William Giraldi The Novella’s Long Life espite the ambiguous reputation it has weathered for centuries, the Dnovella need not be the red-headed stepchild in the family of literature. Be- fore the novel became firmly established as a genre in the mid-eighteenth century, much shorter prose narratives had been in vogue in Europe and America. These novels manqué owed their genesis to Boccaccio’s The Decameron, written in the middle of the fourteenth century. Boccaccio, now the acknowledged father of the novella, hadn’t the slightest intention of fashioning a new prose form, and cer- tainly not one whose identity seems destined to be disputed into perpetuity. The hundred antic chapters that comprise The Decameronowe their storytelling fervor to scenes in the only tomes that mattered to Boccaccio: The Divine Comedy, The Aeneid, The Iliad, The Odyssey. Greeks such as Heliodorus and Longus had been writing long pastoral romances in prose since the second century A. D. Boccaccio simply nixed all the romantic silliness and shortened the individual narratives. The Decameron was the first and finest prose masterwork of the Renaissance. The common assumption that the word “novella” derives from “novel” is in- correct: our English word “novel” comes from the Italian word novella, which is not a diminutive although it literally means “little new thing.” Complicating matters, the term “novelette” is often used as a synonym for “novella” but can also refer to popular drugstore pulp. According to the English writer and scholar J. A. Cuddon in his Dictionary of Literary Terms (finished in 1975 but updated and revised until Cuddon’s death in 1996), a novelette is “a work of fiction shorter than a novel but longer than a short story,” although “in America the term ap- plies to a long short-story somewhere between the short story and the novella.” The term “novella,” meanwhile, “is used to distinguish a long short-story from a short story and short novel from a full-dress novel.” Cuddon then goes on to describe many world-famous novellas as “stories,” including those of Boccaccio, who himself doesn’t help matters, since in the preface to The Decameron he rather A Fight in the Doctor’s Officeby Cary Holladay. Oxford, OH: Miami University Press. $15.00 (paper). 793 the southern review cavalierly calls his work a collection of “one hundred novellas, or fables, or para- bles, or histories, or whatever we want to call them.” Henry James, perhaps the last word on the large and small of prose fiction, muddied the already murky water by referring to his shorter narratives as “nouvelles.” In their Anatomy of the Novella: The European Tale Collection from Boccaccio and Chaucer to Cervantes (1977), Robert Clements and Joseph Gibaldi write of the novella’s “lexical dilemma,” although lexical disaster is more like it: “At present English and American scholars variously employ the term to designate three separate and distinct types of fiction”: Boccaccio’s Renaissance yarns, the German Novelle, and of course the prose narratives of medium length that we now commonly think of as novellas. Perhaps little has changed on this front in academia since 1977, but for the common reader today the dispute over the definition of the term has nothing at all to do with Boccaccio or nineteenth-century Germans, but rather with the ever-shifting line between a short story and a novella and between a novella and a novel. The guidelines that Clements and Gibaldi proposed—that “novella” be used for the Renaissance form, Novelle for the Romantic German form, and “short novel” or “novelette” for modern narratives of medium length— never caught on. The seventeenth-century novella was the forerunner of both the novel and the modern short story, a fact that gets neglected in our foregrounding of the novel and the short story while brushing aside the novella like a refugee who has arrived unannounced from a distant land and forgotten his own name to boot. English writers were not particularly enamored of the novella form and indeed, with some possible few exceptions—J. A. Cuddon cites Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and William Congreve’s Incognita (1713)—they seem to have skipped over it and gone straight to the novel. Only after Defoe and Richardson helped establish the novel as a genre did some English novelists return to the novella: Collins, Kipling, Mary Shelley, Eliot, and Stevenson among them. It was the Germans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries— Goethe and Kleist primarily—who made the Novelle their own, assigning to it definite guidelines reminiscent of fifth-century Athenian tragedy. They limited the Novelle’s central conflict to a single, suspenseful incident that leads to a sur- prising reversal of fates, what is known in tragedy as peripeteia: the turnaround that instigates the ruin of a great figure. With their overt symbolism and silly, rollicking plots, the German Novelle had almost nothing in common with the Italian novellas of Boccaccio and others. And the quasiclassical guidelines were 794 william giraldi only loosely in place when in 1912 another German, Thomas Mann, published what is—along with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—the most famous and influential novella in world literature, Death in Venice. Of course, the nineteenth-century Russians and French would not be bested in any prose fiction genre, and so the maestros of the novel went short: Tolstoy with The Cossacks and The Death of Ivan Ilych; Turgenev with First Love; Gogol with Taras Bulba; Dostoevsky with Notes From Underground and The Eternal Husband; Flaubert with A Simple Heart; Maupassant with The Horla; Balzac with The Girl with the Golden Eyes. Ordinarily long-winded geniuses like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky—and Solzhenitsyn in the twentieth century with a jewel called A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—were capable of limiting their tremendous scope. The heavy-hitting American novelists had the same capability: Melville, Howells, Wharton, James. But are the two capabilities really much different from one an- other? How does the structure of a novella differ from that of a novel? The novella is not destined to be stuck inelegantly between a short story and a novel, with none of the strengths of either. Indeed, the opposite is true: an ex- pert novella combines the best of a short story with the best of a novel, the dy- namic thighs of a sprinter with the long-distance lungs of a mountaineer. In her 1975 study Forms of the Modern Novella, M. D. Springer claims that the novella’s length—between fifteen thousand and fifty thousand words (Forster is responsible for the second number—is uniquely “equipped to realize several distinct formal functions better than any other length,” those formal functions being a list of concepts only an academic could care about. For “formal functions” substitute “range and vision,” and this is the primary difference between a novella and a novel. Tom Jonesdemands eight hundred pages to develop; his character requires that space; once he came to life Fielding was helpless to limit him. A writer cannot pack the complicated rise and fall of a heroine, an Emma Bovary or an Anna Karenina, into the tight immediacy of a novella. A narrative chooses its own length, dictates its own boundaries. One can push or bang or bend one’s narrative into whatever length one wishes, but when the composition of a narrative is going very well, when the characters have assumed pulsating lives of their own, then the writer is pulled along by their au- thority, guiding the narrative’s natural range into the shape it wishes to have, the one in which it is most comfortable, most fully itself. In its immediacy of range, then, and in its restrictions on time and number of characters, the novella has more in common with the short story than it does with 795 the southern review the novel. It is difficult to get an effective short story to span more than a week (although the most adroit story writers, such as Alice Munro, have a miraculous ability to do so), and just as difficult to get a novella to span more than a month. Development and change take time the way psychological excavation takes space. A character’s business in a novel is to develop or to change—to suffer—and de- spite a lot of writing workshop nonsense to the contrary, a character’s business in a short story is simply to act or to react, since he has neither the time nor the space to develop or to change beyond baby steps. We need not attempt to establish new guidelines for the novella, guidelines that take into account something other than page length, because page length alone dictates what a novella is and is not capable of. Page length reveals the size of its engine and thus how fast and how far it can go. A novella like Death in Venice can feel as penetrating as a novel, as profound and psychologically astute, because a genius condensed the action— what little there is—into a short time period and then dedicated nearly every page to Aschenbach’s mental and emotional turmoil. Still, Gustave Aschenbach does not demand eight hundred pages the way Tom Jones does, and one would have a difficult time trying to argue that Death in Venice is as full, as complete a vision as Fielding’s novel. What does one do with the many world masterpieces that are clearly novellas but not recognized as such, Camus’s The Stranger, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage chief among them? Salinger calls Franny and Zooey a “story” even though it’s a hundred and fifty pages long, and, of course, he’s right: it is a story, in the same way The Iliad is a story, but not the same way Hem- ingway’s “The Battler” is a story.