Stacy Hardy's Because the Night
By Dr Peter Blair
By Dr Peter Blair
South African Stacy Hardy’s Because the Night (2015), titled after a 1978 Patti Smith track, contains twenty-one mesmerizing tales. Fourteen are under four pages long, including eight under two pages, five of which each fit on one leaf. Interleaved, like after-images, and wrapped around as cover art, are Impressionist photographs by Mario Pischedda: time-lapse traceries of car lights, or haunting glimpses of natural features or manmade structures, some refracted through rain-smeared windscreens, at dusk.
Reading the intercut stories is often like listening-in to the aural collage of ‘fucked up love affairs’ confided to the protagonist of ‘Flatliner’, who works ‘the graveyard shift’ at a university’s Crisis Call Centre. [1] In the eight flashes, six of which have female narrators, break-ups are imminent or recent. The opening story, ‘Pee Sisters’, offers a rare moment of almost-solidarity between young love-rivals urinating in the veld ‘so the boys in the car can’t see’ (p. 1). In ‘Chicken’, a couple’s inability to save a bird they strike while driving home intimates their relationship’s end. (The artwork’s road-trip motif recurs again in ‘Story Sums’ and ‘Vanishing Point’.) Death as metaphor for romance’s demise also dominates the closing story, ‘More Ways to Die’, when a couple hypothetically discuss methods of suicide.
In ‘A Zulu and a Zebra’, reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s reverie ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (1921), the narrator conjures a ‘PreColonial Tableau’ from her bedroom ceiling; when her boyfriend dismisses it as ‘exotica’ (p. 41), her whimsy takes an initially dark turn, into violent zoophilia. Sexual fantasies drive the two third-person flashes: ‘Squirreling’ describes a rejected girlfriend’s ‘adventurous’ masturbation (p. 37); ‘Mind Fuck’ follows a male gaze ‘p-r-y-i-n-g’ into the bodily ‘folds’ (pp. 100, 101) of a woman on a train. Like ‘Arse About Face’, where a prison warder performs an extreme body-cavity search, both hyper-develop somatic-interior conceits with explicit verve, ironically revealing psychological truths.
‘Artichoked’ explores tearful ‘rebound sex’ (p. 29), while in ‘Kisula’ a white woman leaves a ‘Black Consciousness guy’ (p. 33) and flirts with a Congolese security guard. This brilliant flash, which richly resonates with post-apartheid discourses on political transition, transnational migration, and cross-racial sex, epitomizes the collection’s exhilarating evocation of improvised lives-in-progress. Because the Night will leave you subtly unsettled, as all great writing should.
[First published in Flash: The International Short-ShortStory Magazine, 9.2 (Oct. 2016).]
Endnotes:
Reading the intercut stories is often like listening-in to the aural collage of ‘fucked up love affairs’ confided to the protagonist of ‘Flatliner’, who works ‘the graveyard shift’ at a university’s Crisis Call Centre. [1] In the eight flashes, six of which have female narrators, break-ups are imminent or recent. The opening story, ‘Pee Sisters’, offers a rare moment of almost-solidarity between young love-rivals urinating in the veld ‘so the boys in the car can’t see’ (p. 1). In ‘Chicken’, a couple’s inability to save a bird they strike while driving home intimates their relationship’s end. (The artwork’s road-trip motif recurs again in ‘Story Sums’ and ‘Vanishing Point’.) Death as metaphor for romance’s demise also dominates the closing story, ‘More Ways to Die’, when a couple hypothetically discuss methods of suicide.
In ‘A Zulu and a Zebra’, reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s reverie ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (1921), the narrator conjures a ‘PreColonial Tableau’ from her bedroom ceiling; when her boyfriend dismisses it as ‘exotica’ (p. 41), her whimsy takes an initially dark turn, into violent zoophilia. Sexual fantasies drive the two third-person flashes: ‘Squirreling’ describes a rejected girlfriend’s ‘adventurous’ masturbation (p. 37); ‘Mind Fuck’ follows a male gaze ‘p-r-y-i-n-g’ into the bodily ‘folds’ (pp. 100, 101) of a woman on a train. Like ‘Arse About Face’, where a prison warder performs an extreme body-cavity search, both hyper-develop somatic-interior conceits with explicit verve, ironically revealing psychological truths.
‘Artichoked’ explores tearful ‘rebound sex’ (p. 29), while in ‘Kisula’ a white woman leaves a ‘Black Consciousness guy’ (p. 33) and flirts with a Congolese security guard. This brilliant flash, which richly resonates with post-apartheid discourses on political transition, transnational migration, and cross-racial sex, epitomizes the collection’s exhilarating evocation of improvised lives-in-progress. Because the Night will leave you subtly unsettled, as all great writing should.
[First published in Flash: The International Short-ShortStory Magazine, 9.2 (Oct. 2016).]
Endnotes:
[1] Stacy Hardy, Because the Night (London: Pocko, 2015), pp. 117, 118. All further references will be given in the body of the text.
Citation:
Citation:
Peter Blair, ‘Stacy Hardy’s Because the Night’, Notes on Literature: For Readers and Writers, www.notesonliteraturechester.blogspot.co.uk [accessed Day Month Year].
About the Author:
About the Author:
Dr Peter Blair is Senior Lecturer in English, Department of English, University of Chester. He is programme leader of MA Modern and Contemporary Literature.
On BA (Hons) English Literature and BA (Hons) Creative Writing, he teaches/lectures on the modules: South Africa in Literature and Film; Colonial and Postcolonial Literature; Modernism and After; Flash Fiction; An Introduction to Publishing; Dissertation; The Writing Project.
On MA Creative Writing: Writing and Publishing Fiction, he teaches on the modules: Writing Short Fiction for Publication; Getting Published; The Writing Project.
Peter is co-director of the International Flash Fiction Association (IFFA), and co-editor of Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine and Flash: The International Short-Short Story Press.
On BA (Hons) English Literature and BA (Hons) Creative Writing, he teaches/lectures on the modules: South Africa in Literature and Film; Colonial and Postcolonial Literature; Modernism and After; Flash Fiction; An Introduction to Publishing; Dissertation; The Writing Project.
On MA Creative Writing: Writing and Publishing Fiction, he teaches on the modules: Writing Short Fiction for Publication; Getting Published; The Writing Project.
Peter is co-director of the International Flash Fiction Association (IFFA), and co-editor of Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine and Flash: The International Short-Short Story Press.
Wow - you've made me want to seek this one out, Peter! The visual appearance of the volume as you describe it reminds me of Patti Smith's album 'Horses', an impressionistic mindscape which also links sex and death; it's a far more visceral (messier, and better) album than 'Easter' (on which 'Because the Night' appears).
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