The 2017 BBC National Short Story Award (the 12th year the £15,000
has been awarded to a single short story) went to Welsh writer Cynan Jones for
a story published in The New Yorker entitled “The Edge of the
Shoal.”
Jones has said that the story began as a 30,000-word short novel but
was shaved down to 11,500 words because, as he said, “it didn’t work.” When he sent it to The New Yorker, they liked it but said it was still too long and
asked him to cut it in half. Jones says he only had 4 days to pare the story
down to 6,000 words, working frenetically to strip out anything that was “decorative.”
The halving of the story was fortunate for Jones, since the BBC contest is
limited to stories under 8,000 words. I
am not sure of the sequence of events, but it appears that after the story was
shortlisted for the BBC Prize, Jones decided the original 30,000-words might work
after all. Granta published it as a
novella entitled Cove, which then won
the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize.
Lucy Popescu of the Financial
Times put Cove in the category of
survival narratives, such as Robinson
Crusoe and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. She says the novella’s “terse lyricism” makes
much of it read like a prose poem—a “haunting meditation on trauma and human
fragility.”
Peter Adkins argues in the Glasgow
Review of Books that Jones combines the mythic and the modern, the sacred and
the mundane, the poetic and the technical.
Adkins says it is at times hard to tell the difference between the
imagined and the real in the novel, for it reaches a point where reality blurs with the
fantastic, situating itself on the “threshold between the active, observing
mind and the brute thereness of the sea.” An admirer of the recent academic
trend toward so-called eco-criticism, Adkins calls Cove “profoundly ecological.”
Eileen Battersby of Irish Times
is not so sure. She calls Jones’s style forced and “quasi-poetic” and argues that the main
character’s struggle to survive never becomes more than a “stagey,
choreographed mood piece rife with symbolism.”
The few comments that have been made about the story
come mainly from the judges: of the BBC Contest: Jon McGregor called “The Edge of the
Shoal” “a genuinely thrilling piece of writing with a completeness of vision
and execution that made it an inevitable winner.” Di Speirs said the story is “a
perfect illustration of the transporting, utterly absorbing power of a great
short story.” And Eimear McBride even went so far as to rave that it is “as
perfect a short story as I’ve ever read.”
Claims that the winning story is a perfect short story, a great short
story, an exemplary short story have
often been made by judges of the BBC Award over the past twelve years. I have commented on such claims for the
previous eleven winners of the contest on this blog and on the TSS Publishing Website
because, although I have no right to second-guess the choice of the judges—they
are, after all, the only ones, I presume, who read all the entries to the
contest-- when they claim that the winning story is perfect, doing what the
short story does best, they imply that they actually know what the
characteristics of a “perfect” short story are. I am not always sure their
choices bear this out.
The short story
has often been characterized as a form in which everything not absolutely
essential to its central effect or unifying theme must be mercilessly cut. William
Trevor, one of the greatest short-story writers, has said that the short story’s
“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.” The
result of leaving things out is often a cryptic sense of mystery that many
short story writers insist is an essential characteristic of the short story. Flannery
O’Connor, another undisputed master of the form, once said, "The particular
problem of the short story writer is how to make the action he describes reveal
as much of the mystery of existence as possible.”
However, I wonder if the mysteries suggested by “The Edge of the Shoal”
are intentional thematic mysteries or the accidental result of the cuts Jones
had to make to get the story published in The
New Yorker. For example, there are frequent passing references to the
central character’s father, whose ashes he has in the boat, presumably because
he plans to scatter them at sea.
Moreover, there are several scant references to a “her” or “she,”
who the story suggests is pregnant and
who the central character left at home while he has made this trip to catch
some fish for lunch. These cryptic references to the father and the pregnant
woman are more clearly identified in the short novel. Although it might be
suggested that these contextual allusions reflect the story’s theme of being
caught between birth and death, there is nothing else in the story to support
such a justification for the allusions.
I have written about the relationship between the short story and the
novella on this blog previously, arguing that the novella is more closely
related to the short story than to the novel.
Jones seems to agree that the short story and the novella are closely
related, for in an interview in Los
Angeles Review, he says he likes the novella form because the “level of
engagement” has to be strong and it relies more on implication than explanation,
“adding that short novel is a “moment,
not a journey.” Jones is quoted
elsewhere as saying that he likes the short story form for the very same
reasons that he likes the short novel form: “Everything counts.” You have to
create emotions and judgements, rather than describe them, Jones says, adding, “A
short story is a moment, not a journey.”
I have suggested on this blog and other places that it is not content
that makes a short story a short story, but rather technique. In what follows I would like to suggest some
of the short story techniques Jones makes use of in “The Edge of the Shoal”—techniques
that, if they do not make it a “perfect” short story, at least make it a
representative example of the form.
The most predominant short story technique in “The Edge of the Shoal”
is its frequent use of metaphoric language, particularly the simile, of which
there are fourteen in the story, e.g. “The jaw splits and the gills splay, like
an opening flower.” Another typical short story characteristics derives from
Jones’s frequent use of the “as if”
trope, of which there are sixteen in the story, e.g. “Flecks of blood and scales loosen, as if
turning to rainbows in his hands. Most of these metaphoric comparisons take
place after the man is struck by lightning—primarily to suggest a metamorphosis
in the man’s perception of reality.
Another short story technique is the frequent reference to the
archetypal nature of the man’s experience. For example, in the first paragraph,
the man thinks the sound of the fish thumping in the boat is like a drum beat--“Something
rapid and primal, ceremonial.” The primal is also suggested when the man picks
up the container of his father’s ashes, and it feels warm from the sun “as if”
the ashes were still warm from cremation.
The man is suddenly afraid when he unscrews the lid that he will release
some jinni, or ghost. He thinks of reinvesting the ashes with memories, to
remind them of moments and thus to “make them the physical thing of his father.
In a simile that is as close to a statement of the story’s theme as
Jones will risk, he man sees a fish jump out of the water, like a silver
nail. “A thing deliberately, for a brief
astounding moment, broken from its element.” The simile echoes what happens
with the lightning strike—an “astounding moment” when the man is thrown out of
his everyday element into an alternate reality for which he can no longer
easily find a familiar context with which he can identify himself. He sometimes
“slips off the world” for a time. His
consciousness is a “snapped cord,” and he asks who he is.
The man confuses external reality with his perception, having forgotten
that other life “puppets” around him. He is not sure if a butterfly he sees
actually exists in the world or whether it is his own eye. This echoes the
familiar Taoist parable of Zhuangzi, who dreamt he was a
butterfly, but on awakening, did not know whether he was a man dreaming he was a
butterfly, or whether he was a butterfly, dreaming he was a man.
The man experiences several moments when he cannot
tell the difference between what is happening in the external world and what
his imagination creates. For example, he
feels the warm sun on his neck and thinks it is someone’s breath. He either sees, or thinks he sees, people on
the beach and feels he is in a dream, asking “Where am I?” He hears a child
crying and thinks, “This is not real,” but it is the cry of a dolphin calf.
The man reaches a point when he understands that to gain control of his
life and return to everyday reality he must establish a rhythm of familiar reality,
since that is what has been disrupted by the lightning strike.
The story’s focus on the man’s
efforts to gain some control, to overcome his pain and disabilities to feed
himself and get back to shore, have caused some reviewers identify the story
with the survival efforts of Robinson Crusoe. However, whereas Crusoe is a
classic example of how the novel deals with physical details in the world, “The
Edge of the Shoal” is more like Hemingway’s use of physical detail in such
stories as “Big, Two-Hearted River” and his novella The Old Man and the Sea, for the physical details in Jones’s story
are transformed, as they are in Hemingway’s stories, to significant, thematic
details.
I have suggested in other places that he novel form usually gains the
reader's assent to its reality by the creation of enough realistic detail to
give readers the illusion that they know the experience in the same way they
know external reality. However, in the
short story, realistic details are often transformed into metaphoric meaning by
the thematic demands of the story, which organize the details by repetition and
parallelism into meaningful patterns. For example, the hard details of the
external world in Robinson Crusoe exist as an external resistance to be
overcome. However, in Hemingway's
"Big, Two-Hearted River," the extensive details exist primarily to
provide an objectification of Nick's psychic distress and his efforts to
control it. Thus, at the end of the story, Nick's refusal to go into the swamp
is a purely metaphoric refusal, having nothing to do with the real qualities of
the swamp, only its aesthetic qualities.
It is the short story that transforms the physical
world into meaning, not usually the novel. As Raymond Carver once observed, "It's possible, in a poem or a short story,
to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise
language, and to endow those things--a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a
stone, a woman's earring--with immense, even startling power."
