The Short Story.

Ian Reid

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 e same series

Tragedy Clifford Leech

Metre, Rhyme and Free Verse G. S. Fraser
The Romance Gillian Beer
Irony and the Ironic D. C. Muecke
Symbolism Charles Chadwick
Rhetoric Peter Dixon
Metaphor Terence Hawkes
Modernism Peter Faulkner
The Short Story Jan Reid
 Sor-3!

The Short Story/—

Ian Reid

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 First published 1977 by
Methuen & Co. Ltd
Reprinted four times
Reprinted 1987
Reprinted 1991, 1994 by
Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1977 Ian Reid
Printed in Great Britain by
J. W. Arrowsmith Ltd, Bristol
ISBN 0 415 06580 1
All rights reserved. No part of this book
may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical
or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and
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Contents

Acknowledgements
— Problems of definition
Critical neglect
Protean variety
When is a story not a story?
How long is short?
Translating terms
N Growth of a genre
From ancient to modern
The Romantic impulse
we Tributary forms
Sketch
Yarn
Marchen
Parable and fable
Mixed modes
Brevity expanded
Novella
Cycle
Framed miscellany
Essential qualities?
‘Unity of impression’
‘Moment of crisis’
‘Symmetry of design’
Bibliography
Index
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Acknowledgements

It is difficult to know where a list of one’s academic debts

would begin or end. Several colleagues and students have con-
tributed to the shaping of this monograph, and a roll-call of
creditors is not the best way for me to thank them. But I do
wish to record specifically my gratitude to the American Coun-
cil of Learned Societies for awarding me a Fellowship which
made possible some of the work drawn on here, to Professor
Wolfgang Holdheim of the Comparative Literature Depart-
ment at Cornell University for some helpfully long discussions
of short fiction, and to Ms Robin Eaden for scrutinizing draft
material. ;
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I
Problems of definition

Critical neglect
Over the last 150 years the short story has come to figure con-
spicuously 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 Eng-
lish 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
2 Short Story

down experience to the prime elements of defeat and aliena-

tion.’ 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 recogni-
tions and reversals: a small pump serves to build up the pres-
sure, 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 par-
ticular.

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 criti-
cism, 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. Ger-
many has produced numerous scholarly studies of short fic-
tion, 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
 Problems of Definition 3

English usage ‘short story’ is an inclusive concept. The Russian

school of formalist criticism, flourishing in the 1920s, gener-
ated sound work on theoretical aspects of the short story (nota-
bly essays by Boris Eichenbaum and Victor Shklovsky) and of
its ancestor the Marchen (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 composi-
tional 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 mod-
ern short story embraces diverse tendencies, some of which
have stretched, shrunk or otherwise altered previous concep-
tions of the nature of the genre. Ideas once proposed as defini-
tive 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 con-
tact with various prototypical modes and by moving away
from narrative techniques used in the novel towards the meth-
ods both of poetry (in their language, which is often more fig-
urative and rhythmic than was usual in nineteenth-century
4 Short Story

prose) and of drama (in their tendency to keep the narrator’s

voice out and rely on direct presentation of character and situa-
tion).
While it may be a sign of vigour, this variegated develop-
ment is not conducive to establishing a precise descriptive
vocabulary which would satisfy all critics. Yet if perfect con-
sensus is lacking, adequate working definitions are neverthe-
less possible and helpful provided one recognizes that they
must refer to predominant norms rather than all-inclusive cate-
gories, to evolving features rather than fixities and definites.
At the risk of eroding completely any idea of an essential gen-
eric type, a quasi-Platonic form of the short story, we need to
be empirically mindful of changes undergone by short prose fic-
tion before and since its widespread acceptance in the Roman-
tic period as a field of serious literary activity. If the New
Testament parable, medieval French fabliau, seventeenth-cen-
tury Chinese p’ing-hua, nineteenth-century American tall tale
or recent experimental prose poem are to be regarded as out-
side the pale, they should still provide reference points for usin
delimiting the territory of the short story proper. Accordingly
the following chapters will examine some ‘primitive’ and proxi-
mate 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 cana ‘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
 Problems of Definition 5

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 rudimen-
tary 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 lin-
guistic parlance, is the transform of less than two discrete ele-
mentary 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 dif-
ferent 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 develop-
ment 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, asa result of which they
became crazy and bit each other.’ Temporal movement and log-
ical 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 gener-
ally accepted as basic. Prince and others say nothing to explain
6 Short Story

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 shapeli-
ness 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 own-
ers 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 princi-
ples of temporal ordering and causal connectivity on which
Prince insists. He is not alone in that insistence; most generali-
zations 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 ‘nar-
ratives are forms of explanation’ (p. 233): accordingly, ‘to tella
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
 Problems of Definition 7
such various banners as discourse analysis or Textgrammatik
or translinguistique the aim of distinguishing between a succes-
sion of sentences which are intelligibly connected and a succes-
sion 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 emo-
tionally 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. Ata
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 fic-
tional 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 dis-
connected data; Robert Coover’s ‘The Babysitter’ offers a var-
iety 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 conven-
tional 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 sen-
deros 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 causality on which nar-
8 Short Story

rative has usually depended. We can call these ‘anti-stories’ if

we like, but that is implicitly to concede that they need to be
seen in relation to the mainstream. Seemingly adversative
developments often come to be absorbed within a generic tradi-
tion.
Having extended the concept ‘short story’ in certain
respects, let us now venture some delimiting comments. For
while narrowly prescriptive definitions will not do, since it is
already clear that this genre has no monotypic purity, it would
be useless to go to the latitudinarian extreme of including in it
every kind of brief prose fiction. For instance, as Alfred G.
Engstrom observes, ‘legends of demons, saints, gods and the
like and tales of outright wizardry’ seldom have a claim to be
considered short stories. They do not focus, as a rule, on
human affairs and at any rate are not primarily intended as fic-
tions. Thus we can discard the sort of thing recounted by Yeats
in The Celtic Twilight, a scrapbook of local superstitions and
spooky gossip, or material such as that collected by Martin
Buber in Tales of the Hasidim, consisting largely of legendary
anecdotes. But it is important to emphasize that what disquali-
fies such pieces is not the subject matter in itself, because that
can give rise to admissible stories like Flaubert’s ‘La Légende
de Saint Julien L’Hospitalier’ which are shaped with artistry so
as to convey a fully human dimension. The point is that unless
there is something more than a fragmentary or an episodic
structure, something more than a pious or a credulous tone,
the potential interest of character in action will hardly be real-
ized. This does not contradict the previous point that some
apparently disjointed narratives may qualify as short stories.
In particular instances it is usually easy to recognize sub-liter-
ary material by its lack of either formal poise or psychological
cogency. Exempla about tediously saintly figures, snippets of
legend about marvels and eerie occurrences: such things differ
quite patently from those tales that are imaginatively cohesive
even when fantastic and elliptical, or from tales that explorea
 Problems of Definition 9
mental and moral dimension by evoking the preternatural, as
in Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown’ with its symbols of
devilry and witchcraft.

How long is short?

With the kind of reservation just noted, one can say that in cur-
rent usage ‘short story’ is generally applied to almost any kind
of fictitious prose narrative briefer than a novel. This, how-
ever, needs further refining. What range of sizes does the term
cover? How much contraction or protraction is allowable?
Presumably the lower limit comes down in theory to a mere sen-
tence, of the sort exemplified earlier, though in practice it is
hard to imagine how anything under a page or two can offer
more than a skinny outline of happenings (as with Heming-
way’s stringently abbreviated piece ‘A Short Story’) or a dimin-
utive gesture towards some narrative possibilities (as with
Fielding Dawson’s ‘Thunder Road’). The upper limit is less
clear, and its demarcation will depend partly on whether
author, reader or middleman is made the primary point of ref-
erence. Poe said that a ‘tale’ (which for the moment can be
taken as a synonym; this and related designations will be dis-
cussed in later chapters) is capable of being perused at one sit-
ting. The trouble with that idea, as William Saroyan once
remarked, is that some people can sit for longer than others.
Shifting the pragmatic focus, one may choose to let the matter
of length be decided not by the reader’s span of concentration
so much as by editorial exigencies; Henry James mentions the
‘hard-and-fast rule’ among contemporary magazines of keep-
ing inside the range of between six and eight thousand words.
But of course such rules vary from time to time and magazine
to magazine, so that a single piece of writing may fall within the
bounds according to one editor yet be out of bounds according
to another; generic lines need to be less arbitrarily drawn. An
alternative possibility is to accept as short stories whatever an
author wishes to nominate - or allows to be nominated - as
10 Short Story

such. Somerset Maugham notes in the preface to his Complete

Short Stories that the smallest item there comes to about 1,600
words in all, the longest to about 20,000, and that is approxi-
mately the median range - though some authors would include
briefer and longer work: in Frank Sargeson’s Collected Stories
a few pieces are less than 500 words, while one runs to about
32,000.
None of these alternatives seems wholly adequate. There is,
however, no need to choose between them, because at any rate
it would be unsatisfactory to make a word-count the sole cri-
terion. Genre is not arithmetically defined. Aristotle could say
that a tragic plot must have ‘a certain magnitude’, yet he made
no attempt to measure that magnitude precisely; and while it
can be said incontrovertibly that a short story must have a cer-
tain brevity, confining it within specific dimensions is futile.
But if structural considerations, tectonic elements, are more
important, they must nevertheless bear a relation to sheer size.
That Sargeson story of 32,000 words, for instance, approaches
in scale some other works of his which have been announced
and accepted as ‘novels’. What length can a short story reach
without becoming a short novel? Is there indeed an intermedi-
ate category, as the increasingly frequent use in English criti-
cism of the Italian word novella appears to suggest? This
brings us up against another obstacle: the lack of a precise
trans-lingual vocabulary for comparative purposes.

Translating terms
Generic definition becomes considerably more awkward once
we extend the inquiry beyond literature and criticism in Eng-
lish. There is no exact equivalent to ‘short story’ in the usage of
other European languages, only a cluster of like terms, most of
which are confusingly cognate with the English word ‘novel’.
This difficulty needs clarifying historically. (The following
paragraph is indebted to Gerald Gillespie’s review of the term-
inological problem in Neophilologus for 1967.)
 Problems of Definition 11*
‘Novel’, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, had a
meaning which, like the French nouvelle, stemmed from Ital-
ian novella and Spanish novela; it was applied, usually in the
plural, to tales or short stories of the type contained in such
works as Boccaccio’s Decameron, the Heptaméron of Mar-
guerite de Navarre, Cervantes’ Novelas Ejemplares or Pettie’s
Petite Pallace. \t referred to a fictitious prose narrative with
characters or actions representing everyday life (sometimes in
the past but more often in the present - hence ‘new’, a matter of
novelty, a novella); and as such it stood in contrast to the tradi-
tional ‘romance’, which was less realistic and longer. As late as
1774 ‘novel’ was still being regarded as a narrative of small com-
pass: Chesterfield in his Letters described it as ‘a kind of abbre-
viation of a Romance’. Only in the nineteenth century, when
the old romance had declined further as a genre, did the con-
cept of the novel expand to fill the space available. By then the
word ‘novel’ had lost its original associations. But on the Conti-
nent its cognates, especially the German Novelle, continued to
be linked in many writers’ minds with the Renaissance novella
despite an increasing disparity in size between much of their
work and that small-scale prototype. In Boccaccio’s hands the
novella was very succinct, seldom extending to more than
about ten pages. This was one of the ways in which it opposed
the medieval romance, a diffuse form. But it did normally delin-
eate a completed span of action (such as the full course of a
love intrigue), and hence nineteenth-century writers could
claim to be working within a tradition that stemmed from the
Decameron even when their own narratives stretched to 150
pages. The process of expansion was in fact already under way
in the Novelas Ejemplares (1613) of Cervantes, perhaps as
important a progenitor as Boccaccio himself. A few critics,
however, look sceptically at the idea of a tradition reaching
from those earlier figures down into modern literature, and
argue that the Italian term novella should not be applied to
post-Renaissance forms; with works like Kleist’s ‘Michael
12 Short Story

Kohlhaas’ or Mérimée’s ‘Carmen’ or Conrad’s ‘The Secret

Sharer’ or Lawrence’s ‘The Virgin and the Gipsy’ we no longer
have (these rigorists point out) the kind of economy, narrative
frame, light tone, and so forth, that Boccaccio established. But
that view is too fastidious. Every literary genre continually
alters its shape, and due weight should be given to the fact that
many writers did see themselves as belonging to acertain tradi-
tion.
In France a distinction between nouvelle and conte was avail-
able but not consistently observed. In 1664 La Fontaine enti-
tled a collection of his verse tales (some of them derived from
Boccaccio) Nouvelles; but a second series of the same works,
issued the next year, was called Contes et Nouvelles. Even in
the Romantic period these two terms were sometimes indis-
criminately used, by de Musset and Nodier for instance, but
around the mid-nineteenth century a distinction began to
emerge: as Albert J. George observes in his study Short Fiction
in France, 1800-1850, ‘the word conte was assuming a meaning
that differentiated it from nouvelle, the former accepted as
more concentrated, with one major episode, the latter more
complex and consisting of several scenes’ (p. 234). Conte, like
the English ‘tale’, implied a narrative manner reminiscent of
oral delivery, and frequently contained an element of fantasy;
a nouvelle, on the other hand, ‘included a series of incidents for
the analysis and development of character or motive’ (George,
p. 9), and - after Mérimée - tended towards an objective tone.
But confusion remained; later in the century, works of this
latter sort were often labelled contes, by Maupassant for
instance.
In Germany, over that same period, classification was taken
more seriously. Exactly what constituted a true Novelle was
not a matter of complete agreement, but no-one doubted that
it was a distinct and important genre. Various structural theo-
ries had their day, with Ludwig Tieck asserting that the action
of a Novelle must have a ‘curious, striking turning-point’ (son-
 Problems of Definition 13
derbaren, auffallenden Wendepunkt), Paul Heyse that it must
have a quintessential silhouette, others that it must have a lin-
ear development, still others that it should follow a concentric
path, and so forth. One fairly consistent tendency, however,
among Novelle practitioners was to extend their compositions
substantially. Consequently, when some German writers in
recent times started to produce much more compressed stories,
a different word had to be coined to distinguish these: Kurz-
geschichte. This directly translates the English ‘short story’ -
but its usage is narrowly confined to stories of a few pages only,
whereas ‘short story’ is normally more flexible. Moreover,
such had been the prestige of the Novelle that the Kurzges-
chichte came to be regarded by some as an essentially inferior
form: ‘an illegitimate child of the Novelle’, in Johannes Klein’s
words (ein illegitimes Kind der Novelle). But even those Ger-
man critics who do view the Kurzgeschichte without such preju-
dice have usually regarded it as something to be set in firm
contradistinction to the Novelle. Thus Ruth J. Kilchenmann
declares that the Kurzgeschichte presents ‘a fragment of
extracted experience’ (ein Stiick herausgerissenes Leben) while
the Novelle is ‘constructed around a crisis’ (auf einen Hohe-
punkt zu konstruiert); that the plot of the Kurzgeschichte con-
sists of ‘netlike interweaving’ (netzhafte Verflechtung) while
that of the Novelle follows a ‘rising and sharply falling curve’
(aufsteigende und scharf abfallende Kurve); and that, in gen-
eral, ‘the compact, causally and logically built up form of the
Novelle is in distinct contrast with the often desultorily, often
arabesquely extended or concentrated and elliptical configura-
tion of the Kurzgeschichte’ (Die dichte, kausal und logisch
aufgebaute Form der Novelle hebt sich deutlich ab von der oft
sprunghaften, oft arabeskenhaft erweiterten oder gerafften
und aussparenden Gestaltung der Kurzgeschichte). This
impressionistic scheme is attractive in its tidiness. Unfortu-
nately short fiction, even in Germany, is too perversely untidy
to conform to any such contrast.
14 Short Story

What all this terminological flux indicates is a simple princi-

ple of literary evolution which was previously exemplified by
the linked histories of the words ‘novel’ and ‘romance’. As
described by the Russian formalist Jurij Tynjanov half a cen-
tury ago, this principle is based on the recognition that at any
given time literature as a whole consists of a complex system of
interrelated variable elements, including generic concepts.
These concepts change as their context in the system changes.
Thus, as we have seen, the scope of the ‘novel’ in eighteenth-cen-
tury English literature became altered in direct proportion to a
corresponding shift in the scope of the ‘romance’. And simi-
larly, ‘short story’ and novella are relative, even symbiotic, cate-
gories, sharing space as components in a total literary system
which from time to time undergoes mutations:
The size of a thing, the quantity of verbal material, is not an
indifferent feature; we cannot, however, define the genre of a
work if it is isolated from the system... . The study of iso-
lated genres outside the features characteristic of the genre
system with which they are related is impossible.
We shall need to return to the question whether the field of the
short story is contiguous with that of the novel, or should be
separated from it by an intermediate field. But these fields exist
temporally as well as spatially, and in order to clarify our terms
further we must now trace in broader outline the antecedents
and emergence of what is usually meant by the ‘modern short
Story’.
2
Growth of a genre

From ancient to modern

Observing where something has come from is not the same as
defining what it has become. Nevertheless any generic defini-
tions which aim to be precise and complete ought not to be for-
mulated without a long historical perspective in mind. There is
room in the present survey for only cursory reference to some
early modes of short fiction, but that should be enough to indi-
cate how variable this category is.
If asked to cite an antique example of a brief prose narrative
many people would call to mind one of the memorable Old Tes-
tament stories, such as those concerning Joseph (Genesis
XXXvii - xlvi), Samson (Judges xii - xvi) and Absalom (II Sam-
uel xiii - xviii). These do have stylistic economy, psychological
interest and so forth. Yet they are not offered as fictions; they
purport to be historically veracious and to justify the ways of
God to men. The same is even true of certain well-known pas-
sages of narrative in some of the Bible’s apocryphal books: to
us, the stories of Susannah and the elders or Bel and the
Dragon, in which Daniel plays the role of a clever detective, are
just that - stories; but they were not conceived as literary inven-
tions, not shaped as contributions to the craft of fiction. So it is
also with the New Testament parables, epitomic narratives
which, though invented, are strictly governed by an explicit
didactic purpose. We have to look beyond the Hebrew scrip-
tures to ancient Egypt for the earliest extant stories, evidently
told for their intrinsic value as entertainment. It is still possible
16 Short Story

to read with pleasure tales such as the Story of Sinuhe, or The

Shipwrecked Sailor, which Egyptians wrote down early in the
second millennium B.C.
Much the same as these in scope are numerous brief tales
which appear in the classical and post-classical literature of
Greece and Rome, often interpolated into larger works like the
proto-novels of Petronius (the Satyricon, first century A.D.)
and Apuleius (Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass, second cen-
tury A.D.). (Needless to say, various other sorts of short fiction
are to be found in Greek and Latin narrative writings, but these
are usually in verse, as for instance in the case of the fables col-
lected by Phaedrus and by Babrius in the first century A.D.;
earlier Aesopic gatherings in prose, which do not survive,
appear to have been designed for the rhetorical repertoire -
rather like some modern Dictionary of Anecdotes for Public
Speakers - and not as belles /ettres in their own right.) Though
placed within a larger context, prose tales of the sort included
in the Satyricon have intrinsic artistic value. Here is a list of
what typically constitutes one of these inset narratives:

It is an imaginary story of limited length, intending to enter-

tain, and describing an event in which the interest arises
from the change in the fortunes of the leading characters or
from behaviour characteristic of them; an event concerned
with real-life people in a real-life setting.
(Sophie Trenkner, The Greek Novella in the Classical
Period, p. xiii)

When a narrative with those features had also an earthy, pun-

gent quality it was known as ‘Milesian’, after one of the authors
of them, Aristides of Miletus (c. 100 B.C.); collections of Mile-
sian tales were made in Greece during the first two centuries
B.C. and soon became popular in Latin translations also.
Although these are not extant in toto, individual tales of the
Milesian sort do survive in other works. An example is the
 Growth of a Genre 17

neatly turned story of the Widow of Ephesus, related by Petro-

nius, which goes as follows. A married woman of Ephesus,
famous for her virtue, was so distraught when her husband
died that she began a watch in his sepulchre, weeping incon-
solably over the body. Several days and nights passed thus, dur-
ing which this shining instance of fidelity became the talk of the
town. Even the devoted maid who remained with the widow
was unable to get her to eat, or to terminate this tearful vigil.
Then it happened that some thieves were crucified nearby, a sol-
dier being left on guard beside their crosses to prevent anyone
from removing the bodies for burial. Hearing sounds of lamen-
tation and seeing a light among the tombs, the soldier investi-
gated. When he found there a woman of great beauty, sunk in
grief, he fetched his supper and tried by various arguments to
urge her to break her fast and desist from her profitless mourn-
ing. She paid no attention, but her maid could not resist the
proffered food and wine. Eventually, since the maid had
yielded first, the widow allowed herself to be persuaded too.
Further capitulation followed when the widow grew aware of
the soldier’s handsome appearance and fine manners. Undis-
turbed by the corpse, they took their pleasure together in the
tomb. Meanwhile, relatives of one of the crucified took his
body away; and when the soldier discovered this he rushed
back to the tomb and was about to kill himself - whereupon the
virtuous widow stayed his hand: declaring she would rather see
a dead man hung up than a living one struck down, she ordered
that her late husband be affixed to the vacant cross. This was
soon done, and all the living were happy ever after.
Not only has this story frequently been retold (by, among
others, John of Salisbury in the twelfth century, La Fontaine
in the seventeenth, Voltaire in the eighteenth and Christopher
Fry in the twentieth), but it has a certain flavour, a piquancy of
tone and plot, that we find in such latter-day writers as Maupas-
sant. It smacks of the modern short story.
While some of this Hellenistic and Roman material trickled
18 Short Story

through eventually into the reservoir of traditional story-tell-

ing from which authors have continued to draw, more import-
ant as source and stimulus over many centuries was a rich mass
of oriental fiction. From medieval times onwards, several
large, mobile tale-clusters infiltrated from Eastern cultures
into European literature by various routes. There will be more
to say in a later chapter about the form of these loose collec-
tions; for the present it is enough to describe them in broad out-
line. The most indefatigably migratory is the Panchatantra. In
its original Sanskrit form it dates back at least to the early sixth
century A.D.; in a variety of translations it spread through
Europe in the Middle Ages; and Thomas North rendered it
into English in 1570 - ‘from an Italian version of a Latin ver-
sion of a Hebrew version of an Arabic version of a (lost) Pah-
lavi [middle Iranian] version of some (lost) Sanskrit version of
the original Panchatantra’ (according to Franklin Edgerton,
The Panchatantra, London, 1965, p.13). Similar to it in gen-
eral shape, provenance and stamina, and even sharing with it a
few individual tales, is a miscellany based on the story of Seven
Sages whose narrative powers prevent a wrongly condemned
prince from being executed. In Eastern versions it is a single
philosopher who contrives the stay of execution, not a group
of seven wise men, and his name gives those versions their
usual title, The Book of Sindibad. Belonging to that same fam-
ily of popular books is The Book of the Wiles of Women, a
form of Sindibad which reached Europe in the thirteenth cen-
tury and enjoyed a widespread vogue by affecting a moral pur-
pose. (In contrast, the Thousand and One Nights had no need
to disguise its fantasies as exempla for readers in the West, for
although it began to take shape in Persia by the tenth century
and was current in Egypt by the twelfth, it did not find a Euro-
pean translator until the eighteenth; its array of contes arabes,
as the subtitle designated them, could then be enjoyed frankly
for their exotic and erotic appeal.)
Apart from dull devotional and instructive pieces, it was not
 Growth of a Genre 19

common in the medieval period for short narratives to be writ-

ten in prose. Heroic episodes such as the Battle of Maldon are
in verse; the fabliaux, low-life comic tales of French origin
such as the one told by Chaucer’s Miller, are in verse; the
Breton /ais, popularized by the Norman writer Marie de
France and represented in English by works like the fourteenth-
century Sir Launfal, are in verse. When prose is the medium,
the usual result is tedium: heavy homiletic considerations domi-
nate, regardless of artistry. There are partial exceptions in Old
Norse literature. The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, written
in Iceland in the early thirteenth century, contains some fine
myths and legends, succinctly told. But these are part of a trea-
tise on the art of skaldic (courtly) verse of the Viking era. Edda
means something like ‘poetics’; Snorri’s primary purpose is to
compile a handbook on matters of metrics, diction and style,
and the narratives for which we now chiefly prize it he includes
merely by way of an introductory survey of ancient Scandinav-
ian mythology and heroic stories. The prose parts subserve the
supposedly higher art of poetry. A few of the Icelandic sagas
are fairly brief, but though terse in expression they are more
like novels than short stories in scope, usually chronicling an
extensive series of events. This is true, for instance, of Hrafn-
kels saga, one of the shortest, which runs to about 9,000 words.
Nearer to the short story are the p@ttir, episodes set into longer
works like Morkinskinna, a compendious history of Norwe-
gian kings.
In southern Europe, the work which established prose as an
attractive option for the literary artist was Boccaccio’s Decam-
eron (finished in the 1350s). Erich Auerbach, in chapter9of his
masterly critical study Mimesis (1946; English translation by
Willard R. Trask, 1953), shows through detailed stylistic analy-
sis how Boccaccio enriches the vernacular by subtle rhetorical
treatment, without losing the tone and tempo of oral narra-
tion, to produce a language more resourceful than anything
used by his medieval predecessors. At the same time Boccaccio
20 Short Story

freed fiction from the dead hand of didacticism by blending

courtly romance elements with low fabliau material and by
playfully modifying certain pious medieval forms, such as the
saint’s legend, parodied in I,! and III,10, and the exemplum,
drawn on in IV,2. This latter tale will serve to illustrate the way
in which Boccaccio’s stylistic achievement involves structural
refinement and a tone of genial wit. Pampinea, who narrates
the story of IV,2, introduces it with reference to the proverbial
truism that a wolf can soon have its way by donning sheep’s clo-
thing. The ensuing narrative, says Pampinea, will exemplify
this (morally dubious) proposition. But in fact it does not do
so, ultimately; though initially successful, the rogue is brought
low in the final outcome. Yet the tone in which this outcome is
related is far from being that of a sober sermonic exemplum.
The ‘justice’ served out to Friar Alberto is less moral than
poetic. This comes about through a second twist to the process
whereby he has turned someone’s folly to his own account.
Alberto, a lecherous fellow masquerading as a Friar, discovers
through his role as confessor that a certain scatter-brained
young woman, Lisetta, has a ludicrously conceited estimation
of her charms: her beauty, she declares, ‘would be deemed
remarkable even in Heaven itself’. Alberto makes a pretence of
rebuking her sternly for her vanity, but later visits her with the
story that he has been severely chastized for his insolence by
none other than the Angel Gabriel, who instructed him to seek
forgiveness at once from Lisetta; her beauty is indeed heav-
enly, Gabriel has told him, and moreover Gabriel admires her
so much that he wants to spend a night with her - in human
form, for convenience. Lisetta is enraptured, and agrees to
Alberto’s request that she should pray to Gabriel to use Alber-
to’s body for the purpose, since while the Friar’s body is angeli-
cally occupied his soul will be temporarily in Heaven. All goes
according to plan: Lisetta’s husband being abroad, Alberto /
Gabriel is able to pay regular nocturnal visits to her bedroom,
where he ‘flies without wings’. But Lisetta cannot resist boast-
 Growth of a Genre 2]

ing to an acquaintance that she has celestial connections of an

intimate sort, and before long all Venice knows of her gullibil-
ity. Her brother-in-laws, hearing the news, resolve to track
down this angel and ‘see whether he can fly’. When they ham-
mer at her door, Alberto jumps from the bed, takes ‘a flying
leap’ through the window into the canal, swims to the other
side, and begs an honest-looking man there to shelter him, spin-
ning a yarn to explain his nude condition. The man agrees, in
return for some money which Alberto arranges to have paid to
him, and hides the Friar in his house. After hearing from the
town gossips how Lisetta’s in-laws had entered her house to
find that ‘Gabriel had flown, leaving his wings behind him’, the
man guesses whom he is harbouring. He tells Alberto that,
since the in-laws are searching the city for him, his only chance
of escaping undetected is by disguising himself and joining a
fancy-dress carnival due to take place that very day in St
Mark’s Square, then slipping away from the crowd afterwards:
Alberto allows himself to be dressed as a masked savage,
smeared with honey and feathers, and sets out with the honest
fellow - who, however, has secretly sent word ahead that the
Angel Gabriel will soon be on display in St Mark’s Square.
And there the wretched Alberto is unmasked and subjected to
public ridicule and abuse. What gives this story shape is not
any crudely moralistic point but the comic play on metaphori-
cally linked transformations. Having exploited the credulous
literalism of Lisetta’s flights of vain fancy in order to make his
amorous flights, Alberto finds his own imposture literalized in
the ironic denouement of the story: he must fly from his pursu-
ers, seeming to elude them only to acquire the feathers not of
an angelic creature but of a sub-human one.
Boccaccio’s influence on Renaissance narrative was as var-
ious as it was palpable. In France, Marguerite de Navarre’s
Heptaméron (1558) borrowed the structural formula by which
Boccaccio linked and framed his tales. In England, though no
translation of The Decameron in its entirety appeared until
22 Short Story

1620, there were three collections of novelle, largely derived

from the Italian and French models, in 1566-76: William Pain-
ter’s Palace of Pleasure, Geoffrey Fenton’s Certain Tragical
Discourses, and George Pettie’s A Petite Pallace of Pettie his
Pleasure. In Spain, Cervantes’ Novelas Ejemplares (1613) com-
bined Boccaccio’s anecdotal liveliness and interest in psycho-
logical motivation with a new dimension of moral seriousness.
While not ‘exemplary’ in any narrow didactic sense, the Cer-
vantine novela evinces a keen interest in problems of behav-
iour. In ‘The Jealous Extramaduran’, for instance, the
husband’s jealousy is not (as it is typically in fabliaux) an
excuse for his wife’s infidelity, but the story’s epicentre, a symp-
tom of insecurity more basic than sex.
For about two centuries after Cervantes there were few devel-
opments in European fiction worth noting here. Individual
writers like Diderot did keep alive the narrative possibilities
which Boccaccio, Cervantes and others had broached so vigor-
ously. But the eighteenth century generally was not notable for
any sustained or adventurous exploration of the ‘new’ form,
the novella or short story. Some writers toyed with the oriental
tale; it was used occasionally, for example, by Addison and
Steele as a kind of decorative appendage to essays in The Spec-
tator, and by Voltaire for light satire in Zadig. The ‘character’,
a fictional portrait-essay sketching a representative personal-
ity-type in the manner of Theophrastus and La Bruyére, also
enjoyed some currency in the periodicals, but gave no scope for
either psychological complexity or plot interest. After the Ren-
aissance novella, the next upsurge of short fiction came as part
of the swelling tide of Romanticism. Germany, France, Russia
and America saw the most energetic initiatives.
In Germany the Novelle quickly became during the early
nineteenth century a highly developed literary form, taken up
by numerous talented authors and subjected to serious theoriz-
ing. Its complex evolution has been thoroughly charted by
Johannes Klein in Geschichte der Deutschen Novelle, by E.K.
 Growth of a Genre 23
Bennett and H.M. Waidson in A History of the German
Novelle, and by others. A point worth emphasis, however, is
that the emerging Novelle was not the only kind of short prose
fiction to attract German writers of the Romantic period. This
was, after all, a time of interest in German folk-lore, as two
famous collections testify: Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805-8),
consisting of songs gathered by Achim von Arnim and Cle-
mens Brentano, and the Kinder- und Hausmarchen (Child-
hood and Household Tales) assembled by the brothers Grimm
(1812-23). The same interfusion of natural and supernatural,
mundane and marvellous, which occurs in this folk material
was conjured up also in numerous Kunstmarchen (‘Art’ Tales)
composed by sophisticated writers like Tieck, Brentano and
Hoffmann. The Noveille, it is often said, presents events as
being logically and causally interconnected; very often the
Kunstmarchen, on the other hand, indicates no rationally
explicable motivation for the actions and situations it depicts.
Works such as Tieck’s ‘Der blonde Eckbert’ (Blond Eckbert,
1797) or Hoffmann’s ‘Der goldne Topf’ (The Golden Pot,
1814) evoke a sense of the mysterious within the field of every-
day reality. Strange encounters and metamorphoses may hap-
pen - or seem to happen: nothing is objectively verifiable -
anywhere, at any time, in a Dresden cafe as well as down some
country byway. A full-length study of the Kunstmarchen avail-
able to English readers is Marianne Thalmann’s The Romantic
Fairy Tale: Seeds of Surrealism, translated by Mary B. Cor-
coran. Something of the impulse behind the Marchen entered
the Novelle, and the two forms are less clearly distinguishable
than theorists sometimes suggest. Even the austere Novellen of
Heinrich von Kleist, for instance, implicitly subvert the notion
that events always follow a rational pattern. Not until mid-cen-
tury, with the work of Stifter, Keller, Storm and others, did
German narrative prose turn into more soberly realistic chan-
nels.
In France the art of the short story was firmly established in
24: Short Story

1829-31 with the magazine publication of a dozen contes by

Mérimée, Balzac and Gautier, though the substantial develop-
ments came much later: the pastoral freshness of Daudet’s Let-
tres de Mon Moulin (1869), the cool, meticulous objectivity of
Flaubert’s Trois Contes (1877), and the more styptic natural-
ism of Maupassant’s prolific output in the 1880s. Not the least
important tendency of those latter writers was their predilec-
tion for rural subjects and simple folk. Mostly it could be left to
the novel to delineate those large-scale social patterns which
were so amply extended in urban life; the short story seemed
especially suitable for the portrayal of regional life, or of indi-
viduals who, though situated in a city, lived there as aliens.
Something similar emerged also in Russia, where, after
Pushkin had initiated imaginative work in short prose fiction,
Gogol and Turgenev gave it a particular direction. Pushkin’s
Tales of Bjelkin (1830) brought bareness and concision into
Russian literature; in pieces like ‘The Shot’, all padding is
removed and an interest in narrative perspective becomes cen-
tral. But Pushkin’s fictive world is still an aristocratic one,
whereas what makes Gogol notable is not just that he was
intent, even more than Pushkin, on stripping narrative prose
of fuzzy embellishment, but also that he wrote of ordinary peo-
ple, apparent nonentities, with an attentiveness capable of
revealing deep currents of emotion beneath petty surfaces. The
details of peasant life in the Ukraine or of the pathetic tribula-
tions of a copying clerk in Petersburg could be, he showed, as
compelling as any intrigues of the salon or gaming table. ‘He
took the short story some way back to the folk-tale’, remarks
H.E. Bates in The Modern Short Story, ‘and in doing so bound
it to earth.’ Gogol’s stories appeared in the decade up to 1842,
when the most influential of them, ‘The Overcoat’, was
published. Its seminal importance for later writers was
acknowledged by Turgenev: ‘We have all come out from under
Gogol’s “Overcoat”.’ Turgenev’s own volume, A Sportsman’s
Sketches (1846), augments the efforts of Gogol, both in its way
 Growth of a Genre 25
of compacting into a few casual phrases the essence of a per-
son’s experience and in its focusing on society’s misfits and
underdogs - in this case the Russian serfs.
Of nineteenth-century English-language writers it was not
the British, preoccupied with the expansive novel, who turned
to the short story, but the Americans. Even in America it took
some time for this form to be clearly identified. Fred Lewis Pat-
tee, in his historical survey The Development of the American
Short Story, points out that the term ‘short story’ itself, used
generically to designate an independent literary form rather
than just a story that lacks length, is as recent as the 1880s.
Washington Irving, author of ‘Rip Van Winkle’ and ‘The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow’, called his writings ‘sketches’ or
‘tales’, and the latter term was preferred by Poe, Hawthorne
and Melville. Indeed, ‘tale’ is apt for the kind of fiction these
writers were mostly producing in the 30s and ’40s, with its sty-
lized characterization, detachment from normal social behav-
iour, and tendency towards allegory. While their work
undoubtedly has a prominent place within the comprehensive
history of the short story, it is distinguishable from what some
critics regard as the short story proper, a more ‘realistic’ sort.
In a recent article, ‘From Tale to Short Story: The Emergence
of a New Genre in the 1850s’, Robert F. Marler traces the
decay of the tale after mid-century by examining American
magazine fiction in which ‘the comparatively balanced effects
of Irving’s sentimentalism, Poe’s sensationalism, and Haw-
thorne’s moralism were . . . heavily emphasized, distorted, and
unconsciously parodied’. These excesses led to a reaction dur-
ing the "fifties. Surveying critical commentary in periodicals of
that decade, Marler detects ‘dissatisfaction with the conven-
tional tale’ and the growth of ‘opinion that was congenial to the
development of the short story.’ Although no explicit classifica-
tion was made at the time, a separation of the two kinds of nar-
rative was in process. This background, Marler argues
cogently, is reflected in the increasing advocacy of realism, of
26 Short Story

depicting ordinary experience plausibly, of keeping ‘vividly

true to daguerrotype-like studies of life’, as one magazine edi-
tor put it in 1858. (The excitement resulting from the invention
of photography was still very strong then, and no doubt partly
explains the increasing prestige of realism in art.) Stories
began to emerge which aimed at an impression of actuality:
regionalist vignettes, for example, and fiction of such psycho-
logical subtlety as Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ (in con-
trast to the same author’s romantic tales, like ‘The Bell-
Tower’), and humorous yarns. Folk humour was especially
important in registering and reinforcing the shift in public taste
away from distended tales towards realistic stories. Popular
Southwestern humour gained access to literary magazines in
the East at about that time, and even in its most extreme forms
(so-called ‘tall tales’, where ‘tale’ denotes consciously ludicrous
distortion) this was usually characterized by a kind of irony
and authenticity which ran counter to the emotive inflation of
the decadent kind of tale. Marler makes this observation:
The tall tale, having received the East’s stamp of approval,
was a force for realism because the colloquial teller (as
opposed to the narrator in the frame) was often convincing
as a personality and because many such narratives relin-
quished their humour for the serious treatment of human foi-
bles.
One of the most successful writers of that period was Bret
Harte, author of ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp’ and other local-
colour stories of the Californian goldfields. Looking back later
at the development of American fiction during his time, Harte
remarked that the most important formative influence on it
was humour:

Crude at first, it received a literary polish in the press, but its

dominant quality remained. It was concise and condensed,
yet suggestive. It was delightfully extravagant, or a miracle
 Growth of a Genre 27

of understatement . . . . It gave a new interest to slang.... It

was the parent of the American short story.
(Quoted by H.E. Bates, The Modern Short Story, p.49)

In this context, ‘humour’ includes not only what is seen as

amusing but also what is seen as wry, poignant, disillusioned.
Constance Rourke’s excellent book, American Humor (New
York, 1933) traces this varied nineteenth-century comic tradi-
tion with particular reference to three central figures of Ameri-
can folk-lore: the shrewd itinerant Yankee pedlar, the
audacious roving backwoods frontiersman, and the resilient
displaced Negro slave. Why these character-types and the
strand of native humour they represent found expression
chiefly in the short story form is a question that Rourke does
not consider; but part of the answer presumably lies in the fact
that each of those three figures is a wanderer, and whereas the
conventional nineteenth-century novel normally accommo-
dates the processes of a dense, ordered society, the short story
has been, in Frank O’Connor’s words, ‘by its very nature re-
mote from the community - romantic, individualistic, and
intransigent’ (The Lonely Voice, p.21).

The Romantic impulse

O’Connor’s observation is suggestive. Short stories do fre-
quently focus on one or two individuals who are seen as separ-
ated from their fellow-men in some way, at odds with social
norms, beyond the pale. In this respect short stories can
properly be called romantic, as O’Connor proposes, or even
Romantic by virtue of their affinity with those works by Words-
worth, Coleridge, Byron, Nerval and others through which
move wanderers, lonely dreamers, and outcast or scapegoat
figures. Indeed, since the emergence of the short story asa fully
fledged genre in Europe and America coincides, as already
noted, with the burgeoning of that protean cultural pheno-
menon known as Romanticism, there would seem to be a
28 Short Story

broad basis for the common remark that the short story is in
essence a Romantic form: the Romantic prose form. In its nor-
mally limited scope and subjective orientation it corresponds
to the lyric poem as the novel does to the epic. That the brief,
personally expressive lyric is the paramount kind of Romantic
poem, in contrast to the predominantly discursive modes of
Augustan verse, is a point that needs no emphasis; and its bre-
vity was often regarded as its primary quality. Poe’s essays go
as far as to assert, repeatedly, that the ‘degree of excitement
which would entitle a poem to be so called at all cannot be sus-
tained throughout a composition of any great length’; and by
the same token, he argues, a short prose narrative which can be
read at one sitting is ipso facto superior to any novel. That view
is extreme, but there is more plausibility in the related point
that the short story, like much characteristically Romantic poe-
try, tends to concentrate on some significant moment, some
instant of perception. Just as Wordsworth records in The Pre-
lude certain ‘spots of time’, and Keats celebrates in his Odes the
intense sensation or insight that transcends time, so one could
say that the short story typically centres on the inward mean-
ing of a crucial event, on sudden momentous intuitions,
‘epiphanies’ in James Joyce’s sense of that word; by virtue of its
brevity and delicacy it can, for example, single out with special
precision those occasions when an individual is most alert or
most alone.
That the thrust of Romanticism was one of the main forces
propelling the nineteenth-century short story into the salient
position it came to occupy is undeniable, as is the fact that the
genre has continued in the main to exhibit ‘Romantic’ attitudes
of the kind just mentioned. A few reservations should be
noted, however, because its development cannot be explained
solely and sufficiently in a context of literary culture. Even a
superficial comparison of English and American literature, for
example, makes that very clear: English writers were affected
quite as much as Americans by the Romantic impulse, yet their
 Growth of a Genre 29

output of short fiction during the nineteenth century was virtu-

ally negligible. Two broad explanations have been adduced to
account for this, one in terms of social structures and one in
terms of the magazine market. In the first place it is pointed out
that, unlike the novel, which was urban, urbane and bourgeois
in its origins and which was concerned chiefly with manners,
marriage and money, the short story found its province more
often than not among small groups of working men, especially
in those many areas of the American continent which by the
early nineteenth century had come to consist of regional settle-
ments still lacking social cohesion. As for the market factor, it
issued chiefly from the absence of international copyright regu-
lations and the consequent proliferation in America of cheap
reprints from overseas. Since British novels could be pirated so
simply and profitably, American publishers were seldom keen
to sponsor work by local novelists, a costly luxury. The short
story, on the other hand, could find a ready public through the
gift annuals and periodicals, which became increasingly popu-
lar after about 1830. Among those whose fiction appeared in
these ‘slicks’ were such eminent writers as Poe and Hawthorne.
One further reservation needs to be attached to any descrip-
tion of the short story as an essentially Romantic form: while it
may be true that in its nineteenth-century development the
short story normally incorporated such Romantic features as
the singling out of a significant moment of awareness, it does
not follow that any such features are essential to the genre. We
shall pursue this point in the final chapter.
3
Tributary forms

Some narrative categories mentioned so far need sorting out

now more analytically. Quite separate in their historical deriva-
tions and in some latter-day revivals, these almost amount to
distinct genres in themselves. Of course, their distinctness is
not always preserved; as we shall see later in this chapter, two
or more traditional currents often converge during one story,
so that a reader’s attention may have to keep refocusing as the
various conventions flow together. But first, the main tribu-
taries can be singled out here.

Sketch
There is a broad initial distinction between writing about condi-
tions and writing about events. On the one hand primary
emphasis falls on what some thing, place or person is like; on
the other, it falls on what happens. The former, then, is predom-
inantly descriptive, while the latter follows a line of action. The
way they differ is analogous to the contrast between sentences
whose subject is depicted by an adjectival predicate (‘Fred was
an unhappy chap with a fixed scowl on his face .. . ’) and sen-
tences whose subject is enacted by verbs (‘Once upon a time a
damsel set off to seek her fortune ...’). The first of these is a
sketch; the second, having an anecdotal core, usually develops
into a tale, and more particularly into a yarn.
The sketch proper is virtually static. Washingtor Irving, one
of its chief exponents, gives us a working definition. Although
the most durable pieces in his Sketch Book (1820) were actu-
 Tributary Forms 31

ally yarns like ‘Rip Van Winkle’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow’, the majority (in accordance with the book’s title) con-
tain these elements, which Irving said he wanted mainly to con-
vey: ‘The play of thought, and sentiments and language; the
weaving in 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.’ Several other American writers in the
1820s and early ’30s produced sketches, especially regional vig-
nettes of local scenery, customs and the like. At about the same
time in England something similar is to be found in the work of
essayists. Charles Lamb occasionally introduces a sketch into
some of his writings; the main purpose of ‘South Sea House’
and ‘Oxford in the Vacation’ is to limn a scene in the memory.
A few decades later, Walter Pater’s interest in personality (of
the contemplative rather than active cast) expresses itself in
‘The Child in the House’ and other such ‘imaginary portraits’,
as he called them. More recently still, George Orwell’s famous
essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’ approximates to a sketch, concen-
trating descriptively as it does on the outlines of one situation.
Eighteenth-century periodical writers, too, had produced
sketch-like pieces when depicting fictitious personages (most
memorably, ‘Sir Roger de Coverley’ in the Spectator essays of
Addison and Steele) without involving them in any chain of
substantial events. On the other hand the seventeenth-century
‘character’ and its Theophrastan prototype differ from the
sketch because they present not specific individuals but
abstract human categories, like Joseph Hall’s “The Malcon-
tent’ (‘Everie thing he medleth with, hee either findeth imper-
fect, or maketh so: neither is there anie thing that soundeth so
harsh in his eare as the commendation of another ... ’), or
Thomas Overbury’s ‘A Puritan’ (‘Where the gate stands open,
he is ever seeking a stile: and where his Learning ought to
climbe, he creepes through ...’), or Jean de La Bruyere’s ‘A
Coquette’ (‘. . . never succumbs to her passion for pleasing, nor
32 Short Story

to the high opinion she holds of her own beauty; she regards
time and years only as things that wrinkle and disfigure other
women, forgetting that age is written on her face... ’).
While the mere landscape-essay or pen-portrait can hardly
be called a short story, there is usually in the sketch some move-
ment towards a narrative dimension. Examples of stories that
are predominantly sketches range from character studies like
Joyce’s ‘Clay’, Thurber’s ‘Doc Marlow’, Mann’s ‘The Infant
Prodigy’ and several of Mansfield’s ‘German Pension’ pieces to
Walser’s many atmospheric Skizze describing walks and
encounters in Switzerland and Lawson’s evocations of aspects
of the Australian bush (‘In a Dry Season’, ‘In a Wet Season’).

Yarn
Just as the simplest kind of plotless sketch is too deficient in
human action and motivation to be regarded as a true short
story, so too is the mere anecdote, which recounts a single frag-
mentary episode (often about something supposed to have hap-
pened to a well-known person: George Washington and the
felling of the cherry tree, Isaac Newton and the falling of the
apple, King Alfred and the burning of the cakes). Anecdotes
are by no means all structurally identical; they may take
several of the rudimentary literary shapes posited by André
Jolles in his Einfache Formen (1930), such as the local legend
(German Sage - the Pied Piper of Hamelin, for instance), or
joke (Witz); they may be attached to a proverb (Spruch) or rid-
dle (Ratsel). But anecdotes verge on the modern short story
only when amplified as tales.
The term ‘tale’ has often been applied to almost any kind of
narrative, whether of fictitious or actual events, and remains
too imprecise to be of much use for discriminative purposes.
But usually it designates a fairly straightforward, loose-knit
account of strange happenings. Among the several specific
sorts of tales are the gest (from Latin gesta, deeds), relating
adventurous exploits; the ballad, a versified or sung tale in a
 Tributary Forms 33

popular and often romantic vein; the fairy-story, to be dis-

cussed presently; and the yarn.
An elaborated anecdote or series of anecdotes, the yarn is
narrated in colloquial and the casual tones appropriate to a rac-
onteur working in oral tradition. The word derives from sail-
ors’ slang in which rope-making became a metaphor for story-
spinning, and ‘yarn’ still usually implies the atmosphere of the
foc’s’le (or bar-room, campfire, club-house or the like). The
implicit norm is naturalistic (unlike that of fairy-stories, which
have a preternatural orientation). This holds true even for the
extravagant sort of yarn known as the tall tale; while its
material may be highly improbable, it is related in a matter-of-
fact-way. Perhaps the best-known exemplar of the yarn is
Mark Twain. Such features as the vernacular idiom, the
broadly comic tendency, the paratactic structure, and the
emphasis on externals rather than psychological factors are to
be found for instance in that often anthologized piece by
Twain, ‘The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County’.
More recently, the primitive American tall tale was revived in
Stephen Vincent Benet’s ‘The Devil and Daniel Webster’.
While innumerable yarns issued from the American fron-
tier, the Australian outback, and similar areas of fringe setu.-
ment elsewhere, closely comparable forms did develop also in
some established cultures. Examples are the Chinese p’ing hua
and Russian skaz. The former, flourishing in the early seven-
teenth century, was essentially a popular tale dominated by its
narrator’s presence and colloquial idiom; frequently fantastic
in content, it was nevertheless always realistic in tone. The skaz
is a kind of dramatic monologue in which the narrator’s habits
of speech contribute importantly to the effect of what he
relates.

Marchen
Whereas the yarn and its close cousins stem from the kind of
folk-tale in which everyday life is an implied touchstone, the
34 Short Story

fairy-story is the kind which appeals to our sense of the marvel-

lous. We suspend disbelief and allow patterns of wish-fulfil-
ment to have free reign. J.R.R. Tolkien describes its proper
subject as follows:

Fairy-stories are not in normal English usage stories about

fairies or elves, but stories about Fairy, that is Faerie, the
realm or state in which fairies have their being. Faerie con-
tains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs,
witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun,
the moon, the sky; and the earth, .. . and ourselves, mortal
men, when we are enchanted... . :
A ‘fairy-story’ is one which touches on or uses Faerie, what-
ever its own main purpose may be: satire, adventure, moral-
ity, fantasy. Faerie itself may perhaps most nearly be
translated by Magic - but it is magic of a peculiar mood and
power, at the furthest pole from the vulgar devices of the
laborious, scientific, magician.

Since, however, the connotations of ‘fairy-story’ have become

debased by association with those dimunitive tinselled crea-
tures that plague second-rate books for children, the German
word Marchen is often used instead in the English critical lexi-
con.
We have already noted, in chapter 2, that many such tales
found their way into the mainstream of German literature dur-
ing the early nineteenth century, both from genuine folk
material (in the famous Grimm collection) and as Kunst-
marchen composed by Hoffman and others. These two sorts of
Marchen - primary and secondary, anonymous oral tradition
and conscious artistic adaptation - are of course to be found
also in other countries. In France, more than a century before
the Grimms, Charles Perrault gathered his Contes de ma Mére
?’'Oye, which include such familiar items as ‘Puss-in-Boots’,
‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘Cinderella’ and ‘The Sleeping
 Tributary Forms 35
Beauty’. Though smoothly polished by Perrault, these remain
close to the simple contours of orally transmitted narratives, /e
merveilleux traditionnel. About 1830, under the influence of
Hoffmann, French writers such as Nodier and Nerval began to
produce what became known as the conte fantastique, having
some of the features of folk-tales but being characterized, as
P.-G. Castex remarks,

par une intrusion brutale du mystére dans le cadre de la vie

réelle; il est généralement lié aux états morbides de la con-
science ...
(by a brutal intrusion of mystery into the compass of every-
day life; it is generally linked with the morbid states of
consciousness ... )

Irish literature, too, abounds in vigorous examples not only

of traditional stories of the Marchen type (the Gaelic sean-
sgéal) but also of individual compositions by writers like
George Moore which try to recreate something of the same
oral quality. Vivian Mercier gives a thorough account of that
subject in his article ‘The Irish Short Story and Oral Tradi-
tion’.
Since supernatural elements figure conspicuously in the
Marchen, how does it differ from the myth? Anthropologists
from Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict to Claude Lévi-Strauss
have taken the view that myths and folk-tales share much the
same kind of content, interchanging their themes and motifs so
often that there can be no absolute distinction between the two
categories. In fact, however, they are quite separable in two
important respects. First, their preoccupations differ mark-
edly - on the one hand religious matters, aristocratic heroism,
and so forth; on the other, the familiar daydreams and night-
mares of ordinary folk. Moreover, whereas myth is manifold
and diversiform, the Marchen shapes its material (whether der-
ived from mythology or not) according to a particular kind of
36 Short Story

limited formal pattern. This pattern was demonstrated strik-

ingly in a study made by the Russian formalist Vladimir Propp
in 1928 and translated into English thirty years later as Mor-
phology of the Folk-Tale. Propp’s discovery, after analysing
the structure of a hundred Russian fairy-stories, was that
although particular elements (such as character attributes)
vary from story to story their basic functions in the plot are
rigorously limited and conform to a regular sequence. Thus the
villainous character may be (e.g.) a witch or a dragon or an
ogre, the hero’s initial misfortune may involve (e.g.) a material
deficiency or an inflicted injury, and so on; but the maximum
number of roles never exceeds seven (hero, princess, provider,
etc.) and the maximum number of units of action (hero leaves
home, hero acquires magical help, villain is punished, etc.)
never exceeds thirty-one. No tale has all thirty-one functions,
but such of them as each tale does have will always follow a con-
stant order.
Propp’s emphasis on the strict interrelations of narrative
components has become very influential in recent years.
Several critics, most notably the French structuralists A.J.
Greimas, Claude Bremond and Tzvetan Todorov, have tried
to develop his insight into a more general theory of fiction.
Their interest, however, focuses more on the nature of narra-
tion itself than on generic concepts, and so far they have had
little to say about the short story specifically.

Parable and fable

The parable and fable were closely akin in their simple pre-
modern forms, each being shaped towards a conspicuous anal-
ogy between the main narrative elements and certain aspects of
general human behaviour. In addition to the most obvious dif-
ference, that the fable endows animals (or sometimes vegetable
and mineral objects) with human capabilities, there are other
ways in which the two forms are distinguishable from each
other and from other varieties of short fiction. John Gardner
 Tributary Forms 37

and Lennis Dunlap offer the following convenient summary in

their book The Forms of Fiction:
In general, the Aesopic fable is tough-minded and ‘instruc-
tive’; it is in this respect quite unlike the typical fairy-tale. . ..
The form is epigrammatic, extremely economical, and abso-
lutely concrete. It has no room for the elaboration of
character or setting and originally had no room for a con-
cluding abstraction to explain meaning... .
The typical parable is realistic in its attitudes and moralistic
in its purpose, as is the Aesopic fable; but it need not be cyni-
cal or ironic, and its meaning need not be instantly apparent.
The characters in a parable are generally human beings, not
animals or stones or trees, and certain details in setting and
character (both of these are often presented more fully than
in the Aesopic fable) may be symbolic.
It is when they no longer insist on a narrowly didactic point
that these two forms can enter the territory of the genuine short
story. The economy of style and situation that is common in
modern narratives gives many of them a parabolic quality,
even though they may be much more open-ended than such
exemplary old pieces as the New Testament’s Prodigal Son
and Good Samaritan. Whenever the contours of a story sug-
gest forcibly a summary thematic proposition, we are close to
the parable. A modern instance is the compellingly succinct
‘Before the Law’, included in Kafka’s longer work The Trial
but also published separately. It begins in the plain and pithy
way of all parables:
Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper
there comes a man from the country who begs for admit-
tance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says he cannot admit
the man at present...
The rest of the narrative (it is only about a page long) describes
38 Short Story

the man’s vigil as he waits in vain by the entrance year after

year. The doorkeeper ignores his pleading. At last, on the point
of death, the man asks:

‘Everyone strives to attain the Law... Why is it, then, that

all these years no-one but myself has come here to seek
admittance?” The doorkeeper sees that the man’s end is nigh
and that his hearing is failing, so he shouts in his ear: ‘No-
one but you could gain entry through this door, since it was
intended for you alone. And now I am going to shut it.’

Clearly the whole tenor of such a story directs our attention

not towards the psychological motivation of an individual
character, nor towards any ‘real’ social circumstances, but
towards an implied general statement about the inscrutable
nature of authority.
So it is with many other short stories. Is Hawthorne’s
‘Young Goodman Brown’ dominated by the idea that to leave
one’s faith and community behind means to step into a dark
misanthropic vision which can neither be verified nor dismis-
sed? Is Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ dominated by the idea
that even a placid-seeming community produces violent
impulses which it needs to exorcise by ritual sacrifice? To the
extent that reductive interpretations are appropriate to the
tenor of some stories, those stories are virtually parables. Simi-
larly, there are twentieth-century writers like Malamud (‘The
Jew-Bird’) and Kafka (‘Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse-
Folk’, ‘Investigations of a Dog’) who invite us to imagine ani-
mals with human traits in essentially the same spirit as La Fon-
taine or Joel Chandler (Uncle Remus) Harris, but without any
overt moral lesson attached.

Mixed modes
At their purest, each of these tributary forms represents a dis-
tinct and easily recognizable narrative mode. But we find in
 Tributary Forms 39

some stories a confluence of several modes. This is increasingly

true in modern fiction, but some antique tales also gain much
of their impact by this means.
Take, for instance, Thor’s encounter with the Magician-
giant-king Loki of Utgar®, as related by the medieval Icelandic
writer Snorri Sturluson in the Gylfaginning section of his
Prose Edda. The whole episode unfolds with a fine sense of the
virtues of stylistic understatement and structural compression,
and the tone remains consistent. It is compounded, however,
of various sorts of narrative, and in this mixture lies the read-
er’s chief pleasure. It is a tale of the gods, with aetiological ele-
ments, yet Snorri seems not to be an orthodox mythographer:
he is telling us all this, we gather, for our amusement rather
than instruction, and Thor is no omnipotent deity but a bewild-
ered muscle-man bested by magic. Utgard- Lokiand his vanish-
ing castle belong more to the world of the Marchen than to that
of pure myth. There is also in this episode something of the
appeal of a tall tale; Thor takes such a mighty draught from
his drinking-horn, not knowing its tip has been placed in the
sea, that he lowers the tidal level, and so on. The factor
which brings these several modes together homogeneously is
the consistency of Sturluson’s terse manner, epitomized in the
repeated formula Ekki er langt um at g¢ra, “There is no need to
make a long story about it’.
Seven centuries later, the fiction of Franz Kafka achieves
some of its strange effects by playing off one set of narrative
conventions against another. Many of his stories resemble
Marchen, as Max Lithi observes:

Their figures, like those of the fairy tale, are not primarily
individuals, personalities, characters, but simply figures:
doers and receivers of the action. They are no more masters
of their destiny than are the figures in the fairy-tale. They
move through a world which they do not understand but in
40 Short Story

which they are nevertheless involved. This they have in com-

mon with the figures of the fairy-tale: they do not perceive
their relationship to the world about them.

But it is the darker kind of Marchen that Kafka conjures up,

not the kind in which heroes find everlasting happiness.
Although his ‘Metamorphosis’, for instance, has specific simi-
larities with folklore (traced by Douglas Angus in his article
‘Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” and “The Beauty and the Beast”
Tale’), the author allows no release to his dehumanized charac-
ter, who remains an outcast. In fact, ‘Metamorphosis’ is not
only a black fairy-story but also a black fable, inverting the
usual Aesopic convention. The story begins: ‘As Gregor Samsa
awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself
transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.’ The way in which
this bizarre situation is developed, with a matter-of-factness
that can turn nightmarish panic into comic pathos, recalls
something of the atmosphere of the tall tale, while Gregor’s
plight gradually takes on as well the dimensions of a psycholo-
gical parable, illustrating palpably a condition of parasitic dep-
endence within the Samsa family.
‘The Ballad of the Sad Cafe’ will serve as a final example of
the compounding of various narrative types. What really distin-
guishes this from novels is not its length (c. 26,000 words),
which, though beyond that of an ordinary short story, is much
less than that of an ordinary novel. More important is the fact
that its leading characters are not of the sort normally found in
extensive narratives but are what the narrator calls ‘outlandish
people’ (a hunchbacked dwarf, a gangling gum-booted cross-
eyed woman, and a man flamboyantly vicious in nature - gro-
tesque cartoon shapes, each of them). And moreover, ‘The Bal-
lad of the Sad Cafe’ is told in a way that is totally un-novelistic,
being reminiscent rather of several of the modes from which
the modern short story derives. The opening pages, taken up
chiefly with static description of the town and then of Miss
 Tributary Forms 41

Amelia, suggest the casually observant manner of a sketch-

writer. But another tradition, more important for the story asa
whole, is also implicit from the start: the yarn. What Malcolm
Cowley says of Sherwood Anderson’s best stories, that they
‘retain the language, the pace, one might even say the gestures
of a man talking unhurriedly to his friends’, seems true a
fortiori of McCullers in ‘The Ballad of the Sad Cafe’. From the
first few paragraphs we catch the tone of a local story-spinner:

These August afternoons - when your shift is finished there

is absolutely nothing to do; you might as well walk down to
the Forks Falls Road and listen to the chain gang.
However, here in this very town there was onceacafe....
Often this ambling vernacular takes on the comic hyperbole of
a tall tale, as in the account of Marvin Macey’s villainies (‘For
years, when he was a boy, he had carried about with him the
dried and salted ear of a man he had killed in a razor fight. He
had chopped off the tails of squirrels in the pinewoods just to
please his fancy. . .’), or the account of the awesome final prep-
arations for the big show-down:
There were several signs that this was the appointed day, and
by ten o’clock the news spread all over the county. Early in
the morning Miss Amelia went out and cut down her punch-
ing bag. Marvin Macey sat on the back step with a tin can of
hog fat between his knees and carefully greased his arms and
his legs. A hawk with a bloody breast flew over the town and
circled twice around the property of Miss Amelia... . Both
Miss Amelia and Marvin Macey ate four helpings of half-
raw roast for dinner, and then lay down in the afternoon to
store up strength.

In addition to the yarn and the sketch, other narrative types are
involved too. The strange figure of Cousin Lymon gives the
story a fairy-tale dimension: he is like some Rumpelstiltskin in
physical appearance, he has an uncanny hypnotic power over
42 Short Story

the townsfolk, and he makes a magical leap to end the fight.

Then there is a ballad element, indicated by the title, by the
rhythmic repetition of certain phrases, by the use of a simple
idiom to relate the tribulations of unrequited love, and by refer-
ences to folk music at key points in the narrative: ‘the slow song
of a Negro’ in the background on that evening when Lymon
arrives in town, the fragment of song heard in the dark at the
time when Amelia learns of Marvin’s release from prison (“The
tune had no start and no finish and was made up of only three
notes which went on and on and on’ - suggesting the inextri-
cable involvement of the three main characters with each
other), and the chain-gang’s chant, mentioned at the beginning
and emphasized at the end, a chant ‘both somber and joyful’
which seems to signify simultaneously the isolation of every
person and the ambiguous links between them. Finally “The
Ballad of the Sad Cafe’ has a parable-like quality in that it
exemplifies some ideas about love set forth in a home-spun
homily (‘Love is a solitary thing, etc.). All these narrative ele-
ments combine in the pervading tone of the story-teller’s voice,
a tone supple enough to blend pathos and comedy within a tra-
dition to which novelists have seldom sought access.
4
Brevity expanded

The short story shares no clear and common boundary line

with the novel. We should examine next some other sorts of
prose fiction that intervene between those two polar catego-
ries. There are individual narratives of medium length and
breadth; there are collections of stories unified by interconnect-
ing themes, motifs, and characters; and there are collections of
stories unified within a framing device.

Novella
The word novella and its cognates have already been set in a
broad perspective near the end of the first chapter, with addi-
tional reference to some of its historical inflexions in chapter 2.
Difficulties posed by terminology and by different national tra-
ditions need not be pursued any further here; detailed accounts
are available in sources mentioned previously, or in Harry
Steinhauer’s article, ‘Towards A Definition of the Novella’.
But what does deserve consideration at present is, in Henry
James’s phrase, ‘the dimensional ground’ of the ‘shapely nou-
velle’. Without reviving the fallacy that fiction is classifiable
into absolutely discrete segments, we can agree in identifying
some works - increasingly common since the early nineteenth
century, and nowadays usually labelled novellas - whose
dimensions seem different from those of a normal short story
on the one hand and of a normal novel on the other. Argu-
ments for granting independent status to the middling kind of
fiction are propounded in two recent monographs in English:
44 Short Story

Judith Leibowitz’s Narrative Purpose in the Novella and Mary

Doyle Springer’s Forms of the Modern Novella.
On the assumption that ‘each narrative form has its own
developmental methods, its own manner of developing or giv-
ing shape to its fictional material’, Leibowitz goes on to assert
that
in general terms, this means that the novel’s selectivity dif-
fers from the short story’s because the novel’s narrative task
is elaboration, whereas the short story’s is limitation. And
the novella’s techniques of selection differ from the other
two genres of fiction because its narrative purpose is com-
pression....
She supports her theory by drawing attention to the ‘double
effect of intensity with expansion’, seen as a total aesthetic
impression rather than a stylistic device, in such works as
James’s ‘The Bench of Desolation’, Hauptmann’s ‘Bahnwéarter
Thiel’, Mérimée’s ‘Carmen’ and Silone’s ‘La Volpe e le Came-
lie’, where the compressive quality is achieved by an unwaver-
ing thematic focus and an accumulation of structural parallels.
It is futile, Leibowitz declares, to suppose that the novella or
any other genre can be defined merely by noting the presence
of this or that ‘characteristic’ technique. Such an approach
fails to consider the purpose for which certain techniques
have been used, and therefore does not guide us to an appre-
ciation of their relative importance or to an ability to distin-
guish differences in their function in different generic
contexts.
In the same spirit Springer insists that no distinctive traits can
be discovered in the novella ‘if we concentrate on parts in isola-
tion (plot, character, diction) without reference to how they
“work” in the kind of whole in which they appear and relative
to the magnitude of that whole.’ Examining several medium-
range narratives by Mann, Colette, Lawrence, Crane, Stein
 Brevity Expanded 45

and others, she takes the view that a novella’s scope is espe-
cially fitting for a few kinds of fictional modes whose principle
of coherence is most often ‘serious or restrainedly tragic, sel-
dom or never . . . comic, though parts are often comical in the
service of satire and other forms.’ The kind of satire which grav-
itates towards the novella is that in which ‘the object of ridicule
is a single one rather than a compendium of the follies of man-
kind’; ‘Cat’s Cradle’ by Kurt Vonnegut exemplifies this, and
even Voltaire’s ‘Candide’, while showing us many sorts of fools
and knaves, concentrates on the stupidity of Panglossian opti-
mism. Another mode for which novellas seem suitable is the
‘degenerative or pathetic tragedy’ (Mann’s ‘Death in Venice’
and James’s ‘Daisy Miller’ being obvious paradigms); ‘its
relentlessness and the depth of the misery expand it beyond the
single episode which often characterizes the short story’. And
another is the ‘apologue’ (by which Springer means a fairly
overt and stylized parable - Johnson’s ‘Rasselas’, Conrad’s
‘Heart of Darkness’, Lawrence’s ‘The Woman Who Rode
Away’); in this form, characters per se are never our prime con-
cern, since some idea shapes the whole. Like Leibowitz,
Springer finds that insistent repetition and other elements
designed both to intensify and to enlarge the action will very
frequently govern the novella form.
In basic accord with these two critics (though he neither uses
the term ‘novella’ nor attempts such a comprehensive theory) is
Howard Nemerov, whose essay ‘Composition and Fate in the
Short Novel’ discusses the ‘peculiar purity’ of structural con-
centration in works like Dostoevsky’s ‘Notes from the Under-
ground’, Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’ and Chekhov’s ‘Ward 6’.
Nemerov thinks that this form should be regarded ‘not as a
compromise between novel and short story, but as something
like the ideal and primary form, suggestively allied in simplic-
ity and even in length with the tragedies of antiquity, and deal-
ing in effect with equivalént materials’. Presumably Nemerov
does not imply that a novel, being more spacious, is thereby
46 Short Story

deprived of quasi-tragic potential; Anna Karenina, Jude the

Obscure, Under the Volcano and other works show the con-
trary. But certainly it seems to be true that the novella’s medial
scope enables it to render with especial force the ‘degenerative
or pathetic’ kind of tragedy, as Springer calls it, in which the
protagonist’s fate is neither heroic nor petty.
We can supplement the remarks of these critics with a point
made at the close of the previous chapter, applying it specifi-
cally to the novella. For whatever uncertainty may remain con-
cerning the generic status of particular narratives (Melville’s
‘Bartleby’, say, and Joyce’s ‘The Dead’: novellas or short stor-
ies?), it does seem to be the case that composite works like Kaf-
ka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ and McCullers’ ‘Ballad of the Sad Cafe’
need the balance of strict economy and resonant amplitude
which a novella affords. Playing off one mode, one set of narra-
tive conventions, against others is a method requiring usually
more than a few pages to implement.

Cycle
Probably the impulse to combine individual tales into larger
wholes has its origin in the very nature of imagination itself, a
‘coadunating’ power as Coleridge described it. Certainly many
old story-clusters show that the impulse goes far back into oral
tradition, while conventions of the written word have intro-
duced also a practical need to mediate between normal short-
story size and normal book size. To group separate stories
together cohesively, two sorts of constructive method may be
used: internal linking and external framing.
The former method produced in times gone by some compo-
site narratives of courtly and epic quality, such as Malory
’s
Morte d’Arthur, with its interconnected Grail romanc
es, or
The Book of Dede Korkut, a group of heroic legends
about the
nomadic Oghuz Turks. But in those early cycles
there was
often a lack of firm structural unity, and the constituent
parts
were hardly short stories in the modern sense. Our present
 Brevity Expanded 47
interest lies rather with the kind discussed by Forrest L.
Ingram in his study Representative Short-Story Cycles of the
Twentieth Century (1971). He defines his subject as ‘a book of
short stories so linked to each other by their author 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’. Thus characters, settings, leitmotifs,
deepen their significance as they recur with variations in one
story after another, and moreover a sense of community nor-
mally develops through the series. It may be localized in a par-
ticular place (Joyce’s Dublin, Anderson’s Winesburg), or
centred on a family (as in Faulkner’s Go Down Moses), or dis-
persed through a looser-knit group sharing only an area of
social malaise (Moorhouse’s Futility and Other Animals and
its sequel The Americans, Baby). ‘However this community
may be achieved’, says Ingram, ‘it usually can be said to consti-
tute the central character of a cycle.’ While individual prota-
gonists will perhaps appear in several sections of the cycle, and
the sections be interrelated chronologically, neither of those
connective principles is necessary. Joyce’s Dubliners deserves
to be regarded as a cycle because of its integral patterning and
its evocation of Dublin as a ‘centre of paralysis’, but its stories
have no clear temporal relationship with each other nor any
characters in common.
Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio stands as an obvi-
ous paradigm of the modern short-story cycle. Its form is
clearly between an episodic novel and a mere collection of dis-
crete items. The setting is fairly constant in place and time, and
many characters appear in more than one story, with George
Willard being present in all but a few. But the tight continuous
structure of a novel is deliberately avoided; Anderson said he
wanted ‘a new looseness’ of form to suit the particular quality
of his material. His people are lonely, restless, cranky. Social
cohesion is absent in their mid-western town. Even momentary
communication seldom occurs between any two of them. Wine-
48 Short Story

sburg is undergoing a human erosion caused by the winds of

change blowing from the cities, by the destabilizing of moral
codes, and by the intrinsic thinness of small-town life. The ‘new
looseness’ of Winesburg, Ohio can convey with precision and
pathos the duality that results: a superficial appearance (and
indeed the ideal possibility) of communal wholeness, and an
underlying actual separateness. Reinforcing this structural
pattern are certain leitmotifs, such as the title image in ‘Hands’.
Opening the book (except for its prologue), this story concerns
the inability of one acutely sensitive and isolated man, Wing
Biddlebaum, to express his feelings in words to young George
Willard; it includes a painful episode from his past, explaining
his emotional agitation; and it ends with a scene in which the
central image of his hands becomes imbued with symbolic sig-
nificance. Always moving nervously and ineffectually, the
hands are a perfect focus for Anderson’s main theme: they sug-
gest fluttery impulses towards human contact, thwarted both
by the individual’s timidity and by others’ failure to under-
stand and respond. Throughout the ensuing stories, manual
gestures continue to be emphasized, whether expressing frus-
tration or despair or aggression.
Sometimes the unifying bonds in a short-story cycle are
barely strong enough to distinguish it from an assortment of
independent stories. Faulkner’s Go Down Moses is problem-
atic in this way. It is plainly no novel, and in fact ‘the individual-
ity of most of the stories almost demolishes the cohesion of the
larger unit’, in Ingram’s view, yet Faulkner’s intention to
design the book as a unit is clear. Gradually, as one section fol-
lows another with movement back and forth between the pres-
ent century and the nineteenth, a complex family history
emerges obliquely. To grasp the genealogy is to grasp the essen-
tial meaning of the whole. But while each story gains greatly
from being juxtaposed with the rest, it is also true that one of
them, ‘The Bear’, dominates the volume and is very often read
as a separate novella, and that another, ‘Pantaloon in Black’,
 Brevity Expanded 49
does not fit into the family chronicle at all.
Go Down Moses, Winesburg, and numerous other modern
short-story cycles such as Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples
and John Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven locate their
unity of place in some rural region. In this they follow the most
notable nineteenth-century prototypes, Turgenev’s A Sports-
man’s Sketches and Daudet’s Lettres de Mon Moulin. But a
minority of cycles has a metropolitan context - Frank Moor-
house’s work, for example. His prefatory note to his first book
states:
These are interlinked stories and, although the narrative is
discontinuous and there is no single plot, the environment
and characters are continuous. In some ways, the people in
the stories are a tribe; a modern, urban tribe which does not
fully recognize itself as a tribe. Some of the people are cen-
tral members of the tribe while others are hermits who live
on the fringe. The shared environment is both internal (anxi-
eties, pleasures and confusions) and external (the houses,
streets, hotels and experiences). The central dilemma is that
of giving birth, of creating new life.
Given Moorhouse’s view of this social area, it would be inap-
propriate to integrate the episodes into a novel, making their
ends meet seamlessly. Discontinuity-in-relationship (between
desire and act, lust and tenderness, conception and parturi-
tion, libertarian and conformist, younger and older, foreigner
and native-born, male and female, Sydney and the bush. . .) is
as much a structural and stylistic principle of his writings as it
is their theme, and the cycle is accordingly his natural form. A
large Australian city in the 1960s may seem a far cry from a mid-
western town in the early years of this century, but Moor-
house’s fiction and the Winesburg stories express fundamen-
tally a similar sense of groping search by isolated characters
(‘lives flowing past each other’, in Anderson’s phrase) for an
elusive feeling of community.
50 Short Story

Framed miscellany
Akin to a cycle is the kind of short-story volume which is
rounded off by the use of a framing device. A Rahmenerzah-
lung (the German term, now coming into general critical
parlance, for a tale within which other tales are set) encloses
the components of many old collections, some of them versi-
fied (Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is an obvious example) but
most consisting of prose narratives (the Indian Panchatantra,
Arabian Thousand and One Nights, \talian Decameron,
Spanish Conde Lucanor, Latin Golden Ass). Whereas the
parts of a cycle are woven into an integral totality, these
ancient framed collections comprise a miscellany of narrative
types, diverse and discrete. Instead of the sense of community
that usually permeates a cycle, linking story to story, a framed
miscellany often situates its communal principle in the Rah-
menerzahlung: a group of pilgrims riding together to Canter-
bury, or a sophisticated company of young raconteurs taking
refuge from the Florentine plague. But that did not remain an
invariable feature of the miscellany; in Hoffmann’s Die
Serapionsbrider (1819), instead of being societal, the framing
principle is subjectively individual: each narrator relates some-
thing seen with his inner eye. And besides, it is not in the group
of narrators as such that any miscellany’s real unity lies. The
framing device is often more or less perfunctory, a conven-
tional pretext for assembling different items. Holding such
collections together in a more pervasive way is their author’s
fascination with the manifold roots and branches of narration
itself.
A modern miscellany will serve to illustrate this: Christina
Stead’s undeservedly neglected book The Salzburg Tales
(1934). Its animating interest in all aspects of tale-telling
appears first in the authorial prologue, ‘The Personages’,
where Stead distinguishes between particular kinds of stories
favoured by different people and between the individual quali-
ties of their imaginations or manners of speaking. There is the
 Brevity Expanded 5]

Frenchwoman, with her ‘firm caressing voice’:

to everything she said she gave an aphoristic turn; her conver-
sation disarmed the jealous, dismayed the dull and shar-
pened with salt the wit of the witty ... In company she had
no equal; she was benevolent and polished in repartee, in
anecdote pithy and wise, and in her tales circumstantial and
rotund with a long line of development and a sentimental
conclusion.
By way of contrast the Doctress ‘preferred scandalous stories
and her ideas came out of a slipshod imagination, with an evi-
dent intention of pleasing only herself. . .’ So the characteriza-
tions continue, often suggesting directly how and why these
folk like to talk or listen. The Lawyer is impelled by a greed for
gossip; the Foreign Correspondent speaks ‘with compressed
visionary epithets, as if his imagination flowered impetuously,
quicker than the tongue’; the Centenarist ‘was full of tales as
the poets of Persia: he unwound endlessly his fabrics, as froma
spool the silks of Arabia’; the Danish Woman ‘talked all day
and recounted hundreds of tales, mostly improbable, like a
female Munchhausen’; the Old Man ‘liked company and
joined in all the conversations to show he was a spark and an
accomplished trifler’; the Public Stenographer enlivens and
enlarges her small dull existence with ‘anecdotes of the comic,
pathetic and marvellous’; the Translator, who is ‘bitter, sting-
ing with a thousand imagined affronts, and, cruel, ready for a
thousand expected attacks’, would ‘run down even his dearest
friends for the pleasure of saying something original on his
own account’; the Police Commissioner cultivates literary
skills as one of several means to an end: ‘He had improved his
manners, taken an eyeglass, studied fine eating, invented a few
dishes, written two romances and a book of aphorisms and
learned to seem wise by ignoring questions’; the Broker’s
tongue ‘wallowed through a heavy swell of epithets’, and so on,
often in more detail.
 52 Short Story

It is not only in these scattered introductory comments in the

frame but also through further details in the ensuing collection
that Stead expresses her curiosity about sources and forms of
_ fiction. The tales appear now as products of place, now as pro-
ducts of personality. In one of them a scandal-monger
observes that malicious tattle, so rife in his village, seems to per-
tain to the very locality - topical talk in the most basic sense.
‘Those histories’, he says, ‘spring up here spontaneously; it is
like the feverish, foul air of decay, or a loathsome deposit left
by the old mountain lake that infects the air, a melancholy or
ague which every one of us gets eventually.’ In another story,
another village teems with superstitions and credulous fancies
that nourish any rumour; in another, provincial Périgord is
said to have as its mistress ‘bell-tongued Calliope’, who ‘tells
many a ribald pasquinade or minor pomp, and pieces together
with florid interludes village tales whose tissues long ago fell in
tatters in the sun.’ There is a more personal derivation for some
of the other stories, such as the one recounted by the Musical
Critic, who confesses to being ‘an inveterate and shameless
eavesdropper’: ‘I listen at the doors of rooms, I pussyfoot along
the corridors, I read private letters ... I chortle over the butt-
end of a conversation, and pick up chance remarks uttered as I
pass in the street.’
And so it goes on, with narrator after narrator and character
after character revealing motivation after motivation. But the
author’s preoccupation with fictional processes is most com-
prehensively evinced in the great variety of the tales themselves
- simple and sophisticated, laconic and grandiloquent, refined
and raw ... a full range is there, embracing virtually every
mode or sub-genre of the short story.
The framed miscellany is not always so distinct from the
short-story cycle. Alphonse Daudet’s Lettres de Mon Moulin
(1869) seems casually conjoined, and comprises a-heterogene-
ous assortment of narrative types - sketches, yarns; fables, ‘bal-
lades en prose’ - set into an informal frame. Yet its tone is more
 Brevity Expanded 53

uniform, its narrative scope more constricted, than in a true

miscellany. Despite the structural looseness, its affinity lies
rather with the cycle form; Daudet evokes piecemeal the life of
a regional community in Provence with much the same kind of
cumulative effect as Anderson conveys in Winesburg, Ohio.
5
Essential qualities¢
s

Essays on the short story began to appear frequently during

the first two decades of this century, especially in America.
These repeat unanimously the view that it is a distinctive genre
whose uniqueness lies in three related qualities: it makes a
single impression on the reader, it does so by concentrating on
a crisis, and it makes that crisis pivotal in a controlled plct.
Although this attractively neat triad did not become common
doctrine until about 1900, it derived from remarks made much
earlier by the pioneer theorist Edgar Allan Poe.

‘Unity of impression’
Reviewing some of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fiction in 1842, Poe
asserted that the chief formal property of ‘the short prose tale’
was ‘unity of impression’, which he regarded as a product of
conscious artistry; the author first ‘conceived, with deliberate
care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out’, and
then devised an appropriate narrative vehicle for conveying
that. Taken up by Brander Matthews (‘The Philosophy of the
Short-story’, 1884) and others, this emphasis on singleness of
effect and economy of means has until recently gained wide
acceptance. And of course it is true, if not truistic, to say that
lapses and laxities will probably be damaging in a brief narra-
tive, being relatively more prominent there than in a longer
one. V.S. Pritchett glosses what is incontestable in Poe’s dic-
tum when he remarks: ‘The wrong word, a misplaced para-
graph, an inadequate phrase or a convenient explanation, start
 Essential Qualities? 55

fatal leaks in this kind of writing, which is formally very close

to poetry. It must be totally sustained.’ But Poe’s conception of
unity, claiming to go further than that, becomes too limited to
cover all short stories. For one thing, his implication that for-
mal unity should always be a matter of ‘deliberate care’ is very
dubious. From a reading of Kafka’s diaries and letters, which
incorporate many embryonic stories and a few fully realized
ones, it is clear that some of his fictions were no more deliber-
ately wrought than dreams, than Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ or
Browning’s ‘Childe Roland’. While Kafka’s work may repres-
ent an extreme, the experience of writers generally still does
not seem to indicate that composing an impressive story need
involve any mechanical contrivance. And the experience of
readers generally belies the notion that any strict tonal consis-
tency or monochromatic emotional range is requisite for a
story to be an aesthetically satisfying whole. What makes
many of Chekhov’s narratives, for instance, so moving in an
unsentimentally poignant way is surely that they establish a ten-
sile balance between comedy and pathos. Gogol’s seminal
story ‘The Overcoat’ is similarly mixed: as one of its transla-
tors, Ronald Wilks, remarks, ‘now it is chatty and friendly,
now ironical, now completely impersonal, now sentimental.
And this strange medley is shot with witty anecdotes and start-
ling asides which transfer the whole action to another plane of
reality.” There are indeed many fine stories whose appeal seems
to stem mainly from their very lack of a ‘single effect’, as shown
earlier in discussing ‘The Ballad of the Sad Cafe’, where the
total unified impact is achieved by an interplay of several
modes. And if ‘unity of impression’ is to be interpreted flexibly
enough to include that kind of multiplex narrative, it can
hardly be denied to novels too: unity is not so simply correlated
with brevity as Poe suggests.

‘Moment of crisis’
A Dictionary of Literary Terms, edited by Sylvan Barnet et al.
56 Short Story

(London, 1964), notes that ‘most frequently a short-story wri-

ter of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries focuses on a single
character in a single episode, and rather than tracing his devel-
opment, reveals him at a particular moment’; and as Theodore
Stroud observes in his essay ‘A Critical Approach to the Short
Story’, this moment is frequently one at which the character
undergoes some decisive change in attitude or understanding,
as when Olga, in Chekhov’s ‘The Grasshopper’, suddenly recog-
nized her husband’s true worth and her acute need of him just
as he dies.
James Joyce was keenly aware of the importance of these
critical revelations in some of his own stories. He even applied
to them a special technical term, ‘epiphany’ (a showing-forth).
At the end of the final story in The Dubliners, ‘The Dead’,
Gabriel is assailed for the first time with ‘a shameful conscious-
ness of his own person ... He saw himself as a ludicrous
figure.’ Another story, ‘Araby’, leads similarly to a painful
flash of self-awareness for the narrator. He begins by describ-
ing the ‘blind’ street where he lived as a boy (the significant
adjective appears twice in the first two sentences), and where
the houses ‘gazed at one another with brown imperturbable
faces’. After depicting his adolescent romanticizing and abrupt
disillusionment, he concludes: ‘Gazing up into the darkness I
saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my
eyes burned with anguish and anger.’
But common though this pattern is in short stories, the per-
sonal crisis-point is not at all necessary. If a significant revela-
tion does occur, it may involve a perceived moment of truth
for
a character, but frequently it will be for readers only.
Joyce’s
‘Clay’ is an example of the latter. It simply describes a
simple
woman’s enjoyment of Hallow-e’en: a special tea
with the
women she works with at a laundry, and a visit to
her brother
and his family. To Maria it is all ‘pleasant’; she ‘laughe
d and
laughed’, she ‘said they were all very good to her’;etc
. But we
see more than she does. We see the pathetic constri
ction and
 Essential Qualities? 57

isolation of her existence, and others’ lack of sensitivity

towards her. Maria doesn’t understand the practical joke that
is played on her by the next-door girls while she is blindfolded;
it’s the reader who identifies the ‘soft wet substance’ she
touches with the story’s title image, and who recognizes that
this represents Maria’s portion in life. She herself remains
uncomprehending.
There are examples of both sorts in Katherine Mansfield’s
work: stories such as ‘Bliss’ and ‘Miss Brill’ show people at a
crucial point of new self-knowledge, but in ‘Psychology’ the
reader comes to see that the main characters, for all their
imagined candour, cannot perceive the true nature of their rela-
tionship - that in fact they will continue to deceive themselves,
Prufrock-like in lacking ‘the strength to force the moment to
its crisis’. Hemingway, too, writes stories of both sorts. Often
the focus is ona situation where someone is critically tested; in
‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ Macomber has
failed one trial before the narrative begins, but redeems himself
when another occurs, triumphing not only over his own fear
but over those who have treated him contemptuously because
of his earlier failure. Similarly some Hemingway stories show a
person being initiated into adulthood, or a person, who having
chosen, is alone with the consequences of what he has done or
failed to do; the two appear together in ‘The Killers’, which
presents Andreson’s stoical confrontation of his imminent
death and also the moment when young Nick becomes aware
of certain implacable facts of life - cruelty, indifference to suf-
fering, the essential isolation of human beings. But there is no
moment of crisis in some of Hemingway’s most memorable fic-
tion. Virtually nothing happens in ‘A Clean, Well-lighted
Place’, and indeed that nothing, nada, is precisely what the
story is about. And there are numerous stories by other wri-
ters, for instance Fielding Dawson’s account of inconclusive
pub encounters, which do not raise the action, external or inter-
nal, to any momentous peak.
58 Short Story

Moreover, what makes some stories linger in the mind is

that we are left uncertain about the nature and extent of the
revelation, peak of awareness, that a character has apparently
experienced. We sense that, while there has indeed been an
important shift of perspective in her/his view of things, its sig-
nificance may not yet have been fully apprehended by that char-
acter. This is true of some fine stories by Nadine Gordimer; ina
thoughtful essay on her work, Kevin Magarey remarks that
what the reader finally understands is often also ‘in the con-
sciousness of actors or narrator, but subliminally’. Sometimes,
indeed, even a most attentive reader could hardly indicate very
precisely what the climatic insight amounts to, palpable
though its importance may be. ‘Friday’s Footprint’, the title
piece in one of Gordimer’s books, culminates in a moment
when Rita arrives at the brink of recognizing something about
herself, about her present marriage, about her previous marri-
age, about the essence of her relationship with both husbands.
But the denouement is not quite completed; at the end she is
still struggling with the knot of her feelings, and so is the
reader.
Some narratives that do seem at first to hinge on a personal
crisis-point are in fact adumbrating the pattern only to subvert
it. Henry James’s ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ illustrates this latter
type in a way that approaches parody of the moment-of-crisis
story: it is deliberately anti-climactic, building up to the stage
when something does not change substantially in the main
character’s mind. John Marcher himself fails to recognize the
crisis for what it is. He has spent his life waiting for some thrill-
ing revelation, for the Beast to appear; but the Beast springs
unseen when Marcher overlooks his final opportunity to extri-
cate himself from the petty self-absorption which has enclosed
his whole being. The habit of egotism is so entrenched that he
still cannot see his long-suffering friend May as more than a
convenient adjunct to himself. The final few pages do, it is true,
record a kind of belated anagnorisis when ‘everything fell
 Essential Qualities? 59

together’: Marcher becomes painfully conscious of his loss as

he stands beside May’s grave. Yet even then he apparently
remains less than fully aware of his own nature and situation,
and we can hardly suppose that thenceforth his life’s direction
will be altered.

‘Symmetry of design’
In his influential 1884 essay, elaborating on Poe’s principles,
Brander Matthews declared that ‘symmetry of design’ was a
sine qua non in the short story. Insistence on this quality
accords with his view that a short story is almost null if it has
no plot. And as recently as 1945 A.L. Bader firmly endorsed
that view: plot is always basic, he argued, in the modern short
story, and the narrative structure is always derived from con-
flict, sequential action, and resolution. Similarly Somerset
Maugham and others have said that Aristotle’s dictum about
the need for a beginning, a middle and an end applies as axio-
matically to the short story as to the drama or novel, and we
have already noted, in the first chapter, that there appears to be
a basic aesthetic principle underlying that desideratum. But
while symmetrical design of some sort will frequently be pres-
ent in a short story, it is patently not a property that belongs
to that form in any distinctive indispensable way. Insistence
on symmetry began with Poe, and has more to do with his
own psychic obsessions than with any essential qualities of
the genre. Plot-hatching is part of his preoccupation with detec-
tive puzzles, and with situations and imagery of enclosure -
chambers, pits, walled cavities, vaults.
There are indeed two good reasons for discarding ‘symmetry
of design’ as a definitive term in critical parlance about the
short story. One is that regarding symmetry as requisite has
not helped critics to talk discriminatingly about the structure
of stories in which it actually is present; the other is that it has
impeded recognition of the fact that in many good stories
symmetry is not present at all.
60 Short Story

To enlarge on the first point: an excessive emphasis on inge-

nious plotting (Matthews listed ‘ingenuity’ among the ‘chief
requisites’ of the short story), and especially a relish for the
Final Twist as exemplified most notoriously in the writings of
O. Henry, is particularly unfortunate since it has tended to pro-
voke a reactive critical disparagement of all surprise endings,
some of which are however not manipulative devices but ways
of elucidating meanings latent in the whole narrative. Guy de
Maupassant’s ‘La Parure’ (“The Necklace’) exemplifies this. Its
main character, Mme Loisel, is the wife of a small-time civil ser-
vant; she yearns for a life of luxury, especially for expensive
clothes and jewellery, and is acutely irritable because of her hus-
band’s meagre income. These feelings come to a head when the
couple is invited to an official reception. She makes such a fuss
over having nothing to adorn herself with that they borrow a
diamond necklace from a more affluent acquaintance. The
necklace is lost; after frenetic efforts they manage to borrow a
huge sum, buy a replacement and return that (without reveal-
ing the mishap) to the lender of the necklace. M. and Mme Loi-
sel spend the next decade in exhausting work to pay off the
enormous debt. Only after that long period of expiation does
the woman happen to learn that the borrowed necklace was
merely a cheap imitation. This sudden revelation at its close
has brought the story into disfavour with some critics. Roger
Colet, for instance, omits ‘La Parure’ from his recent selection
of Maupassant’s fiction, implying in a dismissive reference to it
that its plot is factitious. But there is more to it than that, as
Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren show in their anno-
tated anthology Understanding Fiction, which includes and
discusses ‘La Parure’ in the same section as O. Henry’s well
known story ‘The Furnished Room’. This latter concerns a
young man’s failure to find his lost sweetheart. For months he
has searched for her in the big city, and as the narration opens
he is wearily taking a room in one of the many old houses of
New York’s lower West Side. To the landlady he puts the ques-
 Essential Qualities? 6]

tion that he has asked a thousand times elsewhere: has she had
among her transient lodgers a certain young actress, fair, of
medium height, etc., with a mole by her left eyebrow? No, the
landlady ‘can’t call that one to mind’. Dispirited, he sinks into a
dull reverie - which is suddenly invaded by a scent of mignon-
ette: his sweetheart’s perfume! Rushing downstairs, he asks the
landlady who had rented the room previously. But none of the
tenants she describes as having occupied it recently could have
been the woman he seeks. When he returns to the room, the
scent has gone. Then, after blocking every crevice, he turns on
the gas. Meanwhile the landlady is telling a friend of hers that
the troublesome third-floor room has been rented out to a
young man. No, she had not told him about the suicide there a
week before. That dead girl had been “a pretty slip of a colleen
to be killin’ herself wid the gas’; handsome, indeed, ‘but for that
mole she had a-growin’ by her left eyebrow’.
As Brooks and Warren remark, O. Henry seems here to be
guilty of artistic dishonesty. Characterization, and therefore
motivation, remain sketchy, and the story amounts merely toa
contrived demonstration of ‘the irony of fate’. The withheld
information, the lie, is for the reader’s benefit only; presuma-
bly if the landlady had told the young man the truth, that the
girl was dead etc., his reaction would have been just as despair-
ing. The ending provides at most an illusion of significance.
But in Maupassant’s story the surprising turn at the end reveals
more than just a hidden fact, a sad irony; it brings to the sur-
face the real significance of the foregoing action. The lost jew-
els were, after all, only paste, worthless baubles. But so, in a
sense, is the ‘real’ necklace which cost Mme Loisel so much
(not only in money) to pay off. The story’s theme has to do with
true and false values, and the falsity of the lost article becomes
symbolic of the basic situation. In retrospect the loss of the jew-
els appears not so much a terrible misfortune as a disguised
blessing.
Criticism needs to distinguish, then, between the merely
62 Short Story

tricky ending and the ending which jolts us into perceiving

something fundamental about what we have been reading. It is
of no relevance to look for symmetrical plot-design, which in
itself cannot be correlated with degrees of artistry.
In fairness to O. Henry, one should add that his use of final
surprises sometimes has a more respectable function than in
his falsely sentimental piece ‘The Furnished Room’. Boris Eich-
enbaum, the Russian formalist critic, credits O. Henry with
bringing the nineteenth-century American short story to the
phase of structural parody, thus opening the way for a regener-
ation of the genre. As cultivated by O. Henry’s predecessors,
says Eichenbaum, the short story tends to amass its weight like
an anecdote towards the conclusion, ‘towards the maximal
unexpectedness of a finale concentrating around itself all that
has preceded it’. O. Henry lays bare this structural pattern by
playful emphasis on the devices associated with it; he ‘anno-
tates the progress of the plot, taking each instance as an oppor-
tunity for introducing literary irony, for destroying the illusion
of authenticity, for parodying a cliché, for making palpable the
conventionality of art, or showing how the story is put
together. The author time and again intrudes into the events of
his own story and engages the reader in literary conversation,
turning the story into a feuilleton’. Written half a century ago,
Eichenbaum’s long and important essay is now available in an
English translation as ‘O. Henry and the Theory of the Short
Story’ in Readings in Russian Poetics, (ed. Matejka and
Pomorska.)
The second reason for resisting Aristotelian requirements in
short-story criticism is that the action of a short story, though
hardly of a more extended composition, need have no com-
pleted pattern at all. It may be virtually without start or finish,
representing only a state of affairs rather than a sequence of
events. This is generally true of the work of some writers;
Galsworthy said Chekhov’s stories are ‘all middle,-like a tor-
toise’, and Chekhov himself once remarked: ‘I think that when
 Essential Qualities? 63
one has finished writing a short story one should delete the
beginning and the end’. In discarding patterns of enclosure the
short-story writer can perhaps discover a freedom and imagina-
tive truth inherent in this genre. Elizabeth Bowen declares that
‘the short story, free from the Jongeurs of the novel, is also
exempt from the novel’s conclusiveness - too often forced and
false’. And although a few writers have continued to opt for
neatly pointed plots (‘I preferred’, says Somerset Maugham,
‘to end my stories with a full-stop rather than with a straggle of
dots’), there has been a growing tendency during the present
century for short stories to be ‘all middle’, to avoid structural
complications in general and terminal climaxes in particular.
With simple directness Robert Creeley expressed this freer
sense of form in prefacing his 1953 book of short fiction, The
Gold Diggers:
Whereas the novel is a continuum, of necessity, chapter to
chapter, the story can escape some of that obligation, and
function exactly in terms of whatever emotion best can serve
re:
The story has no time finally. Or it hasn’t here. Its shape, if
form can be so thought of, is a sphere, an egg of obdurate
kind. The only possible reason for its existence is that it has,
in itself, the fact of reality and the pressure. There, in short,
_ is its form - no matter how random and broken that will
seem. The old assumptions of beginning and end - those very
neat assertions - have fallen away completely in a place
where the only actuality is life, the only end (never realized)
death, and the only value, what love one can manage.
It is impossible to think otherwise, or at least I have found
it so. I begin where I can, and end when I see the whole thing
returning.
In a stricter sense there is a type of story, more and more com-
mon in modern fiction, which could not exist if it had a develop-
ing plot in the old manner. Samuel F. Pickering mentions a few
64 Short Story

examples in a review of some recent American short-story

anthologies:
In Patricia Griffith’s ‘Nights at O’Rear’s’ (O’Rear’s is a drive-
in restaurant in a small Texas town), the idle young in their
cars, forever circling the drive-in, can be taken as a meta-
phor for the story’s form. In its end is its beginning and in its
beginning is its end; the divisions of the story are inseparable
and there is no progression between them. Wright Morris’s
‘Magic’ confuses the reader by describing a psychological
world in which past, present and future are only separated
from one another. Other stories such as Tillie Olson’s
‘Raqua I’ and Jonathan Strong’s ‘Patients’ examine the non-
sequential world of the mentally ill.
Pickering does not much like stores of this kind; they ‘luxuriate
in stasis’, he says. But unless we turn our back on work by some
of the most eminent living fiction-writers, there can be no gain-
saying the fact that stasis has become very common in modern
stories. ‘Stasis’ is perhaps a misnomer in most cases, since some
activity takes place. Rather than being inert, the character
shows himself unable or unwilling to alter his situation; the
movement is of a treadmill sort or suggests continuous transit
without a foreseeable re-entry into social relationships. This
inconclusiveness becomes a meaningful principle of structure.
Only the most rigid dogmatism would lead one to regard as
faultily fragmentary a piece like Ted Hughes’s ‘Snow’, nar-
rated by someone whose situation is totally mysterious to him-
self and us because he is literally surrounded by blankness;
perhaps he is in a post-mortem limbo, or . . .? Similarly incon-
clusive situations pervade Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘The Gods’
Script’, in which the sole character merely meditates (intermin-
ably, we are led to suppose) on the idea of endlessness, and
John Barth’s ‘The Night-Sea Journey’, a monologue by a swim-
ming creature -Human? Piscine? Spermatic? -who.is in some
sort of oceanic expanse but unaware of his goal or meaning, if
 Essential Qualities? 65

any.
This kind of narrative, open at both ends, frequently centres
on a certain character-type: the bird-of-passage figure whose
significance depends on the fact that his origins and destina-
tions are beyond the narrative’s scope. The first (titular) story
of McCullers’ collection The Ballad of the Sad Cafe gets under
way with the arrival of Lymon the stranger; when asked,
“Where you come from? he replies simply, ‘I was travelling’.
And at the end of the last story in the same volume a bystander
makes this comment on the enigmatic main character, who has
just made his exit: ‘He sure has done a lot of travelling.’ The
nomadic pattern suggested there (and metaphorically echoed
by that tune in ‘The Ballad’ which ‘had no start and no finish’)
is found time and again in the work of many different writers,
and conveys something that the short story can perhaps
achieve more finely than any other literary form. By being vir-
tually plotless, narratives of the kind that we have just been con-
sidering can make salient a quality which William James came
to recognize even in the elaborate tales written by his brother;
these gave, he said,
an impression like that we often get of people in life: their
orbits come out of space and lay themselves for a short time
along ours, and then off they whirl again into the unknown,
leaving us with little more than an impression of their reality
and a feeling of baffled curiosity as to the mystery of the
beginning and end of their being.
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Bibhography

General books of short-story criticism

Bates, H.E., The Modern Short Story, London, 1941.

Selective historical account of the genre, beginning with
Poe and Gogol; very readable.
Beachcroft, T.O., The Modest Art: A Survey of the Short
Story in English, London, 1968.
Concentrates in fact on the short story in England, and is
not much concerned with theoretical issues.
Bungert, Hans (ed.), Die Amerikanische Short Story: Theorie
und Entwicklung, Darmstadt, 1972.
An anthology of useful material, most of it in English.
Gardner, John, and Dunlap, Lennis (eds), The Forms of Fic-
tion, New York, 1962.
One of many American short-story collections intended for
students; this one has a more thorough introductory essay
than most.
Kilchenmann, Ruth J., Die Kurzgeschichte: Formen und
Entwicklung, Stuttgart, 1967.
An interesting demonstration of the difficulty of distinguish-
ing categorically between the short story and the German
Novelle.
Kumar, Shiv K., and McKean, Keith (eds), Critical Ap-
proaches to Fiction, New York, 1968.
Includes reprinted articles on the short story by Bader,
Stroud, West, Marcus and Welty.
68 Short Story

Matthews, Brander, The Philosophy of The Short Story, New

York, 1901.
Strongly influenced by Poe, this booklet was the first criti-
cal study of the form in English. In a briefer version, it first
appeared in The Saturday Review (London) in 1884.
Reprinted by Bungert and (in extract) by Summers.
O’Connor, Frank, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short
Story, New York, 1963.
One of the very few studies offering general remarks about
the form itself in addition to commentaries on the work of
several short-story writers.
O’Faolain, Sean, The Short Story, New York, 1951.
Lucid, illuminating, informal discussion of the craft of
short fiction.
Summers, Hollis (ed.), Discussions of the Short Story, Boston,
1963.
Includes helpful brief essays by Poe, Matthews, Bader and
others.
Trask, Georgianne, and Burkhart, Charles (eds), Storytellers
and Their Art, New York, 1963.
Anthology which brings together ‘what writers of the short
story have said about it’.

Ancillary and specialized studies

(a) Books
Bennett, E.K., and Waidson, H.M., A History of the German
Novelle, Cambridge, 1961 (2nd edn).
Castex, Pierre-Georges, Le Conte Fantastique en France de
Nodier & Maupassant, Paris, 1951.
George, Albert J., Short Fiction in France: 1800-1850, Syra-
cuse, 1964.
Gerhardt, Mia I., The Art of Story-Telling: A Literary Study
of the Thousand and One Nights, Leiden, 1963.
 Bibliography 69

Ingram, Forrest L., Representative Short-Story Cycles of the

Twentieth Century, The Hague, 1971.
Jolles, André, Einfache Formen, Halle, 1956 (2nd edn). Trans-
lated into French by Antoine Marie Buguet as Formes Sim-
ples, Paris, 1972.
Leibowitz, Judith, Narrative Purpose in the Novella, The
Hague, 1974.
Liithi, Max, Once Upon a Time: On the Nature of Fairy Tales,
New York, 1970.
Pattee, F.W., The Development of the American Short Story:
An Historical Survey, New York, 1923 (reprinted 1966).
Prince, Gerald, A Grammar of Stories, The Hague, 1973.
Propp, Vladimir J., Morphology of the Folk Tale, Blooming-
ton, 1958 (a translation of the 1928 Russian original). Trans-
lated into French as Morphologie du Conte, Paris, 1970.
Springer, Mary Doyle, Forms of the Modern Novella,
Chicago, 1975.
Thalmann, Marianne, The Romantic Fairy Tale: Seeds of Sur-
realism (translated by Mary B. Corcoran), Ann Arbor,
1964.
Trenkner, Sophie, The Greek Novella in the Classical Period,
Cambridge, 1958.

(b) Articles and parts of books

Angus, Douglas, ‘Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” and “The Beauty

and the Beast” Tale’, Journal of English and Germanic Phi-
lology, liii (1954), pp. 69-71.
Bader, A.L., ‘The Structure of the Modern Short Story’, Col-
lege English, vii (1945), pp. 86-92; reprinted in the
collections by Summers and by Kumar and McKean.
70 Short Story

Bergonzi, Bernard, ‘Appendix on the Short Story’, in The Situ-

ation of the Novel, London, 1970.
Eichenbaum, Boris, ‘O. Henry and the Theory of the Short
Story’, in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Struc-
turalist Views, edited by Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna
Pomorska, Cambridge, Mass., 1971, pp. 227-70.
Engstrom, Alfred G., ‘The Formal Short Story in France and
Its Development Before 1850’, Studies in Philology, xii
(1945), pp. 627-39.
Friedman, Norman, ‘What Makes a Short Story Short?, Mod-
ern Fiction Studies, iv (1958), pp. 103-17.
Gillespie, Gerald, ‘Novella, Nouvelle, Novelle, Short Novel? -
A Review of Terms’, Neophilologus, li (1967), pp. 117-27
and 225-30.
Magarey, Kevin, ‘Cutting the Jewel: Facets of Art in Nadine
Gordimer’s Short Stories’, Southern Review, vii (1974), pp.
3-28.
Marler, Robert F., ‘From Tale to Short Story: The Emergence
of a New Genre in the 1850s’, American Literature, xlvi
(1974), pp. 153-69.
Mercier, Vivian, ‘The Irish Short Story and Oral Tradition’, in
The Celtic Cross: Studies in Irish Culture and Literature,
edited by Ray B. Browne et al., Lafayette, Ind., 1964, pp. 98-
116.
Nemerov, Howard, ‘Composition and Fate in the Short
Novel’, in Poetry and Fiction, New Brunswick, N.J., 1963,
pp. 229-45.
Schlauch, Margaret, ‘English Short Fiction in the Fifteenth
and Sixteenth Centuries’, Studies in Short Fiction, ii
(1966), pp. 393-434.
Shklovsky, Victor, ‘La Construction de la Nouvelle et du
Roman’, in Théorie de la Littérature, edited by Tzvetan
Todorov, Paris, 1965, pp. 170-96.
Steinhauer, Harry, ‘Towards a Definition of the Novella’,
Seminar, vi (1970), pp. 154-74.
 Bibliograph yor

Stroud, Theodore A., ‘A Critical Approach to the Short

Story’, Journal of General Education, ix (1956), pp. 91-100;
reprinted in the collection by Kumar and McKean.
Todorov, Tzvetan, ‘The Structuralist Analysis of Literature:
The Tales of Henry James’, in Structuralism: An Introduc-
tion, edited by David Robey, Oxford, 1973, pp. 73-103.
Tolkien, J.R.R., ‘On Fairy-Stories’, in Tree and Leaf, London,
1964, pp. 11-70.
Tynjanov, Jurij, ‘On Literary Evolution’, in Readings in Rus-
sian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist View, edited by
Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska, Cambridge,
Mass., 1971, pp. 66-78.
 selec
See Sr, d G55, ee
Index

Addison, Joseph, 22, 31 Book of Dede Korkut, The,

Aesop, 16 46
Anderson, Sherwood, 40, Book of Sindibad, The, 18
47-8, 49, 53 Book of the Wiles of
Angus, Douglas, 68 Women, The, 18
Apuleius, 16, 50 Borges, Jorge Luis, 7, 64
Aristides of Miletus, 16 Bowen, Elizabeth, 62
Aristotle, 6, 10, 59 Bremond, Claude, 3, 5, 36
Arnim, Achim von, 23 Brentano, Clemens, 23
Auerbach, Erich, 19 Brooks, Cleanth, 60, 61
Browning, Robert, 55
Babrius, 16 Buber, Martin, 8
Bader, A.L., 59, 67, 68 Bungert, Hans, 66
Balzac, Honoré de, 24 Burkhart, Charles, 67
Barnet, Sylvan, 55 Byron, George Gordon,
Barth, John, 64 Lord, 27
Bates, H.E., 2, 24, 26, 66
Battle of Maldon, The, 19
Beachcroft, T.O., 66 Castex, P.-G., 35, 67
Benedict, Ruth, 35 Cervantes, Miguel de, 11,
Benet, Stephen Vincent, 33 Ze
Bennett, E.K., 23, 67 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 19, 50
Bergonzi, Bernard, 1, 68 Chekhov, Anton, 45, 55,
Boas, Franz, 35 56, 62-3
Baccaccio, Giovanni, II, Chesterfield, Philip Stan-
12, 19-22, 50 hope, Earl of, 11
74 Short Story

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Gerhardt, Mia I., 67

27, 46, 55 Gillespie, Gerald, 10, 69
Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle, Gogol, Nikolai, 24, 55, 66
44 Gold, Herbert, 5
Conde Lucanor, El, 50 Gordimer, Nadine, 58
Conrad, Joseph, 11, 45 Greimas, A.J., 36
Coover, Robert, 7 Griffith, Patricia, 64
Cowley, Malcolm, 40 Grimm, Brothers, 23, 34
Crane, Stephen, 44
Creeley, Robert, 63
Hall, Joseph, 31
Harris, Joel Chandler, 38
Danto, Arthur C., 6
Harte, Bret, 26
Daudet, Alphonse, 24, 49,
Hauptmann, Gerhart, 44
52
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 9,
Dawson, Fielding, 9, 57
25, 29, 38, 54
Diderot, Denis, 22
Hemingway, Ernest, 9,57
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 45
Henry, O., 60-2
Dunlap, Lennis, 36, 66
Heyse, Paul, 12
Hoffmann, E.T.A., 23, 34-
Edgerton, Franklin, 18
5, 50
Eichenbaum, Boris, 3, 62,
Hrafnkels saga, 19
68
Hughes, Ted, 64
Engstrom, Alfred G., 8. 68
Faulkner, William, 47, 48
Fenton, Geoffrey, 22 Ingram, Forrest L., 47-8,
Flaubert, Gustave, 8, 24 67
Forster, E.M., 4 Irving, Washington, 25, 30-
France, Marie de, 19 1
Friedman, Norman, 69
Fry, Christopher, 17 Jackson, Shirley, 38
James, Henry, 9, 43, 44, 45,
Galsworthy, John, 62 58-9, 65
Gardner, John, 36, 66 James, William, 65
Gautier, Theophile, 24 Johnson, Samuel, 45
George, Albert J., 12, 67 Jolles, Andre, 32, 67
 Index 75

Joyce, James, 28, 32, 46, Matthews, Brander, 4, 54,

47, 56-7 59, 60, 67
Maugham, W. Somerset, 9,
Kafka, Franz, 7, 37-8, 39- 59, 63
40, 46, 55 Maupassant, Guy de, 12,
Keats, John, 28 17, 24, 60-1
Keller, Grottfried, 23 Melville, Herman, 25, 26,
Kilchenmann, Ruth J., 13, 45, 46
66 Mercier, Vivian, 35, 69
Klein, Johannes, 13, 22 Mérimée, Prosper, 11, 12,
Kleist, Heinrich von, 11, 23 24, 44
Kumar, Shiv K., 66 Morkinskinna, 19
Moore, George, 35
Moorhouse, Frank, 47, 49
La Bruyére, Jean de, 22, 31 Morris, Wright, 64
La Fontaine, Jean de, 12, Musset, Alfred de, 12
17, 38
Lamb, Charles, 31 Navarre, Marguerite de,
Lawrence, D.H., 12, 44, 45 1): 21
Lawson, Henry, 32 Nemerov, Howard, 2, 45,
Leibowitz, Judith, 44, 68 69
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 35 Nerval, Gérard de, 27, 35
Luthi, Max, 39, 68 Nodier, Charles, 12, 35
North, Thomas, 18
McCullers, Carson, 40-2,
46, 65 O’Connor, Frank, 2, 27, 67
McKean, Keith, 66 O’Faolain, Sean, 2, 67
Magarey, Kevin, 58, 69 Olson, Tillie, 64
Malamud, Bernard, 38 Orwell, George, 31
Malory, Sir Thomas, 46 Overbury, Thomas, 31
Mann, Thomas, 32, 44, 45
Mansfield, Katherine, 32, Painter, William, 22
Panchatantra, 18, 50
57
Marcus, Mordecai, 66 Pater, Walter, 31
Marler, Robert F., 25, 69 Pattee, Fred Lewis, 25, 68
76 Short Story

Perrault, Charles, 34 Sturluson, Snorri, 19, 39

Petronius, 16-17 Summers, Hollis, 67
Pettie, George, 11, 22
Phaedrus, 16 Thalmann, Marianne, 23,
Pickering, Samuel F., 63 68
Plath, Sylvia, 7 Theophrastus, 22, 31
Poe, Edgar Allan, 1, 9, 25, Thousand and One Nights,
28, 29, 54-5, 59, 66, 67 The, 18, 50
Prince, Gerald, 5, 6, 68 Thurber, James, 32
Pritchett, V.S., 54 Tieck, Ludwig, 12, 23
Propp, Vladimir, 3, 35-6, Todorov, Tzvetan, 3, 69
68 Tolkien, J.R.R., 34, 69
Pushkin, Alexander, 24 Toonder, Jan Gerhard, 7
Trask, Georgianne, 67
Rourke, Constance, 27 Trenkner, Sophie, 16, 68
Turgenev, Ivan, 24, 49
‘Salisbury, John of, 17 Twain, Mark, 33
Sargeson, Frank, 10 Tynjanov, Jurij, 14, 70
Saroyan, William, 9
Schlauch, Margaret, 69 Voltaire, 17, 22, 45
Shklovsky, Victor, 3, 69 Vonnegut, Kurt, 45
Silone, Ignazio, 44
Sir Launfal, 19 Waidson, H.M., 23, 67
Springer, Mary Doyle, 44- Walser, Robert, 32
5, 68 Warren, Robert Penn, 60,
Stead, Christina, 50-2 61
Steele, Richard, 22, 31 Welty, Eudora, 49, 66
Stein, Gertrude, 44 West, Ray B., 66
Steinbeck, John, 49 Wilks, Ronald, 54
Steinhauer, Harry, 43, 69 Wordsworth, William, 27,
Stifter, Adalbert, 23 28
Storm, Theodor, 23
Strong, Jonathan, 64 Yeats, W.B., 8
Stroud, Theodore, 56, 66,
69
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 THE CRITICAL IDIOM
Founder Editor: John D. Jump (1969-1976)

The Short Story

lan Reid

The short story is the most widely read of all modern genres, and
favoured by many distinguished fiction writers, but as a form it has
been. relatively neglected by literary historians and theorists. Good
books about the novel are legion; books of-any sort about the short
story are very scarce.
This study begins by examining some preliminary problems of defi-
nition: what does ‘short’ mean, and ‘story’? How flexible can the
generic category be? What relation is there between the ‘short story”
in English and comparable terms in some other European lan-
guages? The book goes on to trace the emergence of what is usually
meant by ‘the modern short story’, and examines the various sorts of
narrative from which it derives: the sketch, yarn, Méarchen, parable
and fable, and composite types. The final chapter considers the
pos-
sibility that there are certain structural properties belongi
ng
distinctively to the short story.
Throughout the book Dr Reid emphasizes the wide-ranging
nature
of the form, and the consequent need to go beyond rigid
categories,
or Aristotelian orthodoxies about plot, if the essential
qualities of
short stories are to be properly recognized.

Literature

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