Flash
Fiction From Baudelaire to Lydia Davis
From thoughtco.com
Updated August 24, 2017
Over the past few decades, flash fiction, micro-fiction, and
other super-short short stories have grown in popularity. Entire journals such
as Nano Fiction and Flash Fiction Online are devoted to
flash fiction and related forms of writing, while contests administrated by Gulf Coast, Salt Publishing,
and The Kenyon Review
cater to flash fiction authors. But flash fiction also has a long and
respectable history.
Even before the term “flash fiction” came into common usage
in the late 20th century, major writers in France, America, and Japan were
experimenting with prose forms that put special emphasis on brevity and
concision.
Charles Baudelaire (French,
1821-1869)
In the 19th century, Baudelaire pioneered a new type of
short-form writing called “prose poetry.” Prose poetry was Baudelaire’s method
for capturing the nuances of psychology and experience in short bursts of
description. As Baudelaire puts it in the introduction to his famous collection
of prose poetry, Paris Spleen (1869): “Who has not, in bouts of
ambition, dreamt this miracle, a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rhyme,
supple and choppy enough to accommodate the lyrical movement of the soul, the
undulations of reverie, the bump and lurch of consciousness?” The prose poem
became a favorite form of French experimental writers, such as Arthur Rimbaud
and Francis Ponge.
But Baudelaire’s emphasis on turns of thought and twists of
observation also paved the way for the “slice of life” flash fiction that can
be found in many present-day magazines.
Ernest Hemingway (American,
1899-1961)
Hemingway is well-known for novels of
heroism and adventure such as For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man
and the Sea—but also for his radical experiments in super-short fiction.
One of the most famous works attributed to Hemingway is a
six-word short story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Hemingway’s
authorship of this miniature story has been called into question, but he did
create several other works of extremely short fiction, such as the sketches
that appear throughout his short story collection In Our Time. And
Hemingway also offered a defense of radically concise fiction: “If a writer of
prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he
knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a
feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.”
Yasunari Kawabata (Japanese,
1899-1972)
As an author steeped in the economical yet expressive art
and literature of his native Japan, Kawabata was interested in creating small
texts that are great in expression and suggestion. Among Kawabata’s greatest
accomplishments are the “palm-of-the-hand” stories, fictional episodes and
incidents that last two or three pages at most.
Topic-wise, the range of these miniature stories is
remarkable, covering everything from intricate romances (“Canaries”) to morbid
fantasies (“Love Suicides”) to childhood visions of adventure and escape (“Up
in the Tree”).
And Kawabata didn’t hesitate to apply the principles behind
his “palm-of-the-hand” stories to his longer writings. Near the end of his
life, he crafted a revised and much-shortened version of one of his celebrated
novels, Snow Country.
Donald Barthelme (American,
1931-1989)
Barthelme is one of the American writers
most responsible for the state of contemporary flash fiction. For Barthelme,
fiction was a means of igniting debate and speculation: “I believe that my
every sentence trembles with morality in that each attempts to engage the problematic
rather than to present a proposition to which all reasonable men must agree.”
Although these standards for indeterminate, thought-provoking short fiction
have guided short fiction in the late 20th and early 21st century, Barthelme’s
exact style is difficult to imitate with success.
In stories such as “The Balloon”, Barthelme offered
meditations on strange events—and little in the way of traditional plot,
conflict, and resolution
.
Lydia Davis (American, 1947-present)
A recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, Davis has won recognition both for her
translations of classic French authors and for her many works of flash fiction.
In stories such as “A Man from Her Past”, “Enlightened”, and “Story”, Davis
portrays states of anxiety and disturbance. She shares this special interest in
uneasy characters with some of the novelists she has translated—such as Gustave
Flaubert and Marcel Proust.
Like Flaubert and Proust, Davis has been hailed for her
breadth of vision and for her ability to pack a wealth of meaning into
carefully-chosen observations. According to literary critic James Wood, “one
can read a large portion of Davis’s work, and a grand cumulative achievement comes
into view—a body of work probably unique in American writing, in its
combination of lucidity, aphoristic brevity, formal originality, sly comedy,
metaphysical bleakness, philosophical pressure, and human wisdom.”
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