Flash, Absence as Content: Tao Lin's "Things I Wanted to Do Today"
an essay by Joseph Young
There is a style of flash fiction writing that tries to emulate the short story, which attempts to explicitly provide, albeit in a shorter space, what I've come to think of as narrative texture: a richly abundant world of character, setting, conflict, development, and plot. I think this is usually a mistake. Flash can't, by its very nature, satisfy our desire for texture in the same way a short story can. Short stories have the luxury of length, the luxury of time. Flash can't compete.
Tao Lin is a writer who writes both long and short-short stories. His longer stories tend to accumulate rather than move, with short passages of dialogue or action followed by lengthy paragraphs of introspection, his characters often building the most surprising and charming metaphors. His flash fiction pieces can resemble his longer stories in that they read like ever-building lists of ideas or events. The difference between the two though is in the way they handle narrative. His long stories, as quirky and original as they are, move smoothly through time, transitioning easily from scene to scene, carefully building to their conclusions. His narrative method in flash, on the other hand, might best be described as erratic. Transition and logic are not top priorities.
In his flash, "Things I Wanted to Do Today," Tao makes heavy use of anaphora, the repetition of words or phrases at the beginnings of lines. Each of the 36 single-sentence paragraphs that make up the flash start with the same two words, I wanted: "I wanted to join a water polo club;" "I wanted to run into a friend sitting on a stoop to my right." The story is thus more a catalogue of disparate ideas strung together than it is a structured, unified narrative. This kind of anaphoric cataloguing is, of course, best know from the poems of Walt Whitman, as in his "Song of Myself": "And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, And the women my sisters and lovers, And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields, And brown ants in the little wells beneath them."
Like Whitman, Tao is hungry to take in everything around him, itemizing a profusion of white T-shirts and vacuum cleaners, cut papayas and small dogs. And it's the quirky specificness of his desires that lets us get to know Tao's narrator, just as its the ecstatic inventories in Whitman's poem that let us know his. But if we look a bit closer at Tao's story, we begin to notice a difference, that whereas the multiplying lists in Whitman's poems exclaim what he sees, what he has experienced, what he knows and thus possesses, Tao's catalogue is of what he wanted. He wanted to meet an old friend, to have her crawl toward him across her couch, to vacuum her hair, but did these things occur? The use of the past tense, wanted, seems to indicate they did not, that he either hadn't the opportunity or the will to make them happen. It's as if, at the end of the day, he is ticking off the things he wished he'd done, wished he'd seen and said, but didn't.
Tao's story is all about absence. It's not a celebration, a song, but a lament. And isn't it remarkable then that the central image of the flash is a vacuum cleaner, a machine that takes away? And what of the scene inside the woman's house, where he compliments her hair, maybe her teeth? Even in his wishes, his fantasy, he doesn't seem to get the woman he wants. "I wanted her to crawl over her couch towards me," he tells us, but then adds, "I wanted to stand up while she was crawling towards me and then vacuum her couch." He shies away from her advances, as if he's uncomfortable, maybe even spooked. Instead, he wants to vacuum her couch, later her hair, use his machine to remove her.
The diction of Tao's story is rather different than Whitman's too. In his poems, Whitman is the voice of authority, of grandeur, his lines rolling off the tongue in Biblical cadence. In comparison, Tao's narrator is uncertain and tentative, almost childlike. "I wanted to do nice things for everyone I’ve ever knew," he says, tripping over his tenses, "I wanted to do one hundred jumping jacks to build my stamina." In these lines, we hear the voice of awkward young man, a sensitive but anxious kid who, through his wishes, hopes he'll get what he wants. The upshot, we sense, is that he won't; and we feel the lack.
And it's this lack that is the central tension of the story, the conflict that makes it a story, rather than, like Whitman, a poetic exclamation. The boundful energy of the narrator's desires, his wanting "to be standing on the desk together trying to gain control of the vacuum cleaner," his sky "like a peach smoothie," runs counter to his anxious timidity, subtly teasing out a tender portrait of a sad man. And the ending of the flash—as he falls asleep "wondering what the mysterious noise was that woke me up"—forecasts a life that is full of mystery and wonder but that also consists more of sleep than action.
What is interesting, as well as particularly effective, about Tao's flash is that this tale, and its protagonist, are conveyed not so much through narrative development as through the story's very structure. The flash—with its use of disjointed, elliptical thoughts, its list of seemingly unrelated events, the lack of dialogue and setting, the absence of any traditional character—creates a structure that is built not of content, of texture, but of negative space, the gaps between sentences, between what is said. The story is in fact told through its absences, is its absences—character and conflict created out of silence.
And while not every flash can or should rely on quirky devices like Tao's, the most effective of them are built around just such silences. Whereas short stories are excellent at building character and conflict through extended dialogue or introspection, through descriptions of the rooms people move among, the emotional and mental turnings of the protagonist, the development of narrative arc, flash will never be able to provide this kind of "fictive dream." Short-short fiction can't hold the reader this way, cannot create such sustained abeyance of the outside world in favor of the inner life of the story. And it shouldn't try. Flash fiction that relies on sustaining this prolific texture necessarily sacrifices its greatest strength: those evocative negative spaces captured wordlessly among the words.
Which is not to say that flash should do away with the traditional building blocks of fiction or that it should rigidly adhere to some strict story-telling asceticism. Rather though that flash writers recognize its unique strengths, those qualities that make it worth writing, and worth reading, that bring the writer and her audience to the form, excite their imagination. Tao Lin's flash, "Things I Wanted to Do Today," does just this, fashioning both a world and a world between worlds—a story abundant with absence.
Copyright © 2006 Joseph Young
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