David, Goliath and the Short Story

This past Monday evening short story author Kristl Franklin asked those of us attending a meeting of The Write Ingredients, "Is the short story dead?" She answered her question with a list of ten reasons why authors ought to write short stories. She implied that the art form is still alive and kicking. But I wonder?

Earlier this year I wrote a Blog that raised the question, "Is the book dead?" The answer is that book reading is definitely on a decline. Even the prestigious New Yorker ran an article to that effect, The Twilight of the Books. That article says that "The Book Industry Study Group estimates that sales fell from 8.27 books per person in 2001 to 7.93 in 2006. According to the Department of Labor, American households spent an average of a hundred and sixty-three dollars on reading in 1995 and a hundred and twenty-six dollars in 2005."

But back to the question. Brad's Reader- all things literature and writing, writes that the short story is a good way to hone one's skills, but that the publishing of short stories is largely open only to recognized authors. He continues, "Nevertheless, I'm afraid the short fiction market is going down the same road that poetry is going down, and will be doomed as a literary exercise for the literary elite. Maybe, just maybe, there is some talented writer out there who can re-invigorate the short fiction form and bring this classic way of entertainment back to the masses."

Can that be? "...doomed as a literary exercise for the literary elite"?

Recently my wife and I viewed the 2007 movie In the Valley of Elah, with Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron and Susan Sarandon. Jones was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor in this movie. The Valley of Elah (1 Samuel 17) was the place where young David met Goliath to kill him with a stone. The story of the movie is about a retired career army non-commissioned officer (Jones) and his wife (Sarandon) working with a police detective (Theron) to uncover the truth behind their son's disappearance following his return from a tour of duty in Iraq. The story is played out against the horror of war in Iraq.

Some comments on the movie suggest that the metaphor of David killing Goliath as applied to this movie is confusing, but I particularly liked one response.

"I thought the metaphor did have a relatively interesting meaning. The David-Goliath story is a heroic myth. It's what we want to believe whenever we go out to war--that we're fighting on the side of right, and that what matters--as TLJ's character tells us--is that we just have to conquer our fear and then we can defeat any evil force. Being "in the valley of Elah" is being tested to the extreme, being at war where there is a chance that your own life could be lost. What is being tested, of course, is how you would act in that situation. Do you act admirably and heroically (as the Biblical story implies that David did)? The movie is a deconstruction of the myth. As we learn, the soldiers in Iraq, regardless of whether they are fighting on the right side or not, do not uphold any honorable code of conduct or standards of just war while fighting. They kill civilians and torture POW's. While they are 'in the valley,' they do not kill monsters but become monsters themselves (as the overused Nietzsche quote goes, 'He who fights monsters must take care lest he become a monster [himself]')."

View the movie. The main character is obviously a Christian and a believer in the truth of the Bible. The Bible is full of short stories. As you can see, these still have influence upon our current culture and popular art forms.