We are talking about form, and a little bit about movement.
Quite apart from ‘long’ and ‘short’ in fiction there are to my mind (and in general when we speak about writing) two kinds of form. The one is ‘formal,’ recognized and classified, which we’ll find pegged as novel, etc. — and within the same long form, say, we may then encounter a variety of genres such as the ‘picaresque’ or the ‘epic.’ I’m here of course referring to fixed forms like the sonnet or the ballad in poetry. In terms of this approach we’ll think of the novel as having more or less a given length and structured differently compared to the essay or short fiction.
Then there is the other kind of form, perhaps more aptly called shape, which emerges or becomes apparent as a necessity of contents, enhancing or amplifying the latter, giving the impression of inventing itself as it goes along. Recognizable as form, it is itself an element in establishing the authority, the totality and the reach of the work.
One could submit that the first form is ‘formalistic’ and arbitrary (which does not imply that it cannot be a powerful pole against which to play and set off tensions, and in so doing open other spaces); the second is more unexpected and organic.
Form, whichever way we want to look at it, is expressed in space and length of time. Thereafter it is given face by the way it is textured, stretched or cut up or made hollow.
Can one move from the short story to the novel by just adding chapters and scenes as one goes along? Garcia Marquez wrote somewhere: “The effort in writing a short story is as intense as beginning a novel. . But a short story has no beginning, no end; either it works or it doesn’t.” What he’s saying is that the short story, like the beginning of a novel, will be dense and allusive; it must show its tricks over much more condensed ground. It will still be read sequentially, but the ends are so close together that the impression will be one of simultaneousness: a swallow in time, like a gulp, not the furry animal of the mind squirreling away acorns of information for later delectation as it would when reading a novel. Richard Rhodes comments (and I took the Marquez quote above from Rhodes’ manual, How To Write): “(It) helps explain why the short story is such a resonant form: all that follows in a novel, all the elaboration of story and character — the long middle and the brief, resolving end — is held latent in a good short story, left for the reader to fill in from imagination and from personal experience.”
Maybe the reader’s mind has to be more active and participating when dealing with shorter texts, for brief fiction does not have the space or the length to take its leisure in fleshing out a totally autonomous world and then to populate it the way the novel can. It depends for its effects on a stronger and more immediate presence of the building blocks of narration. We normally experience the short story as a whole (and we want no loose ends), whereas we’re willing to accept duller or less interesting parts in the novel, to give it time and head, to even let it be for a while. Time is not always of the same intensity — in the novel, as in life, there will be times of forgetting. The bigger the canvas the more you need ‘gray areas’ (plains, emptiness) to highlight the aspects you wish to bring forward. The main characters, for example, will be less pertinent if all the subsidiary characters are as fully and sharply delineated. A novel is also ‘easier’ on the mind because the division in chapters, to name one option, allows for those major breaks in the narrative that will jump out painfully in a short story unless you can handle the transitions.
One provokes movement in form by, inter alia: resonance, allusion, punctuation, repetition, other patterns; by metaphor (because it shifts the gaze and sets off flares to illuminate the surroundings) and dialogue (you can cut corners and get much more done in a shorter time than a description will take); by switching tenses and swapping attitudes or voices; by jumps and by breaks.
Process, though bordered by form, is incarnated in movement. Sometimes movement is form. You may wish to write in a headlong rush, a river in flood hustling along the pebbles on the bottom. Or use a clipped phraseology so that the movement is in the intake of breath between the bare and brief indications. The movement is in the water, not the stepping stones. Silvina Ocampo brings about a forward and backward flow in the way her focus shifts all the time: the flag flapping is neither the wind nor the cloth, but the mind moving.
And there are differences between narrative movement (the unfolding of the story) and structural precipitations created when you shape your material in sentences, paragraphs and chapters. There may be a movement of ideas relating to larger discourses. Here the form matters; presenting the thoughts in an essay may make them more authoritative, more ‘objective’ than when doing them in a story, as the importance of the thoughts will be foregrounded and not confused with the characters’ traits. And movement can be suggested or introduced by what’s left out. A displacement is caused by the tension between full and empty. Completion is sucked in. One would use all of the above techniques differently depending on the form. The novel may indeed necessitate a fuller engagement (a long-term relationship), but it has a shorter immediate memory: if ideas or images are too far apart in the space of the novel you will lose some resonance and connectedness, and thus ‘sense.’
Henri Focillon wrote: “Human consciousness is a perpetual pursuit of a language and a style. To assume consciousness is at once to assume form. Even at levels below the zone of definition and clarity, measures and relationships exist. The chief characteristic of the mind is to be constantly describing itself.”
And to assume form is to take on responsibility.
I end where I started. Writing (in this instance) is moving into the unknown in order to picture it, to bring it — however tentatively and unsuccessfully — within reach of appropriation and identification. It is writing to the heart of nothingness, whether to exorcize or disclaim or become it. Who knows? And does it ultimately matter? Nor does it matter in the land of writing whether in this process (along this road) the void is out there or in here. Walking the road of itself depicts and becomes the fear and the fall and the oblivion and life resurgent: it becomes the human condition, the state of man.
(mirror note 5)
Suppose I tried to tell you that what I’m actually saying is giving expression to this half-wild animal in my arms, the man said. Fox or wolf. And that I have to let it go because it is pawing at my arms, drawing blood. Suppose when I let it go then, it doesn’t run off to freedom but turns around to look me in the eyes.
Transgressions and connections — thus Picaro closes the subject of a months-long reflection on writing in a note to his students. (That he who is so lost between make and make-believe should have been teaching!) You will remember that we set out with the intention to closely read a number of texts by Carver, Sebald and Kundera, he starts — and that we’d then approach these through discussions pursued to wherever they might lead us? Of course, we were on our way to the Middle World of wanderers and parrots. The intention was to identify those considerations that speak to us as writers as we navigate the reefs of writing. That’s why I did not propose formal lectures, or the academic study of a particular literature, but rather an exchange of insights and thoughts around specific texts. Like paper boats. No need to have the keel ripped off.
Writing is in essence a self-taught discipline. By that Picaro says he means, as well, a discipline of teaching the self what writing is all about. What we tried to do together was to dedramatize the act and the process by scrutinizing it more objectively, testing our reading and our interpretations, stepping away from too cosseted a relationship to our efforts. By looking closely at the work of others we may be more sensitive to what they saw and heard, and to their ways of transcription. The wound that allows you to write will, if sufficiently infected, keep people away from you. Do you then write so that the thing you write about may go away? It is true that once something is defined or cut down to size, it may either fade or mutate, or just quietly slip away in the water. He says this was a question.