The Singing Fish, Peter Markus’ 88-page collection of evocatively strange, beautiful and brutal flash fictions involving two brothers living by the banks of a muddy, magical river, quickly discards conventional form and narrative structure, creates a mythical landscape built by mud and hammers, and employs a language that is superficially sparse and recurrent yet melodiously deep.
The repetition of phrases, events, and even plotlines in Markus’ book endows the stories with a relentless rhythm, a musicality usually found in a verse or prose poem format. The short and often sharply punctuated sentences drive the reader on a staccato march towards the same muddy river, the same brothers, the same Girl, and the same brutal domestic revelations at the end of many of the stories. The child-like simplicity and recurrent nature of the prose create many instances that are at once sonically pleasing and melodically infectious. In “Guts,” for example, the simple act of fishing becomes an almost painfully deliberate ritual performed in a minor key that is at once primordial and catchy:
“We take turns reeling in.
We take turns baiting the hook.
We take turns setting the hook.
One by one, the fish come in.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.”
This obsessive and oftentimes neurotic style is exactly what draws the reader into the text. The words flow like incantations, like pop songs whose choruses and verses blur together to form a mesmerizing hum with no defined beginning or end. In “The Fish That Walked on Water,” the language is almost onomatopoeic, as the reader is presented with the gritty sights and smells of a filthy river: “We were both of us brothers ripping off hunks from the moon with the muddy-clawed hammers that were our fists.”
The timeless and cyclical nature of the stories recalls the oral tradition of storytelling prevalent throughout much of human history, in which the storyteller would create an experience, in a lyrical and repetitive manner, with the audience, in turn, grasping the message and creating personal mental images from the words heard and the gestures seen. The sounds pounded the ears of listeners until, their psyches penetrated, they became, in effect, co-framers of the melodic spoken art. This effect may not be as salient in Markus’ book, but the prose still beckons the reader towards the mud, to become baptized in the river, to become privy to some small part of the ulterior knowledge that the brothers seem to possess. Although the stories are presumably told by one of the brothers in the first person, the abundant use of the words and phrases “we” and “us brothers” and the fact that the narrator virtually never refers to himself in the singular, seems to allude to the idea of a collective conscience, not an interior monologue, evoking the notion that all the major characters, especially the two brothers, are necessary, not just to each story’s plot, but also to its telling.
The Singing Fish not only opens the debate for which facets of a collection (the narrative, the characters, the style of prose) make its stories well-written, enjoyable, and intellectually engaging, but it also opens the debate for what exactly constitutes a work of fiction. Markus’ stories have been widely published in recent years, and sections of his two larger collections (The Singing Fish; Good, Brother) have appeared in a wide array of electronic and print publications, some devoted exclusively to short fiction and others devoted exclusively to prose poetics.
The inside cover of the book refers to these tales as “fictions,” yet the rhythmic writing style creates a stream of consciousness that seems more in line with many contemporary prose poems. All but three of the sixteen stories appear in block format, without paragraph breaks or breaks for dialogue; this structure also contributes to the rapid, sensory-oriented imagery scattered throughout the text, another common characteristic of prose poems. At first glance, the paragraph divisions in “Guts” and “Boy: Revisited” even look and read like poetic line breaks.
However, in order to classify a work of literature, to determine whether that work succeeds in the context of its form, it seems important to look beyond mere aesthetics. In his theory of narratology, or the study of narrative structure in fiction, the Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov states that, in addition to other literary elements, a short story or novel must contain a set of coherent actions that work towards achieving some artistic or emotional effect, an effect, for Todorov, not as important in the context of a poem or film. Each individual story in The Singing Fish follows a clear narrative path, with the same juvenile narrator relating events that follow a logical progression (allowing for some suspension of disbelief) from beginning to end, with few dissociative leaps in syntax. Little, if any, plot development occurs from story to story, though, and each story’s order in the text is interchangable. The actions of the brothers may differ slightly in each vignette, but the images of the river, fish, mud, Girl, and a sinister father figure are constant and make reading the collection in its entirety a bit tedious at times.
Nearly half of the stories end with one of the brothers or their father hammering a nail into one of the brothers’ hands, then some form of the phrase, “I lined up that rusted nail.” The overall plot does not develop beyond this recurring event (the first and last story in the collection end with the same aforementioned line), and, in my opinion, the cyclical nature of the book does not allow for any profound emotional effect at the conclusion.
What sets Markus’ work apart from that of contemporary writers is not its repetitive nature or its genre-bending tendencies, but how its bizarre yet gratifying language sucks the reader into his riverine world to showcase an unconventional landscape that at first feels strange, but quickly feels appropriate in the context of the fables: “This fish was the biggest of the big-lipped fishes that us brothers ever fished from out of this fishy river that runs through this fishy river town.” Ultimately, each story’s success lies in the sounds emanating from Markus’ unique verbal instrument.
