Our senses mellow together like Spring river. You don't know me. I don't know you. We're just another subject of fate. You haven't spoken for a long time, yet I already know all I need to. Life is conceptual. Just another pothole on the road to eternity. You are my eternity. I have found myself. I have found you. I disengage from this infantile flirting, confidence peaks, I touch you. Your body slowly chills under the spell of your own obtuseness. What was a game full of quirks and laurels becomes cops and robbers, a flashing hearse carries you to jail.
Mr. Savage was right – this really has been one of the hardest tasks yet! From re-reading the guidelines, it seems that one of the main aims of this task was for the story to be a ‘narrative distillation’ with a ‘tight structure’. However, many respondents have not picked up on the importance of this: their submissions are summaries of stories, not stories in themselves, vignettes without narrative conflict. As a side-note, I was shocked when I scanned through this month’s entries and saw that no one has included any dialogue! This is one of the essential story-telling tools, as it is inherently dramatic. (For an absolutely killer example of the short short story, look no further than Jeffrey Whitmore’s rightly famous Bedtime Story.)
ReplyDeleteYou’re to be highly commended, then, for understanding the aims of this task, and for achieving a distilled narrative: in 101 words, you have a well-defined beginning (the narrator meeting, and being attracted to, another character), middle (that attraction swiftly turning into an overblown idea of fully-fledged, star-crossed romance), and end (actual events don’t meet up to this idea; the story ends with the narrator’s anger at the other character’s ‘obtuseness’), which flow together well (e.g. the transition between beginning and middle over the word ‘eternity’). You’ve therefore done an extremely good job of strengthening your typically cerebral, abstract style with a solid narrative structure.
You’ve done even better to successfully utilise an unreliable narrator within such a concise piece. This piece holds great narrative interest due to the brilliantly sustained tension between what the narrator knows and what the reader knows, and the alteration of the narrator (from reliable, to idealistic, to delusional, bitter, and even unlikeable) is judiciously handled. For the reader who views the narrator’s situation at a distance, his vision of romance becomes hopeless idealism, and the failure of his vision is clearly not due to the other character’s ‘obtuseness’, but due to his own inability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. Within this word limit it’s difficult to set up the standards of the external world by which the reader can evaluate the reliability (and morality) of the narrator, so well done there! In terms of structure and voice, this is fabulous.
Onto the language: ‘our senses mellow together’ is a really gorgeous opening line, although I wasn’t sure of ‘like Spring river’ (I assume from the capitalisation that ‘Spring river’ is an actual geographical feature, but because it’s an unfamiliar landmark, and because the rest of the piece doesn’t deal in locatable physical features, there was still uncertainty for me over whether it should be ‘a spring river’).
‘Life is conceptual’ at first seemed like a bit of a dead sentence to me (that is, it wasn’t further concept/character/plot), but on re-reading I guess it’s flagging up that the narrator is treating the object of his desire as a concept, not a person, and hence his idealism is obviously hopeless? If so, I still think it should be dropped: it’s too obvious a narrative signpost, and takes some out of the fun out of realising what’s “real” and what’s just in the narrator’s head.
‘Infantile flirting’ is a good hint towards the narrator’s impatience and general weirdness, and the entire build of the sentence towards ‘I touch you’ is wonderfully managed.
The next two sentences are jam-packed with conflicting imagery: ‘chills’ implies frigidity, and doesn’t quite sit right with ‘obtuseness’, while ‘under the spell’ is an over-familiar line. I like the change of the ‘game’ from ‘quirks and laurels’ to ‘cops and robbers’, although I think the final too-mixed metaphor (cops/robbers/police car with ‘hearse’) is over-egging the pudding.
This is a great response to a very difficult task. Well done!
Hey Sarah,
ReplyDeleteThanks for such an in depth comment on what was only a 101 word post :).
Putting aside all the positives highlighted (of which there seem to be many) and picking up on the areas of concern for a minute. I think the reason this piece became a bit 'abstract' towards the end is down to my own desire to see just how far I could 'exploit' language. Even though I'm aware this was a risky route to take I feel that the overall 'openess' of the piece allows for the words to create themselves almost. I'm pretty sure this is what you picked up on in your comment.
Anyway thanks for such an exceptional comment, it sure makes the horizon of creative perfection seem a whole lot closer.
Carlsberger.
Hey,
ReplyDeleteI find the voice of this piece fascinating – you’ve balanced clarity and incoherence in a way which draws in, rather than alienates, the reader. The length of the piece works in its favour, too, because at greater length I think you’d have to start providing concrete answers to the questions that the voice raises; as it stands, though, it is dreamlike, as if the speaker were caught between consciousness and the subconscious.
I love the idea of senses “mellowing”, and the image of “potholes” is a good one – bleak but a bit funny, too. Although I’d question “another” pothole; it distracts the reader a little as he or she begins to wonder what the others are...
I like the turnaround of tone, too: from “I have found myself. I have found you” to the clearheaded “I disengage from this infantile flirting”. As usual, you’ve got quite a high register; at times, it runs the risk of being overwritten, but it’s a tone I see variations of in most of your writing.
The ambiguity of the last sentence is great, and actually introduces, in its obscurity, an intriguing narrative – which isn’t actually present in the rest of the piece. It’s good practice not to cram “story” into a short space, but we need perhaps a little more prompting as to the sense of it. This is particularly because of the duplicity of the final image: first “flashing” (we assume police car or ambulance), then “hearse” (so we’re pretty certain the metaphor is one of a balance of life and death – an ambulance), but it’s subverted with “jail”. Finally, after a few double-takes, we work out that it’s a police car. It’s fine to confuse the reader, but for this level of confusion we need to be given a little more certainty to work with first. It’s only fair!
Don’t lose the lightness of touch of this piece, though – I just think it needs a couple of tweaks.
Well done.
Thanks Penny/Sarah,
ReplyDeleteJust to clear up the 'flashing hearse' metaphor, initially it was meant to be quite Larkinesque (which I thought worked well in this piece). The flashing hearse was to represent a 'dramatically ironic' ambulance. The jail was to encapsulate an irreversible fate (i.e one that could have been so different).
I understand this all might seem a bit OTT to replace one word (death). The explanation should clear things up a bit hopefully.
Carlsberger.