Theory of Short Fiction

Introduction

The common critical assumption is that the short story was first recognized as a literary genre with unique characteristics in the 1840’s with Edgar Allan Poe’s discussions of a “unified effect” of “the tale proper.” However, Poe did not develop these ideas out of thin air; short prose fiction was a topic of critical discussion in Germany in the decades preceding Poe’s influential assertions.

Friedrich Schlegel was the first to theorize generically about short fiction, which, in keeping with the precedent established by Giovanni Boccaccio and Miguel de Cervantes, he called novelle. Schlegel says the form usually focuses on the oral telling of a new, unknown story, which should arouse interest in and of itself alone, without connection to “the nations, the times, the progress of humanity, or even the relation to culture itself.” Schlegel also suggested that although the anecdotal basis of short fiction may be trivial or its subject matter slight, its manner or way of telling must be appealing. One corollary of this focus on “manner” rather than “matter,” Schlegel noted, was that the narrator takes on a more significant role in short fiction—a shift related to the general trend in Romantic poetry toward a lyric point of view. The first effect of this trend, in such writers as Washington Irving, was an increased emphasis on the style of telling; later with Poe, it shifted emphasis to the direct involvement of the narrator in the tale that he or she tells.

German author Ludwig Tieck reiterates Schlegel’s paradoxical idea that because events in short fiction should be strange and yet commonplace they should be described as objectively taking place. However, Tieck’s most controversial idea is his notion of a Wendepunkt, a “twist in the story” or turning point from which it unexpectedly takes a different direction and, argues Tieck,

develops consequences that are nevertheless natural and entirely in keeping with characters and circumstances; this extraordinary and striking turning point, which persists in many short stories throughout the form’s history, distinguishes short fiction from every other narrative form.

Poeowes much of his influential theory of the unified effect in short fiction to Schlegel’s concept of a “totality of interest.” Poe argued in several of his early reviews that whereas in long works one may be pleased with particular passages, in short pieces, the pleasure results from the perception of the oneness, the uniqueness, the overall unity of the piece—on the adaptation of all the constituent parts, which constitutes a totality of interest. Poe distinguished between the usual notion of plot as merely events that occur one after another to arouse suspense and his own definition of plot as an overall pattern, design, or unity. Only pattern can make the separate elements of the work meaningful, insisted Poe, not temporal or realistic cause-and-effect events. Moreover, Poe argued that only when the reader has an awareness of the overall pattern of the work will seemingly trivial elements become relevant and meaningful.

Poe’s 1842 review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales (1837, expanded 1842) contains the central statements of his theory of the short story. What is most important in the literary work is unity, says Poe; however, unity can only be achieved in a work that the reader can hold in the mind all at once. Poe claims only the short tale has the potential for being unified in the way the poem—the highest form of literary art—is. The effect of the tale is synonymous with its overall pattern or design and thus its theme or central idea. Poe was always more interested in the work’s pattern, structure, conventions, and techniques than its reference to the external world or its social or psychological themes.

Brander Matthews and the Handbooks

In 1901, in the first full-length study of the short story (The Philosophy of the Short-Story), Brander Matthews noted the “strange neglect” of the form in histories of prose fiction and set out to justify Poe’s suggestive comments about the form made sixty years earlier and to establish what he called the “art of the short-story.” However, instead of Matthews’s opinion—that the short story is a unique art form differing from the novel in substantive ways—most critics of the time felt that the short story was a smaller, simpler, easier, and less important form of the novel. Not only did Matthews’s book fail to encourage new and creative artistic work in the short story, but also it had the opposite effect of further popularizing the form in the pejorative sense. As a result, the short story in the early twentieth century came to be considered a question of cold-blooded rules of composition.

The appeal of Matthews’s account, along with the popularity of the formulaic stories of O. Henry, gave rise to a number of books in the first two decades of the twentieth century that proposed anyone could write short stories if they only knew the rules. Joseph Berg Esenwein’s Writing the Short Story: A Practical Handbook on the Rise, Structure, Writing, and Sale of the Modern Short Story (1909), Carl Henry Grabo’s The Art of the Short Story (1913), and Blanche Colton Williams’s A Handbook on Story Writing (1917) are only three of numerous such books. By the 1930’s, serious readers and critics called for an end to it, filling the quality periodicals with articles on the “decline,” the “decay,” and the “senility” of the short story. Even Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien, probably the greatest champion of the form America has ever had, wrote his book The Dance of the Machines in 1929, censuring the mechanized structure of American society and the machinelike short story that reflected it.

The Early Histories

Soon after Matthews’s study of the short story, the first histories of the form and some new scholarly studies began to appear. Henry Seidel Canby’s TheShort Story in English (1909) is an especially helpful study of the form that traces the development of short prose narrative from Boccaccio’s Decameron: O, Prencipe Galetta (1349-1351; The Decameron, 1620) and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400) up through O. Henry. Barry Pain’s small 1916 pamphlet The Short Story contains still-useful comments on its essentially romantic nature. Early histories attempted to delineate what constituted the “newness” of the short story beginning with Poe. In The Short Story in English, Canby argued that all writers have used the short narrative to “turn a moral, as in fable, or to bring home, in a fabliau, an amusing reflection upon life, or to depict a situation.” The difference between the nineteenth century short story and previous short narratives, claimed Canby, is not a difference in kind but one of degree; the nineteenth century form shows a higher measure of unity. The conscious purpose of the short story, says Canby, a purpose that throws so much emphasis on the climax of a story, is “a vivid realization for the reader of that which moved the author to write, be it incident, be it emotion, be it situation . . . ; thus the art of the short story becomes as much an art of tone as of incident.”

Both Fred Lewis Pattee (The Development of the American Short Story) and O’Brien (The Advance of the American Short Story) in their 1923 histories of the American short story place the birth of the form with Washington Irving’s combination of the style of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s essays with the subject matter of German Romanticism. Pattee says that in Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-1820) “the Addisonian Arctic current was cut across by the Gulf Stream of romanticism” and thus was born the American short story, “a new genre, something distinctively our own in the world of letters.” Focusing more on the classical “Arctic” than the Gulf Stream romanticism, O’Brien says that the short story begins with The Sketch Book when Irving detached the story from the essay, especially the personal essay of the eighteenth century which arose from the need to chronicle the “talk of the town.”

Poe’scontribution, insisted Canby in his The Short Story in English, was to do for the short story what Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats were doing for poetry—that is, to excite the emotions and to apply an impressionistic technique to his materials to hold his stories together. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, he argued, who uses a moral situation as the nucleus to hold his stories together, was the first American story writer to build a story on a situation, an “active relationship between characters and circumstances.” Fred Lewis Pattee agreed that Hawthorne was the first to “touch the new romanticism with morals,” and that both Hawthorne and Poe differ from E. T. A. Hoffmann and Tieck’s “lawless creative genius” and “wild abandon” by exercising deliberate control and art. Pattee suggested that Poe’s important contribution was his realization that the tale is akin to the ballad form and, like lyric poetry, was dependent on an emotional, rather than a conceptual unity.

Bliss Perry in a departure from usual studies or histories of prose fiction at the turn of the century devoted a chapter to the short story in his 1902 A Study of Prose Fiction. He noted that because of the shortness of the form, a character must be “unique, original enough to catch the eye at once.” The result of this necessity for choosing the exceptional rather than the normal characters is that the short story is thrown upon the side of romanticism rather than of realism. Perry also pointed out another aspect of the short story that has remained constant in the form since its inception: “Sanity, balance, naturalness; the novel stands or falls in the long run, by these tests. But your short-story writer may be fit for a madhouse and yet compose tales that shall be immortal.”

The Short Story as a Romantic Genre

The basic romantic nature of the short story, both in its focus on unusual events and on the subjectivity of the author, was strongly voiced during the later part of the nineteenth century when Ambrose Bierce entered into the argument then raging over the romance versus the novel form. In his attack on the William Dean Howells school of fiction in his essay “The Short Story,” Bierce said, “to them nothing is probable outside the narrow domain of the commonplace man’s commonplace experience.”

Other short-story writers have noted this same romantic characteristic of the form. Henry James said he rejoiced in the anecdote, which he defined as something that “oddly happened” to someone. More recently Flannery O’Connor has claimed the form makes “alive some experience which we are not accustomed to observe everyday, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life.” Short stories, says O’Connor, “lean away from typical social patterns, toward mystery and the unexpected.” Of her own work she says, it takes its character from “a reasonable use of the unreasonable,” a quality that both Poe and Hawthorne would have echoed about their stories. “The peculiar problem of the short-story writer,” O’Connor says, is “how to make the action he describes reveal as much of the mystery of existence as possible . . . his problem is really how to make the concrete work double time for him.”

The only extended discussion of this romantic element in the short story is Mary Rohrberger’s1961 study on Hawthorne and the modern short story (Hawthorne and the Modern Literary Short Story: A Study Genre). Rohrberger notes that Hawthorne and many modern short-story writers share the romantic notion of a reality that lies beyond the extensional, everyday world with which the novel had been traditionally concerned. Consequently, the short story shares characteristics with the romance in being symbolic and romantic. “The short story derives from the romantic tradition . . . the metaphysical view that there is more to the world than that which can be apprehended through the senses.”

The Short Story and Social Reality

Many critics have noted the fact that the short story does not deal with generalized social reality or abstract social values. In fact, the form seems to thrive best in societies where there is a diversity or fragmentation of values and people. This geographic and social fragmentation of peoples and values has often been cited as one reason why the short story quickly became popular in nineteenth century America. In 1924, Katherine Fullerton Gerould said that American short-story writers have dealt with peculiar atmospheres and special moods, for America has no centralized civilization. “The short story does not need a complex and traditional background so badly as the novel does.” Ruth Suckow in 1927 also suggested that the chaos and unevenness of American life made the short story a natural expression. Life in America was so multitudinous that “its meaning could be caught only in fragments, perceived only by will-of-the-wisp gleams, preserved only in tiny pieces of perfection.”

More recent comments on the English short story by Wendell V. Harris and Lionel Stevenson suggest somewhat the same reason for the difference between the English short story and the American form. Stevenson points out that as soon as a culture becomes more complex, brief narratives expand or “agglomerate” and thus cause the short story to lose its identity. Throughout the nineteenth century in England, the novel predominated. Only writers, like Thomas Hardy, who depicted a relatively simple social milieu, could present a short-story sense of “reality” in his ironic verse narratives. The fragmentation of sensibility did not set in England until about 1880, at which time the short story was seen as the best medium for presenting this fragmentation.

Harris also observes that the 1890’s in England was known as the golden age of the short story, noting that with the fragmentation of sensibility perspective, or “angle of vision,” became most important in fiction, especially the short story, in which instead of a world to enter, as the novel provides, the form presents a vignette to contemplate. Harris has also noted that from Henry Fielding to Thomas Hardy, fiction was defined in England as a “presentation of life in latitudinal or longitudinal completeness.” The “essence of the short story,” on the other hand, says Harris,

is to isolate, to portray the individual person, or moment, or scene in isolation—detached from the great continuum—at once social and historical . . . the short story is a natural form for the presentation of a moment whose intensity makes it seem outside the ordinary stream of time, or the scene significance is outside the ordinary range of experience.

Short fiction achieves real success when the realms of “real life” and the mysterious interact and reflect a balance between the rational and the irrational side of human nature. Ray Benedict West has said that naturalism made less of an impact on the short story than on the novel because the former’s shortness of the form demands more preoccupation with technique than naturalistic writers were willing or able to grant. One reason the short story requires more attention to technique is that the form is romantic and therefore concerned with the unseen reality beneath the surface of life and thus requires more artifice. As Edith Wharton has said, “the greater the improbability to be overcome the more studied must be the approach, the more perfectly maintained the air of naturalness, the easy assumption that things are always likely to happen that way.”

Bonaro Wilkinson Overstreet has suggested that the short stories of the nineteenth century, mainly action stories, depended on two basic faiths: that one could know right from wrong because a basic social code of values was taken for granted and that people were what they seemed to be. In action stories, one cannot be forever hunting out obscure motives; men of action have to “assume a reliable correspondence between inner character and outward behavior.” In the twentieth century, says Overstreet, perhaps as a result of the war, readers have lost these faiths and consequently they are “thrown back upon a study of human nature—human motives, fears, wants, prejudices.” The drama of the nineteenth century, says Overstreet, is “the drama of what goes on in the mind.” The short story is an “expert medium for the expression of our deep concern about human moods and motives.”

A much more extensive study of these shifts and their many implications for short fiction in the twenties can be seen in Austin McGiffert Wright’s exhaustive study, The American Short Story in the Twenties (1961). That better stories are written by Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner than were written by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, Hamlin Garland, and Theodore Dreiser is primarily due to a loss of confidence in the adequacy of the social system and a new reliance on the individual self. Wright says that interest in moral problems in the nineteenth century focused on how to resolve the dilemma within the social system. “In stories of the twenties, on the other hand, the more fully developed moral problems have no solution, and their interest centers more directly on the question of sympathy for the bewildered individual.” Wright says that while the world of the nineteenth century was relatively stable, with substantial agreement on the worth of society and social principles as moral guidance, the world of the 1920’s was “fragmented both socially and morally, with each man isolated, obliged to find or make for himself his appropriate place in society and the appropriate principles to guide him.”

Frank O’Connor has also related the short story to a country or a milieu’s attitude toward society, claiming that in those countries where society does not seem adequate or sufficient for self-definition or the repository of acceptable values the reader finds the short story most pertinent. “The novel can still adhere to the classical concept of civilized society, of man as an animal who lives in a community—as in Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope it obviously does—but the short story remains by its very nature remote from the community—romantic, individualistic, and intransigent.” These considerations lead O’Connor to formulate his famous theory that the short story always presents a sense of “outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society.” As a result, says O’Connor, there is an intense awareness of human loneliness in the short story that does not exist in the novel. The short story is more akin to the mood of Blaise Pascal’s saying: “The silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”

The Short Story vs. the Novel

The short story is a narrative form that makes the reader aware of reality as perspective. Nadine Gordimer, the South African short-story writer, notes a general dissatisfaction that writers have with the novel as a means of “netting ultimate reality.” The short story, she says, may be better equipped than the novel to capture ultimate reality in the modern world, where truth is perspective. Short-story writers have always known what novelists seem to have recently discovered: The strongest convention of the novel, “prolonged coherence of tone,” is false to human reality in which “contact is more like the flash of fireflies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness.” The short-story writer’s art, says Gordimer, “is the art of the only thing one can be sure of—the present moment.” The short story aims at a discrete moment of truth, not the moment of truth, “because the short story doesn’t deal in cumulatives.”

It has often been recognized that the situations that the short story presents are quite different from separable incidents in a novel. As early as 1909, William James Dawson, a critic at the North American Review, suggested that incidents that are suited for novels or incidents that could be expanded into novels are not really incidents for short stories at all: “Life consists both of prolonged sequences and of flashing episodes. The first affords the material of the novelist, the second of the short-story writer.” In that same year, Canby also noted that the short narrative is best used for “life-units where only brevity and the consequent unified impression will serve.”

Seán O’Faoláin, on the other hand, has called the short form one vast convention. “There is in life no such thing as a short story; all life’s stories are long, long, stories . . . to chop up life is to pretend that life is not continuous but spasmodic or intermittent.” O’Connor would probably agree, but with significant differences in focus. O’Connor says that in the novel time is the novelist’s essential asset: “The chronological development of character or incident is essential form as we see it in life, and the novelist flouts it at his own peril.” There is no essential form for the short-story writer, O’Connor says. Because the short-story writer must select a point at which he can approach life, each selection he makes contains the possibility of a new form.

The novel as a composite of experiences is not a composite of the kinds of experiences that make up short stories. The flow of experience in the novel is determined by some concept of the “totality of experience,” or as Alberto Moravia says, some skeletal framework of philosophic outlook. The individual experiences that make up the short story are determined by some confrontation that breaks up the totality of experience. The novel presents life as it really is experienced only in the sense that life is usually experienced as perception of a set of categories. Moravia suggests that if the reader accepts the view that art presents experiences that cannot be conceptualized, then it follows that the novel is the most conceptual and therefore the least artistic literary form.

The Pattern of the Short Story

In 1916, Barry Pain suggested that the length of the form creates in the short story something very rarely found in the novel “in the same degree of intensity—a very curious, haunting, and suggestive quality.” This haunting quality, this intensity that manifests itself in the short story, however, does not come from the incident chosen alone; it comes from a tight dramatic patterning of the incident in such a way that its dramatic tension is exposed and felt. Danforth Ross in his study of the American short story says that the major contribution that Poe makes to the short fiction form is that he brings tension, long a characteristic of poetry, to the story form. Whereas Irving’s stories meander, Poe attempted to present a story as a dramatist does in a play. In an article in 1943, Gorham Bert Munson says that the O. Henry story at the turn of the century marked a degeneration of the Poe short story. “Poe aimed not at a transcription of actuality, but at a patterned dramatization of life.” For this, says Munson, he needed a “storyable incident,” an anecdote in the Jamesian sense of something that “oddly happened,” an anecdote with a hard nugget of latent value.

The nugget, however, must be laid bare of its latent value. By metaphor and condensation the latent must be made manifest in whatever seeming artificial manner. Even W. Somerset Maugham, whose story preference was for one that could be told in a drawing room or smoker, insisted on stories as a “dramatization” of life, not simply a transcription. This “artificial” patterning of the short story, this heightening of intensity and deepening of significance has often been a point of controversy among critics. Canby argued in 1909 that whereas the novelist aims at a natural method of transcription, “the author of the short story adopts a very artificial one. His endeavor is to give a striking narrative picture of one phase of the situation or character, disregarding much that a cross section might show.” Such a process, says Canby, is very artificial, but also very powerful. A few years later, Elsworth Corey condemned this very compression in the short story as pathological: “Its unity is abnormally artificial and intense” and leads to titillating the nerves in pathological moments. Not only does the technique seem abnormally intense and pathological to some critics, but also it seems to lead to a sterile art for others. Falcon O. Baker said in 1953 that the concern of the New Critics for form and unity leads toward the dullness of geometry in the short story.

The Limitations of the Short Story

The highly formalistic nature of the short story has also been criticized by those critics and novelists who have affirmed the value of naturalistic presentation and social involvement and awareness. It was criticized by the naturalist writers in the nineteenth century and has been scorned by the Marxist writers and critics since the 1930’s. James T. Farrell criticized the form in two essays in the 1930’s for its sterile formality and its failure to be a vehicle for revolutionary ideology. Maxwell Geismar in 1964 lashed out at The New Yorker school of short-story writer, which included J. D. Salinger, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and J. F. Powers, for the narrow range of their vision and subject matter and their stress on the intricate craftsmanship of the well-made story.

Another reason why the short story has not been popular or has not maintained its place in modern literature is that readers prefer the novel precisely because it does not demand anything more than perseverance in a continuous flow of reading, becoming one with the sustained rhythm and tone of the work. William Dean Howells noted in 1901 that although the short story may be attractive when one runs across one singly in a magazine, the short story in a collection seems most repellant to the reader. The reason stems from the very intensity and compression and suggestiveness of the form itself. Reading one story, says Howells, one can receive a pleasant “spur to his own constructive faculty. But if this is repeated in ten or twenty stories, he becomes fluttered and exhausted by the draft upon his energies; whereas a continuous fiction of the same quantity acts as an agreeable sedative.” V. S. Pritchett has said much the same. The length, inclusiveness, and shapelessness of the novel creates a “bemusing effect,” says Pritchett.

The short story, on the other hand, wakes the reader up. Not only that; it answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience, the desire for the electric shock.

The Subjective Impulse in the Short Story

In addition to the kind of event or situation it deals with and the tight dramatic patterning of that event, another element of the short story that creates unity and compression is the subjective and lyrical impulse of the writer. Elizabeth Bowen has said that the

first necessity for the short story, at the set out, is necessariness. The story, that is to say, must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough, acute enough, to have made the writer write. . . . The story should have the valid central emotion and inner spontaneity of the lyric; it should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure—of however disturbing, painful or complex a kind. The story should be as composed, in the plastic sense, and as visual as a picture. . . . The necessary subject dictates its own relevance. . . . The art of the short story permits a break at what in the novel would be the crux of the plot: the short story, free from the longueurs of the novel is also exempt from the novel’s conclusiveness—too often forced and false: it may thus more nearly than the novel approach aesthetic and moral truth.

Eudora Welty has said that all stories by a writer come from some source within: “All of one writer’s stories must take on their quality, carry their signature, because of one characteristic lyrical impulse of his mind—the impulse to praise, love, to call up, to prophesy.” Something in the outside world, some person, place, thing leads back to the emotions in a specific way, says Welty; it is the “break of the living world upon what is stirring inside the mind, and the answering impulse that in a moment of high consciousness fuses impact and image and fires them off together.” William Carlos Williams has said that the short story consists of one “single flight of the imagination, complete: up and down.”

Many writers have said they feel the form is a subjective medium. Seán O’Faoláin calls it an “emphatically personal exposition.” William Carlos Williams says he thinks it a good medium for “nailing down a single conviction. Emotionally.” V. S. Pritchett says the good short-story writer knows he or she is putting on a personal individual act, catching “a piece of life as it flies” and makes “his personal performance out of it.” Katherine Mansfield has said that what is essential for the short-story writer is to “penetrate one’s subject, not to take a flat view of it; thus feelings, and objects as well, must be contemplated—or rather `submitted to’—until one is truly lost in them.”

The detachment from circumstances in the short story makes it necessary to have every word exactly right. For if it is not circumstances the writer is concerned with, except that these circumstances are resonant with meaning and signification, then the words chosen have to be exactly right to convey or capture the writer’s subjective impression of the significance of the event, character, thing, being described. This means that the short story must be rigorously executed; it must tend, says Herbert Gold, to “control and formalize experience” and “strike hot like the lyric poem.” Because of the subjectivity of the form, editor Herschell Brickell has noted, it requires technical accomplishment. “The whole thing is delicate and subtle, a matter of nuances, and the style itself must have both beauty and exactness, must partake of the esthetic and the functional, if the full effect is to be achieved.”

One very important implication of the subjectivity of the short story is the concomitant importance of tone in the story, a force that more than narrative seems to hold the story together. Canby said very early in the history of the short story that the art of the form is as much that of tone as incident. The work of the author in the story is “harmonized into one tone, as if narrative were a painting.” This perfection of tone is necessary to emphasize the climax, that central core for which the story was written. Irving Howe has said, “If the short-story writer is to create the illusion of reality, he must sing mostly aria and very little recitative. As a result, he uses a series of technical devices, often quite simple inflections of style, the end effect of which is called the story tone. A novel written in one dominant tone becomes intolerable; a story too often deviating from it risks chaos.” However, Howe notes the same problem of this dependence of the story on tone that writer Edith R. Mirrielees had noted eight years earlier, that is several writers either write from the same tone so often that the stories seem identical (the same tone held too long becomes toneless) or else because tone can so easily be wrenched from its necessary context that it can become a stereotype and destroy a writer’s individuality. Howe says, in the novel the “second-rater tends to parrot a vision of life; in the story, he tends to echo a tone of voice.”

Leaving Things Out in the Short Story

Another aspect of the lyric nature of the story is its tendency to “leave things out.” Hemingway once said, “I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.” Rudyard Kipling suggested, “A tale from which pieces have been raked out is like a fire that has been poked. One does not know the operation has been performed, but everyone feels the effect.” Anton Chekhov once wrote to I. L. Shcheglov, “In short stories it is better to say not enough than to say too much, because,—because—I don’t know why.” In another letter Chekhov says that it is compactness that makes small things alive. “Alive” here must be understood to be life at the remove of art, of life more alive for being compressed. Chekhov once wrote to Maxim Gorky that he lacked restraint and thus grace. “When a man spends the least possible number of movements over some definite action, that is grace.” Another implication of this need for compression is that for a story to be good, it must be perfect, a demand made on the form that is never made upon the novel.

This lyric nature of the short story has led some critics, such as Sister Mary Joselyn Baldeshwiler, to argue that although all stories have a mimetic base, some have additional elements that are usually associated with verse. Some of these poetic elements she notes are: “(1) marked deviation from chronological sequence (2) exploitation of purely verbal resources such as tone and imagery (3) a concentration upon increased awareness rather than upon a completed action, and (4) a high degree of suggestiveness, emotional intensity, achieved with a minimum of means.” Most interestingly, Baldeshwiler says that the lyric story often has a dual action: a syllogistic plot that rests on the onward flow of time, and a secondary action that expresses “man’s attempt to isolate certain happenings from the flux of time, to hold them static, to probe to their inwardness and grasp their meaning.” British short-story writer and novelist Elizabeth Taylor has also suggested that the short story by its lyrical nature, its sustaining of one mood throughout, can give an impression of “perfection” and give the feeling of “being lifted into another world, instead of rather sinking into it, as one does with longer fiction.” The German short-story writer Martin Walser also sees the short story as a form that presents not reality but “transcendence of reality,” a counterpoint to reality. Other writers have noted the same paradox of the short story. Maurice Shadbolt says that the challenge of the form is to pull as much of life as the story can bear into the fewest pages and therefore produce “if possible, that hallucinatory point in which time past and time future seem to co-exist with time present, that hallucinatory point which to me defines the good or great short story.”

Character in the Short Story

Since its beginning, the short story has been criticized for its failure to present character in a full and convincing way. Pattee said in 1923 that short-story characters are strangers flashed only momentarily; their tragedy affects readers as if they had seen an unknown man run over in an accident, a moment’s thrill of horror. “If it had been our brother or our son we should feel it.” Pattee unknowingly hits an important point here about the form, a point that O’Connor has made his own in The Lonely Voice (1963). It is precisely the point of the short story that it presents readers with characters they do not have time to get to know intimately; however, this alone no more relieves the readers of responsibility for them than a brief acquaintance relieves them in real life. Many critics and writers have noted that what readers remember about the short story is not the person but the predicament of the story. Howells says readers can scarcely even remember by name any of the people in the short story.

Frank O’Connor claims that in the novel the reader is bound to be involved in a process of identification with the character. One character must represent the reader in some “aspect of his own conception of himself . . . and this process of identification invariably leads to some concept of normality and to some relationship—hostile or friendly—with society as a whole.” However, in the short story, says O’Connor, there is no one the reader can identify with, and no form of society that the character (or the reader) can attach himself to and regard as normal.

Writing in 1958, Granville Hicks said that plot had not counted in the short story for a long time, “and now character, though important, is more often a means to an end rather than an end in itself. More and more commonly, the end is an emotional experience for the reader. Both events and characters are used to create a specific emotion, and the climax, to provide a release for it.” In 1965, George P. Elliott, reviewing several short-story collections of that year, also noted the loss of character and warned that “the worse pitfall a writer dealing in extremes must watch out for is depersonalizing his characters. At the brink, people are apt to behave much alike, less according to their personal natures than according to human nature generally.” However, it is the emotional reaction to the mystery of personality at which Flannery O’Connor says the short story excels. Character in the short story does not give in to the illusion that the novel does that readers “know” this character simply because they have lived with him or her for a period of time. Character in the short story is not revealed or presented either by social context or familiarity, for after all, those are abstractions that can never reveal the totality of personality. Such a totality itself is an illusion and an abstraction.

The Short Story and the New Critics

Professors did not really begin to consider the short story seriously in college classrooms until Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s 1943 short-story textbook Understanding Fiction made analysis of individual examples of the form respectable. Arno Lehman Bader’s essay made the formalist approach to the form quite explicit in 1945. Confronting the common complaint that the modern literary short story has no structure, he tries to show that although a narrative structure is still present in the form, its presentation and resolution are so indirect that the reader must work harder to find the perceived relationships of the parts of the story. John Walter Sullivan developed this rather simple and general assessment into a more rigid formalist methodology in 1951. Using Mark Schorer’s comment that the short story is an art of “moral revelation,” Sullivan asserts that the fundamental methodological concept of the short story is a change from innocence to knowledge—a change that can be either “inter-concatenate” (occurring within the main character) or “extra-concatenate” (occurring within a peripheral character). In 1956, Theodore Albert Stroud, extending Bader and Sullivan’s New Critical approaches, focused more on aesthetic than on narrative pattern, arguing that the best way to discern pattern in the short story is to examine how the completeness of a story results from the units or episodes in a work combining to make credible a change in one of the characters or to create a sense of realization in the reader.

General comments about the nature of the short story as a genre were sparse in American criticism during the 1940’s and 1950’s because the formalist approach of the New Critics focused primarily on individual readings of individual works. One notable exception is Norman Friedman’s attempt to answer the basic question, “What Makes a Short Story Short?” Taking his approach from Chicago critic Elder Olson’s “Outline of Poetic Theory” which itself is taken, in part, from Aristotle’s Peri poētikēs, c. 334-323 b.c.e. (Poetics, 1705), Friedman argues that a short story is short because the size of the action is short, because the action is static or dynamic, because the author chooses to present in a contracted scale by means of summation and deletion, or because the author chooses a point of view that lends itself to brevity.

New Theories of the Short Story

Since the late 1970’s there has been a revival of interest in the short story by literary critics, partially sparked by the publication in 1976 of Short Story Theories, in which Charles E. May argued that what was needed was a theory of the form derived from the “underlying vision of the short story, its characteristic mode of understanding and confronting reality.” In that same year, in an essay in the journal Studies in Short Fiction, May suggested an initial definition of the short story’s underlying vision and argued that Poe’s description of the form’s “unique effect” was consistent with philosopher Ernst Cassirer’s concept of “mythic perception.” In several essays written during the 1980’s, according to critic Susan Lohafer, May has become one of the most consistent proponents of the notion that there is an inherent relationship between a characteristic short-story structure and its theme.

It is this very issue—whether a unified generic definition of the short story is possible—that divided short-story theorists in the 1980’s into two groups. The difference between those critics and writers who doubt that a definition of the short story is possible and those who argue for such a definition revolves around two different concepts of generic definition. The antidefinition group insists on a positivist definition that includes characteristics common to all examples of the short story that will distinguish it from the novel; the prodefinition group is more interested in trying to find a network of similarities and relationships within examples of the form. As long as they can find some characteristics shared by examples of the short story they do not need to find a definition that satisfies necessary and sufficient conditions to distinguish the short story from the novel.

One of the most emphatic proponents of this group is Allan H. Pasco, who believes that the work of defining a genre succeeds when the definition corresponds to general practice and understanding. He is therefore not concerned with finding a single touchstone for the form but rather looks for clusters of traits common to it. The best a genre definition can do, he says, is to draw attention to the dominant aspects of genre, which may indeed include elements that one can find in other genres.

One of the most influential of those who did not think such a generic description is possible was Mary Louise Pratt, who disagreed with those who argued that the short story is a primary form, claiming that since the novel has always been more prestigious and powerful as a genre, the development of the short story has been secondarily conditioned by the novel. Pratt concluded that she did not think that a generic determination of the characteristics of a genre like the short story will ever be possible.

Books on the short story in the 1980’s only unevenly dealt with specifically generic issues. For example, Walter Ernest Allen’s 1981 survey is a traditional discussion valuable for providing a framework for understanding the development of the form, but it does not attempt to formulate a generic approach. Valerie Shaw’s desultory discussion of the form in 1983 disparaged any attempt at a unified approach. Helmut Bonheim’s 1982 study of narrative modes of the short story, based on a statistical study of the form, particularly short-story endings, focused on only a limited set of short-story techniques. John C. Gerlach’s 1985 analysis of the concept of closure in the American short story is a helpful study of an important element of the form but is somewhat narrowly focused both theoretically and in the number of stories examined. John Bayley’s 1988 discussion of typical poetic techniques and devices common to the form from Henry James to Elizabeth Bowen and Clare Hanson’s 1985 study of the authority of the teller in the form between 1880 and 1980 are both suggestive contributions but also focus only on limited historical periods. The most important book on the short story published in the 1980’s was Susan Lohafer’s Coming to Terms with the Short Story (1983), a sophisticated discussion of how the narrative rhythm of the short story uniquely engages the reader’s attention. In this book, Lohafer introduced her concept of “preclosure” which she has further explored and developed in a number of important essays in the 1990’s.

Collections of essays on the short story published during the 1980’s include The Teller and the Tale: Aspects of the Short Story (1982), edited by Wendell Aycock, and Re-Reading the Short Story (1989), edited by Clare Hanson, both of which include original essays on a number of aspects of the form. The most important collections of theoretical essays on the form in the 1980’s were the special issue of Modern Fiction Studies published in 1982 and Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, edited by Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey in 1989. The Modern Fiction Studies special issue is especially notable for two suggestive essays: Suzanne Hunter Brown’s discussion of two readings of a section from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), which argues that identical texts are read differently depending on what genre frame of expectations is brought to them, and Suzanne Ferguson’s argument that the modern short story is not a discrete genre, different from the sketch and tale that went before it, but rather a manifestation of the techniques and assumptions of literary impressionism.

Both Brown and Ferguson also have essays in Lohafer and Clarey’s Short Story Theory at a Crossroads—Ferguson showing how social factors influenced the rise and fall of the prestige of the short story, and Brown providing a helpful analytical survey of research being done by psychologists of discourse on the nature of storyness and cognitive responses to literature. Also included in this volume are essays by critics already mentioned in this survey: Norman Friedman, who reviews and critiques a number of contemporary theorists; Mary Rohrberger, who disagrees with Friedman’s strictly scientific approach to a definition of the form; Austin McGiffert Wright, who argues for a formalist view of the genre as a cluster of conventions; and Charles E. May, who discusses the shift from mythic to metaphoric motivation in the early development of the form during the American romantic period.

Karl-Heinz Stierle reminds readers that there are two different ways in which narrative texts produce systematic texts—by means of the fable and of the exemplum. By fable, Stierle means roughly the same thing that Robert Franklin Marler means by tale; by exemplum, he means roughly the same thing Marler means by the short story. For although fable and exemplum create meaning in quite different ways—the fable presenting the general as the particular, while in the exemplum the general appears in the particular—at a certain historical point at the end of the eighteenth century, it became less easy to determine the meaning lying beyond the events depicted in the short story. The whole history of the development of the short story can be seen as a constant interplay between the exemplary nature of story and its realistic presentation of characters in time and space.

Twayne Publishers has provided a significant boost to the revival of critical interest in the short story in the 1980’s with two book series: Critical History of the Short Story and Studies in Short Fiction. While the first series features historical/critical survey essays on English, American, Russian, Irish, and Latin American short fiction, the second series focuses on the short fiction of individual authors. Each volume in this series includes an extended original essay on the short-story writer, as well as a few selected previously published essays by other critics.

By and large, the burgeoning interest in literary theory since the 1960’s has not had a significant effect on criticism of the short story, in spite of the fact that the highly formal nature of the genre would seem to lend itself to formalist, structuralist, and poststructuralist theory. Frederic Jameson, in one of the best early surveys of formalism and structuralism, suggested that structuralism would find the short story more amenable to its own brand of analysis than the novel, for whereas the novel has no preexisting laws that govern its form, the short story or tale is “characterized by a specific and determinate kind of content” and thus its laws can be the object of investigation. However, although narratologists such as Roland Barthes and Tzvetan Todorov have focused on short forms, this is due less to their generic interest in the form than to the fact that their intensive analyses of grammatical structure are too burdensome to sustain over the long haul of the novel. Representative examples of the sometimes tedious thoroughness of the structuralist or linguistic approach to short fiction that made it die of its own weight are Seymour Benjamin Chatman’s essay “New Ways of Analyzing Narrative Structure,” with its detailed analysis of James Joyce’s story “Eveline,” and Gerald Prince’s A Grammar of Stories: An Introduction (1973), which attempts to account for the structure of all syntactical sets that readers intuitively recognize as stories.

In 1993, a special issue of the journal Style was devoted to the modern short story, featuring essays by Susan Lohafer, Charles E. May, and several others on oral narratives, the epiphany, and the nature of reality in the modern short story. In 1997 and 1998, respectively, two collections of essays by various critics were devoted to the short story: Creative and Critical Approaches to the Short Story, edited by Noel Harold Kaylor, Jr., and Tales We Tell: Perspectives on the Short Story, edited by Barbara Lounsberry, Susan Lohafer, Mary Rohrberger, Stephen Pett, and R. C. Feddersen. In these books, the best-known short-story critics and theorists, such as Lohafer, May, Suzanne Ferguson, Austin McGiffert Wright, and Mary Rohrberger, were joined by several other critics specializing in the short story, such as John Gerlach, Ian Reid, Susan Rochette-Crawley, Hilary Siebert, and Suzanne Hunter Brown.

The journal Studies in Short Fiction published a special issue on the theory of the short story in 1996, with essays on the theory of the short story by Charles E. May, on preclosure by Susan Lohafer, and on the short story and the novel by Suzanne Ferguson, as well as essays on temporality and the short story and the nature of minimalism by short-story critics Michael Trussler and Cynthia Hallett. Also featuring a special issue on the short story in 1996 was the Journal of Modern Literature, which reprinted selected papers presented at the 1994 Third International Conference on the Short Story. The issue included essays on the short story by such writers as Isabel Allende, Bharati Mukherjee, Amiri Baraka, and Wilson Harris, as well as discussions of gender, cultural, and social issues in the form.

A number of significant book-length studies of the short story appeared in the 1990’s. Dominic Head’s book The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice (1992) discusses the modern short story from a Bakhtinian approach, arguing that the form’s stress on literary artifice makes it most amenable to modernist experimentation. Andrew Levy in The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story (1993) explains how the short story has reflected American values throughout its historical development. Kirk Curnutt’s Wise Economies: Brevity and Storytelling in American Short Stories (1997) is an extended study of the issue of brevity in the short story, with chapters on a number of important American writers, discussing how stylistic economy is an important evolving aesthetic tactic in the short story that continually redefined how readers had to form interpretations of the short story.

Charles E, May’s 1976 collection Short Story Theories was reissued in a new, extensively revised edition in 1994, entitled The New Short Story Theories. The collection included important essays on the theory of short fiction by Mary Louise Pratt, Wendell V. Harris, Robert F. Marler, Susan Lohafer, and Suzanne Ferguson, as well as discussions of the form by such writers as Julio Cortázar, Nadine Gordimer, Elizabeth Bowen, and Raymond Carver. The following year, May’s historical/generic study of the development of the short story The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice was published.

As an indication of the continuing interest in the short story both by practicing writers and by classroom teachers, two books of interviews and practical essays appeared in the late 1990’s. Speaking of the Short Story: Interviews with Contemporary Writers (1997), edited by Farhat Iftekharuddin, Mary Rohrberger, and Maurice Lee, featured interviews with Isabel Allende, Bharati Mukherjee, Leslie Marmon Silko, Richard Ford, and Rudolfo A. Anaya. Short Stories in the Classroom (1999), edited by Carole L. Hamilton and Peter Kratzke, includes brief essays by a number of teachers and critics providing practical suggestions about teaching the short story from a wide variety of critical and pedagogical perspectives.

Modern Genre Theory and the Short Story

Much of the critical resistance to short-story genre theory in the past has resulted from two basic misapprehensions. First, short-story critics have often failed to distinguish between two different meanings of the term “genre.” Either they have treated historical genres as if they were theoretical concepts and then gleefully pronounced genre theory a failure because historical genres change or they have assumed that one generic approach should fit all narrative genres and then triumphantly surrendered when a theory based on the novel does not clarify the characteristics of the short story. The short story deserves a generic theory based on the characteristics of the form recognized both by authors and readers throughout its history, a theory that should be judged on its explanatory power in understanding the form’s historical changes without insisting that the short story is a “pure” form or that its history has been “evolutionary.”

The basic generic question that must be confronted by critics of the short story is, What are the significant theoretical and historical implications of shortness in narrative? If narrative is one of the basic means by which one comes to know the world, then how does short narrative “know the world” differently than the novel knows the world? The question that short-story critics must confront is, what methods and means of seeing and conceptualizing reality are accessible to prose fictions that are short?

One of the most persistent implications of the short story’s shortness is that it creates the illusion that understanding of the whole precedes understanding of the parts, first proposed by Poe. Indeed, Poe’s most significant contribution to the development of the short story as a new genre in American literature was his creation of an alternative definition of narrative “plot.” Instead of “simple complexity” or “involution of incident,” Poe adapted from Schlegel a new meaning of the term: “that from which no part can be displaced without ruin to the whole.” By this one stroke, Poe shifted the reader’s narrative focus from mimetic events to aesthetic pattern. Poe argued that without the “key” of the overall design or plan of a work of fiction, many points would seem insignificant or unimportant through the impossibility of the reader’s comprehending them. Once the reader has the overall design in mind, however, all those points that might otherwise have been “insipid” or “null” will “break out in all directions like stars, and throw quadruple brilliance over the narrative.”

What Poe’s approach to the shortness of story reflects is the basic paradox inherent in all narrative: the writer’s restriction to the dimension of time juxtaposed against his or her desire to create a structure that reflects an atemporal theme. Because of the shortness of the short story, the form gives up the sense of real time, but it compensates for this loss by focusing on significance, pattern, and meaning. The central problem, says C. S. Lewis, is that for stories to be stories, they must be a series of events; yet at the same time it must be understood that this series is only a net to catch something else. This “something else,” which, for want of a better word, is called theme, is something “that has no sequence in it, something other than a process and much more like a state or quality.” The result is that the means of fiction are always at war with its end.

Lewis says, “In real life, as in a story, something must happen. That is just the trouble. We grasp at a state and find only a succession of events in which the state is never quite embodied.” E. M. Forster has called attention to the same paradox in a famous mock lament in Aspects of the Novel (1927), reminding the reader that even as he or she agrees that the “fundamental aspect of the novel is its story-telling aspect,” the reader voices his or her assent sadly: “Yes—oh, dear, yes—the novel tells a story.”

Both Forster and Lewis agree that the problem stems from the sense of time. Forster notes that in addition to the time sense in daily life there is something else, something not measured by minutes or hours but by intensity, something called value. Story as such can only deal with the time sense. Story, the “naked worm of time,” is an atavistic form that presents an appearance both “unlovely and dull,” says Forster. Yet novelists flout it at their peril. As soon as fiction is “completely delivered from time it cannot express anything at all.” The problem is that one cannot abolish story unless one abolishes the sequence between sentences, which in turn cannot be done unless one abolishes the order of words in a sentence, which then necessitates abolishing the order of letters or sounds in the words. A novel that attempts to destroy the time sense and only express the sense of value, reminds Forster, “becomes unintelligible and therefore valueless.” The desire to liberate the novel from time is a noble one but one doomed to failure. Thus the reader says sadly, “Yes—oh dear, yes—the novel tells a story.”

The problem is, from the point of view of the writer’s task, how to convert mere events, one thing after another, into significance. The problem for the writer’s relationship to the reader is, once the reader is encouraged to keep turning pages to find out what happens next, that some way must found to make the reader see that what happens next is not what is important. This basic incompatibility, noted by many critics, is more obvious in the short form, which, in its frequent focus on a frozen moment, seems atemporal. Julio Cortázar says, “The short-story writer knows that he can’t proceed cumulatively, that time is not his ally. His only solution is to work vertically, heading up or down in literary space.”

The most difficult problem the aesthetic nature of the short story posed for critics at the end of the twentieth century was that it necessitated approaching the short story from the currently discredited formalist point of view characteristic of romanticism and modernism. In one of the several book-length theoretical studies of the short story published in the last decade of the century, Head complained that short-story theory has largely been determined by an oversimplified perception of modernist practice and urges critics to go beyond what he calls the “visual artifact aesthetic” or the “unity aesthetic” that has dominated criticism of the form since Poe.

However, although Head makes valuable contributions to short-story theory, his insistence on some nebulous connection between literary form and social context and his consequent effort to apply currently fashionable sociological theories to the short story prevent him from developing an approach consistent with the short story’s unique generic characteristics. It is not helpful to dismiss all previous commentary on the short story by authors and critics as wrong simply because the commentary is not currently fashionable. What the short story requires is a thorough analysis of previous short-story criticism, as well as short-story practice, in order to develop a theory that does justice to this most ancient and yet most distinctly modern form.

Bibliography

For further information about the most important books and articles mentioned in this survey see “Bibliography” in this volume.