In my opinion (and thank goodness it is not only my opinion) the best
short stories are the most mysterious ones, or the ones written by writers who
are obsessed by mystery. For some reason
(perhaps many reasons), the short story (both by tradition and generic
qualities) is particularly suited to evoke mystery (or to create mystery where
many never felt mystery before). And in
my opinion (again, thank goodness I am not the only one to think so), the best
readers of short stories are those fascinated by mystery—not simple, solvable mystery, but, (forgive me for using such a
redundant adjective) mysterious mysteries, which, by definition, are the human
kind. (I talk about this issue in more detail in a couple of chapters of my book I Am Your Brother.) One of my favorite writers who is of this opinion is Flannery O'Connor. Here's one of the many things she says about
mystery:
The type of mind that can understand good
fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind
of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with
reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery. Fiction
should be both canny and uncanny.
I could go on and on quoting Flannery O'Connor about mystery, but you
can read her yourself in Mystery and
Manners: Occasional Prose. I will
only cite one more O'Connor observation:
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. He has only a
short space to do it in and he can't do it by statement. He has to do it by showing, not by saying,
and by showing the concrete—so that his problem is really how to make the
concrete work double time for him.
Eudora Welty once said: "The first thing we see about a story is
its mystery. And in the best stories, we
return at the last to see mystery again.
Every good story has mystery--not the puzzle kind, but the mystery of
allurement. As we understand the story
better, it is likely that the mystery does not necessarily decrease; rather it
simply grows more beautiful." "The mystery of allurement." Yes, I believe that. And yes, when it comes to the stories I like
best, the more I read them, the more mysterious they become. I love being caught in the beautiful mystery
of them.
Umberto Eco uses a metaphor to describe what is required of us from
such stories in his Six Walks in the Fictional Woods: "There are two ways of walking through a
wood," Eco says:
“The first is to try one or several routes
(so as to get out of the wood as fast as possible, say, or to reach the house
of grandmother, Tom Thumb, or Hansel and Gretel); the second is to walk so as
to discover what the wood is like and find out why some paths are accessible
and others are not. Similarly, there are
two ways of going through a narrative text.
Any such text is addressed, above all, to a model reader of the first
level, who wants to know quite rightly how the story ends (whether Ahab will
manage to capture the whale, or whether Leopold Bloom will meet Stephen Dedalus
after coming across him a few times on the sixteenth of June 1904). But every text is addressed to a model reader
of the second level, who wonders what sort of reader that story would like him
or her to become and who wants to discover precisely how the model author goes
about serving as a guide for the reader. In order to know how a story ends, it
is usually enough to read it once.
However, in contrast, says Eco, “to become the model reader of the
second level the text has to be read many times, and certain stories
endlessly."
And it is because I like mystery that my favorite stories in the 2015
edition of O. Henry Prize Stories
are: Christopher Merkner's "Cabins," Emily Ruskovich's "Owl,"
Thomas Pierce's "Ba Baboon," and Elizabeth McCracken's "Birdsong
from the Radio."
In his comments on his story, Christopher Merkner says that the mystery
that gave rise to "Cabins" struck him when a friend told him that he
was getting a divorce. Merkner says he realized that the friend had already
told fifteen other mutual acquaintances about the impending divorce and that what
hooked him into the story was his intuition that the real divorce was between
him and his friend's personal life, as well as the personal lives of the
fifteen mutual friends who have told him nothing about the divorce. The problem,
Merkner says, was his foolish assumption that had "some sort of intimate
arrangement with the details of these people's personal lives." And as he worked through the story, he
wondered how many lives he assumed he knew, but ultimately knew nothing about
at all, "or just very tiny bits and pieces."
This mystery of the lives and minds of others is perhaps the central
mystery the short story form most often hooks into, and perhaps why short
stories are, by their very nature, made up of "very tiny bits and
pieces."
This mystery of human identity—just who someone really is—is also at
the center of Thomas Pirce's story "Ba Baboon." In his brief
commentary at the end of the book, he tells about how his grandfather suffered
a traumatic brain injury in an accident and became a different person
afterwards—personality changes that both frightened and fascinated him,
concluding this way: "I think most of us like to assume we are who we ae
and will be that way until we die. It
can be an unsettling thought, the extent to which our identities are so
malleable, the degree to which we are barely ourselves, even from one moment to
the next."
Elizabeth McCracken says her story actually began as an assignment for
the editor of Fairy Tale Review, who
asked her to write a story for a collection of stories based on myths. She
hunted about for a myth to use without much success until one day her children
suggested, lightheartedly, that her New Year's resolution might be biting them
less. McCrackin says, before she had children, this parental desire often
expressed as "I could eat you up I love you so," was unfathomable to
her, but now she understood it. It made
her think of "Lamia," best known perhaps from Keats' poem, and she
did some research and found one version in which Lamia was a woman who had gone
mad from grief after the death of her children and turned into an animal, and
then, McCracken says, "well, it all made sense to me."
Emily Ruskovich says her story began with a single image: "a woman
lying in the grass at night, shot down by a group of boys who had mistaken her
for an owl." In an interview with
Hannah Tinti, she says it began with another story she had started to write
with a peripheral character for whom she tried to suggest a backstory with this
sentence: "He had lived in the trailer ever since his mother was shot by a
group of boys, who mistook her for an owl." She notes in her end-of-book
commentary that two other images clustered about this central image—coffee grounds
spread on a dirt floor and giant-headed inbred cats—both from her family. She
says she felt these three images all connected in some way and that she set out
to write the story to discover how. In her
interview with Tinti, Ruskovich says a friend of her who saw an early draft
told her that the boys in the story reminded her of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan—another connection that
fascinated Ruskovich, especially for the way it evokes how we can be haunted by
our childhood loves to the point we almost don't believe they are real, but yet
we find ourselves waiting until they return.
When Frank Kermode in his Norton lectures twenty years ago asked,
"Why Are Narratives Obscure?"
he cited Kafka's parable
"Before the Law" in The Trial. It’s about a man who
comes to beg admission to the Law but is kept out by a doorkeeper. So he sits there year after year in
inconclusive conversation with the doorkeeper outside the door unable to get
in. When he is old and near death, he
sees an immortal radiance streaming from the door. He asks the doorkeeper why he alone has come
to this door and receives this reply: "This door was intended only for
you. Now I am going to shut it." A terrible parable, you would have to
agree. "To perceive the radiance of
the shrine," say Kermode, "is not to gain access to it; the Law, or
the Kingdom to those within, such as the doorkeeper, may be powerful and
beautiful, but to those outside they are absolutely inexplicable. This is a mystery." While the insiders protect the Law without
understanding it, the outsiders like us see an uninterpretable radiance and
die." A terrible parable indeed.
Kermode is concerned, of course,
with the radiant obscurity of parables, a word that in the Gospel of Mark is
used as a synonym for "mystery."
It is the radiance Welty refers to when she says the "first thing
we notice about our story is that we can't really see the solid outlines of
it--it seems bathed in something of its own.
It is wrapped in an atmosphere.
This is what makes it shine, perhaps, as well as what initial obscures
its plain, real shape." To Marlowe, sitting Buddha-like on the deck
telling the story of Kurtz, to outsiders to the mystery, the "meaning of
an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which
brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of
those misty halos that, sometimes, are made visible by the spectral
illumination of moonshine."
Why is there is apt to be more mystery in short stories than in
novels? I will simply list three that
seem possible to me.
First there is the historical and prehistorical source of the short
story in myth and oral tale that, by its very nature, was concerned with
mystery, for everything was mystery and story was the only explanatory model
available. A genre never completely
departs from its origins.
Second, there is short story's dependence more on pattern than plot for
its structure. As a result of this
dependence, the action of a short story is more apt to be organized around an
implicit principle or idea rather than a series of events occurring causally in
time. The puzzle effect is
inevitable. It is no accident that
America's first theorist of the short story also invented the detective mystery
story.
Third, there is the mystery of motivation in short stories. It is not easy to determine why Bartleby
prefers not to, what Roderick Usher is so afraid of, why Wakefield goes to the
next street over and hides out for all those years. Part of the problem may be the short story's
close relationship to the romance form, which, allegorical in its nature,
develops characters that, even as they seem to be like real people in the real
world, are driven by the discourse demands of the narrative and thus act as if
they are obsessed, propelled by some central force rather than merely
logically, causally, or randomly.
Watch how Emily Ruskovich's "Owl" creates the voice of the
husband who is mystified by his wife, who seems both adult and child at once,
looking for that lost childhood that seems
just out of reach. And admire how Ruskovich, without forcing the allusion, gradually
merges her her story into that never neverland of Peter Pan and Wendy.
Read Christopher Merkner's "Cabins" and enjoy how the
narrator of the story moves back and forth between reality (whatever that is)
and fantasy as he deals with the utter mystery of those he thinks he knows.
Put yourself in that tiny pantry with the two main characters of Thomas
Pierce's "Ba Baboon" as they frantically search for the magic word
that will pacify the dogs that growl at the door.
Identify with the distraught mother of Elizabeth McCracken's
"Birdsong from the Radio," as she is driven to regain that which is
lost in the only way possible to totally integrate the other—by devouring
them. As Kristen Iskandrian, who picked
this story as her favorite, says, the voice of the story seems to come
"from the belly of a timeless and placeless place, from the
nowhere/everywhere where fable gets forged."
As Flannery O'Connor says, "The type of mind that can understand
good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the
kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact
with reality and its sense of reality deepened by contact with
mystery."
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