The Story, The Story

"This story is aware of itself. A bit obsessively, perhaps to the point of knowing that it is about itself."

The short story below is most definitely not a short story, but a kind of jest. It was first published in the online magazine Antiserious back in 2015. I remembered it today while working on a character description in my novel in progress. ‘The Story, the Story’ makes a big deal of what descriptions apparently do to the reader, or how different readers apparently read the same description differently. And it then torments itself—and perhaps the reader too—with the idea of communicating with precision. I was given to such play before 2016, before I’d published my first book. A certain intentionality has surrounded my work since, and a certain movement away from meta-fiction and auto-fiction, and while I’m grateful for it all, there are moments when I miss those early years of trying to figure out how this thing that I wanted to do—write fiction—had to be approached. There is a fearlessness in the writer who wrote this—apropos mistakes, reader reaction, readability, germaneness; fearlessness and an impulse to arrive at a singularity. But perhaps fearlessness is the wrong word, for it is not that I write in fear now. A delectable immaturity, then, one that can in hazardous hindsight—hazardous because it introduces a fresh category of doubt, signifying paths forsaken—seem like a proto-variant of wisdom.

I have, thankfully, always been suspicious of that thing called wisdom. ‘Wisdom, like the sky, is just how vastness appears to us’—I once wrote in a poem titled ‘Runways’. Perhaps it’s just that I look back at ‘The Story, The Story’ from (a little) vastness now, after nine years of its making, removed from the attendant anxieties I must have felt while offering it to the world at the time. Writing is this thing too: the tiny marvel of ‘I did this then and it still is.’

Did I, in 2015, really believe that ‘inferior stories use large descriptions to fill in for character building’? It doesn’t matter. I think differently about it now, a lot differently, and it brings a smile to my face seeing that I was thinking about it then, too.

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The Story, The Story

This story is aware of itself. A bit obsessively, perhaps to the point of knowing that it is about itself. It wants to begin, but only after it gets this out of the way. This—the meta, mirrory, whirlpoolish, recursive side of the story. This needs to be understood urgently. If you don’t understand it as yet, don’t proceed. But this does not mean that the story doesn’t have a story, in the available sense of the word. It does. It does with all a typical story has: character, plot, mood, et cetera et cetera. The main character is K, whose namesakes have floated in literature for long. Ok. One more thing needs to be made clear right now: This story hasn’t really popped out of thin air, or thin imagination. It holds the genes of many other stories, many parents, so to speak. It cannot, like any offspring, recall the moment of its conception, but it does have fond memories of being conceived, being formed, being sculpted to arrive at its current form. K is an idea, not a person, which is something that has always been true. How can there be real people in stories, anyway? K is a human masculine idea—with height, weight, face, nose, penis, and other components. The story can describe these at length, to make you form an image of these things, but it chooses not to. Suffice it to say that K is the idea of the main man. External descriptions are fruitless, or at least some of them are. What is more important is filling this basic idea with character. Many inferior stories use large descriptions to fill in for character building. This story feels that to do so is wrong, utterly wrong. Why, you ask? Well, what if we say that K has “broad shoulders”, or “an aquiline nose”, or that he is “two meters tall”? These things denote something, right? These things make you provide a form to K. But does it stop at that? You imagine things, you extrapolate… no, impose… your form-value perceptions to K. You think you already know what he is like, what his character is like. And that is wrong; it is a flaw, a bad practice that many stories have proudly performed for too long. This story will not do that. This story will not describe K. This story will just fill K with character. Now, filling K with character is difficult, without this story contradicting itself severely. If your powers of association have to be taken completely out of the picture, if what is in the writer’s mind is to be communicated precisely to you, no more and no less, then there are certain things that this story can do and certain others that it can’t. For example, if this story were to say that “K is the kind of smoker who will never learn how to light his cigarette with the first match”, it would prima facie appear to be an excellent filling-in of character in the void that is K. It does indeed do many things. It fruitfully connects the verb of smoking with the obvious objects: fire, cigarette, match-sticks—and provides their particular connection with the subject that is K. It sets a mood of failure around K, which might indeed be the intention. It also seems to suggest that K is not one-of-his-kind in being what he is, that there is a kind of such smokers, such smokers who have an aura of minor failures around them. A good characterization, then? Well, not quite. Instead of thinking of K as a smoker who despite repetition does not quite learn a thing that he ought to, some of you—and let’s not believe that all of you are equally, how to say, adept or patient—may end up imagining K as being in a place or time when cigarette lighters are not available. Now such a supposition would not be wrong, and yet it will be bizarre and slightly out-of-order. Yes yes yes yes yes, this story knows what you are thinking right now. It is aware that one sentence alone can’t be expected to provide character anyway. But what if that is the case? What if that is all that this story wants to say about K? Any additions are actually deletions. For example, if this story was to say that “K is the kind of smoker who will never learn how to light his cigarette with the first match, which is why he always keeps a lighter in his pocket,” at once the mood of the earlier characterization is lost. K’s aura of minor failure mitigates; a certain scruffiness is lost. He has worked around his failure now, used technology to help him bypass the acquiring of a skill that he anyway need not have acquired in this day and age, given that there are lighters around. Is this story already in contradiction with itself? Maybe, but it won’t say so itself. It is for you to figure out. With the added phrase two objects enter the scene, the lighter and the pocket, both of which do nothing but eliminate the conflict of the previous line. In this way they are actually deletions to the mood, not additions. Proven then that characterization is tricky, and can be overdone, insidiously curtailing the mood that it by reticence establishes. Oh, not proven yet, you’re saying. Not just with one example. You need more. Ok, let’s have more. “K is the kind of smoker who will never learn how to light his cigarette with the first match; it takes him at least three, and that too when wind is most benign, or even absent.” Once again it is rather clear that the conflict and mood of the first part are diminished by the addition. Why three match-sticks, first of all? Well, the answer is obvious. Two is not drama enough; three takes the failure a bit forward, adds a bit of dejection to it. If it was two, even the importance of the first part could be questioned. If it was just two, nothing needs to be said because the whole idea then becomes quite irrelevant. But does saying three make it more relevant? It is more than three of course, when wind is not benign. Three is the minimum you say. And that’s the point. The second part of the sentence, after the semi-colon, leads to a great deal of speculation regarding the number three rather than the importance of the conflict that is presented in the first part alone. And it is in this diversion that the aforementioned deletion occurs. The story has made its point. It concludes itself here.