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Table of Contents 1.0 The Survey ...............................................................................................1 2.0 Two Examples of Tension in Stories .........................................................2

Example 1: One Hundred Years of Solitude ....................................................2 Example 2: The South by Borges..................................................................4

3.0 The Use of Tension and Resolution...........................................................6 1) The Baseline Narrative and Tension ..........................................................6 2) The Meaning of Tension ..........................................................................7 3) The Need for Resolution ..........................................................................7

4.0 Generating Tension using Machines or Literary Meaning Generators .......9 1) Action Machines ................................................................................... 10 2) Enigmatic Machines .............................................................................. 10 3) Connotation Machines........................................................................... 11 4) Cultural Reference Machines .................................................................. 12 5) Oppositional or Binary Machines ............................................................. 13 6) Topographic or Scope Machines.............................................................. 15 7) Communications or Voice Machines......................................................... 17 8) Other Machines.................................................................................... 17

5.0 Characteristics of Machines....................................................................18 1) Literary Meaning Generators are not Literary or Rhetorical Devices.............. 18 2) Machines are Networked ....................................................................... 18 3) We do not have a Definite System of Countable Machines .......................... 19 4) Machines do not only operate within the Narrative .................................... 19

6.0 So how is a Short Story Different from a Novel? ....................................20 1) The Restricted Use of Machines in Short Stories........................................ 20 2) The Coupling or Proximity Effect............................................................. 21 3) Redundant Words or Sentences.............................................................. 21 4) Exercises and Frivolities ........................................................................ 21

7.0 Claiming Territory for the Short Story ....................................................22 8.0 Pascal's Thought ....................................................................................23

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Slides Slide 1: The Three Novelists ...............................................................................1 Slide 2: Marquez / The First Sentence in One Hundred Years of Solitude...........2 Slide 3: Marquez / The Second Sentence in One Hundred of Solitude ................3 Slide 4: Marquez / Is this the face of an Innocent Writer?.................................3 Slide 5: Borges / The South – Different Narratives ............................................4 Slide 6: Borges / The South – Shimmering Sentences........................................5 Slide 7: Subvert..................................................................................................6 Slide 8: The Narrative's Three Components........................................................7 Slide 9: Literary Meaning Generators .................................................................9 Slide 10: Gogol / The Diary of a Madman .........................................................10 Slide 11: Enigmatic Machines ...........................................................................10 Slide 12: Escamotage .......................................................................................11 Slide 13: Poe / Valdemar .................................................................................12 Slide 14: F. Scott Fitzgerald / Binary Oppositions ............................................13 Slide 15: Oppositions .......................................................................................13 Slide 16: Kafka / The Burrow (Image) .............................................................14 Slide 17: Kafka / The Burrow (Starting Sentences) .........................................14 Slide 18: Joyce / The Dead...............................................................................15 Slide 19: Topographic Machine / The Unfinished Life.......................................16 Slide 20: Machines Feeding into One Another ..................................................18 Slide 21: The Length of a Short Story...............................................................20 Slide 22: Pascal's Letter ...................................................................................23

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1.0 The Survey

HemingwayDostoevsky

CamusCamus

Slide 1: The Three Novelists In an earlier presentation of this paper, I started the talk by asking the audience to raise their hands if they could name a novel by Dostoevsky. There was no need to name the novel, just to indicate if they knew of one or not. Most everyone did know one. Next, they were asked if they can do the same for Camus and then for Hemingway. There was a strong show of hands. A pause was then followed by the question: can you raise your hands if you know of at least one short story by Dostoevsky. No hands were raised. Silence, then a burst of laughter as the audience was asked to do the same for Camus and for Hemingway. The audience was asked: are telling me that these world class writers wrote excellent novels but failed miserably to write any good short stories? Or is there another reason? We will soon see about that. They were also asked to name writers who did not write novels but wrote short stories. A few names came up but not all of them. Poe came up first, then Jack London and Katherine Mansfield. The question was raised: is it possible that such great writers wrote eternal novels and failed completely to write good short stories or is there a built in belittling of the short story as a genre?

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2.0 Two Examples of Tension in Stories Let us start with two examples, one from Marquez and one from Borges. Example 1: One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Many years later, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia would remember that remote afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

One Hundred Years of SolitudeGabriel Garcia Marquez

(1)Many yearslater facingthe firing squad

(1)Many yearslater facingthe firing squad

(3)Narrationpoint

(3)Narrationpoint

(4)Knowledge

point

(4)Knowledge

point

(2)That remote afternoon todiscover ice

Time

(2)That remote afternoon todiscover ice

(2)That remote afternoon todiscover ice

Time

Slide 2: Marquez / The First Sentence in One Hundred Years of Solitude This is the start of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In just 23 words, Marquez weaves a very complex time structure:

1. The first fixed point is the time of "Many Years Later" 2. The second fixed point is the remote afternoon long ago when father and son

went to discover ice 3. In between, there is a point, and it is not clear where it is in time. This point is

where the narrator must stand in order to be able to talk about the two previous points. He can point forward to the "later" and he can point backwards to the "afternoon".

4. There is one more point. In order to know that the Colonel will remember, many years later, the afternoon, the narrator must have passed that point in time. That is, there is a point after the execution, whose location in time is not clear, where the narrator remembers the execution.

5. Another time issue: how does Marquez relate these events to the time in the title?

6. We have just started the story but do we know where the One Hundred Years begin or end or how they are related to our 4 points?

We are in a spin, thanks to a Master who placed us in a very tense situation. He opens his palm, puts something magical there and quickly closes his hand. As soon as you read a passage like that, you expect the author to resolve the Tension he created with these time enigmas. Marquez does not do that, yet, and for a good reason, as we will see. He will simply leave the time string vibrating and start describing Macondo:

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Macondo was then a village of twenty houses of mud and canestalks constructed on the bank of a river of diaphanous waters which rushed through a bed of stones, polished, white and enormous like prehistoric eggs.

Slide 3: Marquez / The Second Sentence in One Hundred of Solitude

Marquez describes concrete material objects: 20 houses (exact count), mud, canestalks, rivers, stones, eggs. But there are two more mentions of TIME: "then" and "prehistoric" and there is also the motion of the river which symbolizes TIME. Marquez starts his novel with a studied ambiguity. It forces the reader forwards. The reader now expects Marquez to situate the reader in TIME, concretely, the same way he described Macondo. He does not. This is the start of many Tensions in the novel. And Marquez is only dealing with the Time Dimension. There will be others.

Is this the face of

an Innocent Writer?

Slide 4: Marquez / Is this the face of an Innocent Writer?

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Example 2: The South by Borges Borges only wrote short stories. No novels. In "The South", Borges introduces a TENSION point at the very end of his story. Borges begins with a very simple story line. A scholar running up the stairs gets wounded by an open window. He develops septicemia, a serious blood disease. In the hospital, he suffers painful hallucinations. They tell him, he is cured and he leaves the hospital. He crosses over to the South of Buenos Aires to take a train to his ranch in the South of Argentina. The train stops one station before the Ranch. While waiting for a carriage to take him there, some gauchos pick a fight with him. Someone hands him a knife, and he has to fight a duel. The last sentence describes him going out of the restaurant to fight a duel with one of the gauchos. Borges does not describe the fight. He does not tell us who won. This is not the way we expect stories to end: without results and answers. You get puzzled and you reread the last sentence. You then realize that the whole story was narrated in the PAST tense while the last sentence was in the PRESENT tense. Why is there a sudden twist? Borges is also not innocent. Now when we reread the story, we start finding clues. Some sentences take on different meanings. They indicate that the scholar could have died at different points in the story. The events that took place after his death, even the duel itself, might be no more than his hallucinations, a flash before he takes his last breath. Dreams are always in the PRESENT Tense. But when did he die? Did he die in the hospital? Did his death take place when he "crossed over" to the South? Did he die when he entered the train station to cross over to the world of the dead? All points are possible in the story.

Steps out to duel

Dies inHospital

CrossesInto South(to Hell)

Gets on Train (to Hell)

The SouthJorge Luis Borges

Slide 5: Borges / The South – Different Narratives Depending on which point you focus, images acquire different meanings. Sentences shine with different colors. Gates of buildings become gates of hell. Cats become guardians of the gates of the underworld. Trains become carriers to the underworld. Even the fight is indicated as wishful thinking, a romantic death better than dying in hospital.

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Slide 6: Borges / The South – Shimmering Sentences

Borges creates a story with multiple possibilities where the time of death can shift from one point to another. In one of these shifts, the death can even take place outside the text, after the duel. Interestingly, the scholar in the story was carrying the 1001 Nights when he was wounded. He then reads the same book on the train. That is also not innocent. In the 1001 Nights, Scheherazade keeps postponing her death by abruptly stopping the narrative for the night creating Tension for both the King and the Reader.

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3.0 The Use of Tension and Resolution What do these 2 examples tell us? The writers create Tension and ON PURPOSE. The writer is working against a natural order in the narrative. The natural order is the simplest way a casual reader expects the narrative to unfold. Marquez could have narrated the events in the correct time order. Borges could have told us exactly when the death took place. Why do they have to disrupt or subvert the natural order of the narrative? Subversion is an interesting term:

The Thesaurus Entry for SUBVERT:

Slide 7: Subvert 1) The Baseline Narrative and Tension If we remove all literary machinations, we will only have the REDUCED story, the story in its "Natural Order". We will refer to this as the BASELINE Narrative. The BASELINE Narrative does not exist. It is not written anywhere. We can never read it. Authors don't write it first and subvert it later. It is virtual. But as an author writes a real narrative or as we read it, our mind will relate the REAL narrative with the expected BASELINE. Our mind will then get troubled by the "Tension" or the pull between the Real and the Baseline Narratives.

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The Real Narrative

The Virtual Baseline

Slide 8: The Narrative's Three Components In fact, it is one of the Writer's objectives to trouble us with this Tension. This is the Tension of a string when it is pulled away from its resting place. This is the elastic and vibrating distance between the real narrative and the expected baseline. 2) The Meaning of Tension The English use of the word "TENSION" has a negative connotation such as the Tension in a political environment or the Tension in a heated argument. Our Tension is positive. It is productive. It is meant to tickle and please. It has an almost erotic basis. It is meant to generate Literary Meaning. After all, we read literature to gain meaning. The French meaning of the term TENSION is better. HAUTE TENSION means high voltage. It means potential energy, one that will be translated into dynamic energy. It is the same as pulling a string of a guitar outwards or pressing a coil down and then letting go. An author creates a multiplex of Tensions to generate meaning which can only be generated when the Tensions are resolved. Without these Tensions, we might as well read a Police Report or a Newspaper. Here we must state a strong disclaimer: we are not talking about Suspense which is a single solution to an enigma such as in a detective story or a thriller. We are not talking about the reader deciphering problems with hidden solutions. Novels and short stories consist of a large multiplex of Tensions that often resist interpretation. 3) The Need for Resolution Going back to the reader who has been intentionally bewildered by the author, why should the reader care about resolving the TENSION? One function of our brain is very specific: to make life easy, logically consistent and explicable to us. A rainy night with thunder and lightning is very noisy. You sleep in peace, until the bell rings or your child cries. You can hear the bell or the child through

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the noise. Why? Because your brain has been silently filtering all input so that you don't hear the rain but you get alarmed by the bell or the child. Your brain does not like contradictions, paradoxes, inconsistencies, enigmas, unsolved problems. It needs to resolve them. In a narrative, it regards them as ENEMIES. Your brain will not rest until it can resolve the Tensions. Reading a work, one is then involved in identifying and responding to all the Tensions and Resolutions. This is the source of the aesthetic pleasure we get from the text. Another disclaimer here: we are not talking about RESOLUTION as a RELEASE or as a sleeping pill. RESOLUTION is in itself, a process. The author lands you gently, the way a pilot lands an airplane. The TENSION and RESOLUTION pair is frequently used in musical analysis. How do they help us in reading or writing a text? 3.1) First of all, the writer does not aim at mystifying the reader and then give him the answer. This is not the purpose. The writer constructs multiple Tensions and Resolutions to create an aesthetically pleasing narrative. Think of the many tensions in Hamlet: questions of existence, madness, playfulness, guilt and revenge, many more. Shakespeare does not have one answer for us. In his successful mix, there is an aesthetic pleasure or joy. 3.2) Secondly, by looking for TENSION and RESOLUTION, we can judge if the narrative "works" for us or not by assessing our response to the processes of Tension / Resolution. If we don't respond, the work has no meaning for us. In a story by Ariel Dorfman, a well respected Chilean writer, a Salesman is being trained on how to sell a doorbell that has the ability of detecting unwanted visitors. Dorfman describes more than 8 type: nervous visitors, beggars, distant cousins, etc. Just after reading the first or second types, we are able to guess where Dorfman is going. No more Tension. We can also predict that the Salesman will be rejected the first time he rings a bell. The story dies a quick death. It is FLAT. Once you pull out this single string holding the story together, the work falls down. How many strings does Hamlet have? Each time you focus on one, the other one starts vibrating. Of course, an over-complication will also result in losing the reader. We can now understand why different readers evaluate narratives differently. The extent to which a reader is sensitive or can respond to the Tension in a narrative determines the interest that reader has in that narrative. Think of a 16 year old reading Kafka's "Metamorphosis" for the first time. He or she might only react to the sentimental or tragic tension in the story. With time, and literary experience, the same reader can start identifying existential, family, literary and other Tensions. 3.3) Fourthly, understanding the evolution of the use of Tension/Resolution helps us understand how one school of artists breaks away from earlier schools. The Surrealists wished to transcend everyday reality by incorporating the workings of the unconscious. To do that, they had to introduce a completely new set of Tensions and Resolutions.

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4.0 Generating Tension using Machines or Literary Meaning Generators But now, let us ask the question: How does a writer generate TENSION? Here, I must credit two important influences. The first is Roland Barthes, a French literary critic and a semiotician. The concept of machines or meaning generators comes from his book S/Z, a brilliant analysis of Balzac's short story: "Sarassine". The second influence is from two French Philosophers: Deleuze and Guattari. Their concept of how Desiring Machines work in us is important for our understanding of these Literary Meaning Generators. A writer uses one or more Machines to generate literary meaning in a text. When Marquez develops the 4 signatures of time in the sentence that we saw earlier, he is simply generating meaning in the dimension of TIME. Kafka opposes and mixes the ordinary with the extraordinary generating meaning in his stories. This machine became closely linked with his name. In S/Z, Roland Barthes calls these machines CODES. Let us not use the term CODE. First of all, it has a static meaning. It is not productive. Moreover, the term CODE can be misunderstood as a cipher, or a puzzle, one that has a singular solution. While this may be the case in a Detective Novel or a joke, it is not true of most other narratives. It is better to call these Codes: Machines. These machines are not mechanical devices with cause and effect behavior. They are more like Deleuze and Guattari's machines: processes or productive systems. Whatever you call them, Machines in the narrative help us disentangle and expose the pluralistic meanings a text can generate. Before we talk about some characteristics of these machines, let us review some typical machines. The following classification of machines is arbitrary. There can be other classifications.

Literary Meaning Generators

1) Action Machines2) Enigmatic Machines3) Connotation Machines4) Cultural Reference Machines5) Oppositional or Binary Machines6) Topographic or Scope Machines7) Communications or Voice Machines

Slide 9: Literary Meaning Generators

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1) Action Machines Action Machines describe activities and events. This is usually the easiest machine to handle or recognize. Most Hollywood films or Detectives stories are only made up of Action machines. An Action Machine manipulates sequences of events: it can delay them or reverse their sequence.

"Today an extraordinary event occurred. I got up rather late in the morning, and when Marva brought me my cleaned boots, I asked her the time. Hearing that it was past ten, I dressed quickly. I admit I wouldn't have gone to the department at all, knowing the sour face of the chief of our section will make at me."

Slide 10: Gogol / The Diary of a Madman Notice that the machine can also generate negative actions: "I wouldn't have gone". 2) Enigmatic Machines Narratives often frustrate the reader by postponing the revelation of truths. Sometimes, the answer is not given at all as in Borges' story. Dostoevsky's novels are full of enigmas. Why does Shatov slap Stavrogin publicly in The Devils and in The Brothers Karamazov, why does Father Zosima kneel in front of Dmitry when he is leaving a heated discussion on God's existence? We are never told. Enigmatic Machines deliberately insert elements in a story that are not explained. They are raised in many ways:

Enigmatic Machines

1. Unexplained actions2. Questions in the narrative3. Inconsistencies and paradoxes4. Fantasies and magic5. Dreams6. Irony in all its forms7. Escamotage

Slide 11: Enigmatic Machines

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Let us concentrate on Escamotage

escamoter (French)

to conjure awayto retractto omit or excludeto delete to pare or removeto skip a word/sentence

Slide 12: Escamotage I cannot forget the day when that wonderful artist, Aref Al Rayess introduced me to the term. He repeated it several times as if he were tasting wine. If I had asked him which was more important, Escamotage or his 20 tubes of paint, I am sure the answer would have been: Escamotage. But what does this machine delete or carve or remove? Anything really: events, actions, explanations, characters, time intervals. Aref created areas of white space in his paintings through Escamotage. He did not paint the white areas! Yet they were an integral part of the painting. There is so much white space in a story. In The Trial, Kafka does not tell us why Joseph K was arrested. In The Castle, he does not tell us why Joseph K cannot get into the Castle. Kafka is simply removing some of the colors from his canvas. We can then focus on how Joseph K handles these two situations rather than on why they happened. In "The South", Borges does not describe the duel nor does he tell us its result. All of these deletions create Tension. A very haunting use of Escamotage is when it completely removes one or more machines. We will talk about that when discussing characteristics of short stories. Tony Naufal, here with us tonight, pointed out that the term "Qossa" comes from the Arabic verb "Qassa". This has a close link to Escamotage!! 3) Connotation Machines A connotation is a relation between an element of the narrative and a signifier or a meaning outside the text. By intentionally releasing multiple meanings, Connotation corrupts the purity of communication. It subverts our expectation of singular meanings. It explodes the myth that a text is closed. Each reader will respond to different meanings outside the text. Units that connote or evoke meanings outside the text are called by Barthes: "Deja Lu", "Already Read".

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One of the best examples of Connotation is the title of a most wonderful story by Edgar Allen Poe. We are still reading the title, and the fireworks begin:

What’sin aTitle?

Slide 13: Poe / Valdemar

• Facts: so Poe wants us to consider this as a scientific article (which it is not, hence, this machine also contributes to Enigmas)

• Case: so there are others, this is not a normal story. • M.: so this is a Frenchman, more so, he is not someone known to the American

readers of Poe, a foreigner. Later, we learn that he is Polish. • Valdemar: Valley of the Sea? This is a two level connotation: under the sky and

under the sea, twice outside nature. Poe will go twice outside nature in his story. Just before his death, Valdemar is hypnotized. This extends his life beyond the exact point of death. He keeps saying "I am dead". There are two levels outside nature: hypnosis and not being dead when he should have been.

Connotations are not free associations of ideas. They have a kind of determinacy, a kind of forcing but undetermined direction. We are not to guess the intention of the author here. Rather we are depending on the reader to disentangle the tale. 4) Cultural Reference Machines These machines generate elements in a narrative that refer to an explicit body of knowledge. Stories by Jirjy Zaidan and Amin Maalouf mix fiction with historical fact. Machines can also point to the outside world without dealing with historical facts. Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment deals with morality issues current to Russian society of the late 19th century but which are outside the text. Conrad's Heart of Darkness clearly deals with colonial issues. We respond to the colonial issues today differently than when the story was written in 1900.

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By pointing outside the text, such machines extend and open the text, allowing the author to handle meanings that are neither fictional nor literary. 5) Oppositional or Binary Machines Oppositional Machines can generate meaning through the placement of opposing concepts. I thought you would like this brilliant statement:

"The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."

The Crack-UpF. Scott Fitzgerald

Slide 14: F. Scott Fitzgerald / Binary Oppositions Classical uses of opposition involve such machines that generate:

Oppositions

Symbols MetaphorsAllegories ParallelismDuplication ContrastEtc

Slide 15: Oppositions Opposing concepts can be found in time, location, social status of characters, meaning of words, attitudes. The list is endless.

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These machines are not necessarily binary. They can pose multiple oppositions.

The BurrowFranz Kafka

Slide 16: Kafka / The Burrow (Image) "The Burrow" is one of the most fascinating stories by Kafka or by anyone. The translator failed by calling it "The Burrow" which is a hole or a loop in the ground excavated by a mole or a rabbit. The German title is much better. After all, it is what Kafka wrote. It is DER BAU or THE CONSTRUCTION. By calling it "a construction", Kafka inverted its meaning, making a set of holes concrete. Again, we are still in the first few sentences when the fireworks begin:

1. I have completed the construction of my burrow and it seems to be successful.

2. All that can be seen from outside is a big hole, that, however, really leads to nowhere. If you take a few steps, you strike against natural firm rock.

3. I can make no boast of having contrived this ruse intentionally. It is simply the remains of one of my many abortive building attempts.

4. But finally it seemed to me advisable to leave this one hole without filling it in.

5. True, some ruses are so subtle that they defeat themselves.

6. I know that better than anyone.

Slide 17: Kafka / The Burrow (Starting Sentences) An interesting behavior of Oppositional Machines is when they create a membrane object in the text. This is an interface through which the narrative passes from one side of an opposition to the other.

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Window Window

Outside

Inside

Snow

Dinner

Michael(Greta’s Love)

Gabriel(Greta’s Love)

Slide 18: Joyce / The Dead Let us consider two oppositions in "The Dead" by James Joyce. One is between inside and outside and the other is between warm and cold.

• The socially important dinner is INSIDE and it is constantly opposed to the snow and cold, OUTSIDE.

• Later in the intimacy of their room, Greta recalls a love of her youth with sadness.

She tells her husband how Michael came to tap on her window on a freezing night to confess his love for her. Michael is OUTSIDE but his love is WARM while Gabriel, who is INSIDE, gets the COLD end of her love.

Joyce uses the Window as a member between this two Tense pairs of opposites. Gabriel sits by the window to rehearse his dinner speech. He hears the snow tapping on the window pane. The old lover also taps on the window to bid Gretta good bye. Opposites create Tension. But Joyce does not sit still. Snow is used for other oppositions: Alive/Dead, east and west Ireland, and so on. 6) Topographic or Scope Machines Topographic or Scope Machines handle everything related to space, whether it is physical or mental. Such elements are journeys, houses, rooms, countries and even minds are often subject to topographic machination. Topographic machines are also important in

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the structuring of the story. "The Dead" by Joyce is in three physical parts: inside the house for dinner, the trip in the carriage and then the Hotel room where Greta opens up about her youthful love. The Heart of Darkness has a typical start: from the open mouth of the River Thames down across the western side of Africa and into the massive river mouth, deep inside the snake that Conrad describes. But this is not where the topography lies. At the very beginning of the story, Marlow talks about the Romans invading England and going through the mouth of the Thames. The topographic machine creates Tension because it creates an oppositional image, in space and in time, to what actually takes place when Marlow goes up the African river to get to Kurz. The nesting of Stories is typical of this Machine. The best example is really the 1001 Nights. Just this weekend, I read a story by Borges. It has a topographic title: "The Garden of the Forking Path". Its subject is the merging of a physical labyrinth with a projected story that consists of all possible alternatives in time. On its own, this would be a good example of topography. But, Borges fantasizes about 1001 Nights. He says, what if the printer made a mistake and in one of Sheherezade's middle stories, instead of writing down that story, he wrongly inserted the first story of Sheherezade. She will reach that middle story again, going into an infinite nesting. Another example of nesting is a film by Luis Bunuel: The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Every time we settle into a normal pace in the story, one of the characters wakes up from a dream. The story goes on with that character and we think we are now in the reality of the film. Then someone else in that reality wakes up from a dream. And so on.

Einar(granfather)

Griff(daughter)

Jean(mother)

Mitch(bearvictim)

Sheriff

The Bear Lewis(the mother’sex-boyfriend)

Griffin(the dead

father)

Slide 19: Topographic Machine / The Unfinished Life The Unfinished Life is a recent film directed by Robert Redford. He plays the role of the grandfather. He is an angry and a sour man because his son was killed in an accident. The accident was caused by his son's wife, Jean. She and her daughter survive and are therefore estranged from the grandfather. His friend Mitch was mauled by a bear.

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Redford spends most of his time taking care of Mitch. Jean, has a violent boyfriend whom she leaves but with nowhere to go, she goes back to the reluctant grandfather. The film features 4 main characters, shown in the middle square. It also has 4 secondary characters, shown in the outer square. Each scene in the film is based on an interaction between two of these characters. 7) Communications or Voice Machines These machines generate literary meaning by manipulating utterances, sources and destinations. They manage the "Configuration" or "Layout" of voices in a story. In The Heart of Darkness, Conrad presents us with 3 persons: the narrator talks about Marlow. Marlow talks about navigating up the river to find Kurtz. All those listening to Marlow are described by the Narrator, except himself. He comes in and goes out of the story very lightly. Sometimes, the listeners can hear Marlow and not see him. He is a voice. Marlow also refers to Kurtz as a voice and not as a person with a body. Conrad disrupts the natural order of story telling. He chose to distance the reader from the main character thereby creating a vibrant and a tense triangle of voices. 8) Other Machines There are other machines. We list them together here not because they are of lower importance but because we do not have time. Moreover, this classification is liquid. Anytime you discover a new way of manipulating or understanding a narrative, that's creativity – the pleasure and joy of reading or writing. Let us name a few Machines without going into their details:

• The Temporal Machine – this is found everywhere • The Verbal Machine – this machine generates word play, misspellings, quotations,

etc. Joyce's Finnegan's Wake is a good example of this machine in operation. • The Negative Machine – this is a special type of Oppositional machine used to

reverse situations. In Chronicles of a Death Foretold, Marquez starts the novel by telling us who the killers are.

• The Repetition Machine There will be others.

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5.0 Characteristics of Machines We can now leave behind us the traditional approach to the analysis of plots, themes and characters. These elements in a story can now be dissolved in our approach to machines. A plot is generated by a combination of machines. Characters are similarly generated. Themes are generated by Cultural or Connotation machines and a combination of the results of other machines. Let us review some of the characteristics of these Literary Meaning Generators without giving many examples. 1) Literary Meaning Generators are not Literary or Rhetorical Devices When Shakespeare uses a metaphor such as "Juliet is the Sun", he is applying a very localized device. A machine is more pervasive. It is a continuous process, like a snake winding its way throughout the text. 2) Machines are Networked The Temporal Machine may become a Binary machine when time is being opposed. "The Dead" by Joyce shows two machines operating at the same time: the Topographic and the Binary machines. Machines will feed into one another. The outputs of one can be input to the others. The text has multiple entrances and exits. Let's take a look at a graphic description of this feature:

Slide 20: Machines Feeding into One Another The output of machines will resist interpretation. The output will not have deterministic and singular meanings. These are not engineering machines.

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3) We do not have a Definite System of Countable Machines Our classification of machines is really very liquid. This is not a fixed recipe for critical analysis. A writer or a reader will recognize specific instances of machines according to his or her sensitivity and competence. Neither writer nor reader should be bound by a fixed classification. 4) Machines do not only operate within the Narrative Jacques Lacan says: "Je suis le Texte des Autres", "I am the TEXT of Others". So writers and readers are texts! Machines start within the Writer or the Reader. Machines seem to end within the TEXT but that is not true. The Connotations, the Bodies of Knowledge, the effect writing has on the world all reach beyond the Text. If there is a person from England here tonight, that person would have paid taxes to maintain the security forces which protected Salman Rushdie from a Fatwa in Teheran influenced by socio-political issues outside The Satanic Verses.

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6.0 So how is a Short Story Different from a Novel? Is the Short Story just a shorter novel or is it a separate animal on its own? This definition is particularly funny:

The term SHORT STORY refers to a piece of fiction up to 20,000 words. The story's length depends on where it is published. In the USA, short stories can be anything up to 10,000 words whereas in the United Kingdom they average around 5000 words. BUT in Australia they are rarely more than 3500 words!

Slide 21: The Length of a Short Story So, if you write a 5000 word short story in England and fly to Australia, as soon as you land, you would become a novelist. We have traveled a long distance to reach the concept of Literary Machine Generators. We hope to see now how a short story differs from a novel simply by the way it uses these machines. 1) The Restricted Use of Machines in Short Stories The extended scope of novels makes it necessary for them to use most of the machines we discussed. Short stories do not have that restriction. Escamotage comes into play. We will find short stories completely lacking in one or more full machines. Let us take examples of the two extremes. Firstly, it is quite common for a short story to rely on one and only one machine. All others are dropped. The Mexican writer Juan Jose Arreola wrote two beautiful books of short stories called Prosody and Confabulario. Many of the stories in these books tackle only one dimension, one generator. For example, "The Map of Lost Objects" is a one page story about a map where lost objects can come in and go out. The story is mostly under the power of the Topographic Machine. Parables are a good example of singular machines. Kafka wrote a lot of them and so did Gebran. The other extreme of restriction is when a writer completely removes a single Machine. In "The Burrow" by Kafka, we have all machines but Kafka ignores TIME completely. Most of what happens is a discourse in the animal's mind. There is no before or after. You can almost start reading the story on any page. The extended scope of novels makes it difficult for a novelist to remove a machine. This is a quality of short stories.

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2) The Coupling or Proximity Effect Again, in "The Burrow" by Kafka, the Oppositional and the Topographic machines operate very closely together. Such proximity compounds the Tension and results in an increased aesthetic sensibility. It is not possible to sustain such a marriage of machines in a novel as it would become heavy to read. 3) Redundant Words or Sentences Short stories compress the output of machines so much that each word and each sentence is part of one or more machines. In S/Z, Barthes goes through every sentence of Balzac's story "Sarassine". He then shows which machines operate in which sentences. This may not be possible in a novel. The extended scope of a novel makes it difficult to assign meanings to every word and every sentence. Next time you read a novel or a short story, ask yourself this question: if I remove this sentence completely, how would the narrative suffer? Chances are a novel would not suffer while a short story will. 4) Exercises and Frivolities Classical music has been dominated by the larger forms: symphonies, concertos, sonatas. Indeed, Theater and Film have also be dominated by larger forms. But let us talk about music for a bit. Hidden behind these forms is a wealth of Miniatures, small works that suffer the same fate as short stories. Short works seem to be viewed like our cousin from the village, someone we remember, but infrequently. An irresponsible grouping of musical miniatures puts them into three classes:

1) There are dances: minuets, gigues, mazurkas and waltzes. 2) There are pragmatic pieces meant to teach or demonstrate musical principles but are nevertheless beautiful jewels: etudes, preludes and fugues. 3) We also have mood pieces: nocturnes, intermezzos, rhapsodies, bagatelles, capriccios and many more.

There is an endless list of short stories that fit the above classification. Many short stories are written as literary dances, an exaltation of a particular machine. Others are simply meant to evoke moods. We also find pragmatic pieces. Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities is really a set of etudes. Marco Polo talks to Kubla Khan about more than 20 different cities. Unlike Dorfman's story, Calvino's stories vibrate with intensity. In such short works, composers and authors allow themselves a variety of frivolities very often not possible in larger works.

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7.0 Claiming Territory for the Short Story We have to claim two territories for the Short Story: 1) Novels that are Long Short Stories There are many novels that fit the above characteristics of Short Stories. This means that some authors really wrote Short Stories that are very long. We can probably agree that James Joyce's Ulysses is so compact and so injected with machinery that it is really a very very long short story. 2) Novels that are Collections of Short Stories There are also Novels walking around pretending to be novels but they are really an ensemble, or a suite of related short stories. The 1001 Nights and The Decameron spring to mind. How about Fellini? Can't we consider La Dolce Vita, Roma and Satyricon as collections of cours metrages? Ziad Rahbani's early plays were all short plays built into one evening.

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8.0 Pascal's Thought Finally, I leave you with one of the most pertinent comments about short stories.

Dear Jean:

I wanted to write you a short letter but I did not have time.

So, I am writing you a long one!

Blaise Pascal

Slide 22: Pascal's Letter