How do stories come to you? I also make poetry—or at least I write poems—and have not been able to see any difference in my mood when I do these two things. While I’m writing a story, I am subject to a set of tensions indistinguishable from those that overtake me when I write poems. The distinction is most of all technical, because I find the idea of “poetic stories” more horrifying than yellow fever, and I am always very careful that what happens in my stories suggests to the reader a definite structure, a given reality, as unreal as it might seem to the eyes of a newspaper reader and those beings with-their-feet-on-the-ground. (What are feet? What is the ground?) If I find in your stories a fraternity that excites me and makes me want to be your friend, it is precisely the supreme nerve with which you plant your word trees. You plant them without the circumlocution of literarily preparing the ground and “creating an atmosphere,” as if the atmosphere should not be the story itself, the irresistible emanation of that thing that is the story. Henry James is a great short story writer, but his stories are always the children of his novels, submitted to the same previous circumstantial elaboration, that technique of surrounding the reader before unleashing the crux of the story. When you wrote “The Rhinoceros,” you needed only the first (perfect!) sentence to make a person forget he was sitting in an armchair in a second-floor apartment on the Rue Mazarine (a lovely street, believe me) and that in ten minutes someone was going to tell him dinner was ready. The estrangement, the passing into the story, is detonating. You are a lion ant, if lion ants are the ones who make a funnel in the sand so their victims slip down to the bottom. Four words and zap, inside. But it’s worth it to be eaten by you.
Posted 5 days ago.
