While a majority yearns for the immersion that a full-length novel can deliver, such immersion can also be provided by stories that are shorter than usual.
Among the many overbearing tales told of Ernest Hemingway is the one when, after a lunch with fellow writers, he announced that he could write a complete short story in six words. When challenged to do so, he nonchalantly scribbled on a napkin: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
Whether the anecdote is true or not, it drives home the point that a shorter work can often pack a greater punch. Take another example, a story by Augusto Monterroso: “When he awoke, the dinosaur was still there.” That’s an entire universe in eight words.
At a time of dropping concentration levels, one would think that such short tales would make for perfect reading material. Yet, a majority yearns for the immersion that a full-length novel can deliver. Paradoxically, such immersion can also be provided by stories that are shorter than usual. The form is often also referred to as micro-fiction, flash fiction or sudden fiction, and you can see examples, good and bad, all over Instagram.
How long should such a work be? There’s no hard and fast rule but by some estimates, it can range from five to 1,500 words, if not less. Word length is, in any case, a notoriously subjective parameter. In their 1982 anthology, Short Shorts, a collection of “the shortest short stories”, editors Irving Howe and Ilana Wiener Howe included stories of up to 2,500 words, a limit that wouldn’t seem especially short today.
In his introduction, however, Irving Howe makes points that remain relevant for very short fiction. Of Mishima’s story, Swaddling Clothes, he writes: “It is fiercely condensed, almost like a lyric poem; it explodes in a burst of revelation or illumination; it confines itself to a single, overpowering incident; it bears symbolic weight.”
The tales in this volume include those by usual suspects such as Tolstoy, Chekhov, Maupassant, Joyce, and, of course, Hemingway. Their brevity means that “we see human figures in a momentary flash. We see them in fleeting profile. We see them in archetypal climaxes which define their mode of existence.”
One of the more fascinating aspects of extremely short pieces of work is that genre boundaries are blurred. As Alan Zeigler puts it: “Many prose poems are indistinguishable from short-short stories; brief essays from prose poems; and fragments from prose poems and brief essays.”
This is the point that drives his collection, Short, an anthology of several short-short stories, prose poems, brief essays, and other diminutive prose pieces. Zeigler stresses the fluidity of the form in his introduction. “The concept of genre is slippery, shape-shifting, and sometimes non-existent.” It’s a wide-ranging and capacious compilation that contains several inventive and inspiring works with an upper limit of 1250 words. Many are a great deal shorter.
That all these pieces sit well together in one volume bolsters Zeigler’s argument. It ranges over five hundred years of such writing in the Western tradition, from those such as Montaigne in the 16th century to Sarah Manguso and Ben Marcus in the 21st. Also included are two writers who have done much to bring short work into the mainstream: Lydia Davis and Amy Hempel. (In passing, it’s a pity that the pieces are arranged chronologically; a thematic arrangement could have been more resonant.)
The anthology underscores just how many writers of all stripes have experimented and been in love with very short work. To take a brief sample, there are prose poems by Stéphane Mallarmé and Charles Simic; aphorisms by Giacomo Leopardi; mini-memoirs by Michael Ondaatje and Meena Alexander; brief essays by Edgar Allan Poe; micro-fiction by Robert Walser; fragments by EM Cioran; and unclassified pieces by Robert Musil and WS Merwin. A blend of personal history, observation, and opinion, looking at things aslant, often with a strong first-person voice.
It’s appropriate that the Argentine master’s Borges and I finds a place here, as do some pieces by Baudelaire, whose Paris Spleen spawned so many short prose forms. Two notable omissions, however, are Raymond Carver’s Popular Mechanics and Julio Cortázar’s Continuity of Parks – the first, short and impactful; the second, short and ingenious.
Zeigler does mention a strong Eastern tradition of short-form writing, not included in his selection for reasons of practicality. Among others, there’s Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, Pu Songling’s StrangeTales from a Chinese Studio, and Yasunari Kawabata’s Palm-of-the-Hand Stories. Haikus are also widespread, and to take just one more case, Sudan’s Fatima as-Sanoussi is known for her very short works that cut across genres.
Such inscribed flashes of perception can be read slowly, reflected upon and re-read. They can be as intricate as engraved ivories that encourage the eye to move forward and then back again. Randall Jarrell once observed that a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it, but to be successful, a short piece needs to get everything right.
Sanjay Sipahimalani is a Mumbai-based writer and reviewer.