This was back when houses were bigger than people, and people ate food, and air was what birds flew through. If you were me, you pretended to be asleep when story hour ended, when the person obligated to read to you closed the book and announced your bedtime. You faked sleep not because you particularly cared for being carried upstairs and tucked into bed. Being carried can hurt, slung over someone’s massive back, stomach crushed into a shoulder, a bigger person’s bones grinding into your own. Being carried is something we are supposed to want but that I always found wanting—it requires more exertion than skipping upstairs under one’s own power. No, faking sleep after a story ended was the only way to have private time, an afterlude of silence so the story could bloom inside you, and not get ruined by explanations and claims and arguments. When you stayed asleep, the subject could not change and the story could not be defeated by the trivia of aftermath that seeks to noise up the room.
What did you think?
What was it about?
These are not bad questions. Some people get paid to ask or answer them. They reveal us yearning to be interesting in the fashion of our interesting stories, trying to live up to the energy we have just so greedily devoured. We might be at our best when we pursue such questions, thinking out loud in the electrified periphery a story creates. But I wanted instead, during those times, to keep my eyes closed and hear nothing more. The story was sufficient and it would echo on after it finished. I was suspicious of discussion because I suspected that magic was at work, the kind that asked for silence. The best stories were stun guns that held my attention completely, leaving me paralyzed on the outside, but very nearly spasming within.
It is this place, “within,” where all stories take place, despite their ruse to the contrary. We talk about the world of a story, or its setting, but stories are only set inside us. We keep making up other names for our interior. Setting is a myth, like all properties of a story. When it succeeds, we insist it is not a myth. We call this believability. The words real or realistic are curious, because stories are not real whatsoever. Other misnomers abound. A voice in a short story is, in fact, not something you hear but something you see. This is a strange attribute of writing—its silence. A literary voice is silence that we decorate—we spray a private noise into it. We, the readers, are the true speakers of the stories we read. Yes, storytelling was oral from the beginning, and we’ve all sat through public readings and books-on-tape. But the very probable fact is that no one is reading this to you but yourself, and you are most likely not even moving your lips. Yet it comes to you in a kind of sound that only your eye enables. If you are hearing the words in your head, that is your business. If I were to watch you read this, I would hear nothing but your own fidgets. I would not know your thoughts. One of our last privacies is to plot this way, while reading.
The question I wanted to ask, as I read the stories that would fill this book, was not: What is the plot, but rather, What is the story plotting for? Not: What is it about, but How is it going about its business, whatever its business might be? What is the story’s tactic of mattering, its strategy to last inside a reader? How is it scheming to be something I might care about?
Plot, in fiction, usually refers to “the series of events consisting of an outline of the action of a narrative.” But it seems hard to ignore those other, better meanings of plot, such as: small piece of ground. In this sense, plot would refer to setting, the space in which a story occurs. The question we would ask about a story would be not: What is the plot, but What plot does it occur on? The plot would be what we bring, as readers, to a story. A place for the story to come to life inside us. Plot would be another name for our bodies, carved hollow to receive something amazing.
When we plot for something, we devise secretly, we conspire. It is in this sense that plot might best concern fiction, when it suggests mystery, unrevealed conditions driving the characters or language through a story. If a story has a plot in this sense, then, it is what the story is withholding, not what it tells. Plot is the hidden machinery that animates a story. When plots are revealed they cease being plots. They are uncovered, as tedious as a fully nude person. Good fiction is busy keeping secrets, protecting its plots. The story, then, is what the story is hiding, and the hide is indeed a piece of skin, whose effect is to conceal the body.
How it does this is what we might call style—the focus of this book. As various as the methods of storytelling are here, what unites these stories, what might be called their shared business, is a relentless drive to matter, to mean something, to make feeling where there was none. My idea was to read hundreds of stories, in as many styles as I could find. I wanted to align contemporary American story writers who might have radically different ways of getting to a similar place. In each case as I sat down to read, I had to be turned from a somewhat dull, unpromising person into one enlivened, antagonized, buttressed, awed, stunned by what he was reading. I required to be transformed, however little I believed that it could happen. I was asking for something I no doubt did not deserve, but these stories were more than capable of demanding my attention. In twenty-nine separate but ingenious ways, these stories seek permanent residence within a reader. They strive to become an emotional or intellectual cargo that might accompany us wherever, or however, we go. Stories conspire not to be forgotten; they scheme to outlast their moment. That they each do it with entirely different methods, from separate but thriving literary traditions, attests that the current practice of the short story has ample methods of matterfulness and that it might be shortsighted of us to believe that only one tradition of fiction might succeed.
If we are made by what we read, if language truly builds people into what they are, how they think, the depth with which they feel, then these stories are, to me, premium material for that construction project. You could build a civilization with them. They are toolkits for the future. They could be projected by megaphone onto an empty field and people would grow there. These stories prove that many stylistic literary traditions, from brainy to simple, plain to complex, coldly immoral to forgiving, lyrical to terse, easy to difficult, weird to mundane, realist to experimental, long to short, sad to happy, bitter to accepting, circuitous to direct, and cruel to kind, can produce colossal feeling and manage to be true, deep, memorable, and brilliant.
There are allegedly two stories to tell: a stranger comes to town, or a person goes on a trip. If you think you know another story, it is supposedly toiling in the powerful shadow of one of these. This was an idea I paid to hear. It came packaged with my college education. Like many provocative ideas, it is grossly untrue in ways we needn’t bother revealing, and will no doubt continue to make people angry for years to come. But the error of this arrogant claim, like any good mistake, provides some genuine provocation: that we have very little to say to ourselves, in our stories, but many ways of saying it, like the fabled one-word language with thousands of pronunciations. To communicate something new, members of this society need only pronounce the single word differently. The mouth becomes the sole agent of originality.
Stories keep mattering by reimagining their own methods, manners, and techniques. A writer has to believe, and prove, that there are, if not new stories, then new ways of telling the old ones. A stylist is an artist of diction, a grammarist, a shaper of sentences, who recognizes language as the sole technology at work in a story. A stylist seeks to master that technology, to not let it lead or dictate terms, but to control it and make it produce whatever effects the stylist desires.
If any story must concern us, then, it is the way our very few stories are told, and I hope that is the story this anthology tells. As long as we keep looking and reading, we’ll discover that the English language has endless ways of making our stories matter. This resource will not be exhausted. In other words, it is asking to be stylized in a delirious number of ways.
This anthology presents twenty-nine of those ways, and it readily admits that these ways are not really new, in the literal sense, arising from nowhere, with no precedents or contexts. Calling them new, other than indicating that they are recent, is a way of noticing how they have soaked up the styles and techniques of the literary habits—well-known and otherwise—before them. It is a way of saying that the writers are laboring in an entirely new stylistic moment, and these are the voices they have carved out for their stories. This is their guess at what literary styles will puncture our inattention and qualify as relevancies. The writers here have absorbed the fiction methods of the past and added their own hunches, instincts, desires, fears, cravings, and artfulness to command a reader’s attention in compelling ways.
I tried to include a single vigorous practitioner of each thriving literary style I could identify, which doesn’t mean I was trying to label everyone I read, but rather that some voices sounded louder, purer, more forceful, and lasted longer in my head, while other stories seemed to be sharing a single voice. It is hard, when reading deeply into the current American short story, to ignore certain collective passions, techniques, or beliefs of what a story should be and how it should operate. There are movements and schools, camps and gangs. I did my best to read their best work: the realists, the metafictionists, the lyricists of the south, the brainy storyless writers who obsess over information, the writers using nonfiction forms for fiction’s purposes, the child-voiced writers who eschew all forms of knowingness, the patient, detail-oriented slice-of-life writers, the domestic minimalists, and the fabulist maximalists (yes, there are other groups, and no, I don’t really subscribe to these labels). In doing this reading and research, in asking for lists of writers from everyone I knew, I often discovered that my favorite writers from the various camps were all awkward members of any one group, not comfortably situated in a single rigid aesthetic, but rather embracing or originalizing several styles at once. In short, they helped make these subcategories meaningless.
What I found in my reading was an amazing range of styles, beliefs, methods, ideologies, and instincts. Writers are reaffirming tradition, ignoring it, or subverting it. Where once we could have observed a divide between the kind of fiction we call realist and that which we might call innovative or experimental—anthologies themselves have often reinforced these divisions, seeking ever-more specific stylistic subcategories—now there are writers synthesizing the heartfelt and cerebral approaches, the traditional with the innovative impulse, with astonishing results. But let’s admit right now that these categories can have a crushing effect: they are first of all inexact, they reduce the aim of the writer, they can have derogatory overtones, and they can unfortunately shape a reader’s impression of the work before even one word has been read. This is true not just of terms like postmodern, or realist, but also lyrical, southern, gothic, minimalist, metafictional, academic, or naive.
So then, without using classifiers, a note about the various traditions of the short story represented in this book: some seem easy to read, some seem hard, some don’t seem like stories at all. Some seem to read themselves, while others must nearly be studied like a book of codes, evading understanding. Some we can escape into, others we feel we must very nearly escape from. The stories are written simply, intricately, with declared or concealed feeling, with sentences freighted with adjectives and modifiers of every sort, or in partial sentences with made-up words. The usage, diction, and grammar might be familiar, the kind we all use every day, or it might be exceedingly strange, stylized, in the shape of sentences we’ve never seen before. The voice could be that of a child or of a jaded professor, hauntingly naive or disturbingly knowing. Some stories want you aware of their technique, others seek to hide it. Some admit to being fictional, others would not do so even at gunpoint. In other words, to each style is a counterpoint, not in argument against it, but to complement it. I see the cohabitation of these stories as proof that style’s burden is being met.
The terrible secret about short stories is that they are made of language. Entirely. Nothing else goes into them. They might be plausible or implausible, but they are always invented actions created for our interior. Yet we are still more comfortable discussing a story’s imagery. Discussions of language can render us mute. Stories are language-made hallucinations, fabrications that persuade us to believe in them for their duration. They happen on the inside and we can keep them secret. But the word language, used in relationto writing, seems to convey something heavy, cerebral, forbidding, a promise of readerly labor. It is frequently omitted during discussions of our finer stories. Its citation in relation to a writer can often indicate what a reader might call unreadability or difficulty.
But character is, after all, a piece of language slapped to life by a writer. So is plot. And setting. And conflict. These are acts of language rubbed over the air to make people appear. We could list all the traits of fiction we care for and find that none of them would exist if it weren’t for language, one word after another, constructing a world we believe in.
We should not forget that to be a fine story writer is to be an artist of language, someone who uses sentences to produce feeling. However simple this sounds, there is something extraordinary about it to me, given how few sentences that we encounter in our daily lives can manage to make us feel anything, to stir us toward revelation. The sentence, as a technology, is used for so many rote exchanges, so many basic communication requirements, that to rescue it from these necessary mundanities, to turn it into feeling, is to do something strenuous and heroic. But language is also the way we communicate privately to ourselves, the true code of our inner lives, and to be a story writer is to know this, to tap into and reveal those ways of personal address we reserve for the private, necessary messages we send ourselves, when we think no one is listening.
Ben Marcus