Journal of the Short Story in English Les Cahiers de la nouvelle 69 | Autumn 2017 Varia Editors: Linda Collinge-Germain, Michelle Ryan-Sautour, Gérald Préher, and François Hugonnier Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1845 ISSN: 1969-6108 Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes Printed version Date of publication: 1 December 2017 ISBN: 978-2-7535-6516-6 ISSN: 0294-04442 Electronic reference Journal of the Short Story in English, 69 | Autumn 2017 [Online], Online since 01 December 2019, connection on 03 December 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1845 This text was automatically generated on 3 December 2020. © All rights reserved 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword Linda Collinge-Germain, Michelle Ryan-Sautour, Gérald Préher and François Hugonnier Articles Blurring the Boundaries: Dreaming Children in Katherine Mansfield's "Sun and Moon" and Daphne du Maurier's "The Pool" Michaela Schrage-Früh Katherine Mansfield and the Trauma of War: Death, Memory and Forgetting in “An Indiscreet Journey,” “The Garden Party,” “At the Bay,” “Six Years After” and “The Fly” Stephen Edwards When Fear is Feared: Repression, Anxiety, Trauma and War Neurosis in Elizabeth Bowen’s Short Fiction Kate Imwalle The Aesthetics of Orality in Langston Hughes’s Short Stories The Best of Simple Christine Dualé Chess Problems and the Otherworld in Nabokov’s Short Stories Eric Hyman Communities of Self: Mavis Gallant’s Linnet Muir Cycle Tamas Dobozy Tim O’Brien as Grail Knight: “On the Rainy River” Jay Ruud “East is East”: Thematic and Textual Confluence in Jane Gardam’s “Chinese Funeral” Helen E. Mundler Illusions that Resemble Reality: Salman Rushdie’s “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers” Aloka Patel De la divergence culturelle à la confluence transculturelle : rencontres de l’altérité dans The Thing Around Your Neck de Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Julia Siccardi Book Review Book Review: Liminality and the Short Story: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian and British Writing, Ed. Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergman (London, Routledge, 2015) Beryl Pong Journal of the Short Story in English, 69 | Autumn 2017 2 Foreword Linda Collinge-Germain, Michelle Ryan-Sautour, Gérald Préher and François Hugonnier 1 We are pleased to present the Autumn 2017 issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English featuring articles on 20th and 21st century short-story writers. Though they appear in chronological order according to dates of short-story publication, they may also be read thematically. 2 The first article, by Michaela Schrage-Früh, compares the function of dreamlike elements in Katherine Mansfield’s story “Sun and Moon” and Daphne du Maurier’s “The Pool,” exploring not only how the dream experience and the short story form may be related, but also how reading the two texts in light of their references to dream may yield new insights regarding their psychological and artistic depth as coming-of-age- stories. 3 Stephen Edwards also studies Katherine Mansfield, but, as do Kate Imwalle and Jay Ruud for their respective writers, from the angle of war and war trauma. According to Edwards, “war permeates Katherine Mansfield’s fiction, to a greater extent than critics have acknowledged, in pervasive images of death, violence, and loss.” He uses contemporary neurosis theories to illuminate how Mansfield’s diverse fiction “both attempts and refuses to heal the self when exploring traumatic memories” and sees the essential ambiguity of her modernist narrative techniques as being a means to express this. 4 Elizabeth Bowen wrote the short stories studied by Kate Imwalle not in relation to WWI, as did Mansfield, but to WWII, and more precisely to the London Blitz and the trauma it provoked in the population. Imwalle argues that “although Bowen’s work falls under the category of Gothic Literature and has remained in the conversation of the gothic by most scholars, her work goes far beyond the site of the everyday ghost story when examined through the lenses of realism and trauma theory.” 5 Jay Ruud studies a more recent author, Tim O’Brien, affected by the Vietnam War and who, says Ruud, conceived his 1990 story “On the Rainy River” as a reversal of traditional attitudes toward war: heroes do not go to Vietnam but more courageously to Canada, a place which represents spiritual and psychological renewal and Journal of the Short Story in English, 69 | Autumn 2017 3 restoration. Because, says Ruud, “the archetypal literary symbol of these things has, historically, been the Grail,” his article envisions O’Brien’s story as a rewriting of the original Grail story, Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval. 6 Five articles study stories which in some way are connected to cultural in-betweenness. In her article on the short stories collected in 1961 in The Best of Simple, Christine Dualé studies how Langston Hughes was influenced by African American cultural traditions and folklore to create an elaborate written art form based on orality. She argues that Hughes’ aesthetics of orality can be understood by looking at the close relationship between language, history and black music. The story-telling of Simple’s stories, says Dualé, is anything but simple. 7 In “Communities of Self: Mavis Gallant’s Linnet Muir Cycle,” Tamas Dobozy looks at the different communities which make up Montreal society—and so Linnet’s sense of self— in Gallant’s Linnet Muir stories. For Linnet, says Dobozy, “Montreal is the scene of incompatible ideologies—English and French—whose meeting, rather than being a scene of confusion, enables her to offset one socially proscribed role against another. This ‘meeting,’ and the opportunity it offers for subversion, is articulated throughout the cycle.” 8 Helen Mundler studies Jane Gardam’s 1990 story “Chinese Funeral,” a story in which a group of British tourists are destabilized by their visit to China as their colonial certainties become post-colonial uncertainties and as the relationship between dominant and dominated are reconfigured. She then draws a parallel between this story and a passage from a later novel by Gardam, The Man in the Wooden Hat, showing that in both texts, discovering the Eastern Other is problematic for the Westerners. 9 Salman Rushdie’s story “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers” is the subject of Aloka Patel’s article. Patel examines the ways in which Rushdie’s story, a story of exile based on the novel and movie The Wizard of Oz, questions the concept of “home” in a globalized world. The narrator of the story, says Patel, “dismantles the notion of a static, mythical home and perpetuates the notion of home as a transformative agent fraught with ambiguity as it inheres within its frame both the real and imaginary homelands.” 10 Julia Siccardi also deals with exile and identity as she examines Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), a collection which recounts the experiences of characters migrating from Nigeria to the United States. She observes in the stories that “if the encounter with alterity is underpinned by compassionate ethics that acknowledge the other person’s uniqueness (thus avoiding his/her reduction to a stereotype), the notion of transculture might offer the hope of a cultural confluence.” 11 Eric Hyman, in his article “Chess Problems and the Otherworld in Nabokov’s Short Stories,” deals with a different question entirely. As the title suggests, his approach is reader-oriented. Indeed, according to Hyman, “reading a Nabokov short story is like solving a chess problem: readers are challenged to seek a key move, which solves and explains all the elements of the chess problem/short story.” Hyman takes this observation further by noting that the key move often connects to a transcendent Otherworld. Journal of the Short Story in English, 69 | Autumn 2017 4 12 We thank our Research secretary Aurélie Reuillon for her continued dedication and skilled handling of these articles, allowing us to bring this short-story research to readers worldwide. AUTHORS LINDA COLLINGE-GERMAIN JSSE Director of Publication MICHELLE RYAN-SAUTOUR JSSE Editor GÉRALD PRÉHER JSSE Associate Editor FRANÇOIS HUGONNIER JSSE Editorial Assistant Journal of the Short Story in English, 69 | Autumn 2017 5 Articles Journal of the Short Story in English, 69 | Autumn 2017 6 Blurring the Boundaries: Dreaming Children in Katherine Mansfield's "Sun and Moon" and Daphne du Maurier's "The Pool" Michaela Schrage-Früh 1 This article explores the use of dreamlike elements in two short stories which have not received the critical attention they merit, respectively Katherine Mansfield’s “Sun and Moon” (1920) and Daphne du Maurier’s “The Pool” (1959). As I will argue, the genre of the short story is in many ways well-suited to convey the experience of dreaming. Thus, concerning the often fragmented quality of the dream, Colin McGinn rightly notes that dreams “can be more like sketches than fully realized representations” (85). Conversely, Clare Hanson emphasizes the “‘open’ quality of the short story” (Things 23) which lends itself to a comparison with the characteristic incompleteness of the dream experience. Another similarity is that both the dream and the short story are often image-dominated as well as elliptical. As Adrian Hunter argues, in contrast to the novel, the short story tends to cut away “the kind of material we normally depend upon for narrative continuity and coherence, […] working with these tactical omissions to suggest and imply meaning, rather than stating it directly” (2). While the short story depends on images to retain a sense of narrative continuity and coherence, these images often “tend to resist such interpenetration and integration [as takes place in the novel], which is why they disturb us in a particular, a distinctive and distinctly non- novelistic way” (Hanson, Things 24). Besides disturbing us, these images can also provide us with moments of psychological or existential insight: moments of being (to use Virginia Woolf’s term) or glimpses (to use Katherine Mansfield’s)— fleeting, intense and dreamlike.