"The Long Sheet" (1941)

I found this William Sansom story in the Weird anthology, where editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer compare it to Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” (also in the anthology). It’s a fair comparison in many ways but the author and novel it more put me in mind of were George Orwell and 1984—maybe that’s the Brit in them as Sansom also hailed from the UK. “The Long Sheet” feels more dispassionate than the Kafka as it breaks down its Sisyphean dynamic. The task assigned here, and the geometric setting, seem more perfectly absurd than the physical cruelties of “Penal Colony.” Wringing out a sheet to complete dryness is not even as possible as this story makes it sound. Sansom surely knew this, thus forcing the reader to understand it’s even worse than it seems. There actually is a narrative arc here—a climax and resolution is reached—even though it is willfully anti-rational. The story numbers the allegorical chambers it conceives 1 to 4, but describes them in this order: 3, 2, 4, 1. There’s a narrative logic to the way they build, but I don’t know why 3, for example, could not have been labeled 1. It feels like something about the power of bureaucracy and totalitarianism to confuse and exhaust with irrationality, which again feels more connected to Orwell. Each of the four chambers has a group of at least five people working on the task (wring out the sheet, at knee-high level, to complete dryness). They are also periodically harassed by things like piped-in steam. It is a miserable situation but that is more understood than felt. The one point where the Kafka story is stronger is that the intolerable absurdity is more directly felt. “The Long Sheet” resembles Germans turning techniques of mass production to death and ultimately genocide. But part of the horror here is that death does not occur. This life goes on and on. I like the story quite a bit. It may be a little too neat and tidy, but that also contributes to the chilly antiseptic air of it. It’s like a dry, anonymous report from a bureaucracy. It qualifies as weird, that slippery term, the same way the Kafka story does, because it’s such a strange thing to imagine in the first place. What society goes to the trouble of creating an installation for this work that is pointless by design, and why? How do people in that society feel about the imprisoned? Do they know at all? What do they know? “The Long Sheet” is a case study in raising more questions than it answers, with the same gray feeling of bureaucracy as Orwell. And to think, Auschwitz was not even yet a thing when this story was written and published.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Story not available online.