Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-68112-4 - The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English Adrian Hunter Excerpt More information Introduction What is it that makes a short story short? Once upon a time, no one thought of asking that question. The cave-dwelling storyteller, as E. M. Forster imagines him, simply told, and if he was lucky and able enough to hold his hearers’ attention, then they might not kill or eat him.1 It was incident and excitement, anticipation and suspense, and above all the provision of a satisfying ending that characterized the story as it was embedded in oral culture, and as it prevailed in the short printed prose narrative up until the end of the nineteenth century, at which point something changed, and the question was asked: what is it that makes a short story short? This book introduces the reader to a broad selection of English-language writers who, in one way or another, whether directly or indirectly, have taken up that question and whose work has been decisive in shaping our understand- ing of what the modern short story is, and what it is capable of. These writers come from diverse places – England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Nigeria and Canada (for reasons of space, authors from the United States of America have been excluded, and interested readers are directed instead to Martin Scofield’s complementary volume in this series, The Cambridge Intro- duction to the American Short Story); what connects them to one another can be summed up in the words of the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen: they have understood the ‘shortness’ of the short story to be something more, something other, than ‘non-extension’;2 they have treated ‘shortness’, that is to say, as a ‘positive’ quality. What Bowen was referring to when she made this discrimination in her landmark 1936 introduction to the FaberBookofModernShortStorieswas the change that occurred in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, a change that, as she saw it, signalled the short story’s breaking free from the grip of novel and the novelistic imagination. Up until that point, the short story had been treated as a condensed novel, and the art of writing it lay in the skill with which the author could squeeze the machinery of plot and character into the reduced frame of a few thousand words. The short story was a doll’s house, a fully realized world in miniature. What suddenly occurred to writers 1 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-68112-4 - The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English Adrian Hunter Excerpt More information 2 The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English like Henry James, however, was the notion that writing ‘short’ might be less a matter of shrinking the novel into a tiny space than of making more artful and strategic economies, cutting away the kind of material we normally depend upon for narrative continuity and coherence, for example, and working with these tactical omissions to suggest and imply meaning, rather than stating it directly. What James and others saw was that the short story could achieve great richness and complexity – or ‘multiplicity’ to use James’s own word – as a result of, rather than in spite of, its brevity. James himself, it must be said, was keener to observe such reticence in others’ writing than practise it in his own; nevertheless, the idea of a creative trans- action between brevity and complexity – the art of saying less but meaning more – took hold among the emergent literary avant-garde at the turn into the twentieth century, and as we shall see in Part II, became the basis of modernist experimentation in the short form. Yet this new-found property of the short story was always more than just a matter of form and technique. James had come upon it through his reading of Russian and European writers like Ivan Turgenev and Guy de Maupassant, and, as he recognized at the time, these were authors likely to baffle and perplex the ‘moralists’ among their English readers. In other words, James descried a potential connection between an elliptical, ambiguous, evasive, non-didactic story style and the breakdown of certain cultural and moral certainties. Many agreed with James, among them G. K. Chesterton, for whom the attraction to short stories was a reflection of the ‘fleetingness and fragility’3 of modern existence. Throughout the twentieth century we encounter the idea that the short story form is somehow specially amenable or adaptable to the representation of an increasingly fragmented social character under the condi- tions of technological, industrial modernity. This is perhaps most in evidence in the modernist period, but contemporary writers too like to claim that the short story is ideally calibrated to the experience of modern life. Here is the South African author Nadine Gordimer, writing in 1968: Each of us has a thousand lives and a novel gives a character only one. For the sake of the form. The novelist may juggle about with chronology and throw narrative overboard; all the time his characters have the reader by the hand, there is a consistency of relationship throughout the experience that cannot and does not convey the quality of human life, where contact is more like the flash of fire-flies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness. Short story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the art of the only thing one can be sure of – the present moment. Ideally, they have learned to do without explanation of what went before, and what happens beyond this point.4 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-68112-4 - The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English Adrian Hunter Excerpt More information Introduction 3 This is shortness as a ‘positive’ quality, in the sense that the form, handled right, is able to embody an experiential condition of modernity–asenseofchronic uncertainty, historical sequestration and social isolation. In the classic accounts of the short story – by Bowen, H. E. Bates, and Frank O’Connor – one repeatedly encounters the idea that the short story is somehow ‘up to speed’ with the realities of modern life. Bates, for example, citing Bowen, claims that the form is ‘a child of this century’ in the same way that cinema is. Like film, it conducts narrative not by extended exposition, as the novel does, but ‘by a series of subtly implied gestures, swift shots, moments of suggestion, an art in which elaboration and above all explanation are superfluous and tedious’.5 In this respect it is the literary form readily adaptable to the experience of modernity and the accelerated pace of life ‘that travels so fast that we even attempt to anticipate it and play at prophets’.6 It is for this reason too that Bates thinks the short story has played so prominent a part in the literature of America in an age where people are ‘talking faster, moving faster, and apparently thinking faster’.7 The idea that American writers have raised the short story to the level of ‘a national art form’ is reiterated by Frank O’Connor in The Lonely Voice,abook that remains for many the landmark work in criticism of the short story. Like Bates, O’Connor considers the short story to be both an essentially ‘modern art’, attuned to ‘modern conditions – to printing, science, and individual religion’,8 and,initsanti-traditionalistversions,adistinctlyliteraryonethatwillpersistfor as long as ‘culture’ survives the onslaught of ‘mass civilization’. The reason for its pre-eminence in the twentieth century, O’Connor argues, is that it manages to embody ‘our own attitude to life’.9 What that attitude is has something to do with the experience of social dislocation in the modern world – what he calls the ‘intense awareness of human loneliness’.10 In the short story’s fascination with ‘submerged population groups’,O’Connor sees the reflection of a society ‘that has no sign posts, a society that offers no goals and no answers’.11 Whether or not one agrees that the short story is uniquely or specially equipped to do the kind of cultural work that these commentators suppose, it is certainly the case that the form has remained a vital and valid one in the twentieth century, and has served as the medium for much that has been new or innovative in modern fiction. This book is organized in such a way as to reflect both the formal and contextual aspects to the short story’s development and to explore the interactions between them. Each chapter presents close analyses of stories alongside comments writers and critics have made on them, attending both to what is happening in the language, structure and form of the texts, and to the cultural, social and material contexts in which they were produced and to which they contribute. These principles have also dictated the organization © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-68112-4 - The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English Adrian Hunter Excerpt More information 4 The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English of the book into four sections. The first of these examines the ‘rise’ of the short story in the nineteenth century and the emergence of a body of critical and creative work that reflects the new ‘literary’ status of the form. Part II deals with the modernist period. In many respects modernism has been, and remains, the short story’s centre of gravity – and not only in academic criticism.