Poetry and literature are often discussed over tea and wine or to satisfy the noble hobby of profound knowledge and sensitivity to words of a group of scholars and aristocrats. The application of the game principle to creative practice in the current period is no longer a rare case. Accordingly, the game principle becomes a way to control the thinking and text design of the writer. It must be said that the manifestations of the game in contemporary Vietnamese short stories do not have a purely entertaining meaning but show the consciousness of literary innovation, genre innovation by innovating the art of narrative. With the influence of genre thinking, in each genre, the game principle is expressed in different aspects; with poetry being the art of arrangement, novels focusing on structure, in short stories leaning towards the aspects of language, structure and genre.
In contemporary Vietnamese literature, Pham Thi Hoai is the one who introduced the concept of “literature as a game”. The article A Game Without a Trace [67] shows the writer’s concept of the function and purpose of literature. Although it cannot avoid extremism, one can still see the reasonable core of the article, in that the writer’s intention is to liberate literature from non-literary purposes and promote freedom in artistic creation. For the writer, literature is creative, rich in hidden meanings, not easy to decipher but attracts readers to enjoy and recreate. At the same time, writing is participating in a special game – a game with linguistic material, special in that it requires total commitment to creative efforts. She has shown that her works are always new experiments, with a writing style that deviates from the traditional orbit. These works require readers to have a new way of reading, a new knowledge, a new mindset. Reading a work also means that the reader participates in a game, a game of searching and decoding the layers of meaning behind the words, and that can be an endless search.
Examining the game in short stories from the perspective of formal thinking, we can see how the writer's consciousness in writing, aiming to find new ways of expression for literature. Many short stories today are written as a "game" of genre, an experimental exploration of unique forms: there are short letter stories ( The Letter to Mother Au Co - Y Ban), short diary stories ( Ten
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The breaking of genre conventions has made today's short stories rich and diverse. With many short stories today, it can be seen that the writer has broken the previous genre conventions and when reading the work, the reader's habits and experiences are also broken because the author has consciously and practically "played with genre" by creating a work that deviates from the norm.
The game nature in contemporary Vietnamese short stories is also expressed in the structure of the work, in the chaos, disjointedness, fragmentation, and reversal of the order of the elements in the structure (short stories by Pham Thi Hoai, Nguyen Vinh Nguyen). Readers cannot easily receive the work in the usual way of reading, but need to arrange, connect, and assemble events, characters, and fragments (diaries, memoirs, monologues, dialogues), which means they must accompany and participate in the author's game. With the fragmented structure, the work is divided into many segments with separate intervals, situations, and moods, thereby attracting readers to participate in the game of assembling the text from facts, chapters and paragraphs that seem to have no connection in the plot but have internal logic. It would be impossible to receive the short storyTwo small stories that don't know where to attach (Nguyen Vinh Nguyen) if readers still maintain traditional reading habits and experiences. In this short story, the author structured the work by assembling two stories: Story 1: Mono Lisa (a dialogue but actually a monologue between the owner and the customer) and Story 2: Tell me, who are you really ? (the state of "cognitive disbelief" about oneself of the character "I". It is this "assembling" that lures the reader into the process of decoding the work - a way of practicing playing in consciousness to find the layers of meaning hidden behind the words.
With the awareness of approaching the modern artistic thinking of the world, writers have opened a creative trend from considering the author and the work as the center to promoting the role of the reader, considering the reader as a co-creator, the reader is a part of the process from creation to interpretation. Reading a work also means the process of
The reader discovers, searches for, and explains the gaps in the text, and when the reader is confronted with the gaps, familiar cultural norms and codes are likely to be challenged. Turning the work into a text game, where by innovating the writing style and making it strange, the writer has created a space for play, a space of creativity and interpretation. From the writer's fictional ability, the text opens up a space of imagination, which stimulates the reader's interest.
Finding strange elements is also a way of playing in artistic creation. Short stories become games of expression. It can be seen that the meeting point of many contemporary writers (especially young writers) is to seek new possibilities for literature through experiments and strangeness, of which the principle of play is an example. Writers aim for novelty and strangeness in the use of language and in the way of creating texts. This is thoroughly expressed in the structure, use of language and writing style through Nguyen Vinh Nguyen's works from the collection of stories "Five Ten Fifteen Twenty" to "The Wandering Garden" and then "Animals in the City" . For example, in "Aftershock ", Nguyen Vinh Nguyen "played with structure" by combining 5 segments in a short story along with the use of many different language styles (dialogue language, poetic language, narrator's language, foreign languages). The work talks about the geographical aftershocks from the earthquakes in many regions as well as the aftershocks in the human soul before the changes of life and environment. If separated, each segment is just like a short paragraph and it only has meaning when these segments coexist in the story about the shocks of people and the world. It can be seen that the strangeness in the structure of this text is not the way traditional short story authors use. The practice of playing in the art of short stories is also Nguyen Vinh Nguyen's concept of writing style: "writing short stories is a game of hide and seek, searching and establishing new values".
Applying the game principle in short stories will create the surprise of the short story and the openness of the text. The game is first of all the intention of the subject, then asking the reader to participate in the game, accompany, create and interpret.
The game-like nature – a manifestation of formal thinking in contemporary Vietnamese short stories shows the ways in which writers innovate the genre.
It must also be said that the playfulness in contemporary Vietnamese literature is an easily recognizable sign, whether or not the writer intentionally applies the game theories that were once popular in the West to artistic creation. In reality, there are writers who have taken advantage of the advantages of playfulness to build an artistic world that is attractive to readers, but on the other hand, there are also works that are not applied very smoothly, or pay too much attention to formal innovations that turn the work into an "adventure of writing" while not reaching the expressive value, making the work confusing and impossible to grasp. In today's literary life, there are many works that are not serious artistic creations, works of cheap commercial nature, and the element of strangeness is considered a criterion to attract the curiosity of readers. On the contrary, the playfulness as a characteristic of literature must be expressed in the poetics, in the art of narrative aiming to express life issues with profound humanistic meaning. It is a fact that the works of many young writers today tend to seek experimentation. In the art of experimentation, it is necessary, but it is necessary to pay attention to the survival conditions of a short story as well as the reception of French readers in the last decades of the 20th century: "After many decades of being a difficult genre to sell because many authors focused too much on formal innovation, making readers "scared", the French short story gradually regained its position in the 80s because it returned to the story, to storytelling, to the theme" [157, p.41].
2.2.3. Genre interaction in short stories
According to IU.M.Lotman, the movement of genres proceeds along two paths: “The path of movement towards similarity within the given system is conventional, the path of efforts to reform it from within and a rejection of the system as a whole, a need to replace it with something else”. The reality of literary life shows that the core of genres are “artistic models”, more or less of a normative nature.
conventions, have relative and ever-changing meanings. In the new context, encouraged by the innovation of thinking, writers in the process of creation, in terms of genre, on the one hand respect conventional artistic standards, on the other hand, always have the need to escape those conventions by "synthesizing the experiences of two or more other genres to create deviant works". That is, on the one hand, short stories are created with a clear awareness of genre boundaries, on the other hand, many short stories aim to dissolve the constraints of genre conventions .
In today's literary life, the traditional concept of the short story genre has changed with the trend of short stories erasing previously established genre boundaries. In many cases of short stories, the mixing and interaction of genres is considered a "deliberate violation of the rules" by the writer. However: "In the end, going against the rules is only successful under the condition that it comes from the requirements of the story's content, matches that content, and is a closely integrated part of that content"[103].
Observing the practical life of literature and the movement of the short story genre in recent decades, it can be seen that the ability to transform the short story has been applied to the maximum by writers: not only in terms of capacity: the story can be a few pages long (very short story) or twenty or thirty pages, even hundreds of pages ( Tropical Monsoon - Le Minh Khue); innovation in content (with the approach to many issues of life, expanding the creative topics) but also in the diversity in writing techniques, in the mixing and overlapping of genre styles. This can be considered a phenomenon of many genre systems interacting, influencing and penetrating each other to form new genres with dual characteristics of two or more core genres. Surveying Vietnamese short stories from 1986 to the present, it can be seen that three basic trends have emerged: one is the trend of very short stories ; the other is the trend of complex genres ; Third is the tendency to expand the traditional scope of the genre, making short stories closer to novels and having novelistic thinking . With the above tendencies, it can be seen that short stories are having turns on the journey of movement and development.
2.2.3.1. Very short stories – the “new form” of short stories today
As mentioned above, short stories in the process of formation and development always change according to the trend of changing the boundaries of the genre. One of those changes is the trend of shortening, meaning that writers pay special attention to the short nature of the genre. The time when this genre flourished was in the nineties of the last century. This created a phenomenon and was once considered a "new form" in the current short story. Not constrained by the stereotypes of the genre, short story writers have created works in their own way with maximum restraint in language.
Very short stories, in English, are called by many names: short-short story, minute long story, postcard fiction, skinny fiction, pocket-size story, palm size story. In China, they are also called "extremely short stories" or "micro-form novels" in relation to the genre "short stories". Although they have many different names, very short stories are characterized by their shortness (usually 1000 words), their conciseness, their conciseness, and their evocativeness.
According to Dang Anh Dao, the origin of the very short story genre (also known as mini short story ) in the world appeared several centuries before us. Many master short story writers in the world wrote very short stories such as Kafka, Hemingway, O. Henrry, Kawabata,... In China, in 1984, the Microform Novel Selection magazine was published simultaneously from the early 80s, very short stories were also of interest to writers and researchers. In Vietnam, there had been works written in the form of short paragraphs before, but it only became a trend in the 90s of the last century. Writing very short stories is one of the methods that short story writers choose today, and it is also a way to interact with readers in a new context. Very short stories require readers to have the ability to co-create, because one of the characteristics of very short stories is polysemy. On the other hand, there is also an opinion that: the proliferation of very short stories is to respond to the decline in the concentration ability of today's readers, the psychology
impatience in readers. Writer Y Ban - a famous author of short stories, recently released a collection of very short stories Hey, really, have you seen anything yet ? When asked why he switched to writing very short stories, the writer replied: "I have been writing these mini stories for about two years now, along with short stories. Writing mini stories does not take much time, sometimes I write several at once. It seems that mini short stories are a strength for both writers and readers" [6]. Not only in literature but also in other art forms such as theater and cinema, there are changes following this trend, such as short films and experimental theater. In literature, if the short story appears in the form of very short stories, the novel is a trend of short novels with a series of novels that have attracted public attention: Thien Than Tan Hoi (Ta Duy Anh), Tam Ban Phong Dao (Mac Can), Va Khi Tro Bui (Doan Minh Phuong), Paris 11/8, Chinatown (Thuan),... The trend of writing shorter, the act of writing very short, existing in literary life, on the one hand, belongs to the writer's style, on the other hand, it has shown changes from the creative subject: writing short is a way of innovation and this is indeed a counterbalance to the trend of writing novels and long short stories in tradition. At the same time, writing short is also to meet the receptive psychology of a part of readers in the new context.
When writing very short stories, the problem is that with the limited number of sentences, the writer needs to invest in the art of writing so that the work has the power of compression and the power of spreading. Writing a good short story is difficult, writing a good very short story is even more difficult. The writer must pay attention to the criteria of condensation, brevity, symbolism, and suggestiveness, which means "the writer must increase the amount of information with the art of implication" (Dang Anh Dao). Commenting on very short stories, Le Ngoc Tra said: "It is true that a very short story is still a short story, it has quite all the characteristics of a short story as a genre. But a very short story is different from a short story in general not only in that it is shorter and has fewer words, but also in that its resonance seems to be clearer. This is also easy to understand, where there is more condensation, there is more resonance, where there is more compression, there is more power of expansion and spread" [106, p.123 -
124]. Here, it is not entirely the writer's manual work of shortening the page, but the art of constructing the work, the arrangement, the arrangement of situational details, the art of structure, the portrayal of characters... so that the artistic value is maximized, so that within a limited framework, the writer can convey many ideas and bring many aesthetic emotions to the reader. Also because of its compactness, condensation and richness of suggestion, very short stories also contain both poetic and dramatic elements.
In contemporary Vietnamese literary life, there was a time when the very short story genre flourished. The very short story writing contest organized by The Gioi Moi magazine in 1993 and 1994 had nearly 5,000 short stories submitted. Also in this contest, many names were established such as Ly Thanh Thao, Pham Song Hong, Truong Quoc Dung, Phan Thi Vang Anh, especially after the contest, writers specializing in this genre appeared, typically Pham Song Hong, Phan Thi Vang Anh. Phan Thi Vang Anh's stories are often dialogues mixed with feelings about life through the inner world of the characters and are very short, in the literal sense of the word, for example: Visiting Father (3 pages), Extra Class at the Monastery (4 pages), Teacher (3 pages), One Day (3 pages), Summer Vacation, Last Day of School (4 pages), Late Flowers (4 pages). After winning the prize in the 1994 Very Short Story Writing Contest with the short story Sweet Orange, Pham Song Hong continuously released to readers 3 very short story collections : Quiet Areas, Righteousness and The Sound of the Bottom . In recent years, although not appearing as a trend, very short stories still quietly flow in the stream of literary life.
In contemporary literary life, there have been many excellent short stories, such as Hoa ruoi (Phan Thi Vang Anh), Cam ngot (Pham Song Hong), Khach thuong ho (Hao Vu), Duong Tang (Truong Quoc Dung). The concept of form as content is very true in the case of Hoa ruoi by Phan Thi Vang Anh. Writer Nguyen Ngoc commented on the very short story: "What is commonly called content does not lie, does not mainly lie in the story, but in how the story is told, that is, in... form" [115]. With a short length, no more than 1000 syllables, with only a few characters, appearing in a period of time