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The Short Story

critical studies, theory, and classic short stories

critical studies, theory, and classic short stories

A Day in the Country and Other Stories

July 6, 2009 by Roy Johnson

19th century master of the short story form

Guy de Maupassant was a prolific and very famous writer in his own lifetime. Between 1880 and 1891 for instance he wrote about 300 short stories, 200 articles, six novels, two plays, and three travel books. He wrote in the heyday of the short story, and it is this literary form for which he is now best remembered. Maupassant was one of the late nineteenth-century writers shaping what was to become the modern short story. His contribution to the genre was to pare down the means of expression and to focus on the effect of the tale.

A Day in the Country and Other StoriesHis stories are not abbreviated novels or rambling prose poems. They tell a story – and often it has a sting in the tail. Like other French writers of the late nineteenth century he was keen to explore ordinary everyday life – often exposing its less appetising and even grim features. I bought this particular collection after watching Jean Renoir’s beautiful film Partie de campagne which is a completely faithful account of the title story. But I was amazed to discover that the full length feature film and masterpiece of the cinema was based on a tale no more than a few pages long.

His style, much influenced by his friend Flaubert, is one of scrupulous clarity. Everything is pared to a minimum, and the material world is rendered in well-chosen detail. His attitude is that of a sceptical realist, with an eye for the tragic and sad elements of life which lead many critics to brand him a pessimist. They may have a point, because it’s remarkable just how many of his stories end with someone’s abrupt death.

He was shortening and concentrating the narrative, stripping it of excrescence. Yet he still drags along some of its traditional features – the whiplash ending for instance. Some of them are not much more than well-articulated anecdotes, but they are usually resolved with an ironic or dramatic twist.

Despite these weaknesses, it’s his contribution to the development of the short story for which he is still respected. It is his stories which are still widely read, not his full-length novels.

[Maupassant] fixes a hard eye on some spot of human life, usually some dreary, ugly, shabby, sordid one, takes up the particle, and squeezes it either till it grimaces or till it bleeds. Sometimes the grimace is very droll, sometimes the wound is very horrible … Monsieur de Maupassant sees human life as a terribly ugly business relieved by the comical.

It’s amazing to think that Henry James, a friend and admirer who wrote those words was writing at the same time – though when considering the compositional crudities in some of these stories, their origin in newspapers and popular magazines should be taken into account.

But this famous terseness of style is not quite so ubiquitous as is often claimed. He is quite prepared to indulge in rhetorical flourishes to make his point – as in this account of a Parisian visiting the provinces:

I wondered: ‘What on earth can I do after dinner?’ I thought how long an evening could be here in this town in the provinces: the slow, grim stroll through unfamiliar streets, the depressing gloom which the solitary traveller feels oozing out of passers by who are complete strangers in every respect, from the provincial cut of their jackets, hats, and trousers to their ways and the local accent, an all-pervading misery which drips from the houses, the shops, the outlandish shapes of the vehicles in the streets, and the generally unaccustomed hubbub, an uneasy sinking of the spirits which prompts you to walk a little quicker as though you were lost in a dangerous, cheerless country and makes you want to go back to your hotel, that loathsome hotel, where your room has been pickled in innumerable dubious smells, where you are not entirely sure about the bed, and where there’s a hair stuck fast in the dried dust at the bottom of the washbasin.

In one of the finest tales in this collection he tackles a subject which has a long and honourable history amongst writers – the story of a man who, as a result of some trivial argument or misplaced notion of pride, suddenly finds that he is about to fight a duel. It also includes his best known – ‘The Necklace’ – another tale which has spawned many variations, as well as ‘Le Horla’, a story which strangely parallels Maupassant’s own descent into premature madness and death, brought on by syphilis.

Later writers such as James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and especially Virginia Woolf were to take his stylistic developments further – and bring the short story into closer contact with the prose poem and the philosophic meditation. But connoisseurs of this literary form will always be well rewarded by re-visiting one of the earlier masters of the genre.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Guy de Maupassant, A Day in the Country and Other Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp.312, ISBN 0192838636


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Filed Under: 19C Literature, Short Stories, The Short Story Tagged With: A Day in the Country, French Literature, Guy de Maupassant, Literary studies, The Short Story

A Smile of Fortune

June 12, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a harbour tale

A Smile of Fortune is one of Joseph Conrad’s lesser-known long stories. He was essentially a nineteenth century writer who anticipated and then lived into the modernist age of the early twentieth century, helping to shape its spirit of uncertainty, anxiety, and moral ambiguity. Even his own life and works share the contradictions of the era. He is best known as an author of mannish sea tales, yet he only achieved success with a novel set largely on dry land which had a woman as its central character (Flora Barral in Chance).

A Smile of FortuneHe is now regarded as a great figure in the tradition of the English novel, yet he was Polish, and English was his third language. He’s also regarded as something of a conservative, yet his political views were scathingly radical (see The Secret Agent).

A Smile of Fortune comes from his mature period (1911) and features the familiar Conradian device of a young sea captain who is confronted by a puzzling ethical dilemma. The first person narrator is a confirmed bachelor given to a philosophic approach to life, but whom Conrad cleverly makes vulnerable to the duplicities of the more experienced people around him.

He arrives at an island in the Indian Ocean to take on a cargo of sugar, but is also given an open invitation by his ship’s owners to do trade with a local merchant.

The trader turns out to have a brother, and the two of them have diametrically opposed characters: one is socially well respected, but is a brute; the other is a social outcast who wishes to ingratiate himself with the unnamed narrator.

For reasons he himself cannot fully understand, the captain opts for the outcast and allows himself to be drawn into his domestic life whilst waiting for his ship to be made ready. The principal attraction for this delay is a mysterious young woman, who might be the trader’s daughter, with whom the young captain becomes romantically obsessed.

The trader meanwhile is encouraging the captain’s attentions, whilst trying to lure him into a speculative commercial venture. It’s as if the young man is being lured and tempted on two fronts – the erotic and the pecuniary.

In typically modernist fashion, this conflict reaches an unexpected and ambiguous resolution which despite the captain’s commercial profit leads to his resigning his commission and heading back home.

Formally, it’s a long short story, rather than a novella such as The Secret Sharer and The Shadow Line with which it is frequently collected. And in terms of achievement, it seems to me to fall between the level of those excellent longer tales and the often embarrassingly bad short stories which Conrad turned out at the height of his commercial success.

It’s a story full of symbols and half-concealed inferences which is crying out for (at least) Freudian analysis, and can certainly be added to the list of lesser-known tales which deserve interpretive attention from anyone who admires Conrad’s achievement.

© Roy Johnson 2008

A Smile of Fortune Buy the book at Amazon UK

A Smile of Fortune Buy the book at Amazon US


Joseph Conrad, A Smile of Fortune, London: Hesperus Press, 2007, pp.79, ISBN 184391428X


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Filed Under: Conrad - Tales, Joseph Conrad, Short Stories, The Short Story Tagged With: A Smile of Fortune, Joseph Conrad, Literary studies, Modernism, The Short Story

Carmilla

March 31, 2011 by Roy Johnson

the first lesbian vampire story?

Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish writer of Gothic tales and mystery novels who came from the same tradition which produced Oscar Wilde and James Joyce. Indeed, he went to the same university – Trinity College Dublin. But his work is less well known, with one exception – the long story (or maybe novella) Carmilla which was to influence Bram Stoker when he came to write his classic Dracula. However, Carmilla (1871) is not only a vampire story – it’s a lesbian vampire story – plus all the usual trappings of the Gothic horror tale.

CarmillaThe setting is, as usual, a remote part of central Europe. Laura (the damsel to be in distress) lives with her elderly father in a castle situated miles from anywhere in the middle of a forest. As a youngster, she has a frightening nocturnal experience when she dreams she is visited in bed by a beautiful girl. Some years later a mysterious woman travelling with her daughter Carmilla has a coach accident nearby. She leaves the girl in their care and continues her journey.

Carmilla reveals to Laura that they have met before, and recounts to her an identical childhood dream. They agree that the experience was memorable and significant for both of them. Carmilla subsequently becomes passionately attached to Laura, acting towards her like a lover – but also displaying erratic mood swings. She insists on sleeping in a locked room, and doesn’t get up until the afternoon.

There is an outbreak of mysterious deaths in the district, and an ancient oil painting of a Countess Mircalla Karnstein turns out to be an exact likeness of Carmilla. Laura is flattered but also slightly disturbed by the sexual advances Carmilla makes towards her. She has another nocturnal attack – this time by a giant black cat.

Following this she begins to fall ill – but in a manner which she feels is not altogether unpleasant. Further nocturnal visions make her fear Carmilla is in danger, but when the servants go to check in the middle of the night, Carmilla is not in her room – which is locked.

Laura and her father then accompany a grieving neighbour to the old ruined estate of the Karnsteins, where he intends to avenge his niece’s death. En route he tells them the story of a mysterious woman who leaves her beautiful daughter Millarca in his care. Millarca exerts a malign influence on his niece, who dies. The story of course is a close parallel to that of Laura and her father.

The neighbour has traced back the history of evil in the locality to the Karnstein family, whose tombs they visit in a Gothic chapel. The grave of Millarca Countess Karnstein is opened, and even though she has been dead for one hundred and fifty years, her features are ‘tinted with the warmth of life’, her eyes are open, and she is still breathing. There is only one possible solution: she is despatched in the manner prescribed for all vampires.

It’s a marvelously condensed tale, full of thematic parallels, doubling, incidents which echo and repeat each other, and repeated motifs all centred on the principal theme of vampirism – which is why it can reasonably be described as a novella. Of course it has all the conventional features of the Gothic horror story – the remote castle setting, a motherless heroine who is threatened by evil forces, a mysterious and beautiful stranger with very sharp teeth, inexplicable deaths, locked doors, and transmogrification.

In order to understand some of the perplexing mysteries, it’s helpful if you know the rules governing vampires and their behaviour, but these have become reasonably well established in the last two hundred years:

they escape from their graves and return to them for certain hours every day, without displacing the clay or leaving any trace of disturbance in he state of the coffin or the cerements … The amphibious existence of the vampire is sustained by daily renewed slumber in the grave. Its horrible lust for living blood supplies the vigour of its waking existence. The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons.

It is this aspect of ‘fascination’ which will be of particular interest to contemporary readers. The appearance of figures such as old men in tall black hats, a hunchback with a fiddle, and even a black servant with a turban and large white eye-balls are easy enough to fit into the iconography of the Gothic romance – but the overtly sexualised relationship between Carmilla and Laura is unusual, especially by nineteenth century standards.

Carmilla gets into bed with Laura, she is repeatedly kissing her, stroking her hair, and declaring both the passion that she feels and her belief that they destined for each other. Laura in her turn is excited by the magnetism between them, and also a little disturbed by it. Her description of their encounters is couched in distinctly orgasmic terms.

Sometimes there came a sensation as if a hand was drawn softly along my cheek and neck. Sometimes it was as if warm lips kissed me, and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat, but there the caress fixed itself. My heart beat faster, my breathing rose and fell rapidly and full drawn; a sobbing, that rose into a sense of strangulation, supervened, and turned into a dreadful convulsion, in which my senses left me and I became unconscious.

And the story is ripe for other approaches to interpretation. It is drenched with instances of ‘the double’ for instance. Almost every character is twinned with another. The two female lead characters appear to be the same age (Carmillia is of course one hundred and fifty years older) and they have identical and simultaneous dreams. Even the landscape and the architecture is doubled.

In the Oxford Classics edition (which also contains Le Fanu’s other tales of the supernatural) there are two other interpretations explored. One which sees the novella in terms of social anxiety regarding the decline of the protestant ‘acendency’ in Ireland, and another focussing on Le Fanu’s own insecurities with an ailing wife and unpaid debts. Whichever interpretation you wish to pursue, this is undoubtedly a significant text in the history of the Gothic horror story – and of vampires in particular.

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© Roy Johnson 2011


Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp.347, ISBN: 0199537984


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Filed Under: 19C Horror, Short Stories, The Short Story Tagged With: Carmilla, Gothic horror, Sheridan Le Fanu, The Novella

Close reading tutorials

March 21, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorials in literary criticism and close critical analysis

What is close reading?

Close reading means not only reading and understanding the meanings of the individual printed words of a text: it also involves making yourself sensitive to all the nuances and connotations of a language as it is used by skilled writers.

This can mean anything from a work’s particular vocabulary, sentence construction, and imagery, to the themes that are being dealt with, the way in which the story is being told, and the view of the world that it offers. It involves almost everything from the smallest linguistic items to the largest issues of literary understanding and judgement.

  • language
  • meaning
  • structure
  • philosophy

Close reading can be seen as four separate levels of attention which we can bring to the text. Most normal people read without being aware of them, and employ all four simultaneously. The four levels or types of reading become progressively more complex. The most advanced forms of close reading combine all these features in an effort to reveal the full and even hidden meanings in a work.

A close reading exercise is not a guessing game or a treasure hunt: it is an attempt to understand the mechanisms by which a narrative is constructed and its meanings generated. However, a really successful close reading can only be made when you know the work as a whole.

The tutorials listed here offer a variety of approaches to close reading. Some focus attention on details of literary style; others concentrate on how the meaning(s) of a text are constructed. All of them pay close attention to the language being used.


Charles Dickens – Bleak House

Bleak House close readingThis tutorial looks at the famous opening passage of Bleak House and examines Dickens’s use of language, simile, and metaphor. It argues that whilst Dickens is often celebrated for the vividness of his descriptions, the true genius of his literary power is in imaginative invention.

redbtn Close reading – Bleak House.

 

If you wish to read the complete novel in conjunction with these tutorial notes, it is available free at Project Gutenberg.

redbtn Bleak House (full text)


Joseph Conrad – An Outpost of Progress – I

Close reading tutorialsThis is the first of two close reading tutorials on Conrad’s early tale An Outpost of Progress. This one looks at the opening of the story and examines the semantic values transmitted in Conrad’s presentation of the narrative. That is, how the meaning(s) of the story are embedded in even the smallest details of of the prose.

redbtn Close reading – An Outpost of Progress

 

If you wish to read the complete story in conjunction with these tutorial notes, it is available free at Project Gutenberg.

redbtn An Outpost of Progress (full text)


Katherine Mansfield – The Voyage

Close reading tutorialsThis tutorial looks at one of the opening paragraphs of Katherine Mansfield’s short story The Voyage. It covers the standard features of a writer’s prose style – in the use of vocabulary, syntax, rhythm, tone, narrative mode, and figures of speech; but then it singles out the crucial issue of point of view for special attention. Mansfield was one of the only writers to establish a first-rate world literary reputation on the production of short stories alone.

redbtn Close reading – The Voyage

If you wish to read the complete story in conjunction with these tutorial notes, it is available free at Project Gutenberg.

redbtn The Voyage (full text)


Joseph Conrad – An Outpost of Progress – II

Close reading tutorialsThis is the second of two close reading tutorials on Conrad’s early tale An Outpost of Progress. It looks at the details of Conrad’s style as a master of English prose (even though it was his third language). The tutorial looks at his ‘signature’ use of abstract language to intensify the moral seriousness, the satirical irony, and the emotional drama of his narratives.

redbtn Close reading – An Outpost of Progress

If you wish to read the complete story in conjunction with these tutorial notes, it is available free at Project Gutenberg.

redbtn An Outpost of Progress (full text)


Virginia Woolf – Monday or Tuesday

Close reading tutorialsVirginia Woolf used the short story as an experimental platform on which to test out her innovations in language and fictional narrative. This tutorial offers a detailed reading of the whole of the experimental story Monday or Tuesday. It shows how its mixture of lyrical images, speculative thoughts, and fragments of story-line add up to more than the sum of its parts.

redbtn Close reading – Monday or Tuesday

If you wish to read the complete story in conjunction with these tutorial notes, it is available free at Project Gutenberg.

redbtn Monday or Tuesday (full collection)


D.H.Lawrence – Fanny and Annie

Close reading tutorialsD.H.Lawrence was the first world-class writer to have emerged from the working class. His work was passionate, sensual, and controversial. This tutorial looks at the opening paragraphs of his short story Fanny and Annie published in 1922. It considers in particular his use of the rhetorical devices of repetition and alliteration to impart a poetic impressionism to his writing.

redbtn Close reading – Fanny and Annie.

If you wish to read the complete story in conjunction with these tutorial notes, it is available free at Project Gutenberg.

redbtn Fanny and Annie (full text)

© Roy Johnson 2014


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Filed Under: How-to guides, Literary Studies, Literary studies, The Short Story Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, The Short Story

Doing Creative Writing

July 6, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a guide for undergraduate and postgraduate students

Can creative writing actually be taught? Well – judging from the number of college and university courses devoted to the subject, and the number of books written about it, the answer appears to be ‘Why not?’ Steve May teaches at Bath Spa University , and Doing Creative Writing is an attempt to support students whilst they choose a suitable course, what to expect when they embark on it, how to organise themselves as writers, and what possibilities exist for a writer once the course has finished.

Doing Creative WritingApart from having the desire to write, not many students know what is involved in the process. His first two chapters argue the case for teaching creative writing against the advice of such lofty figures as Henry James, who believed that it could not be taught.

He uses music as an analogy: nobody would expect to pick up a clarinet (as they might a pen) and perform a Mozart concerto without learning how to play the instrument first.

The next section will be of vital interest to anyone planning to study creative writing in higher education. He looks at the way it is taught in the US and the UK; he explains the variety of reasons why such courses are offered; and he provides guidance for judging the calibre of the people teaching the subject. Not many people realise that some of the best ‘qualified’ (published writers) might well be employed on a part-time basis and paid at hourly rates.

When you’ve enrolled on your course, what can you expect to happen? You’ll have to get used to the idea of the seminar or workshop in which you’ll be expected to present your own work and have it discussed by fellow students. He gives advice on how to handle the feedback you will be given – and how to give your own when you in your turn become ‘the audience’.

He tackles head-on the often vexed issue of assessment in creative work. Be warned! These workshops might form part of your assessment – so don’t think these sessions are an easy option where you can sit back and just listen. He shows real-life examples of the criteria UK and US institutions use, and he emphasises the element of self-assessment or reflective writing which is common to both.

The last part of the book is dedicated to the techniques of creative writing – where to write, how to write, what to write about, what materials to use, and how to present the finished work.

He also includes some real-life case studies of students who have taken creative writing courses and the variety of paths their careers have taken; and finally there’s a useful bunch of recommendations for further reading.

This is a useful adjunct to books which focus on the techniques of creative writing (such as Ailsa Cox’s recent Writing Short Stories) and it’s obviously aimed at students with ambitions in creative writing course who may not know which course to choose – or what to expect when they get there.

© Roy Johnson 2007

Creative Writing   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Creative Writing   Buy the book at Amazon US


Steve May, Doing Creative Writing, London: Routledge, 2007, pp.152, ISBN: 0415402392


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Filed Under: Creative Writing, The Short Story, Writing Skills Tagged With: Creative writing, Doing Creative Writing, Short stories, Writing skills

Edith Wharton short stories

March 13, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorials, critical commentary, and study resources

Edith Wharton published more than eighty short stories during her writing career. The exact number is debatable, because some are so long (such as the early tale, The Touchstone) that they can be counted as novellas. She certainly produced stories regularly from 1900 until her last collection Ghosts in 1937. During that time she also wrote a number of full length novels, as well as works of non-fiction, such as her travel writing, her war memoirs, and books on the design of house interiors and gardens. The following are tutorials and study guides which offer plot summaries, characters, critical commentaries, and suggestions for further reading on each story. The list will be updated as new stories are added.

Edith Wharton stories   After Holbein
Edith Wharton stories   Afterward
Edith Wharton stories   Autres Temps
Edith Wharton stories   Bunner Sisters
Edith Wharton short stories   Confession
Edith Wharton short stories   Diagnosis
Edith Wharton short stories   His Father’s Son
Edith Wharton short stories   Kerfol
Edith Wharton short stories   Pomegranate Seed
Edith Wharton short stories   Roman Fever
Edith Wharton short stories   Sanctuary
Edith Wharton short stories   Souls Belated
Edith Wharton short stories   The Angel at the Grave
Edith Wharton short stories   The Last Asset
Edith Wharton short stories   The Long Run
Edith Wharton short stories   The Muse’s Tragedy
Edith Wharton short stories   The Other Two
Edith Wharton short stories   The Portrait
Edith Wharton short stories   The Pretext
Edith Wharton short stories   The Reckoning
Edith Wharton short stories   The Touchstone
Edith Wharton short stories   The Triumph of Night
Edith Wharton short stories   The Verdict
Edith Wharton short stories   Xingu


Video documentary


Study resources

The Triumph of Night Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

The Triumph of Night Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

Edith Wharton - biography Edith Wharton – biography

Edith Wharton - Wikipedia Edith Wharton at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Edith Wharton - tutorials Edith Wharton at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Edith Wharton - tutorials Edith Wharton’s Short Stories – publication details


Edith Wharton's writing

Edith Wharton’s writing


Further reading

Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton: A Woman of her Time, New York: Viking, 1971,

Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1982, pp.222. ISBN: 0820305138

Janet Beer, Edith Wharton (Writers & Their Work), New York: Northcote House, 2001, pp.99, ISBN: 0746308981

Millicent Bell (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp.232, ISBN: 0521485134

Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit (eds), Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays, New York: Garland, 1992, pp.329, ISBN: 0824078489

Eleanor Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994, ISBN: 0810927950

Gloria C. Erlich, The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton, California: University of California Press, 1992, pp.223, ISBN: 0520075838

Susan Goodman, Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals, UPNE, 1990, pp.220, ISBN: 0874515246

Irving Howe, (ed), Edith Wharton: A collection of Critical Essays, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986,

Jennie A. Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp.240, ISBN: 0521830893

Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, London: Vintage, new edition 2008, pp.864, ISBN: 0099763516

R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1975, pp.592, ISBN: 0880640200

James W. Tuttleton (ed), Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp.586, ISBN: 0521383196

Candace Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991,

Sarah Bird Wright, Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Reference to Her Life and Work, Fact on File, 1998, pp.352, ISBN: 0816034818

Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, New York: Perseus Books, second edition 1994, pp.512, ISBN: 0201409186


Other works by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton - The Custom of the CountryThe Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon UK
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Edith Wharton - The House of MirthThe House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.

Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2014


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Filed Under: Edith Wharton, Short Stories, The Short Story Tagged With: Edith Wharton, English literature, Literary studies, The Short Story

Fictions

November 30, 2015 by Roy Johnson

short stories of fantasy, parody, mystery, and satire

Fictions (1944) is a single-volume compilation of two collections of short stories which made Jorge Luis Borges famous – his 1941 publication The Garden of Forking Paths and the 1944 follow-up Artifices. He is one of the few writers to achieve international fame merely on the strength of short stories (Katherine Mansfield was another rare case).

Fictions

His approach is distinctly playful. The stories are in the form of fantasies, essays on imaginary objects, fake biographies, bibliographic parodies, detective stories, and a form he is particularly fond of – commentaries on other people’s work, real and imaginary. He defends this approach in a typically witty manner:

It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books — setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that these books already exist, and offer a commentary on them.

This illustrates the ironic, tongue-in-cheek approach he brings to the short story form. He is also keen on blurring the distinction between fiction and reality. A story might begin by referring to the real world or a well known text, but he then blends it with fictional inventions or fanciful distortions which produce an effect like philosophic mind games. As a reader, you are suddenly no longer sure in which conceptual plane the narrative is taking place.

As a former librarian, he frequently highlights the bibliographic elements of his creations. He offers academic references (often spurious) for the sources of his information and bogus but amusing footnotes to support the authenticity of his narratives .

Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is a story in which Borges and his friend Bioy Casares (a real Argentinean writer) find one volume of an encyclopaedia that documents an imaginary world. It has been written by a collective of scholars working in secret. The language of this world has no nouns, there are no sciences, and one of the many schools of its philosophy denies the existence of time. The story has a postscript explaining how the project was later expanded to produce the invention of an entire planet. This at first appears to be a failure, but then physical objects from this imaginary world begin to appear in the fictional ‘present’.

In Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, a French belle-lettrist decides to re-write the whole of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, word for word from scratch. The story has an amusing defence that claims his reproduction (of which he only manages a couple of chapters) is more subtle than the original – because it was written three hundred years later. This conceit prefigures a school of literary criticism (Cultural Materialism) which argues that the meaning of a text is influenced both by the time in which it was produced as well as the time in which it is read.

In The Circular Ruins a man crawls into a primitive temple with the task of dreaming another person into being. He eventually manages it – first the heart, then the lungs, and so on. This being becomes his ‘son’, and he worries that his creation might come to realise that he is the projection of somebody else’s dream. When he tries to escape from this metaphysical problem, he suddenly realises that somebody else is dreaming him.

The Lottery of Babylon is a Kafka-like invention of a society run on pure chance, in which everyone is compelled to participate. Lots are drawn which might result in torture, death, or infinite riches. But even the administration of the results are subject to chance, and might be carried out at random, reversed, or simply ignored.

Another plot device favoured by Borges is the point of view reversal or the hidden narrator – such as the Irish republican in The Shape of the Sword who tells the story of how he saved the life of a coward during the civil war. He protects his comrade from his abject fear, only to find that the man has betrayed him to the Black and Tans. When the narrator is brought before a firing squad for execution the story turns itself inside out to reveal that the narrator is in fact the coward.

Funes, the Memorious is the potted biography of a poor young Argentinean boy who has a memory so prodigious that he cannot forget anything. As a child Ireneo Funes always knows exactly what time it is at any moment and can remember trivial events with chronological exactitude. He is thrown off a horse, crippled, and when he recovers he discovers that his memory is virtually infinite. He can remember the shape of clouds on any particular day, the pattern of the leaves on a tree, or the veins of decorative marbling in a book he has only seen once.

Whilst the stories are marvellously inventive, it has to be said that they are not uniformly consistent in quality. Some are formless and not much more than self-indulgent whimsy. But the best are tightly wrought and well constructed, with no superfluous material at all – just as a good short story should be. Borges went on to produce an enormously varied body of work – essays, poetry, translations, lectures, film and book reviews – in addition to his now-famous stories. But this collection Fictions remains what might be called his ‘signature’ work.

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© Roy Johnson 2015


Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions, London: Penguin Classics, 2000, pp.179, ISBN: 0141183845


Jorge Louis Borges links

Fictions Jorge Luis Borges – biography

Fictions Borges Center – University of Pittsburgh

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Fictions Paris Review – Interview


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Late Victorian Gothic Tales

May 14, 2011 by Roy Johnson

mystery, weirdness, supernatural, and horror

For reasons much debated amongst literary historians, there was a revival of the Gothic horror story at the end of the nineteenth century. Within the space of just a few years we have Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), H.G.Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The horror story was also a popular ingredient of the popular mass-circulation magazines which were launched around this time. Robert Luckhurst’s collection Late Victorian Gothic Tales is drawn from these sources, and it aims to show the range of stories by mixing examples from well-established authors with no less chilling takes from lesser-known writers.

Late Victorian Gothic Tales Henry James believed that a horror story should not rely on the traditional trappings of midnight spookiness in ruined abbeys and graveyards for its effect. He thought that the mysterious and the macabre we all the more effective for taking place in the full light of day. His story here – Sir Edmund Orme – has a ghost who appears on the Parade at Brighton on a sunny afternoon. And true to James’s ever-inventive spirit, even though the ghost is of somebody long ago dead (as a result of a gruesome suicide) it turns out to be a force for good. It is a ghost of ‘retributive justice’ which appears to check that an injustice is not repeated.

Oscar Wilde performs the miraculous feat of making a horror story funny. His Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime offers an amusing critique of palm-reading (Cheiromancy as it was known then) which was in vogue at the turn of the century. Lord Arthur singularly fails to act out his destiny, which is to commit murder, despite sending a poisoned bon-bon to Lady Clementina and an exploding clock to the dean of Chichester.

In what he himself described as an ‘unpleasant story’, Rudyard Kipling manages to combine drunkenness, torture, and a contemporary case of a man turning into a rabid animal under the curse of a leper. This was one of his earliest Plain Tales from the Hills which made him famous as an author of Empire.

Arthur Conan Doyle follows a similar pattern in both stories that represent his contribution to the supernatural – his personal belief in which actually contributed to a decline in his literary reputation He has one story of an oblique form of sexual mutilation, and another in which an Egyptian mummy attempts to murder a series of Oxford undergraduates.

What’s clear from this collection is that Gothic horror is a formula sufficiently adaptable to work effectively in any circumstances. Ruined castles, vampires, and coffins in subterranean vaults are not the real essentials. They might help create atmospheric effects, but the basics elements of horror remain existential anxieties – such as predestination, the burden of inheritance, fighting uncontrollable forces , and the threat of death.

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© Roy Johnson 2011


Roger Luckhurst (ed), Late Victorian Gothic Tales, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.326, ISBN: 0199538875


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Metamorphosis and Other Stories

July 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Franz Kafka is one of the most original and idiosyncratic writers of the twentieth century. He published very little during his own lifetime; he lived for literature (in fact he said “I am literature”); he wasn’t formally a great novelist or writer of short stories; and yet he put his stamp on literature to such an extent that his name has become an adjective – and we now speak of Kafkaesque situations and circumstances.

The Metamorphosis and Other StoriesThese tend to be scenarios in which the individual is trapped in madly contradictory situations, confronted by bureaucratic and totalitarian forces over which he has no control. That’s why Kafka’s reputation soared in the 1930s and 1940s. He prophesied the sort of state which condemned individuals as guilty – but didn’t tell them of what they were being accused. He spelled out the mad logic of the show trials long before they took place, and he is quite rightly regarded as a precursor of modern existentialism..

Metamorphosis is a superb piece of imaginative fiction. A young commercial salesman wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed into giant insect. He is horrified – and so is his family, who shun him, neglect him, and eventually kill him. The tale admits to several levels of interpretation, and like most pieces of rich fiction it is dense with contextual symbols, metaphors, and suggestive allusions.

This collection also includes three other major short works – The Judgement, In the Penal Colony, and Letter to his Father. The first was written in a single creative burst during one night and concerns an Oedipal conflict between father and son which ends with the father condemning the son to death. The second is a horrifying account of someone undergoing torture in a way which prophecies what was to happen in the concentration camps (of both Russia and Germany) only a few years later. The famous letter to his father (which was never posted) is yet another a soul-searching psychological investigation of the relation between father and son. And for those who have not come across the lighter side of his writing, there’s also a collection of his first-ever published works – fragmentary pieces, to which he gives the title ‘Meditations’.

I was glad to see that in his introduction, Ritchie Robertson mentioned Nadine Gordimer’s magnificent short story Letter to his Son, which presents his father Herman Kafka’s hypothetical response to his neurotic son’s letter from beyond the grave. It’s a marvellous presentation of the other side of the picture.

The translation notes make very pertinent reference to the difficulty of rendering Kafka’s extraordinarily complex syntax. His writing is an odd mixture of startlingly dramatic images or situations, surrounded by endlessly convoluted descriptions and speculations, with deeply nested conditional clauses that can lead on from one page to the next in huge Teutonic paragraphs.

These new editions from OUP offer full value in terms of critical apparatus surrounding the text. There’s a lengthy introduction, a chronology of Kafka’s life, an essay on the new translation, explanatory notes, and an extended bibliography. This volume is an ideal starting point for anyone who has not read Kafka before.

© Roy Johnson 2009

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Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.146, ISBN 0199238553


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Some People (Harold Nicolson)

July 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

amusing character sketches, fictions, and memoirs

Harold Nicolson was a career diplomat, best known for the fact that he was married to Vita Sackville-West, who had a love affair with Virginia Woolf (and other women) and that despite his own homosexuality they kept going a marriage whose apparent success was recorded in their son’s account, Portrait of a Marriage. Nicolson blew this way and that in both literary and sexual terms, but in 1927 he produced a wonderful collection of portraits, Some People, which is part documentary and part fiction.

Some People (Harold Nicolson) They are based on his experiences of public school and the diplomatic service. The idea he explained to a friend ‘was to put real people into imaginary situations, and imaginary people into real situations’. You can view this as a new literary form, alongside such works as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando or just a personal whim, but the result is surprisingly polished and amusing. The sketches are based upon just the sort of upper-class privileged life Nicolson had led – scenes of a childhood spent in foreign legations supervised by a governess; life as a boarder at Wellington College; and early postings amongst similar toffs at the Foreign Office.

In one story Nicolson accompanies Lord Curzon on a diplomatic peace mission to Lausanne where he is due to negotiate with Poincaré and Mussolini – but the whole of the tale is focused on the Dickensian figure of Lord Curzon’s valet who drinks too much and disgraces himself in comic fashion at a high-ranking gala.

The stories are written in the first person – and for someone who had the opinions for which Nicolson became infamous, they are refreshingly self-deprecating. The narrator is more often than not the character in the wrong, the person who has a lesson to learn from others or from life itself. Real people such as Nicolson himself, Marcel Proust, Princess Bibesco, and Winston Churchill flit amongst fictional constructions in a perfectly natural and convincing manner.

The world of public school and Oxbridge run straight through seamlessly into that of the diplomatic service, and even though Nicolson’s conclusions are that its stiff conventions should be challenged and even broken, his stories rest heavily on the shared values of the Old School Tie, letters of introduction, and the right accent.

They reminded me of no less than the early stories of Vladimir Nabokov (written around the same time) which similarly combine autobiographical memoirs with fictional inventions. And the style is similar – supple, fast-moving sentences, a fascination with foreign words and places, and the phenomena of everyday life pinned down with well-observed details.

There was a lake in front of the hotel, cupped among descending pines, and in the middle of the lake a little naked island, naked but for a tin pagoda, with two blue boats attached to a landing-stage of which the handrail was of brown wood and the supports of pink.

It was this that made me think again of Jeanne de Hénaut.

It is writing which is very sophisticated, and which ultimately flatters the reader – it draws you seductively into this world of privilege, clubishness, and money. And yet if he had written more, I should certainly want to read them.

© Roy Johnson 2001

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Harold Nicolson, Some People, London: Constable, 1996, pp.184, ISBN: 094765901


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