What’s the Time? It’s Time to Get Ill with Emerging Literary Forms!

Tue-Moi

In my pursuit of scholarship regarding what I’ve been calling “hybrid” literary forms, I recently ran across an interesting connection between digital poetry, flash fiction, and the diary. I’ve grouped them together based on their liminality: digital poetry is and is not text, flash is both story and not story, the diary is both secret and not secret. They all defy canonical definitions of literature. They all seem difficult to categorize in terms of purpose and audience. Digital poetry and flash are forms that are gaining significance in literary scholarship, and the diary, albeit a pretty ancient form, is apparently invading the realm of fiction, particularly the contemporary female novelist.

In an article for The New Republic, Jordan Kisner says that the attraction to these novels (all of which I now have to read), “is that they confront the anxiety of time passing by forcing their readers into uneasy interactions with literary time.” Examples include Ongoingness: The End of a Diary by Sarah Manguso, The Folded Clock: A Diary by Heidi Julavits, and 8 by Amy Fusselman.

“The pleasure of the passage (and the book it belongs to)” Kisner says, “hinges on turning the mundane into the magical, and granting permission to feel the bigness of the things we secretly know to be big. This permission is central to our delight in books that disorient us in ways that are somehow familiar, books that seem to shriek, in fear and jubilation: WHERE ARE WE IN TIME AND SPACE? What a relief to feel that it’s all right not to know.”

I found this article enlightening because it pointed out ways of reading the diary in the same way we read digital poetry and flash fiction. Those forms both contain much more than meets the eye at a glance. Flash fiction lives in a larger space in the reader’s mind than it takes up on a page. In the “Afterwords” of  Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories, Fred Chappell says that the short-short “inhabits a larger world which it must take pains to imply” (227). Paul Theroux says “In most cases it contains a novel” and John L’Heureux says that “no matter how many times we read it, we’re not quite through it yet” (228). Flash fiction goes a mile without moving an inch. Every word is somehow at least three.

Digital poetry (and prose) also occupies a kind of infinite space. The reader/viewer doesn’t just read these kinds of pieces. They require interaction by the reader in a way that might manipulate the text in any number of ways. A digital poem is multiple poems, all different, depending on the input of any number of viewers. Because our technology allows us to contain huge amounts of data in the tiniest of spaces, digital poetry represents an expansion of the traditional poem. This I concluded after reading C.T. Funkhouser’s New Directions in Digital Poetry. His writing is not my favorite style of writing – he reads like a computer science major, which interestingly many digital poets are. But he provides many cool examples of interactive digital texts, such as Angela Ferraiolo’s The End of Capitalism, which you need Adobe Flash to see.

These texts take time to absorb, even though they exist in a world that thrives on abbreviation and speed. Funkhouser writes, “Digital poetry on the WWW grows and expands, not any unified direction but pluralistically. Works presenting difficulty to viewers risk marginalization; authors who attend to such practices rely on a presumption that readers or viewers will spend time with sophisticated expression, even if that flies in the face of the WWW’s overall identity of providing information quickly and selling products” (241). In other words, readers looking for easy meaning, such as they might get on Wikipedia, are going to struggle.

 

The End of Capitalism

On that note, Kisner also notes the disorientation inherent in these texts, which is also one of the outstanding traits of flash fiction. When we talked about some of the stories we read in the flash fiction unit of my undergrad honors class this past spring, we agreed that it was often difficult to place the story in time and space, or even in a unified reality. In the Rose Metal Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, Sherrie Flick points out the freedom that writing flash allows to abandon plot. “By forgetting about plot,” she says, “you can suspend yourself in a timeless limbo. Let yourself free fall. Think about objects and details, about how they happen in real time. Focus on them.” This seems to be the limbo in which Kisner is saying that the novel/diary suspends the reader. Like poetry, flash focuses on image and details without explanation or locating these objects in any specific way. This takes the reader into a larger realm of meaning, in which, as Flick suggests, the story is “about the past, present, and future all at once” (122).

Disorientation is also part of how a great deal of digital poetry functions. Most of these forms also integrate the aspects of confusion and miscommunication that characterize our use of the computer and the internet. Interacting with these texts involves overcoming roadblocks between programs and communication systems which we all negotiate in using this technology – and that difficulty is intentional. The meaning of the poetry (which Funkhouser annoyingly provides a version of in his book) must be interpreted through a miasma of text, sound, and imagery which appears random and senseless to a viewer unwilling to devote some time to it. For example, check out Eric Sérandour’s Tue-Moi. Don’t give up – you’ll be tempted to. (Tue moi, by the way, is “kill me” in French.)

So we return to time again, and Kisner makes a point about why books that futz with time, such as these fake diaries, are particularly enjoyable to the modern reader. “Time is maybe more excruciating now than it used to be because we are rarely allowed to be lost in it,” Kisner says. The smart phone that does everything for us at all times also “tells us the minute. Despite this regimentation, the minutes feel freakily elastic—there is no hour that feels longer than the hour spent waiting for a text message, and no bafflement like emerging from an internet k-hole to discover you’ve stayed up until 2AM looking at slideshows of zooborns.”

The editors of the Rose Metal Guide also point to modern technology as creating a flash-friendly readership. As early as the 19^th century, “the American attention span was already beginning to shrink with the advent of huge leaps forward in aviation, transportation, radio, photography, and the general quality of life. …In turn, the editors had to entertain the masses and fit prose works between the lucrative, eye-catching advertisements; periodicals thus began to narrow their definition of the short story, which grew shorter” (XVI).

 

Tue- Moi

These forms have evolved further due to the advent of the computer, which makes digital poetry possible. It also makes flash a preferred form for reading: “A new high-tech machine – the computer – has partially leeward the audience away from the “Box” and has once again reduced the American reading span still further and allowed for the resurgence in the online magazines that are growing in number almost daily, with blogs also now publishing flash fiction. Flash’s brief length makes it perfect for viewing online and on handheld electronics” (XXXVI).

Funkhouser also points to the way in which digital poetry is the sign of our technological times. “Given the attention span and sometimes temporal constraints of the average WWW or mobile device user, artists may benefit from making works that do not fluster, and can be read in small chunks. Further, authors may gain advantage by taking into account that much of the potential audience may absorb content on smaller screens, such as mobile phones” (245). Couldn’t we say the exact same thing about very, very short fiction?

Having noted this connection, I want to investigate further the way in which the fake diary (or the real diary for that matter, if we want to make such a distinction) is a response to the cultural inundation of social media and the mobile device. How might a culture pressed for time and short on attention be especially attracted to the diary format as a way of reading fiction or memoir? Does it have something to do with the fact that the typical diary is divided into fragments of time (usually days)? Do the gaps between those increments provide modern readers the space and time they need and never seem to have?