short stories – Fluid Imagination

Thirty years after we last saw the heroic Jedi knight celebrating with his friends on the moon of Endor, an unknown scavenger named Rey will respond to his name by saying, “Luke Skywalker? I thought he was a myth.”

Rey’s line from STAR WARS: Episode VII: The Force Awakens is the basis of Ken Liu’s canonical short story collection, The Legends of Luke Skywalker. Released during the run-up to STAR WARS: Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, the collection is centered around an evening of stories told to the young deckhands of a transport barge making its way across the galaxy to Canto Bight.

All told, the collection includes six “legends” about Luke Skywalker. The first revolves around a conspiracy theory that sees Luke and his friends, led by an old con-man named Benny ‘Wiseman’ O’Kenoby, tricking the Republic into using them as weapons in a propaganda war with the Empire. It seems, according to this conspiracy, that there never was a Death Star, that the Emperor made the whole thing up to scare his enemies, but the Republic knew of the secret, so they came up with their own false story about Benny Kenobi and his gang of bandits blowing the Death Star to pieces.

The second story is told from the perspective of a gunner in the Imperial navy whose Star Destroyer crashed during the Battle of Jakku. According to the gunner, Luke Skywalker was singlehandedly responsible for pulling all of the Star Destroyers down from the sky:

He was real, a glowing figure of sorcery and magic. He floated in space, his feet astride the stars, his cape billowing with an arcane power that could not be understood by mere mortals… He was a god playing with toys, except the toys were city-sized structures of steel and held tens of thousands of lives.
— The Legends of Luke Skywalker, p. 79

Crashed on the surface now, the Imperial gunner is rescued by a shadowy figure in a hooded robe. He is convinced the figure is Luke Skywalker, and as the figure drags him through the deserts of Jakku, he worries over the torture he’s about to undergo: how will the wizard, Luke Skywalker, attempt to draw the secrets of the Empire from him?

When they get surrounded, with a crew of other scavengers, by the melted-down reactor cores of the crashed starships, the hooded figure leads them all to safety. The question the reader is left with is: Was the hooded figure, indeed, Luke Skywalker?

The third story takes place on the world Lew’el, where the people “lived by, from, and with the sea.” In The Last Jedi, we watch as Luke Skywalker uses a spear at least fifty feet in length to catch a fish for his dinner. In this third story, we learn how Luke gained his fishing skills.

Like many throughout the galaxy, the people of Lew’el are Force sensitives. A long time ago, they paid the price for their skills, and now they refuse to share their understanding of “the Tide” with outsiders. When Luke shows up, he charms his way into being instructed in the Tide, where he learns to “Trust in the Tide, and do what needs to be done.” But more importantly, he learns that, for the people of Lew’el, there is no “dark side” of the Tide:

We don’t think of the Tide that way. The ebb and flow are phases of one Tide, not two opposed sides. To use the Tide is to pervert it… It is those who seek to master it, to control it—whatever excuse they make up for themselves—who bring suffering.
– The Legends of Luke Skywalker, p. 161 & 163

The fourth legend is narrated by “a construction droid from the Z7 series,” a droid, “designed for the heavy work of digging ditches, cleaning fields, grading terrain, putting up new buildings—everything necessary for civilization to blossom in the wilderness on newly settled planets.” When the droid is captured by slavers, it finds itself in the company of another captive, a “small astromech droid painted in white, silver, and blue.”

The narrator droid ends up getting a chip implanted into it that forces it to become an enforcer for the slaves. It quickly discovers that the astromech, R2-D2 (of course), “refused to do as he was told. I had to deliver shock after shock,” but even with all of that, R2-D2 was “full of defiance.”

Later, a new droid arrives on a slave ship, a humanoid figure with “five red stripes” on its arms (for those who remember, Luke Skywalker’s pilot designation is “Red 5”). The rest of the legend demonstrates Luke’s Force abilities and his charisma as he rescues R2-D2 and thousands of other droids from the slavers.

The fifth story takes the narration in an even weirder direction than a droid. This time, the narrator is Lugubrious Mote, a four-millimeter insect that lives on the fur of Salacious Crumb, the cackling creature that survives on Jabba the Hutt’s lap.

In Lugubrious Mote’s tale, Luke Skywalker only survived his battle with the rancor thanks to Lugubrious’ skill as a puppet master. Riding atop of Luke’s scalp like Remy the Rat in the Pixar film, Ratatouille, Lugubrious whispers fighting tactics into Luke’s ear and bites him on the scalp to steer his actions in a certain direction. The Jedi knight interprets Lugubrious’ instructions not as the voice of an intelligent insect but as the spirit of some long-dead Jedi offering him guidance through the Force.

Lugubrious also accompanies Luke to the sarlac pit, guiding the young Jedi as he defeats Jabba’s guards and rescues Han, Leia, and the others from the Hutt’s clutches. Finding the job of helping Luke too exhausting, Lugubrious retires from the rebellion and takes a job at a circus, where she winds up with her name in lights.

The final legend is told by a young biology student who hitchhiked a ride with Luke Skywalker while conducting fieldwork on two remote planets. Luke was out searching for more information on the Jedi, and together, he and the biologist decided to take a look inside a cave on an asteroid. Unfortunately, it ended up not being a cave, but the inside of “an exogerth…giant, silicon-based creatures that live on asteroids and can grow large enough to swallow starships.”

The inside of the space slug is a world unto itself, with creatures living inside the slug similar to the way bacteria live inside of us. But along with the ecology of the place, Luke discovers a series of glowing letters and carvings that seem to be alive. Entranced by the opportunity to investigate a potential Jedi connection, he and the biologist delve deeper into the slug.

Days or weeks later (it’s difficult for them to keep time in the slug), they discover three statues at an altar, except further investigation reveals the statues aren’t statues at all, but creatures who, despairing at being trapped in the slug, have wrapped themselves in a kind of “time cocoon,” stretching one lifetime into thousands. The arrival of Luke Skywalker, who these creatures call “Bright Heart,” has awakened them to the flow of real time, and in their returned state, they concoct a plan to save Bright Heart from suffering their same fate.

Unfortunately, it requires Luke to sacrifice their lives with his lightsaber. The plan reminds him of the sacrifice Obi Wan Kenobi made, who trusted his life to the Force and allowed Darth Vader to cut him down in order for Luke and the others to escape the Death Star.

After following through with the plan, Luke admits to finally understanding “that accepting the sacrifice of those who love us and share our ideals is the first step to becoming more powerful than we can possibly imagine.”

All told, the six legends of Luke Skywalker add little to the canon of STAR WARS, but they do provide a young adult with a deeper understanding of what it means to be a Jedi knight and how the Force can be interpreted in different ways, much like the diverse cultures on Earth interpret divinity.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this book for adults, but if your pre-teen or teenager is a big fan of Luke Skywalker and STAR WARS, this collection of short stories should resonate with their sense of the Force.

A piece of fiction writing—a short story, for example—has two distinct elements to it. The first we can call synchronic, which means existing at one and the same time; the second is diachronic, which means existing through time.

Or to put it another way, a piece of fiction writing has both structure and flow.

Fiction writers must become artists in both domains, developing aesthetic skills that are akin to a water-slide designer’s. They must build structures that impress upon the intellect, and develop a sense of flow to tickle their reader’s sensations.

The synchronic domain of fiction writing—its structure—usually becomes manifest in the arrangement of a story’s scenes, but in a short story, where the entirety of the text may consist of only one scene, the synchronic domain has to become manifest in something else entirely.

When it comes to short stories, where does the structure come from?

Let’s begin by defining the short story as a narrative text that is intended to provide the reader with a unitary effect. As Edgar Allan Poe wrote in his essay, “The Philosophy of Composition”

I prefer commencing [the composition process] with the consideration of an effect. Keeping originality always in view — for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest — I say to myself, in the first place, ‘Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?’

The structure of a short story, then, comes not from the arrangement of scenes, but from the arrangement of sensations and impressions experienced by the reader, an arrangement designed to leave the reader, at the end of the text, experiencing a unitary effect.

James Joyce said that he wrote his stories with an aim towards providing his reader with the experience of an epiphany. In Stephen Hero, a precursor to the text that became A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, Joyce wrote:

By an epiphany he meant ‘a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.

When Joyce writes, “vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind,” he’s using “vulgar” in its Latin sense, meaning “common and ordinary.” It’s important to note the radical nature of Joyce’s project. His stories try to record the presence of the spirit as it manifests in everyday objects, events, and people.

Joyce continues:

The clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany….I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin’s street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany…

Joyce further explains the process of epiphany via Thomas Aquinas’ theory of beauty, summarizing:

First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.

For Joyce, epiphanies are the result of a structural beauty, which is comprised by the quality of an object’s “integrity, symmetry, and radiance.”

Of course, short story writers can aim at different effects than Joyce’s epiphany, but the success of their project will still be decided by the story’s integrity, symmetry, and radiance.

What do these words mean in the context of the short story?

Aquinas (and Joyce) use “integrity” to speak about an object’s wholeness. When you come across an object in the world, you have to first discern the object from the world around it, which means you have to divide the world into the object and not the object. Sometimes you have to combine several parts to actually perceive the whole, i.e., a chair may be comprised of two arms, a back, a seat, four legs, a handle to lift a footrest, cushions, multiple fabrics, screws, nails, etc., but even then, it is still a chair.

A short story is not a collection of random words on a page, nor a collection of random sentences, settings, characters, events. The parts of a short story must work together to form a whole. This is what it means for a short story to have integrity.

Additionally, integrity implies that nothing extraneous is included in a short story. If some character, event, object, setting, or even a word is not absolutely necessary to the integrity of the whole, then the writer should have enough integrity to excise it from the final draft. By deleting the extraneous, the writer begins to achieve what we’ve called “symmetry.”

Symmetry can only be appreciated through a process of analysis. As Joyce writes, we must “consider the object in whole and in part, in relation to itself and to other objects, examine the balance of its parts, contemplate the form of the object, traverse every cranny of the structure.” Accomplishing this, we can begin to appreciate an object’s symmetry.

Short story writers can use the concept of symmetry to help them decide what needs to come next. When drafting a story, writers are continually faced with the question of the blinking cursor, the question of what should they write now!

One way to find the answer is through symmetry. If the writer knows that her final story must, in some way, achieve symmetry, then she can examine what she’s already written with an eye towards putting it in balance. This balance could require changes to something major, such as the plot, or to something minor, such as the quantity of words the writer uses to describe the physical appearance of her secondary characters; the key is to discover those elements of the text that are out of balance with the others, and to decide if something can or should be done to correct them, whether through deletion or extension.

Symmetry helps the writer to know that her “story” is complete (and by story, I mean “narration of the plot”). When the beginning, middle, and end of the story achieve a kind of symmetry, when every extra scene has been cut and every extra line of dialogue has been deleted, the writer can stop working on the “story” part of her text and start focusing on its “radiance.”

When it comes to short stories (or really, all creative writing), radiance refers to the text’s clarity of vision. When a text is radiant, it lacks a certain fuzziness, a certain murkiness; it shines a clear light into the reader’s imagination and dispels the shadows of ambiguity (this is not to say that a short story can’t be ambiguous, but it is to say that its ambiguities must be radiant).

By placing a value on the radiance of the text, the short story writer ensures that her reader won’t wander lost and alone through a fog of impreciseness. The writer reads through her draft—”traverse(s) every cranny of the structure”—and revises all those instances where she used an imprecise phrase.

For example, where she once wrote “He looked at the woman, his eyes full of determination,” she now writes, “He looked at the woman the way a bull looks at a red cape.” The writer needs the look on her character’s face to radiate in the mind of her reader, but her original phrase, “eyes full of determination” created a murky image at best; the image of the bull is clearer, and it shows the determination rather than tells it.

(In a later draft, the writer may want to improve the phrase by changing it from an analogy to a metaphor, but we don’t need to take that trip with her. Why is a metaphor an improvement over an analogy, you ask? Because analogies create two images in the reader’s mind, requiring the reader to do the heavy work of transferring the qualities of one image onto the aspects of the other; metaphors, on the other hand, impregnate one object with the qualities of another, providing a single image for the reader to examine; a metaphor allows one image to shine with the radiance of another.)

Integrity. Symmetry. And Radiance.

If writers focus on these three aspects of the text, the beauty of their short stories will begin to take shape.

Of course, in the end, short stories will not only be judged by their beautiful structure, but also by the way the spirit of the text rises from the dead pulp and enters into meaningful communion with the reader. If integrity, symmetry, and radiance defines the story’s structure, it is this quality—this quality of rising and communing—that defines the story’s flow.

But we’ll talk about that some other time.