Constructing Coherence in the British Short Story Cycle

Patrick Gill, Florian Kläger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351382137
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

The first major collection of essays on the contemporary British short story cycle, this volume offers in-depth explorations of the genre by comparing its strategies for creating coherence with those of the novel and the short story collection, inquiring after the ties that bind individual short stories into a cycle. A section on theory approaches the form from the point of view of genre theory, cognitive literary studies, and book studies. It is followed by investigations of hitherto neglected aspects of the generic tradition of the British short story cycle and how they relate to the contemporary outlook of the form. Readings of individual contemporary cycles, illustrating the form's multifaceted uses from the presentation of sexual identities to politics and trauma, make up the third and most substantial part of the volume, placing its focus squarely on the past decades. Unique in its combination of a focus on the literary traditions, politics and markets of the UK with a thorough examination of the genre's manifold formal and thematic potentials, the volume explores what is at the heart of the short story cycle as a literary form: the constant negotiation between unity and separateness, collective and individual, of coherence and autonomy.

1 Introduction

Constructing Coherence in the British Short Story Cycle

Patrick Gill and Florian Kläger

While not nearly as comprehensively researched as other literary forms, the short story cycle has undeniably, over the past fifty years, received its share of critical attention. From Forrest Ingram’s Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century: Studies in a Literary Genre (1971) and Susan Garland Mann’s The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide (1989) to James Nagel’s The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle (2001), J. Gerald Kennedy’s Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities (1995), and Elke D’hoker and Gert Van den Bossche’s special issue of Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties entitled “Cycles, Recueils, Macrotexts: The Short Story Collection in a Comparative Perspective” (2014), every decade has seen the publication of a major study on the form, and every one of these studies favours certain methodological approaches. Thus, Ingram’s book incorporates specimens from several different literary traditions and endeavours to foreground the defining features of the form based mostly on putative authorial intention. Also proceeding from the vantage point of authorial intention, Mann introduces a more formalist understanding of the short story cycle in her book, while her focus is clearly on Irish and American writers of the twentieth century. Nagel not only synthesizes and updates methodological interests on display in earlier studies, but also introduces a clear thematic focus in terms of the geographical and historical provenance of the texts he is interested in. A number of arguments against these earlier critics, whose interest is by and large in the idea of cohesiveness and formal homogeneity in short story cycles, are fielded by Kennedy in the introduction to his edited collection, as well as by Robert Luscher in his essay “The Short Story Sequence: An Open Book” (1989). Their primary fascination with the short story cycle is based on the form’s openness and the way it relies on readers to discern patterns and activate meanings. Indeed, to critics from Timothy C. Alderman to Rolf Lundén, the short story cycle is fundamentally characterized by this “friction” between “centripetal” and “centrifugal narrative forces” (Lundén 49–50). As D’hoker and Van den Bossche affirm in the introduction to their comparative journal issue tracing “linked stories” (8) in different national traditions, this tension between the part and the whole is not just a feature of the short story cycle itself, but has also arisen as the focus of extensive critical debate (9).

Many of the debate’s central issues are rehearsed, with authority, by one of its main protagonists in Elke D’hoker’s chapter in this volume. Crucially, D’hoker stresses that none of the above features identified by critics of the short story cycle as productive of its generic identity are exclusive to this form: they clearly lend coherence and unity to any longer narrative, or – when missing or weakly marked – signal the absence of coherence and unity. If coherence in the short story cycle derives from authorial intention, thematic foci, formal cohesion, or the ‘writerly’ participation of readers, how is the function of these features enhanced by use in this form, rather than in a novel or other longer narrative genres? Is there anything specific about their use in the short story cycle? Does the form, through these properties, lend itself to the negotiation of particular topics and concerns more readily than to others? In exploring these questions, the present volume makes use of the concept of the ‘affordances of form’ recently introduced into literary studies by Caroline Levine. She argues, in Forms, that “[r]ather than asking what artists intend or even what forms do”, we might usefully inquire instead after the affordances that “lie latent – though not always obvious – in aesthetic and social arrangements” (6–7), ready to be activated by creative users (be they authors or readers). Just as the material of glass “affords transparency and brittleness” (6), we might view the short story cycle as potentially ‘affording’ both centrifugalism and centripetalism, and the tension between them. Other potentials available to be exploited to a greater or lesser degree include the performance of individual or collective agencies and the highlighting of certain thematic, spatial, or symbolic arrangements (or ‘organizing principles’ as defined by Dunn and Morris, 14–16) enabling, but also constraining such agencies. The specific combination of these affordances is what produces the form of the short story cycle, and it highlights both its potentials and constraints. It is easy to see, for instance, that these affordances are shared by ‘imagined communities’ of various types, which might also experience centripetal and centrifugal forces, competing attempts at making sense of them and finding common denominators by reference to certain shared features in time, space, or myth. Prominent examples of critical engagements with just such communities of shared fates and identities include the 2007 collection Narratives of Community: Women’s Short Story Sequences, edited by Roxanne Harde, and Maria Löschnigg’s 2014 monograph, The Contemporary Canadian Short Story in English: Continuity and Change. As short story cycles privilege certain potential affordances in particular ways, they can suggest the relative purchase or legitimacy of one criterion over the others with regard to social forms, as well. Thus, Löschnigg, for instance, explores the functions of narrative voice, perspective, and polyphony as “structuring device[s]” (256) differentiating between narratives of individual lives and ‘cycles of migration’. Sandra Zagarell, in Harde’s collection, stresses that alongside more positive factors for social cohesion, a sense of community can also arise from exclusion and suffering, and can even “reproduce forms of intolerance” (434). As one ‘affordance’ of the genre, the organizing principles held up for scrutiny in short story cycles thus lend themselves to exploring the origins, processes, and consequences of community-fashioning. The specific functions these affordances assume in various historical and social contexts are the topic of many of the chapters that follow.

While not primarily interested in further extending extant taxonomies or exactly locating individual specimen volumes on a spectrum, the present volume will use three terms to distinguish various degrees of integration where necessary: the term ‘short story collection’ will be used to denote a retrospectively curated collection of previously written stories by one or more authors; the term ‘short story cycle’ will designate a book of autonomous short stories “so linked to each other … that the reader’s successive experience on various levels of the pattern of the whole significantly modifies his experience of each of its component parts” (Ingram 11); and the term ‘composite novel’ will be used with reference to books divisible into separate diegetic units but featuring a higher degree of integration than the cycle through a shared chronology or other clearly foregrounded telos. Obviously, these are relative rather than categorical distinctions, and so their usefulness in absolute terms may be limited. In fact, some of the contributors to this volume have chosen to discuss books originally labelled one thing in terms of quite another, which neatly illustrates the permeability of this basic taxonomy. And while some terminological clarity is necessary, it is not the intention of the present volume to quibble with, modify, or buttress extant taxonomies. Rather, its aim is to situate ‘cyclicity’ and the coherence that produces it on various levels that would fuse theories focusing on formal unity and ‘organization’ (e.g., of character, setting, motifs, as in Ingram, Mann, and Dunn and Morris) with those more interested in formal openness and sequentiality (Luscher, Kennedy; cf. also Smith, and March-Russell 103–105).

In their recent survey of the genre of the short story cycle, D’hoker and Van den Bossche helpfully contrast two research approaches to the short story cycle that could be said to differ in their attitudes towards coherence. One inquires after generic traditions and prototypical features and thus, the ‘what’ or the forms of coherence on the level of genre theory; the other is interested rather in ‘coherence effects’ of a wider, potentially intermedial, relevance and thus, the ‘how’ or functions of coherence. In both of these senses, the term ‘coherence’, otherwise of limited critical currency in literary studies, serves us here as an index of the various ‘ties that bind’ the short story cycle into something distinct from its constituent stories. As in linguistics, the term foregrounds semantics over grammar and implies that the textual whole presents a number of propositions that may be usefully viewed in relation to each other. While there is certainly no strict requirement, as in philosophical logic, for “freedom from self-contradiction” (Rescher 5), the sense of coherence is certainly heightened by that freedom. Thus, ‘coherence’ suggests both the idea of gestalt and the concept of the ‘whole’ that has been the subject of much formalist criticism and (especially in recent decades, during formalism’s eclipse by other approaches) opprobrium for its pernicious effects (see Bogel 59–101). As Levine succinctly puts it, “[t]he valuing of aesthetic unity” has been taken to imply, by anti-formalists, “a broader desire to regulate and control – to dominate the plurality and heterogeneity of experience” (25). However, it is also true that “we cannot do without bounded wholes: their power to hold things together is what makes some of the most valuable kinds of political action possible at all” (27). In his book on translation, Douglas Hofstadter cites an ‘odelet’ by James Falen:

Every task involves constraint,
Solve the thing without complaint;
There are magic links and chains
Forged to loose our rigid brains.
Structures, strictures, though they bind,
Strangely liberate the mind.
(Hofstadter 272)

It is in this spirit that we approach coherence, viewing it as the means to creating, through the imposition of certain constraints, a short story cycle’s ‘cyclicity’ or added value beyond its individual constituents. It is a structure offered up beyond the individual stories that suggests they ought to be viewed in concert in a particular way – readers are asked to take a larger perspective, but one that is not arbitrary (hence, it is also a stricture for authors and readers). Coherence emerges from this also as a potential effect of cyclicity held up for critical reflection, because the effects of coherence-making are by no means limited to creating ‘well-wrought urns’ and suggesting an essential harmonious or monolithic centre to the work of art. As a number of contributors to this volume illustrate, a key effect of leading readers to expect coherence – by a set of conventionalized signals afforded by the genre of the short story cycle (perhaps similar to what linguists call ‘cohesive devices’) – is to highlight a tension between the parts of a supposed ‘whole’, to stage centrifugalism as well as centripetalism. As readers struggle to perceive expected coherence, they are made to reflect on the very process of creating unity through meaning.

This also raises the question of agency, so prominently featured in critical discourse on the short story cycle. Criticism on the genre has focussed extensively on authors and readers as sites for the production of coherence. For the purpose of this volume, we propose two additional sites that might be seen as special instances of these: first, towards the authorial end of the spectrum, the agency of publishers and the dynamics of the literary market; and second, the literary scholar as a special kind of reader. It is quite obvious that we, as critics, need to account for our own observer bias as we study the short story cycle. Genre and structure emerge from coherence-making efforts, not only of the elusive ‘general reader’, but in particular of the scholar. In looking for formal criteria of cyclicity and coherence, we must avoid, as far as possible, arriving at forgone conclusions: as Lundén reminds us, “we as critics and scholars try to create gestalts in order to unify texts” that may not necessarily be (otherwise) “intended to be completely homogenized” (49). Certainly, to look for coherence between constituent parts means to view the cycle as the sum of those parts, rather than as a gestalt in and of itself. However, we would argue that gestalt can also be seen as one possible formal effect of coherence and that in fact, this is precisely what the short story cycle encourages its readers to do. It is our conviction that, as a genre that self-consciously yokes together pieces of writing that, by definition, might also stand for themselves, the short story cycle stages and self-consciously performs this tension between gestalt and multi-part ‘whole’. We suggest that the ‘gestalt shift’ between these two – between homogeneous, ‘natural’ organism and heterogeneous, ‘artificial’ machine, if these metaphors are permitted – is a key effect of cyclicity as we understand it. Readers are asked to progressively contextualize each individual constituent story within the wider frame of the cycle while also, at the same time, revising their idea of the cycle itself in a self-conscious performance of the hermeneutic circle.

On a meta-critical level, moreover, short story cycles remind us of the similarity between the critical activity of describing genre and the hermeneutic activity of readers being triggered to seek, and then produce, coherence and ‘cyclicity’. Critics of genre look for structures emerging from separate units, as do readers of individual specimens. However, there is a key difference in that short story cycles have authors, while genres do not – agency is redistributed from author to reader.

Undoubtedly, a demand for forms reflecting this dual view of separation and connectedness has existed for quite a while. This is reflected in the popularity of other artistic genres and modes of expression inviting their audience to seek out coherence between individual items. Across media, such constituent items are arranged (potentially) to form a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, inviting readers to (co-)create coherence from their configuration. Examples of such forms include the classical symphony and the pop music album of the latter half of the twentieth century (further to be differentiated on a spectrum ranging from the concept album to the compilation), network narratives in film, anthology TV series, as well as scrap books and their digital counterparts. For each of these forms, readers or audiences are entitled to ask the chicken-and-egg question of whether the sense of coherence created by the collection precedes the collection and, hence, determined it, or whether it is only produced by it.

This provides one possible perspective on the question of why coherence should be sought, in that it opens an anthropological or cognitive dimension in which the short story cycle might be seen to partake of wider phenomena of coherence-making. Anja Müller-Wood’s chapter, below, offers a trenchant critique of theories approaching the short story cycle from this perspective, and it also suggests that a greater focus on the productive participation of readers might be in order. A number of other contributions also explore the effects of puzzling readers into producing ‘unity in diversity’ in order to lend aesthetic form to social dynamics ranging from the conflict between individual and collective, between various collectives, or between intersections of various individual and collective identities. From the array of conventionalized ‘markers of coherence’ in the short story cycle, readers produce cyclicity by identifying which works best. This privileging of certain forms of parallels, analogies, and other common denominators can articulate a worldview or ideology based around such privileges. For example, on the paradigmatic level, a cycle ‘cohering’ through spatial setting and one foregrounding recurrent characters might tend to suggest a priority of the material and external over the psychological and internal – although of course that very priority can also be contested by the same means. Joyce’s Dubliners, in its very title, stresses the mutually constitutive nature of place and self – no Dubliners without Dublin, no Dublin without Dubliners. The same effect can occur on the syntagmatic level, as stories are arranged in patterns suggesting sequentiality and a sense of progression, or otherwise cyclicality, stasis, or compulsive repetition. These formal configurations can serve to suggest a certain rhythm of experience and a sense of order, as much as broadly paratextual features, such as titles of stories or sections suggesting such patterns and overall ‘plans’ can. Of course, these features include the title of the cycle, but also blurbs and reviews that might be provided alongside the cycle per se. Each of them might designate a degree between centripetalism and centrifugalism, and they might be further differentiated on a matrix of coherence-effects that indicates their respective integrative actors: for recurrent settings, authorial agency might be strongest; the actualization of recurrent themes might also involve an amount of readerly agency, and for blurbs, editorial agency is probably more pronounced.

What is more, readers of short story cycles will perceive the co-presence of such generic features, as individual stories within a mainly thematically linked cycle also form ties on the basis of spatial settings or certain symbols. Each individual story may be part of various subgroups united by different features of cyclicity, with any two stories in a cycle either linked directly or via a ‘nodal’ third (or fourth, etc.) story. As it encourages readers to seek out these direct and indirect connections, the genre affords the potential of a world-making model, both in the sense of a ‘model of the world’ and ‘for the world’, representing as well as producing a certain worldview. Thus, the short story cycle is easily turned into a form that reflects a distrust in grand narratives, in monolithic meaning, and in authority. Perhaps it has, in recent years, increasingly been used for creating a looser, but still recognizable, sense of coherence that satisfies a desire for ‘formal’ harmony (in the aesthetic and social senses) while registering that such harmony might not be readily available in our day-to-day lives. By this we mean not a counter-movement to polyphony, but rather the very creation of a polyphonous, cosmopolitan world that invites readers to make their individual sense of a conglomerate that seems disparate and disjunct – much in the way that, perhaps, the world we live in seems.

In this sense, coherence in the genre can be something that is not thrust on us but rather self-consciously withheld: readers of short story cycles might start from the assumption that texts of this genre aim at less coherence than a novel might, and that they as readers have to work harder to (co-)produce it. That is not to say that writers neglect the creation of coherence (they do not work less hard than they would for a novel), but rather that they actively attempt to render the sense of coherence more tenuous – for example through the strategic placement of disruptive elements and by balancing them with elements conducive to coherence-making. This highlights the special intergeneric position of the short story cycle, and also the high degree of reader involvement: the implicit ‘task’ of the reader is to look for coherence and not necessarily be satisfied with identifying it in one or two of the features mentio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Introduction: Constructing Coherence in the British Short Story Cycl
• Section I Theory
• Section II Traditions
• Section III Transformations
• List of Contributors
• Index