"Books always seemed to me like music
being questioned under duress."
                         --Richard Greenberg.

All artists, all authors, are necessarily arrogant. On a large canvas, the author has room, and time, to make a detailed case in justifying her arrogance: Yes, I render, I rend, and I judge. I leave these bits in, leave those bits out. Adjust the brightness, fiddle with the contrast, and so on. Given enough pages and talent, the author can convince us overwhelmingly of the rightness of her perceptions. The very sweep of even the poorest novel has its own grandeur, however tattered.

But in miniature? No.

The prose miniature distorts beyond forgiving. The reader is tied to a chair, slapped very hard once in the face, and that’s it.

Musical miniatures, like Chopin’s mostly very short preludes, are tiny, perfect constructs of abstraction. Certain notes in certain combinations can be made to do precisely THIS in 30 seconds. Done, and done.

The short story, every bit as cleverly constructed, is like one of those enormous color prints that Kodak hangs in public places, announcing that—whatever you may think—THIS is reality. Just as the eye is seduced by the lovely surface of the print, the heart is seduced by the lovely surface of the short story. Seduced, but finally unsatisfied as the author, after having her way with you, leaves you bruised, unfulfilled, with your less noble guesses about the world having been given much added support.

Fabergé eggs that for all their golden perfection reek and reek of authorial bile and disdain: Yes, by God, I shall force these already small souls into these impossibly small spaces and then have them perform their few tricks, which they know to perfection.

The problem is that the tricks depicted in the whiff of narrative are tricks as understood by this tiresome, quickly bored omniscience standing to one side and watching and compulsively making notes: Prize-winning puppet masters and mistresses who take artifice for art, drabness for durance, and detail for deity.

What better way to put everyone (especially one’s spouse and one’s friends) on notice: Beware me because when I’m near I’m watching through dun-colored glasses your every move, and when I’m finished later with my Mephistophelean alchemy (negate! negate!), even you may be convinced of the worthlessness of your Lilliputian struggles—and yet my awards prove that your best hope of any sort of immortality lies only in letting yourself be caught in my tiny net of words.

If you seek wisdom, solace, respite, truth even, look rather at the nearest stone. Picasso said art is a lie that tells the truth. This brief narrative art is a lie that perpetuates the lie: in the gloaming of human existence, all is murk and murk is all.

YEA:
Love in a Field of Nettles

by Sylvia Sikeston

Granted, there may be an element of pandering, either to editors or readers, in a writer who devotes her career to what we may call the New Yorker short story, that being a story of a certain length, a certain tone, a certain character, and a certain condescension. But to do it well still requires a high level of what decades ago Percy Lubbock dubbed the "craft of fiction."

Of course such craft requires trickery. Not only art, but life, perhaps (if the Hindus are right) the universe itself is illusion. Only the spoiled child rails against a good magic show. We all love to be deceived if the deception is pulled off gently, cleverly (with some wit), and lovingly.

Put yourself in any artist’s hands and you will be whisked into this or that magic kingdom. Many magic kingdoms, as we learned in the 20^th century, are pretty but plastic (Disney). Others have more substance and may be terrible and terrifying, or seductive and sensually gratifying.

Give yourself to Alice Munro and for a time you exist in a sub-arctic (Canadian) world of shivering manners, short, brilliant summers, long, cold winters, background for lives eked out at a difficult pressure point where an upstart adolescent cultural bully to the south challenges the arrogant assumption of privilege from the old, violent aristocrat across the ocean to the east.

A pretty place? No. Hopeful? No. Merely a place among a world of such places where love among the nettles is the only possibility while waiting for the bear to come over the mountain.

An unwillingness to accept, even to allow, a writer’s sincere and serious attempt to take snapshots of her place (even huge, color-forced poster-size snapshots) indicates a certain blindered view of the world: My way or no way at all.

Story-tellers we shall always have with us for filling those moments of rest of an evening before night comes. Some choose not to listen. Fine. To them I say: Get thee to a lamasery where your distant ears and faint lamentations can invoke disharmonious demons more to your own uncomfortable liking.