Authors on the Short Story--Paris Review Interviews: Part II

This completes my survey of the Paris Review Interviews. I plan to collect more author comments on the short story from interviews and essays in a later post. My goal is to synthesize all these comments to discover if there are significant unifying author notions about the form.

Donald Barthelme, 1981
The change of emphasis from the what to the how seems to me to be the major impulse in art since Flaubert, and it’s not merely formalism, it’s not at all superficial, it’s an attempt to reach truth, and a very rigorous one.

How does “form” arrive at, or discover, or create, “truth”? Barthelme’s notion seems to be based on the postmodernist assumption that reality is a process rather than a product, that is, reality is a construct, a fiction, not some “stuff” that you stub your toe on, regardless of Samuel Johnson’s refutation of Berkeley’s idealism by kicking a stone. The focus of formalism has always been on “how” rather than some dubious “what.” The short story, it seems to me, has, since Poe, always been more concerned with process rather than product, with formal unity rather than mimesis.

Erskine Caldwell, 1982
[To transform a simple incident into a story] you get a kind of fever, I suppose, mentally and emotionally, that lifts you up and carries you away. You have to sustain this energy you’ve gotten to write your story. By the time you’ve finished, all your energy, your passion, is spent. You’ve been drained of everything.
James Salter, 1993
Above all, [the short story] must be compelling. You’re sitting around the campfire of literature, so to speak, and various voices speak up out of the dark and begin talking. With some, your mind wanders or you doze off, but with others you are held by every word. The first line, the first sentence, the first paragraph, all have to compel you. Further, I think, it should be memorable. It must have significance.
Grace Paley, 1992
There’s an equal amount of adherence to craft in both [poetry and the short story]. I would say that I went to school to study poetry, that’s how I learned to write. I got my courage for the way I write stories from first writing poems. … Still, there’s always that first storytelling impulse: I want to tell you something . . .
Harold Brodkey, 1991
There are about nine hundred million aphorisms about writing that are true, and one of them comes from Bill Maxwell—all short stories should be written in a sitting. As I understood it, that meant that you could spend weeks, months, years writing drafts, outlines, notes, sections, but sooner or later you ought to take all that and sit down and write a draft in a sitting, in a single flight—which might take days or weeks but without interruptions—so that the broad elements and the nuances cohere, certain echoes, certain resonances fit together, and there is real motion in the narrative—not a false motion linguistically grafted onto the story. Words have a strangely changeable, contingent kind of meaning, and as T. S. Eliot said in one of his famous essays, the music of language carries more of the realer meaning than the literal meaning of words does. A shift in the mind, in the mood, and you lose control of that music.
Julio Cortezar, 1984
It’s like improvising in jazz…. I’m a bit embarrassed to sign my stories sometimes. The novels, no, because the novels I work on a lot; there’s a whole architecture. But my stories, it’s as if they were dictated to me by something that is in me, but it’s not me who’s responsible.

Paley refers to something more common to short story writers than novelists—what she calls the “storytelling impulse.” This probably stems from the short story’s debt to oral storytelling. Many short story writers, like Caldwell, for example, talk about a “kind of fever,” a compulsion to tell the story; this perhaps has something to do with the kind of event that storytellers feel compelled to tell, as well as the obsessive sense of unity of the short story. Salter seems to suggest that the compulsion of the teller to tell is matched by the compelling nature of the story. Salter also is right, I think, to suggest that the story must have “significance”; it cannot just be “something that happened.” Brodkey’s citation of Maxwell’s notion that the story should be written in “one sitting,” one “single flight,” has been echoed by may writers and speaks to the sense of unity that the short story requires. Cortezar’s sense that the short story possesses him is related to this notion of compulsive unity.

Raymond Carver, 1983
Good fiction is partly a bringing of the news from one world to another. That end is good in and of itself, I think. But changing things through fiction, changing somebody's political affiliation or the political system itself, or saving the whales or the redwood trees, no…. It doesn't have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it, and the different kind of pleasure that's taken in reading something that's durable and made to last, as well as beautiful in and of itself. Something that throws off these sparks—a persistent and steady glow, however dim.
William Trevor, 1989
I think [the short story] is the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more. It is concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness. Life, on the other hand, is meaningless most of the time. The novel imitates life, where the short story is bony, and cannot wander. It is essential art….. I like the inkling, the shadow, of a new short story. I like the whole business of establishing its point, for although a story need not have a plot it must have a point. I’m a short-story writer, really, who happens to write novels. Not the other way around.
Nadine Gordimer, 1983
Short stories are a wonderful discipline against overwriting. You get so used to cutting out what is extraneous.
Peter Taylor, 1987
The short-story writer is concerned with compression, with saying as much as he can in a short space, just as the poet is. So he has to choose the right dramatic moment for the presentation. If he can do that in writing a story, he can have as big a canvas as he would with a novel. That’s the genius of the short-story writer—finding precisely the right moment in the vital interplay between the characters.

Carver, a short story writer rather than a novelist (and not just because he did not have the time to write novels) reminds us that the short story does not have “to do anything,” does not have to have a social message (although it may have moral meaning). As I have noted before, the short story has never been concerned with social/political ideas. I like Carver’s notion of the writer’s “fierce pleasure” and the reader’s appreciation of something beautiful in and of itself, that has a steady glow. Eudora Welty talks about this idea of a “glow” of the short story, as does Joseph Conrad. Trevor, who admits that he is a short-story writer first, who just happens to write novels, emphasizes that the short story, unlike life, or the novel that tries to imitate life, excludes “meaninglessness.” Borges has talked about this “essential” nature of the short story. And Trevor, like Salter, reminds us that a short story must have “significance,” must have a “point.” Peter Taylor, another short-story writer who happened to write novels, talks about “compression” in the same way that Trevor talks about excluding meaninglessness. And, as Gordimer says, short stories urge the writer to exclude the extraneous. And what is extraneous? Everything that is meaningless.

V.S. Pritchett, 1990
The short story appealed to me straight away because of its shortness, and I preferred it to the novel. It represents a certain vision of reality that consists of isolating the incident. The great thing about the short story is the detail, not the plot. The plot is useful, but only for supplying the sort of detail that is not descriptive but which pushes the action forward.
Russell Banks, 1998
[The short story and the novel] are very discontinuous. For me, they each bear greatly different relations to time. The novel, I think, has a mimetic relation to time. The novel simulates the flow of time, so once you get very far into a novel, you forget where you began—just as you do in real time. Whereas with a short story the point is not to forget the beginning. The ending only makes sense if you can remember the beginning. I think the proper length for a short story is to go as far as you can without going so far that you have forgotten the beginning.
Richard Ford, 1996
Novels are a lot harder to write [than short stories]…because they hold so much more stuff, and the stuff all has to be related and make one whole—at least the way I do it. And from my experience with writing both, I do think writing a long novel is just a larger human effort than writing a book of short stories—assuming that both are good. I used to say that a novel was a more important, a grander literary gesture than a story. And when Ray Carver would hear me say that he’d vigorously disagree, and then I’d always cave in. …. Forms of literature don’t compete. They don’t have to compete. We can have it all.
Mario Vargas Llosa, 1990
I think the novel as a genre tends toward excess. It tends towards proliferation; the plot develops like a cancer. If the writer follows a novel’s every lead, it becomes a jungle. The ambition to tell the whole story is inherent in the genre. Although I’ve always felt there comes a moment when you have to kill the story so it won’t go on indefinitely, I also believe that storytelling is an attempt to reach that ideal of the “total” novel.

Pritchett argues that the short story has a different vision of reality than the novel, which involves “isolating the incident.” George Lukacs has also talked about the difference between detail that describes and detail that is integrated into the significance of the story. Banks echoes Poe’s notion about the story being just so long that the ending keeps the beginning in sight. With the novel, you can forget where you began; with the short story, you cannot. Ford thinks that novels are harder to write, but only because they contain more “stuff.” The short story has never been as interested in “stuff” as the novel; the short story is only interested in “stuff” that is transformed or transcended into significance. Flannery O’Connor talks a great deal about this. Llosa, like Ford, reminds us that the novel is omnivorous, constantly devouring stuff, or perhaps spewing out “stuff.” The ultimate novel would be one that contains all the “stuff” of the world. The ultimate short story would be one that eliminates everything but essential meaning—“Blake’s “the world in a grain of sand.”

Amy Hempel, 2003

I don’t like having anything spelled out. Of course, mystery is not vagueness. Mystery is controlled. It involves information meted out only as needed. Tim O’Brien used to say that stories are not explanations. Certainly if you teach writing you see that some students think they are. They feel they haven’t made their point clearly enough so near the end of the story there will come an extremely spelled-out emblematic section. I not only don’t want the explanation, I want the mystery.
Often I’ve started a story knowing the beat, the rhythm of the first line or first paragraph, but without knowing what the words are. I’ll be doing the equivalent of humming a tune over and over again and then this tune will be translated into a sentence…. There’s something visceral about the musical quality of a sentence

.

Lorrie Moore, 2001
[The short story is] a more magical form. Who knows sometimes where stories come from? They are perhaps more attached to the author’s emotional life and come more out of inspiration than slogging. You shouldn’t write without inspiration—at least not very often. As I’ve already said, in discussing writing one shouldn’t set the idea of inspiration aside and speak only of hard work. Of course writing is hard work—or a very privileged kind of hard work. A novel is a daily labor over a period of years. A novel is a job. (Story writers working on a novel are typically in pain through the entire thing.) But a story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.
There’s a lot of yak about how short stories are perfect for the declining public attention span. But we know that’s not true. Stories require concentration and seriousness. The busier people get, the less time they have to read a story. (Though they may have a narcotizing paperback novel in their purse. This is not their fault.) Shockingly, people often don’t have a straight half hour of time to read at all. But they have fifteen minutes. And that is often how novels are read, fifteen minutes at a time. You can’t read stories that way.

Annie Proulx, 2009

I think the short story is a superior form. It’s definitely more difficult than writing a novel, and a novella is an unwieldy length. The challenge is to make something that could be a novel but that works better as a short story, and to know the difference. So yeah, some stories could have been stretched out into a novel, but they would have been weaker and certainly not as interesting to write.
The short story deserves more honor and attention than it gets. It can be a powerful reading experience. One can go back to a good one over and over and always learn something new about technique. I sometimes think it would be better in creative-writing programs if students cut their writing teeth on novels instead of short stories. Short stories are often very difficult and demanding, drawing on deep knowledge of human nature and the particulars of pivotal events. Every single word counts heavily. The punctuation is critical. Finding the right words and making honorable sentences takes time. The general reading public has no idea of what goes into a short story because it is literally short and can give the impression that the writer sat down and rattled the thing out in an hour or two.

Amy Hempel echoes many short story writers, particularly Flannery O’Connor, on mystery and the short story. I will come back to this later. I have written about it in some detail in another place. I will also come back to Lorrie Moore’s notion about the paradox that the busier people are the less time they have to read short stories, for it gets to the heart of my central idea that short story writers like short stories more than readers do. Annie Proulx is surely right that the short story deserves more honor and attention than it gets. And she is surely right that the general reading public has no idea about what goes into a short story (and therefore does not know how to read short stories, thus often underestimating them).

The Experimental Short Story--Part I: Caponegro, Evenson, and the Experimentalists of the Sixties

Mary Caponegro and Brian Evenson are often characterized as “experimental” writers. I had only read their stories occasionally as I ran across them in the journal Conjunctions and in trade anthologies such as Ben Marcus’s The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. However, I recently read their new collections All Fall Down by Caponegro and Fugue State by Evenson (both published by Coffee House Press).

If you have never read Caponegro, this new collection may be the one to begin with, since the four stories in it are somewhat more traditional than her usual “experimental” style. The two novellas in the book are closer to the challenging syntax more often associated with Caponegro. “Ill-Timed,” the longest piece in the collection, is challenging, if for no other reason than its lengthy repetition of banter between two women. However, the witty dialogue makes it relatively more porous and comprehensible than the final novella, “The Translator,” in which self-conscious literary monologues about language threaten to mire one down in the inky print on the page.

I enjoyed Evenson’s stories even more than Caponegro’s, for no one pushes the envelope of the Poe/pulp tradition with more bravura than he does. In “Mudder Tongue,” chosen for the 2007 O. Henry Prize Stories, the central character loses his ability to communicate with others when the words he speaks are not the ones the thinks. In “Dread,” a graphic tale illustrated by Zak Sally, a man’s identity crisis is caused when he is haunted by a phrase--“He no longer resembled me”-- from Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. “Ninety Over Ninety” is a laugh-out-loud satire on the publishing industry, while the title story is a Borges-like nightmare in which dissociation is a contagion that causes characters to morph from one to another. Fugue State is an irresistible mélange of the comic and the terrifying. I recommend both Caponegro and Evenson to you.

However, what the two books got me to thinking about was the meaning of the term “experimental,” especially when used to describe a type of short story. I remembered that the debate about experimental fiction made some literary news a few years ago and dug out an old issue of Harper’s (October 2005) and reread Ben Marcus’s essay “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It.” Marcus, whose penchant for “experimental” fiction can be seen in his own work, as well as the choices he made for The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, takes on Jonathan Franzen for his attacks on James Joyce, William Gaddis, and other nontraditionalists.

Franzen has said that praise for Ulysses as one of the top ten books of the century “sends this message to the common reader: Literature is terribly hard to read. And this message to the aspiring writer: Extreme difficulty is the way to earn respect. This is fucked up. It’s particularly fucked up when the printed word is fighting other media for its very life.” In another place, Franzen calls Gaddis “unreadable, needlessly obtuse, and frequently indifferent to his reading audience.”

Marcus argues: “If reading is a skill, with levels of ability, and not simply something we can or cannot do, then it’s a skill that can be improved by more, and more varied reading. The more various the styles we ingest, the better equipped we are to engage and be moved by those writers who are looking deeply into the possibility of syntax as a way to structure sense and feeling, packing experience into language, leveraging grammar as a medium for the making of art.”

I align myself with Marcus’s argument that fiction writers use syntax to explore human complexity, but would further argue that writers such as Alice Munro and William Trevor, who are often called “realists” or “traditionalists,” use language in this self-conscious way, as well as so-called “experimental” writers such as Evenson and Caponegro. If you are interested in this debate, you can find Marcus’s essay online, as well as the various pieces by Franzen that he refers to. I would be happy to discuss the issue with anyone who wants to resurrect it. However, as a student of the short story as a genre, I am more interested in what kind of short fiction is often called “experimental.” I went back over a number of writers I have read and written about in the past to see what is characteristic of the “experimental” short story, if there is such a thing.

I will mention briefly four writers from the late sixties who were called “experimental” (Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, and William H. Gass) and four writers from the nineties who have likewise been dubbed something other than traditional (Stephen Dixon, Steven Millhauser, George Saunders, and David Means). I will make a few comments about the Sixties writers in this blog and discuss the four Nineties writers in next week’s blog. I will then try to draw some conclusions about what is the typical “experimental” short story.

Robert Coover's first collection of short stories, Pricksongs and Descants (1969), consists of a number of stories based on fairy tales, legends, folktales--all of which are made more earthy and "real" than their mythic originals. "The Door" is an erotic, self-reflexive retelling of "Little Red Riding Hood," while "The Magic Poker" is an elaborate exploration of fictional creation, ala Shakespeare's The Tempest, and "Seven Exemplary Fictions" is an homage to Cervantes. However, the most popular story in the collection is "The Babysitter," a complex play with the shifting intermixture of fantasy and reality. "The Babysitter" ultimately asks the basic question "What actually happened?" for as you read the story you are never quite sure at any given point if you are reading a fantasy or a description of so-called reality. Although the story seems filled with ominous events, nothing actually happens, except in the sexual fantasies of the participants, which predominate over ordinary reality. At the end of the story, when a television program enters the mix of fantasies, it seems no less real than the character fantasies throughout. Few stories have gone as far as "The Babysitter" in undermining the easy assumption that reality refers merely to external events in the physical world.

When Donald Barthelme's first collection of stories, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, appeared in 1964, critics complained that his work was without subject matter, without character, without plot, and without concern for the reader's understanding. For Barthelme, the problem of language is the problem of reality, for reality is the result of language processes. Because so much contemporary language has become trash, dreck, Barthelme takes as his primary task the recycling of language, making metaphor out of the castoffs of technological culture. For Barthelme, the task is to try to reach, through metaphor and the defamiliarization that results, that ineffable realm of knowledge which he says lies somewhere between mathematics and religion "in which what may fairly be called truth exists."

Barthelme has noted that since films tell a realistic narrative so well, the fiction writer must develop a new principle. Collage, says Barthelme, is the central principle of all art in the twentieth century, the point of which is that "unlike things are stuck together to make, in the best case, a new reality." One of the implications of this collage process is a radical shift from the usual temporal, cause-and-effect process of fiction to the more spatial and metaphoric process of poetry.

The most basic example of Barthelme's use of this mode is "The Balloon," in which a large balloon has encompassed the city. The persona of the story says that it is wrong to speak of "situations, implying sets of circumstances leading to some resolution, some escape of tension." In this story there are no situations, only the balloon, a concrete particular thing that people react to and try to explain. The balloon is an extended metaphor for the Barthelme story, to which people try to find a means of access and which creates varied critical responses. To plunge into a Barthelme story is to immerse oneself in the flotsam and jetsam of contemporary society, for his stories are not so much plotted tales as they are parodies and satires based on the public junk and commercial media hype that clutter up and cover over our private lives.

In 1967 and 1968, John Barth made his alignment with the postmodernist focus on fiction as a self-reflexive art form explicit. First he published a controversial essay in the Atlantic entitled "The Literature of Exhaustion," which, although it has been much misunderstood to have argued that contemporary fiction writers have "run out" of a subject for their work, actually urged more of the kind of self-conscious experimentation practiced by the South American writer Jorge Luis Borges. Secondly, he turned from the novel form to the short story, publishing Lost in the Funhouse, an experimental collection in which the stories refused to focus their attention on their so-called proper subject--the external world--and instead continually turned the reader's attention back to what Barth considered their real subject--the process of fiction-making.

Barth insists that the prosaic in fiction is only there to be transformed into fabulation. The artist's ostensible subject is not the main point; rather it is only an excuse or raw material for focusing on the nature of the fiction-making process. Great literature, says Barth, is almost always, regardless of what it seems to be about, about itself. Perhaps more than any other American writer Barth made fiction intensely conscious of itself, aware of its traditions, and of the conventions that make it possible. If, as the main currents of modern thought suggests, reality itself is the result of fiction-making processes, then John Barth is truly a writer concerned with the essential nature of what is real.

A philosopher particularly interested in the fictional nature of reality, William H. Gass's contribution to the postmodernist short story came in his 1968 collection, In The Heart of the Heart of the Country. Gass, as well known for his philosophical literary essays as for his fiction, has always reminded readers that "stories and the places and people in them are merely made of words." A character in a story, Gass insists, is not an object of perception, and "nothing whatever that is appropriate to persons can be said of him."

"Order of Insects," which Gass thinks is one of his best short fictions, charts the growth of a woman's obsession with a species of insects that inhabit her home. By limiting her vision obsessively, she transforms the insects into mythic creatures, ultimately feeling as though she has been entrusted with a kind of "eastern mystery, sacred to a dreadful god." As opposed to humans, the insects, whose skeletons are on the outside, retain their shape in death. They are beautiful in the ideal sense with a fierce joy in their very composition, a joy of stone that lives in its tomb like a stone lion. Never seeming to participate in decay, they are perfect geometric shapes representing pure order.

The title story of Gass's collection is a lyrical evocation of being in "retirement from love." The voice of the narrator, who has come to a small town in Indiana because he has "love left over" which he would like to lose, mixes his response to the inhabitants of the town with his meditations and memories of a past love, who was, as all romantic lovers are, a fiction. "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" is the narrator's attempt to organize himself, pull himself together by means of the language of poetry.

I will try to draw some general conclusions from all this next week when I discuss four major nontraditional short story writers from the nineties.

What Draws Some Writers to the Short Story?--Barthelme and O'Connor

The pressure on writers by agents, editors, and critics to abandon the short story as soon as possible and do something serious with their lives--such as write a novel--is unrelenting. This narrative bias that bigger is better persists in spite of the fact that the faithful few who have largely ignored it are among the most critically acclaimed writers of the twentieth century: Anton Chekhov, Jorge Luis Borges, Flannery O'Connor, Peter Taylor, Alice Munro, Grace Paley, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver.

Two new biographies released in the last couple of weeks remind us of this fact and raise a central issue about the short story that I would like to discuss briefly, as usual, hoping to create some conversation among my readers.

Both Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme, by Tracy Daugherty (St. Martin’s Press) and Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch (Little, Brown) have been reviewed in many of the “high places”: New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, etc., reminding us of two writers who, although they wrote the occasional novel, specialized in the short story.

So what does it mean to specialize in the short story? Is there something about the craft or technique of the short story that attracts certain writers? Or is there something about the thematic focus of the short story that seems special to the form and irresistible to certain writers?

The short story's dependence on a tightly controlled structure rather than a linear plot and mimetic methods has been one of its central aesthetic characteristic since Poe adapted from Augustus William Schlegel a new meaning of the term plot as being "that from which no part can be displaced without ruin to the whole." By this one stroke, Poe shifted the reader's narrative focus from mimetic events to aesthetic pattern. However, the short story’s dependence on formal unity is not simply a product of Edgar Allan Poe's obsessive imagination, but rather a conventional characteristic deriving from the genre’s ancestry in myth and folklore.

As Frederic Jameson has reminded us, short tales have a kind of "atemporal and object-like unity in the way they convert existence into a sudden coincidence between two systems: a resolution of multiplicity into unity, or a fulfillment of a single wish.” It is a basic human wish that the short story perhaps fulfills better than the novel. According to Hayden White, we desire to have real events “display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary. The notion that sequences of real events possess the formal attributes of the stories we tell about imaginary events could only have its origin in wishes, daydreams, reveries.”

Many years ago I argued that the short story “way of seeing” was like that which Ernst Cassirer says characterizes perceiving the world in a mythic way, for it means not distinguishing objective characters, but rather “physiognomic characters.” In this realm, says Cassirer, we cannot speak of things as dead or indifferent stuff, but all “objects are benign or malignant, friendly or inimical, familiar or uncanny, alluring and fascinating or repellent and threatening.” As Cassirer has suggested, the basis for the “short-story way of seeing” is not a substratum of thought but of feeling. This is also what John Dewey means by the difference between “experience” and “an experience.” An emotionally charged experience phenomenologically encountered, rather than "experience" discursively understood, is the primary focus of the modern short story, and, as Dewey makes clear, "an experience" is recognized as such precisely because it has a unity, "a single quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of the variation of its constituent parts.”

Rather than plot or ideology, what unifies the short story is an atmosphere, a certain tone of significance. As Alberto Moravia has noted, when Chekhov tried his hand at a novel he was less gifted and convincing than he was with the short story. If you look at Chekhov’s long stories, says Moravia, you feel a lack of something that makes a novel, even a bad novel, a novel, for in them Chekhov dilutes his “concentrated lyrical feeling with superfluous plots lacking intrinsic necessity.” The very qualities that makes him a great short story writer become defects when Chekhov tackles a novel.

In his biography, Gooch says that O’Connor’s two novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away do not hold up as well as do her stories because O’Connor was not a novelist, but rather, as David Ulin echoes in his Los Angeles Times review, “perhaps the greatest 20^th century American practitioner of the short story.”

So what made O’Connor stick to, and succeed in, the short story? Was it the formal control of the short story that appealed to her, or did her particular vision seem most appropriate to the short story?

Tracy Daugherty reminds us that although Donald Barthelme wrote novels and plays, he is still best known for his short stories.” The short story’s appeal to Barthleme is perhaps suggested by Menand, who reminds us in his New Yorker review that Barthelme thought the goal of writing was “access to the ineffable,” saying in a fiction seminar in 1975, “I believe that’s the place artists are trying to get to, and I further believe that when they are successful they reach it…an area somewhere probably between mathematics and religion, in which what may fairly be called truth exists.”

To understand what Barthelme attempted in his fiction; we should remember the pervasive postmodernist view that underlies it. For Barthelme, as well as for Robert Coover, John Barth, and William H. Gass, what is considered everyday reality is the result of a fiction-making process; reality is not so much ‘out there’ as it is created out of language and language like structures of various communication media. Thus literary fictions constitute an analogue of the means by which people create what they call reality. To write fiction is to engage self-consciously in the process by which reality is constructed, for the fiction writer makes the tacit explicit.

The primary effect of this mode of thought on contemporary fiction is that the story tends to loosen its illusion of reality to explore instead the reality of its own illusion. Rather than presenting itself as if it were real—a mimetic mirroring of external realty—postmodernist fiction often made its own artistic conventions and devices the subject of the story as well as its theme. The basic problem with such fiction is that it is often called “unreadable,” for readers are unaccustomed to having those fictional conventions which are usually invisible suddenly laid bare, foregrounded, and manipulated by the author.

The short story seems a more appropriate form for Barthelme’s vision than the novel, for historically the short form has been less bound to the conventions of realism than the long form. The short story has also always been more aligned with the spatial techniques of poetry than the novel.

The basic issue overshadowing the work of Barthelme seems to me to be this: If reality is itself a process of fictional creation by metaphor-making man, then the modern writer who wishes to write about “reality” can truthfully only write about that very process. However, to write about this process is to run the risk of dealing with language on a level that leaves the reader gasping for something intangible and real, even if that reality is only an illusion.

So, what do you think? Is there a style or vision characteristic of the short story that draws certain writers to the form, in spite of the fact that their agents and publishers beg them to write novels?