There are any number of ways by which today's wily short story writers depict the "other" place. Gerald Shapiro's artist protagonist in this issue's "The Twelve Plagues" stumbles into such a world when he goes off to an eastern suburb to receive his artistic award: the Cajun swamps it ain't, but suburban New Jersey can get pretty strange to the West Coaster. This issue's story "Swimming in the Dark," by Nancy Zafris, is about a Japanese stewardess enamored of American culture. From her perspective, very little about her own life is interesting; not her highflying, globe-hopping work or the many places she visits, and certainly not her own culture. She yearns for what to her is the exotic freedom of Americans. The "other" place--the place of challenge, adventure, and desire--is to the typical reader of this story an ordinary world.
THE MISSOURI REVIEW frequently receives in the mail stories written by people stuck in television consciousness, sometimes competent fairy tales about drug dealers and cops. We also get stories written by script writers with impressive lists of credits, who haven't yet mastered the short story and who don't understand how real fiction can be, how unruled by concepts fictional voice can be, and how "unstructured" the contemporary short story can seem by comparison with storytelling in the visual media.
In fact, almost from the beginning, short story writers have fiddled with different ways to organize stories and different sorts of outcomes. Most of the stories in James Joyce's collection THE DUBLINERS (1914) are brief, spare X-rays of disappointment and futility among the people of Dublin. The concluding story "The Dead," however, is a fully narrated and explicated story, with a lot of action but a different sort of outcome: Its protagonist Gabriel Conroy is led not to a narrative climax, but to a climax of insight.
Spurred by the realization that in her youth his wife Greta had a more gallant lover than he can ever be, and by a an almost delectably described mood of melancholy and mortality, he learns that he is not, after all, the center of his wife's universe. Indeed he has never really loved his wife or anyone in the way that her young lover did. This realization proves to be like a bowling pin that knocks over other assumptions that are already wobbling around in his and the reader's mind--that he is the Continental sophisticate among the locals, or the generous male figure over his extended family. As the story concludes in a lyrically written fadeout, Gabriel Conroy stands at a window, watching the snow falling all across Ireland, and all across the living and the dead, and we experience with him a sense of the infinite darkness. Conroy's revelation is scary in its intensity, conveying a feeling that reaches beyond his character into the condition of all Dubliners and all mankind.
"The Green Suit," Dwight Allen's wonderful comic story in this issue, shows how the moment of insight in contemporary fiction has become more subtle, more ambivalent, woven into the texture of a story rather than occuring in a lyrical burst. Allen's young male publishing assistant, swimming naked in the pond with another man's girlfriend, brings upon himself a very embarrassing moment indeed--which plainly suggests to him something that he should have figured out a while ago. Yet in this and many stories today the "epiphany" may not always be fully understood by the protagonist.
Another, somewhat surprising aspect of short stories in the nineties is how little good experimental short fiction is being written. From the sixties through the early eighties, influenced by the metafictional stories of John Barth, the paranoid, lyrical satire of Thomas Pynchon, the various experimental approaches of the Fiction Collective, and the magical realism of several South American authors, a creditable amount of such short fiction was written and published. At this time a healthy number of experimental novels are being written by authors like Milan Kundera, Kazuo Ishiguro (whose new novel is reviewed in this issue), and Salman Rushdie. However the stream seems to be sluggish in short fiction.
I frankly do not understand the reason for it, since the short story by its very briefness has always been a natural lab for experiment. The only guess I can make is that good short story writers sense how dated and mannered such stories can quickly become. When I note that John Barth has published his latest collection of metafictional short stories--fiction about fiction--I wonder if he is going for the all-time trophy for rehashing an old idea, twenty-five years and running.
In this issue, Pulitzer Prize winning writer Robert Olen Butler shows how natural experiment can be to the short story. Starting with the whimsical concept of writing a story based on a tabloid headline, Butler creates literary substance behind a ridiculous title: "Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed" is told by a very real and oddly appealing man who sank on the Titanic and has since been finding his disembodied self in various vessels of water, from teacups and pisspots to the grand ocean itself. Mostly, though, the story is about the chance of a lifetime, in which a seemingly oblique and brief encounter with another person can change one's life--or at least one's understanding--quite literally forever.
Enjoy, Butler says, and we agree!
