In Short: Belly Dancing and Oral Narrative

Here are some insanely obvious observations: The above is a video. It is not a short story. But the content of this video is a man telling a story. A short story. Right, then. Moving on to less obvious observations...

While this isn't a short story in the traditional sense (a published piece of writing made available for the independent enjoyment of a reader), I have decided to consider it a short story for several reasons which I will now explain. Ahem. 

The act of reading a text is markedly different from the experience of hearing a story performed aloud: the former is a solitary act that requires the reader to consume and process content separated from external influences, while in the latter, an audience is expected to laugh or cry at the same junctures during a story’s oral performance. So how can I say that this oral narrative (the video above) can be considered the same as a short story if the impact on the audience is so different for textually and orally constructed stories? 

The critic, B.W. Ife, comments on the impacts of a story's medium on its audience in his book Reading and fiction in Golden-Age Spain (1985): 
What an orator is to an assembled audience, an author is to a dispersed one. ... It is likely that a reading public consuming literature in an atmosphere of contemplative solitude will be much more individualistic in its response than a hearing public moved perhaps more readily by mass emotion.

This has all kinds of important implications for critics, readers, writers, storytellers, and audiences everywhere-- especially as a new medium emerges: the Internet offers a hybrid medium that allows for both oral dissemination of a story as well as private consumption of that story. I listen to the storyteller and watch him perform, but I do so alone in my reader's studio. In a way, what we have here is the possibility for both oral and textual markers to coexist, and thus balance the semblance of a living, participatory dialogue (oral narrative) with an official, resolved permanence (texts). Do you see why I want to call Shlomo Bellydancer a short story now?

Socrates gives the stank eye
to the practice of writing.

A debate over the efficacy and reliability of either texts or oration began in antiquity with the advent of systems of writing (alphabets) and a particular philosopher (Socrates) who gave the stank eye to the practice of writing. Walter Ong has summarized Plato’s Socrates’ position on the debate (Socrates favored orality, viewing writing as an intrusive technology that dulled man’s mind) in his book Orality and Literacy (1982), emphasizing one of the main arguments offered in orality’s favor: the unresponsiveness of a text. "…Plato’s Socrates also holds it against writing that the written word cannot defend itself as the natural spoken word can."

But here again, the Internet has resolved the the conflict that Socrates points out-- once the video is posted, the audience consumes it privately and can begin to argue with it or praise it via the comments section... and the storyteller can respond there, too, speaking on behalf of his message or performance. 

So. We have just placed this short story squarely in the interstices of textuality and orality-- in a place called Internet. No one can stop me from calling it a short story because in many ways this video is like a text. By the same token, its distinctly participatory qualities and, well, oral presentation make it inseparable from its connection to oral narrative.

I've been thinking a lot about this intersection of writing and performing as made possible by modern technology. Expect to see more of it as I develop dissertation ideas!

Oh! And by the way, don't you just absolutely love this guy's story?!?!?!?

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Until next time, fair petticoat rustlers-- keep rustling!

In Short: Augusto Monterroso

Guatemalan author, Augusto Monterroso

Several months ago, I sat in my office, loudly bemoaning what I perceived to be a complete lack of fable literature (of the likes I was reading from the Medieval period) in 20th century Latin America. Luckily, a friend and colleague standing nearby overheard my lament and informed me that there was no need to complain; I simply needed to look into the short stories of one Guatemalan author.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of reading the first of Augusto "Tito" Monterroso's collection of short stories, Obras completes (y otros cuentos) [Complete Works (and other stories)]. Published in 1959, these stories reflect, at times, a mood of both anger and resignation, possibly symptomatic of Guatemala's tumultuous socio-political situation (a transition from dictatorship to democracy and back to dictatorship within the period of 15 years).

Born in Honduras, raised in Guatemala, and lived the majority of his adult life in Santiago, Chile and Mexico City.

But while it is important to be cognizant of the historical context in which Monterroso wrote, it would be folly to imply that the sole objective of "Obras completas" (or any other collection of his stories) was to reflect the socio-historic disposition of Guatemalan politics. His political context is but one of many sources from which he sought inspiration; critiquing his work entirely based on his political context would fail to adequately address the richly layered literary accomplishments of his concise texts.

Indeed, Monterroso himself commented on this in a 1996 interview he gave with Mexican-American academic Ilan Stavans, telling the interviewer that he "never experienced a connection between politics and literature in which literature became an instrument aimed at promoting social upheaval. ... I think that, in general, my work demonstrates a concern with social dilemmas, but not with politics in any strict sense of the word." [See: Ilan Stavan's piece, "On Brevity: A Conversation with Augusto Monterroso" in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 37, No. 3. August, 1996; pages 393-405.]

Monterroso's writing is clever, almost self-depricating, and totally unique among the other 20th century Latin American authors I've read.

Augusto Monterroso's first published collection of short stories (the same collection I read). 

The first thing I noticed about the stories in "Obras completas" is the immense restraint with which these stories are crafted. Subtle gestures here and there casually signal the central themes of his stories; major character development is accomplished with merely a wink in the direction of the reader.

In no other of his stories is this fact more pronounced than in his most famous short story (though perhaps not his most important). "El dinosaurio" ("The Dinosaur") is a one-sentence story that is, all at once, a fable, a joke, a surreal image, and a poetic transformation of the entire short story genre:

Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí. (When s/he awoke, the dinosaur was still there.)

The story begins in medias res with "When s/he awoke," immediately confronting the reader with the pace of the narrative and a perplexing, gender-ambiguous central character (in Spanish, the verb is conjugated for the singular third person without defining a male or female subject). This opening phrase also generates suspense for what we can expect to find after the comma, which announces the story's inevitable climax. When someone awoke, something must've been happening, otherwise there wouldn't be any story to tell, and suspense builds towards the resolution of that story as we approach--and read past--that comma.

At this point, the reader is thrust into a more surreal and fantastical realm with the introduction of the dinosaur, who is suddenly and inexplicably in the presence of the (main?) character. And yet there must be an explanation for the dinosaur's presence, because he was there before our gender-ambiguous character supposedly fell asleep. The end of the story forces the reader to re-evaluate his original assumption about the waking-up character being the main character--by the end of the story, the extraordinary importance of the dinosaur becomes clear. The dinosaur is, after all, the title character.

"The Dinosaur," on my kitchen table

I am certainly not the first to admire and analyze this brilliantly pithy story, nor shall I be the last. Monterroso almost did not include this short story in his collection, thinking that while it may have been relatively easy to write, it would not be the easiest thing to publish. He decided to publish it with Obras completas, at the urging of friends. The story became incredibly popular among the public (though not among critics, those nasty things), and in the interview with Ilan Stavans, he recalls the horror he felt as the little dinosaur began to eclipse the rest of his writing. Monterroso said:

... the story not only brought great recognition; it also generated great harm. ... People think that, since they've read 'The Dinosaur,' which obviously doesn't take that much effort, they know my entire work. I still have the very first reviews of the book [Obras completas]: critics hated it. Since that point on I began hearing complaints to the effect that it isn't a short-story. My answer: True, it isn't a short-story, it is actually a novel... 

Ha! I love that last line-- he succeeds in directly addressing the critics of his story at the same time he completely changes the discussion. He has "agreed" with their critique, but only after surreptitiously  teaching them how to elevate their critique to a new plane. Again, he manages to do this in one line...

Monterroso credited extensive study of and admiration for classic Greek writers (and the Spanish Golden-Age writer, Baltazar Gracián) with his penchant for brevity. He claimed that the straightforward and wildly inventive styles of Golden Age Spanish tales informed his short story writing by showing him how to pursue a structurally simple story, gilded with his own wonderfully strange voice: "Traditional stories are useful in that they broaden our scope by showing us what people enjoy most: simplicity." Drawing from traditional tales also uninhibited him from the notion of "originality."He said, "Originality isn't based on the construction of a certain argument, but in the style and twist a writer gives it. ... It's only possible to achieve originality through form."

Monterroso died at age 81 in 2003 in Mexico City.

My favorite tale in the Obras completas collection was called "Sinfonía conluida" ("Completed Symphony"). The story is two pages long and relates how a man discovered, while cataloguing old sheet music of La Merced church, the lost pages of a symphony. He eventually comes to realize that the sheets of music belonged to Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony."

As he excitedly shares his discovery all over his town, the people only respond by laughing at him and scorning the sheets of music. So he ends up selling his house and possessions (without bothering to tell his wife) and traveling to Vienna, to try to convince more "learned" men of his astonishing recovery of the lost Scherzo and allegro ma non tropo. But there, as in Guatemala, he meets with disbelief and disapproval.

Finally, a handful of Schubert scholars realize that this little old man is correct, and that he holds in his hands the lost parts of the symphony. In the end, however, they tell him that revealing these sheets of music would spoil the beloved narrative of the first two movements of Schubert's symphony-- how Schubert himself didn't think he could write anything beautiful enough to live up to the first two movements. Not only did they not wish to depose the old narrative, they did not want to have to figure out what the new one would be: how did Schubert's music end up in Guatemala? how had it languished in obscurity for so long?... (Remember the post I did about preferring a collectively constructed narrative to a "true" narrative?!)

I won't spoil the end of this tale for you. But you can already tell how wonderful a story it is (packed neatly into two pages like some elegant literary bento box)...

Augusto Monterroso seemed to be able to address enormous truths about humanity--our inclination to make assumptions in the face of suspense, our occasional foolhardiness, our occasional brilliance, our inferiority- and superiority-complexes. He was not afraid to let animals do the talking, he was not afraid of borrowing age-old tales that could be recreated entirely in their telling, he was not afraid to let each word he wrote turn around and say ten other things to his reader that he had no control over.

I am very inspired to read more of his work, and am very happy that, because of him, I am able to rescind my complaint about there being no fables in 20th century Latin American fiction.

On the "Centro Virtual Cervantes," (a Spanish-based online literature website) they chose to end his biography with a very sweet and personal line, and I'd like to conclude the post with this same line:
Pese a su intención de hacerse invisible, Monterroso refleja las huellas luminosas de un talento y una modestia excepcionales. Querido Tito, muchas gracias por tus maravillosos libros y por tu amistad.
(In spite of his attempts to make himself invisible, Monterroso left behind luminous traces of exceptional talent and modesty. Beloved Tito, thank you so much for your wonderful books and friendship.) 
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<Please note, all translations in this post are my own.>

Have you read any ultra-short-stories that could actually be novels?? What is on your reading table?? Until next time, fair petticoat rustlers-- keep rustling!

In Short: Harry Crews

I love short stories. They come by the book full; a whole collection of different little stories that you can read in an hour, sometimes less, and feel as utterly satisfied by that story as if you'd just finished a novel. You can read the stories in any order you chose. You can skip a story if you don't like its title. You can become attached to a character in the span of a page, and then you can leave that character as you found him, several pages later.

Welcome to the first installment of "In Short," the aptly named new feature here on the blog in which I will dedicate a weekly post to a short story and its author.

I decided that I need to read more short stories and write about them here. I arrived at this decision after recently (and voraciously) reading a collection of short stories in a couple of hours. My husband had insisted I read this one short story by Harry Crews called "L.L. Bean Has Your Number, America!"

Harry Crews. Photo by Tom Graves.  

"C'mon," he kept saying, "it's only seven pages. That'll take you, like, five minutes. And its a really great story." He had just finished reading this author's memoir and was now getting into a collection of his short stories called Blood and Grits. Every meal my husband and I shared included some episode, some remark, from the things he'd just read by this author. I had been wrapped up in reading the Brazilian epic, Os sertões (which will be a post unto itself), but when I finished that book there was nothing standing between me and reading those seven little pages anymore, so I did. And then I knew I had to read the rest of the collection.

Harry Crews was a beer-drinking man. And a vodka-drinking man. And a whisky-drinking man. And he wrote as if, after having been drinking all of those things all morning, he had gotten a little uncomfortably sober in the afternoon sun, irritated by anyone who happened to enter his periphery, and probably even self-consciously irritated by having to keep himself company if he was alone.

Yet, in spite of the jagged edge with which much of his writing is presented, there is a vulnerability that permeates each line-- the true brute masculinity of his writing is most evident in the moments of fear, melancholy, uncertainty, awkwardness. Crews has a remarkable way of looking shyly at something and then proceeding to describe it, always a little bashfully, in a savagely raw and accurate way. No frills, no apologies-- no attacks or accusations either-- just a timid observer with an unflinching gaze, a relentless power to see. The force of his narrative voice moves over his literary landscape with authority, but does not bulldoze it.

Here's an example from "L.L. Bean Has Your Number, America!":

The building in front of me, the L.L. Bean store, was a miserable-looking structure. ... For no good reason, I though it looked like the kind of building that would house a third-rate plumbing company on the verge of bankruptcy.

Source

The stories of Blood and Grits are strangely real, too. By strangely real, I mean they're non-fiction. Blood and Grits is a collection of this man's experiences and thoughts. All but one of these short stories were originally published in Esquire, Playboy, or Sport magazine in the 70s. These stories describe the confusion of the forest and its natural and unnatural inhabitants, the comfort of lonely dive bars along highways, the threat of violence from animals, the threat of violence from men, the crude impulses that we indulge in when we think no one (or everyone) is looking. They describe how many stupid ways we've come up with to stop hearing ourselves think, at the same time they listen deeply to the longing a man's soul can harbor.

One of his former students, Lucy Harrison, describes the collection like this: "It's a funny book. It's also awfully sad. It's about living the best you can with whatever burden you've chosen for yourself. It's about getting rid of that burden and dancing around like a crazy person. It's a book, largely, about drinking. ... It's a man's book. It isn't a guy's book. But I'm a girl, and I get every word of it. Got it?" 

Yep. That's about right. 

Source 

Probably one of my favorite stories from the collection was "Tuesday Night with Cody, Jimbo and a Fish of Some Proportion." It is such a simply story, all of 8 pages, in which nothing really significant happens. It takes place in a dark old bar sparsely populated with dedicated, professional drinkers. Crews describes the pleasure and downright necessity of such a worn-down  worn-in place: "Say it's sentimental or romantic or silly, but I'm convinced nothing new will work with whiskey because whiskey is never new. It's old and likes old things." 

The story is about two friends that don't shy away from demonstrating their "mutual admiration" by getting "locked up toe to toe and beat[ing] each other severely about the head and shoulders." One of the friends, Cody, brought a fish he caught that day into the bar and was estimating how much he thought it weighed. His friend, Jimbo, disagreed with that estimation. To settle the matter, the men took to the empty parking lot to put the powers of their pick-up trucks to the test in a reckless competition in which the friends, with trucks hitched to one another at the rear, tried to dominate his opponent's truck by putting full force on the gas peddle.

It's a funny story, but its also deadly serious, in the way you can tell a joke to a drunk who laughs at first but then suddenly becomes angry and dangerous. You watch two men take their lives into their hands, over the weight of a fish, on a Tuesday night, in a near-empty bar. And then they laugh about it and head back to their stools to finish their beers. Think about it.

Source

I am inspired to read more of Harry Crews' work, especially his fiction. He died just last year on March 12th, but he left behind a large collection of work. In precious few words, the Crews short stories I read today seemed to say so much about life. The tattoo on the author's arm, an excerpt from an e.e. cummings poem, shows in equally few words the way Crews felt about death-- at once taunting it and fearing it:

how do you like your blueeyed boy 

  Mister Death

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What are your favorite short stories?? Have you read any Harry Crews?? What are your favorite author tattoos??

Until next time, fair petticoat rustlers-- keep rustling!!