Since the beginning of the short
story as an historically-recognized genre, writers and critics have agreed that
the form depends more on a tightly-unified structure and a formalized ending than
the novel does. However, critics have often argued that consequently the short
story is not realistic, not natural, and therefore not worthy of critical
consideration. The assumption underlying this judgment is that since life
itself is continuous, the novel is the only narrative form capable of imitating
that continuity; the short story, on the other hand, because it is spasmodic
and intermittent, is artificial. Since
the short story cannot follow the chronological development of character, but
must select a point at which the author can approach life, it has no essential
form and thus generates a unity that is abnormally artificial and intense.
Why, I wonder, when discussing an
aesthetic object, should we take "artificiality" to be pejorative,
especially the artificiality of unity and endings? Henry James, in his preface to Roderick Hudson, reminds us
that stopping places in fiction are always artificial. As James puts it, since universally
relations stop nowhere, "the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally
to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear
to do so." Similarly, J. Hillis
Miller has noted that it is always impossible to tell whether a narrative is
complete. If the ending is considered a
tying up into a knot, the knot could always be united again; if the ending is
considered an unraveling, a multitude of loose threads remain, all capable of
being knotted again. This is why,
Miller says, the best one can have is the "sense of an ending."
The coiner of that nicely-turned
phrase, Frank Kermode, also reminds us, "We always underestimate the power
of rhetorical and narrative gestures."
Endings, says Kermode, "are always faked, as are all other parts of
a narrative structure that impose metaphor on the metonymic
sequence." In other words, any
time we arrange a narrative sequence to achieve a meaningful end, that is, any
time we make use of the processes of repetition and similarity to convert a
temporal flow into metaphoric sets, we inevitably "fake" the
ending. For this faking of an ending is
the very act that makes meaning out of the
"one-damned-thing-after-another" that meaningless events always are;
such faking thus constitutes the essence of narrative art.
Still, many
critics have argued that the faking of endings was primarily a negative
characteristic of nineteenth-century short fiction; they are fond of citing
such writers as Ambrose Bierce, Frank Stockton, and O. Henry as the chief
culprits. Not until the work of
Chekhov, Sherwood Anderson and Joyce, many critics like to claim, did the short
story develop a "natural" structure that was "open-ended,"
reflecting a realistic "slice-of-life."
However, I would argue, in spite of
all the praise for the realism of the modern short story, from the
"slice-of-life" anecdotes of Anton Chekhov to the intense
"hyperrealism" of Raymond Carver, the twentieth-century version of
the genre has remained highly formalized, artificial, and metaphoric, like its
nineteenth-century antecedents. What has changed is that a new convention of
the form developed to increase the illusion of everyday reality. From Chekhov to Sherwood Anderson to Bernard
Malamud to Raymond Carver, the short story has been bound to a highly artificial,
rhetorically-determined unified structure, and therefore formalized ending,
which depends upon the artificial devices of aesthetic reality.
The Russian formalist critic Boris Ejxenbaum was alone among early
twentieth-century critics to recognize that what O. Henry, one of the most notorious
practitioners of the artificial ending, exploited in his stories was a
convention unique and essential to the short story genre. Ejxenbaum argues that the difference between
the novel and the short story is a difference in essence. Whereas the novel ends with a point of
let-up, the short story "gravitates toward maximal unexpectedness of a
finale concentrating around itself all that has preceded." O. Henry understood this important aspect of
the short story, Ejxenbaum argues; his pervasive tendency was to "lay bare
the construction of a story and subject the plot to parodic play.” By this means, continues Ejxenbaum, the O.
Henry story opened the way to the regeneration of the short story ala Chekhov,
Anderson, and others at the beginning of the twentieth century.
I suggest, however, that the laying
bare of the conventionality of the ending of short stories began long before O.
Henry. To illustrate my point I will comment briefly on one nineteenth-century
story famous for its "artificial" ending--Ambrose Bierce's "An
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge."
Purely a story of technique; the
"content" of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is a
pretext for a game Bierce plays with the conventions of narrative endings. The story explicitly and sardonically
exploits the idea of the reader (and the protagonist) being pulled up short as
Peyton Farquhar comes to the end of his rope and faces the ultimate and only
genuine "natural end" possible--death. However, in this story death is forestalled in the only way it
can be forestalled--through an act of the imagination and an elaborate bit of
fiction-making that the reader initially takes to be actuality.
The story is made up of three
sections that correspond to three fictional elements--static scene, exposition,
and action. But all of these elements
are self-consciously ironic in presentation and thus undermine themselves. The first part of the story, the only part
in which the realistic convention suggests that something is "actually
happening," seems quite dead and static, almost a still picture, highly
formalized and stiff. At the end of
Part I, the teller tips the reader off to the play with time that the story,
because it is discourse rather than mere event, must inevitably make: "As these thoughts, which have here to
be set down in words, were flashed into the doomed man's brain rather than
evolved from it the captain nodded to the sergeant. The sergeant stepped aside." The self-reflexive reference here is to the most notorious
characteristic of fiction --the impossibility of escaping time. In spite of the
fact that the author wishes to communicate that which is instantaneous or
timeless he is trapped by the time-bound nature of words that can only be told
one after another. It is this purely
rhetorical acceptance of the nature of discourse that justifies or motivates
the final fantastic section of the story.
The second play with the convention
of time in the story is the insertion at the end of Part I, purely and
perversely by the demand of discourse rather than by the demand of existential
event, of a bit of exposition that tells the reader who the protagonist is and
what he is doing in such a predicament.
The reader sits patiently through this background formality while the
protagonist plummets into Part III of the story--which itself is of course a
depiction of that which does not happen at all except in the flash (which can
only be recounted in words) that takes place in the protagonist's mind. It is thus only because of discourse that
Farquhar's invention of his escape from hanging, drowning, and death by guns
and cannons makes the reader believe that the escape is taking place in
reality.
At the conclusion, when the
protagonist reaches the end of the fall, the verb tense of the story abruptly
shifts from present to the ultimate past tense: "Peyton Farquhar was dead." At this point, the reader is forced to double back to look at the
tone and details of the story which created this forestalling of the end--a
forestalling which is indeed the story itself, for without it there would have
been no story. Postponing the end of
the story until the ultimate and inescapable end of death is the subject of
Bierce's self-conscious and self-reflexive discourse.
Thus rather than being a cheap
trick dependent on a shocking ending, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek
Bridge" is a complex narrative reflecting both in its theme and its
technique the essential truth that in discourse there is no ending but an
imaginative, that is, an artificial, one.
As Boris Ejxenbaum has shown, the stories of O. Henry, rather than being
trivial tricks, likewise lay bare the conventions of the short story's
dependence on the artificiality of the ending, for all endings in narrative
discourse are inevitably artificial. It
is simply that in the short story this artistic truth is laid bare rather than
concealed behind the conventions of realism as it often is in the novel. However, at the end of the nineteenth
century many critics, bound to the naive notion that narrative must replicate
the real, scorned the stories of O. Henry and rejoiced when the stories of
Chekhov seemed to signal the resurgence of realism.
The question that should be asked
is: How "realistic" is
Chekhov's realism? One of the primary
characteristics of the modern short story ala Chekhov is the expression of a
complex inner state by the presentation of selected concrete details rather
than by the creation of a projective parabolic form or by the depiction of the
contents of the mind of the character. Significant reality for short-story
writers beginning with Chekhov is inner rather than outer, but the problem they
have tried to solve is how to create an illusion of inner reality by focusing
on external details only. The result is
not simple realism, but rather a story that even as it seems a purely surface
account of everyday reality takes on the artificial aura of a dream.
In Raymond Carver’s "Why Don't
You Dance?" from What We Talk About When We talk About
Love, the first question the reader asks is: why does the man put all of
his furniture out on the front yard?
Because things are described as "his side, her side," although
no "her" is present, the reader can infer that the story is about the
breakup of a marriage. However, the
answer to the second question the reader asks--why does the man arrange all the
furniture outside just as they were inside and plug in all the appliances?--is
more problematical since the motivation for his making everything appear
outside the house as they once were inside the house can only be explained
metaphorically. "Things
worked," says the narrator, "no different from how it was when they
were inside."
But they are different, of course,
precisely because what was previously hidden is now manifested for everyone to
see. And of course this is what the
modern short story since Chekhov always does. The problem, as it is in this
story, is that the manifestation, although it looks like external reality,
suggests internal reality. The story
does not supply the realistic answer to why the man plugs everything in, only
the metaphoric answer to why everything is indeed plugged in. In other words, that everything is plugged
in is not motivated by the psychology of the character but rather by the
aesthetic demands of the discourse.
That everything is plugged in on
the lawn is of course a static metaphor.
What the frozen situation needs to make it a dynamic story is the
entrance of the young couple who provide what is always necessary for meaning
to be manifested in fiction--repetition and recurrence. If the man who has put
out the furniture is in a movement of transition from one situation to another,
then the couple is also involved in such a transition. They are the beginning of the story that has
ended for the man, for they make use of the materials of his story to create
their own. In the epilogue, which
constitutes the "end" of the story, the girl is telling someone about
it weeks later. "She kept
talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was trying to
get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying." Thus, the story ends with the frustration of
trying to reveal by merely telling. The
key line--"There was more to it"--refers to a basic convention of all
modern short stories---that indeed there is more to it than the mere external
details.
A
narrative, by its very nature, cannot be told until the events that it takes as
its subject matter have already occurred. Consequently, the "end" of
the events, both in terms of their actual termination and in terms of the
purpose to which the narrator binds them, is the beginning of the
discourse. It is therefore hardly
necessary to say that the only narrative which the reader ever gets is that
which is already discourse, already ended as an event so that there is nothing
left for it but to move toward its end in its aesthetic, eventless way, i.e.,
via tone, metaphor, and all the other purely artificial conventions of
fictional discourse. Thus, it is
inevitable that events in the narrative will be motivated or determined by
demands of the discourse that have nothing to do with the psychological or
phenomenological motivation or cause of the actual events.
The short story's most basic
assumption is that everyday experience reveals the self as a mask of habits,
expectations, duties, and conventions. But the short story insists that the
self must be challenged by crisis and confrontation. This is the basic tension in the form; in primitive story the
conflict can be seen as the confrontation between the profane, which is the
everyday, and the sacred, which are those strange eruptions that primitive man
took to be the genuinely real. The
short story, however, can never reconcile this tension either existentially or
morally, for the tension between the necessity of the everyday world and the
sacred world is one of those basic tensions that can only be held in
suspension. The only resolution
possible is an aesthetic one.
If the novel presents life as it is
actually experienced, as some critics like to claim, it is only life as a set
of categories, that is, in terms of the profane everyday world of
necessity. In this sense, the novel is
the most conceptual, least artistic narrative form. And indeed in the history of the development of narrative forms
this seems to be the case. Not until the late nineteenth century when James and
Conrad made the novel less conceptual and more aesthetic, and thus less
realistic and more symbolic, were critics ready to accept the novel as an
artistic form.
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