The gothic writers and the English romantic poets of
the early part of the nineteenth century shifted away from a concept of
language as referential and the art work as imitative to a view of language as
constitutive and the art work as creative.
The Romantics demythologized the old tales and ballads, divesting them
of their external values, and then remythologized them by internalizing those
values and self-consciously projecting them outwards. They wished to preserve the old religious
values of the romance and ballad form without the religious dogma and
mythological trappings that formerly attended them; knowing that the origin of
the old story mode lay in basic psychic processes, they secularized the myth by
radically foregrounding the subjective and projective nature of story, thus
returning to the psychological origins of myth as the primal source of story.
The ballad, which had previously existed seemingly
in vacuo as received story without the influence of the teller, became
infused with the subjectivity of the speaker and projected onto the world as a
new mythus. Value existed in the world
outside, but only because it existed first within the imagination of the
artist. The romantic artists'
fascination with medievalism and folk material springs from their realization
of the basic religious or spiritual source of both the old romance and the folk
ballad. Their fascination with the old
ballads were part of their efforts to recapture the primal religious
experience, albeit in a new way.The positioning of a real speaker in a concrete
situation encountering a particular phenomenon that his own subjectivity transforms
from the profane into a psychological similitude of the sacred, but about which
he is always undecided, is an important impetus to the development of the early
nineteenth-century short story.
Whereas
Coleridge's task in The Lyrical Ballads was to focus on the
supernatural, "yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human
interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of
imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which
constitutes poetic faith," Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to choose
subjects from ordinary life and "excite a feeling analogous to the
supernatural by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom and
directing it to the loveliness and wonders of the world before us."
Clear examples of this dual project are
Coleridge's lyrical story, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and
Wordsworth's story lyric, "Resolution and Independence." In the Lyrical Ballads the
"story" element, the hard outlines of the event, are subsumed by the
lyrical element, which is foregrounded.
However, in America, for Hawthorne and Poe, the story element is
foregrounded; the lyrical element remains primarily as the personal voice of
the teller. As George Lukacs says, in
the short story, when the writer lifts a fragment out of the totality of life,
"this selection, this delimitation, puts the stamp of its origin in the
subject's will and knowledge upon the work itself: it is, more or less, lyrical
in nature."
Consequently, while America is usually given the
credit for the origin of the short story, it is clear that the basic impulse
for the form began in Germany with the romantic novella and in England with the
eighteenth-century essayists and the nineteenth-century poets. Two well-known and frequently-cited short
narratives from the early nineteenth century in England make use of the same
devices and conventions that underlie the more accepted beginnings of the form
in America, Germany, France, and Russia. These include Charles Lamb's "Dream
Children," because of its focus on the tension between reality and
imagination and Sir Walter Scott's "Wandering Willie's Tale," because
of the relationship between its narrator and the traditional ballad story.
T. O Beachcroft suggests that "Dream
Children" (1822), Charles Lamb's most famous essay, with its narrative
movement and its management of time between present and past, is a central
example of the emergence of the short story from the essay. Indeed, the piece is a precursor to a central
nineteenth-century short story convention, for it depends on a surprise ending
in which what the reader took to be an event is revealed to be reverie.
On a first reading of "Dream Children,"
one has no reason to doubt the actuality of the event described--that of the
narrator's children sitting around him to hear about their great grandmother
and their uncle--until at the very end when the narrator awakes and finds
himself alone. The imagined events,
because they correspond to the projected reactions of the reverie-children to
the made-up memory, convince us of their reality until we discover that the
teller is an old bachelor and that the children are only those who might have
been.
As in the 18th-century essay form generally, no one
really exists in "Dream Children" except the teller; characters and
events merely serve his rhetorical purpose.
The structure consists of long passages of reverie parading as discursive
recollection, beginning with the phrase, "Then I told them how...",
alternating with short descriptions of
the children's reactions, beginning with such phrases as, "Here Alice put
on one of her dear mother's looks," "Here John smiled, as much as to
say...," "Here the children fell a crying...." The climax comes when the teller sees the
dead mother in the face of one of the children and begins to doubt "which
of them stood there before me."
Rip Van Winkle has the same ambiguous response when
he awakes and sees his own son as himself.
The children grow fainter and recede until only their "mournful
features" are seen in the distance, which, "without speech,"
seem to communicate as if by speech: `We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are
we children at all.... We are nothing; less than nothing, and
dreams.'" Thomas Aldrich's famous
nineteenth-century story, "Marjorie Daw," in which a supposedly real
character is revealed at the end to be a product of the imagination, is perhaps
the most famous example of this common short story motif. Anatole France's "Putois," in which
a purely imaginary gardener is created, is another. Variations of the motif occur throughout the
century whenever there is some ambiguity within the narrative as to the
psychological or phenomenological status of characters or events.
Another common creation point for the short story is
when an oral tradition meets a literary tradition. The best-known example of the literary
transformation of the oral folk-tale in early nineteenth century British
literature is Sir Walter Scott's insert tale in Redgauntlet, often
anthologized as "Wandering Willie's Tale." Told by the blind fiddler
Willie Steenson, the story has been called Scott's "only fully successful
brief narrative," almost a "textbook example of the well-told tale,"
and Scott's greatest achievement in the ghost story. Foregrounding the teller and thus making tone
as important as story, "Wandering Willie's Tale" manifests the
typical self-conscious ambiguity of the nineteenth-century short story as to
whether the events recounted are supernatural or psychologically
realistic. The story has much the same
combination of oral ironic voice, folk legend, and local color as Washington
Irving's most famous tales and manifests much the same uncertainty about dream
reality vs. external reality, albeit with less moral ambiguity, as some of the
tales of Hawthorne.
"Wandering Willie's Tale" forms an
interesting bridge between the traditional folk tale, in which supernatural
confrontations were the stock-in-trade and the later British mystery story in
which the seemingly supernatural encounter is justified in a grotesque but
realistic way. Although the Scottish
dialect of Willie's telling and the somewhat trivial crux of the missing money
and rent receipt on which the story depends undermine the seriousness of the
supernatural, eliciting more chuckles than gasps, what makes the story differ
from the old-fashioned ghost story is its thematizing the supernaturalizing of
the natural which lies at the very heart of the folk tale impulse itself. As is evident from his Letters on
Demonology and Witchcraft, Scott was familiar enough with this impulse to
parody and play with the conventions that underlie it.
Both the supernatural and the natural are presented
side by side in the tale to create a pattern of motifs that mocks the Lord of
the manor, Sir Robert, even as it also lightly mocks supernatural explanations
for the mysterious disappearance of the rent money and Steenie's consequent
visit to hell to obtain the receipt he needs to prove he paid the rent. The manifest motivation of the tale is to
clear Steenie's good name, even as the satiric thrust is to cast disrepute on
the name of Redgauntlet and thus register a triumph of the lower class over the
higher.
Sir Robert is presented as a powerful figure made
mythical by the folk as one who has a compact with Satan, a fearsome image,
which is undercut when Steenie goes to pay the master his rent, for Sir Robert
dies in a grotesquely comic struggle with the gout, screaming for water to put
on his legs, all the while being mocked by his pet Jack-an-ape. The Jack-an-ape plays a crucial role in the
tension between the supernatural and the real, not only by providing the
naturalistic explanation for many of the seemingly supernatural events, but in
being presented as a grotesque "familiar" for Sir Robert, both of
whom bear the image of the fiend in the folk imagination--"a fearsome
couple."
At the end of the story Willie notes that many think
the shape of the fiend that the butler saw on Sir Robert's coffin was the
monkey, as it was the monkey who blew the master's silver whistle that summoned
the butler to his death from fright. It
is of course the ape also who is responsible for hiding the money in the old
turret called "Cat's Cradle."
Thus the monkey serves as a realistic explanation for supposed
supernatural events as well as a metaphoric image of the demonic Sir Robert
himself.
Although
Stennie's trip to hell to get the receipt is seemingly motivated by his
drinking and his calling upon Satan to help clear his name, it is also an
objectification of his exasperated reply to Sir Robert's son's question about
the whereabouts of the money: it is "in hell! with your father and his silver
whistle." The stranger who meets
Steenie in his ride through the dark forest is a typical figure of
nineteenth-century short fiction, used by Irving in "The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow" and Hawthorne in "Young Goodman Brown." As do many other short fiction figures of the
century, Steenie responds to his journey to a hell-like image of the
Redgauntlet castle filled with ghastly revellers as if he were "like a man
in a dream." After receiving the
receipt from Sir Robert and being ordered to return in one year, like Goodman
Brown, Steenie calls on God's name and immediately finds himself lying in the
old churchyard of the Redgauntlet parish, thinking "the whole thing was a
dream, but he had the receipt in his hand."
The central
ambiguity of the tale--whether the events take place in the realm of
superstition and folklore or in the real world--depends on whether the Lord of
the manor's good name or Steenie's reputation is to be preserved. Because of the ambiguous tone of the teller, "Wandering
Willie's Tale" marks a transition from the supernatural tale of the folk
to the modern short story in which the seemingly supernatural events have
either realistic or psychological explanations.
In the next phase of the British and Irish short story, with the
quasi-scientific mystery stories of Wilkie Collins, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and
Sheridan Le Fanu, this ambiguity becomes the central concern of the narrative.
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