‘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

‘Stirrings Still’ by Samuel Beckett

Superlatives and Beckett: a dry hole to dig in if ever there was one. I say only that ‘Stirrings Still’, and Beckett’s other short prose leading up to it (from the mid-1950s with ‘Texts for Nothing’ but particularly from the early 1960s onwards), are the height of Beckett’s achievement and the best short prose works written in Europe since the war. I gasp before them, through them. Language gnaws itself to life from its own bones. What else to say about a work that begins:

“One night as he sat at his table head on hands he saw himself rise and go. One night or day. For when his own light went out he was not left in the dark.”

And closes:

“Then such silence since the cries that perhaps they would not be heard again. Perhaps thus the end. Unless no more than a mere lull. Then all as before. The strokes and cries as before and he as before now there now gone now there again now gone again. Then the lull again. Then all as before again. So again and again. And patience till the one true end to time and grief and second self his own.”

In the words of Winnie (who better to help us dig in a dry hole?):

Marvellous gift. Nothing to touch it in my opinion. Always said so.

First published in a limited edition illustrated by Louis le Brocquy, John Calder, 1988. Now available in Company / Ill Seen Ill Said / Worstward Ho / Stirrings Still, Faber, 2009

Kaddish for a Child Not Born by Imre Kertész, translated by Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson

Everything begins with ‘No’. A work spun from refusal, but not, like Bartleby’s refusal of the societal pressures of administration, of the crushing conformity of dominant social forms, of saying no to the present. No. it is too late for that. The no here is that of birth, it is a no to the future, of all possible futures in the wake of genocide. No. No. Never again. It is a book we pray will stop being relevant. It should lacerate us, and does.

First published as Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekértin 1990; first English translation Northwestern University Press, 1999; also translated as Kaddish for an Unborn Child, translated by Tim Wilkinson, Vintage, 2004

The Cheap-Eaters by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Douglas Robertson

Bernhard has been, and remains, one of the most important writers in my life. After leaving university and moving to London, I met a friend who shaped the course of my life more than I can say. Bernhard numbered among the countless things he introduced me to, as did a group of other people, writers, critics, bloggers, and students, who had found ways to articulate that shifting darkness that literature had and reading activated. Bernhard acted like a gateway for this way of thinking about literature, of trying to think what I had previously felt. In his work, Bernhard takes the promise and failure of literature and turns it into self-immolating obsession. Writing’s frozen infinite is not a hexagonal library but pain in the chest, a tightness in the lungs. Its bleak humour and fulminating recursion reveal their propulsive force in Bernhard like nowhere else. The unraveling of reality by the most quotidian events is taken to a pitch nothing short of daemonic. Bernhard takes the humiliation and shame of being human and winds it into the sensation of totalisation and collapse that unites everything from a single breath to the movement of life as such. The Cheap-Eaters is not Bernhard’s greatest book, what prevents it from being so is the same thing that makes it exemplary for including on a list such as this: it is the work where Bernhard’s style is most present, where even his own techniques of construction appear to get caught in the machine of their unfolding. By turning the tools of the writer against himself, making a success of his failure, a failure of his success, it stands as the ideal introduction.

Die Billigesser first published by Edition Suhrkamp, 1980; English translation, Spurl Editions, 2021

Everything Passes by Gabriel Josipovici

A room.
He stands at the window.
And a voice says: Everything passes. The
good and the bad. The joy and the sorrow.
Everything passes.

Josipovici is the only writer on this list I’ve known personally, and I think one of our finest living novelists and critics. In this short fragmentary novel literature opens itself in the smallest of spaces. Narrative is exposed, stripped bare, in a way quite different to Beckett. It has an austerity and development of tonal and sentence patterns that draws from music as much as poetry, leaving any consistent narrative elusive. It works in the little shadow that writing opens, where life shows itself to us, life and the passing time that will eventually take us from it.

Published by Carcanet, 2006