"...the world in a grain of sand..."

“To see the world in a grain of sand…” William Blake

A little more in this post on that book of short stories edited by Jane Urquhart… Fsjl makes the point that some excerpts from longer works make excellent short stories. That's true, but I think that a collection of short stories ought to be just that. I’ll get back to this later. I think of anthologies as democratic books (demos = people; kratos = power), for want of a better word. Several people have their work presented, and, hopefully, many people are attracted by this literary buffet. I'm avoiding saying that one hopes to attract the ordinary reader because I don't know if that's every compiler's hope. Certainly, that is my hope. That’s because – and I’m going to digress a bit here – this literature business has become just that – a business, and a very elitist one at that. The whole factory of publishing, reviews, criticism, theory, the 'academy' in which students are taught how to pull the literary work to pieces, etc., etc., has turned more people off poems and stories than on to them. (So literary agents have been saying that factual works now have greater appeal and are more publishable: biographies, histories, travel books, and so on.) Not that the theorizing thing can't be great fun and discussion can’t be stimulating – if one recognizes that enterprise for what it is. My quarrel is that, at the end of it all, fewer and fewer people buy and read fiction. In the rush to secure their share of what action there is, people do bad things: writers, creative and otherwise, plagiarize – I needn't refer to several recent spectacular cases; they lie; the various parties involved form power-grabbing cliques and cadres (Russell Smith was gently suggesting this in that article in the Globe and Mail); they abuse influence. And, deliberately or no, those whose expert business it is to guide us through these tricky waters sometimes mislead us. Critics fan fires of ‘controversy’ and unpleasantness for their own ends. I've no problem with a real quarrel, but a fake fight for the sake of the flying feathers is another matter entirely. All in all, it's a set of bad behaviours that has slowly, over the past three or four decades, been throttling literature to death. But I've got far from anthologies and from the short story, haven't I? Maybe. Maybe not so far. Read The Dubliners and read the short stories in The New Yorker. Read Frank O'Connor and Olive Senior. Read Alice Munro and Thomas King. Read Timothy Findley and Mavis Gallant, Sam Selvon and Rohinton Mistry. Don't we – writers, critics, students, lecturers, common or garden readers – have something to talk about? What makes a short story a short story? (This is why I think it's better for all the choices to be stories written as stories.) What makes a short story a good story? A great one? Characters that a reader remembers? Dialogue that is riveting? Scenes and events that are striking and burn the imagination? Plots that have you on tenterhooks? A procession of unlikely versions of all the above that erodes you into loneliness, or emptiness or despair? And what makes a short story Canadian – or Caribbean? How have those artifacts changed in the last half century? What do the critics say? Should we give them half-an-ear? Are prizes useful? Are prizewinners all deserving, or is it, as has been said of awards here, there and elsewhere, a bunch of mutual admiration societies composed of people who receive awards this year and hand them out the next? It's not that Urquhart's introduction doesn't touch on some of these things – but the touch is so light as hardly to be felt at all. In particular, she avoids the obvious first question of why she hasn't been reading short stories! And she sidesteps the challenging issue "Concerning the Canadianness of the authors included in this volume" by using a quote from Margaret Atwood's introduction to a 1997 collection: "Some are born Canadian, some achieve Canadianness and some have Canadianness thrust upon them." Such a pity, for that would have made a mighty good discussion! She implies a criterion when she explains that she included a story of Gabrielle Roy's "even though it was originally written in French": there's a Pandora's box waiting to be opened. Should the book have been called The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories Written in English? So there's a lot for an editor to say, apart from pointing to themes and explaining why stories in an anthology have been collected in a particular way. There's lots of room for a good discussion with the gentle reader. Our ideal editor, having carefully said what the task has been, and how she’s approached it, digs in to her expert self for some insights. Beyond likes and dislikes. Bestowing something for the reader to hang on to, keep thinking about. For my money, where the short story is concerned, a thoughtful glimpse of a particular "world in a grain of sand…”