Among the Taiwanese authors included are Yuan Qiongqiong (袁瓊瓊), a writer of song lyrics and film scripts, and Ku Ling (苦苓), among other things a talk-show host, both of them established practitioners of the genre. Ku Ling contributes a story, Jailbreak, about a man who climbs over a prison wall, not to escape confinement but to get back to the comfort and security of his cell. The editors consider this concept exhibits "modern man's existential dilemma," but readers could be excused for thinking that it was merely a convenient (and not very original) idea on which to base a marketable story that may not have taken above an hour to write.
The editors make much of the amateur status of many short-short writers. Taiwan's Chen Kehua (陳克華), for example, is an eye specialist by profession, while China's Xiu Xiangming is a chef in a Tsingdao rest home. And it's true that the short-short has affinities with the Internet blog. Anyone can have a go, and in both these genres there are fast becoming more writers than there are likely to be very interested readers.
And part of the short-short's essential profile is its emergence in a culture where traditional book-based literacy is giving way to text deriving from the electronic media, both the computer and the mobile phone. Mobile phone fiction already exists and represents an even shorter version of short-short story.
But despite the windy effusions of its advocates (the editors' Introduction is the longest piece of prose in this book), the short-short is severely limited in its possibilities. It may provide useful ammunition for those who want to claim the art of literature is alive and well even if it's true (is it?) that fewer and fewer books are being sold. But real talent demands its natural space, and the traditional forms — lyric, drama, history, narrative fiction — aren't going to give up their right to pre-eminence overnight. Major authors like Mo Yan (莫言) might write short-shorts as a diversion, and to use up ideas they haven't the energy to turn into full-blown fiction, but this doesn't mean they've abandoned the substantial narrative in any real sense. The greatest artists, after all, have arguably carried on creating what they wanted to create irrespective of how many people were going to be interested in the result. There's always posterity, after all, and no one can possibly know what that vast era's tastes are going to include.
RSS