Literature – Page 2 – Paola Trimarco

Digital Fictions and other Ephemeral Writings

About a dozen years ago I was teaching a course on analysing digital texts, those texts that can only be read on computers and that used the affordances of computer technology in their production. The course included hypertext fiction, digital poetry and novels using adobe flash interface to tell their stories with words, images and music. Fascinating stuff.

I recall one of my luddite colleagues making an off-handed comment about the texts on my syllabus just being fads of technology and not real ‘literature.’ I admitted that there was some truth to that in the sense that technologies develop and change so quickly, other ways of writing creatively using new digital platforms are likely to come along. I shocked my colleague even more by saying that my course was likely to become superfluous in the coming years as digital texts become more common and would be studied alongside print books as part of courses on literature and critical studies. (That was me talking in a world that is ruthlessly territorial when it comes to who teaches what. I was always an odd fit in academia.)

In a recent interview, the British Library’s curator of digital publications, Giuilia Carla Rossi, noted that many ‘born-digital’ works, like the ones on my old course, are structurally and technically more complex than the pdfs and e-books we use today. These older publications – by that, I mean even eight years old – relied on the software and hardware they were designed for. With changes in computer technology, these works are no longer accessible. Painfully, that has been the case for a couple of the digital poems I used in my book Digital Textuality. These innovative multimodal poems were produced on Adobe Flash, which was discontinued in 2020.

Other texts analysed in my book have been rescued by digital archivists. The much-praised Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson first appeared in 2001 as a floppy disc (remember those?) with embedded specialist software. This hypertext fiction, where you can choose different paths to reading it, is a wonderful retelling of Frankenstein with a female monster. To read this work when I was teaching it, a CD driver was required. How many of us have computers with CD drivers in them these days? Luckily, thanks to digital archivists, Patchwork Girl is now available online as a download. This is because it was a seminal work in hypertext fiction. Other lesser-known works in this sub-genre have evaporated.

My prediction spoken to my colleague turned out to be too true, and many digital texts are now just texts. Digital Textuality only had one edition. But I don’t mind. Firstly, I managed to get a few articles and book chapters published on the back of this book. Secondly, these digital works and studies about them are not all that different from the many stage plays out there that are never recorded, and their scripts never published. As a former playwright, I’ve grown to accept that. Plays and their performances are re-experienced in our memories. Perhaps that makes me less clingy when it comes to digital texts and the short shelf life of my writing about them.

As I was taking a break from putting together this blog, I happen to read John Naughton’s latest column in The Observer, where he has coincidently taken up a similar topic. Naughton points out that we shouldn’t assume our stored digital data is going to be around forever. Not only is the technology changing in ways that make our digital artefacts inaccessible, but the companies that store these artefacts could go out of business, taking our data with them. WordPress, the platform for this blog, recognises the concern among its bloggers that our work might not last in perpetuity and has offered us a solution. For a fee of $38,000 WordPress will secure ‘your online legacy’ for 100 years.

Dear Reader, I’m afraid you’re going to have to treat this blog, like so many digital texts, as a fleeting thing, a mere transient writing of the moment.

Reading around the war in Gaza

With all the news coverage of the situation in Israel, I hadn’t planned to read any books on the topic any time soon. When taking in such horrible and complex news, I tend to mix reportage with commentary, newsprint with television and podcasts, trying to make sense of it and to distinguish between factoids and misinformation. All the while, I’m too aware that the unfolding humanitarian crisis is being presented in ways intended to tug on heartstrings and stir up anger. I thought I was getting close to my news saturation point with this war.

But then, I realised that two books I happen to be reading these days are related to this conflict. Both books draw from personal accounts of well-known and documented events of the twentieth century. One is The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland, a non-fiction book I mentioned earlier this year, having first heard the author talk about it in an interview. The other book, Le Pays des Autres (The Country of Others), is Leila Slimani’s reimagining of the lives of her French grandmother, Mathilde, and Moroccan grandfather, Amine, who settled in his native Morocco post-WWII during the fight for independence from France.

These stories overlap during the Second World War, presented in Slimani’s book in flashbacks of Amine fighting for the French colonisers when he met and fell in love with Mathilde. The Middle East as we know it today was geopolitically constructed by western powers of the past two centuries through force and exploitation. In the aftermath of WWII, Muslim cultures revolting against the West and their allies reverberated across North African to the eastern Mediterranean. As Slimani taps into this resentment and deep-seated hatred of the French in post-war Morocco, it’s hard to not make parallels with the contemporaneous creation of the state of Israel and the consequences of years of deadly conflicts.

The first half of The Escape Artist is set in Auschwitz during the war while the mass murder of Jews was taking place and follows the story of Walter, a Slovakian Jew, who was deported to a labour camp at the age of 18 and miraculously escaped two years later with a fellow Slovakian prisoner. These escapees kept mental records and described what they witnessed in forensic detail to Jewish leaders in Slovakia. The second half of the book recounts the difficulties in getting governments across the world to act on this Auschwitz Report before thousands more were killed, and the story continues with Walter’s troubled personal and political life after the war. Such events related to the war have been referred to throughout this most recent war in Israel.

Both books present the complexities of ethic bias and hatred, highlighting the sense of otherness with an awareness of inexplicable contradictions. Even though Amine has married a French woman and appears to harbour a secret esteem for the French, he becomes violent with rage when he learns that his sister is having a relationship with a Frenchman. By taking the narrative to the years following Walter’s escape, Freedland’s book covers the stories of Jewish leaders who collaborated with the Nazis to save their own families and who after the war – with nothing to personally gain – became character witnesses for Nazis that were put on trial. When the current Israeli conflict is looked back on, I suspect we’ll find similar sentiments and anomalies.

While I hadn’t intended on reading any more about the Gaza conflict beyond the daily news reports and their commentaries, it seems I have. This makes me even more aware of colonialism and the Second World War being as much about the present as they are about the past.

A Sense of Place

I submitted my story only a day before the deadline. I don’t like running so close to the edge, but I’ve been busy with moving house in France. The story is for a literary magazine with an upcoming issue on the theme of place. Of course, place is everywhere, and every story takes place somewhere. Bringing place into the foreground is, I assume, what the editors meant by calling it a theme.

My story is set in India and is about a young woman who is somewhere on the spectrum (as we say these days). The treatment of animals (a contrary mix of despise and adoration) and of the poor (a mix of tolerance and alienation) makes this Western woman realise something about herself. I don’t know if I have succeeded in keeping place in the foreground. My main character has stolen the scene, and I suspect the editors will put my story into the neuro-diversity box either for another issue or for the overflowing rejection bin.

All of this has me thinking about place in fiction writing. I recall a playwright once explaining to fellow writers that he treated place as if it were a character. Place shouldn’t just be wallpaper. Whether it’s developing characters or causing certain actions to occur, place needs to play a meaningful role in the story.

In a book I just finished reading, The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller, the author does a particularly good job of using place as if it were a character. A New York family’s summer home is referred to as the paper palace. It is a tranquil, beautiful place that draws the family together and is where two key events occur. One event is a traumatic childhood experience, which triggers a tragic death and more painful memories. The other is a secret romantic relationship, which creates the main conflict of the story and a decision for the protagonist to grapple with until the very end. The summer home is feared and desired, and most importantly is unavoidable for the main characters.

While working on my short story and reading the Heller book, I’ve been reflecting on my sense of place in Nice, where David and I have had a second home for nearly 14 years. At one time, Nice was our escape from British winters. Now, it has become an escape from British life post-Brexit. As it has also become a place to spend more of my retirement (if writers every really retire), we’re looking for a larger apartment, a quieter city and a location closer to Italy for weekend jaunts. And thus, we’re apartment shopping in Menton. I trust that once we have left Nice, it, like India, will be a place I can write about from the vantage point of memories. Having said that, I’m reminded of a quote attributed to Benjamin Disraeli: ‘Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember and remember more than I have seen.’

Writing about and with our senses

In her book Sentient: What Animals Reveal About Our Senses, Jackie Higgins quotes from Leonardo Da Vinci who observed that the typical person ‘looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting . . . [and] inhales without awareness of odour or fragrance.’ When it comes to using our senses, Higgins concurs that ‘We are guilty of underappreciating – and underestimating.’

Higgins’ book is chocked with fascinating facts and anecdotes about animal and human senses, presented in accessible language that at the same time is not shy to use scientific terms. By senses, the author is not considering only the five senses delineated by Aristotle, but others that have since been examined, such as the senses of balance, pain, time and space.

I learned among other things that octopuses are covered with tactile sensors. Higgins cites studies showing how octopuses can use their heightened sense of touch to navigate mazes, dismantle Lego sets and even open childproof caps that leave us adults flummoxed. Other sea creatures can see colours that humans cannot, and some humans are so colour blind they experience the world in greyscale. The legendary speed of the cheetah is explained through recent studies of their acute sense of balance. This idea is explored further through experiments with athletes and dancers.

Along with these fun factoids, I also came away from this book thinking about the ways writers exploit the senses in creative writing. This is a well-worn topic in writers’ workshops and in those ubiquitous how-to books on writing. I won’t disagree with any of it. To transport the reader into an unknown place through words alone involves attention to all the senses and not just that of sight – visual description tends to be overdone and over-adjectived by novice writers.

This week I’ve been reading Black Dahlia and White Rose, a collection of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates. In ‘Spotted Hyenas: A Romance’ Oates employs the sense of smell in a few noteworthy ways. First, she uses smell to create fear and intrigue. A middle-aged woman, Mariana, thinks there’s a male intruder in her home and when he disappears all that is left is an animal scent. A few days later, the man reappears and seems to be half man, half animal. He enters a room filled with books. After he disappears for a second time, Mariana finds a book sticking out from a shelf – ‘The paperback Origin of Species was still warm, as if the furry man had been breathing on it. There was a smell—a distinct, acrid, animal smell…’. Mariana later realises (or strongly believes) that the man is someone she knew in her student days. The sense of smell becomes integral to the developing plot as the realisation triggers a flashback into an earlier life, full of dreams unfulfilled. This leads to a reunion at a pungent hyena habitat and this gem, when she first encounters her old classmate: ‘He stared bluntly at her and leaned close. Mariana could smell his breath—a meaty, earthy smell—a faint under-smell of decay like something overripe.’

If Da Vinci and Higgins are accurate about humans not appreciating their senses, perhaps writers and artists are needed to remind us of the copious world our senses can produce.

Some thoughts on dialogue in prose

Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain and Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees have been among my summer reads. The two novels are studies of poverty and familial relationships. Shuggie Bain is a coming-of-age story set in the council estates of Glasgow spanning ten years of the 80s to early 90s, while in The Bean Trees, a quasi-road story, a young woman in a beat-up car drives from Kentucky to Arizona over several months creating a new life for herself.

While I found both stories engaging and interesting in the worlds they inhabited, their handling of dialogue made Shuggie Bain the better read. This is despite losing its pace about three-quarters in. The Bean Trees, Kingsolver’s first novel, is tightly constructed and held its pace, but occasionally the dialogue fell flat as it appeared to try too hard to sound like the way people speak. Let’s be honest – in everyday speech, people wear out idioms and exhaust popular expressions. It’s part of the interpersonal function of language (for you M.A.K. Halliday fans). That is, we speak in familiar, tried and tested, language to connect with people.

In Shuggie Bain, the dialogue worked – which I wouldn’t have expected from a novel containing the Glaswegian dialect. Despite having lived in Edinburgh for five years and regularly visiting Scotland ever since, I still stretch my ears to understand Glaswegian. Perhaps Stuart knows this. He’s allowed the narrative prose to do much of the work, leaving the dialogue gently sprinkled throughout the text.

A writer’s confession – my true love is scriptwriting. While I’m not writing scripts these days and might not ever return to it (a topic for another blog), I have learned some useful lessons from writing in a medium where dialogue does the heavy lifting. Allow me to enter the imperative mode. First, don’t bother trying to replicate everyday speech all the time. As mentioned, it can be dull on the page and duller still when coming out of the mouth actors, unconvinced themselves. Aim for dialogue that sounds natural, but devoid of the mundane parlance of everyday life. Second, use subtext. Characters don’t need to explain their thoughts. In fact, their dialogue is strongest when they say one thing to mean something else or to do something that is not obvious from the literal meanings of their words.

Okay, I’ve left the classroom and the imperatives behind.

P. G. Wodehouse was masterful at dialogue. Nothing sagged in his characters’ speeches, using language more colourful than quotidian conversation. Where a character from The Bean Trees would say something like ‘he thinks he’s the cat’s pyjamas,’ Wodehouse’s Aunt Dahlia huffs out ‘Your uncle Tom thinks he’s the cat’s nightwear.’ As for Jeeves, everyone’s favourite butler provides understated commentary and suggestions to his master that are loaded with subtext. In this example from Right Ho, Jeeves, the text leading up to this tells us that Bertie is confused about a woman’s intentions, and Jeeves offers, ‘Feminine psychology is admittedly odd, sir. The poet Pope…’

‘Never mind about the poet Pope, Jeeves.’

‘No, sir.’

‘There are times when one wants to hear all about the poet Pope and times when one doesn’t.’

‘Very true, sir.’

From this snippet, the reader knows that Bertie is irritable and won’t listen to considered advice, and that Jeeves, due to his station, is going to play along.

There are loads of other great prose writers who command the dialogue in their works, but on a Saturday afternoon in August, Wodehouse was the first to come to mind.

Indigenous in the Age of Identity Politics

Native Americans, Māori and Nahua, those are among the peoples I think of when I come across the word indigenous. What I don’t think of are the Mincéirs, one of several groups referred to as Irish Travellers. Their precise origins are unknown, but they broke away from Ireland to travel to other parts of Britain in the early 1600s. As a minority group that identifies themselves as indigenous, they have their spot on the UN’s List of Indigenous Peoples.

According to the UN, there are over 5000 groups of indigenous peoples, and nearly half a billion individuals qualify as indigenous. That’s larger than the population of the US. These large numbers have come about in part by removing the criteria of firstness. This appears odd given that our understanding of indigenous comes from colonialism, making a distinction between the people who were already occupying a land before the colonisers arrived.

Indigenous derives from the Latin indigena, meaning ‘native’ or ‘sprung from the land.’ Writing in The New Yorker, Manvir Singh observes that the word first appeared in English with reference to people in 1588. ‘Like “native,” “indigenous” was used not just for people but for flora and fauna as well, suffusing the term with an air of wildness and detaching it from history and civilization.’ Singh argues that the notion of indigenous peoples as ‘historical relics’ perpetuates their marginalization and hinders progress towards justice and equality. Indeed, according to the World Bank, although indigenous people make up just 6 percent of the global population, they account for about 19 percent of the extreme poor.

Now, at least for the UN, indigenousness (try saying that after a few drinks) is determined by self-identification. Singh points out that ‘Many groups who identify as indigenous don’t claim to be first peoples’ like the Mincéirs, and that ‘many who did come first don’t claim to be indigenous.’ I understand the feelings of this latter group. This singular label oversimplifies the immense diversity among these communities, each with its own languages, cultures, and traditions, reflecting a rich tapestry of human history. Wearing my linguist’s hat, allow me to add that indigenous peoples account for over 4,000 languages.

Singh also confronts the harmful stereotypes and romanticized notions that persist about indigenous cultures – what I would call coloniality (I’ve waxed on about this before). The author aptly calls for a more nuanced and inclusive perspective on indigenous peoples, acknowledging their diversity and addressing the challenges they face as minority groups.

I agree with the need to reevaluate the concept of indigenous and to adopt a more comprehensive, empathetic, and respectful approach, understanding the intricacies and historical contexts of each community. Yet, I feel I’m being sucked into a wave of identity politics.

Like indigenousness, identity politics can be exploited by opposing sides. Claiming certain group identities or being sensitive to others’ identities makes one woke – in a negative sense – unless you flaunt or ‘protect’ your white identity or your male identity (for example). I know what side I lean towards in such debates, but the currency of these terms and their changing meanings can make it difficult to be understood. For those struggling against discrimination and poverty, the ambiguities surrounding indigenous and identity make it difficult to be heard.

Parthenogenesis and Seahorse Dads

It’s not a word that rolls off my tongue, but I had to use parthenogenesis to avoid receiving an obscene sticker from the bots at WordPress for using the word virgin as in virgin birth. Pity the seedy surfer who was looking for a virgin and wound up here in my sociocultural blog.

Clare Chambers’ novel Small Pleasures sparked my interest in the topic of virgin births. The story begins with a journalist investigating a claim of a virgin birth to have taken place ten years before, with the proof being a ten-year girl without a biological father. As this is not a book of fantasy or SF, there’s no spoiler in saying that it turns out not to be a virgin birth after all. If it were set in the present, this would be a rather dull and short book with a DNA test revealing all. But this story is set in the late 1940s in Britain. The recreation of post-war austerity and medical practices of the day make this an interesting historical read. The 1940’s medical examinations of rudimentary blood tests and skin grafts fail to discount the possibility of a virgin birth. It’s the detective work of the journalist that uncovers the truth.

Gratefully, the parthenogenesis story soon becomes a subplot for the more interesting love story between the female journalist and the husband of the woman who professes her virginity when her child was conceived. At different points in the unfolding story, the journalist and the husband find it hard to not believe the woman. This is without religion coming into the story. Naivety, perhaps. Or yet another example of otherwise intelligent people believing the impossible. I recall as a child still believing in the tooth fairy long after accepting the Biblical virgin birth as a myth, a creation of faith and not science.

Virgin births do exist among some species of reptiles, fish and insects, but let’s try to stick to humans. Today, popular culture has us wrestling with the idea that men can become pregnant and give birth. Of course, I’m talking about transmen who were assigned female at birth and can become pregnant after transitioning. A term that has been floated around in recent years by the mother/father themselves is seahorse dad. The female seahorse lays her eggs in the male seahorse’s abdomen, and it is the male seahorse who carries the eggs to maturity and releases the offspring into the water, effectively giving birth.

The label of seahorse dad evokes a cute analogy, a metaphorical relationship between seahorses and transmen who give birth. After watching a few interviews with the seahorse dads, however, I’m left feeling a bit uneasy. I heard these mother/fathers speak of themselves as almost literally being seahorses. I’m not questioning their transitioning or living as a different gender from their birth sex, or even their suitability as parents. But humans are not seahorses, and when it comes to reproduction, these humans were able to get pregnant and give birth because they had female reproductive organs.

I wonder if I should have entitled this blog ‘The things we choose to believe’? Nah, better to build my vocabulary by using a new word, even if it’s one for a very old concept, and an even newer term – those seahorse dads – for a concept I accept, metaphorically speaking.

The Older Writer

Older than who or what? I don’t know. I’m leaving this a dangling comparative for now, something I would tell my students and editing clients not to do.

I’ve realized of late that I have become an older writer,to use a phrase that gets bandied about these days in writers’ networks. Though I see myself as middle-aged, who happens to possess a Senior Railcard, I’m not eligible for some writing competitions and funding grants reserved for the under 35s. The flipside of this is that I can enter competitions for the over 40s and others for the over 50s. I’ve not convinced these age categories help the underrepresented. They just decrease the number of possible applicants, making these smaller and usually less-noteworthy awards.

There’s also an underlining assumption that older writers write for older, more mature, audiences. Children’s literature and young adult fiction blows that theory out of the water. In my thirties and forties, most of my protagonists were in their twenties. In my fifties, I wrote about a nonagenarian. Sure, my writing style has changed somewhat over the years, and I would like to think that I’m a better editor and rewriter of my own work than I was thirty years ago. But when it comes to published writing, I usually can’t tell the age of the writer from their works.

Martin Amis once said that ‘Talent dies before the body.’ He supported his point by claiming that Roth, Nabokov, Updike, Joyce and Tolstoy ‘disintegrate before your eyes as they move pass seventy.’ The generalization is obviously ageist, and in typical Amis fashion tinged with sexism – where are the great women writers in his list? I don’t think he was implying women writers didn’t disintegrate with age the way men apparently do. It’s more likely women writers weren’t worthy of study or mention. Examples abound of older writers having their first novels published or winning literary prizes in their 50s and 60s. Margaret Atwood, Annie Proulx, Hilary Mantel and Annie Ernaux come to mind. All females for sake of balance.

Edward Said famously examined ‘late style,’ as he called it, of artists, composers and writers towards the end of their lives. He didn’t make judgements on the quality as Amis did. Said was interested in the commonalities in these later outputs, only to suggest that such works are about dreams unfulfilled, understandings never reached – a sense of being out of touch with tradition and popular trends at the same time. Different and reflective, rather than disintegrating talent. Being older than I was when I wrote my first short stories and essays, I accept this view and put a knot in the dangling comparative.

Mansfieldmania

Whenever I regale people with the attractions of the French town of Menton, something I’ve been doing a lot lately as we’re on the lookout for an apartment there, I include a former home of Katherine Mansfield. I’m met with more or less the same response – ‘Oh, I love Katherine Mansfield! She’s my favourite short story writer.’ To which I add, ‘There’s a street named after her too!’ Eyes light up. This is the ‘cult’ (not my word choice) of Katherine Mansfield.

It’s been described as ‘a cult unique in modern literature’ because it was started after Mansfield died by her husband, the writer and literary critic John Middleton Murry. Only three of Mansfield’s books appeared during her lifetime. After her death, Murray edited and published eleven others, along with articles about her works, giving his late wife a status far greater than she had in her lifetime. According to literary rumour, when Murry received a handsome royalty cheque for The Dove’s Nest and Other Poems, he was reported to have said, ‘It was by far the biggest cheque I had ever received, and ten times as big as any Katherine had received for her own work.’ Most biographers agree that Murry’s motives for creating the myth of Mansfield (better alliteration than ‘cult of Mansfield’) had more to do with his financial needs than any literary conviction.

The intense interest in Mansfield’s work goes beyond her husband’s dealings. Like other idolised figures, Mansfield died young. She was 34 when she fell victim to tuberculosis. Though short, her life was scandalous and intriguing. She married twice and was known to have affairs with women and men, and her friends included D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. Mansfield broke barriers, taking up topics such as women’s sexuality and support for the Indigenous peoples of New Zealand.

This year, marking the 100^th anniversary of Mansfield’s death, the veneration has been rekindled and interest in her life and works have resurfaced. Helen Simpson, writing in The Guardian, notes that biographers have wildly varied in their account of her personality and motives for writing. I agree. Some have painted her as a saintly feminist icon (the phrase ‘free women’ is overused), others as a liar and literary imposture, while others still describe a tortured life and consequently aggressive personality. Simpson attempts to make sense of this divergence of opinion: ‘One explanation might lie in Mansfield’s keen sense of the absurd and the striking lack of anything deferential in her attitude – whether towards men or anyone powerful or rich or influential. The “ripple of laughter” (a favourite phrase of Mansfield’s) at play throughout her writing could cause offence (particularly coming from a young, upstart, female New Zealander). A sense of humour for a woman is a double-edged sword. When one of her finest tragicomic stories, The Daughters of the Late Colonel, was published, the reviewers found it “cruel;” in a 1921 letter Mansfield commented: “It’s almost terrifying to be so misunderstood.”’

While I have a few ‘favourite’ short story writers – J.D. Salinger, Joyce Carol Oates, Italo Calvino, Anton Chekov, Helen Dunmore and William Faulkner – Mansfield is up there, but not an all-time favourite. It’s not that I don’t like her work. I simply haven’t read much of it. Despite Mansfield’s popularity, her books didn’t appear on the undergraduate reading list during my years as a student or as a teacher of literature. I stumbled across a few of her stories, such as ‘At the Bay’ and ‘The Stranger,’ in anthologies of great short stories. I was surprised to see that the Literary Encyclopedia, which I have written for over the years, does not have any entries for her books, only a short paragraph about her life. I see an assignment proposal in my mental in tray.

I’m currently reading Mansfield’s first collection of short stories, In a German Pension, published when she was only 23. It’s a beautifully subtle work, often involving what modern audiences would call observational humour. It draws me in, and I can see myself engaging in Mansfieldmania – ah, that’s the word I want. ‘Cult’ connotes David Koresh, the Tr*mp base and the horrific deaths reported this week in Kenya at a Christian doomsday ‘church.’ Mania in a non-clinical sense is about enthusiasm and joyful obsession. I submit.

I tell my Mansfield-adoring friends that the house in Menton is called a ‘memorial’ with a plaque on the exterior wall. At this point, I confess that every time I go to this house, it’s always closed, and the plaque is impossible to read from the gated fence. I stand on my tiptoes to see what inhabits her garden. The mysteries of her short life metaphorically captured.

Some Thoughts on Six-Word Short Stories

I was recently invited to write a response piece to a scholarly article about six-word short stories for Connotations. The original author, David Fishelov, and I agreed that while all six-word stories in his study were narratives, they weren’t all truly stories. Fishelov defines narrative as ‘a represented action that involves “a change of fortune” … or a change or evolvement from one situation to a significantly different situation.’

Here’s an example of a six-word story that I would classify as a narrative but not story:

I invented a new word: plagiarism. (https://www.reddit.com/r/sixwordstories/top/?t=all)

This first appeared in a section of Reddit with the label of “Jokes.” Then it reappeared in a section on six-word stories. This mini-narrative reads as if it were a one-line joke. The only action in this narrative is the invention of a new word, with the punchline being that the word is about the wrongful borrowing of other people’s words. The action would be meaningless to the narrative if the invention were not of the word plagiarism. This example has a narrative element but would not be categorised as a story by most readers.

Since writing this piece, I’ve stumbled across a few other stories that I think are good examples of six-word stories:

Poked hole in condom. Divorce final. (From generatorfun.com/6-word-story-generator)

Alexa, where did my parents go? (By Lucy-Jo Dalby Six Word Story 2020 shortlist and winners announced | First Story)

It’s still you. Always will be. (From a Buzzfeed reader: messinab on BuzzFeed)

These little stories give us not only events or suggest a change in a situation, but also imply other events and narrative elements, such as background, resolution and character.

But my favourite six-word story is still the famous one attributed to Ernest Hemingway – he never published it, so I imagine it written on the back of a cocktail napkin at a bar in Havana:

For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.