The Short Story

A Critical Introduction

Valerie Shaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317872771
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

Throughout this text, Valerie Shaw addresses two key questions: 'What are the special satisfactions afforded by reading short stories?' and 'How are these satisfactions derived from each story's literary techniques and narrative strategies?'. She then attempts to answer these questions by drawing on stories from different periods and countries - by authors who were also great novelists, like Henry James, Flaubert, Kafka and D.H. Lawrence; by authors who specifically dedicated themselves to the art of the short story, like Kipling, Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield; by contemporary practitioners like Angela Carter and Jorge Luis Borges; and by unfairly neglected writers like Sarah Orne Jewett and Joel Chandler Harris.

Chapter 1

‘Only Short Stories’: Estimates and Explanations

A short-story writer can try anything. He has tried anything – but presumably not everything. Variety is, has been, and no doubt will remain endless in possibilities, because the power and stirring of the mind never rests. It is what this power will try that will most pertinently define the short story. Not rules, not aesthetics, not problems and their solution. It is not rules as long as there is imagination; not aesthetics as long as there is passion; not success as long as there is intensity behind the effort that calls forth and communicates, that will try and try again.

(Eudora Welty)

‘It will always be one of the darkest mysteries to me’, wrote Kipling to the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward in 1896, ‘that any human being can make a beginning, end and middle to a really truly long story.’ With his own abilities and limitations very much in mind he went on to elaborate the remark:

I can think them by scores but I have not the hand to work out the full frieze. It’s just the difference between the deep-sea steamer with twelve hundred people aboard, beside the poor beggars sweating and scorching in the stoke-hold, and the coastwise boat with a mixed cargo of ‘notions’.¹

Kipling’s imagery here conveys a view of the novel as a gallant enterprise dignified by toil and hazard, in comparison with which his own endeavours seem pitifully frail and cautious. Despite his achievement as a short-storywriter, Kipling clearly regretted that ‘the full frieze’ of long fiction, with all its reminiscences of epic breadth, was beyond his powers. It is a regret which no admirer of Kipling’s work would share, but it can be taken as typical of the disparaging attitude frequently shown towards the short story.

Comment on the short story has tended to be either rueful or patronizing, even among writers who have proved themselves experts in the form. V. S. Pritchett’s admission that he finds stories and essays the most congenial forms to work in, because he is ‘a writer who takes short breaths’, actually echoes Zola’s stem remark that Maupassant would have to produce a novel, ‘une oeuvre de longue haleine’, in order to fulfil the promise shown in his first collection of stories.² The widespread notion that unless it can be seen as useful apprentice work for budding novelists, short-storywriting must be a compromise of some sort is even more starkly evident in Katherine Mansfield’s reaction to a friendly enquiry about her work: ‘What do you do in life?’ she was asked.

‘I am a writer’

‘Do you write dramas?’

‘No’. It sounded as if she were sorry she did not.

‘Do you write tragedies, novels, romances?’ I persisted, because she looked as if she could write these.

‘No’, she said, and with still deeper distress; ‘only short stories; just short stories.’

Later on she told me she felt so wretched at that moment she would have given anything if she could have answered at least one ‘yes’ to the ‘big’ things.³

Both participants in this conversation are in no doubt about what the ‘big things’ are – dramas, tragedies, even romances. Compared with these, short stories seem flimsy, calling for apology rather than pride, and subduing the firm announcement ‘I am a writer’.

That publishers also prefer ‘big things’ is often proposed as one reason for the comparative neglect of the short story. Apparently, if it takes ability to become a published storywriter at all, then strong determination is needed to remain one: the writer has to resist what Katherine Anne Porter describes as ‘the trap’ waiting for ‘every short-story writer of any gifts at all’ – the novel which ‘every publisher hopes to obtain’.⁴ Having discovered that his talent is for brief narratives written at full pitch and intensity, the writer, so Porter insists, has to defy the common expectation that his abilities will be all the more powerfully displayed in the roomy spaciousness of a full-length novel. In fact, far from welcoming the chance to expand and elaborate, the committed short-storywriter is likely to flinch at the prospect, as, for example, did A. E. Coppard. Urged by publishers to write a novel, Coppard ‘cringed from the awful job of hacking out mere episodes into epic stature, draping the holes in them with bogus mysticism, factitious psychology, and the backchat of a paperhanger’.⁵ Wildly distorted as a general description of novel-writing this most certainly is, but it does demonstrate vividly how Coppard would have conceived his task had he succumbed to persuasion, and sacrificed his need ‘to see all round and over and under my tale before putting a line of it on paper’.⁶ Wisely, he did not tackle a long composition, realizing that ‘within my limitations there was no need for me to do any such thing, no point in stretching and inventing’.⁷

Coppard’s belief, based on his own experience, that the short story is a totality which the writer as it were ‘possesses’ before he writes the first sentence is shared by many practitioners of the form. Katherine Anne Porter too has stated that, ‘If I didn’t know the ending of a story, I wouldn’t begin’.⁸ Her story-endings are not only foreseen, they are fixed points to steer by: ‘I always write my last lines, my last paragraph, my last page first, and then I go back and work towards it.’⁹ Similarly, Katherine Mansfield proposed that, ‘once one has thought out a story nothing remains but the labour’.¹⁰ Despite widely different cultural backgrounds – Coppard a working-class Englishman; Porter an American Southerner and Mansfield a New Zealander – all of these twentieth-century writers recognize the short story as a distinctive form with its own methods of construction. In this they were anticipated by Chekhov, who in 1889 had asserted that, ‘the short story, like the stage, has its own conventions’, its own need to ‘concentrate for the reader an impression of the entire work’ at the end.¹¹

The argument that the novel and the short story are separate entities which share the same prose medium but not the same artistic methods is crucial to an understanding of short fiction, but it was slow to gain currency, particularly in Britain. Only towards the end of the nineteenth century, when in fact all branches of literature and the arts were becoming acutely self-conscious, did people begin to acknowledge that short fiction might be shaped according to its own principles. Importantly, the practice of the form in a deliberate way coincided with the early stages of short-story theory; writing short stories and discussing them were aspects of a single exciting situation, as H. G. Wells proclaimed when he described the 1890s as the heyday of the short story. Everyone was discussing short stories in the nineties, Wells recalled, and that gave anybody who was writing them prestige and stimulation: ‘People talked about them tremendously, compared them, and ranked them. That was the thing that mattered’.¹² But although the short story in the nineties became, as Wells’s rival Henry James put it, ‘an object of almost extravagant dissertation’, there was little inclination to apply the new term ‘short story’ to indigenous products that had been around for centuries.¹³ This places the genre in a rather curious position. Whereas, for example, the German label ‘novelle’ came considerably later than the well-established practice of the form, an aesthetic for the British short story seemed to develop simultaneously with the genre itself, label and object emerging alongside one another.¹⁴

One of the lingering consequences of the late nineteenth-century emphasis on discussion as somehow authenticating the storywriter’s activity, has been exaggeration of both the newness and the autonomy of the short story. Perceiving aesthetic differences between novels and short stories can easily turn into separating their destinies, which is not the same thing at all. Although Wells’s thrill at the attention given to short fiction for its own sake might suggest otherwise, the development of the short story has always been bound up historically with the state of the novel. What has altered is the nature of the relationship: whereas in the eighteenth century short fiction consistently treated the same subjects as novels, the modern short story tends to reflect the diversity of ‘component parts’ into which Mary McCarthy saw the novel dissolving in 1960 – ‘the essay, the travel book, reporting on the one hand, and the “pure” fiction of the tale, on the other’.¹⁵ Furthermore, discussion of the short story in late Victorian England was only one subsidiary element in a far wider debate in which writers like Wilde, James and Conrad were exploring immense questions about the artist’s role in a fragmenting and increasingly secular society. The rise of the short story in England is closely linked with the emergence of the characteristic figure of the modern artist, and with anti-Victorianism in its widest sense; in the atmosphere of the 1880s and 1890s it was simply inconceivable that short fiction should not have been talked about. Admittedly, when discussion focused on the part fiction could and should play in a changing world, it was the novel, not the short story, which attracted controversy. So much so, in fact, that the American critic Brander Matthews (himself a writer of short stories) was moved to protest against English complacency and grumble that the London debaters were ignoring the short story, a form pioneered by his compatriots and already supreme in American literature for half a century.

In 1884 Brander Matthews made his claim that the short story deserved as much theoretical attention as Henry James and Walter Besant, among others, were giving to the novel, and for years afterwards he worried away at the topic, publishing several versions of what became in 1901 The Philosophy of the Short-story. Dignifying the ‘Short-story’ with a capital letter and a hyphen, Matthews argued that the dominance of the three-decker novel had ‘killed the Short-story in England’, while in France and America conditions had favoured the development of short fiction which was different in kind, not merely in length, from the novel.¹⁶ There was a nationalistic side to Matthews’s purpose, and this led him into some exaggerated contrasts between the Old World and the New. He asserted that, whereas the native American novel had been positively helped into existence by the short story, ‘there is not a single British novelist whose reputation has been materially assisted by the Short-stories he has written’; it was a remark Matthews realized he should modify after reading Kipling and Stevenson.¹⁷ All the same, Matthews was making a convincing point when he noted that English writers of the late nineteenth century lacked a tradition of storytelling as a distinct literary art, and that the main reason for this was the supremacy of the Victorian novel.

The shortage of precedents for treating the short story as a separate genre was, however, more intelligently acknowledged by writers working in England than Matthews suggested. For Henry James, the principal comparison was not with America, but with Europe. While admitting that Hawthorne, Poe and Bret Harte had given the ‘short tale’ eminence in America, James saw France as ‘the land of its great prosperity’.¹⁸ To James, a writer like Maupassant was to be envied the quick-witted public he could rely on to get the point of his brief tales: in contrast, ‘the little story is but scantily relished in England, where readers take their fiction rather by the volume than by the page, and the novelist’s idea is apt to resemble one of those old-fashioned carriages which require a wide court to turn rou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgement
• 1. ‘Only short stories’: estimates and explanations
• 2. ‘A wide margin for the wonderful’: Robert Louis Stevenson
• 3. ‘Artful’ narration: from the sensation story to the scenic method
• 4. ‘Artless’ narration
• 5. ‘Glanced at through a window’: characterization
• 6. Places and communities
• 7. Subject-matter
• 8. ‘The splintering frame’
• Bibliography
• Index