‘The Rain Horse’ by Ted Hughes

In Poetry in the Making, Ted Hughes describes the connection he perceives between capturing animals as a young man and writing poetry as an older one. He compares poetry to animals in the senses that animals “have their own life … and nothing can be added to them or taken away”, and that writing creates “an assembly of living parts moved by a single spirit.” He emphasises the importance for a writer of imagining, very fully and with every sense, what it is that is the focus of the writing, of keeping “your whole being on the thing you are turning into words” and of doing so for some time before writing, so that when the time arrives to write, “it should be regarded as a hundred-yards’ dash.”

This approach, described in the context of poetry, seems to be equally applicable to his short story, ‘The Rain Horse’. An unnamed young man has returned to a remembered scene and found that his recollection has betrayed him. The walk that should have followed “pleasantly-remembered tarmac lanes” turned into a “cross-ploughland trek”, and instead of the “meaningful sensation” he hoped to find, he is plunged into a frightening and disturbing encounter with a black horse.

The protagonist (if the word is appropriate, since it is the horse that instigates the action) has an anthropomorphising reaction to the landscape: it “no longer recognized him”, it made him “feel so outcast”, and while he is able to notice details from all around, the landscape becomes blurred when the rain starts, the rain “dragging its grey broken columns, smudging the trees and the farms.” There is a wealth of visual detail of the landscape, even after the blinding rain has started; there are close-ups, as it were, of the thorny trees, the stones and foxholes in a wooded quarry, the “scurfy bark” of a tree under which he takes shelter. The rain is reassuring in sound, but intensely cold to experience, and inhibiting in its effect. For all its smoky, misty appearance, the rain makes the ground muddy and intractable, and weighs the man down through his sodden clothes. He has not so much underestimated the natural world as misunderstood it, being ill-prepared by memory for the reality of the place, and ill-equipped for the weather.

Whatever world it is into which he is drawn when the rain starts and the horse appears, he is only briefly in synch with it. The horse appears of almost mythological proportions, “tall as a statue”, apparently autonomous, apparently able to move at almost supernatural speed. For a brief space, the man is able to respond in kind. He stops being bored, and irritated, and worried about his suit. He has a “savage energy”, he gives a “tearing roar”, he is able to fend of the horse by throwing stones—bits of the landscape—at it, his aim seems to be “under superior guidance”. But while he does manage to get away, ultimately the experience stays with him; the natural world, bringing him into contact with a bewildering and seemingly illogical aspect of itself, keeps part of him with it.

First published in The London Magazine, February 1960, and available to read online here; collected in Wodwo, Faber and Faber, 1967

‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ by Ursula K. Le Guin

Brendan Behan once said in an interview with Anthony Cronin that as a writer, he was a nurse, because “in my plays and in my book, I try to show the world to a certain extent what is the matter with it.” Ursula K. Le Guin, similarly, had as a focus of her writing both philosophical and political criticisms of the world as she saw it. Her opposition to the Vietnam War was expressed in The Word for World is Forest; she delivered stinging criticism of consumer capitalism, specifically as it affected writers, in a speech at the National Book Awards in 2014 (“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.”) Though politically a pacifist anarchist, Le Guin did not necessarily insist that she had the right answer, or even that there was one; her novel, The Dispossessed, acquired a later subtitle of ‘An Ambiguous Utopia’. She was also very influenced by philosophy and wrote a translation (or a “rendition”) of the Tao Te Ching, the classic of Chinese Taoist philosophy. This combination of politicised philosophical reflection, or philosophical political reflection, characterises ’The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’.

The story takes place during the Festival of Summer in Omelas, a city “bright-towered by the sea”, with mountains in the distance that “burned with white-gold fire”, and a great water-meadow that is the destination of all the festive processions. Everything is beautiful and idyllic, and the citizens are ‘decorous”, “grave” and “merry”. Hardly has the story started when Le Guin breaks the fourth wall, raising questions about the assumption, the “bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates”, that “only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.” Unable to describe the city in a satisfactorily convincing way, Le Guin invites the reader to participate in the world-building, to imagine Omelas “as your own fancy bids”. She proposes ideas for it, all intended to reflect the fundamental, central happiness of the citizens, thought she fears that “Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody”, and repeats her encouragement to the reader to come with their own ideas; “If an orgy would help, don’t hesitate”. Once the reader has reached the point of believing in Omelas and its people, Le Guin asks to add “one more thing.”

The idea for a story about the psychomyth of the scapegoat came from reading the American philosopher William James (older brother of Henry), who hypothesised a world in which the permanent happiness of millions could be achieved but only at the cost of “a certain lost soul at the far-off edge of things”, condemned to live “a life of lonely torment”. This is Le Guin’s “one more thing”: in a basement under a public building in Omelas a child is kept prisoner, abject and abandoned. Everyone knows that the child is there, other children are brought to see it so that they understand that a price is being paid for happiness. Most of the citizens forget their initial shock and repulsion at the sight of the child, and the realisation that nothing is to be done to relieve its misery. Some do not forget, and these are the ones who walk away from Omelas.

The ‘meaning’ of their departure is unclear. The story could be understood as a stark parable of consumer capitalist society, where the only response to realising that there is a price being paid out of sight is to withdraw. But given how reflective and articulate Le Guin was, it seems unlikely that she would simply recommend flight from an intractable reality. The darkness into which those who leave walk might be the great difficulty of imagining how, based on the world we currently have, to achieve something that is fundamentally fair and happy, the darkness is the as yet-unimagined better world, and those who walk (perhaps those who recognise that there is no inevitability about the way things are) “seem to know where they are going.”

First published in New Dimensions, 1973, and collected in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Harper & Row, 1975. Also available in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters and The Compass Rose, Gollancz SF Masterworks, 2015

‘The Hospice’ by Robert Aickman

Aickman’s 1985 story is of a travelling salesman who becomes lost on his drive home, because he was cajoled into following alternative directions that were supposedly a short-cut. Upon realising he is lost, and that he will soon be out of petrol, he turns off the road towards a place that offers “good fare and some accommodation”.

The unavailability of the full facts, and the promise of weirdness to come, is evident from the start. The location is “somewhere at the back of beyond”, which has a Brothers Grimm ‘once upon a time’ ring to it. There is the brief possibility of normality, with a sign promising accommodation and food and a driveway lined with rhododendrons, but Maybury has approached from a secondary entrance, a battered concrete drive and a general air of farmyard (even a shambles?) about it; the slippage—already signalled by naming the hotel The Hospice—between apparent normality and actual strangeness has started.

The hospice acts as a sort of weird digestive system: there is an obscene weightiness about the food, which Maybury can’t identify, and which ultimately defeats him, and the bullying, infantilising attitude of the staff means Maybury is uneasy about having to send it back uneaten. He has been consumed by the hospice, his preference or requirements become irrelevant inconveniences (they are not, in fact, accommodated at all), though he fares better than some, as a number of other inhabitants have been shackled to the floor of the dining-room. At the same time, he remains ‘outside’ every situation he encounters in the hospice, not quite caught up with, or dominated by, the institution and its inhabitants, unlike Bannard and Cécile who cannot do without it.

Aickman used as an epigraph to his Cold Hand in Mine collection a quotation from Sacheverell Sitwell: “In the end it is the mystery that lasts and not the explanation.” The ‘meaning’ of the story, if there is one, is not easy to determine, and there is a sense that there are too many complex interactions not only that the reader is not aware of, but that are interactions of things she may not know exist, or may not have the right words to identify, let alone describe. The horror Maybury feels is not in response to something that happens—the defeating pile of terrible food, the dead, possibly murdered, corpse—but is rather the horror experienced by those keeping their eyes tightly shut in the dark that is not quite silent enough.

First published in Cold Hand in Mine, Victor Gollancz 1975, reprinted by Faber 2014

‘The Roulette Player’ by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by Julian Semilian

The narrator of the first story in Cărtărescu’s Nostalgia makes a Behanesque association with medicine: “literature”, he says, “is teratology” (the study of abnormalities). He is a writer disillusioned with his own writing: “let me permit myself now … one moment of lucidity: everything I wrote after the age of thirty was no more than painful imposture,” and puts at least some of his loss of ability down to the time when he was very happy, because “writing does not reconcile itself with happiness and plenty.” He is old, lonely, facing the remainder of his life with a sort of dull, nihilistic despair, convinced that his remaining reader “is no-one else but death.”

Nostalgia was originally published in Cărtărescu’s native Romania in 1989, and though this was in the waning days of Ceauşescu’s rule, the book was heavily censored. An uncensored version was published in 1993, and an English translation appeared in 2005. It is described as a novel but each of the sections reads as a separate work, related to the others predominantly through the depiction of a harsh and decadent Bucharest. ’The Roulette Player’ resonates with The Master and Margarita. It does not have the explicit unreality of Bulgakov’s work, but there is the same disconcerting familiarity with extremes of repression or deprivation, the same sense of urgent pursuit—of understanding with Bulgakov, and meaning with Cărtărescu—and the same unspooling of the everyday world.

After years of inventing characters, Cărtărescu’s narrator writes finally of one whom he describes as improbable but as nonetheless having really existed. The man in question was almost destitute when he came out of prison, and when the narrator sees him again years later, “still displaying the vagabond appearance” but clearly in materially far more comfortable circumstances. Through this renewed contact, the narrator begins “to sense the terror of beginning to discern … some vistas which disappeared toward a great space other than the bourgeois world”, and he eventually encounters, blindfolded and “dragged long some twisted and tortuous corridors”, high-stakes, illegal, and ritualistic performances of Russian roulette.

This pursuit of death in which his friend (now the eponymous Roulette Player) participates becomes perversely very profitable, and the performances take place in more open and opulent surroundings. The ‘game’ takes on an almost hieratic aspect: not only did the Roulette Player hold “the Angels by the lapels”, the game achieves a “theological grandeur”, and the sounds (of the gun’s hammer, of a falling body) “were surrounded by a sacred silence”.

The story does ring an off-note with the women who are present in the roulette audience (all the players are men). While images of ‘bloodied gowns’ adds to the tension between aesthetic elegance and actual brutality, there is also a reek of the sexism, sometimes really appalling, present throughout Nostalgia. That aside, the story is remarkably textured, vivid and grim, and unhesitating about extremes of each. The world of roulette it depicts is very niche but the themes it reflects upon are almost limitless: literature, chance, God. The narrator equates the Player with ultimate meaning. If the Player exists, the world exists, and the narrator will “march forth for as long as eternity lasts”.

First published in Romanian in Visul, Cartea Româneasca, 1989, and in English as part of Nostalgia, Penguin Modern Classics, 2005

‘Guts’ by Chuck Palahniuk

If Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ generated a record amount of hate-mail to the editors of The New Yorker, it is hard to imagine what readers would have done with Chuck Pahlaniuk’s Haunted, which even in a more blasé 2006 had a parental advisory sticker on it. It is a novel of stories, and one of the best known is ’Guts’, an in-novel story told by one of the characters, Saint Gut-Free. It is a horribly detailed account of the repellently disgusting way—involving using a swimming-pool in masturbatory experiments—by which he ended up with only six inches of large intestine. It is not exactly body-horror, but it is horrifying, the sort of story that is difficult to read because of the impulse to avert your eyes, the kind of nasty-minded story that makes you think twice about shaking the author’s hand. Apparently, when the author was promoting his work, people dropped like flies at readings of ’Guts’; after the ambulance left during one reading, Pahlaniuk’s agent called him to the edge of the stage and told him to stop.

The story is told in the first person by Saint Gut-Less himself, in a slangy, vibrant, vulgar style, that starts by offering an alternative (perhaps) to Poe’s measurement of a short story: “This story should last about as long as you can hold your breath, and then just a little bit longer. So listen as fast as you can.” Then he is off, a gonzo journalist of the sexual experiments of teenagers, unhesitatingly shining a light on practices “too low to even get a name”, things too “stupid, desperate” for even the French to have a name for them, culminating in his own invention, pearl-diving.

The awfulness of the story (so awful that, just when you think you’ve read the worst, he comes up for one last sucker-punch) is not a reason for including it in an anthology; I am not a fan of on-page blood-and-guts (sorry), or explicit horror, and do not seek out literature that causes a particular either physical or emotional reaction. There are two reasons for ’Guts’ being here: one is the sheer brio of the writing, and the other is the rebellious charm, still gleaming even in this queasy account, of those who truly have no damns left to give. Not every rebel, fictional or real, has this quality; too many are simply irresponsible, or over-entitled, leaving everyone else to pick up the pieces. My enjoyment of the story is linked, in an attenuated way, to my enjoyment of noirHollywood: everyone seems to be knee-deep in a compromised and dirty world without the veneer of sophistication or the heart to observe polite social rituals. That ’Guts’ is as extreme as it is means (possibly ironically) that it is less truly horrifying than, say, James Ellroy, because it is also horribly funny.

First published in Haunted, ‘a novel of stories’, Doubleday, 2005

‘Marbles’ by Marion Arnott

This is the only story I have read by Marion Arnott, and I know very little about her, other than that she is (or was) a history teacher at St. Andrew’s Academy in Paisley, Scotland. ’Marbles’ was shortlisted for the Crime Writer’s Association Short Dagger Award in 2002; Arnott had won the previous year with ’Prussian Snowdrops’ and she was also nominated for a British Fantasy Award in 2007 for ‘The Little Drummer Boy’.

In ’Marbles’, the main character is Miss Buchan, “sallow, middle-aged”, who uncharacteristically seems to take an interest in her new neighbour, Ken. He, attractive and approachable, is known by his first name and makes friends easily, he and his dog, Cara. Miss Buchan, not friendly enough with anyone for them to use her first name, is seen as shy or standoffish, unattractive, and gauche, even “daft”. Her behaviour around Ken is peculiar, both intensely timid and yet stalkerish. Given her gaucheness, her perceived plainness, and her lack of social grace, she and her ‘obsession’ become matters of mockery.

In her diary entries, Miss Buchan comments that “[p]eople are like cloth: nothing in themselves, and before they know what’s happening, they’re folded and sheared and snipped into shape.” Her neighbours turn her into a figure of fun because they think that they are correctly reading the signs, that there can only be one reason for her behaviour. It has nothing to do with the ‘cloth’ Miss Buchan, it is the pattern they have pinned to her: since she is a woman who reached middle-age without a husband or family, her interest in Ken must be romantic, “Last Chance Syndrome”, an “old maid’s” lurching towards love. She writes of Ken that he has “such a face—unforgettable”, and even this apparent praise has more than one meaning. She puts everything into her diary, saying that “a record is pointless if things are missed out”, and so she records her responses to Ken and her apparent stalking of him, along with, very obliquely, her memories from childhood.

The diary, though, is not just her recollections, or her attempts to create a monument of sorts to her thoughts and beliefs. It becomes a means through which she begins to find a way to negotiate the kind of person she is (the result of some very nasty patterns around which she was ‘snipped’) and the actions she feels she must take. She is in some ways aware of how she is perceived by other people. But her diary entries reveal firstly a full world of which her neighbours are ignorant (or may be, Miss Buchan does not know the identity of her callers), and subsequently an overweening obligation to act, though in what way she initially cannot decide. The diary ultimately shines a clear light through the layers of obfuscation, recollection, and assumption, built up by Miss Buchan and her neighbours, dropping hints that later turn from lovelorn sighs into signposts: of Ken she writes “How organised he is. Cara draws people to him and K charms them into staying.”

In an interview with The Scotsman in 2001 (after she had won the CWA award, though the paper was careful to mention her age, her marital status, and the number of children she had; thanks for that), Arnott mentioned two characteristics of stories that interest her. One is the way in which criminals reflect the values of the society in which they live, and the other is the tension between a reprehensible reality and an underlying apparent respectability.

‘Marbles’ is a sophisticated engagement with both ideas, but particularly the latter. It is a subtly layered narrative, with many facets to who is being ‘created’ by those who interact with them (including the reader, facing the twist at the end), to what is being hidden and how.

First published in The Best British Mysteries, ed. Maxim Jakubowski, Allison & Busby, 2003

‘Parable’ by Louise Glück

Until the twentieth century, a ‘story’ usually meant either one for children, or else a folk tale or legend; these are the earliest form of story and are constantly re-used, sometimes as a framing device or template, sometimes retold as a humanised experience. This is related to what Louise Glück does in her poem, ‘Parable’; she creates a very human story—it focuses on what is, as far as we know, a concern only of humans: why are we here, and what, if anything, has objective meaning?—and does so in a mythological or sacral frame. The main reason for including ‘Parable’ as a short story is very simply that when I first read it, its nature as a short story was the first thing that struck me.

It is not only short, it is, like ‘The Dead’, a perfectly proportioned story. Its plot, insofar as it can be said to have one, concerns a group of pilgrims (“it was by this word [purpose] we were consecrated/ pilgrims rather than wanderers”), who are setting out on a journey. That something is not quite straightforward is evident from the start. There are assertive statements regarding the reasons for abandoning worldly goods, but though by the fifth line, there is mention of mountain passes that they expect to encounter, immediately this is followed by their need to discuss “whither or where we might travel”. The pilgrims try to determine whether or not their journey should have a purpose, some arguing that it was an intrinsic part, others that purpose constituted a worldly good. In the course of vigorously debating this point, over four long sentences, “where the stars had shone, the sun rose over the tree line/ so that we had shadows again; many times this happened.” They do not stir from their starting point, they remain in a state of preparation but “we had changed although/ we never moved” and the debate concerning purpose is very satisfactorily resolved.

In an essay in American Originality: Essays on Poetry, Glück wrote of her fear that true happiness would deprive her of the ability to write, and ‘Parable’ would certainly refute this; despite the apparent failure of the pilgrimage, it is a very contented tale. It has the same acceptance as Gabriel Conroy’s inner monologue but without the melancholy. In the same essay, Glück briefly discusses “mythic or totemic stories”, which have “a certain interior spaciousness within clear outlines”, and though she moves on to speak of other stories, this description seems peculiarly apt for ’Parable’. The intentions and the resolutions of the pilgrims, their context and their perceptions, are clear and assertively presented, but the location, the passing of time, and the nature of their philosophical debates are sketched without the clutter of details or specifics. The poem is also, in its way, as mysterious a narrative as Aickman’s story, but where ’The Hospice’ is terribly heavy, ‘Parable’ is incredibly light, weightless; it has what Calvino called “a lightness of thoughtfulness”, the sort of lightness that can make frivolity seem “heavy and dull”. It articulates and resolves its single central concern, it manages to be both static (the pilgrims do not travel) and dynamic (the two schools of thought within the group achieve a radical intellectual or philosophical transposition).

Collected in Faithful and Virtuous Night, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014

‘On the Fourteenth Day’ by Jane Fraser

In many ways, these stories of Fraser’s are not my usual cup of tea, dealing as they do with “the quivering sensibilities of the self” (Alan Bilton), an arena that I prefer to scuttle past on my way to something less emotionally charged. Hers are stories of the everyday lived experience, and (possibly in consequence) most of them make for grim reading: a boat is shattered and along with it, hopes of retrieving a marriage, parents mourn lost children, people grasp at brief happinesses or the reassurance of memories.

Fraser has noted on her website her explicit intention to give cohesion to the stories through their geographic location, and that psychogeography was central to her writing process. The locations are also what make the stories stand out. They are all set in Wales, the “wind-flensed land’s end of north Gower” and she does a magnificent job of presenting both natural and built environments. Each setting is as distinct and nuanced as a well-turned character, and interacts with the humans with a remote, autonomous implacability. Because the quality of the nature and geographical writing is so strong, any of them could be included here. The one selected is ‘On the Fourteenth Day’.

The narrative is primarily one of loss. A young man is drowned in a surfing accident, and his body is washed out to sea. The story’s point of view is that of May, a neighbour, who has a peculiar acuity of perception with regard to the natural world, to its changes and to the significance and implications of the signs of light, or wind, or clouds. She sees the young man’s father on the beach each day, sitting on a boulder, waiting for the body to be washed ashore. May’s position is awkward, because she is not a close friend, and is deeply sympathetic, but she also knows how long the bereaved father will have to wait before the sea gives up its dead.

The story is a sort of tipping-point between two atmospheres arising from Fraser’s Gower. The language Fraser uses to create this world is very material and realistic, vivid enough to make the cold and the lowering sky feel uncomfortably present. There are uncanny, intangible shades to the Gower Fraser presents, too. Sometimes the uncanny or the strange is oblique or may be imaginary (are the cockles literally “filling the eerie landscape with music”?) or very overtly odd (like the abandoned husband who tries to reassemble dead wasps). Then there is a very direct allusion in one story, where a grey mare is at once an actual animal, a conduit of fraternal anger, and the hobby-horse figure in Welsh Christmas traditions, known as the Mari Lwyd, which translates (so Museum Wales tells me) as the grey mare. ‘On the Fourteenth Day’ balances between the two approaches. May’s account of the fourteen days—the hunched figure of the father, the cold beach, the effect of the sun on uneven ground—is sensuous and realistic. But her alertness to the world around her is both canny and uncanny. It is a particular form of knowing, and of shrewdness, but it is so very heightened that it becomes a strange gift. It troubles her, too, as she wrestles with deciding what, if anything, she should say to the bereaved father, as she knows how long he must wait.

First published in The South Westerlies, Salt Publishing, 2019

‘Every Forest, Every Film’ by Marie-Helene Bertino

In her introduction to Six Memos for the New Millenium, Esther Calvino mentioned in passing that her husband was worried by the “vast range of possibilities” open to him as topics for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he was due to deliver before his death, “believing as he did in the importance of constraints.” Italo Calvino had been a member of Oulipo (a gathering of mathematicians, writers, and others who sought to create works using ‘constrained writing’ techniques), a group that included Georges Perec, who wrote a novel without using the letter ‘e’. A less dramatic but nonetheless productive imposition was offered to four writers by the Editor-at-Large of The Stinging Fly literary magazine, Thomas Morris, in 2021.

Morris says he got the idea for this from a combination of two things. One was that uncertainty about his own writing had made him focus on editing, or rather, on a “fearful kind of second-guessing and compulsive ruminating.” In reaction to this, and inspired by Kafka’s claim to have written his story ’The Judgement’ in one night, Morris decided to experiment, by offering four writers the opportunity to have the “essential creative encounter with Not-Knowing” (or the “openness towards chance that all artistic production under severe constraint must necessarily incorporate”, to use the phrase introducing the Archive of the Average Swede, written by Fabian Kastner in 24 hours in 2017). Morris asked each of the four to accept a prompt (to use at least four of the five words randomly chosen by Morris) at 7 p.m. and to turn in the story twelve hours later.

Marie-Helene Bertino’s story is based on a “recent wild dream”, though as it is presented as realistic fact, it is not possible to tell which parts were directly from the oneiric source and which (if any) were created to make a narrative. The first-person narrator, Miletti, is a reviewer living in New York, in an apartment where the toilet is in the middle of the living room; the plumbing has been thus arranged in more than one of my own dreams so I would give good cash money to know what that’s all about. The tenor of the day is set by two people, her father and her friend, the one worrying about whether a parcel he has sent arrived safely, and the other (a fellow reviewer whom Miletti “admired … to the point of nausea”) asking if the narrator will take on a job that night, at a show called “The Cab” that is showing “in the middle of nowhere or wherever the fuck.”

The performance, which is to be the only one, is wonderfully bizarre, taking place in a disused subway car, with a driver who “arranged her legs around the steering wheel.” They ‘travel’ through a city, up steep hills, and finally the driver launches the carriage off a ledge and over a valley, towards a hulk of mountain, and once they crash into the mountain, the train stops, the lights come on, and the show, such as it was, is over. As Miletti leaves, she trips, the contents of her handbag are “launched away from me with violent purpose”, and random people try to buy her dropped belongings. The story’s minor mystery (why has the package not arrived?) has a banausic explanation but the bigger mystery (what just happened?) is left unexplained. There is a certain The Third Policeman feeling about it, even if only because the story continues after the ending of a show that is so much like life: starting before you are ready, not at all what you expected, and over before you know it.

The four stories are available in Issue 45 Vol. 2 of The Stinging Fly, and there is a podcast in two parts, in which the four writers discuss the experiment with Morris, freely available here: Staying Up All Night To Write A Story – The Stinging Fly

First published in The Stinging Fly: Winter 2021-22,Issue 45 Vol. 2

Introduction

Every true work of literature re-asks the question of what it means to tell a story. In doing so, it moves towards what cannot be spoken; something that lies beyond it, an impossible, shimmering thing. This is why the work of literature, when one encounters it, is always a surprise. It is also why it is a rarity. For support in this claim, we might ask the two great European critics of the previous century: “all great works of literature establish a genre or dissolve one” (Walter Benjamin), “Let us suppose that literature begins at the moment when literature becomes a question” (Maurice Blanchot). More immediate, much closer to the bone, than this however is simply that those works which move towards this darkness between word and world, whose mediation we call experience and whose terrain the imagination roves over but ever fails to grasp, they are the place where literature, in all its deadness, comes closest to life.

To personalize this diatribe, I can only say that this explanation rings true for me, and has remained the only reliable guide when examining why some novels and stories remain with me when most others seem to have suffocated before they’ve even got going. The stories I’ve chosen, have all remained with me for these reasons. They re-shaped how I think about stories, living in me as I have in them. I’ve presented them in roughly autobiographical order and, in order to work against the equivocations of the critic, attempted to type this in one sitting, to hold the twelve stories that first rose to the surface when I accepted this task no matter how many others (Joyce, Rhys, Spark, Purdey, Yates, Bolaño, Salter, Stamm, Nice, MIshima, Cooper, Pink, Lin…) were clamouring from the depths beneath. ‘In the Penal Colony’ was the most painful excision, which is as things should be.

‘Terra Incognita’ by Vladimir Nabokov, translated by the author and his son, Dmitri Nabokov

The Penguin Classics edition of Nabokov’s Collected Short Stories was the first book that made me want to give up writing. I was 16 and had only just started. In fact, I’d really only started reading novels that weren’t for children, emerging from a few years filled with comics, Diabolo II forums, and Magic: the Gathering cards. I’d also just met the friend that would come to be the closest of all, and we’d read, lend books to each other, listen to records, get high, and talk about either escaping or dying in our Yorkshire mill town, whichever seemed easiest. Against this, the shock of reading ‘Terra Incognita’ is still with me. It is a narrative about a tropical expedition in a fictional country, Zonraki, with a narrator hallucinating and succumbing to some strange fever, caught between two worlds neither of which quite seems like the “real” one, written in (what was for me) difficult, showily eloquent language. Nothing could have been more alien to the experience of my own life. And yet, it got close to something inside me, a sensation I didn’t really understand and probably still don’t, manifesting like an opening in the stomach or something trapped in the roof of the mouth. This thing now seemed like it was the most important thing in the world to search for, but which I was hopelessly unequipped to ever find. If, as a remark from Angela Davis a couple of years ago so succinctly put it, “art can make us feel what we cannot yet think”, then this was my first feeling of literature.

First published in Posledniya Novosti, Paris 1931, English translation published in The New Yorker, May 1963; collected in A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, McGraw-Hill, 1973 and the Collected Stories, Penguin, 1997

‘Funes the Memorious’ by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by James E. Irby

Borges I read not long after Nabokov. Having grown up with a secondhand bookseller for a dad, Borges made sense to me right away. There had always been something magical about all the evenings spent driving in the dark to garages in Huddersfield or damp terraced rooms on the outskirts of Halifax, watching as dad picked through endless boxes and sports bags heaped with books. Borges got into these moments and, again from a seemingly impossible distance, transfigured them. Borges, perhaps more than any modern writer, takes on directly the infinite as the promise of literature, its curse being always to break that promise. Borges’ talent is that he manages to make these stories read not like intellectual exercises but as the leftover case files of literature’s unsolved crimes. In this story we learn of Ireneo Funes who is given a perfect memory after a riding accident. Being able to perceive not only the individuality of every leaf on a tree, but each of his perceptions of each leaf, destroys his ability to talk, his ability to live. As I learned from philosophy a little later, it is a story that will absorb and spit back as much Hegel as it will Nietzsche, will wrestle with the paradox of sense certainty as ferociously as it will the reductive epistemological violence of conceptuality. It will also, like the Babylonian libraries and books of sand, remake into the patterns of the infinite the memory of an excited child on a rainy night watching his dad drive from the back of a Volvo.

First published as ‘Funes el memorioso’ in La Nación, June 1942 and collected in the 1944 anthology Ficciones. The first English translation appeared in Avon Modern Writing No. 2, 1954. Collected in Labyrinths, New Directions, 1964/Penguin, 1970 and in Fictions and Collected Fictions, Viking, 1998/Penguin, 2000, where it is translated by Andrew Hurley as ‘Funes, His Memory’

‘Blackbird Pie’ by Raymond Carver

At university, an unrequited love (or unconsummated crush, I’ll never know) told me to read Carver. I’m not sure there could be a better introduction. In the finest Carver stories, that unspoken force called literature stands just in the next room and, at certain moments, we are allowed to glimpse it, like neighbours who have snuck into its apartment, finding it gone but frozen with awareness of its having been. It is usually an everyday breakdown of reality, by a car accident and a cake or a broken fridge, or, in this case, a letter pushed under a door, that affords us this glimpse. Why I think ‘Blackbird Pie’ stands out among the Carver stories I love is that here, quite literally, literature itself is what intrudes, what pulls at the fabric of living, of all that rough sentiment Carver writes so expertly.

First published in The New Yorker, July 7, 1986; collected in Where I’m Calling From, Atlantic Monthly, 1988/Harvill Press, 1993

‘The Malady of Death’ by Marguerite Duras, translated by Barbara Bray

Duras is someone I discovered in my early twenties who, as I’m now in the mid-stages of completing a PhD on her work (alongside that of Paul Celan), one of the writers I read most frequently. This short, intense work opens with a direct sexual address in the second person.

“You wouldn’t have known her, you’d have seen her everywhere at once, in a hotel, in a street, in a train, in a bar, in a book, in a film, in yourself, your inmost self, when your sex grew erect in the night, seeking somewhere to put itself, somewhere to shed its load of tears.”

The personal and anonymous are united from the outset. The text hovers, like that of another book later on this list (one that Duras translated and staged) with the presence of death in life, of a life that does nothing but die while it is living, living in the grip of its inevitability. In the meantime, we dance around the bed. In Duras, the locus of desire as a dissolving infinity is too often used to psychoanalyse away the philosophical and political commitments of her work, transmute them into inwardness. Rather, the logic of desire always operates in the shadow of historical obliteration: commodified, genocidal, colonial. Through this framework Duras continually tries to give us a new experience of time. Thank you for coming to my viva.

La maladie de la mort, first published by Les Éditions de Minuit 1982; English translation published by Grove Atlantic, 1986