What can be said about the short narrative, no matter the form? As a writer I live within the confinements of the short narrative, be it poetry, short stories, short essays, or even my to-often Facebook status updates. Indeed the world I am confined within, the world I have grown in many respects to abhor, has given rise to my own appreciation of the short narrative form. I am a creation of my environment no matter how hard I attempt to fight it. I live my literary potential within the power of two doubled spaced pages.
Recently Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature, cited as a "master of the contemporary short story." The short narrative form, through never maligned and highly respected, rarely gets the respect it deserves. It doesn't hold the magical artistic appeal of the "Great" all encompassing novel. Such novels, be it War and Peace or the the more modern Infinite Jest, hold a grandeur on the minds of writers and readers alike. Lovers of literature wish to delve and tackle the magnum opus for it promises greatness, perhaps a shrivel of truth that we can keep warm under our pillows and hold till we breath our last breath and utter our last unmemorable utterance. Yet the short narrative form has proven to become increasingly useful and meaningful, holding as many "truths" as the magnum opus we all wish to read and/or write.
The power and struggle of the short narrative is the need to speak with as little as possible, to say great things with the minimalism of a deep seeded epiphany. The world has began to ask for this tiny miracle more often than ever before. With a world of information, I site exhibit A the internet, there seems to be a greater need for a reductionist soul, someone able to encompass an entire thought in a sentence; some are more than able to expound upon such wit. The comedians that control and bring insight to Twitter, the world of 140 characters (what an absurd length for such as myself), have shown they can bring forth and encapsulate the absurdities and fallacious elements of humanity with the freedom and bravery (perhaps stupidity) of an iconoclastic Jester. So why are we still clinging to that magnum opus, does it hang upon our neck like an albatross cursing us as it did the ancient mariner?
Perhaps not. I cannot say that I have the focus of my predecessors, lord knows I am unable to focus on my own writing past two pages, as I have mentioned before, but does that mean that my entire generation is cursed as I? With the attention and memory span of a goldfish but the intelligence and material resources of all past generations combined? When the "written word" was first invented the Greeks debated on the price of such a tool, as simple as it may seem to us, and they worried that memory, a tool used to tell great and all encompassing stories such as the Iliad, would be lost and what would that mean for humanity? The debaters and maligners of writing proved prophetic for we do not possess such memorial powers but we have gained the ability to understand and comprehend more conceptual realities than ever before, drowning in our present digital sea while often ignoring the perils of "surfing" the network of seemingly infinite websites overflowing with information and opinions at our fingertips.
Yet our humanity has not changed, the great magnum opus was respected (though for them it was the epic poem), and the short narrative form was left at the wayside, known to be beautiful, profound, and sadly un-idealized and under utilized. That doesn't change though that to say so much without seeming cumbersome or to say so little without seemings uninspired are the struggles that every writer, musician, poet, painter, artist and conveyer of reality share. They share in the struggle if not in the majesty.
