Authors on the Short Story--Paris Review Interviews: Part I

In preparing for my presentation at the April Angers conference, “The Figure of the Author in the Short Story in English,” I have thought it well that I should consult short story writers who have spoken of their own experience with the short story: their love of the form, their theories about the difference between the short story and the novel, their notions about short story technique.

The Paris Review, which has been publishing interviews with writers under the title “The Art of Fiction,” since the late 1950s, has been generous enough to post these interviews in an archive online. The URL address is: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews

Although I have been collecting writers’ comments about the short story form for years, I have so far scanned the Paris Review interviews for the fifties, sixties, and seventies, looking for ideas that I might be able to develop and use in my presentation. I list below those writers’ remarks about the short story I think most helpful, followed by brief comments of my own. Next week, I will post a second set of citations, with my comments, of Paris Review interviews from the eighties, nineties, and the first decade of the twenty-first century.

[Side note: I have read Alice Munro’s new story, “Axis,” in the January 31 issue of the New Yorker four times now and think I may be ready to talk about it soon. I have also read Steven Millhauser’s story, “Getting Closer,” in the January 3 issue of the New Yorker five times, and hope to be capable of making some remarks on it soon also. These things take time, you know.]

Truman Capote, 1957
When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium…. I believe a story can be wrecked by a faulty rhythm in a sentence— especially if it occurs toward the end—or a mistake in paragraphing, even punctuation…. Joyce, our most extreme disregarder, was a superb craftsman; he could write Ulysses because he could write Dubliners.

I like Capote’s take on the importance of getting training in writing fiction by first writing short stories—not that stories are mere finger exercises, but rather than they are more demanding, at least on the microcosmic level, than the novel is. I also like the idea that short stories depend on a certain rhythm. Some short story writers think that rhythm is as important as content. More on this later.

Ernest Hemingway, 1958
I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.

This, of course, is Hemingway’s most famous statement about leaving things out. He probably gets it from Chekhov; later Raymond Carver got it from him. More on “leaving things out” later, as I cite other writers who believe in the power of omission.

Frank O’Connor, 1957
[The short story] is the nearest thing I know to lyric poetry… A novel actually requires far more logic and far more knowledge of circumstances, whereas a short story can have the sort of detachment from circumstances that lyric poetry has…[The greatest essential of a story] is you have to have a theme, a story to tell. You grab somebody and say, “Look, an extraordinary thing happened to me yesterday—I met a man—he said this to me—”and that, to me, is a theme. The moment you grab somebody by the lapels and you've got something to tell, that's a real story.

Frank O’Connor is certainly not the only writer who has said that the short story is the closest thing to lyric poetry, especially in its detachment from circumstances. And there is more to be said about O’Connor’s insistence on the importance of theme—i.e. that the writer has something to say—not just an event, but an event that “means” something.

Katherine Anne Porter, 1963
If I didn’t know the ending of a story, I wouldn’t begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph, my last page first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I’m going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God’s grace.

The first self-conscious theorizer and practitioner of the short story, Edgar Allan Poe, was the first to emphasize the importance of beginning with the ending. There are many important implications of this notion, which I will talk more about later.

I.B. Singer, 1968
In each story, I try to say something, and what I try to say is more or less connected with my ideas that this world and this kind of life is not everything, that there is a soul and there is a God and there may be life after death. I always come back to these religious truths although I am not religious in the sense of dogma.

Singer is not the only writer of short stories who has felt that the form has something to do with the idea that “this world and this kind of life is not everything.” Probably the most famous is Flannery O’Connor, whose work I have reread in its entirely these past few months. Religious truths, in the broadest sense of that term, may have some inherent connection to the short storm form. I have explored this issue in many places and will talk more about it.

John Steinbeck, 1969

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced that there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes but by no means always find the way to do it.

This is that idea that Frank O’Connor talked about—the writer’s need to tell the story. It might be called “The Ancient Mariner” compulsion. I have written about this before and come back to it later.

Bernard Malamud, 1975
I like packing a self or two into a few pages, predicating lifetimes. The drama is terse, happens faster, and is often outlandish. A short story is a way of indicating the complexity of life in a few pages, producing the surprise and effect of a profound knowledge in a short time. There’s, among other things, a drama, a resonance, of the reconciliation of opposites: much to say, little time to say it, something like the effect of a poem.

Here is the poem/short story connection again. And Malamud is wise to remind us that the short story can convey the “complexity of life,” can have the effect revealing “profound knowledge” by reconciling opposites.

Eudora Welty, 1972
I don’t think we often see life resolving itself, not in any sort of perfect way, but I like the fiction writer’s feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art, however imperfectly and briefly—to give it a form and try to embody it—to hold it and express it in a story’s terms... A short story is confined to one mood, to which everything in the story pertains. Characters, setting, time, events, are all subject to the mood. And you can try more ephemeral, more fleeting things in a story—you can work more by suggestion—than in a novel. Less is resolved, more is suggested, perhaps.

Welty emphasizes an aspect of the short story that others have discussed, and that I will return to: that whereas life does not have a resolution, there is something that might be defined as aesthetic resolution—something communicated not by content, but by form. Also important, I think, is Welty’s notion of “mood,” what other writers have called “tone”—a unifying rhythm or glow holding everything together in a meaningful way.

Said Sayraefiezadeh's "Appetite": How I Read a Story

In response to my last post on several New Yorker stories, Elissa, one of my readers, made the sort of “comment” that professors, young and old, can never resist: “I would love to know what you thought of….” Since I have spent my professional life telling folks what I think of short stories, and since Elissa wanted to know what I thought of Said Sayrafiezadeh’s story “Appetite” in the March 1 issue of The New Yorker, I dug it out from the pile of mags by my bed and reread it.

After I first read the story, about a month ago, I laid it aside without much thought. I am not familiar with Sayrafiezadeh’s work, although I vaguely remembered his name associated with a memoir about skateboards. At Elissa’s prompting, my second reading (which--I never tire of saying--every short story deserves) made me consider some guidelines for reading short stories that I have always followed.

When I read a story for the first time, after I have read the first paragraph, I stop and start over again. It takes a little time to make a transition from the real world around you to the fictional world you have entered. Sometimes I feel tempted to skim and thus do not get attuned to the voice of the story, fail to grasp relationships between characters, and cannot quite picture the setting. As a result, I begin to flounder and rush through the story, finishing with a shrug and a sense of puzzlement or a feeling of “so what.”

When I finish a story that interests me, I read it again. This time, the details of the story have more significance and weight because I have the whole story in mind. I know, somewhat vaguely as I begin the second reading, that “Appetite” is a first-person story about a young guy with a routine, low-paying job, who wants to ask for a raise, but doesn’t have the confidence, who wants to ask a waitress out, but lacks the nerve, who feels that he is a loser.

But in my opinion what the story at first seems to be “about” is not really the story. The story is the “means” by which the author transforms this ordinary character facing this ordinary sense of failure into a meaningful language-constructed narrative. I am interested in how the author uses language to transform a series of temporal events, i.e. “one damn thing after another,” into an aesthetic totality, existing all at once. The primary way an author performs this transformation is by the process of redundancy, that is, the obsessive repetition of similar motifs. The way I read a story is to identify these repeated similarities or echoes, to arrange them into bundles that constitute themes, and then to try to understand how these bundles of themes relate to each other.

There are many repeated motifs that cluster together to create themes in Sayrafiezadeh’s story. A careful reader becomes intuitively aware of them as the story becomes transformed from a temporal flow of events into a spatial pattern of meaning. It is not necessary to identify all of them unless one is writing an analytical article, so I am only going to identify the central theme here. (I am trying hard to avoid being the pedant here; I just want to respond to Elissa’s request and characterize how I read a story).

In my opinion, the primary theme of “Appetite” is announced in the first sentence: “Things were not going as I had hoped.” This is, of course echoed in the first sentence of the second section of the story: “Somewhere in my past, something had gone wrong for me.” The speaker/protagonist of the story is always making plans for future events that never quite pan out as he hopes they will. He is not quite sure what figure he should strike in the world, so he is always posturing, posing, and he is always self-consciously aware of the gap between how he wants to look and how he fears he really looks. In other words, he lives in a world that seldom corresponds to reality.

The key phrase in the story, the phrase that is repeated obsessively, is “as if.” According to my count (not that I am urging anyone to count such things), the phrase is repeated 14 times. Forgive me if I risk playing the professor for a paragraph here. The most famous coiner of the phrase “as if” is Hans Vaihinger, a German philosopher of the late nineteenth century, whose book The Philosophy of As If argued that because we cannot really know the world, we construct useful fictions and behave “as if” the world matched those fictions. The literary theorist Frank Kermode, in his book The Sense of an Ending, argued further, “I see no reason why we cannot apply to literary fictions what Hans Vaihinger says of fictions in general, that they are mental structures.” The implications of this notion have been pushed further in poststructuralist theory to suggest that what we call reality is always a fiction, an elaborate construct that we continually make. Thus, if one wishes to study reality, one should study the means by which human beings construct reality, for reality is a process, not a product.

However, the theory of “as if” that I have chosen to help me understand Sayrafiezadeh’s story was popularized by that well-known twentieth-century Valley Girl philosopher Alicia Silverstone in that classic masterpiece movie “Clueless." Any time she wished to suggest that something that someone thinks is going to happen is never going to happen is to state the assumption or plan, and follow it with an emphatic “as if.” e.g: “He thinks he’s so hot. As if!” or “He thinks I am going to go out with him. As if!”

This disjunction between what the narrator/protagonist of "Appetite" hopes/thinks/plans will happen and what really happens constitutes the central theme of the story. This Bobby Burns idea of “The best laid schemes of mice and men” is echoed by the narrator/protagonist’s reference to himself as a hamster. He knows others may think of him, “What are you—a man or a mouse?” This central disjunction appears throughout the story in many ways.

This kind of character has always been a favorite one for the short-story writer. Whereas the novel, springing from the epic, may have an heroic figure with whom the reader can identify, the short story, springing from the folk tale, as Frank O’Connor has noted in his wonderful little book The Lonely Voice, is most often about the little man, citing Gogol’s great story “The Overcoat” as one of the first modern short stories.

I could go on at length about Sayrafiezadeh’s story, but that is a professorial occupational hazard I will resist at this point. I suspect many of my students often wished I had resisted it much earlier and more often.

So, Elissa, in answer to your request, this is what I thought about “Appetite.” I would love to know what other readers think about it.

Making A Focused Professional and a Broadly Human Response to the Story

In a “Comment” on my last post, Sandy expresss the same lament I have expressed over the years—the uncertainty about whether as readers we have been true to the deeply human complexity of the story—whether as teachers we demonstrate to our students that we are both trained professional readers and wholeheartedly human readers responding with our whole being to deeply human writers.

Back when I first started teaching, I was twenty-five years old, just out of graduate school. Lord, only six years out of high school. I was teaching a short story one day to a class of freshmen and sophomores and had worked the story pretty hard, I thought, doing my best to get the students to interpret, explicate, analyze--to figure out what the story meant and how it meant what it meant rather than just to process plot. When I finished, I asked if anyone had any final questions. One older man in the back of the room, who had remained quiet through the whole proceedings, raised his hand and said, with the exasperation years of experience with the work-a-day world often brings: "Well, hell," he said, "if that's what he meant by the damned story, why didn't he say it that way in the first place?"

I took a deep breath and gave some version of answer all literature teachers have given in one way or another over the years. I stumbled and stuttered about how stories could never be reduced to explanation, that they were about stuff that couldn't really be talked about any other way, and so forth and so forth. He listened with pursed lips until I straggled to a halt, finishing hopefully, "Does that answer your question?" He shook his head indulgently--the older man putting up with the earnestness of the younger--and said, "It's a mystery, ain't it, son?"

Sandy is a dear friend of mine; we met in graduate school at Ohio University in the literary criticism class of the professor she mentions in her comment: Eric Thompson. He was my favorite teacher also—a model of the combination of the focused professional and the broadly human that I admired.

It was in one of Professor Thompson’s classes that I developed an idea for the first article I ever published. We were talking about a story by Eudora Welty entitled “A Visit of Charity,” and my fellow students seemed quite satisfied with their trained academic reading of the story, but Professor Thompson was not satisfied. Nor was I. A couple of years later, I wrote an article, a portion of which I excerpt below, that I felt more fully expressed my human response to the story.

Last year, I made a presentation on Frank O’Connor’s theory of “the lonely voice” at an international short story conference in Cork, Ireland. I excerpt a brief section of that below also. As you can see, over forty years later, I am still struggling with developing a “focused professional” and “broadly human” response to literature that Eric Thompson might have approved of.

1969: “The Difficulty of Loving in a Visit of Charity” (Excerpt)

The most significant critical problem in Eudora Welty's short story "A Visit of Charity" is: What does Marian's frightening and crucial visit to the Old Ladies' Home have to do with charity? Past critics of the story have tried to account for the little girl's strange experience without considering the concept. In order to understand how the visit is actually a crisis in charity, it is first necessary to see that charity in the title means love. For Marian's visit is her first experience with the difficulty of loving. It is also an ultimate challenge of the biblical injunction, "Love thy neighbor as thyself."

As Erich Fromm points out about this brotherly love the most fundamental kind of love, "In order to experience this identity it is necessary to penetrate from the periphery to the core. If I perceive in another person mainly the surface, I perceive the differences, that which separates us. If I penetrate to the core, I perceive our identity, the fact of our brotherhood." What most shocks Marian about the old ladies and throws her into an unfamiliar world is their basic difference from her. The experience is a strange one of her because she is a stranger in the most extreme sense. She has left the comfortable world of belonging and entered the nightmare world of separation and isolation. From the very beginning Marian does not think of the old ladies as people like herself.

Marian's final act--retrieving the apple she had hidden before she entered the Home and taking a big bite into it as she rides away on the bus is the final symbolic gesture that unifies all the complexities in the story of man's basic separation and his refusal to heal that breach by loving. Ruth M. Vande Kieft suggests that in Marian's biting into the apple, "there is a subtle hint that this little Eve has had her initiation to the knowledge of evil." If so, it is not the brutal evil of the Home itself that Marian has become aware of. Her very concrete bite into the apple shows that she has forgotten the misery of the Home is once more in her own familiar world of sunshine and indifference.

If indeed she is Eve, her awareness is of the most basic evil that resulted from the eating of the apple in the Garden of Eden. Here again Erich Fromm gives us the clue. He suggests that the knowledge that Adam and Eve gain when they eat the apple is the awareness of their own separateness. They become aware of themselves and of each other and thus know that they are different. This is the meaning of the Old Testament loss of Paradise. Man becomes aware of his separateness from all other men. Fromm goes on to explain Adam and Eve's response to this new knowledge by noting that "while recognizing their separateness they remain strangers, because they have not learned to love each other."

This, of course, is the other side of Marian's problem. If she reminds us of the Old Testament loss of man's oneness, she also illustrates the difficulty of following the New Testament message of how man might heal that division through love. Marian's bite into the apple ironically encompasses both these suggestions. In the Gospel of St. John, 21:15-17, Jesus three times asks Peter, "Simon son of Jonas, lovest thou me?" When three times Peter answers, "thou knowest I love thee," Christ replies, "Feed my sheep." When we recall that Addie, the old woman who asks Marian for love, is constantly referred to a s a sheep or a little lamb, the reverse implication of Marian's bite into the apple becomes clear. She has refused to feed the she--literally by refusing to give the apple to Addie, symbolically by refusing to give her love. Thus the irony of the story is more complex than hitherto recognized. At the same time it illustrates both the Old Testament loss of human oneness and the difficulty and perhaps impossibility of following the New Testament hope of recovering that lost state. Marian takes a bite into the apple and the story is over. Nothing is solved. Marian has learned nothing. Now that she is away from the home, she has forgotten her strange and terrible experience. She is once more in control of her limited little world, and the bus stops when she shouts for it "as though at an imperial command." But even as she takes that unconcerned bite into the apple, we still hear the piercing questions of the love starved old Addie: "Who are you? You're a stranger--a perfect stranger! Don't you know you're a stranger?"

2008: The Short Story and the Lonely Voice (Excerpt)

I believe that the central focus of the short story as a genre is the basic primordial story that constitutes human beings existentially--their basic sense of aloneness and their yearning for union. The question story proposes, according to Isak Dinesen, is “Who am I?” and, as Heidegger says, any answer to the question “who am I” that is based on a description of everyday existence is inadequate, inauthentic; the most revelatory state of mind, says Heidegger, is anxiety, which arises from one’s confrontation with nothingness.” Husserl says the problem is the enigma of the other, for I can only see from the other’s point of view what I would have seen if I were there in the same place. But the “as if I were over there” does not permit introducing the ‘here’ of the other into my sphere. My “here” and the other’s “over there” are mutually exclusive. Since there is no way of knowing what the other actually sees, feels, intends, as if I were he, we are born into solipsism.

The human yearning that this would be otherwise is best expressed by Martin Buber. "In the beginning," says Buber, "is relation as category of being, readiness, grasping form, mould for the soul; it is the ”a priori of relation, the inborn Thou." Studies in anthropology and child psychology support Buber's assertion that both phylogenetically and ontogenetically the “Thou” relation precedes the “It” perception, but only in a primal undifferentiated universe from which the adult civilized human is excluded except by means of an aesthetic or religious "As if”-- best expressed in Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for.”

According to Jean Piaget, the young baby itself constitutes its sole reality because the baby's universe contains no permanent object, no “It” and therefore no “I” except the total and unconscious egocentric self, that is not a self with which the adult can identify. Piaget tells us that the baby's objectless universe is made up of "shifting and unsubstantial `tableaux’ that appear and are then totally reabsorbed." However, during the first eighteen months of life, a kind of "Copernican revolution" takes place in the child, a general decentering process during which the child begins to perceive the self as an object in a universe made up of permanent objects, a universe in which causality is localized in space and objectified in things. Philosopher Ernst Cassirer locates this “Copernican revolution” in the history of the race as a realization of Pascal’s “The silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”

Buber also describes the event phylogenetically in terms that suggest its metaphysical and moral implications. "This actual event is the separation of the human body, as the bearer of its perceptions, from the world round about it...whenever the sentence `I see the tree' is so uttered that it no longer tells of a relation between the man and the tree, but establishes the perception of the tree as object by the human consciousness, the barrier between subject and object has been set up. The primary word “I-It,” the word of separation, has been spoken." Thus arises, says Buber, the "melancholy of our fate" in the earliest history of the race and the individual.

The human dilemma is that we are always caught between the demands of our deepest wish and the demands of our social self, which is the battle between the sacred and the profane, between union and separation. The unconscious is where "reality" resides, says Eliade. The human search to know it is equivalent to the desire of the religious man to live in the sacred, which is, "equivalent to his desire to take up his abode in objective reality… to live in a real and effective world, and not in an illusion."

The problem for the critic is to determine how stories reveal the spiritual, how they escape the "naked worm of time" and embody the hierophanic principle. The most emphatic and succinct statement and illustration of this primal nature of story can be found in Isak Dinesen's "The First Cardinal's Tale." In telling his female penitent a story to answer her question "Who am I?" the Cardinal explains to her how the story has answered her question. "Stories," the Cardinal says, "have been told as long as speech has existed, and without stories the human race would have perished, as it would have perished without water. The Cardinal then goes on to discuss the difference between the story and the new art of narration known as the novel. This "literature of the individual" is a noble art, says the Cardinal, but it is only a human product. "The divine art is the story. In the beginning was the story…. We, who hold our high office as keepers and watchmen to the story, may tell you, verily, that to its human characters there is salvation in nothing else in the universe.”