poet may be as naturally drawn to the isolated human moment of frustration—the distilled, indelible peak on the emotional chart.

In
Moulin Rouge
, Baz Luhrmann takes the most thrilling moments in a movie musical—the seconds before the actors are about to burst into song and dance, when every breath they take is heightened—and makes an entire picture of such pinnacles.

When plot shapes a narrative, it’s like knitting a scarf. You have this long piece of string and many choices about how to knit, but you understand that a sequence is involved, a beginning and an end, with one part of the weave very logically and sequentially connected to the next. You can figure out where the beginning is and where the last stitch is cast off. Webs look orderly, too, but unless you watch the spider weaving, you’ll never know where it started. It could be attached to branches or table legs or eaves in six or eight places. You won’t know the sequence in which the different cells were spun and attached to one another. You have to decide for yourself how to read its patterning, but if you pluck it at any point, the entire web will vibrate.

in praise of brevity

The short-short story isn’t a new form. It’s not as if, in 1974, there sprung from the head of Zeus the short-short story. Still, the short-short (dreadful label, but what’s better?) feels particularly relevant to contemporary life. Delivering only highlights and no downtime, the short-short seems to me to gain access to contemporary feeling states more effectively than the conventional story does. As rap, movie trailers, stand-up comedy, fast food, commercials, sound bites, phone sex, bumper stickers, email, voice mail, and
Headline News
all do, short-shorts cut to the chase. Short-shorts eschew the furniture-moving, the table-setting typical of the longer story.
Here, in a page or a page and a half, I’ll attempt to unveil for you my vision of life;
short-shorts are often thrillingly nervous-making for both writer and reader. In the best short-shorts, the writer seems to have miraculously figured out a way to stage, in a very compressed space, his own metaphysic:
Life feels like this
or at least
Some aspect of life feels like this
. What in the traditional story requires character and plot is, in the short-short, supplanted by theme and idea.
Every work, no matter how short or antilinear, needs momentum; the momentum of the short-short is lyrical in nature—
What does this mean?
—rather than narrative in nature:
What happens next?
My reaction to a lot of longer stories is often
Remind me again why I read this
, or
The point being?
The point, such as it is, often seems to me woefully or willfully obscure in even the most well-made stories. I’ve become an impatient writer and reader: I seem to want the moral, psychological, philosophical news to be delivered
now
, and this (the rapid emotional-delivery system) is something that the short-short can do exceedingly well. Even as they’re exploring extremely serious and complex material, short-short writers frequently use a certain mock modesty to give the work a tossed-off tone and disarm the reader. The reader thinks he’s reading a diary entry, when in fact it’s a lyric essay or prose poem. Short-shorts remind me of algebraic equations or geometry proofs or lab experiments or jigsaw puzzles or carom shots or very cruel jokes. They’re magic tricks, with meaning. Examples: Jayne Anne Phillips’s “Sweethearts,” Jerome Stern’s “Morning News,” Any Hempel’s “In the Animal Shelter,” Linda Brewer’s “20/20,” Gregory Burnham’s “Subtotals.”