What The Hell Is Microfiction?
A friend of mine recently broke down his view of the basic, general-populace feeling toward microfiction, those littlest stories of 40 or 70 words: 1) I don't get it; and 2) Who cares? He said these are an extension of most people's feelings toward haiku, their thoughts on which take 3 prongs: 1) I don't get it; 2) Who cares?; and 3) Doesn't it have something to do with mood—wintery, summery, or green and springy?
I thought his observations were astute in a couple ways. First, and we might as well get it out of the way, Who cares? It's a pretty standard idea in writing circles that the only people who read, much less care about, poetry are poets. That means that maybe 1 in 10,000 people read poetry (a wild guess; don't cite me). A pretty strong, similar case could be made that the only people who read microfiction are microfictionists. This means that 7 people in the entire world care anything about it. Maybe, and I hope, this essay will change a few minds, that the range of fans will grow, 2 or 3 of you will be convinced.
We'll dig into "I don’t get it" later, but the other shrewd thing about my friend's comments was that he compared microfiction to haiku. I think this is right. If microfiction can be compared to any other writing genre, it's not short stories, it's not prose poetry—though a lot of people would argue this—but rather it's haiku. The way it's read, the way it's understood, or not, as the case may be, the way it works in the mind of the reader, haiku is closest. I will take a second to say though that he's wrong about point number 3, that haiku (or microfiction) has something, anything, to do with mood. I suppose that may be the way it's taught in school, but it's wrong. Haiku has nothing to do with mood. Not good haiku. The best haiku doesn't even have anything to do with nature.
But let's back up a minute. What is microfiction, at its most basic? It's a story, a narrative, usually with at least some of the elements of short fiction—characters, dialogue, setting, descriptive language, a scene, an occurrence. Something moves through time, even if just a few seconds of time, and something happens, people interact. It's a story, though only 10 or 40 or 85 words long.
It'd probably be good to read a couple examples. Here's one that appeared in the magazine elimae, written by the microfictionist Kim Chinquee:
Cross
The toddlers wore lace. "Mamma," one said, bottle-mouthed, pulling on a pants leg. Parents sat on chairs. Daughters wore small outfits. There were days of stretching, gearing up one's mind, warming up one's body. Rehearsing the route. Some girls had to pee a thousand times beforehand. The gun went off. They ran: sisters, nieces, girlfriends -- children. There was a last placer, shoving herself. Everyone stood watching. "Go," they said, clapping.
And here's one by me:
She burned the shirt in the backyard, the green smoke an ugly whiplash, the buttons popping.
I still don't get it, he said.
What? That I have one less shirt?
The fire was pale, shining on her arms.
First thing we can see is that, yes, it's true, these little strings of words have many of the elements of short fiction. Both have characters. In Chinquee's, the characters are generalized, children who fill the necessary roles of the action, the character actors, so to speak, of the story. In mine, the characters are more specified, two people, he and she, who are talking, although they are perhaps less vividly rendered than the children in "Cross." Also, both pieces have dialogue, both are set somewhere specific, backyards or races, and both entail some sort of happening, an event.
In "Cross" the event is a race, a foot race, we can assume, that appears to be open only, or perhaps mostly, to children, to girls. It may be that it takes a couple reads of the story to gather exactly what is going on, to stitch together in our minds the whole of Chinquee's scenario, but once we do, once we navigate the rhythm of the story, it's pretty clear what's occurring. In my story, the scene, the event, is probably more mysterious. We glimpse what is occurring, this burning of a shirt, but the details are left sketchy enough, the dialogue clipped enough, that there are probably many who are left scratching their heads, asking, What's going on here? Nevertheless, we know something is happening, a conflict it seems, a disagreement between these two people.
So, here we have stories. Or at least Chinquee and I would claim to have them. To others, and perhaps many others, this claim is in doubt. Yes, you might say, we do have characters, of a sort, dialogue, of a sort, and happenings, of some kind, but what does it mean, what does it add up to?
We are used to stories to which we can attribute some meaning: A character goes through some demonstrably life-changing event, she makes an important decision, he has a realization about life, god, or humanity that makes sense to us, a revelation to which we can relate. Something important takes place, we can see it; life, for the characters, is altered. Perhaps as readers of modernist short stories we've become used to the fact that the writer might not spell out this change in broad strokes, the story ending might be subtle, slight. Even so, with a bit of looking, there it is, meaning, emotion, change.
What is the meaning of "Loss"? What do these 38 words add up to? She burned a shirt; the fire was pale on her arms. Even I, the author, don't know what it means! I really don't. There's not enough there. I don't understand why these people are doing what they are. It's not even clear what they are doing, this funny ritual. How then can I, or you, know what it might mean?
A similar line of thought could be followed with "Cross," asking, okay, they stood clapping for the last placer, I see that, but for goodness sakes, why, what can it mean? And, why write about it? This is perhaps why many people would rather move microfiction away from fiction at all, and instead call it poetry. We're used to poetry, at this late date, being inscrutable. Language poetry? Found poetry? Cut-up poetry? Flarf? Even the bulk of prose poetry is dense enough with obfuscation to keep us uncomfortable with the idea of meaning. It's something anti-meaning perhaps, something dreamlike, nightmarish, surreal.
And yet, nothing in either of the stories given above is so entirely weird, it's really not dreamlike at all, and the words, their order and grammar, are relatively clear and clean—certainly not flarf. The meaning then is not lost in the language, so much as in the "story"—there is lack of conclusion, a finish without wholeness.
At this point, I'll propose something radical: Meaninglessness, a lack of ability to attract meaning, as we might generally consider it, is in fact the goal of microfiction! The words, the characters, the events in this work are meant not to mean anything at all, their purpose is to point beyond meaning, to a kind of emptiness. It's too bland, or too big, or too small, to attract meaning. Or, to think about it another way, they are meant to contain something larger, and more vague, to state something about the whole. Microfiction tries to say (and certainly not always successfully), Here is the essence, here is existence. It doesn't attempt corner off one portion of life, break it into a demonstrably meaningful chunk of experience. It is everything, and thus nothing.
Again though, I want to stress that the idea is not surreality or nonsense, as might be true in some kinds of poetry. And neither is it to create a metaphoric reflection of some life truth. That's poetry's sphere. Poetry creates a finely crafted set of images and ideas through which, metaphorically, we see some other thing, in which dislike things become like. That is the revelation of poetry—Aha, things I don't understand (or didn’t previously) are like things I do! I get it!
In microfiction, there is a greater tensility of language. It might be just as lush, or highly wrought, or tricky as in poetry but its underlying structure is leaner, skeletal, there are more spaces through which an emptiness can be seen. Look at "Cross." The spaces in the narrative, between sentences, between actions and characters, not only give the story its halting, fragmentary feel but also open it up, replace its texture not with something unknown but with emptiness. It's not as if Chinquee is leaving out material we are supposed to fill in on our own, but rather that she is carving out space in which nothing exists, a white space. The story echoes with this space. By the time we reach the story's end, it fairly tolls with it.
In this sense, we see through the language of microfiction not to a metaphoric Aha of meaning, but to meaninglessness. And this is where we can return to haiku, since, of any form, the void is haiku's clearest target.
Here are two poems by my favorite haiku writer, Issa:
With his radish
The radish picker
Points the way.
Emerging from the nose
Of Great Buddha's statue:
A swallow comes.
In both poems we recognize the same strange lack of meaning, of consequence, as we did in the microfictions given earlier. What does it add up to, we ask, this radish picker, this swallow coming from the nose of Buddha? What revelation or movement or change proceeds from these words? We also recognize the same echo in these haiku, a similar emptiness. Perhaps it's not so much between sentences, or between words, as in the microfictions, but the echo is there, around the poems, before they begin and after they close, a sense that space for nothingness has been provided.
The result, as before, is that we look through the poems, to meaninglessness. The haiku are not about something else, in the manner of most kinds of poetry, because the actions they contain, the narratives they relate, do not mean things in any metaphoric sense. Haiku are about everything, a wholeness of experience, conveyed in 9 or 11 words, and thus they are about nothing at all, no one broken-off piece of meaningful occurrence. Which is why I must claim that haiku are not about mood, and not about nature. To claim they are about mood is to say they are about something else, a wintery sky or grassy spring, that points to some human feeling in a poetic, metaphoric sense. And they are not about nature either, in that the goal of nature poetry is to beautify human experience, give meaning to a lover's lament or the poet's ambling thoughts.
None of which is to say that haiku, or microfiction, is devoid of feeling, or of humanity. Issa's poems are witty and earthy, and Chinquee's "Cross" is suffused with human detail. Microfiction is, after all, fiction. It's about people, characters, their desires and hopes and conflicts. It's just that it isn't demonstrably meaningful, you don’t walk away from it feeling that something was learned.
So we ask, what's the point? Who cares? And this is where it's hard to explain, to justify. Very good haiku, and excellent microfiction, they bloom in the mind, you read them and a rose of apprehension spreads through the head, across the synaptic spaces. Their meaninglessness opens up possibility, a grasp of chance and luck that is nearly impossible to explain. It's a view of the void that is filled brim-full with nothing, like the spaces left out of a sculpture, the women of Henry Moore. It's nothing, nothing at all. It's a chrysanthemum blooming, two people arguing about a dog.
There may be some who believe that this argument in favor of microfiction wants to privilege it over other forms, over poetry. I speak in grand terms of its ability to capture the whole, of its avoidance of metaphoric density. But I don't mean that; poetry and its uses and beauties are at least on par with any of microfiction's. It's just that it's such a strange and wonderful form, a whole other way of getting at life. These little stories want your attention, and, I'd say, deserve it. Write them, read them, exasperate yourself with their inconsequence. Worst off, 8 seconds later, you won't care.