David Means: Master of the Short Story

The Secret Goldfish (2004) is David Means’ third book, and it goes against good economic sense, not to mention the probable pleas of his agent and publishers, that it is, once again, a book of short stories. Although his earlier collection, Assorted Fire Events (2000), won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, was short listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and received rave reviews both in America and England, still it was just a collection of short stories.

 I suspect the guy can’t help it.  Like Borges, who once said that a short story may be, for all purposes, “essential," or Andre Dubus, who said he loved short stories because “they are the way we live," or Alice Munro, who once told an interviewer that she doesn’t write novels because she sees her material in a short-story way, David Means-- like Chekhov, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, and Grace Paley--sees the world in a short-story way.

To understand that “short-story way,” pick upThe Secret Goldfish  But don’t rush through them. Read one, put the book by and meditate on the mystery of the human condition the story explores. Then wait a while before reading another. The short story is often misunderstood and underrated because readers read it the same way they do sections of novels. 

Don’t go to David Means for plot that rushes to its inevitable end or for easily recognizable character, like the folks you meet every day. Go to David Means for some scary, sacred, sense that what happens is not as important as what it signifies and for the shock of recognition that those you thought you knew you don’t really know at all. You go to Means for mystery and the paradox understood by the great short story writers from Poe to Chekhov to Carver--that if you remove everything extraneous from a scene, an object, a person, its meaning is revealed, stark and astonishing.

The first paragraph of the first story, “Lightning Man,” makes clear that the realm of reality that matters for Means is sacramental, ritualistic, miraculous--a world in which the old reassurances, such as lightning never strikes twice in the same place, are shown to be nonsense. Here a man is struck seven times throughout his life by a powerful revelatory energy until he becomes a mythic creature, waiting for the inevitable eighth.

In the short-story world of David Means, a mundane tale of infidelity and divorce gets transformed by the metaphoric stillness of a neglected goldfish in a mucked-up tank, surviving in spite of the stagnation around it. Means’ short stories are seldom satisfied with linearity of plot and thus often become lists of connected mysteries. “Notable Dustman Appearances to Date” is a series of hallucinatory manifestations of famous faces in swirling dust kicked up by wind or smoke:  Nixon, Hemingway, Gogol, Jesus.

“Michigan Death Trips” is a catalog of catastrophic disruptions, as people abruptly disappear beneath the ice of a frozen lake, are suddenly struck on the highway, or hit by a stray bullet from nowhere.“Elyria Man," lays bare mummified bodies found lying beneath the soil, as if patiently waiting to embody some basic human fear or need.

In each of these stories, David Means reveals the truth of our lives the way great art always has—by making us see the world as it painfully is, not as our comfortable habits hide it from us. 

In an interview after the publication of his award-winning second collection, Assorted Fire Events (2000), Means said he feels that if you're really good at something you should keep doing it.  His fourth collection, The Spot (2010), thirteen new stories, which originally appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, Harper’s, and other places, is just one more piece of evidence that Means is very good at what he does.

Since his first collection, A Quick Kiss of Redemption (1993), Means has largely moved away from Chekhovian realism, taking more chances with experimental narrative structure. Pursuing tactics begun in Assorted Fire Events and made more evident in his last collection, The Secret Goldfish (2004), Means takes increasing liberties in The Spot with storytelling techniques to explore the nature and importance of storytelling itself.

Two stories in The Spot focus on tramps gathered around a campfire spinning yarns.  In “The Blade,” the central character, Ronnie, hesitates about telling his peers his “blade story,” for he knows it will involve making explanations about how he spent a couple of years with an old tramp named Hambone, which would expose the old tramp to the ridicule of the men.  Ronnie’s blade story centers on his waking up one morning with Hambone holding a knife at his throat, insisting that if Ronnie does not believe the good things he has told him about his mother, he will kill him.  However, Hambone has told Ronnie two stories: one characterizing his mother as a wonderful woman and another, two months earlier, in which he said she did not have a decent bone in her body.  Even though Ronnie tries to placate Hambone by agreeing that his mother was a great woman, the old man does not let up; Ronnie is forced to turn the knife and kill him, making his blade story one in which he wields the weapon.

Means’ second hobo story, “The Junction,” is considerably lighter, but no less focused on the importance of storytelling. The central character is a man named Lockjaw, who, like all hoboes whose lives depend on telling convincing stories, knows that one has to spin out a yarn and keep it spinning until the food is in your belly and you are out the door.  The story, which has to be just right, is drawn not from one’s own life, but from an amalgamation of other tales the teller has heard in the past, within which he must weave his own needs.  Lockjaw tells the other tramps about spinning a story at the kitchen table of a family who is feeding him. When the husband asks him if he has taken Jesus as his savior, Lockjaw responds a little too fast to be believed, and the man goes upstairs and gets his gun. However, the wife cajoles her husband and tells Lockjaw that if he returns, she will set out a piece of pie for him on the windowsill.  The story ends with Lockjaw’s coming back for the pie, which may or may not be the subject of another story.

In addition to hoboes and tramps, Means explores in three stories another group of characters who live their lives on the road--thieves and scam artists. “Nebraska,” told with Means’ usual flawless syntax, focuses on a young woman who is involved in an armored truck robbery in Nebraska, engineered by a man named Byron, with whom she lives.  These are amateurs, members of the underground in the late 1960s, planning the robbery to finance bomb making to demolish the status quo, with Byron spouting a lot of rhetoric about striking out against the corrupt system.  Although they make careful plans to execute the robbery, at the crucial moment when Bryon and his partner shoot two Brinks guards, the central female character, in charge of the getaway car, panics and drives away, leaving them literally holding the bag.  The central tension in the story is the young woman’s romantic identification with Depression era thieves, Bonnie and Clyde—not the real bank robbers, however, but Faye Dunaway and Warren Beattie in the movie “Bonnie and Clyde.”

“The Botch” is a more explicit exploration of the gap between the plan and the execution of a robbery. The key phrase, which opens the story, and which is repeated throughout is, “The idea is…” And the basic idea of the thieves in this story, also amateurs, is to “to tap into the old traditions” of the bank heist, in which they see themselves as Robin Hoods, trying to free money from the big syndicates.  The thieves must act formally, like movie stars, playing their roles and thus avoid the typical “botches” that might make the robbery fail.  However, again at the crucial moment, the central character sees a woman on the street in a tight red skirt, stumbling in her high heels, and is distracted, causing him and his partner to shoot an old man in the bank.  After they escape, the central character wants to return to the scene of the crime, approach the woman, and shift the burden of the botch to her.

A more explicit treatment of the gap between the vision and the event is “Oklahoma,” in which a man named Lester picks up two young women and teaches them how to scam stores by picking up receipts in the parking lot, grabbing goods in the store, and returning them for cash back.  The central point-of-view character is a young woman named Genevieve, who is taken in by Lester’s blustering talk of making a movie. Throughout the story, she sees their lives as if they are actors in a film being made, in which they move about in a fake movie night that’s not dark enough to be real, with fake snow on their shoulders, refusing to melt. 

The title story, "The Spot," is about another on the-road couple--Shank, a lost sixties soul who cannot extricate himself from a high, and Meg, a fifteen-year old kid he has picked up and pimps for a seed salesman. The title comes from Shank telling Meg that there is a spot out on the lake, a “suck” where the Cleveland water supply is drawn in.  She thinks about that spot while the john is having sex with her.  After Meg chokes the john to death on his own string tie, Shank takes her to Niagara Falls and pushes her over. The real story is not these horrific events, but, as usual, Means’ masterful telling of them.  In a story within the story, Shank tells the half-sleeping Meg about a man named Ham who lived in an old hobo hangout with a girl who Shank fancies.  Offering to baptize her, Shank has her take off her clothes and holds her down in the water.  When Ham comes running to the stream, Shank holds her down too long and drowns her.

 “A River in Egypt” is a story of one of those terrifying periods between suspicion and confirmation of the worst. The central character Cavanaugh, has taken his son to be tested in a sweat room for cystic fibrosis.  The title derives from the child’s toy called the Question Cube, for which one of the questions is, “What river is in Egypt?”  Means may be playing a little word game on the old pun of “denial,” for this is a delicate story about a father trying to deny or forestall the dreaded test results. The story ends with a moment when the father, who has been concerned with his own anxiety about the future, shifts his attention to the boy lying in the back seat of the car to focus on a luminous present.

“Reading Chekhov” is a version of Chekhov’s famous “Lady with a Pet Dog.”  The story is told in brief sections that move back and forth between the man, who is a 35-year-old part-time student at a seminary, and the woman who is married with a daughter.  They know they are part of the overall tradition of adultery, reading “The Lady with the Pet Dog” together and comparing themselves to Chekhov’s lovers. When walking in the park, the woman’s heel stick in the soft ground and she falls, breaking the bone just above her ankle. She tells her husband she did it stepping off the curb—a lie that makes her decide to end the affair.  Like Chekhov’s famous story, this is a perceptive exploration of the subtle complexities of adultery.

Means is often concerned with essential mysteries that defy explanation. “Facts Toward Understanding the Spontaneous Human Combustion of Errol McGee” is an account told in separate sections of the spontaneous combustion of a man sitting in a chair looking out a window.  The different sections suggest various theories to account for this inexplicable mystery, e.g. the hair ointment the man wears, a sympathetic reaction to his son’s death by napalm during the war, the white heat of memory of a past showgirl lover. This is a story about essential mystery and symbolic explanations, for only symbolic explanations can account for the inscrutable.

In “The Gulch,” three teenage boys crucify another boy on a homemade cross set up in a gulch to see if he will rise from the dead.  The focus of the story is on various possible explanations for the murder, as news commentators and professors try to find reasons and precedents for the crime.  A detective named Collard, who is investigating the case, thinks that when he retires full of stories, the incident in the gulch will be the classic one he pulls out of his hat when the conversation gets boring.  He knows, however, that his job now is to find out who dreamed up the idea and made it true.  Making an idea come true and making stories out of inexplicable acts constitute the themes of many of David Means’ stories in The Spot. 

“The Knocking,” the shortest story in the collection, is in many ways one of the most complex. The first-person male narrator complains of knocking noises from the man who lives in an identical apartment above him. We know nothing about the narrator or the noisy neighbor—just a lot about the nature of the knocking—until three quarters through the story when the narrator says that the knocking often comes late in the day when the man above knows that he is in his deepest state of reverie, feeling a persistent sense of loss of his wife and kids.  In the last two paragraphs, the narrator begins to identify with the knocker, remembering when he had gone around, fixing things at his own house, trying to keep it in shape. “The Knocking” is about having nothing worthwhile to do, and thus engaging in an activity that is irritating, but that you cannot cease doing.  The rhythm of the story echoes the repetitive, annoying, meaningless actions.  Means creates a timeless universality here that allows the reader to become deeply embedded in the story, caught up in a language event that is, paradoxically, both a personal obsession and an aesthetic creation.

David Means’ unerring ability to transform the seemingly casual into the meaningful causal is what makes him a master of the short story, placing him in the ranks of other great short story writers such as Andre Dubus, Raymond Carver, and Alice Munro, who stubbornly resisted pressure to desert their chosen form for the more highly prized novel.   

David Means' "The Mighty Shannon" and Andre's Dubus III's "Listen Carefully As Our Options Have Changed"

I have long had an uneasy suspicion that really good short stories embody a philosophic, psychological, theological, or interpersonal theme about the complexity of what it means to be a human being—basic, universal issues.  I have talked about the importance of universal theme many times on this blog—indeed every time I have discussed the stories of Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Bernard Malamud, William Trevor, David Means—to mention only a few of the really great short story writers.

One of the differences between really good short stories and merely ordinary short stories, I am convinced, is that "ordinary" short stories and most novels are more concerned with as-if-real characters and events than with  themes, or, if they do seem to be "about" something,  their themes are often obvious and simplistic.

This makes me "uneasy" because it suggests that good short stories make demands on the reader that ordinary short stories and most novels do not—a claim that smacks of elitism and the academic because it suggests that one has to "learn" how to read good short stories, but not how to read ordinary short stories and most novels.  It makes me uneasy because it may cause some readers to huff and sneer that such good stories may be fit only for students and professors in the classroom, not for ordinary people in the real world (whatever that is)

This issue occurred to me again recently when, after reading Andre Dubus III's story, "Listen Carefully As Our Options Have Changed," in his new book Dirty Love, I read a story by David Means in the February issue of Harper's Magazine entitled "The Might Shannon." Although both stories are ostensibly about one man's attempts to deal with his discovery that his wife is having an affair, I thought Dubus's story was just an ordinary one, that is, a story with an obvious, even simplistic theme; while I thought Means' story was a very good one, that is, a story with a complex philosophical theme about what it universally means to be human.

Now, in all fairness, I have to admit  a predisposition:  I have always admired David Means' stories and have always respected him for remaining staunchly committed to the short story form.  And I must also confess I have always thought Andre Dubus III's fiction was second rate—just ordinary novelistic House of Sand and Fog stuff, casually realistic and carelessly written, about as-if-real characters and interesting plots that not very challenging.

Furthermore, I surely don't have to remind anyone that I am partial to short fictions, much preferring them over long fictions. Dubus's story is a "short novel"—about 25% of his book; whereas Mean's story is a very short story— about five and a half pages in Harper's. And, I would argue ,Dubus's piece is not a tightly woven, thematically dense novella like the classics of the "novella" genre, but rather a "novel" that just happens to be relatively short.

Finally, I have to admit, once again, that I greatly admire writers who love the language and treat it carefully, making it an inextricable part of the narrative, not merely a transparent means by which the narrative jogs realistically along, a clear glass through which to view the world (whatever that is). Given this criteria, there is no doubt in my mind that David Means is a much more scrupulous artist of language than Andre Dubus III.

If all that makes me an effete snob, a dilettante, an ivory tower academic just plain out of touch with the gritty world of everyday reality, one of those ethereal characters who cannot abide Junot Diaz, but loves Henry James—then so be it.

Let me make a few comments about the Dubus story first, for it is fairly easy to dismiss. The central character, Mark Welch, aged 56,, has been married to his wife Laura, also 56) for 24 years.  When he suspects that Laura is having an affair (because one night he senses she holds his testicles as if she is comparing them to someone else's), he hires a detective to make a video of the man treating her to oral sex in a parked car.  Welch forces his wife to watch the video, and makes a wreck of the kitchen when she says he made her do it by always criticizing her. Much of the rest of the story focuses on his alternating between rage and remorse—imagining what his wife has been doing with the man, taking a peek at her email record, planning on how to kill the man, convincing himself that he doesn't care because she has bad breath and has never really been a good cook, having a sexual encounter with another woman, fantasying she will return to the man she has loved all along, etc. etc.—all pretty pedestrian soap opera stuff that goes on and on repetitively and predictably.

In order to provide some motivation for the affair and some opportunity for Mark to reach an inevitable self-recognition, we are given some background to his becoming a successful project manager by being more than a little ruthless and, from his wife's point of view, just plain bossy. In a revelatory confrontation she tells him, "You treat me like I work for you. You always have.  Well I don't work for you all right?"

The story ends with Mark thinking maybe he will apologize to her, make it all up to her, pay more attention to her, let her do whatever she wants.  Standing at the threshold to his home, he hears her footsteps in the entryway: "his heart in his head once again for he did not know if he was even up for any of this, this change from change, the door swinging inward as he straightened, his wife's face lovely and surprised and waiting."

What is this story about?  Well, it is about what many soap operas on television are about.  Nothing more. Simplistic, predictable, pedestrian, ordinary.  On finishing it, a reader might tsk tsk testily at Mark's bossy attitude toward his wife, nod knowingly,  and smile smugly.

David Means does not give a name for the male character in his story; he is simply "I" in this first-person account that begins with a pain in his hips and lower back and shoulders and neck, for which he consults a doctor. The doctor says he needs to look at the man's stress levels, suggesting that it is possible that his musculoskeletal pain is related to his emotional life.  The idea that something inner might be related to something outer is echoed when, standing vulnerable  in his underwear, the man looks out of the examining room window and sees his reflection, "while a barge navigated through his belly and the buildings of Fort Lee, New Jersey, stabbed through his breastbone."

The man thinks a great deal about his condition, just as Mark Welch does in Dubus's story, but he thinks in longer, more complex sentences. For example, after the doctor's tentative diagnosis, he thinks:

"I did not want to acknowledge that one way or another my so-called migrating pain was connected to what was going on at home, not only with Sharon, who at that time was in the middle of her affair with her colleague at the firm, but also with my own thing with Marie, who was at that time my lover but also, in truth, a responsive gesture (as Dr. Haywood would later call it)."

The theme of the relationship between inner and outer is suggested again in the following long, well considered sentence: "Even there on that crinkling sheet of paper, with sweat beading on my brown, listening to Dr. Zuck breathe while the light outside faded and the light inside, fluorescent and shrill, pressed the glass, I had a sense that whatever was going on with my body was eventually going to find a way to relate itself to the extremely tactile facts of my life, my son, the house, the yard, as they, in turn, would relate to vague, nebulous, cloudy sensations that surrounded love, desire, loneliness, need."

Compare this with Dubus's more obvious description of his character considering what to do about his cheating wife:

"Wasn't it time to let her go?  But to allow the question into his head and heart was to allow a black tumor to take residence there where it would grow.  But the only thing growing was this distance between himself and the world he supposedly lived in.  He's become a man things happened to, and he found himself groping for the tools of his work: Risk response and its plans for contingency and mitigation.  The monitoring and controlling of the results of those plans."

The man in Means' story says he is aware of his "predicament as it would unfold in the next few months…until, finally, the story of my pain—as Dr. Haywood would describe it—would merge with the story of my relationship with Sharon and our simultaneous assured destruction in the form of two affairs."  Telling the story years later, he has trouble dividing the blame between himself and his wife, although he knows she betrayed him first and he responded in kind; he does admit, however, because he is the one telling the story, "the whole unseemly thing was ultimately on my shoulders."

One indication of the difference between the level of complexity, both syntactic and psychological, in the two stories, are examples in each of a kind of Henry Jamesian self-reflexive awareness.

When Mean's central character describes an encounter with his son Gunner's Spanish teacher, with whom he later has a brief retaliatory affair, she greets him with "Hey, Gunner's Dad." He avoids mentioning Gunner.  "Looking back, I think that one thing that sparked our relationship was her awareness of my avoidance, and my awareness of her awareness, which fed a mutual effort to keep the two arenas separate, opening up a glorious no-man's land, a pure space, unbinding and wild."

When a woman smiles at Dubus's central character as if she has known him longer than she has, the narrator  says: "This makes him feel comfortable which then makes him uncomfortable for feeling so comfortable."

It just seems to me that the Means double awareness is more complex than the Dubus one.

Midway through "The Mighty Shannon," the narrator/central character enacts a repetition of the inside/outside theme that may be quite familiar to literary readers.  When Marie sneaks over to his house during a lunch break while his wife is not home, we have this passage:

"Inside my house, I felt not only the guilt and fear you'd expect but also the same brooding sense of myself I'd get two years later at our annual holiday cocktail party, standing at the window and looking out at the cold, wintry street while behind me someone shook a shaker with an icy sound like a comet flying through the din of chat, and I stared outside for a few beats beyond civility and felt, behind me, the party I was hosting awaiting my return.  One more man staring out his window feeling the weight of his obligations shove him into a loneliness that was almost, but not quite, beyond comprehension."

Compare Means' passage with this famous account of a man looking out a window at a wintery scene:

"Gabriel's warm trembling fingers tapped the cold pane of the window.  How cool it must be outside!  How pleasant it would be to walk out alone, first along by the river and then through the park!  The snow would be lying on the branches of the trees and forming a bright cap on the top of the Wellington Monument.  How much more pleasant it would be there than at the supper-table!"

That tapping of Gabriel's trembling fingers is picked up in Joyce's grand final paragraph:

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window.  It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight… It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.  It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns.  His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

Lest you think this is an accidental echo, Means' central character says he felt the same sensation when he went on a second honeymoon with his wife to Ireland.  Indeed, the title of the story comes from his recalling a third honeymoon when he and his wife cross a bridge over what one of them refers to as "the mighty Shannon."  Joyce's "The Dead" is a classic of the short story genre because it explores the theme of the mystery of the inner life, the secret life, so delicately.  David Means pays a subtle tribute to the story.

Another example of the inside/outside theme occurs when Means' character describes one afternoon when his cell phone rings and he hears his wife's voice as if far off, and he realizes it is a "pocket dial" and that her phone is in her purse.  He hears a giggle that he knows she makes only in response to something said "in the most intimate terms."  He shouts, "Hey, hey, I'm here in your purse, Sharon.  I'm right here in your fucking purse."  He admits that now, years later, he is still ashamed of being privy to a moment of her life from that vantage: "It was as if I'd gone behind her face for a moment and stared out through the bright blood spume of her eyelids."

This is the most crucial example of the inner/outer theme Means creates throughout the story because it suggests that most important ability to empathize with the other—to be able to go out of the self and see as the other sees.  This is, indeed, the heart of "The Mighty Shannon."

The story ends with the central character and his wife Sharon sitting on their back deck with drinks in hand, recalling their meeting with a marriage counselor and laughing at how he had fallen to the floor of the office because of his pain.  He says if you were hiding in a bush near their deck you would hear the "intimate forgiving sound" of Sharon's laugh and his own responsive laugh, an entwined sound that is like a "Bach counterpoint: two themes working together in a helix of motion, twisting around a dark heavenly void that might be where God, if he lives, lives.  Hearing it, you'd be able to tease out the story that had produced the laugh.... If you listened with enough sensitivity, you'd hear in our laughter…the first hint of a playfulness that is, if you're lucky, the wonderful byproduct of forgiveness."

It just seems to me that David Means' story is a better example of the genre than Andre Dubus III's story—more complex, more profound, more subtle, more artistically sound.  The basic theme of the difficulty of moving from the outer of the other person to the inner is an important one, and Means explores it in a style that syntactically matches that complex theme. As in a Henry James story, the reader must listen to the rhythm with enough sensitivity to "tease out the story."

*A footnote here:  In his story "A River in Egypt," in his most recent book The Spot (2010),  the central character Cavanaugh is an assistant art director who has just been dropped from a big budget sci-fi movie because his design was “too real, too clear.” His wife Sharon is a lawyer. His son Gunner must take a test for cystic fibrosis. One of the toys the child plays with is called the Question Cube and one of the questions is “What river is in Egypt?  The Nile? The Hudson? The Thames? Or the Kalamazoo?”  It's a delicate story about a father trying to come to terms with his son’s possibly fatal disease.  The story ends with a moment in which the father, who has been concerned with his own anxiety, shifts to the boy lying in the back seat of the car. The diagnosis is still somewhere off in the future. I don't know if this is an indication that Means is working on a set of linked stories for his next collection.

David Means, Lorrie Moore, Bret Anthony Johnston: Best American Short Stories 2013

I am currently reading the 2013 Best American Short Stories, selected by general editor Heidi Pitlor and guest editor Elizabeth Strout. I am happy to say, at least so far in my reading, that they seem to have been selected on the basis of their excellence as short stories. 

And what other basis of selection might there be for a collection entitled “The Best American Short Stories?” In my opinion, too often in the past, the BASS collection has been built more on the principal of making a book that would be most appealing to those who want a book, rather than those who want the “best" stories. That is, often the stories had to be representative of gender, race, cultural concerns, contemporary subject matter, etc.; they had to be varied and diverse, conscious of relevant content and well mixed in terms of style—not too much of the same, you know, or else risk boring the fickle reader, who is often happier wandering through the diverse world of the novel than being captured by the focused world of the short story.

But this time, if you are familiar with contemporary short story writers, just a look at the table of contents should convince you that the criteria for this collection is the excellence of the work as a short story, not the relevance or variety of its content. Here are stories by great short story writers--writers who know the technical secrets of the form and how to maximize brevity. Here are stories by Alice Munro, Steven Millhauser, David Means, Lorrie Moore, George Saunders (Hell, those names alone would be worth the price of admission), as well as stories by Antonya Nelson, Jim Shephard, Elizabeth Tallent, Gish Gin, and Charles Baxter, not to mention more recent writers who have already made the short story their own, such as Daniel Alarcon, Michael Byers, Bret Anthony Johnson, Sheila Kohler, Suzanne Rivecca, and Kristen Valdez Quade.  A collection featuring these writers should convince you right away that this is indeed a collection that emphasizes the short story as a form, not just fiction as a content carrier.

I realize that Heidi Pitlor chose the first 120 stories, but I am guessing that Elizabeth Strout, who chose the top 20 is largely responsible for the focus on short story form in this collection. Her Introduction seems to confirm this. She says right up front, “If you wonder why I chose the stories I chose, I would say it had a great deal to do with voice.” She approvingly quotes from the opening story by Daniel Alcaron: “I should be clear about something: it is never the words, but how they are spoken that matters.” Strout makes no apologies for the fact that, as she says, “I did not choose a story primarily based on its subject,” adding that if the voice does not work the subject matter is not important.

As a result of Strout’s focus on form rather than subject matter, it should be no surprise that some stories deal with similar subjects, with no fear that the reader will snort that the stories are redundant or too much alike.  The first three stories I want to talk about are David Means’ “The Chair,” Bret Anthony Johnston’s “Encounters with Unexpected Animals,” and Lorrie Moore’s “Referential”-- all three of which deal with parents’ relationship to children

However, as important is that relationship is, these stories use this “content” to explore more universal human mysteries.  All three stories are quite short—between four and seven pages—and all three depend, as Elizabeth Strout reminds us , more on language, rhythm, and voice than on mere content.  Indeed, in these stories, as in most short stories, content is transformed and mere surface reality is penetrated to reveal secrets, mystery, even magic.

Bret Anthony Johnston’s “Encounters with Unsuspected Animals” is closest to recognizable reality. This is a third-person pov story about a man whose fifteen-year old son is in a relationship with a seventeen-year old girl who, in a description that lets us know what the father thinks about her, has “a reputation, a body, and a bar code tattooed on the back of her neck.” 

The dinner conversation about wildlife the girl and the boy’s family have seen in strange situations—a macaw riding on the headrest of a car’s passenger seat, goats in the tops of peach trees—sets up the central metaphor of the story suggested by its title. The father cannot understand what the girl sees in his son, since he has only recently been playing with model airplanes.  Indeed, the unspoken mystery of the story, concealed beneath his ostensibly fatherly protection of his childlike son from this experienced woman, is his own sense that what the girl needs is a man, not a boy, a man, of course, like himself, although this is something he could never admit to himself.

When he stops the car on a deserted road and tells her to cut the boy loose, that she “has been to the rodeo a few times” and that she can do better, that she is too much for his son, he even feels pleased with his superior tone and how much he thinks he sounds like a father.  The girl knows him better than he knows himself, for when he says there is no mystery in his stopping with her alone in the middle of the night, she says “There’s mystery all around us. Goats in trees. Macaws in cars.”

The incongruity of the father in the car with his son’s girlfriend is made all the more extreme by the girl’s superiority to the father’s naiveté. When he keeps insisting that she turn the boy loose, leave him be—that this is the only “takeaway tonight,” she makes it all more complex by asking him to consider what might happen if a girl came home dirty and crying. She asks him to consider if the girl might keep it to herself and it be a secret between the two of them when she marries his son and she bears his grandbabies. “These are bona fide mysteries,” she says.

He watches her jump quickly out of the car and dash across a creek, and he wants to see her as an animal he has managed to avoid, “a rare and dangerous creature.” He feels disoriented and short of breath. “He knew he was at the beginning of something, though just then he couldn’t say exactly what.”

This is a classic short story ending, with the sudden appearance of an animal when animals were not expected, coalescing the central metaphor, and the central character, who thought he knew his motivation but discovers that he did not know it at all, when he has engaged in an action based on mysterious desires that changes his life in ways that he has no way of predicting. The mystery of motivation is, as I have discussed many times, a central dynamic of the short story as a form. Bret Anthony Johnston explores it masterfully in this story.

David Means’ “The Chair” turns the narrative screw that moves his story farther away from action in the world and closer to reality as a construct of consciousness. This is a first-person pov of a man who says at home in the suburbs with his five-year-old boy while his wife goes off to work in New York City each day.  He is a man who thinks a great deal about the significance of what he does, indeed so much so that the story is more about what he thinks or what he thinks he thinks, than what he does. The initial motivation of the story is his thinking about what is involved with being a parent, which involves having an ideal image in his mind of the best way to live and trying to impose that ideal on his son, but at the same time being glad that his son resists becoming what his father tries to impose on him.

It is the rhythm of this meditative voice that makes the story move as the man considers “the sublime nature of taking care of his boy” and feels the “pristine clarity of the innumerable potential teaching moments.”  And, as usual in the short story, it is this focus on meaningful moments and what they mean that makes the story work. The narrator not only thinks about what he thinks, he also thinks about what he might think in the future about what he thinks now. As Henry James knew well, it is the rhythm of thought and the action of the mind doing the thinking that best reveals the complexity of humans in conflict.

Part of the conflict in the man’s mind is his thoughts about his wife, who has what he calls a Helen of Troy face, a beauty that gives her “a density that was prone to the pull of the city, I thought I think.” The man uses this self-reflexive reference to his thinking several times in the story, saying “I used to think, I think,” reminding us of the mysterious nature of consciousness.

He imagines his wife entering her building in the city, going up in the elevator, while he stands looking out the window of his home, feeling they are riding on an apex, with her career on one side and his own deep solitude on the other.  It is not that he feels jealous of his wife’s going out in the world or that he resents staying home with his son; it is not that he distrusts his wife or chaffs against his responsibilities as a care-giver. It is all this, but more than this.

The one physical action in the story occurs near the end when the boy ignores the father’s warning and goes too near an embankment. The man says, “In a moment he’d be looking back at me, I was thinking, the wind in my hair, feeling, as I moved, a good, manly sense of dominion over everything. This is mine, I was thinking, I think. This is my chance of glory of a sort perhaps I was thinking. I don’t remember.”

When the boy falls over the side of the embankment into the black sand, and the father must come down and lift him back to safety, he says, as he has said throughout, “It’s the chair for you, little man”--warning a punishment that he prefers to the usual “It’s time out for you.” The boy then leans over and offers his hands to the man, and for a few seconds there is a moment of what he sees as “astonishingly pure love.”  But then he takes the boy home and makes his sit in the chair, and when the boy squirms, he says “Your time’s not up.  Your time’s not even close to being up.”

It is a story that cannot be summarized, but must be read, aloud if possible, or at least with your lips moving to internalize the subtle rhythm of a father being supremely aware of the complexity of caring for his son when he is thinking about it, more when he is thinking about what he is thinking. 

I read Lorrie Moore’s story “Referential” before I read her discussion of its origins in the “Contributors’ Notes,” and I kept thinking that I had read the story before, although, for some reason, I missed it when it first appeared in The New Yorker.  The visit to a deranged son, the bottle of different jams, the mysterious phone calls at the end—all seemed so familiar, but I could not quite grasp where I had read the story until the last line when the woman in the story answers the third and final phone call and. hearing nothing on the line, wonders what would burst forth—a monkey’s paw. A lady. A tiger.  And then, I literally smacked the heel of my hand against my forehead and said to myself, in the words of a character in Ambrose Bierce’s short story “The Mockingbird”--“Idiot!” I often talk to myself in lines from short stories.

Of course, this is a story about a story. The reference to a monkey’s paw is to W. W. Jacob’s famous story of the same name.  And the lady/tiger reference is to the most famous trick ending story of all time, Frank Stockton’s “The Lady or the Tiger.’ Then I remembered Vladimir Nabokov’s famous story “Signs and Symbols,” which suddenly seemed to be the same story entitled “Referential” I had just been reading.  Hell, I had even included Nabokov’s story in a textbook I edited some twenty years ago, Fiction’s Many Worlds, in the section named “The World of Story.” In the Introduction to that section I quote Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who once said, “Stories only happen to those who know how to tell them,” suggesting that it is not the content that makes a story, but rather the technique, the language, the style, the rhythm—all that is other than, but the same as, the story.

And sure enough, when I turned to the Contributors' Notes, Lorrie Moore says a rereading of Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” last year led her to a “narrative dance” with the story, with her as the hat rack and Nabokov as Fred Astaire.  Like most writers, Moore became obsessed with the story and felt compelled to write a tribute to it.  It reminds us that stories often come from stories, some very specifically so. In my textbook, I include Guy de Maupassant’s story “Confessing,” followed by Isaac Babel’s tribute to that story entitled “Guy de Maupassant.” I also include Isaac Babel’s “My First Goose,” followed by Doris Lessing’s tribute to that story, “Homage for Isaac Babel.”

Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” is about a deranged boy who has a mania that everything around him is a veiled reference to himself, that all is a pattern, and that he must always be on guard to decode things.  The primary changes Moore makes to Nabokov’s story is to make the mother in the story go to visit the boy with a reluctant lover rather than with her husband.  The result of this is to thrown the drama of the story more on to the mind of the woman than the Nabokov story does.


At the end of Moore’s story, the woman answers the second phone call and pretends that the caller id on the phone indicates that the call is coming from the man’s apartment.   Although it is an invention, his response makes it true, when he says he has to go home and diffidently leaves her.  And at the end, she is completely alone; the third phone call, with no one on the line, emphasizes her isolation. Usually, in tribute stories, the tribute moves the story farther away from reality into symbolic significance. However, here, Moore’s tribute pushes Nabokov’s story away from his aesthetic exploration of referentiality back to the original referent itself, that is, the woman’s loneliness and despair about what to do about her son.

More discussions of BASS 2013 in a few days.  If you are reading these stories (and if you love the short story, you will be glad you did), please let me know what you think about them.

David Means' "El Morro"--Literary Quest for the Sacred

My thanks to Dex and Phillip for responding to my last post about entertainment stories vs. literary stories. Dex suggests that the literary story may be one of the last remnants of modernism. Lorrie Moore has, I think rightly, pointed out, that now “the commercial slick story has largely died out, the stories we are left with are almost always all serious art.” The fact that short stories do not sell well and thus that publishers are reluctant to take them on--unless they come with the promise of a novel--is due to the public shift to other media for narrative entertainment. And once the short story is no longer sought after for simple entertainment, it either dies out, or for better or worse, is relegated to the realms of art. Whether cause or effect, it seems clear, as John Updike has suggested, “Short fiction, like poetry since Kipling and Bridges, has gone from being a popular to a fine art, an art preserved in a kind of floating museum made up of many little superfluous magazines.”

I appreciate Phillip’s Virginia Woolf citation about reading Chekhov’s stories and feeling “at first” as if the solid ground had been dislodged from under us, leaving us dangling in mid air with unanswered questions. One of America’s finest short story writers, Joy Williams, says that short story writers love the dark and are always fumbling around in it. “The writer,” says Williams, doesn’t want to “disclose or instruct of advocate, he wants to transmute and disturb. He cherishes the mystery…. He wants to escape his time, the obligations of his time, and, by writing, transcend them.” And the greatest short story writer of the twentieth century, Alice Munro, says, “I write because I want to get a feeling of mystery or surprise. Not a mystery that finishes you off, but something that makes the character or reader wonder. I don’t really like interpretations. I don’t want to make definite explanations.” Amy Hempel agrees that she doesn’t like having anything spelled out, but insists, that mystery is not mere vagueness. “Mystery is controlled. It involves information meted out only as needed. I not only don’t want the explanation, I want the mystery.” John Edgar Wideman adds: “Stories that don’t acknowledge the mystery at the center of things, don’t challenge the vision of reality most consenting adults rely upon day by day, are stories that disappear swiftly into the ever-present buzz of entertainment.”

The most common characteristic the literary short story shares with the lyric poem, Herbert Gold argues, is that they both tend to “control and formalize experience.” However, this very characteristic, according to British writer James Lasdun, is one of the reasons many readers don’t care for the short story. Lasdun suggests that short stories do not sell well because the genre demands an interest in form more than the novel does, and “people do not seem so interested in form these days.” The literary short story’s emphasis on language and form rather than on content is, of course, one of the primary characteristics of what we loosely call “modernism,” which, as that great short story writer Donald Barthelme reminds us, begins with Flaubert, who changed the emphasis from the what to the how—a shift that is not merely formalism and not at all superficial, insists Barthelme, but rather an “attempt to reach truth, and a very rigorous one at that.” As Flaubert himself so emphatically proclaimed, “I don’t give a damn about the story, the plot. When I am writing, my idea is to render a colour, a tonality.” And no less emphatically, Truman Capote once said he wished always to maintain a stylistic and emotional upper hand over his short story material. “Call it precious and go to hell, but I believe a story can be wrecked by a faulty rhythm in a sentence or a mistake in paragraphing, even punctuation.”

That the short story is a modernist genre embodying Flaubert’s ideal is a prevalent authorial conviction. Harold Brodkey recites the familiar modernistic mantra about the short story this way: “The music of language carries more of the real meaning [in the short story] than the literal meaning of words does. A shift in the mind, in the mood, and you lose control of that music.” American author Charles D’Ambrosio agrees, chiming in that, “It’s the musical nature of sentences, where you actually hear the sound in a meaningful way, and those sounds have meaning and nuances as important as any of the content.” “ I love that aspect of the short story, says D’Ambrosio; it’s almost like reading a poem.” Short story writer Amy Hempel says that when she starts a story, she often knows the beat, the rhythm of the first line or first paragraph, without knowing what the words are. “I’ll be doing the equivalent of humming a tune over and over again,” she says, “and then this tune will be translated into a sentence. I trust that. There’s something visceral about the musical quality of a sentence.”

Hempel’s fellow short story writer, Deborah Eisenberg agrees, noting, in classic Flaubert fashion, that in her stories, “Sometimes there’s a kind of tonality that I want, almost as if I were writing a piece of music.” And David Means--that brilliant short story writer who after four collections, still fends off his publisher’s demand for a novel—says about his experience writing the short story: “You listen to a song and get a bit of narrative along with beat and tone and sound and images, then the song fades out, or hits that final beat, and you’re left with something that’s tangible and also deeply mysterious.” This deeply mysterious, yet tangible something—what Donald Barthelme calls “rigorous truth”—is related to the formal nature of the short story, which communicates by pattern rather than by explanation or by mimesis.

David Means’ most recent story, “El Morro,” which appeared in The New Yorker on August 29, 20011, may be puzzling to many readers because it communicates, as most literary short stories do, more by thematic pattern than it does by character and plot. Consequently, if readers respond to the characters as if they were ordinary real people in the everyday world and to the action as if it merely pointed to actual events in that everyday world, then they may ask, as one blogger expressed it, “What the f**k is this story about?”

The first thing one notices in the story is the repetition of references to the sacred-- beginning with Lenny, the central character, talking about a goddess who lived in a lake, back when it was freshwater.” He says the natives make “pilgrimages” to what is now a muddy hole, dip leaves in the brine (for it has turned to salt water) and “lick them the way you lick a lollipop.” (Lenny will come back to this story of the salt lake later.) The girl, who is unnamed, determines four main things that form the “litany” of Lenny’s thinking.” 1. drugs, 2. native culture, 3. birds, 4. her story. He talks of the Zuni Pueblo tribe, altering history to make them “worshippers” of deep pits, navels. He talks about a “holy” seer named Don Juan, not the fake one who helped Carlos Castaneda, but a true “visionary.”

One of Lenny’s key obsessions is hawks and falcons, which can spot a prey ten miles up and dive for it. “You’d be hard pressed to know which side of the story to look at, because it all meets up right there when the bird hits the prey and the prey, which wasn’t anything, man, becomes something, for a second, at least, and then suddenly it’s nothing but a half-dead carcass being lifted into the sky.”

He has told her about his brother who was killed in the early days of the Iraq war by a wayward U.S. Air Force Missile. “At least for a split second, he knew what was going to hit him, man. You always know what’s going to hit you. Maybe for only a sliver of a second. But you still know. Every second, there’s a missile ready to strike you in the head.” This notion of a sudden assault by an invisible force reoccurs later in the story, becoming a repeated thematic pattern.

Lenny prefers the story he invents to the events lying out there to be reported. He makes up a story for the girl from the few details she had given him back in California. One of the stories she tells is about her friend Kimberly who, one day near the stables in Griffith Park, told her a story of being somewhere in Utah when a “dervish” appears and tells her a story. It is a fable about a guy walking in the desert who comes upon a horse and a dog talking. The dog says he does not want to hear about running free and eating wild grass, but is waiting to be told about hunting a rabbit and tearing meat from a bone. The horse says he is sick of blood and gore and wants to hear about wild clover. The man interrupts and says “Meat and grass. What’s the difference? The function of each is to give you life. Without that function, you’re just bones.” Both animals turn on the man, kills him, and then go back to their argument.

One of the best-known sources for this kind of Sufi teaching story is Indries Shah’s Tales of the Dervishes. One has to probe beneath the surface to discover their meaning. After the young woman tells dervish stories in Griffith park, Means shifts the perspective to a group of Japanese tourists on a string of horses above the taking pictures of vistas of Hollywood, “and two homeless girls, pale and gaunt, huddled on a sheet of cardboard.” The image is a telling juxtaposition between the surface and the secret reality of Hollywood. The gap between the surface reality and what lies beneath it is another repeated theme in the story that Means will return to later.

Lenny constantly “riffs” on the girl’s story as they drive north from Tucson. “You spent a summer sleeping on the sidewalk or in cut-rate hotels with other kids who’d embraced a mute acquiescence in a common dream of freedom, a possible salvation in the form of a good time, hanging on an edge of chance that might at any moment give way to complete, abject reality, and it did, man, it did.” Lenny riffs more on the common dream of freedom giving way to freeways and faceless drivers and one more piece of roadside trash sauntering by the roadside, which is all she had left when he found her. “Everything else was gone, pushed away, because you’d come to realize, no, scratch that, you’d learned through trial and error that your only recourse was to forget your past.” The tension between forgetting the past and trying to leave a mark on it is another theme that the story will return to.

When they pass the biggest copper mine in North America with the monstrous trucks and bucket loaders, Lenny shifts back to the theme of fear of an invisible force waiting to destroy one. Each man has his own “unique fear” when he creeps up one of the roads, putting on earmuffs and praying to God he will not be able to hear, for if someone hits a “sensitive vein or digs too eagerly, the ground gives way and the road crumbles. Lenny compares the mine to a similar mine in South America, which is on “holy land” guaranteed to give payback in the form of some catastrophic event, most likely in a hundred-year-rainfall-slash flood-slash mudslide.

They encounter a girl with a stop sign and walkie-talkie, who has a scar on her face that is too deep to cover with makeup, which she got on her honeymoon in Tijuana where her husband showed her his true nature for the first time—another example of the theme of something hidden beneath the surface.

Lenny says he likes the new lady, saying she probably has Zuni blood, or at least something Indian, “a stoic ability to put her woes aside and center in on the moment at hand, to withstand the elements for the sake of some larger vision.” Then he begins to invent a story about her—that she has a little brother with cancer, another brother who works at the copper mine—that he did not think he would work there, but one day his father and brothers put in the application papers in for him to work at the mine. Lenny continues his story, “And this guy—let’s settle on the name Bobby—couldn’t say no. Bobby felt himself caught in the long history of his family. Past generations had opened up an obligation” So he said, what the hell, and worked there until he was too tired to think of reinventing his life.

By the time they cross into New Mexico, the first girl is sitting in the back seat trying to avoid listening to Lenny, and the second girl is in the front, listening attentively. Lenny talks with “delusional precision,” saying he guarantees she is going to meet his hawk, Jag, who has intense focus, who flies out of sight but always keeps Lenny in his vision, and, when he is ready, can dive out of the sky and land gently on his arm; he says he is flying above them now, out of sight, following them.

The second girl and Lenny now become like two souls united by a mutual need formed back during the two hours they had spent navigating the hairpin mountain turns. She tells him how to manage skids, telling him the “myth” is you turn into a skid but in the mountains you have to turn against it as hard as you can, that she has seen trucks turn into a skid and head over the ledge and become a wad of tinfoil. When Lenny tells the first girl to stay in the car while he and the new girl have some time alone, she blocks their voices by remembering the road straightening out like a “magic carpet” when they left the twisty mountain roads.

When they pass through a reservation, Lenny returns to the myth that opened the story, about how the people walk a hundred miles to pay their respects to Old Lady Salt who ran away from Black Rock Lake, taking most of the potable water with her. People come here once a year and place their prayer sticks in what’s left of the lake and draw up granules of salt and take bags of it home.

The second girl starts talking about her younger brother who is gorgeous and is going to be a star in Hollywood. He was driving a truck one day and the road just rolled away from him, and he said he had a “vision.” She shows Lenny a picture of brother who has remorse but also hope in his eyes. Lenny says he looks like Gregory Peck, Clark Gable, and James Dean, but then says he is going to tell her what will happen to him. “He’s going to fall like the rest of them and end up holding a spoon over a flame.” Lenny says they will find his body up in the hills or, if he is not lucky, in front of the La Brea Tar Pits, for one does not want to die in front of a tourist from Wisconsin. “No one wants to shatter the congenial blandness they bring, the greenhorn belief in hopes and dreams that settles like the smog and makes it exhilaratingly hard to breathe. And let me tell you, there is nothing better in this world than struggling to breathe. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.”

When they reach the El Morro national monument, the first girl wakes and leaves the car and hears Lenny talking to the second girl about the men who came here. “They stumbled here astonished at the immensity of the stone formation…They stumbled here in wonderment. How could something like this rise out of so much flatness? It’s the work of the Devil, some said. The work of God, others said. He says they all felt compelled to make a mark on this thing, pointing to the petroglyphs. They all had to leave some indication that they had existed, leave their mark. Now they cannot. He said the last time he was here he marked his name with a pen and ended up in jail. He faces the monument with his arms out: “In a firm, hard voice, he spoke directly to the monument of his country’s urgent need for redemption.” He rhapsodizes about birds flying in formation, tribes moving from one “sacred site” to the next, cookhouses in Washington cranking out pure “sacramental salts.” Then he starts telling the first girl’s story again, about how she never dreamed of this place while on the streets of L.A., saying this is a fitting place to end this thing they have had.

The last part of the story shifts to Ranger Russell, a Zuni, who sees them on a video screen--the man like other white boys who came to vandalize the park who have no respect for the reality of the world. “An element of desecration was caught by these four cameras.” Once or twice a year a few nuns in habits, two monks from Vietnam, Fellow-Zuni. He watches the little drama play out and then goes to the girl who has been left, who is driving a piece of flagstone into the rock. “He saw in the delicacy of her action and in the lift of her toes a balletic movement, and he knew something about her that he wasn’t sure how to articulate…. When she turned, he saw the face of a girl who had lost almost everything, including her ability to speak. She kept the mute silence of a soothsayer. He saw that right away. It wasn’t the willed silence of the guilty….. Most in the white world didn’t understand medicine people, he thought, seeing her…. In truth a medicine man never picked his vocation. It was a fate that was bestowed, forcing one to forsake certain pleasures in the world—he thought—in order to become someone who knew a little too much about reality.”

In the last section, Ranger Russell is at home that night, telling his wife about all this. He has a vision of the grandeur and hope of the place, which he cannot see so well while in the midst of it. He thinks he will leave the mark the girl made a secret. When the archeologists come from Santa Fe, he will try to persuade them it had been there for years. “It’s just a scratch, he’d say. A few years of wind and rain will blow it away with all the others.” He thinks it will go against his good judgment and the strictures of his job and the park itself to lie for her, but he feels he must do it, “and with that he fell asleep, carrying with him the monument, his tribal land, and the rest of the world.”

In order to read literary short stories with some meaningful pleasure, one must move in close to the story to identify the repetition of meaningful details and then move back away from the story to try to determine what thematic patterns these repeated details create. The overall pattern of the story is a journey to a sacred place, in which one character plays the role of a seer or medicine man, who creates stories about the precarious life that human beings lead, afraid that at any moment, some invisible force can make the seemingly solid ground fall away or some force from the seemingly harmless sky strike from above. What the seer does in the story is rescue wanderers or waifs and tell them stories that provide them with a context for their lost state—very much what modern analysts do for their patients. The sacred place to which the seekers journey is a promontory, or “el morro,” where wanderers have always tried to leave their mark, if, for no other reason than to signify, “I existed. I was here.” The irony, of course, in making a mark on a solid place, is that the mark signifies the universal human desire to transcend mere place—to assert that true reality does not lie in the stones on which we stub our toes, but rather in some hope for a dreamlike, projective reality that lies beyond mere stuff. All the references to sacred places, drugs, appearance/reality, carving signs of the self, searching for meaning, telling stories, Zuni medicine men, marking/erasing the past create a pattern of the universal human quest for transcendence and significance.

Literary short stories, with their emphasis on form and pattern, are often like Sufi stories, because they present mythic, defamiliarized invariants of universal human action, not temporal, familiar variants of social interaction. Such an attitude has dominated short fiction since Hoffmann, Tieck, and Novalis; it can be seen in Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville, as well as in such modern descendants as Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Jorge Luis Borges, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, and others. Human beings need to hear stories the same way they need to experience religion, says Canadian writer Hugh Hood. "Story is very close to liturgy, which is why one's children like to have the story repeated exactly as they heard it the night before. The scribe ought not to deviate from the prescribed form. That is because the myths at the core of story are always going on...Myth exists to give us this reassurance of the persistence of some of the fundamental forms of human action."

Stories, like liturgy or Sufi tales, do not teach by concept, says Indries Shah, but rather by some more intuitive method of communication, by rhythm, or as the structuralists would say, by a deep structure that lies beneath the conscious level of concept. We must go back to an early stage to prepare ourselves for story, says Shah, a stage in which we regard the story as "a consistent and productive parallel or allegory of certain states of mind. Its symbols are the characters in the story. The way in which they move conveys to the mind the way in which the human mind can work." Such teaching stories depend on an ancient and irreplaceable method of "arranging and transmitting a knowledge which cannot be put in any other way." Carol Cassola, an Italian writer, describes the mental disposition of the modern in a way that is similar to the kind of mental disposition which Shah attributes to the serious writer: "He doesn't observe reality, he contemplates it. He is passively receptive in front of it. He is, if you wish, a mystic: someone who awaits the revelation of truth from the silent language of things. What drives him to write is not psychological curiosity or social interest but a metaphysical need."

Story, like liturgy, like mantra, insists on a rigid formalized rhythm repeated in structures that remain the same regardless of the content until they become coordinated with the rhythm of the unconscious life itself, with the deeper rhythms of human reality as it is sensed to be. In this the reader "becomes" the narrative; that is, during the process of reading, the story establishes a rhythm that corresponds to and structures a rhythm within the thinking or responding processes of the individual. Randal Jarrell claims that our stories show that we take pleasure in "repeating over and over, until we can bear it, all that we found unbearable.” Bruno Bettleheim has suggested that fairy stories, one of the primary progenitors of the short story, are such ritualized defenses or outlets for childhood anxiety. Bettleheim argues that the child is subject to fears of loneliness, isolation, and mortal anxiety--existential anxieties that fairy tales take seriously and deal with by objectifying in a highly formal structure, much the way that Sufi healing stories do. The entire line of development of the short story--from fairy tale to Poe, from Chekhov to Raymond Carver--has focused on such basic human anxieties and has dealt with them by the creation of a highly formalized, unified, and ritualized aesthetic object.

However, as much as “El Morro” explores the basic human desire for transcendence, leaving a mark, and ritualistic, story-telling protections against those invisible forces that threaten annihilation, the story also seems to undermine the means by which modern human beings seek to fulfill these desires. If Lenny is a seer, he also seems a self-serving meth-head who exploits the loneliness of others. And if the two young women are seekers after salvation, they also seem misguided victims. Perhaps the only character in the story who seems redeemed by this role is the Ranger, who protects the monument from desecration, for he is the only one in the story who seems to value the “old way.” If primitive peoples seem noble in their affirmation of the sacred, then modern peoples seem merely seeking an easy drug-induced escape. Maybe this is inevitable. Every generation seems to seek its own means of spiritual affirmation, but these seekers always become either dangerous extremists or helpless escapists. “El Morro” is, I suggest, a serious literary exploration both of the human need for meaning and transcendence and the human despair of finding a means for fulfilling those needs.