V.S. Pritchett spoke in an interview of how Chekhov’s gifts were limited to short forms because he lived in an anarchic and chaotic society, diagnosing the same state of genius to Irish writers like Frank O’Connor and Liam O’Flaherty that came after him. Pritchett said, “the novel depends enormously upon its sense of a stable social structure and the short story does not really depend on there being a social structure at all.” To give form to our fractalizing 21st century chaos, traditional short stories are too neat, wishfully formal, consoling. Adorno believed art worth its salt does not aspire to console. So it may be in the fragments, flash fictions, micro fictions, that we’ll find the form of our current chaos aestheticized.
