I have some
work coming out in Double Room, a Web del Sol
e-zine that focuses on that nebulous terrain between the prose poem, the
short-short story & so-called flash
fiction. In addition to publishing work itself, in my case a section of VOG, each contributor has been asked to
respond to a question on the general topic. The contributor can pick one of
five, all of which have to do with some aspect of genre. For example:
Regarding differentiation between flash fiction and prose
poetry, Tony Leuzzi wrote, “If the writing contains a
compressed plot, with character and motive, then I am inclined to think, ‘flash
fiction.’ If the reading experience forces me into unexpected directions, where
a loss of control is expected, then I am probably in the realm of a prose
poem.” Peter Johnson also noted, “I agree with Todorov when he says that all
genres come from previous genres, but that doesn’t mean Schlegel was wrong when
he said, ‘Every poem is a genre in itself.’” What criteria do you use to
distinguish between prose poems and flash fictions? Is Schlegel correct in his
assessment? If so, is there any point in designating genre?
Unspoken
within that question is one of the deeper & more misguided presumptions
about the nature of the prose poem – what I think of as Jacob’s fallacy – that a signature feature of the prose poem is its
brevity. Thus “flash fiction,” which by definition is characterized by its
length, might be something that requires differentiation.
But this is like trying to identify the border between, say, Korean &
Portuguese, similar insofar as each is a language.
One way to
read Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la
Nuit, the first volume of what will evolve into the prose poem, is as a
series of short pieces, but it also can plausibly be read as a book-length
serial poem. Lautréamont’s work in the 1860s should
have resolved once & for all the idea that length had nothing to do with the nature of the prose poem. Yet for
some reason, the impact of Bly & Edson on the poetry of the 1960s was to
generate an almost monolithic model of the prose poem cast largely from the
mold of Max Jacob’s little prose confections. Even as a reading of the French
prose poem, that approach erases the work of writers such as St.-John Perse, Victor Segalen, Edmond
Jabès, Francis Ponge & Marcelin Pleynet.
If
anything, “flash fiction” as a theoretical concept rescues soft surrealism from
the trough of predictability into which it had devolved. Fiction has been
perhaps the most challenged of all the writing genres over the past century, as
much of its social rationale as the “logical” medium for creative narrative was
drained, first by cinema & later by television.* Flash fiction transforms
the issue of time in narrative – frankly a far more interesting dynamic than
plot.
A work
without genre makes no sense – not simply because the term is derived from genus, the root for kind, but because to achieve such a state a work would have to
cancel out or erase its own sense of form & integrity as it proceeded,
constantly dissolving before the reader, & that of itself would constitute
its genre. This is not the same as works that are merely muddy or confused.
Of greater
concern is the degree to which genre in writing itself has served for nearly
two centuries as a surrogate for the social divisions in our society. The
appeal to convention at the heart of the
*Which is
why the best novelists over the past 50 years – Burroughs, Kerouac, Pynchon,
Acker – have shown so little interest in narrative-as-plot.
