Flash Guest Robert Shapard: Quantum flash, Newtonian novel
It’s interesting to think why this is so. One thing Randall points out is indisputable: that Hemingway’s story is “always, always mentioned” these days, in discussions of very short stories.
But it’s not the only famous very short story. There’s E.M. Forster’s pronouncement in Aspects of the Novel (1927) that “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. And one of the best known flashes in Latin America is Augusto Monterroso’s “The Dinosaur” (in his Complete Works and Other Stories, 1959), which is only 7 words long: “When s/he awoke, the dinosaur was still there.” (The pronoun could be either “he” or “she” in Spanish; or even, in English, “it.”) There could be as many interpretations for “The Dinosaur” as for “Baby Shoes”—in fact, there’s a book of some of these interpretations, by dozens of writers and critics, called The Annotated Dinosaur (published by a major university press in Mexico in 2002). And of course there has been no lack of speculation on how very, very short fiction reflects our modern age, as quantum physics does.
Before the age of quantum physics, there was Newtonian physics, which was more apt for describing the novel, with its extensive visible reality, created by pages and pages of sensory images and other information arrayed in narratives and scenes, circumscribing the path of the novel’s plot (without making it totally predictable). But, in our time, the extremely short flash has an invisible reality, and a more indeterminate one—as in the famous experiment in which sub-atomic particles were shot through slits onto a screen: not only was each (invisible) particle’s path unpredictable; each of the particles took every possible path (and took them all simultaneously). (For a description, see page 75 in Stephen Hawking’s The Grand Design, 2010).
So, are some readers Newtonian, those who want stories to be explicit and visible on the page? (This would be a traditional view and no doubt include most readers.) And are others Quantum readers, willing to live with uncertainty—with what is invisible, but powerfully suggested?
Too bad analogies comparing readers, stories, and physics don’t prove anything. But there’s direct evidence of a difference in a traditional story and a flash in the words themselves. Isn’t it obvious that words in a flash are no different from words in a novel? That is, it’s easy to imagine the 7 words in “The Dinosaur” as coming from the middle of a science fiction novel; it’s just as easy to imagine “The king died and then the queen died” as part of a longer work, or even “Baby Shoes” (even though it takes the form of a classified ad). Yet the difference is clear in terms of the focus given them. When words are presented as a flash, nothing surrounds them—they’re bracketed by blank space. In a novel, on the other hand, those same words have a surrounding context of other words.
(By the way, Mark Strand said of the flash, “Its end is erasure”—but so is its beginning. If all this nothingness sounds existential, we might wonder if Jacques Derrida, or Jean-Paul Sartre, would acknowledge flash as a form for a more secular age. But we don’t have to go there. We don’t have to go anywhere with a flash—but we can go anywhere. Well…maybe not anywhere, but many wheres. That’s where the indeterminacy comes in.)
But the traditional novelistic view isn’t completely at odds with flash. Even though many of the possible interpretations of the words of a flash, if embedded in a novel, will be eliminated by the context of the novel, not all of them will be. If we think about it, we usually have a sense in a novel of where the words are taking us, but we can’t know for sure what the end will be, or even, for sure, what the very next thing will be, so we read on to find out. In other words, placing the identical words in a novel will shift the focus toward suspense. Not necessarily the gripping suspense of a thriller, but just the normal suspense that all fiction has, that has us wanting to know what happens next.
Even a stand-alone flash (not embedded in a novel) has some suspense, though it lasts only for a few words. It ends so quickly that if one is looking forward, wanting to know what happens next, the story isn’t there. But if one is already attuned to very short fiction, no sooner does suspense end than interpretations begin.
About the Author
Robert Shapard is co-editor of Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America (2010) and Flash Fiction Forward (2006). A few of his own short-shorts, Motel and Other Stories (2005), won a national competition. He taught at the University of Hawaii and now lives in Austin, Texas.
For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net’s suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.
Subscribe to FlashFiction.Net by Email
posted on 7 Mar 2011, 11:44 AM
Wow. This would be hard to summarize. I liked it.
posted on 7 Mar 2011, 1:28 PM
As a physicist, I appreciate the very interesting analogy, and as a writer of poetry, flash and microfiction, I completely agree with the influence of interpretation by context.
A few weeks ago I was discussing Hemingway's famous story with a perceptive friend. She argued tat the only reason that six-worder was famous was because a famous man wrote it. If those words were read by an everyday person, perhaps one who was not familiar with Hemingway, and those words indeed appeared as a classified ad, then those words would only be taken as unremarkable and literally. I believe she was right. Context and anything that guides focus will certainly bias the interpretation (or lack of another).
Thank you for the stimulating blog.
posted on 9 Mar 2011, 2:38 PM
Thanks for the comments! (On “Quantum Flash, Newtonian Novel.”)
Another piece that may answer (at least touch on) your comments will be appearing tomorrow. It’s called “What Is a Story? What Is a Flash?”
I wrote the piece in response to Randall Brown’s “Hemingway’s Six: Always Mentioned, Rarely Explained,” at the same time as “Quantum Flash.”
To John Mannone:
No doubt your friend is right. Perhaps relevant to this: in an Associated Writing Programs panel discussion in Washington, D.C. last month it was noted (I think by Randall himself) that the Hemingway story may be apocryphal. There’s an informative, brief article on Snopes.com http://www.snopes.com/language/literary/babyshoes.asp that says there’s no appearance or mention of ”Baby Shoes” in print until a play about Hemingway more than 30 years after his death. If this is so, the story certainly fits Jan Brunvand’s criteria for an “urban legend.” I’m not sure if or how this changes the discussion—but it may recast “Baby Shoes” as a spontaneous literary icon, or cultural meme, challenging the traditional idea of story.
To [Previous Commenter, since deleted]
No, I don’t think your 4-words, “new shoes for sale,” is a story. I may be more on your side than you think.
For one thing, I’m far more a “Newtonian reader” than a “quantum reader.” I think “quantum readers” are Newtonians, too, most of the time—though maybe they’re more open than many readers to idea of extremely short stories as a new art form or sub-genre.
Another thing that may cast me as more of a traditionalist is my skeptical view of the somewhat popular idea that very short works give readers more freedom to create (or flesh out, from the writer’s suggestive words) their own stories. A related idea is that it’s good for the writer to make (or encourage) the reader to “do some of the work.” I think this may not credit, or understand, traditional fiction. The fiction writer and essayist William Gass (Fiction and the Figures of Life) likes to point out that written words are no more than a handful of inky symbols on a page, which the readers translate into, or create in their minds, images, connections, voices, and so on. Writers in workshops who say they are “giving the reader more freedom” are really simply not in control of their work. If they specific enough, if they don’t do the work of finding the detail the reader needs to conjure a vivid image, then the reader may come up with something vague, or less compelling, or even nothing at all.
Having said that, I agree with Randall Jarrell that a story can be as short as a sentence; it can be wondrous and brilliant can give the reader a lot to conjure with merely a handful of words. Maybe extremely short prose isn’t anti-traditional so much as daring to see how far a traditional process can go.