The Short Story

Ian Reid

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138233713
• eBook ISBN: 9781315308777
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

First published in 1977, this book examines the short story, which is one of the most widely read of all modern genres. The study begins by examining some preliminary problems of definition before going on to trace the emergence of what is usually meant by 'the modern short story' and examine the various kinds of narrative from which it derives, such as the sketch, the yarn, Märchen, parable and fable. The final chapter considers the possibility that there are certain structural properties belonging distinctively to the short story.

This book will be of interest to those studying literature and creative writing.

1

Problems of definition

Critical neglect

Over the last 150 years the short story has come to figure conspicuously in the literature of several countries. Appearing in diverse periodicals as well as in books, it is probably the most widely read of all modern genres, and not only light-weight entertainers but also many distinguished fiction-writers during this period have found it congenial. Yet even now it seldom receives serious critical attention commensurate with that importance. Not until the OED Supplement of 1933 did the term ‘short story’ itself, designating a particular kind of literary product, gain formal admittance into the vocabulary of English readers. Theoretical discussion of the form had begun nearly a century before that tardy christening with some essays by Edgar Allan Poe, but was slow to develop and is still in an immature state. It seems to be impeded especially by problems connected with the popularity of the short-story genre.

Slightness and slickness, for instance, while not invariably resulting from brevity, do often infect the short story when it is adapting itself to market requirements. Magazine publication expanded hugely during the nineteenth century, tending to encourage stereotypes, mannerisms, gimmickry and the like. Consequently critics are sometimes reluctant to take the short story seriously as a substantial genre in its own right. Bernard Bergonzi, for one, thinks that ‘the modern short-story writer is bound to see the world in a certain way’ because the form he is using has an insidiously reductive effect: it is disposed ‘to filter down experience to the prime elements of defeat and alienation.’ More satirically, Howard Nemerov applies these belittling strictures:

Short stories amount for the most part to parlor tricks, party favors with built-in snappers, gadgets for inducing recognitions and reversals: a small pump serves to build up the pressure, a tiny trigger releases it, there follows a puff and a flash as freedom and necessity combine; finally a celluloid doll drops from the muzzle and descends by parachute to the floor. These things happen, but they happen to no-one in particular.

There are indeed many magazine stories that one could justly dismiss in such terms, and it may well be true that even the acme of short fiction hardly matches the greatest novels in depicting the complex and wide-ranging nature of much human experience. Complexity and breadth, however, are not always the most central or interesting features of our lives. Only a naive reader would confuse significance with bulk. The lyric is by no means less potent and meaningful, inherently, than a discursive poem, and the short story can move us by an intensity which the novel is unable to sustain.

Small-scale prose fiction deserves much more careful criticism, theoretical and practical, than it has usually had. It gets elbowed out of curricula at the universities and elsewhere by its heftier relatives, novel, poetry and drama; and of the countless academic journals very few regularly give space to essays on this neglected genre. Good books about the novel are legion; good books about the short story are extremely scarce. Most of those in English were written on the side by practitioners such as H.E. Bates, Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain. Germany has produced numerous scholarly studies of short fiction, but these are frequently impaired by a finicky taxonomic purism which would set the Novelle in contradistinction to the Kurzgeschichte, each regarded as a discrete type, whereas in English usage ‘short story’ is an inclusive concept. The Russian school of formalist criticism, flourishing in the 1920s, generated sound work on theoretical aspects of the short story (notably essays by Boris Eichenbaum and Victor Shklovsky) and of its ancestor the Märchen (Vladimir Propp’s classic account of ‘The Morphology of the Folktale’), but permutations in the genre during the last half-century have outdated some of their findings. Those formalist investigations have recently been extended somewhat by the analytical ‘narratology’ of French structuralists such as Tzvetan Todorov and Claude Bremond, who however have not yet attended closely to any compositional principles which might be said to set the short story apart from the novel.

Protean variety

If on the one hand their popularity has tempted short stories towards the reductive formulae of merchandise, on the other hand it has sometimes encouraged protean variety. The tale-telling impulse is too irrepressibly fecund to be confined within any single narrative pattern. Therefore the history of the modern short story embraces diverse tendencies, some of which have stretched, shrunk or otherwise altered previous conceptions of the nature of the genre. Ideas once proposed as definitive about the proper structure and subject material of the short story have needed revising to meet the facts of literary evolution. For example, nineteenth-century critics frequently insisted on the need for a firmly developed plot design in any ‘true’ short story; this was part of their effort to make the form respectable in terms of current taste, to lift it beyond its lowly origins. Some modern writers have undermined that principle of neat plot-making, both by bringing their fictions back in contact with various prototypical modes and by moving away from narrative techniques used in the novel towards the methods both of poetry (in their language, which is often more figurative and rhythmic than was usual in nineteenth-century prose) and of drama (in their tendency to keep the narrator’s voice out and rely on direct presentation of character and situation).

While it may be a sign of vigour, this variegated development is not conducive to establishing a precise descriptive vocabulary which would satisfy all critics. Yet if perfect consensus is lacking, adequate working definitions are nevertheless possible and helpful provided one recognizes that they must refer to predominant norms rather than all-inclusive categories, to evolving features rather than fixities and definites. At the risk of eroding completely any idea of an essential generic type, a quasi-Platonic form of the short story, we need to be empirically mindful of changes undergone by short prose fiction before and since its widespread acceptance in the Romantic period as a field of serious literary activity. If the New Testament parable, medieval French fabliau, seventeenth-century Chinese p’ing-hua, nineteenth-century American tall tale or recent experimental prose poem are to be regarded as outside the pale, they should still provide reference points for us in delimiting the territory of the short story proper. Accordingly the following chapters will examine some ‘primitive’ and proximate varieties of fiction, and look into the possibility that there may be certain formal properties which distinguish the short story (‘Short-story’, as Brander Matthews and others wanted to call it) from stories that just happen to be short.

When is a story not a story?

The simple term ‘story’ itself needs some preliminary attention. How strictly should one interpret it? Does it imply at least some plot, some sequence of narrated actions, or can a ‘story’ be purely descriptive in a static way?

E.M. Forster once represented himself as saying, in ‘a sort of drooping regretful voice, “Yes – oh dear yes – the novel tells a story”.’ And the short story, we might think, can hardly justify its name if, on a smaller scale, it does not do likewise. Herbert Gold, contributing to an ‘International Symposium on the Short Story’ in the Kenyon Review (XXX.4, 1968), asserts that ‘the story-teller must have a story to tell, not merely some sweet prose to take out for a walk’. That seems reasonable as far as it goes. There remains, however, the fundamental question: what does ‘story’ mean? Few critics deign to examine such a rudimentary concept. We all know (it is ordinarily supposed) what a story is: a recital of events. But what constitutes an event? How many events go to make up a minimal story? Need they all be logically related to one another? Gerald Prince pursues these questions in his recent study A Grammar of Stories, using transformational principles derived from linguistics to account for the nature of tacit rules operating in various kinds of narrative. An event, he remarks, is a structural unit that can be summarized by a sentence of the simple kind which, in linguistic parlance, is the transform of less than two discrete elementary strings. Thus, ‘Adam said that it was all Eve’s fault’ records a single event, whereas ‘Adam blamed Eve, who had initially encouraged him to eat the apple’ records two events, being derived from the transforms of two discrete elementary strings. At any rate, neither of these examples is a story in the proper sense. No story exists, says Prince, until three or more events are conjoined, with at least two of them occurring at different times and being causally linked. Other theorists have made similar observations: Claude Bremond, for instance, calls the requisite group of three events or stages of development une séquence élémentaire. ‘Eve took a bite of the apple and then Adam did so too’: that does not amount to even a skeletal story. But this does: ‘Eve took a bite of the apple and then, at her urging, Adam did so too, as a result of which they became crazy and bit each other.’ Temporal movement and logical linkage are just enough to make it a story, though no doubt insufficient to make it an interesting one.

We might ask in passing why a three-phase action is generally accepted as basic. Prince and others say nothing to explain this; it is adduced axiomatically, since it probably lies (though they do not admit as much) outside the scope of their strictly objective method, in the field of affective aesthetics. There may well be a connection here with Aristotle’s sage remark, in the seventh chapter of his Poetics, that a plot must have beginning, middle and end in order to be a whole. And the same aesthetic pattern is evinced in that incremental trebling of actions which recurs in so many durably appealing tales. Our sense of shapeliness would not be satisfied if the poor woodcutter had only two magic wishes, or if four billy goats gruff crossed the troll’s bridge, or if Goldilocks found five plates of porridge in the bears’ cottage. (Indeed, in the latter story, there are not only three items in each bearish set but three sets too: only after the intruder has tried food, chairs and beds is it timely for the owners to return.) That there are seven dwarfs in Snow White’s tale, that the valiant tailor kills seven flies with one blow – these and other numerical formulae are of a different sort, since they do not produce a structure of incremental narration. And besides, the point is not that a tripartite sequence is invariable in simple stories, just that its frequency seems to support the idea that a deep-rooted aesthetic preference is behind it.

We might also ask how important, or narrow, are the principles of temporal ordering and causal connectivity on which Prince insists. He is not alone in that insistence; most generalizations about the nature of narrative are to the same effect – and beg the same question. Arthur C. Danto, in his Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge, 1965), proposes that ‘narratives are forms of explanation’ (p. 233); accordingly, ‘to tell a story is to exclude some happenings …. Stories, to be stories, must leave things out’ (pp. 11–12). But how much can be left out? For Danto, ‘explanation’ means a delineated pattern of causation, and he expects this to involve a temporal process, a change of situation. Must every story be rationally coherent in those ways? Help with the problem could perhaps have been expected from the contemporary linguists who pursue under such various banners as discourse analysis or Textgrammatik or translinguistique the aim of distinguishing between a succession of sentences which are intelligibly connected and a succession of sentences which are randomly jumbled. But actually this kind of linguistic inquiry proves too inflexible to be applied usefully to literary narrative, which sometimes allows events to become unbonded while still retaining the reader’s interest in the ‘story’. Fiction can be as disjunctive, yet as emotionally compelling, as a weird dream; and not to let ‘story’ cover such cases would be to make the generic category more constricted than some modern story-tellers wish it to be. At a time when the border-lines of definition are in practice shifting outwards, an inclusive theoretical view has to be taken. To begin with, at least, let us regard almost any piece of brief fictional prose as a short story provided that, while it may lack a coherently sequential plot, it retains some clear formal relation to plotted stories. It may for instance present a surrealistic counterpart to any cause-and-effect organization of material, as in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’, Jan Gerhard Toonder’s ‘The Spider’, or Franz Kafka’s ‘Ein Landarzt’. Or it may leave the reader to elicit a plot from disconnected data; Robert Coover’s ‘The Babysitter’ offers a variety of alternative developments from the initial situation, each of these being a more or less credible fulfilment of fantasies in the minds of the characters. There is no defined story of an orthodox sort in ‘The Babysitter’, no single arrangement of happenings in whose actuality the author solicits our conventional belief. But psychological action is certainly there, and we may select a story from the available possibilities if we wish. More subversive still, yet parodically relevant to the tradition of plotted stories, is Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘El jardin de los senderos que se bifurcan’ (The Garden of Forking Paths), which collapses normal distinctions between the veracious and the invented and which itself splits into several incompatible plot-paths so as to undermine the premise of ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Problems of definition
• 2 Growth of a genre
• 3 Tributary forms
• 4 Brevity expanded
• 5 Essential qualities?
• Bibliography
• Index