Short Story Month
2017-Part 11: Dream and Desire in the
Short Story
Jarrell,
Randall: “Reading stories, we cannot
help remembering that ‘We have to reckon with what exists, and dreams,
daydreams, too, are also facts; if anyone really wants to investigate
realities, he cannot do better than to start with such as these. If he neglects them he will learn little or
nothing of the world of life.”
Joyce Carol
Oates: “The short story is a
dream verbalized, arranged in space and presented to the world, imagined as a
sympathetic audience: the dream is said to be some kind of manifestation of
desire, so the short story must also represent a desire, perhaps only partly
expressed, but the most interesting thing about it is its mystery.”
Christina
Stead: "The belief that life is a
dream and we the dreamers only dreams, which comes to us at strange, romantic,
and tragic moments, what is it but a desire for the great legend, the powerful
story rooted in all things which explains life to us and, understanding which, the
meaning of things can be threaded through all that happens."
Alice Munro: “We
can hardly manage our lives without a powerful ongoing narrative. And
underneath all these edited, inspired, self-serving or entertaining stories
there is, we suppose, some big bulging awful mysterious entity called THE
TRUTH, which our fictional stories are supposed to be poking at and grabbing
pieces of.
Robert Olen
Butler: “Fiction is the art form of human yearning.” Butler cites Joyce’s
famous theory of epiphany--that moment in the story when something about the
human condition shines forth in its essence.
Butler says this is the result of the yearning present in all the
separate organically resonant moments in the fiction accumulating to a critical
mass. It is just that because of its
brevity, these two moments typically occur at the same time in the short story.
“The final epiphany of a literary short story is also the shining forth of the
character’s yearning.”
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