Too Much Too Soon

A common story telling disaster, of which you are a sometime unwilling participant, is the desire to let the reader see what is going on, what is at stake, what the prize or contention point is,and what the potential menace is, a sort of Kubler-Ross index before the reader learns of an issue in the first place.

True enough, you intrigue the reader with the sense that two trains are already on the same track or are about to be shunted onto a common course, but this is done by oblique reference. Anything remotely resembling Little did they know, finds repose in the trash bin. The mantra is withhold; don't tell the reader what the reader wants to know until the reader is close to shaking with impatience to find out, which is toward the final paragraphs of a short story, the penultimate chapter of a novel--or later.

Nor is it prudent to take the reader where the reader wants to go. For all practical purposes, once the reader gets where he desires, the story is over. You don't have to believe that, but 1) make a list of your favorite stories that allow such things early on. Short list, right? 2) take a look at a story of yours in which the lead character accomplishes a major goal just as the story is setting out. See any problems? Hear any thunk sounds, like a large souffle dropping its collar right out of the oven? Unless the real story homes in on the consequences of a character accomplishing a major goal, the natives will be getting restless and the readers will be impatient enough to bail on you.

Things accomplished too soon, too easily, too much as if by accident or divine intervention all have the consequence the writer least wants to deal with, the Kubler-Ross index as it applies to the scrap of paper attached to a returned short story, or the Thanks-for-letting-us-see-the-enclosed letter that comes back with the book length manuscript, containing that impersonal-yet-snotty trope, unfortunately it does not suit our needs.

There is no one way to describe what the our needs of that kind of letter intends but you can be sure that some of those needs are for characters who seem to do things neither good for them or you, characters who are too comfortable about the wrong things, not uncomfortable enough about the right things, they are Emma Bovary, looking for a life that is quite beyond her grasp, Captain Ahab too pissed with one creature to realize he is angry with all of Nature, the way a faithful parishioner was after discovering God didn't see fit to grant him what he wished; they are individuals who achieve their heart's desire only to be left wondering, what now, what do I do with this situation I have wrought upon myself?

Bad dialogue, too much description, too many coincidences. Mere moths fluttering about the Coleman lantern during a summer's camp-out compared to the heavy hand of Too much, too soon. Even when we tell ourselves a secret story, we know not to make the payoff to soon or too easy, the better to enjoy the satisfaction of the feeling that emerges at the end, a haunting surprise of satisfaction that comes from a source deeper than the payoff.

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.

Sarah Palin, the Madam Bovary of Alaska

Bovary, Emma--a memorable, iconic character; a prime example of the way causality and determinism trigger responses in a front-rant character; a person who became disenchanted with her life, then attempted to effect change.

Emma is everything you could want in a character. She has a vision, which she seeks at accelerated levels to achieve; she has a mounting sense of frustration because her stratagems do not produce their intended goals; she has a growing sense of dislike for her husband, Charles, because of the fact that he, of all those with whom she has contact, wants nothing more than to please her. The fabric of life is Emma's romantic vision. Emma's behavior and attitudes comprise Charles Bovary's romantic vision. They are coevals in an existential train wreck.

Compare and contrast Emma Bovary with Mr. Stephens of Kazuo Ishiguro's remarkable The Remains of the Day: Each means no harm to others. Although each causes some collateral damage along the way, Emma is an absolute disaster in the totality of her effect, bringing her feckless husband to the state of utter inability to cope with life, while Mr. Stephens, although unintentionally breaking Miss Kenton's heart, has mostly damaged himself. He is, in fact, Charles Bovary writ larger than Bovary himself. Emma has romantic visions of enhanced social position and the exciting life she imagines will result from that position. Stephens has the romantic notion of achieving the enhanced plateau of being one of the best butlers ever. In fact, Stephens has served Lord Darlington, a conspicuous supporter of Hitler in the pre-World War II years, and who now, at the beginning of the novel, is reduced to serving a status-conscious American. Both Emma Bovary and Stephens are extreme examples of naive narrator, each intelligent enough to see beyond the surfaces apparent to them but each is resolutely unwilling to do so.

As Mark Twain notably did with his parodic treatment of Walter Scott-type romanticism and chivalry in such works as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom Sawyer, Detective, and Huckleberry Finn, Emma Bovary's creator, Gustav Flaubert, took Emma's reading habits as a vehicle he rode into the literary sunset. Emma's early readings only seemed to whet her appetite for the things she considered to be missing from her life. In a real sense, the more she read, the more her sense of reality was shunted off to the side, allowing the vast interior of her fantasy life to expand to the point where it overrode any possibility that reality would survive. In a fitting irony, Emma Bovary identified herself with Anna Karenina, pursuing suicide as the appropriate way out of the nightmare of circumstance she had created for herself. But here, too, Emma was betrayed by illusion. Anna Karenina's death was over in a brief moment. The drama of Emma's death was painful and protracted.

For more reasons than exquisiteness of character delineation, Madam Bovary is consistently cited as one of the five or ten major novels in any language at any time, but the complexity, inner struggles, and outer agenda inherent in Emma Bovary make her a tempting height to aspire when bringing a character onto a page in a story. Flaubert is famously remembered as saying that Emma Bovary is he. He might as well have said Emma Bovary is story.