View of Experiments in Short Fiction: between Genre and Media

Elke D’hoker, Bart Van den Bossche

Experiments in short fiction : between genre and media

Résumé

Quelle est la relation entre le genre bref et l’expérimental? Un texte narratif invite-t-il davan- tage à l'expérimentation de par sa brièveté? En outre, serait-il possible de déceler certains liens particuliers entre le récit bref et l’expérimental dans la littérature du XX^e siècle et la littérature contemporaine ? L’introduction à ce numéro d’ILLI aborde ces questions en examinant les caractéristiques formelles et stylistiques des récits brefs (condensation, fragmentation et ellipse) et en étudiant leurs contextes de publication en termes de polytextualité, d'intermédi- alité et d'hybridité. Pour ce faire, nous faisant appel à des approches théoriques de la brièveté dans les récits en prose plus en particulier, ainsi qu’à des exemples concrets tirés des articles réunis dans ce numéro spécial.

Abstract

What is the relation between brevity and experiment? Do short narrative texts particularly invite or facilitate experimentation? Or can a special connection between both be traced in twentieth-century and contemporary literature? In this introduction we explore these questions by looking at the formal and stylistic characteristics of short texts (condensation, fragmentation and ellipsis) and by investigating their specific publication contexts in terms of polytextuality, intermediality and hybridity. We draw on theoretical approaches to brevity in prose narratives as well as on concrete examples from the articles gathered in this special issue.

To quote this article:

Elke D’hoker, Bart Van den Bossche, “Experiments in short fiction: between genre and media”, Interférences littéraires /Literaire interferenties, n° 24, dir. Elke D’hoker, Bart Van den Bossche, May 2020, 1-5.

http://www.interferenceslitteraires.be ISSN : 2031-2790

COMITE DE DIRECTION –DIRECTIECOMITE

Anke G^ILLEIR (KU Leuven) – Rédactrice en chef – Hoofdredactrice Beatrijs V^ANACKER (KU Leuven) – Co-rédactrice en chef – Hoofdredactrice Ben ^DE B^RUYN (UCL)

Christope C^OLLARD (VUB)

Lieven D’^HULST (KU Leuven – Kortrijk) Liesbeth F^RANÇOIS (KU Leuven)

Raphaël I^NGELBIEN (KU Leuven) Valérie L^EYH (Université de Namur) Katrien L^IEVOIS (Universiteit Antwerpen) CONSEIL DE REDACTION –REDACTIERAAD

COMITE SCIENTIFIQUE –WETENSCHAPPELIJK COMITE

DavidM^ARTENS (KU Leuven)

Chiara N^ANNICINI (Factultés Universitaires Saint-Louis) Hubert R^OLAND (FNRS – UCL)

Matthieu S^ERGIER (FNRS – UCL & Factultés Universitaires Saint-Louis)

Lieke V^AN D^EINSEN (KU Leuven)

Michel L^ISSE (FNRS – UCL)

Anneleen M^ASSCHELEIN (KU Leuven) Christophe M^EUREE (FNRS – UCL) Reine M^EYLAERTS (KU Leuven) Stéphanie V^ANASTEN (FNRS – UCL) Bart V^{AN DEN} B^OSSCHE (KU Leuven) Marc VAN VAECK (KU Leuven)

Geneviève F^ABRY (UCL) Anke G^ILLEIR (KU Leuven) Agnès G^UIDERDONI (FNRS – UCL) Ortwin ^DE G^RAEF (KULeuven) Jan H^ERMAN (KU Leuven) Guido L^ATRÉ (UCL) Nadia LIE (KU Leuven)

Olivier A^MMOUR-M^AYEUR (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle -–

Paris III & Université Toulouse II – Le Mirail) Ingo B^ERENSMEYER (Universität Giessen)

Lars B^ERNAERTS (Universiteit Gent & Vrije Universiteit Brussel) Faith B^INCKES (Worcester College – Oxford)

Philiep B^OSSIER (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) Franca B^RUERA (Università di Torino)

Àlvaro C^EBALLOS V^IRO (Université de Liège) Christian C^HELEBOURG (Université de Lorraine) Edoardo C^OSTADURA (Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena) Nicola C^REIGHTON (Queen’s University Belfast) William M. D^ECKER (Oklahoma State University) Ben ^DE B^RUYN (Maastricht University) Dirk D^ELABASTITA (Université de Namur) MichelD^ELVILLE (Université de Liège)

César D^OMINGUEZ (Universidad de Santiago de Compostella

& King’s College)

Gillis D^ORLEIJN (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) Ute H^EIDMANN (Université de Lausanne)

Klaus H. K^IEFER (Ludwig Maxilimians Universität München) Michael K^OLHAUER (Université de Savoie)

Isabelle K^RZYWKOWSKI (Université Stendhal-Grenoble III) Mathilde L^ABBE (Université Paris Sorbonne)

Sofiane L^AGHOUATI (Musée Royal de Mariemont) François L^ECERCLE (Université Paris Sorbonne) Ilse L^OGIE (Universiteit Gent)

Marc M^AUFORT (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Isabelle M^EURET (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Christina M^ORIN (University of Limerick) Miguel NORBARTUBARRI (Universiteit Antwerpen) Andréa O^BERHUBER (Université de Montréal)

Jan O^OSTERHOLT (Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg) Maïté S^NAUWAERT (University of Alberta – Edmonton) Pieter V^ERSTRAETEN (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)

Interférences littéraires / Literaire interferenties KU Leuven – Faculteit Letteren Blijde-Inkomststraat 21 – Bus 3331

B 3000 Leuven (Belgium) Contact : beatrijs.vanacker@kuleuven.be

Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties, 24, May 2020

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Short narrative texts have a long and ancient lineage in the Western literary tradition: from folk tales and myths over fables and novellas to short stories and flash fiction in recent times. Over the course of the centuries, short fictional texts have formed genres and traditions with a remarkable stability, yet at the same time they have frequently been the locus of experimentation, border crossings and generic hybridity. Experimentation in short fiction has often been connected to larger aesthetic and literary trends, such as the prose poems that emerged within the symbolist movement, yet many forms of experimentation have also been incited by the arrival of new media, the creation of new publication formats and the develop- ment of new contexts of publication and dissemination. Think of the prose experi- ments that were published in avant-garde little magazines in the modernist period, of the fragmented hypertexts that evolved in tandem with the world wide web in the 1990s or the various forms of microfiction that emerged in response to develop- ments in digital media during the last decade.

In this special issue we present six articles that explore such new and experimental forms of short narratives developed from the 1960s to the present in countries as diverse as Greece, Austria, France, Ireland and the U.S. While the influence of the particular socio-political and literary contexts on these short fiction experiments comes to the fore in all case studies, the articles also share a common focus on the way form and medium shape the meaning of these short texts as well as their effects on the reader. Hence, the different forms of experimentation explored in these articles – whether in the form of intertextuality, intermediality, generic hybridity, radical aesthetics or fragmentation – raise the question whether there is perhaps a special connection to be traced between brevity and experiment- ation in twentieth-century and contemporary literature. Perhaps short texts lend themselves particularly well to test out new forms of expression and representation, as Virginia Woolf did in her short fiction collection Monday or Tuesday (1921) in preparation for her famous modernist novels. Similarly, as shorter texts can be produced, disseminated and read more quickly, they can have a more immediate effect on the reader, which makes them particularly suited to promote new literary movements as so many avant-garde publications readily demonstrate. Conversely, one could also wonder whether certain forms of radical experiment can only be sustained in longer narrative prose at the risk of boredom or unreadability. These and many other connections between brevity and experiment are explored by the different case studies discussed in this special issue. On the basis of these examples, the rest of the introduction aims to present an overview of the way in which different properties of short texts invite and enable experimentation.

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As Paul Zumthor has argued in “Brevity as Form”, brevity is not just a matter of length. Rather it “constitutes a structuring model” in which the formal constraint of shortness has consequences on a stylistic, structural, narrative and thematic level as well.¹ A useful distinction in this respect is that between “shortness”, which is usually conceived of in terms of quantity (the sheer number of words, paragraphs or pages), and “brevity”, which can be defined in qualitative terms such as concentration, ellipsis and concision (terms rooted in a long-standing tradition of brevitas that reaches back to classical rhetoric). As Alain Montandon has put it, “Le court est relatif à ce qui est plus long, il est mesurable, alors que le bref appartient au champ notionnel du langage et la brièveté concerne un rapport interne à la parole. La forme brève relève donc d’une rhétorique, d’une stylistique et d’une poétique particu- lières.”² Given the huge variety of short forms that exist across different literary genres and traditions, it is impossible to delineate a singular aesthetics of brevity that would apply to all brief texts. Nevertheless, characteristics such as density and concentration seem to accompany brevity in many genres. They are often created through literary techniques of condensation, ellipsis, suggestion and synthesis. In addition, this formal mode of concentration is often accompanied by a thematic focus on the singular³, the “being-in-the-present”⁴, the “disruptive force”⁵ or the sudden epiphany. (Indeed, one could argue that short fiction – with its capacity to transform random moments in the flow of experience into sudden and unsettling flashes of insight – epitomizes the aesthetic experience of epiphany.) Another common stylistic consequence of brevity and shortness is the care that is taken over construction and formulation. The short text is often the well-crafted text, in which creativity and innovation are stimulated by formal constraints. This is the case, for instance, for the twitter feeds that Clara Beaudoux sent out between 2015 and 2017 as part of her Madeleine Project (2015), which combines terse messages and images to reconstruct the story of a life. In her article on this fascinating project, Cécile Meynard analyses how Beaudoux “exploite la forme contrainte liée à la brièveté d’un tweet”. Not bound by the 140-character limit of Twitter, but by the constraints of both the print space provided for his drawings and the minimalism of these drawings themselves, the sequential drawings of Richard McGuire in The New Yorker, here analysed by Jean-Bernard Cheymol, construct stories on the basis of a brevity that is constricting and liberating at the same time. And as Nathaniel Davis argues about the short experimental prose texts which the Graz group published in the literary journal, manuskripte, their close attention to language and style reveals a

“constructivist approach to prose writing” whereby language is treated “as material rather than as medium”.

The three case studies just mentioned also offer examples of the generic border crossings and hybridity of short texts. Beaudoux’ Madeleine Project uses text

1 Paul ZUMTHOR, “Brevity as Form”, in: Narrative, 24, 1, 2016, 73-81; 74 (italics in the original).

2 Alain MONTANDON, “Formes brèves et microrécits”, in: Les Cahiers de Framespa, 14 (2013), par. 1; < http://journals.openedition.org/framespa/2481

3 MONTANDON, “Formes brèves et microrécits”, 19.

4 ZUMTHOR, “Brevity as Form”, 76.

5 Marc BOTHA, “Microfiction”, in: Ann-Marie EINHAUS (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the English Short Story. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 201-220; 203.

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and image to tell a story that flirts with the boundaries between fiction and fact;

McGuire orders images sequentially so as to tell a story; and the manuskripte writers consistently apply poetic techniques, such as repetition, parataxis, and segmentation, in their prose texts. Other articles too point to the generic hybridity that often accompanies short fiction, perhaps on account of the aesthetic structures of condensation and concision that accompanies brevity across genres, from the maxim and the haiku to flash fiction and twitterature. In her article on Pierre Ronsavallon’s publishing project Raconter la vie, to give another example, Annick Batard argues that the series consists of “différents récits courts ou très courts, de genres différents, mélangeant parfois fiction et témoignage”. Of course, the dif- ferent media of publication also play a role in this generic hybridity and boundary- crossing, with the changes from twitter over website to print (in the Madeleine Project) or from online to hard copy publication (in the case of Raconter la vie) having a noticeable impact on the aesthetic response to these short texts.

The combination of different short texts into a larger textual whole, such as a sequence or series, a periodical, collection or publication project, also alerts us to the tension between openness and closure that accompanies all short narratives.

While the careful crafting and terseness characterising short texts point towards concentration and eventually self-sufficient closure, the text’s appearance next to – or in combination with – other texts suggests rather an openness to interaction, in the sense that each individual short text becomes but one piece in a puzzle, one fragment in a larger whole. This “polytextual regime”⁶ is an essential feature of almost all short texts (in contrast with the “monotextual regime” of longer texts such as the novel), and it impacts the reception of short texts in two major ways.

First, when reading short texts combined in the same print space or medium (whether a collection from a single author or an anthology, a magazine or a website) readers are likely to select and combine the texts they read in different ways, and their reading experience may be marked by forms of distraction, sampling and disruption. Such forms of “haphazard reading” (“lecture au hazard”), as Alain Montandon has termed them, are more likely to occur in publication formats combining many different text genres and media (as is the case in magazines), but they may also occur in the case of apparently coherent short fiction collections by a single author. As the analysis of Richard McGuire’s drawings in The New Yorker shows, experimental short forms may actually explore and foreground this reading experience, confronting readers with the ways in which they combine constraints of the medium and forms of sampling and moving back and forth between different sections of the magazine.

Second, the short fiction’s “polytextual regime” may also invite the reader to open up the reading of individual short texts to other texts in the surrounding publication context, to be alert to echoes and repetitions, similarities and coincidences, and to install connections with the texts and images that surround it.

This is convincingly demonstrated in Cheymol’s investigation of the readerly functions of McGuire’s drawing sequences within the context of The New Yorker, but also by the articles by Meynard and Batard exploring the consequences of this

6 Bruno MONFORT, “La nouvelle et son mode de publication: le cas américain”, in Poétique, 90, Avril 1992, 153-171; 157.

INTRODUCTION

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co-textuality for the serial publications of the Madeleine Project and Raconter la vie, respectively. In her article on David Hayden’s short story collection, Darker With the Lights On, Alessandra Boller similarly traces the playful connections and recurring motifs the author installs between his highly experimental stories so as to make the book into a multi-perspectival and necessarily heterogeneous textual whole.

Heterogeneity and multiplicity feature in yet another way in Hayden’s collection as well. As Boller’s careful close reading shows, through experimental techniques and intertextual allusions to literary tradition, the stories seek to subvert the conventional form and tradition of the (Irish) short story and to allow room for other, often marginalised, voices and perspectives. A similar attempt to use experi- mentation and polyphony in the battle against dogma and totalitarianism can be found in the short fiction of the Greek writer Marios Hakkas, who transformed his artistic practice of the short story in response to the repressive socio-political context of 1960s Greece. Abandoning the conventional well-told story and making room for a multi-voiced dialogue of voices, dreams and desires, Hakkas himself called his practice one of “de-dogmatisation”. The same subversive and radical inspiration also characterizes the short fiction experiments in manuskripte which, as Davis shows, sought to challenge the conservative and parochial outlook of the Austrian cultural establishment. These examples suggest that experimentation in short fiction often has a political or ideological dimension that ties in with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “minor literature”. Situated “at the margins” of establish- ments, so-called “minor” forms of literature, they argue, are able “to express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility”.⁷ This applies very well to the short story, which has often been considered a “minor” genre in terms of literary hierarchies.⁸ Moreover, both Marios Hakkas’ intertextual and polyphonic writing practice and the Graz group’s literary community around manuskripte are apt demonstrations of the communal potential of short fiction as minor literature, able to create an “active solidarity”.⁹

Experimental short fiction often draws on cultural tropes connected to the dynamics of modern societies from the nineteenth century onwards. The

“shortness” of short fiction has often been associated with patterns of cultural consumption marked by instant writing, swift dissemination, and “haphazard reading”, but also with the potential of heterogeneity: the possibility of exploring different perspectives and viewpoints, voicing the experiences and interests of subaltern groups, and allowing room for the marginal and the liminal. As the articles in this special issue show, experiments in short fiction often draw on these cultural tropes of acceleration, fragmentation, and liminality, exploring their viability in connection with new developments in media, politics and society. Hence, in experimental short fiction, brevity and experimentation are often put in the service of a broader cultural and philosophical distrust in well-established grand narratives

7 GillesDELEUZE & Félix GUATTARI, “What is a Minor Literature?”, in : Id., Kafka. Toward a Minor Literature, translated by Dana Polan, Minneapolis and London: Minneapolis University Press, 1986, 16-27;17.

8 See Adrian HUNTER. The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2007, 138-140.

9 DELEUZE & GUATTARI, “What is a Minor Literature?”, 17.

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and mainstream media, in institutionalized discourses, vested interests and fixed world-views. In short, aesthetic and ideological subversion typically go hand in hand in experimental short fiction. Moreover, as the cases discussed in this special issue also show, they often result in appealing, innovative and always interesting literary texts.

Elke D’HOKER & Bart VAN DEN BOSSCHE

KU Leuven .