That was Orson Welles reading the opposite of a big book. A six-hundred some word parable, the exact count depending on the translation, but I have to imagine it a perfect story in any translation; Kafka's Before the Law, and if you haven't read or heard it before today, you'll find yourself pondering its meanings for the rest of your life.
There's a reason that so many athletic events are over in a minute or two. If, for say, olympic athletes had to operate at peak performance past a few minutes, they would fail to perform their optimum at best, injure themselves permanently at worst. In the same way, there is no way to expect any kind of aesthetic perfection from long-form narrative. The best short stories are perfect, they are self-contained worlds which create multitudes of meaning that never stop yielding possibilities no matter how often you ponder them. Over the last ten years I've thought of so many different possibilities for what the end of Chekhov's The Black Monk might mean that it would be an entire podcast to list them. Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants is little but a conversation that can mean an exponential multiplicity of different situations. The chill of Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown can make you speculate your whole life long about America's origins, and wonder how many Puritans, or how many Christians through the millennia, went through the motions of faith while truly believing in nothing, or even only the Devil, and how that lack of faith may have corrupted the Christian faith itself. And it would be pointless to discuss all the potential meanings in Kafka's Before the Law or Borges's Borges and I, because both are not even a single page long and have enough potential meanings to ponder for a lifetime and never get past their first door. But meaning does not necessarily connote intellectual meaning, it can also connote emotional meaning. My personal favorite writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, is very nearly forgotten master of the short story writing in a very nearly forgotten language (Yiddish), and his short stories don't have the subtleties of Borges or Kafka. They are almost folk tales, like Hans Christian Anderson or Edgar Allen Poe in their different ways, or Giovanni Verga and Flannery O'Connor, and they evoke not speculation but sense-impression, so grounded are they all in various pre-literate oral traditions that they evoke the entire worldview of a place and time, not only the superstitions and fears of distant people, but their hopes and values, and to me and so many others, that's almost more worthwhile than the more intellectual type of story, the meaning of these stories is not contemplative but empathic, and lets you identify with the extraordinary within other humans who have nothing in common with you as though they live inside your own skin.
On the other hand, even the best big books have to make aesthetic contortions of logic and structure and character development, with a hundred pages at a time of boredom and hollow manipulation to be endured until the narrative picks up again. Dostoevsky called Tolstoy's 864 page Anna Karenina a flawless work of art, and it's definitely more flawless than Dostoevsky's four final loose baggy monsters, but Part III of Anna Karenina, with all its prattling on about Levin's land dealings, would strain even the most business-savvy farmer. In terms of perfect novels, One might say The Great Gatsby is perfect, or Pride and Prejudice, or Cormac McCarthy's The Road, or Dostoevsky's earlier and very lean Notes from the Underground, or Stefan Zweig's Chess Story, or Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude, the latter three are short enough that they might fall into the novella category rather than novel, and personally, I think the novella is particularly great because it neither creating its splendors by elision as the short stories almost inevitably have to - the unsaid being as important as the said, nor does it let its author yield to the temptation of taking us through every narrative permutation of which they can think, no matter how dubious the connection to the rest of the book.
And then of course, there's Shakespeare, writer of writers, who takes us through so many permutations and contortions of logic and structure and character paradox that it's almost impossible to say that Shakespeare plays have any form at all, and yet they hurtle along to a literary momentum that breaks the speed of thought. Perhaps Shakespeare was writing the equivalent of the loose baggy monster in an era when few writers knew how to construct a story that was more than a hundred pages long - even the 850 page Don Quixote is more an anthology of short stories about two characters than a connected narrative, but because Shakespeare's plays are so short in comparison to later greats like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Melville, they scorch on both the stage and the page. The plays absorb us in as other writer can, and spit us out a different person.
And then, even over Shakespeare, there's the 'BIGGEST' book of them all, the Holy Bible, a work probably collated, redacted, edited, and marinated over a period of 2000 years. A lot of atheists of our time think the Bible is just regressive mesmerism for groupthink, I think it's still the greatest book ever written, containing everything from the largest cosmic questions to the smallest domestic squabbles, the best intentions to the most appallingly violent ones, the highest poetry to the lowest comedy - and yes, there is comedy in the Bible all over the place and some of it even translates to our time, so more's the shame for them. The Bible is an anthology that has themes for every situation, and as the universal relatability of its themes pops up again and again in relation to the problems of every generation, one can only conclude that even if the Bible gets all kinds of specifics wrong, it is the eternal book. And because its themes and characters are so universally relatable to everyday life, encounters with the Bible completely change our thinking about life. For good or ill, there has never been a more powerful work of art, and perhaps there can never be.
And why might that be? I submit that's because the Bible is the big book par excellence. I would imagine that the limit for a book to have no excess verbiage is probably around 375 pages, but the big books, the big novels, the best of them anyway, are the nearest thing to lived experience that we get without living life. Clive James, as we said a few podcasts ago, defined fiction as 'life without the dull bits', ...well.., in big books the dull bits are definitely there, ditto any symphony over an hour and any opera over two-and-a-half, ditto any double album or long-form TV show. But here's to them. Part of living life is living through the disappointing passages, which make the exciting parts all the sweeter. Even the best long novels will have one dull page for every nine that excite, and we will be grateful for lives with so little dullness than rather so much. And as we take them in, necessarily little by little, our impressions of these works cannot possibly be instant. We don't just watch the story evolve, we evolve alongside the story, often having to leave and return to it in the middle, bringing all sorts of unrelated new experiences to the book, pondering these stories and characters and themes for days. The books read us, as George Steiner might say, we don't just read them, we absorb them, they become part of us, changing our thinking as any of our memories would.
I'm cringing as I write all the English class appreciation cliches, all this is a prelude to the next podcast in which we discuss Purity by Jonathan Franzen. Talk to you soon dear listener!
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