The Story and Its Writer

APPENDIX ONE Reading Short Stories

Fiction is like the spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. — Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

People have told stories to each other since before the dawn of history, but the literary genre that we call the short story is a relatively recent phenomenon, much younger than the genres of poetry and drama. Te terms story and short story do not necessarily mean the same thing. Te word story itself has two meanings. It can refer to a literary text (for example, we can say that Grace Paley wrote a story titled “Samuel”), or it can refer to the events themselves that are represented in the text (we can say that the story of “Samuel” is about an accident on a New York subway in which a young boy is killed). In contrast, the term short story always means the name of a particular literary genre. It refers to a short fctional prose narrative, usually involving one unifed epi- sode, and it is ofen applied to any work of narrative prose fction shorter than a novel. Most of us have spent our lives listening to, telling, watching, and reading stories, and we think we can recognize them. But what are the essential qualities of a short story such as Paley’s “Samuel”?

GRACE PALEY Samuel

1968

Some boys are very tough. Tey’re afraid of nothing. Tey are the ones who climb a wall and take a bow at the top. Not only are they brave on the roof, but they make a lot of noise in the darkest part of the cellar where even the super hates to go. Tey also jiggle and hop on the platform between the locked doors of the subway cars. Four boys are jiggling on the swaying platform. Teir names are Alfred, Calvin, Samuel, and Tom. Te men and the women in the cars on either side watch them. Tey don’t like them to jiggle or jump but don’t want to interfere. Of course some of the men in the cars were once brave boys like these. One of them had ridden the tail of a speeding truck from New York to Rockaway

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Beach without getting of, without his sore fngers losing hold. Nothing happened to him then or later. He had made a compact with other boys who preferred to watch: Starting at Eighth Avenue and Fifeenth Street, he would get to some specifed place, maybe Twenty-third and the river, by hopping the tops of the moving trucks. Tis was hard to do when one truck turned a corner in the wrong direction and the nearest truck was a couple of feet too high. He made three or four starts before succeeding. He had gotten his idea from a flm at school called Te Romance of Logging. He had fnished high school, married a good friend, was in a responsible job and going to night school. Tese two men and others looked at the four boys jumping and jiggling on the platform and thought, It must be fun to ride that way, especially now the weather is nice and we’re out of the tunnel and way high over the Bronx. Ten they thought, Tese kids do seem to be acting sort of stupid. Tey are little. Ten they thought of some of the brave things they had done when they were boys and jiggling didn’t seem so risky. Te ladies in the car became very angry when they looked at the four boys. Most of them brought their brows together and hoped the boys could see their extreme disapproval. One of the ladies wanted to get up and say, Be careful, you dumb kids, get of that platform or I’ll call a cop. But three of the boys were Negroes and the fourth was something else she couldn’t tell for sure. She was afraid they’d be fresh and laugh at her and embarrass her. She wasn’t afraid they’d hit her, but she was afraid of embarrassment. Another lady thought, Teir mothers never know where they are. It wasn’t true in this particular case. Their mothers all knew that they had gone to see the missile exhibit on Fourteenth Street. Out on the platform, whenever the train accelerated, the boys would raise their hands and point them up to the sky to act like rockets going of, then they rat-tat-tatted the shatterproof glass pane like machine guns, although no machine guns had been exhibited. For some reason known only to the motorman, the train began a sudden slowdown. Te lady who was afraid of embarrassment saw the boys jerk forward and backward and grab the swinging guard chains. She had her own boy at home. She stood up with determination and went to the door. She slid it open and said, “You boys will be hurt. You’ll be killed. I’m going to call the conductor if you don’t just go into the next car and sit down and be quiet.” Two of the boys said, “Yes’m,” and acted as though they were about to go. Two of them blinked their eyes a couple of times and pressed their lips together. Te train resumed its speed. Te door slid shut, parting the lady and the boys. She leaned against the side door because she had to get of at the next stop. Te boys opened their eyes wide at each other and laughed. Te lady blushed. Te boys looked at her and laughed harder. Tey began to pound each other’s back. Samuel laughed the hardest and pounded Alfred’s back until Alfred coughed and the tears came. Alfred held tight to the chain hook. Sam- uel pounded him even harder when he saw the tears. He said, “Why you bawl- ing? You a baby, huh?” and laughed. One of the men whose boyhood had been more watchful than brave became angry. He stood up straight and looked at

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the boys for a couple of seconds. Ten he walked in a citizenly way to the end of the car, where he pulled the emergency cord. Almost at once, with a terrible hiss, the pressure of air abandoned the brakes and the wheels were caught and held. People standing in the most secure places fell forward, then backward. Samuel had let go of his hold on the chain so he could pound Tom as well as Alfred. All the passengers in the cars whipped back and forth, but he pitched only forward and fell head frst to be crushed and killed between the cars. Te train had stopped hard, halfway into the station, and the conductor called at once for the trainmen who knew about this kind of death and how to take the body from the wheels and brakes. Tere was silence except for passengers from other cars who asked, What happened! What happened! Te ladies waited around wondering if he might be an only child. Te men recalled other afernoons with very bad endings. Te little boys stayed close to each other, leaning and touching shoulders and arms and legs. When the policeman knocked at the door and told her about it, Samuel’s mother began to scream. She screamed all day and moaned all night, though the doctors tried to quiet her with pills. Oh, oh, she hopelessly cried. She did not know how she could ever fnd another boy like that one. However, she was a young woman and she became pregnant. Ten for a few months she was hopeful. Te child born to her was a boy. Tey brought him to be seen and nursed. She smiled. But immediately she saw that this baby wasn’t Samuel. She and her husband together have had other children, but never again will a boy exactly like Samuel be known.

When you fnished reading “Samuel,” you probably sensed that it was a short story, diferent from a newspaper account, but how did you know this? For one thing, the story wasn’t simply reporting the facts of a particular subway accident that had occurred recently. Paley begins and ends her narrative with her subjective response to the death of a young boy. Her frst sentence “Some boys are very tough” is not the way a newspaper reporter would open a story, unless perhaps it was meant for the editorial page. Also by the second paragraph of “Samuel,” Paley is describing the antics of a group of boys on the swaying platform between two subway cars as they stunt for each other. As a short story writer, she is showing you their antics, not telling you about their presumed toughness any more. She is making the events she describes come alive in your imagination as you read the page. Te way that the writer uses language to show the events of a narrative, not merely to tell about it, is the most important diference between a short story author and a newspaper reporter. In an interview, Paley explained that her decision to write stories was her attempt to “get the world to explain itself to me, to speak to me.” She regarded her decision to dramatize the events of her stories as an efort “to reach out to the world and get it to tell me what it was all about.” To accomplish this dramatization, this ability to suggest a living

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world on the page, writers of short fction have various means at their disposal, including plot, characterization, setting, point of view, style, and theme. With these elements of short fction, skillful writers such as Paley can create stories that communicate their own unique sense of the mystery of life, the realization that “never again will a boy exactly like Samuel be known.” Paley’s story is very short, because she wanted to attempt a literary style that was close to poetry. As she described it in an interview, I would say that stories are closer to poetry than they are to the novel because frst they are shorter, and second they are more concentrated, more economical, and that kind of economy, the pulling together of all the information and making leaps across the information, is really close to poetry. By leaps I mean thought leaps and feeling leaps. Also, when short stories are working right, you pay more attention to language than most novelists do. Te length of “Samuel” is of less importance than what the author succeeds in accomplishing with her few words. Paley believes that the form of the story is very fexible. “It can be just telling a little tale, or writing a complicated phil- osophical story. It can be a song, almost.” Like poetry, the short story is a concentrated use of language dependent for its success on feeling and suggestion. Edgar Allan Poe was one of the frst to attempt an analysis of the short story’s aesthetic properties. He stressed unity of efect as the story’s most characteristic feature. All successful art gives an impression of unity, but for over a hundred years readers of short fction have pondered what Poe could have meant by the word efect. Te critic Louis Menand has ana- lyzed it cogently in his essay “True Story: Te Art of Short Fiction.” A short story is not as restrictive as a sonnet, but, of all the literary forms, it is possibly the most single-minded. Its aim, as it was identifed by the mod- ern genre’s frst theorist, Edgar Allan Poe, is to create “an efect” — by which Poe meant something almost physical, like a sensation or (the term is appro- priate, since Poe’s reputation was always greater in France than in his own country), a frisson. Every word in a story, Poe said, is in the service of this efect. . . . [A]t the end there has to be the literary equivalent of the magician’s puf of smoke, an outcome that is both startling and anticipated. . . . Te difculty of putting into words the efect a story produces is part of the point. Te story is words; the efect is wordless. . . . James Joyce called the efect an “epiphany,” a term whose theological connotations have led, over the years, to a lot of critical misunderstanding. What Joyce meant by an epiphany was, he said, just “a revelation of the whatness of a thing” — a sudden apprehension of the way the world unmediatedly is. Language being one of the principal means by which the world is mediated, the epiphany is an experience beyond (or afer, or without) words. “Snow was general all over Ireland.” Te sentence is as banal and literal as a weather report. (In fact, in the story it is a weather report.) But if “Te Dead” works, then that sentence, when it comes, triggers the exact shiver of recognition that Joyce wants you to have.

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Paley wrote her story to set you up for the “shiver of recognition” in her fnal sentence. When you understand the intricate way she used language to create her fctional world, the story’s efect has an even greater emotional impact. As the writer Annie Proulx told a Paris Review interviewer, “Te short story deserves more honor and attention than it gets.” She believed that “in a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter. . . . Short stories are ofen very difcult and demanding, drawing on deep knowledge of human nature and the particulars of pivotal events.” Tough stories are short, “every single word counts heavily. Te punc- tuation is critical. Finding the right words and making honorable sentences takes time.” Proulx felt that the “general reading public has no idea of what goes into a short story because it is literally short and can give the impression that the writer sat down and rattled the thing out in an hour or two.” Paley created her harrowing story “Samuel” nearly a half century ago, but it seems timeless because it comes alive again in our imagination every time we read it carefully. Each reader creates it anew. When we read a story, savoring the details of the fctional narrative adds to our enjoyment of the storyteller’s achievement. Te writer Angela Carter even argued that “Te limited trajectory of the short narrative concentrates its meaning. Sign and sense can fuse to an extent impos- sible to achieve among the multiplying ambiguities of an extended narrative.” Writers of short fction must forgo the comprehensiveness of the novel, but they ofen gain a striking compression by using language with the force of poetry. Like poets, short story writers can impress on us the unity of their vision of life by focusing on a single efect.

Close Reading Short Fiction In your reading you will fnd that all writers create their short stories by using the elements of fction: plot, character, setting, point of view, style, and theme. When you read a story for the frst time, you may fnd it relatively easy to see how the elements of plot, character, and setting interact on the page. Tey stand out because they seem to make the story happen, and — a t least for the casual reader — t hey appear to be what the story is about. Point of view, style, and theme, on the other hand, are less visible elements. Many insecure readers regard them with dread as part of what they call the “hidden meaning” of a story. While it is true that you may have to look for these particular elements deliberately, you will fnd that this hunt is worth the treasure. Te more atten- tively you read, the easier it will be to appreciate how all the elements operate in short fction. Your close reading will help you to understand more clearly that how a story is written is an essential part of what it is saying. Stories are shorter than novels, but t hey’re not necessarily easier to read. Te editor Charles McGrath cautions that stories aren’t just brief, they’re diferent, and they require of the reader something like the degree of concentration they require of the writer. . . . You can’t skim or coast or leap ahead, and if you have to put a story down, it’s not always easy to pick up — em otionally, that is — w here you lef of.

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You have to backtrack a li ttle, or even start over. It’s not enough to read a story the way you read a book or a newspaper. Stories ask of us that we sur- render ourselves to them.

Guidelines for Close Reading Short Fiction 1. R ead the story with a pen or pencil in hand, asking questions and making observations as you go or highlighting if the text is electronic. Don’t be afraid to write in the margins of the text. (On the following pages you can see how you might annotate the opening of Paley’s “Samuel.”) Questions to consider as you read: What do you notice about the title? What’s happening in the narrative? Are there words you should look up in a dictionary? Are there puzzling passages you’ll want to reconsider once you’ve fnished reading? How are the elements of fction at work? Notice that simply highlighting sentences will not help you think as you go. You could also write your comments in a notebook. 2. M ake an entry in your notebook for each story assigned in class, writing down the author’s name and the story’s title and date. As you begin to read your assignments, remember T. S. Eliot’s advice in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Tis important poet believed that “criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.” 3. U se a dictionary to look up any words in the story and its headnote that you do not understand. 4. A fer you have read the story, take notes about the way the author has used the elements of fction; this will help you remember when you review the story later. Note, for example, the names of the characters, the geographical setting, the author’s choice of a point of view, and the literary style in which it is written. Try summing up the story’s theme in a sentence. 5. I f you have difculty understanding the story’s meaning or how any of the elements of fction work within it, write down your questions so you can ask them in class. Te related commentaries may also throw light on the stories. 6. I n class, take notes on the important m aterial about the story that you learn from lectures and discussions, and ask any questions you have about the assignment. Later your notes may suggest new ideas to develop in your papers. 7. R eview technical words about short fction used in class in the glossary of literary terms (p. 1108). Tis will help you to understand them better and to use them more confdently in your writing. 8. I f you have particularly enjoyed a story, go online or to the library to check out other works by its writer. Reading on your own will enrich the class assignments.

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Sample Close Reading Grace Paley In the title, Paley Samuel 1968 uses a full name, not nickname — serious Some boys are very tough. They’re afraid of nothing. They are the tone ones who climb a wall and take a bow at the top. Not only are they brave on the roof, but they make a lot of noise in the darkest part of Introduction — Set ing is a subway the cellar where even the super hates to go. They also jiggle and hop in New York City on the platform between the locked doors of the subway cars. Four boys are jiggling on the swaying platform. Their names Rising action — are Alfred, Calvin, Samuel, and Tom. The men and the women 4 boys are riding between the cars. in the cars on either side watch them. They don’t like them to Dangerous. jiggle or jump but don’t want to interfere. Of course some of the The men watching men in the cars were once brave boys like these. One of them them are sympathetic. had ridden the tail of a speeding truck from New York to Rockaway Beach without getting off, without his sore f ngers losing hold. Nothing happened to him then or later. He had made a compact Details about a with other boys who preferred to watch: Starting at Eighth minor character suggest that many Avenue and Fifteenth Street, he would get to some specif ed boys take risks. place, maybe Twenty-third and the river, by hopping the tops of the moving trucks. This was hard to do when one truck turned a corner in the wrong direction and the nearest truck was a couple of feet too high. He made three or four starts before succeeding. He had gotten his idea from a f lm at school called The Romance of Logging. He had f nished high school, married a good friend, was in a responsible job and going to night school. These two men and others looked at the four boys jumping and jiggling on the platform and thought, It must be fun to ride that way, especially now the weather is nice and we’re out of the tunnel and way high over the Bronx. Then they thought, These kids do seem to be acting sort of stupid. They are little. Then Hint of they thought of some of the brave things they had done when foreshadowing — they’re really very they were boys and jiggling didn’t seem so risky. young. The ladies in the car became very angry when they looked at The women are angry the four boys. Most of them brought their brows together and and judgmental. hoped the boys could see their extreme disapproval. One of the ladies wanted to get up and say, Be careful, you dumb kids, get off that platform or I’ll call a cop. But three of the boys were Negroes and the fourth was something else she couldn’t tell for sure. She was afraid they’d be fresh and laugh at her and embarrass her. She wasn’t afraid they’d hit her, but she was afraid of embarrassment. Another lady thought, Their mothers never know where they are. It wasn’t true in this particular case. Their moth- Actually the boys ers all knew that they had gone to see the missile exhibit on have responsible mothers. Fourteenth Street . . .

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Critical Thinking About Short Fiction You will fnd that reading a story carefully for the frst time is only part of the process of understanding it. Usually your thinking about a story begins with interpreting it, clarifying what the author is saying in the action of the plot, and making sure you understand the characters and have a clear idea of the theme of the story. Critical thinking goes a step beyond interpretation when you consider how the form of the story is related to its content or when you analyze the story’s signifcance, how it relates to your own experience. Reading a commentary about a story can help you to think critically. Always read the story a second time to feel that you thoroughly understand it as a whole. When you read it again, notice the passages that strike you with particular force. Underline the words and sentences you consider signifcant — or, even better, make a list in your notebook of what seems important while you are rereading the story. Tese can be outstanding descriptions of the characters or settings, passages of meaningful dialogue, details showing the way the author builds t oward the story’s climax, or hints that foreshadow the con- clusion. You may want to jot down answers to the following questions about the elements of the story as you reread it.

Plot. Does the plot depend on chance, or coincidence? Or does it grow out of the personalities of the characters? Are any later incidents foreshadowed early in the story? Are the events presented in chronological order? If not, why is this so? Does the climax indicate a change in a situation or a change in a character? How dramatic is this change? Or is there no change at all?

Point of View. How does the point of view shape the story? Would the story change if told from a diferent viewpoint? In frst-person narration, can you trust the narrator?

Characterization. Are the characters believable? Are they stereotypes? Are they sympathetic or unsympathetic? Do they suggest real p eople or abstract qualities? Is there one protagonist, or are there several? Does the story have an antagonist? How does the author tell you about the main character: through description of physical appearance, actions, thoughts, and emotions, or through contrast with a minor character? Does the main character change in the course of the story? If so, how? Why?

Setting. How does the setting infuence the plot and the characters? Does it help to suggest or develop the meaning of the story or to heighten the drama of the story?

Style. Is the story realistic or a fantasy? If dialect or colloquial speech is used, what is its efect? Does the author call attention to the way he or she uses words, or is the literary style inconspicuous? What is the tone of the story? Can you fnd evidence of any objects used as symbols in the narrative? If so, what do they symbolize?

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Theme. Does the story’s title help explain its meaning? Can you fnd a suggestion of the theme in specifc passages of dialogue or description? Are certain symbols or repetitions of images important in revealing the author’s intent in the story, what Edgar Allan Poe would call “the single efect”?

Close reading and critical thinking about the stories will help you to understand the author’s creation of design and pattern in the text. If you make the efort, you will fnd that reading literature is an activity that ofers a worthy challenge. Afer fnishing a short story for the frst time, you may feel con- tradictory responses to it, uncertain how to interpret what you have read. A second reading may help clarify your impressions, or you may fnd you have to close your book and think about the story if it doesn’t ft easily into your pre- conceptions about human behavior. Te efort is worthwhile. As the critic Ray Carey has explained, the diferent forms of storytelling can “point a way out of some of the traps of received forms of thinking and feeling. Every artist makes a fresh efort of awareness…. He [or she] can help us to new and potentially revolutionary understandings of our lives.” Reading a good story can be an enlightening experience. You will discover that analyzing the means available to the storyteller will ofen help you to reach a deeper understanding of what you have read.

RELATED COMMENTARIES Grace Paley, “A Conversation with Ann Charters,” page 940; Edgar Allan Poe, “The Importance of the Single Effect in a Prose Tale,” page 945.

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