The Short Story

The Reality of Artifice

Charles May

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136747885
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The short story is one of the most difficult types of prose to write and one of the most pleasurable to read. From Boccaccio's Decameron to The Collected Stories of Reynolds Price, Charles May gives us an understanding of the history and structure of this demanding form of fiction. Beginning with a general history of the genre, he moves on to focus on the nineteenth-century when the modern short story began to come into focus. From there he moves on to later nineteenth-century realism and early twentieth-century formalism and finally to the modern renaissance of the form that shows no signs of abating. A chronology of significant events, works and figures from the genre's history, notes and references and an extensive bibliographic essay with recommended reading round out the volume.

Chapter 1
Overview

Mythic Origins

Although there is some justification for the common claim that the short story as a distinct literary genre began in the nineteenth century, the wellsprings of the form are as old as the primitive realm of myth. Studies in anthropology suggest that brief episodic narratives, which constitute the basis of the short story, are primary, preceding later epic forms, which constitute the basis of the novel.

In many ways, the short story, with its usual focus on a single event and a single effect, has remained close to its primal mythic source. Philosophic anthropologist Ernst Cassirer echoes Poe's famous delineation of the short story's singleness of effect in his description of mythical thinking, which, he asserts, also focuses all forces on a single point: "It is as though the isolated occurrence of an impression, its separation from the totality of ordinary, commonplace experience produced not only a tremendous intensification, but also the highest degree of condensation."¹

Philip Wheelwright confirms this similarity by reminding us that the mythopoeic outlook most often is represented in the form of particular concrete narratives. A myth not only expresses the inner meaning of things, says Wheelwright, but it does so specifically, by telling a story.² Just as the religious experience begins in momentary perceptions of spirit that later become conceptualized into structured theological frameworks, the short story begins in momentary perceptions of what Mircea Eliade calls the "sacred," which later accumulate and become conceptualized into the organized narrative form we have come to know as the novel.³ Russian formalist B. M. Éjxenbaum makes the distinction emphatic: "The novel is a syncretic form (whether its development be directly from collections of stories or complicated by the incorporation of manners-and-morals material); the short story is a fundamental, elementary (which does not mean primitive) form."⁴

As Cassirer and Eliade define the terms, the 'mythic" or "sacred" motivation for short narrative persisted throughout the Middle Ages. In England, for example, from the seventh through the fourteenth centuries, most short verse narratives such as Genesis B, Exodus, Judith, and The Dream of the Rood take their narrative materials from Judeo-Christian myth and their moral purpose from Judeo-Christian theology. The romance form, dominant at the turn of the thirteenth century, is represented in short fiction by such exemplary narratives as "Athelston" and "Sir Orfeo," which were used to illustrate moral points in medieval sermons. Although this medieval form of short fiction in verse survived into the Renaissance, in the fifteenth century the short narrative shifted from poetry to prose and its purpose shifted from moral edification to entertainment; one example of such narratives is the French lai, which often was used for adapting folklore motifs to the chivalric social milieu. But even when the moralities disappeared, supernatural elements—either from religious myth or from folklore—persisted in these short fictions, even as their focus was slowly "displaced" toward everyday reality by their accommodation to evolving social contexts.

Short Narratives from the Renaissance to the Age of Romanticism

Boccaccio, of course, is the central figure in this gradual displacement of the religious toward the secular in Renaissance short fiction. Nineteenth-century literary historian Francesco De Sanctis argued that The Decameron marks a shift from the sacred world of Dante's "divine comedy" to the profane world of Boccaccio's "human comedy." Whereas the basic quality of the literature of the Middle Ages was transcendence to a sort of "ultrahuman and ultranatural 'beyond'" outside of nature and man, Boccaccio devoted himself to the events of everyday life. With him, says De Sanctis, the world of the spirit was replaced by the world of nature. God and Providence as determinants of action gave way to chance, and thus, De Sanctis argues, "a new form of the marvelous was born, not from the intrusion into life of certain ultranatural forces, such as vision or miracles, but by the extraordinary confluence of events which could not be foreseen or controlled."⁵

Boccaccio's stories do mark a shift from the realm of the sacred to the profane world of everyday reality, but they are not "realistic" in the way that we now understand that term. Characters in Boccaccio's stories are not "as-if-real" people in a similitude of the real world; rather, they are primarily functions of the stories in which they appear. Moreover, Boccaccio presents himself in The Decameron not as an observer and transcriber of real life but as a collector and teller of formalized traditional tales.

An exemplar of the next phase of short fiction's development can be found in Cervantes, who does present himself as an inventor of original stories; his short narratives derive more from his direct observation than from traditional tales, and he records concrete detail in more profusion than did Boccaccio. Moreover, characters are more important in Cervantes's short Exemplary Novels than in Boccaccio's The Decameron, for their actions can be attributed to psychological motivation based on observation of "real" people rather than to aesthetic motivation based on formulaic functions in traditional stories.

This shift of short fiction's focus from the supernatural to the natural was further carried out in the seventeenth century through developments that moved the form closer to the narrative method that Ian Watt and others have called eighteenth-century "realism."⁶ Charles Mish says that two such basic modernizing trends took place in short fiction in England from 1660 to 1700 as a result of French influence: a rising interest in psychological analysis and in vraisemblance, or verisimilitude. Mish says that, as a result of these trends in such works as Mme de Lafayette's Princess de Cleves (1678), by the end of the seventeenth century, fiction in England was rapidly moving toward the eighteenth-century novel.⁷ In fact, short fiction was almost completely replaced by the novel during this period—the notable exception being short fiction's resurgence for purposes of edification, albeit in the service of social rather than religious values. As Benjamin Boyce observes, eighteenth-century authors seem to have no clear conception of short fiction as a genre except perhaps as the sort of narrative-based essay, in which the primary virtue is instruction in social values, that appeared in Addison and Steele's The Spectator.⁸

Daniel Defoe's "A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal" is perhaps the paradigmatic example of eighteenth-century short fiction's midway position between the narrative essay presented to teach a moral lesson and the realistic story developed for its own sake, as an account of an actual event. In discussing the conventions of this "marriage of realism to didacticism" in "A True Relation," Edward W. Pilcher has noted the importance of Defoe's establishing the credentials of the teller and assuring the reader that the events described actually took place in such Spectator-type narratives.⁹ Defoe's story, in addition to being cited as an early example of both the old moral tale and the new narrative of verisimilitude, has also been called a precursor of the Gothic mode that dominated English short fiction later in the eighteenth century. It attempts to validate, by means of the techniques of realism, the appearance of the kind of ghostly apparition that before the eighteenth century might well have been accepted in folktales as an article of belief and faith.¹⁰ "A True Relation" therefore looks both backward to the traditional fable, presented to teach a moral lesson, and forward to the realistic story, presented as an account of an actual event.

Although there are Gothic elements in Defoe's tale, the true Gothic narrative, which was later to have such a powerful influence on the beginnings of the short story in America, began in Germany with Goethe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Heinrich Kleist, Ludwig Tieck, and A. W. Schlegel—critics and creators of the novelle, a short form that combined elements of folktale and realism by focusing on a marvelous happening that at the same time was conceivable. The basic difference between the novel and the novelle, German critics have argued, is that characters in the novel develop through time as they are conditioned or determined by their milieu, whereas the novelle presents characters who are already developed and are brought into a conflict that reveals them. Although its focus on a particular case biased the novelle toward a realistic depiction, the very shortness of the form required the high degree of formalization characteristic of the folktale.

Nineteerith-century French short fiction, beginning with Prosper Mérimée's "Mateo Falcone," marks a movement away from the eighteenth-century conte philosophique of Voltaire and the romantic return to folktale; the basic difference, however, is that the new romantic treatment of the stuff of the old tales focused on the subjective inner world of dreams and hallucinations that originally had given rise to the tales. As French writers moved away from the presentation of external descriptions to the interior portrayal of character, the plots in their stories shifted from the presentation of a sequence of events toward an emphasis on a character's reaction to events. As with the German novelle, this also marks a shift from a realistic narrative, which presents character gradually developing within a social milieu through time, toward a revelatory narrative that focuses on characters in isolation experiencing basic existential conflicts.

The romantics attempted to demythologize folktales, to divest them of their external values, and to remythologize them by internalizing those values and self-consciously projecting them onto the external world. They wished to preserve the old religious values of the romance and folktale without their religious dogma and supernatural trappings. Understanding that stories were based on psychic processes, they secularized the mythic by foregrounding their subjective and projective nature. The folktale, which previously had existed seemingly in vacuo, as a received story not influenced by the teller, became infused with the subjectivity of the poet and projected onto the world as a new mythos. Value existed in the external world, but, as the romantics never forgot, only because it existed first within the imagination of the artist. Just as the uniting of folktale material with the voice of an individual perceiver in a concrete situation gave rise to the romantic lyric, as Robert Langbaum has shown, the positioning of a real speaker in a concrete situation, encountering a specific phenomenon that his own subjectivity transforms from the profane into the sacred, gave rise to the short story.¹¹

Irving, Hawthorne, Poe

Washington Irving's focus on tone rather than incident illustrates this new emphasis on the teller and accounts for the combination of attitudes that come together to create the short story in America. While Irving did take as his subject matter the stuff of folklore, it is the point of view or "voice" of his teller that sets his stories apart from the Germanic models from which he borrowed the situations of "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." In a letter to Henry Brevoort in 1824, Irving wrote, "I consider a story merely as a frame on which to stretch my materials. It is the play of thought, and sentiment and language; the weaving of characters, lightly yet expressively delineated; the familiar and faithful exhibition of scenes in common life; and the half-concealed vein of humor that is often playing through the whole—these are among what I aim at."¹²

Both Fred Lewis Pattee and Edward J. O'Brien in their 1923 histories of the American short story place the birth of the form with Washington Irving's combination of the style of Addison and Steele's essays with the subject matter of German romanticism. Pattee says of Irving's Sketchbook, "It is at this point where in him the Addisonian Arctic current was cut across by the Gulf Stream of romanticism that there was born the American short story, a new genre, something distinctively and unquestionable our own in the world of letters."¹³ Focusing more on the classical "Arctic" than on the Gulf Stream romanticism, O'Brien says that the short story begins with the Sketchbook when Irving detaches the story from the essay, especially the personal essay of the eighteenth century which arose from the need to chronicle the "talk of the town."¹⁴

Diedrich Knickerbocker, the narrator in Irving's two most famous stories, is more like the eighteenth-century "town talker" Roger de Coverly memorialized by Addison and Steele than like the anonymous storyteller of folktale. Whereas in the folktale the personality of the teller seldom intrudes, the town talker emphasizes his own personal impression of that which he narrates and describes. If Irving's Sketchbook, especially "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle," mark a significant departure, that innovation lies in his uniting of traditional folktales with the individualized narrator: while maintaining interest in the events of the story, he adds another, subjective interest in the story's point of view.

However, it is with Hawthorne's and Poe's development of the romantic impulse that the short story truly begins in America. Poe's contribution, says H. S. Canby in his early history of the form, was to do for the short story what Coleridge and Keats were doing for poetry—to excite the emotions, and to apply an impressionistic technique to his materials in order to hold his stories together. Poe's attempt to convey a "single impression of a mood, or emotion, or situation, to the reader," was a distinguishing characteristic of short fiction.¹⁵ However, according to Canby, Hawthorne places a moral situation at the nucleus in order to give narrative shape to his stories. He was the first American story writer to build a story on an active relationship between characters and circumstances.

However, such an "active relationship" does not unequivocally create a "realistic" story. Indeed, much of Hawthorne's famous "ambiguity" may be due to the fact that many of his stories combine old allegorical conventions with new realistic techniques. Although Hawthorne's most famous story, "Young Goodman Brown," derives from the allegorical tradition, Brown's journey into the forest seems to be prompted by motivations both realistic and allegorical. Moreover, Brown himself seems to be both a character typical of allegory, what Northrop Frye has called a "psychologized archetype," as well as an "as-if-real" character who has his own psychological makeup.¹⁶ Thus, the story manifests a compromise, between realism and allegorical romance, that characterizes the development of short fiction since Horace Walpole's eighteenth-century claim that his Gothic novella The Castle of Otranto was an attempt to blend two kinds of romance— the ancient and the modern. "In the former," said Walpole in his famous preface, "all was imagination and improbability; in the latter, nature is intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success." Whether he succeeded or not is a matter of some debate, but Walpole's announced intention was to make his characters "think, speak, and act, as it might be supposed mere men and women do in extraordinary situations."¹⁷

In mid-nineteenth-century America, the drama of the clash of the sacred and the profane took place not in the cosmos or in the lives of the saints or idealized nobles, as in the old romances, but rather in the psyches of the individual, as Hawthorne's and Poe's stories so clearly demonstrate. Alfred C. Ward, in his 1924 study of the modern American and English short story, notes that what links Hawthorne's stories with writers of the twentieth century is that they both "meet in the region of half-lights, where there is commerce between this world and the other world."¹⁸ The difference between short story writers before Hawthorne and those after him is that while this region of half-lights for the preromantic writers exists as part of a mythic belief system and the religious externals of allegory, for writers after the romantic shift it exists within what Henry James has termed Hawthorne's "deeper psychology."

Edgar Allan Poe's most significant contribution to the development of the short story lies in linking his aesthetic concept of unity, derived from the German and English romantics, with his notion of psychological obsession, derived from the Gothic romance. Poe moves the first-person narrator away from the eighteenth-century discursive and distanced ironic voice familiar to readers of the Spectator and the stories of Washington Irving, and toward a teller so obsessed with the subject of his narration that the obsession creates the tightly controlled unity Poe discusses in his famous review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales. A story unified around a single effect, impression, or impulse is the aesthetic similitude of a psychological obsession: alt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chronology
• Chapter 1 Overview
• Chapter 2 Nineteenth-Century Beginnings
• Chapter 3 Nineteenth-Century Realism
• Chapter 4 Early-Twentieth-Century Formalism
• Chapter 5 Contemporary Renaissance
• Chapter 6 Bibliographic Essay
• Notes and References
• Recommended Titles
• Index