14 Fictional
Positions
Short Fictions
by
Eric Miles Williamson
Copyright
14 Fictional Positions copyright © 2010
by Eric Miles Williamson
Published by Raw Dog Screaming Press
Bowie, MD
First Edition
Book design: Jennifer Barnes
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010928479
www.RawDogScreaming.com
Dedication
For my professors, living and dead:
N.V.M. Gonzalez, Robert Williams, Jake Fuchs, Robert Neely,
Ronald Sukenick, Steve Katz, Edward Dorn, Anselm Hollo,
Robert Phillips, Harmon Boertein, George Trail, Richard Howard,
James Tuttleton, Harold Bloom, Denis Donoghue, Jacques Derrida,
and Donald Barthelme.
Were it not for them, I’d still be a construction worker,
and my books would not exist. Maybe I wouldn’t, either.
Also by Eric Miles Williamson
Novels
East Bay Grease
Two-Up
Welcome to Oakland
Nonfiction / Criticism
Oakland, Jack London, and Me
Acknowledgements
Stories in this collection have appeared, in various postures and attitudes, in the following magazines, journals, and newspapers:
The Arkansas Review
Buffalo Press
Continental Drifter
Eat it Alive
Gulf Coast
i.e. magazine
The Iowa Review
The Kansas City Star
Literal Latté
Moral Kiosk
The Slate
The Texas Review
The Yalobusha Review
Many thanks to the editors of these publications.
14 Fictional Positions
Positions
Copyright
Dedication
Also by Eric Miles Williamson
Acknowledgements
14 Fictional Positions
Preface: A Fictional Position
Hope, Among Other Vices and Virtues
The Professor Asks His Students If They Agree With The Conclusion: The Table Is An Imitation And Therefore Not Real
H A N G M A N
Third Person On A Bed Built For Five
Creusa
Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young
The Cow Island Open
A Wise Man is Known by his Laughter
Kickshaws
Wamsutter in Dali Vision
Rhoda’s Sack
Mr. Murphy’s Wedding
Skaters
The Teachings of Don B.
Preface: A Fictional Position
The development and rise of the American short story in the 19th century was the result of simple market forces. Because urban populations in America were so unstable, workers moving from city to city as new lands and employment opportunities arose, newspapers found that serializing novels was bad business: advertisement space was worthless alongside a chapter from a novel that no one lived in town long enough to read. British novelists like Dickens and Trollope published their novels first in serial form, and then collected the chapters together to sell as a book. American novelists had very few venues for serialization, which is why the shape of the American literary novel differs so radically from its British counterpart: chapters from serialized novels read like episodes of soap operas—each chapter opens with a crisis that is soon resolved and closes with the introduction of a new crisis or cliffhanger which will be resolved at the beginning of the next installment. Not so with the American novel—think Moby Dick or Huckleberry Finn.
With no periodical market for the novel in the U.S., writers of fiction in the first half of the 19th century borrowed the form of the short tale from German authors such as Wilhelm Kleist and E.T.A. Hoffmann and altered the form to suit American newspapers. The result was the literary form we now know as the short story.
What we now know as a literary form, however, was originally no more high Art than is pop music today. Short stories were commercial products written for newspapers and magazines by writers who were trying to make a living at it. Poe tried to elevate the short story to the condition of Art, and Hawthorne produced a few volumes; there’s Melville’s Piazza Tales, and the little busybody Washington Irving wrote The Knickerbocker Tales. For the most part, however, the short story was a mere short entertainment akin to a sit-com or hour-long drama on the television.
By the time William Dean Howells took over the editorship of The Atlantic Monthly in 1871 the short story form had split into two distinct categories, the same way other art forms split into that which aspires to the Condition of Art and that which exists only to make money. The literary short story had become an art form, but it was also an art form which paid real money. For instance, Jack London once had a contract with Cosmopolitan to write a story a month for a year at the rate of $1000 per story. I once did the math on this number, using rents in Oakland, California as the index of the value of the dollar, and that thousand dollars a hundred years ago is worth about $250,000 in today’s money, what one would get for selling film rights to Hollywood. When a novelist at the turn of the 20th century needed cash to support the novel-in-progress, he would write a short story, and the money would sustain him nicely for a good long while. And it’s no surprise that the short stories, written for money as they most often were, were generally not of the same caliber or difficulty as the novels produced by the same authors. Compare the difficulty level differences between the stories and novels of Henry James and William Faulkner and this becomes obvious.
The rise of film, however, changed the status and ultimately the function of the short story permanently. Just as photography negated the mimetic function of the art of painting, rendering the imitative function of painting obsolete, film’s rise obliterated the short story’s function of delivering short narratives. This took some time, as not everyone had a movie theater nearby and open all hours of the day and night, but today, with movies available with the click of a mouse or remote control, obtaining a short narrative that not only tells a story but which shows the story as well, the short story, for the greater public, has become an artifact of the past and curiosity of the present.
When photography disrupted the mimetic function of painting, artists responded by making paintings that were decidedly non-mimetic, that used as a premise the notion that what they were painting was not reality, but an artist’s impression of reality. Monet’s Cathedral of Notre Dame paintings are not attempts to realistically render the church any more than Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” is an attempt at astronomical accuracy.
The short story has followed suit. When its narrative function was usurped by film, short story writers focused increasingly on the other aspects of the art of fiction. Robert Coover attempts to obliterate narrative certitude, Donald Barthelme operates like a collagist and pop-culture analyst, John Barth fuses criticism, mythology and narrative, the minimalists favor style over substance, and it’s almost a universal law that whatever conflict is introduced is not going to be resolved (in rebellion to film, which almost always resolves conflicts neatly and with divine finality). The short story has responded to film by attempting to render in fiction that which is unfilmable.
The short story has evolved
into a different creature than its forbears. The short story is no longer a popular narrative medium. Like poetry, the short story has honed itself out of the public eye and entered the depopulate badlands of Art.
There are very few commercial venues in the country for the short story—Harper’s, The Atlantic, Playboy, The New Yorker, Esquire and perhaps a few others. Short story writers publish in literary journals for nominal pay—a few hundred dollars at best—or, as is usually the case, no pay. The majority of readers of short stories are the short story writers themselves—mirroring the state of contemporary poetry. Operating beneath the radar of any culture but their own, short story writers are creating works of Art that bear little semblance to the works being created by novelists. Uncompensated (except perhaps with university posts), unread, short story writers, like poets, are free to write whatever they want to write without fear of low sales, public censure, or even bad book reviews, since their collections, published primarily on university and small presses, usually don’t get reviewed in anything other than the journals in which the stories originally appeared.
Ask the editors of most literary journals: there are probably more “writers” of short stories than there are readers of them, far more submissions than subscribers, all those would-be writers scrambling around trying to get published in literary quarterlies no one reads (often not even the would-be-writer submitters!) except other short story writers and poets. Journals get hundreds of thousands of short story submissions every year, but a short story collection is lucky if it sells even a thousand copies. Short story collections tend to be consigned to the oblivion of small press purgatory, where, without publicity budgets, media coverage, or often even distribution, the books become curiosities for the literary historians of the future even before they exist in print.
My point, finally, is this: the American Short Story has its own unique history and pattern of development. This history and development is not the same as that of the American Novel, which is still a thriving medium and a medium with a wide range of aesthetic intent. The American Short Story, as a popular form, is extinct. Its descendant, the Short Story as Art Form, survives, albeit in the literary fringes of the culture.
In America the novel is generally (although not overtly) favored, granted more prestige, than the short story.
The American Short Story may be fiction, but it is not the same type of fiction as the American Novel.
The Short Story may garner less prestige, but it is nonetheless as worthy an art form as the Novel.
When I was a college freshman—a music major—I took a beginning course in fiction writing, figuring it would be an easy A, a blow-off. We were required to write short stories. I’d never before read one, blue-collar music nerd that I was, fresh off the construction site and from the Mexican nightclubs in which I played cumbias and rancheras and salsa and merengue.
I wrote two stories that semester—one about my messed-up family and the Hell’s Angels who reared me, the other about the construction work I’d done before entering college. Both stories got published pretty quickly in national journals—Smackwarm (now the Nebraska Review) and The California Quarterly. The one that got published in Smackwarm was so poorly written, so larded with my youthful and unlearned ignorance, so thoroughly rotten that many years later, when driving across the country, I stopped at every university library I could, and if I found the issue that contained my awful story, I tore the pages out and shredded them, throwing the paper ribbons into a trash can in the men’s room, where they belonged. The only saving grace concerning my early stories is that they served as prototypes for what would eventually become my novels, East Bay Grease, Two-Up, and Welcome to Oakland.
During the 30 years it took me to write those novels I periodically returned to the form of the short story. Not because I enjoyed writing them—because I didn’t and still don’t—they’re far too difficult for me to write, and I tend to be longwinded anyway—but to try out tricks and gimmicks I was appropriating from my betters, literary innovations perfected by the great living and dead masters. I’ll not venture proposing that the stories which constitute 14 Fictional Positions are nothing more than exercises, but in many ways that’s the function they’ve served for me. By writing short stories I’m practicing linguistic and formal techniques I employ when writing novels. So by definition these stories are apprentice work, this novelist’s training ground.
The earliest of the stories collected here date from 1984-1986, when I was a graduate student at the University of Colorado, where I studied with Fiction Collective authors such as Ronald Sukenick, Clarence Major, Robert Steiner, and Steve Katz. Across town, at Naropa, was Allen Ginsberg, who I’d see at the supermarket on occasion. Fridays the Black Mountain poet Ed Dorn bought me beers at the Boulderado Hotel. The rule of the day was to experiment and innovate, to stretch the language to its breaking point and to invent appropriate forms to contain the language. Hence the coyness and silliness of stories like “The Professor Asks His Students if They Agree With the Conclusion: The Table Is an Imitation and Therefore Not Real,” “Wamsutter in Dali Vision” (written after reading Walter Abish), “H A N G M A N” and “Third Person on a Bed Built for Five.” I look back at them now and I blush remembering the giddiness of the young man—then only 23 years old—who wrote these little ditties. That guy, young Mr. Williamson, he’d only been reading novels and short stories for two years, and yet not only did he presume to have the technical facility to write stories, but he had the nerve to send them to magazines for publication. Young Mr. Williamson believed at the time he was doing new things with form and content, with linguistic and semantic construction. Young Mr. Williamson hadn’t yet even read James Joyce, let alone T.S. Eliot or Gertrude Stein.
I continued writing short stories at the University of Houston, where I studied with Donald Barthelme until his death in 1989. There I began work in earnest on the two books which would become East Bay Grease and Two-Up. Novels don’t do so well in creative writing workshops, and so I’d write short stories as required for class while continuing work on my novels under a cloak of secrecy. The stories I produced during my eleven years in Houston all served to help develop my novelistic chops. “A Wise Man is Known by His Laughter,” the title swiped from John Donne and tweaked a bit, was written in 1986 in a single sitting, an all night caffeine and nicotine and whiskey burst of jubilance at being once again in a major city (I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area). The exuberance and urgency I thought I was expressing grew into the voice of my most recent novel, Welcome to Oakland. Other stories written during my Houston years include “The Cow Island Open” (a Robert Coover rip-off), “Mr. Murphy’s Wedding,” “Creusa” (a Hemingway homage of sorts), “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young” (the title and method swiped from Oscar Wilde), “Kickshaws” (toying with writing only dialogue á la Manuel Puig), “Rhoda’s Sack” (written after reading Robert Coover’s little novel, Spanking the Maid) and “Hope, Among Other Vices and Virtues” (an homage to a man who later appears as a character in Welcome to Oakland). All these stories were written under the immense and looming presence of Donald Barthelme, who haunts me to this day. It’s as if he stands behind me as I write, grimacing in disapproval, shaking his head slowly and saying, “No. That will not do, young Mr. Williamson. That will not do.” The final story of this collection is, of course, a playful tribute to Mr. Barthelme, originally written on cocktail napkins at Old Barney’s, my watering hole of choice in Warrensburg, Missouri, hours before I was to read a ghost story at a bar. I hope his austere and saintly ghost will not be offended.
It was Donald Barthelme who convinced me to abandon imitating postmodern authors (as I’d been doing) and pursue my own brand of realism—what I’ve called in print “Meta-Realism”—a kind of realism informed by modernism and postmodernism, utilizing innovations and techniques of the experimenters, all the while presenting something that resembles mimesis.
And so 14 Fictional Positions: Readers of my novels and even my literary criticism and reviews may find this book entirely out of character—a far cry from the urban realism they have likely come to expect of my work—a strange set of oddities and curiosities, a doggie-bag of conceits. This, of course, would be no surprise for its author. To me, though, there’s nothing in this collection that doesn’t directly relate to my corpus of prose. Realism, or, if you will, “Meta-Realism,” would never advance, never develop or improve were it not for the oddities among its precursors. Dostoievsky’s Underground Man makes possible Henry Miller, Hardy’s muscular prose makes possible D.H. Lawrence, Flaubert creates Hemingway, Jane Austen’s character studies lead to Henry James, the Beats would never have existed had it not been for the triumphant and gargantuan Walt Whitman, James Joyce creates Malcolm Lowry and Samuel Beckett and the entire gang of Postmodernists, Tristram Shandy makes possible everything, and, as my professor at NYU Harold Bloom says, Shakespeare—the greatest experimental writer ever—created us all.
The literary form we call the short story, as I have said, is a quaint relic from bygone times. This does not mean it is without use. The short story is the training ground of the novelist. It’s where the novelist hones his skills.
Without experimentation Realism in all its forms stagnates. 14 Fictional Positions is the record of one author’s attempts at expanding and enhancing his lifelong mimetic fictional position.
Hope, Among Other Vices and Virtues
Charity
Four years ago, Duke, my neighbor and employer’s husband, introduced me to Agnes, my employer’s daughter.
Duke did this before he was my friend.
Agnes said, “I like you. You are everything in a man I want to change.”
14 Fictional Positions Page 1
