The Experimental Short Story

This chapter investigates the expressive and methodological possibilities inherent in writing ‘short’ through close analysis of the narrative structure and prose style of a sample of what can be classified variously as ‘postmodern’, experimental and anti-realist short stories. It achieves this through the use of theoretical frameworks rooted in narratology and stylistics. First, the paper proposes briefly some narratological and stylistic ‘norms’ against which the deviations characteristic of experimental short fiction can be measured: the linear plot, unity of point of view, a standard narrative discourse in linguistic terms and so on. Subsequently, the discussion explores the work of writers whose work pulls against these norms, investigating how their writing does so and to what end and effect. It will draw on brief examples from the anti-narrative and negation of Beckett to the graphological and typographical experimentation of Donald Barthelme, Ronald Sukenick and Gabriel Josipovici, the psychogeography and explicit ‘urbanism’ of Iain Sinclair, the demotic vernacular of James Kelman, to the use of myth and folktale in the work of Robert Coover and A.S. Byatt. The paper’s thesis is that the experimental short story genre can thus be defined and delineated in a principled manner with reference to concepts drawn from stylistics, and that such definition has useful implications and lessons for creative practice in general.