The Disambiguation of the Short Story

A short story is a quick trip to a place and time where your primary intent was to relax and observe. Instead, you became distracted by what you saw, perhaps even irritated, but quite possibly disturbed or inspired.

Actual visitors on quick vacations often return with a tangible souvenir such as a sun tan or snow burn, a few extra pounds from overeating, the onset of an indigestion or a cold. These visitors are likely to have spent too much on food and lodging, accounting for their irritation or disturbed senses.

Readers of short stories, a different genre of travelers, come away from their visits with an emotion they did not have going in.

Each group, traveler and reader, come away with some souvenir. What the reader brings back lasts the longest.

This is by no means a diatribe on tourism nor a plea for persons to read and/or write short stories. Rather, it is an observation that where ever we go, however we travel, packed somewhere in our baggage is emotion--the way we feel about things and the way we feel about ourselves.

We read short stories in the first place, you argue, for emotional information, the feelings behind how persons in seemingly improbable situations bring their experience under some guidelines and are not completely run by them. Or perhaps not; one rank of short stories demonstrates how individuals who are possessed by a vision, say an artistic vision, are swept along by that vision, much like the hapless ballerina in The Red Shoes. Or was she so hapless? Another layer of short stories demonstrates the effects of characters who want something just over the boundary line separating acceptable behavior from the unacceptable. True enough, neither Anna Karenina nor Emma Bovary were players in short stories. Each needed a longer narrative to demonstrate the consequences each brought about when stepping over the line of convention, in each case the boundary of adultery, but otherwise the examples are fair because a smaller version of their larger story could have been made from the simple decision to reach over the boundary with the belief that she could do so with some control over the consequences.

We read short stories not only for happy endings or tragic, depressing ones; we read for the way the more modern stories end on a note of ambiguity which, as you look out your splendid windows here at 652 Hot Springs Road or the more commercial windows at your most frequented coffee shops, seems all about you. There are some short stories and some longer ones you return to because they are not in the least ambiguous in their conclusions. Or are they? You read and reread to rethink your earlier takes on stories you once prized because they seemed to merely end, as Bobbie Ann Mason told you her short stories ended--when their energy gave out. Life keeps planning surprise parties for you, with hidden friends and acquaintances popping forth with arms all waving, shouting surprise, and you feeling the stomach thump of having been suckered by some egregious excuse that got you out of the house, and now you get to the serious part of the party which centers around the covered casseroles and drinks and conversation. "I wish you could have seen the look on your face!" You don't need to have seen it; you felt it. Ambiguity rules, sometimes to the point where it runs over into the long form fiction. You want meanings, go take courses in Philosophy or mathematics. You want ambiguity, go look at short stories.

You think you know how it ends, but you come back as soon as a year later and you see something you wish you'd seen before, first time through. You remember feeling so smug, scrawling away in final exam blue books about short stories and what truths really lay hidden in Henry James' "The Jolly Corner" because you'd read beyond the canon and new enough to tilt the screen sideways to deflect the strictness of the cannon. You did have enough guts to take on the Hemingway short stories but even now you wish you'd been able back then to say what you felt about Henry James and The Jolly Fucking Corner because it wasn't ambiguous and inferential at all; what it was in fact was that he'd developed the technique of talking away from a theme and the emotions resident in the theme rather than facing them. You wish you'd written then about the fact that when Henry was back in Boston for the funeral of his beloved brother, William, he'd had a chance meeting with Somerset Maugham, who also happened to be in Boston, Henry pretty much in the closet, Somerset more out than in. And what did they talk about and why?

So it is all of it about a conspiracy that's being conducted in much fiction from about Thomas Hardy onward, the conspiracy of the author and the reader against the character, thus irony. But the joke comes to the reader if he or she will take the trouble to reread over time. The reader is often led to believe he knows the answers, but in reality, he knows only parts of them. Try a reread of Dubliners. Try Louise Erdrich's masterful "The Red Convertible." You'll see. It's not so fucking ambiguous any more, it is simply a matter of characters being caught out, doing something they might not want to be noticed.

Where Will It All End?

Among the many technical and emotional joys to be found reading and rereading Richard Price's earlier novel, Clockers, and his most recent, Lush Life, there is the tacit agreement that the good guys don't always win, the bad guys don't always lose. The surprise comes not so much from seeing justice triumphing as an abstract condition but rather to see how much justice will be done at a particular time and how much is held over for later.

Short stories used to be more perfervid in their allocation of justice. Lately they have become more advocates for a force almost as forceful as justice. I speak of ambiguity.

We have moved, I observe, from living dangerously to living ambiguously. Living ambiguously may be more dangerous than living dangerously because of the uncertainty, the tension of wondering when things will become more dangerous--all this rather than the creeping boredom of ceaseless danger.

I believe there are reasons why short stories end on more ambiguous notes than, say, A Cask of Amontillado or An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, or even To Build a Fire. We have grown as a result of those stories, grown more cynical and sophisticated. As they did with so any other things of style and technique, the short stories of Ernest Hemingway added to the ambiguity syndrome, particularly some of the Nick Adams stories, say Big Two-Hearted River, or Hills Like White Elephants. In more recent years, in this century, the ambiguity is more deliberate than ambiguity merely for the sake of not being specific it is put in place to draw the reader artfully into visualizing a conclusion. Often this conclusion is a bundle of emotion, as well-orhestrated and sensual as a bouquet of flowers.

Do not, therefore, do the reader's work for him. Show the reader the direction you have in mind, then end with a good shove. To my mind and senses, the best ending seems at first blush a bit abrupt. You mean, That's it? Then, like an Altoid aftertaste, the other shoe drops and the ambiguity coalesces--off the page.

They all lived happily ever after is more ambiguous than it sounds because it raises questions that at the present time make you
question such things as what happiness is, and because of certain liberties taken with logic and semantics by a former president of the United States, oh, you know, that one, William Jefferson Clinton, it is fair to ask how long you mean when you say ever after.

I remember still the instant wisdom I got some years back when Barry Spacks called to invite me to one of his classes at UCSB to hear a presentation by an author he knew I admired greatly. I asked Bobbie Ann Mason to talk about why she'd seen fit to end her remarkable and memorable story, Shiloh, at what seemed to be an up-in-the-air moment. It was her answer that helped me forge my vision about ambiguity. "I ended it there," she said, "because that's where all the energy ran out."

I found it impossible to let that remark fade down the hallways of my memory, and I have thought long and hard since about where to end a story, and learned from countless attempts at trying to tack endings onto stories I did not realize were already done, the defensive sound staying on too long brings to the story.

Mark Twain actually said, "Put all your eggs in one basket--and watch that basket." I'm taking liberties by suggesting Bobbie Ann Mason's contribution as being, "Put all the available energy into a story situation--and watch that energy."