The Transportive Power of Small Fictions Lies in the Offing
By K. Allen McNamara
One Christmas I got the most awesome gift, a View-Master viewfinder. The viewfinder allowed you to insert a disc filled with images that were actually 3D scenes. These were transportive - you could see Disney’s Magic Kingdom or Snoopy and Woodstock or Rocky and Bullwinkle. It was like being inside your favorite cartoon world. This is what the Short Story did for so many at the start of the 20th century; it transported the largely, newly literate, American worker to another place on the pages of a newspaper or magazine.
The Short Story reached its popularity pinnacle at the start of the 20th century. Short story writers found they could earn $4000 for a single story which would be today’s equivalent of roughly $80,000. The short story market was so lucrative because the reading public - those purchasing newspapers and magazines were often transient workers following the rail line looking for work. Given that its audience was not guaranteed to stay in one place, something which serialized novels required (the same X number of people reading the same paper over the course of the novel’s installments), serialized novels did not thrive in the United States. But short stories with their all in one containment published in a newspaper insured the story would be read and the advertisements next to them would be read.
Further, the Short Story form that emerged from the influence of Anton Chekhov (and which is the form still evident today), abandoned the novel’s need for beginning, middle and end. As William Boyd writes in his brief history of the short story: “Chekhov saw and understood that life is godless, random and absurd, that all history is the history of unintended consequences. He knew, for instance, that being good will not spare you from awful suffering and injustice, that the slothful can flourish effortlessly and that mediocrity is the one great daemonic force. By abandoning the manipulated beginning-middle-and-end plot, by refusing to judge his characters, by not striving for a climax or seeking neat narrative resolution, Chekhov made his stories appear agonisingly, almost unbearably lifelike.”
So what happened to the Short Story? From it’s rise in popularity and lucrativity in the 1920s? The answer is the same for the viewfinder - television and film. First movies with their increased technology of sound and visual effects and then television with its episodic story-lines happened. The single narrative that made the short story both wonderfully short and palatable started appearing in living rooms with both words and visuals. The Short Story became an art form. As noted by the blog Critical Mass (the National Book Critics Circle) in 2007: “The short story has evolved into a different creature than its forebears. The short story is no longer a popular narrative medium. Like poetry, the short story has honed itself out of the public eye and entered the depopulate badlands of Art.”
Is all hope lost of for the Short Story? Has it been reduced to merely a process that all aspiring novelists must learn and undergo in order to become a published novelist - just fundamental drudgery for the MFA student to wade through? Are short story writers now only writers-writers unappreciated by the reading public? This did indeed seemed to be the future berth of the short story, a place in the literary museum - an art form to be viewed, contemplated, and mimicked in the attempt to achieve the “greater goal” of the novel. Enter Stage Left Small Fictions: Flash Fiction, the Short-Short, Micro-Fiction and the Short Story forms of varying word counts. The Short Story of the internet age, of handheld devices and 140-280 character bite-sized of #vss is now Small Fictions.
Under the Small Fictions umbrella, the Short Story maintains at its core the classic definition of a Short Story as defined by Edgar Allan Poe: as being able to be read in one sitting. But Small Fictions also now encompass the part of the narrative that is un-filmable. Un-filmable that which cannot be captured by film. Consider this for a moment - it is that point that you as the reader just can’t but your finger on why it haunts you - that unfathomable point that echos and resonates with you after you’ve read it, that keeps coming back you after you’ve finished reading that short story and moved on. It is the Offing. In nautical terms the offing is defined as unanchored portion of the sea visible by land - with Small Fictions the Offing is the point that is unanchored, un-filmable but able to be glimpsed.
What is this elusive un-filmable part of all Small Fictions? What is the Offing of Small Fictions? It is as William Boyd points out what Poe struggled with when he first encountered the Short Story. “Poe was trying to put his finger on was the short story’s curious singularity of effect, something that he felt very strongly came from its all-in-one-go consumption. Poe continues: “In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction.”
A sense of fullest satisfaction - this is indeed what the masters of the short story of the 20th century accomplished and what the Small Fiction Writers of today also but today’s Small Fiction writers go one step further. They add to the Small Fiction forms (Flash, Micro, #vss, short-short) and albeit the Chekhov-propagated short story the added quality so avidly advocated by Chekhov: “The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.”
Perhaps this why so many Small Fictions leave the reader pondering and at times puzzled; because their endings are not all tied up. Their endings are in the “offing”, beyond the anchoring ground. Small Fictions leave the reader looking beyond the shore. And this is just as it should be when capturing the un-filmable.
****May is Short Story Month. This article is written in homage to Amy Hempel, Tara L. Masih, Kathy Fish, K. Kilbee, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiee Bender, Kelly Link, Jim Heyen and Stephen Vincent Benet - Short Story/Small Fiction writers who have made my life the richer one Small Fiction at a time.****
Sources Consulted:
*Becky Tuch Flash Fiction: What's it All About?
