Story

 

Re-reading a favourite work of Italo Calvino, his unfinished lectures entitled ‘Six memos for the next millennium’ (1988), I find the lecture on ‘Quickness’ includes this paragraph. “Borges and Bioy Casares put together an anthology of short extraordinary tales (Cuentos breves y extraordinaires, 1955). I would like to edit a collection of tales consisting of one sentence only, or even a single line. But so far I have not found any to match the one by the Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso: ‘Cuandro despertó, el dinosaur todavía estaba allí.’ (When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.)” That he doesn’t quote other one-sentence stories, only this one, is further demonstration of Calvino’s literary virtue of quickness. His attraction to the concept of the one-sentence story is in keeping with his enjoyment of writing experiment, the challenge of making up more such self-contained and complete brief tales. Monterroso is legendary for such exercises, which in his case are intrinsic to his thinking, a natural trait of his personality. His dinosaur story has a literal first meaning, itself arresting, but then meanings that evolve from scrutiny of the tale - can we ever feel separate from prehistory, even in our dreams? Is the dreamer himself not a dinosaur? Could he exist if not for dinosaurs? Are dreams not a product of primeval evolution? Poetry readers are familiar with such compact storytelling and related levels of reading. Sappho’s fragments leave everything open to the hearer’s experience and imagination: ‘Love shook my heart like the wind on the mountain rushing over the oak trees.’ Haiku is Buddhist nature poetry wishing to place the reader in the present, but many haiku are also cuentos breves y extraordinaires. When the poet Shushiki confides ‘Dead my old fine hopes and dry my dreaming but still … iris, blue each spring’, we may fill in the hopes and dreamings anew, while Kikaku’s short story likewise intimates innumerable stories in its one line: ‘Oh lucky beggar! … Bright heaven and cool earth your summer outfit.’ The fashion for reducing great works of literature to a sentence has an ephemeral appeal, unlike the works being reduced. Marcel Proust, he of controlled length, cannot be contained in one brief line, nor can that line hold the attention for long. Calvino’s ultimate and covert desire though, I think, is not to make an anthology, but to write a series of such stories himself. I admit it’s my first instinct as well. Summer days are spent watching out for one-sentence inventions. I am on alert, like a dinosaur. Until I start noticing that so much of our conversation, whether gossip or news, opinion or fact, dream or plan, works in the same way to say the best or the most in the best and the least number of words. Only thing being, we don’t immediately write them down, like Calvino or Sappho or Shushiki or Monterroso.