David Arnason and Flash Fiction Cycle

Abstract

David Arnason’s “Fifty Stories and a Piece of Advice” is the titular “story” of his collection of short stories from 1982. It is of conventional short story length, fifteen pages, but looks like a collection, or even fragments, of miscellaneous tragicomic stories and anecdotes. Upon closer inspection, however, this is an extremely complex cycle of flash fiction, meeting all the formal conventions of a story cycle, wherein a collection of individual stories is interconnected to form a whole. Arnason allows the reader a wide scope to participate in the production of the meaning of the narrative, based on his sometimes ambiguous and often multivalent text. The setting can be a specific small town or it may be fictional, and the time period captured in the stories may be irrelevant or unspecific for a reader who is unable to recognize historical markers that date the story. The narrative situation seems flexible: there may be one or numerous storytellers and there may also be one or many listeners – but this may also be the internal dialogue of the recollections and ideas of a single individual. The fragmented surface of “Fifty Stories and a Piece of Advice” presents a small town where you find unconventional characters and unorthodox behaviour becomes tolerated and everybody knows one another.

Readers familiar with some of the theories that were central to postmodern writing in Canada in the 1980s may also read Arnason’s crisp, compact, ironic flash stories as dramatizations and explications of theoretical formulations that the author selects and combines in his own idiosyncratic ways, making them accessible in colloquial English. Among those discussed here, are ideas discussed by Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes and Marshall McLuhan. In a tragicomic overview on cultural history, Arnason demonstrates that the narrative techniques of a poet and storyteller can activate imagination and memory to amplify and complicate the narrative techniques distinct to story cycles and challenge the reader to participate in the construction of a world – a village – where the medium is the message.