Many Dogs, Barking
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Many Dogs, Barking” is a short story by Jan Wildt. It is his first published work. It appeared in abridged form in the speculative-fiction magazine Talebones in 1998. Labeled “unfocused” by a reviewer at Tangent Online, the story is indeed more interesting in concept than in execution, in part because a crucial passage was omitted from the published version.
The unabridged manuscript of the story began with a lengthy epigram from compiler Annie Proulx’s introductory essay to Best American Short Stories 1997 (Houghton Mifflin), lamenting the unoriginality of the vast majority of stories rejected for that volume, and listing 15 themes and elements whose repeated recurrence she found tedious, including “the sensitive watcher-child observing mother’s or father’s adultery,” “banal, folksy one-liner advice given by old dad,” and “many, many barking dogs.”
“Many Dogs, Barking” appears a willful attempt to incorporate Proulx’s entire litany of literary offenses into a single brief story with a minimal number of characters. The science-fictional result is reminiscent of the early Kurt Vonnegut and certainly radically different than anything Proulx might have encountered. Shoehorned into these cramped confines, the shopworn devices mutate and recombine; for example, two completely separate irritants on Proulx’s list, “aged couples featured in photographs taken decades earlier” and “insensitive kids making fun of sensitive kids of different ethnicity,” are embodied in a single relationship between a young man and his half-Arcturan half-sister, which eventually turns incestuous. (The story’s Arcturan invention for storing all human lives on a thumbnail-sized device is perhaps an allusion to this dense-pack methodology.)
The editor at Talebones reportedly preferred the story without the Proulx quote, however, and deleted it in the published version.
“Many Dogs, Barking” contains little of the narrative innovation that marks Wildt’s subsequent work, aside from a wry closing meta-observation about rejected literary manuscripts.
[edit] Notes
The name “Sonja Kowalewski” mentioned in the story is probably intended to refer to 19th-century Russian mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya.
