Tuesday Flash Focus: Maneuvers and the Short Short

I came across an interesting article on the short-short during a search for the text of Lex Williford's "Pendergast's Daughter." In The Common Room, the Knox College Journal of Literary Criticism, there's William Boast's "The Heimlich and Unheimlich in Short-Short Fiction." Some excerpts and thoughts.

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"Because our imaginations tend to run wild when we read, a large amount of information can be implied by a small amount of text" (4).

I've recently become more and more convinced  there's more to the requirements of flash fiction than the limits of word count. One essential challenge is for each word to imply all that has been omitted. Sometimes, it has to do with not explaining what an image/description already makes clear (he raised his fist in anger), and other times it's that poetic sense of objects as seen in Imagism (the rules of which  Pound stated and Wikipedia quoted: "direct treatment of the 'thing', whether subjective or objective; and to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.") As I look around at the objects of my office—the Gold Peak ice tea bottle, the Orbit gum, the iPhone, the iPod playing Chris Isaak, the Frida Kahlo magnet & quote "I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality," the Scooby-Doo stickers—I wonder what each one might imply, and how that choice of what object/detail/word to include in a story includes not only that word but all that the word brings with it (and all the meanings/implications/experiences the reader might have attached to that word).

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"Like all other fiction, short-shorts must also have a mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Short-short fiction, however, is unique in the extent to which it exaggerates their coexistence" (5).

I'm thinking of Pamela Painter's "New Year" in Micro Fiction, in which the familiar break-up scene becomes something else when a cased Italian ham goes on a cross-country trip. Flashes unfold for me the way dreams do, each image weighted with what it is, what it isn't, what it represents—and each surreal twist treated as if it rationally belonged.

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"In Freud's essay 'The Uncanny,' the German words heimlich [of the house, not strange] and unheimlich [withheld from others, not known] are related to our English definition of uncanny....The unheimlich alters the reading pattern. It dislocates the reader, forces him out of the realm of the familiar, and replaces the ability to predict with uncertainty" (5-6).

I've noticed recently the tendency of micro fiction pieces to use generic nouns/relationships (the man, the daughter, the woman, the niece, the bus driver) rather than specific names. It makes sense, of course,  for small fictions to use archetypal names to break out of the confines of the compressed space and reach for the universal. But also there's something strange about this world without names, something uncanny—and so much of the short short feels that way, and it's no wonder, because we (as readers) are often thrown into the middle of things and then thrown out of things without any time to acclimate.

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"Tension or suspense enters a fiction when we are no longer able to accurately guess its direction" (8).

Jennifer Pieroni discusses the "smart surprise" in her essay on flash in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide, and I've used that phrase a million times already since reading it. It's about this idea of tension created by uncertainty, and faced with uncertainty, one often comes up with a ritual to relieve the anxiety of not-knowing—and so maybe the ritual of the reader when confronted with a world in which every word is a surprise and cannot be predicted  is to continue reading, until the anxiety subsides (& the story ends).We read on to relieve the anxiety that each read-word produces within us, in the hopes that our reading will end it.

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"This 'incomplete completeness' [of the short short] requires that the writer frustrate the reader in his or her attempt to tidy conclusions about the situations, ideas, or possible endings a fiction presents" (9).

The classic structure of a character's desire driving a narrative into existence by forcing the character to act and fail, act and fail, act and fail before that desire can be resolved doesn't quite work in the short space of flash to reach a "tidy conclusion." A reader could be left wondering how such a profound change could happen in such a short space. So flash writers might explore other ways for their pieces to end, and one way is for the opposite to occur, especially given the constant reminder of constraint that exists within the form. In other words, the ending might open, rather than close, the story.

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"Short-shorts continue to work on the reader's imagination by using suggestion rather than statement as their final effect. They often contain last lines or last paragraphs which surprise or reveal new information that complicates the resolution of the fiction or forces the reader to reevaluate what he has previously read" (10).

This process of "reevaluation" is an interesting one. I'm not sure a reader wants to reevaluate the reading of a novel, a reading which might have taken days or weeks or months. It's hard enough to remember, let alone reevaluate. But a reader might be more willing to reconsider and reread and reevaluate a reading that took a few minutes. The reader might even read it again, in that new light.

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"There's something in...last lines which defies explanation" (11).

Poems are like this for me, maybe too often, something about them defying the efforts I make to quantify the meaning gleaned from them. Maybe flash is a qualitive form, whatever that might mean.

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