Amihud Gilead, "How few words can the shortest story have?" Philosophy and Literature, 32.1 (April 2008)
How to do the maximum with the minimal number of words, or how to do the best with the minimal or few words, is a key question. Hemingway's story focuses around a tragedy of a great loss, perhaps the greatest possible, the loss of the greatest hope or expectation. By limiting itself to this tragedy, these six words open a wide human world for the readers.* * *
The grief and mourning appear to confine or restrict the world but, in fact, they open it wider. A whole world has been changed because of the loss of one child...* * *
Hemingway's story could not be a poem. It is as if a notice or an advertisement appeared in a newspaper... Nevertheless, Hemingway's six words do not make an advertisement. To do so, some indispensable details are needed, such as the address or the means of communication by which the seller can be reached as well as something about the price of the item. The lack of such details makes these six words commercially useless or impractical yet leaves their artistic value intact. Were these details mentioned, the reader would think that the six words were still artistically put although for a commercial aim.* * *
The tension between the practical aspect of an advertisement and its artistic significance opens an unbridgeable gap. It is the gap between mundane life and a great artistic achievement. This gap is a loss. It embodies the very loss, the unbridgeable gap between grief or misery and real beauty; between real beauty and the mundane world of commerce, advertisements, and innumerable pretty things. The baby is dead; the shoes are for sale; what remains is Hemingway's best story. What remains is the beauty of genuine art.* * *
Science fiction, pulp fiction, and the like need only one's imagination and intellect; that is all. They offer us a game: a puzzle to be solved, something to entertain the reader and not much more. Hemingway's shortest story does not entertain us. It demands much more. It demands the reader's commitment and it does so from the reader as a whole person, not only as an imaginative person or one capable of solving or dissolving puzzles. Without deep emotions, the reader could not get the point in Hemingway's story.* * *
Hence, the best shortest story may contain some thousands of words or more, provided that not even one single word in it is superfluous; rather, each word is indispensable for creating or revealing a whole world. Moreover, the story lacks nothing. As long as such is the case, it does not matter how many words the story contains. Everything that the reader needs is there, waiting for him or her to uncover it.* * *
How many superfluous or missing words may the best shortest story have? My answer is: Not one. Each word in such a story is entirely necessary or indispensable; not one is missing. Six words may be good enough to create or to reveal a whole world of beauty, a cosmos.
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