Vibrant Absences

By Tom Conaghan.

Ask a short story fan about their love of the form and you’ll have to invent an emergency to get away from them. It’s not our fault; we feel it needs constant championing, like there’s a gap in its public perception. If you were to make a Venn diagram of Why People Read Novels and Why People Read Short Stories, it’s stark to see how little there is in the overlapping space.

From a distance, this as-yet-uncharted area can appear like a blankness. At a recent short story reading, an audience member — an author and academic — asked the panel of short story writers: ‘though what is a short story?’

I think it was an academic question but, still, is it really so mysterious? What has got in the way of us understanding a story? Are novelists asked to account for their line of work as much?

Admittedly, it is difficult to talk about short stories — the great ones are such an auspicious meeting of content and form that using any words other than the story’s is futile. Which means that, as we are unable to conjure it, the short story’s power to haunt us is untamed… which might feel unsatisfactory, unsettling even — we are used to feeling more control than this.

But if there is something unknowable about the short story, maybe we can at least hypothesise about its potential; intuit something indefinite but undeniable that it must have — like a literary antimatter. The best short stories certainly have that ‘there/not-there’ feel to them; the way their readers receive something that the writer doesn’t explicitly give.

Are stories all recognisable as stories? It feels that, like an edifice in time, reading casts a shadow in us. From each shadow we can understand a little about the edifice: to read a merely descriptive piece is like admiring a sculpture. But there’s something about the way we participate in a story that is more like an ‘inhabiting’ — however mad or unlikely or unprecedented its architecture, we feel we can live in it, sensing its space from the way its characters move within it (the author, crucially, having given them the run of the place).

This interaction of living and reading is a recurring theme in a story. As Yiyun Li says, its technical accomplishments and imperfections are purely the way a story aspires to live.

Better than an academic dissection of what a short story is, reading the stories themselves give us a glimpse of what a story can be. By sensing their gaps and blank spaces we pursue the unsayable within the writer, following them as they allow — and place their trust in — these vibrant absences.

Reverse Engineering II (Scratch Books), edited by Tom Conaghan, features stories and interviews with Eley Williams, Ben Okri, Yiyun Li, Tessa Hadley, Wendy Erskine, Tom Drury and Sussie Anie.