The end
of 2013 saw the launch of Flight Press, a new publisher of short fiction. Its
first collection, Edgeways, collated the winning and shortlisted entries in the
2013 Spread the Word short story prize which I judged alongside Courttia
Newland and Tania Hershman. The Edgeways anthology also featured a new short
story by me, entitled The Comforting of Children, and this essay on the ritual
of reading short fiction.
Everyone knows the story ritual. It begins
with ‘Once upon a time’ and it ends, in childhood at least, with ‘And they all
lived happily ever after.’
As we get older the stories become more
complex, more shadowy and circumspect. Perhaps yearning for some comfort and
familiarity we turn back to the fairytales, fables and adventure stories we
knew from childhood, only to realise that even they contain striking
ambiguities and subversions. Bluebeard: wife killer. The wolf in Little Red
Riding Hood: murderer preying on the elderly, human eater, sartorial
necrophiliac and cross-dresser, child groomer. The prince in Cinderella: foot
fetishist. The prince in Rapunzel: hair fetishist. The prince in Sleeping
Beauty: rapist. Snow White: female masochist who finds happiness as seven men’s
domestic drudge.
Even these stories, with their generic,
Disney-colonised contemporary names, arise from rituals of recounting
adventures, creation myths and folklore which long predate written culture and
are strongly echoed by countless narratives all over the world. They are full
of death, betrayal, selfishness, desire, heroism, ambition, bloody-mindedness, defiance,
friendship, sadness, enmity: the stuff of life. The stories embody
near-universal hopes and fears, provide escape, give warning, reprove or reward
certain desires. They reflect both the time of their telling (and retelling)
and the universality of our own impulses.
The story ritual isn’t about whether the
narrative is committed to paper or to the air and the ears. It’s not even about
literature, as such. Journalists and news crews pursue emerging stories,
fashion spreads in high-end magazines are referred to as stories, private
investigators try to get to the bottom of a story and witnesses of crimes give
their stories to the police. Con artists have their stories too, often very
elaborate ones. Part of the ritual is that you follow a story, if it’s a good
one, all the way to the end. The mark of a rich tale, whether it’s epigrammatic
or epic, is that you want to know what happens next. And if that ending is
weak, the reader feels not irritated but actually betrayed. We are galled and
disappointed, as if we were set up in good faith and then sold a dud.
I’m always intrigued by nurseries and prep
schools that have a soft-furnished, quiet, special story corner, as if stories
deserve their own place as well as their own time in which to flourish.
Similarly, the ritual of parents reading their kids to sleep, which always
struck me as incredibly narcissistic on the part of the adults, is a memory
apparently cherished by many. My own childhood story ritual was listening to a
tape of The Snow Queen every night as I attempted to drift off. The sound of
the queen flying up to the children’s attic window, tapping on the glass and
keening their names in a ghostly voice is one of my most harrowing, vivid
recollections. It was only fiction, but fictions provoke real reactions.
Later, I was given a wonderful hardback
book of hundreds of stories, each exactly a page long. One was about a young
woman with waist length blonde hair. She was so tired of being teased (or as we
say these days, sexually harassed) about it that she tried to dye it black in
the kitchen sink. It turned green and she was mocked even more badly when she
went to school the next day. I never quite worked out the moral of the story.
Either it was ‘just be yourself’ or ‘just be sexy’.
Readers have rituals: they read before bed
or on a long afternoon, in the chair they always use, or on the commute to
work. They do or don’t fold pages, break spines, underline things or read the
last paragraph first. Writers also have rituals, some more OCD than others. I
know some who kiss their copies of Pablo Neruda or George Eliot when beginning
a new book, put a lucky charm on their desk or, getting to the trickier end of
common behavioural disorders, make sure they’ve washed their hands three times
before they touch the computer keys. Others go to their study with just the
right cup of tea and just the right biscuit.
We are hoping that if we get the ritual
right, it’ll repay us in words, in inspiration, in insight and good judgement.
All of us are striving to write that one, perfect, satisfying thing. Every word
has to count, every shift has to happen at the right moment. It goes deep yet
seems light; it’s a structure of iron hung with silk. I once met a writer whose
story had won a competition I co-judged. She hadn’t expected to win. ‘I just
wrote it in a week,’ she said, exhilarated and disbelieving. I reeled back. It
takes me months.
The story ritual is so powerful that we
carry its psychological imprint with us for the rest of our lives, even to the
point of naivety. We assume that our lives will have a coherent narrative
balance, moral shape, emotional form. We go into our thirties and forties
believing that things will always work out in the end, with a natural karmic
equilibrium; that we will fall in love, perhaps even at first sight like so
many fictional characters; that we deserve or are justified in pursuing
adventure; that any event or act can be explained and therefore understood;
that any pathology or feeling can somehow be decoded. We assume that this
mysterious thing called karma will eventually repay the balance of evil and
good. We believe that every story we live through must have an appropriate end,
which we call ‘closure’, and that we can bring this about as though we are
protagonists. It is from stories, nothing more, nothing less, that we believe
that everything that has begun will be ended, and will end somehow fittingly.
This does not happen often in reality, yet still we keep the faith.
I had to come to faith sooner or later.
Underlying all world religions is an indissoluble trinity of faith, story and
ritual. The great books of nearly all the world’s major religious belief
systems are really just short story collections presented either as emblematic
myths or as faithful accounts of true events. And all the rituals of the
world’s religions are built on those stories, and everything we believe is
built not on the evidence of our own eyes but on stories. Angels and other
supernatural harbingers do not exist. The Garden of Eden did not exist. A man
cannot walk on water. A god can’t have ten arms or four arms or a monkey’s head
or an elephant’s head. The part-animal sentinels and judges of the Egyptian
underworld do not exist. But it doesn’t matter. We read the stories, we heed
them and we invest them with meaning, regardless of whether they are true or
possible. We extrapolate their conclusions, build them into morals and use them
to structure the laws, beliefs, values and customs of societies of billions of
people. We use the stories to justify both our violence and our generosity, our
exploitation and our humanity, our abusiveness and our self-sacrifice. We
perform various rituals we invented, inspired by the stories, and have done so
for thousands of years. That is the power of the story ritual: to underpin,
explain and motivate human society for as long as we have existed.
Further reading:
- All Bone and Muscle, an essay on the art and craft of short fiction which I wrote for the University of Chichester’s short story module.
