The literary short story is an empty formal exercise

In my MFA workshop, one semester we read the stories from Best American Short Stories, and I remember thinking that even the worst stories had a certain density of language that I admired and felt was beyond me. I'd always thought my own sentences were too sparse: whether short or long, my sentences encoded information at a much lower rate. In contrast, these BASS stories were full of grace notes that I couldn't match: precise verbs, oddball nouns, and intriguing metaphors.

Recently I thought to myself, I wonder what the good old BASS is up to?, so I bought the latest volume and started looking at the stories. The moment I read the first line of the second story, I thought Oh I get it! This narrator is deeply in pain, but he won't talk about it. I bet I could write a story like that! (Here's the paragraph, by the way):¹

"In the morning, I received a phone call and was told to board a flight. The arrangements had been made on my behalf. I packed no clothes because my clothes had been packed for me. A car arrived to pick me up."

So I tried to write a story about a woman who's deeply in pain because of her dad dying, but she can't talk about it or even think about it, so the pain just comes out in the unspoken weight of her narration: the arrangement of images, etc. Because that’s essentially how you write stories now: it’s all about the objective correlative.² If the reader understands the emotional weight of the story through just the arrangement of images and the quality of the narration, then the piece is accounted a good (or, in this case best American) short story.

But I just couldn't do it! I realized that I simply did not believe in this form of storytelling. The problem is, most peoples' response to terrible pain and grief is simply to never ever ever ever ever ever think about the pain. Sometimes it bubbles up, and you're overcome, but that's a bad thing. Most of the time, you don't think about it.

In the author's note for this story, the writer says:

"My father is very mysterious. When I was a child, he told me stories about when he was a child, almost all of which he made up. The stories weren't lies. They helped contextualize the stories that were true, which I could hardly believe. He had been orphaned? And then imprisoned? His old life looked nothing like my young life, but I sensed that my father still had something to do with me, and that the connection between us would be forged through language."

Which makes perfect sense. The father wanted to obfuscate his past. He'd suffered. He didn't want it probed. If he was genuinely trying to connect with his daughter by telling these stories, then that is the story (that's not what the dad in this story does by the way, instead he tells a bunch of tall tales to the people he meets while on his way to see his dying brother).

The question is, what is the benefit of unearthing this suffering? Does it serve any artistic function? To me, it doesn't. I don't think the purpose of narrative art is to just evoke feelings. I understood exactly what this character was about (and what this story was about) from the very first paragraph. But so what? Is there anything beyond that? Anything higher? Any release or understanding? No, not really. Because the truth about grief is that to the extent you experience it, you don't get over it. There's no real integration, no real catharsis, there's only forgetting.

Lately I've become pretty suspicious of the idea of "embodied" writing—the attempt to describe the moment-to-moment experience of being alive, of moving through the world. In the story I attempted to write, I wanted to start with the woman getting the call that her dad was dead, and then she has to, you know, do a phone tree and start letting other relatives know. She has to make funeral arrangements, etc. It's all true. A dead relative is an experience, but it's also a responsibility that requires a lot of work. Sort of like how if your husband kills himself in your bathroom, after the body gets taken away, you've got to hire someone to clean your bathroom!

And yes when you're calling crime scene cleaners and taking quotes and looking if you've enough money left on your credit card to afford them, you might suddenly notice a yellow flower in the windowbox. The one you planted a year ago with your husband, but forgot to water, and now it's dead and dried out, but the sunlight is still catching in the fine fibers that cover its stem.

But...is that really meaningful? Is there anything there? Is it even true? Or is it just an effect? Is the 'seeing' genuine, or are you just constructing images the way you've been taught?

For me, there's no way that kind of image can be genuine. I just do not believe in the concept. I do not believe there is any transcendence to be gained from revisiting moments of great emotion. They happen, and then they pass. Normally during those moments, your inner monologue is shut off, you're more like a character in a play than you are like a person. Even reliving the moment is comparatively meaningless, it's just a strong experience, like a jump-scare in a movie—what's more meaningful is the story you tell yourself about the experience. For instance, the person who is angry that nobody helped them call the crime scene cleaners. The person who sends their brothers and sisters a bill for the crime scene cleaners.

That is a story! Like...I read an insane advice column recently where a wife was writing that her husband had left their toddler in a locked car. And the neighbor's fifteen year old kid broke the window to save the toddler. And the husband loves his car, so he's trying to sue the neighbors for repairs to the car. In this short letter, the woman tells a story much more compelling than anything in the Best American. It doesn't matter what flowers are in the window-box when a man’s telling his wife "So, I went to small claims court today".

I just think something has gone very wrong with the contemporary short story.³ You're told to embrace verisimilitude at the expense of reality. You're told to write from "within the body" as a way of creating realism, but...people don't actually experience their lives that way! What they experience are stories they tell about their lives, and actions they undertake in response to those stories. That's real experience, not, like, the fraught conversations you had with the taxi driver while going to visit your dying brother.

Not that putting in taxi-driver conversations is bad. There's a place for that. But right now fiction is 90 percent taxi-driver convos and window-box flowers, and it's ridiculous. Nobody wants to read this. It's boring. It makes me think of this genre in 11th-century Korea where writers would allegorize inanimate concepts: one well-known kajon story is about a “Mr. Cash”, of whom it’s said “Promotions and dismissal were within his power; nobles and ministers violated their integrity to serve him.” The beauty of the form was in how cleverly you could make the concept seem like a real person: it was essentially a game.

Similarly, the current way of writing stories is just a game: can I make the reader feel something without explicitly telling them what to feel? And by that standard, the story in question is quite good. It's a great example of what it’s trying to be. I just think this form of story is completely played-out and not particularly fun to read, because it confuses a technique for an actual story. Being able to use the objective correlative effectively is a great tool for a writer, but it can’t be the whole thing! Reading Best American Short Stories puts me in the same position as when I watch a clip of someone speed-running a video game: I admire the ingenuity, but I question the ends to which it’s been applied.

1. I’m picking on this story because it’s the first one I read (not sure why I read the second story first, but that’s how it happened). However, the first five stories in the anthology all have similar themes and use similar techniques. The aesthetic homogeneity of the anthology was actually a bit shocking. There used to be at least a few zany Saundersesque stories in these anthologies, but I didn't see any in this one. The story I'm writing about was actually the least realist of the ones I read—it has a very surreal vibe that's not captured by my review (though ultimately it was told in the same flat tone as much of the rest of the anthology, which drained the surrealism of any sense of surprise or wonder).

2. The objective correlative is the concrete thing in the story that serves as a stand-in for the emotions the reader is meant to feel. It’s kind of like a symbol, but it’s less elusive, more easily legible. For instance, in the Jack London story “To Build A Fire”, every mention of the dog serves to convey a sense of hope that the man might actually survive. (By the way I reread that story recently, and the dog is actually a very active participant in the narrative—it’s even a viewpoint character for a bit!—great storytelling). If the objective correlative is too legible (e.g. if it’s raining during a heavy and sad scene), then the effect is considered corny or sentimental, so writers today strive for a very light touch. Personally, I think it’s fine if it rains during a sad scene—as long as that’s not what the whole scene is about! But in contemporary stories, there is no content beyond the delicate arrangement of symbols, so obviously a lighter touch is necessary.

3. I know many of the comments on this piece will blame the MFA degree. I really don't think the MFA is the homogenizing influence people make it out to be. I have an MFA, and I write quite differently from a Best American writer—so do hundreds of other writers. In my opinion, the issues with literary fiction stem from demand issues rather than supply issues. You can write something quite different from the average literary story, but it likely will not be published in a top journal or get any awards. As such nobody will see it, and people will continue to think that nobody is able to write differently. People in the literary world pick on MFAs because they are an easy target. An MFA can’t fight back, can’t refuse to praise or publish you. Because critics want to be published themselves someday, critics are often desperate to exculpate editors and publishers for their decisions about the books they choose to publish. The fact is, Best American is a book assembled largely by one person, a series editor, who's been doing it for decades, and in critiquing the book one is largely critiquing that person's editorial decisions. In my experience, as someone who was writing sci-fi stories in an MFA, creative writing departments do much more to honor individual vision and creativity than the publishing industry does.