Short and bittersweet

The Swedish Academy, I am convinced, is political. By choosing this person, from that place, they exercise enormous influence, of which they cannot be ignorant. I remember the year in which they chose Camilo Jose Cela, the Spanish writer who had lived and worked in Spain all through the three decades of Franco’s dictatorship. The question was: How can an artist thrive in an isolationist, militarised state where human rights are trampled on and the Opus Dei is in cahoots with the oppressive dictator and not run foul of the regime? The answer is that Cela had been a Franco informer all along. Was the Academy totally ignorant of that? Or might it argue that the Academy’s focus is on the writing? And Cela’s writing was excellent, even if he was tainted. That in itself sends a political message.

Awarding the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature to the Canadian short story writer, Alice Munro, is every bit as political as Cela’s win and as its decision not to support Salman Rushdie in the late 1980s when a fatwa was issued on his life, which led to members of the Academy resigning in protest. But Rushdie has been one of the first to sing the praises of the Academy for making Munro the newest Laureate. Apart from tending to Euro-centricity in its choices the Academy can sometimes appear to be unconcerned about what the vast number of people are reading, selecting quite obscure writers. This is not necessarily a bad thing as it introduces us to worlds of which we are ignorant.

The latest choice of a popular short story writer validates the much under valued short fiction genre. The fact, too, that she is the first Canada-based writer to win will turn international reading attention to other writers there and put Canada on the world’s literary map, where it deserves to be. Alice Munro is that rare thing, a great writer who has not had to sacrifice her preferred literary form to become successful. Because the traditional business of publishing fiction is based on the full-length novel short story writers have to write long to interest publishers in their work, unless they are as lucky as Munro is and have one who supports the short form.

Her long time publisher Douglas Gibson tells the story of how Munro had been urged to “get serious” and write a novel. She just could not do it. It resulted in her being unable to write at all. He stepped in, told her to do what she was best at and the rest is history. Yet, publishers still argue that only novels sell enough to sustain the industry. They normally expect high-selling novelists to sell only a third or quarter of a short story collection as they would of their novels, so authors get more money up front for novels, pushing them partly for financial reasons to writing novels. And marketing departments do not help by, as a consequence, allocating small budgets for promoting short fiction.

It may be a story of the chicken and egg. It is true that most people prefer novels but I wonder how much we have all been influenced in that taste. Munro has published 17 collections of short stories and won several of the world’s most prestigious literary prizes, but snobbery about the novel’s superiority has been unshakeable. She herself admits that she thought writing short stories was simply practising until she got “that” novel out. Many writers have been similarly schooled. VS Naipaul, whose short fiction stands out for me, would not have been able to base his career on it, if he had wanted to. Excellent short fiction loses out to mediocre novels to keep the industry going. The wonderful novelist JG Ballard commented that short stories were “loose change in the treasury of fiction”. He then described the novel as “an over-valued currency that often turns out to be counterfeit”.

Short stories are not condensed novels. The two genres are quite different. I guess people prefer the great sweep of the novel, the intricate plot, cast of characters, its sometimes epic proportions, the control the author exercises in leading us to strange places inside our heads and hearts. Short stories, like Munro’s, contrastingly, focus on the small moments of life but can equally acutely affect our emotions. Personally, I prefer short stories not to be in collections, when you have to engage with new characters after an intense, vicarious, sometimes bittersweet experience of life just a page before, but whichever we choose, long or short, all good fiction feeds our souls. Many congratulations to Ms Munro.