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