SHORT-STORYNESS AND EYEWITNESSING

Abstract

Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself,It provokes me forever, it says sarcastically,Walt, you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?Come now I will not be tantalized, you conceive too much of articulation.1Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.2Is reality amenable to storytelling?Does the short story speak to us about human limitations with regards to comprehension even before we read one? Do readers approach a story with the semiconscious premonition that the writer will show that our relationship with life involves more dumb amazement than understanding? Reading short stories has inscribed this expectation in readers' memory, and a certain amount of familiarity with short story theory makes us aware that the short story's only compromise with readers is to stun us with the impact of a situation whose nature upsets our customary attachment to sequential patterning.3 This situation, which exemplifies a contact or, rather, a clash with reality, does not necessarily rest on a spectacular or out-of-the-ordinary event; instead, the story confronts us, as life occasionally does, with an occurrence against which no system of thought can protect us. The impact derives from our looking at something as if we were still untrained by speech. Our helplessness derives from the gap between a sight and our previous learning, and it metaphorically defines us (the characters, the readers) as witnesses looking at a reality that our eyes unwillingly register and our mind absorbs, but without being able to decode it.Looking into reality would be a more appropriate way of describing our engagement with the novel: we have internalized the novel as a bearer of the comprehensiveness of life, no matter how much it might have swerved from a nineteenth-century canonized model; in the novel, time keeps moving in whatever direction, but in the short story, the writer seems to create an atemporal dimension of time, and once we step aside, the vision gained from within that framed space will remain the main axis of the narrative, however much it might be disturbed by the continuum of life.Walter Benjamin and Susan Buck-Morss described a mental state where the individual, by looking at something other than himself, lets this otherness, usually inhospitable, invade his senses.4 As a result of this saturation of the senses, the powers of thought are paralysed. This understanding of reality as shock was explored by Benjamin to explain how modern society has created artistic mechanisms and commodities (phantasmagoria) that protect people from the excessive energies of external stimuli and from the harshness of industrial societies. The creation of cushioned spaces in the professions and in art is further developed by Buck-Morss, who located the threat of bewilderment and pain in the relationship between man and the image. According to her, we possess a synaesthetic system through which the images we store in our memory get connected with external stimuli, creating an internal language that cannot be grasped in conceptual terms.5 This language threatens to betray the language of reason, endangering its philosophic sovereignty. What is absorbed unintentionally resists intellectual comprehension. This idea is strikingly similar to recurrent theorizations of the short story as a genre that baffles notions of knowledge as comprehension and instead confers climactic status on states of bewilderment, focusing on a paradigmatic encounter with strangeness.Critics and writers have often claimed that the short story is a form of fiction that challenges knowledge, a genre which posits that an intelligible explanation of our experience is impossible and perhaps not even desirable.6 But does the short story really address life only as an irresolvable case? My hypothesis here will be that this feeling of impotence may come from our impression that what the genre does is paradoxical: it tries to convey through words an experience for the reader only to see, to look at, without reconciling this experience with the presumed comforts of narrative. …