Celebrity Guest Poster: Mr Tulgey Wood on Short Stories

I’m very honoured to present today’s Celebrity Guest Poster: Mr Peter Ringeisen, a charming fellow, fellow teacher and author of the Tulgey Wood blog. He has kindly agreed to answer my desperate questions on short stories:

1. Why are short stories almost always so damn depressing? (I know two exceptions: How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl or Halfie) and Salman Rushdie’s Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies)

Depressing their readers is what *serious* authors strive for. They know their “Ars Poetica”, where Horace told them to either instruct or delight their audience (aut prodesse aut delectare), and as it is so much easier to instruct than to delight, they take the “delight” part lightly, and take the “instruct” part to mean the following: Drive it home to your readers that life is hard – REALLY hard, and if they don’t watch out they’ll become nervous wrecks and will have to earn their money as writers. (The same is true for *serious* movies, by the way. Don’t ever watch one of those. What you want is “comedy”. Really.)

2. People keep talking about epiphanies. Is there a secret contest among short story writers to hide the epiphanies in the most obscure places, such as under the main character’s dirty laundry?

a) Short answer: Yes.
b) Long answer: Well, you may have a point there. This epiphany-mongering is a rather shady business though. First of all, they’re not even sure where the word comes from. *Probably* from obsolete French “tiphanie”, Epiphany, from Old French, from Late Latin “theophania”, that’s what they tell me. It all goes back – this is my theory anyway – to good old Wordsworth being very surprised one day when he realized he was lying in the middle of a field of daffodils – very likely after sleeping off whatever needed sleeping off from the night before. So, in a way, this epiphany mostly is a very sobering experience – in all senses of the word. (continue with answer to question 1, where it says: “Drive it home …”

3. If I read short stories by writers who are supposedly among the best (Katherine Mansfield and Alice Munro come to mind – BORING!), why do they fail to charm me?

You are not alone. Many readers of short stories have been severely disappointed with this genre – mainly because of a misunderstanding about the term “short”. As far as I can see (and at my age, that isn’t very far), a short story that aims to charm its readers should not exceed four pages (of average size).

4. Why aren’t short stories brilliant little tales of adventure, wit and insight into the human soul, but instead boring, humdrum moments in boring people’s lives that are even more boring outside the story (because the story’s where the epiphany happens, remember?)

Read Michael Bullock’s “The Head” and David Lodge’s “Guess What Happened?”.

5. Who are these people who really enjoy short stories, and what sets them apart?

Read Graham Greene’s “The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen”. The narrator certainly is somebody who enjoys an after-dinner short story. What sets him apart is that he’s fictional.

6. What, in a nutshell, is wrong with me?

In a nutshell? Nothing. Out of a nutshell – I’m not so sure. [Forgive me - this was irresistible. My thanks go to Groucho Marx.]

7. I enjoyed the film “Brokeback Mountain”. Well, I suppose I didn’t exactly enjoy it, but I thought it was very good. Will reading the story completely spoil the experience?

Reading a book after having seen a movie made from it usually leads to a prolonged phase of somber moods, where the reader ponders over the question why he went to see the film at all if he could have had so much fun imagining all the people and settings for himself without all the Hollywood stuff interfering from the other corner of his mind. It takes a very strong book to eradicate memories of a bad movie … So – I don’t know. But: Read Stephen Leacock’s “My Financial Career” aloud, listening to the vowels and consonants, the sentence movements …

All the stories I recommended are in Short Short Stories Universal, ed. Reingard M. Nischik (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1993) [UB 9297].

Tomorrow, I will visit my trusty booksellers to place an order for this book. Thank you very much, Peter! It was a pleasure to have you over!