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 this 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 that a typical story has: character, plot, mood, et cetera et cetera. The main character is K, whose numerous 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 in it, many parents, so to say. It cannot, like any offspring, recall the moment of its conception, but it does have fond memories of being thought, 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. All that is 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 gene that many stories have proudly carried 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, there are certain things that this story can do, and certain others that it can’t. 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”, 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 and 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 failure 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 intelligent — -may just imagine 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 a character anyway. But what if that is the case. What if this 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 failure mitigates, because the hopelessness of his failure 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 acquire 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 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 default 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 can be illustrated that the conflict and mood of the first part is 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 actually needs to be said because the whole idea then becomes quite irrelevant. But do 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 is over.
Tanuj Solanki lives and writes in Bombay, India. His fiction has been published in The Caravan, Out of Print, elimae, Burrow Press Review, and others. He was a runner-up in the DNA-Out of Print short story contest.