Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand (2018)
The Shadow-Line
or, What’s the difference between micro-fiction & prose poetry?
Recently I attended a short story conference in Shanghai with a group of other New Zealand writers. Each of us was asked to give a reading. My wife Bronwyn Lloyd chose some short prose pieces from her forthcoming collection
A Slow Alphabet, one of which used the recurring phrase “the house didn’t care” as a structural motif.
Afterwards, a young Chinese student questioned whether such a piece could actually be called a short story. In Chinese literature, she explained, there was a form called prose poetry, and she felt it might more properly fall under that heading. Bronwyn explained that we had the same genre distinction in English. I suppose what struck me most about the student’s comment was the fact that she thought of this form as uniquely Chinese.
There’s always been an air of the subversive about prose poetry in English. It’s never been a form that vaunts itself: more like the poor cousin of “true” poetry or “real” prose. But what actually is the difference between a prose poem and a short short story (or micro-fiction, or flash, or any other term you prefer)? No doubt there are as many answers as there are writers, but that doesn’t mean that no further distinctions are possible.
For instance, I tend to see the virtues of fiction of
any length as including “plot, characterisation, depth of immersion in ‘Mirror City’ (to borrow Janet Frame’s term for the world of her own writing).” In prose poems, by contrast, I look for
The sudden sparky connections, the topsy-turvy thinking: the need to read between the lines to be understood, which most of us would agree to be poetic virtues.[1]
I remember clearly the strange and vertiginous effect some of Kafka’s short parables had on me when I first read them as a teenager. One that particularly sticks in my mind is “The Knock at the Manor Gate”:
[2]
It was a hot summer’s day. I was coming along the homeward road with my sister and passed the gate of a manor. I do not know if she knocked at it out of sheer mischief or merely threatened to do so with her fist and did not. A hundred yards farther up where the road turns left began a village. We were not acquainted with this village, but just after the first house people came out and waved at us. Whether out of friendliness or warning, they were apparently frightened and stooping in dismay. They pointed in the direction of the manor we had passed and reminded us of the knock at the gate. The landlord had brought an action against us and an investigation was to begin at once. I was very calm and calmed my sister also. She probably hadn’t even made any knock – and even had she done so, nowhere in the world was there proof of it. I tried to make the people around us understand. They listened, but withheld judgment. Later they said, not only my sister, but I too was to be charged. I nodded, smiling. We looked back at the manor, as when one observes a distant plume of smoke and waits for the flame. Dust rose, covering everyone. Only the points of the tall lances were visible. And scarcely had the troop vanished into the manor grounds when presently their horses appeared to have turned round, and were headed towards us. I pushed my sister aside – I would sort things out on my own. She refused to let me go by myself. I said she should at least change her clothes, so that she might come better-dressed before the gentlemen. In the end she followed and took the long way to the house. Soon the riders were upon us, nor had they alighted from their horses before they had asked for my sister. “She’s not here at the moment,” I answered anxiously, “but she'll come later.” The answer was received quite indifferently; it seemed significant above all that they had found me. There were two main gentlemen: the judge, a young, lively man; and his quiet assistant who was named Assmann. I was asked to enter a peasants’ cottage. Slowly, shaking my head and adjusting my braces, I sat down under the sharp gaze of the gentlemen at work. I still believed the word of honour, given by any of these peasants, would be enough for the townsfolk to set me free. But when I had crossed the threshold of the cottage, the judge, who sprang forward already expecting me, said: “I feel sorry for this man.” However, it was beyond all doubt that by this he did not mean my present state of affairs, but rather what would happen to me. The room looked more like a prison-cell than a cottage: large flagstones, utterly bare walls, immured by an iron ring; something was in the middle – half platform, half operating table.
Could I still taste other air than the prison’s? That is the great question; or on the contrary – it would be, if I still had some prospect of release.
It seems to me beyond question that this work of Kafka’s constitutes a short short story, rather than a prose poem. But why is that? What is there about it that makes it seem like fiction rather than poetry?
For a start, there’s its length. It’s 530 words long (in translation: 499 in the original German). There’s also a fair amount of characterisation: the brusque, rather pushy brother, who is determined to save his errant sister at all costs from the avenging “gentlemen.” Then there’s the sister herself, impulsive and volatile enough to knock (or gesture towards knocking) in the first place, but loyal enough to resist her brother’s desire to take the whole blame on himself.
The “young, lively” judge says only: “I feel sorry for this man.” Then there’s the chorus of avengers, “the riders,” as well as a chorus of villagers prophesying woe. The only person who isn’t characterised clearly is the Judge’s “quiet assistant,” Assmann.
He is, nevertheless, the only named personage in the story. What’s more, the fact that the judge is profoundly sorry for what is about to occur, and that the mention of that “something” in the middle of the floor: “half platform, half operating table,” makes us fear the worst. Is Assmann a torturer? He’s described simply as a “quiet assistant” to the young judge, but there’s a sinister implication behind that silence.
Kafka is at his best in short pieces such as this. The weight of implication in the two siblings’ simple, almost non-existent act of transgression and the immense weight of authority expended on repressing it could hardly be more economically suggested. Far from an abandoned scrap, this short piece is in its own way as complete as any of his more famous stories: “Metamorphosis,” for instance, or even
The Trial itself.
•
The other night I was lying on a sofa … moaning and groaning and ingesting copious amounts of painkillers. A 'friend' decided to divert me by reading long passages from a book … called Black November: the 1918 Influenza Epidemic in New Zealand by Geoffrey W Rice. A nightmare and this prose poem were the inevitable results.[3]
For years I’ve been teaching the poem “1918” by poet and historian Scott Hamilton in my first year Creative Writing class:
At the edge of Temuka the road is blocked by three bales of hay, a black flag, and the last two O'Shanessey kids, who take turns holding the rifle their cousin brought back from the Somme. Outsiders get sent back to the city; Maoris have to keep to Arowhenua, on the far side of the creek we dive in to wash the sickness away.
When Queenie got the cramps we took her to the small house behind the marae, and laid her out on clean sheets, and fetched a bucket of creekwater, and cooled her stomach and hips, and washed the mushrooms under her arms. The younger kids giggled beside the bed, expecting another baby cousin. First her fingernails then her hands turned black; her breasts swelled, popped their nipples, and dribbled blue-black milk. We couldn't straighten her arms in the coffin, so we folded them across her chest. She looked like she was diving into herself.[4]
Why does Scott describe this as a prose poem rather than a short short story? Was it simply that, as a poet, he thought he should be writing poems? It was, after all, included in his first collection
To the Moon, in Seven Easy Steps (2007)? That book contains work in so great a variety of forms – essays, diary entries, left-margin justified “poems” – that it’s hard to believe that Scott would feel constrained by any such conventions of nomenclature, however. I would prefer to argue, then, that this is intrinsically a prose poem – and not a mislabelled piece of micro-fiction. Why?
Certainly it lacks any of the play of character so obvious in the Kafka story. Its details are, if anything, even more horrific and disturbing, but Scott’s piece makes much greater use of imagery and word-play.
She looked like she was diving into herself.
This last sentence in Scott’s evocation of the 1918 ’flu epidemic sounds more like an observation than a thought. What does it mean to “dive into yourself?” It is, I would suggest, a conflation of an attitude we associate with intense introspection with the finality of death.
The racist attitudes so apparent in the first paragraph of the piece – Maoris this side of the stream, rifle-toting Europeans the other – are largely submerged by the brutal levelling effects of the disease itself, with its strange aping of childbirth and generation in its later stages.
But there’s no real story here – in the sense of a forward-moving narrative. It would perhaps be possible to project one from the interaction of the “last two O'Shanessey kids” – whether their siblings were killed in the war, or by the disease itself – and “Queenie” down at the marae. But that would be our construction, not his.
His piece is universal in the sense that he means it to be extrapolated: the simple tragedy of death and fear it describes could be multiplied easily to cover the whole of New Zealand – and thence onto the rest of the world affected by the Spanish ’flu pandemic.
Kafka’s piece, too, has its universal aspect: but in that case it’s the incidents of the story he wants us to take note of: the initial act of disobedience, the terrifyingly disproportionate reaction to it. The manor, the village, the riders are all generic props by means of which he is able to impose this stark pattern on us. If they were more clearly delineated, it would detract from rather than enhance this intention.
Precisely the opposite is true of Scott’s piece: specificity of place is necessary to give us the sense of multiple repetition he wishes to convey. The words “many people died during the great pandemic” have little emotional resonance for us – and yet the fate of poor Queenie is hard to read, hard to endure, even through the medium of print. My students find it revolting – want to turn the page, even scribble over it – but once read, it’s in their memories, and they can’t escape it any more.
Mind you, it’s true that Kafka’s piece is more than three times as long as Hamilton’s. Is this a more plausible explanation for the differences between them? Did the latter simply lack the space to sketch in more characters and flex his narrative muscles?
It’s true that more space is generally required to animate a short short story than a poem. But I still feel that it’s the differences in emphasis, the
genre differences, between Kafka’s and Hamilton’s pieces, which are most significant: a poem is not simply a more condensed version of a short story, and neither is the most poetic piece of fiction a poem, exactly.
Perhaps, though, the virtue of all such works lies in their element of surprise – their ability to undermine our perception of an apparently static and ordered cosmos. The paradox inherent in their close resemblance to each other is simply another way of achieving this. It raises questions which might otherwise pass by unnoticed.
•
Notes:
1. Jack Ross, ‘Review of Frankie McMillan,
My Mother and the Hungarians and Other Small Fictions’,
Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017, Massey University Press, Auckland, 2017: 322-23.
3. Scott Hamilton, ‘1918’, Reading the Maps, accessed 19 November 2016 from
http://readingthemaps.blogspot.co.nz/2006/03/1918.html. It should be noted that while the original title of the first edition of Geoffrey Rice’s
book was indeed
Black November: The 1918 Influenza Epidemic in New Zealand (Allen & Unwin, Wellington, 1988), the second, revised edition, to which Scott is more probably referring here, was entitled
Black November: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand (CUP, Christchurch, 2005).
•
(19/11-11/12/16; 25/8-1/9/17)
Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand. Ed. Michelle Elvy, Frankie McMillan & James Norcliffe. ISBN 978-1-927145-98-2. Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2018. pp 268-72.
[2061 wds]
•
The Shadow-Line
or, Is there really a difference between micro-fiction & prose poetry?
[complete version]
I was at a short story conference in Shanghai recently where the mere fact of having visiting delegates from a country as mythically distant as New Zealand seemed to cause intense excitement. As a result, our little posse of writers was invited to go on plenaries, deliver papers and panels, and – most importantly – give readings from our own work.
My wife Bronwyn Lloyd chose to read a group of short pieces from her forthcoming collection
A Slow Alphabet. One of them used a recurring phrase as a structuring motif: “The house didn’t care … The house didn’t care …” and so on through a long list of things the house didn’t care about.
At the end of the reading, a young Chinese student questioned whether such a piece could actually be called a short story. In Chinese literature, she explained, there was a form called prose poetry, and she felt that it might more properly fall under that heading.
Bronwyn replied that we had a form called prose poetry in English, too (I should mention that, although held in China, the whole conference was conducted in English, with simultaneous translation for the plenary sessions and some of the readings). I suppose what struck me most about the student’s comment, though, was the fact that she thought of this form as something uniquely Chinese.
There’s always been an air of the secret and subversive about prose poetry in English. It’s never been a form to skite about: more like the poor cousin of “true” poetry or “real” prose.
When Richard Burton, back in the 1880s, tried to echo Arabic saj‘ (or “rhyming prose”) in his fantastical translation of the
Arabian Nights, the result was greeted with sneers by reviewers and readers alike. Most subsequent versions of the collection have plumed themselves on not following his bad example. True, rhymed prose
does seem a little alien to the spirit of English, but Burton held that the true function of translators was to enlarge the possibilities of their own language by grafting on certain features of other tongues.
Dickens, too, has been criticised for his tendency to break into blank verse at moments of high emotion: as if there were some primal sin in mixing the tropes of poetry and prose – some threat of cultural miscegenation which might undermine both.
Other literatures see these things somewhat differently. In German, for instance,
Kunstprosa (heightened or “art” prose) is accepted as a perfectly legitimate form. Rimbaud’s prose poetical works
Une saison en enfer and the
Illuminations have influenced French poets even more than such conventionally rhymed and structured poems as the “Bateau ivre.”
But what’s the difference between a prose poem and a short short story (or micro-fiction, or flash, or any other term you prefer)? No doubt there are as many answers as there are pieces of writing, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t venture on a few attempts at further classification.
For instance (as I commented in a recent review), I tend to see the virtues of fiction of
any length as including “plot, characterisation, depth of immersion in ‘Mirror City’ (to borrow Janet Frame’s term for the world of her own writing).” In prose poems, by contrast, I look for
The sudden sparky connections, the topsy-turvy thinking: the need to read between the lines to be understood, which most of us would agree to be poetic virtues. (Ross, 2017, p. 323)
Perhaps, though, it would be better at this point to descend to cases. I remember clearly the strange and vertiginous effect some of Kafka’s short parables had on me when I first read them as a teenager. One that particularly sticks in my mind is “The Knock at the Manor Gate.”
•
We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.
– Franz Kafka, “Letter to Oskar Pollak” (2014, p. 16)
Here is a (conveniently non-copyright)
Wikisource translation of Kafka’s story:
It was a hot summer’s day. I was coming along the homeward road with my sister and passed the gate of a manor. I do not know if she knocked at it out of sheer mischief or merely threatened to do so with her fist and did not. A hundred yards farther up where the road turns left began a village. We were not acquainted with this village, but just after the first house people came out and waved at us. Whether out of friendliness or warning, they were apparently frightened and stooping in dismay. They pointed in the direction of the manor we had passed and reminded us of the knock at the gate. The landlord had brought an action against us and an investigation was to begin at once. I was very calm and calmed my sister also. She probably hadn’t even made any knock – and even had she done so, nowhere in the world was there proof of it. I tried to make the people around us understand. They listened, but withheld judgment. Later they said, not only my sister, but I too was to be charged. I nodded, smiling. We looked back at the manor, as when one observes a distant plume of smoke and waits for the flame. Dust rose, covering everyone. Only the points of the tall lances were visible. And scarcely had the troop vanished into the manor grounds when presently their horses appeared to have turned round, and were headed towards us. I pushed my sister aside – I would sort things out on my own. She refused to let me go by myself. I said she should at least change her clothes, so that she might come better-dressed before the gentlemen. In the end she followed and took the long way to the house. Soon the riders were upon us, nor had they alighted from their horses before they had asked for my sister. “She’s not here at the moment,” I answered anxiously, “but she'll come later.” The answer was received quite indifferently; it seemed significant above all that they had found me. There were two main gentlemen: the judge, a young, lively man; and his quiet assistant who was named Assmann. I was asked to enter a peasants’ cottage. Slowly, shaking my head and adjusting my braces, I sat down under the sharp gaze of the gentlemen at work. I still believed the word of honour, given by any of these peasants, would be enough for the townsfolk to set me free. But when I had crossed the threshold of the cottage, the judge, who sprang forward already expecting me, said: “I feel sorry for this man.” However, it was beyond all doubt that by this he did not mean my present state of affairs, but rather what would happen to me. The room looked more like a prison-cell than a cottage: large flagstones, utterly bare walls, immured by an iron ring; something was in the middle – half platform, half operating table.
Could I still taste other air than the prison’s? That is the great question; or on the contrary – it would be, if I still had some prospect of release. (1917)
It seems to me beyond question that this work of Kafka’s constitutes a short short story, rather than a prose poem. But why is that? What is there about it that makes me see it as fiction rather than poetry?
Well, for a start there’s its length. It’s 530 words long (in translation, that is; 499 in the original German). There’s also a fair amount of characterisation: the brusque, rather pushy brother, who is determined to save his errant sister at all costs from the avenging “gentlemen.” Then there’s the sister herself, impulsive and volatile enough to knock (or gesture towards knocking) in the first place, but loyal enough to resist her brother’s desire to take the whole blame on himself. Fearful, but still distinctly honourable.
The judge, too, a “young, lively man,” whose only comment about the case is “
Dieser Mann tut mir leid” [I feel sorry for this man] (Kafka, 1983, p. 300). Then there’s the chorus of avengers:
die Reiter [the riders / knights], as well as a chorus of villagers prophesying woe. The only person who
isn’t characterised clearly is the Judge’s “quiet assistant,” Assmann.
The name is interesting. It’s been transliterated precisely from the original: “
Aßmann” has become “Assmann.” Needless to say, there are no anatomical implications to be derived from the word “ass” [UK English: “arse” – German: “
Arsch”]; nor does it imply an “ass” or donkey [German: “
Esel”]. The verb “
essen” [to eat] does take the past form “
aß” [he/she/it ate], so possibly one could argue that this Assmann is well fed, but the conjecture is somewhat strained.
What is certain is that he is the only named personage in the story, that the Judge is profoundly sorry for what is about to occur, and that the mention of that “something” in the middle of the floor: “half platform, half operating table,” makes us fear the worst. In short, we may suspect that this short sketch might have been meant as a companion piece to Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” composed at much the same time, during the early years of the First World War, with its elaborately described instruments of torture?
Is Assmann a torturer? He’s simply described as a “
stiller Gehilfe” [quiet helper] to the young judge, but there’s certainly something sinister about his named – but silent – presence.
One could argue that Kafka is at his best in short pieces such as this. It may lack the cumulative intensity of his (unfinished) novels
The Trial or
The Castle, but the weight of implication in the two siblings’ simple, almost non-existent act of transgression and the immense weight of authority expended on repressing it could surely not be more economically suggested. Far from an abandoned scrap, this short piece is in its own way as complete a work as any of his other great stories: “Metamorphosis,” for instance, or “The Great Wall of China.”
•
The other night I was lying on a sofa - it was not a particularly hospitable sofa – moaning and groaning and ingesting copious amounts of painkillers. A 'friend' decided to divert me by reading long passages from a book … called Black November: the 1918 Influenza Epidemic in New Zealand by Geoffrey W Rice. A nightmare and this prose poem were the inevitable results.
– Scott Hamilton, Reading the Maps (10th March 2006)
For years I’ve been teaching a prose poem by poet and historian Scott Hamilton in my first year Creative Writing class. It’s called “1918,” and it runs as follows:
At the edge of Temuka the road is blocked by three bales of hay, a black flag, and the last two O'Shanessey kids, who take turns holding the rifle their cousin brought back from the Somme. Outsiders get sent back to the city; Maoris have to keep to Arowhenua, on the far side of the creek we dive in to wash the sickness away.
When Queenie got the cramps we took her to the small house behind the marae, and laid her out on clean sheets, and fetched a bucket of creekwater, and cooled her stomach and hips, and washed the mushrooms under her arms. The younger kids giggled beside the bed, expecting another baby cousin. First her fingernails then her hands turned black; her breasts swelled, popped their nipples, and dribbled blue-black milk. We couldn't straighten her arms in the coffin, so we folded them across her chest. She looked like she was diving into herself. (Hamilton, 2007, p. 99)
My question is, why does its author describe this as a prose poem rather than as a short short story? Through mere inadvertence? It was, after all, collected in his first book of poems
To the Moon, in Seven Easy Steps (2007)? Was it simply that, as a poet, Scott thought he should be seen to be writing poems?
His book contains work in so great a variety of forms – essays, diary entries, left-margin justified “poems” – that it’s hard to believe that Scott would feel constrained by any such conventions of nomenclature. I would prefer to argue, then, that this is
intrinsically a prose poem – and not a mislabelled piece of micro-fiction. Why?
Well, for a start, it lacks any of the play of character so obvious in the Kafka story. Its details are, if anything, even more horrific and disturbing, but Scott’s piece makes much greater use of imagery and word-play.
She looked like she was diving into herself.
This last sentence in Scott’s evocation of the 1918 ’flu epidemic sounds more like an observation than a thought. What does it
mean to “dive into yourself?” It is, I would suggest, a conflation of an attitude we associate with intense introspection with the finality of death.
The racist attitudes so apparent in the first paragraph of the piece – Maoris this side of the stream, rifle-toting Europeans the other – are largely submerged by the brutal levelling effects of the disease itself, with its strange aping of childbirth and generation in its later stages.
And yet there’s no real story here – in the sense of a forward-moving narrative. One could project such a story from the interaction of the “last two O'Shanessey kids” (whether their siblings were killed in the war or by the disease itself) and “Queenie” down at the marae. But any such additions to what Scott has provided us with would be ours, not his.
His piece is universal in the sense that he means it to be extrapolated: the simple tragedy of death and fear it describes could be multiplied easily to cover the whole of New Zealand – and thence onto the rest of the world affected by the Spanish ’flu pandemic.
Kafka’s piece, too, has its universal aspect: but in that case it’s the incidents of the story he wants us to take note of: the initial act of disobedience, the terrifyingly disproportionate reaction to it. The manor, the village, the riders are all generic props by means of which he is able to impose this stark pattern on us. If they were more clearly delineated, it would detract from rather than enhance this intention.
Precisely the opposite is true of Scott’s piece: specificity of place is necessary to give us the sense of multiple repetition he wishes to convey. The words “many people died during the great pandemic” have little emotional resonance for us – and yet the fate of poor Queenie is hard to read, hard to endure, even through the medium of print. My students find it revolting – want to turn the page, even scribble over it – but once read, it’s in their memories, and they can’t escape it any more.
•
Dear Sir,
I am writing to you to object to the word cremains, which was used by your representative when he met with my mother and me two days after my father’s death.
– Lydia Davis, “Letter to a Funeral Parlor” (2010, p. 380)
I chose the two examples above for various reasons: for one thing, because they both describe the same period of time. The young Bohemian Franz Kafka’s story was composed during the First World War, contemporary New Zealander Scott Hamilton’s prose poem concerns the tragic aftermath of that war in a small settlement on the Canterbury Plains, with details derived from Geoffrey Wise’s history of the great pandemic in New Zealand,
Black November (2005), mentioned in the blog-entry quoted above.
Accusations of stacking the evidence are always possible in such cases, though. Kafka’s piece is, after all – at 499 words – more than three times as long as Hamilton’s (162 words). Is this, perhaps, a more plausible explanation for the differences between them? Did the latter simply lack the space to sketch in more characters and flex his narrative muscles?
I’d say it was (generally speaking) true that more space is required to animate a short short story than a poem. But I still feel that the differences in emphasis, the
genre differences, between Kafka’s and Hamilton’s pieces, are more significant.
To make the point more clearly, I’d like to make another comparison. I can’t (partly for copyright reasons, but also because I don’t want to bore you with too many long quotes) include the full text of the pieces involved. Both are readily available in print and online, however.
On the one hand, we have the 480-word short short story “Letter to a Funeral Parlor” from Lydia Davis’s 2001 collection
Samuel Johnson is Indignant – included in
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (2009). On the other, I’d like to discuss one of the ten prose poems by American poet and translator Eliot Weinberger collected under the title “Renga” in the online journal
Jacket (issue 11, 2000).
I’ve used Lydia Davis’s story in my first-year Creative Writing course, too. It fitted very neatly into the prose fiction part of the course, under the heading “characterisation.” And, since we want our students to write stories which get to the point as quickly as possible, the fact that Davis managed to confine the whole thing to less than two pages was a consideration also.
Little could be said to happen in the story proper. A man has died. His widow and daughter have discussed the funeral arrangements with a representative from the local funeral parlor, who is described (by the daughter) as “respectful and friendly.” She gives as an example of his dealing with them “in a sensitive way” the fact that:
He did not try to sell us an expensive urn, for instance.
The element of humour here – the suspicion most readers might form that
not trying to sell you an expensive urn is a pretty meagre criterion for being considered “sensitive” – is characteristic of Davis’s work in general. There aren’t many laughs to be found in Kafka, but Lydia Davis – arguably as mordant in her view of the world – seems to find black humour the only way of rendering it bearable.
The whole piece, in fact, hinges on the daughter’s attempts – in her letter of complaint to the funeral parlor – to convey just
why they found the term “
cremains” so offensive in its flippancy, while acknowledging that they know that it wasn’t chosen with any desire to offend. This is, in context, very funny. The daughter and her mother come into ever sharper relief as the letter proceeds. So, however, does her father:
We noticed that before the death of my father you and your representative used the words loved one to refer to him. That was comfortable for us, even if the ways in which we loved him were complicated.
The complications in the ways in which they loved him are only hinted at, but they probably included the rather tiresome pedantry attributed to this erstwhile professor of English:
my father himself … would have pointed out to you the alliteration in Porta Potti and the rhyme in pooper-scooper. Then he would have told you that cremains falls into the same category as brunch and is known as a portmanteau word.
He sounds like a treat! Beyond that we can’t say whether he drank, or was unfaithful, or a domestic tyrant, or simply a bore – but clearly there was nothing easy in the relationship between them all. These two women certainly cared enough for him to do the right thing by him at his funeral, but whether that actually constitutes “love” is certainly “complicated.”
There’s rich word-play in the daughter’s various attempts to classify the effect of the word “cremains” in her letter:
Cremains sounds like something invented as a milk substitute in coffee, like Cremora, or Coffee-mate. Or it sounds like some kind of a chipped beef dish.
Nevertheless, I would argue that the effect of this passage in context is principally to characterise her as both an imaginative and a clear-thinking person: someone who is accustomed to expressing herself accurately, and who is thus capable of generating exact, apt similes when they’re required (as they certainly are here).
In no sense, then, does Davis’s story resemble what I would call a “prose poem.” Its designs upon the reader are all in the realms of action, implication and character. If there is poetic language there (and there undoubtedly is) it is meant strategically, as a clue to the overall intention, rather than virtuosically: as an example of how prettily this author can write.
Eliot Weinberger, by contrast, in the startlingly diverse pieces – both in length and subject-matter – included among his “Renga,” shows every sign of being a poet (and I don’t mean that term to double for the word “show-off”).
The passage I have in mind is entitled “Blue Eyes.” It’s 408 words long (and is therefore comparable in extent to both Kafka’s and Lydia Davis’s), and concerns an encounter of the narrator’s with an elderly man who wore “clean denim clothes faded to the color of clouds” in a little village on the Amazon. The man spoke to him in German, initially, then went off into a monologue about his own clear blue eyes:
“You probably think I am an Indian, but I am not an Indian. Look at my eyes, they are blue. Indians do not have blue eyes. I am not an Indian. Indians are like animals. In Germany we had the right idea. One little injection and poof! no more. Look at my eyes, they are blue . . .” And on and on into the dark. (Weinberger, 2000)
Weinberger then shifts to an experience years later, “in a car driving across a plain in India, hours from any town.” Slowing down for a herd of cows, he makes momentary eye-contact with a “wandering mendicant”:
his skin was a burnt pink, not brown. As the car slowly rolled past him, he raised his bowl to the window, not speaking, and stared at me for a moment with celestial, incomprehensible, glacial blue eyes.
Two experiences, years and continents apart, are linked by the coincidence of two anomalous figures with blue eyes – or, rather, the tall mendicant is described as
having blue eyes, whereas in the case of the German on the Amazon, the narrator neither confirms nor denies the old man’s claim to them.
The significance of this is supplied by the middle paragraph of his piece:
Most Germans believed that Hitler had blue eyes, but they were brown. The official portrait photographs of high Nazi officials were often retouched to give them blue eyes and that particular stare, pure and cold as a mountain lake, as a glacier, as a cloudless sky, as the fruit of an imaginary unmixed blood.
So could either of these men have been Hitler? The idea that the Führer escaped to South American rather than dying in the Bunker is one of the most widespread conspiracy theories on record. And yet (it seems), the man on the Amazon cannot have been he, for the simple reason that he had blue eyes.
Nor, for the same reason, can he have been the wandering mendicant in India, who, in any case, is described as being “far taller than usual.” Hitler was only 1.75 metres tall (5 foot 7 ½ inches, for those of you more familiar with Imperial measures).
Unlike George Steiner’s brilliant short novel
The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H. (or, for that matter, Ira Levin’s thriller
The Boys from Brazil), Weinberger has no interest in the narrative possibilities of either man’s actually
being Hitler. Rather, I think, he wants to talk about the persistence of ideas such as “imaginary unmixed blood,” and the contradictions between such Platonic notions and the complex intricacies of the world which actually surrounds us.
Weinberger’s piece makes an implicit contrast between his room by the Amazon, with its ceiling “covered with hundreds of transparent salamanders, motionless and upside-down” and the pure cold of the imaginary “mountain lake” evoked by the idea of those “pure” (and equally imaginary) blue eyes.
The same is true of the sheer detail contained in his evocation of a journey across the plains of India, its:
monotony of mud-baked villages with a single tree, two men squatting in the shade of a wall smoking, three children scratching lines in the dirt, four vultures bickering over the carcass of a dog, a woman leading a single goat, two men on an ox cart, three crows pecking aimlessly, four flies resting on my leg.
If I read his prose poem correctly, its message lies in the contrast between all such “dappled things” (in G. M. Hopkins’ phrase (1918)), and the actual monotony of an
idée fixe: the angry superiority complex of the old man in the South American village, the fanatic glare of the wandering mendicant.
The implications of certain images and pieces of word-play must, in other words, be explored in depth before we can even begin to interpret Weinberger’s piece. It is (for him) unusually narrative in its structure – but that still doesn’t make it a short short story.
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Encased in talent like a uniform,
The rank of every poet is well known
– W. H. Auden, “The Novelist” (1991, p. 180)
I’ve always liked the distinction Auden makes between the poet and the fiction-writer in the sonnet quoted above. As a poet himself, he can afford to be critical of their propensity to “amaze us like a thunderstorm” – to create something deeply impressive but, at the same time, sudden and transitory.
The novelist, by contrast (it’s assumed – probably correctly – that he had his friend Christopher Isherwood in mind), must learn:
How to be plain and awkward, how to be
One after whom none think it worth to turn.
In other words, the writer of fiction must
become what the poet is content simply to describe: “all the wrongs of Man.”
It’s an intensely idealised vision, no doubt, and one to which one is immediately tempted to make exceptions, but at least it reminds us that the capacities and intentions of these two types of writers can never be truly parallel: a poem is not simply a more condensed version of a short story, and neither is the most poetic piece of fiction a poem, exactly.
I don’t pretend to have unknotted many the intricate differences and contiguities between the two in this essay, but I still think there’s food for thought in these four prose pieces – any one of which might have found itself labelled casually a “short short story” as easily as a “prose poem.”
What I hope I’ve demonstrated is that there
is a difference in kind in Scott Hamilton and Eliot Weinberger’s pieces which requires us to read and analyse them “poetically,” rather than in the narrative terms more appropriate to Lydia Davis’s or Franz Kafka’s.
Nor do I see any contradiction in such generic hybrids as Japanese haibun (or, for that matter, certain of the Icelandic sagas), with their deft alternations of poetry and prose to cover the same thematic ground in different ways. Rather, I would see this as a confirmation of the fundamental distinction between the two modes.
Perhaps, though (as is implied by Kafka’s famous letter about the “frozen sea inside us,” quoted above) the virtue of all such works lies in their element of surprise – their ability to undermine our perception of an apparently static and ordered cosmos. The paradox inherent in their close resemblance to each other is simply another way of achieving this. It raises questions which might otherwise escape us.
Works cited:
- Auden, W. H. (1991). “The Novelist.” Collected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. 1976. Rev. ed. London: Faber. 180.
- Davis, Lydia. (2010). “Letter to a Funeral Parlor.” In The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. 2009. New York: Picador. 380-81.
- Hamilton, Scott. (2007). “1918.” In To the Moon, In Seven Easy Steps. Auckland: Titus Books. 99. Available online at:
http://readingthemaps.blogspot.co.nz/2006/03/1918.html.
- Hopkins, Gerard Manley. (1918). “Pied Beauty.” Available online at:
http://www.bartleby.com/122/13.html.
- Kafka, Franz. (1917). “The Knock at the Manor Gate.” Available online at:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:The_Knock_at_the_Manor_Gate.
- Kafka, Franz. (1983). “Der Schlag ans Hoftor.” In Sämtliche Erzählungen. Ed. Paul Raabe. 1970. Hamburg: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. 299-300.
- Kafka, Franz. (2014). Letter to Oskar Pollak (January 27, 1904). In Letters to Friends, Family and Editors. Trans. Richard & Clara Winston. 1977. Richmond, Surrey: Alma Classics Ltd. 15-16.
- Ross, Jack. (2017). Review of Frankie McMillan, My Mother and the Hungarians and Other Small Fictions. Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017. Auckland: Massey University Press. 322-23.
- Weinberger, Eliot. (2000). “Renga.” Jacket 11. Available online at:
http://jacketmagazine.com/11/weinberger-renga.html.
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(10-11/12/16)
[4797 wds]
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Abstract: The Shadow Line:
Crossovers between Micro-fiction and Prose Poetry
There’s an air of the secret and subversive about prose poetry in English. It’s never been a form to boast about: always the poor cousin of “true” poetry or “real” prose.
When Richard Burton, back in the 1880s, tried to echo Arabic saj‘ (or “rhyming prose”) in his fantastical translation of the
Arabian Nights, the result was greeted with sneers by reviewers and readers alike. True, rhymed prose does seem a little alien to the spirit of English, but Burton held that the true function of translators was to enlarge the possibilities of their own language by grafting on features of other tongues.
Dickens, too, has been criticised for his tendency to break into blank verse at moments of high emotion: as if there were some primal sin in mixing the tropes of poetry and prose – some threat of cultural miscegenation which might undermine both.
Other literatures see these things somewhat differently. In German, for instance,
Kunstprosa (heightened or “art” prose) is accepted as a perfectly legitimate form. Rimbaud’s prose poetical works
Une saison en enfer and the
Illuminations have influenced French poets as much as any of his more conventionally rhymed and structured poems.
But what’s the difference between a prose poem and a short short story (or micro-fiction, or flash, or any other term you prefer)? No doubt there are as many answers as there are pieces of writing, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t make a few attempts at further classification.
For instance (as I commented in a recent review), I tend to see the virtues of fiction of
any length as including “plot, characterisation, depth of immersion in ‘Mirror City’ (to borrow Janet Frame’s term for the world of her own writing).” In prose poems, by contrast, I look for
The sudden sparky connections, the topsy-turvy thinking: the need to read between the lines to be understood, which most of us would agree to be poetic virtues.
And yet there remains a difference. It’s as hard to read Kafka’s short parables as poems as it is to read Robert Hass’s or Eliot Weinberger’s short prose pieces as fiction. Perhaps, then, the virtue of all such works lies in their element of surprise: their ability to shift our perception of an apparently static and ordered cosmos? The paradox inherent in their form is simply one more way of achieving this.
Bio-note:
Jack Ross is the managing editor of Poetry New Zealand, and works as a senior lecturer in creative writing at Massey University’s Auckland Campus. His latest book The Annotated Tree Worship was published by Paper Table Novellas in late 2017. He blogs at mairangibay.blogspot.com/.
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(19/11/16)
[482 wds]
