The Short Story

critical studies, theory, and classic short stories

critical studies, theory, and classic short stories

The Short Story: the reality of artifice

July 6, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the history and development of the short story genre

In this classic study of the short story, Charles May traces its development as a genre from its origins as a Renaissance conte to its maturity in the twentieth century. Of course single episodes extracted from texts as old as the Bible and the Koran might have features in common with the short story, but May identifies Boccaccio and Chaucer in the fourteenth century as the first writers of shorter fiction to move out of the mythic and supernatural towards the realistic mode. He places these at the beginning of a first chapter which provides an overview, from the fourteenth century to the present day.

This sets out the ground for what follows. The short story as a literary form in its own right really begins in the nineteenth century. I was surprised at the omission of E.T.A.Hoffmann, but he settles quickly into his stride with Gogol, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and of course Edgar Allan Poe, who both wrote stories and theorised about the form too.

He offers interesting reasons to support his claim that the short story took off most emphatically in the US (no copyright agreements at the time) but most of his attention is focussed on to a close examination of seminal examples – Nathaniel Hawthorne’s’Young Goodman Brown’, Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, and Herman Melville’s “Bartelby the Scrivener’ – all of which, as he rightly points out, combine elements of the allegory and an almost supernatural element, along with a realistic surface.

By combining the code-bound conventions of allegory and romance with the contextually based realistic conventions of the novel, Hawthorne creates a story that has both the unity of allegory, held together by a powerful idea and an overall intentional pattern, and the hallucinatory effect of dream reality, made realistic by psychological plausibility and the specificity of concrete detail – all elements of short fiction that have persisted to the present day.

Having established these ground rules, he moves quickly through the rest of the nineteenth century figures who developed the form – Ambrose Bierce, O.Henry, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad – with a very persuasive reading of ‘The Secret Sharer’.

It was Anton Checkhov who is credited with posing the modern alternative to the whiplash ending or the surprise denouement which had been the norm until the end of the nineteenth century (including Guy de Maupassant, who is not mentioned). Checkhov introduced mood, tone, understatement, and careful selection of impressionistic detail as a substitutes for plot and dramatic incident.

James Joyce and Sherwood Anderson seem oddly to bring the century to an end rather than to start a new one – but May’s reading of ‘The Dead’ is exemplary.

Moving into the twentieth century proper, he sees Hemingway as a natural descendant of Checkhov – a creator of dialogue which implies much more than it says on the surface, a master of understatement.

His other central figures of mid-century are writers who I sense are not much read these days – Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, John Cheever, Bernard Malamud, and Eudora Welty. Time will tell if their influence was important or not.

The principal omissions so far as the development of the modern short story is concerned are Virginia Woolf and Nadine Gordimer – but that’s just my opinion.

May comes up to date with a round-up of influential short story writers of the last quarter of a century – Jorge Luis Borges, John Cheever, He makes a particularly large claim for the importance of Raymond Carver.

He ends with a chapter which traces the development of criticism of the short story from Poe to the present. This will be of particular interest to the audience at whom this study is aimed – teachers and students at undergraduate level.

There’s a very useful chronology, giving dates of significant publications, full notes and references. and annotated suggestions for further reading. Despite the obvious US weighting here, for anyone who needs an overview of the short story and an insight into its development as a literary form, this is an excellent place to start.

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Charles E. May, The Short Story: the reality of artifice, London: Routledge, 2002, pp.160, ISBN: 041593883X

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The Turn of the Screw & Other Stories

June 29, 2009 by Roy Johnson

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Towards the late period of his long and astonishingly productive life, Henry James wrote a number of mystery or ghost stories. In these he combined his skills at controlling narrative and point of view with his penchant for puzzling and ambiguous situations. This collection contains some of the most famous tales – ‘Sir Edmund Orme’, ‘Owen Wingrave’, ‘The Friends of the Friends’, and his best-known shorter work, the terrifying story of (apparent) demonic possession, ‘The Turn of the Screw’.

They all deal with ghosts (or the supernatural) in a non-conventional manner, in that they hold a narrative interest whether you find the ghosts believable or not. And none of them rely on any conventional notions of spookiness or ghastly apparitions for their credibility. As Leon Edel, James’s biographer observed, “A ghost was most ghostlike, James held, when it walked in broad daylight, shorn of all Gothic trappings. It was too obvious to have clanking chains, bloodstains, secret stairways and dead of night for one’s phantoms.”

But what these tales do have in common with many other ghost stories is a connection between the supernatural and death. There’s also a more-than-coincidental link to romantic liaisons between the characters. In Sir Edmund Orme for instance (without giving away too much of the story) a middle-aged lady has been haunted by apparitions of a man who took his own life many years before when she ‘wronged’ him. She wishes to protect her daughter from his influence, and does so with the aid of a narrator who falls in love with the daughter. But in the end there is a reversal of expectations and a dramatic price to pay.

Similarly in Owen Wingrave (which Benjamin Britten used as the basis for his opera) the eponymous hero is oppressed by family traditions of military service he is expected to uphold. He resists them on grounds of humane pacifism, and when challenged by a young woman with whom there is a romantic potential, he defies everyone by sleeping in a bedroom haunted by an ancestor. Once again the outcome is disastrous.

James rings quasi-humorous changes on this theme in The Friends of the Friends where he introduces the conceit of two characters who have both seen the ghost of a parent at precisely the moment they have died in a completely different location. When the narrator (a mutual friend and unusually for James, a woman) becomes engaged to the male character she is determined to introduce him to her friend who has had the same experience. But the female character dies first. Her ‘influence’ however, lives on to have a dramatic effect on the proposed marriage.

But of course the most famous story of all is The Turn of the Screw (another Britten opera) which has attracted widespread comment and a number of different interpretations. A governess has the job of looking after two loveable and innocent young children. She is hampered in her endeavours by the repeated appearances of a former gamekeeper and Miss Jessell (her predecessor) who are both supposed to be dead. It seems that these ghosts are seeking to exercise a malign influence over the children, and the governess is driven to desperate measures to protect them. Each step she takes winds the dramatic tension ever higher, right up to the last page and its horrible finale.

This tale was described at the time of its first publication as ‘the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read in any literature, ancient or modern.’ (the Independent 1899) and it has remained a tantalising puzzle ever since. Like the other stories in this collection it is delivered to us in a very oblique manner, and recounted by a narrator who may or may not be telling the complete truth. Readers are presented with a literary experience not unlike a hall of mirrors, in which nothing is quite what it seems. This is what makes the stories worth reading over and over again.

This is a particularly good edition, since it includes an editor’s introductory essay and explanatory notes to the text, a brief history of its publication, and James’s own introductions in which he explains the origins of the stories and how he decided to treat them – all without giving away their specific outcomes, just as I have tried to do above.

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Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp.266, ISBN 0192834045

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Vladimir Nabokov Collected Stories

May 26, 2010 by Roy Johnson

complete shorter works – commentary and annotations

Nabokov began writing shot stories as a young man in early 1920s Berlin, publishing them along with chess problems in Rul’, the emigre Russian newspaper established by his father. He continued to do so in the 1930s whilst establishing his reputation as a novelist, writing under the name Vladimir Sirin. Production slowed down when he emigrated to the USA, and then stopped. in 1950 as his academic work and his international fame as a novelist took up all his time. Nevertheless he published four volumes in all during his own lifetime, totalling fifty stories. Vladimir Nabokov Collected Stories brings all those together in one volume and adds as a bonus thirteen extra tales that Nabokov didn’t think worthy of publishing in book form whilst he was alive. He listed these in a handwritten note as ‘Bottom of the Barrel’.

Nabokov used the short story as a writer’s laboratory, exploring fictional devices and strategies that he then deployed at greater length in his novels. Not that there is anything unfinished or tentative about the results: Almost all his stories are superbly shaped and polished, and the most successful of them rank amongst the greatest modern short stories.

It’s impossible to prove without seeing the original publications, but one can’t help but suspect that many of the stories were revised and re-polished for their first presentation. The whole Nabokov family was complicit in presenting its only wage earner’s work in the best possible light, and Nabokov used the services of both his wife and son as translators and literary assistants. [The recent publication of VN’s manuscript index cards for The Original of Laura demonstrates that the Olympian master was not above committing simple errors of spelling and grammar.]

Nabokov had an amazing range in the tone and subjects of his stories, even whilst retaining his own unmistakable prose style. The tales vary from lyrical evocations of childhood and prose poems which celebrate the surface textures of everyday life, through to narratives of black comedy and a taste for dramatic irony which treads a fine line between beauty and cruelty.

The Eye (almost a short novel, which strangely enough has not been included) is a masterpiece of narrative complexity and deception in which a first person narrator tries to convince us of his wit and popularity, does just the opposite, then resolves to kill himself half way through the story. How can this be? Nabokov contrives this narrative conundrum as another opportunity to show off his powers of subtlety and manipulation of point of view.

Spring in Fialta (which I think qualifies as a novella) is without doubt Nabokov’s most complex and successful achievement. The story of events is almost inconsequential. A narrator encounters an old lover and recalls his previous meetings with her. His memories of their apparently romantic past are wound together with his account of their latest episode in Fialta.

But the main focus of interest is the narrator’s reliability. He tells us one thing, but the facts as narrated suggest the opposite, even though they come to us from his account. Taken at face value, it’s just a romantic memoir: read more carefully, it’s a roccoco study in self-deception and narrative manipulation which might take several readings to fathom.

Nabokov continued his puzzle-making right to the end. One of his last short stories, The Vane Sisters is a tale in which the solution to a puzzle (a message left behind by someone who has died) is actually woven into the story itself. The narrator is unable to see the message, but provides enough information for the reader to do so. These are stories-cum-puzzles which as Nabokov himself claimed ‘can only be attempted once every thousand years’.

This is an excellent compilation of his whole oeuvre as a writer of short stories. It contains all Nabokov’s notes on the bibliographic history and full details of each story from their first publication, and it has an introductory essay by his son Dmitri which throws extra light on the collection as a whole.

Analysis of Nabokov’s 50+ Stories

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Vladimir Nabokov, Collected Stories, London: Penguin, 2008, pp.333, ISBN: 0141183454

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Wessex Tales

May 10, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tragic and comic tales of the rural past

Thomas Hardy is one of the few major novelists (D.H.Lawrence was another) who is equally celebrated as a poet and a writer of short stories. Wessex Tales is a collection of his best-known tales which he shaped and re-shaped during his lifetime. It gathers together incidents, anecdotes, and folk memories which record the passing of an old rural era which Hardy captures with his customary sense of drama, his powerful language, and his wonderful depiction of the English countryside. All of these qualities make him an enduring favourite with the common reader.

The stories seem to exist in three simultaneous time zones. Their events capture the social history, the practices, beliefs, and language of the early nineteenth century which Hardy was keen to document before they disappeared from living memory. They were written in the late nineteenth century and contain many of the literary devices of that period for which Hardy is famous – the use of fateful and tragic coincidences, plots which strain credulity, and a post-Darwinian sense of tragedy which pervades almost all of his work. Yet there are also elements of modern sensibility that reflect the fact that Hardy did in fact live for almost three decades as part of the twentieth century, and was personally acquainted with modernists such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf.

Those people familiar with Hardy’s novels will recognise his use of traditional and melodramatic plot devices in these stories. The young country girl who arranges to elope with a dashing soldier, but at the very meeting point overhears a man from her past and changes her mind – with tragic consequences for her and for the soldier. A christening party interrupted by the arrival of two strangers, who turn out to be an escaped convict and the hangman who has been summoned to execute him.

One of the most interesting stories (Fellow Townsmen) is set, unusually for Hardy, not in the countryside but in a manufacturing Dorset town (Bridport) amongst businessmen, a solicitor, and the local doctor. It concerns a number of Hardy’s favourite themes – the building of a house (a symbol of prosperity and status) an unhappy marriage, a former sweetheart who marries the hero’s best friend, and a series of missed opportunities which lead to a bleak outcome for all concerned.

These are correctly entitled ‘tales’ rather than ‘stories’ because they lack some of the compression and singularity of purpose we expect in a story – long or short. They have instead multiple characters, locations, and incidents. Some even have chapters with descriptive titles, and are almost like scenarios which might easily have been fleshed out into full length novels had Hardy felt the inclination to do so.

At a biographical level of comment and interpretation, it’s notable that many of the stories turn around matters of improvident, unhappy, and second marriages. We know that Hardy was less than content in his relationship with Emma, his first wife, but these stories were written twenty years or more before he met Florence Dugdale, with whom he formed his second and no more successful marriage. It’s almost as if he is exploring unconsciously these issues in advance of living them out, just as he did in his later novels. Tess of the d’Urbervilles has a heroine who is deserted on her wedding night. The Mayor of Casterbridge has a hero who sells his wife. And Jude the Obscure is the story of a man who marries twice – both times without success.

But whatever the plot, all these stories are imbued with that profound love and understanding of the countryside for which Hardy is rightly famous. He has a perception which combines historical consciousness, scientific accuracy, and a lyrical evocation of his native Dorsetshire which is truly poetic:

They were travelling in a direction that was enlivened by no modern current of traffic, the place of Darnton’s pilgrimage being an old-fashioned village – one of the Hintocks (several villages of that name, with distinctive prefix or affix, lying thereabout) – where people make the best cider and cider-wine in all Wessex, and where the dunghills smell of pommace instead of stable refuse as elsewhere. The lane was sometimes so narrow that the brambles of the hedge, which hung forward like anglers’ rods over a stream, scratched their hats and hooked their whiskers as they passed. Yet this neglected lane had been a highway to Queen Elizabeth’s subjects and the cavalcades of the past. Its day was over now, and its history as a national artery done forever

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Thomas Hardy, Wessex Tales, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.248, ISBN: 0199538522

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Women Who Did

September 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Stories about the New Woman 1890-1914

Women Who Did present a collection of stories featuring the ‘new woman’. The short story came into its own as a literary genre at the end of the nineteenth century, as the three-decker novel died its death and the rising numbers of magazines and journals created a new market for shorter fiction. Moreover, the short story, as Angelique Richardson points out in this charming collection, “was concerned with questions rather than answers [and] was perfectly suited to give expression to the turbulence and uncertainties of the late nineteenth century”.

This was also the age which gave rise to the ‘new woman’ – the female who claimed her independence, wore what clothes she liked, flirted openly with men, smoked cigarettes, and rode a bicycle. These are the issues which form the background to this very entertaining compilation of stories from the fin de ciécle, which only really ended with the start of the First World War. Editor Angelique Richardson offers an expansive introduction which explains the developments that were taking place at that time and puts the stories into a rich context.

She makes the very good point that in the struggle for women’s emancipation, some women were in reactionary opposition to it, and some men were strong supporters. It’s for such reasons that she includes stories on the Woman Question written by both sexes – though it has to be said that those written by women (in this collection) are on the whole superior.

Some well known pieces are included: Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s The Yellow Wallpaper; Kate Chopin‘s The Storm; Katherine Mansfield‘s The Tiredness of Rosabel. Others are less well known. Mona Caird’s The Yellow Drawing Room rings somewhat comic changes on the use of yellow as a symbol of something challenging. New woman Venora Haydon has decorated an entire room in this colour, which confuses the opinionated male narrator because he cannot square her radicalism (of which he disapproves) with the fact that he is attracted to her.

There’s also a swirlingly romantic piece by George Edgerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne) in which a new woman seems to catechise every man in her life (including her husband) before possibly running away with a chance acquaintance. Richardson has the good sense to include a parody of this story taken from Punch the following year.

It’s not surprising that the best stories are written by the most famous writers – Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Kate Chopin – but there are a number of unexpected gems by writers who will be new to most readers and who certainly deserve the sort of reconsideration that Richardson’s excellent compilation brings to our attention. As one Amazon reviewer remarks – “It’s worth reading for the introduction alone”.

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Angelique Richardson (ed), Women Who Did: Stories 1890-1914, London: Penguin, 2005, pp.528, ISBN: 0141441569

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Writing Short Stories

June 12, 2009 by Roy Johnson

creative theory and practical writing techniques

Can creative writing actually be taught? There is some debate about this question, but the number of university departments devoted to the subject is expanding so rapidly, many people must believe it’s possible. And why not? After all, we believe that the skills of painting, music, and architecture can be taught, don’t we. Ailsa Cox teaches creative writing, and this book is her version of an academic seminar – analysing the details of stories, then suggesting exercises which students (or readers) might complete to develop their own ability in writing short stories

She kicks off with a good shot at defining the short story. How short is short? How long can a story be before it becomes a novella or a short novel? There are no simple answers to these questions. As soon as you think of an answer, you’ll realise there are exceptions. But she explains what most stories have in common. She sets out a series of chapters which explore various types of short story: the suspenseful narrative, the fantasy, the comic yarn, and so on. Her approach is to explain the genre, outline its rules so far as they might exist, then look in detail at examples from masters of the short story, from Edgar Allen Poe to contemporary writers such as Stephen King and even her own work.

She deals with the plotless story – the ‘epiphany’ as deployed by James Joyce in ‘The Dead’ and Katherine Mansfield in ‘Bliss’. Actually, she skids around quite a bit from one genre to another – from the tall tale, to the horror story, and back again via the anecdote – but there are lots of examples enthusiastically presented in such a way that I imagine they will appeal to the aspirant writers at whom the book is aimed.

She’s very keen on fantasy and science fiction, so Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ and Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘Tlon Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ are given close scrutiny, alongside stories by H.G.Wells and William Gibson. Each chapter ends with a series of practical exercises. These are designed to provide ideas and prompts for the would-be writer – to start the imaginative pump working.

She makes a reasonable case for considering the higher journalism as a form of creative writing, and rightly points out that some of the best reportage can be considered as short stories if seen in a different light (or published somewhere other than in newspapers). She’s not so convincing on her claims for erotic fiction, but fortunately she redeems herself by a sensitive reading of Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’.

The book ends with several useful lists of resources for writers: magazines in print and online which accept short stories; prizes for short story writers; and organisations and databases – though for the ultimate list of resources readers will still need to consult The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook or The Writer’s Handbook.

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Ailsa Cox, Writing Short Stories, London: Routledge, 2005, pp.197, ISBN: 0415303877

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The Short Story

critical studies, theory, and classic short stories

the history and development of the short story genre

essays on the theory and practice of information design

complete shorter works – commentary and annotations

tragic and comic tales of the rural past

Stories about the New Woman 1890-1914

creative theory and practical writing techniques

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