Robert Shapard: What is a story, what is a flash?
I don’t blame a recent commenter on FlashFiction.Net for suggesting that in order to understand “Baby Shoes” we need “a definition of what we mean by ‘story.’” But I don’t blame Randall for not wanting to take the discussion in this direction, since people have been debating definitions for stories, suddens, flashes, and micros for years with little agreement.
However, there may be an answer for “Baby Shoes,” in a thesis recently published at the University of Vienna by a British writer and scholar, Colin Peters. It’s a study of short-short fiction in Latin America that includes extremely short flashes, though they don’t call them “flashes” there—in Latin America short-shorts go by many names, such as microrrelatos, microcuentos, nanos, or the term Peters prefers, minificciones, for which he sets a limit of no more than 200 words, though he concentrates on much shorter ones like Hemingway’s.
It’s a rich study that touches on many aspects of story, plot, tale and teller, diegesis and mimesis, and the views of thinkers from Plato to the present, especially the work of narratologists such as Propp, Todorov, Barthes, Genette, and Rimmon-Kenan, as well as widely accepted sources such as M.H. Abrams’ A Glossary of Literary Terms and The New Oxford English Dictionary—both of which have “narrative” and “story” as, basically, the same thing. Similarly, the Latin American critics he reviews—Lauro Zavala, Koch, Lagmanovich—accept that the minificción “is essentially a relative of the short story, and is therefore a form of narrative.” Finally, from his wide reading of minificciones themselves, Peters concludes that minificciones are not a narrative form, essentially or necessarily; that is, minificciones can be narrative, but don’t have to be, and many are not.
It’s important to note that all that’s needed to have a narrative, or story, according to the narratologists, is a simple sequence of actions.
Narratology terms can be dry for those who love (as I do) Hollywood formulations, like boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back again. Writers are used to talking not about distributional and integrational functions but about plots, descriptions, dialogue, characters—and countless books have been written on these elements. In workshops we hear, “What’s at stake?” “What’s the motivation?” If we use dramatic terms we’re into rising actions, climaxes, denouements. But for narratologists, all these can be counted in the realm of mimesis, the showing, the elaboration, the development, versus the basic telling or narrative. Rimmon-Kenan is most convincing in paring things down to the essence. Yes, every tale must have its teller, but a teller can always be assumed, so we need only focus on actions or events. As for plot, there’s no need to talk about it separately either, because causality between events can usually be assumed as well. Even the traditional formulation of story—that it begins with a situation, has a middle in which an action causes the situation to change, and ends with a new situation—Rimmon-Kenan simplifies further: “[W]hen something happens, the situation changes. [Any] event, then, may be said to be a change from one state of affairs to another.” In other words, “temporal succession alone is sufficient, at least as a minimum requirement, for a group of events to form a story.”
And—-especially important to the “Baby Shoes” discussion—Rimmon-Kenan says that all we need for a narrative fiction is “something that happens, something that can be summed up by a verb or the name of an action.” (Italics mine.)
By this formulation, it can be argued that Hemingway’s “Baby Shoes” qualifies as a narrative, and therefore a story. The words “For sale” (in “For sale: baby shoes, never worn”) constitute “the name of an action”—the action of the shoes being offered.
However, Peters, in his thesis, doesn’t draw the same conclusion from Rimmon-Kenan’s formulation (“something that can be summed up by a verb or the name of an action.”) Instead, he keeps strictly to narrative as a sequence of events, and notes that, among the minificciones he’s read, many lack such a narrative. Does something take the place of narrative? Yes, strategies such as intertextuality, parody, humor, irony, wordplay, metafiction, appropriations of other forms (see the introduction to Michael Martone and Robin Hemley’s anthology Extreme Fiction).
If we accept Peters’ view, instead of Rimmon-Kenan’s, then “Baby Shoes” is an appropriation of the classified ad form, not a narrative (and therefore not a story). But it still may qualify as fiction, and in this we see the wisdom of calling the genre flash fiction, not flash story. If we accept Peters’ description of minificciones, we will say they (and flash fictions) can be stories, but don’t have to be—and some, like “Baby Shoes,” are not.
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.
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posted on 14 Mar 2011, 11:06 AM
Not all highly evocative arrangements of words imply narrative; consider haiku. However, some such arrangements automatically suggest narrative, as Hemingway's does. Is this conventional narrative? No, but it kin to narrative the way narrative poetry can be, the pairing down to the most essential elements that suggest more than is written down. Perhaps that is why, as a poet, I am drawn to microficciones and flash. Just as in poetry the reader is engaged to participate in some way in the unfolding of the words into something larger.
posted on 14 Mar 2011, 3:13 PM
The context of a reader's encountering these six-words is also, I think, part of the process of seeing them as story. A reader usually encounters them with the introduction "Hemingway's six-word story." When I encountered them as such, they evoked the dead baby story because that makes those six-words story-worthy to me. The other scenarios, such as the baby with feet too big or the extra baby gift, don't make those six words into a "story." Had I come across these six words without context, I might first think, "Jeez. Why someone be selling never worn baby shoes?" Out of that question comes a number of possible answers. So, I think part of the experience of these six-words is the precursor that these are Hemingway's "story."
The measure for story--if any narrative (and I think ANY is a bit of an overstatement) can be inferred by an inventive spinner, than we do not have a narrative--does make it seem as if there is a "line" that a writer crosses when the words become "specific" enough to have a story. That idea interests me a lot. What is that line? Of course there is a difference between having a "story" and having a "good" story, but that point aside, I wonder if, for example, if that idea alone (that the words must create a specific story) is all that is needed, or is there more? As most words calling themselves narratives do lead to more than one possibility, how many possibilities constitute those words no longer being called "narrative"?
posted on 14 Mar 2011, 6:23 PM
I don't think I'm communicating clearly enough. I was saying that the context DOES seem part of the reason why the six-words work as story, because they are always presented as "Heminway's six-word STORY." If readers just came across these untitled six-words, I'm not sure that "story" would necessarily come to mind.
I am fascinated by your idea that these words aren't story because of the idea that whatever story exists is inferred by the "inventive spinner" of stories. As I said above, that implies to me that there is some line that divides too much inference required and the right amount of inference required. As a writer of flash, it's along this line, or maybe within that space, that I feel I often write. So that idea of that line interests me a lot.